Writings - Jeff Foster - Nonduality / Advaita

Life is a singular movement. Sometimes loud, sometimes violent, sometimes ferocious. Sometimes sweet, sometimes soft, sometimes as gentle as a feather. Sometimes life roars, sometimes it whispers… but it always moves. And yet at the heart of that movement, there is no origin, no point of reference, no centre… no ‘heart’ at all, if truth be told. And truth can never be told.

Words such as these attempt to tell the truth that cannot be told, and yet the words themselves are but another part of that infinite movement, that inexpressible aliveness that fuels all things, moves all things, is all things in their totality. Life is a movement, and its origin is movement. Its origin is itself.

Life has no centre because it has no circumference. There’s nowhere where it ends, nowhere where it begins. It is simply a spontaneous expression of aliveness, happening now, now and now, leaving no trace of itself, projecting nothing into the future, concealing nothing, giving itself totally and completely and exhausting itself in that expression, leaving no residue. It is all things, and yet it is no thing.

Life – or what we call ‘life’, anyway, is totally beyond mind, too alive for mind, too free for mind, too total for it, and that total and complete expression, which we are no way separate from, happens constantly. Life throws itself out of itself again and again to create the illusion of a world, to give us this wonderful dream of waking life. And yet of course, life ‘does’ nothing at all. There are no separate events, people, places, and so nothing separate from anything else has ever been done. From the Big Bang, and before that, there has only been one happening, and it is happening now. No happening separate from any other happening, although the illusion is a good one. And the illusion is what we might call “me”.

I’m standing near the sea. A storm rages. The wind nearly knocks me off my feet. Waves crash onto a jetty. The roar is deafening. Seagulls struggle to fly in the gale.

And yet the wind is not separate from me. The sea, the jetty, the seagulls are not separate from what I am. In fact, I cannot even say that. All I can say is that, presently, life, Oneness, aliveness, Being – call it what you want – appears as the sea, the jetty, the wind, the seagulls, and this body as it stands there in the gale. It is all a present appearance, appearing for no-one. It exists only to be itself, and for no other reason. Nothing exists apart from it, nothing that could ever be known, anyway. This is how the Source appears now. This is the movie playing out presently. This is the dream, and it is total, and it is complete, and it needs nothing else. Life has already accomplished what it set out to do.

I am one with it, I am separate from it, I am something, I am nothing, I see it, it is seen by no-one. All just words. Life needs no more words. Its words are already the crashing of the waves against the beach, the foam building up along the shore, the screech of the seagulls, the deafening roar of the wind blasting my eardrums. Its words are already being spoken, and life doesn’t need anyone to speak for it, especially not me. The words of life are being shouted, screamed. They deafen me. I am annihilated by them.

And not just here, in this storm, but everywhere, all the time. In the quietest moments, and in the loudest moments, life speaks. And the quiet moments and loud moments are both perfect expressions. It’s all One Taste, all the taste of life itself, living itself as it must. “Jeff” is just a relic from the past. “Jeff” is a fossil. Who needs the past? What good did it ever do? Who needs the future? It never arrives anyway. Nothing at all can begin to touch the wonder of this. Of this moment, this present expression of life.

Like newborn babies, we always see it for the first time. The sea roars for the first time. The seagull screeches for the first time. Back inside my room, where it’s warm and cosy, I sip a cup of tea for the first time. Nobody could tell me otherwise.

This needs no defending. It does not need to be proved, to be argued. It is its own defence, it is its own proof. Nobody can argue with the isness. Well, they can actually. And they do. And that’s the misery of a lifetime.

Life is an offering, and it offers itself now, now and now. It offers present sights, sounds, smells and feelings and asks nothing of you. And yet we spend our lives wanting so much more. Well, that is our misery. In the absence of that, there is only this, as there always has been. Only ever what presents itself now. Only what emerges presently from the Source, only what manifests out of the Unknown, you get only that and nothing more.

And right there, it is all released. The burden of a lifetime, gone in the blink of an eye. This “Jeff” character who suffered and suffered, and sought a way out of his suffering, where is he? He’s simply not there. Who is typing these words then? Is Jeff typing these words, you may ask? There is only that question. No answer rises up to meet it, and so the question dies away, dissolving back into the Source.

