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/