Our Heroine….

I finally found a small writer’s group…I have been looking for one for a very long time. There are twelve or thirteen of us and all are fiction writers, save myself and a blond and very attractive cop. (You would not guess that was her profession if you got a look at her.)

It is a little awkward for me to write about non-dual spiritual teachings, in a group of shoot-em-up action screenplay writers and romance genre specialist’s. I try to keep the conversation that I no longer believe in, or experience, a “self” to a minimum… for quite obvious reasons.

We read our work and then comment and add what we can, to support and help the writer to move forward. It must be working, as three of the writers made quantum, and I do mean HUGE strides forward in the development of their “voice”.

One so surprisingly improved, as to be shockingly so.

I enjoy that very much, even if I do not enjoy the growth and development of romance fiction, something I have never read.

One of the writers has a real gift for describing the environment her heroine finds herself in… the writing is taut, the descriptors vivid, and she engages all the senses in her account of the predicament her heroine is struggling to survive.

At our first meeting, this writer’s work was one of the best, the most engaging, and by far the most vivid. Because it was engaging, I cannot report if the same process that I experienced in her second piece, was also there in the first.

When she concluded reading her piece at our second meeting, I realized that I was entirely confused. I tried, as we are there to dedicate ourselves to being of help, to determine why I was so confused so that I might report it to her to help her develop her story.

As others commented, I kept skimming over the pages she had provided me in an attempt to capture my confusion. Her scene found the heroine in great peril, in a wooded area, running for her life amidst brambles and branches. There were natives of some sort conducting a mystifying dance, which seemed to have purpose and direction and a very real sense of danger.

As I continued skimming… it finally dawned on me that there wasn’t a single word, not one phrase, that related what her heroine was feeling, experiencing, or sensing. There was tremendous drama in the outer, and nothing at all of the inner. Not knowing a great deal about fiction writing, I do not know where the narrator’s voice was coming from…but I realized with great clarity, that my confusion sprang entirely, from the total lack of inner experience of the protagonist.

So I reported to the author my confusion and inquired if we, the reader, should be included in the inner realms of the main character’s experience. (I do not know if that is supposed to happen or not, I only knew that is why I felt so confused.)

Oddly it caused me to remember a very valuable lesson my Teacher gave to me, and I wondered if it might be useful to you as well.

Because my Teacher came into Silence, by a long and time consuming growth process, instead of the rapid and instantaneous reports of the likes of Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and Saul – before becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, and because I too, have entered into Silence by a similarly long and circuitous route… I feel there is something to be gained by understanding the step-by-step unfolding, rather than the blindingly bright, one-time-event that gets all the press.

When I first moved back to Phoenix my eldest sister was here with me for that first year, and she attended my Teacher’s workshop.

And, much to my surprise, valued the experience greatly.

She recognized the innate and wondrous qualities he possessed, and welcomed with open arms his every lesson and his great understanding. My deeply religious, deeply Christian, deeply fundamental sister, not only came to love him…but even went so far as to tithe her ten percent to his organization, for the length of her stay here in the valley. She described him as “having a mission”, fundamentalist language for his being an anointed one…which of course, I agreed with entirely. (Perhaps one of the few things we ever entirely agreed upon, you know how it is some times between the eldest – who knows all – and the youngest who gets very tired of, that particular sisterly experience.)

During one lesson my Teacher declared that we would never find the narrow gates, if we could not learn to “divide our attention”.

On the long drive back home, my sister queried what that meant. “Well”, I said, “we must become capable of keeping one ‘eye’ as it were, trained on the outer events while keeping the other eye on the inner responses, thereby ‘dividing our attention’.”

“What do you mean, inner responses?” She asked. I remember being very surprised by that, and I said “well, you know, you have to know what you are saying to yourself about what you are engaged in.”

She then asked what I meant by that…

I said, “you know the ‘voice’ in your head”. She said, “I don’t have a voice in my head”. And I promise you, that I didn’t then or now, believe that she had somehow arrived at Silence. It was my very first understanding, that not every one is even aware that a running commentary in the mind is a nearly constant companion for almost all human beings. It did, however, explain why the TV is on in every room in my sister’s house, every waking moment of her life, and it even accompanies her into sleep.

I would often comment about all that conflicting noise and how distracting it must surely be, and she reported that no, for her it “kept her company”. I have often wondered if instead, it is a means by which she remains unaware of the “voice” of the self, that is the most common of human experience’s.

As it turned out, I was unable to help my sister understand our Teacher’s lesson…perhaps I will do better for you.

We must first agree that there is indeed a “voice” in the mind. This voice is the veil through which your entire experience of life is conducted, it is the voice that “believes”, it is the voice of the “self”, it is the voice that supposedly guides, directs, and enhances your life experience. It is the voice that was missing from our author’s work, and our heroine’s dramatic flight into the unknown.

