A Pure and Budding Wish…

This notion that thinking can be stopped, and in point of fact, that you benefit greatly from the cessation of thinking is, I suppose, a fairly radical idea. After all, the “self” that promotes itself as the who of you, is so deeply embedded in your thinking that no Silent self can even be conceived of, much less embraced.

And yet, the best and brightest among us do indeed claim that a Silent self not only lives inside you, but has access to much deeper, much broader, much more valuable levels of understanding than can even be approached by the “mind that thinks.”

I thought perhaps that hearing from someone other than a spiritual leader in our attempts to understand the notion of a Silent self might be beneficial, and thus I pull the following quotes from a treatise by David Bohm.

In the 1940’s Dr. Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. Bohm then left for Brazil to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo, and later was also at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is largely seen as one of the most important and influential quantum physicists of modern times. (1917 -1992).

Dr. Bohm is not a fluid writer, so I ask that you bear with him while moving through his description of thought as a dangerous form of hijacker…

He begins, “...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But you don't decide what to do with the information. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false notion that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each of us.”

“Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”

“This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. (Creating artificial divisions.) And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call sustained incoherence". (Emphasis mine.)

My Teacher, in an effort to distinguish between the compulsive thinking that the eminent physicist Bohm described above, and the creative Thought that sources out of the Silence…named the two in this manner “thinking” - the repetitive, compulsive, dangerous, and largely useless production of mind, and the truly creative use of Mind he defined as “Thought”.

His intent was to cause us to look deeper at the recurring, habitual, and quite destructively neurotic patterns of what we often describe as the “self”. If you imagine that your thought patterns are somehow the gifted creative ones, while it is the crazy and the lunatic among us who are saddled with “thinking”, then you have just heard your thinking self provide you with a loophole by which it continues to elevate and preserve itself. Until Silence has taken root in your mind, the thinking self, can and does, produce all manner of misdirection to prevent you from discovering the Silence out of which you were born, and to which you belong.

Our thinking is for all intents and purposes an inherited phenomenon. Handed down to us by first our ancestors and parents, and then our education, mentors have a hand in it, and certainly society creates a great deal of our repetitive thinking, it is a kind of culturally induced coma that somehow passes itself off as the “self”…and in doing so, becomes lauded above all other idolatries.

As I have been graced with the slow unwinding of the thinking self inside me, I become more and more convinced that “thinking” is indeed Bohm’s “sustained incoherence”, or Mahatma Gandhi’s “devil in the mind” and most assuredly it is the “samsara” or field of suffering, that the Buddha worked so compassionately to help us overcome.

Alongside Bohm’s description of thinking as a “sustained incoherence”, the most striking thing to me - that he states so boldly -in the treatise from which I took his quote, is his assertion that “Thought runs you.”

One of the many benefits of the reclamation of Silence being a long and slow process, rather than a lighting bolt from the blue, is that prior to the capacity to stop thinking becomes truly accessible, thinking slows way, way down. It’s like a spool of thread unwinding… ever less dense, ever less compact, ever less imposing, ever less demanding, ever less binding, ever less threatening…until finally…in a soft thud it just quits altogether, and gives itself over to a much higher authority.

I have come to see that Silence is A Priori.

Silence is the Who of You, whereas thinking is a type of hostage taker that clings most ferociously to your psyche and therefore, to your freedom. I suppose part of our fascination with thinking as the source or origin of the “self” that so garners our attention, and so rules our existence, is that all of the West’s most treasured creation stories focus on the spoken word.

In John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. And in Genesis 1:3, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The thing most frequently missed about this glorification of the spoken word, is that the Word itself sources out of Silence…thus silence is indeed a priori.

Even the most cursory look at language will identify, that though it does convey a certain standard of meaning, it’s primary and most demanding feature is that it limits, as much - if not more, than it explains.

My Teacher would often describe adjectives as the very first form of lying. Imagine, he would say, Og and Bog happily formulating the very first language…Og decides to call that thing that stands on mountaintops and blows around in the wind, dropping leaves in the autumn and bearing fruit – good to eat – in the summer…a tree.

Bog shrugs and indicates that he has no strong objection to the tall thing being forever more called a tree, as long as he gets his fair share of fruit he doesn’t really mind what they call it…(Bog is just a wee bit less clever than his cousin Og, as you might have ascertained by now).

