Chapter 24 - The Man on the Sidewalk
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Chapter 24 of Coincidence Speaks. As always, chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
It’s getting curiouser releasing each new chapter now in my own life…
Chapter 24
The Man on the Sidewalk
The interconnective flow was back, although not nearly as strong as before. But it was there. And he was grateful.
Once more, a spontaneous and inexplicable natural phenomenon had given Paul surprising insight into the pathway forward. The curious synchronized behavior of the ducks at Echo Lake had thawed his frozen spirit, and along with it came the courage to resume his awareness expansion practices once more.
Gradually Paul began to bring back a sense of wary optimism to each new day, going much easier on himself now that he’d realized he didn’t have to do everything all at once, and that even if he stumbled and “missed the boat,” so to speak, future potential for growth would always line back up in another guise. Even the months of depressive numbness, a seeming lack of all feeling—a crystallized unwillingness to move at all—had acted as a signpost to show how he’d been judging himself as unworthy of his own intrinsic connection within life itself.
He wrote the essence of the vital truth in his journal:
“True death is the decay of the spirit, not the passing of the body.”
He could still sense that at some point in the future he would be drawn into something new with his career, but it wasn’t his job to force it, or even to figure it all out on his own. For now Paul had all the autonomy and trust in his gainful employment that a guy could possibly want. And crucially, he could finally let himself appreciate that, instead of always pressuring himself for the next step—be it physical, financial, spiritual, or otherwise.
That next Saturday morning, Paul went upstairs to sit in quiet contemplation before Clara and the kids got up for the day, feeling encouraged enough to start asking some direct inner questions again:
“What are some simple actions I can take now that are more aligned with my highest expression in my career? And what might be holding me back? Show me. In fact, don’t just show me — hit me over the head with it!”
It didn’t take a PhD in quantum physics to figure the second question out—money was the obvious thing preventing him from having the time and the freedom to fully follow his dreams. Wasn’t it?
But the silence in the predawn darkness encouraged a more profound exploration. It wasn’t just money holding him back—it was what money represented. Money was the collectively agreed upon human symbol of ability to acquire and provide food. To provide shelter. Put more bluntly, to survive.
As he kept inquiring deeper and deeper within, past the realm of thoughts and into pure emotive sensation—he began to feel the corresponding inner blockage, wrapped up like a snake contracting around his abdomen. A deep constrictive need of something external to complete him. Money was intricately intertwined with mortality.
And it wasn’t just him either—it seemed to be entwined as a pervasive part of humanity itself, within its very epigenetics, a collective subconscious fear instilled in just about everyone. It was massive and paralyzing—a large-scale amplification of the old splinter in his mind he’d sensed in the world since before he was even old enough to put words to it: push push push work work work there’s not enough to go around hoard as much as possible.
Rich or poor—it didn’t matter in the face of shared human mortality. It was the exact same constrictive energy. People without money worried about finding it, and people with money worried about losing it.
The entire human race, whether conscious of it or not, seemed to be wrapped up in the same desperate chase to gather enough resources to survive. Haunted by a primeval insecurity that there would not be enough to go around for themselves and their loved ones.
And this indeed had been a literal truth for so much of the course of recorded history—a mortal anxiety wrapped up in mass human trauma, suffering, violence, and death. A war over access to resources was being fought on multiple levels—physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual.
Paul was tired of fighting for his right to live.
As Paul sat there in the exploration of scarcity, of not having enough, a vivid image popped into his mindspace unannounced. He saw himself curled up on the hardwood floor in his old house in the suburbs from a bird’s-eye view, body burning in unspeakable pain, abandoned by his life, abandoned by God—but it was on that precipice, in that crucible when his life had changed forever. When he’d looked directly into the abyss of his greatest fears through the horrific lens of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, and witnessed them brought fully to life. When he’d allowed visceral emotion to completely break him down until there was nothing left but emptiness.
Yet in that emptiness, that silence, a new seed had been planted.
The invitation once more was to keep on sitting… to center within the somatic sensations of scarcity, of what it felt like to not have enough. To amplify the inner discomfort so he could see it, know it, feel it—that was the only way he knew how to truly equalize within it.
So Paul played a game he called What If — imagining the absolute worst-case scenario in full color living detail through his own inner senses. The “game,” while not at all fun in the traditional sense of games, seldom failed to smoke out the core truth embedded within his fear—as long as he was willing to face it.
He took a deep breath, preparing himself.
“OK—so what’s the worst that could happen here?”
Several fairly daunting what ifs landed immediately.
“Well, what if I were to lose my job and I fall flat on my face? What if we can’t pay our bills? What if we go bankrupt?” With each new question, his abdomen twisted tighter and it got harder and harder to breathe.
“What if we lose our house? What if we become homeless? What if we can’t eat? What if Clara leaves me?” He choked, struggling for air now.
“What if I lose my kids? What if they all suffer, because of ME?”
Suddenly words failed, and Paul found himself engulfed within the somatic sensation of the energy itself —
ancient.
profound.
wordless.
shame.
A stark image of a man on the edge of a city sidewalk came up and through. The man was bent and contorted into the fetal position, and it took a few moments to realize it was him… at least some aspect of him, his filthy body curled into itself, a brittle dried out husk on a cracked sidewalk in the bitter cold of winter. He looked down with that same bird’s-eye view as before and witnessed himself as a complete outcast from human society—hungry, divorced, homeless, unrecognizable, broken.
The experience amplified further, and he went directly into it, into the firsthand perspective of the man on the sidewalk…
I am a rotting carcass, mentally incoherent, people stepping right over me as if I am invisible. I AM invisible now. Completely abandoned by my family, by my wife, by my world, by my God. And it’s MY fault. I DID THIS.
