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/