A Resolution...

Health, as it is commonly understood, is a surface notion lacking in both depth and truth, (in so far as it is not recognized as merely one face of the myriad of possibilities that life has to offer us) . 

Illness, on the other hand, unmasks...if we are willing to look long, directly, and deeply enough...both horror, and, SO much more importantly, Wonder. It is the marriage of these seeming opposites that results in the great gift of aliveness and solemnity, that arrives fully formed when vitality returns. 

 I honor your prayer for understanding with a vigorous, Hallelujah!, as both my heart, and soul, tremble with deep realization. I am altered beyond recognition, no longer constantly lost in the brambles of the "me", and, surprisingly, despite my continuing to live a very solitary existence, "we" beckons at every turn and around every corner. 

This "we" is not so much a physical, emotional, or even actual phenomena, but rather an intense sensation of quite grounded liberation. I met death's gaze and saw reflected therein, the freedom of Being.  (posted upon recovering from life threatening illness which began 7/10/15 and resolved 9/15/15)

Day Two...Feeling Acutely Alive

 

The last time I felt this kind of aliveness, (it isn't excitement, or intrigue, or high interest, or high passion), was at the moment that my mother took her last breath, March 3, 2001.  A kind of all encompassing awareness, coupled with very still and very quiet joy. The sheer split second timing that allowed the unknown driver to careen across four lanes of traffic, directly in front of me, and then through force of impact careen the other direction, across four lanes of traffic and hit the opposing wall, just behind me, while also missing several other drivers, myself included, has both a tragic, and yet, utterly poetic nature to it.  I feel as though his or her soul's generosity, of sparing us - the witnesses - was on full display.  

 Like a movie where the main character steps through a ghost who cannot be seen, but is surely felt, I stepped through this soul's last moment on earth.  I have seen several people pass away as a volunteer chaplain for hospice, but those people knew life was ending.  The person in the late model red Volkswagon, was merely going from here to there...and yes, I recognize the metaphor. The power of the moment does not encourage me to build a bucket list, (something I have never had any interest in), LIFE is not to be found on the mountaintop, or in the Serengeti, but rather standing over the dirty dishes in the sink, or sweeping the cobwebs up from under the bed.

 My family stopped celebrating Christmas when I was six or seven years old.  The Christmas tree never found it's way out of the box again.  Christmas presents became cash that I used as I saw fit, and in adulthood, lacking a family with which to share such a tradition, I haven't opened a present in nearly thirty years.  (No I do not have friends that with which I exchange gifts.)

You may think me poor in relations, and perhaps I am.  But I can tell you this much, I have never received a greater gift than the one bestowed upon me by the person in the flying red Volkswagon.  And in return, Please God, may they know, in their deepest Being, that both their gift and their sacrifice is both known, recognized, received, and embodied.

I am forever changed.

96...

It is a remarkable thing to have a hard target number at your disposal with which to measure both progress and well-being. 

Since I discovered that I had diabetes, each day I walk, eat only what will reverse the insulin resistance in my body and thereby restore my beta cells to health, and track my progress.

It is easy to do.  A small pinprick, a bright red spot of blood, delivered into a home measuring device…and I have my answer.

From the first day when I found a blood sugar above 250, (dangerously high, and actively destroying kidney, pancreas, and retinal beta cells), I have watched my blood sugar levels dropping.  They got stuck for a week or so, hovering around one sixty, and I thought I might have to begin taking medication, something I am actively seeking to avoid.  But then today, at 3PM, the small ring tone sounded and the number on the screen was 96.

Wow!

I am quite certain my blood sugar has not been that low, (60 to 80 is normal), for more than a year and a half.  Now that I have had the opportunity to research the disease, and connect the dots with all the symptoms I have experienced, (but did not know were linked to diabetes), I realize that my numbers have been at dangerous levels for a good long while.

My backache is still with me, (I thought it was old age – turned out it was a pancreas in dire straights), and I am still in the toxic range, (140 and above), some portion of everyday.  But…a slow and steady drop is once more the norm.

I cannot recall anything in my life being as empowering as graphing those numbers has become.

