Machine shop

I woke up in a dream to a place I had never before been. I’m in a metal working shop. I’m standing in front of a large machine that bends pieces of metal and stamps them with an impression. I am dressed in light blue long sleeve shirt and blue jean pants and so are all the other men in the shop. Our clothes are uniforms that are wrinkled and worn. We’re all fairly dirty. Our hair is unwashed, our hands are smeared with grease and our fingernails are filthy. Our faces are grease-smeared and pimply and wrinkled. Our eyes are creased and tired. Our movement is lumbering. Our speech is slow.

We are bending cut pieces of flat metal just so. Bent one way in just the right spot, creased just so along a precise axis, and bent again along the edges to specifications just so. With holes punched into them in precise sizes and in precise spots. These are components for some other machine, about which we know nothing at all. It could be a hinge for a refrigerator door, a component for some kind of gun. They could be parts for children’s toys, they could be parts for a rocket or parts for picnic basket, all that is none of our business, not even part of our interest. We don’t care what happens with these pieces of metal, all we care about is getting it exactly right.

Cliff has left us.

And that is catastrophe.

Cliff leaves a hole in our crew that cannot be patched.

Cliff leaving our workgroup is a personal catastrophe for each of us individually. Each our own way. In a way, Cliff is our personal Jesus. And now Cliff is gone because of his girlfriend whose name none of us even know.

I am the only person there who understands the nature of Cliff. Everyone else there simply responds to Cliff without knowing the basis of their connection. But I do.

Cliff is not handsome. Not tall. Not well built. Not even clean. Cliff is not careful nor discerning by any definition. Cliff is not wise, not intellectual. In fact, Cliff looks like a bridge troll. He has dark rough wrinkled skin and long wiry brown reddish thinning hair and uneven teeth. Whereas it is axiomatic the eyes are windows to the soul, Cliff’s eyes are Cliff’s soul. Cliff’s dark wrinkled skin is Cliff’s soul expressed as skin. The hair on Cliff’s head is the soul inhabiting the body we know as Cliff expressing itself as hair. Every single aspect of Cliff is an expression of the soul we respond to as outwardly physical Cliff, not an expression of his heart, not an expression of his mind. Not an expression of his personality. Every single thing, his greasy shoes, his broken laces, his old blue cap with holes, his wrinkled neck, his misshapen face, his small stature, his gait, his odor, his breath, his heartbeat, his voice, his nose hair, his longish asymmetrical ears, his energy, his heat, his aura, every detail of Cliff is an outward expression of soul with nothing concealed nothing held back. Cliff is divinity expressed in physical form and all outward expression is communication of divinity. Divinity to divinity, that is what the men in this room respond to in interaction with Cliff, and that is why they all deeply miss Cliff. But none of them would describe it like this. Only I do.

Cliff is an extremely rare individual.

He shines freely where others hold back their shine. His inner spark of divinity is all that there is to Cliff. There is nothing else in competition. His personality is subservient to his soul. That tiny spark tucked deeply into his physical form is all that there is to see from Cliff.

So then, when Cliff makes something so simple as an omelet, Cliff holds the knife in his hand and his soul energy envelopes and becomes the knife, Cliff is the cutting board and Cliff is the tomato that’s sliced. So each piece of cut tomato is a portion of Cliff. Cliff is the stove, Cliff is the pan, Cliff is the cheese, and the cheese grater all at once, Cliff is each individual shaving of cheese. When Cliff sprinkles cheese over the omelet as it cooks, Cliff is distributing himself over the beaten eggs that are Cliff denaturing in the pan just so to the exact point of doneness. Exactly as each machine part is bent and creased and hole punched just so. Each bend and crease and hole is Cliff affecting himself. Everything that he touches becomes part of his energy. So the omelet that is served is Cliff himself. When we eat it, we’re consuming Cliff-energy. And that’s why it is so perfect. And this is why the crew misses him so sorely. They miss being taught how to be human. His machine work is soul communication, and that communication is energy. His omelets are Cliff soul communication and that communication is energy.

Cliff’s whistling is Cliff soul communicating and the medium is not the air vibration that can be measured by physical instruments, rather the real medium is soul energy. Cliff’s idle whistling communicates directly with birds. The birds are responding to soul energy. Cliff speaks to the birds.

A linguist would attempt to analyze Cliff’s whistling bird speech as language using  their meta-language tools of words that describe words, and words that describe sounds that make words, and their words for the organization and arrangement of words that convey meaning, they’ll analyze as sentences that are adjective-structured, or noun-format sentences, or verb-arranged sentences, and they will miss entirely what Cliff is doing, his soul communicating through the energy of soul, on that plane of soul energy, the energetic vibrations that birds respond to. The linguist will fail at comprehension of Cliff. But not me.

So, Cliff’s tragedy is his girlfriend’s failure at matching with Cliff vibrations of pure soul. She’s come into their relationship with a pre-construct of expectations and Cliff has failed to meet them. Cliff is not going to be the mate she imagines herself requiring. She drew the line regarding Cliff’s expected behavior and the soul that is all that there is to Cliff cannot meet her demands. That’s why Cliff left the machine shop, to go elsewhere and attempt to work things out.

Right then the crackling old radio announced that Cliff is returning to the machine shop and the whole place burst in rejoicing. All men in greasy blue uniforms overjoyed for their own individual reason. Together they decided a book must be written but none of them can write. They looked at me, “write us our book.”

Fine. I’ll write your book. But I must write your book such as first person narration. I must write the book such that Cliff broke it off with me.

The crew was confused about this strange approach and they were all immediately against this. It didn’t make sense. They told me to get off that idea and write our book the right and sensible way. I tried to explain to them what I just now told you but none of it passed their discernment. They wanted their story told as surface narration. Only the salient points bearing on the immediate crew in the standard physical realm where everyone is always awake and all dealings are surface-level in the physical world were acceptable. We disputed the approach I must take in writing our book. They rejected my explanation of soul. They thought my ideas are fancy and inappropriate for their reality. It doesn't match their interaction as they see it. I told them this is a very real revelation and important about a unique soul on earth behaving as pure and astonishingly advanced soul to the exclusion of everything else, that is what each of us respond to individually. It is not a plain flat one-dimensional story of a man stuck in thick and slow physical world who works in a machine shop with superficial surface interactions with his crew, who leaves and is missed, then returns. No. This book will be a small revelation about our layered existence on energy planes that hints at eternal life of our souls and our abiding sparks of divinity in each of us, the only thing eternal about us. You’ll have that interpretation, or you’ll have nothing. They agreed to allow it, since I must.

I woke up in the place where my body was sleeping and my thoughts changed to, holy shit, that was different. I could actually smell the greasy machine shop and feel the cool air that hangs in that place.