by Jeff Foster
Can it be okay, just for a moment, to not have the answers, to not have the reference points, to not know anything anymore? Can it be okay, just for a moment, to feel this, whatever shape this is taking now? And in the midst of the rubble, can we once again breathe, and contact that place within ourselves, that most intimate and familiar place of silence and deep presence? The place that doesn’t need to know and doesn’t care about the outcome of dreams and doesn’t want any answers? Can we remember that stillness that has secretly always been our best friend? Can we relax into that clarity which has never left? Can we take our stand as that awareness that cannot be destroyed?
Perhaps the cosmic intelligence that we are has not actually abandoned us, and right at the heart of the seeming mess of this moment, there is something that is not involved in the mess at all. We can call it love, or God, or consciousness, or simply Who We Really Are, prior to our dreams of how life should be, of how this moment should look and feel and taste and sound and smell. Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is one giant invitation to wake up from the illusion of control and embrace whole-heartedly what is present.
Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory. Perhaps we were never really in control of our lives, and perhaps we are constantly invited to remember this, since we constantly forget it. Perhaps suffering is not the enemy at all, and at its core, there is a first-hand, real-time lesson we must all learn, if we are to be truly human, and truly divine. Perhaps breakdown always contains the seeds of breakthrough.
Perhaps suffering is simply a rite of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to the mystery of existence itself, here and now.
Perhaps our lives cannot go ‘wrong’ at all.
REWIND, PLAY, FAST-FORWARD
Regret is thought’s futile attempt to alter the past. But trying to manipulate the past is like trying to rewind to, and alter, a previous scene in a movie you’ve already been watching for a while. Thought says “that scene should have been different!” or even “that scene shouldn’t have happened at all!” But of course, the movie was perfect as it was – a perfection which actually included any seemingly ‘imperfect’ scenes. The appearance of past imperfection is part of the cosmic perfection of this moment.
The recognition that things are exactly as they are right now is not a call to detachment and life-denial, an excuse to dismiss the appearance of the world as ‘illusory’ with an uncaring attitude. Quite the opposite. We don’t just sit back from life and say “everything is perfect so I’ll do nothing to help or change things anymore.” That is another blockage, another conceptual position, another escape from reality. This perfection is radically open to the world, open to the rest of the movie, open to what happens. We can still learn the lessons from the past, and take them into the future. But our sense of regret is gone. We no longer rewind. We could call this “trust”, but there’s no need to name it at all.
We cannot change the past (Rewind), we cannot know the future (Fast-forward), but we can meet life exactly as it is (Play), and play, and play…
ARE THERE TWO OF YOU?
You are a King, a Queen, watching over your magnificent ever-changing kingdom. Thoughts, sensations and feelings are constantly parading for you in the present moment. Without your constant Presence, there is no parade. Without You, there is nothing.
The one thing that you long for, the one thing you have always been seeking – YOU – is the one thing that will never appear in the parade of thought and emotion, for it cannot be a ‘thing’ to you. Thoughts will dance, sensations will tingle, feelings will burn, but You will never appear in your own presence – FOR THERE CANNOT BE TWO OF YOU. You could wait forever for You to appear. But who would be waiting?
From one perspective, this is a tragedy! You will never find what you seek through seeking it. The spiritual search therefore can end in exhaustion and disillusionment, frustration and even despair.
From another perspective the realisation that YOU CAN NEVER APPEAR TO YOU is a massive invitation to remember who you truly are prior to the parade: That which never appears or disappears, That without which no parade is possible, That which is beyond the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
You are a King, a Queen, and there is no lineage, no line of succession – only You. This isn’t narcissism or solipsism – this is deep peace, and heart-busted-open-compassion for all who do not yet understand their true worth.
THE PROMISE
In this presence beyond presence,
In this place that is no place at all,
In this warm embrace I call myself,
Even a ‘no’ is a secret yes,
Even resistance is deeply allowed,
Even doubt is a celebration of life.
Come, all you unloved creatures,
All you homeless waves in life’s vast ocean,
Pain, doubt, shame, guilt,
All you frightened orphans of light,
Crawl out of your hiding places,
Shuffle out of the darkness,
You are invited to a great feast.
Come, uncertainty, sit by my side,
Come, despair, drink from my cup,
Come, fear, do not be afraid of me,
I will not turn away from you,
I will not deny you a place at this table,
Now that I know the truth of myself.
I invited you here, long ago.
I have an ancient promise to keep.
A CELEBRATION OF WEIRD
Don’t become a spiritual zombie, devoid of passion and deep human feeling.
Let spirituality become a celebration of your uniqueness rather than a repression of it. Never lose your quirkiness, your strangeness, your weirdness – your unique and irreplaceable flavour. Don’t try or pretend to be ‘no-one’ or ‘nothing’ or some transcendent and impersonal non-entity with ‘no self’ or ‘no ego’, ‘beyond the human’ – that’s just another conceptual fixation and nobody’s buying it any more.