I have created a chart, which shows, in a very graphic fashion the ups and downs of my blood sugar levels.  Spread out over the first month with several more to come are the penciled lines of an up and down progress, which has an overall southern direction.  Beginning as soon as my blood sugar dipped below emergency numbers, there is a small pink dot, placed above five days of the week denoting the days I march around the block with all my small dogs in tow.

It is the very definition of self-reliance.

My Beloved Teachers message to me was not one of Hope, nor Love, nor Peace.  His message was consistently and continuously one of Self Reliance.

He strove not to instill us with warmth, but rather with the stamina and commitment of a warrior…alone on the battlefield, outnumbered, outmanned, and outgunned.

Why is that?  Why self-reliance and not community, or tribe, or a found family?

I believe it was because he was hoping to groom leaders, people of a certain boldness who had the will, and the fortitude to persevere through the loneliness, that is required for anyone to truly know themselves, and through that knowledge, to glimpse the Universe Entire.

He often repeated his mandate…”I serve the deck, not the individual cards.”  It took me a very long time to understand that serving the deck meant that his students were only important from the long perspective, from the perspective of Eternity and the survival of the species.

As individuals he required from us that most elusive of attributes, Self Reliance.

The first gift of the disease that is now functioning in my life, is to make me capable of truly seeing how self-reliant I have become.

Each day, only I can make the choices that will result in my bodies restoration, only I can do the research, learn the skills, test the limits, reinforce the boundaries, and cross the finish line.

When once I could not bear to be alone, to face the inner fears that populated my life like rotting rust, now I stand inside myself with such calm, fierce, loyal, and trustworthy sure-footedness that I am quite simply amazed.

I do not have the life that I had wished for, nor the one that I had hoped for.  I live alone; I do not bounce from pillar to post seeking salvation in any form.  I stand quietly inside myself, capable of meeting all of my own emotional needs from within.  Calm, clear-eyed, and watchful…I merely observe…and celebrate.

I understand now, that I have become the leader my Beloved Teacher hoped I might one day be.  I do not have a following, and I hazard to guess that I might never have one…but that part is not my doing.

My job was to become truly Self Reliant.  To chip away like the sculptor, knowing that a masterpiece resides inside the stone.  I have done the work… and have become liberated from the desire to seek without, that which can only be found within.

I no longer need someone to hold my hand, to rock me into a troubled sleep, or to sing me the lullabies of the lost.

I am home.

I can face my life, physical decline, and death on my own terms…quiet and resolved.  I cherish that awareness; I bow down to the journey that has led me here.

I am unafraid.

Can there be anything better than that?  Is there even a shred of a thing, which the world could offer as competition for such a state?  Of course not…

So, today, I have had a victory.  A number in the double digits, a reward for taking effective and competent action, but one day, not so far off, victory will no longer be possible…and I will be just as content on that day, as this one.

And that is Self Reliance.

Adayre R. Miller

5/2/2014

...If They Can Find The Door...

 

Stripped down to its essential core, everything I have ever learned has led me to one simple idea.  Full stop.  Just one.

That idea is: “Don’t take it personally.”

Don’t take your life, circumstances, situation, relationships, or process personally.

That means not just the bad things, but the “good” as well.  Nothing about Life is personal, despite how desperately personal it all seems to us, in our infancy and confusion.

The most recent test of learning to live life from an impersonal perspective, for me, came on the day that I discovered that I was a diabetic.

Diabetes is not only a life threatening disease, but one filled to the brim with deeply unpleasant potential…things like amputation, blindness, kidney failure, and much more.

On the first day I grieved.

I grieved the loss of innocence that led me to believe that I was OK.  Despite all the worsening symptoms that had been plaguing me for many months, extreme fatigue, excessive diarrhea, worsening vision, pain in my feet, and much more.

Later that same day, I was given a formula for reversing its effects.  That formula was one of considerable change in diet and exercise.  Despite the fact that I had eaten a “cleaner” diet than the average American for many years, it still contained enough carbohydrates in the form of breads and pastas to keep my blood sugars in the red-hot danger range.

