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/
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