If realization and subsequent liberation does not drop upon you like the house dropped upon Oz’s Wicked Witch of the East, then it must and surely does, come through the committed and constant witnessing of the voice of the “self”.

Herein is the admonishment of my Teacher’s lesson…of learning to “divide our attention”. We must become capable, he taught, of being involved in our life’s events…while also watching, with great commitment, our internal response to those events.

While we watch, without judgment, the “self” is exposed to us and slowly unwound like a once overwhelmingly large ball of yarn…it merely one day comes to an end, by the sheer weight of having spun itself out.

And that coming to an end, is the end of the “self” we so believe in, and are so committed to. The division of attention - as my Teacher suggests - or the vise grip of unendurable suffering as Eckhart Tolle reports, are perhaps the only two ways to come into the Silence of Emptiness or the no-self’s Oneself.

I know that a great many people believe that there are many ways up the mountain, and in the realms of the conditioned mind…that is entirely true. It seems to me, that the Spaciousness of No Mind attracts the thinking mind by whatever means are best suited, to the fiction that is the personal self. If great suffering is needed, it is supplied, if angels singing and wondrous effects and spectacular events are required, then that is served up for the conditioned mind’s experience…for the singular purpose of coming to know what the great Hindu traditions describe as the “neti”, “neti” or the ”not this”, “not this”, or sometimes translated as the “neither this-nor that”, of the imagination and its many and varied attempts, at discovering the realm of the Divine.

The great and singular Truth that is veiled from us by the thinking mind and it’s overuse of the voice of the “self”, is that if a belief cannot be brought into the Silence, then it is not True in any real sense of the word. If an idea does not exist when we are not thinking about it…then it does not, in Truth, exist.

Which is why the “self” also, does not exist.

In Silence, there is no evidence of a story of any kind. Neither the dangerous story of the self-deluded, nor the glorious story of the equally self-deceived.

There is only a full and encompassing Silence.

A resonance that is equal parts Total Trust, Total Love, Total Beingness, Total Rest, Total Wholeness, Total Equanimity and Total Harmony…in short…Home.

One of the most well known quotes from the Course In Miracles states, “Nothing Real can be threatened, nothing UnReal exists.”

In Silence you come to understand that all of the thinking mind’s productions are Samsara, or Maya, or illusion. The outer products are “real” enough, we do in fact have airplanes and telephones and the internet, but all of these forms and all of the thought forms that create the self, are temporary phenomena with a beginning, a middle and an ending and are therefore…”unreal”.

Only the Silence is everlasting, only the resonance found in the Silence provides for the end of the search. It is the healing that all are seeking, the pleasure that all are pursuing, the hope that all are counting on, the help that all are in need of, the answered prayer that all are relying upon, the resolution that all are searching for…it is our right mind, our end of days, our salvation, our eternal existence, our heaven upon the earth, the Bible promised so many millennia ago…

To split our attention means to attend to the productions of mind, until you can see for yourself, that it is at best nonsense and at worst a self created hell. When the veil is finally pierced, when the ball of yarn unwinds itself so thoroughly as to be mere string upon the ground, then the welcome relief of Silence brings with it an end to suffering, disappointment, seeking, loss, disharmony, and disunion. We are fully restored, and it is reported, that the Silence enlarges itself endlessly. I cannot yet report that myself, I can only say that the yarn of my mind unwound itself and I am standing in the deep wellness of Silence and can find no need in it, no loss in it, no harm in it, no discomfort in it, no lack in it, no complexity in it, no confusion in it, and no disturbance.

It is only when my thinking mind reengages, that I experience any discomfort of any kind. The day I was invited to quit my job, the thinking mind reengaged.

Something to be expected really, after all, in my panicked childhood I invented the thinking mind for just this sort of perceived emergency…and so did you.

It leaped from the stillness to which I had become so engaged and so attracted, back to center stage to save the day…

It began by attempting a litany of ways to save me from total poverty, and ways to invent an income stream for me, and ways to save me from the “future” something I haven’t engaged in, for a very long time now.

And with each and every song it sang, I felt more and more burdened and done in by it. The heaviness, uselessness, futility, disharmony, and sheer pain of it, was almost beyond describing. It sat upon my breast, crushing my uplifted heart beneath its heal… demanding my attention and causing the burden of it to bow my head, with its weight and ill fittingness.

It took about ten hours for me to once more trust the Silence that has become so available. Those ten hours were draining, painful, sorrowful, and a complete waste…save teaching me to know fully how much the “self” is a burden to bear, rather than a significance to protect.

I am come home, and I no longer desire the productions of mind.

