Silent Night...

Recently the outward circumstances of my life have taken a decided change.

I passed rigorous testing to be allowed to interview for a company, at which point I passed additional testing to arrive at a job offer…the first in nearly three years. The offer is conditional, there are several more tests that must be successfully negotiated, but my willingness is high and my capacity to absorb information will likely get me thru to an actual income once more.

Soon after the job became a real potential I began to experience a form of toxicity that I couldn’t quite define. The Silence that has become such a source of well being departed, to be replaced by a jingle of all things. A monotonous circulation of a holiday jingle that was both annoying and surprising. Soon a “future” was dancing before my eyes, just like the elves dancing in that Christmas tune, and delving deeper I discovered the wheels of desire turning once more.

Most cultures have a very strong attachment to desire, or as it is sometimes called “passion”, it is defined as one of the cornerstones of achievement, and thereby lauded as absolutely necessary to the grinding of wheels and the “making of hay while the sun is shining”.

Here in the words of Claude Bristol is a succinct description of the cultures belief in the all-powerful capacity of desire to motivate and guide us. “One essential to success is that your desire be an all obsessing one, your thoughts and aim be coordinated, and your energy be concentrated and applied without letup”.

I do not argue with this notion when it is applied to the achieving of outer goals. I do believe that coordinated thoughts, aimed at an obsessing desire, coupled with concentrated energy consistently applied, will in fact produce results. It’s just that those results will be depressingly unsatisfactory, and therefore deeply disturbing to the individual who has so committedly placed all their eggs in one tiny basket.

Neil Gaiman, a novelist, describes desire in this manner in one of his popular novels, ”But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize. Their hearts desire, their dream… But the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.”

….”Getting what you once wanted”, an afterglow or after image of who think you should be/want to be/desire to be…but in almost all cases, a figment of your imagination, having no real value or contribution to your Soul’s journey. With the possible exception that realizing your “dream” will almost certainly bring disappointment and disillusionment in it’s wake, and with that will come the potential to awaken from the pursuit of the desired, in favor of the authentic and the real.

St. John of the Cross, said this about purifying ourselves of attachment to that which we desire… “If you purify your soul of attachment and desire for things, you will understand them spiritually. If you deny your appetite for them, you will enjoy their truth, understanding what is certain in them.”

One of poverty’s many blessings is how well and completely it may, if you allow it to, purify and cure you of the appetite for things, the experiences that money can purchase, and even the need for the illusion of security.

As I begin the journey out of poverty, I can already see the first great contribution to my life that it has made. Because I was self employed a good deal of my life, and my business was never a wild success, I have dealt with not having the means to get what I wanted a good deal of my adulthood…and that brought creativity, clarity, and trust. But this round of poverty was unlike anything I have ever experienced, it was a scarcity that seemed at times to be a boundless and encroaching desert, one that might swallow me whole.

This round of poverty had new dimension, in large part, because I have quit fantasizing entirely about “the future” and it’s potential to liberate me from myself. I awoke each day prepared to deal with that day’s lack with genuine willingness, and more, to become willing to face losses that heretofore would have seemed impossible.

I did not always do it well, or without drama.

Not two days before the job offer arrived, I discovered that my elder sister who holds the mortgage on my home had begun the process of selling my mortgage to a bank. She vehemently denied it when I asked her about it, but because her age and disease process are making her incapable of memory and perhaps even understanding, when I called the bank and spoke to the officer in charge of the loan it was clear that indeed the bank was preparing documents to make it possible to “attach” to my home if my sister defaulted on her loan.

It was then that I realized how deeply unconscious was the sense of security that came from knowing that my sister would not put me out on the street if the worst arrived and I was no longer able to pay my loan…but of course, a bank, would have no such loyalties.

In the circumstances that I have been faced with these long months, defaulting on my loan was not a matter of if, but rather of when….

One of the achievements of character that I am most prideful of is my commitment to the most basic form of integrity, that of your words matching your actions. The bank is interested in my loan precisely because, in eight years, a payment has never even been late much less skipped.

