A colorful fast moving blur caught my attention this morning while making my way up the mountain.
A little boy, on a very little bicycle.
His mom must be stylish, as his outfit was color coordinated, and not in the primary colors that kids favor, but the more sophisticated hues of a grown up. His helmet, which looked two sizes too large for his tiny little head, was a maroon red with a gold tone visor sticking out in front to shade his tiny eyes from the bright morning sun. His bike whose wheels looked even smaller from across the road, had a sporty inner wheel the color of pumpkins ripening in a field, and they were spinning as fast as his little legs could pump.
He was traveling downhill and thus had a good head of steam aided by the furious pumping of his hamstrings, his dad was running along side him in the bike lane and was striding to keep up with his young son. Dad was in his early thirties, fit and very handsome, moving easily beside his son down the hill…even if he was being outdistanced somewhat by his boy.
As I continued to watch and the son started pulling slightly more ahead of his Dad, the boy shouted back over his shoulder in wild glee, ”Come on Dad, hurry up!!” and then…”Wheeeeeeeeeeee”….
It made me smile, that “Whee” of his.
It is the primordial sound of Joy, the total engagement of the Soul in a sterling moment of connection with the present…living out loud, and loving it!!
Not long ago, I was gifted with someone’s opinion that we are meant to have fun in our lives. An opinion I don’t share, if we are defining fun in the manner that most adults define it.
By the time we reach adulthood, we have lost all semblance of the kind of unreserved Joy that little boy was so exuberantly expressing, to be replaced by a sad shadow of it, that is normally defined by our society as “fun”.
Fun, as it is practiced by most adults, is a form of forgetfulness that has a strong quality of escapism deeply imbedded in it. To escape the self, is not the same thing as transcending the self. In my twenties I had a strong escapism streak, I jumped out of planes, went white water rafting, no-engine plane gliding and tried many other less wholesome methods to forget the burden of the self, even for just a few moments. It does work. I can tell you from personal experience that when you are dropping out of the sky, two miles above the earth, that there is not a thought in your head…nary a one. You’ve heard the phrase, “scared straight”….well; you can be scared into Silence as well. The problem is that it doesn’t last, all too soon the burdens of an overactive, thought producing, opinion making, belief building self, reasserts it’s control and you are back in the weeds, as they say.
Escapism is the real name for what the vast majority of people mean when they discuss fun, or relaxation, or chilling out, or partying, or adventure, and so many more euphemisms for escaping the self, that is such a burden by the time you are thirty years of age. It almost goes without saying that TV and radio are ways that we supplant someone else’s train of thought for our own, so as to avoid the pain and anxiety that arises when we are listening to ourselves.
The ways and means by which we seek to avoid ourselves are legion in number, there is no way that we could even begin to negotiate the shear volume of clever resources that we all have at our fingertips, to be able to escape the self we are so burdened by.
But none of these escapism behaviors, attitudes, and outlets deserves the happy euphemism of “fun”.
When Christ directed that we “be like the little children”, he wasn’t admonishing us to have fun, but rather to experience our lives and the continuous stream of events we are exposed to, all the days of our lives, with the spontaneity and lack of judgment that all children automatically live their lives from. Watch kids and you will see, when they are angry, sad, hurt, jealous, or happy…it is out loud and up front. There are no filters, or opinions, or judgments and sanity restores itself with ease, just like that they are over it and onto some other interesting or engaging experience.
They have no past and no future to compare the current moment against, and find it wanting…they live entirely in the moment. Freed from expectation they find potency in life whether it brings tears, or joyful screams of Wheeeeeeeeeee…..
This is the “innocence” the Bible speaks of, and the “age of reason” is the point at which we are no longer free from the self, is the moment at which we are born into the world of “sin” and damnation that the old religions speak of.
The old religions, confusing the inner with the outer, assume that the age of reason and the fall of man put us at risk for an external “lake of fire”, which is what my Baptist minister pounded his Bible over and screamed red-faced about, each Sunday morning service.
