The Search For My Absurd Wisdom...

It has taken me a very long time to recognize what I really want. Not what I once imagined I wanted…not what the culture trained me to want…not what my parents wanted for me…but what I truly, really, want.

And I am not talking about your garden-variety desire, the stuff that the Buddha claimed all suffering sources out of. Stuff like the desire for money, recognition, power, fame, or the most common desire, which is as ubiquitous as the UV radiation in which we are immersed, the desire for things to be other than they are.

This “want” seems to come from beneath me it is so deep inside.

It is the desire to live a natural life, the desire to live in accordance with the wordless, seamless, flowing source. To do only what is truly mine to do, to live only as I can live, to step out of the shadow of the personal self and keep my focus, and therefore my direction, on the Impersonal Ground of Being.

Safe from the shifting tides of the personal will, I want to turn my life over to the “something greater”, than that which can be imagined by the personalities conditioned mind.

Just last week, I overheard a conversation between a student and her advisor. The student said in a somewhat shy manner, that she wanted to take the skills she had learned in energy work “around the world”. The translation for that sentiment is that she wants to become famous for her capacity to “heal” others.

I wanted that too, once.

I am so grateful I didn’t get it.

I have, it seems, gone through a kind of right of passage. Having discovered inside myself the ability to stop my thoughts, and much more importantly than that, the ability to free myself from the beliefs that robbed me of the potential for naturalness…I had begun to wonder how one might make decisions, if not by being guided by a “belief/value system”.

Two fairly extreme situations have now answered that question, in an experiential and “lived” way.

The first was the moment when I came around my dining room wall, to find my favorite dog squared off against a hissing and striking diamondback baby rattler, which my cat had brought in on one of her many prey excursions.

I realized then, the truth that my Teacher had always assured me was so.

That if I trusted myself enough… if I learned to trust life enough…that action would source out of an entirely silent mind, and much more importantly, that I would have no need of plans, or goals, or knowledge. He was correct, of course.

When push came to shove. When leather and road met. When the crows came home to roost…my mind had nothing to say, and my body or some higher intelligence that was using my body, saved my dog, the cat, injury to myself, and even the snake. Action was smooth, effortless, simple, effective, and of course highly adrenalized, and therefore extremely exhausting, once the moment had passed. But I didn’t need to know a single solitary thing.

Next came an event that happened just last week. If you had asked me anytime prior to this event, if I would have taken the action that unfolded…I would have been very, absolutely, certainly, completely, totally, without-question-positive, that I would NOT have done as I did, in fact, do.

It seems I stole a dog.

The dog was in harms way, and had been, on many more times than just this occasion. He was underfed and under groomed. But mostly his life was at real risk, and his “owners” were the reason his life was at risk. I had spoken to them the last time I had saved the dog from being run over, I had asked that they make more responsible choices, I had hoped for the best and wished that there were some way in which I could avoid what seemed inevitable…his death, or profound bodily harm. (These were the actions I that I knew to be appropriate ones.)

This time, it was me that nearly ran over him.

This time…I didn’t have my dogs with me, and when jumping from my car to make certain he was not hurt…he came to me, joyfully, when I called to him.

He came home with me gladly, playing and snuggling most of the way. He was possessed of an amazingly wonderful temperament, happy, loving, open, extremely friendly, playful like a puppy.

Without a moments thought, or even the tiniest tinge of conflict…I found him another home.

It happened without effort or stress. I merely called the person whose image popped into my head, and minutes later they were in agreement that the dog’s life was in peril, and had taken him home with them. They found a home for him the very next day.

No doubt, there are some of you who are reading this, who will think I have done the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, or the right thing the wrong way, or the right thing the right way…or some other combination of personal “opinion”.

In fact, an old friend of mine says that I experienced no conflict because the action I took was so completely in accordance with my “value system”, that it created no dissidence within me.

I disagree with that notion…

I have spent the better part of three decades dismantling my “belief and valuing systems”, and my very personal “opinions”.

My teacher was very fond of saying, ”show me a belief and I will show you… where a mind has stopped growing”. We are all familiar with the “beliefs” of generations gone by, we smile knowingly at the terrible ignorance that once allowed people to believe that the world was flat, or that surgeons need not wash their hands between operations, or the horror of believing that Jews, could and should, be eliminated because they were not quite human.

But we think that our beliefs about “manifesting” or about our inherent right to prosperity, or about how we need to pursue and develop our “greatness” are “good” beliefs. This is a terrible type of blindness… the inability to pierce the veil of the egoic minds capacity to lure us to sleep, with notions that cause us to pursue outer directed illusory goals, projected into an entirely illusory future.

So how does corralling and capturing a snake, and stealing a dog in harm’s way, afford me a “right of passage”.

Both of these actions, in their own way, were extreme. The first a socially sanctioned action, which no one would have disagreed with, although most would have wanted someone else to do the heavy lifting – as did I, at first blush. The second was questionable, at best, to those who “believe” that ownership has its privileges and its inalienable rights, or that I should have reported it and left the decision in the hands of the authorities.

But here is the thing…my thinking mind, laden as it is with all the beliefs, notions, ideas, ideologies, and dogmas, that I have ever learned or unconsciously taken in…was no more present in the taking of the dog, than it was in the capturing of the snake.

“I” was not involved in either of these experiences.

There has been a hand-full of moments in my life, when “I” was not there. When my Mother took her last breath. When she told me her darkest secret. When my Teacher told me the truth about my self-constructed, self-perpetuating, self chosen mask. When I captured a snake, and when I stole a dog…

There are a few others, but you get the idea. And these small moments in time, are some of the best moments I have ever experienced. They are the ones that will pass before me on my deathbed; I have no doubt about that.

The ones that predated the stealing of the dog were moments that were in some manner thrust upon me.

Taking the dog was a moment free of the extreme needs of the experiences that preceded it. And yet, it was just as entirely “self”-less, as the moments that led up to it.

