It Can Carry Me the Rest of the Way Home…

I have a good deal more to unpack…perhaps its not too soon to hear from me again?

First I wish to modify and expand the quotes I provided from my Teachers. Terms like “apathy”, “high indifference”, and the “discovery of not giving a damn”…these terms are modern day language for an ancient concept known as non-attachment, or detachment. I suspect both of my teachers use these fairly provocative, and somewhat shocking terms, to express the certainty that you cannot have the clarity and whole sightedness, of your true nature as Eternal Awareness, and at the same time remain attached to your quite personal preferences, passions, hopes, dreams, and opinions. You must either choose the pendulum swings of grasping or avoidance that was conditioned into the development of your egoic mind structure, or be willing to burn them unto death, so that your unique and embodied freedom may arise within you. (I wanted to clarify that, rather than run the risk that you might interpret “not giving a damn”, as the avoidance half of the grasping/avoidance cycle of expression, which is what comprises the entirety of the personal self.)

It is either the life of suffering born of the personal, or the freedom and expansiveness of the everlasting impersonal. It is not a both/and proposition. It is not easy to develop this correlative or unitive vision, (whole seeing), in which there are no distinctions between good and bad, nothing and something, success and failure. The Upanishads describe it as the path of the razor’s edge, a balancing act on the sharpest and thinnest of lines. It is that razor’s edge that is coming into view in my life, at this moment in time, and with the strongest, cleanest, and clearest, access I have ever had to it.

As my creative efforts continue being dismantled, my gladness at their leaving expands almost exponentially.

I think I may have the first glimpses of why this is so…

The woman I am working for has been in my life for more than 25 years. We have not always had close contact, but we have always had the exact same form of relationship…one that has required of me a deep evolution, that is just now coming into full flower.

She has a very magnetic personality and a large and quite committed following. I knew her before the crowds came that now surround her, but I suspect the reason they are drawn into her sphere, is a very similar reason for why I was also drawn.

Her bearing, capacities, talents, mode of conduct, vision, and process all produce a subtle and tangible form of promise. A perfume of potentiality that makes you feel, and even believe, that being near her, with her, following her, will help you to create the dreams that drive the conditioned mind’s very existence.

In fact her business’s motto is to “do your dream”.

And that is not only fine, but also wonderful…as long as you continue to believe in the concept of dreaming and the desire to fulfill those dreams…

I have left that place behind me. That does not make me better, more spiritual, more or less of anything at all. It, however, does mean that I have fully committed myself to the death of the personal in this my current “lifestream”. Here is how Eli Jaxon Bear describes this bloom of the impersonal self.

“Freedom is the only real choice in a lifetime. All choices made from fixation are mechanical and predictable, having neither weight nor free will. The choice to be free is the only true, and final, choice that arises in a lifestream. Once freedom is chosen, the fixated life is surrendered. This surrender is the giving up of following choices driven by fixation. Then life is without choice. When freedom is in control, there is no one choosing and nothing to choose. Personal control has been surrendered, so that personal choice has no real meaning. Life then flows without choice as a divine expression of love.

True desire for freedom is the last desire of the ego. Before this desire arises, the fixated ego is lost in myriad desires and fears. Spiritual maturity is the willingness to put all desires into one final desire for freedom. This final desire leads the egoic mind to its surrender in the face of something huge and unknown. When the ego is willing to die for freedom, it will eventually face its death and die. What remains is what is untouched by death, and the deathless soul realizes itself as immortal consciousness. This is the end of the search and the beginning of true love.”

I have come to this “last true desire”, and my relationship with the woman whose gifts help so many to pursue their dreams, is a central component of my having finally made my way to this last most valuable shore.

I have been, and was perhaps, her first follower. The weaknesses in my heart and mind, the fears that were born out of my childhood, the unknown that scared me senseless, were all modified by her presence in my life…as I suspect they are for a great number of people. That she can provide that service to others is a good thing, and I would not consider trying to take that from a single soul who desires it.

As for me, our long journey together has allowed me to burn through the last remaining dependencies I was in bondage to; on her, on dreaming as an idea, on hope, the future, winning, success, fame, recognition, applause, approval, and much much more, that I may not even be aware of. I have come into the full weight and heft of this most poetic of descriptions from Lao Tzu:

“Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

Arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.” ~ Lao Tzu

I have fallen in love with that “darkness within darkness” and its gateway to all understanding. The last and final desire for freedom has arisen, the total willingness to leave behind the protection of the bastion of believing, and move ever deeper into the unknowable depths is the only thing left in me.

I weep in gratitude…

The woman for whom I work, and I, have had a very unconscious, (on my part), yet very active contract. I would provide her, sometimes with great resentment on my part, with my time, talents, energies and commitments, provided she continued to provide me with that perfume of the belief in my potentiality, that I spoke of above. As I began the slow and plodding process of awakening from the slumber of a better and dream fulfilled future, our exchanges were often fraught with great and ugly and awful tensions, (my side), and frustration and exasperations, (her side).