I have come to see, there is no potential in reality for an outer or external lake of fire, but that does not mean that we do not burn in pain and sorrow, some of us, all the days of our lives.
Standing in the grocery store line this morning just after my walk and encountering the wild ride of my young friend, I stood behind an elderly gentleman who was surely about the same age as my Teacher. He too, seemed somewhat adrift with respect to his mental capacity, but unlike my Teacher who is no longer mentally available, but whose presence is still simple, easy, non-conflicted, and joyful…this elderly gentleman seemed swaddled in sadness and sorrow. He had the worn out feel of too many years of life much too long, I felt for him and was very aware of the many years of burden that lay behind him.
My twenties were filled with just such a burdened and burning pain, and therefore the need to escape that pain. Adventure, fun, partying…all ways and means by which, I sought relief from the burning and scalding of a mind divided by itself. The cruelty and savagery of my inner dialogue was beyond my capacity to bear, I had taken the ravages of my childhood and internalized them into the Voice of the “self” that sought my undoing at every turn.
Every spiritual source that has come down to us from the Ageless Wisdom Traditions, exhorts us that we must return to the innocence from which we once sprang. It is our obligation, and perhaps even our duty, to negotiate the inner realms of our own minds in search of the innocence we once were. The innocence out of which we came as children has no seasoning, no leavening, and therefore no potential for wisdom. The innocence of a child is inherent and unfulfilled…it is only when we have come through, and beyond, the crucible of a fully formed “self”, that we can restore innocence and balance it with Wisdom.
To be Wise is not to be elevated above suffering, a god on a pedestal…but rather wisdom is born in the hearts and minds of those who have seen themselves in the harsh and true light of mindfulness. To know yourself, to forgive yourself through the activity of forgiving others, to find your kindness by witnessing your cruelty, to discover your capacity to allow and accept, by acknowledging your judgments and criticisms, to know the extremes of yourself and to finally come to rest in the Middle Way of the Buddha. This is the root, trunk, leaf and fruit of wisdom…and its seeds shall nurture untold millions.
In the seasoned, mature, and clarified adult…the “wheeeeee” of our small and colorful friend might be more clearly defined as a kind of fierce fearlessness. The kind of fearlessness that can give up “knowing” and believing, in favor of spontaneous current moment experience, unmanaged and unmanagble. Captain of our ship, master of our destiny? Only if you are clear that there is a very big difference between the inner and the outer realms.
Fix not your eye on the horizon, cling not to goals and the illusions of desire and its cunning capacity to side track and confuse…master your own internal dialogue, return yourself to the clarified innocence that has seen, and heard, and felt, and has finally found it’s way home.
“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever”. John Updike
The Essential Self is a very different creature from the self that clings so to our minds and hearts, the Essential Self is freedom incarnated, it is a type of unknowing, of not believing, of not hoping or wishing or needing. The Essential Self is the Real and the True, writ large. Jesus said if the Christ be lifted up, he (it) would draw all men unto him.
This is why my Teacher who can no longer think coherently is still so vital and giving, having mastered his thinking mind he is now completely unencumbered by it. He once taught us that Mastery is achieved only by virtue of mastering ones thinking, I see now that one need not even be capable of thought to live, express, and exude the marvels and wonder of the Essential Self.
Long ago I read that the Buddha said about the “self”, that there is no “string in the beads” of experience. Meaning that there is no self in the moment-by-moment expansion of the ever-evolving flow of Life. I remember very clearly being quite threatened by that idea, but now as age and care has broadened my understanding, I welcome the untying of the knot of self, I look forward to the more consistent release of opinion and weighty self believing, and I glory in the potential of the Wheeeeeeee……
Adayre R. Miller
1/4/11
photo courtesy of ashwynwarrier and flikr photo sharing http://www.flickr.com/photos/miragebuilder/1588602692/
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