The Quiet In My Life….

It has been a year and six weeks, since I lost my job and began this daily vigil. As the days lengthen and the hours require so much of me, I have come more and more to know the meaning of acceptance and the cost of resistance.

I compare this experience to the first year I took time off from working and the difference could not be more striking. That year, a quarter century ago, I was broken in spirit, challenged in mind, and ruptured in heart. I spent my time reading the masters, studying with a master, riding a bicycle and trying to remain at least reasonably calm. I did not know at the time that my identity was dying, but I had all the anxieties and fears of someone diagnosed with a terminal illness, so I suppose I should have known that some part of me was in fact, dying.

Recently I saw a 60 Minutes report on a Female Buddhist monk who has been living in a small, single room on a wind swept mountain for more than thirty years. Now when I say small, I mean it was the size of a coffin times a half bigger. Reportedly she did not leave this small enclosure for more than thirty minutes a day. Her food was delivered to her by the villagers, who respect and revere the devoted and their pursuits, and the reporter who was capturing her story was the first outsider she had spoken to in decades.

Now my home is larger than a coffin, to be sure, but the principle is the same. Unlike the first time this process was required of me, I experience no phantom and psychological fears of dying, as much of my ego has long ago let go of me. I no longer use my imagination to torture myself with fantasies, of a cataclysmic future filled with shopping cart pushing and cardboard box beds.

I live in harmony with my circumstances doing what I can to join with, rather than run from.

I swim everyday, which helps a great deal. I have made dramatic changes to my diet becoming a somewhat flexible vegan, (the flexibility means that now and again I will have a bite of cheese or a slice of bacon in my spinach salad but the amounts are so small that, for all intents and purposes I am animal free-I know those of you who are VEGANS would argue with me-and thus I apologize in advance.)

But the most important change in this year’s sabbatical from the normal American life is the great depth of subtlety that has entered the playing field. Not only can I watch my mind with the patience of a cat watching a mouse hole, but also I have each day gained additional grace and humility in the process.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, my very favorite author of all time- a century ago-wrote these most inspiring words, which fuel my daily commitment to harmony and willingness…

“I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here, certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk, and dodge, and duck, with unseasonable apologies and vain modesty, and imagine my being here impertinent?”

“Here” is where I am supposed to be, like my kindred spirit living in her tiny, weather worn coffin, hanging on the side of a mountain in Nepal…I just didn’t have the consciousness to choose my confinement as she did.

As an American we are not allowed to choose solitude, over success and winning. In American culture there is nothing but disgrace, shame, dishonor, and ignominy to be heaped upon the head of the “unproductive”. Success and winning are such ingrained attitudes that anything less than full out commitment is viewed with suspicion and disdain. If that small and quiet female monk were living in America, the authorities would be called and something would be done about it…damn it!! I might add here that the reporter, whose name I have forgotten, made mention that the very air around this woman seemed electrified with a kind of quantifiable peace, something he could feel, almost tangibly, and something he clearly admired.

Conversely I have a friend I have known for more than thirty years, and she once told me that being around “someone who doesn’t work made her uncomfortable”. I understand that.

In our culture speed is the only thing that matters, speed and acquisition, and it has made us partially insane. Someone, whose revving motor has been quietly disengaged, creates an echo of emptiness, which bounces around the room like a call echoes off canyon walls. So I understand her distance, and her opinion.

As for myself, the same cultural dictates that I have spent a lifetime immersed in are letting go of me, as surely as my ego mind once died an anxiety-ridden death. And like Emerson, (I take pause comparing myself to him-even in a literary fashion), I have found myself comforted by the notion that the “Soul has need of an organ here…”

The sound of my home’s air conditioner, which in our unrelenting 115-degree summers runs almost non-stop, and often sounds like wind on a high mountaintop. It often has me thinking of that tiny wise woman, living in her small shed, eschewing the world around her so that she may make an invisible contribution, to the human spirit’s evolution and ongoing development.

My Teacher, a master on Emerson’s level, often compels us to end war in the world by ending war in our individual heart and mind. I am coming to the very edge of that personal level of peace. Each day I get closer and closer. Each day I ruminate less and less, on my circumstances and open my heart wider and wider. Each day I find more peace in my interior landscape than I had any right to expect, given where I started. And each day, my gratitude stews me gently in its juices until I am near perfectly done, and ready to be served up to some greater purpose.

I have come, thru the quiet in my life, to be capable of understanding the notion of finding the world in a grain of sand.

The great soul has need of an organ here…I will assume the post, and stand the ground. I will bow before the unyielding sovereignty of the What Is of my life, and accept with grace, equanimity, and some small measure of nobility, the circumstances given me.

If someone is out there, reading these words…I thank you for your silent companionship. If not, and I am writing these words for my ear alone…still I am grateful to have had the journey that brought these words forth from my heart, even if they are for mine ear alone.

God bless you, and keep you….

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

The Quiet in My Life…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com

And They Flew…

Because I have no income, due to the economic troubles we are facing and having been laid off from my job, I choose the only way I can to honor my financial obligations by conserving my savings, (which of course I am living off of), in the strictest ways possible.

I buy only the necessities, which amount to food, shelter, and in our climate air conditioning. I drive only to and from the library, and to and from the grocery store, and once weekly to the dog park and library.

If it were not for the dog park, I suppose I could go days and days without speaking to anyone at all…save the small conversations held in line, during my food purchase transactions.