I, not yet fully grounded in the Silence, must remain vigilant in not allowing the thinking mind to overtake me once again. I know, by virtue of my Teacher’s great stillness, that it is possible to become so deeply engaged in Emptiness, that you cannot be removed from it by any outer means. It is this groundedness to which I now turn my attention, as nothing the world has to offer can, in any way compare.

Silence can surround and include all that the world can produce. Silence does not compare one thing against another. In Silence it is not better or worse to be poor, or hungry, or rich or successful. To be met with Silence is the greatest kindness that can be served another, to be enveloped in Silence is the greatest healing one can experience.

So…unlike the heroine who started our conversation…I encourage you to “split your attention”, to come to know at all times and in all situations what the voice of the mind is saying to you. To come, slowly and vigilantly, through non-judgmental Witnessing to arrive at the sure and certain understanding, that the voice of the mind is not real in any sense of the word and to come as quickly as possible to cease believing in it, which is the strongest spiritual step you can take… as it leads without hesitation, to the Silent One…and full liberation.

Adayre R. Miller

8/29/11

Photo courtesy of Endless Curiosity and flickr photo sharing…to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.endlesscuriosity.com

What Can Never Be Lost…

This last Tuesday my boss gave me the option of quitting or being fired. I have not been selling air conditioning units at the level they require, and they would not allow me to move into a product line that I know I would have had greater success in, as I have never failed to produce before.

I gave everything I had to selling these machines, I worked long and diligent hours trying to understand them, how to choose the right one, which combinations of machinery made sense. It was an uphill battle right from the start, and I often could not make sense of the process.

However, I gained a great deal from the five months of intense labor I put into it and over those five months; I became entirely resolved to the place I found myself in.

Although I struggled mightily to understand the machines and the process of air conditioning, I had no struggle what so ever with where I was or what I was doing. No resentment, no upset, no blame, no fear, no regrets…I merely did what was in front of me, to the very best of my limited skill sets. (And they were limited…the very last machine I sold, was in a small town near Nogales and on the long drive home I had an intense experience of doubt that I had picked the right machine, in the right configuration. So even after five months of diligent study, I was not able to relax and trust that I understood what I was doing. Which, more than anything else, was the reason for the outcome I am experiencing).

I have never before been capable of meeting something I disliked so much, without a shred of resistance.

My Teacher often taught the lesson that “unlimited personal power” is available to those who learn to embrace what they don’t like, who can learn to leave their preferences behind.

He was fond of saying that the highest we can attain in our spiritual development is to “give to the undeserving, forgive the unforgivable, and to love the unlovable”. In my immaturity and early development I did not truly understand this lesson, to give up one’s preference’s and to meet the undeserving, the unforgivable, the unlovable with patience, tolerance, and kindness, is not something we can do from the personality or the personal will.

Our personal will is not capable of putting aside the strong attachments and rejections that rule the un-awakened life. We are led by these two aspects and are destined to run toward, what we imagine will save us, or away from what we are afraid of… all the long days of our lives, if we rely solely upon the self.

When the personal will rules our lives, the moment something goes wrong - like being invited to leave our place of employment - the very first jump is to move directly into dramatic, sustained, and prolonged activity. To move heaven and earth to “fix” what is wrong and spare ourselves the experience of emptiness, and the recognition of just how tenuous our lives truly are.

There is very little that stands between me and hunger, or me and homelessness, or me and injury, loss, death, or disease and that is true of you, as well.

We are inherently fragile…all of us. Essentially without a safety net, intrinsically set up for eventual and complete loss, naturally frightened and awed by the specter of death and dissolution.

Have you ever wondered why that might be?

You could answer with the Darwinist that it is because we are descended from the animal realms and have no more right to expect longevity, or ease, or comfort, than does the common housefly. You could look to our circumstances, and the appearance that there is great trouble in the world and no visible help, that we are adrift in a sea of unwelcoming space with no source to turn to.

Or you could stand aligned with those who believe that a great grandfather lives in the sky, who meets out punishment to those children who do not curry his favor in just the right way, with just the right forms of genuflection.

Or…you could come to see, that all is exactly as it should be, for all circumstances are designed and dedicated to moving those who are experiencing a given set of “problems”, inward to the only point of salvation that exists.

In the deep inner realms where Silence rules, there can be no problem. There is in fact only Silence and Emptiness…but paradoxically, that Silence and Emptiness holds within it the most voluminous and joyful sound the world has ever heard.

Everything that has ever entered your life comes with only one purpose, the hope of turning you toward home and the deep interior of yourself.

Two days before my mother’s life was to come to an end, tucked under the covers in the bed she had slept in for decades, she said to no one and without provocation…”I don’t know who I am”…

She had just gotten up from her morning bowl of cereal, and was heading slowly and painstakingly back to her bedroom to lie down and recover from the effect of being upright, she was steadying herself by holding onto the kitchen island countertop, and her bent and pale, back and shoulders, looked more fragile and poignant than I could even begin to describe.

