à la liberté…

Yesterday I went to an “open call” interview, and had a couple of interesting experiences I thought I would share…

One of the most amazing things about having truly unveiled the impersonal self is the total absence of self-consciousness. Gone is comparing myself in terms of age, or weight, or attractiveness, skill sets, or potential desirability, in its place is the moment-by-moment attention to the present experience. Not talking to myself about whether or not I will like the idea of working in a call center, whether or not I can do the job, whether or not I will get the job, whether or not they will want me, etc. and so on, leaves me free to just be in the moment and watch it unfold.

At one point the intake person, (she was managing the flow of ten or twelve people at a time), announced the name of a young woman sitting to my right. The potential candidates response was loud, direct, and meant to be unpleasantly personal. She complained, and as I said - loudly so - as to how long she had been kept waiting, how she no longer wanted to even submit her application, how if she finally went for the test now… her friend would then have to sit and wait for her to finish, (said friend then spoke up, in an effort to excuse the loud ones behavior, and said that they had been waiting a long time and her friend was really frustrated - a self evident fact for all to see - really).

And it left me with such a clear and direct picture of what it looks like, sounds like, and the losses a life sustains, when one argues with the nature of reality. Inside this young woman’s head, for the hour and forty-five minutes she reported to have been kept waiting, ran a story about how it should not be so…how they should be better organized, or better equipped to handle the large numbers, or how she shouldn’t have to wait so long, or how ineffective they all were…or whatever argument she was running, all of which were lies.

If you find yourself in a position of being blocked from achieving the outcome you think you deserve, value, wish for, hope for, pray for…or just plain want, damn it!!...and you allow yourself to begin arguing with the way your experience is unfolding, then you are lying to yourself and causing great and terrible harm.

You might find my assertion that she was lying to herself hard to believe, but let’s examine it carefully. She was given a window of time in which to appear, 11am to 3pm, there was nothing in that small window that spoke to how long it would take, what would be involved, or how she should expect the time to be spent. (I can say this with authority as I followed the same process to arrive there as did she, a small add posted on CareerBuilder - “job fair 11am – 3 pm”).

So, at some point in the process she began to talk to herself about how she disagreed with the flow of experience. At the moment at which that disagreement began, she was lying to herself… as an example; perhaps she may have said to herself, “They are taking too long, it shouldn’t be like this, they should be doing this better, I shouldn’t have to wait like this” … but in reality, the process was not in her control and each and every event that was taking place, could not have taken place, in any other way. You see this is the most important aspect of learning to live in the truth…life unfolds in exactly the manner in which it does… to argue with that, in any form, is insanity, and destabilizes the mind and heart of all who are doing the arguing.

Despite our beliefs that we can control the events of our life, the truth is, that very little of any real importance, is under our control. We might be able by sheer dent of willpower to accomplish great and wondrous things… only to discover, quite painfully, that nothing we can accomplish, in the outer, fills us with lasting peace or well-being.

Our birth, and death, and safety, is well beyond our control and due to that innate insecurity, somewhere along the line, we begin to lie to ourselves about how things are and we develop a great fondness for soothing ourselves with internal conversation about how things “should be”, which is the lie this young woman was so engaged in.

My Teacher defined this sort of lie as the only “unforgiveable sin”. He defined it in this way, no doubt in part due to his tenure as a Southern Baptist preacher, and because of his consistent focus on learning to live in the “What Is” Truth. The What Is truth does not allow for your personal opinion, personal desires, or personal wishes…the What Is Truth, accepts events as they unfold, without commentary or a shred of resistance to the process or path those events take.

I have taken from Dostoevsky’s, "The Brothers Karamazov" this short quote, which describes the dire effects of lying to oneself.

“The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize the truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices – all this being caused by that man's continual lying to himself and to others.” Note that Dostoevsky asserts that all “evil” comes from lying; from lying to oneself and to others.

Sadly this most basic form of lying to oneself, as demonstrated by this young woman, is not even seen as lying by the vast majority of humanity. Most people would consider her display of pique…just her opinion, or her feelings, or her experience, or some other euphemism to continue allowing the conditioned mind with its pleasure/pain cycling to have dominion over the life she is leading. So conditioned are we, by the mind that desires and rejects, that it has become impossible for us to accept the moment we find ourselves in, just as it presents itself.

Proverbs 19:55 “A false witness will not go unpunished, And he who tells lies will not escape.”

The escape that cannot be made when we lie to ourselves about the “What Is” way of things, the punishment we receive…is not meted out by a Grandfather in the Sky, but rather by our own hand. Confusion, despair, despondency, ruin, darkness, disease, and the death of Aliveness is the punishment we are destined to invite into our lives, should we continue to cleave to the conditioned mind, rather than face the fear required to free ourselves of its grip.

There are only two postures the conditioned mind can take, it is only and always, either rejecting or grasping…that’s it, really. We either want what we don’t have really badly, or we want what we do have to go away…and that, too, really badly.