I immediately embarked on changing all of that, and dropped all sugars in every form (even fruits), and all breads and pastas from my diet and there was an astonishing drop in my blood sugar, and concomitant rise in my energy and well-being.  Exercise once again became a daily part of me life, and I thought I was well on my way to ending and reversing a very dangerous health risk.

Now, 30 days post that decision, and much very effective action…I am dramatically improved, but by no means, out of the weeds.  I am still in ranges that are unacceptable for optimum health, and I notice a creeping desire to take my somewhat lopsided success/failure, personally.

Pride in that I have made so many changes, with no resistance whatsoever, and sadness that I did not get totally back to “normal” ranges of blood sugar.

Because I am not taking medication, I now know that I might never again be able to eat a dessert or have a sugary mocha latte, (oddly the thing I miss the most), I may very well, have to live in this highly restricted realm for the rest of my days.

That is hard to not take personally.

But that is the greater lesson, the one no one notices…as they bounce from one goal post to the other.

Our lives are meant to be a journey of releasing ourselves from the burden of a personal self, to grow beyond viewing every event and every outcome, from the egoically centric stance of being the center of the universe.  We are not.

We are the Everywhereness, stuffed into the shell of a single human journey.  Mapping our way through the galaxy, as a point of perception for the vastness of creation.

And creation has no problem with illness, poverty, death, or disease.  These things too, are a source of abiding awareness, of deepening sensitivity, of life being informed and shaped by every form of expression.

I am, in this body, 58 years of age.  I now know, without equivocation, that my youth and resilience is finished…and that the coming years will bring many forms of debilitation and dysfunction.  I need no longer guess at the decline of my physical form.  And yet, I must respond to life as it expresses itself through me now, just now, and not the way I had hoped for, or wished for, or prayed for.

There is yet another layer of opportunity for me to mature into leading a transpersonal life.

I want that for myself.  I want that for you too.

I have not been here before.  I do not know the way.  But I do know that others have gone before me, and if they can find the door, so may I.

In Transpersonal Love,

Adayre R. Miller

4/30/14

Lost Too Soon...

 

 

I continue to think about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death.  I know in part, it is because I always tried to see every movie he was in.  His depth of talent, capable expression of that talent, and artistic sensitivity was all so compelling.  And yet, as one critic pointed out, he never once tried to make you like him.  That takes courage and real spirit, to not pander to an audience for a need they cannot fulfill.

I work with a woman who does that.  We photograph folk for churches and church directories.  As you attempt to get people to smile for you, (you would surely be shocked to find out just how hard that it is to accomplish), we, the photographers, must put on a type of show.  Engage them, encourage them, seduce a smile or some form of expression and find a moment that can then be frozen in time for the lens.  It is exhausting work.

Working with her makes it even more exhausting.  Her need to be liked is so overwhelming that just being near her is hard work.   She is loud, constant, seeking, and her attempts at humor and the necessary intimacy between photographer and subject, are a bit like nails on a chalkboard.  I have, on more than one occasion, had the person sitting in front of me tell me how glad they are they did not end up in front of her.  That is not a testament to me, as much as it is an expression that they escaped her neediness.

She, of course, has no awareness whatsoever of the emotional drive that creates such a desperate desire to please.

I suppose, Philip had no awareness of the emotional drives that caused him to purchase more than 70 small bags of heroin either.  The police reports indicate he was alone, and therefore we can assume it was not a night of “partying”, or the frenzy of fun that caused him to accidentally take his life.

To be so clear a vessel for so much talent, and to know so little about yourself, is a shock to me.

I do not know when I made the transition from pursuing outer goals to the deep inner journey that has become my home.  I know only, that I encountered others who had something that I knew I could not continue to live without.

At first that “something” was so far beyond my reach that I felt it was magical.  It confused and confounded me, I could not think about it, understand it, or come even close to achieving it.  But I could, and did hold on.  It took stamina, grit, commitment, constancy, courage, and will.  The deep mystery of it beckoned me, like nothing has before or since.  I gave myself to it; with ever greater and greater willingness…and over time the door began to open for me.