Here, I see, is how life is supposed to be led. One moment at a time, grounded totally in the present, compellingly empty of a self, where decision/action/result are one smooth effortless and wonderful expression, of the deeper source of Impersonal Being who is guiding and directing the outcome.

I asked my Teacher how to live in the world without a “self” guiding the way, a very long time ago. I share it with you, because keeping something this valuable only to myself is a poor choice. So I include an email exchange we had in early September of 2004…

“Dear George:

I have a question regarding giving.

Aldous Huxley provided this most satisfying quote defining genius, as “supreme usefulness”. And you have provided the understanding that “what injures essence enhances personality, what embarrasses personality heals essence.”

So in light of Huxley’s definition, that to find ones genius is to provide a supreme level of usefulness to the human family and in light of your assertion that what gives to essence will be the polar opposite of what gives to personality, I am looking for a deeper level of understanding with respect to giving.

For instance, my neighbor has inoperable cancer. He is frightened, desperate, lonely and very needy. If I give him my time and attention in the manner, which is customary, (and in which I am currently most aware of, and the way he is most desirous of), I would commiserate, calm, and soothe him…keeping an eye to “giving” him comfort and succor.

However, using Mr. Huxley’s definition and your direction, that action would be neither supremely useful, nor serving his essence. I understand that the supreme level of usefulness is what you have always demonstrated, which is to “shock” people’s personality in favor of awakening their essence. Of course, that would not be appropriate in such a situation as my example.

So not having the forum or the skills you possess, how does a person go about being useful to essence in the everyday personality world? I am trying to grasp this concept under the assumption that “giving” to another’s personality has just about as much value, as does “giving” from one’s personality…namely, little to none.

I hope that I have asked this question in a clear fashion and that you can provide some additional clarity at some future Monday meeting.”

Here was his response:

Ronni –

“Your question is very clear, and your response, or direction, to resolving the example is also very clear.

If we follow tradition, we would feed the hungry, and they would never learn to fish. But we would be hallowed for the feeding. If we don’t feed them, and teach them to fish instead, we secure their future, but the present generation would consider this insensitive. In any polarized situation there is both praise and judgment. So what do we do?

We must develop whole seeing, where uni-polar exists. We find it in the idea world, (his term for Universal Source beyond the mind), not in the thinking world. When Jesus asked a man to follow him, the man said, “First let me bury my father.” Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” (In another lesson he used this parable to describe the need to step out of the deadening world of self generated conceptual understanding, or the “thinking” world…or as Jesus put it…let the dead bury the deadened.) When Aldous Huxley was dying, they say he asked for LSD so he could die alone, conscious and aware. Georg Groddeck said that we should go to bed and be alone when we are ill, to listen to the sickness and learn from it.

It seems to me that I relate to these examples. And for me, to nurture the sick and dying is to meddle in the same way that I would be meddling if a person inherited a fortune and I stepped in to help them spend it. Yet there are times where both are appropriate. (Emphasis mine.)

I personally think rules are polarized, and not only should each event be considered in the present moment, I may change my response from moment to moment. No two moments call for exactly the same response, in the same way that no two moments are alike.”

George

~~~~~

Here is my right of passage.

I once believed that stealing was wrong, no matter the motivation. In this way, I was laboring under a “believed” value system that was deeply inhibiting, and would not have allowed me to take the action that has resulted in the animal’s salvation.

In the moments leading up to taking the dog; those of decision, action, and outcome, there was no conflict what-so-ever…the next few days brought a great deal of conflict. I did not sleep for almost three days, wondering how I came to do the thing done. I worried about the potential effects on me, what if I was found out? What if my “bad” behavior was discovered? What if I am judged, blamed, harmed in some way…?

Surely you can see the difference between the essence in me, and the personality in me. The two sides of me, the one willing to face any measure of censure or harmful outcome in the service and action of a will higher than my own. The other, worried and sleepless, wondering if I had done the “right” thing.

I am fifty-six years old. Before I die…I “want” from some place deeper than my physical existence to live as fluidly, quietly, creatively, and instinctually active, as I saw my Teacher do…time and time again.

I want the “uni-polar, whole seeing” that allows me to serve essence and not personality…I want to be strong enough to do as the moment calls me to do, despite how “wrong” it may appear on the surface.

Allan Watts said of Georg Groddeck 1866-1934, "He was a completely wonderful man because everybody felt calmed by him. They felt an atmosphere of implicit faith, in nature and especially in the individual’s own inner nature. No matter what, Groddeck taught, there is a wisdom inside you which may seem absurd, but you have to trust it."

My particular brand of “absurd wisdom”…that is what I want…

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing

The Red Folder

There is something that actors define as the “psychological gesture”, it is the one move, the one physical expression, that when a character makes it, we, as the audience, know the entire sum of their point of view…their life’s direction, dedication, and the decisions they are likely to make in the third act.

The very best among the craft of acting are masters of the psychological gesture it is why we are putty in the hands of the likes of Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Robert De Niro. We cry where they want us to, we are afraid if they require it, we laugh out loud if they are in a comedic role.

Some of them are obvious… like the slow, silent, erect and committed soldiers salute, to a fallen hero as his body is being loaded onto a large belly transport plane for the last ride home.

Or the hand over your heart, as the national anthem plays and we are asked once more to acknowledge home, family, nation, and national pride.

I have found that one of the many and great benefits of a quiet mind, is the capacity to catch the “psychological gesture” when it shows up in everyday life. To see it in another is golden, to see it in the self is a treasure trove of awareness and alertness. Let us first agree on why the “psychological gesture” is so very powerful…it bypasses our thinking mind. It shows up as us, unveiled and without the mask that we normally wear in our daily discourses with one another. It is almost always entirely unconscious, and entirely revealing.

I thought I would share with you the most recent one I was privileged to view, as they often break my heart open, when I am able to catch one as it passes by.

~~~

To begin…we must know that I have been given a job.

I say that it is a gift because I have no background specific to the job. I am, in all probability, being slightly overpaid for the job… as it is not nearly as difficult as procuring enough trust, in a two hour time frame, that someone will purchase a thirty thousand dollar kitchen from you, (one of my last jobs), and the job itself is straight forward and fairly clear in its requirements.

