May You Discover Where You Are Empty...

“I interact with the world around me…not so I can change it, but so it can change me”. –Unknown

Try to imagine that this notion is true, that you are here not to make your mark…but rather to receive, (or perhaps more accurately to reveal) your mark. How different would your world be, if this idea had even the merest foothold in your reality?

Gone would be the demand to be recognized as great. Gone also the goals, ambitions, achievements and demands you place upon your life, its directions and outcomes. In place of these outer directed drives, could it be that the authentic nature of your Being would show itself?

Emerson once queried…” Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”

In this culture in which we are all instructed, enchanted, goaded and pressured into discovering and claiming our “greatness”, I am always looking the other way…wondering who exactly is going to populate the unwashed masses, the adoring fans, the collective group that will make our greatness possible. When we measure ourselves along a linear scale of greatness, by that scale’s very nature we are required to place others below us to achieve our deeply valued “greatness”. What we fail to realize is that if we are on the 10 side of the scale by which we are currently evaluating ourselves, then with out fail we will be on the 1 side of some other scale, some other circumstance…”for if you live by the sword, you shall also die by the sword”.

Currently, I live in a world of little or no distractions; there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from my mind, and its every small nuance. I live in a world in which there are no scales by which to measure myself, no better no worse by which to buoy or berate myself, no comparisons to make, no opportunities to evaluate my worthiness.

And here in the void of the continuing stream of comparisons that make up our modern day culture, I discover the extreme demands that giving up weighing yourself against others, places upon your heart and soul.

I don’t believe that I am moving forward gracefully or with aplomb, there is no ease in my jerky desire to deepen my understanding. I have such a slim hold on my ability to think critically and to determine the path of the “middle way” that I have almost no right to speak with you about it.

Yet speak, I must.

We, each of us, are living two different lives. The world of the invisible is not awaiting our deaths, it is here and now, traveling silently inside us…one breath away, one small incline of the head toward the center of our Being, one small decision away…nearer even than that.

On the day of our death, at the last exhale, all that you have achieved shall pass away, “dust to dust” it will go, even if your name adorns street signs, libraries, or children’s school books…only the interior world will travel with you into the Great Beyond.

And that world is populated not by what you gained, but by what you gave. And not even by that, as it is so easy to delude ourselves into believing that we are giving, when in reality our gifts are tainted with the desire for approval and love from others, making of them not gifts…but manipulations and machinations. Only when your gifts have no attachments, no self-serving agendas, no hidden desires are they really of service to others.

I am put in mind of a story I recently heard about a Chinese man by the name of Hiao-Tsiun Ma, he was born in the tiny village of Ningpo China on July 11, 1911. In 1936 he moved to France and eventually earned a doctorate in musicology at the Sorbonne.

His son tells the story that Ma lived in a small garret apartment during the Nazi invasion of Paris, enduring the daily bombings that nearly brought the city to its knees. During the day, while the bombs fell, he would memorize Bach and at night… when the bombing had mercifully ceased, he would play the sweet refrains of classical music on his violin to comfort his neighbors, and himself. The sound of his gift wafting thru the night air, surrounding and soothing his battered and deeply fearful companions in the daily struggle for survival and endurance.

He eventually moved to America and here brought up his young son Yo-Yo Ma, a renowned American cellist. In Yo-Yo, Ma’s gift continues to develop and move, to inhabit the night air, to soothe and to serve.

The single greatest gift that can be bestowed upon a laboring and labored humanity is the gift of Acceptance. Christ in his humility and agony embodied this most amazing of capacities…”forgive them Father, for they know not what they do…”

Buddha when asked if he was a God replied, “No, I am merely awake”.

Lao-Tzu reminds us…

“Mastering others is strength:

Mastering yourself is true power.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.

The utility of a house depends on the empty spaces. Thus, while the existence of things may be good, it is the non-existent in them which makes them serviceable.”

True also of us, the utility of our deeds may be good…but it is the empty spaces in us that has the potential to create our true service.

May you find within yourself some measure of Emptiness.

Adayre R. Miller

8/2/2010