As I awoke to the realization that the future does not exist, as that realization found its way into my body and began rearranging the molecular structure of my cells, she was consistently providing her part of our bargain…while I was moving ever farther afield.

The one thing we could both count on was the exchange of my talent for her protection. The destruction of the evidence of my talent, in her environment, is an out picturing of the end of that unconscious contract.

It is so good for us both, for that to come to an end. I notice as I move through the building how many people wish me to talk about the intrigue of the dismantling that is taking place. Interpersonal intrigue is the glue that binds all egoic transactions, the “he said, she said” dramas, that pass for relationship are as alive and well in this work environment, as they have been in every public situation I have ever been a part of. Several people have come up to me and with a subtle non-verbal cue, have given me the signal that they would be compellingly interested in the drama I must surely be feeling as my work is destroyed. I see it in their eyes and in the moistness of their bated breath. Particularly so, in a few that I have known for a while. I am suddenly invited into circles heretofore un-open to me for the same reason.

I understand it. You need only watch one night worth of TV, to be made aware of how juicy is the “dish” of personal relating, as depicted on “reality” TV that passes for entertainment in our soul starved culture. I have no argument with their desire to hear me cast her in the role of manipulator or fiend, but it simply is not so, and no amount of their desire to have their own resentments validated, will draw me backward into that form of relating. Even as we work to formally end my dependencies upon her capacity to weave dreams, my only reaction is one of humble gratitude.

Some years ago, my Beloved Teacher introduced me to one of his favorite authors, a man by the name of Manly P. Hall. The tile of his work is called “The Lonely Ones”, and in it he depicts the journey of the solitary ones as they move from the drama filled life of the personal, into the “darkness within darkness” of the deep understanding available only to the impersonal life.

We, in our innocent ignorance, assume that “awakening” and “enlightenment” will be something akin to popularity on steroids. Everyone will know us, will want to be with us, and will hang upon our every word. We will heal the masses, feed the multitudes, and turn water into wine… and be celebrated for it on every talk show coast to coast. But that is the distorted lens of the egoic mind’s conditioning, suggesting to us that awakening will solve all our infantile demands for attention, approval, and acceptance. Never once do we turn our attention to the other half of the Christ story, where we will be betrayed by those closest to us, cast out by those whom we are attempting to serve, and finally crucified as was necessary for Impersonal Freedom to make its way onto the planet. No sirree bob!!... we want no part of that type of awakening. No lines are forming around the block for that form of “enlightenment”.

And yet, it is the perfected picture of what is required. Hall’s “The Lonely Ones” is the story of that specific form of enlightenment. That to truly be free from the egoic drama of the personal self, one must be willing to actually die. I find that willingness within myself, so completely, that it has transformed into a sort of sweet sorrow. A willing release of the personal and all its pseudo pursuits, in favor of the lonely path to non dual and non separate existence.

I will end with this passage from Allan Watts, who said: “You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real “you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.” This is the only version of “me” that is left now, an eternal coming and going, a manifestation of the universe looking at itself from a billion points of view.

And from Lao Tzu, this, “The utility of a house depends on the empty spaces. Thus, while the existence of things may be good, it is the non-existent in them which makes them serviceable.” Lao Tzu

I have found the non-existent within me; it has no personal agenda, no grasping, and no avoidance. It can stand in the face of a man/child’s attack, and remain unmoving and unmoved. It can witness the destruction of its creative energies with total non-involvement. It can free itself from the seduction of dreams, dream makers, and the hopeful wish for a better tomorrow. It can breathe the free air, of the fresh perspective, of the ever arising Now.

It can carry me the rest of the way home…

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and, MudMapImages to see more of this artist work please follow this link… http://www.flickr.com/photos/mudmapimages/4496029951/

Freedom On a Miniature Pink Plastic Spoon…

My week has included such enormous growth spurts I almost don’t know how to begin to describe it. It has put me into a place I have never been before, a place I have only heard my Teachers talk about, a place I would not have imagined possible for someone as slow and plodding as I have always been.

I so wish that I could some how reach inside my heart and give you a taste of what this place is like. Like Baskin Robbins, a small dollop of total personal freedom on a miniature pink plastic spoon…nuts with that? Sprinkles?

I have only ever read about this place, or heard about it from people whose worth cannot be contested in my mind and heart…and yet, it is so utterly simple, how did I ever miss it…!!??

My tale begins with an episode of a near epic attempt to completely and totally dominate me, to a point that is fairly shocking.

The company I work for informed me, that I would need to share an office space with a man that I have never formally interacted with…but whom almost everyone I work with, has a very strong opinion of.

