The Waiting Is Over, I Am Gone From This Place…

I have entered an entirely new realm of being, a place I have never been before, a place that makes me – in equal measure, uncom-fortable and pleased – an odd combination to be sure.

I didn’t even know what it was until I spoke with an old and very wise friend, and in attempting to tell him the feel and texture of this new place…I stumbled, literally fell over, the awareness of what has changed so dramatically.

I have stopped waiting.

After such a build up, you may be thinking…”girlfriend, that doesn’t seem like to big a deal to me.” I submit you may not fully grasp the reach, of such a potent change.

We are, all of us, waiting for something. When we are young we wait for summer, or prom, or the car keys, or that first date night kiss. When we get a bit older, we wait to get out of college, or to find prince charming, or the mother of our children. At some point we start to wait for some understanding to bloom, some method by which we can find ourselves, some form of help, some source of well being, some-one-thing-place-event or experience, to give meaning and purpose to lives, long surrendered, to the sad awareness that the outer realms with all their apparent glow have nothing of any real value to provide us.

We can, and do, wait for love, or hope, or peace, or comfort, all the days of our lives - unaware of how much damage and loss the waiting produces in our minds, and in our spirits.

Waiting is a form of evasion, a very effective, potent, and captivating one. It calls on us to “hold onto our dreams”, to “make a plan and set a goal”, to “believe”, and to “seek” but never to find.

Waiting is the illusion of a future, in which the conflicts of the present are resolved and we find ourselves in a “heaven” with no impact of the demands and difficulties, that are inherent in living in a mind created and formed from the duality that seems to exist everywhere we look.

To end waiting is to liberate the mind from the pull of the fantasy of a “better tomorrow”.

I am not suggesting that it is easy or even smooth; in fact I am experiencing what I would define as a form of grief. I feel a kind of loss and a type of drain from the end of waiting, but I have chosen freedom over illusion and I made that choice so long ago it can no longer even be recalled from memory.

Recently a conflict brewed up in my workplace, a conflict involving a coworker and me. It had all the just right components, he attacked me for not making his job easier, he blamed me for not helping him in just the right way, at just the right time…etc. and so on. It boiled over and produced a great deal of impact; both my bosses took the opportunity to tell me where and how, and in exactly the specific form in which I am disappointing them. One accused me of not being interested enough in heating and cooling, the other defined me as a perfectionist, and too black and white. From every corner and in many different ways, I was treated to the understanding that I am not measuring up.

And of course, they closed ranks around the other man – as men often do, and he was treated to commiseration because I did not serve him well enough.

In the midst of all this righting and wronging, all this blame and finger pointing, all this conflict and disturbance. I found the where-with-all to remember that nothing can take root in my mind and heart, until and unless, I allow it to.

Inside it was like watching a ping-pong match. My conditioned egoic, “sense of separate self” mind, would begin a type of singing…a lyrical way of describing the conflict in ways that painted me as entirely right. Things along this line…”the misinformation was right there on the appointment sheet – the address and map they provided didn’t match. I found my way to the appointment, corrected the mistake, took the necessary action to discover there was a problem and fixed it for myself. Why am I responsible for the fact that he didn’t do the same? Why am I to blame because he does his job poorly?” And so on, and so forth.

These lobs over the net were strong, fierce, addictive, oddly pleasurable, and deeply effective, the aim true, the follow thru powerful…and yet, from the other side of the net came a clear, soft, whisper.

When I could listen, it said things like this…”this is why my Teacher always counseled that the things we don’t like, that disturb us, that we don’t want, are our greatest opportunities.” And…”you can transcend this if you choose, there is no reason to take this personally, to experience this in any other way than as the observer. It is possible to step away from this conflict provided you are willing to give up the position of being ‘right’ in favor of being well, and whole.” And most importantly came the gentle reminder that while I was choosing to be “right”, I was living in the lie rather than honoring the What Is truth, and so, listening carefully enough, I could hear that as well. And it sounded like this…”my co-worker has an opinion that differs from my own. My bosses appear to agree with him. Neither of these appearances say anything at all about me, the inside me.”