When I confirmed that my sister was unwittingly selling my loan, a wave of fear washed over me like a tsunami…and thus I was able to confront again, a most basic desire to be free of the anxiety of the unknown.

A thing that is, of course, not possible.

I have come to realize that the heroics that most of us define as finding our “greatness” are a hobbled together compilation of the noise, frustrations, fears, and hidden anxieties of our childhood and the personality we developed in answer to that childhood.

I will save myself the embarrassment of relating to you the heroic fantasies that populated my childhood and suffice it to say that the goals, and dreams, and idealized versions of life that have occupied much of my adulthood, have finally been recognized for what they are…a flight from reality, and the attempt of a scared child to make sense of a frightening world.

John C. Collins admonishes us to be clear enough to understand that; “There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.”

I would go further and say that the things we fear are the very things necessary to awaken us from the dulling and damming “dreams” we so desire and that we have come to believe, are the answer to our lifes confusions and demands.

Everywhere and in every form we are encouraged to discover our dreams and pursue our goals, not understanding that the fruition of those dreams we hold so dear will not and can not, match our expectations or the many childhood fantasies grown up now and parading through our minds as adulthood Goals.

My Teacher’s advice…to give up goal setting in favor of what he called “Grazing”.

He used the analogy of a horse who begins the day happily munching on a satisfying and life giving clump of green grass, long neck stretching downward to gently nibble at the first mound he sees. As the day wears on, he moves from clump to clump, “Grazing” his way…miles and miles from where he began. A journey accomplished, a life sustained and an arrival entirely unknown and at one and the same time, completely achievable.

(Grazing unlike Goal Setting, would never make the New York Times bestsellers list…can you imagine the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Grazers” burning up the bestsellers lists? I can’t.)

I have come to see the vast wisdom and incredible courage that my Teacher’s grazing methodology requires. To achieve this experience total trust must become the foundation of your life, an abdication of desire must provide the fuel, and the willingness to show up is the only action necessary… the outcome unknowable, we must find within us the willingness to allow the Soul to have control over our lives.

I have often thought what a disservice is done to us by those who have achieved the cultures definition of “success”, but do not have the will to tell us how empty and devoid of value it turned out to be. Occasionally you do hear a celebrity try to approach expressing it, either by word or by deed, but the enormous wall of reproach they would face provides for a kind of communal secret keeping, and in all probability no one would believe them anyway.

That said, here is a quote I found by John Cleese – a very successful British comic – and herein you can see his developed understanding…

“I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that’s to get rid of all my other desires.”

So how did we come to believe such an upside down and backwards notion that achieving our goals, is the business of life?

I found a very clear voice who has an answer for just such a conundrum as this one, which many of us labor under the whole of our lives, unless we commit ourselves to the value of Being rather than Becoming…

“Because gratification of desire leads to the temporary stilling of the mind and the experience of the peaceful, joyful Self it’s no wonder that we get hooked on thinking that happiness comes from the satisfaction of desires. This is the meaning of the old adage, “Joy is not in things, it is in us.” - Lyn Yutang

“Stilling of the mind”, that is what two and a half years of nearly abject poverty rewarded me with…the certain knowledge that Joy springs from one source and one source only, Internal Silence.

So I leave you with an Indian Proverb, a watchword if you will and a lighthouse that you may see your “passions” and “desires” perhaps a bit more clearly.

“Large desire is endless poverty”.

The poverty here is the poverty of Soul, a much worse condition than the mere inconveniences of lack.

For myself, I am grateful for the clump I ingested that produced the large lack of the last two and a half years, as it has awakened in me at least the beginnings of Silence and with it the Joy, that is inexplicable and undeniable.

In this Holiday season, my wish for you is that you be gifted with the end of desire and the blooming of a Silent Night.