But then, some months later, Og comes to Bog and asserts that he has decided that trees have distinctions…that the ones over on the blue ridge are beautiful, and therefore more valuable, and that the ones at the bottom of the gulch are ugly, and therefore to be used as firewood and thus completely consumed. (Can you see that adjectives are in fact a form of perceptual lie, and worse, that they can indeed be dangerous…at the very least, to the trees at the bottom of the gulch…)?

So Bog argues with Og, as he is most fond of the trees at the bottom of the gulch and does not find them ugly in the least, it is after all his favorite napping spot - under the branches of those trees - and he is not going to allow them to be wantonly consumed just because stupid old Og has come up with some new modifying word he wants to attach to that stupid “tree” name…anyhow.

And in this self same fashion… Thinking became capable of running you…

Bog and Og eventually lose all sight of the truth of trees, and become lost in the labels they learned to apply to the miracle of treeness, and in the doing, build for themselves and all their progeny a prison of untold complexity, and untold losses, and untold agonies.

The thing about Silence is it transports you back to the most wonderful and wonder filled simplicity. A type of undivided wholeness that is wrapped in miracle, boundless in it’s invitation, open to all, available for the asking, eternally present… the very nature of creation.

The No Sound, Sound… just before the singing began…

…and as such… the Source, the a priori beginning, the breath before the Word was spoken, and before that word became the name of God, and before that name, became the ways and means behind which centuries of killing and atrocities were perpetrated on other human beings.

I humbly beg to differ that only the word was god…

God is the quiet, simple-as-in-pure, stable, eternally soundless and silent vessel, out of which the creative word issued forth, and to which the word will one day return.

To find the Silence in yourself is to remove the long reach of the origins of language, the confusion and despair that the upside down use of language can and does produce the world round…and to open yourself once more, and forevermore to the embrace of the Original One.

When language and its first born - thinking - once again fall under the rightful and honorable control of Silence…conflict ends, suffering halts, desire loses it hold on you, rejecting your circumstances becomes a thing of the past, and ease opens up vistas of untold beauty and beneficent experience in all that you see, all that you touch, all that touches you…

Language is the tool kit of the artificial divisions that Bohm tried so valiantly to describe; it hijacks the mind, gives birth to the “thinker” and imprisons the true self in a self-constructed, but somehow completely invisible and decidedly hellish prison.

Sogyal Rinpoche in the book, The Tibetan book of Living and Dying describes thinking/language in this most poetic of terms…

“Imagine an empty vase. The space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate one from the other. Our Buddha mind, (what I call the Silent mind), is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if that vase shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space “outside.” They become one, there and then, we realize they were never separate or different; they were always the same.”

As I write this, I am five days away from the very first time I experienced a silent mind…March 13, 2001…I suppose in truth I should celebrate it as the day of my birth, as it surely was the first opportunity I had in which to truly live.

That it coincided with my mother’s last breath is no small occurrence. Her expanding profoundly physical silence, and my first experience of the spaciousness of a silent mind will be forever bound together as the reward we, somehow both received, for having crossed the finish line in dealing with our shared sexual and physical, violence and abuse. I feel in my heart, that the Silence that was for the very first split seconds, available to me, as she slowly breathed out her last breath went with her, traveling into the deeper Silence that is our shared source. With the very hand that she had once beaten me with, with the very hand that she had once left me unprotected against a darkly confused uncle…with that same hand, she helped me create that first moment of Silence.

Our hard journey has provided me this doorway into the simple, the sweet, and the breathtaking Silence.

I don’t know how to convey to you… how much, how truly, how honestly, I would wish for Silence to unveil itself to you as well…

The motivation behind these essays, more and more truly becomes, this pure and budding wish…that you find the self that existed in you before thinking hijacked your mind, and stole your freedom. That you bloom into who you were before language began in your mind, that you introduce yourself to your original innocence, and that you find your way home…

Adayre R. Miller

3/8/11

photo courtesy of padawan xava du and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link… /www.flickr.com/photos/7933170@N03/2928420223/

Repetition…..

