Is Our Will Our Own?...

I have been thinking a good deal about the concept of free will.

As the Silence grows in my life, or at least my understanding of it grows, I see that the “Who of Me” is not in my thoughts, or the decisions born of those thoughts, or the actions that then follow those conclusions.

As thinking becomes more and more optional, I find that the field out of which thinking arises is the most interesting part of the capacity for inner silence. It is quiet and still, certainly, but it has a quality that is not conveyed by the terms quiet and still. A kind of vibrancy, or aliveness, a sort of round fullness…a dark, yet rich texture that feels very much alive.

In these moments of utter Silence, a thought will arise like a balloon floating into awareness…it has no context, no before and no after…it merely appears. If it catches me and I follow it, then I “wake” up moments or hours later having lost all sense of the being alive that Silence provides, and am aware that I have a distorting sense of having been unavailable during whatever time has passed. Whereas, not long ago, I would have defined my thoughts as “me”, now I see that they may have little or nothing to do with me.

Consider this – if we can control our thoughts, or if they are “ours” in the proprietary sense – then why do we have any thoughts at all, that run counter to our well being? If we were the ones doing the shopping in the thought farmers market, so to speak, wouldn’t we choose the freshest, ripest, plumpest, most healthful thoughts? But we don’t do we, instead the thoughts we choose are often the most harmful, denigrating, desperate, and painful ones that can be found. Why is that…if, in fact, we are in control of our thinking?

So if we do not choose our thoughts, but rather they somehow choose us, then where does that leave the concept of free will? Consider this notion by Elly Roselle…“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind.” To discover the stillness that rests beneath the activity of mind, and thereby free us from the tyranny of the conditioned mind, requires the willingness to Un-learn some of our most cherished and long held beliefs.

Over the years that I have made my pilgrimage from self-loathing to no self at all, I have often had the experience of a thought letting go of me…and not the other way around. As though I was no longer a fertile soil, for a thought form that needed a certain type of environment, in which to continue to thrive.

The earliest form of that, in my experience, is the “What is wrong with me” thought. Because of the nature of the fear that was a central feature of my childhood, I have very few memories prior to the age of twelve or so, but I remember very clearly and very distinctly the “what is wrong with me” thought. I can remember asking my mother what was wrong with me as early as three, and I continued to ask it in ever more sophisticated ways, until at 28, I knew that question was going to kill me if I didn’t get free of it.

Since the writer’s workshop I recently had the opportunity to attend, out of which was born the realization that I cannot make an adequate living from being a “bestselling” author, a deeply buried and future oriented illusion has been fiercely illuminated, and with it the sorrows that come from illusions.

For you see, the counter balancing belief to the thought “What is wrong with me” – is the notion that in some place in the future the wrongness will somehow magically be transformed into rightness.

Here is where I part company with the mainstream thinking that governs our culture. We deeply and in a much-misguided fashion, seek a future experience with no shadow element attached. Which simply is not possible. Every type of success has it’s deep darkness, which is hidden from view, if not actively so by the successful themselves… then passively so, by the conditioned mind that is doing the looking. In the external world of form, it is not possible to have success without some form of failure attached…some form of shadow is always attached to every “light” filled moment. Here is how I have come to recognize that I must be willing to embrace the shadow side, if I am to experience the freedom that is a potential for every human being.

I have no right to abundance, if I cannot make a home in poverty. I have no right to health, if I cannot make illness into my wheelhouse. I have no right to power, in the form of influence, if I cannot make meekness my cornerstone.

Why?

Because if I know myself only through the lens of one half of life’s two extremes, then I am only a believer and not worthy of becoming believable…do you recognize the difference?

A believer is someone who carries a thought form to it’s extreme. In spiritual terminology it is the religious among us, who possess – they believe – the truth about the divine. They know what is true, and feel powerfully the need to either convert the non-believers, or in extreme cases, put them to death to liberate them from their ignorance.

On the other hand to become believable, is to free yourself from the stream of thinking to such a degree, that you are no longer a conditioned mind. A mind that is free of conditioning is spontaneous, creative, powerful, humble in the extreme, potent, available, and very open ended. Possessing “whole seeing” they no longer have the experience that life is divided into good and bad polarities, into right and wrong judgments, into pleasurable or painful events.

A mind which can rest in the unmanifested, in the silence at the crest of the wave, along the razor’s edge between past and future…is a mind freed from the polarities of life, and Silent in the face of all occurrences.

The easiest assessment you can make with respect to a mind that is freeing itself from the burdens of conditioning, is to look to see if you are still seeking. Seeking may very well be a hard wired experience, it may even be a survival strategy born of the millennia in which we have evolved out of the primordial soup, but seeking is not an energy that can be taken into the Silence.

Seeking is the active form of the question, “what is wrong with me”… and as such it has a future oriented aspect that denies the here and now, and locks the mind into problem solving. To imagine that there is some way to fix your life is to reach for something that is wholly imaginary. Your life cannot be fixed, for the simple reason that all solutions reside in the realm of form, which is born, peaks, and dies in a never-ending cycle. In this way today’s solution becomes tomorrows burden.

Our only salvation is the willingness to face without moving away, the arguably overwhelming nature of the conditioned mind.

A friend of mine, a longtime member of AA, who once confided to me that his anger was so powerful, and so available, that he would sit in bars and public spaces and fantasize about how many people he could kill and how quickly. When he first told me this I was shocked and recoiled, but then I realized that being able to voice the thought would in, and of itself, do more to prevent it’s being acted out than anything else possibly could. Moreover his thoughts about killing others, were no different – in their energy patterns – than the thoughts I once continuously entertained about killing myself, my friend was fond of saying that “the mind is a dangerous neighborhood, and it is best not to go in there alone.”