Adayre R. Miller

12/22/10

photo courtesy of Ming Chai and Flickr photo sharing: www.flickr.com/photos/ming_chai/4209587493/

Weeping with Joy

Recently I read an article published online in the AOL News feed, written by a woman whose circumstances reflect mine almost like a mirror. She is younger than me by twelve years, and was a CEO of a construction company, rather than a successful home improvement sales person but there is where our outer dissimilarities end.

She, like me, was laid off two years and six months ago. She, like me, has applied to every firm in the known universe…and like me…been rejected by them all. The firms that hire teenagers and the aged won’t consider her, because they know that she will leave the moment her field returns to some normalcy, so the Targets, Wall-marts, and K-Marts of the world won’t invest in someone they know will depart, when there are so many to choose from who will more likely stay.

Then there are the vast numbers of employers who require you to have experience in their field, so waiting tables, selling mortgage loans, or working nights as an ER nurse, are of course, out of the question.

She, like me, has calculated that she has sent out somewhere upward of 2,000 resumes. I am sure my number is somewhere near that as well…and like me, she has turned to writing as a way of hearing herself think and keeping her “working”.

She speaks of how she has sold almost all her possessions to keep the lights on one month and the bills paid the next. I understand her experience of extreme financial limitations, the state is keeping me fed with a monthly stipend of $200.00, but even here there are odd limitations. For instance, I can buy raw chicken – but not rotisserie chicken, I can buy the ingredients to make pizza – but not the deli’s already baked ones, I can buy canned goods – but not soap or toilet paper, both as essential, to my mind, as is eating.

She speaks of the loss of all her “friends” with a somewhat bitter tone to her voice. I did not have a large circle of friends, but I do understand her experience. Turns out you need money to have friends. I cannot speak for the Construction CEO, but I know for myself, that working at friendship is difficult when you can’t afford to invite them out to dinner or a movie, or to your own home as the money stipend from the state doesn’t reach to the end of the month much less allow for dinner parties. Going to something as simple as coffee, requires gas and the capacity to buy ridiculously overpriced beverages, to legitimize taking up space in their booths and overstuffed leather chairs. And putting your friends in a position of having to pay your way is both an embarrassing and painful choice that absolutely begs avoidance.

Even chatting on the phone is a less than desirable activity, for without fail, one of two things must come up. Either we talk about the elephant in the room, lack of employment, and that brings up well meaning problem solving which is always potentially painful…or we don’t talk about it, and in a life whose central aspect is lack of employment and the vast array of constraints that places on a person’s life, a conversation about it can easily turn into complaining, something I am committed to not doing…(can’t speak for the CEO…)

We are leaving our regularly scheduled program, at this juncture, to speak a word about extreme life circumstances and the “problem solving” attitude that those on the outside so often feel the need to bring to the event.

I have the perfect example to share with you…

The day before my mother’s death, she was still coherent and conscious, and I had been sitting with her for almost three weeks watching her agonizingly slow departure. My sisters would spend a half an hour or so a couple of times a day visiting, but they were clearly uncomfortable and ill at ease, so the visits were distressing for everyone concerned. My approach was decidedly different… I merely sat. Sometimes I sat across from her on the couch, sometimes I sat near her in a chair…but for three weeks, I just sat.

Once or twice a day, she would marshal her energy, command her prodigious will and raise her head to look at me. Sometimes I spoke to her, often we just exchanged looks…reaffirming for ourselves that, yes…we are here and we will be here, together, to the end.

So, on this day before her death - a cousin by marriage came over - knocked upon the door and offered to “help” by giving me a break from being with my mother by reading a book to her. A break neither of us wanted, but back then I didn’t have the courage for truth telling that I now possess.

So in she came, wanting to do her good works and of course it caused my mother to feel the need to attempt putting on her “companies come over” face, which was a sad and deep loss of energy for her. And I wanted no part in a social experience, cocooned as I had become in the process of her death, so I told my mother I would be in the next room until the visit was concluded. I will never forget the poignant and quiet urgency in her barely audible voice when she said, “You’re not leaving are you?” “No, mom…I’ll be right in here, don’t worry”.