I was standing behind her as I often did when she was walking, so that I might be capable of catching her should her brittle strength give way, when she said it… as though to herself. She didn’t expect an answer, and I had none to give her.

In my life to that point, by the time of her death, I had spent all of my focus, energies, and considerable commitment to the slow and difficult process of turning my attention from the outer to the inner, and I had just begun to arrive at the doorstep of the ineffable…a thing it would take me many more years to even begin to understand, much less describe. Thus I had no answer to give my mother, no words to ease her sudden awareness that her life was about to come to an end, and she had not lived a single moment of it.

She spoke perhaps one or two more phrases before her death, but nothing she said before or after, this small utterance, is more potent or more heartrending to me.

It is the very source of all the world’s ills.

So many of us believe that our problems originate in our circumstances, and our solutions are to be found in our proactive stance toward those problems. We define what is “wrong” and place our prodigious wills, strength, and capacity, toward the effort of changing those wrong things into “right” things.

If we could only come to understand that there are no wrong or right things, events, people, places or situations…that instead there is only the outer or the inner.

My Teacher, in his infinite wisdom, always counseled one precious understanding. He set aside all conversation of goals, or results, or change, or success, or failure…and instead repeated over and over, the only thing you can know or even develop, is your Sense of Direction.

It took me a very long time to truly understand this lesson.

In Matthew 19:24 the Bible states: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” It would be a common and even understandable interpretation, to believe that the writers of the Bible were discussing material wealth. What a poor and thin interpretation that would be, a waste of the wisdom hidden beneath the metaphor.

The deeper realization would lead us to understand that the man too rich in “knowledge” is the one prevented from entering the kingdom of God.

And herein lies the reason for my Teacher’s most valuable instruction.

The development of one’s Sense of Direction, is the capacity to know if you are headed deeper inside or still adrift in the outer world. One of the ways in which you may gauge whether your general direction is toward the interior, or you are still lost among the distractions of the world, is whether or not what you “know” is decreasing.

In the deep and silent realms of the Oneself there is nothing to know, the cognitive mind, the conditioned mind, the self, does not exist in the deep realms of Silence. Here resides only the Joy of Being, the radiance of aliveness, the depth surrender to bottomless connectedness, the unfathomable comfort and ease of the changeless source…the very origins of Beingness, which paradoxically has no beginning and no ending.

And this…this sweetness, is the answer to my mother’s question…”Who am I?”

She was, you are, I am, a singularized expression of the Oneself.

We are consciousness with the potential to know Itself to deepen and depend solely upon the inner realms, to guide the activity, action, and pursuits of the days of our lives into the capacity to enter the kingdom of Heaven, from the very moment in which we are standing.

Our salvation does not lie in the solution to our problems; it lies within our willingness to “gird up our loins” and to end our intense desire to defend the personal self.

With our focus on the external… on what we want, what we believe, what we need, what we can’t live without, we keep ourselves locked inside a prison of our own making.

You are not your personal understanding, your desires, your history, your story, or your goals…you are not your achievements, or activities, or successful or failed pursuits.

You are - now and forevermore - a point of consciousness, who has the potential to become aware of Itself, and in the doing of so… to help to liberate all that you encounter, and all that encounters you.

There is great suffering overlaid upon this world, much of it carried by the innocents among us, to which we are obligated to ameliorate what suffering we can resolve. However, unenlightened action is not the answer - which will paradoxically - only enhance and enlarge the suffering. It is not what we do in the world that counts; it is who we are that matters.

Do we still labor under the illusion of a self? Do we still see ourselves as separate? Do we imagine that what happens to our bodies is the place our attention should be placed?

In other words…Do we have a developed Sense of Direction, or are we still working in the visible world wanting satisfaction where it can never be found?

Adayre R. Miller

8/26/11

photo courtesy of Color-de-la-vida, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/color-de-la-vida/4584364258/

Beloved Teacher

I thought I would report my experience of my Teacher’s eightieth birthday, mostly so that when I am eighty I will be able to look back and remember…

In my eagerness to see him, I left the house much sooner than I would normally have, and was surprised to find myself there an hour early. (I must have driven a bit faster than normal as well.)

There were already a good number of folk there, and I ended up sitting in the small collection of chairs in the front hall, with a very nice group of elderly folk. It took a few moments for me to realize that I had taken a seat in the portion of the room reserved for George’s family members, and offered at once to leave. But his youngest sister and I, had fallen into a lovely conversation about him in his youth and their shared home life, and she asked me to stay.

