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