Yesterday being required to go to the grocery store to stock
up my pantry, walking on a foot that protested every step, I leaned on the shopping
cart and hobbled glacially slowly down first, this aisle and the next, looking
for the items that will get me through the next few days of foot elevated
healing.
The store was busy, and the aisles packed, and my slow
progress created even more pressure on the over stuffed isles. A young man, in his early twenties, was
stacking yams and sweet potatoes in the root vegetable isle, and I asked him
which did he think, was a better purchase – yams or sweet potatoes.
As he turned his attention to me I could see clearly his
disgruntled and slightly disturbed attitude. He did not want to be where he was, nor doing what he was
doing. Just after he answered my
question, an older woman walked past us with her purse hanging from her
shoulder. The purse swept a clear
plastic box of cherry tomatoes, from the top of a stack of them, and onto the
floor. I could see from my vantage
point that she had no idea she had even touched them, and she continued down
the isle with nary a backward glance.
The young man, however, put on quite a floorshow.
He looked after her with such disdain, aggravation,
disturbance, and resentment; you would have thought she had been caught
murdering puppies. Even as he was
reaching this way and that, to pick up the small red escapees, his glaring gaze
followed her down the full length of the store.
I attempted some inane remark to ease his upset; he ignored
it and continued to glare in her direction.
I could almost hear his conditioned mind’s
conversation. “What an
idiot!! Why doesn’t she watch what
she’s doing!! Now I have to clean
up the mess she has made!!” (I
suspect I have cleaned up his inner language quite a bit…)
This tiny moment spoke to me in a large way.
We imagine, by courtesy of the many dream merchant’s our
country supplies us with that our lives are supposed to fulfill some great
purpose. That we are to go out
amongst the world’s population to slay dragons, win the maidens, and acquire
great gobs of attention, approval, money, and fame.
But what if the dream merchants are wrong? What if our only purpose in this
lifetime, or any other for that matter, is to win a simple victory over a mind
that sees everything as a problem,
and by doing so causes us to hate, or so much worse, fear… our moment-by-moment
existence.
If you view the cherry tomato escape from this perspective
then the only thing that occurred, is that the young man went from stacking
tuberous root vegetables to picking up tomatoes, and both activities could have
been achieved with no emotional component at all…with no resentment, and
therefore no suffering.
The twenties is the decade of the “should” and “should
not’s”, the time when we are most sure about how our world should work, the time when we are most physically, mentally, and
emotionally, capable of fighting the losing battle that is the world of dream
chasing.
As we age, and life begins to teach us that we can never
control the outer world to suit our desires, we learn the hard truth that life
is filled to the brim with suffering for those that continue to fight a losing
battle for what they imagine they
want, instead of looking to the real and the true and beginning to unravel the
darkness within.
In religion, it is said, that there is always an exoteric
and an esoteric version of every faith.
The exoteric is the outer traditions, trappings, rituals and rights,
which the believers follow – hoping to ward off the fears of daily living. But always a few, in every tradition,
begin to hear the call of the esoteric… hidden within the depths of all the
outer genuflections and church dogmas.
In the “new age” movement there is an exoteric and an
esoteric path as well.
Adayashanti calls it being “in time” or “out of time”. He describes the in time group as one
that is easy to find, quite visible, probably advertising, and making a large
splash of some sort…while the “out of time” groups are often obscure, hard to
find, never promote themselves, and will teach you to fish so that you may feed
yourself.
The dictionary meaning of exoteric is “understood by all”;
anyone who speaks the same language can understand the messages of the dream
merchants. My Beloved Teacher was
an “out of time” teacher, an esoteric and deeply wise human being, and it took
me 24 years to begin to understand the obscure, oddly impenetrable, arcane, and
wise teachings that were the work of my Teacher.
This is not a fault of his capacity to teach in a clear and
simple manner, but rather the workings of the conditioned mind’s many ways in
which it strives for survival and to veil the truth from us.
Lost in the productions of the conditioned mind we become
incapable of accessing our direct, deeply intimate, and beautifully fluid experience. We can no longer feel the beauty of the rising sun, but rather we can only talk to
ourselves about it, and thus reduce the world around us to a series of “like it
or don’t like it” internal conversations.
The most valuable thing that happens when we are freed from
the mind that creates all that conversation is the recognition that “like it or
don’t like it” is an illusion. We
can therefore be in pain or pleasure without having to run from it or run toward
it, and herein lies the real meaning of stillness.
Spiritual stillness is not a function of sitting in
meditation, watching our breath, or opening to our chakras. Stillness is a mind at repose, a mind
capable of ending the constant refrain of “I want or I don’t want”, a mind made
peaceful through the grace of surrender and acceptance.
The young grocery store stocker did not want to be spending
his time putting yams in a pyramid, he believed strongly that the woman who was
completely unaware that she dropped a box of tomatoes, should had stopped,
apologized, and perhaps even picked them up herself. He had an enormous conflict with reality and was instead
lost in the world of illusions, where he “knows” what should and should not
happen, and “knows” how people should and should not behave. And the only person paying the price
for his “knowledge” is himself.
One day his body will tire of the constant conflict with the simple
truth of the moment and his heart will stop, or his body will begin to over produce
cells in the form of cancer, or some other window will open for him to flee
from himself and the world of suffering he is in the process of creating.
Or perhaps grace will enter his life in the form of a simple
teacher with an even simpler message, to give up “believing” and “knowing” in
favor of direct and pure experience.
If he is so graced, then a world that cannot be imagined will suddenly
appear directly in front of him as though a miracle, and he will begin to
breathe the free air of the middle way…
Adayre R. Miller
2/15/12 fidgetromeo
photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Fidgetromeo to
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