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