This awakening, it has nothing at all to do with you. If you think that “you” can get awakened, you’ll be chasing your own tail for the rest of your life. You cannot awaken, because this is already fully awake. Already whole, already complete, and it’s only in the dream of separation that the search appears to have any validity at all. But in the falling away of the seeking, the miracle is revealed. And the miracle is life itself, and life itself has always been the miracle. We just couldn’t see it, because we were too busy trying to be someone, trying to become something, trying to be good, trying to understand, trying to succeed… or even trying not to try.

But in the clear seeing of this miracle, all of that is rendered obsolete. In the seeing that there is only this, in the shockingly simple and simply shocking waking up from the dream of separation, there is a death, and that death, as Jesus said, is the only salvation. You have to lose your life to save it. And so when there is no-one, there isn’t an empty void, a lonely and joyless black space devoid of all qualities… no, no, no. That void is full, it is bursting with life. With the sea roaring, and seagulls screeching, and the wind crashing against your face, and a steaming mug of tea, and… life, damn it, life! The emptiness is fullness, the void is fully alive, the nothingness is life in all its magnificence, and that is the freedom that the so-called ‘individual’ could never, ever find.

And in that, all the concepts in the world dissolve. They are seen to be what they always were: words, just words. And beyond those words, the foam from the crashing waves fascinates me more than anything in the world, and those seagulls are as precious as my very own children, and the wind is simply life caressing me, and there is a fragile beauty here that words could never touch at all. It’s a wordless, bittersweet, tender love affair with life, a life that’s given now, freely, to be seen, just to be seen.

This awakening, this love, this tenderness, this innocence will never be put into words, never communicated, never captured, and yet it is all there is, forever appearing everywhere, always being everything, always rejecting nothing, embracing you – or what you take yourself to be – in every single damn moment.

Life itself is the only miracle. There is no other. The secret of spiritual awakening has always been staring you in the face.

Just life, but nobody living it. Just this, playing itself out spontaneously, of its own accord, in its own time.

And there is no "you" separate from "this". That's the illusion. That's the dream. That's the suffering.

Only nothing - no-thing - arising as everything. Only the absolute paradox of it all. And yet, in life without a centre, there are still faces, places, feelings, ups and downs. Although now the ups are equal to the downs, pain is equal to pleasure, the most excruciating suffering is equal to the greatest joy. Because with the collapse of the individual self comes the ending of all opposites, all opposition, all duality, which is to say that everything now exists in perfect balance (as it always has done). And yet, there is nobody to know that balance, nobody who could name it, nobody who could speak of it, even if they wanted to.

How to use dualistic concepts to describe that which is beyond duality? And anyway, isn’t “beyond duality” just another concept, perhaps the biggest concept of them all?

And of course, the mind will struggle with these dream questions. But the mind has missed the point entirely. The mind is so lost in the dream that it could never hope to see this.

What is being said here has nothing to do with words. Once we get lost in words and concepts and meanings we're so totally, completely, utterly lost. Because this message is about what is presently happening – present sights, sounds and smells. It’s about the utterly obvious present appearance of life, an appearance which appears to nobody, an appearance which dances and swirls and pretends to be solid but actually has no solidity at all, an appearance which cannot be grasped in any way (and the attempt to grasp it would only lead to suffering anyway…)

It’s an appearance which cannot be escaped, cannot be denied, cannot be transcended, because the person who would try and do any of these things in the first place does not even exist. Ther person is an apparition, a ghost, a mirage, a thought. And what power does thought have?

And so this is the end of choice, the end of control, and a plunge into something far more explosive.

This is the absolute freedom which cannot be reached through any sort of effort or non-effort.

This is the end of duality because it is the wide open space, the vastness in which duality appears to arise in the first place.

This is not something a mind could ever hope to grasp. This is not a concept to be understood, not a new belief to be believed.

This is breathing, this is the heart beating, this is an entire world arising out of nothing and falling back into nothing, ceaselessly, playfully, like waves in the ocean, like icy breath on a winter’s day, like the memory of a loved one, long since departed.

This is not a state to be reached; it is not something that some people have and others don’t.

This exquisitely fragile world, this mind-blowingly impermanent, iridescent parade of sights, sounds smells.

