For The Remainder of My Days...

Many years ago, I had a type of relationship unique to my experience in the whole of my lifetime, in fifty-five years of living, there has never been another like it…and I doubt that there will be another similar to it, for the remainder of my days.

What I was not capable of understanding then, was that the arc of my experience in this particular relationship, was the process by which…if I had been capable of said, understanding…I might have found freedom a great deal sooner than I have.

It began one night, in the deep middle of the night, when I had just returned home from a night of partying. I was in my middle twenties the decade in which you believe in unlimited possibilities, and the decade in which you are most vulnerable to fantasy and illusion.

I was living in central Phoenix, in a modest apartment turned condo complex, which featured a central courtyard onto which every apartment door opened. It was probably late spring or early summer, as the night was warm, even at three in the morning.

I opened my ground floor condo door, to hear my phone ringing, and like most people if your phone is ringing at 3 am you automatically assume someone in your family has taken ill, or been injured. I dropped my purse, rushed to the phone, and snatched up the receiver of my trim line princess phone…(this was after all the early eighties)…and on the other end was the first obscene phone caller, I have ever had.

His declaration that he wanted to “F@!* me” was delivered in a deep, throaty, menacing, and scratchy, whisper. In the first few seconds, having been expecting an announcement that one of my already elderly parents had experienced some form of health crisis, I couldn’t even understand what he had said. Tiny slivers of time, measured I am sure in fractions of seconds, marched by in what felt like, long stretches of eons…standing there in my dancing shoes, holding a phone to my ear, and struck dumb by an invasion of my privacy, and my well being, that could not have been anticipated.

“What did you say…”, I finally demanded. And he repeated himself, something he was to do for three very long years….

For three years, he called me at two in the afternoon, at four in the morning, during breakfast, before dinner, after I had just come home from a date, while I was doing the chores around the house, just after I had stepped out of the shower, while I was applying lipstick….his calls interrupted every type of moment I spent inside my home. In the early months, he called me as many as 15 to 20 times 24/7.

Now your first reaction to this information is going to be, “why didn’t you change your phone number…you goof ball?”

I couldn’t. I had the beginnings of what was going to turn into a business, at that time in my life, and changing my phone number without forwarding the number to the new one would represent, in my mind, a loss to large to sustain. Remember at that time, there was no Internet, or cell phones, just your primary number and your snail mail address.

He only ever said two phrases to me…just eight words, for three long years. He didn’t embellish or story tell. He didn’t elaborate or complicate. He repeated the same two phrases, comprised of the same eight words many times a day… over, and over, and over…

In the beginning, that first time in the warm desert night, after I got over the shock that kept me from understanding, I was flooded with terror when he repeated his phrase. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, wondering where he was, how he found me, why he had found me, and if he were coming for me.

The next morning I called the police, they informed me that I could change my phone number, (not possible), keep an accurate log of dates and times, which might or might not, help them catch him…(remember early eighties – not the kind of technology we have now), and get a registered gun, not something I could bring myself to do.

I tried keeping the log…but you try finding the thing, when you last had it in the bedroom, at four am, when he called the night before…and now your standing at the kitchen sink, with your hands in soapy water when he calls on a Saturday at 1:30, and you are scared witless, it just wasn’t doable.

It took weeks and weeks for terror to downgrade to fear, and I suppose it only did because my system could not sustain the physiological trauma of that much adrenaline. In the weeks of terror, I would snatch up the phone before the first ring was expended, so as to stop it’s now malevolent sound, and drop it when I heard his breathy, scratchy, male, “I want…” which would, if given the time, evolve into the sexual threat he was constantly issuing.

Finally when terror did downgrade to fear, I tried many different ideas of defense - chief among them was blowing a police whistle into his ear - it made him laugh softly, before issuing his threat.

I spent many nights sleeping over at good friends homes in an attempt to not be found alone and vulnerable in my bed, by this deviant, and what I imagined would one day be his escalation to physical violence.

Finally, in time, I got enraged and our “relating” metamorphosed into one of my screaming similar profanities back into the phone, the instrument he was using to exact such a price on my life.

The rage didn’t last nearly as long as the fear did.

Then came a contest of wills. It would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so crazy.

I began picking up the phone, without saying hello…

He had already proven, that he would not speak if someone else answered the phone, and thus I picked up the ringing phone and merely waited, quietly, on my end. This tactic confused a good many people…who could be heard to finally offer a somewhat confused and/or frustrated…”Hello”?...”Hello”?... And in this manner, I could determine if it was him or not.

When prolonged emotionally taut filled, not to mention, heavily breathed silence, greeted me allowing me to know it was him, on more than one of these occasions I tried to wait him out. Once, three full hours went by, until I finally offered an hello and without hesitation his… “I want to F@!* you”… traveled back down the line, and into my ear.

I had been going about my chores, with the phone line connected and the receiver sitting on my desk’s top. Just imagine what kind of concentration and dedication it took, for him to be sitting there, for three hours waiting for me to return…amazing…

Then came pity.

I had come full circle, I now understood how damaged he was by the choices he had made, how lost, how empty, how damned…

I began, upon hearing his oft-used phrase, to advise him to get help, to reach out, to find a way out of the prison he had made for himself. At this juncture came the only change in his behavior, that he ever expressed, he stopped declaring sexual violence…and instead, in the same throaty whisper, offered his affection. His new phrase? “I love you”…and it was as constant and repetitive, as had been his threat.