(A comment from a old friend who has recently begun reading my backlog of essay’s, caused me to search through them to find the one she identified as her “favorite”…that search produced a recognition of just how much I repeat myself. That of course caused me a bit of embarrassment, in that I am sure a truly good writer does not have such a habit as the one I have acquired. The reason I repeat myself so much, seems obvious to me now, having uncovered the sweetness of silence…it is all that I wish to engage in…but is that reason enough to continually put the same offering in front of you, over and over? For that reason, I hesitate to post this one as it too, is merely repeating what has already been said… So far, I do not have a book in me…and do not seem to have a writing style other than essays, so I don’t know quite how to fix the problem, or even if it is a problem…

That said I offer this one because I invested in it, perhaps between now and the next one I will have stumbled upon a solution.)

Having finally found a job, and preparing to return to work, I look back over the last 2 years and nine months of unemployment and the subsequent penury that has provided me with…and I am stunned at how much I would prefer my life to continue as it is.

When joblessness first began, I had no debt and significant life savings and I believed unemployment would be at most a limited experience, sort of like a summer break or a tiny eddy in a constantly moving stream.

I had long ago set to rest the need for constant companionship and stimulation, but this long period of retreat developed in me a strong taste for solitude, and an even stronger commitment to it. Not long ago I read a wonderful book, The Cave in the Snow, chronicling the life and circumstances of the first Western Buddhist nun who took her vows in the early 70’s and subsequently spent 12 years in a tiny, and I do mean tiny…as in touch both sides with your outstretched arms…tiny, cave.

I recognized her solitude and mine as the same basic impulse, hers was formal, and of course, recognized as not only necessary but lauded and supported by the culture that gave rise to the most spiritualized human expression of recorded history, that of Tibetan Buddhist’s, and thus was a revered and acknowledged form of existence.

Conversely, to spend almost three years in near total solitude in a small house in the middle of one of the largest cities in America is not only viewed with suspicion, but also actively derided as a valid choice. And of course this is not my first rodeo, with respect to “retreat”, in between wall-eyed crazy and the start of therapy I took a year off. Then I devoted myself to 15 years of standing alone on a ladder painting murals. Then another couple of years, in between the end of my business and the start of the “daily grind” once more, and then this one, of being caught in an economic tsunami and losing the opportunity to work no matter how hard or how often I looked for a job, it wasn’t to be had.

In days gone by, I often felt a form of shame about the ways I spent my time, in a culture where outer achievement is a very active form of idolatry, choices like mine are not only suspect but also actively frowned upon. And yet, from the perspective of this new height, I am so grateful for the path my life has taken, that I would symbolically kiss the ground if it would somehow demonstrate my bone deep gratitude.

I have, most assuredly, traveled the path less trod. There is only my sister left of my original family to tsk, tsk, and shake her head at the way my life unfolds and the “laziness” that, she believes, must surely motivate my every waking moment.

But here is my vantage point about the process I have so long been engaged in…let’s start with this…

It has been a very long time since I subscribed to the “new age” notion that our thoughts produce our external reality. I have come to view that notion as my Teacher does, that the Outer is a matter of Karmic obligation and/or Karmic opportunity, and the Inner is the only realm of potential total mastery and the freedom that mastery provides. How else could we possibly understand the decades of daily torture endured by many of the monks and nuns of Tibet’s rich spiritual history, who, once freed from their prisons, were overflowing with a heart of gratitude, fortitude, charity, and kindness toward the very ones who caused so much agony for so long a time? To subscribe to the notion that they “manifested” their way into prison, is to denounce their great sacrifices that serve so elegantly and eloquently the necessity of humanity’s need to awaken, in this time of elevated pressure for survival. A mind who survives and even thrives under that kind of treatment, becomes a quiet pool of energetic transmission, and a much needed source of the Silence that might serve to save humanity and pull us all back from the brink.

I, of course, may only speak to my own life’s evolution and understanding. But I know without doubt, that the many evolutions of increasingly deeper levels of solitude that I have been fortunate enough to have either thrust upon me, or chosen by dent of emotional need were a necessity of the highest order.

There are no visual, emotional, or spiritual fireworks that have laid themselves upon my awareness in these cyclic evolutions of my ability to serve the needs of the virtue of Sacrifice, in my very small way. No one has gotten up out of a wheelchair and walked, no one has spoken in tongues, no one has directed me from a burning bush…and yet, the Silence of Mind that is now accessible to me is the greatest gift that has ever crossed my path...or I suspect, ever will…

Some years back there was a movie starring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage, titled The City of Angels, it told the story of a cardiac surgeon and her sudden capacity to see the angel of death who came to take her patient from his life, and into the next. As the movie unfolds, and the principal characters are teaching each other about their respective lives, and before Meg understands that Nicholas is an angel, he asks her while in the market one day, to describe for him, the taste of a pear.