How impossible to communicate the absence at the centre of it all, the fact that it has no centre, that it swims in nothingness, arises and dissolves continuously in the barest emptiness.

And in liberation, when the person is not there, it is not an empty void .... not at all!... it is a full-bodied cacophony, a stunning play of dancing, singing, shimmering reflections of refractions of reflections of the original One, an utterly convincing trick of light… and it all happens for no-one, and it is always already released from the need to be anything other than what it is.

Yes, it all appears to no-one, happens for no-one, but it’s not a detached world, no, not at all…. in fact, it’s now all so intimate, in fact it is nothing but Intimacy itself…. because there is simply no “me” separate from “it”…

Only It, only Life in its totality, the One and only, in its infinite, intimate manifestations.

This will never be communicated. It is beyond all that, too great for all that…. and yet too simple for it too.

No wonder "you" cannot see this : This is a freedom that a "person" will never see.

How could a "person" ever accept that everything happens spontaneously, of its own accord, in the absence of the person?

The Tao (or Oneness, or God, or Life, or Spirit, or Emptiness…) has no centre, no mind, no personal volition. It appears as everything, but itself is nothing. Nothing manifesting as a world, as everything there is and is not. And there is only the Tao, which is to say there is no Tao at all.

And even to speak of it, even to think of it, even to do that is to lose it forever.

And yet the thinking and the speaking are fully the Tao; there is nothing that it is not.

It is the no-thing by which everything appears. And it’s not even that, because it’s not an “it” at all.

Yes, only the Tao, only Oneness, only One without a second, appearing as a “world”, endlessly, continuously, without beginning or end.

The “mind” could never see this. How blind it is to all this, and yet how perfectly blind it is, how it couldn’t be otherwise!

This world is a perfect world, perfect in its apparent imperfection, extraordinary in its ordinariness, Divine in its perfectly acceptable and appropriate and inevitable search for “something more”.

In the absence of the person, in the absence of the world “out there”, everything is. And that’s the miracle that will never be spoken of. These words hint at the miracle, but will only ever hint. Pointers will only ever point.

The futility of trying to communicate the incommunicable is at once comical and utterly Divine, as it is. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Everywhere you go, people believing they are separate from each other, arguing, wanting to be right, wanting to know.

How to communicate to them that nobody is speaking? That there is only noise, and nobody doing it?

The silence is always apparently ignored. Because what is silence to a person? What use is it?

No use, of course. To a person, only noise is of any value at all. Hence separation, hence suffering, hence the human condition.

But Forgive them Father, because the silence is All, and All is the Silence. And even the noise arises in the Silence of all Silences, and so there is nothing to forgive, nothing at all.

But how could a person ever see this? A person is nothing but noise, nothing but an attempt to fill the silence, to avoid it, to resist the Nothingness at the heart of all phenomena.

And yet, what the person cannot see is that he has no existence at all outside of the silence. Without the silence, he is nothing. No thing at all. And so the person is really always at war with the ground of existence itself.

And it never ends. Computing, competing, the mind searching for something it can never really have. Until it all ends, that is.

But never mind. Searching is all a separate person can do, because a separate person believes they have lost something. Forgive them Father, they have no choice, no choice at all.

And really there are no “people” in the first place. No people separate from the silence. The mind itself has created “silence and noise”, created them and separated them, separated them and kept them apart, never to be reconciled.

But in the absence of the person, in the space where a person once was, the noise never began, and the silence never ended, and there is no death.

No death, no life, just this, beyond all knowing and all knowledge and all words and concepts, beyond all beyonds.

And nobody here to know all this. Nobody writing it. Pen moves over paper. No volition, no control, no centre.

No idea what the pen will say next. God Himself writes, Spirit writes, the Buddha writes, Life Itself writes, and yet Nobody writes at all.

What freedom in this – a freedom that isn’t really a freedom at all, because there was never any bondage to be free from!

When the person is no more, when the search is undone, when the demand for life to be anything other than what it is collapses, the noise and silence, the freedom and bondage, the Yin and the Yang are all seen to be illusory, simply the mind’s attempt to cut the world up into manageable little pieces, and the truth is revealed: there is only the whole.

And that “When” is now, and there is no other time, and the whole spiritual search will only ever be a cosmic entertainment.

“In the gap between subject and object
lies the entire misery of humankind.”

