The Pendulum's Arc...

As far as I can tell, what separates the few of us with liberated minds, from the many of us, tortured inside a prison cell of our own making, is the capacity for acceptance.

And, I have come to realize, that here is the only level playing field we will ever likely encounter.  Our government asserts that we have the mandated right to pursue happiness, our religious origins tell us that all are created equal, and in our immaturity we like to hope that means equal in gifts, skills, talents or capacities…or maybe just equal in treatment.  Of course, even a cursory look around you will belie that possibility.  We are not equal in any other way, than the capacity to bend our minds toward the inevitability of acceptance.

I say inevitable, because no matter how much you may shake your fist at the sky, and attempt to control your life and circumstances, one day death will come and take your breath and life, with no more need of acquiescence from you, than the seed must bend to the wind’s direction.

My mother’s last breath confirmed that for me, in no uncertain terms.  She lived a very small and very ordinary life, but she ruled that life with an iron fist.  Her will was the order in our house and was never, so far as I could tell, breached by her husband or any of her children. And on the day of her death, much to my surprise – although I probably should not have been surprised, given her tremendous willfulness, she was still ambulatory, still very much requiring control and her last words before she lay down her head and her breathing ceased were…”I think I can get through this”.

Our will, no matter what we think, hope, or wish, is not our own.

The life we are living was chosen for us, not by us.  I know how much that goes against the American grain, I fully accept that you will find that abrasive and even impudent…but I cannot but help to speak what has been growing in my heart, in terms of understanding and willingness.

Eckhart Tolle recently posited these questions:  “Can we accept the possibility that comfort and security are not the ultimate purpose of human existence -- and that consciousness evolves and awakens through facing discomfort and insecurity? Can we accept that we may be here to be challenged, and so no longer resent the fact that we have problems? Can we accept each moment as it is?”
 
Can we accept?
 

It seems to me this is the only question worth our time and attention.  Prior to our physical death, can we, will we, die to the notion that we can have what we want?  That what we want is right for us, or will bring the peace we so yearn for?  That we know anything about how to reach fulfillment and end suffering, even that we know anything at all…?  These are just a few of the many roadblocks that stand in the way of our capacity to save ourselves through the power and majesty of acceptance.

I discover for myself that when my eye is trained on acceptance, my body, heart, emotions, and internal sense of balance are in harmony even if they are not entirely peaceful.  I find that when I begin to want, to desire, to yearn for some other experience than the one in front of me, gloom blooms inside of me like a black rose climbing ever higher and replete with thorns.

My transition from outer dependency to inner acceptance has been a long and circuitous one.  I have, often, pretended myself farther along than I really am, for reasons I am not entirely clear about.  I received just yesterday a comment on one of my posts, only the third or so in as many years and I reprint it here in its entirety:

“This is incredible. In a matter of a few paragraphs you've relegated the entire population of the Earth to the status of a frightened child. Of course, you exclude yourself from that status. Let me ask you something. For someone who is "willing to stand still, in the full gale force of his or her own fears, hurts, injustices, and injuries – and to do so alone, in the deep darkness" Why are you so freaking depressed? Every blog entry for the past year is about depression, darkness and despair. If you are so enlightened about "universal intelligence” (I can hardly write that without laughing) why are you not able to pull yourself out of the funk you're in and be happy. You keep writing about this great and wonderful state of being, but you never seem to attain it. You appear to be the strangest creature I’ve ever heard of: You are a megalomaniac with low self esteem. Wow!” Jeanna-Klein

I find myself agreeing with Jenna.  I may well be guilty of all that she accuses me of…including the megalomania and the low self esteem. And I do indeed carry a type of darkness with me, it announces itself – (at least to Jenna) – in blaring and blatant terms…and yet, I can feel the reserves of Trust, that live now in my very bones supporting and relaxing me.

Pema Chodron describes the darkness that I can very much feel, as “the wounded and softened heart”.  She puts it this way: “Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart. Now, if you look for that soft heart that we guard so carefully—if you decide that you’re going to do a scientific exploration under the microscope and try to find that heart—you won’t find it. You can look, but all you’ll find is some kind of tenderness. There isn’t anything that you can cut out and put under the microscope. There isn’t anything that you can dissect or grasp. The more you look, the more you find just a feeling of tenderness tinged with some kind of sadness. This sadness is not about somebody mistreating us.

This is inherent sadness, unconditioned sadness. It is part of our birthright, a family heirloom. It’s been called the genuine heart of sadness.”

