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/