Why Are Our Days Numbered and not, say, Lettered Instead? - Woody Allen

A couple of days ago I was “evaluated” by my boss, he is brilliant at what he does…has a very strong mechanical aptitude and a capacity with numbers that quite literally seems like magic to me.

I had not known he was coming, and so when I arrived at the home and he pulled up almost at the same time I had no opportunity to make extra preparations or to gather myself together, or in truth, to attempt to outwit the strong suspicion I harbored that I would not do well in his presence.

And of course, I did not…

There was no blood left on the floor, my gray matter didn’t pour fourth out of my ears, but I experienced a level of nervousness which I can’t recall having that, particular sensation in maybe fifteen years or more.

To say that I tanked, is of course a mild understatement.

I have tried, on the many occasions that he has caught me with a petrifyingly stupid look upon my face, when dealing with the numbers that swim around me like sharks in infested waters, to explain my number problem to him.

I have told him that it is like being illiterate, only with numbers, which seemed to create no understanding for him. I have told him it is like having numerical dyslexia, which also created no lightness in his bewilderment at my ongoing ignorance.

So after such an astonishingly poor performance, I decided to try to shock him into the clarity that he needs to allow me to develop the strategies that can make it possible for me to get through this.

Please understand, that we are talking about a very nice guy, a kind man – but like most people – a man who has little capacity to feel his way beyond the confines of his own skin, his own perspective, his own understanding, his own view of the way he thinks things are or should be. And thus, he cannot seem to come to terms with my total lack of numerical ability.

Spontaneously and somewhat surprisingly, as we discussed my blowout, I decided to tell him why I have no working relationship with numbers…at my advanced age.

I said, “Tom…in an attempt to reframe your view of me, I want to tell you why I am not good with numbers and how I work within my limitation and have developed strategies to cope with, what in many ways is a personal handicap.”

I told him that my childhood had been horrific, a terrifying series of various types of violence that led to a child so needy, so desperate, and so frightened that the very first coping strategy that I developed was to read. I read a book a day, and if they were simple and small sometimes two a day. (Tom is always telling me to tone down my vocabulary, so I thought this might be a good time to get that in as well…asking me to “tone down” my vocabulary would be asking me to do the same rearranging of my basic brain waves that would be necessary to overcome my number problem…it is simply to late in the game to try that.)

He became very quiet, calm, and centered as I spoke to him…I gave no details, save the ones I just described and I went on to tell him that he need have no emotional response to what I had shared as I am entirely beyond the reach of the long shadow of my childhood, and have now moved into gratitude for all that came with me, as I emerged into the world and began my great adventure.

What I did do, however, was attempt to link the number problem to the childhood issues.

“So”, I said, “I started life, as a desperate, needy, wounded, and extremely vulnerable child, and in that condition my pre-algebra teacher, shamed me while I stood at the black board to such a degree that any small manner of numerical skill I might have once had, disappeared on the spot.”

I have spent a lifetime developing strategies to deal with this handicap. These strategies do not include comprehension. I don’t understand the ways and means by which I move around the block in my brain, I only know that I develop a pathway that works, by confirmation of my calculator – which, in this job, I am never without – and I thereby, get it right, most of the time.

I said to him, in ordinary circumstances – (which means not having been unemployed for almost three years) – I would not have taken a job that relies entirely upon math and it’s wicked stepsister, mechanical aptitude. I would have run screaming from the room, pulling my hair out at the roots…rather than place myself in a position of having to work in an enviroment that rests upon my greatest weakness, and a place in which my greatest capacity – visual and spatial creativity – is entirely useless.

I don’t really know how he took this news; he seemed subdued or perhaps shocked by my forthrightness.

I felt no awkwardness in telling him these things, no need to couch it in a certain manner or distribute the information, in a way I thought he would respond favorably to…there was no withholds, and no covering up or over.

A great freedom that…

One of the many benefits in learning that what I “believe”… “know” … “think I understand”… is almost surely entirely false, is that it liberates me from ill-advised attempts to manage the perceptions of others.

“We see the world – (and all things in it) – not as it is but as we are”, I no longer remember who said that…but it is truer than true can be.

