“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