Welcome to the Mind of a Filipino Mahayana Buddhist, a Rare Kind of Filipino.

The Tale of the Nothing


The nothing walks around the campus grounds of the university where he is currently enrolled as a Bachelor of Arts Major. All that he really wanted was a simple life in a simple house made of nipa leaves and bamboo. All that he really wanted in life was to spend afternoons sleeping under the shade of his plants and during the nighttime to play his guitar by the side of a great roaring fire. During particularly hot days he would go out and swim in a nearby stream where along with the carabaos downstream he would wallow in the cool refreshing water. But no. He is in here walking the campus grounds, staring at the sidewalk, gazing at that space where he would land his feet next. He is walking briskly, silently, disinterestedly, and GOd knows what he is thinking.

After several hours of walking the campus grounds, he walks back toward his dormitory where he currently lives. The dormitory is a two-storey complex shaped like a C with sharp, angular turns ( [ ). He enters the lobby and sees the evil smirk of the security guard behind her control desk which faces directly the sofas where guests are entertained in front of the communal television. there's no one there today. He walks past the lobby and into the long corridor towards his room. 141, it says above the door. He pulls out the key from his pocket, inserts it in the vertical hole on the door knob and hears the tiny tumblers go into their places allowing him to turn the key and then the knob with ease. He opens the door and is horrified by what he sees inside.

The giant octopus fills almost half of his room. It's slimy tentacles filling the floor with its shiny mucus like what snails leave behind in their trails only this one is still wet and shiny. The octopus, with its two eyes, stares at him, blinking, conveying the empty darkness from the depths of its being, like the depths of the ocean where it came from - the Pacific.

The nothing screams and wakes up moments later to realize that he has been dreaming all of this. Although which parts were the dream and which parts were reality he's not certain. He rises up from his disheveled bed and looks at the floor to check for slime. Nothing. Everything has been a dream.

And if everything has been a dream, then who is he? Is he also a dream? Can he be certain of his reality? And so asking himself these questions he pinches himself in his right hip. There seems to be something wrong with his flesh for when he looked at his fingers, the fingers which pinched his hips, there is a bit of  flesh that came off. He looks at his leg and sees a steady stream of blood flowing down from his leg into the floor where it is slowly collecting into a puddle.

A puddle of blood, he muses, right here in my dormitory room and I'm already late for class. He starts to dress himself and he just lets the wound drip so that he leaves splotches wherever his right shoe lands in the corridor floor. He looks back and feels as if his room is so far away and that he's been walking for miles now and still he does not find the way out of the building. Suddenly cats start to emerge out of the garbage bins and then chases him and so he runs. Dammit, I'm very very late already, he thinks. He looks back to see if the cats are still following him. They are licking his blood off the floor.

Damn cats. I knew I should simply have followed my dream of living in a small hut in my parents' farm. Damn all these ambitions and the demands of society for human automatons, skilled only in doing whatever it is that is told to them. Where's the creativity man, where's the quality, where's the, as Erich Fromm would say it "spontaneous activity" that is the only way that human beings can escape from the totalitarianism of modern existence?