In years gone by, this situation would have induced such panic in me that I would have been calling the 411 operators, just for the sound of another person’s voice. Gratefully…with time, commitment, perseverance, and an unwavering desire for healing it is possible for me to live and even thrive, under these dire and difficult circumstances. In my twenties, I could not possibly have stood this…back then, as a friend of mine once put it…”your mind is a dangerous neighborhood, you should never go in there alone.”

Sometimes as I reflect back over this astonishing inward journey that my lifes has turned out to be, I am well beyond gratitude’s shores and somewhere, in some land, I don’t even have a name for…it does not escape my attention that every single step, in hindsight, has been carefully orchestrated, masterfully guided, and mindfully capable.

The very first of these masterstrokes came in the form of a “didn’t happen”, rather than a happening. And that was, that I never entered the halls of traditional psychiatry, I was spared and wonderfully so, the medicinal approach to emotional solutions that is now so widespread in our culture. Not long ago, I spent sometime with someone so heavily medicated, that I couldn’t seem to find a person in there. She worked, came to social events, we went out to dinner occasionally, but I always felt like I was spending time with someone who was slightly out of focus, or like watching a television program with the sound turned down...you have a basic understanding of the plot line, but no real clarity or nuances. It was tiring, and finally unpleasant.

I was looking over a book recently written by the psychiatrist, Howard C. Cutler, M.D. he was detailing the very reasons why I was so blessed to not have wandered down that road in my search for healing. He said, “This type of training, (psychiatric/medical), has led many in my profession, to the grim conclusion that the most one could hope for was the transformation of hysteric misery into common unhappiness”. Our priests of mental and emotional health, the medical doctors specializing in psychiatry, have as their core value, at the heart of their training, the goal of turning “hysteric misery into common unhappiness.”

Lord, love a duck…

In Dr. Cutler’s defense, his book was born out of long and detailed discussions with the Dalai Lama regarding the pursuit of happiness, and the means by which to achieve happiness. So he too, it seems, has turned his back on much of his traditional training and sought out the wisdom and abilities of the Spiritual pathways.

In my own life, I have come to understand that every problem devised by the shattered and self-created egoic mind structure, has only one solution…and that is Spiritual development.

Name your problem… from petty theft to hoarding old newspapers, from nail biting to alcoholism, from cheating on your college entrance exams to sleeping with your best friends spouse, from pulling out all your eyelashes and eyebrows to using aerosol spray cans to get high, every single self-debasing activity, ever devised by a broken and weeping human being… the answer is now, and always will be, a renewed connection to Spirit.

When the Spiritual realms begin to lay claim to the territory of a human life, these problems begin to unknot themselves, by themselves. Here is the reason I stopped setting goals, years and years ago.

The reason goals are so useless, especially in the realm of healing, is that the inner realms of Spirit do not, nor I am sure, have they ever followed a linear path.

In the world of our sense perceptions, we must follow a step-by-step process. As the guru’s of self-help are so fond of pointing out, “If you don’t know where you are going…how can you possible get there”. True enough, in the outer realms of the material world, but utterly useless in the development of Spiritual connection…why… because Spiritual development might start off at G double back to A, skip over B and bring Z to the party way before the end. It never follows a straight line, it cannot be predicted or controlled and will not be subject to the self made mind’s demands.

If you want to fly to LA, you must A. book a flight, B. purchase a ticket, C. arrive on time to the airport, D. board the flight…etc. etc….you get the idea. So you can-and I am sure you have-set a goal, planned that goal, taken those steps, and arrived at your destination.

From building a tree house, to world domination…you can force what you want to happen, and it will change not one jot or tittle, your level of emotional, mental, or spiritual well-being. In point of fact, I would bet the last penny of my dwindling life’s savings, that once your “goal” has been achieved you would eventually be, let down and disappointed at best, and hollowed out at worst.

How could this pull the rug-out-from-under-you-horrible-truth be so blasted invisible?

Well… it is the egoic mind’s sleight-of-hand trick to keep you looking the other way, while your life’s flow ebbs away from you, spilling itself down an empty and pitiless hole of desire, and setting you up for the next climb up the mountain of “goals”.

Salvation, and I mean that word in its most graphic form-as in-saved from a burning building or a flesh eating bacteria, can only be had by the mind so abused by itself that is willing to lay down the structures it built up during childhood, in favor of the care and guidance of the Unknown.

Salvation is a free fall backwards, from a very great height.

Now, I am not saying that there aren’t the occasional brilliant flashes… those among us like Saul on the way to Samaria who break open all at once and are so renewed, in Spirit, that a name change is required. But those are the exceptions to the Spiritual path, not the norm.

For the vast majority of us, who escape the tyranny of our own minds, the trip is a fitful combination of false starts, round abouts, and cul de sacs. You have to pack light if you are going to take the side road to the spiritual peak, if you decide to decamp the flow of your cultures paradigm’s and strike out on your own, don’t expect to get to take your cherished notions with you.

First you must delouse. For you are without doubt, covered head to toe, in a miasma of self, family, religious, and culturally induced illusions. (When I left the fundamentalist religion into which I was born, I feared deeply, that I would end up in a burning lake of fire for all of eternity. That will give you some idea of how much impetus I had, for finding the help I so desperately needed, to end my suffering.)

Second, you must come out of hiding. (Here is where, if you are observant, you will first notice the guiding hand of the Divine). To come out of hiding, you must begin to tell someone the secrets you are keeping. The, oh-my-god-if-they-knew-that-about-me-the-earth-would-open-and-swallow-me-whole, closeted and furtive, worst about yourself. The one thing you simply couldn’t bear for anyone else to know, has to be known, or there is no hope what-so-ever.