His reputation is so extreme, that several people expressed real concern for me that I would have to share anything at all with him, and advised that I do all that I could to keep a low profile so as to not disturb him.

Of course I did not heed their warning…a character flaw of mine, no doubt.

As I watched him moving into the space we were supposed to “share”, him for 20 hours a week, me for 40…it was very clear that my needs or desires regarding that space would not be a consideration for him, in any form.

While I was working in the halls early this week, he came up to me and asked a question about something I was doing. We exchanged a few words, and in a moment of sheer internal pressure to express my desire to have some small measure of control over the environment in which I was slated to spend 40 hours a week of my life for the foreseeable future, I said to him, these words. “Richard, as you can see by the commitment of effort, time, energy and excellence that I bring to the process of my design work that my environment is very important to me…so…I just want to say that if we are to share an office, I hope that you will be willing to come to some compromises as to the development of that space.” (That may not be word for word, but it is entirely accurate to the content.)

He was immediately and completely angered. His response was very surprising in its speed, projection, commitment, and content. He strove with all his considerable might to cower me into some form of submission that would support his need for winning through domination. I was rocked back on my heels, but was not cowed, as I have faced, met, and fully accepted the primary fears of my life…and thus cannot be scared in the manner that he was used to being able to intimidate others. I suspect my very lack of “normal” response fed the fire that was instantly burning for him. I did not back down, turn away, fold like a cheap suit, or otherwise allow him to win. I also did not actively fight with him…I merely disagreed. As I did so, he moved into my sphere, glared and bore down on me with his eyes, maligned my character, accused me of having damaging “energy”, attacked me for bringing this up in the hallway rather than coming to him in his office and communicating in the “right” way, and finally threatened me with going to the boss, a grown up derivation of “I’m going to go tell Mommy on you”, which he did in fact do… (I also overheard him telling several other employees, describing for them, my total lack of worthiness.)

The boss did in fact come find me, after his explosion, and I was warned about the need to keep him on task and to leave him alone.

As the vibrations of that level of an attempt to intimidate and control me, along with the concomitant reverb washed over me, the adrenaline I was feeling in my body was extremely powerful. It came in waves of heat that felt very much like being on a beach witnessing the rise and fall of powerful pounding on the sand. My mind went immediately and potently into the desire to defend myself, to produce a “story” of how much I had been maligned both by him, and the owner of the companies’ assertion, that I do not recognize my own failings.

The pull and stickiness of the desire to cast myself in the role of helpless victim, was so intensely powerful it nearly swept me off my feet. And for the first time ever, in all the years of my life, I did not allow it to carry me away. As Gangaji, one of the teachers I have great respect for calls it; I allowed the experience to “burn” me.

I watched with intense and focused commitment my yearning to be the innocent one, the wronged one, the maligned one…it did indeed burn me. Staying with the energy, not allowing myself to disperse it by gathering others into my sphere and telling them of his assault on me and casting him in the role of devil, I merely went back to working on the walls and watching my internal history go up in flames. It burned for the better part of the day…and I cannot adequately describe how potent it was. Although I have not, thankfully, had this experience, it was a bit like having your fingernails pulled off one by one. And like every wound laid bare, the mere movement of air caused the burn to reignite.

And not one time, not for one instant, not even to myself…did I allow a “story” to coalesce inside my mind. And not one time to a single soul, did I, or have I, or will I, ever tell the “story” of him as wrong or dangerous. (Hopefully you can tell that my recounting of it now, is not about his behavior, but rather, about my growth.)

I won. Fully and completely. I was the sole victor, and the sole opponent, in a fight to the death with and in myself, for the full freedom of my soul.

I won.

Never again will I be able to go back into the trance necessary to place myself into the drugged state of sleep consciousness, that is required to cast myself as victim and someone else as the devil. Never again.

Do I need to describe the freedom in that? Surely not.

But wait…there is more.

The work that I am doing is something that I have never once failed at, literally, never one time. I know that sounds quite exaggerated, but it is true. I have had people dislike me over the years, or have trouble dealing with my process, but no one has ever been unhappy with the work itself.

And in this case I was more than confident that I had gotten it totally right. Before work ever began, I had showed the client, and several employees, the entire palette. I had pictures of the rock fountain that was to be the central focus, I had a sample of the papered wall treatment, I had samples of the accent rocks I was going to use, and the fabric choices. It was all displayed and agreed to by everyone concerned.

I then went out and purchased a great number of items that “answered” or referred back to those original agreements. I pushed my body terribly to finish the front entry hall as a way of making the entire process visible to all concerned, and the shear volume of excited and enthusiastic compliments was truly surprising. I have never done work in such a public setting as this, and the volume of praise for the work that was now fully developed was quite staggering. (My crew, as they were in the halls more than myself, was especially flooded with compliments and glad handing…to the degree that they are taking the work to heart and very personally.)

