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