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/
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