The Dark Heart of Loneliness...

The first blush of potential health problems have caused, as you might imagine, a life review. While walking the mountain this morning I traveled back over time and connected with the vast changes that have occurred in my life.

In my childhood, aside from my mother’s rages and my uncles misconduct, the central feature of my childhood was agonal loneliness.

It was the kind of loneliness that burns like fire, but ices your insides to the degree that paralysis sets in. It hollowed me out, and left me trembling with tension, fear, and anxiety. My father absent because of my mother’s rages, my mother in effect dead since she was three, and my sister’s gone the moment they had feet under them.

Thus I had no family connections to speak of. In all of my adulthood; I cannot recall my mother calling me even once, (and of course my Father never did). I know she must have, when my father had his heart surgery or when my sister announced she was going to marry a man she met five days previously…at some point she must have called me. But it was so rare an occurrence as to be virtually non-existent.

Thus all contact, connection, effort, and participation rested on my shoulders. (Something I no longer have the will for…)

In childhood, I can distinctly remember, how poor a job I did at attempting to “make” friends. Beverly, who lived across the street and two doors up, was a gangling and skinny kid with dark curly hair and large gaps between each of her front teeth. Her nose, short and upturned, was already - at six years old - sprinkled with freckles so liberally it looked like polka dots. I remember very clearly the breezy confidence she had in the arena of “friend making”. Easy to be with, goofy, and oddly cute she gathered up friends like daisies from a field. I yearned to be in her circle, but never fit, as I rarely fit anywhere.

Young adulthood arrived and I vowed to figure out what was wrong with me, correct it, and somehow learn to be “popular” and attractive to others.

I honed my innate intelligence, developed my wit, poured over magazine articles on the “how to’s” of everything from, yuppie- dressing-for-success-to-sculpting-your-features, with 2 hours worth of “natural looking” make-up application. I dropped, without consideration or application of thought, into an anorexic phase intended to keep me reasonably slender, to the degree that I once went three months without solid food. (This messes with your brain chemistry in such a profound way, I know that it was part of the reason I was so actively suicidal, throughout my entire twenties and some measure of my thirties as well.)

At one point in a bar with co-workers, I watched Robin, the only other woman on our team...surrounded by men three deep…her daisy cup filled to overflowing, and I ventured a question of Dave, a good looking and friendly teammate.

“Dave” I said, “In a very objective way, it is my belief that Robin is not more physically attractive than I am. We are similar in body type, level of facial attractiveness and care with appearance. So, tell me if you know, why she is so attractive to men and I might as well be wallpaper?” And he replied without the spoonful of sugar that would have helped so much…”easy”, he said…”you’re way to needy”.

As it turned out that was not the last time I was to hear that phrase, something that literally took my breath away each of the three times I have heard it.

…Meet my shadow; her name is “Miz Needy and Then Some, Daawlin”…

The other half of me. The dark side of the force. The danger in the pitch black. The boogey man under the bed. The hellhounds of the Baskervilles. (If sound effects could be added, you would be hearing the breathy, mechanical breathing of Darth Vader right now.)

The first two times I heard it, from dim but beautiful Dave, and from rich and successful Jim, I was not capable of putting the information to use. But finally my gifted, harmless, intuitive, and powerful Teacher said it to me, (who I would trust with my life), and the light dawned in my heart and mind.

As I write this, posted above my computer screen are these two quotes in bold 48 pt. typeface:

Rumi…writes of “night travelers who search the darkness instead of running from it, a companionship of people willing to know their own fear. “ ….and….

As Milarepa sang to the (emotional and spiritual) “monsters” he found in his cave, “It is wonderful you demons came today. You must come again tomorrow. From time to time, we should converse.”

These great and wise sages, attempt with all the graciousness and kindness that they possess, to lead us to the fracture that wounds our hearts and hamstrings our lives. Know your fear, converse with your demons….meet your dark side and liberate your life.

The agonal loneliness that was such a feature of my childhood, that motivated my every waking moment in early adulthood, the source of my desire to bury a bullet in my brain, was the loss of, the fear of, and the running from…my “other” half.

Now my other half and me are co-conspirators. Gone is the need to hide myself from myself, gone is the “I don’t know who I am blues”. Gone is the looking outside of myself for others to define me, describe me, or reflect me.

Just before my mother’s death, while I was walking behind her from the kitchen back to her bedroom making sure she didn’t fall along the way, she said, almost too quietly to hear and apropos of nothing and to no one, (I do not believe she was speaking to me), “I don’t think I even know who I am.” It was a moment of deep sadness for me, deeper even than the death that followed the very next day.