The cousin left ten minutes or so later, and was quite clearly peeved that her “help” had not resulted in the expected welcome or recognition of her heroic efforts at “kindness” that she had been expecting, she was so plainly an intrusion that even she could feel it. The irritation in her voice and the look on her face was very obvious, as she announced her departure by saying…”well, it’s clear I’m not helping, so I guess I’ll just leave.”

To this day I still marvel about someone so unconsciously unaware of how their need to be of importance and to problem solve, robbed a dying woman of energy and a soon to be grieving daughter of precious time.

But problem solving is very often like that…

When someone we know is in the midst of some form of emergency that deep down may scare us, rather than feel the feelings of fear that our association with the dying, sick, poverty stricken, or troubled may bring up for us, it is almost the social norm to turn to platitudes, problem solving, or suggestions for action, that are dressed up to look as though they are meant to ease the other’s suffering…but which, in truth…merely make us more comfortable and less anxious about our own potential for falling victim to life’s troubles.

True help is so much subtler than that. My teacher describes it in this way “helping another… is being attuned enough, (or present enough), to the energy or process that is already underway that you can discover a way to fit yourself seamlessly into that energy rather than running counter to, or disturbing it, by attempting to fix it.”

Another human being, in any form of emotional or spiritual distress, may want…but never truly needs, your solutions.

The only thing that can ever serve another is the amplitude of “The Witness”…and if the person you are attempting to serve is conscious enough, then their attitude, behaviors, energies, time and commitment will be entirely bent upon the amplification of the awakened Witness within themselves, as they continue to sit with the wave of “trouble” that is breaking upon the shore of the “self” that is the vessel they have chosen this lifetime.

Back now, to our regularly scheduled program and the CEO’s article and her final description of the life she is now leading.

She finished her examination of the many troubles and tribulations that poverty has brought into her life in allowing us, the reader, into her inner life by describing how she has begun to feel entirely “invisible” to the outside world. Disappearing down the rabbit hole. Scores upon scores of unanswered resume submissions, the hard rejections from the few interviews she manages to obtain – where competition is steep beyond imagining – and friendships no longer sustainable, she finds herself disappearing and by the sound of her voice, deeply afraid of the potential of ceasing to exist and thus vanishing into thin air.

Here is where our shared circumstantial paths part ways. I have become more visible than I would have ever imagined possible. That visibility is mine and mine alone. No one shares with me the light by which I can now see…I am not, now… nor likely to become, visible to others. I have not found my “greatness,” or my marketable talent, or my place in the world… in-point-of-fact all of that has been lost as I face my life circumstances without reference to a future, and with the willingness to live every breath within the frame of the current moment.

I have, like my CEO friend, quite literally no idea where I am headed or how much more extreme it might get. But unlike her, (based upon her own testimony), I have found an inner place of solitude…so vast, so welcoming, so warm, and so kind that I do not fear the circumstances of my life or what yet might be about to appear on the horizon. Is this quiet place of peace constant? No, not yet.

There are days where I feel almost like I have a raging fever. The “voice” of the self returns and begins to formulate plans for my salvation, it foments trouble like a brew….bubbling in an iron cauldron over a flaming fire. “What will happen? Where will I go? What should I do? How will my sister survive without my mortgage payment?” ….and so on and so forth….

It took hold of me yesterday, while walking up the mountain. It was like suddenly being aboard a run-away train, with no conductor at the helm. Awash in projections of an increasingly troubled “future”, which I now know to be non-existent, I couldn’t locate the breath that has become so competent at extinguishing the voice, and allowing me to bathe in the bliss of Silence.

On and on… the voice rose and pitched, rolling from one side of my mind to the next like a loose cannon aboard a sinking and wind tossed ship, breaking and splintering large timbers necessary for smooth sailing.