In that emotional environment, as you might easily imagine, I was perhaps over confident in my belief that I had quite literally nailed it.

However the other shoe was not far from dropping…

The owner came to me and reported that the color palette, which had been entirely driven by the loveliest piece of natural rock fountain that I perhaps have ever seen, and a complimentary set of natural stones…(all of which never made it into the environment)…was “dead” and flat. One painting was especially offensive, and described as a “swamp”, (as an aside this painting was the only personal choice that I had made out of all that I had chosen). It fit the working palette so well that I was thrilled to have found it, and it depicted a deep forest with a path running straight through it and into a golden orb of palpable sunshine. (This description is, of course, my experience of it… as it was a swamp where things die and decay for the owner.) In addition to the deadness of the colors, a pair of lamps that are whimsical in nature and depicted a cat, with a magnifier reading a book under lamplight, was so offensive as to be generating a student “petition” to have them removed, as they “depict animal cruelty”, the cat, its book, and lamp, are inside a wire cage which is the lamps structure.

As you might imagine…for someone who has never failed at this sort of work, in the past twenty-five years…this was a severe surprise, especially considering the number and volume of folks complimenting the work, asking to be taught how to do the “amazing” paper treatment, and stopping to take pictures of the work in progress.

Again… I allowed it to burn me.

I did not build a story; attempt to defend my value, my work, or myself. Instead, I just let it burn.

Each time the desire arose inside my heart and mind to craft myself as the victim, each time I felt the nearness of the tidal wave seeking to steal from me my freedom, each time the pull and sickly stickiness of dualistic perspective sought me…I let it burn inside me. It was damnably difficult…

Standing still inside that, is a bit like standing still as a tsunami thunders toward you. It takes real and demanding courage, and total internal mastery.

And then, just like the sun breaking through after decades of gray stormy clouds. I was set free. My beloved teacher calls it the maturing of emotional “apathy”, my new teacher calls it “high indifference”…I call it… a bloody freaking miracle.

I felt, when I awoke this morning, (this is still quite fresh), a gladness that cannot be describe. A freedom from the opinion of everyone concerned, a deep willingness…even a joy, at destroying what I had created. The pleasure of painting out what I had so painstakingly crafted was visceral, real, and deeply satisfying. I don’t possess very much understanding of why that is so, but it is deeply so.

I imagine, in the weeks and months to come, that will be required to unpack all of this flash change, that understanding the joy of destroying my creation will be experienced, and already is of course to some degree, as being something akin to the reason why sand mandalas are crafted with such exquisite attention to detail, and then utterly destroyed, immediately upon completion…an homage to the total transitory nature of all apparent reality.

What appeared on the walls, what gathered such intense, and vocal, and voluminous praise, is quite literally ashes, compared to what has opened in my heart. (My crew is way more upset about its loss than I would have been in the past and thus, I have not attempted to describe my joy at its destruction, as I cannot imagine anyone else even coming close to understanding it.)

It takes great will to do the work I do, hours and hours of sifting through merchandise. Miles and miles, of standing on ladders and paying attention to the smallest of details, total obedience to the demands of the work that are placed upon my body, my mind, my talents, and my nervous system. It is a quadruple length marathon, and over the many years of doing it I often hated the stresses it placed upon me, and yearned to be free of it. But like a master cellist, I required of myself the commitment to strum the strings of my instrument, until my fingers quite literally bled.

And I gave this job, all of that and much, much more.

I liked it better than any other job I have ever done. The subtle palette, the quiet stillness, the quirky humor of cats reading books, (you have to see them to understand that, and the company is, after all, a school), the vibration of calm that flooded me every time I looked at it – (of course I mourned the loss of the natural stone fountain that had lived inside a mountain in Idaho for millennia waiting for its time in the sun, and the small stones from China that are the color of the sea at tides edge in a Caribbean sun drenched beach), none of which were ever introduced.

But still, and even so, its destruction produced an eagerness in myself that was, and is still, quite surprising. (I have never once before been present, or taken an active part, in the destruction of anything I have created professionally.)

So far…all I can manage to understand about it, and believe me when I tell you understanding is the least important aspect, is that it heralds the true dissolution and destruction of my “personal” self.

My new teacher, whose language is much more contemporary than my beloved teacher, calls it the “discovery of just not giving a damn”.

I don’t care that I put my heart and soul into creating it, I don’t care that I drove my body until I became quite sick because of it, I don’t care about the investment in time, thought, intention, commitment, care, concern, and will.

I just “don’t give a damn”…

My investment is like a dandelion floating away upon the wind. The creation of the work was not personal, (it hasn’t been for years and years now), and its destruction is now equally impersonal.

