The Door is So Wide Open...

 

Yesterday I went to County Hospital, to get my still hurting foot looked at, to determine if it was broken.  It wasn’t.  But I had to spend nearly the whole day there, between financial counseling, radiology, and two trips to internal medicine…it was a long day…spent in total interior silence.

This is a first for me.  I have had moments of living inside a silent mind before this, but it required that I be in a quiet environment and with my eyes closed.

The things I learned are almost not describable.  Certainly language does not adequately convey the lessons, which seemed to well up from under everyone and everything.

First and foremost, I connected with people in a way and manner that I did not know was possible, (even though I spoke only when spoken to, and only about my foot).  I suppose in large part that came from not viewing them through the filter of my inner dialogue. 

When I use the word connection, it implies a sentimental type of feeling…but that is not the case at all.  In terms of my “feelings”, I could only say it was a comfortable, and deeply comforting, form of neutrality.  I did not need anything from them, nor they, anything from me.  Rather we were fellow sojourners on an invisible highway going nowhere, and everywhere, at one and the same time.  We were companions in the truest sense of the word.  We were accompanying one another into a deepening evolution of the mystery of Being, that goes unknown and unfelt, by all who are addicted to the steady stream of rumblings, from the thinking minds process of distraction and disturbance.

There were children, the elderly, the sick, those that did not speak my language, the poor and every other random type of folk you can imagine, and none of them were seen, through the filter of my conditioned and thinking mind. 

It was a REVELATION.

No one, including myself, was special or unique…and simultaneously everyone was precious beyond compare.  This utter lack of specialness and its concomitant deeply felt preciousness, was not a label I affixed, but rather a feeling tone.  Like a low, barely audible hum that pervaded the air around everyone, and made everyone seem both common as dust, and vibrant as stars.

It seemed as though people were drawn together by their stories or beliefs about the experience they were undergoing.  One woman told the story, with much emotional exasperation, about being from Tucson and how hard it had been to find the hospital.  How she got lost, her GPS didn’t work; it made her late for her appointment… and such and so on...  She ended her story with how she had finally turned it all over to God, and he provided the means by which she had finally been able to arrive.  The other two women she was speaking with had a similar belief in God and his interest in guiding us, even on a street by street basis, and so at the end there was the holding up of hands and the blessing of the all pervasive goodness that worked, when the GPS had failed.

The reason I point out this particular exchange, was because of the way in which it drew them together, while oddly keeping them apart as well.

I don’t quite know how to explain what I have just said, but I am going to try…

There was an artificial quality to the coming together.  They bonded over the story of frustration that began the conversation, it became strengthened by the frustrated one being provided directions for returning home, by the one who was clearly enjoying “helping”, and then they all shared in the expression of the belief that God was a good co-pilot, and thus deserved their praise, which drew everyone toward one another in a shared communal moment.  It seemed quite fragile, this agreed upon “community” as it was born entirely of opinions about how things operate in the world, and being born of opinions, subject to change in the blinking of an eye.

Because I was not listening to my mind, all of this was recorded in an inner attention spaciousness; a kind of open, soft, receptive, and yielding field of awareness.  My experience of the fragility of the type of connection I was bearing witness to…one born of shared agreement…was a “sense” of it, like a fragrance in the air.

What it left me with, and I suppose what I am calling the artificiality of it, was the strong sense of loneliness that it called up.  It was as though, having lost their connection to the Ground of Being, they warmed their cold hands for a small moment over the fires of shared opinion, when the sun’s radiant warmth was available for the taking all around them.  Trapped in the shallow warmth of shared agreement, they were available to only a tiny portion of the overwhelming volume of well being, that existence is pouring fourth from every quarter and at every moment.

But it does lead me to the most striking thing about this more steady experience of the silent grounded mystery of Being, which is now more available to me, than I could have ever imagined possible.

It has cured my loneliness.

I make no predications that I will never be lonely again.  But I can tell you that loneliness was the cornerstone of my childhood, the bondage of my young adulthood, and the pursuit of the healing of it, the reason I moved into spirituality in the first place, as a means of finding some hope of exorcizing its hold on me.

Inner Silence has provided the cure I have spent a lifetime pursuing.

As I sat there yesterday, surrounded by the young and the old, the weak and the care providers, my predominant experience was of being fed by a continuous and steady stream of wellness.  Like I had been plugged in, tuned up, hugged by an unseen set of beloved arms.  It was entirely irrational, indescribable, illogical, unsought, unbidden, and steady as the oxygen that filled my every breath.

