The Heart of Silence….

I have heard it said that who we were is who we are meant to become, this idea was presented to me in a book I read years ago. The author and the name of the book are long past remembering, but his thesis was so entertaining that I remember it to this day.

He took some fifteen or so, very famous people in different arenas and went searching for the point of origin of their particular genius. He recounted stories of the most admired Matador, Spain has ever produced, and how he was such an easily frightened and spooked child that he spent a good deal of this youth hiding behind the skirts of his mother…which then of course, eventually became the flowing cape of his bullfighting trade.

He chronicled the painter Jackson Pollack, and his ground breaking explosive expression, of dripped and spun and spattered paint. As a young boy the story of his excessive interest in peeing in the winter snow, told over an over by his childhood friends, making the same splatter patterns that would one day catapult him into iconoclastic status among twentieth century painters, was apparently all there in the yellow snow of his childhood.

These are the only two stories from the book that I can remember, but I do remember looking back into my own childhood and wondering if there were some clue as to who I was destined to become, in the wreckage that was my background.

My mother, despite the rages that would overtake her and cause her to briefly lose her mind and her judgment, was by her nature, taciturn in the extreme…nearly mute, she required me to do all of her “public” speaking. As soon as I could speak, if we needed ketchup in a restaurant I would be required to ask for it, if someone came to the door I would be required to be part of the discussion. She worked for 35 years in the same job as a presser in a dry cleaner, (the chemicals used were surely the culprit of the lung disease that eventually killed her), I believe, primarily, because she never had to speak to anyone new.

As most folks who prefer not to speak, she was an extraordinary listener. So much so, that entire days could be spent with my spinning one tale after another, recounting days at school, first dates, homecoming dances, or new job escapades. She practically bred me to be a storyteller.

In time, I met the first of my many mentors, I was seventeen when he walked into the dry cleaners where I worked “the front” dealing with the customers, while my mother shrouded in steam made perfect creases in customers’ pants…and he appeared to be glowing to me.

A precocious child, made voluble by my mothers long time patient listening, and my very real desire to keep her entertained and thus calm, I had excelled only at classes that had some form of public speaking attached to them. All through primary and middle school there was English where we read from well loved books; in high school there was drama, speech, and debate, which were by far the most exciting, and the only time I was really engaged. And then onefine day, this glowing-to-my-eyes man, walked into the dry cleaners and made it possible for me to know that you could make a living telling “stories” to audiences.

When I asked him what he did, and he explained he sold and taught Dale Carnegie public speaking courses, I demanded that he let me take one. At the time, in the early seventies, the course cost $350.00 a very large sum of money for a seventeen-year-old girl. He said no…but I would not take no for an answer…

“You can’t, it’s too expensive”, was his first volley. “I have the money and I can write you a check right now”, was my reply. “We have a rule that only people twenty-one years of age and older can take the course”, was his next lob. “Change “Well”, he said, recognizing three commissions in one no doubt…”if you get your parents to spend $700.00 dollars taking the class with you, I will get the regional manager to suspend the age limit just this once”. the rule… and if you can’t, I will get both of my parents to take the class with me, thus providing all the protection against underage risk exposure that you might be worried about” was my demand.

I did, and he did.

You can imagine that getting my mother to take a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, was a contest of wills worthy of the gods of Olympus…but I prevailed and we attended, and she was forever and very dramatically positively changed by the experience.

As for me, the die was cast…I could imagine no other life for myself, save continuing the experience of engaging large numbers of others, in the way I had spent my childhood engaging my mother.

There were a good many missteps along the way…

I once got a friend to give me a chance at speaking to a large crowd of business people about the topic of “customer service”, something I had no business doing. It went so badly, to this day, the memory of it causes a blush of embarrassment.

But in time, I found my topic, as well as my venue. I was in the first wave of “new age” speakers that came out of the early eighties, and I settled into a church in California that was the largest of it’s type in that faith, and soon I was giving the one of the fastest growing of the many services we provided.

We sat up chairs in the lobby, had a TV installed in the rec room, borrowed parking spaces from surrounding buildings, and allowed folks to sit on the stairs going up to the second floor of the auditorium, the church board began looking for properties three sizes larger for us to purchase and move into.