A young woman, who was working the front desk when much of this was decided, and was privy to my conversation with the owner of the building, said to me later that she could not believe my reaction. I can’t either, but for very different reasons... She was astonished that I was not devastated, and said that she would have been entirely crushed by it, I am astonished because I do not care even the tiniest bit about it. I care so little that I feel as though I am sort of floating a bit. Like I am a bit tipsy, or a bit high.

Being suddenly, physically, and potently, untethered from the personal self is a very dramatic experience. I know without doubt, that the attack of the man whose need to control others is as strong as I have ever seen, and the destruction of my creative efforts, are working in tandem with the burn I was willing and able to endure. That those “outer” events, coupled with my inner willingness to stand still in the face of it, to meet it, to fully embrace it, to allow it to burn me, will be the front runner to the full measure of peace I have sought all the long days of my life. These last few days will set my destiny for perhaps lifetimes to come…

I repeat here the quote from Albert Camus, “A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.”

My “taste for truth” has required the sacrifice of many weeks of intense labor, complete failure in my once total confidence in my design sensibilities, and a rather demanding attack by an emotionally weak man, all of which I would do again, and again, and again, for the release that is now my victory.

I fully commit to the necessity of giving my freedom back to the ones who have unconsciously provided me it. I have no opinion of the man that sought to control me, and no opinion of the destruction that has been required of my work. I fully allow for all to be as it is, with no argument from me in the slightest

I will be reporting on this for a long time I suspect…I can’t wait to see what unfolds next…

Adayre R. Miller

4/13/12

photo courtesy of aso2008, to see more of this artists work please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29643712@N03/4989015516/

I Hope So. I Want It To Be So…

As I walked down the hall this morning, intent upon a task in a daisy field of tasks, I looked over and into the office of a young woman who is sweet, kind, caring, young, gentle, and committed.

Her face tugged me from my future oriented, goal and outcome, driven process. I didn’t know what was tugging me. I could not have diagnosed the problem or even seen that there was one. But something drew me away from my desire to meet my self-defined and quite arbitrary deadlines, and into her sphere.

As I entered her office, I sat down in the chair in front of her desk. I don’t remember saying anything of any import. I just sat with her and waited.

She began to cry, tears rolling from her eyes and down her face, so fast, and with such compulsion the soft curve of her neck was soon glistening with moisture.

She spoke about how neglected she felt, how trampled upon, how unseen, unheard and uncared for. She had until recently shared a desk with another co-worker, whose possessions filled the space with such heft that there was no room for her to be found, no space to call her own. Then she was moved into an office with a personality so intent upon “becoming someone”, so sure of his greatness that here too… she was lorded over and made small and insignificant, not a single thing was allowed into this space that was hers or about her. And then the company decided that she should move to what amounts to a hallway, where people will walk through her space without consideration for her or her needs.

The shear volume of neglect that she felt she was laboring under, spilled forth simply because someone had stopped long enough to look closely at her.

And because she was being seen, she cried for the better part of a quarter of an hour. I felt a kinship with her as she wondered if there was ever going to be a place for her.

The work I am doing now is something I am good at, that I do well, and that is fun for me…but like her, when the music stops I too, may be without a chair to call my own.

I felt the need to champion her. I may well have angered her supervisor who seems to not have much compassion for those who are tender, as I strove to use my skills in design to create a space she could finally call her own. I pushed on her behalf, and it is possible I should have restrained myself…after all, I am most likely quite temporary.

It is hard to know that all suffering sources from the story we believe about ourselves, our situation, and our circumstances…and as such is inherently unreal, and still to remain unmoved in the face of such seemingly innocent pain.

I chose a side… her side.

Even though I know there is no such thing.

To discover the Emptiness, or at least to touch it, that lies behind the self I thought I once was, has been and will be, my greatest liberation. To discover that vast Silence is to come into the fullness of understanding that there are no sides, that essence and movement are the only real events. As an example, it was the Silence that moved me into her office, the Silence that sat me in her chair, and the Silence that saw and heard her sorrow.

It was my humanness that chose a side, my humanness that felt the compulsion to rescue her. And here is where I moved out of the truth, and back into the fantasies and illusion that have driven so much of my life.

I do not mean to say that I was wrong to offer her my design skills, or that it was wrong to offer to set some form of physical boundaries for her, by blocking off one of the doors that allows her office to become a pass through for whoever wishes to invade her space. Where I went wrong was in the emotional tone that fed my actions.

I could feel, and strongly so, my desire to protect her from her too-busy-to-notice-her, supervisor and from the egoicly driven man who so claims his space, that she remains invisible even as she sits at the desk that he has laid such a claim to, on an only part time basis.

My Teacher would often use a metaphor of a car wreck as an illustration of the need for remaining neutral even in the face of great pain. He would speak about two cars colliding, and how, if we “know” who is in the “right” and who is in the “wrong” that we severely limit our usefulness to the imminent moment that is arising.