There is wisdom in that…I do not know if I could have begun this journey without the help of some very gifted therapists. But I can say without equivocating, that the source point of the Mind cannot be found except through solitude and stillness. To discover the silent space, out of which the mind arises, is to come home and more, to find the rest that is normally only available in deep dreamless sleep.

I began wanting to be a speaker/teacher when I was seventeen years of age, thirty nine years with a single goal, a single aspiration, a singular commitment. I had one brief success with it in my forties that only served to more deeply confuse me… I could not reconcile my internal sense of “still very much wrong”, with the external wave of approval and success that was streaming in my direction.

I had finally arrived at my “someday” future, only to find it a counterfeit one. The hole I felt in myself was not fulfilled as I had long dreamed it would be, but that did not prevent me from returning to the “dream” even as I knew it couldn’t and wouldn’t do for me, what I had hoped and prayed it would. So the always clever, conditioned mind morphed that dream into being a “bestselling author”, which I have been gratefully divested of just this past week.

Whenever I encounter the book or article that includes countless interviews of the rich and famously successfully, I am always aware of how much that is a deep form of half-truth. In this culture we are not even allowed to question the notion that success does not bring happiness, and I know that it cannot. I know this because there is nothing in the known or unknown Universe that does not have its exact polarity, the light its shadow, the material its anti-material, the matter its dark matter. The clever conditioned minds greatest achievement is its ability to mask this truth from our view.

Our successes whatever they may be never bring the one thing that we are looking the hardest for…the connection to source, and the end of the sense of separate self.

Those experiences are hidden from view by the egoic mind, right under our very noses. While we are busy looking to our future to present us with a circumstance that will not fail, or to a past that can somehow be mysteriously corrected, we lose the only opportunity for happiness that can, or ever will, exist. I trust the Masters, who report that happiness is the natural condition of an undivided mind, and an undivided mind develops out of the Silence of a mind at rest, this I know from personal experience.

I can say without reservation that Silence has brought me peace, in the face of seemingly great discord. To be mere inches from sheer penury, and the high probability that I will always be poor and also to be at peace is nothing short of a miracle. But I cannot say I have been happy, especially these past weeks. However, I know in the deepest part of my heart, that the cause was the subtle way in which my conditioned mind had transferred my three decades long “dream”, to a new platform that had escaped my attention.

A dream by its very definition is a condition, place, event or outcome that is to be realized at some future date. That future orientation locks us out of a Silent mind as surely as a guard with a gun might do, locked out of silence we live in division, living in division makes us incapable of discovering the truth of Being.

In every religion known to man, there are the traditions, creation stories, myths, and behaviors of that religion…all are sure, beyond doubt, of the sanctity of their beliefs, the power of their right understanding of God’s will, and with it the greatest dangers that man has ever faced. The religions of the world have killed more in the name of god, than any other form of mass murder the world has ever known. I found this convincing description thru an Internet search…

“In short, 809 million people have died in religious wars. That is nearly a billion people.

Oftentimes, a retort is that secular ideals and Godless Communism have killed many more. It is true that Stalin, among others, slaughtered his own people by the millions during the industrialization of Soviet Russia. By comparison, 209 million have died in the name of Communism. Some 62 million died during World War II, civilian and military, on all sides. Conclusively, more people have died in the name of religion than in the name of Communism or Hitler, or the two combined times two.”

The lethal divisions amongst the religious are quite obvious and are, of course, both historical and current. But for every religion there is the spiritual equivalent, who all have a monastic tradition and support the idea that God is One, in the Jewish tradition it is the Cabbalists, in Christianity it is the Christian Mystic, in Islam it is the fourteen orders of Sufi, in Yoga – Raja Yoga, and in Buddhism it is Zen. All of the religious traditions are founded upon a monastic source, monastic from the Greek word monos, which means alone, single, or One.

God alone exists, and all is God or source, thus our will such as it is, exists only in aligning ourselves with the expression of the One.

Because our thoughts arise without our volition, an experience I can affirm, then our only choice rests in where we place our attention. Do we continue to seek outside ourselves for some circumstance to free us from the self-created burden of the conditioned mind? Or do we bow low our heads, and surrender our willfulness in favor of the freedom that can only come from acceptance?

For myself coming to the awareness that I had subtly shifted my future orientation to a new goal, and thus to a new carrot on a stick…I have won for myself the opportunity to awaken at a new level of awareness, to surrender to a new level of grace, to open to a new level of freedom. Though I cannot yet claim happiness, I can most assuredly claim peace…which is already more than I could have ever hoped for.

I leave you with this quote by Matthieu Ricard, author of The Monk and The Philosopher…

“If a prisoner wants to free his companions in misfortune, he must first break out of his own chains. It’s the only way to do it. You have to gain in strength to act appropriately. An artist has to begin by discovering the roots of his art, acquiring a technical skill, developing his inspiration and become capable of projecting it on to the world. The sage’s approach is similar, even if it doesn’t have the same goals. The spiritual path begins with a period of retreat from the world, like a wounded deer looking for a solitary, peaceful spot to heal her wounds. Here, the wounds are those inflicted by ignorance. To try to help prematurely is like harvesting wheat when it is still grass, or like a deaf musician playing beautiful tunes that he can’t hear. To be able to help beings, there should no longer be any difference between what you teach and what you are. A beginner might feel an immense desire to help others, but generally doesn’t have sufficient spiritual maturity to be able to do so.”

