Hallelujah……

In recent weeks, I have lost three jobs that I interviewed for with the best, most ship shape persona I could pull out of my bag of tricks. I lost a friend who described our conversations as having become stale. I lost a small income stream a friend had offered, and then mysteriously decided not to follow through with. I am losing the very last of my financial reserves, and now am faced with having to make some rather drastic decisions to curtail the impact of my financial lack from affecting my sister, who still has an income position in my house. (I am beginning the process of moving out, and either selling the property at a substantial loss, or attempting to rent it, and thereby meet my obligation to my sister.)

I tell you my circumstances, not so that I engender sympathy in you…but rather, to engage in the process of inquiry and the necessary growth that inquiry can bring.

In all the losses that have occurred over the course of the last three years, the greatest of them has been my belief in a future happiness.

This loss is the most difficult, and yet the most freeing.

To give up the notion that it “will get better some day”, in the face of one of the most challenging periods of my life…has been a deeply demanding process. (Moving to the future was my very favorite way of avoiding perceived difficulty in the present.)

This “getting better some day”, in our culture, goes by the more common name of Hope, and or Dreams. We are encouraged by every source imaginable to look to tomorrow to ease the suffering of today’s limitations.

Whole structures are built upon this idea; large businesses, psychological institutions, schools of every stripe, almost every entertainment venue includes a future orientation, and every story that ever began with “Once upon a time…”

Prying my cold, dead, fingers, from around the neck of “the future” has been the biggest thing I have ever attempted to accomplish. I am not at all sure I am winning at it…but I am certain it is the only gateway to happiness that exists.

I am not someone who thinks a great deal about happiness. Suffering was such an overwhelming companion in my early life, and had become so constant, that I wove an identity for myself from its’ dark coziness, and happiness, therefore, was not a notion that I spent much time indulging in…I still don’t.

When the capacity for experiencing myself wrapped in the breathing aliveness, of a silent mind, was first introduced to my system, (a grace I am sure I did nothing to be worthy of)… that Silence, made clear several different things.

The first and foremost is that every thing I ever believed about myself was a mental construct, (made from thought derived abstractions and having no basis in reality at all). Further, that everything I have ever believed about life, life’s processes, the past and the future, are all equally mental constructs, fabricated out of who-knows-what hobbled together compilations of; internal dialogue, learned behaviors, habitual mind patterns, and cultural traditions.

To discover that everything you have ever believed in, from the nursery rhymes in childhood, to the pledge of allegiance in grade school, to the Prince Charming of early adulthood, to the “manifesting” of New Age dictums…are all just a large game of “let’s pretend”…is a foundation rocking realization, and one that requires Silence for its unveiling.

I was recently introduced, via email, to a “healer” from Croatia who travels the globe, “gazing” at folk. He does not speak, does not listen…but merely gazes. He – on a tall platform – so that he may be seen by the back of the room, and large crowds of people who are “gazed” at for fifteen-minute intervals in hourly shifts. These healing events are attended by thousands of people, in dozens of different cities, on almost every continent.

I have no idea who he is, whether or not his “gazing” heals, and if, or if not, his work has legitimate effect.

But I do know, without equivocation, that silence is the mind’s optimum state. It would be my guess that it would be quite difficult to stand in front of thousands of people and quietly gaze upon them, without benefit of a silent mind.

These last weeks, as-one-right-after-another, forms of financial salvation have slipped away from my grasping fingers…Silence has been the only possible safety, from the perception of lack, that crowds the internal shores of my life from every conceivable direction.

The truly difficult part is that you cannot “want” Silence. You cannot grasp it, or encourage it, or demand it, or learn it, or sneak up on it. You cannot be worthy of it, or be made special by it. You cannot hope for it, or dream about it, or work toward it.

And yet…

It is the only answer, to every shred of human suffering that has ever been, or will ever be.

It is the threshold between living a life of make believe, or living in the vast mystery of the unknowable Truth.

There is a very mysterious component to the Silence that is the source point of mind. It has no methodology, (as far as I can tell), by which to attract your attention, it is as if it were a somewhat indulgent parent…watching you from afar, running hither and yon looking for salvation in all the wrong places.

My sense of it is that you could go your whole life through without once ever knowing that your “self” is a myth generated by the mind that chatters, and the Impersonal Self would have no problem with that at all.

Of course, nothing at all, can be problematic from the position of Silence.

As your mind unwinds like a dreidel coming to rest, slower and slower it spins, you can see quite clearly that the only problem that has ever, or will ever exist, is the capacity to describe an event as problematic, and then convince yourself that the description is real.

For myself, I vacillate, between Silence and chatter.

Waiting is a particularly difficult process for me. My father’s only measureable effect upon my life was his total untrustworthiness. He was forever making promises to me, which almost never came true. “I’ll be home early tonight, or we’ll go fishing on Saturday”, or hundreds of other promises which I waited for the fulfillment of, with waning hope to see if they would come true…and mostly they never did. I remember quite clearly deciding to stop believing him, when I was nine years old. I just couldn’t bear the waiting any longer…

So as I waited for second interviews, for my friend to respond to an email, for a job that I have some hope of fitting into to appear on the job boards, for some form of movement in the ever-increasing pressure of financial lack…I could not maintain my connection to Silence.

The belief that my thinking mind can, and will, provide me with a solution to my problem was to great…the desire for a future with less restriction was to desirable…the will to overcome was to strong…and thus the Silence left my life, and took with it the Sun and the Light.

In lieu of essays, I had sent you several videos that have been of great value to me. I have not heard from any of you regarding their content, or receipt, so I have no way of knowing if you found value in them.

But for me, the song I sent is the one that moved me the most.

In that song, is this phrase…”And even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah…”

Some where in the depths of my being, I know that this period of my life is about whittling me down to “nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah”…this is not a thing being done to me, but rather by and for, some deep version of me, yet unknown.

If Silence could be sung it would be the sound of the Hallelujah made most soulful, by these four Canadian tenors.

The pressure to search for, and believe in, a mental solution to my problem is immense. The desire to look to the future, and hope and dream, is deeply seductive. The need to be spared the coming losses puddles inside me like a weeping child.

And yet…

The Silence within awaits… secure, comfortable, quiet. It waits to see if I can remember it, if I can pull away from the seductions and return my attention to the limitless realms of Silent, Deep, and Unfathomable Source. To see, if I can rescue myself from the self created and conditioned mind, to see if I have the will to walk away from the comforting, in favor of the True but Unknowable.

My Teacher once said that you cannot know where you are on the scale of unfolding Being, you can only know which direction you are traveling in…

We are only, and always, looking to the outer and the future for salvation…or willingly stripping ourselves naked, so that we may stand “before the Lord of Song with nothing on our Tongues but Hallelujah.”

With all my heart, with all my will, with all my childhood prayers…may I know the Silence more deeply, and empty more fully, the mind’s conditioning upon my life, and whatever meager gifts I may have to give.

Adayre R. Miller

11/11/11

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and musicmuse to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…http://www.flickr.com/photos/42304632@N00/388083743/