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.