The best though, came when I began to unravel the dire circumstances that the egoic mind brought forward by the bushel barrel full. It said things like, “your boss hasn’t called you back for the last three messages you left him, they are punishing you for not doing what they all agreed was the right thing to do”, or, “you are going to lose this job, and you must keep this job because of the need to refinance the house”, things of that type bubbled up to the surface in mighty waves of frothy, slimy, overkill. And still the small whisper, made its way to my inner ear…

“You are telling yourself lies about a future that does not exist, and a trouble that is only in your own mind. You are scaring yourself because you still want to be liked and included and valued, things that can only truly come from inside. You are wanting, from others, what can only be had by coming to the deep interior…by rediscovering the sanity, that sits with great stillness, beneath the dancing surface… waiting for you to turn your attention away from the outer and toward the depth of Being.

Listening to the lie, attempting to prove its rightness is the only sin that has ever existed, or will ever exist. It is the only hell that is possible, the only harm that can ever come your way, and the only way you can lose, is in its unconscious embrace. Turn away from the siren call, turn your attention to unraveling the mind with which you learned to become a victim, and set yourself free forever.”

I have come, finally, to see that there is no need to wait for some better circumstance, some better life, some better experience. That the very best that can be, or has ever been, offered any human being is waiting for me with open arms. The choice to live in sanity, rather than the hell of right and wrong, has at some point in the last one, three, five (?) years become available to me. (Am I capable of always choosing the sane thing? No I am not. But now, finally, the choice is at least available to me).

Some how and in some way, my Teacher’s great wisdom is becoming mine…to live wholly inside oneself, to give up the need to be right, to stop having “opinions” about how the world “should” work and instead, interacting honestly and truthfully with how the world actually is. To never expect more than what is directly in front of me, to end my searching so that I might discover what has been underneath my heart and within my grasp, all the long days of my life, to liberate myself from the bondage and horror of the conditioned mind…these are the things, worth living for…and they can be found every minute of every day, and in every circumstance in which we find ourselves, nothing needs to be added or subtracted from the life we are all leading at this very moment, for liberation to be ours.

I have very nearly succeeded in ridding my mind and heart of the hope, wish, and expectancy of a better tomorrow. I have almost reached the place where I am willing to live in the truth, rather than the fantasy of a heaven somewhere off in the clear blue future. I am almost an adult, with the strengths, capacities, abilities, potency, power, honor and humility that adulthood brings with it. I am almost beyond the sticky reach of things like approval, and fun, and pleasure, and gratification. (No, there is nothing “wrong” with these things, it is that they provide no real value. You and I do not take any gains away from the illusory difference between the pleasurable and the painful sides of the same coin, and we can and do, very often turn “pleasures” into additions.)

I can no longer recall the author of this quote, but I leave you with his/her, sane and reasoned words…”Each of us must choose between two ways of facing life: We must (1) live in direct, spontaneous contact with the emerging now, or (2) live fearfully on the deferred payment plan as an alien from reality in a world of wishful thinking, ideal expectancy, and endless searching.”

To wish, to have idealized expectations (hope), to endlessly search…is the wheelhouse of the egoic, conditioned mind…it is a hamster wheel cage, from which there is no release, no respite, no reprieve, and worst of all no authentic power, a long and painful childhood that ends in defeat, despair, and eventually physical death.

The Course in Miracles defines the ego in this manner, “The ego’s dictum is to seek, but never to find”, to seek but not find is the very foundation of the waiting place. To end waiting is to end the desire to be released from the truth of the current moment, to end resistance and come to find the beauty and value of acceptance.

Adayre R. Miller

5/29/11

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Kevin Bond, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link… www.flickr.com/photos/bondomania/482223348/

In The Middle Nothing Stays…

Not long ago, I stopped at a convenience store to supply myself with directions and snacks. I pulled up to the shaded side of the building hoping to spare myself some of the blinding heat drowning the store in its embrace, and noticed an elderly homeless man making himself busy searching for cigarette butts in the sanded trash receptacle located just beside the door. He combed through the offerings found there, with the practiced patience of a man used to sifting the leavings of others, to meet his simple needs.

