What Matters, And What Doesn’t…

I have reached a new level of vulnerability that has never before been felt or experienced.  I would have to be very sick or very weak for it to get deeper, than this.

It is born of a few different things… an interview that went badly right from hello.  She was a young woman with the speed disease that is now so prevalent in our culture, and I of course, am slow.  I thought I was answering a question she didn’t feel was being answered, so as the third pass, of my apparent non-answer – (I really did believe I was answering her question, I wasn’t being obtuse for the sake of it) – approached, we both knew I would not get the job.

Then there was the moment my coach pointed out to me that my deeply pleasurable response to a moment of shared conversation, was the expression of my intensely felt emotional commitment to my “belief system”…and I knew in an instant he was right, it was true, I had been duped by my own mind into believing once again.

After that coaching session, I went to a meeting I attend somewhat sporadically in the home of some lovely older folk, who provide a vegetarian meal and a video of Eckhart Tolle.  We eat dinner, watch the video, and then have a “discussion”, about the ideas that are presented.  I have noticed, that although the attendance is evenly split between men and women, only the men “discuss” and they, to a man, sound like they are teaching, lecturing, or are “leading” the group toward some horizon that pulls at them.

I recognize that pull. 

It is the desire to be identified as special, or important, or valuable.  It hides itself beneath the banner of spirituality, and growth…but it is the age-old need to be included and approved of.  It was made more difficult to sit through, because of my coach having unmasked its presence hiding under my pleasurable experience of being listened to, and valued, by some younger people at a recent gathering I attended.

One man at the Tolle meeting, in particular, was so intense in his conversation, that if you could have somehow removed the words and left the emotional tone on which they were carried, he would have sounded just like any Ku Klux Klan, Nazi, or fundamentalist that ever drew breath.  Pounding away at his non-dual, you are divine; all is Universal Love, rhetoric until I felt as though I had been beaten about the head and shoulders.

I came away defeated by the realization that my deep exploration of all things “spiritual” is merely the old desire to find some safe haven in a world rocking with insecurity.

I get a quote a week from Pema Chodron, one of the very few teachers I allow into my head, and this week’s went like this:

THE DREAM OF CONSTANT OKAYNESS

It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

“Fundamental ambiguity”, constant doubt, hazy uncertainty, vague indistinctness…this is the human condition.  No one escapes it, none are ever free of it, there is no hope of being released from its grip.

I get the sense that the ones I have known that are so very remarkable, my Beloved Teacher, my new teacher, Pema, Gangaji, Emerson, are all folk who have learned some how to remain constantly present with themselves, while being crushed just like the rest of us, by the “fundamental ambiguity” of being human.

It is the full embrace of our hazy uncertainty that is called for, not the search for bliss or an altered state of mind that cannot be sustained.

You would think I would be a bit better at that than I am; after all, I have lived with financial uncertainty for more than two decades.  I “died” when I was seventeen, and again at fifty-two, I have watched a few other folk actually die, and I have explored the experience of my mind going silent.  Which I might add, scared the loving bejesus out of me when it happened, or more accurately when I noticed it for the first time.  I was deeply afraid if I let go and surfed the silence that I knew was within reach, that I would not return from it, and would sink beneath the surface never to be seen or heard from again.  Now that I know as a felt experience, that who I am is not the sound of the voice in my head, silence is a welcome respite rather than a feared companion.

But still, with all of that experience, I unconsciously am still seeking “ground beneath my feet”, and sought that ground, dressed up in a non-dual belief system.  Good lord…

It makes my teeth ache to know this about myself.  To know that I am a fundamentalist as well, demanding recognition wherever I can find it, nursing a deeply unconscious need to be special…as though it might somehow fend off the ambiguity that Pema so adroitly points out.

I can no longer be enchanted by the busyness, goal setting, achievement orientation, of the culture into which I was born.  I no longer nurse fantasies that I will “someday” be well off, or well known, or bigger than life, or divinely great.  I have come into the full willingness to be ordinary and invisible…and therefore potentially useful…but I still want, somehow, to be spared the rocking wildness of vague uncertainty.

I want to know what to do about my shrinking resources, how I will feed myself when the end of them is reached, or where I will turn when I am sick and old.  These desires are not at the forefront any longer, but they are old and deep and dangerous.  And my first impulse is to struggle against them…precisely what Pema counsels against.

I know, to an incontrovertible certainty, (paradoxical isn’t it?), that the only way to traverse this dangerous shore, is deep stillness.  To sit with myself, by myself, and let it have me, to pour myself directly into the path of the one and only thing, that I definitely do not want to experience.

My Beloved Teacher’s stories were as scarce as hen’s teeth.  He so radically preferred to teach through the medium of experience, that I could probably count his stories on the digits of my own two hands and feet.  But he did occasionally tell a story to illustrate a point, and once he shared the story of his great fear of flying.  It was during a period in which Omega, the organization he founded, was at its peak in growth and influence.  He had trainings in California and Canada that he was routinely forced to fly for, and he related that this fear of flying was so intense that he imagined death and destruction as a result.  Each time that the fear would come upon him, so his story went, rather than turn away from it, he would engage it on all levels.  He imagined and embraced a fiery death for himself, shrieking from the sky like a falling bomb.  And in this way, in very short order, he became a comfortable and confident flyer.

This was his great and open secret.  Just like the famous Buddhist teacher, (whose name I cannot currently remember), who when asked for his “secret” stated simply…”I don’t mind”. 

That’s it…I don’t mind, I don’t mind the fundamental ambiguity of being human.  I don’t mind the groundless nature of living and breathing.  I don’t mind the possibility of dying in a fiery airplane crash.

I – Don’t – Mind.

What if that is all there is?

What if that is all that can be known by us?

What if, all our running around, and inventing belief systems, and hoping and praying and wishing and wanting, all boils down to that one simple phrase and its full embrace or its unconscious rejection?

What if “Not Minding” is the very pinnacle of achievement?

What if “Not Minding” is a state of restful awareness in which our true nature is revealed to be all that really exists? 

Restful awareness, or “not minding” might then be the only thing that captures our attention…and what if, it costs us everything we have, to discover its peaceful presence in our lives?

I am getting closer to being willing to pay the price.  Perhaps I will never have the courage to fully know the depths of the Oneself, to discover myself as the ground of being and the enveloping ever constant nature of pure awareness…but at the very least…I finally know what matters, and what doesn’t…

Adayre R. Miller

(Ronni)

9/21/12

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