The difficulty lies not in the job itself, but in the minefield of emotional entanglements that surround the job.

I am working for a woman who has held the job for some time now. She is dedicated in a way that allows you to know that the job is her life, not just her source of income. She defines herself as “territorial” and she states this, as though she has a common allergy to household dust.

Apparently this is the word someone else has applied to her need to control every nuance of the job, as I don’t really experience her as understanding what the concept of territoriality means, as it applies to herself and her dominion over the job.

To be “territorial” is to mean that you have set up perimeters, a sort of psychological barrier, around some small island of self-defined landscape that you patrol as though your very life depended upon it. Territoriality is often confused with having a passion for something, or “loving what you do”, or a sort of all-hands-on-deck dedication, that assumes your level of commitment to something or other outside of yourself as heroic, or valuable, or to be admired.

Our employer defined her as “one of our most valuable and valued” employees. Her direct supervisor uses her to do most of the work that she herself, should more likely be doing.

This is a very common set of circumstances for the “dedicated” among us.

But do not be mislead, there is a deep thicket of thorns beneath that blush of red roses. There is no harm done to the employer who gets way more than she is paying for, no difficulty for the supervisor who gets to coast a little, or a lot, when she probably should be pedaling a little harder.

No, the harm that comes from turning your life over to something outside yourself is the loss that you personally sustain.

We see around us in every walk of life the truly dedicated, the truly committed, and the truly “passionate”…but what we don’t see can’t see, and what would be truly liberating if we could see it, is where that dedication, passion, and commitment is sourcing from.

There are two very different locations from which that type of total life immersion can spring…and sadly, you can only really know which source is which, when the life in question is slowing down and coming to a close.

The most common source of that type of life dedication comes from the deep need to be viewed in a certain way, accepted for something you have to give, acknowledged for your greatness, seen as an exemplary in your field of endeavor. This category is by far the broadest, deepest, and most common. Here are the sports figures who when the arm goes, or the running slows, or the knee no longer supports, they have nothing in their lives and often end up in rehab…or worse. Or the actor, or singer who when age takes the voice or the looks, end up with a needle in their arm and gone to soon.

This type of passion is lauded in our society, and it seems to me no-one questions the validity of this type of balls out dependency, for that is surely what it is. Somewhere, at some point along the way, a sad and lonely child finds that if they sing, or throw the ball, or smile that just a little-bit-goofy smile, they get all the attention their young heart is yearning for…and suddenly a “self” is born.

I found this sort of attention from being a story teller. My entire family, stopped, paid attention, and focused on a lonely and lost little girl when I told a particularly enticing story. It became my identity. And large portions of my life were lost to that ability and the rewards received from it. Finding my way up and out of that identity, has been the hardest and most rewarding climb I have ever undertaken and I cannot truly say that I have succeeded… I only know that at least I understand how big a trap it is, how far reaching it can become, and how necessary for the soul to step out of that particular patch of light filled applause…and into the darker aspects of being, so that balance may be restored. Balance, humility, stillness, and simplicity…the other location… from which passion and dedication can source.

When we do something with our whole heart and mind, because we get great goodies from those around us, we are more lost than can be imagined. Conversely when we do something with our whole heart, mind, and soul simply because it is the thing before us to be done, the thing that has put itself in our path, the thing that is arising just now… in the field of the present moment… we are found in ways that are very difficult to describe, catalog, or express. From the outside the appearance of those two sources, often look exactly the same. But that sameness is only millimeters deep.

The first is born out of neediness and deep dependencies; the second is the blooming of the Impersonal Self and its delight in awareness for awareness sake. That state of Being has been known throughout recorded history as an “Awakened Being”. Here we have a person who has so thoroughly lost ALL territoriality that everything that presents itself to them, garners their full attention with the same commitment, dedication, depth, and resolve, as those that do what they are good at, because they get applause for it.

The difference is vast indeed…

So, I promised to tell you about a “psychological gesture” and the sorrow it brought to my heart, for the supervisor who is supposedly teaching me her job…but who, in truth, cannot bear to let go of even the tiniest aspect of the job and her hold upon it.

When she describes herself as “territorial”, what she means by the descriptor is that her need for the approval that she acquires through her dedication to the job is nearly absolute. She fusses with me over the size of font that I used to write the copy that was once her duty. She doesn’t like the words I choose, or the way I describe something that she once was tasked with describing. She is aghast when I ask another co-worker a question…when I should have asked her. She variously describes me as being her property, as in “she is mine” or as my being her “mini-me”, both ways of patrolling her perimeter and clearly announcing that she does not view me as capable of doing the job correctly. She has given me nothing to do of any consequence at all, as she cannot emotionally afford to.

As the Christmas break approached and she was alerted to the fact that I would temporarily be absent from my duties on the upcoming Monday, as I was being diverted to another project, she reached out and took the red folder from my desk that contains the necessary information for a task that must be completed every Monday by 5 pm.

And here was her “psychological gesture”.

As she plucked the folder from its paper tray, she did so with a kind of energetic reclaiming of what is rightfully hers. Up and away it went as she brought it to her breast, above her heart, with a flourish and a look on her face that assumed ownership and that it had been correctly restored to where it truly belonged. Her look was gleeful, eyebrows arched with a slightly self-satisfied smile, meant to convey the absolute dominion she feels for her small fiefdom.

A while ago, when I was still imprisoned inside the personal self, I would have experienced her gesture as a gauntlet thrown down…a personal challenge of her right to exercise that much control over me and a need to defend myself would have drawn me, up and out, of myself and into some measure of warfare with her.

And instead, on this day, as she scooped up her red folder and with it her entitlement to a job that is her life, rather than her source of income…I felt only, very real and compassionate, sorrow for her.

Sorrow that she appears to know so little about the depths within herself. Sorrow that her life has become so entangled with something so temporary, and so fragile. Sorrow that she will inevitably fail at being able to successfully defend her small territory, and sorrow that she has apparently missed finding a doorway into the larger version of herself…the larger version that awaits us all.

