Peace is the Product of Acceptance…

In preparation for my visit with the Cardiologist, I was required to go to a lab and present my veins for a little fluid harvesting. For me that is easier said than done, unlike my mother who had large and powerful hands, mapped all over by bluish purple veins that stood up like small dunes in an African desert, and which travelled just as pronouncedly thru the curve of her inner elbow….mine run and hide at the mere suggestion of a needle.

My veins were once described to me as rolling… I don’t know exactly what that means, from the perspective of someone who must capture and rope them into submission…but I do know it is not good.

In my twenties - on the eve of a hysterectomy - the doctors had ordered an IV to be inserted, a thing done the world round, generally without too much difficulty. Mine took five nurses, one anesthesiologist, four hours, both arms, both hands, and four blown veins. Nearing the end of the fourth hour when all hands on deck had exhausted their skills and left me in tears, they – four of the nurses and the Doctor – had a caucus and decided that we needed “Lucille”. A cardiac care nurse, who apparently had a reputation somewhat akin to a miracle worker…by this time I was so spent and beat up, that I would have happily traveled the halls with my buttocks exposed in that split-up-the-back-gown, plaintively calling out Lucille’s name. Hope, help, freedom from being poked by amateurs…I wanted, no, I yearned for “Lucille”, and an end to my suffering…

It would not be possible for me to adequately convey my surprise when “Lucille” turned out to be older than dirt, with palsied hands that shook like leaves in a high wind. But true to her reputation, when she picked up the needle her hands obeyed her years, and years, and years, of experience and the needle slid home as easily as a warm knife slicing thru “budder”. Hooray for Lucille’s everywhere…

So with this history, I presented myself to the young women at the Sonora Quest Laboratories.

The first to try was a waif of a thing, hair neither brown nor gray, but some sad hue in between. She was painfully thin and utterly shapeless in her plain white lab coat. Her spare shoulders rounded forward as though to protect her heart, from some oft repeated pain. I felt for her. She placed the tourniquet, rubbed to feel the vein and inserted the needle into an entirely dry well. She then pulled it halfway out of the twelve o’clock position, and tried again at ten and two swinging both right and left under the skin of my arm, it reminded me of slapping windshield wipers on the old fifties Ford my father once had.

After she completed the two-step on my right arm, she tried again on my left…same dry well.

At this point, as the members of the first team had done… those many years ago… she called for reinforcements. Next to arrive was a strikingly tall and leggy blonde, in a coat of many colors - it seemed to me to be some sort of stylized flower motif - but it was so loud in color that I am not entirely certain. She couldn’t have been more different that her co-worker. She strode so purposefully into the room, sorted thru her various vials and needles with such practiced hands and such obvious self assurance, that I truly could not resist… as my wit took hold of my tongue… and caused me to say just before she slid the needle into my flesh…”Oh, my goodness…you are so amazingly confident!!”

And of course, she hit the same dry well as Ms. Sad and Barely Brown.

Once more the windshield wiping two-step, in-at-twelve-halfway-out-in-again-at-ten-and-two…both arms. I sat watching her excavation with interest and serenity, as her confidence melted like chocolate in the summer sun. She said, “You are just sitting there watching me plunge the needle in and out”…she was clearly surprised by such a mild response to her metaphorical digging to China. I said, “darlin’ this isn’t my first rodeo”…

And then I told her the story of Lucille, and I queried might they have a “Lucille”? As she ruminated on whether or not they indeed did have a Lucille, I made a small joke and said…”well, at least it prevented me from ever becoming a drug addict”, and while saying it, I made a general stabbing motion at my arm indicating the futility of trying to get heroin on board with veins as shy as mine. It caused her to laugh and before you know it we were giggling like two young girls passing dirty notes, in the back of Sister Elisabeth’s religious studies class. It was such a lovely and intimate moment, filled with merriment and ease, and the humor relieved her sense of failure and distress at poking me with a needle so many times.

It was of course not the right time or place to discuss with her the freedom that acceptance brings to every situation, and how ending resistance ends suffering. It was enough to enjoy the moment and share with her the ease with which you can face every invasion with equanimity when you have given up the notion of “how things should be”. Miss Long and Leggy wanted to quit by that time and roam the building seeking her Lucille, but I allowed as to how she should try one more time and then we would seek out the big guns. She did…well, still dry as bone dust…

Next came a diminutive dark haired elf of a woman, barley five feet tall. She, having been alerted by Miss Long and Leggy, that my veins appeared to be MIA had no confidence but a strong will to try. Which is something I always appreciate. She did the windshield slap – two step, to both inner arms as well… the count now being 7 attempts… and on her third go round she caught what must have been the edge of a shy vein and captured mere drops of what was necessary. So she began exploring my hands, something I prefer not to do as it physically hurts so much more than arms…but we were at that point. And finally, painfully, success!!

