by Jeff Foster
Awareness: “Ah, they are all just afraid of you, because they don’t see that you are inseparable from me! They are trying to reach something called enlightenment in something called the future. It’s very endearing.”
Sadness: “But I don’t understand. I thought you preferred happiness to me?”
Awareness: “Preferred? What does that mean?”
Sadness: “Oh…. Well I know how negative I am, and…”
Awareness: “Negative? What’s that?”
Sadness: “You know, positive and negative, light and dark, heaven and hell, you and me?”
Awareness: “Nope. Never heard of those divisions. Hell, I don’t even know who I’m talking to right now!”
Sadness: “Oh sorry. Let me introduce myself. I’m sadness…”
Awareness: “Sadness. Sadness. Interesting. You know, it’s just that you’re so close I can’t see your boundaries, so it’s hard for me to call you anything at all.”
Sadness: “Oh, all this time I thought I was a mistake. I thought I shouldn’t be here. I’ve never even stopped to check with you…”
Awareness: “Yes, I know, it’s strange! They all do the same, for some reason. Fear, anger, even pain, I don’t understand why they are all scared of me. I have never asked them to leave. And happiness, joy, bliss, too – I have never asked them to stay. Everyone is either trying to stay, or trying to run away from me! It’s very peculiar.”
Sadness: “So, they are all allowed to come and to go in you? I mean, you allow it all?”
Awareness: “Well… More than that! You see, I can’t actually allow anything, or get rid of anything. It’s all just myself. Do you see? Even you….”
Sadness: “You mean…. I am not… I am not sadness?”
Awareness: “Of course not, my dear child! You are made of myself. I’m dancing as you…”
Sadness: “I am you? Oh, then…. then how can I call you… Awareness….”
“Exactly. No separation. No problem.”
“And there never was”.
“I’m sorry I kept running away”.
“I’m sorry you felt that you couldn’t stay”.
“This could be the start of a beautiful friendship”.
THE CALL OF BROKENNESS
Friend, when you feel broken, lost, far away from home, when enlightenment seems like another country and the words of the saints and sages seem like fairy stories, when answers won’t come, and doubts rage like fire... Stop. Breathe. Remember, nothing has gone wrong. A dream is dying, that is all, a second-hand dream of how this moment ‘should’ have been.
As the brokenness calls to you, as the doubts sing their crazy song, as stories cascade like oceans, remember that the very homesickness you try to push away is actually inviting you to your true Home, Here and Now, prior to all earthly homes.
A problem is a situation that longs for kind attention. A crisis is a turning point. Dis-ease is a call for profound rest and release. Trauma is the invitation to the kind of acceptance you never even imagined. Raging doubts are explosions of supreme intelligence, calling you to deep trust in your own first-hand experience, and a fearless plunge into the constant embrace of the Unknown.
Even when it all seems to be going wrong, stop and breathe and remember that nothing can go wrong in the vast field of your undying presence.
A PERFECT LOVE
The things I should have said,
The ways in which I turned away,
Protecting an image I never was,
For a salvation I never knew.
But now I have learned,
That salvation lies only in turning toward,
In burning these images one by one,
In letting go of these precious children,
The ones I smothered with love,
Out of fear of being nothing.
This may be harder than letting go of my actual children.
But whoever said unconditional love was easy?
It is not easy.
It is internal genocide.
The flames ravage without discrimination.
Leaving no part of me untouched.
But I’d rather die than never know this love.
So have no pity, dear friend.
Sit by my side as I burn.
Hold my hand this one last time.
Let me feel your warm presence.
Know that I always loved you in my own imperfect way.
Through the thick and rancid smoke of my old self,
Through the passing of all that we thought would never pass,
Can you smell the unspeakable freedom?
Do you understand now?
THE FREEDOM TO NOT BE PRESENT
We are encouraged to ‘be in the Now’ and ‘be present’, and perhaps that is a useful practice, for a while. But then you go deeper, and ask, “What is this me that can be present, or not be present?” – and soon you discover that you are that very presence, ever-present in the midst of being present or not being present, in the midst of every thought, sensation and feeling, unchanging, indestructible and so very intimate. You are the common denominator throughout every experience of your life. You are the unchanging ground of all experience.
So give yourself the greatest present of all – the freedom to be present or not be present!
THE ONE GOD
One of the most divine, sacred, deeply religious things that can happen is a total loss of your personal religion, a dropping of your second-hand belief in God and a waking up to what the word ‘God’ has always been pointing to, beyond words and sounds and images and the passing of experiences.
To confine God to a word, a belief, an image, a feeling, a concept, a story, a dream, an ideology, to imprison God in a time-bound religious system, is to put limits on the vastness and give God a boundary, an inside and an outside, a shape, a form, a time-frame. To believe in God, to think of God, to dream of God, to argue about God, to claim God as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ in any way, is to separate ourselves from God and each other, and create division where there is none. That is idol worship, the worship of form and story and mental truth, and it is not a sin but a vast limitation, a human forgetting of what can be only ever hinted at by the metaphor ‘God’.