My life long dream to teach was a masked, and deeply unconscious, desire for attention, approval, and applause. I would not have had the courage to fully know that, prior to this time in my life, I honestly and sincerely thought I was trying to “help” others.

The courage it takes to face the “What is wrong with me question?” … is the undertaking of a lifetime, but the great good news, is that question and all it’s many cousins, quite literally dissolves in the soothing soundlessness of inner Silence. To come to know the deep well out of which thought arises, is to know that nothing that has ever floated through my mind, or yours, is even a tiny bit personal.

As Ms. Roselle so clearly stated, a mind does not hold an idea…but rather an idea, in the form of a belief, takes hostage the mind that can no longer touch its silent source. It is in this release from our self made prison that all our attention, efforts, action, and capacities must be brought to bear. Here is where the work lies…and it is an entirely solitary pursuit.

Post Script

Friends,

I am very conflicted about this essay. I do not know why. I did not get a job yesterday that I had very high hopes for...or to be more accurate, I was hoping to the get the job to spare me from having to live through what is coming next.

But here is the truth of it, whether homelessness and hunger are on the horizon or not...there will come a time at which there will be no escape, illness and death is my future just as it is yours. There is no escaping that, and all fear is based upon it and the unknown, out of which our demise will appear...when it does appear. The only valor that we can bring to a life well lived, is to teach ourselves the resolve necessary, to stand firm in the face of come-what-may. I have made great strides in this capacity...and have a great deal farther to go.

Today I am lost in the productions of mind, I am sad, and a bit scared...but I will not run. Moments before my mother took her last breath, she said..."I think I can get through this". I knew that was not possible as the blood had already begun to pool in her extremities and under her eyes, leaving them bluish purple under her nearly transparent skin (this is a function of the slowing of the heart and I am told is quite common - it happened with my father as well). Even as she said it, and I knew it wasn't possible, it broke my heart, not that she would not be capable of exercising that mountain of a will she possessed and somehow escape death...but rather, that she struggled against life's expression, with all she was capable of, until the very last breath she took.

I do not want that for myself, for you, for any human who has ever lived or will ever live. Our salvation rests not in the mountains we can move to attain what we wish for, but in the clear eyed acceptance of what life brings to us, for us to open wide enough to include it in ourselves and in our hearts.

Change (read self-improvement) and the pursuit of change, has little or no value...as it is a game the mind plays to keep us searching and struggling until our limbs go blue with the onset of the truth about Life, we are not here to "improve" the self but rather to free ourselves of it, and thereby stand naked, innocent, and whole in the face of whatever comes our way.

In this moment my courage is flagging, but I have so long stood in the face of my fears, without turning to run, that I have no doubt what-so-ever that courage will return and with it, the heart capable of bearing what is mine to bear.

So I send my small message in a bottle, as that is what these essay's surely are, in the hope that it may find its way to the shores of your heart and help you in some way to deepen the courage to turn within, rather than running about in the outer chasing one dream after another.

I have spent the vast majority of my life learning to turn within, I have been given extraordinary help along the way...help, which in my often clumsy way, I am trying to give to you in the form of these written words. It is my prayer that they serve you...

With Great Love,
Adayre R. Miller

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing...I have somehow lost the artist's name whose photograph is included in this essay, I apologize for not be able to direct you to more of their work.

One Writer's Report

I attended a “writers workshop” this weekend, one I had been looking forward to for a long time. It was a gift from a friend, as I would not have been capable of paying the five hundred dollar entrance fee, and thus it was a doubly large opportunity.

This was not a workshop to teach writing, but rather a weekend in which “a small to medium size” publishing house, specializing in spirituality and new age books, was to provide a fairly large group of writers with access to a publisher and two editors.

In the first two hours of their presentation, the publisher demystified what every one in the room was hoping the opportunity would allow them to become – “The Best Selling Author”.

Here is the thing about that…

It seems that a bestselling author is someone who sells between 3 and 5 thousand copies of their book a year, at the remuneration rate of $1.50 per book. (As you can see the very first thing we learned is not to give up our day job.)

A New York Times - Bestselling Author, is someone who has sold those same 3 to 5 thousand copies of their book in a somewhat more compressed time frame. (The publisher did say there was some sort of proprietary information that was used by the New York Times, to determine which among the 3 to 5 thousand selling writers would make their list and thus be given the mantle of New York Times Bestselling Author, even so, becoming one was a matter of 3 to 5 thousand copies sold per X time frame.) Tell me… that does not surprise you….

As an aside, the authors that we are all really familiar with and hold in our imaginations when we think of the term “bestselling author”, among them, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Richard Bach, these are as the publisher said the ”1 percent of 1 percent”. In other words, the potential that someone in our group of a hundred or so budding authors who were attending the conference, might actually become that next 1 percent of 1 percent, is so small, as to be practically statistically impossible.

The publishers positioned themselves as being a “partner” to the writer in the process of bringing a book to market. Of course the word partner almost implicitly implies a 50/50 relationship, and the publisher went on to demystify that as well, by describing a relationship in which we, the writers, would both write the book and be responsible for somewhere near 60 percent of the sales of the book.

They emphasized in great detail, the necessity of the writer possessing what they called “a platform”. This is the writer’s dedication to, and capacity for, garnering the attention of others. Things like… where do you speak? How many people are on your face book friends’ list? How many times have you been interviewed by local media? How committed are you about getting the word out, regarding your book and its benefits? And a great deal more along those lines.

