Buried Alive...

“Police in Florida, found a one week old puppy buried alive” reads a post on the face book scrawl that travels past my awareness.  It’s eyes were not even open yet, an officer had heard its cries, followed the sound and revealed the newborn, who is now being fed with a baby bottle and is expected to thrive.

Having had the companionship of intensely loving and loyal animals for the majority of my life, I am always deeply affected by these stories. 

I wonder at the madness that produces such behavior, until I remember that I once carried self harm born of suffering.  Having been born in a female body, with the less aggressive effects of estrogen, I did not act out upon others…would not have considered doing that.  But I treated myself to such poor experience, that madness would have been the only way to describe it.

I don’t value telling the stories anymore, of the many ways in which I acted out my self hatred.   They are so irrelevant to the life I lead now; it might as well have been an entirely different one…(perhaps this is the meaning of reincarnation?)

I include it here, only so that there is some hint for you to follow of the deep freedom that is possible, when the life in question is no longer being lived from the limited and limiting perspective of the personal self.

We imagine that the full embrace of the Universal, within each of us, will some how bleed life of its hum.  And I must admit that there were stages I went through, that did indeed; drain the hum right out of things.  I suppose that is the fundamental value of a teacher – they possess the direct experience to support you, in the continuation of self-discovery, by telling you about how it was for them.  The rare teachers of true freedom, (anyone who promises you greatness, wealth, happiness, any other form of marketing hype, or is going to “teach” you anything is someone who has not touched the Universal within), must be discerned by what they do not promise.

In today’s environment, these teachers are often called non-duality teachers.  My Beloved Teacher, active well before non-duality came into vogue called it “Whole Seeing”, to quote from the Tao Te Ching: 

“Free from desire, you realize the mystery. 

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.”  

A non-duality teacher is someone freed from the desire to have life be any other way than what the current moment experience presents itself as, and in that deep acceptance, they realize the deep mystery that all things are in harmony in the Tao.  A-L-L things…

Even…puppies buried alive…

You will miss the mark by a mile, if you confuse acceptance with approval.

Acceptance is the strongest force on the planet, there is quite literally nothing that can overcome it, nothing can capture it, force its hand, restrain it, coral it, or win over it.  Nothing…anywhere…ever…

The conditioned mind is forever confusing acceptance with approval.  It is one of the many ways that the conditioned mind holds sway over our lives and keeps us imprisoned in suffering.  Approval is the active form of liking something.  It isn’t possible for the average person to “like” discovering that a puppy has been buried alive, there is no place inside the average person’s lexicon, that an act of such cruelty, perpetrated on such innocence, could ever be liked.  (Even those made mad by their minds, in all likelihood do not “like” it.)  But it can be accepted.

Why?

Because it is already so, and being so, it exists in the world, and existing in the world, means it is a part of the tapestry that weaves itself into this beautiful/horrible world in which we find ourselves.  When we argue against what has already arrived we lose our capacity to stay grounded and whole.

And that… is “whole seeing”.   When whole seeing has been arrived at, action is guided and directed by the Source, and thus becomes healing rather than divisive.  Thus one can work tirelessly on behalf of abused animals, in this case, while still feeling deep acceptance for the fact that there exists in the world a thing such as this.

Your life and mine are beautiful/horrible.  Your life and mine are good/awful, sweet/sad, wonderful/nasty, and if you bring a full measure of acceptance to that truth, it will set you free, and potentially everyone you meet.

Acceptance is a life long process.  I find that my capacity to accept my life grows daily, or perhaps even hourly.  Sometimes I can watch its head stretching toward the sun, seizing the moment and growing toward the light.  Here is the true meaning of “carpe deim”.  That term is almost always used in conjunction with outer achievement, to win the race, or the war, or the prize.  But I have come to see that “seizing the day” is about a moment-by-moment acceptance of the current experience in which I find myself.

I remember quite clearly when I first began to understand what acceptance meant, and how it is the means by which we stay in the “Now” to quote the most well-known non-duality teacher.

Deeply addicted to my own thinking, when my mind first began to slow down and I could manage a few moments of clear awareness, I was alternately baffled and angry, “there is nothing going on in the here and now”, I thought to myself…and certainly nothing of any real interest.

Bored up to my eyeballs, absent the drama that I was so attenuated to by my internal story telling of she did this, and he did that dialogue…I could find no value in the here and now, and the quiet solitude that was knocking at my door.

But as my capacity to live in a quiet mind began to grow, I have discovered it is even possible to dwell in silence even when my mind is speaking to me, I don’t know quite how to describe that, but it is a form of rest, or relaxation, even as my mind is burbling about something or other, there is a soft yielding in the background.  A sense of home, or safety, or sanctuary…a quiet stillness that defies explanation, exits under or behind the volume of thinking.

This sanctuary allows me to accept, never approve, but rather accept, the truth that we live in a world where lovely, innocent, loyalty, can be brutalized in an entirely uncivilized manner.  A world where deep pain breaks the surface of a mind, which it has possessed and forces an action of such intensity, and such madness.

Again from the Tao:  

“Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal: 

accept the world as it is. 

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. 

When goodness is lost, there is morality. 

When morality is lost, there is ritual. 

Ritual is the husk of true faith,

the beginning of chaos.

Therefore the Master concerns himself

with the depths and not the surface,

with the fruit and not the flower. 

He has no will of his own. 

He dwells in reality,

and lets all illusions go.”

The primal illusion is that a thing that does exist, should not exist.  This is the foundation upon which the conditioned mind is born.  We suffer when we are possessed by a belief that a thing that exists should not, in fact, be so.  Thus our primary spiritual motivation, if we are intent on ridding ourselves of suffering, should be to unlearn all of our beliefs.  What is so, is already so, learning to lean into that fact, frees us from judgement, self-harm, criticism, and comparison...freed from these we become supple, open, clear, and whole.

“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness”, the Tao, or the unified whole, when broken apart by the perceiving, conditioned, and judging mind begins to break apart reality into relative conditions.  Good and bad, ugly and beautiful, poor and rich, sickness and heath, this relative existence is fraught with suffering and homesickness as the deep unitive whole, from which we source, knows no such relativity.

Again from the Tao:

“What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear? 

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self. 

When we don’t see the self as self,

what do we have to fear?

Stop thinking, and end your problems. 

What difference between yes and no? 

What difference between success and failure? 

Must you value what others value,

avoid what others avoid? 

How ridiculous!”

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering. 

That is why love of the Tao

is in the very nature of things.”

 - Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation.

The Tao, “takes all things back to itself”, herein is our comfort, our home, our salvation, our redemption.  The Tao is capable of embracing a mind so dark that it is intent on killing innocence, this is the meaning, action, and activity of the true way, the deep path, the ageless wisdom, the Masters who have walked among us…

“Other people have what they need;

I alone possess nothing. 

I alone drift about,

like someone without a home. 

I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

I alone don’t know. 

I drift like a wave on the ocean,

I blow as aimless as the wind.”  -Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching. Stephen Mitchell translation.

It is my great good fortune that I have begun to “blow as aimless as the wind”,  and to come into a fuller measure of “not knowing”, here is my fortune, my rest, my home, my wealth.  I am so glad that you journey with me through these pages, that we share this aimlessness for so brief a moment…

Adayre R. Miller

9/29/12

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Peter Hulance to see more of this artists work please follow this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterhules/7876464188/