by Jeff Foster
What holds all of it, allows all of it? What cannot be doubted, even when there is doubt? Who is reading these words right now? Who or what is trying to understand them? This is not the perfection of the mind, not “the perfect life” or “the perfect body” or “the perfect experience” or even “the perfect moment”, but the perfection that is the absolute embrace of all of this, exactly as it is – the perfect embrace that you already are.
THE FIERCEST GRACE
I was talking to a dying friend. He was having trouble breathing and was in a lot of pain. He was telling me how, despite the pain, it was all perfect somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain. That in the midst of the blood and the sleepless nights and the immobility, he had found a place of serenity. A place of freedom from his story of himself as ‘the dying one’. A place of freedom from all dreams and hopes for the future, and a deep acceptance of things as they were.
Life had radically simplified itself – the moment was all that mattered now, and all that had ever mattered. He told me, “Despite all this, I wouldn’t swap this life for any other.”
This was the kind of love they don’t teach in books. This wasn’t the conceptual love of the mind, nor the fluffy happy love that comes and goes and depends on things going ‘my way’, but an unconditional love, a blood and sweat love, a fierce and unyielding grace without a name, indestructible, forever renewing itself in the furnace of presence, blowing anything unreal before it to smithereens. Pain was my friend’s final guru, whose lessons were brutal and unexpected but ultimately pointed to nothing less than his total spiritual freedom, his infinite nature, deathless and eternal.
UNBREAKABLE
What’s wrong with falling apart?
Why not fall apart so completely that there’s nothing left? And then keep falling apart for the rest of your life, recognising yourself as the wide open space of awareness that cannot fall apart, but deeply allows all falling apart to happen?
And then can you really call it ‘falling apart’ at all?
Thoroughly fallen apart, thoroughly One.
WHAT YOU REALLY WANT
You don’t really want what you think you want
You only want your wanting to end
To no longer want for anything
To be existentially full and complete
But isn’t that just another want?
Perhaps the biggest want of all?
“Want” actually means “lack”
So now the question changes:
What do you really lack?
Do you really lack anything in this moment?
Thought says yes
Thought lists all the things that are missing
Thought advises that certain objects, people, experiences would complete this moment
Thought is always a seeker
It is always comparing
Thought says: “If you get what you want
The lack will disappear permanently
And life will be complete”
Get what you want! No more lack!
Do you see the trick here?
A mechanism perfectly designed to keep you away from what you really want
What is true abundance?
It’s not about getting what you want
It’s not about filling an absence
It’s about realising that the present moment never lacks anything
It’s already full to the brim with sights and sounds and smells
With thoughts and feelings
With colours and shapes beyond imagination
A thought or feeling of lack
A sense of ‘something missing’
Is actually part of this moment’s completeness
Not a threat to it
Part of the richness of Now
Not an enemy
A welcome visitor in the vast open space that you are
An old friend, come for tea
Space lacks nothing
For it is full with everything
Pregnant with possibility
Rich with potential
The mind confuses peace with ‘absence’
Space with ‘emptiness’
And unlimited capacity with ‘lack’
And the game is on
The search for opposites
The longing for goals
You don’t really want what you think you want
And that’s why getting what you want
Doesn’t satisfy ‘you’ for long
Who you really are does not ‘want’ anything
It has never heard of ‘lack’
It is already satisfied with this moment
For it is this moment
Exactly as it is
This is true abundance:
Remembering who you really are
Prior to time and change
These are the unparalleled riches of the universe:
A breath
The simple feeling of being alive
Getting what you thought you wanted
Acquiring all the material and spiritual riches of the universe
Doesn’t even come close
When nothing belongs to you
Everything is yours
This moment is a strange and unexpected jackpot
A CONSTANT APOCALYPSE
For you, every day is the end of the world. Every hour, every minute, every moment, the old world is falling away, the known is burning itself up, and the new, the never-before-seen-world, is revealing itself, in all its freshness. Truly, every moment is the end of a dream, and the birth of newness.
Seen in the light of truth, life is a constant apocalypse, a constant awakening to what is, yet the separate self, with its fear of the loss of the status quo and its clinging to form and ideology, pushes ‘apocalypse’ into time, and even fixes it to a specific date. And when that date passes, the mechanism creates a new date. It has to. This has always been the case. It is the seeker in action. To the illusory self, the end of the world will always be ‘nigh’. It’s how it keeps its own illusion going. It loves the drama of it.
And all the while, this timeless, ever-present apocalypse has always been with us, sweetly singing its song of emergence and unshakeable truth.
STOP
Whatever is happening in the circumstances of your life, stop.
Gently begin to acknowledge what is here, in this moment.
