The Practical side of Spirituality…

Although I have tried to develop an “impersonal” voice for use in writing these essays today I must speak with you from the personal, as my experience is to fresh and to vital for the distance needed to adopt the voice of “we”.

Years ago I was an associate minister for a Unity church in California, which was founded by the Fillmore’s and was original called Unity Church of Practical Christianity. That name, the Practical Christianity part has always held deep appeal for me. I have family members who claim to have received visitations of all sorts and stripes, spoken in tongues, experienced ephemeral phenomena, have laid on hands and been to the mountaintop, and although I do not discount any of these out of the ordinary spiritual phenomena, for me… it is the Practical side of the equation that most deeply attracts me.

Spirituality needs to function for me to be interested, not just in the pew, or in the crowd…not just demonstrations, manifestations, and spiritual fireworks…but in the day to day grind of my life.

I suppose that is why I gravitated so strongly to my Spiritual Teacher, he too, is a nuts and bolts kind of guy. I don’t recall him having ever used the word “enlightenment”, yet he is the most enlightened person I have ever met, heard about, and even read of. His presence calms, persuades, pries open the locked and burdened heart and sets the Soul free. His entire message could be summed up in one small phrase, a phrase he has used many different times in the 25 years I have been his student, which is…

Self Mastery, is Mastery of One’s Thinking.

To be Masterful, is to be capable of the control of thoughts that flood our mind and capture it’s focus. In New Age circles, it is my opinion, that most folks would translate that Idea to mean that we take control of our thoughts and bend them to the “positive” pole for use in the bringing about of the “manifestation” of our goals and dreams. I have no disagreement with this translation of Mastery, provided that it recognizes that the use of the Mind for this purpose, buries the Soul as deeply into Form as does the negative pole. The negative and the positive are as truly wedded to each other as the two sides of a coin, or the two sides of a road, or the up and down of this versus that. You cannot have one without the other, it isn’t possible, thus the having of “Form”…even if it is “positive” is not enough for me and only sets a person up for the transformation of the positive into its other nature the “negative”, as surely as the rising and setting of the sun.

What is possible is to transcend the yin and yang of it all, by virtue of the Middle Road of the Buddha, or the “Mastery of One’s Thinking”.

Here is where the game gets Practical.

The attempt to “think positive” is still a prison; it merely has a different flavor. But to free oneself from thinking entirely, is to stop allowing the tail to wag the dog. Practicality at its finest.

For many months now, I have been experiencing tiny…but astoundingly clear moments of the absolute cessation of thought. I recently wrote about them as my “Seven Precious” moments. The experience of these moments of acute, intense, alert, aliveness – ABSENT thought of any kind, has been the greatest experience of my life. As impossible to describe as it would be to describe, the magnificence of a ripe peach to a person who has never eaten one. The bloom, the taste, the ripeness, the sweetness, the glory…the wonder…of the No Thought mind is very much like being let out of a hole in the ground, into a dewy morning of sunshine, that you didn’t even know you had been imprisoned by.

That experience replaces the desire for Form entirely. To know that it is possible to be free from the thinking mind brings into clear focus the old spiritual story of the beggar sitting on a box of wealth that he had never had the foresight to open. A treasure trove of Formless Wealth beyond measuring, a gift beyond the capacity to describe, a wonder that no amount of seeking could hold a candle to, right there under your own rump…all along.

This is a phrase from the great work of Emerson my favorite author, all of his essay’s and poems carry with them the resonance of the Formless No Thought mind, you can hear the vibration as it travels thru his person, out of his hand and onto the paper. He writes of the making of poetry in this manner… “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down…”

“Where the air is music”, this is the dwelling place of the Formless No Thought Mind…musical air…. A restoration of the lost innocence of the age before reason, when merely breathing in and out suffused us with the Joy of Being.

Last night, just before bedtime, I received some news that would normally produce a mountain of anxiety and concern. A disturbance and a detonation of my well being…lying alone in the dark quiet of my bedroom…the thinking mind attempted its long standing hijacking of my self, my soul, my heart, and my will. And for the first time in my entire lifetime, the mind of the personal was utterly undone. Undone in the midst of emotional upheaval, undone in the face of fear and anxiety, undone in the desire to spin a story of impending doom and potential suffering. Undone.

A heretofore unknown and very-hard-to-believe ability, to transcend the thinking minds control, was bestowed upon me like the cool hand of a Beloved. Acute, alert, awake, aware, Formless No Thought Aliveness won out over the story streaming in from the personal mind. Triumph was had…Self Mastery has begun.

I can no see no other reason for living save this one.

Eckhart Tolle says that the Universe has two movements. “The movement of Form into manifestation and the return movement back to Formlessness.” The Journey of Undone. Thinking is “Forms” greatest disguise…No Thought Mind is Formlessness restrained to a singularity, to a body, to a Being.

There is no way in which to describe my gratitude. No way to compel you to understand the relief, the freedom, the sanctity, the Beauty…the Glory. To say that I would give up everything I have, including my life, to pay for this most amazing experience would not come close to conveying the priceless value of the welcome experience of Formless No Thought, in the midst of the well worn road of personal suffering that “thinking” has delivered, all of the days of my life.

The promise of Salvation that populated my childhood fundamental religion has been received, in the most unexpected and surprising manner I could never have dreamed up on my own. Once more from Emerson… “All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the Great Soul have its way through us; in other words to engage us to obey.” Obedience, in a word, is the foundation of Self Mastery… the thinking mind and its many personalities, behaviors, quirks and idiosyncrasies has finally been made obedient to the Formless No Thought Mind that bathes in the wonder of Being, for the exquisitely simple reward of noticing the breath moving thru the body. Nothing else can be added, nothing else can be gained, nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to have…all desire and yearning laid aside, cast off like the beggars they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson…“He must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees and his gloom’s alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise reward enough for him. And why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then, will the (silent) faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will gladly receive.”

…the silent faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers…a cherished Soul…a life reclaimed…

If my heart were to give up its cadence, this day, this very moment…I would journey forward knowing I had found the only thing worth having. God… I am so very grateful…

Adayre R. Miller

8/8/2010