- J. Krishnamurti

As the story goes (and I can barely remember any of it now) I was walking through the rain on a cold Autumn evening in Oxford. The sky was getting dark; I was wrapped up warm in my new coat. And suddenly and without warning, the search for something more apparently fell away, and with it all separation and loneliness.

And with the death of separation, I was everything that arose: I was the darkening sky, I was the middle aged man walking his golden retriever, I was the little old lady hobbling along in her waterproofs. I was the ducks, the swans, the geese, the funny looking bird with the red streak on its forehead. I was the trees in all their autumnal glory, I was the sludge sticking to my feet, I was my body, all of it, arms and legs and torso and face and hands and feet and neck and hair and genitals, the whole damn lot. I was the raindrops falling on my head (although it was not my head, I did not own it, but it was undeniably there, and so to call it "my head" is as good as anything). I was the splish-splash of water on the ground, I was the water collecting into puddles, I was the water swelling the pond until it looked fit to burst its banks, I was the trees soaked by water, I was my coat soaked by water, I was the water soaking everything, I was everything being soaked, I was the water soaking itself.

And everything that for so long had seemed so ordinary had suddenly become so extraordinary, and I wondered if, in fact, it hadn't been this way all along: that perhaps for my whole life it had been this way, so utterly alive, so clear, so vibrant. Perhaps in my lifelong quest to reach the spectacular and the dramatic, I had missed the ordinary, and with it, and through it, and in it, the utterly extraordinary.

And the utterly extraordinary on this day was awash with rain, and I was not separate from any of it, that is to say, I was not there at all. As the old Zen master had said upon hearing the sound of the bell ringing, "there was no I, and no bell, just the ringing", so it was on this day: there was no "I" experiencing this clarity, there was only the clarity, only the utterly obvious presenting itself in each and every moment.

Of course, I had no way of knowing any of this at the time. At the time, thought was not there to claim any of this as an “experience”. There was just what was happening, but no way of knowing it. The words came later.

And there was an all-pervading feeling that everything was okay with the world, there was an equanimity and a sense of peace which seemed to underlie everything there was; it was as though everything was simply a manifestation of this peace, as if nothing existed apart from peace, in its infinite guises. And I was the peace, and the duck over there was it too, and the wrinkly old lady still waddling along was the peace, and the peace was all around, everything just vibrated with it, this grace, this presence that was utterly unconditional and free, this overwhelming love that seemed to be the very essence of the world, the very reason for it, the Alpha and the Omega of it all. The word "God" seemed to point to it too, and the word "Tao", and "Buddha". This was the self-authenticating experience that all religions seemed to point to in the end. This seemed to be the very essence of faith: death of the self, death of the "little me" with its petty desires and complaints and futile plans, death of everything that separates the individual from God, death of even the idea of God himself ("if you see the Buddha, kill him") and a plunge into Nothingness, the Nothingness that reveals itself as the God beyond God, the Nothingness that all things are in their essence, the Nothingness that gives rise to all form, the Nothingness that is the world itself in all its pain and wonder, the Nothingness that is total Fullness.

And yet this so-called "religious experience" is not really an experience at all, since the one who experiences, the "me", is the very thing which is no more. No, this is something beyond, something prior to, all experience. It is the foundation of all experience, the ground of existence itself, and nobody could ever experience that, even if the world lasted another billion years.

*

That day, there was nobody there, and yet everything was there in its place. Beyond experience or lack of it, there were the ducks flapping their little wings, there were the raindrops trickling down my neck, there were the puddles under my shoes which were now caked in mud, there was the grey sky, there were other bodies, just like mine, splashing through the puddles, some walking their dogs, some alone, some cuddling up to their loved ones, some running frantically to escape the downpour.

And there was a great compassion. Not a sentimental compassion, not a narcissistic compassion, but a compassion that seemed to be part of what it meant to be alive on that day, a compassion which seemed to be the very essence of life, a compassion which seemed to pulsate through all living things, a compassion which said that none of us were separate from each other, that nothing at all was really separate from anything else, that your pain was identical to my pain, that your joy was my joy, not because these were principles we'd read in the Bible or taken on authority from those we held in high esteem, not because these were ideals that we tried to live up to, but because this seemed to be the way of things, this seemed to be the nature of manifestation: that we were all expressions of something infinitely larger than ourselves.