In the tradition of the “teacher will appear, when the student is ready”, the right listener will be brought to you no matter what obstacles stand in the way.

Emerson describes that phenomenon this way… “O believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend, (teacher), whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, and endless circulation, through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.”

Your teacher feels your call and will be waiting for you with open arms, a tender heart, an iron will, and an eternally giving spirit. I know, I have found several…each with successively deeper understanding and wisdom, the last of which required more of me that I felt could be found, and yet find it I did…and so will you…

Trust is the only thing you are allowed on the spiritual journey, the only tool at your disposable, the only thing you need to pack, the one thing the journey cannot begin without, and the only ticket to wisdom that exists. Control is the first thing you have to unpack.

The Gospel of Thomas allows that salvation stands at one end, and utter ruin at the other…”

“If you bring forth what is inside you,

what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is inside you,

what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

And the Poet Guillaume Apollinaire promises that the leap into the unknowable has fear, help, and glory abounding..

“Come to the edge.

We can't. We are afraid.

Come to the edge.

We can't. We will fall!

Come to the edge.

And they came.

And he pushed them.

And they flew.”

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

And They Flew…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com

Fill The Unrelenting Minutes…

In recent weeks I have been revisiting my past in a most peculiar way. Unbidden, and without provocation, the people, events, places, and experiences of my past happen into my memory like a long played out life review. Sometimes just before I fall asleep, sometimes in the pool, sometimes in a dream…just like Ebenezer Scrooge I have the ghosts of relationships past coming to catalog, dialogue, and categorize themselves to me…and requiring of me that I see them, me, and my story about them, anew.

A friend at the dog park tells me that it is because I have too much time on my hands. Lord knows there are so few distractions in my life-what with no work and all-that I understand now, in a way I never have before, the “tyranny of time” that is often referenced by the poetic among us.

My Teacher once said it is our responsibility to “fill the unrelenting minutes, with sixty seconds of distance run.” …To be equal to the task of the minutes we are allotted requires the end of distractions of all kinds. The minutes-they are unrelenting-when faced squarely, and without distraction, yet it is the only way to assure that some measure of distance has in fact been run. We all know someone, who no matter how many years may have passed in their lives they behave toward others, themselves, and situations, like self-indulgent children. These are those among us, who have filled up all of those unrelenting minutes with minutia, and thus have traveled no distance at all. Sadly, they will die children…still searching for a mother’s love or a father’s pride, until the very end.

I have come to see that a Spiritual Path of real value is one that empties you out…not one that fills you up. A path that opens you to the requirement of distance covered, wisdom achieved, and the flame of self-understanding lit and burning. In my youth and ignorance, I would pray for all the things I wanted, or thought I needed. Give me, give me, give me could have been the refrain for all the many bounties I wanted the Lord to provide. Money, fame, recognition, attention, acceptance….give me, give me, give me.

I look back now and am astonished by the selfishness, self-centeredness, and sheer childishness of such pitiful requests. Especially, taking into account that all of the most important of these requests cannot be had from without, but must come from a change in relationship to the self and a deeper understanding of life, and my role in that life.

I, like you, were taught to believe that the highest stature that we could achieve, in our culture, was the achievement of becoming special in some way. We need only look at the lives of celebrities, to understand how potentially ruinous, the achievement of specialness can become. Only the powerfully grounded can attain wild success and not have it totally destroy them.

I once achieved a mild form of fame, working as an associate minister in a church in California. My lectures soon grew to fill our auditorium to overflow capacity; people sat in the aisles and on the stairs and stood in the foyer. After services they wanted my time, attention, and to praise me for my “life altering” words. I remember at the time being, (to use a British term that seems to fit), gob smacked by the whole experience.

I felt a mild, (and sometimes-not so mild) form of shame, not guilt…but shame, about the whole affair. I went to the Senior Minister to ask for her guidance and she rebuffed my confusion with a somewhat brisk response that she had no counsel for my complaints, and she made it fairly clear that she couldn’t understand exactly what it was I was complaining about anyway. I couldn’t either, then.

That was thirteen years ago, it has taken me all this time to understand how lucky I was, not to get trapped in my small moment of fame and success.

I will try to illuminate what I have discovered, with regard to the achievement of “specialness”…

Our culture inbreeds us with a value system that has at its foundation a divisive substructure. A one-to-ten kind of measurement of value, best to worst, bottom to top, a linear evaluation resulting in our quality and worth being measured on a scale. For instance, if you are a card carrying, clipboard wielding, pocket protector wearing, geek…you will no doubt show up as a lowly “one” on a scale of ten in the athletic world. Here, you are so far down the scale as to be almost invisible…and, on the other end… the Golf Pros, Olympians, NBA, and Pro football players.

You no doubt, are thinking…”well sure, that’s how it is supposed to be”. If you are thinking that, then you have missed the painful deficits that a linear scale of valuation brings to the party. Let’s say you are the-just-graduated-local-High-School Prom King or Queen, pretty as a peach, popular as a summer shower on a sun scorched day…in your small town, you are the definitive Ten. Now you go off to college in some major city up north-built up by your years of being applauded and appreciated-you discover that in this new much larger pond, you are only a four, or maybe on a good day a five.

