A Follow Up Conversation…

My friend and I anticipating a huge crowd arrived at my Beloved Teacher’s memorial, so early, no one else had even arrived at the building.  It is one of her passions to be early…we attended the last class my Teacher was able to be present for together, she was my “buddy” and we arrived very early for every break and every start time.  We remain close although we do not speak or see each other more than every year and a half, or so.  (She finds she is to busy for more.)

It was lovely to sit and talk with her about George, to reminisce and discover more deeply a shared experience of him.

When the service began it was more of what we had already shared, folk from far and wide, SRO in the “blue room”, describing the indescribable.  A man with so much humility, service, nobility, caring, and kindness that those who surrounded him for more than 30 years, had such a similar story to tell it might have been a zerox copy one to the other.

Some were more articulate than the next, more polished than another, funny or charming…but they all said almost the exact same thing.  “I watched/interacted with him for 30 (25, 28, 26, 24) years, he was unfailing committed, kind, potent, capable, giving… he changed my life, saved my life, purified my life.”

I marveled at the consistency of such a wide array of people, such a similar experience, such a shared understanding.

I realize the reason we all saw the same thing, felt the same thing, benefited from the same result, was and is, the total authenticity of the man.

Someone spoke of how he had once, two decades ago, succumb to considerable pressure and charged for an Omega training…it lasted one time, and was so disturbing to George he quit it forever.  I have always felt that he didn’t charge for three primary reasons, the first so that no one would be turned away because they could not afford the entrance price, the second so that we the graduate base, would need to shoulder the financial responsibilities as the program grew beyond his capacity to pay for it, and most importantly, so that the only relationship we would never share with him, was one of being his customer.

When a teacher’s financial well being is tied to a student’s expectations, there develops an almost inescapable need for the teacher to be “popular” or wanted and needed by that student.  And then, subtly or overtly, the teacher becomes incapable of providing the shocks that are so necessary to rid another of the trap of illusions.

I have met a good many folk who fancy themselves a spiritual teacher, myself included in that number, and it has only been in the last few weeks that I have come to see the shear hubris in such a desire.

I, and the great many others who I have witnessed, who desire such a place in another’s life are almost all frauds of one type or another.

A true teacher is not someone who comes to the position under the steam of their own desire, but rather one who is called to it by the students who gravitate toward them.  A true teacher will, if the student is ready, support that student in Awakening to the context of their mind…rather than its content.

So many who wish to be seen as a leader, a healer, a knower, a gifted one, are using their gifts in a deeply unconscious collusion with the waking sleep that is the condition of the common man.

To share with another the woe of their childhood harm, to reflect back to them an agreement that life should have been different/better/kinder is to trap them within the contents of a mind lost in a deep quagmire of how “it should have been”. 

It is not possible in the relative to disagree with the concept that children should not be beaten, raped, or abused.  But in the Absolute… it cannot be argued with.  For if it did happen, then it most assuredly should have happened, and now our only hope is to bring ourselves into alignment with the “What Is” of our past.  The other form of collusion that most teachers practice, is in the arena of wish fulfillment…the hope for a better/brighter/more wonderful tomorrow, here and in this manner, we are trapped in the illusion that somewhere else, sometime else, someplace else, life will bloom.  We will find our bliss, our peace, our home…a teacher colludes with illusion, each and every time they bless a notion that “the future is better than the here and now”.

We search and seek for the teacher, who sells the one-two-three formula, which will rid us of the very necessary pain of maturing beyond the childish notion that life is anything other than the current moment.

My Beloved Teacher never once engaged in such collusions with the waking sleep, that is normal and nominal consciousness.  He strode with all his considerable and authentic power, into the deep center of all our illusions and with his piercing blue gaze, required that we see the lie at the center of the notion that it “should have” been one iota different than it was, or that it “could be” one iota different than it is.

Here is the kernel of why we came together to celebrate his most amazing lifetime.  To shake our heads in amazement, and wonder aloud, at the power of his will to live and embody the Truth.

I have over time told you of the many ways in which I witnessed his remarkable lack of resistance, his constant willingness to allow himself to be taken to exactly the location that life required of him.  The time a sound so horrible pierced us all, and slipped through him like a whisper, the time he froze in mid motion attempting to turn a piece of paper over, and finally giving into our need for his being capable of continuing the lesson, and thus speaking aloud that he “had lost the battle with the page”.  He spoke that phrase and received the help he needed to continue to turn that page, not because he was uncomfortable, but rather because we needed his service.

