There is a Tibetan proverb that speaks to the process by which we come into the fullness of our lived spiritual expression.
It is… “Don’t mistake understanding, for realization. Don’t mistake realization for liberation.” (This courtesy of a new website I have discovered called Buddha at the Gas Pump, aka – batgap.com – I would so encourage your having a look).
It took me many years to understand my Teacher’s conversation regarding the Impersonal Self, and only very recently have I been able to move understanding into the realms of realization. To realize the Silence out of which mind sources, is to come into an entirely different understanding about who we are, what we are here for, and why our lives are as they are.
I have begun, in recent months, to deepen and broaden the move from understanding to realization, but only twelve short hours ago have I had my first taste of Liberation…and I just had to share it with you.
This quote is posted above my computer and I refer to it often…”As Milarepa sang to the monsters he found in his cave, ‘it is wonderful you demons came today. You must come again tomorrow. From time to time, we should converse.”
As I move closer to some form of decisive action with respect to my obligations and how to meet them, the “demons…they came a visitin’ last night.”
And I thought to share their visit with you, in case you might find some benefit for yourselves.
The temptation to see myself as having failed, and failed spectacularly, in the circumstances in which I find myself, are, as you might imagine enormous.
I am aging; flat broke, without prospects, and on the verge of some form of homelessness, and/or deeper travail. Within that context, last night I joined the voyeuristic community, that is reality television, and watched a program called “Hoarders”.
As the woman who’s home appeared to be the county dump site, railed against the help that was being offered, and blamed everyone within ear shot for the circumstances of her home and its slow descent into a sea of garbage…some combination of her rage, unconsciousness, projection, and general ill will toward her husband and sons, found its way into my nervous system, and sparked a flood of “what is wrong with me” internal conversation.
The, what is wrong with me question, is my oldest and most intimate demon. It has come to visit me, since the moment I could form the language with which to invite it.
Last night it took hold of me and began to blame my long bout with unemployment and all my current circumstances, with a chorus of “what is wrong” with me…sung badly, and out of tune, to the melody of “you deserve this.”
That experience is as common as household dust for me…what is utterly uncommon, and occurred for the very first time last night, was the liberation occasioned by the Impersonal Self on behalf of the personal self, I once believed me to be.
I don’t have the nuanced language necessary to fully describe the experience my flesh was having. Certainly I could say that my gut was tightening up, my blood pressure was surely on the rise, my nervous system was shimmering, my heart was contracted, and my attention was narrowing and beginning the unconscious search for an external threat.
My mind had begun to sing the song that maybe I was just as crazy as the woman who was so fiercely fighting to keep her garbage, that maybe my slowly suffocating in poverty, was as surely my creation as was her mountain of boxes. (She was having the greatest discord with those that came to help her, her children, husband, and friends, over cardboard boxes…yes, you heard correctly empty boxes…which she was prepared to fight to the death for, and lord, that made her seem batshit crazy.)
I have often avoided these particular “what is wrong with me” monsters in my cave, by singing back to them that all of this, (whatever this might be), is in the service of making me into a much-better-some-day-soon-to-be, spiritual Teacher, somewhere off into the future… And with that slender blade, I have – in the past – been able to quiet the “what is wrong with me” and “I am crazy” monsters, enough to move back into a comfortable cohabitation with them.
But last night was different… no longer able to avail myself of my slender blade of future someday happiness, I did not unsheathe my small, and truthfully useless weapon to deal with my cave monster visit, in the same predictable and habitual manner. I merely stood there, naked and defenseless. (Metaphorically speaking. I don’t often stand anywhere naked…).
And then the most amazing thing happened.
The Impersonal Self, the one who does not speak, who does not fantasize, who does not project, who does not own, or compete, or compare, or fear, or distrust, or need, or want, or desire, or is in any way limited to me personally…breathed into me and dissolved my old friend, the “what is wrong with me” demon, like vapor before the rising sun.