To say that I excelled at it would be an understatement. But the most amazing problem began arising, in all of this wild growth, just as the long held and much desired fulfillment of my already decades old “dream” of making my way in the world by telling “stories” to audiences, began to ripen and become real… I became increasingly lost in a very surprising form of shame.

I would finish a lecture, sit down in the front row next to the Senior Minister, and shame would flood my interior. It was so sharp and real and painful that I could almost not bear it…and worse, I didn’t have the foggiest notion where it came from, or why I was experiencing it.

The parishioners had no idea that my experience was so different from theirs, in the receiving line that was a tradition of our church, they would file by one by one, crying, or smiling, or deeply moved by what I had “shared”, and would tell me in many different ways how important what I had said was, how valuable what I had provided them, how glad they had been that they had come that day.

And I would leave the auditorium on the long drive home, bathed in confusion and shame.

To this day I do not really, clearly, understand it. Sure… I have teased apart some of the aspects of it, enough to share with you the pearl I have finally discovered, but beyond that I do not know, and perhaps do not need to know.

Of course, the first layer is one of finally understanding that I was pandering. If you grew up as I did, insecure enough to want everyone you meet to “like” you…if you teach yourself how to make others like you by using praise and affirmation, to cause them to turn toward you like the sun causes sunflowers to follow it through the sky, then you are well on your way to becoming a panderer. (Just a note here, “to pander” has two very different meanings – one; a person who furnishes clients with a prostitute or supplies persons for illicit sexual intercourse, a procurer or pimp. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t mean that one, or two; a person who caters to, or profits from, the weaknesses of others. This is the meaning I am making with the use of the word.)

Now, how is it that a person, like myself, who is utterly sincere in their desire to “help” others and equally devoted to her own personal and professional dream…could rightly be considered to be pandering, or “profiting” off the weaknesses of others?

Well…that is precisely the point of this essay…if you are still with me, we will get there.

My teacher, spoke to us often over the course of the twenty-five years I was among his many students, of the dangers of following those whose primary benefit was to make us “feel good about ourselves”. That may very well rest harshly on your ears, so try – if you can, to listen to the deeper meaning. Every one of us, throughout the known and unknown history of the world, was born into a conditioned mind. A mind developed and defined by the cultural, familial, and tribal boundaries of our particular time in history, which is used to create what is considered the current and common social “norms”. This mind, although decidedly NOT the real you, becomes so familiar and fundamental to our sense of self, that it quite literally puts us to sleep with its hypnotic and mesmerizing abilities.

The vast majority of us live inside this mind, swinging like a pendulum between ease and comfort on one side, to disease or discomfort on the other, for the remainder of our lives. A lucky few of us, (and perhaps more and more), reach a level of disturbance and suffering that sets us out upon the heroes journey…the search for the unknown and, in truth, unknowable.

In this realm we follow what feels good, is somewhat novel compared to what we grew up with, and here we find release from the pressure and some measure of resolution to our various conflicts. This is the “many paths” of the current structure of the new age movement. There is nothing wrong with this process, nothing to complain about, or condemn, in any fashion what-so-ever…and my Teacher would also have supported any and all, who chose to rest in this particular bend in the road.

But if you have traveled long enough in this brand of teachings and processing, you will most likely come, as did I, to a very strong and compelling form of disillusionment. No matter how many times you affirm, process, pray, pick a card, form a goal, follow a heart’s desire, or find a new idea…the current level of swinging between ill and well remains. This new level, could well be – as it was for me, far above the level at which suicide seems like a doable solution, but well below the “peace that passes understanding” that the Bible promises.

Here is the source of the shame I felt, during the wild success I was experiencing those long years ago…I was unconsciously pandering…and I was just as lost in the productions of mind as I had ever been, and more, my soul knew it and communicated it to me in no uncertain terms.

It is not possible to use the productions of your mind; no matter how elegant, eloquent, beautiful or sincere they may be…to find your way beyond the mind. It simply isn’t possible.

Not only can the mind hamper discovering what is beyond itself, but it can and will, actively cloud the issue as it is struggling for its own survival in the process of your attempting to unburden yourself from it, as the conditioned mind is the very source of all suffering.