Come out of your conclusions about life, your ideas about the past and future, and begin to notice the sensations, feelings, thoughts that are present, right here and right now. Notice what is alive and immediate here. Let your present experience – sights and sounds and smells – become totally fascinating, the most curious dance in all the universe. You are seeing, tasting, touching, hearing the world as if for the first time. This is your Garden of Eden, and you are awake to it at last.
Notice how thought is always giving names and labels to things. A car, a tree, a foot. It even labels what you are feeling – “sadness”, “anger”, “fear”, “disappointment”, “expectation” and so on. And then judges it as good or bad, right or wrong. Is the feeling the word? Is the judgement the feeling? Is the thought the reality?
Try the following as an experiment: Instead of calling it ‘sadness’, drop that label for a moment, and sink deeply into the raw sensation in the body. Feel deeply the sensation in the stomach, the chest, the heart, the throat, the back of the head. Assume that you don’t even know that it’s sadness yet. Allow that unnamed life energy to dance and move freely in the sacred space that you are.
Instead of calling it ‘anger’, drop that heavy and loaded word, and directly contact the intense raw sensation in the belly, chest, throat. Feel directly the intensity of it. Feel the sheer aliveness of it. You are alive! You are alive! Allow life to move without blockage. Notice that these waves of energy are already allowed, without you having to allow them. They are allowed because they are life.
Instead of calling it ‘fear’ – or ‘boredom’ o
r ‘frustration’ or ‘powerlessness’ – drop that second-hand conclusion, and directly contact the raw, first-hand sensation in the body. Is this energy really against you? Allow it to burn, fizzle, prickle, dance, move, as if for the first time. You have never met this energy before. It is fresh in this moment. Is it really a threat to life? Is it really blocking anything, except an idea of how this moment should be?
What is sadness, when it is not named? What is anger, when we no longer call it ‘anger’? What is fear, prior to the word ‘fear’? What happens when we profoundly contact these life energies without history?
A POEM FOR NO-ONE
Who has been wearing these shoes?
Who has been walking in these footsteps?
Who eats this breakfast?
Speaks these words? Breathes? Moves as I do?
Who has known both the mountains of bliss and the valleys of total disillusionment?
Who has journeyed into the abyss and come out unbroken on the other side?
Who has suffered both the joys of pain and the pains of ecstasy?
Who has never abandoned me, throughout nirvana, samsara and those unspeakable realms of light?
Who has taken the hand of the child, the unloved one, the frightened one, the dying one?
Who is both the lover and the beloved and the imaginary gulf between them?
Who has cradled the entire universe in its arms?
Who is closer than the most intimate sensation?
Who asks these questions that cannot ever be answered, and delights in asking them anyway?
Whose music is it that I hear from dawn until dusk?
Is it You who wears these shoes?
Is it You who breathes these dying breaths?
Is it You I return to?
Is it You I never left?
Once, in pursuit of You, I ran from You.
I ran from these shoes and from the surfaces of things.
I ran from all that I judged as mere ‘appearance’.
I ran from the simple wonder of waking up in the morning to a fresh new day, not knowing what was to come.
But now, I run no more.
I can no longer seek, or escape, what I already am.
I have been gutted, turned inside out, replaced by gratitude,
and left not knowing why
I ever doubted this miracle
in the first place.
TIME TRAVEL
There is no such thing as a thought from the past. Who we really are does not ‘travel’ into the past in thought. A thought about the past, a memory, an image, arises in the present. A thought about the future, a dream of what may or may not happen, the imagination of a plan, does not happen in the future, it happens here, now. Past and future do not happen in the past or future – they arise here, where you are – just as a movie set in the past does not cause the movie screen to travel into the past.
This moment is not really a ‘moment’ separate from any other moment at all. It is not a sliver of time between a separate past and future moment. This moment is the vast field where stories of past and future arise and fall, where dreams are born and die, where thoughts, sensations, sounds, smells, feelings, all arise and dissolve, leaving no trace. This moment is vast and timeless and holds everything.
Since the words ‘moment’ and ‘movement’ come from the same root (Latin, movere) it may be better to call this the present movement of life. The movement of thoughts, sensations, feelings. The movement of past and future. And what is aware of all this movement? That which never moves. That which you truly are.
In the midst of all the movement of life, the total stillness of You.
PERFECTLY UNFINISHED
Perhaps your imperfections
Are not really ‘imperfections’
And not ‘yours’ at all
Perhaps they are the last remnants
Of a greater perfection
Misunderstood by mind and forgotten long ago
Come out of the story of the ‘poor me’
And discover the riches in the smallest of things
A single breath, a glance from a friend, an autumnal breeze
Celebrate the unwanted, the unloved stranger, the perfect mistake
Collapse into wonderful unknowing
Be perfectly unfinished,
At last.