(Please resist the temptation to hear this in a way that depicts us as two, the Impersonal self and me, there are not two…only one, but the limitations of language make it sound thus, and I am someone who greatly enjoys the poetic use of language. Just remember, not two, only One.)
My blood pressure instantly began to return to normal, the shivering over the surface of my nerves dissolved away, my heart opened wider than I can ever remember it doing, my gut flowed back to pre-fight or flight status, and my what is “wrong with me” song… fell out of my mind with almost a surprised yelp, (as though it had been caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar). It was, at one and the same time, comical, vastly relieving, hugely liberating, wildly beneficial, and deeply moving.
This, I believe, is my first real glimpse of “liberation”.
Here is a brief paragraph from the vast volumes of information I was given by my Teacher, George Addair. He states, “The ability to determine your level of Being is directly associated with your ability to renounce your attachments. If you are attached to an object, idea, dream, or a person, you can rise no higher on the vertical scale of Being, than the thing you are attached to. Renunciation is necessary in order to rise higher. It is imperative that you understand that renunciation is always in the mind, not in behavior. The goal is to not let the mind turn outward. You cannot control events. They are determined by the destiny of cause and effect, but your mind is under your control 100% of the time, and is what determines your level of Being.” (When the question of free will vs. determinism or Karma was put to George, he always answered that paradoxically they are both true. Outer events are pre-determined, inner experience is where free will resides.)
By virtue of the responses I received from my request for your prayers that I be able to let go my long held dream of teaching/speaking, it is clear that I did not create the understanding that I sought your prayers, for my release, of the attachment to…not the behavior of. And, in truth, I perhaps did not even clearly recognize the distinction myself.
My Teachers assertion was always that the events that happen in the outer are not determined by us, (despite the vast majority of Americans believing that we can mold, shape, source, direct, and manifest our destinies), and that our only real, and absolute, control is found in our responses to our circumstances. I find that not only does my mind now agree with this idea, but so does my heart and my soul. (Emerson, my other personal favorite – as you well know – agreed with it as well, when he said…”What comes to you belongs to you.”) Nothing of any real value happens in the outer, all that is eternal is also internal.
I have been “praying” mightily to be released from my attachment to teaching/speaking/writing, for some time now. I submit that last nights first breath of Liberation, is a direct response to that prayer.
In the twenty five years that I had the miraculous and quite glorious opportunity to be George Addair’s faithful student, I had only three short personal visits with him, all of which effected me so powerfully that it was as though he had reached inside my chest and touched my beating heart with his powerfully cleansing fingers. Two of those visits left me bedridden for almost two weeks, so impacted did my system feel.
I also had a small number of email exchanges with him, five or so. (All of the rest of my experience of him, over the twenty-five years, was in groups of one sort or another.) In one of them, on September 21, 2004 he wrote this, in response to a question I had sent him…
”This is my first activity of the day, even before a drink of water. I feel the life in you as it weaves its way through the pathway of obstacles. What moves me most is the fact that you keep moving forward in spite of the blocks that loom before you (us). (He is ever humble, and his parenthetical inclusion of himself at my level, is just one more example of his humility.) I think you have found the way. Your description of the path matches mine. And I think you have learned that we travel alone when we pass through the valley. Perhaps, when we no longer think of turning back, no longer waver in the lonely darkness, and nothing else matters except to go on, then we shall find beauty all around us. I long for the day that you discover that you are really traveling the path for someone other than yourself.”
It has been several years now, since I “wavered in the darkness”…and surely it is true beyond questioning that, “nothing else matters to me, except to go on”…and I am just now beginning to see the beauty in everything that happens to me, poverty, potential homelessness, et. al.
But here is the very best thing… and since I cannot share it with him, my spiritual father, please allow me to share it with you.