He was born the second of eleven, in West Virginia, and by his own account attended school only until the seventh grade. His youngest sister Sharon, said that he was sixteen when she was born and already leaving their home, so her relationship with him had more in common with my relationship with him, than one might imagine…he was her teacher too…

She spoke of how much he gave to all of his family members, how much he cared for all that he encountered, how those he supervised cried when he left Reynolds Aluminum to start the printing business, that would one day house Omega. She spoke of asking him for personal advice and his refusing to tell her what to do, (as far as I know he never once provided anyone with advice – although I am sure he was asked to more than any one living being ever has been), she spoke of attending Omega with her husband, and how it changed her life and altered the course of her understanding, and enhanced her well being. She spoke of calling him on the evening that is the hardest in the workshop he taught so powerfully for so many years, and how that even as a brother, he refused her desire for reassurance and direction and counseled her to decide for herself if she should continue or quit. (The event that takes place on that night is a turning point). It is powerfully confrontational, even though George does not confront, and to move through it you must be willing to face your fears…a good many people quit at this point, and this is the point at which his sister wanted her brother to reassure her. It is the measure of the man that he refused to do so. It seems he has always been willing to risk losing someone rather than keep them, while also losing the opportunity to free them.)

After our most wonderful chat concluded, I sat quietly and watched those around me.

The most significant thing I saw was competition and an odd type of ownership, that dominated almost every conversation I overheard.

It was a series of…”I did this with him, and that with him” or “I was here 30 years ago, and he let me do this or that” it was all tinged with the desire to be perceived as special, by association, because he is so utterly unique, and in some way being next to him meant owning some portion of that light. His granddaughter didn’t even want pictures taken of him, as she pronounced that she wanted to stand in front of him…”so these people cannot take his picture”.

And through it all, he sat.

Quiet in body, mind, and soul.

It reminds me a great deal of a documentary I recently saw of Ramana Maharshi. He is considered by many to be the greatest Teacher of non-duality, (of which George is a supreme example), who has lived in the 20^th century. He was Indian, and gave a good many of his “talks” in complete Silence, never speaking at all to his audience, who would come and sit with him, and report leaving with answers and deep understandings because of his spaciousness, stillness, and quiet. The documentary I saw of Ramana reminds me so of the birthday celebration I just attended, that I include Ramana’s words so that you may know how each taught from the same source.

“Mind is a wonderful force inherent in the Self. That which arises in this body, as 'I' is the mind. When the subtle mind emerges through the brain and the senses, the gross names and forms are cognized. When it remains in the Heart, names and forms disappear. If the mind remains in the Heart, the 'I' or the ego which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self, the Real, Eternal 'I' alone will shine. Where there is not the slightest trace of the ego, there is the Self.”

I cannot know how long there was no trace of “I” in George, but it must have occurred long before I met him as I never saw a trace of anything but stillness and quiet, (although when we met in 1982 I could not recognize it as such and knew only that he was unique among men).

When thinking of George and how utterly uncommon he is, I am always drawn back to Emerson’s explanation of character…”Ordinarily everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else.”

I have never met another individual that reminds me of George, but like Ramana his mere presence, calms, quiets, centers, and evokes great devotional love, from all that have the capacity to see.

I had no hope of seeing George personally today. His advanced age, disease, and frailty, made it seem impossible that I would have the opportunity to speak with him one last time. But to my surprise, great gladness and gratitude, I was approached by a member of the staff and told that I would be able to spend a few moments with him in his office.

When it was my turn, I was told to tell him my name so that he might be able to pull from some distant memory, some recognition of me. Just as I meant to do so, he said, “I remember you, I remember your eyes.” He then went on to ask me if I were still teaching, and that I needed to be the stepping stone so that others might hear…

I have no explanation for his assertion; I have not taught for fourteen years and have resolved not to do so again, until I am entirely free of the desire for “specialness” that once drove my need to be the center of attention. I cannot currently claim that need is gone. And, in truth, I do not know how I will even know if it is gone.

I take no stock in what he said; I place no faith in it nor lay any predictive tinge to it. It could have been meant for me, and it could just as easily have been meant for someone who resembles me in some fashion, after all, nearly forty thousand people have been in George’s classroom over the last 32 years.

More than that, the Silence that now engages me so, allows me to agree with my whole heart and mind with what Ramana wrote to his mother as she continued to beg him to return home. Here is that small passage…

“Day after day his mother begged him to return, but no amount of weeping and pleading had any visible effect on him. She appealed to the devotees who had gathered around, trying to get them to intervene on her behalf until one requested that Sri Ramana write out his response to his mother. He then wrote on a piece of paper, "In accordance with the prarabdha of each, the One whose function it is to ordain makes each to act. What will not happen will never happen, whatever effort one may put forth. And what will happen will not fail to happen, however much one may seek to prevent it. This is certain. The part of wisdom therefore is to stay quiet." At this point his mother returned to Madurai saddened.

I have learned in the deep marrow of my bone…from my much beloved Teacher, that “the part of wisdom therefore is to stay quiet.”

