I have spent a lifetime curbing the desire to set and pursue goals. And believe me when I tell you, that I am painfully aware of how unpopular that track is…how few and far between, are the people who allow life to unfold, rather than working to manifest what they desire.
The reasons I have done so, are probably many fold. I can think of a few that float almost immediately to mind. As an example, when I painted murals for a living, if I had a plan and followed that plan I always ended up with an outcome that somehow missed the mark. There were occasions and clients who insisted on a plan, an outcome foretold, and a result already defined, I would do for them what they required…but there was no joy, no wonder, no transcendent beauty in the outcome, as there was when inspiration, dedication, and devotion where allowed to helm the process.
As time and maturity, wisdom and commitment, began to take control of my life… and as my Teacher’s work made its way to the marrow of my bone…I began to attempt the life’s work of turning my inner process over to the natural flow of events, rather than using my mind as an instrument of direction and false pride.
I came to understand in my very depths that the “self” I thought of as me, was an echo that I carried forward by virtue of repetition and duplication. A type of illusion that reverberates out of self-conversations I once had, stories I once told, beliefs I once held. And that the true job of living is to come to know that about yourself, to recognize the clever conditioned mind in its determined pursuit of the story of “me”.
From deep inside myself has come the capacity to grasp the knowledge that the story of “me” is the story of the loss of innocence, the story of the “fall of mankind”. It wasn’t the serpent, the apple, or Eve that caused our fall from Grace…but rather the lowly humdrum and hardly worth noticing, formation of opinions, and perceptions, and desires, and dreams. The conditioned mind, ever so clever and complex, winds for us a story of need and the compelling striving for more, and better, and greater.
It pursues acknowledgment, and attainments, and achievement, and accomplishments. These things are not bad, or somehow unworthy…they are merely time and energy drainers, a way for the clever mind to prevent the awakening of the depth of Being, that so overshadows anything as small and isolated as a “self”.
My Teacher broadcast a light so clear, so pure, and so compelling, that despite my fears and folly and lack of strength…I could not turn away. His message was always the same, undo, unlearn, transcend, impersonal, whole seeing, non-judgment, non-dual, Being…never, ever “becoming”, (another trick of the clever and complex conditioned mind).
He embodied the light, there was no density in him, no withholds, no complexity. He was/is as simple as a mountaintop spring and just as clear. He gave his Life, and in turn Life shone a light upon him that all with eyes to see could comprehend, even if we could not always understand.
I have attempted to follow in his footsteps, and I am so far away that I can barely see the path any longer.
He once told us that there would come a day when we would be required to become, “our own student, Teacher, and Teachings”…that day came for me, as surely as he had predicted. I can no longer comfortably look outside myself for Teachers or Teachings, and yet I am somehow not living up to the roles required of me.
The break in my arm, the pain, financial loss, and loss of motion and capacity serves to make me aware how tenuous is our time here, how fragile we all are, how easy it would have been for it to be my head and not my arm. It calls me to a greater commitment, to a higher calling, to a deeper devotion…and yet, I seem incapable of making the next leap into the unknown, to undo, and unlearn, the next stage of “dying to the self” that the Bible calls for, in so many different ways.
I want to cry out in frustration and prayer to a father figure in the sky…I want someone to show me the way, to pray for me, to fix me, to save me, none of which are possible, or even desirable, if the truth be told.
My Teacher once stated that nothing of importance comes “to” me, but rather it must come “from” me.
I finally understand what that means.
The undoing of the story of me, cannot be accomplished by another, the unlearning of the stored beliefs and opinions instilled within me by my culture, family, nation and tribe, cannot be unraveled by any other than me. Only I can learn to live free of “seeing the world through a glass darkly”, only I can let go of the rhythms, behaviors, and emotions of the personality that developed out of my childhood.
“Something unknown, is doing we don’t know what”. – Arthur Eddington, Physicist
Only innocence restored, only freshness and childlike wonder will make it possible for us to join in the great Ongoing. To join in wonder, innocence, purity, trust, commitment and dedication, to devote ourselves and our lives to the Unknown Something, doing only Heaven knows what…
I pray not for what I want…but for what I need…the courage to leap again into the dark, to fall without reassurances into the unknowable, to stop when I would rather run, to stand when I would rather cower, to say yes from my heart, when my mind screams no.
To Die before I die, and thus to liberate the depths of the One In Me.
Adayre R. Miller
7/22/11
photo courtesy of Damien and flikr photo sharing, to see more of this artist work follow this link. www.flickr.com/photos/damiendevigne/4903804919/
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