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