By mid morning I was exhausted and lost in what was once the normal patterns of my mind, the surrender that allowed Silence to enter my heart and mind and fill me with the “peace that passeth understanding” was entirely beyond my reach. And I felt cooked by a fire that was once a standard in my life, I lay down upon my bed and slept away the extreme energy loss that had been drained out of me by doing battle with the “self,” I had once imagined me to be.

This morning, calm has returned…the voice is silent once more, and I continue to examine my moment-by-moment breath, the feel of my fingers upon the keyboard, the sound of birds outside my window, the rushing of traffic as it passes by me on its way to somewhere and someplace. In less poetic terms, sanity has reasserted it’s gentle nature and is back in it’s rightful place at the helm of my mysteriously rudderless boat, meandering its’ way into the unknown and unknowable…taking me, it’s passenger, along for the ride.

I attempted to find the CEO, and did in fact locate her face book page, to extend to her an invitation to being seen by someone who shares her outer circumstances, but to no avail. She has not responded, and I understand that her path may not have room in it, for someone who is not in emergency patterns of reaction to the current “crisis”. And so I let her drift away, certain as only personal experience can make you, that her troubles are entirely right for her, that her soul’s guidance is at the helm and that all manner of things are well.

Here is an invitation I extend to you, from the hand of the writer of The Diamond in Your Pocket, Gangji…

“I invite you for just this moment to stop searching for relief from suffering. The invitation is neither to become oblivious to suffering, nor to give up in despair. It is an invitation to stop searching for something to rescue you from yourself.

What is the experience of life when there is no ‘you’ left? What is the experience of problems when they are not ‘your’ problems?”

All of lifes processes can be entirely and completely summed up in the phrase…”stop searching for something to rescue you from yourself.”

Seeking, believing, praying, wanting miracles, hoping for positive change, going to healers and shamans and priests and preachers, all are attempts to rescue you from yourself…and even though it is pointing out the painfully oblivious…when I note that it can’t be done, as you cannot find relief from the self in any other way than by transcending it altogether.

And finally, this… last…and first….and always…

When the answer searches for the answer, what can it ever find?

- Stephen Mitchell

The outer circumstances of your life, are neither a curse nor a gift…they are merely, and always, the life specific choices most necessary and unique to you, that have the potential to liberate you from the limitations and suffering of the personal self, and bring you weeping with joy, into the limitless kindness of the One.

Adayre R. Miller

12/8/10

photo courtesy of Shiya and Flickr photo sharing www.flickr.com/photos/26182292@N08/4582908015/

Into the Blue and Gold.....

Well…the verdict is in - the jury has spoken, and the sentence has been revealed. And it was worth the wait…

Yesterday I saw the “primary” doctor, the one who voiced the statement; “we only ever see that pattern of EKG in people who have had a heart attack.”

Like most Doctors she has the mad cow disease of speak fast, don’t let them ask questions, and leave the room before they start wanting something from you, a condition that has existed in every physician I personally have ever encountered, and I have met and dealt with my share, in the long and protracted illnesses that preceded my parents death.

But in her, there is an added dimension of quite aggressive, and I am going to assume, quite unconscious pain. As I felt my way around the edges of it yesterday, experiencing its impact in the many ways in which she avoided all forms of communication with me, and the instant and quite dramatic annoyance and irritation that sprang up when I attempted to pose a few questions…I could easily feel it’s readiness to smack me loopy if I continued to press her. If I were the one, on the diagnosing end of our relationship, I would say that she quite literally hates interacting with patients. (I suppose it goes without saying, that is not a good state of mind for a private practice Doctor to find themselves living with).

After our small confrontation, in which I attempted to get answers from her, she left the room leaving behind a wave pattern of anger that rippled round the room like a heat signature. And I found myself rooted to the floor, staring down, hands on my hips watching the arising of the “self”.

Two things happened almost simultaneously, the voice of the self that I used to think of as me, rose up with indignation and self righteous proclamations of “she shouldn’t treat me in this manner”…and so on and so forth. This voice no longer holds sway over me, as I no longer believe in it, and am thus no longer held hostage by it…but that is not what caught my attention. As I stood in the middle of the room listening to the old voice, and watching it die back down to wherever it comes from…a deep stirring of compassion rose up from my heart.