He was thin to the point of painfulness, not an ounce of spare flesh hung from his bones or crept out over the lip of his belt. His arm muscles exposed to view in his dirty t-shirt, roped and attached to his bones like small snakes curling around the long bone in his upper arm and roping his forearm with such sharpness, that he seemed somehow unclothed, compared to the ample flesh of those coming and going through his world like the shades, we no doubt were, flowing around and past him, like water around an obstruction in a stream. To say that he was dirty does not at all describe the layers of soil and the gray sheen that covered him from head to toe. His clothes carried the encroaching layering of dirt as though it were especially dedicated to ending the patches of white that, here and there, stubbornly clung to the fibers out of which it was once spun.

He wore an old baseball cap to shield his eyes from the glaring sun, his head bent to it's task of sifting and sorting, and the brim of his cap making his world a visually circumspect one. I doubt he would have seen me, even if he had been aware of my presence, which there seemed little evidence of. After he had found all the cigarette fragments of an acceptable length, he went to the dead middle of the first parking place in the shade, directly beside my car, and knees bent he sat on his spare haunches and began to sort through a stack of pennies.

There were perhaps 40 of them in all, and he made and remade stacks of them, like poker chips on green felt. He shifted them from one size of stack to another, and from one location to another, in the same manner as black jack players I have seen at tables in Las Vegas. A kind of restless and hypnotic, kinetic energy expressing itself in the placing and replacing of small towers of rounded and compartmentalized copper objects. His attention never waivered, he never looked up, and he seemed entirely unaware that he was occupying an entire car parking spot in a busy and bustling environment.

I was attacked to, and repelled by, his concentrated focus and the magic it surrounded him with, making all but his own thoughts utterly invisible to him.

Later that same week, I stopped in Whole Foods – my favorite lunch spot – and encountered a homeless woman, also completely lost in her interior reaches, and yet there were some striking differences.

She too, wore clothes covered in the same gray film, evidence of weeks or perhaps months of absence from any form of laundering. Unusually, she wore layers and layers of clothing, here in our sun drenched climate a pair of shorts and a t-shirt is all most people can endure as the thermometer climbs well into the triple digits, for many months each year.

With temperatures already over a hundred, she had on socks and tennis shoes, with slim pants beneath a floor length skirt and a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over her head, a shirt atop that…and gloves, one cotton and one plastic. Her gloves were of especial interest to me, I felt they were more about protection of some sort, rather than for the added warmth they might bring, despite the fact that they too, were grimy gray and ragged from use. I have always thought of the homeless as being underfed, (she too, was painfully thin), and yet she sat before a banquet of such rich diversity that it was somewhat surprising to me. Every type of food was represented, dairy, fruit, meat, pasta’s, grains, deserts… they were spread out upon her table in staggering volume, bound in plastic and resting jumbled one upon the next, in a veritable cornucopia of edible possibility.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that they looked inviting… some of it I would have worried, quite rightly, about salmonella issues as there is no way she could be providing the proper cold storage for her many food items, and even the breads will grow molds and become unpalatable in very short order, in the temperatures to which our city is exposed.

So my first observation was that hunger is something she is not plagued by, despite her thinness, at least on this particular day. (I have encountered her at Whole Foods on two other occasions, and each time, this day included, someone from the lunch crowd approached her and asked if they could buy her some lunch…and thus her basic survival is not in question).

I sat behind her and to the right of her, fascinated by her presence and by the expression of her interior process. Unlike the homeless man who seemed entirely beyond the pale, completely unaware of anything at all, she was quite actively engaged in an inner dialogue.

As each new “functioning” member of society entered the lunchroom, all were affected by her presence. Some stared quite openly, as though she could not know that she was being ogled, some cut quick glances her way, and one woman stopped her advance into the area and retreated back the way she had come, with a look of disgust written large upon her features…

All of us could feel her presence, and unlike the members of our collective humanity who seem to glow from within, and drag our attention their way because they are beautiful, graceful, or exquisite in some way…she compelled attention for exactly the opposite reason. Her quiet, self-contained demeanor, her unpacked and on display possessions, and her layers of dirt all spoke to a supposed misery, that may well have been our collective projections.

She, in fact, had more than she needed, some form of shelter was provided somewhere, clothes were available and food was plentiful…and yet, you could feel the impact she had on each of the room’s other lunch customers. A kind of…”there but by the Grace of God, go I” kind of self crossing and fearful pulling away, from one so different than all the rest of us.