She is self conscious and a little shy…and she voices her curiosity about why he doesn’t already know what a pear tastes like, but at his urging she bends to his desire and attempts to explain to this man/angel the simple pleasures of a pear. She tells him it is “sweet and kind of grainy” in a final attempt to express it more clearly she says…”sort of like sweet sand”.

I can understand her discomfort at trying to put into words an idea, in her case a taste, which if the listener has no frame of reference for can’t truly be described.

To breathe into a silent mind is like the strong but somehow equally gentle hug you have waited all your life for, like the sighting of the beaming sweep of a lighthouse over the tossing waves of a storm – and the promise of rescue it provides, it is what it must be like to taste a ripe pear for the very first time…

To call it Home, is right – but not adequate. To describe it as Peaceful is accurate – but not deep enough. To assign it to the emotional category of Joy is truthful – but not expressive enough. To think of it as a much-needed respite is certainly precise – but does not really hit the mark. To say it is Perfect is of course it’s nature – but what does that mean to a world of people who live in and through the chattering of the conditioned mind, a state of mind whose only real capacity is to grasp or to reject.

The Bible and all other respected sages of ages gone by…say that “dying” before your physical death is required to reach the Silence. The self that thinks repetitively and compulsively, the personal self, must be laid aside if Silence will have entry into any given life. And I can tell you without hesitation you would hold the sword yourself, if you knew how fulfilling the Silence truly is.

I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I had not had these periods of decidedly, (in the Western world), unconventional stretches of solitude…I would not have been capable of experiencing this most prized of understandings. Nothing I have ever encountered, acquired, heard about, seen, touched, or tasted even remotely compares.

I suppose I could restate the wisdom of the Buddha, for you…

The Buddha said that all is “dukkha”. Dukkha is a Sanskrit word that was first brought to India by the ancient Aryans, a nomadic horse and cattle breeding people. Kkha was originally the word for hole, specifically an axle hole in the cart of a traveling ox drawn vehicle, “du” and “su” as prefixes were respectively bad and good. Thus dukkha originally meant a bad axle hole, but over time and through use it began to be more and more associated with a potter’s wheel, thus dukkha was often compared to a wheel that would screech as it was spun around, and did not turn smoothly.

The opposite of dukkha was the term sukkha, which brought to mind a potter's wheel that turned smoothly and noiselessly. Although dukkha is often translated as "suffering", its philosophical meaning is more analogous to "disquietude" as in the condition of being disturbed.

The conditioned mind, run rampant, is the source of the Buddha’s recognition that all that the mind is normally capable of perceiving is “dukkha” or disquietude. If the mind you find yourself living in, is not as disturb as the mind I came up out of childhood with, you may not face the seven levels of hell that I have navigated through, and in that, I celebrate your escape…but even so, disquietude is not the heaven you so richly deserve.

Thoreau said….“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

A relatively sane mind is still a mind that will go to the grave with its song still unsung.

There have been those in recorded history who popped up out of the conditioned mind like toast out of a Hamilton Beach Toaster, like Saul on the road to Damascus who forevermore become Paul. But most of us are not that lucky…I know that solitude was the tilling of the soil that was an absolute necessity for me, and which is why I would prefer to live my life of quietness, rather than return to the empty busyness the world so embraces.

I know also that willingness plays a large role, to become a servant of Sacrifice is to become willing to make yourself sacred for a higher purpose, and that purpose of course, is to inspire others to reach for the Silence that is their rightful home as well.

Patience is key, stillness is required, beliefs must be laid aside, turning away from the seductiveness of achievement, accomplishment, and outer appearances will aid and support, but ultimately only grace will cause the path to arise…even as the foot descends upon empty air.

In truth, I know only this one thing…Silence is the only experience that has ever occurred in my life that would be worth any price required. I cannot think of anything I would withhold from it, including the remainder of my days.

I suppose I should turn to the wise ones for something to leave you with…

Confucius

“Silence is the true friend that never betrays.”

Kahlil Gibran

“Your heart knows in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.”

Rumi

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

Rabindranath Tagore

“Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamoring for silence.”

Thomas Carlyle

“Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”

Arabian Proverb

“The tree of silence bears the fruit of peace.”

