Garbageman

 

Good Friday, 2021

One wants to know where one is.

But this is quite difficult; because already, one doesn’t have a full sensation of oneself. The Being isn’t a single thing; it exists in fragments. A full sensation, an organic sensation, can reassemble the self; it can be that one has a single self. But even then, one has the exact same single self that one had when one was in fragments. The fragments are now just in relationship; they have a magnetic attraction that has gathered them and realigned them so that the broken edges fit together.

But where is this a single self, with its many parts? 

Its many parts are both physical and psychological; they have an objective existence from a molecular and atomic point of view, an objective existence from a cellular and corporeal point of view; and yet these are not just assemblage of materials, but also allocations of consciousness that manifest individually by scale and according to the nature of the materials that they are related by.

Wow, doesn’t this sound complicated? Well, it is. Consciousness, which is ever-present, locates itself within scale and according to scale. 

If it manifests with accuracy within us as human beings, on our level, the first thing we see is that we’re in the middle of a mystery. We inhabit a particular tier on a scale of vibrations; and as we become whole within ourselves, we may at first just see that simple fact alone. It’s only one fact; but it’s a real fact, not the imaginary stuff I have told myself my whole life. Within the context of this real fact there is the potential for not just a real sensation — which grounds the fact in the inevitability of its truth — but a real feeling. That real feeling is one of humility and remorse.

Humility and remorse aren’t experiences so much as locations. If one has real remorse of conscience, it’s a place to be, not a feeling that passes, a desire or an impulse. It’s a landscape that one dwells in with a truth as real and as solid as the sensation of the earth beneath the feet. It’s magnetic; it doesn’t lie. One could say this is a terribly uncomfortable place, because of course we prefer to lie about everything; and in fact we not only prefer it, we’re experts at it. It’s not a hobby for us, it’s a profession. 

Yet the profession that we need to undertake, the craft we need to learn, is that of remorse; only by learning this trade can we locate ourselves accurately both within the scale of our own tiny lives and within the scale of the planet.

All of this needs to be undertaken while all the garbage we have swilled and filled ourselves with is still there, because it won’t go away. In point of fact, the garbage serves a function, because without perceiving it, no remorse. Only a true garbage collector who knows what he is can feel remorse. It’s a big thing to know that one picks up trash; it’s an even bigger thing to be humble about it, and to not only attend to one’s own trash, but to make oneself responsible for all the trash one encounters, everywhere. 

Only a garbage collector can help organize things, establish right relationship and put the landscape into a right condition. Folks who are not conscious garbage collectors just inattentively throw their garbage all over the place, everywhere. The results are self evident. One will always be a garbage collector. There are two kinds: those who live in their piles of garbage and become them, and those who separate themselves from the garbage and retain a sense of identity, honor, and agency independent of the trash.

The attentive garbage collector eventually becomes a recycler. Every single piece of trash within Being can be recycled with economy in order to help it return to value of one kind or another. This can’t be done casually, because in order to recycle the trash it has to be sorted out and each individual piece has to be examined in terms of its nature and what substances it has in it so that it can ultimately be reemployed to better ends. 

Understanding myself as a garbageman in a dump is useful. Maybe I can acquire some dignity by admitting the facts to myself. In the end, the search isn’t for the gold (which is what I’m usually looking for—I naively keep telling myself that there’s going to be gold somewhere in all this garbage), but for the plastic. The inert materials that are cluttering up my insides; the things that resist decomposition and haven’t been returned to the soil, where they might be of actual use and provide nourishment.

But I don’t want to get completely stuck in this analogy.

I’m here this morning; and I’m just trying to sense myself, quite gently, without any force. 

The sensation is a natural character that brings itself to this moment; I can go to it and be with it as a friend. I can let the breath out of myself gently until it reaches the last impulse of departure.

 I can pause and wait attentively for the place where it turns around and I breathe the air back in. 

I can feel the fullness, the magnetism of this substance as it enters.

The garbage has been put aside for just a moment.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.