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.