It is a crushing and painful discovery to have tumbled so far so fast. Even the pro athletes will one day no longer matter to the scale of one to ten. Their bodies will age, reflexes slow down, speed decreases, agility wanes…and suddenly they are put out to pasture, no longer the shining example of the “best of the best”. All because we measure everything on this unforgiveable scale of worst to best, or more accurately, plain-old-ordinary to oh-my-god-special.

My small experience with fame exposed me, very radically, to this imaginary scale dreamed up by-who-knows-who, eons ago. It exposed my unconscious desire to be “special”. My Soul knew the danger I faced and sent me messages thru the emotion of shame, to try and divert me from becoming lost, in the maze of beings set apart, as no longer ordinary.

Here, I feel the need to insert a moments worth of consideration of the differences between “special” and excellence. Excellence is the commitment and application of the truest self, a sort of focus that drives one deeper and deeper into a set of skills, innate tendencies and talents, that finally result in a harmony of flow, a synthesis of the talented with the world’s need for that talent. Excellence is a bringing forth…specialness is conferred from without, and that difference is the difference between night and day, distances so vast as to be almost uncrossable. Excellence is born of the soul’s essence in a given lifetime; specialness is the false and temporary light of conferred fame.

The depth of excellence provides us the connection to source that will allow, as the theologian Frederick Buechner puts it, for us to reach that place where, “our deep sadness and the world’s deep hunger meet”, here we may find the path that leads to our becoming a small part of the advancing saga of human spiritual development.

To return to our study of the harrowing aspects of the one-to-ten scale, contrast the damages of the linear system with a circular one. Draw an imaginary line in your mind, and next to it, a circular one…here, if you are willing, you will come to see why being “special” is so horribly dangerous. As we have already seen, that line is problematic…because just as surely as you are a ten in your small town high school, you will be a five or below in the larger world of an upscale college. So the safety, security, love, and appreciation we can easily spend a lifetime seeking, has no stability of any kind, if we are living on the linear scale of worst to best.

Enter the life-giving circle.

Here, you can no longer be judged on a worst to best scale. A circle has no room in it for best or worst, how could it have? Merely, points of position or degrees, around the circles perimeter…here, you are safe from the tyranny of best and worst. But, and it’s a big but, you have to be willing to give up competition to join the circle’s community. Most humans wouldn’t even consider giving up competition. Those few moments of standing on the number ten platform, medal hung about the neck, are enough to keep most of us striving on the slippery slope of linear thinking for all the days of our lives.

Me, I chose the circle, right after my small brush with fame. Intuitively, I knew shame should not be part of any kind of authentic success. I couldn’t have understood then… I’ve only, just now, begun to understand the depth, value, beauty, and redemption of moving from line to circle.

In a Soul’s progression moving from line back to circle, is a tremendous life altering experience. But there is even more…

Once aware of the beauty and serenity of the circle, one can begin the movement away from the perimeter of the circle to its hub or center. To choose the circle over the line, ends the first level of judgment that so poisons are lives and progress. If I am not better than you, or worse than you, as the line would have me believe-then I have begun the process of ridding myself of the Soul numbing desire for “specialness”. But if I stay stuck in my one seat, or position on the circle soon I will begin to see those who share my point of view, those on either side of me closest to my perspective, as friends…and those directly opposite me on the circle as enemies.

Go back to imagining that circle. Here you are on your point or degree of perspective…and let’s say you are a Muslim, as you gaze directly across the circle you see a Christian and an “infidel”…or maybe you are the Christian and you see a suicide bomber. If you allow yourself to become wedded to your the place on the circle you were born into, then all Soul gains achieved from moving from line back to circle will be lost. (Line thinking is a kind of self induced hypnosis, devised, developed, and fostered by a cultural process designed to set up justifications for everything from "being a winner at all cost" to race genocide. Whereas your position/perspective in the circle is something you are born into, having been provided by your family and heritage.)

We must leave behind our most cherished perspectives to move alone and committed to the center of the circle, here at the hub, all perspectives are seen to be valid, all are welcome….each is home. A gentleness, kindness, and perhaps the meekness, the Bible promises will one day inherit the earth, is achieved only by those who are willing to move to the center of the circle…giving up all claims to self righteousness and self enhancement.

I, personally, have not yet left the outer perimeter. I know this because of the experience of judgment, that still washes over me from time to time. I no longer seek, or yearn, or envy, or feel jealous of others…those states of mind have long ago let go of me. For the most part, I no longer lay claim to the truth, or to being right. I understand that right or wrong, like best or worst, are a line form of thinking…something I am so grateful to have let go of. As to the truth, only the most noble and humble among us have seen the “truth”. So I will leave the truth to beings much more expanded than myself.

Now I see the judgment left in my heart, in the day to day business of life. I encounter the loud overbearing man who needs so desperately to be acknowledged, that he forces his way into my field of vision, laying claim to my time and attention because he is lonely and lost…and instead of finding the grace in myself, that would allow kindness to meet his neediness, instead I resist him and resent the attention he demands of me. This is how I know I am still stuck in the outer circle. If I weren’t, I would answer this mans sense of entitlement with non-judgmental silence and stillness of soul, rather than resentment and resistance.

I am the only one alive, who can fill my “unrelenting minutes with sixty seconds of distance run”. There are days, when I can see the distance traveled…and days, when I feel no distance at all has been achieved. But, at the very least…I am certain of the track I am traveling on. Long, long, gone is the need for measuring myself by some arbitrary, made up, illusory, linear scale of achievement.

And in it’s place, the clarity and self-mastery of moving closer to the center of the circle.

Until Tomorrow….