When that door did open two things struck me nearly blind.  The first was that the “something” my Teacher had in abundance was already within me, and had always been.  The second was the sheer simplicity of it.  I marveled that I could ever have been confused or confounded by something so startlingly simple, so beautifully elegant, so whisper soft.

I remain on the threshold of that door.  I have not gone into the realms that my teachers describe, nor do I know if ever I will.  But the view from this place is worthy of the lifetime of dedication that I have given it.

This hunger, to know by virtue of experience, these simple realms of pure being must have been what drove Philip to his untimely death.

I used to be filled to the brim with that hunger and nothing could satiate it.  Not food, money, sex, achievement, accomplishments, or any form of external experience, not winning, admiration, respect from others, recognitions or awards…nothing could make that ache go away.  I was sad, lonely, hurt, frightened beyond description, and yearning for the release, I imagined death would bring.

It is good to look back and remember from whence I have come, and just how far I have traveled.

As I view that long and winding trail, I see that the only thing that I brought to bear on the path, as it wound its way into the dark…was courage.

As fear rattled my teeth, cooled my bone marrow, made jelly of my knees, I kept moving into its embrace.

Now it is my only advice.

Stand still.  Do not run.  Do not hide.  Do not hope.

The tyranny of the constant search for self improvement, for the fulfillment of goals, for the hope of a better tomorrow, is the very thing that prevents you from falling into the depths of fear that are at the foundation of a life lived in sorrow and pain.

If you will only let go, and surrender…the fear itself will carry you home.

Rest In Peace, Philip.

Adayre R. Miller

2/5/14

I Must Go On, Because Going On is the Only Thing Left…

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I have been watching a video entitled “The Dark Ages: An Age of Light”, its central focus is the development of the arts through the period of time that is largely known as the “dark ages”.

This time frame is roughly the third century to the 11^th, and is the time during which Christianity truly takes root and displaces the many gods of paganism with the “One God” theory.

The most interesting aspect of the video so far, is the slow development of Christ’s visage.  In the earliest works of art he is depicted by symbol only, an X with a key symbol, shaped much like a capital P overlaid on top of it.  It is well into the fifth century before he is depicted, by artists of the time, with a face.  That face is the countenance of a cherubic boy, tender, young, even slightly female, and always jovial.  It not for another couple of hundred years, and they, the artists, have borrowed Isis from the Pagan’s lexicon to develop the face of Mary that he becomes the Christ in Agony, that we know today.

What I find so useful in this exploration of the slow development, of the arts expression of the divine, is the light it casts on “believing”.  The Christ we know today would be unrecognizable to the Christ from the earliest days of Christianity.

I have stepped cleanly free of the role of “believer”.  I no longer live in a world where the context of my mind’s theories is invisible.  I can see, and see clearly, the role of my mind’s imagination as it plays out in my experience of life.

As each new vista is breached, I can ask myself, with ever-greater clarity…”where does this idea come from?  Am I only believing, or more truthfully experiencing?

To believe is to be lost in a pretend role of the mass mind’s dedication to the facades of life.  It seems to me, as I gain greater and greater clarity, that there is an energy or stream of thought patterns that becomes attached to us, which engages us in its current forms of deceit.  I assume this is what Shakespeare and Emerson meant when they wrote of the need to “rise above the times to which we are born”.

Where I stall out is in the arena of full freedom and realization that my Teachers have both expressed.  The full surrender to “NOT knowing” that they so eloquently lived…to not know is to completely surrender to the fact that we can know nothing through the limited perspective of the individuated mind.

I return, so often, to that moment in class when my Beloved Teacher had no reaction at all to a feedback loop in the old sound system that caused three hundred people to have extreme reactions.  The surprise of it, the pain of the sound, the piercing quality of the decibel level…caused all of us to react in some very negative ways…save one person.

He had no reaction whatsoever.

None.

Nothing.

Nada.

Here then, is a person so relaxed, so in tune with the natural waves of inner stillness, so “surrendered” that even the base of his brain, his reptilian brain, had given itself over to the higher energies of Sacred Emptiness.

This is what I want for my life.

