Equilibrium…

I have come to think of it as the Holy Grail.

The dictionary says its synonyms are symmetry, balance, and stability. The ability to stay in the center when all around you is out of balance, chaotic, and transitory…it is the work of a lifetime…and the only thing really worth the effort.

I know that the few of you who read my work are often caught off guard, if not even “gob smacked” as the British say, by the assertions I make and the inferences I provide.

I am continually entreating you to reconsider the meaning of things the culture takes for granted, like fun and pleasure and goals and success and failure and happiness, and I know that I challenge some of you with my views and the levels my understanding seeks.

Life is all too short, the commercials and sales schemes are always telling us…get your gusto now, before the shelves are empty and the tank runs dry…I get it, the world sells pleasure and sells it with a vengeance. This notion is even promulgated by a good many of our Spiritual leaders, you can see it every day of the week in some huge TV church with a good looking pastor and an even prettier wife…lovingly selling abundance and well being, ease and comfort, and all you have to do is BELIEVE…

(If you imagine that I am saying abundance and well being, and ease and comfort, are somehow wrong, you are missing the point and losing sight of the potential of seeing beyond the mundane in favor of the transcendent.)

My childhood was so chaotic and frightening, that I was a world-class sort of believer. I believed with a fervency and commitment that would have met with approval during the Spanish Inquisition…I “believed” and then some…

But in all the swirl of emotional believing, one man’s voice called out in the wilderness, one quiet, calm, kind, gentle, strong and confrontive man who appeared beside me, as if sent by an angel, and slowly over many years repeated and repeated the cautionary need to unbelieve, to undo the conditioning of my mind, to come away from the slavery of living in a mind who “knew” what was real and what was not. A mind already lost, a mind adrift from itself.

And one day, after considerable fear, anxiety, and even dread…I became capable of unbelieving.

And suddenly opinions stopped, and certainty became a thing of the past, and liberation became more than just a word.

It wasn’t permanent…not for me, I drop back into believing as easily as night follows day, and once more I find myself shackled and assuming that I “know” what is right or wrong, good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, kind or unkind.

Just this morning my sister called, before I was even out of bed and eventually got around to telling me what she wanted. She, by her own choice, invested in my house many years ago. At 6 percent interest she has realized some 34,000 dollars of profit on her original investment, an investment with such solid gold consistency that her bank has used it two different times to provide her loans for professional risks, that ended up costing her a lifetime of profits from hard earned business ventures she once owned and created.

Now after many years of poor financial choices she is living in almost as much poverty as am I, and now she wishes that I would sell my house so that she could get her money out of it. A wish I understand and even empathize with…

Because of her age and the fragility of her mental state, no matter how many gentle times I tried to tell her that if I sold now, she would get her money but I would be completely financially devastated, and thus totally impoverished…she could not hear the perspective I hold about the folly of selling and moving to some better city, with better employment opportunities…”come to Denver, it is better than Phoenix, you will be able to find a job there” she kept repeating.

It is a function of the egoic mind, that believes that running from your current circumstances to some other circumstance, will somehow magically transport you to a place where solutions will be found. That somehow Denver holds a solution that Phoenix doesn’t, it is the same kind of thinking that caused me to invest $2,000.00 in jewelry supplies a year or so ago, only to discover I had no place to sell them and no desire to create them.

When we choose to live in the world of believing, the world where we imagine that we know where the good is and how to get there, a place where we pursue pleasure and external approval, an illusory place where life matches the workings of our imaginations and the desires of our childhood conditioning…we are as lost as we can possibly be.

This is why the Buddha’s first noble truth is that life is suffering. We suffer because we use our extraordinarily skillful mind in the development of fantasy, illusions, and projections rather than the capacity to fit ourselves seamlessly into the present moment just as it arrives without protest, or demands.

My sister has come to the place where she imagines salvation rests in my selling my home. In fairness she imagines that the salvation she is looking for will benefit us both, and of course it would not. It is hard for me to hear her need, and not move heaven and earth to get her what she wants, despite the fact that I understand without question, that a temporary fix will not mend a broken mind.

I have a singular obligation toward her, and that is to stay within the bounds of my integrity and continue to supply the monthly payment I have so faithfully supplied these last eight years, I have every intention of doing so…should my circumstances permit. Today I have that money; tomorrow must take care of itself…

At the conclusion of my conversation with my elder sister, a woman who was once - for all intents and purposes - my mother, my equilibrium was lost and my heart hurt, and my mind wanted solutions and fixes and answers and resolution…none of which is possible or even valuable.

