An Invitation…

Waiting for someone to make good on a promise is not something that I have traditionally been good at…

I have a long history of folk in my life who make promises but either choose to, or are incapable of, completing the circle and making the connection that promises require. My father was particularly poor at keeping his word, and my response to that was painful and helped to shape who I am in the world.

So from this history, I am waiting for a company to make good on their promise, that I may rejoin and restart an employment process interrupted by illness and lack of fundamental skills. So far the wait is nine business days and six emails, on my part, long. (I have tried unsuccessfully to reach someone by phone).

And once again… all that is possible to do, is face myself and my own interior conversation. I have come so far in that process, that I no longer believe that any outside or external event has very much consequence at all.

It becomes more and more clear, with every passing year, that the whole of one’s life is spent in the space between the external trigger and the internal conversation that trigger produces.

It is so simple as to be almost laughable.

All the years of searching, seeking, wanting, hoping, hurting, and running were all ways and means by which I tried, in vain, to escape the self that lies in wait just beneath the surface.

In these two weeks, the snippet of conversation from my sister…that she is afraid I might “take us both down”, or the embarrassment I felt while failing so publicly in class, or the return to the job search, or the relief, now dissipated, that I have finally restarted my income stream…have all come to sit with me…but not on me, as they once would have done.

They sit, like toads on a lily pad; green, garrulous, shiny, and unblinking…watching me…waiting… tirelessly.

Among the many character defects I have come to know and communicate with over the years, the biggest, may well be my quite childish belief that once I have discovered the fault in my thinking…that there’s an end to it. For some reason, I am always and evermore, thinking that if I have conquered my desire for rescue from the self once, that it will no longer darken my door again.

And so… I tick-tock like a metronome between the Truth and the Lie.

The Truth: nothing is ever wrong in the present moment. I know this to be real, as more and more of my life is spent in the release and relief of the present moment experience…the greatest gift these long months have given me, these months with no external life to speak of…have taught me by experience, that the present moment is entirely free from pain, worry, fault, hope, help, suffering, and want.

The Lie: that the future matters, or is relevant, or necessary, or valuable, or different in any way from the moment now unfolding. (I have long ago, left behind living in the past…my mind does not often wander back over what was, or if it does, I am capable of finding myself fairly quickly, thus the future and the potential rescue that my imagination fires the future with, is now the field of endeavor to which my attention must turn).

I know that a good many who might read this find great comfort in anticipating a potentially “good” future. Most American religious systems are founded on the notion, that the good lies somewhere out in front of us all. Heaven being the deepest and most radical of the future based beliefs of an eventual good, and of a much desired well-being.

A belief in future good is so compelling, that young men with all of life in front of them, will strap bombs to their chests and die in flames and outrage to defend their beliefs and to find the open doorway to a “future” of fulfillment and promise.

This anticipatory view of a greater good somewhere out in front of us, like the proverbial carrot on a pole, is a notion so hard to see and so damaging to live by, that it can and does, take lives the world round and for all of recorded history.

Clearing the mind of anticipation is, I find, a much more difficult task than clearing it of old resentments and historical stories of “me”. I am sure the reason for that is, anticipation unlike resentment, has a good taste and pleasing aroma to it. We savor like a good meal, the notion that we are headed for somewhere better than here, a new and exciting horizon beckons with promises of new life, and love, and fulfillment, and personal victory…or whatever combination of delights your particular history and culture populate your dream state with. Those young men who needlessly die are told stories of 77 virgins and their open, waiting, and pliable arms.

It is possible, for those of us in the West – with our history of scientific research and our belief in reason – to smile indulgently, at the notion that 77 virgins are awaiting these young and earnest men. But our notions of a better future are no less dramatic, and no less grounded in falseness than is the young Muslim who is now preparing himself for the glorious death he has been taught to anticipate.

The belief that tomorrow will hold better things than does today, is so universal it could be thought of as ubiquitous. It is, as they say, the water in which we fish are swimming…and ending its hold on our psyche is something that requires an intense commitment and willingness on the part of the individual to conquer.