And I have no way of knowing if I even have the slightest hope of that type of realization.  I know, now, that the spiritual candy of finding myself alive, and inside a silent mind, is just that…candy.  Sweet, but of very little lasting value.

The discovery of inner silence, inner stillness, inner emptiness, is merely the first step…if even that much.  I have been there, I have drunk from that cup, and it largely cured me of the ills of my times, but it has not released me into the sweet abyss of sustainable peace.

I no longer yearn for the spoiled fruit of the imagination.  I am no longer in bondage to the dictates of my culture.  I no longer breathe the fetid air of imaginary fullfillments.  But…I am also not truly liberated.

I am very discriminating when it comes to teachers.  If I can discern even the smallest flavor of formula, of “how to's”, I run the other direction as fast as my feet can carry me.  Thus I have only found three, in a lifetime of looking, that I can say meet my criteria.  They must be capable of demonstrating to me a type of liberation and freedom so rare as to be almost unbelievable.  I patiently sift the wheat from the grass, and have found the value in these three that allows me to follow them.  Each in their own unique way, advise and quite strongly so, against seeking anything.  Stop they say, as though one voice.  Stop, and know that you are free.

I have stopped.  I am not yet free.

The hubris that has dogged all the days of my life, (as I was born with both a deeply vivid imagination, and a facile and agile intelligence), has kept me from becoming sufficiently humble enough, to deeply understand, that the gifts I came with, cannot be brought to bear upon my current circumstances.

There is no “solution” to the problem of being a lost soul.  There is only surrender.

I find myself praying quite a bit these days.  My prayers have no direction, I do not pray to a “god” that is beyond my capacity to understand.  I do not pray out of sentimentality, or superstition, or even need.

I pray, because I can do no more than pray.

Standing here, on the razor’s edge, I can no more return to the land of the “believers” than I could unlearn how to swallow.  Knowing, through experience, that my life is not a personal one…disallows the veil to be redrawn.  I cannot go back to the sleep of desire, to the land of wanting, and goals, and being driven by needs I do not understand.  Those days are over for me, they have blown away like so much ash, from a fire so cold, even memory can no longer bring the blaze to mind.

But…I also cannot seem to go forward, into the deep milk of total surrender.  The evidence, of which, my Teachers so deeply display.

At the very end of his life, my Most Beloved Teacher cried a good deal of the time.  He could no longer teach, his body was so blighted by disease.  But his mind was still opening, still stretching toward the sun, still giving itself to the Great Unknowable.  He was positioned, by his caretakers, near the back of the room and in his wheel chair and I always found a seat near him that would allow me to watch him.

He was so still, so pale, so translucent.  His soft and aging face would run like a river with his unfettered tears.  He would begin crying early, and he would cry throughout.  Fortunately, he did not cry as I do, with a good deal of the salty moisture finding its way out of my body by the pathway of my nostrils, thus making snot a significant feature of my tears.  His tears merely fell from his cheeks, upon his now hollowed out chest.

When asked about his tears, he would often say that they came from his experience of our Nobility.  That he could see and feel the goodness in us did not surprise me in the least.  But I have often felt, that those tears were the manifestations of his deep embrace of the eternal moment.  He lived so fully in the present moment that his connection to the True and the Real, could be felt by anyone with even a smidgeon of sense in them.  And there, at the end, he was rewarded for his many years of selfless service, with the tender heart of a newborn.

I miss him so much.

He once told me that he “felt movement in me”.  I assume he meant that the hardened shell of the “believer” was glacially slowly sloughing off of me, and might yet, make of me an “available” person.

I hope that is true…but I no longer yearn for it.

These next steps in my journey are entirely unknowable.  I must find my way in the darkness, toward the deep.  I must not rest, nor want, nor hope, nor weep.

I must go on, because going on is the only thing left…

Adayre R. Miller

2/2/14

The photo that accompanies this essay was shared by flickr photo sharing and  Pavla Hajek, to see more of this artists work follow this link: www.flickr.com/photos/31008322@N05/6187670086/in/photolis...

Best Wishes in the Coming Year:

This one foot in…one foot out…is a hard place to be.

