A Choice…

I am undergoing a type, and intensity of devotion that I have never before experienced.

I have known a great deal of devotion in my life.  The terror and suffering that I came up out of childhood with, was so all consuming, so absolute, that I could often be found at the altar of the Baptist church I attended, prostrate and beseeching.

I look back now…and I wonder at the fact that no one felt the need to question a child of six, seven, or twelve years of age, laying sobbing and begging for salvation.

In the lost years when I traveled the pathways of my culture who promised that money, fame, and success would salve the wound, there to, I was completely devoted.  Tireless, consumed, committed, capable…I strove with all my considerable will to discover the key that would afford me a ticket out of the insanity; I lived with on a daily basis.

Then I met my Teacher and true devotion began to bloom in my heart and in my will.  Devotion to the truth I could see, hear, feel, and experience, whenever I was in his presence.  Unable to truly understand him, I jealously guarded his influence in my life and would have no other streams of thought diluting his sovereignty.  I bathed myself in his words, his concepts, and his lessons…not because he somehow, through some trickery of mind, held me to him…but rather exactly the opposite.  He was so unattached to us, his audience, that only his example of service made clear how willing he was to give us his all.  He asked for nothing from me.  Not my money, my time, my talent, or my agreement.  He was merely, and always, only “available” to me as he would have described it.  I had the privilege of speaking with him, on a one on one basis, only three times in his life.  That translates to three personal hours, and with all the intensives, weekends, and workshops I might have spent three hundred hours with him all tolled, in a group setting, over the 29 years I knew him.  During those three hundred hours, (and most particularly the three personal hours), I felt more alive, more concentrated than at any other time in my daily existence even though, I repeat, I mostly could not understand him.

Now that Silence fills my very soul…I not only understand him…I cannot imagine how I could ever have been confused.

This more stable version of the Silence that has sporadically visited me for the last couple of years, has now become so palpably present, so deeply felt, so intrinsically and absolutely true, that I find myself lacking interest in anything other than its presence.

I discover under its influence that I have no relationship to my thoughts.  Like a hammer my hand might pick up, and put down, when the job is complete…my thoughts have no more, or less value than this.  I do not strive toward “positive” thoughts, nor shun “negative” ones, in-point-of-fact, those terms make no sense to me now.  Just as a hammer can be neither positive, nor negative, so to my thoughts are merely available for use, should I have need or want of them.

My personal will has all but disappeared, I no longer guide my days by the light of what I want or don’t want, what I like or don’t like, but rather by whether or not I am settling deeper into the Silence, that has begun to fill my soul to expanses beyond the realm of understanding. 

I can think of no better use of the steadfastness of my heartbeats, than that they should carry me ever deeper into this quiet field of Silent Emptiness.

The Oxford English dictionary defines devotion, as “committed love”…yes, I could agree with that… provided that does not evoke in you some sentimental notion of love as: approval, appreciation, or applause.  Love as the Ground of Being is not an emotional experience, but rather an abiding and ever present “suchness”, an intrinsic and invisible foundation upon which all things stand, a harmonizing flow of liquid openness, a wonder filled opening to the Great Beyond.

I can find no other reason to breathe save to honor it.  I can find no other reason to live save to express it.  I can find no other right-use-ness of my time than to deepen it.  I have no other value save being its witness.  I have no “I” save its presence.

My thoughts, my life, my time, my intention, my service, my talents…all that I have, will have, might one day acquire…given in full measure and to my very last breath, would not come even remotely close, to some measure of recompense for it’s grace having found me, and having opened me.

My teacher was very fond of teaching the need for sacrifice, he spoke of it often and in very profound and moving ways, and he embodied it in a manner that cannot be adequately described.

He said that the original meaning of the word sacrifice, was to “make one’s self sacred.” A mastery that he evoked with such simplicity, dignity, grace, and fluidity, that I felt the need to bow my head whenever I was in his presence, I often felt deeply inadequate to the tasks of becoming “sacred”, and of course, I now understand that the conditioned mind is not capable of becoming so.

But now I know, in the very marrow of my bone, that it is not something you become…but rather something that is revealed to be the naked truth of the real face, of every being that populates this globe.

The very last exchange my Teacher and I shared, was the placement of a small plaque into my outstretched hand.  Upon this small memento is carved these three words…

You Were Chosen.

He did not mean, my personality, the self I once imagined I was…he did not extend this honor to a self…but rather to Life as it expresses itself, here and now, in this deeply sacred moment.

We. Have. Been. Chosen… to carry Life’s deep Silence, its breathtaking Emptiness, into the color and cacophony of daily living…to be the One; living, breathing, expression, of the Unknowable Mystery and its great, deep and wide, wellspring of goodness.

Adayre R. Miller

3/10/13

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and WuJS to see more of this artist’s work, please follow this link:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wu1229/7346582494/