When we have the courage and the will to step behind the self that we created out of childhood needs, when we can begin to feel the lifeblood of Beingness flow in our veins…when we have allowed the mask we have worn all of our lives to slough off, like so much dead and no longer useful skin, our “territory” becomes a vastness so large, so encompassing, so power filled, and so lovely that all are welcome there.

Here in this place, laying claim to that red folder or not, has no consequence at all. In our larger selves there is no territory at all, as we are finally able to see that the circle we drew around our lives, our loves, our needs, our wants and our passions…was an entirely arbitrary and made up one.

Passion sourcing from this place gifts us with the capacity to turn everything we touch into our red folder. Everything we see, everything that sees us, everything we do and everywhere we go…establishes in us the awareness that we are the One, the Only, the View, and the Viewer.

And in this place…it is just as good to let go, as it is to hang on. Just as good to lose as it is to win, just as good to fall down as it is to get up, just as good to sink as it is to rise, just as good to be quiet as it is to shout, and just as good to go unnoticed as it is to be applauded.

I tell you this simple story of my supervisor’s psychological gesture, not to expose her, but rather to potentially awaken in you the desire to catch yourself hanging onto your own red folder, and the many ways in which that grasping limits your life, and your destiny.

Let go… give up the need to know, the desire to compare, the craziness of competing, and begin to notice the depth in yourself and the hugeness of the vast consciousness of which you are a valued and valuable part. Live there, in that, and you will find peace, harmony, and quiet joy…

Adayre R. Miller

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Luis Ribes I Portillo, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…http://www.flickr.com/photos/lluisr/1457453463/

Blue Shirts…

In the aftermath of deciding to give up my home to protect my obligation to my sister, a good many changes have flowed from that decision point, to the one in which I sit now. I had no resistance to the idea of becoming homeless. Due in large part to the trust that I have uncovered, which lives beneath the mental chatter I once thought myself to be, and is, from my current level of investigation… absolute.

I find in the depth of my life, a worth that is not measureable. Not only is it too deep to determine, but beyond that… it is too vast. There are no boundaries or limits, no edges that can be discovered or discerned.

There is no longer any doubt about the path my life takes, no seeking or pursuits. I find no fault with the expression my life presents to the world. I find nothing to fix, or improve.

Not long ago, I rediscovered a small envelope that has sat beneath a pile of papers for more than nine years. It is one of those things that I touch occasionally, never open, and am unwilling to throw away.

It contains about 25 slips of paper, each with a hand written commentary about who I once appeared to be, in the world.

It came into being from a nine-day “School for the Work” that was meant to certify me in the use of Byron Katie’s four questions, and the freedom to be found in them. I have never used my certification, as I have very rarely taught since that long ago “School for the Work”.

In Katie’s workshop, after we had spent nine very intense days disclosing our fears, hurts, self-harm and emotional disturbances, we were asked to comment to each other, anonymously, about the perception the group had toward each of us.

Because I was – at that time – a very vocal participant, my small envelope filled up with comments that I have heard many times in my life. How articulate I was, how verbal, how courageous…but one opened and revealed itself as a harsh and demanding criticism.

It said, …”You make yourself ugly.”

I have no idea if the writer meant to comment upon my physical appearance, or my emotional displays. I have always assumed that it was meant to describe my physicality. I am obese. I have been for more than twenty years. I once felt a huge need to fix that condition, and did everything within my power to affect a difference, all to no avail. Now I no longer need to fix it, as I no longer need to fix my brushes with poverty, or failure, or my near miss with homelessness.

As the Silence in my life, broadens, deepens, and settles into my daily ordinary existence, less and less space is given to the mental concept that something…anything…about me, needs to change.

Just a few days ago, I found that envelope once again and read to myself the words that stung so much, all those years ago, the “you make yourself ugly” comment and my immediate response was the recognition that “ugly” no longer holds any sting for me.

If in fact I am, then…

I don’t mind being the ugly one, the one who failed, the poor one, the fat one. My life is no longer measured on a linear scale of success. My wrinkles, hips, empty bank account, lack of professional success and even the end of my dream to teach, and write professionally… none of these things define me, or limit me in any way.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb filled with the wisdom of the middle way, which seeks to invite us into the whole of our lives. It states, "One should not miss the flavor of being sick, nor the experience of being destitute"… and another equally sound wisdom, “brass shouts, gold hides”.

When you can walk free and unattached amidst the miasma that was once your hopes, dreams, and wishes…you have, finally and forever, found release.

I have come to the deep wisdom that my failures, my sorrows, the “flavor of my sicknesses” and “destitutions” are the very reason that the shouting of brass, has finally transformed itself into hidden gold.

I have made the perilous and demanding journey from the outside of myself to the deep interior of the No Self, and found a home, a welcoming, a healing that cannot be shaken, that carries no doubt, that abides in a place of such depth it cannot be disturb or dislodged.

Not long ago, someone I care for admonished me that I write and express myself in “absolutes”. She explained that she must “translate” what I write as she reads, so that she may find some form of inclusion in my writing and expression.

I am sorry for that, but I have no way of effecting a change in that experience. When Silence was revealed to me as the core of my Being, when it poured into my mind, eased its way into my muscles, made a home for itself in my beating heart, and took the reins of my life from the misguided hands of my thinking brain and into the ineffable Mystery of itself…doubt disappeared…

It is as though the nerves that controlled the musculature that tenses when doubt and uncertainty are present, were cut by the hand of a loving and attentive surgeon…I simply no longer possess the nervous system control that once allowed doubt to spew acid into my stomach, tighten the muscles of my limbs, and bind my heart into spasms of concern and wavering of purpose, for any persistent length of time. Doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, tension, all the various forms of self harm, that were once my moment-by-moment experience, do still occasionally arise, but herein is the great gift of moving from the personal self to the Impersonal Source, they melt away, if not immediately… then within a few hours. All the painful thoughts that arise within the context of the personal, no longer find purchase or footing in the landscape of vast interior that is Impersonal Being.