Those of us, who feel the most alone, develop strategies that bring harm and chaos, causing others to turn toward us out of pity, sympathy, or outrage. Those of us who feel “white/right must win” are the crusaders for good, who are deeply unaware of, and blind to, the very necessary order that exists just beneath all apparent evil. And then there are those exceedingly rare among us, who learn to live the middle way, defining nothing, judging nothing, arriving nowhere, and being nobody. They step truly and cleanly into the role of Witness, accepting all – never resisting…always moving to the deep center and the wave less depths.

Here in the miasma of dullness that I find myself in, numbers and machines abounding, I find within the capacity to not resist. I abide the feeling of stupidity that washes over me when Tom’s face describes his displeasure, at my weakness. I accept the grasping that bubbles to the surface every single time I see a machine I don’t recognize, don’t understand, and yet am charged with defining what should replace it. I work with diligence, dedication, and discipline to understand what I do not esthetically value, (machines), and am not attracted to, (numbers), for the mere exercise of doing what is right in front of me, what is asking to be interacted with, what is moving toward me, without struggle, without rejection, without regard to the lie that I don’t belong here.

A lifetime ago, I used to believe that I knew what was good for me, what would make me happy, what I deserved…and what I should have.

But now, with wisdom and maturity – in some measure – making itself felt in my life, I come to the realization that my life is, and will always be, measured by my capacity to embrace what lies directly in front of me.

Success turns out not to be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but rather the developed, and ever developing, will to stand in the direct middle of the storm and without cringing, turning away, or working toward a brighter future… to stand not with my back to the rainbow, or the imaginary glow of the pot…but rather to discover that the storm, the rainbow, and the illusory pot are a seamless whole, an unbroken line of lush and abundant care, provided by an unseen and unknowable source.

To rise above the desire for “good” is the only true power, to know that “evil” is as necessary as the dawn is the only true liberation. To find in every circumstance the will to deepen, open, and reveal the great and majestic impersonal being, that is the ground of your life and mine, here is our calling and it can come to us dressed up as numbers and machinery, just as surely as in any other form.

I do not, and cannot, know the reason I am surrounded by the numbers I have always dreaded, or the machines I have always been baffled by.

I know only that the resolve that once took me down the long hallway of a nursing home, in search of the sexual deviant that was my uncle, to sit with him…to speak with him…to end his hold over me…the same resolve I used to come to terms with my raging mother, is now in the employ of being willing to surround myself with numbers, machinery, and the mundane.

I smile inwardly at the irony of that…

It seems to my small mind that a woman who has overcome so much, been capable of honoring so much effect, from so much violence, might be more useful in some other role. But that is not where I have been placed, not what has come into my experience, and is apparently not what belongs to me.

It has been a very long road, coming to terms with life. Becoming capable of seeing my world as a moment-by-moment experience, rather than a far away goal for some better tomorrow, which in truth does not and cannot exist.

I believe that acceptance, the end of resistance, the will to tell the What Is truth, and the kindness to serve the smallest measure of reality, with the greatest level of humility, is the front-runner to wisdom. Standing here gazing at the thin edge of a growing horizon of potential, I will myself toward what is True and Real…rather than illusory and fictitious.

I find that along with Allan Watts, author – teacher – committed student, I too am willing to serve not knowing. Watts defined it in this manner… "Atheism in the name of God is an abandonment of all religious beliefs, giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system. It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it."

I left the hellfire and damnation god of my early childhood, and now I find myself leaving the “getting all the goodies” god of the new age movement. I lay myself down, prostrate in front of the Unknown and Unknowable…willing to grow into the Oneself, to return from whence I came, mature, seasoned, open, humble, willing, mute, and respectfully aware of how little it is possible for me to “know”.

I won’t ask you to join me. I am not sure it is a pathway that can be shared, I only know that I must continue traveling…and that the accurate direction takes one more deeply into the limitless interior.

Namaste,

Adayre R. Miller

6/29/11

photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/10351446@N06/3089676384/ and Janice Valise to see more of this artist’s work follow this link

What Is Within Us All...

In the last week, I have gone from being debt free to $5,000 in the hole.

After years of grinding poverty, the move up to paycheck poverty has provided some breathing room…but it seems that I had/have a strong attachment to the debt free portion of my financial life.

