It Takes a Long Time…..

In the interest of deepening the potential for understanding, mine and yours, and because I got some lively response to my indictment of “fun”, I thought I might spend a few minutes more, drilling down to deeper bedrock.

So lets start with this awareness…there is nothing special about me, I am not overly talented, capable, or gifted.

Perhaps the only truly unique thing about my life has been the rhythms and patterns that I have experienced quite literally ALL of my life, patterns that turned deep loneliness into abiding and sustaining solitude.

It began with being born to a mother, emotionally fractured, who was well into her thirties - in the fifties when children were born early - and a woman’s thirties was normally long past child bearing years. A father too preoccupied with finding the ways and means to stay away from his angry wife, and siblings more than a decade older who were already planning their escapes.

A single word, Alone, encapsulates everything you need to know about my childhood…if you add terrified, you would have the complete story.

Then came decades of doing everything I could think of, and imagine, to sweep crumbs from the table of “popularity”, sometimes succeeding and more often failing, you would then have a fairly complete picture of the years from six to twenty eight. I spent those twenty-two years trying to escape “Alone”, and the next twenty-seven learning to vigorously embrace it.

The first year of near complete retreat began with the need to save myself from my own hand. At twenty-eight I knew without a shred of doubt, that everything I had seen, felt, heard, tasted, experienced, acquired, achieved, believed, or discovered would not and could not, save me from the tempest that boiled inside of me. I knew without reservation or doubt, that if I did not leap into the unknown…I would most assuredly leap into the abyss.

Many years after my suicidal crisis had passed, I saw a most astonishing documentary entitled “The Bridge”. In this very arresting film, a French documentarian had convinced the Golden Gate Bridge authorities to allow him to film the bridge on a daily basis, to document the “life” of the bridge. What he did not tell them is that he was really there to capture on film, the behavior and decisions of the some 45 persons per year, who jump from its embrace to the Pacific far below.

Of all the people that he captured on film leaping to their deaths, (he did always attempt to do the responsible thing and call the authorities when critical behaviors were sighted and identified, but of course most could not be saved), one man stood out in my mind and still in my memory.

He was just a few years older than I am now, somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties. He strode onto the bridge, walked directly to the edge, pulled himself over the side with surprising commitment and leapt…no walking back and forth to screw up the courage, no looking off into the distance, hearing the siren call of madness in a troubled mind, no coming back day after day until finally the moment arrived, as had so many others. The only reason the Director even caught the surprising moment was that, of all the possible positions the camera could have been facing that day, it was trained directly upon the spot he chose to leap. It was early on in the year long vigil and the Director, looking thru his long lens, was so disturbed by what he saw that he leapt to his feet in a surge of adrenaline and in the doing of so, tilted the camera crazily downwards and captured the man falling thru the frame of the lens just before hitting the water. (Should you want to view this most amazing awarding winning film, some of the best of it is in the special features where the Director has a chance to explain the many things he witnessed and viewed from afar, in particular his explanation of his experience of this man’s death.)

He stands out in my memory, because that is how I would have done it….

No agitated striding back and forth, no looking off into the distance, no hesitation…just the purpose filled leap….

So, instead of leaping off a bridge…I leapt into the unknown. And when my feet left the metaphorical dirt that day…my life took on its own self-adjusting and self-directed rhythms, guidance, and trajectory, and I do not mean myself when I use the word self, (I mean that my life from that day to this takes it’s own crazy path despite my ill-spent best efforts to control it). It was a very long time before I understood that I gave up control that day, (or in my opinion the illusion of control), that so many others spend a lifetime pursuing.

I quit my job, and spent the next year in desperate prayer, self-exploration, meditation, and counseling. Alone again…

Some years later, I ended up with a business I never wanted, sought, decided upon, or in some ways even embraced. And I spent fifteen years, Alone, standing on a ladder listening to the same mind that once drew me to the very thin golden edge of annihilation. Alone again…

Then came the end of the business, also something I didn’t consciously choose, and a couple more years of Mostly Alone.

Now we come to the Mother of all Aloneness, for always before I had groups or communities, however loosely organized they might have been, to see me through these spaces of emptiness and eyeball to eyeball seeing of the “self”.