I have experienced enough Silence, with enough stability to know beyond any doubt, that the fiction that we imagine ourselves to be is nothing more than a constant parade of created thoughts… held in place by habit, overuse, and spitballs."

More than this, because the thoughts I do have, now come to me in such a slowed down, slow motion sort of way, I can tell that they arise from some place beyond this place, to which I do not have access.  They are attracted to me by rote memory and old habit.  They are not “mine” in any sense of the word, save their habitual nature.

Most of them are entirely useless, but some are designed specifically to put me back to sleep and thereby to render me useless to myself, and, not-to-put-to-fine-a-point-on-it, all of humanity.  Now don’t misunderstand me…I do not think of myself, in any way, as a necessary component to humanity, other than the fact that I am breathing.  But: truth be told: most folk do believe their thoughts in the entire, and never once even suspicion that those thoughts may be utterly without ground beneath them.

Thus a person who has come to undeniably know, not in a conceptual way, but in a mud between your toes kind of way…that thoughts are not personal in any form, not “mine” nor “yours”, but just things that float around impersonal like, and get stuck between your teeth like a poppy seed, is a person equipped for escape velocity.

These days that escape is all I want.

I can’t figure out what to do with myself, in the main, because everything I still “want” is something I cannot force into being.  It is something that is bestowed or not, by some other circumstance than the one I find myself in.  A Gift of freedom, that is not for the taking, but only for the receiving.

My thoughts can no longer get me emotionally involved.  Already gone is any lingering doubt, that they are anything other, than the purest of fiction.   Not that thought is somehow wrong or inappropriate, without thinking nothing in the world could be communicated or created.  But those type of thoughts are few and very far between.  The thinking that names itself, by the name on your birth certificate, is a function of habit only and the source of all suffering.

My new Teacher has a lot to say about the end of the “personal will”.

He describes how: when liberation – constant and stable – has been gifted to you, that the personal will drops away.  I did not fully understand that notion until now.  The egoic mind is based entirely upon aversion and desire, what you like and what you don’t like.  All activity that could be defined or described as born of one’s will, is born out of the scorching need to move away from something that one wishes to avoid, or the equally scorching need to move toward something one wishes to have and hold.

When the egoic mind begins to dissolve, all aversion and desire goes with it, thus all motivations that could be described, as sourcing out of the personal will also ebb away.  He says quite directly that the personal will dies with the personal self.

I am on the cusp of that…on the skinny razor’s edge…of having no personal will.

The number of times that I am driven to action to avoid something, or to lay claim to it, are dwindling each and every day.  It is a strange and somewhat scary place to be.  Thus my “one foot in, one foot out” dosey doe, a circumstance I would change if I could.

I look forward to being without aversion and desire…they are exhausting, debilitating, and deeply disturbing fellow travelers.  High on the one hand, low and painful on the other – they require too much of us, and do so, without our conscious permission.  In that way, they are like soul eaters, constantly nibbling at our flesh and honing the skills necessary to keep us trapped and in bondage for all the days of our lives.

Laying them down, heavy as they are, threatens us with the notion that we might just float away into the heavens…never to be seen or heard from, ever again.

But enough exposure to the Silence Within as made it possible for me to trust, in the deep marrow of my bone, that putting them down is the last step before freedom’s doors open their gates to me.

Despite the fact that it is a step that I cannot take, by virtue of the aforementioned personal will, (owing to the aversion/desire paradox), I can continue to make myself ready for Grace through the medium of development of true humility.

True humility, is not the simple posturing of clothing oneself in the lookalike garb of the beatified among us.  True humility is the capacity and the willingness to recognize that we not only know nothing at all…but more accurately we cannot know anything.

We can measure everything to the sun and back; we can bend the laws of nature – despite the fact that we haven’t the foggiest notion what they really are – to our desires and even to our whims.  But not one of us, living or dead, knows a thing about what is really True and really real.  All we can know is that life experienced without the veil of the poverty of the thinking mind, is the most restful and healing place imaginable.  That is what we can know.  And nothing else.

Best Wishes in the Coming Year:

Adayre Ronni Miller

12/29/13