The debt was born in two parts. First I was told that I cannot refinance my house as I had expected to be able to do for another two years, and thus the $3,000.00 I had borrowed to give my sister, becomes a debt instead of a mere timed extension. As I look truthfully at the debt I incurred on her behalf, I find that I wanted to give her this small portion of the money she had invested in my house, as a means of stopping the pain filled and disturbing calls she had begun making to me. Long ago we agreed that she would be the lender for my property, and she has been earning higher than the current rate on mortgages for more than nine years, with a payment that is as regular and constant as clockwork…never late…never missed.

The second portion of my new debt came from going into my mechanic with a “check engine” light burning, and the need for an oil change. What was supposed to have been a 28 dollar oil change and a 20 dollar diagnosis turned into a “420” code and an almost 1,000 dollar bill for a catalytic converter.

Later, no longer in the heat of the moment…I discover online that catalytic converters are non moving parts and that if they go bad they must be replaced by Toyota within the first ten years, (my car is 9 years old), and if they are bad something else has caused them to go bad. Therefore, the reason for my car problem continues and I will eventually have to throw “good money after bad”, as they say, until I discover what the real problem was, and what the real fix should have been. (The remaining thousand came from a pet emergency, also avoidable, in that my dog – who’s face swelled up like a pumpkin, after having been bitten by something she was allergic to, could have been treated with the Benadryl I have in my medicine cabinet rather than the liquid version, the nighttime emergency vet dispensed.)

So all of these debts are an outgrowth of my being unwilling to tolerate the discomfort that comes from having to deal with the unknown, and the unknowable.

If I had been willing to let my sister’s calls continue, knowing that her desire to cast me in the role of villain was a desperate flailing about for some form of salvation and had nothing to do with me…if I had been willing to wait and seek a second opinion about my car, and to wait and embrace the fear of watching my dog’s face balloon while treating her from my own medicine cabinet, then I would not now be shackled with debt that I chose, rather than deal with the escalation of my interior experience. I want to share with you what I have purchased for my $5,000 dollars of debt and the future curtailment of spending power.

Here is what I know for sure…

Some months ago, I cannot say exactly when…I became capable of stopping my thoughts. At first it was so novel and relief filled, that I could ascertain nothing more about it than the extraordinary flood of freedom, which abounded within that quiet emptiness. To sit, and watch your breath, or listen to the susurration of the trees outside, or to watch dust float in mid sun stream through a light filled window…and have no one speaking, was to wonder-filled to explain.

I cannot describe the feeling, it is light filled – both weight and sparkle wise, it is sensitive – both touch and heart wise, it is quiet – both to the ears and to the soul, it is kind – both to the body and the spirit, it is priceless – both to the parts of the self that believes it needs something and to the parts of the self that knows it needs nothing, it is living, breathing, moving, powerful, non-personal, non-judgmental, active, healing, all-giving, COMPASSION…writ large and bold.

Now, these many months later the novelty of the experience has worn off, enough, for me to know a little more about the experience in terms of understanding it.

First and foremost, there is nothing whatsoever about it that is personal – either to me as a personality, or to us as humans. The mental/emotional construct you are so deadly certain is you, cannot be found anywhere at all when your mind is not running its’ yap. In other words, the self everyone is so concerned over… is a mirage, built up by the patterns and habits of thought that bombard us every waking moment of our lives from cradle to grave, and eventually become embedded within us creating crescendo type reactions to those embedded commands, and thereby create what we think of as the “self”.

Now, this self cannot be found, high nor low, here nor there, front nor back, up nor down…unless it is being kept in play, like spinning plates, by the constant barrage of speaking coming from its aforementioned yap. When still empty quiet reigns, within the mind…there is no self. There just isn’t one, period-paragraph-dot-com, as a co-worker of mine is fond of saying.

So if there is no self, unless the monologue is running, then of course… it follows that there is no me or mine as well, as in my money, my car, my dog. There is merely an event, in some measure dramatic, which while occurring has captured my attention and restarted my monologue in a captivating, but life draining way.

Since the beginning of this new capacity to stop my thoughts, I have found that my ability to do so can be grown, or developed. At first I had to be absolutely still, eyes closed…then eyes opened, but still non-moving…now, I can drive down the road, sit in a restaurant, wait at a stop light, and be surrounded and imbued with a peace filled quiet.

And suffering has become a choice.

