Just A Glimpse…

As I continue dwelling in silence, I find some very startling experiences coming to the foreground, that I wished to share with you.

First, and perhaps foremost, the comfort cannot be effectively described.  It is a nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to lose, kind of easy, quiet, shaded, harmony.

Many years ago when I was in the process of giving birth to the pain ridden, self-loathing mirage that I once thought myself to be, I would often go out into the backyard and lay in the hammock my Dad had strung between two very large Sycamore trees.

The trees, owing to my mother’s excessively green thumb, were enormous.  Their shade was so absolute that no grass grew at their feet, and their trucks so large that three people could not have touched hands around their circumference.  Their susurration, the blessed sound of their leaves moving in rhythm with the breeze, was a boon to my injured and hurting soul.

I particularly liked swinging beneath their outstretched arms, when it was beginning to cool down in early and late fall.  I would carry a large handmade quilt out into the yard, wrap myself in the quilt and climb into the hammock.   If it were windy as well, all the better…

I would lie there, shifting gently in the breeze, warm except for the tops of my ears and the tip of my nose, and listen to the self hating filled voice, that had captured my attention from the very moment I learned to speak.  I believed then, that if I could only figure out what I had done wrong, then I would have the hope of fixing it and not have to continue enduring the fear that dogged my every waking moment.  Under those two trees, large and kind embrace, I spent hours searching for the hidden key, the veiled miracle, that would set everything right and make it possible to leave behind the pain and sorrow that wound its way into the very fabric of my being.

My home was so chaotic, my mother’s rages so abrupt and dangerous, and my need for her so great, that I had no other choice than to recognize myself as the one who was broken, wrong, bad, guilty, and worthless.  I built a painful, wrecked, sad, lonely life upon this idea and its companion concepts.

The years with my beloved Teacher, unwound that self-harm and allowed me to entertain the notion that I might have been wrong in my self diagnosis, and my deep need for self punishment.

Even as I had the great good fortune to sit in his silent presence, I could not have conceived that his mind’s stillness was the “why” of his effect on me.  Yesterday I sat down with his writing’s and re-read the deep quality of his lessons.  For the first time ever, they did not have an emotional impact on me.  I was not startled by the clarity or the deep simplicity, his kind indifference to suffering, or the careful layering of understanding, which he had woven throughout every word and passage he had written.  As I read, I was most impacted by a kind of…”well, yes of course, that is self evident” kind of recognition, in concert with the deep realization that what I had really been attracted to, was his utterly quiet mind.

I had seen that total stillness many times and in many very dramatic ways, but unable to find it in myself, I could only yearn for it from him.  Merely sitting in the same room with him, would and did, restore me…I see now, that he was the twin sycamores of my willingness to endure the ending of the belief in the self made mind.

As he led me to give up believing, a fearfully scary enterprise, his quiet emptiness would shine a light upon the path and made the journey so much more bearable.

Now, post believing, I know…as one knows that one is breathing, how comfort, solace, well-being, and ease, enters into ones life.  To say that Silence is good does not come even close, to describing its value and healing power.

Most surprisingly, I have a very real and very dramatic preference for this more mature Silence.  I, who spent a lifetime learning how to be a storyteller, would rather sit silently on the couch with drool dripping from my chin, than to disturb the quiet magnitude of the spacious wonder of Silence.

Now there is more silence in my mind than there is speech, and here is the other most surprising effect of this deeper realization of the Silent Ground of Being. 

I have no relationship with the conversation that does enter my mind.

Now what does that mean…exactly?

Well it means a great many different things.  The first and most surprising is that I have no emotional, psychic, spiritual, or any other form of relationship, to the thoughts that I once believed was me.  There is no self that exists in thinking, just an illusion that is brought into being, and emotionally clung to, rather than to face the fear of its potential and defacto lack of existence.

When thoughts do appear, I see them as just that…a passing appearance, neither good nor bad, valuable or worthless, they are merely appearances in the vast openness of Empty Space which has become so much more alive for me, than anything else I have ever experienced, that thinking can hardly hold my attention…much less capture me.

From this vastness, as a thought arrives – (from wherever they come from) – I entertain, or not entertain it, based on my bodies reaction to it.  If it adds to the depth of well-being, I watch it as it passes by…if it causes disturbance in the body’s well being, I let it evaporate.  (That it is what it looks and feels like, as though fog were suddenly hit with a ray of powerful, strong and warm sunshine, and…poof…the thought disappears).

To have no relationship to one’s thinking, which is to say to have no personal investment in thought forms, is a great deal more than merely comforting.

But it cannot be put into words, this deep experience of Silent Emptiness; liberation, freedom, home, hearth, life, love, release, emancipation, independence, sovereignty, dignity, nobility, graciousness, goodness, soul-deep gratitude.  These words perform a dim, vaguely correct pointer toward the truth, but in no way capture the essence of that truth.

It is a hopeless task to attempt to describe the wonder of Silence, and I am not poet enough to get even close…

I am going to post this, even though it is so woefully inadequate at describing the experience, in the hope that it provides someone with some needed assistance.

Adayre R. Miller

3/9/13

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