Full of Paradise….

As friends often are, mine have been aware of the many “troubles” that have beset my life these last three years…

The loss of my entire life savings, my sister’s pressure to sell my home, the health concerns, my professional losses and on and on…and as friends will often do, a friend of mine was attempting to commiserate with me and honor the “dark night of the soul”, that he assumes I have been passing through these long months.

His kindness toward me has been boundless, I had the best professional experience of my life with him and I know that he is offering only more of the same, when he offers me his appraisal of the troubles I have been traveling amidst.

The thing of it is, this has not been a “dark night of my soul”. I have had those and they are daunting indeed…but they are born of a mind in resistance to the circumstances in which it finds itself.

The death of resistance ends all struggles, and ending struggle ends suffering.

When I entered into this long spiritual retreat, I was well prepared and adequately disillusioned, (a quite necessary step along the way), and therefore well equipped for what was to about to unfold… but I had no capacity in the beginning, to viscerally understand what it means to end resistance, and further what it means to connect with the Silent Mind.

Along the way, a long time friend and I had a very painful exposure to one another, and in that exposure I revisited the very worst aspects of myself…and that too, allowed me to deepen my experience of the end of, or death of, resistance.

We, as human beings attempting to live in and through our “doings”, resist almost everything. We resist the car traveling too slow in the fast lane, we resist the loss of everything and everyone, we resist the changes that each new day brings, we would resist the sun rising fresh each day, if we thought for a moment it would get us closer to the day we dream of, when life finally settles down and behaves the way we want it to.

Resistance is so common to our experience we don’t even really understand that it is there, present in our every waking moment, and ruining any hope we might possible have for freedom, security, peace or well being.

Resistance is not the same thing, or even similar, to a clean functioning “No”. Resistance is that subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, emanation of the desire to be somewhere else, doing something else, or even fundamentally being someone else. It is the very source of the “celebrity” culture with which this particular time in history is flooded.

It is a way of denying yourself that is so primal, that it decays any potential to truly live and discover the truth about our nature, and our potential contribution to the ongoing unfolding of the Universe.

This long, long retreat that was gifted to me in the form of being laid off from my job, which then required me to live so frugally that driving my car became a luxury, was in its essence a study in releasing resistance. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do, (save fruitlessly searching for another job), and no one to turn to in the oh-so-common pursuit of running from the conditioned mind, that portrays itself as the identity we think ourselves to be.

Out of this emptiness came the willingness, even in time the desire, to altogether cease resisting my life and the process into which it is unfolding. Over time, I began to embrace all of the circumstances of my life and no longer made distinctions between what was “good” and what was “bad”, in giving up those comparisons…even more capacity to end resistance became available.

As resistance flaked away like rust off of old and weathered steel, fresh new and inviting energy flooded my system…soon I discovered the capacity to still my thoughts, and in the resulting quiet I have discovered the personal self as something decidedly more than just the functioning of the thinking mind.

It is stranger than strange, to discover that your thinking mind is deeply problematic, in that everything that has ever been created in the material world has come to us by use of the part of us that “thinks”. My teacher trying to convey the same odd truth would often call the productions of mind that cause us so much suffering – “thinking” and the aspect of mind that sources from the deeper creative parts of us – “Thought”.

A great many wise and powerful sages have defined the entire manifestation of the physical Universe, as one that is being “Thought” into existence, by the creative and loving Intelligence that surrounds and inhabits us.

This form of Thinking is the form that is obedient to, or subservient to, the deeper Silence out of which thought arises. All you need do to prove this to yourself…is to sit quietly and watch your thoughts arise. They source out of absolute silence and absolute stillness, in time and with joyful commitment, you can actually “watch” them arise.

Because my sensory perceptions are so visual, it seems to me as though they float up like ethereal balloons rising against the morning sun, floating up from some depth, which is unknowable and unperceivable. This depth, this unknowable ground of Being…is the truth about each of us. It is the Source…. home, help, ease, joy, comfort, abiding peace, unlimited affection, unalloyed pure and absolute Love and high regard, it is our immanent and abiding true nature.

When this has been touched, what in our external circumstances can stand against such experience? What could possibly be more valuable, more stable, more desirable?

This most vital and powerful of experiences is not available, in or through, the thinking mind… in point-of-fact this non-thinking mind surrounds or includes the production of thinking, while also being beyond it, or beneath it, or above it – all deeply inadequate ways of trying to describe the enveloping sweetness of the mind that is larger than thought. Believing, positive thinking, praying, hoping, wishing, and most especially wanting, are all productions of the thinking mind and as such have no capacity to touch this most vital of selves.

This eternally quiet, yet viscerally palpable self, is the ground out of which you, and I, and all that exists springs.

If a name were called for, my heart would whisper…like air moving over the wings of fragile moths… the name of Yahweh, the “personal” name for God. I am not Jewish, and somehow it feels slightly as though I am transgressing to speak a name that does not come down to me through legitimate means, such as birthright…that said, it is the one that my heart would use, were a name required.

But even as this name, this personal name of God, speaks itself in my heart…I know that this is not the god of the ages, not the god of gray haired old men who live as superstitious figures from out of the historical time of men. But rather, a binding force that holds the stars orbiting in their light filled paths, a delivering force that will lift us above the smallness of our own minds, a living force that causes breath to come and to cease, a loving force that beckons us beyond the limitations of the conditioned mind, that at once causes and creates, all of our suffering.

Believing in this God, this personal god, is a pale lifeless substitute for experiencing it in the stillness and silence of our very own mind. Belief is the structure and construct of the very mind chatter that keeps direct experience of the Ground of Being unavailable, it is the prison into which our minds guide us…when freedom is available for the taking.

“Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.”

- Rumi

“I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. “

-Thomas Merton

We are “full of paradise” without our knowing it, and the circumstances of our lives do not figure into that fullness in any way what-so-ever…it is only the conditioned mind that can enter into “a dark night of the soul”. The Silent Mind is forever at rest, forever in repose, and forever available….

Adayre R. Miller

2/8/11

photo courtesy of CD Barnes and flickr photo sharing