I cannot believe that sentence. Wait…let me say that again…

Suffering has become a choice.

In a life where suicide was a real and valid option for the containment and curtailing of suffering, I, (and I use the term loosely), the one living that life, can barely contain my shock at knowing, truly knowing, that suffering is a choice. Not just for me, but for all of us.

Deeply embedded reactionary patterns of thought, which have universally developed pain filled responses in me…are slowly coming under control by virtue of the capacity to end my thoughts, about those various events. My co-worker’s recent attack, my new debt, my every day life is becoming less and less burdensome. Every day brings new levels of capacity to merely step to the right, rather than participate in the ancient grooves of the dosey doe, that I am so intimately familiar with.

There is nothing the world can offer that could even remotely compare.

Here is the thing; the debt is only a burden if I tell it to myself that way. The potential loss of the dog is only a loss, if I tell it to myself that way. The car, and my mechanic’s possible shady dealings with me, is only a problem if I tell it to myself that way.

Do you see? …it is only a problem if you tell it to yourself that way….

I had a dream last night that my beloved Teacher had died. The grief was so acute it awakened me at 3:30 AM, (I felt the need to know the time – don’t know why), and I had a very surprising experience of his death, alongside the grief there was some form of liberation, or exultation, or joy perhaps…some form of freedom rang through my being, I cannot say if it was for me, or for him…but I can say it was as potent as the grief, and just as precious.

I have loved him, in a way and to a degree, which is beyond anything I have ever felt for any human being, experience, object, or imagined possibility. Twenty-eight years ago, he began saying to us – his students – that “self Mastery, is the Mastery of one’s thinking”.

By that definition, I am being born into Mastery.

A type of Mastery that needs no affirming, no recognition, no external applause, no prizes, no acknowledgment, no rewards and no compensation…a win that has no counterbalancing loss. It is the transcendence he spoke so often of, an overcoming of the small and the bitter and the resentful and the resistant, a way of being in the world that takes nothing from another and yields always, to the What Is of every given moment.

Can I claim the kind of constancy that he so artfully displayed? No, of course not. But in the quiet corridors of my own internal empty and quite beautiful self…I know that I am only some measure of practicing away from it, and whether it takes another 30 years, or another 30 lifetimes it is the only thing that has any value at all.

How would one repay a someone, who gave them a gift of such magnitude? I have thought of that now for twenty eight years, and even as I know that he has no need for payment…I wish somehow he could be given something equal to what I have been gifted with, some treasure to speed him on his way and to make him available to the next layer of student, the next group of willing truth tellers, the next horizon…

Thinking of him, and his amazing gift, reminds me of a story of great merit… “A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. ‘I've been thinking,’ he said, ‘I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.” –Author unknown.

My Teacher has given to me what was within him, and it is my hope that these pages give to you what is within us all.

Adayre R. Miller

6/20/11

photo courtesy of Joyce and flikr photo sharing, if you would like to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link… www.flickr.com/photos/joyce411/5024168083/

This Arises…That Becomes…

As far back as junior high school… now some forty years ago…I wanted with all my heart a singular desire, to garner the attention of others by the use of my story telling skills, in other words to be a public performer, or a public speaker, or a public teacher. Way back then I had no way of truly defining that, I knew only, that when I stood at the front of the class in debate, or speech, or drama, that it was the only time I felt myself to be real, or effective, or potent. In all other ways, and at all other times, I felt somehow invisible or even worse, irrelevant.

In high school I won a speech contest at a regional high school event, hosted and held by the Durango College for the Arts in Colorado - it was the highlight of my days in high school and again, the only time I felt relevant or worthy.

Just after high school I was given the enormous opportunity of attending a Dale Carnegie Class in which I excelled at public speaking, during which they toned, seeded, refined, and defined my native skill at the task, and sent me into the world prepared to “make my dream come true”.

I followed that dream with an intensity and passion that I would barely recognize now…having come to rest in a mind that truly understands, that only passionless activity has the power to actually heal.

Finally in my fortieth year, my dream came true. I routinely found myself in front of hundreds of people, who appeared to value what I said, who applauded my efforts, and who scratched the itch I had experienced - in some measure - my whole life.

At one and the same time, life was moving me inexorably toward deeper and deeper experiences of Silence. A move that seemed entirely at odds with the life I wanted, the life I was passionate about, the life I planned, and schemed, and lived for….