His last audible sentence was…”do not stop improving”.

His only aim was to teach us how to die.  Die to the self, the content of our minds, that have convinced us we are some singular someone.  Die to the desires that populate our self-serving hopes.  Die to the illusion that we are somehow greater than any of the other expressions of life.  Die to the notion that we are important, or great, or necessary, or worthy of something other, than the Great What Is.  Die to our deep need for approval, applause, appearances, and the many ways in which we keep ourselves in the bondage of wanting it other than the way it is.

I have come to see how bad it would have been for me to get the dreams I had dreamed.  How much more lost I would have been, how much more poorly I would have been served.

I have come to see how tirelessly he served us.  How patient he was with the nonsense we brought to him, and the many ways we lied to ourselves.  I have come to see the great Emptiness he embodied, and the power to serve that it provided him with.

I have come, finally, by being his student…to want only what life wants for me, so that when my head is lain down for the last time, I can lay claim to some small portion of true service, and not the empty wishes of the contents of my conditioned mind.

Adayre R. Miller

7/4/2012

“Replace Yourself” - George Addair

I cried most of the day yesterday, and I am worn out by it.  I am, in some ways surprised by my reaction and its intensity, after all, those last two minutes at his eightieth birthday party – I knew beyond doubt, would be the last time I would ever see him.

In point of fact, I knew that the email I received yesterday announcing his death, would be the next communication regarding him that I would receive.  So surprise should not have been a factor in the grief that I feel, but it was and is, and I am allowing it to wash through me as it comes, in small waves of sadness.

I arrived at Omega, the teaching group he founded, about two years after its inception.  My heart was broken by the faith I had placed in “success” and the utter emptiness, I had discovered hiding underneath such a nonsensical term.  I had made more money that last year than my father had made in his entire career, I had driven a Mercedes convertible around town – even if it wasn’t mine – and had clearly seen how little those reactions I had expected, and occasionally received, did to help me run from the suffering that was a daily companion.  I even had a tiny brush with fame, I was the operations head of a recall campaign to oust the Governor of Arizona, Evan Mecham, and was on the news several times over a brief few months, and that too, showed itself as nonsense.  (Although it took me longer to get out from underneath that particular illusion.)

Perhaps one of my very few gifts is the clarity I possess, to see very quickly, the delusion in the offerings the culture assures us will be our salvation.  I am not one of those people who believes that if a Mercedes will not make me feel wealthy and desirable, then I must need to step up to a Rolls.  When I climbed the ladder of “success”, what I discovered, was that it was leaning against the wrong damn building.

And just as I had become entirely disillusioned with every single aspect of our cultures sales pitch, and my suffering had ratcheted up to my sitting on my bed holding a gun to my head most nights…

I found myself at Omega…with George.

From the very first moment, I could feel his sanity.  It was like the weight of a tool in my hand, or the feel of summer humidity in a southern coastal town.  It had presence, heft, weight, volume, and light…light, by which to see the truth even if I could not experience it for myself, I knew that he did…and in the beginning that was enough for me.

His workshops were almost entirely experiential.  He had the most amazing gift for bypassing the conditioned mind, and putting your heart in the direct path of an experience of facing your fear, or learning about the effects of cruelty.  Not as a concept, but rather as a direct, lived, experience.

By comparison, all the teachers who crowd the marketplace with their conceptual “technologies”, the seven habits of this and the path to manifestation of that, cannot even get my attention, much less move me to some deeper place of Awareness.

He knew then, and I know now…that adding additional conceptual notions, to an already over crowed and conditioned mind, will do nothing to support a person in approaching, experiencing, and gaining, sustainable freedom for themselves.

I am not saying that a good cathartic cry in the midst of kind hearted individuals does not provide some relief, as I know that it can and does…but it will not provide sustainable freedom, as it merely replaces one habitual need for another.  Sort of like giving methadone to heroin addicts, a place to shed some tears can loosen the grip of suffering but it can never resolve the suffering itself.  For that to happen, a stripping away must begin in earnest.  A “dying” so that you may live says the Bible, a complete and utter wasting away of all that you “believe” in, is the only open doorway through which the Unknowable can enter.