This is why my Teacher warned us of those that lead by “making us feel good about ourselves”, there is nothing wrong with those folk in any form, it is merely and only, that a leader cannot take you where they themselves have not journeyed.

Let me turn your attention to the manner in which Gangaji reports this understanding…

“But when it comes to the recognition of truth, the mind is not equipped to lead. It is exquisitely equipped to discover or to follow, but not to lead. The mind is not the enemy; there is nothing wrong with it. The tragedy is that we believe the conclusions of the mind to be reality. This is a huge tragedy, responsible for both mundane suffering and the most profound suffering, individually and collectively.

You are conditioned to try to keep mental understanding in an exalted place, but that is not true understanding. That is in the realm of understanding how to tie your shoes, practice good manners, learn a new language, or decipher advanced mathematical formulas.

The power of understanding, which is a beautiful power of the mind, is useless in the discovery of your true self.” (Emphasis mine.)

I would go further and say not only useless, but actively problematic in the pursuit of the non-thinking, or Silent mind.

Unknowable Silence is the source of Beingness and as such is the source of the self. It is the real you, the everlasting you, the safe and secure you, the discovery of which has been driving your thirst from the day you began “searching”. It cannot be found precisely because you search, and because you are searching with the very mechanism that must be laid aside, if you are to be found at all.

A rightful Teacher is one who has laid this false self away, and has embraced the no thought mind to the degree that they can embody it’s presence, and thereby make it possible for you to turn within and quiet the mind of the “thinker” in yourself.

My Teacher’s presence was so strong that I felt the need to bow my head when near him. His capacity to see beneath my many personas and attempts to please him and thereby curry his favor, was so strong that I eventually could no longer handle the embarrassment I felt when he would turn his laser like clarity upon me, causing me to feel the falseness in myself and making me want to hide in shame from that piercing, and still somehow, life affirming examination.

Recently I heard Gangaji expressing a similar phenomenon with her Teacher. She reported using all the many personality skills she had developed to entice him to look kindly upon her and to approve of her. She reported that he had no interest at all in the many roles she took on in those attempts, and that she often felt he was disgusted with her behavior. And then finally, when she had no more ways to gain his approval and instead began to submit to his greater understanding, she reported feeling shy and awkward like “an eight or nine year old”, and it was then her understanding began to develop and mature.

I too, remember feeling so awkward in the presence of my Teacher that I could hardly bear it, and as I looked around me I saw that same awkwardness in almost every one in the room.

A human being who has become capable of moving beyond the mind and into the changeless, ever present, no thought self…is something to behold. A marvel to wonder at, a harbinger of the future of the entire species of humanity, a Buddha…”the Awakened One”, but this “One” is not a mere dressed up version of the self that thinks.

This Awakened One is the one who no longer sees or experiences the sense of separate self that was the fall of mankind, and the expeller of humanity from the Garden of Eden. To Awaken is to know yourself as vibrantly alive, in a mind that is capable of stilling the ensnaring trap of thought and thereby coming to know that we are not the productions of our minds. But something so much more, and so much more necessary…a fully engaged Being, a Presence, a centered and centering Knower come fully free of “believing” in the productions of the mind, a carrier of Silent Wisdom.

So now, many years past the time in which I had an “audience” to speak to, I finally have something worthy of being said…

Deep within you lies the heart of Silence, in that silence lives and continues evermore, a Being whose nature is transcendent Goodness…the Good that has no opposite. That Being cannot be found or sought, but only uncovered. To uncover the Being we all share, you must be willing to lose all that you now believe makes you, you. It cannot be done without fear, or traveling through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but take heart…both the fear and the “death” are figments of the imagination of the very active mind, and thus are entirely unreal.

And here in these fourteen words of A Course in Miracles, is the truth to comfort you, while you peal back the layers of unreality and the production of mind that shroud your true nature from view.

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.

The “unreal” productions of mind do not exist, what is real in you cannot be threatened. Silence allows you to know this beyond anything the mind can “believe” itself into accepting, Silence is an uncovered or discovered state of Being having nothing at all to do with the productions of your mind. It rests below your mind, always available…eternally patient…

Adayre R. Miller

2/4/11

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