“The genuine heart of sadness”…I like that phrase and it aligns itself with my experience.  The more I grow in an authentic capacity for acceptance, the more I experience this genuine heart of sadness.

Jenna assumes that because I write about what I wish to understand, that I should, by now, have arrived at someplace other than where she views me as being.  That I am therefore fraudulent in my writings and in my very being, and she may well be right…for I have come to the end of my ability to believe in the productions of my mind.  I do not mean to claim in any form whatsoever, that I am enlightened – or even close to it, but I have stopped believing.  And it has brought with it great sadness and great tenderness.

I left behind the hellfire and damnation traditions of my childhood, in favor of the teachings of a great and gentle soul whom I loved beyond all description, and now…I am leaving him behind as well.  He would celebrate this day with me, were he able.  He, in his quiet, calm, and non-demonstrable way, might actually do some sort of internal Irish dancing jig, to know that I am finally leaving him behind.

Not his lessons, his great love, nor his deep kindness…but rather my dependency upon him.  And even that may not be correct or accurate in any fixed way.  I am finally mature enough to realize that the pendulum will continue to swing until my last breath.  You and I will find no fixed positions, while we live and breath inside these fragile bodies.  We will find no good without ill, nor a high without a low, no light without darkness and the notion of a permanent happiness is the longing of children. 

I have come to see that the very best we can hope for is an ever decreasing arc of the pendulum’s swing.  When we are young, or even young in understanding, the pendulum’s swings are wildly erratic…taking us from one passionate pole of pleasure to its equally passionate pole of despair.  But, if we are constant, committed, able and willing…acceptance’s great generosity, will eventually lead us to the place where the pendulum’s swings between the two poles are a mere whisper of what they once were, and here we will locate Pema’s genuine heart of sadness…our birthright and family heirloom.

I am finally capable of giving up the notion that I can be permanently peaceful, or open, or happy, or successful and I am finally open to becoming fully genuine instead.  I count that as a great victory…and look forward to discovering at a deeper level my “genuine heart of sadness”.

Adayre R. Miller

12/26/12

A Pure Mind, an Open Heart…

 

I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t wake up talking to myself…mostly I am telling myself the story of the dream that I am in the midst of, or in my early years I was telling myself to wake up so that I might escape the demon I am dreaming of, whose clear intention is to crush my bones.

On the rarest of occasions I wake up telling myself some long overdue Truth.

Of course Truth can never really be overdue, as it appears precisely when and where and how, we are capable of hearing it…but this one seems overdue because I have again been suffering for a good while now, and I am so very glad to have awakened to its purposeful and meaningful entry into my mind, and yes, my heart as well.

It was a single phrase.

“Believing in the “good”, makes “bad” things possible.”         - Universal Intelligence

Now this idea is not new to me, my Beloved Teacher was the first to put it into my mind, but somehow it escaped the reaches of my heart.  And more than that, even though every teacher I value has said basically the same thing, I have not been capable of taking it to my depths prior to this day.  (And perhaps not even now, only time will tell).

Due to the nature and depth of my ignorance, when I first met my teacher, I could do no other thing than to turn his lessons into concepts…the bastion of the conditioned mind…

I swept the fundamentalist Christian concepts from my mind like so much old debris and inserted my Teachers lessons.  Unlike my hell- fire and damnation childhood minister, who made me fear the very breath in my body, my Beloved Teacher radiated such kind and tender knowingness that I loved him instantly, deeply and completely.  Which led to Trust the nature of which, is still baffling to me.  I have never trusted another thing, person, place or idea the way I trusted him…and for a child who had survived the raging fires of a mother’s unbounded anger and an uncles sexual assaults, that trust remains the great miracle of my life.

But…and it is a huge one…I was not capable of taking his lessons into my heart.  I am not saying that they did not provide me with extraordinary relief, for they most assuredly did.  But an idea that remains only in the mind, in the form of a belief, is merely a reprieve from the suffering that exacts its toll until we are willing to come naked and bare to the alter of the heart.

The heart of us is the guiding principle; it is out of the heart that we garner the odd pathways our lives take.  The heart with its blind faith and unknowable depths, are the true hands that are on the reins of our lives, no matter how much we would like to believe that is not so…nor how much we rail against that truth… our thinking mind, is like a small and fragile punctuation, in the eternal reaches of the ever abiding heart.

It is with the heart, through the timbre of the heart’s echo, that we must come to deep terms with the idea that the hope, and wish, and belief, in the good is what creates what we imagine is the bad.

