It's Quieter Now

The machine is idling.

Yesterday the engines were at full power, their roar deafening. Today, though, it’s just ticking along. You can just about feel it shuddering as it turns over, but now there’s something different.

All we’ve known, up until now, is the machine. Its noisy cogs and vast expanse obscuring everything else. All we can see for miles around are its streets and its spires, it’s towers and its blinking lights. We walk on its pavements, we push its buttons, we eat its ready meals, and catch its trains. We wear its uniforms and fit ourselves into its categories. We adjust ourselves so that we more easily fall into its grooves and channels. 

We cut our hair a certain way. We adjust our language and our routines and our thinking so that we can be more easily processed, targeted, kettled and advertised at. We deny our intrinsic truth so that it accepts us more readily. We foster our insecurity so that we can yearn for its stuff, its products –  a sticking plaster for the unmanageable emptiness we feel within. And we judge those who dare not conform, who stand out against its systems and its mores.

The machine rests atop the real world, hiding it completely, like a thin, artificial veneer. Occasionally we glimpse what lies beneath through the portals of art and literature and poetry. Occasionally we take a deep breath, go for a walk in the park, listen to the sound of the rain. Occasionally we find ourselves caught in the moment – content, satisfied, not wanting for anything, maybe… possibly… happy?

But then the machine snaps us out of it, with its adverts, and its smart phones, and its apps, and its promises of beach holidays and fast cars, and its distractions of printer errors, and its angry emails, and its performance reviews, and its KPIs and its WhatsApp, its low-calorie snacks and video nasties.

But today there’s something different.

Yesterday the engines were roaring, but now the volume has been turned down. The streets are empty, and the smog is clearing. When we look up the sky seems bluer. At night the stars seem brighter. Our dreams seem more lucid.

When we listen, we hear new sounds. It’s no longer the sounds of the street, the pistons and the grinding and churning of the cogs and the gears. Now we hear the birds as they talk to each other, and welcome us to their world. The real world.

Now we hear the sound of the wind in the trees. Now we hear the creaking limbs of the oak outside our window, and lose ourselves in the hypnotic, pendulous motion of the swaying branches. We feel the ground beneath our feet. We really taste the food we’ve cooked for ourselves. We have room to pause and be still.

The sticking plaster of stuff falls away, and for a fleeting moment we find the hole within us filled with something, something light, something electric. Could this be meaning? Could this, in this simple moment, be meaning?

Yesterday we absorbed ourselves in the pursuit of happiness – the accumulation of stuff, of wealth, of material rusk to fill the gaps. But today we are looking through the cracks that have appeared in the artificial veneer of society, and a brighter, more vivid light is shining through. Look, it asks us, look and see for yourselves. Now that your machine is faltering, now that your cage is breaking apart, now that the veneer of your false reality is splintering, the light of the real world is waiting for you. Stop seeking happiness, and be just be happy.

As you wash your hands, feel the water on your skin. As you breathe in, feel your lungs and your body expand. As you breathe out, feel that release of forgiveness for all that life has denied you, and know that everything you could ever desire is waiting for you outside the artificial boundaries of the machine.

Take this moment to recognise your place in the universe, to see that you revolve around the sun as part of the planet you stand on. To see that you are made of stardust. To see that within you lie infinite possibilities and that because you are alive everything – anything – is possible. 

Take this moment to see beyond your uniform, beyond your haircut, beyond your category, beyond your place on the pavement of the machine. And recognise your uniqueness. Recognise that you are energy, without form, without definition, just pure feeling energy. Because while the machine needs to define us, we are indefinable. We are the consciousness that makes the universe real. Without our awareness nothing exists. 

Without your awareness, nothing exists.

This time is hard. Painful. Waiting for whatever comes next. Waiting for an uncertain future. Struggling to keep up. To fill the hours. To continue business as usual. To remain normal while remaining twelve feet from the next nearest human.

But sometime in the near future we will have a chance to return to the machine, it’s engines will kick into gear and once again the sound will be deafening. And we will have a choice. 

Will we pretend nothing ever happened and get back to our cubicles, tapping away at keyboards like battery chickens pecking away at their feed? Or will we bring back a little bit of our intrinsic selves with us? A little bit of that which cannot be categorised. A little bit of that which is beyond the machine. Which is magic. Which is unique. Which is our undeniable truth.

You are energy. You are one with the universe. The machine wishes to hide this from you, but now that its volume has been turned down low, we have an opportunity to hear our nature calling us.

All we have to do is answer, and keep a little bit of what we hear for ourselves.