To transcend our need for choosing sides is to make of us an empty and deeply useful vessel. On the other hand, to choose a side is to limit our value to the transitory feel good, that has no place in the world of the deep truth.

I cannot say what I might have been capable of providing her, had I been mature enough to not “take her side”. Her sorrow and grief at being essentially invisible, her fear that if she spoke up she might well be fired for it, these are events and expressions that live only in her mind. Instead of being strong enough to simply share my presence with her and nothing more, I moved into agreement with her illusions so as to make her feel better.

She did indeed feel better, in the moment.

It always feels good to have a cathartic moment of emotional release, in the company of an apparently caring someone…it does not… however, foster deep growth or real healing.

Real healing is the solitary journey of discovering within the confines of the apparent self’s limited consciousness, the lie that we are telling ourselves. The how and why of the story that causes us to feel left out, unnoticed, unwelcome, unloved. There is no one else who can journey that path for us, no one else who can do battle with the illusion we ourselves have crafted, no one else who can bring permanent relief…rather than just transitory feel good.

I have, if it is possible, even greater respect for the fine line my Teacher was so capable of walking.

He could listen to my grief, sorrow, self-inflicted and self-created pain with total equanimity. His presence was a balm upon my soul, crafting a safe space of open awareness in which I could venture the soul jarring risk of seeing myself, naked and real. And yet, there was not a single time he sought to rescue me, to take my side, to champion me, or to “heal” me.

It is the small mind of the self-deluded hero who believes that he can manage the growth of another, guide the outcomes of another, or heal another. There is such a hugely unconscious and unflattering payoff to casting yourself in the role of hero. The man who shared her office and now whom I must share an office with, views himself in just such heroic terms.

My failing is that he stirs within me the memory of my desire for fame, heroics, “greatness”, bigness and living large… and I am in equal measure shamed, and chagrined, for having once sought such a poor substitute for reality and authenticity.

My new Teacher, whom I have not yet met in person, is equally capable of, and equally free of, the need to get his emotional highs from being viewed as the “one who knows”, as the leader, the savior, the hero.

I suppose such equanimity is a function of coming cleanly into the awareness that the self does not truly exist. That our collection of desires and avoidances, that we innocently name the self, are a poor substitute for discovering the vast depths within.

I wish I could have a do-over. I wish I could follow Presence into her room, watch it sit me in her chair, see it hold my attention upon her sorrow and remain grounded in Beingness, unmoved and unmoving.

I wish I could make a clean offer of help, free of the need for someone to be wrong so that she could be innocent, of the story she was building in her own mind.

I wish I could have been an empty vessel, useful, productive, valuable and transcendent.

Perhaps it is enough that I have seen and seen cleanly, my still sticky desire to be the hero in her story. I want free of that, in more ways than I can describe. The chase to be “Somebody” is a futile road to nowhere and one I wish I did not have to witness in myself, or to be reminded of how much of my life has been driven by such a sadly neurotic need.

My new Teacher, unlike my Beloved one, makes promises. He has promised me that once the Silence has been tasted, if even for a moment, that it will “clean you out” of the desire to be a false and dangerous “Someone”. That Silence will help me to remove the “me”ness off the controls of my life, and return me to the unfolding flow of the “movement of peace” that is my original face, (and yours).

I hope so. I want it to be so.

To move through the remainder of a life, neither grasping nor pushing away, is a form of heaven that few are capable of realizing. I do not know if I am capable of such a depth of release, but I do know it is the only thing worth accomplishing. I do know that it is the direction I am intent on traveling. I do, also know, that my young co-worker would have been much better served by that level of Presence than the one that was incapable of not choosing sides.

To stand inside yourself and not choose a side is a strength of immense proportions, a true power, and a real value.

Here is how Eckart Tolle describes the unattached activity of awakened awareness… “As Presence moves through you, it’s not based on desire anymore, it’s based on enjoyment. It’s not based on wanting or needing anything, because you’re coming from fullness. The actions, you take are not designed to fulfill you. It’s not designed to add something to you. The action is coming out of the fullness in which you already dwell – so there’s no neediness in it.” (Emphasis mine).

This is the place my Teacher dwells, he has no investment in my outcome. He moves only in response to the will of Peace and the needs of the moment… to discover this place inside oneself is to know true humility, to express authentically, and to end the need to be the hero in someone else’s story.

A true hero is the one who can turn within, who has the strength to end illusions and to come into the simple light of the noonday sun…here is where we discover Webster’s truly, “remarkably brave person”.

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtesy of flick photo sharing and Sash’s Kitchen – Studio photography, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0095009/photos/insashi/2047056983/

The Backward Step…

I have come to see the event horizon of my life so much clearer and more acutely than ever before. It is especially hard to stay clear, when we are all embedded in a culture that is constantly telling us that our happiness rest outside and in front of us.