Conditioned as I have been, these last few weeks, to turning my attention to its beatings and rhythms…I felt a soft fluttering of quiet surrender to the arrogance, coldness, and rudeness that armors the Doctor and ostensibly protects her from the discomfort her life choices, and her reactions to those choices, have now imprisoned her in.

Slowly, my indignation turned into the enfolding smoothness of compassion and sorrow. As I quietly watched, I found within my depths a sadness for a life that hurts so much, that she must use surrogates, to distance herself from the work she spent so very many years pursuing the right to practice.

I know that her responses and behavior patterns are not personal to me, as she has spent cumulatively no more than eight minutes with me. Her physician’s assistant, asks all the questions, receives all the answers and translates them for the Doctor, her nurse takes all the blood pressures and other tests and the PA is dispatched once more to discuss all test results and protocols. Our time together was so brief on both visits that I am prepared to state that eight minutes may in fact be an overestimation, thus her irritation cannot be personal, excepting of course that I challenged her patterns and forced her into interactions she would so clearly prefer not to have.

The value of watching the simultaneous arising of the unreal self and the impersonal heart of compassion cannot be overstated. I can’t recall ever having seen them in that way before, the constrictions and limitations of the concept of “I”…and its many rights, opinions, preferences and easy indignations, juxtaposed with the open spaciousness of the heart that hears the deeper truths of sorrow and yielding, and the union of all beings.

The heart won the day and “my” indignation collapsed like a cloth, that no longer has its puff of wind to keep it inflated.

Today came the Cardiologist visit and with it the results of the many tests and explorations. A clean bill of health was pronounced, all systems functioning at or above optimum…and yes, I do have an anomalous arrhythmia, the bundle branch nerve what-cha-ma-call-it, that prompted the primary to tell me that it is a pattern only seen in people who have had a heart attack, but in me, so says the Cardiologist, it must be a “birth defect” of some sort.

I felt no relief, just has I had felt no dread.

I have had no worry or anxiety since the first, I have had a much more intimate experience of my mortality and a much more realized recognition that today, (I have no capacity to know what tomorrow may bring), I do not fear my death, or death in general. A good thing to know/feel, and a very good thing to be challenged with, as my age moves me closer to the functional death that will eventually come for me.

The working hand of death, the one that resides at the ready all the days of our lives, lovingly willing to liberate us from the constraints, and limits, and drama, and torment, of the unreal life is an old acquaintance of mine.

We first met in a dark theatre in 1993.

The opening credits were rolling on the film, Philadelphia – starring the talented Tom Hanks, I knew the premise of the movie was a lawyer and gay man who would soon face his death at the hands of Aids, and how he fought to right the injustice of his dismissal from the law firm in which he worked.

As the credits rolled and the distinctive music played, that “voice” I used to think of as me, practically shouted at me that I had Aids as well and would also soon die.

For the very first time, I had the where-with-all to challenge that voice, and its believability. “Right” I said, “a woman who is now almost a decade celibate has somehow contracted aids.” …”Yes, you have and you are going to die, and die horribly.” (The panic attacks, anxiety load, and general malaise I had suffered with for years was still very much attached to me in ’93, although I was beginning to come out of the suicidal years by that time.)

Thinking back on those days makes me recall the words of the 18^th century Russian mystic, Annie-Sophie Swetchine, who said…”Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being. Ladies, be so kind as to speak only four at a time please?”

“Fine” I said, “leave me alone and let me enjoy the movie…and this very week, I will go to the free clinic and get an Aids test.”

And so…true to my word, later that week, I took myself to the clinic and set thru the various educational conversations regarding condom usage, and proper application complete with the use of visual aids and cucumbers and so on…and when it came my turn to visit with the nurse I answered her questions with aplomb and complete honesty.