As a stressful thought arises, and with it an emotionally burdened experience, in a few moments…or at most a few hours, the thought is seen to be a form of lie, and drops away as though it were dead skin being shed from the body taking with it all emotional discomfort, and restoring peace and equanimity.

I discover, from the position of the Impersonal aspect of Being, that there is nowhere for me to go and nothing to accomplish. My role upon this earth is to bear witness, to notice, and to allow. I do not dismiss the deep seeking I see all around me, I do not wish to disturb anyone who believes, seeks, strives, or pursues. But, as they say in the Deep South…”I don’t have a horse in that race.”

Recently, a long-term friend gifted me with a job, a gift I am humbled by. Her concern and kindness has prevented the move to homelessness that was the next action preparing itself in the periphery of my world. I am grateful beyond measure, and yet I feel no sense of having been rescued… as there is nothing to be rescued from.

With the slow unwinding of the personal self, that was begun the very first time my mind touched Silence, I now understand that nothing I once feared can stand in the face of that Vast Expanse. Our true existence is in many ways beyond our perceptive capacity…and yet, when the end of the personal self is glimpsed even for a moment… Timeless Being fills the void vacated by the false, and ends the need for assurances, rescue, hope, and dreams.

Even a tiny glimpse, of the source of Being, changes forever the structures of unconscious neediness, which seem so important that we feel the desire to assign them personhood.

My Teacher, in his constant striving to explain how truly simple salvation really is, would often tell the story of his closet full of blue shirts.

He was a quiet, and by his own assessment, a shy man.

For me, he always seemed to be quietly shining, and until he first told the story of the blue shirts, I had never noticed the choice of color that predominated in his wardrobe.

He explained that no matter how committed he might be, to finally purchasing another color, he would almost always find himself having made the trip to the clothier’s only to return with some shade of blue. Whether that blue had another thread color as accent, or a subtle pattern of squares, or was mixed in its hue with a neighboring green, or a slight hint of red, he seemed always to end up with some, or other, shade of blue.

His teaching style held two primary components, and this simple story demonstrates one of those two deep styles.

First, and always, he was either subtly or directly asking our permission to “shock” us. This was his way of saying that the calcification of habitual mental patterns that we take to be us – (I most often describe that as the personal self) – needs some form of shock, to open a portal, so that fresh understanding may reach us and form a bridge upon which we may walk ourselves out of hell, and into the heaven of timeless and selfless Being. This “shock” may be provided by a gifted teacher, in a deeply loving and kind manner…or most frequently, and sadly, it will be provided by life, in the form of some deep loss, or deep suffering…but make no mistake, shock is entirely necessary.

His second most fundamental style was how simple he tried to make his lessons.

Like his story about his closet filled with blue shirts.

The essence of his story lies at the root of our misperceptions of ourselves. He chose blue, not out of desire, or need, or even preference. He chose blue because he had been habituated to it in some manner in his early life, and soon “blue” became a story about the “me” we miss-identify ourselves as. His attempt was to cause us to recognize that all the “choices” we make in our lives, until we are freed from the personal, are born out of the self same habituation as his oft repeated choice for blue.

To live under the blindness of the limited self is not to possess a mind… but to be possessed by one. There is no such thing as will, or choice, or freedom when we are living in, and through, a mind habituated to patterns of thoughts and the subsequent behaviors, that were born into us out of reactive childhood survival mechanisms.

Choice, in this state of mind, is a job of smoke and mirrors that gives us the illusion of forward and positive momentum while at the same time keeping us locked in the old familiar cycles of abandonment, pain, suffering, and the illusion of, and search for, positive change.

The old adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”, is born from this deep truth.

It never matters where we arrive, where we are going, who we are meeting, or what goals we have set…if we are locked in the habituated and identified role that we came up out of childhood with, for then, “the more things change, the more they will stay the same.”

It is as though we have become so comfortable with the prison of “self” hood, that we have begun to decorate our prison to make it more homey and welcoming. We seek out folk who enjoy the same view of the prison, and call it support. We pray to a god who never intended us to live in prison in the first place, and who has left the door standing wide open, hoping we might find the will to walk through its portal, and out, into the wide open spaces of selflessness and non-dual freedom.

Our immense desires, both spiritual and material, are primarily pursued to fill the hole that the story of “me” develops in the deep center of our despair. When we live, in and through, the story of “me” and “mine” there can never be enough to fill the cavernous longing that searches endlessly and mindlessly for more, and better, and different.

In these long and fruitful years since I left Byron Katie’s school for the Work, I find the greatest value in the commentary from the person who criticized, not the ones that praised. Not because criticism is inherently valuable, and in point of fact, the choice to criticize is one that bedevils the presenter much more powerfully than it haunts the receiver. No, it is not the criticism itself that provides the value…it is the realization that the desire to run from my ugliness has fallen away, as has the need to be praised and approved of, and so has the need to be sheltered from criticism.

Because there is no longer, a “self” that needs shoring up…both praise and condemnation have little to no effect.

I have found the Middle Way…on the deep inside…it is a place shown to me by a man who favors blue shirts, and a woman who asks four simple questions…

And you are there as well.

Adayre R. Miller

12/10/11

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Mag_Tags, if you wish to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…http://www.flickr.com/photos/magstag/5315334251/in/photostream

And Liberation…is the Universal Light of Salvation.

There is a Tibetan proverb that speaks to the process by which we come into the fullness of our lived spiritual expression.

It is… “Don’t mistake understanding, for realization. Don’t mistake realization for liberation.” (This courtesy of a new website I have discovered called Buddha at the Gas Pump, aka – batgap.com – I would so encourage your having a look).

It took me many years to understand my Teacher’s conversation regarding the Impersonal Self, and only very recently have I been able to move understanding into the realms of realization. To realize the Silence out of which mind sources, is to come into an entirely different understanding about who we are, what we are here for, and why our lives are as they are.

