Abandonment: The Dream

I was in my shop located behind the stadium. There was a competitive sports event starting and at the same time a construction and remodeling of the facilities. A temporary fence blocked off the fans and the stadium itself. My shop was in the area of the construction.

I was in my shop space getting things sorted out and put away. I had just come in through an opening just before the fence was closed to the fans. They were on the other side of the fence in the stands focused on the game.

I caught no one’s attention. I noticed the red, orange, and green of camouflage pants and yellow shirts of the fans. It was the team colors of the college.

Just as I slipped into my shop I saw a man at the fence checking to see if anyone was inside that shouldn’t be. He closed the fence and moved on to something else. He didn’t see me but neither was he expecting to see anyone. I didn’t feel like I had to sneak around because I felt ownership of the shop space and everything in it to be under my care and function. I had been here for many years.

I then walked out to the back to get something. I had an inkling that I wasn’t supposed to be there. No one had told me that the work would be going on. I ignored the feeling of exclusion but tried not to make myself obvious.

The atmosphere of the whole place was filled with the collective energy of the fans and the game, as well as a kind of restricted authority of the construction work. My shop space felt somewhat surrounded rather than included in all this.

I walked back to the shop door, opened it and stepped in. Nothing was the same.

The walls and cabinets were either removed or covered over with cardboard rectangles. I couldn’t tell if everything was gone or just covered up? The workbench was gone. I looked around. I was appalled! I realized that this was all done without a thought or even concern of how it might affect me.

There was no communication with me of the project nor inclusion in its decision.

I looked at the wall around the shop.  Wherever I looked I would see that the cardboard covered everything. I saw one electrical outlet with a single socket, another for a telephone plug, but no phone, cut into the cardboard, none anywhere else.

I felt a shock of total emptiness. I wasn’t consulted, even included in the remodeling. I felt my place didn’t exist!

I awakened feeling what I had ‘sensed’ in the character of the emptiness of the Zen Zero—the nothingness of non-existing.

All this caused me to feel very lonely, isolated, discarded from humanity in a way that I don’t know quite how to understand or how to integrate into my understanding of ‘enlightenment’. It seems to have helped me realize the totality of my unimportance and separation from what humanity is and does . . .and the cosmos.

We are not connected, nor are we connect-ing. Like my dream, all are not considered or included in the cosmic reconstruction. We are all being covered over, entertained.

Is this an enlightened vision? A vision of enlightenment without ‘God’ or the attention of anything? The arbitrary self?

Is this an abandonment of egotism, of meaning and purpose of life? Human life? My life?