So why, might you ask, does it matter?

If it provides us with delight to anticipate a more pleasing future, if it soothes our troubled brow and doesn’t go so far as to have us turning ourselves into weapons of mass destruction…why not look forward to the bloom of a new horizon? Why not see the world, our lives, and the whole of the human drama through the lens of our rosy imaginations?

In answer… I point you to Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 1 BC – 65 AD) Roman Stoic philosopher, “Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, we lose today.”

To look back or to look forward, in either it’s negative forms or it’s positive, which is to say either regret and nostalgia or dread and expectation we lose the whole of our opportunity to live, to learn, to behold, to bear witness and thus fail both ourselves, posterity, humanity, and the evolution that is so direly needed.

We imagine in our minds so befuddled with confusion, that serving others is a matter of working in the external, to feed, to clothe, to inoculate, or to protect. We believe that extinguishing the suffering of others is an act of wiping a fevered brow, of filling a bowl with rice, of putting a dollar in an outstretched hand. Yes…I don’t deny, that all of these things and so much more, can and do soothe and supply…but none of these things can cure.

Curing is an internal, solitary, necessary, essential, and personal journey. No one who has ever lived, or will ever live, can help another into the inner sanctum of his or her own mind. A great and vibrantly centered Teacher may inspire, may display the necessary Mastery, may light the way…but can do no more than that…each of us must travel alone and naked to the center of Being wherein a cure may be found.

It is paradoxical in the extreme that the only thing that has ever, or can ever harm us is our own mind. Yes we can be struck by lighting, or maimed by a bomb, or robbed at gun point…but the sane among us will walk away from events such as these unfettered and in tact, the almost sane among us may feel an emergency response in the moment but they will not be traumatized for a moment longer than the event lasted, and the sick among us will live for a lifetime shackled by the echo of something that no longer exists.

So how best to serve humanity and ourselves?

Give the dollar, fill the bowl with rice, and wipe the brow…if you are so inclined, but do not for a moment believe that is the greatest, or even the best form of service, that can be provided a family in such great a need as is the family of man.

Demonstration of the courage to face the figments of imagination that so populate the mind, and so confuse the individual, is the greatest gift that can ever be given.

Masterful determination is required to leave behind the traditional pathways the culture has so inoculated our minds with… “The goal of every life is to grow bigger than the circumstances into which you were born.” -Maya Angelou

I suspect that Ms. Angelou may have been talking about what is traditionally considered “greatness” in this quote, a building of an external life admired and applauded, but it held great resonance for me when I applied it to the pursuit of understanding that so captures my attention.

The “circumstances” into which you were born are the mythologies of your culture that you accept as givens, things like the culturally accepted definitions of good and bad, of success and failure, of illness and health…it is your job and mine, to grow “bigger” than these deeply flawed and potentially dangerously divisive ideas. We can see that so clearly when we shake our heads and wonder at the sheer nonsense of planes being flown into towers, or cars being bombed, or congresswomen being shot, but when we apply that to the ideas of success and failure and the intrinsic good that success is supposed to hold, we can no longer sustain the awareness that it is every bit as illusory as what drives the terrorists among us.

To loosen our grip on the cultural view that so binds our minds, requires potent and quite personal faith, a faith that allows no withholds and no back-pedaling.

“Faith is knowing that there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.” - Emanuel Teney

In a mind no longer dominated by the furious and rushing sound of the thinking self, a brook appears…a trickle at first, no doubt, but if followed in faith an ocean cannot be far.

I know by faith…”I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” - Douglas Adams

I began my life so far outside of myself that I was a danger to myself, I publish here with you as my witness, that I will walk without knowing where I am going, and by faith, so that I might restore my own sanity and by doing so serve all that shall come behind me.

I invite you to do the same…

Adayre R. Miller

1/25/11

Photo by Kristin Farwell, Karmalized.com - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kfarwell/3087928486/ and flickr photo sharing…to view additional images please follow the link listed