I have begun, in recent months, to deepen and broaden the move from understanding to realization, but only twelve short hours ago have I had my first taste of Liberation…and I just had to share it with you.

This quote is posted above my computer and I refer to it often…”As Milarepa sang to the monsters he found in his cave, ‘it is wonderful you demons came today. You must come again tomorrow. From time to time, we should converse.”

As I move closer to some form of decisive action with respect to my obligations and how to meet them, the “demons…they came a visitin’ last night.”

And I thought to share their visit with you, in case you might find some benefit for yourselves.

The temptation to see myself as having failed, and failed spectacularly, in the circumstances in which I find myself, are, as you might imagine enormous.

I am aging; flat broke, without prospects, and on the verge of some form of homelessness, and/or deeper travail. Within that context, last night I joined the voyeuristic community, that is reality television, and watched a program called “Hoarders”.

As the woman who’s home appeared to be the county dump site, railed against the help that was being offered, and blamed everyone within ear shot for the circumstances of her home and its slow descent into a sea of garbage…some combination of her rage, unconsciousness, projection, and general ill will toward her husband and sons, found its way into my nervous system, and sparked a flood of “what is wrong with me” internal conversation.

The, what is wrong with me question, is my oldest and most intimate demon. It has come to visit me, since the moment I could form the language with which to invite it.

Last night it took hold of me and began to blame my long bout with unemployment and all my current circumstances, with a chorus of “what is wrong” with me…sung badly, and out of tune, to the melody of “you deserve this.”

That experience is as common as household dust for me…what is utterly uncommon, and occurred for the very first time last night, was the liberation occasioned by the Impersonal Self on behalf of the personal self, I once believed me to be.

I don’t have the nuanced language necessary to fully describe the experience my flesh was having. Certainly I could say that my gut was tightening up, my blood pressure was surely on the rise, my nervous system was shimmering, my heart was contracted, and my attention was narrowing and beginning the unconscious search for an external threat.

My mind had begun to sing the song that maybe I was just as crazy as the woman who was so fiercely fighting to keep her garbage, that maybe my slowly suffocating in poverty, was as surely my creation as was her mountain of boxes. (She was having the greatest discord with those that came to help her, her children, husband, and friends, over cardboard boxes…yes, you heard correctly empty boxes…which she was prepared to fight to the death for, and lord, that made her seem batshit crazy.)

I have often avoided these particular “what is wrong with me” monsters in my cave, by singing back to them that all of this, (whatever this might be), is in the service of making me into a much-better-some-day-soon-to-be, spiritual Teacher, somewhere off into the future… And with that slender blade, I have – in the past – been able to quiet the “what is wrong with me” and “I am crazy” monsters, enough to move back into a comfortable cohabitation with them.

But last night was different… no longer able to avail myself of my slender blade of future someday happiness, I did not unsheathe my small, and truthfully useless weapon to deal with my cave monster visit, in the same predictable and habitual manner. I merely stood there, naked and defenseless. (Metaphorically speaking. I don’t often stand anywhere naked…).

And then the most amazing thing happened.

The Impersonal Self, the one who does not speak, who does not fantasize, who does not project, who does not own, or compete, or compare, or fear, or distrust, or need, or want, or desire, or is in any way limited to me personally…breathed into me and dissolved my old friend, the “what is wrong with me” demon, like vapor before the rising sun.

(Please resist the temptation to hear this in a way that depicts us as two, the Impersonal self and me, there are not two…only one, but the limitations of language make it sound thus, and I am someone who greatly enjoys the poetic use of language. Just remember, not two, only One.)

My blood pressure instantly began to return to normal, the shivering over the surface of my nerves dissolved away, my heart opened wider than I can ever remember it doing, my gut flowed back to pre-fight or flight status, and my what is “wrong with me” song… fell out of my mind with almost a surprised yelp, (as though it had been caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar). It was, at one and the same time, comical, vastly relieving, hugely liberating, wildly beneficial, and deeply moving.

This, I believe, is my first real glimpse of “liberation”.

Here is a brief paragraph from the vast volumes of information I was given by my Teacher, George Addair. He states, “The ability to determine your level of Being is directly associated with your ability to renounce your attachments. If you are attached to an object, idea, dream, or a person, you can rise no higher on the vertical scale of Being, than the thing you are attached to. Renunciation is necessary in order to rise higher. It is imperative that you understand that renunciation is always in the mind, not in behavior. The goal is to not let the mind turn outward. You cannot control events. They are determined by the destiny of cause and effect, but your mind is under your control 100% of the time, and is what determines your level of Being.” (When the question of free will vs. determinism or Karma was put to George, he always answered that paradoxically they are both true. Outer events are pre-determined, inner experience is where free will resides.)

By virtue of the responses I received from my request for your prayers that I be able to let go my long held dream of teaching/speaking, it is clear that I did not create the understanding that I sought your prayers, for my release, of the attachment to…not the behavior of. And, in truth, I perhaps did not even clearly recognize the distinction myself.

My Teachers assertion was always that the events that happen in the outer are not determined by us, (despite the vast majority of Americans believing that we can mold, shape, source, direct, and manifest our destinies), and that our only real, and absolute, control is found in our responses to our circumstances. I find that not only does my mind now agree with this idea, but so does my heart and my soul. (Emerson, my other personal favorite – as you well know – agreed with it as well, when he said…”What comes to you belongs to you.”) Nothing of any real value happens in the outer, all that is eternal is also internal.

I have been “praying” mightily to be released from my attachment to teaching/speaking/writing, for some time now. I submit that last nights first breath of Liberation, is a direct response to that prayer.

In the twenty five years that I had the miraculous and quite glorious opportunity to be George Addair’s faithful student, I had only three short personal visits with him, all of which effected me so powerfully that it was as though he had reached inside my chest and touched my beating heart with his powerfully cleansing fingers. Two of those visits left me bedridden for almost two weeks, so impacted did my system feel.