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Fill The Unrelenting Minutes…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com

FEAR NOTHING, BUT THE FAILURE TO EXPERIENCE YOUR TRUE NATURE…

I have been trying to reinvent myself as a writer, because I get no response from the outside world, it is a daunting and difficult task…writing for the sound in my own ear.

I can’t tell if I am succeeding or wasting my time, and I often have no internal thread to follow either.

These months of solitude have been hard in a very particular way. The first time this happened to me, the drama of my own internal process was so scary, vivid, and demanding I didn’t have the necessary stillness to truly know what was going on inside me. Like so many people who use busyness to keep from feeling themselves when I left my job, had no external demands on my time, I underwent the first in a long series of mini identity deaths. Most of us spend an entire lifetime not knowing that our personalities, the very “me”-ness of us, is just a collection of behaviors, preferences, automatic responses, emotional triggers, and avoidance rituals that were started like a wind up toy in our childhoods, in response to the demands of the adults around us. These mechanisms become so deterministic that eventually we think these early choices are the who, of who we are. I have discovered, over a long and winding path, that nothing could be further from the truth.

Four or five days prior to my mother’s death, she was walking with great effort back to her bed to lie down, and in the most off-handed way, she said, I guess mostly to herself… “I don’t know who I am”. The pathos in that statement almost sent me reeling and the sound in her voice…a combination of surprise, innocence, regret, sadness, and resignation, nearly sent me to my knees. As it turned out, her sudden and deeply sad realization came two days prior to her death.

She wasn’t expecting a response from me, I am not entirely certain she was even speaking to me, and I understood exactly her dilemma. I had felt that way all the time, for the first two and a half decades of my life. Who am I? How did I get here? Where exactly is here, anyway? …and much later… Am I headed in the right direction? If these questions have not darkened your door, I can promise two things…the end will be rocky, and you haven’t spent your time wisely.

It is so easy for us to spend our youth and vigor, expressing just that…youth and vigor, achieving, acquiring, demanding, results and more results, getting and taking. The antidote to this youthful folly is little mini deaths. Dying to the idea that you are the world’s one and only. Dying to the idea that you deserve only the good things in life…and that you know what is, for you, the good. Dying to the notion that your preferences, opinions, personality quirks, and desires have a preeminent place in the scheme of things. Why dying? I don’t know…it’s just the way it is.

Everyone from Biblical authors to Shakespeare counsel that we should die, before we die…sounds like a neat trick, but what exactly does it mean, and why is it valuable?

My spiritual journey has been fraught with the experience of death- in the early going-because I lacked imagination, intuition, and courage; it was fear of an actual bodily death that hounded me nearly mad. As I have said before, in these pages, I had to have baby sitter’s to get through it; both my young gay friend and an elderly woman in the condo complex where I lived, would let me stay with them to allay my anxieties…and much to my shame, I used them ruthlessly, in my neediness and fear.

Reportedly, I even did the actual thing during a surgery in my seventeenth year, my heart quit and apparently getting me up and started again was almost not accomplished. That night, the pain killers they gave me were not enough, and I awoke to a pain in my chest from the electric shocks they had given me that was the fiercest, most virulent pain I have ever experienced. I have broken two bones in my life and passed a gall stone, and those events didn’t come close to the pain I felt from the thumping they had given me.

Once I even went to get an aids test, even though I had not had sex, used injectable drugs, or had a blood transfusion for years and years, but the fear of dying was so constant, palpable, and present, that it attached itself to every hyperbolic, hypochondriacal situation that came down the emotional pike.

So if you think you should get an award for baseless, groundless, anxieties-the trophies are all in my basement-carefully preserved in memoriam, to the times in my life where fear ran everything about my daily existence.

Sometimes now, I cannot believe the quantity and pervasiveness of the fears I used to feel…much more importantly, I haven’t been afraid for years and years. Now, I am not saying that if a bear were to leap off a tree in front of me, that I wouldn’t go screaming out of the forest tearing my hair out at the roots, you bet your ass I would!! No, I am talking about those obnoxious little fears that make you worry about the stove, the doors locked, the bump you felt under your arm, the economy, the neighbors dog, the general decline of western civilization…and oh yeah, the big kahuna…actual physical death. None of these things breed fear in me, at least not today and not for many years now.

Lest you think I might be lying about that last one…I have been a Volunteer Hospice Chaplain and I was present when both my parents died. And in all cases, I found the experience beautiful, serene, calming, simple, quiet, kind, loving, generous, and immanently doable.

There is nothing I saw in the deaths I witnessed, and I pay very close attention, that was scary, ugly, bad, or unworthy of us. From where I stood, death had a grace, gentleness, and an ease that is very difficult to explain. Nothing like Hollywood portrays it.

My father was so busy talking to some invisible someone else, that our presence in the room, his wife and three daughters, was not registered by him at all. His eyebrows went up and down, knitting together in concentration and understanding, his mouth moved in harmony with his other facial features like he was having the conversation of a lifetime. He didn’t speak out loud, but he didn’t need to, for me to see the animation of his last conversation. He neither needed us, or possible even wanted us there.

Statistics say that most people die in the wee hours of the morning, when the family members that having been hanging onto them are finally gone so that they may, just as finally, let go. My dad, charismatic and self-referencing as he was, didn’t need to wait for us to leave…and somehow I knew he would let me see it, something I really wanted to participate in. Having shed my psychological fear of death, through the many and varied small personality deaths I had undergone by that time, I wanted to witness the death of a family member, as opposed to a stranger. To see if it contained the same graces I had already experienced…it did, and many more.