I began that stripping away with him.  I am sure there is not a person on the planet that I could have done that with, other than him…

The greatest damage I sustained from my pedophile uncle, and my raging mother was not the loss of my fertility due to the damage to my reproductive organs, or the nightly battle with horrific nightmares, or the daily drops into deep depressions.  It was the complete and utter, loss of trust.

I came into adulthood with no trust whatsoever.  It manifested as panic attacks, anxiety disorders, deep delusional fantasies, a near total rejection of the present moment, of the need for process and development, and a driving debilitating urge to be anywhere, any time, save the present.

Lost doesn’t begin to describe the nature of my internal experience.  Hopeless, helpless, stricken, broken, fractured, empty, wounded, drowning, sorrowful…I could go on, and on, and on.

And into this horrific darkness, stepped a small man with a Stillness the like of which I had never before experienced.

Over many multiple weekends, over nearly three decades, I watched him for some fault line, for some crack in the truth my heart knew, but my brain could not accept.

Is he real?  Can I trust him?  Will he fail me?  He is.  I could.  And he never, ever did…

Now I know that his Stillness came from the Universal, deeply buried within each of us, and from the truth that he had fully embodied… which is that all suffering is illusion, and can be stepped cleanly out of at any moment in time.

Despite the suffering that I, and others, routinely brought into the classroom there was not a single time that he demonstrated, in response to that suffering, any thing other than total Stillness.  He did not commiserate, provide a solution, attempt to fix, soften, or tweak it.  He merely sat, quietly, and listened.  When the story had spun itself out, he would provide an insight that could literally cause you to internally collapse with the shock of it…but otherwise, he was merely Still and Quiet, in the face of what often appeared to be immeasurable suffering.

Having seen entirely through his own suffering, and the many ways he manufactured it, he knew that we were all suffering only by our own hand…and nothing but our hand, could free us.

Over time, I began to trust him with such simple and complete dedication that it became an unshakeable constant in a life of near total turmoil.  It was the one thing that I knew would never change, and brick by brick; I rebuilt my life upon that trust.

Now I know, that what I was trusting, was not George specifically, but rather, the Universal aspect of the very nature of existence, which poured forth from him like water from a tap.  He once provided a lesson that led me to believe that he had trusted his teacher, in the same way and manner that I trusted him.  So I am, I suppose, a part of some ancestral lineage…going back who knows how long, and to who knows what, original source…each of us one thin page, in a book to voluminous to even contemplate.

I find now, that trust I saw in him, is a deeply felt and consistent aspect of my continuing sojourn.  I never lose it for long, and only when I am back in the personal, deeply engaged in wanting life to be other than it is appearing, just now in this tiny moment.

It built my business, and funds my current moment-by-moment experience.

I didn’t want my painting and design business.  Looking back, I realize that it was the active arm of the inspirational guidance that George had provided me with.

When it came and took me, all I could focus on was my desire to be a famous and rich, spiritual-rock-star-teacher, an affliction shared by a good many people – I might just mention – and one it took me a great many years to overcome.  (I mean no disrespect by sharing this tiny moment with you, but I encounter a good many people who share this same fantasy, and recently, a woman who was to speak at a Friday night event held at the school I work at, actually arrived with a tiny entourage.  Well within the halls of the building, she and her assistant were both wearing large dark sunglasses, and dressed in nearly matching black outfits, striding toward their destiny of being “special”, as though the paparazzi were about to jump from the non-existent shrubbery to steal a photograph of the angel whisperer.  It made me alternately amused by her great need, and saddened by her deep illusions.)  

So, as you might imagine, standing on a ladder all-day, silent and alone, was not my idea of the “right” use of my time, and I alternately resisted it, and resented it.  (One of the reasons I could not bear to “succeed” at it.)  But oddly, I suppose, I did exceptionally good work when I was called to it, and committed myself to it utterly.

What the work required of me more than any other thing, was complete trust in the unfolding process.  I never knew before hand any more than the very next step, which made working for people who need to control the outcome, a form of torture, and one that I was mostly spared.

I realize now, that the path George had sat my feet upon, which he might have called “trust only in the immanent arising moment, and look no further” was a thing that my work was requiring of me to become an expert in.  In the beginning I would stand on my ladder in desperate fear, worried that the action I was taking would result in disaster, only to be rewarded with the next right step the moment the need arrived.