I also had a small number of email exchanges with him, five or so. (All of the rest of my experience of him, over the twenty-five years, was in groups of one sort or another.) In one of them, on September 21, 2004 he wrote this, in response to a question I had sent him…

”This is my first activity of the day, even before a drink of water. I feel the life in you as it weaves its way through the pathway of obstacles. What moves me most is the fact that you keep moving forward in spite of the blocks that loom before you (us). (He is ever humble, and his parenthetical inclusion of himself at my level, is just one more example of his humility.) I think you have found the way. Your description of the path matches mine. And I think you have learned that we travel alone when we pass through the valley. Perhaps, when we no longer think of turning back, no longer waver in the lonely darkness, and nothing else matters except to go on, then we shall find beauty all around us. I long for the day that you discover that you are really traveling the path for someone other than yourself.”

It has been several years now, since I “wavered in the darkness”…and surely it is true beyond questioning that, “nothing else matters to me, except to go on”…and I am just now beginning to see the beauty in everything that happens to me, poverty, potential homelessness, et. al.

But here is the very best thing… and since I cannot share it with him, my spiritual father, please allow me to share it with you.

The realization of the Impersonal Self, the touching of the Silent Source of mind, has finally driven enough greed, grasping, and clutching from my heart, to make possible the potential understanding that he yearned for me to recognize, and I am now “discovering that I am traveling the path for someone other than myself,” or my own personal comfort and peace of mind.

Not in the sentimental way I once perceived that idea, that I would someday get to be a teacher and a communicator of spiritual ideas…but rather, that my efforts – as exemplified last night –- alone within the confines of my own mind, naked, innocent, open and undefended against my personal demons, greatly benefit all of humanity… dead, born, or yet unborn, and the cosmos as well.

That one woman, finally capable, and alone in her own thoughts, willingly bared her breast to the knife’s edge, is the culmination of a lifetimes worth of spiritual work.

And it was not for me…as such…

Do I benefit? Beyond measure.

But so do you…

If, a woman as common and ill gifted as me – can find within – the courage to stand alone in the face of her oldest demon, and silently prevail…then it is true for us all.

If one such as me can reveal the Silence, then we can all find our way home. It is only a matter of willingness and commitment, as I have no other gifts than these, and they are as common as leaves upon a tree.

Clinging to the attachment to future happiness which made it possible to survive a desperate childhood, long enough to meet George Addair, and under his most elegant guidance…to have the potential to become of use, silently, to the human family and further, to recognize that as the only reason for breathing, is my greatest good fortune.

The Nova science documentary I sent you, has detailed that the science of physics and higher mathematics has proven beyond dispute that the fabric of spacetime is not empty. But rather is filled to the brim with moving, energetic, largely unknowable, and likely highly information garnering stuff, (my opinion), or Dark Energy, as they called it. Further that this Dark Energy constitutes seventy percent of the cosmos, and clearly connects every thing with every thing else. (It resides in the space between you and me as well…so say the best minds in the field, and accounts for why particles can communicate over vast differences in location, and thereby behave harmoniously.)

(You may find that documentary, entitled The Fabric of the Cosmos: Part One, What Is Space – at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html it is so very much worth your time.

It is not a leap for me to understand that if I can liberate myself from the oldest demon in my life, (not that I don’t expect him to show up once again – but who could possibly be afraid of him now – that he has been exposed as vapor), that my potential liberation can and does affect yours…even if we never meet, speak, or touch.

This is the Sense of Universality that my Teacher promised would awaken within us, when we had allowed enough detritus to fall away.

He often spoke about how moved he would be, while in the grocer’s aisle, at his being capable of feeling the labors and toiling of the farmers who provided the food that would soon be nourishing his body, so complete was his Sense of Universality.

His caretakers have told stories about how his joining a cashier’s line of garrulous, agitated, and quarrelsome customers, would silence their disturbance and soften their behavior, to the point that the cashier would comment on it.

In particular I am fond of the story of his visiting a new dentist, well into his disease process, when he could no longer concentrate or demonstrate his great teaching ability.

His caretaker moved him out of his wheel chair and into the dentist chair, when the procedure was complete and she had come to collect him, the Dentist would not let go of him. The Dentist put him back in his wheelchair, pushed him out to the car, put him in the car, hung over the window looking at him, and all the while asking his caretaker who he was…which really meant, what manner of man is this?

The reason for his effect on so many people is due entirely, to Agape Love being so well established in him. The Impersonal Self was a palpable presence in him, and no shred of the personal was still holding him hostage.

I have come to a new definition of Agape Love, which is that in its essence it is… Noticing and Allowing. There is nothing that escaped George Addair’s attention, and nothing that was not allowed. He had divested himself entirely, of the universal human experience of resistance. He had no internal or external conflicts. He wore his divinity like a graceful cloak, and his humanity like a personal poem to the Universe.

And the steps are; Understanding blooms into Realization. Realization transforms into Liberation.

…And Liberation…is the Universal Light of Salvation.

Adayre R. Miller

11/15/11

The photo is courtesy of flikr photo sharing and Paul Fontana to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amiko/181961483/in/photostream

Hallelujah……

In recent weeks, I have lost three jobs that I interviewed for with the best, most ship shape persona I could pull out of my bag of tricks. I lost a friend who described our conversations as having become stale. I lost a small income stream a friend had offered, and then mysteriously decided not to follow through with. I am losing the very last of my financial reserves, and now am faced with having to make some rather drastic decisions to curtail the impact of my financial lack from affecting my sister, who still has an income position in my house. (I am beginning the process of moving out, and either selling the property at a substantial loss, or attempting to rent it, and thereby meet my obligation to my sister.)

I tell you my circumstances, not so that I engender sympathy in you…but rather, to engage in the process of inquiry and the necessary growth that inquiry can bring.

In all the losses that have occurred over the course of the last three years, the greatest of them has been my belief in a future happiness.

This loss is the most difficult, and yet the most freeing.

To give up the notion that it “will get better some day”, in the face of one of the most challenging periods of my life…has been a deeply demanding process. (Moving to the future was my very favorite way of avoiding perceived difficulty in the present.)