Now we arrive at this last two and one half years of unemployment…

Lacking the funds to put gas in the car, I couldn’t go hither and yon as I did in other spaces and times of Aloneness, and more I didn’t want to. Something in me called out for this newest period of Alone to be well and truly alone. I don’t imagine it would be possible for an American to be more alone than I have been these last 30 months. Sure, a Buddhist monk on a hill in a remote mountain range, would be able to see as few, and speak to as few folks as I did…but an American? No way, not unless something catastrophic had happened to them.

And here we come finally, to my uniqueness…I have provided you with this vitae, so that you might consider how uncommon it really is to lead a life of such quiet aloneness, for a modern day American.

And how from deep within, that vast windless emptiness, I might come to view things like “Fun” and “Passion” and “Adventure” and “Happiness” with a perspective that is dramatically different from the average American I see, meet, and hear about.

You may be tempted at this juncture to project onto me and my circumstances your own anxieties about such a life of quiet as mine, and view me as lonely or sad or depressed, but try not to, if only for your own well being.

Instead, attempt to understand the soaring wind lift that would be necessary to go from living inside a mind that embraced the desire for annihilation on a daily basis… when alone for even a few moments…to a mind so at home with itself, that it has even become capable of giving up the notion of a “me” at all.

Twenty five hundred years ago, The Buddha declared with great compassion, love, kindness, and care that there is no such thing as the “self”. The Christ, his contemporary in understanding and far-reaching Universal Love, admonished us all to “die daily to the self”. (A somewhat more dramatized way of saying… there is no such thing as the self.)

Here is what I have learned in my cumulative two and a half years of total Aloneness, my two years of mostly Alone, my fifteen years of non-chosen silence, and my birthright which dedicated me to Alone without my awareness…I agree completely…with the Buddha and the Christ.

The “self” that nearly took my life… was a figment of my imagination, and every day and every hour that I am capable of remembering that, I am freed just a little bit more.

No, I am not in Joy every moment of every day. But I can tell you without equivocation that when I am not, it is because the “self” has returned and I am once again laboring under the notion that “me”, and “mine”, and “I” matters.

It is as though the “self” we are all so concerned with, the one we groom, acquire things for, nurture and protect, the one we fight and claw and build bombs for, is a little imaginary box that we put on one day for the adventure of it, and then forgot how to take off.

And thus, was useless - but horrible suffering, born into the mind of man and into the mind of a small child whose first breath was on a Wednesday on a cool and crisp September evening, but whose last breath will most assuredly be free of the broken mind, that was once such a very great threat.

So, do I think “fun” is normally anything more than an escape from the burden of the self…no I don’t. You would be shocked and taken aback by all that I now think is just more running from the self, I see it everywhere I look now. It’s like I just woke up from a bad dream, and I see everybody else is still dreaming this bad dream…and I wish they didn’t have to, but I am not in control of that anymore than I am in control of anything at all.

So there you have it, I am no longer interested in my ”self”, so it goes without saying that your “self” doesn’t engage me either…

I don’t know for sure, but I believe, that is why my Teacher was such an oasis in the dark for so many thousands of people. He simply didn’t believe in the selves we were so carefully protecting, and it wasn’t some notion that he was “selling”…it was a lived, direct experiential understanding, and being near him lifted the burden of the self and gave all those people just a little bit of breathing room.

Unlike him, I do not have his great gifts of harmlessness, and clarity, and impersonal kindness…but I do have one small window completely free of fog and dust and dirt, and from that small window I peer into the great unknown and bring what I am capable of seeing back thru this writing to serve you, those few who have the will to listen…

So from that small pane of clear seeing, let me say without hesitation or condition that Solitude dissolves the self like sun melts ice, and further, that dissolution of the self is the very thing that human beings are so deeply and unconsciously searching for, in every moment of “fun”, and every expression of passion, and every exercise in adventure, and every longing to be something other than what they are…all of that and so much more, is an unconscious urge to return to the pristine state of Oneness with the All, a cleaving away of the burden of self and a return home to selflessness and harmony.

Is there anything left when the “self” is dissolved?…yes… gratitude and serenity.

Are we anybody at all, without a “self”? …yes…we are Essential, Vital, Valuable, and best of all Real.

And as the Skin Horse said to the Velveteen Rabbit… Real is where it’s at…

"What is real?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side... "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked "or bit by bit?"

“It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loosed in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." - Margery Williams

Real makes you Beautiful…most especially to yourself…

Adayre R. Miller

1/5/11

photo courtesy of Bahama Mama and Flickr photo sharing www.flickr.com/photos/bahama_mama2007/2325014556/