In addition to this demystifying process they also went over, very thoroughly, the submission guidelines found on their web page for the ins and outs of properly getting your work in front of them.

It would not be very hard to imagine that there were a significant number of people in the room, who were very disappointed to discover that the “dream”, was a 1 percent of a 1 percent proposition. Moreover that the Dream Merchants were not the source of the realization of that dream, which was no doubt a large part of the draw for folk who traveled from many other states to attend this weekend workshop.

On that first night there was a good deal of surprise, followed the next morning by some sharp responses from the crowd. For instance one young man stood up and said, “Well, if we do all the writing and most of the selling of the book…what do we need you for?” A sentiment that was shared by a good many in the room, I suspect.

There were three primary centers of influence in the room. The publisher/editors, the conference coordinator – who also books speakers for a large spiritual conference held each year – in several locations around the country, and my friend who owns a large school here in the valley.

Because I was seated at the front of the room, I had a front-row-center view of all the influential folk who were imagined – by the writers – to be capable of helping the attendees to realize their dreams.

And so I bore witness to a fairly steady flow of…”I am special, what I do is important, can you help me to find public agreement and succeed at being special and important?”

I know that the above statement sounds unflattering. I am sure such a raw examination of the process is one that may seem jaundiced and critical, please attempt to accept my sincerity, when I tell you that it is neither jaundiced nor critical, but rather, just plain old garden variety realistic.

The Dream Merchants, like dream merchants in every other field of human endeavor from acting, to race car driving, are all sincere and kind folk who are looking to serve others in the pursuit of their “dreams”. In the field of New Age/Spirituality, it is highly likely that everyone there, with the exception of myself, wants to save and/or heal the planet. (I find the planet to not be in need of my ministrations, not that I would not hug trees if I were called to do so…but rather that I can find no fault amongst the things that exist, not because I favor them necessarily… but simply because already existing, makes denying or arguing against them a fool hardy pursuit).

Being alone among so many is a unique perspective, and allows for a type of understanding that might not be available to others who are deeply, even passionately engaged.

To describe just how alone, among many I was, if I were to present myself to the “centers of influence” I would more likely say…”I am not special, what I do does not matter, and can you help me rid myself of the last vestigial effects of a conditioned mind, and the self it gave birth to?”

Now, it might be likely that you have a strong reaction to the statements I just made, and if you were an aspiring new age or spiritual author you might well want to pray over me, or put a crystal upon my brow, or lay hands upon me, or any number of other processes designed to heal me from my low self image.

And in doing so, you would miss the much deeper truth that I am trying to point at. When someone is suffering, and I do mean suffering, from low self-esteem… that condition expresses itself in one of two ways. They either sink to the earth in tears and the rending of clothing, (metaphorically speaking), or they blast you backward with their excessive amount of charm, flattery, and seeming high self-regard.

For instance the publisher brought to the stage an author on the verge of being published and defined this author as a “hustler”… (which in spiritual circles deserves some examination, in and of itself, but we will leave that for another time), the moment she appeared – having long ago stopped seeing peoples exteriors – what I saw was a kind of over wrought and unconscious high energy need, to be approved of, applauded, and acknowledged. Her zeal was undeniable, her commitment was equally undeniable, but her depth was slim and her reach only momentary.

It is only when you can operate from the whole truth, or from both sides, or from the deep center that your reach has the capacity to change more than the surface chatter, that the mind is so capable of producing.

I would say that a good deal of the folk that were in that room, including one of the presenters and the soon to be published author, are so driven, precisely because, they cannot touch the place inside themselves that deeply fears that “I am not special, what I do does not matter, and can you help me rid myself of the burden of a conditioned mind, and the subsequently inauthentic self it has given birth to?”

I look back over the course of my many years of spiritual dedication and I find without fail, that the Teachers, writers, and healers that I have been drawn to were the ones that could help me move, however slowly on my part, toward embracing my fear that I was not special, nothing I did mattered, and who could help me to embrace the death of the self, that is so necessary to live a liberated Life.

Each Teacher in their turn was more powerfully capable than the last, of seeing themselves both as the shining one, and as the dark and hungry one. It is in this synthesis of the opposites, this willingness to see the deeply unconscious fear of not being special or important, that finally gives rise to the Impersonal self, which is more than special and a great deal more than merely important.

Of course, my Beloved Teacher, was the deepest well from which I drank, in all the years when I could not face my own hunger by myself.

In this weekend’s workshop, I sat quietly in that large room and was deeply and compassionately aware, that the vast majority of people on both sides of the influence division were there because they cannot embrace the dark one, the hungry one, and the fearful one.

It is strange for me now, having come such a distance from the belief that anything outside me can save me or resolve what only I can resolve, into a place where so many, are searching for so much.

Mostly it did not arouse me, mostly I was quiet within and unmoving…only twice, did I find myself off the rails and in the weeds.

On Friday night or perhaps Saturday morning when the “how to” became the central focus, I could feel myself winding up and having the potential to get lost. The communication about the one, two, three, of how things work was so clear and so without compromise that like a virus or a contagion, I had to gird my loins, as the Bible says, to protect me from sliding backward, into the notion that we as humans know how the world works, and how to make all things happen.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that I disbelieve the shakers and movers when they say they know how to get it done. Of course they do, look around us, it would be stupid of me to say that things cannot be accomplished in the 1234-step process of “How It All Works” … and I am not a stupid woman.