The realization of the Impersonal Self, the touching of the Silent Source of mind, has finally driven enough greed, grasping, and clutching from my heart, to make possible the potential understanding that he yearned for me to recognize, and I am now “discovering that I am traveling the path for someone other than myself,” or my own personal comfort and peace of mind.
Not in the sentimental way I once perceived that idea, that I would someday get to be a teacher and a communicator of spiritual ideas…but rather, that my efforts – as exemplified last night –- alone within the confines of my own mind, naked, innocent, open and undefended against my personal demons, greatly benefit all of humanity… dead, born, or yet unborn, and the cosmos as well.
That one woman, finally capable, and alone in her own thoughts, willingly bared her breast to the knife’s edge, is the culmination of a lifetimes worth of spiritual work.
And it was not for me…as such…
Do I benefit? Beyond measure.
But so do you…
If, a woman as common and ill gifted as me – can find within – the courage to stand alone in the face of her oldest demon, and silently prevail…then it is true for us all.
If one such as me can reveal the Silence, then we can all find our way home. It is only a matter of willingness and commitment, as I have no other gifts than these, and they are as common as leaves upon a tree.
Clinging to the attachment to future happiness which made it possible to survive a desperate childhood, long enough to meet George Addair, and under his most elegant guidance…to have the potential to become of use, silently, to the human family and further, to recognize that as the only reason for breathing, is my greatest good fortune.
The Nova science documentary I sent you, has detailed that the science of physics and higher mathematics has proven beyond dispute that the fabric of spacetime is not empty. But rather is filled to the brim with moving, energetic, largely unknowable, and likely highly information garnering stuff, (my opinion), or Dark Energy, as they called it. Further that this Dark Energy constitutes seventy percent of the cosmos, and clearly connects every thing with every thing else. (It resides in the space between you and me as well…so say the best minds in the field, and accounts for why particles can communicate over vast differences in location, and thereby behave harmoniously.)
(You may find that documentary, entitled The Fabric of the Cosmos: Part One, What Is Space – at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html it is so very much worth your time.
It is not a leap for me to understand that if I can liberate myself from the oldest demon in my life, (not that I don’t expect him to show up once again – but who could possibly be afraid of him now – that he has been exposed as vapor), that my potential liberation can and does affect yours…even if we never meet, speak, or touch.
This is the Sense of Universality that my Teacher promised would awaken within us, when we had allowed enough detritus to fall away.
He often spoke about how moved he would be, while in the grocer’s aisle, at his being capable of feeling the labors and toiling of the farmers who provided the food that would soon be nourishing his body, so complete was his Sense of Universality.
His caretakers have told stories about how his joining a cashier’s line of garrulous, agitated, and quarrelsome customers, would silence their disturbance and soften their behavior, to the point that the cashier would comment on it.
In particular I am fond of the story of his visiting a new dentist, well into his disease process, when he could no longer concentrate or demonstrate his great teaching ability.
His caretaker moved him out of his wheel chair and into the dentist chair, when the procedure was complete and she had come to collect him, the Dentist would not let go of him. The Dentist put him back in his wheelchair, pushed him out to the car, put him in the car, hung over the window looking at him, and all the while asking his caretaker who he was…which really meant, what manner of man is this?
The reason for his effect on so many people is due entirely, to Agape Love being so well established in him. The Impersonal Self was a palpable presence in him, and no shred of the personal was still holding him hostage.
I have come to a new definition of Agape Love, which is that in its essence it is… Noticing and Allowing. There is nothing that escaped George Addair’s attention, and nothing that was not allowed. He had divested himself entirely, of the universal human experience of resistance. He had no internal or external conflicts. He wore his divinity like a graceful cloak, and his humanity like a personal poem to the Universe.
And the steps are; Understanding blooms into Realization. Realization transforms into Liberation.
…And Liberation…is the Universal Light of Salvation.
Adayre R. Miller
11/15/11
The photo is courtesy of flikr photo sharing and Paul Fontana to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amiko/181961483/in/photostream