Be a celebration of what your unique expression is and stop apologising. Fall in love with this perfectly divine, very human mess that you are.
There is no authority here, and no way to get life wrong. So get it all wrong.
Fail, gloriously.
THE MEDICINE OF DESPAIR
I often get excited when someone reports uncaused and seemingly inexplicable sadness. I see sadness, like all the other waves in the ocean of life, as an invitation, an invocation, a calling to open up to deeper truths about existence, to recognise our inherent vastness.
Life is bitter-sweet. However beautiful things are right now, they will pass. Everything is impermanent and groundless. You will die, at least in this incarnation. Everyone you love will pass on. Your success may turn to failure. What you have, you may lose. Your body will cease to function in the way it does now. Nothing is certain, everything is cast into doubt. The water of relative existence slips through our fingers so easily. Our joy is tinged with sadness. Our bliss is pierced with nostalgia. The yin and the yang of things won’t let you settle on an independent opposite. There is no home for the homeless here.
Contacting this deeper truth of existence, encountering the raw ground of being unprotected and unprepared may initially present as melancholy and even despair, but that existential disturbance may contain unlimited riches.
At the point of despair, when the ground falls away from under our feet and life spins out of control (were we ever ‘in’ control?), often we are medicated, or we self-medicate, with pills or sex or alcohol or even spiritual teachings. Science would like to reduce our existential predicament to the dysfunction of brain chemicals, easily remedied with a few innocent-looking pills prescribed by someone with a hard-won certificate. And perhaps those theories have some
validity – through certain lenses. But there are so many other lenses. Infinite lenses. There are myriad sides to this diamond of human experience, and it would be a shame to reduce our glorious being to chemicals or neurons.
Perhaps our depression is not a sickness (though I will never argue with anyone who wants to defend that view) but a call to break out, to let go, to lose the old structures and stories, perspectives and opinions we have been holding about ourselves and the world and rest deeply in the truth of who we really are.
Conventional wisdom would have you turn away from melancholy rather than face it. Well-meaning friends and family and self-help gurus may want to fix you, to get you ‘back to normal’ (what the hell is normal, anyway?), to make you more ‘positive’, to cheer you up. What if ‘normal’ no longer fits? What if you need to shed your half-shed skin, not climb back into it? What if sadness, and pain, and fear, and all of the waves in life’s ocean, just want to move in you, to finally express themselves creatively and not be pushed away? What if you are tired of being average?
What if you are not nearly as limited as you were led to believe? What if you are vast enough to hold and contain all of life’s energies, the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’? What if you are beyond both, an ocean of consciousness, unified, boundless and free, in which even the deepest despair has a resting place?
What if your depression was simply your infinite intelligence calling you back Home, in the only way it knew how?
Your melancholy may contain natural medicine.
THE END OF SEPARATION
Nobody you have loved has ever left you. They only buried themselves so deeply in your heart that it was hard to recognise them for a while.
When our imagined boundaries begin to melt, when the protective walls around our tender hearts soften, our loved ones breathe again, and come out of the darkness. When you have been touched by someone, felt the warmth of their presence, even if it was only for a moment and so long ago, you are forever changed, and cannot go back or forget, however strongly you build those defences. Once you know the presence of God you can never be the same.
In the Bible it is written: “The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will fall, and every wall will crumble to the ground.” In presence, in the fullness of Now, separation cannot stand. Love does not know time nor limitation. It is beyond death.
THE SMELL OF STRUGGLE
Here is an ancient invitation to love the struggle of life, the sorrow, the confusion, the uncertainty, even the despair of it. Love the impermanence of it all, love it all to death, its unpredictability, its uncontrollability, its unmanageable quality and mysterious nature.
Life was never supposed to be 100% smooth. What would be the fun in the ride? Love the bumps along the way. Love the total absence of any answers that satisfy. Love your own inability to love sometimes. There are never any mistakes here in this place we call reality, and nothing is thrown at you except rich and nutrient-dense fertiliser, which may smell bad at first, and you may be tempted to run away, but its smell contains a secret: it will lovingly help new things grow, if you give it a chance and stop assuming it is divided from the supreme intelligence of life itself, the One intelligence that births solar systems and tiny birds in springtime. The smell of your struggle is the smell of life, not death, and does not indicate your terrible failure, but your stunning aliveness. Yes, yes, you are alive, and sensitive, and you feel everything!
DIRTY LOVE
Waking up doesn’t mean ‘being okay’ with everything all the time, or ‘being fearless’ all the time, or ‘being relaxed’ all the time, or being anything ‘all the time’ for that matter, for why would you place such heavy demands on present experience? Why would you put conditions on the unconditional, and whose conditions would they be anyway? Why would you want to live up to a second-hand, time-bound image?