George had a saying for it…”you will know what you need to know, the moment you need to know it, and not one moment sooner.”  It is a bold and daring way to live, and I spent twenty years working it into my muscle and sinew, and now I can even do my work when trust is entirely absent.

I know that I am rambling a bit, and you are kind to journey with me…if indeed you have come this far.  But this is my form of memorial service.  I will go on Tuesday, with my buddy, from the last Omega workshop we, she and I, and he attended.  I will sit with her, in front of his body, and we will weep together.  I will see some of the many faces that I have known over the years, in that room with the shockingly bright blue carpet, out of the – at last report – 32,000 people who have been exposed to his teachings.  We will formally say our goodbyes, in the company of one another, and I will mark his passing…but these essays I am writing are my real memorials.  And you are so kind to join me in it.

Perhaps everyone has some form of this type of relationship.  A schoolteacher, a neighbor, a stranger who changes the very fabric of your being.  Or perhaps it is entirely rare, and that is why people came from every corner of the globe to sit with him, to work with him.  He took a small measure of pride, the only pride I every saw him display, in the fact that Omega had never been marketed in any way whatsoever.  Yes, there was a simple and unsophisticated brochure, and later a website, but none did anything more than hand one out when it was requested.  And yet, workshop after workshop, (in the many months that I worked as a volunteer), we would play our ice breaker game of who came the shortest or farthest distance to be there, and we would always have someone from Europe or Asia, it was a marvel to me then…and now…32,000 folk and counting.

So I guess I will end this portion of my memorial with one of his many, short aphorisms.

“You must leave home.  You must discover your own truth.  You must replace yourself.”  - George Addair

I have always understood this to mean…you must leave behind the “home” of all that you were taught to believe in, and strike out naked and alone into the deep wildness of the unknown, you must discover there your own deep interior, where all streams meet and join the vast and unknowable ocean of experience, and finally you must replace your self.  Like the apple, which is the source not of food, but rather a carrier for “appleness” itself.  I am one tiny measurement of George having “replaced” himself, so that Stillness – however flawed I might still be at it – may continue on into the world, washing to unknown shores and bringing light to unknown darknesses.

To be Still is to know yourself, and your true nature, for the very first time.  There is nothing else but this Stilllness, and paradoxically…it is the only Movement possible.

In Loving Memoriam,

George Addair 1931 – 2012

Ronni Miller

6/30/12

The Things I Wish I Could Tell Him....

I don’t know how long that list would be.  Could it last the rest of my lifetime?  Those things I would tell him…

The things I would say that only he would truly understand.

My Beloved Teacher is dead. 

I am glad for him; I know that he has been released back into the freedom he so elegantly embodied.  But my body is grieving in a way that I did not grieve for either of my parents, whom I loved, but not in the way I love him.

I would start by saying that I have matured enough to know, in the depths of my heart, that my spiritual evolution has not been about me, or about my getting somewhere, or getting something I want, or need, or desire.  That I am finally in touch with the soft ordinariness that comes from the recognition, that my Awakening is not about my getting some form of approval or applause, and that it is not even about my getting some measure of relief from the life threatening suffering that led me to his doorstep.

My Awakening, such as it is – humble as it is, is not even fundamentally, or essentially, mine.

Whatever measure of clarity, honesty, and truthfulness that he made possible for me, by his life long service, now rests safely in my heart, but is not truly mine, in any way at all. 

I cannot begin to imagine the patience it must have taken to sit with me, and to give so selflessly to me, when I was buried in such a deep state of self-absorption.

He tried in so many ways to help us to see our selfish drives, our deep neediness, our broken, fractured, and conditioned views.  Once he spoke about an apple.  Red, firm, sweet…he talked about how we imagine the apple is there for our use and consumption, to meet our needs for nutrition, comfort, and desire fulfillment.

Try he said, to imagine the apple is not there for us…but rather, for the use of its species.  That the apple, however tasty and delicious we might experience it to be, is specifically designed so that the seeds of its species might travel into the ever unfolding Now, for the purpose of keeping “appleness” alive on the planet.

That Apples, and People, and Planets, and Dewdrops…are all an interconnected web of Oneness, and that “we” are not special, merely because we cognize and can speak.  And more, to view us as the pinnacle of creation is a misinterpretation of the vastness of the Creative pulse.  We are a single note, in a glorious symphony, to vast for us to even comprehend, and we would serve others and ourselves so much more effectively, if we can mature to the point of knowing this simple truth.

