1904 - 1992
The Life and Teachings of Joe Miller
by Shabda Kahn
(written as a book review for Yoga Journal
after the publication of Richard Power's book about Joe)
Joe Miller is one of the great "homemade" American Mystics
of this century. He was recognized as an enlightened being by many
spiritual authorities and revered as a mentor by many young seekers.
He and his wife Guin, best known for taking hundreds of people on
their weekly walks through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, were
true torch-bearers of Love. They were hard to miss on the walk,
two white-haired elders wearing T-shirts that read: "No Religion
higher than Truth, no Power greater than Love"
"Don't bother just listening to the words, but try to get
the feel of what I'm putting out! Realization can't be taught, it
can only be caught". He would roar at his audience: "There
are three things one needs for the spiritual path -- common sense,
a sense of humor, and more common sense!"
In the words of Richard Power, who wrote the book, Great Song:
The Life and Teaching of Joe Miller, "Joe was an authentic
American revolutionary of the spirit. He challenged his young friends
to issue their own declarations of independence from the empire
of fear and wanting. Joe wanted people to seek the truth for themselves
within themselves. He felt that each person had an inalienable right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life - as in 'the
resurrection and the life'; liberty - as in spiritual liberty from
the tyranny of opposites; and the pursuit of happiness - as in the
inner contentment that flows unceasingly from the depth of the heart
if you 'let go and let God'".
When giving a rap, Joe often introduced himself as "a graduate
from the School of Hard Knocks." In his autobiography, Joe
offers insights into both his worldly life and his inner development.
Born to poor parents in the frigid north of Minnesota, with an eighth
grade education and beautiful tenor voice, Joe became a vaudeville
entertainer by night and a Wonder Bread truck driver by day. He
recounts how several episodes of pre-cognition and sudden spiritual
ecstasy, together with a misplaced book on a library shelf, led
him to join the Theosophical Society in his early twenties.
His T.S. membership was just the beginning of a life-long inner
quest. Joe experimented with many other groups, taking correspondence
courses from the Rosicrucians, dabbling in Aleister Crowley's "sex
magic", learning the sales pitch for the I AM movement with
its "Ascended Masters" and purple Cadillacs. Searching
to unlock the healing powers of color and music, Joe encountered
charlatans and bold innovators. Along the way, Joe read voraciously,
and used himself as his own laboratory for the various techniques
that attracted him. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that most
of the groups he had investigated and much of the popular literature
he had studied boiled down to "astral real estate, just pretty
pictures in your imagination."
While Joe pursued his interest in the mystical and occult, his
personal life provided him with plenty of what he would call "the
manure that makes the flowers grow." His early life was a painful
American patchwork, moving from town to town for work, staggering
through three marriages and raising two sets of children. After
moving to northern California, Joe began to find books and people
with the answers he was looking for. In the works of Ramana Maharshi,
the Sutra of the Sixth Zen Patriarch, and Dr. Evans-Wentz's
translations of sacred Tibetan texts, Joe found practices that made
sense to him and he began to dig deeper into the inner mysteries.
Dr. Evans-Wentz, the original translator of the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, and other sacred Mahayana texts, considered Joe
Miller "the only man he had met in the West who understood
the Doctrine of the Clear Light."
Near retirement, Joe's quest received a great forward impetus when
he met his fourth wife, Guin, a woman of his own age (for a change),
an accomplished pianist and a fellow Theosophist. Together, they
vowed to "grow geometrically" toward "falling awake"
(a term they coined to express Enlightenment). His marriage to Guin
provided Joe with the emotional equilibrium and spiritual camaraderie
he needed to unlock that inner door. The key was love, unconditional
love. After decades of inner searching and outer turmoil, Joe was
able to turn the spiritual ecstasy that he had first touched as
a young man on and off at will. The inner and outer worlds began
to mirror one another. Joe called his friend and mentor, Dr. W.Y.
Evans-Wentz on the phone and sang him a verse from one of the sacred
scriptures that Evans-Wentz had translated. Guin had set it to music.
Although ill and very old, the good Doctor shouted into the phone:
"You're there now, stay there!" As Joe told it later:
"When he said that, it didn't do anything to my 'kundalini,'
it did something to my heart."
From then on, in their late fifties, when others of their age had
settled down to mah-jong, Joe began to walk in the Golden Gate Park,
singing and expounding to the many young people who came along.
Always, balancing him beautifully, was his opposite and "better
half," his beloved Guin.
Without taking any titles, Joe was known among the Sufis as Murshid
(Master) or Madzub (one crazy for God), among the Buddhists as Roshi
or the "Sufi Lama", and among the Vedantists as "Swami
Joe". Virtually every high Lama, Swami or Murshid visiting
San Francisco would make their way to his door to pay their respects.
The Ven. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called the musical meditations
that Joe sang to his wife's piano accompaniment "the first
American mantras". On his deathbed, the American Sufi Master
Samuel L Lewis (a.k.a. Sufi Sam), entreated Joe to: "Take care
of my disciples", and for more than twenty years, Joe lovingly
fulfilled his friend's request. But as Power writes: "Joe didn't
take any money for public speaking or private consoling. He absolutely
refused the role of Guru or spiritual teacher. He referred to himself
as 'just a friend' ".
In Joe’s voice,"This isn't something you can go to India
and get, or the moon, or South America to get! It's inside you.
Just be still and find it and start living from there”. “The
truth IS, nobody can say it. You've got to BE it!" Joe used
his vaudeville flair: "You can get more stinkin' from thinkin'
than you can from drinkin', but to feel is for real! AND I MEAN
REALLY FEEL!" His advice on meditation was disarmingly simple:
"Just take a gentle in-drawn breath into the heart and feel
unselfish love flowing out. If you can do that you're cooking on
the big burner."
Joe's message was simple but powerful, direct but subtle: "Just
be. But just be who and what you really are, in depth. Not what
someone else tells you to be, or what you think you should be. Be.
When you first wake-up in the morning, who are you then? When you
say "I", you put your hand to your heart, don't you? Well,
that's headquarters, not in your head. Your head is just an outpost.
You've got to get out of your cotton-picking mind! Go deeper."
Joe was always trying to break-up people's fixed ideas and biases
about how to get to the goal: "You've got to do it for you.
No one can carry you piggy-back to the Reality. You've all got your
own do-it-yourself kits. You don't have to go to anybody else, pay
out a lot of loot, do a hundred thousand gyashos, and contemplate
your navel till it gets as big as a wash-tub. Just be still, be
very still."
"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!
This is the magic that each of us has within us."
Joe Miller left his body Aug 19, 1992, but his presence and message
live on.
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