In preparation for my cardiologist appointment, I have had several contacts with his multiple Doctor practice, beginning with their “customer service” and scheduling arm. They were without fail, kind, enthusiastic, eager to serve, capable, and as I shared with the departing scheduler…”a-very-well-oiled-machine”.
It was the kind of service that was once ubiquitous in America and immortalized in the early TV advertisements of the “Men from Texaco”… for those of who may be to young to remember the dark ages of television when everything was in black, white and infinite shades of gray… the Men from Texaco were well dressed, eager, handsome, young men who serviced every inch of your car with a glowing smile and a winning personality, and a red-only-in-your-imagination-star, emblazoned on their crisp uniforms.
So too, the large and busy and effective, Cardiologist practice I have become a small moving piece in. The first scheduler asked me a very surprising question…”what kind of personality did I want in my Doctor”. It was so surprising, I practically wanted to swivel my head to and fro, about my empty office, to see if anyone else had overheard such an astonishing question with respect to the medical community - particularly the head of the community - the revered and removed, DOCTORS… boy, the times they are a changing…
Well…I ruminated, yes; I would like one who has the patience and the will to LISTEN to me. Someone who unlike my primary care Doctor has the sensitivity to pause after delivering news like…”you may have had a heart attack” and allow me a moment to gather my wits and ask a question or two. “Do you have one like that?” I queried…
“Oh yes”, she warmly responded. “We have one just like that, his name is ‘Dr. O’ and he is the MOST patient and attentive Doctor in our practice”.
So prepped in this manner, I met with Dr. O.
I told him of the day in early June, when my heart beat out of rhythm for an entire day. I told him of how it caused me to get back out on the mountain, and slowly regain the capacity to make it all the way up to the water tower. I told him of how I had not seen a physician in almost three decades, save the broken arm five years ago, I told him of my fathers heart bypass surgery and my grandfather’s sudden heart attack death in his thirties.
And please believe me…I do not exaggerate…for every piece of information I shared with him, he asked me - not once but twice - about whatever I had just said, as though it had never been uttered before. Some of the information had a third repeat query, this after ostensibly having heard it twice already. It caused me to smile to myself, at the assurances that this was the most effective listener, this busy and successful practice had to offer.
He seemed like a good enough guy. And I was not put out with him at his intense lack of presence, as I once would have been. Instead I felt a kind of sadness for him. If this is typical behavior in his role as physician, and I suspect it is, then his life is spent in a kind of one-eighth presence while his mind is absent and “busy” with more pressing matters.
He appeared to be in his late sixties, so the vast majority of his waking hours have been spent in this deep fissure of being somewhere else, while his body is in the present moment. A condition that has become epidemic in this century, and a condition that disallows entirely, the possibility of finding and connecting with the Internal Real.
Because there are no “authority” figures in my life, which is to say, I hold no one above me as being capable of fixing the life that is mine to lead, I do not have great expectations or needs of the people who pass thru my life who are successful, or educated, or powerful in the external definition of that word.
I am moved only by those who have demonstrated the capacity to embrace the “Don’t Know Mind” the wisdom of the sages and saints…those that have moved beyond thought, to the realm of Silence that connects one to the pulses and energies of the Formless Now.
In the Ageless Wisdom traditions that is often defined as Being vs. Doing or as Lao-tzu defined it “wei wu wei” which literally translated means “doing, not-doing”. This Being vs. Doing construct is often confused with not taking action, but nothing could be further from the truth. Lao-Tzu’s definition of Being as “non-doing” is more clearly understood, in this manner…”Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame. This nothing is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body.” (Quoted from the work of Stephen Mitchell)
To become one with the present moment, no matter what it’s apparent content may be, is the essence of Being. When the mind is elsewhere, while the body is here…the Being is tragically halved in two, and both the mind and body suffer greatly. The soul cannot shine in a mind/body so badly spilt, nor can it grow, express, motivate, or truly inspire.
In the work of Eric Fromm a much admired and brilliantly spiritualized psychiatrist of the late sixties, comes the definition of the split between Being and Doing as one of Being and “Having”. His explanation has so much more resonance for me that I have abandoned the Ancient Chinese metaphor in favor of Fromm’s as it is so relevant to the world we live in.
Fromm holds to the standard definition of Being, which is to say, that he agrees with The Buddha, Christ, Lao-tzu and others when he describes the “Orientation toward Being” as he calls it, as the alignment of the mind, body and spirit fully available in the Eternal Present. Where he differs is in his definition of the Doing, or as he calls it the “Orientation toward Having”. Here we see the plight of humanity in the 21st century. The accumulation of things, people, relationships, experiences, and events as a substitute for finding the deep center of your life, and of Life itself.
He was writing in a time, the early sixties, when the public storage phenomenon was not yet a glimmer in some future entrepreneur’s eye. And yet he predicated a consumer society so out of control that buying, owning, and having things would someday swallow us whole. In his era not one square foot of commercial space was allocated for “public storage”, now forty years later we have some 6 million square feet devoted to the storage of our “stuff” and “Hoarding” has become an exploding and debilitating national mental disorder.
Fromm goes on to say that the “Having” mode of life is not relegated to just the accumulation of property, but spills over into accumulating relationships, over stuffing ourselves with experience, belonging to every organization we can fit into our over stressed and over scheduled lives, and all other more hidden forms of hoarding…(face book alone gives one pause, as countless numbers of people acquire “friendships” that have no depth, no cause, no participation save the scroll of mostly useless facts and the mechanical counter attached to how many “friends” one has.)
It is the “Having orientation” that drives all the commercialization of the…”you’ve only got one life to live you need to live it with gusto”, grab for greatness, fame, and fortune that so drives and infuses our society. Fromm postulates that the acquisition of things, particularly personal property which is a relatively recent phenomenon, is a bid for immortality…”If myself is constituted by what I have, then I am immortal if the things I have are indestructible”.
In contrast, Karl Marx, left behind this most powerful idea…”The less you are and the less you express of your life – the more you have and the greater is your alienated life”.
An “alienated life” could almost describe the average 21st centuries normal day to day experience. And thus the overwhelming amount of dissatisfaction, disquiet, disturbed, disenfranchised, and like my new acquaintance Dr. O, disconnected lives that are the norm in every western culture the world round.
My Teacher’s lessons often involved what he called “pruning”, to remove from the out of balance and Having orientated life the weights and additions that keep the Soul from having preeminence, that keep the person always “seeking” and never finding. To let go the many distractions and disturbances, in favor of the cultivation of Silence and with it the full realization of harmony and Joy.
As Meister Eckhart once said…”People should not consider so much what they do, as what they are.”
I share with you here, in conclusion, the only prayer that I have any interest in praying…it comes down to us from Brother Lawrence a 13th century mystic and monk…
“Lord I know not what to ask of thee. Thou only knowest what I need. Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. Father, give to thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. Smite or heal, depress me or raise me up: I adore all thy purposes without knowing them. I am silent; I offer myself up in a sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.”
This “not knowing” lights my way…and I too, wish the One to “Pray Thyself in me….”
There is only, and ever, one question…do you Trust the Universe in which your life is unfolding?
Adayre R. Miller
11/16/10
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