I tell you this personal story, not to explore my own experience, but rather to mine the gold of understanding that suffering is absolutely optional. Pain is a physical phenomena, but even it… will dial down its impact on the mind with which it is communicating, provided that mind has made the decision to surrender to the moment, and give up resistance.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of Spiritual Paths in the world, those that follow some kind of Form or Content and those that embrace Formlessness or Emptiness. A teacher of Content may bring you images of Angels, or work to heal you, or attempt to serve your desire for greatness, or fulfillment. There will be goals, and road maps, and seeking, and action of all sorts and stripes as they seek to replace the “negative” or suffering content of your mind with a positive or “loving” content. I have no argument with this form of religious activity, it has been practiced the world round since the dawn of time. And it can and does, provide religious fervor…which in its turn does provide some relief and an elevation of mood.

But it cannot and does not provide an end to suffering.

For many - maybe even most - of humanity, replacing deeply negative mental “content” with a lighter, easier content is the sum total of their expectations from whatever forms their religion takes. From the old time religions to the New Age smorgasbord, making it all a little less dark is the “good enough” hope of the majority of humanity.

Yet, up ahead, in the pre-dawn grayness there is always one or two who beckon us, beyond content, into the realm of Formlessness. Come they say, do not stop with merely manageable pain, keep traveling… move beyond the content of mind, the small self, the narrow view, the personal opinion, the little me, in favor of the wide open spaciousness of your True Nature.

Acceptance is the name and shape of this most high of Spiritual activity…acceptance of the mundane and the monstrous, of the easy and the difficult unto death, of the beautiful and the hideous. Or if you like your spirituality couched in non-existent terms as do the Buddhist’s, then Acceptance could well be called the End of Resistance…they are of course one and the same.

The egoic mind structure, the mind that knows itself thru thinking, sets up enormous resistance to the idea that Acceptance is all there is. A great hew and cry will poor forth…”accept child abuse, murder of the innocent, betrayals, and horrors…NEVER!!”

And of course, this is one of the many ways in which the Ancient Egoic Mind causes us to turn away from the open door of our prison, and return instead to the endless cycles of searching and seeking outside ourselves, that will eventually leave even the strongest among us spent and destitute.

When the Egoic Mind hears the term Acceptance it always hears agreement instead. And of course it is not possible for anyone, with any measure of kindness to “agree” with abuse, mayhem, or harm.

Acceptance, or No Resistance is not about agreement of any kind. Acceptance is the will to see the truth of any given moment and to bend to the supremacy of the Now. If harm, hurt, abuse, or mayhem is, or has, or will, occur it is by the very nature of its existence a part of the Reality of Truth. No amount of internal disagreement with the various circumstances, in which Reality presents itself to us, will change the facts. The dead are still dead, the harmed and the hurt are still harmed and hurt.

A teacher of Content or Form, will… in all probability… offer some modality by which they can hold the space, or heal the response, or change the circumstance, that has caused the harm…they will attempt, in all good intention, to right the wrong or make some change in the outer aspect of the world, to insure that no other will be harmed in this way…and in so doing they miss the doorway into the Eternal and Internal Formless Now.

Mahatma Gandhi, a leader who championed and won - perhaps the only bloodless “war” that has ever been fought - said this about the External unreality, or the world of form, and the Internal Real or the world of Formlessness…

“The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.”

He said, in effect, if we wish to bring down the British Empire and its unfair rule of our country…spend the most of your energy on the interior realms.

When your mind has sufficiently turned inward, when enough Acceptance has bloomed in your Being…suffering gives way to wide open spaciousness, the Emptiness of the Buddha, the return of Innocence, the Glory of Eden and the capacity to bring Heaven into the realms of Earth.

The Philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville describes this way of Being in this poetic and lovely manner…”The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no more effort or glory, with no more affectation and without shame. Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple as the air, as free as the air. The simple person does not take himself too seriously or too tragically. He goes on his merry way, his heart light, his soul at peace, without a goal, without nostalgia, without impatience. The world is his kingdom, and suffices him. The present is his eternity, and delights him. He has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What lighter? It is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of saints.”

He goes on to say…” The wise man, (healed mind), has nothing left to expect or to hope for. Because he is entirely happy, he needs nothing. Because he needs nothing, he is entirely happy.

Peace is the product of Acceptance, and can be acquired in no other way…

Adayre R. Miller

11/15/10