On my end… pity, morphed into sadness, and finally into resolve.

By this time, the ringing of the phone… was once more… just ringing. I picked up that ringing instrument of communication, just as I had done before he entered my life, without hesitation, without dread, without trepidation, or anxiety. And when I said hello and he began his new phrase, I put the receiver into its cradle, with no more emotional content, on my part, than if it had been a census taker, or an advertiser, or a wrong number.

Done, finished, complete, over…

He called a few times a month or so, for another seven or eight months and then he disappeared from whence he had come, with no more between us than the molecules that wrongly appear to seem to separate us all.

It was a preview of things to come…

For here in the arc of this sad but fruitful relationship, is the entire history of my spiritual development, and that of every other seeker that has ever stepped upon the path.

I had not yet met my spiritual teacher, had not yet become sufficiently disillusioned with what the world pretends to offer, had no yet become so panic and anxiety ridden that suicide seemed like a viable solution, and still in those three years, with him, I was exposed to all that the spiritual path has to offer…but had no capacity with which to understand it.

I have now; come to the same internal “space” with every important relationship of my life.

If you imagine that I arrived at indifference with him, my phone-it-in-helper, then you have misdiagnosed the transaction between us.

I assume a good number of people believe that hatred is the opposite of love, but it isn’t….indifference is the opposite of love. (There is no “opposite” to True Love; I am talking about relative love here, or the love that most people mean when they use that word). Indifference provides the capacity to use others, as mere stepping stones to the outcomes we believe will serve us, to use them without hesitation, recognition, or recompense, to allow for a sort of mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical theft. A thing we have all been guilty of…myself included.

If I believed in Evil, as a stand-alone entity or devil, which I do not…Indifference…would be its name.

That is not what I came to feel for my phone-it-in-helper. What I felt for him, at the time, I could not even have named. It took my teacher’s guidance, my coming to the same place with every important relationship of my life, and many years of spiritual maturity to be capable of naming my internal response to my, once upon a time, faceless phone brethren.

I came to complete and utter Internal Silence, in my relationship with him, and my mother, and my sister, and now with an ever-increasing inclusion of the many relationships that populate my life.

Silence, the unwavering capacity to stand within myself accepting the events of my life, without hesitation, commentary, or judgment…to watch what must be seen, without grasping and clinging, or denying and rejecting.

The author Gangaji says,…”Life is silent awareness, and all the events of life appear and disappear in that silence. You are that silence.”

To know yourself as a seemingly individuated part of the totality of Silence, out of which all things come and to which all things return, is to know, at-one-and-the-same-time, your True Face and the face of every seeming “Other” that has ever lived, crawled upon the earth, moved up out of the sea, or sat like stone at the top of a mountain.

To meet a friend, a family member, or a phone-it-in-helper with Silence is to allow them complete freedom from you, and thereby, real and lasting and truthful, Agape Love.

I also learned, from my phone helper, that true Silence cannot be manipulated, cajoled, controlled, demanded of, taken emotional hostage, or in any other way used…and that is why he was finally capable of letting go of me.

William Butler Yeats defines relationship better than, truer than, more powerfully than, any other sage, writer, or wise one, I believe, ever has, when he said. “We can make of our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer, life because of our quiet.”

To be met with Inner Silence by another, is to receive the potential to have our lives set free.

It isn’t necessarily comfortable, meeting this “still water” in another, because our reflection may just be ugly to us, and therefore hard to witness. For years and years, when I sat in front of my Teacher I felt the need to bow my head, in part because of his radiance, but more often than not… because I was ashamed of what I saw of myself, reflected in his Silence and Stillness.

The emotional greed, neediness, manipulations, approval seeking, emotional bartering, smallness, desires, loneliness and terrible grasping, all of which and more, were true of me, were all there reflected for me to see… on the smoothness, acceptance, kindness, generosity, and non-attachment of his countenance. That is why true teachers are so rare, most folks who claim to be spiritual teachers, are just salespeople hawking the currently popular images and patterns of the childhood need for safety, from a scary world. That is not necessarily bad, but it will cost you precious time and a great deal more suffering…

As Gangaji puts it, “As a child I used to recite a Christian prayer, and I found comfort in that prayer where I imagined there was an angel beside me, and there was Jesus in heaven. Everything was in order and I would be taken care of. At a certain stage that comfort wasn’t enough. I needed to enter heaven itself.

That prayer was a way of taming a child’s mind. When childhood is finished, prayers from childhood are not enough. Finally the one who is praying must be discovered.”

Discovering the “one who is praying” is to discover the Silence in yourself. To discover the Silence in yourself, the conditioned mind’s identity must die, and that death is the fiercest battle you will ever undertake. You must and do, “pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death”, to be capable of bringing an end to the conditioned mind’s hold upon your life.

When that hold is abolished…freedom, fearlessness, abiding calm, and complete security are established and become ever, and ever, increasingly available.

So I choose for myself, and pray for you… the capacity to journey without ceasing… all the way from terror, through fear, passing into anger, toward pity, including sadness, and finally to the resolve of Silence wherein “they” will be as free of you, as you are of “them”…and in that freedom, the Oneself is reborn anew, as fresh and real as the original birth of the Universe…

Adayre R. Miller

2/20/11

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