I began making a living painting murals, something I would have never expected, defined, envisioned, or chosen - but for more than fifteen years I stood on ladders, alone with my thoughts, required by life to be quiet and still, while I produced work I was very good at but had no affection or real desire for. Those years were the necessary preparation for returning to the bosom of my spiritual Teacher, and to beginning anew, the willingness to understand his great and silent depths.

He is one of the very few living Masters, a man whose presence stole speech from my tongue as surely as paralysis would have stolen movement from my limbs. His deep inner clarity allowed me to feel the inauthentic nature of my “passion”, his quiet calm allowed me to know my chaos, his stillness allowed me to know the turbulence of my being, his generosity allowed me to know my grasping, his certainty allowed me to feel my bone deep doubt, his willingness to join with and embrace the Emptiness, allowed me to know my childish fears and my weary clinging. In his presence, I began to understand the deep wisdom in the Chinese proverb that states, “When the wrong (wo)man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” My pursuit of the dream of public recognition became the realization of the “right means working in the wrong way.”

His intense ability to see through me, through the patter, charm, flattery, and falseness, stole from me the very thing I had worked so hard to acquire, the capacity to influence others by magnetism, allure, and verbal seduction. And life sent me ever deeper into Silence, by removing my work life and keeping me bound by economic stresses, to the small world of the interior of my home, my mind, and my keyboard.

In this quiet and still place, in long years of near total outer emptiness…I began to see the value of dropping the notion that I can control the outer world. I began to acquire the understanding that knows planning, and goal setting, and vision boards, and the desire to bend life to my will, is the activity of the lost and the desires of the rudderless.

It matters not, where you arrive…but rather, only what direction you are traveling in.

Is your life moving more and more toward the deep interior of you? Or are you still caught on the wheel of samsara, lost in the notion that the outer world of form and circumstances is where your efforts should be placed?

In a lesson my Teacher once provided us, he pondered the meaning of karma vs. free will, and his conclusion rang as true in my heart as anything I have ever heard. He said that determinism and free will exist at one and the same time…that your outer circumstances can be nothing other than, the result of all of your past actions - both this life and before - and that your free will comes into play, only and not until, you have learned that it is your response that counts.

Emerson said, “What comes to you belongs to you”, which is of course saying the same thing as my Teacher’s conclusion…your outer life is the result of the previous accumulation of the density of your unconsciousness. That your success or failure, illness or health, wealth or poverty, are all governed by the deep love of a Being whose only goal is to support you in achieving the clarity of wakefulness, and that each and every circumstance in which you find yourself is meant for only one purpose…to change the direction in which you are traveling.

To move you from reaching outside yourself, to traveling the hidden and quiet depths of Being…the move from exterior to interior is the only journey that counts, and the only outcome that has merit.

In Buddhist philosophy there is a notion that defines the concepts of interdependence and the clever working of all that expresses in the world of form, as merely the movement of life toward the depths of Being. That notion is stated thusly, “between thing and thing, there is no block”, which is to say there is no separation the world over. Or more directly in this understanding…”if it were not the way it is, you would not be the way you are.” Here even more clearly, is the expression of interlinking interdependencies. Look out your window, wherever you are at this precise moment, whatever you gaze lands upon, whether tree, or bird, or road, or cloud. If that were not there…you would not be here. It could not be defined more deliberately than this, we are where and who and how and why we are, because Being requires it to be so, in the hope that we may use whatever befalls us to Awaken.

You can, and most do, spend an entire life in pursuit of the outer world of form, you can pursue a dream or pursue a philosophy, you can be lost in the result, or lost in your thinking about the result, you can reach for more, or for greater, or for better…all the long days of your life, and all it will buy you is more and more of a sense of separation, more and more insecurity, and more and more seeking.

There is another way…”the path less traveled”…the way home.

The Buddha taught, “Karma comes from our hearts, and it leaves from our hearts.”

Which is to say that you bind yourself to the wheel of karma, by the deep interior blindness that refuses to see that the world of form is in its entirety an illusion, whereas the Truth is found only and always from within. Bondage comes to the heart, and liberation springs from the heart. It matters not one jot, not one tittle, not one tiny iota what is occurring in your life, or mine.

