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