It is not that I disagree that you can accomplish a great deal following that model, it is rather that I posit the theory that you will not end up where you wanted to go, and so much more importantly, that peace will not end up being the result of the accomplishment you produce.

Here is the flaw, as I see it, in the 1234 linear model of “how things work”; at birth we woke up, in a particular – family/place/time –and by observation and imitation, we acquired a viewpoint that was fixed, solid, and entirely unreal. We began to live from that viewpoint until it became a fixed habit of mind, that fixed habit of mind has a very particular type of blindness, and weakness, and neediness. Out of that blindness, weakness, and neediness we formed what we began to believe were our life goals or purpose, and out of that, we chose actions and the infamous 1234 plan of bringing those goals to fruition.

If you are strong, capable, committed, talented, and willful, a good number of your lifes goals have been accomplished…and then, you are either severely conscious of how much it didn’t match what you were hoping for on the inside, as was the case with me, or you were merely mildly dissatisfied and deeply unconscious of the dissidence between what you imagine and what you received, and therefore you are most likely to have picked a new goal with new objectives to pursue, and carried on “manifesting”. (By the way this is a very bumpy ride and creates a great deal of karmic load, that must be resolved at some point in the future, it is not unlike a child insisting that he gets his way, despite the fact that it puts his well-being in severe and dangerous peril.)

Contrast that with this model.

Consider that there are only two really important experiences to have in our lives, the end of fear and the resurrection of trust. The first requires that we move with total dedication toward what we don’t like, don’t want, are afraid of, and cannot even imagine surviving. As we do this our courage grows – courage from the Latin “cour” meaning to live who you are with your whole heart – the second, trust, which is born of the first.

Now let us say that we have a working familiarity with fearlessness and trust, now we merely sit quietly within the Impersonal self and wait for the action that suits the moment to arise of itself. We cannot have, nor do we need, a plan, a goal, a purpose, a mission, and have long ago resolved the motivations of desire, (which this weekend allowed me to know is not entirely gone from my life).

We come to be aware that, “I of myself can do nothing”…further we allow that what is waiting for us to mature, so that we may be of some use can then move through us unimpeded, and free of the need for a specific outcome, or a certain type of recognition or validation.

This method of bringing things to fruition resolves karma, rather than building up additional debt…and more, it ends emotional hunger, psychological longing, and fruitless striving, along with the utter futility of ending up somewhere that does not and cannot match our internal need for deep connection. The Bible said it best a millennia ago, Matthew 16:26 “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Here is the thing that causes the first rub.

You may not be the one destined for greatness, you may be the one destined to toil quietly in the dark.

So far in my life, I am most definitely the one toiling quietly in the dark.

I once asked my Teacher, before I had resolved resistance in my life, which I haven’t experienced for a good long while now, what the difference was between resignation and acceptance. (You could boil everything he ever taught me, or anyone else, down to that one word…Acceptance, so this was a fairly large question on my part.)

Without a moment’s hesitation he said, ”Acceptance is the capacity to find the beauty and the value in whatever life event we are facing”, and of course that means that resignation is merely the negative, or static form of passive resistance.

The beauty and the value…

I am obese, nearly penniless, aging, without influence of any kind, and almost always alone. I can’t imagine anyone in our world of the best, and the brightest, and the first, experiencing the type of subtle envy that would create for me a fan base, like the one that the publisher described as necessary for selling a spiritual book.

And yet, for every one of those seemingly negative aspects of my life, I could define for you great beauty and great value.

Given the model that was laid out for a book proposal submission, and the requirement of having to be about the business of creating fans, I will not be sending in a book proposal. And that aroused the second ripple that I had the opportunity to work through for myself.

I experienced some measure of sadness or loss around the notion that I will, in all likelihood, not become a traditionally published author…and certainly not the 1 percent of the 1 percent. But you would be wrong in assuming that the loss and sadness I felt was due to being disabused of that illusion. I value greatly being disabused of my illusions, rather, what caused the sensation of loss and sadness was the recognition that there are still remnants of a self who wants and desires.

So late Sunday after the conference was over I found myself in tears, and with a prayer on my lips, (something I rarely do, as I have stopped seeking change that I will imagine will create happiness and change is fundamentally the reason for praying), what I wanted, was some form of help to take me deeper into stripping me free of the self I once imagined me to be.

I miss the power and impact of having the Impersonal Self embodied in another, with whom I can sit and rest. I miss feeling the quiet strength of Emptiness flowing freely and without reservation, toward anyone and everyone who is willing to give up seeking. I miss the wisdom that issues forth from someone who does not need or seek approval or validation. I miss the strength of someone who can say yes to anything and everything that Life presents, without hesitation, argument, or even the slightest shred of disharmony. I miss the Love that has no sentiment, and thus can and does, have the will to shake you free if you have the courage to face your fears.

But that time in my life is over – my Teacher is gone, if not in body then in mind, and more, I no longer need him – that said, I do sometimes miss him.

So I suppose one could guestimate that I received as much as anyone who attended the workshop, but as always, it came not from the external realms where I might have snagged someone else’s attention and support, but rather from the internal realms where I once again recognized that my life, and wealth, and success, and value is measured not by the visible outcomes…but by the invisible capacity to earn for myself the hard truth, the whole truth, the non-dual truth.

As for writing, I do that already and I will always do that, as for publishing I do that already as well, as for earning an income from my work … that remains to be seen, and is, I suspect, not mine to decide. For myself, I will not seek fans, or build a “buzz”, or network, or search for admirers, as all of that runs counter to my message.

