SOPHIA’S OPEN SECRET

There is a locked vault containing everything you’ve ever longed for – all the riches of the universe.

You spend your life trying to open the vault – through struggling, striving, meditating, transcending, guru-worshipping, believing, rejecting, accepting, praying, self-enquiring, yoga-ing, and so on and so forth.

Finally, exhausted, you give up trying to open the vault … and that’s when the vault opens by itself. It was never locked in the first place.

What’s inside the vault? This moment, exactly as it is.

You always knew. The Beloved calls us home in any way she can, and this ‘ordinary’ life is her ingenious invitation.

And the raindrops whisper that the enlightenment we seek is this unspeakable intimacy with the appearance of form, with this ever-changing watercolour scenery of life, its colours forever running into the gutters of emptiness. “Love us”, the raindrops whisper. “That’s all”. And still the raindrops keep falling and I walk on, embraced by a love with no name.

Jeff Foster Falling in love with where you are: a year of prose and poetry on radically opening up to the pain and joy of life Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2013

NB: I have messed around a bit with Jeff Foster’s work, eliding sections from two separate entries and giving the result another title. All the words are his.