There was no experience of the passage of time, save when hunger caused me to realize that several hours had gone by.  And there was an absolute absence of the need for anything at all to happen.  I didn’t need to move the experience along, I wasn’t resentful of the time it took to be seen, and I didn’t resist the pain of having my foot handled by the x-ray techs.

It all seemed so “jump for joy” wonderful, without any jumping involved at all.

It was, paradoxically, mundane as mud…and wonderful beyond compare…at one and the same time.

Have you ever seen one of those amazing videos, where the makers of the film, somehow make it seem like everyone is a moving blur…while one person stands stock still and looking directly into the camera?  That is as precise a visual expression of my day yesterday, as I could possibly come up with.

Everyone had an agenda, save me.  Everyone had a plan, save me. Everyone had somewhere to be and something to accomplish, save me.  But most importantly, everyone was carrying the impossible burden of a someone, inside their heads…save me. 

(Please understand that I am taking poetic license here, I have no idea if anyone else was sitting in that lobby in silence or not, I am only trying to convey what cannot be said…and that is the wonder of being in a crowd and bathed in inner silence as well, something I have never heretofore experienced.)

All day long, the very ordinariness of the day was infused, with a constant stream of the willingness to give all of my attention, to the constant flow of moving parts that shared the space of Being with me.

When I was alone in the exam room, the floor, chair I sat upon, the medical equipment, and the wall of cabinets embraced me.  When I was with others the sound of their voices, the movement of their colorful bodies poured over and around me like water streaming, pooling, and eddying all about me, and somehow into me as well.

The children seemed especially available.  They watched me, and I watched them, our eyes met and held for long periods of waking watchfulness.  While they climbed upon small child sized chairs, or tossed small objects in a game of fetch with a dad, or tasted the delight of a bright red, heart-shaped sucker, their eyes would come back to me, again and again.

Each of them had dark, liquid brown eyes.  Those eyes held no opinion of me… and mine… held no opinion of them, we merely watched one another, from the safety, sanity, and communion of the sacred ground of Being.

One of the more surprising events of the day, and the only time I had any thinking to do at all, was when the nurse took my blood pressure and pulse rate.  (I asked her to do it twice because the results were such an anomaly.)  My blood pressure, which has been slightly elevated for a long time now, and my pulse which has stayed at a steady 81 beats per minute for years, were both so much lower that I found it quite hard to believe.  I cannot remember the blood pressure number, but the pulse rate which is normally 81, was instead 68.  I cannot ever remember having such a low pulse rate.  It gave me radical and quite physical evidence of the deep goodness that internal quiet brings into your life.

The experience of breathing into a Silent mind is so good, and so much more enhanced by being available in a sea of distractions, that it is the only thing I can imagine spending my lifetime doing.

There is nothing else that even remotely compares to it.  It is like a salve, applied to a burn, that you did not even know was burning you.  An end to a pain that you somehow don’t know is hurting you, and you only become aware of the presence of that pain, because of its sudden absence.

The most surprising thing of all; is its absolute availability, its total universality, its willingness to serve anyone who is open to it…and all you have to do to partake of it is to drop the pursuit of more, better, and different.  Stop believing, stop pursuing, stop the search…and miraculously it appears, as though hidden by some dark veil, it rushes forward to greet you, like a wildly available lover, whose patient waiting has been a life time long.

Prior to yesterday’s deep wealth of abundant well being, my experience of living inside a silent mind and the absence of a “self” were limited to tiny moments of time.  So sweet, so pure, so inviting, so relevant, and so vital that I would have given anything at all to get back there, and I was quite bereft when the door to those moments closed, as surprisingly as it had opened.

Now having had the magnificence of sitting in that open spaciousness, while in a sea of movement…I know in a way that cannot be described, that there is nothing better than this experience.  And best of all I no longer doubt its constant and eternal existence…

I, personally, have never known intimacy until yesterday.  I have never before known true well being, or wealth, health, value, or simple shared sweetness.  There is nothing that the mind can conceive of that can compare, nothing that can end your search more completely than the Ground of Being, that is the mysterious and invisible expression, of every thing that exists.

I will leave you with Rumi who has said it better, and with fewer words, than perhaps anyone who has ever lived: 

“Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.  

Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation…

Adayre R. Miller

3/8/13

photo courtesy of Melissa “San Francisco Gal” and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55198400@N05/6205961485/