Just before I left, I was able once more to tell George how very much I love him. How grateful I am. How amazed and astonished that I found him, and that I had the great good sense not to leave.

I have no doubt that the next time I see him, his body will be resting in his coffin, (his funeral arrangements were told to me by his caretaker, for some reason, many months ago), and that I will be viewing the shell of the once great man who walked the inner reaches of my soul, and exposed me to the deep neediness that was the cornerstone of my self made prison, thereby beginning the release I now enjoy. His Sacred Emptiness touched me with its clarity and wisdom, and he, the quiet carrier of that Sacredness - never needed or wanted - my praise, acceptance, or validation. But in my gratitude I could never stop myself from trying to give it, and today, was no exception…

Adayre R. Miller

8/13/11

Clarity and Emptiness…

That which we call a person is the bringing together of components
and their actions with each other. It is impossible to find a permanent
self there. And yet there is a paradox. For there is a path to follow and
there is walking to be done, and yet there is no walker. There are actions
but there is no actor. The idea of a specific self is a mistake.

Existence is clarity and emptiness. –Author Unknown

I thought not to write again, because now that I have truly seen through the veil of the “self”, the use of the personal pronoun seems unwieldy and useless and hopelessly inaccurate.

The nature of Silence which I have, only and rarely, glimpsed until now is so satisfying that giving up the personal seems such a small thing to give, in order to receive such a vast well spring of well being.

A friend of mine writes me back and says…”I don’t see you as some spiritual person, I see you in the way that I have always seen you…worried about money, family, work, etc.” And he is both entirely right and entirely wrong.

I am not special in any way, not now…nor will I ever be. I am also not overly gifted; my Teacher is a man of such clarifying wisdom as to seem luminous. I have watched and read others who carry the same astonishing wisdom. I am not of that ilk. The only thing that I possess is a complete willingness to embrace what I fear…this is my only, and my greatest strength. (None of these “I’s” are even remotely accurate, it would be more clear if I were to say that the mindstream carried inside this body and through it’s many experiences has a certain type of courage, certain skills, abilities, proclivities, and understandings…and not even that is right…but who could say all that every time an “I” is called for….) This capacity for facing fear started early, and it is my only real gift.

It carried me, into and out of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and worst of all the addiction to suffering that garnered the attention, I had been so missing and yearning for, in my childhood.

It carried me, into and out of, the turbulence of breaking the bondage of beliefs I was born into – (fundamentalist Christianity) – and into and out of breaking the bondage of the beliefs I had personally chosen, (New Age), which was so much more difficult. Breaking the bondage of the beliefs of my childhood meant facing the fear of burning in hell for all eternity, breaking the bondage of the beliefs that I had personally chosen, was so much worse than the fear of burning in hell could ever have been…and herein lies the perfection of the Teacher I had been guided to, as my trust in him allowed me to be washed clean of all believing.

It carried me, into and out of, the seeking that once characterized my every waking moment and into the quite necessary disillusionment that anything other than the true meeting of the inner Silence can ever provide relief from the conditioned mind.

It carried me, into and beyond, touching the Silence but not being capable of stabilizing it.

And now, it has carried me here.

There are so many voices in the spiritual marketplace that speak for being loving and kind and easy and sweet, but it is rare indeed to discover a voice that speaks for letting your fear burn you up, letting it consume you, letting it have its way with you, running toward it rather than away…in short, turning to embrace the monster that is the thinking mind.

I have a great love for Gangaji, and Byron Katie, and Eckhart Tolle, the current teachers of Formlessness, of Emptiness, of Silence…but they, with the exception of Gangaji, speak of the “egoic mind” or the “separate self” or some other conceptual understanding of the thinking mind, that allows us to surmise that the egoic mind is somehow different from the mind that speaks inside our heads. We misinterpret the message to mean that as along as we are not showing off, or acting up, or in some other way misbehaving, that we are not fully engaged in the egoic mind patterns these great teachers speak of…my Teacher did not allow that kind of loophole.

He plainly and directly said that thinking is the veil that prevents Thought from entering the mind. “Thinking” is the repetitive and largely useless form of mind chatter that can talk to you about anything you find acceptable….bliss, spiritual matters, hope, help, love, kindness and so on, and so on.

Thought on the other hand is entirely original, sources from out of the Silence, arrives in the mind attuned to it by virtue of having first emptied itself of “thinking”. Thought is not personal…in any way.

Thought has no limits and no boundaries and there can be no personal claims laid upon it. Thought is the vibration of Emptiness finding use for vowels and consonants. Thought is the One, making use of a clarified and empty vessel.

My Teacher, Socrates, Buddha, Christ, Emerson, Gandhi and others are carriers of Thought.

This is where my friend correctly and rightly points out, that I am not among their number.

