Life Talks to Me in Symbols

Does life talk to you in symbols? If so, can you describe how that works?

–Higher Thought question

A symbol, unlike a sign, has multiple meanings. A symbol does not “stand for” just one thing, like the colors on a traffic light. A symbol is a kind of mind trigger – it “activates” something deep in our psyches and resonates on many levels at once. Its “meanings” are ambiguous and inexhaustible, like a lake that, once disturbed, never stops rippling.

So yes, life talks to me in symbols. How about you?

Another way to put it is that life is constantly sending me messages. Or maybe, as per the Buddhist take on things, I’m creating my life experience moment by moment via the countless machinations and conceptual structures generated by my consciousness – in which case, if life is sending me messages, then I’m really sending messages to myself. And I see that too.

But for the sake of this discussion, I’ll stick with one example.

I was without heat for five days during a cold spell last month. The weather outside hovered around 20 degrees. In my house it was somewhat warmer – about 30 degrees. In other words, freezing. A friend loaned me a space heater, which I used to warm my small bedroom, and that room became my tiny world for five days, all day and all night, save for necessary “expeditions” to the bathroom and kitchen. (I brought in my laptop and a chair to sit on, but I spent most of my hours lying or sitting on my frameless futon, which lives on the floor.)

When my furnace got fixed I was in heaven. Back in control of my climate-controlled universe! Now I could stretch out and get things done again.

A week or so later I walked by one of the little “free libraries” in my neighborhood and found myself drawn to the novel The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. I hadn’t read Grisham since the ‘90s; I’m not a huge fan; I think he’s just okay, but this book beckoned me for some reason. As it turned out, it’s about a lawyer in a well-heeled Washington, DC corporate law firm, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, working about 80 hours a week, dreaming of becoming a “partner” some day at the firm, at which point his salary would increase to over a million dollars a year.

But events conspire to change his life, and he finds himself a lawyer for homeless people instead, and through his eyes we see the “lifestyles” (if you can call them that) of the (thousands of) people living on the streets during the harsh sub-freezing DC winter (where 20 degrees is a relatively “warm” day), sleeping in crowded shelters or under church pews or in cars … and naturally, I was moved to compare their challenges with how paralyzed I’d felt simply without a working furnace in a private, safe home with a warm bedroom and plenty of healthy food just steps away. I still couldn’t quite imagine what it feels like to be homeless, but I knew I was getting a message. The juxtaposition of my “random” encounter with that book and my recent quasi-heatless (though not at all homeless) experience felt too synchronistic not to be symbolic … but of what? The fact that I’m very privileged? The fact that the homeless people in our midst are like war heroes in the resilience they must summon just to survive? That I should do more to help the homeless here in Portland?

Possibly all that and certainly more. A whole lot more, undoubtedly.

I also received a “continuation” of that symbolic message recently. See, that’s how symbols work. They come in threads, and in different forms, like a literary motif (speaking of consciousness structures).

I was taking the 72 bus home last Saturday evening, late, from North Portland. At night, I always like to sit on the bench seats at the back of the bus, because it’s well-lit back there and I can read.

It’s also where the grittiest, seediest looking dudes tend to sit, which is not a feature that draws me but it’s never bothered me much either. After my experience on this particular night though, I did wonder why do they keep the lights on bright only at the back of the bus? Is it really so people like me can read? (Probably not; most people are reading on their cell phones, if anything.) Or maybe it’s to reduce the potential for trouble? Don’t know why this thought never occurred to me before.

So anyway, I’m sitting there reading a hard-copy book – The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as a matter of fact – when I feel the heavy thud of a guy plopping himself down right next to me on my left.

Now, the way these back bench seats are arranged (in case you’re unfamiliar with the layout of most city buses), they’re not like the normal paired bus seats. Instead, there are two rows of three seats that face each other along the side walls of the bus, and one wider bench across the entire back wall. For some reason, that back bench is where the hardest-looking fellas tend to congregate at night. So I’ve never actually sat there; I’ve only ever claimed a side bench seat, as I did on this particular night.

My nose was buried in the book – the Dalai Lama’s introduction, actually – though I vaguely sensed it was probably not good news that some guy chose to plant himself right next to me when there were plenty of open seats available.

I was holding my umbrella between my knees and at one point it slipped to the floor. I felt a movement from the guy on my left, like he was reaching to pick it up for me. 

“That’s okay, man,” I muttered as I reached down for it myself, still not looking at him.

Then he mumbled something. 

And I looked at him. 

White dude. Maybe in his 30s or 40s, hard to say. Wasted looking face. A slight unpleasant odor. An odd twist to his mouth, fury in his eyes, and a certain corkscrew-like distortion in the set of his facial features that spoke of degeneracy, brutality, trauma.

“I can’t hear you,” I said. “What?”

I had to ask him to repeat himself two or three times. He was mumbling out the side of his mouth and I’m a little hard of hearing.

Finally I understood he was telling me that he was trying to “raise five dollars.”

I had given five dollars just days earlier to a (presumably homeless) man holding a sign outside of New Seasons grocery. I give away money often on the streets. But I didn’t like being solicited on the bus. It felt intrusive and a little threatening.

I said something like, “No, I don’t have money for you.” And, sliding down one seat away from him on the bench, I returned to my book, and to the Dalai Lama’s elucidation of the illusory nature of our lives, and how we create all our experiences via the workings of our mental constructs and habits of consciousness.

Meanwhile, after a few minutes, my “bench mate” stood up and took another seat for himself.

I did not question my response to him when I thought about it later. In the moment when he was asking for money, he was sitting much too close to me. His face was too close to mine. And if I’d acceded to his request, I’d have had to reach into my left pant pocket – the one closest to him, almost touching him – for my wallet. Withdrawing my wallet would have rendered me a lot more vulnerable and exposed. He might have tried to snatch it. 

Instead, I set a boundary, which he could have proceeded to test or violate, at his peril. I had been firm in my refusal, and, while I’m not much of a fighter, I would have fought if need be, and I’m a large man, and I think he was probably on drugs that were addling him. I wonder if he was weighing possible courses of action before he got up and moved.

According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, my distinct selfhood is an illusion. But something brought this man on the bus into “my” field of consciousness. Perhaps, in a fundamental way, we are not so separate as it feels to “me.” But I can no more imagine the horrors of that man’s life experience than I can the experiences of homeless persons on the streets of Washington, DC (or Portland, OR for that matter) in the dead of winter.

It’s all connected though, isn’t it? It must be. My week without heat, the book The Street Lawyer, the man on the bus, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Life is talking to me in symbols. I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me exactly (and anyway symbols do not communicate “exactly”) though I can think of a few things …