Sitting behind her, and fascinated with her experience, I both watched her and didn’t. She spoke softly to herself, and ate quietly, while I tried to read the book I had with me…but every few moments she would raise her plastic gloved hand in a gesture of protection. Her palm facing inward, toward her face, she would lift her arm with speed and commitment as though something were flying her direction and might hit her in the face, if she were not so defended.

Not every time, but frequently, her other cotton gloved hand would bounce up beside her right ear…held a few inches from her head, with now a hand held in front and one on the right side, she might have been executing an energetic dance move, had there been the slightest hint of music.

Each time her hands flew up to defend her, the movement would pull me from my book to peer at what might be assaulting her from out of the reaches of the unknown, and of course there was no way for me to discern whatever had been launched at her, but I could not avoid the looking.

It began to develop a kind of superstitious quality to it… my looking and her defending herself, were so well timed, I actually asked myself if she somehow knew I was observing her at the precise moment she needed defense against my intrusion. But then I scoffed at myself for making her experience about me, something we humans are so very prone to doing.

Her need for defense was an internal one, and solely so…

Her hands in their plastic and cotton coverings, leaping into action to protect her, were the evidence of a mind divided by itself. The only threat that could possible have been occurring, there in the midst of Whole Foods bountiful environment, was the assault of a mind turned in upon itself.

We, those of us, who daily sift through our comparisons of ourselves against another, like the cigarette hunter, endlessly looking for some measuring device to determine if we are more worthy than that one, or less so than another one….are equally divided inside ourselves, but not so much, that it can be seen from the exterior.

We take some measure of comfort in the fact that our lips are not moving to the rhythm of the internal dialogue that we are constantly engaged in, and thus we assume that our hold on reality is more steady and capable, than the woman who must defend herself from her own mind, with her own hands.

We imagine that because we bathe, work, launder our clothes, pay a mortgage, and know where we are going to sleep tonight…that we are somehow better off, somehow better examples of humanity, than someone so adrift in their own interior that they cannot be reached. I submit that distinction is the splitting of hairs, a razor thin edge of difference to small to even count.

You and I, just like he and she, are victims of our own hand. There is nothing in the world that can harm us save ourselves.

If you have been betrayed, beaten, harmed, shamed, shunned, or unloved…the suffering you continue to endure is by your own hand. It is a very difficult thing to understand and an even more difficult thing to practice, but the Truth hidden behind your divided mind and mine, is that no event, no matter how evil, can reach you unless you allow it. It is your response to the events in your life, that shape your reality and nothing else…

We are put here to remember that.

Born and born again, over and over, we are required to remember that our inner experience is a choice; the outer event is a karmic obligation.

I am reminded of a Buddhist adage that describes the spiritual path of remembering the Truth in this way…“at first nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, and in the end nothing leaves.”

In the beginning of our remembering the Truth, when we are lost and trying to protect ourselves with our cotton and plastic sheathed hands, “nothing” seems to come. We cry out to our god, in whatever form he may take, and we suffer at having been so forsaken. In the middle, “nothing stays”… finally wisdom has begun to make an appearance… one day we know that all of Life’s experience sources out of how we choose to use the power of our attention, that finding ourselves is a matter of coming to know that what we tell ourselves is not real, but rather our personal illusions… and the next moment, the wisdom departs us.

Here is where I find myself…

One day I am bathed in the blessed relief of the Truth of What Is, and the next day I am sifting through comparisons with others and losing myself once more to my divided mind, and thereby empty heart.

“In the middle…nothing stays…”

Nothing may stay in the middle, but I can tell you for sure that faith blooms even so…I know in my heart of hearts, that there will come a day when “nothing leaves”. A day so full of impersonal self-understanding that I cannot be lost again amongst the rubble of the conditioned mind, a day when my heart, will no longer allow my mind, to rob me of the peace that “passeth understanding”.

A day in which I will live solely from the depth of Being, and will not be persuaded to return to the conditioned mind’s unwinnable war. Here is the Promised Land, the land that flows with milk and honey, the land of our Fathers, the end of our journey, the way back home…the place… “where nothing leaves”.

I have lifetimes of faith built upon this truth, that one day I will be free of the divided mind, that one day all of us will be freed from the divided mind…and suffering will leave us for ever, and ever, Amen.