I am a woman as ordinary as dust motes, who has been willing to let fear have her body and soul, and in the doing of same, has been gifted with the release from the bondage and suffering of thinking. I have no Thoughts to offer, I have nothing to offer.

I merely report to you that seeking, searching, adding concepts, precepts, understandings, and knowings to an already overcrowded mind will not allow the emptiness that sweeps away the burden of the personal, that lifts the veil on the eternal, that opens the heart to the spaciousness that surrounds and pervades your every cell.

Now that I have fully given myself to Emptiness, I can’t imagine what kept me hanging onto even a tiny shred of the personal. Who could possible want a self over freedom, trust, spaciousness, openness, and total ease; I can’t imagine what kept me from it for so long.

My Teacher once said, “Until you know what you would die for you are not yet living”. I did not know what he meant by that, conditioned as I was by my culture, I took it to the outer, the “heroic” and thought of the solider, the saint, the martyr.

But now, I understand his meaning…to truly live you must be willing and capable of dying, this is non-negotiable. You do not get to hang onto some rarified version of the thinking self, some dressed up gone to Sunday meetin’ version of the thinking mind, and still get through the “eye of the needle” that the Bible speaks of. To want to keep the mind that prays, while giving up the mind that curses, is a form of spiritual materialism which is perhaps even more difficult to detect than material materialism. (I am not saying praying is bad or wrong or in any way inappropriate – it is a metaphor only). We who view ourselves as seekers are willing to let go the worldly mind, but unwilling to recognize that seeking itself, is a means by which the death of the thinking self can be successfully avoided for an entire lifetime.

Today is my Teacher’s eightieth birthday. I am going to a gathering in his honor, in the hope that he will be physically present. (His disease may prevent his attendance.)

It will surely be the last time I see him…

I cannot believe the good fortune that has allowed Silence to fully take me, prior to his death. I do not expect to get to sit with him or even to speak with him…but I want to, once more, bow before his river of ruthless commitment to command me toward my fear, to love me enough to never coddle me, to be willing to lose me in order to save me, to never withhold the right ruthless truth at the right moment, and in the doing of so, to set me free from the lie of the personal self…so that I may soar upon the freedom of the embrace of the Impersonal One.

I write this in haste, so that I might send it to you prior to leaving to see him, for what I am sure will be the last time.

Take a moment, with me, if you can and are willing… and feel the lift that the release of the you, you think yourself to be, could experience if only you would stop searching. Here, now, stop…for just one moment.

It is the greatest tribute I/we could provide the soul that is my Teacher.

With the heart of the Christ and the restful mind of the Buddha, I honor you and your journey…

Namaste

Adayre R. Miller

8/13/2011

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Cassandi to view more of this artist’s work please follow this link /www.flickr.com/photos/cassandi/

UnCaused Joy...

Each day for the last three, I have passed some measure of time in each of them, in a state of what can only be described as UnCaused Joy.

This is not my first experience with UnCaused Joy, but it is my most mature. The first time I had the experience I did as anyone might imagine, and tried to hang on to the experience, I tried unsuccessfully to remember what I did, or did not do that created it, where I was, how I was, what I was doing…etc. and so on.

My conditioned mind - as true of all conditioned minds - has no wisdom, and I suppose in truth cannot have, and thus tried to understand the formula by which I had an experience of UnCaused Joy and attempted mightily to replicate it.

But as you might suspect by the name I have given it…”UnCaused Joy”, it follows no formula, arises by Itself, has no parameters and no external triggers.

That does not mean that each time I have experienced it I did not look outside myself, as we are all conditioned to do, for the source of such a sweetness as I was feeling.

I won’t recount all of the sights I saw as I felt this UnCaused Joy, save the one from today.

Sitting at a plastic picnic table, eating a slice of Pizza and drinking a soda, I noticed an elderly man putting condiments on his hot dog. He favored lots of mustard and onions, and no catsup at all. He moved slowly as the aged often do, he was tall and dressed in khakis and wearing a blue and green plaid long sleeved shirt, unusual attire for a Phoenix summer. He was wearing a fisherman’s hat, the kind that can be waded up and stuffed in a pocket; cotton, tan colored, with a brim and a chin strap, sporting a wooden bead for tightening in a sudden storm or down pour.

The thing that most surprises me about UnCaused Joy is it’s radical arrival style. It merely arises, just like that, from out of NoWhere…with no more advance notice than a whisper of wind that lifts the leaves or moves the hair from off your forehead. Here Now… and often gone, just as surprisingly.

The feeling is so overwhelmingly wonderful, that it can’t truly be described…sweet certainly… precious beyond measure, quiet, confident, care filled, soft, loving, kind, personal – and yet somehow not, radically inclusive, yielding, generous in a way that is truly without measure, open, receptive, enlivening, comfortable, impossible to own or win or purchase or keep, utterly without cost, and as impossible to capture as a breath.