Thankfully, what you are never has to live up to any image of how awakening ‘should’ look. The myriad, ever-moving waves in the ocean of you can’t be anything ‘all the time’ since they are alive – they love to dance and play and arise and dissolve as spontaneously as they arose, leaving no trace – and this recognition is the beginning of such cosmic relief for the exhausted seeker of ‘the next experience’.
Life never has to match up to your idea of ‘life’ and that’s why life is so restful at its very core. There is simply no demand for present experience to be anything other than what it is. There is simply this – present, complete, empty and full.
But, intelligent and discerning reader, this inherent perfection does not equate to detachment and apathy. Quite the opposite! It’s not ‘just letting things be’ or doing ‘doing nothing’ or preaching ‘there is no me’ to anyone who will listen. It’s not a mental conclusion or second-hand belief, or a way to block out pain. It’s more of a living attitude, a way of being, a seeing that, no matter what arises in present experience – a thought, a sensation, a feeling – no matter how intense or unexpected, these visitors have a home in you, they are welcome as beloved and inseparable waves of yourself. Love is no longer a fancy notion but a living, breathing, real-time reality. The poets and sages were right. The end of violence is here within you. And from this creative and compassionate place we become more engaged with life than ever, more alive than ever, even as all stories and dreams of ‘my life’ and ‘how it should be’ fall away.
This love, this deep and ever-present silence that you are, is so vast it swallows everything. It pays no heed to images of how it should be. It does not try to impress, it is not looking for rewards, acceptance or validation. It is not pretending to be transcendent, or fearless, or beyond pain, it has no use for the word ‘spiritual’ or ‘enlightened’, it does not act as if it’s above everything. It knows no bypassing, no clever tricks, no ways to numb itself to itself. It gets its hands dirty.
Yes, this is a dirty love. The unloved and unwanted and unmet get stuck under its fingernails. It wants all of its children, not just the pretty ones. It is the mother, the father, the lover, the guru we have always longed for. It loves because that’s all it knows. It would work its knuckles to the bone just to be here.
We pretend to be fearless and beyond human concerns only because we are afraid. We act at being peaceful and undisturbed only because there is a storm inside. We strain to show others how far beyond anger we have gone, only because anger still rages in us, longing to be met. We show off our perfect spiritual know-ledge in public to mask our perfect private doubt. It’s a perfect balance.
Who will stop pretending? Who will meet the ‘shadow’, the misunderstood ‘dark side’ of life, those waves of ourselves that are not inherently negative or sinful or dark, just neglected and abandoned and longing for home? Who will meet life’s orphaned children? Who will sacrifice the image for the delight of not knowing?
It is such a relief to no longer have to pretend to be anything – not ‘the awakened one’, nor ‘the one who knows’, nor ‘the blissed-out experiencer’, nor ‘the spiritual expert’ – and instead to know ourselves on a deeper level as the home for those homeless parts of experience that we always thought ‘should’ disappear.
Our unwanted children cannot disappear until they are truly free to appear in us. And when they are truly free, who would ever want them to disappear? When they are no longer unwanted, is there any problem? Even the unwanted are wanted here in the vastness that we are. There is plenty of space.
Beyond awakening, there is this grace, this inexplicable and heart-breaking timeless welcoming of everything as it arises. By dirtying itself until it cannot dirty itself any more, love purifies itself.
FORGET PERFECTION
Forget trying to get it “right” all of the time.
Here’s to doing your best, falling flat on your face, getting up again, falling down again, screwing up totally, failing beyond belief, being laughed at, ridiculed, mocked, even crucified, and losing what you thought was yours.
And here’s to embracing the mess of it
all, dying to the dream and waking to the reality of it, loving the perfect imperfection of it, opening your heart wide to all of it, continuing to live your truth despite everything, fearlessly meeting each sacred moment with open eyes.
You cannot get it “right”, and that’s why you cannot get it “wrong”, and out beyond both, there is a field...
IN MY FATHER’S FIELD
In my father’s field I stood
I felt his longing
For something he could not name
In my mother’s old room
By her empty bed
In the place she used to dream
I felt her fragile heart
And her courage to open it
Just enough
In my brother’s house
By the peeling wallpaper
In the room that was never quite complete
I finally understood
Why he never understood
And I wept myself clean
Father, mother, brother
Were you not as I was?
Trying to close a broken circle?
Seeking resolution?
Now, at last, the circle is unbroken
Now, at last, we meet
We’re not so different, you and I.
MARCH
Since everything is only an illusion,
perfect in being what it is,
having nothing to do with good or bad,
acceptance or rejection,
one might as well burst out laughing!
– Longchenpa
UNIVERSAL LOVE
Before I am born, before I am 5 years old, 49 years old, 84 years old, before I die
Before I am a student, before I am a teacher, before I am an artist, a shopkeeper, a doctor, a monk, a priest, a farmer, a scientist, a spiritual seeker