Adayre R. Miller

5/14/2011

photo courtesy of Nardell and flickr photo sharing to see more of this artist’s work, please follow this link http://www.flickr.com/photos/nardell/5510203776/in/gallery-58398502@N05-72157626144720522/

Between A Finger And A Thumb…..

I found this photo, in my favorite place to window shop, flickr photo sharing. The amazing artists, who populate the place with their color, genius, and generosity, afford me the opportunity to put pictures to the words that I spend so much time, devotion, and energy producing.

I wanted to direct your attention to this one, I am sure you agree with me, that it is transcendentally beautiful … the shades of gray, white, and black, contrasted with the spring green and the deep azure blue. The circular nail bed and the crisscross ridges of the skin texture, add dimension and depth. The soft defocused presence of the thumb resolving into the crystal clarity of the sphere, cause the eye to travel up and in some mysterious way… in …

The three small blades, one of which gently holds the bubble from floating away into the forever blackness of the background, and the oh-so-small world a-l-m-o-s-t recognizable – but somehow not – pictured in the bubble, create a sense of wonder and powerfully valuable uniqueness.

I feel that way today… held between a gentle thumb and index finger … suspended on a tiny sliver of living green, bound on all sides by a beautiful, but mysterious sphere of right side up and upside-downess, back lit by the emptiness of eternity.

I have, of late, been spending a good portion of every day contemplating my death.

It hasn’t been that I “decided” to do so, and it certainly isn’t the wishing to die that came out of the emotional trauma of my childhood and young adulthood, but more like a spontaneous form of spiritual waking meditation.

I have not feared death, in any tangible way, for a long time now… but I haven’t actively engaged it either. I think now, in the middle of my fifth decade, is just the right time to begin the slow waltz that will prepare me for it’s inevitable embrace.

The notion of it, comes to me in the oddest places and circumstances…

Yesterday, in the shower, I was rubbing soap along a washrag causing bubbles to jumble together and grow like froth at the edge of a fast moving stream, as they grew into my hand and the cotton cloth I held against the soap, into my head popped this idea. “There will come a time when this warmth, soft soap, pleasant aroma, and tender falling water will no longer be perceivable. A time when death has sealed my eyes and taken touch from me.”

I waited and watched the idea, as it moved through me and around me, and I marveled at how much it enhanced and elevated the simple process of growing and harvesting bubbles.

Sometimes, in no particular order – or discernable pattern, I will glance out my car window and capture a person in a still frame sort of image, doing something perfectly benign … like sitting waiting for a bus, or leaning over adjusting a bike pedal, or talking on a cell phone in the car beside me, and I will be struck anew with the recognition that they too, are traveling the exact pathway that will deposit them alongside me, at death’s door.

Look again at the picture … don’t you see that same mystery, in the deep blackness beyond the apparently life filled sphere? The fragile nature of our lives, that we live with such silly seriousness – the comings and goings, the useless ambitions, the terrible desires, the misspent time and the lost opportunities … the whole tale, told in that one arresting photograph.

Something that we cannot fathom has plucked us out of the deep unknown, placed us here on this floating sphere, and holds us worthy of the deep attention necessary to keep our slender green tether from loosing us back to whence we came. You can see the great tenderness it takes to hold that fragile bubble in place, between thumb and finger, you can see the great power humbling itself to be concerned with us … caring for us … holding us steady…while we build castles in the air, unconcerned with how fragile it all is.

Foolish I say, we are all so very, very, foolish.

We parade around with our notions, and beliefs, and problems, and concerns, and desires, and ambitions … meanwhile, everything that we think we know, everything we think we can control, everything we think we want is all just an image, locked inside a bubble, hanging on a slender strand, held by someone or something whose immensity is beyond our wildest imaginings.

I have come to understand that spending a good deal of time imagining one’s death puts everything we do, and every moment we breathe, into the exactly right perspective.

This photographs perfect depiction of the truth of our lives, should awaken in us the power and perfection of humility. We don’t know anything, in fact we can’t know anything … and still we are so perfectly cared for … that to withhold our trust, is tantamount to withholding our devotion, worship, and allegiance. Every single time we allow the smallest shred of doubt to creep in, we abandon, not just ourselves – but the divine as well.

