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/