[Excerpted from Joe Miller in "Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller," Edited with An Introduction by Richard Power, Foreword by Coleman Barks, p. 79-80.]
Be Who You Are
I'm going to talk at random. I always do. Because it is the only way I seem to be able to talk. I sort of throw everything to the wind and try to take it from the intuition and pure love.
Pure love is the main thing. Love without the possessiveness. Can you feel that love? Can you touch that impersonal, yet highly personal love? You can't be impersonal unless you're personal! And when you're personal, you're impersonal Because when you're stingy, you're trying to keep it all for yourself. You don't have to do that. It's got to be universal love. Sooner or later, we'll all realize the whole world is one family, one beautiful family. That's the wonderful part of life.
If you don't shut off the thoughts that you have running wild in your mind, you can't meditate and you can't be at peace with yourself.
Now there are other times when you touch this MIND, suppose you go to the theater and you hear music that's so wonderful that it lifts you right out of yourself. You ain't even thinking of who you are, you've become drunk on the music and you are right into the music and it's beautiful. That's what we want, the BEAUTY, the HARMONY within.
Another time your lower mind will shut off is when someone WHACKS you unexpectedly. They utilize that a lot in Zen. Then, for a minute, the guy has clearness of MIND. "What did ya hit me for?" He's there, he don't know it but he has turned this thinking off. Then, if he wished, he could turn to the heart and the heart would tell him something.
Or, another example, let's say you go to a show and you really get tickled. You start laughing, then the jokes get better and you're going, "WOW! Hilarious." Well, when you're at the top of your laughter, arc you thinking about anything?
Can you just turn it off? Try it sometime. Turn “off your thinking. Usually, you can't turn it off. You say, "It just keeps on going." Well, it does keep on going, if you let it. But the programmer for your computer is in the heart, and you can turn off all that software anytime you want. You're the only one who can do it.
BE WHO YOU ARE. Be. Feel your at-oneness with that I AM within you.
It's not something that you can get if you go someplace where someone says, "Well, if you lay down fifteen dollars and you stay here for a couple of weeks, I’ll teach it to you." They can't. Nobody but you can bring you out of it. This is part of the New Age! You're not going out to temples of religions of the past, you're going into the temple of the Living GOD-yourself! We are all Gods in the making.
I say these things to people. Why? Not because you'll dig it now. The chances are ten to one that you'll say, "Oh, that crazy old coot with the fuzzy “muff don't mean anything." But sometime when you are in a bind, maybe five years from now, maybe ten years from now, you'll reach back inside and that'll pop out. I'm placing it in your computers for that purpose, to use when needed.
We've all met before or we wouldn't be here now. We wouldn't be here in this room together. There wouldn't be enough people to come up and fill this room and listen to me if there wasn't some connection. All I'm trying to do is give you the benefit of what I have dug in this life.
You've read this and you've read that and you've read the other, but you have to have an experience before it's real to you.
We're probably living in the most materialistic time the world has ever known-everything is only measured by the THINGS that are here. But we're not our bodies, our lower minds or our feelings, we're not that. We are sparks of Immortality, something that you can't describe. You can give an idea of what happens with it, but you can't show a picture of it. And you don't see it when you come to it. You just feel such a vast relief that, "Ah, this is what I have been looking for all my life," that peace that passeth all understanding.
I know I'm NOTHING, no-thing, no-thing, not me, not me. I'm just a wild-assed spark of the Infinite functioning in the Finite! I can turn it on or turn it off any damn time I want to. I could drag you through a pool of sad-sack stories and have you crying tears as big as horse-turds. This is the magic that each one of us has within us.
My viewpoint is that you surrender yourself to your deeper spiritual SELF. And BE that spiritual SELF. BE WHO YOU ARE. And that's who you are! You're all GOD. You're carrying around the GENERATOR of FORCE within you. Use it. That's what you got it for. You just needed some silly-billy like me to come along and mention it to you.
It doesn't matter if I ever see any of you people again, you won't forget that reality within you. Because you haven't heard this from a famous minister that's a member of the Hierarchy, I'm just a jerk ....