The “Now that you have arrived…what type of car are you driving” commercials are not the only way that we are encouraged to continue the unending and fruitless search for more and better and different. It is embedded in most of the spiritual cultures that dot the landscape as well. Prosperity, abundance, greatness, manifestation, all are euphemisms for the future, and the search for more and better.

It is so easy to lose yourself in these types of searches, to live a whole life caught in the maze of more, different, better, when none of it really exits.

In Zen they have a saying that the way out of this type of illusion is the “backward step”. I like that – it has a sort of visceral tone to it that allows understanding to be more accessible, more available.

The “backward step”, is a step out of the personal perspective and into the ground of Being, or Awareness.

No matter what your circumstances, no matter what is “wrong” in your life or mine, the backward step into Awareness and out of the “me”ness of the egoic mind is the cure. Nothing and no one else needs to change in any way what so ever, for Joy and Peace and Harmony to find us, heal us, nurture us, and forgive us.

Last week, I had dinner plans with a couple of friends…one of whom has suddenly grown quite distant. He left the building at about 3pm without confirming our plans, or in anyway acknowledging that we were scheduled to meet. His partner called at the appointed time and I missed his call, but immediately returned his voice mail and left three different messages trying to find out what had happened and why I had been stood up, as it were.

It dropped me back into “me”ness without even a breath’s distance between arrival and departure. My feelings were hurt and I went instantly into withdrawal as a means of dealing with it, and I questioned everything about our friendship.

My whole emotional experience was reactionary and entirely unconscious. I lost the stillness and silence that has become such a feature of my value system, and dropped instantly into the unwelcome child I had been born as.

The desire to fix it in the outer did not pull me as it has in years past, I did not go to him and ask him to explain his decision to avoid me. I did not work toward restoring his approval, or rediscovering his attention.

I let it rest in my heart, until I was capable of taking the “backward step” and restoring Awareness, into the central position of control in my life.

It is all so impossibly simple that it defies explanation.

Life, God, The Present Moment, The Universe, The Divine…whatever your euphemism for the unknowable Intelligence that breathed Being into us, wants us to PAY ATTENTION, (without judgment). That’s all. That’s all there is to it.

Awareness utterly dispels “me”ness. The Impersonal Self is Awareness, the personal self is in a prison of misdirected attention and judgment.

Now that I can hold that in my mind and heart, restore it from out of the stillness and silence I have been practicing toward for nearly thirty years, now comes the next phase of release and restoration.

I can see that not only does the backward step make possible the move from small and hurt “me”ness to spacious Awareness, but also there is an even deeper backward step that can be experienced and expressed.

I look forward to the moment when I have grown far enough beyond the confines of the personal self that I might be capable of stepping backward deeply enough, to a place where I can be glad that he found something better to do than to spend time with me. (Do not read that as a judgment call about me, but rather as a statement of release that he “should” do exactly what his mind and heart calls him to do. If walking away from me without explanation or conversation is right for him…then I want to come to the place where I want for him, precisely what he wants for himself. You see the distinction don’t you…)

Here is the place where you can allow all beings to be as they are, all events to unfold as they unfold, all circumstances to come to rest in their natural equipoise of balance and harmony.

On that day I will embody freedom. I know that it is possible; I have seen freedom in the flesh, in the body of my Teacher.

Also in the Zen tradition, they speak of the one “true” desire, which is the desire to know freedom beyond all other experiences… I have come to that one desire.

I want freedom, more than I want approval, sentimental love, hope, dreams, the future, regrets, goals or outcomes.

And I will not settle for illusion instead…

Adayre R. Miller

4/1/12

Just follow this link to see and comment on this photo:

» http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0095009/photos/albireo2006/5655363774/

thanks to flickr photo sharing and Albireo for the use of this wonderful photograph.

“Look in the Mirror”, he said… So I Did …

I have been really sick for the last three days or so, and sidelined from the many responsibilities that I am enjoying taking care of…I have laid in my bed unable to lift my head for hours on end. Hot and cold at the same time from a high fever, a condition I have always really disliked as there is nothing you can do to alter two opposing experiences, I finally feel a wee bit better and can sit upright and chat with you.

I had the most marvelous and quiet insight yesterday, and I so wanted to share it with you.

I was going to include the whole written exchange so that you could see what I saw, but when I finally felt well enough to retrieve it the other combatant had pulled his end of the conversation from public display.

It began with my spending just a few moments online. I do not value Face book as most folks do, as the whole “too busy” to relate any other way, seems a bit crazy to me. So I very rarely post, but I do follow one or two folk who I see very rarely, and watching them on face book is the only way I get to see them.

