I have been watching a video entitled “The Dark Ages: An Age
of Light”, its central focus is the development of the arts through the period
of time that is largely known as the “dark ages”.
This time frame is roughly the third century to the 11th,
and is the time during which Christianity truly takes root and displaces the
many gods of paganism with the “One God” theory.
The most interesting aspect of the video so far, is the slow
development of Christ’s visage. In
the earliest works of art he is depicted by symbol only, an X with a key
symbol, shaped much like a capital P overlaid on top of it. It is well into the fifth century before
he is depicted, by artists of the time, with a face. That face is the countenance of a cherubic boy, tender,
young, even slightly female, and always jovial. It not for another couple of hundred years, and they, the
artists, have borrowed Isis from the Pagan’s lexicon to develop the face of Mary
that he becomes the Christ in Agony, that we know today.
What I find so useful in this exploration of the slow
development, of the arts expression of the divine, is the light it casts on
“believing”. The Christ we know
today would be unrecognizable to the Christ from the earliest days of
Christianity.
I have stepped cleanly free of the role of “believer”. I no longer live in a world where the
context of my mind’s theories is invisible. I can see, and see clearly, the role of my mind’s
imagination as it plays out in my experience of life.
As each new vista is breached, I can ask myself, with
ever-greater clarity…”where does this idea come from? Am I only believing,
or more truthfully experiencing?
To believe is to be lost in a pretend role of the mass
mind’s dedication to the facades of life.
It seems to me, as I gain greater and greater clarity, that there is an
energy or stream of thought patterns that becomes attached to us, which engages
us in its current forms of deceit.
I assume this is what Shakespeare and Emerson meant when they wrote of
the need to “rise above the times to which we are born”.
Where I stall out is in the arena of full freedom and
realization that my Teachers have both expressed. The full surrender to “NOT knowing” that they so eloquently
lived…to not know is to completely surrender to the fact that we can know
nothing through the limited perspective of the individuated mind.
I return, so often, to that moment in class when my Beloved
Teacher had no reaction at all to a feedback loop in the old sound system that
caused three hundred people to have extreme reactions. The surprise of it, the pain of the
sound, the piercing quality of the decibel level…caused all of us to react
in some very negative ways…save one person.
He had no reaction whatsoever.
None.
Nothing.
Nada.
Here then, is a person so relaxed, so in tune with the
natural waves of inner stillness, so “surrendered” that even the base of his
brain, his reptilian brain, had given
itself over to the higher energies of Sacred Emptiness.
This is what I want for my life.
And I have no way of knowing if I even have the slightest
hope of that type of realization.
I know, now, that the spiritual candy of finding myself alive, and
inside a silent mind, is just that…candy.
Sweet, but of very little lasting value.
The discovery of inner silence, inner stillness, inner
emptiness, is merely the first step…if even that much. I have been there, I have drunk from
that cup, and it largely cured me of the ills of my times, but it has not
released me into the sweet abyss of sustainable
peace.
I no longer yearn for the spoiled fruit of the
imagination. I am no longer in
bondage to the dictates of my culture.
I no longer breathe the fetid air of imaginary fullfillments. But…I am also not truly liberated.
I am very discriminating when it comes to teachers. If I can discern even the smallest
flavor of formula, of “how to's”, I run the other direction as fast as my feet
can carry me. Thus I have only
found three, in a lifetime of looking, that I can say meet my criteria. They must be capable of demonstrating
to me a type of liberation and freedom so rare as to be almost unbelievable. I patiently sift the wheat from the
grass, and have found the value in these three that allows me to follow
them. Each in their own unique
way, advise and quite strongly so, against seeking anything. Stop they say, as though one
voice. Stop, and know that you are
free.
I have stopped.
I am not yet free.
The hubris that has dogged all the days of my life, (as I
was born with both a deeply vivid imagination, and a facile and agile
intelligence), has kept me from becoming sufficiently humble enough, to deeply
understand, that the gifts I came with, cannot be brought to bear upon my
current circumstances.
There is no “solution” to the problem of being a lost
soul. There is only surrender.
I find myself praying quite a bit these days. My prayers have no direction, I do not
pray to a “god” that is beyond my capacity to understand. I do not pray out of sentimentality, or
superstition, or even need.
I pray, because I can do no more than pray.
Standing here, on the razor’s edge, I can no more return to
the land of the “believers” than I could unlearn how to swallow. Knowing, through experience, that my
life is not a personal one…disallows the veil to be redrawn. I cannot go back to the sleep of
desire, to the land of wanting, and goals, and being driven by needs I do not
understand. Those days are over
for me, they have blown away like so much ash, from a fire so cold, even memory
can no longer bring the blaze to mind.
But…I also cannot seem to go forward, into the deep milk
of total surrender. The evidence,
of which, my Teachers so deeply display.
At the very end of his life, my Most Beloved Teacher cried a
good deal of the time. He could no
longer teach, his body was so blighted by disease. But his mind was still opening, still stretching toward the
sun, still giving itself to the Great Unknowable. He was positioned, by his caretakers, near the back of the
room and in his wheel chair and I always found a seat near him that would allow
me to watch him.
He was so still, so pale, so translucent. His soft and aging face would run like
a river with his unfettered tears.
He would begin crying early, and he would cry throughout. Fortunately, he did not cry as I do,
with a good deal of the salty moisture finding its way out of my body by the pathway
of my nostrils, thus making snot a significant feature of my tears. His tears merely fell from his cheeks,
upon his now hollowed out chest.
When asked about his tears, he would often say that they
came from his experience of our Nobility.
That he could see and feel the goodness in us did not surprise me in the
least. But I have often felt, that
those tears were the manifestations of his deep embrace of the eternal
moment. He lived so fully in the
present moment that his connection to the True and the Real, could be felt by
anyone with even a smidgeon of sense in them. And there, at the end, he was rewarded for his many years of
selfless service, with the tender heart of a newborn.
I miss him so much.
He once told me that he “felt movement in me”. I assume he meant that the hardened
shell of the “believer” was glacially slowly sloughing off of me, and might
yet, make of me an “available” person.
I hope that is true…but I no longer yearn for it.
These next steps in my journey are entirely unknowable. I must find my way in the darkness,
toward the deep. I must not rest,
nor want, nor hope, nor weep.
I must go on, because going on is the only thing left…
Adayre R. Miller
2/2/14
The photo that accompanies this essay was shared by flickr photo sharing and Pavla Hajek, to see more of this artists work follow this link: www.flickr.com/photos/31008322@N05/6187670086/in/photolis...
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