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