A year later, my hyper shy mother, allowed me the same opportunity. Her death was even more vibrant, for me, than my fathers… I assume that was because of the power of our relationship and its many complex and far reaching aspects. I remember the moment of her death, as being the single most alive moment I have ever felt…and I have jumped out of planes. Nothing in my lifetime has been as pure, real, arresting, or powerful. No… I don’t fear death or even, it’s sometimes ugly stepsister, pain. I am not saying I wish to suffer, but facing emotional pain has been my liberator, even my savior…so I assume physical pain has some value as well…if not, well then, there are always drugs.

Today, the 25^th of June, three well know celebrities have died in this last week, two of them today. It’s interesting how death changes your landscape, I remember very clearly the moment I learned of Princess Diana’s death. Going out onto my duplex porch in the clear California morning sunshine, and opening the paper to see her face with text so large it was almost obscene, pronouncing her death in big, black, bold font. There is a shift that occurs, a rearranging of your topography.

When my sister called to tell me, my niece, only 21 years old had been shot and killed on her birthday. That too, rearranged my topography, of course, in a much more personal way than that of a celebrities passing.

It’s the hole that death leaves that can be so painful, not the dying itself.

With my mother and father, there wasn’t even that much of a hole…particularly with my mother. Our relationship had been so fruitful, so layered, so rich…in truth, in harmony, in forgiveness, in unconditional acceptance…that letting her go, was simple, easy, even right in an unexplainable kind of way.

Gone are the dramatic days, when Death seemed like a maestro, conducting the tempo and pauses of my life. Always at the helm, turning me this way and that, so that I might be exposed, tempered, and baked to perfection. Now Death seems like a companion, who urges me to serve, to give, to find my contribution.

I am 53 today, nine years younger than Farrah-three years older than Michael…but my days are numbered as well. I am not privy to that number, neither are you. The question, to my mind, is not when…but whether…whether or not, we have done what was ours to do…whether or not, we have given more than we took…whether or not, we have overcome our natural tendency toward selfishness and made of ourselves a gift, to the world, to each other, to ourselves. Are we ripe? Are we worth the gift we have had bestowed upon us, the gift of breath, and life?

We need not be famous, talented, or beautiful, to make our contribution. We need only become authentic, real, kind, considerate, capable, and giving.

I cannot speak to realms beyond this one…but here; it is the greater that lift up the lesser. The more mature you become, the more necessary your contribution, there are so many emotional and psychological children wearing adult suits who rule our culture…that without the unbroken line of sages who have given their all, that we might understand…humanity would have lost its way centuries ago. You can always tell the authentic light bearers, their humility shines like a great light, and leads the way for so many undeveloped and underdeveloped brethren.

I know, I have been following the light of just such an individual for a great many years. He too, is not far from physical death…but his life has touched so many thousands that his ripple will echo for decades and decades. His life is the standard by which I measure my own contribution…and find it lacking.

I agree with Sir Francis Bacon, who said, ”Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.” I am in such agreement with this statement, that I might suggest to you that your fear of death is a good barometer by which to measure your emotional and spiritual health. If Death scares the living bejesus out of you, then you are not at home…and it is that absence, rather than your physical death that is the basis of all your fears.

This essay is titled, “Fear Nothing but the Failure to Experience Your True Nature”, your true nature is birthless and deathless, your true nature is the essence of life itself, your true nature cannot be harmed, killed, or given birth to…take your rest here, in your true nature. Be at rest from the constant seeking outside yourself, there is nothing out there to find, everything that has real value was laid gently upon your heart the day of your birth. It is up to you to discover and reveal that truth.

Leonardo da Vinci, a towering genius felt this way about Death…”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”

I personally, am striving for a life so well used that it will bring with it a “happy death”. Sometimes I am unsure of the best use of my life, but the desire to use it well, is the compass by which I direct my journey.

I bet you think I have no sense of humor at all…it isn’t true; I am told that I can often be quite funny. But it seems in these pages, where I am attempting to leave some sort of legacy that I tend toward the somber and serious, the deeper registers of life's melodies. So, amongst the other minds here quoted…allow me to include this, from Paula Poundstone…”The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.”

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Fear Nothing but the Failure to Experience Your True Nature…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com

Fourteen Days…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the dreams, hopes and aspirations that I have carried with me the majority of my life. In just the last few months I have been able to let them go…or maybe, they have let me go. It has helped me to deepen my understanding, of one of the most powerful lessons found in the Ageless Wisdom Teachings.

The lessons regarding First Force, Second Force and Third Force. My Teacher spent a good deal of his valuable time trying to create understanding for us, with respect to this very extraordinary idea…and just now, years later, I finally understand.

(I have often wondered about the phenomenon that keeps spiritual understanding cloaked and misty, before the Soul is ready to receive it. Emerson discusses this phenomena in one of his essays, and says… ”Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away, - means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it - one thing as much as another.”

As Emerson so beautifully describes, all things are changed by relation, to the acquisition of simple and divine wisdom. I suppose it is the very nature of the loss “means, teachers, texts, and temples”, that in part, help to keep us confused and incapable of absorbing understanding, venturing into new depths, and maturing into our deepest selves.)

First, Second, and Third forces are the means by which all things are created, all experience is leavened, and all understanding develops. First force creates, Second force destructs and Third Force is the consciousness we, as the Witness, bring to the interplay of the first two forces.