“No, I have never been an IV drug user. No, I have not recently had a blood transfusion or needle stick.” …and… “My last sexual encounter was approximately 10 years ago.”

The-seen-it-ALL, heard-it-ALL, bone weary nurse…slowly set down the pen she had been using to record my answers, looked up from her page and said…”sweetie, you wanna tell me why you’re here?”

So I did.

From the very day, my once broken mind, began to heal itself with the revelation of the secret abuses of my childhood by first knowing and then telling the truth, total transparency has been my policy.

So I told the nurse, with a completely straight face, the sitting in the movie, scared voice in the dark, I’ll get tested and shut you up, story.

I just know it was the first surprise she had had, in eons…

I got my test and it was, of course, negative. But the real gift, was the beginning of a working relationship with the affirming side of the reality of Death.

As my commitment to the “dying to the self” that the Bible recommends and which in fact will see an end to the unreal self, grew and expanded, and as the physical death of my mother gave me my very first glimpse into the experience of the “no thought” mind, I have had a harmonious, expanding, and generous relationship with the letting go that death will require of us all.

Stephen Mitchell, explores the role of death in our lives in The Second Book of the Tao, in this manner…

“The sage knows how to die, because he knows how to deal with the everyday losses that form the texture of our life. He deals with them by understanding that loss is just a concept. He looks into the abyss as into the eyes of the beloved.

He knows nothing about death; he knows everything he needs to know about dying.”

And he goes on to say…”There’s a current that is deeper than we are. It will carry us off whether we want it to or not. When we resist it, we suffer. Only when we let it take us can we begin to sense its intelligence.

The more we move beyond our ideas about life and death, the more open we are to life. This radical ignorance is not a path to wisdom: it is wisdom itself.”

Radical ignorance, the don’t know – no thought mind, is the welcome end of the self. One of my favorite Buddhist writers, Matthieu Ricard says this about the “self”…

“To discover as a direct experience, through analysis and especially through contemplation, that the self has no true existence is a highly liberating process.” He further illuminates…”I’d like to say a little about the ego, the attachment to the self is the basic expression of inner blindness and cause of negative emotions. Buddhism recommends a very detailed investigation of the notion of ego, of the way we perceive ourselves as a ‘person’ and phenomena outside ourselves as solid ‘entities’. The very root of all negative emotions is the perception we have of ourselves as a person, as an ‘I’ that is an entity existing in itself, autonomously, either in the stream of our thoughts, or in our bodies.”

You may find the assertion that there is no “self”, a very threatening one…I know I once did, and yet when courage prevailed and confusion lifted, I saw without reservation how constricting, burdensome, painful, confusing, and debilitating the “self” is…letting it go, fulfills the Bible promise of salvation and the return of Heaven on Earth.

In the last two years of unemployment and financial penury, the very last dregs of an external identity have been sloughed off like so much dead skin, and now, thanks to my angry and insensitive primary doctor, I got to live almost three weeks with the potential of my physical death, or possible illness, as a looming possibility.

It was a gift.

Each day some new clarity was had, some new sensitivity to life’s wonder revealed, and a much richer, deeper, and lovelier relationship with the life affirming experience of gratitude.

A commitment to living without past or future, to living with an ear tuned to the hum and undercurrent of the present moment makes possible a new understanding of death and depth and reality. It makes possible the recognition that there are no problems in the current moment, all problematic experiences arise yoked together with the “future”. A future that will never come…

Perhaps the words of Novelist Willa Cather, will make the idea of the end of the “self” a bit more palatable…

“I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen. The earth was warm under me, and warm, as I crumbled it through my fingers. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen, I was something that lay under the sun and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die..., become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

To dissolve the grasping, clinging, shrinking, vain, envious, lonely, desiring and demandingly ill at ease “self,” is the very definition of Bliss.

I leave you in the very capable hands of Ms. Cather and her description of Death…”Something whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly, picked the lock slid the bolts, and released the imprisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, in to the morning...”

12/1/10

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtesy of Emaad and flickr photo sharing