I suppose we do more to injure ourselves in our headlong pursuit of the “good” we imagine for ourselves, than any other single event or process in our lives.  That has certainly been true for me…

I am possessed by a deeply subtle imagination.  Yes…it possesses me.

I have used it to create beautiful interior spaces; I use it to create words on paper.  But I have many more times been its prisoner than it has been my tool.

In the hands of my mind, my imagination has been the raw materials out of which I have crafted what I reasoned would be the “good” in my life, I dreamed a dream…I pursued an outcome…I wanted, no yearned, for a very specific goal.  This powerful use of my subtle, and seasoned imagination, allowed me to hide from the Truth.  The deep, and in many ways entirely unbidden trust I placed in my Teacher, quietly and with astonishing Stillness, was the antidote to my imagination, but I could not know that until now.

Many events had to come to pass before I could wake up with the echo of my heart’s thought routing its way past my conditioned mind, this Christmas morning, the 25^th of December 2012.  

The Truth that “Believing in the “good”, is what makes “bad” things possible…”

It began with my Beloved Teacher’s death.  Like the death of a parent there is now no one on whom to rely, and I must walk through the darkness more fundamentally alone.  Then a friendship of thirty years was broken.  I say friendship when I might more accurately depict it as a dependency.  I cannot and would not speak for the other side of this relationship, as I am a more honorable person than that, but on my side there was a fierce and entirely unknown dependency that was the source of my abiding connection.  I could see that dependency in all the others that surround her, but for some reason could not see it in myself.  I was not dependent on her in some of the more obvious ways, I did not want or need her ever-present flattery, or her money, or her attention, or her influence…as all those things had worn off years before.

No, my dependency was as subtle as is my imagination.  I wanted her in my life for the reason that she kept at bay my Beloved Teachers’ influence.  I am shocked by that knowledge, shocked and aggrieved…but it is true none-the-less.

She excels at believing in the dream of the “good”, truly excels.  I do not mean to, and I hope you will not hear, that I am painting her as the villain in this piece for if any villainy is present, it is mine, and mine alone.

She wills herself to do “good”, be “good”, pray for “good”, hope for the “good” and teach the “good”.  She is popular, well liked and very successful.  In appearances, she is all the things that I am not, and I simply could not let her go.

So even as my heart was pulling me toward the abyss that my Beloved Teacher taught was necessary, I grasped onto her in the hope that I could have my cake and eat it too…as the old saying goes…

Which is to say that I wanted to follow my Teacher’s path, while secretly believing in an imagined future for myself that would be the “good” in my life that I have been seeking, all the days of my life.  In other words I wanted to keep my toes in the waters of the mental illness that is so rampant in our shared human perceptions, while also dabbling in the demanding pathways of those that have chosen a life of reality, rather than dreams.  Perhaps my Teacher can say it better than I …

Here is an excerpt from one of his lessons:

A Pure Mind (Heart)

“A pure mind does not run from book to book, or from person to person, like a vagrant looking for loose change in the park.  He stands firmly with his own Mind, (heart) even if he stands alone.

He gives himself to “what is” and nothing more.  He interprets life at the level of events.  He does what he says.  He does not complain, demanding his rights, live to please others, buckle under to authority, act differently than he feels, nor blame.  He does not approach situations as he wishes them to be, but faces them squarely as they are, in the context of “what is”.  

He does not over-think issues, expecting to find peace and relief in some elusive discipline of thinking.  He may counsel and share with others, but he does not look to them for conclusions, decisions, or answers.  He stands on his own feet.

He does not manipulate people, nor does he manipulate facts, nor circumstances.  He seeks only to improve  (open) himself, and those things under his stewardship.

He has learned that he can’t feel disappointed, used, or taken advantage of unless he is guilty of the same.  Life rewards his sacrifices by opening doors to more prosperous pastures.   He is kind to the stubborn, knowing that they have been disappointed too many times.  He has a gentle spirit for everyone when called for.

He looks within for security, knowing that there is no god or human to make him secure without self-reliance and self-mastery, which is the mastery of thinking.  His purpose is to lose all shred of dependency, and to replace them with reality.

Mental and emotional dependency is another way of saying, MENTAL ILLNESS.  In Biblical terms, this is a lost soul.  A classic sign of this disease is to live in a state of wishful thinking, or to think of WHAT OUGHT TO BE, as a way of avoiding WHAT IS.  Few indeed achieve the “what is” state.  Most people live in hope instead of reality, so the vast majority carry their mental illness to the grave. 