So here I sit, with my hand holding a white soda cup, a plate of pizza before me, on my white plastic picnic chair…when this most delicious visitor arrives. It winds it’s way through my chest cavity touching me in ways more intimate than can be imagined, causing me to be grateful in the most profound way, and as I watched it move softly through my interior…I did as my culture has trained me to do, and looked up and out, in an attempt to determine some cause for the wealth that has found me this day.

And there across the many white plastic chairs sat my elderly friend.

He was chewing his bright yellow, mustard bathed, hot dog. Unlike the jaw action that you or I might produce, where our teeth allow our jaws to move in the vertical, no more than perhaps half an inch…his toothless mouth allowed his jaw to move, what by comparison, seemed half a foot.

His lips caved in with each upward motion, allowing his chin to almost touch his nose…and it reminded me so strongly of the many months my father went without his “teeth” prior to his death, that the lovely experience of UnCaused Joy, was joined by the soft touch of nostalgia and pleasant sentiment.

The thing that UnCaused Joy teaches, as I have come to experience more of it and have matured to the place that I do not attempt to hang onto it, is that it cannot be pursued in any form.

Goals will not work, effort is to no avail, it cannot be manifested or manipulated in any way what-so-ever.

It needs nothing from the realms of hope, or power, or position, or ability. It arises out of the un-doing, the un-learning, the un-moving.

I recognize its point of origin in the dim reaches of my first introduction to my Teacher. I met my Teacher 29 years ago. During that time in my life, I worked diligently to hide the broken places in me. My mind was such a confusing, disorienting, and damaging place to abide, that suffering was a near constant companion.

When I met my Teacher was the first moment that I had ever felt some relief from the powerful, demanding, and all consuming nature of that suffering. It was as though I were standing in a limitless room, and every surface was covered with some form of signal receiving device…small transistor radios, surround sound theater systems, radio towers, clock radios, car radios, headphones, speakers and more…and every device, turned to its volume limit was broadcasting a different signal.

The noise and confusion, the pain and disorientation, were nearly absolute.

And into that cacophony of noise walked a small man with an entirely Silent Interior.

His Silent Presence so calmed me, that for the very first time, it was as if all the power was cut to every noise producing device that had dammed me to so much suffering. In the beginning I needed his physical presence to provide this vibrational shift, and after I moved to California I would return to him over the years, and receive another dose of antidote to the harm my internal noise caused me.

When I returned to live in the same city, I was finally ready to become a devoted aspirant to his Mastery. Do not be deluded and think that it was all sweetness and light, for my Teacher is not the kind that so overfills the spiritual landscape in our current age, there was no softness in his approach…but rather a rigorous debunking of all the facades, and pretenses, and self soothing lies, I was so very capable of telling myself.

Eli Jaxon-Bear defined his teacher as a “power larger than my own egoic mind, to which I could totally surrender”. I too, was capable of surrendering my egoic mind to my teacher…his emanation of Silent Being, and my having watched him for more than 29 years, provided me with a type of trust that is literally indefinable. Sacred Trust, the nature of which allowed me lay down all of my defenses, to strip to my psychological, emotional, and spiritual bones and allow him to reflect back to me the image of the lie I had lived all my life. In that reflection I was set free.

And slowly over many years, the Silence I had first been touched by because of his presence, I earned for myself.

A mind quieted and tamed, a self released, a story unwound.

All my beliefs undone, I was finally and once more entirely innocent… and out of this place arises, UnCaused Joy.

Recently a friend told me that in my conversation and understanding that I was too “definitive”, I believe this was her way of saying that I am too rigid in my opinions and to committed to my process. I have thought a great deal about it, and I know it to be true from the personality side of me. My love and gratitude for my Teacher, and the light he shone upon the darkness that was drowning me is without peer in me, when Truth has been revealed there cannot be anything else to seek.

That said, I am still young in the Silence that I have revealed beneath the noise my mind produced. I am still immature, graceless, and gawky in my attempts to pass along the great gift I have received…but that is changing, and rapidly so.

Everything in my life is now in aid to the continuing development of the Silence within, everything seems intended to enhance and develop my capacity for emptiness, selflessness, and impersonal Being.

My life has become a singular note, in a symphonic gift to the Soul of which we are all some indefinable part.

To say that I am grateful does not begin to express the depth of my feeling. And so in some small form of recompense, for the great gift of my Teacher’s 3 decades of service and for the Grace that aided and abetted the revelation of Silence, beneath the squawking mind that I was once so burdened by, I give to you this small offering.

Joy & woe are woven fine...

Joy & woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine,
Runs a joy with silken twine. – Author Unknown

Adayre R. Miller

7/31/11

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and LH Dumes to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link

www.flickr.com/photos/16154905@N04/3953251441/