Illness? Hooray. Return to health. Hooray. Poverty? Hooray. Return to wealth. Hooray.

The Bible says in Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” I prefer the term Being for the word God, and I know in my heart that all are called to the purpose of allowing themselves to know that the outer world is not where the source of Being resides.

Has your fear begun to recede? Has your striving lessened? Has your seeking dissipated? Has your pursuit of your dream dimmed? Has your demand that life conform to the view you have of it softened? These are only some of the many ways in which you can know which direction your are traveling in, and therefore know whether or not you are building a destiny of bondage, or one of liberation.

You can forget and even forgo the Being out of which we all spring. You can forge ahead with the notion that you are the Captain of your destiny, the author of your will, the doer of your life…these are not bad things, they are merely painful things… which create greater and greater levels, of suffering and disconnection.

We are not required to Awaken; it is not a goal that can be achieved or a thing to be striven for. Just as the fingertip cannot touch itself, so too, the Being that you are an intrinsic part of cannot discover itself…but rather, must be uncovered… by the slow and scary, measured and meaningful, difficult and weightless, realization that you know Nothing, come from Nothing, and will return to Nothing. And so much more importantly, that this Nothing is the greatest help, the greatest joy, the greatest healing, the greatest source, the greatest place, the truest home that can ever be found or embraced.

My Teacher’s great and clarifying sight, his capacity to see the false in me and by doing so allow me to feel that falseness, was the cornerstone by which I built my escape from the world of form and circumstance, thinking and bondage, outer seeking and useless pursuing…and instead, have come to rest in the realization that my inner self, that deep interior Emptiness out of which my thoughts bubble forth like the play of a child tinkering with toys, is the Truth of me…and of you.

Our true identity is the Space out of which everything sources. We are the Vessel, the Container, the Witness, the Observer…and as such, what we observe, contain, witness or experience is not just secondary…but in some ways, entirely irrelevant.

Take your attention from your outer circumstances, withdraw yourself from your thoughts – which are also only forms – and you will discover that you existed prior, after, and always. That you are not what happens to you, but rather what happens from you. And in truth, there is no “you” at all.

I leave you with this hopefully startling image…we, those of us born to the Western culture, imagine our God as either an image of a great bearded man, or if we are a bit more subtle…a glorious individual of luminous light filled essence. A strong, warming, embracing, all supporting L I G H T.

Try this one on, for just one small moment.

Imagine, instead, that God is an unfathomable mystery of totally concealing Darkness and Emptiness….or if you like, a bent and tired old woman. Can you feel the jarring quality of that image? Can you feel the dread and fear it may bring up? Maybe you even go so far as to think that Blackness, or Emptiness, or Nothingness is of the Devil or the dark forces. Maybe you can’t imagine god as a woman.

Here is where the greatest Joy lies concealed, here is where you slumber, here is where you sleep…

The Light is not available to our senses, save for the darkness. The words upon this page are not available to your mind; save for the emptiness that preceded them, the sound of beautiful music has no relevance, nor even any existence, without the Silence out of which it springs.

When your mind has settled enough to stop its ceaseless and endless chatter, the Silence that sits beneath that mountain of jarring and mostly useless noise, is the well spring of Life itself. To know yourself in Silence is to know the spaciousness of yourself, the eternalness of yourself, the self you were before form took you.

Eckhart Tolle calls it Space Consciousness versus Form Consciousness that is as good as any, of the many names, which have written themselves across time. For myself, I know it as Relief.

The journey from a mind that cannot be stilled, to one that softens into Silence upon request… is the journey of a lifetime, producing a gratitude that is limitless, and a will to continue journeying that is boundless.

When thought can be watched like bubbles drifting up from Nowhere, God has gone from being an object whether crafted of Light or muscle and beard, to the deep unfathomable Mystery of the great unknowable Mother…the very womb of existence. Seeking stops, hunger and craving cease, goals are useless, and Acceptance rules the day…leaving in its wake Peace and harmony.

May you be blessed with coming to know yourself in this most wondrous Silence, may you travel into the Emptiness and know it for the first time, may you end your reliance on the outer and know the pure joy of total trust, may you finally find the reason for living…

Adayre R. Miller

6/6/11

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Mervin L. Manalo to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…www.flickr.com/photos/sir_mervs/2760851995/