One of them is a woman I value a great deal. I will use J to name her, and she was my last partner, in the last ever class that my Teacher was able to attend. We did really good work together and we were fated to do so. They always choose some interesting way of pairing us up, and on that day we had an inner and outer circle. I was paired with someone when the facilitator realized a mistake had been made, and moved everyone on the inner circle one place forward, and J slid in beside me.

She is beautiful, charming, kind, a really good hostess – something I am really bad at, and compulsively on time. (We would have to leave at least 25 minutes early to get back to class, a journey of ten minutes at the outside, to keep her internal alarm clock from knocking down the door to her chest. (I enjoyed that about her, it so reminded me of my father…plus, I never once had to know what time it was.)

So yesterday, with just enough physical fuel to sit and read a few face book posts, I saw that J had posted a quote from a Hindu teacher that spoke about the need for a new form of profit making. The Hindi teacher stated without equivocation, the need to rid the planet of corporations that have no center save the bottom line, and piling up as much profit as possible. How they are the primary force for destruction of the planet and the source of the ongoing and unmet needs of millions, for the benefit of handfuls. (I am paraphrasing broadly, but that is the gist of it.)

J’s only comment was that she agreed, that she was an old hippie, which made me smile, and that she wanted to put forth this brave idea.

Next came a response so attacking it was vitriolic. It included words like “communism”, “stupidity”, “un-American” and so on. It was so loud, aggressive, and committed to attacking J that I was fairly surprised. Without a single thought, or a moment’s hesitation I waded in to defend my friend. I spoke about the need to assess the ways and means by which profit shorn free of communal responsibility is dangerous, and that greed is killing the planet. I tried to “educate” him, and enlighten him. I talked about how the Japanese figured this out ages ago, and it is part of their culture to weigh profits against what it will do to 7 generations into the future.

His response to me was equally vitriolic, I “should move to Japan or India” if I was so hell bent on being so “un-American” and so on. I felt that I had the right to call him on his attacking energy and did so, and our final engagement came with his response of…”you should look in the mirror”.

My first response was, of course, to feel validated in my opinion of his brutish behavior. But it wasn’t sticky like it has always been in the past. It was just a thought that floated across the expanse of my mind and I knew even as it came to see if it could engage me, that it wasn’t real. Then J popped up on the private communication panel and told me that “Bob” was her ex-husband, (thus explaining the personalness of the attack) and how much she valued my defending her.

By that time, I had come to the realization that I had gone to war with him, and more, that no matter how “right” we feel we are, war is never a pathway to peace.

Next came a very surprising realization that he was entirely right, that I should look in the mirror…that my accusing him of brutish behavior while also being a brute myself, was exactly what I had done. My language was better, my arguments more reasoned, my verbal skills more deft, but I had picked up a stone just as surely as had he.

Let me be very clear, none of my realizations mean that my friend should not have been defended.

In fact, one of the few lessons that my Teacher provided, that I could never quite get my brain around, was that you could become a fully enlightened warrior.

I remember asking him…”wait, you mean that you could become an awakened being and then go out and actually kill someone on behalf of your country/family/homeland?

And he assured me, it was possible.

I see now, what he meant.

I could have defended J with just as much care and concern, and much more humility if I had been able to see “Bob”, not as a perpetrator, but as an innocent being severely caught in the web of misunderstanding and ignorance. In other words, I could have been an enlightened warrior…

But instead, I was the brute in the mirror.

Here is why the coming to rest in Impersonal Being, which is the source of our lives, is so incredibly valuable. I have no value judgments about having seen my brutishness. In fact, not having judgment about it, is the how and why of being capable of seeing it.

I once thought that spirituality was a kind of “get out of jail” free card. When I was a young Baptist, I prayed fervently for what I wanted, and almost never got. When I became a metaphysician, I worked with fervor to “manifest” what I wanted, and almost never got. But I come to see now, as I stand on the precipice of true adulthood, that spirituality is not a goodie grab bag, not a “how to” manual for getting what you want, not a dream machine…but rather, the opening of eyes deep with sleep, that finally become capable of witnessing yourself and the world around you, free of illusion and fantasy. Free of ignorance, right and wrong, good and bad, and all the other dualities that exist only in the conditioned mind…and nowhere else.

I see now, that a tiny moment with “Bob”, has led to more freedom for me…and that is what spirituality really is.

Tiny moments of quiet liberation, when you can allow someone to tell you the truth about yourself and not back up and hide from it.

Tiny moments of truth that open your eyes and save your soul, your mind, and your heart.

Tiny moments that lead you steadfastly back toward fully realized innocence.

My hat is off to Bob, for helping me to “look in the mirror”…

Adayre R. Miller

3/25/12

photo courtesy of Nancello photo and flickr photo sharing, you may see more of this artist’s work by following this link…http://www.flickr.com/photos/nancello/5053382179/