FALLING IN LOVE WITH WHERE YOU ARE
Dying to all
you think you know
Letting go of the image
of how life ‘should’ be
Sinking into the vast mystery
of the present moment
Embracing change and loss
as misunderstood friends
Falling in love
with where you are
This is the path
for those who know
there is no path
Only endless destinations
and never-ending beginnings
MAY
Once you realise that the road is the goal,
and that you are always on the road,
not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom,
life ceases to be a task, and becomes natural and simple,
in itself an ecstasy...
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
FOR YOU, THERE IS NO DEATH
Many spiritual teachers say there is no death. Here’s a simple explanation as to why that’s true. You don’t have to believe it, or take it on authority – simply look into your own experience and verify it for yourself.
Throughout your life, you have witnessed the constant coming and going of thoughts, sensations, feelings – painful and pleasurable – sounds, smells, images, memories, dreams of past and future, visions, fantasies, varying states of consciousness, and so on. You have known the appearance and disappearance, the coming and going, of all this ‘content’. If the shifting ‘content’ truly defined you, who would have been aware of this ‘content’? Is that which notices the content defined by, or trapped within, or limited to, the content?
What is the one thing you have never seen appear or disappear, the one thing that has never been a piece of changing ‘content’ for you? What is the one thing that has never been a ‘thing’ for you, a passing form? Your own presence, of course. You, in the deepest sense of you. You have been the One unchanging presence throughout every experience of your life, the silent background that has never appeared or disappeared. If it came or went, it wasn’t truly who you were.
You, as presence, cannot know the absence of presence. Who would know it? Who would notice it? Presence can never witness its own vanishing as ‘content’. That is why, for who you truly are, death is – quite literally – never an object of concern. It is Home, beyond all dreams of Home, and you are already there.
For who you really are, there is no death – only false identifications can die, and who you are cannot be false.
BE PASSIONATELY ALIVE
They used to say, “chase your dreams”, “fulfil your destiny”, “achieve your life’s purpose”, “listen to your heart’s true desire”, “follow your passion”, and I never knew what the hell they meant.
So I compromised and settled for less than what was possible and worked in jobs where I felt half-alive and so, so far from the wonder of existence. Life and creativity and adventure and passion wanted to burst out of me, but I had no idea how to facilitate or release them, and besides, I was too terrified to unleash these energies lest they disrupt the status quo too much, or destroyed me completely.
I said to myself, “a life of adventure is not possible for little old me. I’m too introverted, too afraid, too weak, too ugly, not intelligent enough, not brave enough…” I comforted myself with spiritual concepts like ‘there is no choice’, ‘all is One’, and ‘everything is predestined’ and lived each day waiting for the evenings, the ‘remains of the day’, when, safely on my own, I could breathe again and be authentically myself for a few brief moments.
Wh
at was my destiny? What did my heart truly desire? What was my life’s purpose? Where was my passion? I didn’t know where to begin. Everyone else seemed to have answers, and I had none. What was wrong with me? I felt numb and bored to death in my jobs, but at least I felt safe. I was hiding from possibility but at least money was coming in. I ‘fit in’, and I had a solid story about myself that I could regurgitate in polite conversation. But there was no risk in it. I was half dead, and only in my twenties. I often thought of suicide. At least then I’d feel alive and powerful, if only for a few moments.
What to do with this one precious, fleeting gift of life? That is the question. To be, or not to be, or to be but only half-heartedly, living out of the ‘shoulds’ of others?
And the answer is simple, because life is short. Do whatever makes you feel passionately alive. Find a way – however much you have to struggle at first – of making a living from truly living. Honour your unique talents and abilities. Do what moves you and connects you to the deepest truth of yourself. Trust prosperity and passion over profit and comfort and the approval of others, because all the approval in the world is empty if it is for something your heart does not believe in.
Breaking out of the known can be terrifying, and you may lose what you thought was yours, and your trusted images of yourself may melt in the fire of newness, and you may face fear and trembling, uncertainty and doubt, rejection and even ridicule. You may have to learn the hard way to open yourself up to more pain and life may become more uncomfortable than ever... that is, until you fall in love with the deep comfort of insecurity, and love the security of doing what makes life worth living. You will be swimming in the unknown, but you will be vast and alive. You will feel life running through your veins once again – as it did when you were young and you hadn’t yet settled for a life of compromise and clock-watching and justifications for your quiet desperation – and you will channel this aliveness back into creation, and the cycle of prosperity will keep flowing, and yes, you may even make a good living, better than expected.