What Surprises Me Most…

What surprises me most about consistently living in, and through, the Impersonal Self, is the radical nature of the awareness of the common and everyday.

It seems, as I follow where my attention leads, that it is invested in the most seemingly absurd and unimportant details, of my day-to-day existence.  The difference in the way light shines on the white hairs on my head, or the still brown ones, as they lift themselves on the breeze.

The way my bedroom carpet feels under my feet, as opposed to the cold and hard surface of the living room floor.  Oddly, I particularly like the sound differences between the soft shushing of the carpet and the, by comparison, loud slapping of the concrete.

The color of coffee grounds as they swirl in the hot water that is brewing my single cup of the day.

The smell of jasmine from the bush that lives near my backdoor, and how subtly it creeps its way to my nostrils inviting me to drink in the full volume of its beauty.

The way my upper arms rest in the hollow of my shoulder sockets catches my attention a great deal.  I sit, quietly feeling their smooth and harmonious connection, and it bathes me in quiet gratitude.  My shoulder socket gathers my attention to itself a great deal.  I cannot say, nor even imagine, why my soul likes the feel of my shoulder joints so much…but I feel it often, and for great periods of time, and it never fails to soothe and stroke me with gentle and tender kindness.

I could go on and on, reporting the ways and means by which the inner silence allows me to know that I am fully alive, fully engaged, fully present…but how could that serve this conversation?  The list would be endless and endlessly repetitive, and yet, for the Impersonal self that has taken up full time residence inside my deepest being…the color of my coffee strikes me anew, each and every day.

When I believed in thinking as the modality by which life was led, understood, and experienced – I could never have lived such simple and uncomplicated joy – it plainly would not have been possible.

When the schemes of the thinking mind, with its insistent that my dreams were valid and my fears even more so, ran my life, there was no room, nor any patience for the tiny moments that truly make up a-life-well-lived.

I understand now in a way that I could not have imagined possible, that the actions I take, the results that come, and the outcomes that are garnered from the life I am leading, are fundamentally not my business.

It is the sway that my attention is allowed to hold over me that can bring me to my highest good, my deepest peace, and my most available usefulness.  I have, and so do you, a place to strengthen.  A place that only I can serve in, only I have the correct combinations of strengths, weaknesses, kindnesses, and capacities for this most unique of places. 

I cannot, nor can you, choose this authentic place. 

If we are plotting, planning, dreaming, scheming, or in any way attempting to control, then we are,  – so slowly that it cannot be perceived – building for ourselves a prison, that presents itself as a mirage of hope…but will eventually manifest as the very worst form of disappointed despair… and it will only take the ever turning wheel of time, for this truth to be bitterly felt.

If, on the other hand, we can live through the courage of the heart, trust the unfolding of all that is, lean into the ground of being, and surrender ourselves fully and completely, to the unique path of our attention… we will be led to the place that is ours to uphold, purify, cleanse, and heal.

There may be nothing there that the thinking mind will recognize.  It may present as so absurdly simple as to be laughable, and yet, the proof of the clarified attentions gaze, makes real the need that the Impersonal self has, to know, this or that, particular thing.

I imagine that the feel of my shoulders as they sit inside their sockets is somehow a need that the Universe has, else why would my attention be so directed?  That I write to you about it, that too, may fill a need that I cannot know, see, or intuit.  But yet, here we are, me describing it and you taking it in…

I shudder, now, at the grandiosity, neediness, and self-violence, of the conditioned minds demands about how my life should look, how it should feel, and how it should unfold.  If I had lived the whole of my life, following these drives born of my neediness and lost-ness, I would never have found the grace that makes sweet jasmine, coffee colors, shiny white hairs, and the quiet sureness of my shoulder sockets, as valuable as the recognition and applause, I once thought would allay my fears and take away my loneliness.

Now, here, this moment, there is no room for fear or loneliness.  No space for it to take up residence, as the fullness of my ever moving attention and its impersonal delight, is too vital for something as non-existent as fear or loneliness to become the focus of my days.

I have become so simple minded, that I am no longer recognizable as the busy brain who wanted my dreams fulfilled, with a fierceness that could, now, only be defined as cruelly brutal.  All the desires that once ran my every breath have faded, or are in the process, of fading away.  Now, my only interest is in following this serene path of the unfolding of my attention, and the way it drinks in everything and everyone.

This morning, coming home from walking my dogs, they were pulled to a light post sitting on the corner of the small bit of grass, by the first house in my subdivision.  The post, of course, was thickly covered in the liquid leavings of the many dogs, which are walked past the opening to my community.  The aroma too delicious to be ignored drew them up and onto my neighbor’s grass, to circle around the lamps base and receive its olfactory bloom, from the choicest of locations.

As they performed their search for the best and brightest of the smells, my neighbor came home.  His slow drive around us, and his glowering face, as he pulled into his drive-way upset by the fact that my dogs were walking on his lawn was plainly visible to me…but oddly, I could not feel it.

Always before, when I have been the subject of someone’s irritation, angst, upset, or demands that I do it differently, I have had a keen reaction.  Some combination of indignation, answering upset, embarrassment, or even anger…would greet my accuser.  And I would experience a sometimes piercing need, to respond in some form…but today, there was only calm awareness.

I could see, and quite plainly, that he was upset with me, my dogs, and their sniffing…but I could not feel it in any form.  I saw it with the same attention to detail that I notice the color of my brewing coffee, but I could not react to it.  I hold this to be one of the highest things that has ever happened to me…this blooming and stabilization of the Impersonal self…

Adayre R. Miller

3/26/13

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and CappiT, to see more of this aritist’s work, please follow this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34637679@N04/4177654100/