 They never realize the power and freedom that comes from facing “what is”.  Living in the hope of “what should be” is a classic example of the dream world of illusion.

For example, we concern ourselves with body illness and give little time to thinking of our mental illness.  We give nobility to our sickness of dependency by calling it love, or concern, or caring.  Settling into co-dependent relationships, we abandon the idea of individual purpose, and the awakening of the soul.”

My dependency on my old friend was my way of being blind to my continuing desire to live in WHAT OUGHT TO BE, as a way of avoiding WHAT IS…this is a hard thing to come to know about oneself, and I have been experiencing a low grade form of depression for several months now, as I have sought to avoid the recognition of it.

To believe in the “good” is to bury oneself in the siren song of WHAT OUGHT TO BE, and that depth of avoidance makes all the “bad”, that has ever been, possible.  Conversely to open oneself to the WHAT IS of life, to live as though every single thing that occurs is meant to be here, fits in somehow, works together for the highest and truest good, can fill up the heart with the subtle joy of inner peace and the welcome glow, of the mature and seasoned “Pure Mind”.

I leave you with my Beloved Teacher’s prescription for the healing and restoring of “A Pure Mind”:

“We know that the life we long for is outside the box we live in.  So we must stop thinking in relationship to the box.  Instead of taking the safe way, take a risk.  Instead of seeking comfort, do something that really hurts.  This is the process of UNDOING.

          The plan is not to find a new way.

          It is to find freedom from the old way.

          Our mission is not to re-learn, but to un-learn.

           Reality appears once illusions are destroyed.

            Un-learning frees one from mental and emotional dependency.                            

                           …And then problems become stepping-stones.

                           …Fear becomes the elixir of courage.

                           …Pain becomes the birth pain, introducing new

    life.

                           …No longer will we live lives of quiet desperation.                                                                                                       -Thoreau

Adayre Ronni Miller

12/25/12

Caught...

I made the mistake of attempting to share my current experience with a couple of different people.  The first heard it incorrectly, took it personally, (even though I was not speaking about her), and rejected me in an old and familiar way.  The second wanted to fix me…always an unpleasant experience, no matter how well-intentioned the “fixer” is.

And so I thought perhaps I might write it down and come to some new understanding on my own.

I am Caught. 
  
Like fish trapped in a barrel I am easy pickin’s, you wouldn’t even need a hook to reel me in.

And I am caught in a place I haven’t ever been to before.

The two most important teachers in my life, have, through their peerless personal examples, convinced me of the Ageless Truth that steering one’s life by the light of a belief system, (any belief system), keeps you trapped in the world of conceptual thinking and thereby prevents your soul from breaking free of its prison.

I have come more fully into agreement with that notion than ever before, I was capable of, and instead of being greeted by bliss and joy…I feel dull and sad.  And in so doing, I reach, what is very probably, a completely erroneous conclusion and decide that I am doing it wrong.

At the same time as this is occurring, I have finally released an ages old “dream” that has had me in its grip for more than three decades… so, to dull and sad…add a heaping helping, of loss and grief.

The tool that was used by Universal Intelligence, to tear that “dream” from beneath my cold dead fingers, was a “friend” who ended our thirty years old relationship with an email.  It was precisely the right tool, as it caused such a breach of faith, due to the shear shock of the experience, that it turned my long held belief in a better life “out there somewhere” to dust.  Not just dust, but motes of dust so completely was it obliterated.

I know in my heart of hearts that one day I will be grateful for such a brutal awakening…that somehow the shock of it will be transmuted into sanity.  I know that, not because of some mystical feeling that I am conjuring up and soothing myself with the feel of, but rather, from a boots on the ground perspective that the general drift of my life has been toward greater and greater sanity.

In these rather dark times I am currently experiencing, that is the one thing that holds my hand as I walk this lonely path.  All the days of my life have held a general drift toward sanity, and I have learned to trust that the remaining days of my life will also drift, however erratically, toward greater and greater sanity.

Here is an email that my Beloved Teacher sent me on the 21^st day of September 2004.  I include it in total because it so reflects my current experience and his immense generosity…

“Dear Ronni

This is my first activity of the day, even before a drink of water.  I feel the life in you as it weaves its way through the pathway of obstacles.  What moves me most is the fact that you keep moving forward in spite of the blocks that loom before you (us).  I think you have found the way.  Your description of the path matches mine.  And I think you have learned that we travel alone when we pass through the valley.  Perhaps, when we no longer think of turning back, no longer waver in the lonely darkness, and nothing else matters except to go on, then we shall find beauty all around us.  I long for the day that you discover that you are really traveling the path for someone other than yourself.