She didn’t “know” herself, as the vast majority of people do not, because she had spent a lifetime running from her fears…a lifetime not conversing with her demons.

It is my experience that the meeting of one’s other half is a prerequisite to the capacity to leave behind both halves in favor of the higher realms of understanding. The United Me’s that have no “self” in them.

Here is my entire definition and understanding, of all the variations the spiritual path has to offer: Pre-thought – Trapped in Thinking – Post Thought, this is my church, my doctrine, my liturgy, and my high holy days. (Although there is not a great deal of pomp and circumstance as you might imagine…and membership is quite low as well).

Pre-thought: this is the realm of the animals, minerals, and vegetation in the higher orders of the animal kingdom we see emotion, but no thought as such. For instance, when my dog was attacked by a pit bull and his over large incisor bit into her flesh just next to her spine, she screamed and ran, but as soon as the danger had passed and she was safely away there was never another moment from that day to this that she “relived” her near death. No fear of that particular corner as we passed it each day, no trauma around pit bills in general, no upset at all…even as the wound was still fresh in her back. ---No thought, no suffering---

Trapped in Thinking: as consciousness develops, as it has in humans, the capacity to think brings both gifts and hugely difficult challenges. On the first day that Og named a tree, a tree…limitation began. As the mind settled, by naming, on what a thing is - hardly ever again searches for greater depth. Then Og developed aesthetics and called the tree “beautiful”, and Bog disagreed…and thus conflict was born into the Mind of Man. Then Og reached a new level of “thinking” and discovered the concept of mine, as in, my rabbit for dinner…and Bog wished him dead over it. And this is where we get nuclear proliferation; we have Bog and Og to thank for WMD’s…

(My Teacher first introduced me to Og and Bog and I, in turn, introduce them to you.)

But let us not forget, the “trapped” portion of this hugely painful and deeply suffering second level. The trapped comes from not being willing to embrace the all of you. The ugly, maimed, lonely, hurting, deformed mess that came up out of childhood, in response to which, you created an identity you would now die to protect. An identity entirely false and with no basis in Being, but which none-the-less has caused billions over millennia to die unrealized and separated, both from themselves and from the One.

OK, here’s where it gets good…

Post Thought: Beyond thought… Like dolphins leaping from a silvery break in the water, joy-filled, free, easy, calm, quiet, lovely, capable, powerful, wonderful, delightfully simple.

To discover that the who of you, is not your thinking - as an actual lived experience and not a concept others have told you - which has merely been added to your thinking mind’s inventory, is miraculous beyond the capacity for words.

One tiny crack is all that is necessary. The first time your mind is silent puts you in touch with Silence, and awakens the desire to abide there. It ends the fear of death both the real one and the unreal one, (the death of that hobbled together childhood created “identity” – which must die if Silence is to be fully engaged.)

Post Thought, makes it possible to control thought. In time, with commitment and concentration, thought will still bubble up from wherever it bubbles up from, but the moment it is recognized as being detrimental to your well being you can drop it like a hot rock. Thoughts like, “I don’t like this or that”, or “She shouldn’t have done this or that”, or “No one loves me”, or “I am unwanted”, or any other variation on the theme of pain and suffering can be dropped off at the curb like just so much refuse. Sure it takes practice, but learning to disbelieve a thought is easy, once you come to know - Post Thought - that they aren’t even real.

Post Thought will end all conflict, all limitations and all seeking. It is the very center of the great Mystery, and yet the need to understand what cannot be understood is left sitting on the shelf gathering the dust it should be gathering. Where did we come from? Don’t know, doesn’t matter. Where are we going? Don’t know, doesn’t matter. Will anybody be there when we get there? Don’t know, doesn’t matter.

Why doesn’t it matter…because Post Thought brings with it a feeling tone of open spaciousness so delicious, so wonderful, so captivating that not knowing is truly a wonderful, glorious experience. But the best thing is that it ends fear and anxiety. Don’t enjoy being afraid, drop that thought…

In a Post Thought World…thinking will be what it was meant to be, a tool for exploration, creation, communication, and delight. And it will no longer be, the source of such horrific agony that a young woman sits alone on the side of her bed, night after night, holding her father’s twenty-two and wishing she had the will to shoot those thoughts right out of her brain.

To be capable of stopping your thoughts, is like manna from heaven…it soothes, nourishes, liberates, fuels and frees the Heart and Soul.

The Post Thought World comes into existence the moment a single individual crosses the gulf of fear, and releases the need for “me”… a need born in the dark heart of a lonely little girl, and released into the waiting arms of A Woman of Substance….

Adayre R. Miller

11/22/10