My life is a commitment to the inner, the events that populate my external life are drawn to me by the Will of Something larger than myself, and I yield to that…and in the yielding, find for myself a home, a haven, a small measure of sanity in an otherwise insane world.

I suppose the best possible outcome, is that my words and your intention meet somewhere beyond time and distance and support us both, in some small measure, in turning within and discovering the sanctuary that is without limitation, without bounds, and without the need for any form of external support.

It can after all, be said in just one word…

Acceptance.

9/20/11

Post Script: Something about this essay does not sit well with me I cannot find the location of the dissidence I feel surrounding it. So I am left with a quandary, do I delete it and not include you? Or do I send it and trust that even though I find something amiss that you might benefit, even so?

I had a conversation yesterday with my Christian friend and in attempting to describe the value of being disabused of the illusion that I will be able to make a living writing, he commented something along the lines of “so you have given up wanting to be a guru?”

Because he believes so strongly in the story of the Holy Trinity and Jesus as the only son of God, my exploration of other veins of thought has got to be unnerving, for him, if not downright heresy. But in his question he it a nerve and I suspect, that nerve is buried somewhere in this essay. My path has led me from the story of traditional Christianity, into New Age circles, and through that, into the non-dual teachings of the Ageless Wisdom Traditions, of which, my Teacher was a Master.

I am prepared now, finally and hopefully, to dissolve the last stronghold of the conditioned mind upon my life and its direction. The end of desire – a true end to it – is a frightening place. Where will it take me, and how will I survive without it? I hope to discover that answer, and to report it back to you…

9/21/11

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtes of flickr photo sharing and “the trial” if you wish to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/thetrial/1241596127/

Red Or Blue…It Is Entirely Your Choice…

Yesterday I met with a friend with whom I play a board game once a week. He is kind, loving, gentle, deeply loyal, and deserving. In every situation I find myself in, he is prepared to help or serve – when I broke my arm and mentioned that my HOA sent me a warning about the dead tree limbs in my front yard, he pulled out a trimmer and got to work removing them. When I couldn’t understand the math necessary to sell heating and cooling, he attempted to tutor me – (didn’t help of course). He has often said that he would keep me from starving or becoming homeless if my job situation does not improve, even though he lives on only ten dollars an hour, while supporting a wife that does not work and two animals he loves and cares for.

I tell you all this about my kind friend, so that you may know the large manner in which I value him. And so that you may also know, that my examination of our more spicy and direct conversations is not driven by acrimony, but rather by a deep fondness for him and of him.

He has a tendency to occasionally speak, in conspiracy theory type absolutes. He decides that the government, or big business, or some other equally large and inaccessibly monolithic institution, is at FAULT for the current bad state of things, and pronounces the decision with the commitment that is normally reserved for war criminals, child molesters, and baby killers.

On most occasions I do not respond, as there is no place to take those kinds of absolutes. But on occasion we will enter into a spirited debate, (which he enjoys, as most men do enjoy a good joust – for the opportunity of besting an opponent), and we will begin what might appear on the outside to be an argument.

Yesterday, we went to Einstein’s Bagels to have our morning coffee, game time, and the Birthday Bagel they provided me with. (When you have gone without an income as long as I have…a free birthday bagel sounds quite lovely.)

These conversations range the world round. He may start somewhere fairly odd, yesterdays roundabout included our constitution, the FACT that America is the best place to live since the dawn of time, that communism is BAD, that living now with technological tools is better than living millions of years ago and being a hunter-gather, that winning is good and losing is bad, that it is ALWAYS better to compete and win – than to cooperate, and end winning and losing altogether, (my position)…and many more sorts of ideas I cannot recall.

These conversations range so far and wide, not because we are actually covering new ground…but rather, because he is seeking and desiring that I yield to the truth that there are absolutes in the world. That some things are absolutely right and some are absolutely WRONG…that the choice I have made, to slowly but surely eliminate the concept of absolutes from my life, is a choice that causes me to be without a center, without hope, without potential, and without salvation.

He posits the theory that if I view death and life, right and wrong, good and bad, sinners and saints, as two sides of the same thing… that I will simply sit upon my chair unmoving, and let myself starve to death. He can’t understand how or why, any form of action would ever occur to a one such as me, as being necessary.

In short, he fears for someone who cannot see the right and the wrong of things.

In the astonishing breadth of our conversation, as it moved backward and forward in time and swung as wide as the world, in search of an absolute wrong that he could coerce me into agreeing with, I tried to keep one eye on the only goal I had, while in engaging in our conversation. Which was to bring his attention to the understanding that everything he so vehemently believed in was something his mind – and the collective minds of our culture – have pretended into being.

He, somewhat exhausted by my refusal to come to rest on the side of absolute right and wrong, said to me….”no one thinks the way you do, no one else believes the way you do”…and from his perspective I am sure that is quite true.

What baffles him so, and I am sure it would be almost impossible for him to see and/or agree with this, is that I no longer “believe” at all.

Believing, and it truthfully does not matter what you are believing in…is a mind built, mind developed, mind consuming, limitation and constriction of the particular circumstances into which you were born.

You believe that wealth is a good thing, that republicans are right, that health is to be cherished, that babies are to be nurtured, that fame is valuable, that everlasting life awaits us upon our death, that Al Qaeda should be stopped, that murderers should be hung…or any other belief that you could come up with, any and all of them, are a happenstance of the circumstances into which you were born. Had you been born in another time and place, lets say a time when they sacrificed the purest and best baby born that year, to the Gods – and it was a great and wondrous thing to be chosen as the family to save the entire tribe’s yearly crops – or you were born into a rain forest tribe that had no concept of wealth and no form of money – or that the murderer in question was a patriot who started a democratic revolution…in those circumstances, and laboring under those beliefs, your opinion would most likely rotate a full 180 degrees.

