As far back as junior high school… now some forty years ago…I wanted with all my heart a singular desire, to garner the attention of others by the use of my story telling skills, in other words to be a public performer, or a public speaker, or a public teacher. Way back then I had no way of truly defining that, I knew only, that when I stood at the front of the class in debate, or speech, or drama, that it was the only time I felt myself to be real, or effective, or potent. In all other ways, and at all other times, I felt somehow invisible or even worse, irrelevant.
In high school I won a speech contest at a regional high school event, hosted and held by the Durango College for the Arts in Colorado - it was the highlight of my days in high school and again, the only time I felt relevant or worthy.
Just after high school I was given the enormous opportunity of attending a Dale Carnegie Class in which I excelled at public speaking, during which they toned, seeded, refined, and defined my native skill at the task, and sent me into the world prepared to “make my dream come true”.
I followed that dream with an intensity and passion that I would barely recognize now…having come to rest in a mind that truly understands, that only passionless activity has the power to actually heal.
Finally in my fortieth year, my dream came true. I routinely found myself in front of hundreds of people, who appeared to value what I said, who applauded my efforts, and who scratched the itch I had experienced - in some measure - my whole life.
At one and the same time, life was moving me inexorably toward deeper and deeper experiences of Silence. A move that seemed entirely at odds with the life I wanted, the life I was passionate about, the life I planned, and schemed, and lived for….
I began making a living painting murals, something I would have never expected, defined, envisioned, or chosen - but for more than fifteen years I stood on ladders, alone with my thoughts, required by life to be quiet and still, while I produced work I was very good at but had no affection or real desire for. Those years were the necessary preparation for returning to the bosom of my spiritual Teacher, and to beginning anew, the willingness to understand his great and silent depths.
He is one of the very few living Masters, a man whose presence stole speech from my tongue as surely as paralysis would have stolen movement from my limbs. His deep inner clarity allowed me to feel the inauthentic nature of my “passion”, his quiet calm allowed me to know my chaos, his stillness allowed me to know the turbulence of my being, his generosity allowed me to know my grasping, his certainty allowed me to feel my bone deep doubt, his willingness to join with and embrace the Emptiness, allowed me to know my childish fears and my weary clinging. In his presence, I began to understand the deep wisdom in the Chinese proverb that states, “When the wrong (wo)man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” My pursuit of the dream of public recognition became the realization of the “right means working in the wrong way.”
His intense ability to see through me, through the patter, charm, flattery, and falseness, stole from me the very thing I had worked so hard to acquire, the capacity to influence others by magnetism, allure, and verbal seduction. And life sent me ever deeper into Silence, by removing my work life and keeping me bound by economic stresses, to the small world of the interior of my home, my mind, and my keyboard.
In this quiet and still place, in long years of near total outer emptiness…I began to see the value of dropping the notion that I can control the outer world. I began to acquire the understanding that knows planning, and goal setting, and vision boards, and the desire to bend life to my will, is the activity of the lost and the desires of the rudderless.
It matters not, where you arrive…but rather, only what direction you are traveling in.
Is your life moving more and more toward the deep interior of you? Or are you still caught on the wheel of samsara, lost in the notion that the outer world of form and circumstances is where your efforts should be placed?
In a lesson my Teacher once provided us, he pondered the meaning of karma vs. free will, and his conclusion rang as true in my heart as anything I have ever heard. He said that determinism and free will exist at one and the same time…that your outer circumstances can be nothing other than, the result of all of your past actions - both this life and before - and that your free will comes into play, only and not until, you have learned that it is your response that counts.
Emerson said, “What comes to you belongs to you”, which is of course saying the same thing as my Teacher’s conclusion…your outer life is the result of the previous accumulation of the density of your unconsciousness. That your success or failure, illness or health, wealth or poverty, are all governed by the deep love of a Being whose only goal is to support you in achieving the clarity of wakefulness, and that each and every circumstance in which you find yourself is meant for only one purpose…to change the direction in which you are traveling.
To move you from reaching outside yourself, to traveling the hidden and quiet depths of Being…the move from exterior to interior is the only journey that counts, and the only outcome that has merit.
In Buddhist philosophy there is a notion that defines the concepts of interdependence and the clever working of all that expresses in the world of form, as merely the movement of life toward the depths of Being. That notion is stated thusly, “between thing and thing, there is no block”, which is to say there is no separation the world over. Or more directly in this understanding…”if it were not the way it is, you would not be the way you are.” Here even more clearly, is the expression of interlinking interdependencies. Look out your window, wherever you are at this precise moment, whatever you gaze lands upon, whether tree, or bird, or road, or cloud. If that were not there…you would not be here. It could not be defined more deliberately than this, we are where and who and how and why we are, because Being requires it to be so, in the hope that we may use whatever befalls us to Awaken.
You can, and most do, spend an entire life in pursuit of the outer world of form, you can pursue a dream or pursue a philosophy, you can be lost in the result, or lost in your thinking about the result, you can reach for more, or for greater, or for better…all the long days of your life, and all it will buy you is more and more of a sense of separation, more and more insecurity, and more and more seeking.
There is another way…”the path less traveled”…the way home.
The Buddha taught, “Karma comes from our hearts, and it leaves from our hearts.”
Which is to say that you bind yourself to the wheel of karma, by the deep interior blindness that refuses to see that the world of form is in its entirety an illusion, whereas the Truth is found only and always from within. Bondage comes to the heart, and liberation springs from the heart. It matters not one jot, not one tittle, not one tiny iota what is occurring in your life, or mine.
Illness? Hooray. Return to health. Hooray. Poverty? Hooray. Return to wealth. Hooray.
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