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

“You can hear the footsteps of God when silence reigns in the mind.”

Menander of Athens

“Nothing is more useful than silence.”

Ahhhhh well, I suppose I should stop now…..

Adayre R. Miller

3/3/11

photo courtesy of Britton B and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work follow this link…www.flickr.com/photos/23741224@N02/2280220026/

Silence Can Never Be Lost...

I passed along The Power of Now, a well-read and well loved book to a good friend of mine, who walks with me in the early mornings and talks with me about the only thing I value in life…the understanding of the invisible in us…

He is a Christian, and deeply committed. His mind is clear, piercing, and wonderfully open. His love of Jesus, and the Christ’s role as savior is one that is central to his well being, and is central to the focus of his reverence. A position I not only understand, but one in which I spent a good many years as well.

Unlike a fair number of Christians, he has the capacity to engage in other ways of viewing and/or discussing, the same need for touching the Mysterious that motivates my every waking moment.

He explains that he is on page 25 of the book, has some questions, and tongue-in-cheek, assures me that I will be graded on the answers. What a delight!!!

His questions are the central focus of my attention at this time in my life and thus, with what I hope will be my friends blessing, I answer those questions, to the best of my humble ability, in the form of this essay…in the hope that you might join our discussion and benefit for yourself in some way.

My friend writes…

“How was Eckhart able to write the book if he didn't use thoughts? In other words, he is telling us that the state we are in when we spend our time thinking is inferior to the state we are in when we stop thinking. He said that all real creativity comes to us from this state of "not thinking". Yet didn't he have to use his mind and thoughts in order to write the book? The only alternative I can think of would be for him to claim that all the words of the book just came to him spontaneously while he was not thinking, and then he just wrote them down as some kind of dictation. Does he make this claim later in the book? Because if he doesn’t, then doesn’t the fact that he had to use his mind to write the book invalidate his claim that a cessation of thoughts is a “superior” way to exist?” (You see how piercing his mind is….)

Let’s start with Eckhart’s most basic message, distilled down to just a few words…everything I have ever heard him say, in person, by book, or on tape can be found in this one slim quote.

“Being must be felt it cannot be thought.” (Which by the way is a perspective my Teacher, and all the Teachers of Being I have ever encountered agree with…)

Now, the first thing the mind will want to do with this simple but profound idea is to conceptualize it and/or reduce it to an emotional level and decide that “feeling” Being is the same thing as emoting, and the never ending cycles of pleasure and pain, that so trap the mind and enslave the senses.

The “feeling” that Eckhart is describing can only be discovered, or more accurately uncovered in the Silence of Mind that is the source of this feeling state. A Silent mind, is a mind that has come into direct contact with its source, the source thus contacted no longer needs to be named. It could be called God, Holy Spirit, Buddha-mind, Home, Welcome, Ease, Peace, Harmony With All That Is…I could think of dozens of names none of which adequately, or even remotely, describe the direct experience of discovering your living Being in the vast Silence, out of which all things source. A scientist might even define it as the silence of the vast reaches of outer space, the silence in which galaxies are born, live, and die…it is, after all, the same thing…

My friend says…” In other words, he is telling us that the state we are in when we spend our time thinking is inferior to the state we are in when we stop thinking. He said that all real creativity comes to us from this state of ‘not thinking’. Yet didn't he have to use his mind and thoughts in order to write the book?”

To define thinking as “inferior” is in some ways accurate, but it engages the mind in the way the mind most favors, that of comparison and judgment, both of which begin to dissolve with greater and greater speed when an individual mind is released from the bondage of thinking as its only way of knowing itself. Thinking is only inferior when experienced as the only means by which we can recognize ourselves.

Here again in Eckhart’s words…the mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over. What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.

Knowing yourself only, as the “voice in your head”, is a dreadful type of prison. With dedication, commitment, time, and shear force of will, it is possible to modify the voice in the head and relieve some of the burden of a deeply troubled and broken childhood. I know, I accomplished that…

In my twenties, I was in a physician’s office selling the medical products by which I was making my living. I was good at my job, very successful – monetarily speaking – and looked for all intents and purposes, on the outside only, like a successful and thriving professional woman.

In this particular visit, the Doctor was intently listening to the protocols I was explaining, which were necessary to integrate those products into his practice. Nearby, on a small rolling metal table - that most Doctors then used - to set their various instruments and small equipment on, was an open scalpel. It had been, no doubt, used on the last patient in some way and had not yet been placed in the sharps container.