I cannot move into her interior being and mitigate even for a moment the anxiety and pressure she feels, my selling my home will not and cannot change the mounting pressure she will most likely feel for most of the remainder of her life. She lived an entirely external life, pursuing outcomes and results and goals, and she did so with great commitment and great success, if you are measuring life by numbers of dollars. So now, in the twilight of her years, she has a weak internal reference system and a decidedly growing need.

I am moved to sorrow about that, but I can do nothing to change it.

It is so common, as to be sadly normal, for us to think that we can ameliorate another’s life. We think because we have skills, understanding, resources, will, or commitment that we can somehow transfer those and improve, amend, or even restore another human being to the dignity, sanity, and well being that we all so richly deserve.

It just is not so…

No matter how much we might wish, or want, or pray, or hope to support another in finding freedom, it isn’t possible. We imagine, just as my sister does, that freedom has some external shape or form. That getting her money out of the smart investment she made those many years ago, will fix the problem and provide the solution…an Oh so common belief…

But her problem lies not in the stretched to tight budget that she labors under, but in the romanticism with which she has lived her whole life.

And now, she has laid her decision making and ill conceived choices at my doorstep, and wishes that I move against my best interest to support ending her anxiety and alter her internal experience by providing a solution to her money woes.

Would that it were so easy as that…

We want those we love to somehow escape the truth that life, lived in and through the fantasy of imagination, is suffering. We want them to somehow escape, having to learn the hard way, that the origin of suffering is that we are attached to the desire that our lives should be other than they are, we want them to somehow escape having to learn how to cope with attachment and how to end their internal, and very personal, suffering. We want to provide them with an escape hatch, a ladder out of a burning building, and a rescue from their own depths.

“Never do for another, what they can and should do for themselves,” taught my beloved Teacher. And seemingly conversely, “selfless service to others” is the highest state imaginable.

Two ideas that seemed always at odds with one another, in my understanding, until very recently. What every human being “can and should do” for themselves is to explore, challenge, restore, and heal their own minds weaknesses and desire for rescue. Selfless service can only be effectively provided to those who have the will to stand in the face of their own fears, you and I, cannot make another’s mind stable, we cannot empty another’s mind of imaginary boogey men, we cannot walk the dark tunnels of another’s lost understanding, and we cannot live through another’s dark night of the soul.

From the moment I chose to live, in 1983, I have been gifted with great, wise, and loving, guidance…but I sought them, I reached out, I made myself available, and I did the necessary standing in my own fears until the light began to dawn.

Rosa, a gifted therapist…George, the wisest person I have ever known or even heard about…Byron Katie, who gave me a tool of incalculable value…Tom, who walks beside me with constancy, patience, commitment, and kindness…a tiny army of incalculable power. But even as gifted and committed as they all are, they could not, would not, and have not, sheltered me from the storm of my own making.

It is one of life’s great paradoxes, that we must be willing to serve others while at one and the same time never venturing beyond the restraints of “each must go alone.”

I will leave you with the wisdom and soundness of a mind so much more supple than mine…

Lao Tzu says of “real people”; (emphasis mine)

“They are full yet appear to be empty.

They govern the inside, not the outside.

Clear and pure, utterly plain, they do

not contrive artificialities but return to simplicity.

(They comprehend) the fundamental, embracing the spirit.

Seeing the evolution of events, they keep to the source.

Their attention is focused internally, and they understand calamity

and fortune in the context of unity.

They keep to the simplicity of wholeness

and stand in the center of the quintessential.

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight.”

And finally…

“I empty my mind of its likes and dislikes together with all the other rubbish accumulated during a lifetime of folly, (unbelieving) and then, I may expect to be guided by the universal Tao in me, that is to say by my personal Te.”

I, choose this day, to serve my sister and myself… by doing nothing in the outer and once more bending my will, my commitment, my determination, my resolve, my strength of character, and my spirit to the Inner and thus to serve the Real and the Necessary.

And may God in his infinite kindness and care, speed us both along our way…

Adayre R. Miller

1/14/11

“rock balancing” photos courtesy of Heiko Brinkmann

www.flickr.com/photos/85034017@N00/5340319192/

www.flickr.com/photos/85034017@N00/1492041644/

(if you have never seen “rock balancing”, I can tell you that it seems miraculous in its shear implausibility…the first time I saw it, I swear I didn’t believe it…until a seagull looking for a perch landed upon what appeared to solid rock, only to have the entire thing fall apart at his first touch, the memory has never left me. And there sitting relaxed and intensely quiet off to one side was the craftsman who built this astonishing structure, with a hat at his side where a growing amount of greenbacks were piling up…to which my contribution was added, to express the shear joy of discovering so unique a construction.)