While the situation wasn’t anywhere near his current reality, the brutal feelings in him begged to differ. It was as if he was experiencing a quantum shard of himself in some other timeline, separate yet simultaneous with his own, all while he sat in the upstairs guest room on an otherwise typical Saturday morning.
And as the intense emotions brought out by this worst-case scenario were seen and honored in the light of day, in the light of conscious awareness, suddenly whatever actually ended up happening in Paul’s own future didn’t seem nearly so daunting anymore. In a way, he had already played it through and felt, seen, and lived it. A major extent of his fear had been smoked out, witnessed within the space of the present moment.
“After all — here I am, right here, right now, just fine!”
With that recognition, the last of the crippling fear spontaneously dissolved into a timeless sense of peace, and Paul found himself immersed within that fallow sense of spaciousness again, a pregnant open space where anything could happen. His entire being now surrendered into a resolute acceptance of come what may.
Paul just dropped right into it, following that welcome sense of peace further and further inside, a deep abiding stillness, an essential sacredness, all of his muscles relaxing, until he could hardly tell whether he was awake or asleep anymore. His lungs barely seemed to draw breath, and his heartbeat slowed so much it hardly broke the silence.
The silence! The silence was alive—the silence cradled him and he was floating in it.
Paul was flying once again.
Somewhere out of the unfathomable depths, a curious sound arose and drifted through, all on its own. A tiny undulating echo, a faint ripple in a pool of perfect glass. It was subtle—so subtle that Paul figured he must be imagining things.
“Maaaa…”
“‘Maa?’ What the heck…” Paul sat there, totally still, open and listening.
After another minute or so of stillness, just as he was about to question his lucidity, a second sound came through:
“LAAAAA.”
This time it wasn’t nearly so subtle. And he didn’t seem to be making it up himself. It sure wasn’t the usual mind chatter agenda of more productive things he needed to be doing, in any case. Paul perked up, curious, putting the two sounds together, “Maaa…laaaa… Mal?? ‘Mal’ sure sounds kinda negat…”
A third sound cut right through the commentary.
“KAAAAI.”
Three distinct sounds. Paul put the three syllables together.
“Maa — Laa — Kai.”
“Maa Laa Kai? Uh… OK… never heard of it.”
What could it possibly mean? He sat there for a few minutes more, waiting, wondering what else would come through…
But,
that was it.
Upon returning to normal waking consciousness, Paul hopped straight onto the internet to search up the strange sound combination, and was mildly interested to discover that “Malakai” was the Americanized version of an old Biblical name, “Malachi,” apparently one of the twelve minor prophets of the Old Testament. This meant absolutely nothing to him, so he filed the whole experience somewhere in the “Mildly Interesting” section of his brain and moved on with the weekend.
The next Sunday morning he got up early to sit in quiet stillness again, intrigued by whatever had happened the day prior, wondering whether the strange spontaneous inner soundforms had been some kind of fluke, or if they had some kind of deeper meaning as yet unknown.
After a few minutes of deep breathing, following the breath further and further within, Paul broke through linear time and dropped once more into that sacred sanctuary of silence—a paradoxical placeless place where even basic body functions seemed to slow down to a crawl. Yet his core awareness remained vital and alert, watching as thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations popped up and drifted through.
It didn’t take long this time. A sequence of inner soundforms came beaming in out of the blue:
“Use
Money
For
Good.”
“What?” Paul was a little shaken.
Not just that there seemed to be some kind of inner voice that was making itself heard within him, but that said voice now seemed to be specifically challenging his financial methods.
He watched his inner narrator going haywire in reactive response:
“What the heck is going on here? Where is this coming from? And anyways I AM using my money for good, I work at a fricking bank—I’m providing food and shelter for my family, I pay a boatload of taxes for the benefit of the whole damn country, we’re saving for our future, for our kids to go to college, for retirement, for vacation experiences… for Clara to actually be home with our kids like she wants instead of having them in day care… I mean dammit I try to help people when I can, and we give what we can…
Heck we keep adopting friggin’ animals, adding chickens and ducks and goats and God knows what else Clara is going to bring home next… we need all we can get just to feed our exponentially growing farm population…”
Cutting right into Paul’s rambling deluge of defensive thoughts, another soundform popped out of the silence and into his awareness, obliterating the torrent of mind chatter:
“10%.”
The power and directness of the spontaneous numerical impulse rattled Paul so much his eyes flew open. Collecting himself, he couldn’t help but connect the emphatic 10% impulse to the concept of tithing. He looked up the origin of the word:
“Tithe comes from the old English word teogotha, which means ‘tenth.’ To tithe is to relinquish one-tenth of your personal income, either as a mandatory contribution, a voluntary donation, or as a levy.”
Paul had always thought the whole “tithing” concept was just a thinly veiled way for a centralized church authority to hoard wealth and power over the course of centuries.
“Why would I pay a set amount of income to church just because some crotchety old testament god will punish everyone if we don’t obey a bunch of outdated commands transcribed into a human translated book written thousands of years and several languages ago?”
Entirely skeptical, Paul nonetheless felt a faint flickering of curiosity arising despite himself.
End Chapter 24
Chapter 25 of Coincidence Speaks will post next Friday. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
“The entire human race, whether conscious of it or not, seemed to be wrapped up in the same desperate chase to gather enough resources to survive. Haunted by a primeval insecurity that there would not be enough to go around for themselves and their loved ones.”
There we go!
“When he’d looked directly into the abyss of his greatest fears through the horrific lens of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, and witnessed them brought fully to life. When he’d allowed visceral emotion to completely break him down until there was nothing left but emptiness.
Yet in that emptiness, that silence, a new seed had been planted.” Yes!!!!!!!! 🙏