Here in this apple allegory is the deep blindness that I suffered from, that we suffer from, the same blindness that causes all the suffering that has ever been, or will ever be…the blindness of wanting life to be about us, about our desires, our needs, our wishes, our hopes and aspirations.

I would say to him, if I could, “George, I understand so much more now, that your investment did not fall on fallow ground, that your help and guidance and grace, will echo in my heart until my last breath…”

I finally can feel, deep in my heart, that my life is not for, or even about, me.  That I am useful and valuable only to the degree that I can break free from the selfishness of desire, and transcend the harm that I cause when I use my gifts for the purpose of satisfying impulsive wishes and wants.

I would say, certainly, “I love you, and deeply so.”

But, so much more importantly, “I trust you in a manner that cannot be defined.”

In the years that I was still attempting to hide behind pretense and artifice, still trying to become someone important, someone special, even as I would sit in front of him and burn with the shame and embarrassment of the recognition that he knew, and could deeply see, my pathetic screen of artificiality…even then…I trusted him completely.

Sometimes I could not lift my eyes to look into his, I came to a place that I would no longer speak in his presence, no longer ask the question that was unconsciously designed to make me seem knowledgeable and impressive…because he always knew the rabid nature of my neediness, and he never one time shielded me from that knowledge.

His was a hard grace, a knowing grace, and a grace of depth, breadth, and potency.  I could never successfully hide from him, and in truth, I probably did not really want to.

I came to him to learn to see. 

Not in that way that selects only the sights we prefer, or the ones that reflect us in a favorable light.  But rather, to well and truly see…to see without opinion, without grasping, without hope, without need, without desire.

Almost all of my best memories include him, or some measure of his influence. 

When my mother set us both forever free, by telling me of her brothers sexually molesting her, of her father’s wild rages…it was George… who had helped me to craft myself into a person, who could tolerate the transformation from her “innocent” victim, into her warrior forgiver and thereby, to become capable of loving her without conditions or expectations for the remainder of her life.  It was he, who gave me the foundation to open to my mother’s childhood, and allow it to require of me bone deep forgiveness for her, for us, for who we were together.

It was George who made it possible for me to end my need for self-flagellation and self-harm.  I can’t recall the last time I was truly critical of myself, not in that self-hating destructive way I was so deeply addicted to.

It was George, and his influence, that made it possible for me to save myself from myself.  He is the reason that I can glimpse the world of the Impersonal Self.

There is no contribution, now or in the future, that I might possibly make, that will not be a direct descendent of his all encompassing selfless grace and generosity.

I weep, this long sad day…not for him…but, selfishly, because he is no longer breathing the same air I breathe, and that I will never again be able to tell him of the gratitude that I carry in the very cells of my body, for having been gifted with the opportunity to meet him these three decades gone.

He told me, often, that I only saw his light, because I was capable of seeing it, that I was as much responsible for the depth of my salvation as he was.  And I have known for a very long time that the volume of my gratitude was a type of burden for him, but even so, he shouldered that burden with as much grace as he did every other need, his thousands of students brought to lie at his feet, over these last three decades.

I feel blessed to have known such a Being.

Blessed to have seen a one such as he, blessed to have not been lost to the pseudo teachers who promise wealth, ease, fame, and greatness, blessed to have been required, by him, to end my dependency on the world around me, and Awaken, instead, to the world within me.

He has helped me to balance my books, to become accountable, to enter adulthood, to have the potential to rise above the inherent selfishness of the conditioned mind.

To have someone freely give you the instruction, by which you might one day find your freedom, to ask nothing in return save honesty, commitment, and integrity, is in some ways too large a gift.  And I am ashamed and humbled, that I have not paid it forward in some more demonstrable way.

The last time I saw him, I was allowed two minutes to sit with him.  I looked at his impossibly shiny white hair, into his cerulean blue eyes, and touched, softly, with the tip of my index finger his nearly transparent skin on the arm above his hand…and I said, just one more time…”thank you, and thank you”…and….”I love you.” 

It will have to be enough, that last opportunity to thank him…it will have to last me… until I too, am released from this form into the Formlessness, from which, he had long ago begun living out of and teaching from.

I wish somehow to share him with you; I hope that is what I have done.

In Grief and Gratitude,

Rhonda Darlene Miller (Ronni)

6/29/12