Not long ago, I saw a post on facebook of a young family dealing with the recurring leukemia of their four year old. The father had posted that his faith was badly shaken, that he had prayed, his wife had prayed, their community had prayed, and yet his small son had not been cured or spared the difficulty of a life threatening disease. He had come to the conclusion that God had deserted him and his loved ones, having not brought him the cure he so longed for, he now wondered if God were even present in his life.

I can certainly understand and empathize with the young father’s anguish, his despair, and his doubts … but I no longer share his view of God as a dispenser of the fulfillment of our desires.

I imagine God exactly as the picture depicts. A gentle hand holding a lively and largely imaginary world, having little or nothing to do with the worlds comings and goings … and why, might you wonder, would my God have so little interest in my world? Well, mainly because He, or She, or It, is waiting for me to mature to the place that I can accept every single thing that occurs as being utterly and totally necessary. He, She, or It, is watching as I work my way toward the kind of total trust that accepts what is directly in front of me, without opinion, intrusion, or judgment.

Waiting for me to see the long view, waiting for me to recognize through the embrace of death’s coming … that the real stuff is in that deep blackness, in that long beyond, in that long dark night.

I believe in that, and very little else.

I don’t know what “God” wants, what he plans, or what his purposes are, and neither does anyone else … I do know that I am held aloft, on a slender thread, by a loving hand … and that is all I need to know…

I came to that knowing through a great deal of self-created hell, until finally I was strong enough to stop believing and start accepting. Belief in all it’s many forms is a way of holding off that deep black mystery, a way of self-soothing that is designed by the egoic mind structure, to keep us from facing the reality of our brilliant but startlingly brief stay here, and the total mystery of our existence.

It is possible to end our dependencies on believing, and open ourselves so deeply… that we are willing to stare straight past the colorful blue sphere, and into the deep unknown.

In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king … so says the ancient parable. In a world scurrying around like all this matters, the one who has learned not to mind anything at all, is King. I am reminded of a story I heard of a great Indian Vedantic Teacher, I have since forgotten his name, but the story goes that after decades of teaching the ways and means by which peace can be acquired, a follower begged once more for his secret. After decades of trying to illuminate the minds of his followers, who at one and the same time wanted peace and worldly control, he finally said … “my secret is, that I don’t mind.” Not minding, is to say that Life flows through, in, and around me, with no resistance from me whatsoever.

To Not Mind, is to take everything with the same detached attitude that you might conjure up for nothing. To Not Mind, is to hold no opinions about the challenges we might be facing, and with equal commitment to have no opinion about the victories we have accomplished. To Not Mind, means to hold everything in your life, between your own gentle thumb and finger … viewing it all from the same distance and calm space as would God, giving nothing any greater significance than any other “no” thing, or event, or person, or feeling, or attitudes, or any of the other thousands of things we are surrounded and impacted with on any given day. To Not Mind, is to come to the centered core in which, I have no doubt, the divine rests at all times.

Leonardo Da Vinci is quoted as having said, “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” I too, have been learning how to die … for a very long time now. From the moment my heart quit beating, when I was undergoing surgery at 17 years of age, through the dark years of facing the desire for death, to the recent years of actively attempting to allow the death of the personality I once thought myself to be, to these quiet years in which I spend some portion of each day recognizing that physical death is drawing ever nearer, all of these years having been teaching me to die well, and by doing so, to live more profoundly than I could have ever imagined. To be capable of recognizing your life in soap bubbles is the birth of being capable of recognizing – at one and the same time – the utter smallness of your life, held between your own thumb and finger, and the Universal Spaciousness out of which you have come and to which you will return.

When next you are lacking the peace that passes understanding, when life has taken a turn you do not want, or wish, or desire, try putting your disturbance on a slender green thread, trapped inside a blue bubble, held at a distance by The Loving Hand … and remember softly to yourself, that the one who “does not mind” is King, in the world of the overwrought and despairing. And in this, you will have found “God’s will” for your life and with his will, the peace you crave.

Adayre R. Miller

4/30/11

photograph courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Svein Nordrum (Zen Roxy) to see more of this artists work, please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0099009/photos/nordrum/5669325242/