God cannot be anything less than the totality, than all that is touched, tasted, heard, smelled, known, imagined and dreamed, and whether we dream of the God of a personal religion or of God’s non-existence, God is a word, a metaphor for That which gives rise to all of it, prior to human belief and knowledge and even faith. Yes, this God is so vast that even our faith is too small to contain it, and our science cannot touch it, and yet it is as intimate and obvious and present as the very next breath...
We may all adhere to different religions, and hold on to different beliefs, and dress in different ways, and speak different languages, but we are all secretly intimate with the same God: presence itself.
TOO MUCH LIFE?
Existence can feel overwhelming sometimes; the waves in life’s ocean can be so intense that it feels like we will be destroyed if we go any further, and the only ‘solution’ seems to be to shut down and distract ourselves from present experience, and then dream of a future freedom or awakening. Pain, fear, sadness, joy and bliss, can feel so huge, so unmanageably colossal, so intense, it’s almost as if you’re about to die, about to be crushed by the weight of life, or burnt in its fire, and it can be terrifying, to be on the verge of death like that, to be on the precipice of total dissolution.
Perhaps it’s not death we are afraid of, but too much life.
But as the ocean itself, as the vast space of consciousness that holds all of these beloved waves, you can never truly be destroyed, for you know that all of the waves are only movements of yourself, and cannot actually harm you in your essence. A wave cannot overwhelm the water, a storm cannot destroy the sea, a tornado cannot damage the air, a teardrop cannot cry itself, and grounded in this knowing, we can expand rather than contract, we can relax rather tha
n tense up, we can allow ourselves to feel totally overwhelmed beyond reason, whilst knowing deeply that we can never be truly overwhelmed in our essence, and that if we ever did reach that elusive point of ‘too much’, the vast and creative and loving intelligence of the body would render us unconscious instantly. We are always spared from ‘too much’.
And so we can fearlessly open ourselves up to both the pain and bliss of life, incorporating all of it into ourselves, knowing that it can never truly overwhelm us, trusting the intelligence of the body, so that even the darkest places in us become flooded with light, and loss transmutes into love, and pain transmutes into compassion, and “seek and ye shall find”, that most ingrained of concepts, dissolves lovingly into “stop seeking, child, rest deeply in yourself, and ye are found...”
OUR WOUNDS, ILLUMINED
Don’t hide your wounds, friend.
Let them into this last candlelight.
I won’t judge you.
See, we are all broken.
There’s no shame in being wounded.
You have fought many battles.
Your wounds are not your faults.
Illumined, they are reminders of a deeper healing.
Illumined, they are invitations to the Unbroken.
Right there at the heart of your wounds,
infinitely deeper than enlightenment,
a silent Hallelujah stirs to wake.
You are only a ‘screwed up mess’
compared to some second-hand image
of perfection.
JULY
The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me,
apparently two, really one, seek unity,
and that is love.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
THE CIRCLE OF LIFE
All over the world, and in the news every day, people killing people. People on one ‘side’ killing people on the other ‘side’. Each ‘side’ claiming that they are right. Each ‘side’ holding onto ancient pain, each ‘side’ unwilling to be the first to let go, coming up with all the reasons in the world why they can’t and won’t. A tragic tale as old as humanity itself.
When will we wake up to the obvious fact that we are all the same Consciousness in disguise? That no matter who we think we are, no matter how we appear, beyond our stories and histories, our religions, our nationalities, our beliefs, the colour of our skin, our heavy pasts and uncertain futures, we are all expressions of the One life? That in truth there are no Israelis or Palestinians, Jews or Christians, Muslims or Buddhists, atheists or agnostics, Republicans or Democrats, gurus or disciples, that those images can never define us? That who we truly are at the most fundamental level is indefinable, mysterious, never fixed or separate, never identified with an image, just as the vast ocean can never be defined by its waves?
Consciousness has no religion, and no nationality. It gives birth to Palestinians and Israelis, gurus and disciples, light and dark, the yin and yang of the ever-changing dream world.
As consciousness itself, when we hurt each other, we are only hurting our own brothers and sisters, our own kin, waves of ourselves. We are only fighting reflections of our original Face. We are only killing the ones we love, ancient friends from long ago.
Outer war has never lead to inner peace. How much more bloodshed? How much more pain? How many more men, women and children must disappear into infinity before we wake up?
That bleeding child is my own. The circle of life takes no ‘sides’.
A NATURAL HEALING
Our wounds, when they are ignored, denied, repressed, neglected or pushed away, begin to fester, and they eventually poison us and those around us.
Those very same wounds – physical, emotional – when given kind attention, when given permission to exist in the vast landscape of the present moment, when illuminated unconditionally by the loving light of awareness that we are, begin to heal naturally, without effort.
