Best Wishes in the Coming Year:

This one foot in…one foot out…is a hard place to be.

I have experienced enough Silence, with enough stability to know beyond any doubt, that the fiction that we imagine ourselves to be is nothing more than a constant parade of created thoughts… held in place by habit, overuse, and spitballs."

More than this, because the thoughts I do have, now come to me in such a slowed down, slow motion sort of way, I can tell that they arise from some place beyond this place, to which I do not have access.  They are attracted to me by rote memory and old habit.  They are not “mine” in any sense of the word, save their habitual nature.

Most of them are entirely useless, but some are designed specifically to put me back to sleep and thereby to render me useless to myself, and, not-to-put-to-fine-a-point-on-it, all of humanity.  Now don’t misunderstand me…I do not think of myself, in any way, as a necessary component to humanity, other than the fact that I am breathing.  But: truth be told: most folk do believe their thoughts in the entire, and never once even suspicion that those thoughts may be utterly without ground beneath them.

Thus a person who has come to undeniably know, not in a conceptual way, but in a mud between your toes kind of way…that thoughts are not personal in any form, not “mine” nor “yours”, but just things that float around impersonal like, and get stuck between your teeth like a poppy seed, is a person equipped for escape velocity.

These days that escape is all I want.

I can’t figure out what to do with myself, in the main, because everything I still “want” is something I cannot force into being.  It is something that is bestowed or not, by some other circumstance than the one I find myself in.  A Gift of freedom, that is not for the taking, but only for the receiving.

My thoughts can no longer get me emotionally involved.  Already gone is any lingering doubt, that they are anything other, than the purest of fiction.   Not that thought is somehow wrong or inappropriate, without thinking nothing in the world could be communicated or created.  But those type of thoughts are few and very far between.  The thinking that names itself, by the name on your birth certificate, is a function of habit only and the source of all suffering.

My new Teacher has a lot to say about the end of the “personal will”.

He describes how: when liberation – constant and stable – has been gifted to you, that the personal will drops away.  I did not fully understand that notion until now.  The egoic mind is based entirely upon aversion and desire, what you like and what you don’t like.  All activity that could be defined or described as born of one’s will, is born out of the scorching need to move away from something that one wishes to avoid, or the equally scorching need to move toward something one wishes to have and hold.

When the egoic mind begins to dissolve, all aversion and desire goes with it, thus all motivations that could be described, as sourcing out of the personal will also ebb away.  He says quite directly that the personal will dies with the personal self.

I am on the cusp of that…on the skinny razor’s edge…of having no personal will.

The number of times that I am driven to action to avoid something, or to lay claim to it, are dwindling each and every day.  It is a strange and somewhat scary place to be.  Thus my “one foot in, one foot out” dosey doe, a circumstance I would change if I could.

I look forward to being without aversion and desire…they are exhausting, debilitating, and deeply disturbing fellow travelers.  High on the one hand, low and painful on the other – they require too much of us, and do so, without our conscious permission.  In that way, they are like soul eaters, constantly nibbling at our flesh and honing the skills necessary to keep us trapped and in bondage for all the days of our lives.

Laying them down, heavy as they are, threatens us with the notion that we might just float away into the heavens…never to be seen or heard from, ever again.

But enough exposure to the Silence Within as made it possible for me to trust, in the deep marrow of my bone, that putting them down is the last step before freedom’s doors open their gates to me.

Despite the fact that it is a step that I cannot take, by virtue of the aforementioned personal will, (owing to the aversion/desire paradox), I can continue to make myself ready for Grace through the medium of development of true humility.

True humility, is not the simple posturing of clothing oneself in the lookalike garb of the beatified among us.  True humility is the capacity and the willingness to recognize that we not only know nothing at all…but more accurately we cannot know anything.

We can measure everything to the sun and back; we can bend the laws of nature – despite the fact that we haven’t the foggiest notion what they really are – to our desires and even to our whims.  But not one of us, living or dead, knows a thing about what is really True and really real.  All we can know is that life experienced without the veil of the poverty of the thinking mind, is the most restful and healing place imaginable.  That is what we can know.  And nothing else.

Best Wishes in the Coming Year:

Adayre Ronni Miller

12/29/13