First and Second forces are, in large part, beyond our control. We can put the ingredients in the bowl and because we have followed the recipe, we can reasonably expect a cake to show up…but it is beyond our comprehension as to why - or how - following the recipe creates cake. Just as, in life, we can make all the right moves and we may, or may not, take home the victory… because Second force, always arises with its commitment to destruction. In the common vernacular we hear Murphy whispering his dictum…”if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”.

This spiritual phenomenon has a scientific corollary. In science, First Force is defined as “action”, Second force as “reaction” and the Third Force or witnessing process is accurately defined by the Heisenberg Principle as being capable of changing the outcome of the action/reaction phenomena. In other words, science has now come to support the notion that the very activity of our directed attention changes the outcome of material or “quantum” physics.

In our emotional immaturity we resent, and hide, from the realization that Second force travels in tandem with First force, that light brings with it shadow.

Every thing I have ever wanted, every desire that has every traveled past my mind’s eye, did so cloaked and covered in the Glory, Beauty, and Majesty of First force. That is the tricky part of believing the cultures advice… “to follow your dreams”. In the escapist illusory mind, our childhood left us addicted to, we are the Hero dressed in glorious robes, trailing starbursts in our wake. Every idea that springs from this source never gets even close to hinting about the downside of our dreams, that they will inevitably bring with them, when, (or if), they manifest. Second force cannot be denied…the shadow side; ruin, wrong turns, and unexpected outcomes cannot be avoided, run from, or bargained with.

Oscar Wilde, put it this way…”There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it.”

I ran head long into the notion that life can be a bowl of cherries, if you just are gifted with the right opportunities, when I was having a chat with a couple of fellows that I meet, every Sunday, at the dog park. We got to talking about winning the lottery; the guys took the stance that all things wrong can be cured by money. That the fabulously wealthy are not subject to the twists and turns of an ordinary life, I was quite literally incredulous by their assertion, and still don’t know if they weren’t just pulling my leg.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone past the age of thirty can believe that life is not hard for every creature that has ever walked upright, no matter their station in life, amount of money, cultural power, or inherited gifts.

Examining this very theme is a quote from the Great Caliph Abdul Rahim. “I have reigned more than fifty years in victory and peace. During this time I have been beloved by my people, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have all been at my beck and call, nor has any earthly pleasure been missing to complete my sense of perfect bliss. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness that have fallen to my lot. They number fourteen.”

Fourteen, good golly miss molly…

So, I got to thinking about my friends belief that money cures all… went online and found an article written by a magazine in Wisconsin which did some in depth, follow-up reporting, on the lottery winners their state has had since beginning lottery sales. Here is a quote from that article…”A shockingly large number of lottery winners end up in financial ruin. National statistics show that about one-third of lottery winners ultimately file for bankruptcy. Often, that’s just the initial symptom of good fortune gone bad.”

In the article, they went on to chronicle a divorce rate much higher than national average, DUI arrests way out of proportion to the national norm, foreclosures rampant, tax problems of unprecedented magnitude, and one guy who ended up living in his car after filing bankruptcy and losing his home and business, to foreclosure.

This is only a tiny portion of the many types and varieties of losses the lottery winners faced. Most were not willing to be interviewed so a great deal of the findings were sourced from public records, but one interviewee said this about winning…”It’s supposed to be a happy thing,” says a Neenah woman we’ll call Nancy, whose husband won $7.2 million in 1989 and who agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity. “But really, it’s not.”

Why amidst all this good fortune, do the lottery winners echo the Caliph’s assertion that fourteen happy days, are about as good as it gets?

Why? And why can’t we understand that winning/money/fame/fortune/et al. don’t create the happiness we seek? The answer is Second Force.

We finally get that big time degree from the prestigious Ivy League college, and it leads to huge debt load and a dead end starter job. We plan, save for, and execute that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe and the kids get sick and throw up all over everything and everyone.

Second force. Murphy’s law. Or, lowbrow and common…Shit Happens.

So how can we expect any relief from the roller coaster ride of imaginary, illusory, mythological hero, and real life zero?

If we look to religion to sort the mess out, our old-time religions promise that we should look to the life beyond this one; in Islamic traditions 77 virgins await our conquering hero, (I guess the best you get if you’re a woman, is more time spent catering to a man.) In the fundamentalist religion of my childhood, it was streets of gold and pearl gates. Some of our newer religions promise a world you, and your spouse, get to be a god over. The New Age movement gets a little closer to home, and promises prosperity, bliss, and happiness, in the here and now, if you just choose the right thoughts. (Mind, showing up again with illusions of bliss, free from Second Force).

For myself, I no longer believe in a world-this one or any other-that does not bear the mark of Second Force.

My favorite author, Emerson, has this to say about the marriage of first and second forces, and its progeny Third Force…”It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

I have finally come to the clarity, that science and Emerson, have it right… “that what you see (perceive/believe) changes what there is to see”. Heisenberg’s theorem, Emerson’s “triumph of principles”… is the Ageless Wisdom Teaching of Third force.

The acceptance and lack of judgment that The Witness brings to bear on our lives will, and can, free us from the roller coaster ride of first and second forces. When you can watch your life unfold without praise or criticism, without attraction or repulsion, without craving or denial, then you have risen above first and second forces, and have released yourself from the limits imposed on this plane of existence and doing so, have acquired Emerson’s “triumph of principles” and the peace it brings with it.

Third force on a feeling level might be called Compassion, Kindness, Acceptance, Honor, Nobility, Divinity…each would be correct, and all are a part of the package.