My entire visit with the Doctor was a drama of unfolding difficulty. While using a portion of my mind to describe how best to integrate this new modality into his practice, the remainder of my mind was terribly fixated upon that scalpel. If it had been a movie the director would have had the camera entirely focused on the razor sharp scalpel, laying innocently - yet somehow menacingly, against the silver edge of the table, while the Doctor and his sales person were mere blobs of fuzzy color and echoing words.

My mind, as it did almost every day, spoke to me in mesmerizing and seductive ways about the need to pick up that scalpel and drive it straight into my right eye, past the socket and into the brain…ending as it did so… the terrible suffering that beset my every waking moment, and flooded my nighttime with terror.

I did battle with these types of thoughts on a daily basis. Sometimes it was driving my car off a cliff, as I made my travels to the various physicians who lived in my state. Sometimes it was holding the 22 pistol my father had given me, from his days as a police officer, against my temple as I sat on the edge of my bed. The various tools by which I plotted my demise were creative and nearly constant, but the truth was always…that my mind was not a safe place for me to live.

I know a great deal about Eckhart’s assertion that….” Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease.

In those days, my mind did indeed use me. It used me to exact punishment for being an unlovable and worthless child. A child that a mother could beat for incorrectly cleaning the baseboards under the bed, and a child that an uncle could use for sexual gratification… a child unworthy…

That lack of worthiness formed the core of an acquired mental construct that eventually became a personality. Over many years and with very strong and capable help, I modified that personality enough that my physical safety was no longer an issue.

But this relative safety, in time, turned into disillusionment and a kind of sad realization…saving my life for the purposes of pursuing outer accomplishment, began to seem like a kind of bad joke. Here a new cycle of letting go began to formulate, a new level of understanding developed, a new willingness to put aside what was learned, in favor of what cannot be known…

Again from Eckhart…"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ --- and find that there is no death." In the process of saving myself, I had begun the “dying before you die” that Eckhart and the Bible encourages us each to allow.

And here begins the mystery of transcending thinking, as the only means of knowing yourself and those around you.

My individual life came down to one very clear, and amazingly simple mandate…”evolve or die”… the same precipice that our shared humanity is also rapidly approaching. Our world, just like my small life, can be saved and celebrated by becoming willing to die to the small self that inhabits the thinking mind only, and to open ourselves to the shared Silence out of which that mind sources.

How does Eckhart write a book that is more than the thinking mind can conceive of?... By first discovering and uncovering the Silence, in himself, and allowing that silence to guide and develop and attempt to communicate with words, what is well beyond mere words…

All truly creative activity comes out of silence, in the arts that is a well know and deeply revered state, musicians often define the silence in their music as more important than the notes, dancers will say that stillness informs and elevates their every move, even highly skilled athletes reference the Silence…but they call it the “zone”. The place where the body takes over, and thinking no longer directs or controls the actions, of a supremely well-developed and trained physicality.

Einstein directly attributed the non-thinking portion of his mind as the source of his theories and profound scientific discoveries.

The Bible describes it in this passage from the Old Testament:

Proverbs 3:5-6

⁵ Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶ in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight. ^[a]

I would make only this small modification to the wisdom of the direction Proverbs hands down to us from the ages…Trust in the (Silence) with all your heart, and lean not on your own (thinking), in all ways submit to the Silence and it will make your path straight, (true, and valuable beyond measure).

If you are willing to die to the thinking mind in favor of directly meeting the Silence out of which you came, and to which, you will return… then the promises that are made by all those who have ever touched that Silence will apply to your personal life as well. Here are some of the promises that Eckhart Tolle has made in his work…

"All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind."

"You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are."

"You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level."

"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness."

I am not wise like Mr. Tolle, or my Teacher, or the writers of Proverbs…but I am someone who has passed from the hell of a mind using me, into the heaven of a mind so entirely at rest… that it can lay itself aside and bask in the Silence of the unknowable.

That Silence is recognized as my original home, and that recognition grows in my heart and mind each and every day, fully liberating me, fully restoring me, fully engaging me…and as Mr. Tolle so rightfully promises, once touched…Silence can never be lost…

Adayre R. Miller

3/1/11

photo courtesy of magic fly paula and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/magic_fly/45299829/