The young impatient woman was an out loud demonstration of the mind that is rejecting the current moment’s truth. (If waiting for the process by which the company chose to interview had been truthfully wrong for her, she would merely have gotten up and left without disagreement or discourse, in this way even a “no” response is a Yes to Life.)

A few moments later a woman came in who, (I diagnose this by appearance alone – and thus you are free to accept or reject my diagnosis), was living the direct opposite and grasping in vain, for what cannot be acquired.

Her age was undeterminable. Her hair…that lovely shade of light brown – but just pushing auburn, was clean, shiny, straight, and looked as though it should be adorning the head of a seventeen year old, it was so beautiful and well cared for. Her skin however had the appearance of a two hundred year old, leather library chair. It had been so abused by the sun, that it had cracked and fissured and hardened, just exactly in the same manner, as terribly old and rough used leather. She was thin to the point of extremity, her knees circumference was well beyond the dimension of the thigh above it, and her arms were so thin… I am sure I could have circled them twice, by cupping my fingers around them.

Her appearance was so drawn, so debilitated, so painfully waifish…and yet topped with such a lovely head of hair, as to be dramatically dichotomous. The evidence of pain was so clearly on display, as to almost demand my attention. To starve yourself and cook yourself to those extremes, requires an active and very aggressive form of self-hatred.

And these too, are lies.

Somewhere inside this woman was the deep grasping for acceptance that drives so many of us. I know first hand, about this particular demon – as it is the one that nearly drove me off a cliff. To want to be someone, anyone else, than the body, mind, and soul, in which you find yourself. To take up the culture’s belief that thin, (and in her case tan), equates to beautiful…which will in turn provide acceptance and love, is to deeply believe the lies that we have consumed, and to begin living from those lies as one’s foundation for existence.

I could almost feel her cloaked self-hatred.

Of all the many benefits and graces that pour forth from resolving the personal self perhaps the greatest, is the release of the grasping and rejecting cycling of mind.

To find yourself in the circumstances you are in, with no resistance of any kind…to find yourself where and how you are, with no rejecting of any kind… is to find paradise. To live in a mind that neither reaches nor rejects, is to live free of the pain that surrounds and drives the human experience.

Recently at an Eckhart Tolle video group I have joined, a woman spoke with great concern over the potential loss of her “humanness”, should she discover the capacity to “awaken”. This kind of anxiety is one of the many ways in which the clever egoic mind prevents us from taking the necessary step into clarity, that would resolve and dissolve its hold over our lives.

We hold to our “humanness” as a means by which we relate to others… without it, we assume, we will no longer have the capacity for compassion or the will to work toward a greater healing. Or we see it as the foil against which we measure our spiritual goodness, or potential greatness.

Both of these are merely new disguises for an old fear. It is true that “humanness”, or the egoic and conditioned mind must face the death it so fears, if we are to liberate ourselves. And it is equally true, that when you reach a place at which your mind can no longer lure you into the lies you once told yourself for the purpose of soothing your fears, that you will, in fact, be alone.

But that aloneness is just like the Silence, Emptiness, and Nothingness that the Ageless Wisdom Teachings have variously used to describe our rightful home. Aloneness in the context of a Silent Mind, is to be included in a way and in a manner, that no amount of external approval can ever provide. We cannot take the conditioned mind into the Silence, it cannot survive there, we therefore cannot maintain our “humanness” if we wish to save ourselves, our planet, our species.

We must be willing to evolve beyond humanness into the Impersonal Self that is the Divine awakened. To allow the Universe to see through our eyes, to hear through our ears, to witness through our unencumbered mind, to love without sentiment through our open and unimpeded hearts…this is our mandate, and our only hope.

To begin; tell the truth, in all ways and at all times.

Not just the relative truth, but also the larger truth. The truth that knows Life is as Life does, and we are where, who, and how we are, not so that we can change the world...but so that the world may change us.

The Truth, as the Bible so boldly states, can and will “set you free”.

It is reported that there are 27 million among us, living on this blue globe, who are, at any given moment, living as physical slaves. We in the west with our relative physical freedom are aghast at such a report. And yet, every human being, who has ever lived and died… and done so, laboring under the conditioned mind is living in slavery just as surely as any poor soul, in a third world hostage situation. Could it be, that our brethren whose physical lives are led in slavery, are in some way the out picturing of a world filled with lives that are slaves to acceptance, approval, wants, desires, and demands? Could it be that freeing ourselves from the hold of the conditioned mind would set the whole world free? Is freedom worth giving up your personal opinions, beliefs, judgments, and desires? Can you wait even a moment longer for liberation… can they…?

‘A la liberté…

Adayre R. Miller

9/2/11

photo courtesy of flikr photo sharing and Roelien Vorster., to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link… www.flickr.com/photos/38140648@N06/3720388575/