But even the word "ourselves" seemed to imply that we were separate, and therefore this was a compassion which was beyond words, beyond language; indeed this compassion transcended any idea of “compassion”, this compassion arose from the fact that there actually is no separation at all, that separation is an illusion, that in fact we are each other, that I am you, that you are me, that we cannot be ourselves without others, that I cannot be I without you, and you cannot be you without me, not in some wishy-washy lovey-dovey sentimental way, but really, honestly: we need each other, we are bound to each other, we cannot live without each other, we cannot live without everything else. I cannot live without that tree I'm walking under, without the raindrops that have made their way down my back, without the old woman who's managed to waddle a little further down the path (she's being so very careful to avoid the puddles, bless her!), without the pond, without the ducks, without the swans, without my new coat keeping me warm, without the man with the dog who smiles and says “hi” as he walks past.

We are bound to each other, all things are bound to all things, which is to say there are not really any separate "things" at all, there is only Oneness, only the whole, only the Buddha, only Christ, only the Tao, only God himself, and nothing exists apart from anything else.

And so to say that on that day there was no "I" is really to say that there was only God, there was only Christ, there was only the Tao, only Buddha, only Oneness, only Spirit, and Jeff had exploded into it all, Jeff was nowhere to be found, in the sense that he was not separate from everything that arose. Jeff was just a story spun by a storyteller with a vivid imagination, Jeff was missing from the scene and yet infused into it, Jeff was nothing and he was everything, he was present to his own absence and absent to his presence, he was life itself, in its entirety, and yet he, in all truth, had died.

And yes, there were tears. What else is there to do but cry at such a discovery? A discovery which really wasn't a discovery at all, because nothing had been found, since nothing had really ever been lost. This clarity had always been there, I'd just been looking elsewhere my whole life and ignoring the utterly obvious. God had always been right there, in the present moment, in the midst of things, but I'd spent my life seeking Him in the future. The Buddha Mind had been my own mind, always, but I'd spent years trying to attain it. Christ had been crucified and resurrected and was walking in the midst of us, drenching our lives in unconditional love, but for a lifetime I had assumed he was elsewhere, in some other world (or in this world but not in my own life, at least).

No, nothing had been found, because nothing had ever been lost. But perhaps it was the realisation of the utterly obvious that hit me that day, the realisation that there was nothing to realise, that everything I ever wanted was always right there in front of me and always would be, that peace and love and joy were always freely available in each and every moment, that love, pure unconditional love, the love of Jesus, the love of Buddha, the love that passes all understanding was the very ground of all things, the very reason for anything being here in the first place. It was there, always there, always waiting patiently for me to return home.

And there, in the rain, on that day, I knew finally that I was home, and what's more, that I would always be home, that I had always been home, through it all, through all the tears and the pain, through the dark times and the desperate times and all the times I thought I'd never make it, through all those times and more, the Home of all Homes had been there. The possibility of the Kingdom of Heaven was always present, the grace of God was always an open invitation, through thick and thin, through sickness and through health, through all that, world without end....

*

It was a very ordinary walk on a very ordinary, and very wet, Autumn day. And yet, in that ordinariness, the extraordinary revealed itself, shining through the wetness and the darkness and the sludge on the ground, shining so brightly that I was no more, that I dissolved into that brightness and became it.

And yet, that makes it sound way too special. That day, in the rain, nothing really happened at all. It was just a very ordinary walk on a very ordinary day.

I left through the large iron gates, crossed the road and waited for the bus, huddling in the shelter with several others.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed. I had glimpsed something, something deep and profound and in some ways shocking, and yet something that was utterly ordinary and somewhat unsurprising. Yes, it was unsurprising that the very ordinary should turn out to be the only meaning of life, that who I took myself to be should turn out to be just a nice fairy story.

Yes, it was unsurprising, that the divine should be in the utterly ordinary, that God should be one with the world, present in and as each and every thing.

I boarded the bus and as the rain streamed down the dirty windows I smiled to myself. What a gift - to be alive now of all moments, to be in this body of all bodies, to be here, in this place of all places, even though it is all a dream, even though it is all impermanent, even though if we really look, we find nothing but emptiness.