First force breathes in…

Second force breathes out…

Third force makes breathing worth it…

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Fourteen Days…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.

Stuck Here in the Middle Treading Water…

I swim every weekday morning. It has become a favorite experience, the cool descent into water not yet warm by the sun, (I try to start by 5:30 am), its touch travels up my extremities engulfing my calves, thighs, stomach, chest…its hardest when it reaches my shoulders, I don’t know why, but just when it tops my shoulders a delicious chill nudges me all over and then the final drop over my head. I love the way it feels, and the way it’s reshaping my experience of living in one of the hottest deserts America has to offer.

I bring a timer and travel one end to the other for at least 40 minutes, over and over, back and forth, I go…giving it my best and feeling the smooth caress of the water with each stroke.

I am graceless in the pool, having never had any athletic skill of any kind. But I am without self-consciousness either about my skill, the shape of my body, or my goofy stroke pattern. It is enough for me to feel the buoyancy, to move my limbs, and fill my heart and lungs, with air and occasionally chemically enhanced water.

I get in the pool so early; first because I want that cool experience, something hard to come by in the summers here…but mostly because I want to be alone when my swim comes to an end. The pool I swim in is our subdivisions community pool, and I want to be finished before folks and neighbors start their morning commute.

After my little kitchen timer chirps its tuneless little burp, I wait for the water’s motion to subside and then I float.

Toes, kneecaps, breasts, and nose sitting atop the waters surface, my head, arms, legs and torso are held aloft by the smooth touch of the calm surface. I float and I pray.

I pray mostly to put an end to my selfishness.

Sometimes I pray for the capacity for kindness, gentleness, openness, the will to serve others and the ability to give. But mostly I pray for an end to my selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed behaviors.

I am inflicted, as we all are, by the mind that weaves its victim stories, its self induced illusions, and self-medicating theories. The only difference between who I am now and who I used to be, (a great distance believe me), is that I no longer believe the stories and justifications my mind presents me with. And I have come; albeit slowly, to understand that keeping the narrow-minded self alive, is a form of hell.

My Teacher once presented a lesson that queried whether or not the invisible realms were more powerful than the visible. Of course his conclusion was that what we can’t see is certainly more powerful, more valuable, and more necessary to our humanity than the things are five senses can bring us.

I remember one of his examples being the advent of the capacity for flight. He asked us, which was more powerful, all the planes in all the world, or the invisible idea that gave birth to an entire industry. The answer is self-evident.

Today in the pool, praying for a deeper level of release from the self made mind that once caused me to want to take my own life, I wondered if the invisible realms as well as being more powerful, are more real as well. What if our lives are being led backwards, or more accurately inside out?

EVERYTHING in our culture, from education to shopping, from soup to nuts, from White House to outhouse, pushes us to live for the achievement of outer manifestations. Awards, accolades, achievements, stuff, more stuff, the right man, the perfect girl, the cherry on top, the flag-planting win. All external to us and as such an echo, or rebound effect of the inner reaches.

In every religion, philosophy, depth understanding, Ageless Wisdom Teachings and even science, the proof is incontrovertible… that the invisible, the inner, the unknown is the source of all that is, or will be.

If it is true in the macrocosm of the Universe, then surely it is true in the microcosm of our personal life.

Yet, the number of humans who notice that, and manifest that knowledge, is so small as to be almost ridiculous.

Sure… the Buddha, the Christ, my Teacher, Socrates, the Dalai Lama, Plato, Pythagoras, Emerson…mostly dead, you’ll notice. I want to be in that number or at least in the outer parking lot, (the one you have to be bused to), when my end comes. I want to right myself the way Emerson prescribes… “He who knows that power is in the Soul, that he is weak only because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.”

Erect position, working miracles, commanding limbs…an end to standing on one’s head, these are the achievements I want. To release and let die, the small mind I used to survive my childhood, to give up the petty self, to learn the larger truths, to bathe in the glory of a right mind. I heard an old black gospel saying once…”to wake up clothed in your right mind”.

Having woken up all of my twenties, in the tatters of my wrong mind… I know beyond doubt, that Heaven and Hell are not places, but rather states of mind. In my twenties, I wouldn’t have had the courage to know that, because it would have required my taking complete responsibility for the hell I lived in all day, every day. But now, with almost all of that hell in my rear view mirror, I can know for myself that my state of mind is the only place where real power resides. I often think of the differences between the two as the Outer Life and the Inner Life, but it could just as easily be the Outer Echo and the Inner Source.

Emerson also said…Common souls pay with what they do; nobler souls with that which they are.

My Teacher is a man of such nobility that he can change the air in a room by his presence. I have been his pupil/novitiate for more than 25 years, I have seen hundreds of people affected by his presence, some moved to tears, some see themselves for the first time, some shocked into silence, some bow their heads…. only the truly calloused and truly lost, are unmoved by him, his simplicity, humanity, inclusiveness, lack of judgment, and great kindness.

It’s a tall order, the opportunity to know, first hand, one of the truly enlightened. Not the many and obvious show versions that populate the self-help horizon, they are at best actors and at worst charlatans. But the real deal, it causes changes in you that are permanent and otherworldly.

I haven’t fit in the culture for a long time now; it seems to be getting worse…I haven’t made it to the shore he resides on, and am to far gone to make it back to the cultures…stuck here in the middle treading water.

Perhaps that is why swimming seems so comforting these days…

Until tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Stuck Here in the Middle Treading Water…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.