Every form of believing is specific to the time, place, and family, into which you were born.

Can you think back in your life to a time in which you fervently believed something…that later on, you came to view as being flawed to the point of being ridiculous?

Can you imagine how much liberation you might encourage for yourself, and in others, if you could free yourself from all forms of believing?

My friend was attempting to pull me toward shore…I was attempting to pull him out to sea.

His perspective is a correct one - when he asserts - that very few indeed, wish to brave the waters of uncharted openness.

To make conscious each and every one of your buried suppositions, to draw out of your mind the very structure upon which it is built, to honor the vulnerability and fragility of our lives by looking at it straight on, to end hoping (future) and longing (past) and instead stand directly in the center of your own mind, never looking to another to direct or to guide you…is NOT, for the faint of heart.

And so, finally, our conversation settled down to the notion that thought is all there is, (his perspective), and that thought is merely a tool that has run amok, (my perspective), and there we tried to find common ground.

He defended thought as being the only reason anything exists, that all products, processes, development, progressions, methodologies, and means of producing anything, is done in and through the medium of thought. (He would be appalled to know that notion is at the root of the New Age movement – being a Christian and all.)

I do not dispute that…

Thought does, and has, and always will be, the source of the products that populate our world. That is not the place upon which I stand…I have no argument with thinking, except when it begins to take the center point away from the Mystery, out of which thought and all its small achievements source.

You can, and he does, argue that cars are better than walking, that guns are better for defense than rocks hewn to a point, that vaccinations are better than throwing babies into volcanoes… and I do not dispute those suppositions. I merely wish for him, and all that I encounter, to recognize that thinking and its many productions are secondary. That thought and it’s many outcomes, will always come in a poor and distant cousin to the freedom to be found in a mind that can pick up, and put down, thinking, as the tool it was meant to be.

We imagine that if we are not thinking, that we are in fact, not alive… so immersed have we become, in the sound of our own inner voice.

It isn’t so.

We are, or can be, dramatically more alive, more available, more present, more capable, more resonant, more willing, more flexible, more radiantly living… if we are not thinking, than when we are listening to mostly redundant or even actively harmful nonsense, which bubbles up out of the soundlessness, due to sheer habit and nothing more.

Our true nature is Silence itself, our true home is Silent, our source is a Silent One. There is no one speaking and yet the Universe is made available, and even understandable, in the Silence that is the source point for the thinking we so desperately cling to, despite the fact, that it batters us nearly unto death.

To check the validity of my statement you need merely to set an eight-month-old, down next to an eighty-year-old. And look to see the freshness and viability of the person who cannot yet use language, counterpointed by the person who has suffered mightily by listening to a lifetime of “believing”.

It is not about the wrinkles, or the gray hair, or the knotted knuckle joints…which causes us to feel the decay of the elderly, as opposed to the sweet soft freshness of the young. It is that the young have not been compromised and polluted by language and believing, it is that their minds are open, intense, available, capable, flexible, and free ranging. Nothing escapes their attention, nothing is too small or insignificant to notice, everything is filled with such wonder and possibility it can, and does, fascinate…while expressing the power of the Mystery out of which it comes, and thus demanding a radiant raptness that cannot be ignored.

But once the mind learns language, and begins to adopt the beliefs into which it was born…the door begins to close, and for most… it closes for lifetime, after lifetime, after lifetime.

Thomas Merton, a much revered Catholic mystic said, “There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality it must starve. It must therefore die. There is no greater misery than to mistake this fruitless death for the true, fruitful and sacrificial ‘death’ by which we enter into life.”

The “unreality” of which he speaks, are the beliefs that veil our capacity to see without opinion, to interact without judgment, to take action without goals, to live free from a demanding and clouded mind. It is the self-made mind that must become the “sacrificial death” if we are to experience the “entering into Life”, that is our birthright.

To pull out of “unreality”, the fantasies and illusions that populated my life well into my thirties, has been the greatest struggle of my life. Whenever I set myself to reminiscing about it, I am reminded of the movie The Matrix and the scene in which one of the supporting characters says to Neo, “don’t you wish now, that you had chosen the blue pill”. In this scene he is referring to the process by which Neo is awakened to the truth of his life, by choosing to swallow either a red or a blue pill.

Morpheus offers him the choice with this dialogue, "You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Whether art is imitating life here, or the other way around…this scene more than imitates the truth that waking up is a matter of discovering a rabbit hole so deep there is no end to it.

That rabbits hole is the one in which you discover that everything that you suppose has ever happened to you, happened in you and from you rather than in the world around you. A notion at one and the same time, so large and so simple as to be almost non-intelligible.

So I must end this small journey we have taken together somewhere…it seems. A way to wrap it up, as they say…

And so I will leave you with a quote from a non-dual Teacher whom I admire and value, and who has the courage to tell it straight.

“If you are, in fact, surrendered to some phenomenal experience, your mind will be pulled out of the experience of your own being as gratification itself, and back into the search for “more” or “different” or “better” – the names of the gateways of hell.”

- Gangaji

More, Better, Different – the names of the gateways of hell – because they keep us looking outside ourselves, turned toward the world and away from the freshness that lies buried beneath a mountain of self generated believing, which in its turn, is born of thinking and its dominion over the once pure and innocent self we were born as.