This “getting better some day”, in our culture, goes by the more common name of Hope, and or Dreams. We are encouraged by every source imaginable to look to tomorrow to ease the suffering of today’s limitations.

Whole structures are built upon this idea; large businesses, psychological institutions, schools of every stripe, almost every entertainment venue includes a future orientation, and every story that ever began with “Once upon a time…”

Prying my cold, dead, fingers, from around the neck of “the future” has been the biggest thing I have ever attempted to accomplish. I am not at all sure I am winning at it…but I am certain it is the only gateway to happiness that exists.

I am not someone who thinks a great deal about happiness. Suffering was such an overwhelming companion in my early life, and had become so constant, that I wove an identity for myself from its’ dark coziness, and happiness, therefore, was not a notion that I spent much time indulging in…I still don’t.

When the capacity for experiencing myself wrapped in the breathing aliveness, of a silent mind, was first introduced to my system, (a grace I am sure I did nothing to be worthy of)… that Silence, made clear several different things.

The first and foremost is that every thing I ever believed about myself was a mental construct, (made from thought derived abstractions and having no basis in reality at all). Further, that everything I have ever believed about life, life’s processes, the past and the future, are all equally mental constructs, fabricated out of who-knows-what hobbled together compilations of; internal dialogue, learned behaviors, habitual mind patterns, and cultural traditions.

To discover that everything you have ever believed in, from the nursery rhymes in childhood, to the pledge of allegiance in grade school, to the Prince Charming of early adulthood, to the “manifesting” of New Age dictums…are all just a large game of “let’s pretend”…is a foundation rocking realization, and one that requires Silence for its unveiling.

I was recently introduced, via email, to a “healer” from Croatia who travels the globe, “gazing” at folk. He does not speak, does not listen…but merely gazes. He – on a tall platform – so that he may be seen by the back of the room, and large crowds of people who are “gazed” at for fifteen-minute intervals in hourly shifts. These healing events are attended by thousands of people, in dozens of different cities, on almost every continent.

I have no idea who he is, whether or not his “gazing” heals, and if, or if not, his work has legitimate effect.

But I do know, without equivocation, that silence is the mind’s optimum state. It would be my guess that it would be quite difficult to stand in front of thousands of people and quietly gaze upon them, without benefit of a silent mind.

These last weeks, as-one-right-after-another, forms of financial salvation have slipped away from my grasping fingers…Silence has been the only possible safety, from the perception of lack, that crowds the internal shores of my life from every conceivable direction.

The truly difficult part is that you cannot “want” Silence. You cannot grasp it, or encourage it, or demand it, or learn it, or sneak up on it. You cannot be worthy of it, or be made special by it. You cannot hope for it, or dream about it, or work toward it.

And yet…

It is the only answer, to every shred of human suffering that has ever been, or will ever be.

It is the threshold between living a life of make believe, or living in the vast mystery of the unknowable Truth.

There is a very mysterious component to the Silence that is the source point of mind. It has no methodology, (as far as I can tell), by which to attract your attention, it is as if it were a somewhat indulgent parent…watching you from afar, running hither and yon looking for salvation in all the wrong places.

My sense of it is that you could go your whole life through without once ever knowing that your “self” is a myth generated by the mind that chatters, and the Impersonal Self would have no problem with that at all.

Of course, nothing at all, can be problematic from the position of Silence.

As your mind unwinds like a dreidel coming to rest, slower and slower it spins, you can see quite clearly that the only problem that has ever, or will ever exist, is the capacity to describe an event as problematic, and then convince yourself that the description is real.

For myself, I vacillate, between Silence and chatter.

Waiting is a particularly difficult process for me. My father’s only measureable effect upon my life was his total untrustworthiness. He was forever making promises to me, which almost never came true. “I’ll be home early tonight, or we’ll go fishing on Saturday”, or hundreds of other promises which I waited for the fulfillment of, with waning hope to see if they would come true…and mostly they never did. I remember quite clearly deciding to stop believing him, when I was nine years old. I just couldn’t bear the waiting any longer…

So as I waited for second interviews, for my friend to respond to an email, for a job that I have some hope of fitting into to appear on the job boards, for some form of movement in the ever-increasing pressure of financial lack…I could not maintain my connection to Silence.

The belief that my thinking mind can, and will, provide me with a solution to my problem was to great…the desire for a future with less restriction was to desirable…the will to overcome was to strong…and thus the Silence left my life, and took with it the Sun and the Light.

In lieu of essays, I had sent you several videos that have been of great value to me. I have not heard from any of you regarding their content, or receipt, so I have no way of knowing if you found value in them.

But for me, the song I sent is the one that moved me the most.

In that song, is this phrase…”And even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah…”

Some where in the depths of my being, I know that this period of my life is about whittling me down to “nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah”…this is not a thing being done to me, but rather by and for, some deep version of me, yet unknown.

If Silence could be sung it would be the sound of the Hallelujah made most soulful, by these four Canadian tenors.

The pressure to search for, and believe in, a mental solution to my problem is immense. The desire to look to the future, and hope and dream, is deeply seductive. The need to be spared the coming losses puddles inside me like a weeping child.

And yet…

The Silence within awaits… secure, comfortable, quiet. It waits to see if I can remember it, if I can pull away from the seductions and return my attention to the limitless realms of Silent, Deep, and Unfathomable Source. To see, if I can rescue myself from the self created and conditioned mind, to see if I have the will to walk away from the comforting, in favor of the True but Unknowable.

My Teacher once said that you cannot know where you are on the scale of unfolding Being, you can only know which direction you are traveling in…

We are only, and always, looking to the outer and the future for salvation…or willingly stripping ourselves naked, so that we may stand “before the Lord of Song with nothing on our Tongues but Hallelujah.”

With all my heart, with all my will, with all my childhood prayers…may I know the Silence more deeply, and empty more fully, the mind’s conditioning upon my life, and whatever meager gifts I may have to give.

Adayre R. Miller

11/11/11

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and musicmuse to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link…http://www.flickr.com/photos/42304632@N00/388083743/