George”

I have come to the place where I no “longer think of turning back”, even though I am still wavering in the lonely darkness…I have come to know, without doubt, that it is a journey that must be undertaken entirely alone.  What I have not discovered is the “finding of beauty all around”, nor the courage and strength required to make all of myself, the gift that my Teacher so assuredly was.

He would often teach a lesson that I have come to think of as “giver” v. “taker’. 

He would ask us at various points and in varied circumstances if we thought of ourselves as “givers or takers”.  It would always surprise me how simple we thought that question was.  Invariably most of us would translate that question Vis a Vis money, did we give to charities, the poor and impoverished, the helpless and weak, the downtrodden and lost…

Money, as a measuring stick, is of course, the thinnest of surface understandings, the grossest and least valuable way to interpret his question, and the most immature.  But, we his students, did not possess his great sensitivity to the unseen world and its many layers of great depth and reach.

For instance, every single time-without exception, you or anyone you know, attempts to convince you of something that they “believe” they are attempting to “take” something from you.  They take your attention, or your energy, or your money, or your gifts, or your influence, or your time….and they purport to give you something in return…healing, well being, hope, prayerful insight, or a host of other returns on your investment.  But what they really want is a selfish and entirely self-serving measure of your life’s energy stream.  Why?  Because they lack the courage to face life alone, naked, and undefended…the fully mature are those that no longer seek outside themselves, for some small scrap of hope that life will no longer be scary, brutal, or unjust.

The undeveloped want someone else, anyone else, to travel their path for them, they want someone else to make the path smooth, to unravel the knots, to find the doorway, to make good their escape.  The most deluded of all, are those who believe that they can indeed help another through life’s turbulent waters to the distant shore and the horizon of internal peace.

I do not mean to say, and would dishonor my Teachers memory, if you heard, that helping others is somehow a poor way to spend ones’ time.  It, most assuredly, is not.

However, it is a rare human indeed, who has crossed the great divide between being a “taker” and into being a living, breathing “giver”.

All the world’s religion, by whatever name they go by, are all constructed for the takers of this low plane of existence.  They are all carbon copies of one another…”heaven”, the place you will surely arrive at, may be named nirvana, bliss, joy, populated with virgins, or personal godheads, or a host of other images…if only you execute the steps correctly.  Genuflect, follow the rules, dance the dance, pray the right way, or think the right way, and eventually you will end up in your personal version of heaven.  This is the “takers” dream.  That somehow heaven will be the end result of all their efforts, and that, we, the takers of the world, will somehow be spared having to face life on life’s terms…naked, alone, defenseless.  Being spared this deep truth is the hope of a frightened child, the haven of the deeply immature, the cul-de-sac of those who have willfully chosen the sleep of “believing”, over the demands of awakening.

It cannot be so.

Only those willing to stand still, in the full gale force of their own fears, hurts, injustices, and injuries – and to do so alone, in the deep darkness – have the right to expect anything other than more of the same.

I suspect that beauty seen “all around us”, is a prize that is fully reserved, for only the truly brave, the truly willing, the truly capable.  

It makes sense doesn’t it?  Why would Universal Intelligence waste hidden-in-plain-sight-beauty, on those of us who are still hoping that some other day, some other place, some other time, will bring us the joy we say we are so hungry for?

The eyes with which to see Beauty’s grace, no longer see the “right” set of circumstances, or the “right” time, or the “right” place, or the “right” people.  No…those eyes take in everything that happens and see grace and beauty everywhere, and in every circumstance.

Since the day my Teacher exposed me to his lessons of “givers and takers”, I knew then, as I do now, that I am a “taker”.  What I did not know, is that being a taker is not a function of how little money, time, or energy, I give to the world of problems we imagine we live in, and that being a “giver” is not a function of how much I wish to help others heal.

No… I have come to see that plainly and simply, what makes me a taker is that I am still so immature that I spend my precious time on this planet, hoping for a better tomorrow.  I am a “taker”, because I lack the courage to stand still in the face of the deep unknowable, and not invent for myself a “heaven” somewhere off in the future, where I will be happy and content with my lot.

You can see how I am caught, can’t you?  

I have the courage to understand the hard truth, but lack the strength to live it…

Ronni Miller

12/21/12