You cannot think yourself out of the problematic mind and it’s “phenomenal experience”, the task is not to find new and better beliefs…but rather, to swallow the red pill and wake up in a land you cannot even imagine, a land where thinking is optional and Silence is the source of all the well being you have ever searched the world over for.

May your journey be swift, and your aim true, and may you choose with deep understanding… and even deeper reverence.

PS (a reader sent me a response with some questions...it seemed to clarify the above essay and so I include my answers as an adendum to the essay, here in the postscript)

No I do not believe in absolute evil, for a very simple reason, if there is only One then there can only be One, not two. (If I were pressed to define evil, I would define it as very large and very powerful confusion. No one who is not completely confused, would or could, seek to harm themselves or another... but confusion does deep and dark things to a mind...and can cause enormously painful actions to spring into being.)

The difficulties you may experience with respect to my conversation, is perhaps the difference in the understanding between the Outer and the Inner, between event and experience.

I am working toward the commitment to live in the understanding that events are neutral and without intrinsic valuation, (neither good nor bad), and that our experience - or internal response to those events, is what determines their relative good or evil. As the Bible states, (or maybe it was Shakespeare), "there is nothing good or evil under the sun...but thinking makes it so." I do not dispute that there are a great many organizations around the world, as there have always been, who are attempting in their fear, and motivated from their desires, to exercise power or control over others...what I am disputing is that, that has anything at all to do with personal internal freedom - think Nelson Mandela, who had his outer freedom restricted for 32 years while growing in internal freedom with each passing day.

I do not experience this lifetime as one that duplicates another, where I sat in mediation on a mountaintop...that said, I serve in the very best way I know how, and that is to free myself from the spell and trance of the conditioned mind. Where do my written words come from? They come from the Silent Mystery, just as all things do...

Am I retiring from society? No, I do not experience myself as having done so...I merely am not interested in the things that interest most other people. If I am to teach, and carry forward my Teacher's work, then a student will call me forth...that is not mine to decide. I have nothing to sell, make no promises, advance no agenda. I am only and always, doing the work that will clear my mind of its conditioning so that, if and when, the right constellation of events unfolds and I am called into duty I will be prepared and cleansed enough to contribute.

Do I believe in "cause and effect"? Only in the outer...where it is clear that if you accidentally pick up a blazing hot pan as I did just the other night, your fingers will burn, and sizzle, and spittle, and pucker, and smoke, and you will dearly wish you had had the sense to understand that just because the pot was empty, did not mean that the burner was not on, in the outer hot pan, "cause" = deeply painful fingers, "effect". But in the world of the inner where we all truly live, it is not a straight line from "that to this." No effect can be seen to derive in a straight line from some previous cause, in the inner it is free will only. Here is how, as my Teacher defined so powerfully, it is possible to be both the captive of Karma and the Master of our own soul, at one and the same time. What happens to us in the outer, has long ago been decided by Another or by ourselves in a previous life... who is to know...what happens in the inner, can be, totally within our grasp and under our control. When that level of self Mastery is achieved, those who seek control over us in the outer can no longer have any power at all, no matter what they may do to our bodies, finances, institutions, politics, universities, or media outlets. Again, think Mandela, Mahatma, Jesus, Buddha, or my Teacher.

Here is where our greatest work is to be accomplished, like the tree rings of a giant oak sprung up from a tiny acorn...we must be willing to toil alone and in the dark, away from the spotlight and the applause of others, while we seek self awareness, self mastery, and depth understanding...at some point the rings of growth laid down over time and with great commitment, may indeed free more than just ourselves alone, but that too, belongs to the outer and cannot be controlled.

Do I offer meek apologies for my work? I do not know, that would be an evaluation that springs from the minds of others...
Do I value humility? Yes indeed I do, to end the thoughts that populate the mind is a form of radical humility, as it ends the notion that we have a self at all. I have come to see that the self does not exist, and that realization is the greatest gift I, personally, have ever received. To a world that honors the productions of mind and is deeply fearful of the end of those productions, to not have a self means dissolution, disaster, damnation, and being summarily discarded...none of which is true in the slightest. To not be burdened by a mind created self, is to walk free for the very first time. It is to live in harmony as the flower, the bird, and the oak does. It is to yearn for nothing, to open to everything, to drop the dead weight of the mask we pretended into being which sadly, over time, became a "self".

I do not seek to change your mind, just as I do not seek to change my friends mind. To embark upon the journey into selflessness is not something one should even consider if they are not fully committed. I spoke because he asked. I write without promoting it, because it is in my heart and hand to do so...I do not imagine that there is a large audience for what I write, or even a small one...I am just following the cues and impulses that come to me.

My friend, after our lively "debate", at one point said..."I don't know" to one of the many questions I had peppered him with in the circuitous route we took in attempting to find the source of his beliefs. "Right there", I said..."stop right there"- that is the place that seeks you, and me, and him, and all of us on this golden globe...I (of myself) - do - not - know...and herein is the only Truth that can be claimed by any of us. To be willing to be meek enough, humble enough, healed enough, to lay claim to the not knowing place that has been seeking us all our lives, to rest, lean back into, embrace, and become the living, breathing embodiment of "not knowing", is to become the life giving crystalline stream of clarity, the world over is hungering for. To not know is to trust, and really what else is there to do....?

Adayre R. Miller

9/15/11

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Santali to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…www.flickr.com/photos/64775761@N02/6102577429/