Make no mistake – ‘healing’ is not the mending of something broken, nor the ‘making good’ of something ‘bad’, nor even the transmutation of darkness into light. It is much deeper than that – it is the understanding that, on the primordial level, nothing is broken, nothing is darkness and nothing is against darkness, and even our wounds are only intelligent invitations to stop and remember our deeper original nature – ever-present, undying, unborn, and already whole.
Seen in the light of awareness, our wounds are not really our wounds at all, they are our greatest spiritual teachers, healing us from all inherited notions of sickness and health, ignorance and awakening, sin and salvation.
EFFORTLESS CHANGE
You want the perfect partner? The perfect mother or father? The perfect boss? The perfect body? The perfect feelings? The perfect enlightenment? The perfect life?
How about deeply accepting what is here, right now? How about deeply accepting yourself, in all your imperfection and unresolvedness, in the very place you stand? How about deeply accepting others, as they actually are?
A strange place to start, admittedly. Sounds a little... back-to-front. Like giving up. Like settling for less than we deserve. Like... spiritual weakness. It goes against the whole “go out and get what you want” mentality.
Yes, these teachings of Presence and Being Here Now and Present Moment Awareness can seem so over-simplistic, even naive, to the mind. They are so easy to misunderstand and dismiss. After all, who wants to let go of their dreams of past and future and face a mysterious moment? Who wants to admit the fragility and preciousness of life, its fleeting nature, the bitter-sweet gift of it? Who wants to confront their own powerlessness and recognise a deep cosmic humility? Who wants to die to time? Who wants to give up the idea of control? Whose heart could take such grace?
The most profound truth of existence is simple, but never simplistic.
Is acceptance of ‘what is’ the same as giving up on the possibility of change? No. Never.
Does acceptance mean tolerating or “putting up with” things? Does it mean blindly following violent impulses? Not at all.
Does acceptance mean becoming detached and passive, turning a blind eye to violence and letting others walk all over us and our loved ones? No way.
Does acceptance mean playing a new role, the role of the “very spiritually evolved, deeply accepting, utterly peaceful person who is never affected by anything”? No. Acceptance is not a role, and it’s not personal.
Deep acceptance means staring life in the face, right now. It means turning towards what is here, rather than away. It means letting go of hopes and dreams and awakening to what is really true. It means ending the war, seeing through the illusion of a ‘self’ separate from this mysterious movement of life. It means total alignment with the Way Things Are. It means finally being at Home, no matter what is happening.
It is the supreme paradox: that out of a deep and uncompromising acceptance of the moment can come creative and intelligent – and surprisingly effortless – change.
The mind was never in charge of change.
THE ‘I’ OF THE STORM
Rest as the great storm nears.
Relax as all you know comes to an end.
In the storm’s eye,
In the centre of the madness,
You will only lose your imagination of yourself.
You will only lose definitions.
The storm will not destroy your capacity to love,
Nor your sense of being alive.
It will only remind you of what you knew long ago.
So stand now
in the calm before the storm
and wait
and choicelessly fall
into its infinitely calm centre.
MEETING CRISIS
We live in a time of great change. Perhaps we always have done.
Many people I speak to are going through big changes and upheavals in their own personal lives at the moment. Nothing makes sense to them anymore. Everything they believed has been cast into doubt. T
hey feel lost, living a life that isn’t really their own. This was also my experience for many years.
Crisis is actually healthy. It means the snake is shedding its skin. The old ways, the stagnated identities, do not fit anymore. There can be no true transformation without pain. Think of Jesus on the cross, or the Buddha prior to his enlightenment.
Change is inevitable, and the ever-present invitation is to turn towards the pain of change, and to invite this moment in, as if it had been chosen, even if you can’t believe for a moment that it was.
UNDERNEATH THE LABELS
We label everything and everyone – the plants, the animals, the stars, even our own intimate feelings. “Sadness”, we call it. “Anger”. “Fear”. “Boredom”. “Confusion”. These are second-hand words picked up when we were young. But underneath the labels, prior to the abstract language, there is a profoundly alive mystery here, unspeakable, unable to be captured by thought. Without our mind-made descriptions of experience, do we really have any way of knowing what we are experiencing? Take away the label ‘sadness’, and what is alive here? Take away the description ‘anger’, and what is this raw, passionate energy we feel? Stop calling an emotion ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, and what happens? Come back to the raw sensation of life, the present-moment dance of the body. What is this unfiltered, dynamic, raw life energy? Can we touch life before the labels?
This is the river of life, my friends, sacred, intimate, familiar, and we are inseparable from its flow. Every thought, sensation, feeling, image, is infused with the mystery of universes.
THE INESCAPABLE NOW
If you can be In the Now, you can also be Out of the Now. But who would be in or out of a Now? And when? Now?
Even the experience of being out of the Now, if that were possible, would be happening Now. Now cannot be escaped or avoided.