Jeff Foster | Contemplative Inquiry

February 14, 2018

YOU ARE WILD NOW

“Sometimes you are walking alone, and it is late, and you are lost once again in the dream of past and future, of yesterdays lost and tomorrows unlived, of choices to be made or not made, of words to be spoken or left unspoken. Yesterday’s enlightenment feels a million miles away, and the spiritual clarity you thought you had has faded into the evening. Now, there is only the sound of footsteps on a cold pavement, the rustling of trees before sleep, the naked glow of orange streetlamps, and a deep melancholy burning inside. You are out of time, out of body, finding your home in neither form nor the formless. Perhaps you are the only one of your species on the planet. Perhaps you do not even exist at all. Perhaps this is the price you pay for awakening, for your commitment to opening your heart to everything, this never-ceasing questioning of everything solid, this abandonment of every single reference point.

“And suddenly you remember: this too is life! For whatever reason, you turn toward your present experience, you hold it again the way a mother holds her newborn baby. You focus on what you have, not what you have lost; what you see, not what you may never see again. Your solitude is sacred, you remember, your doubts are nothing less than holy, the evening breeze on your cheeks is a caress, a kiss, not a block to some imagined future.

“It is okay to feel the way you feel. It is okay to feel a little broken by life. It is okay to touch the depths in yourself. It is okay to forget, and to remember, and to forget. All movements are held in the vastness, as the ground holds the trees, as the sky holds the planet, as the house holds the family, as the story of your life is held in pristine awareness on this night of all nights. Even your disconnection is so damn connected. There is something humbling about never being able to come to a conclusion, something touching in your raw vulnerability to the evening, the way you are moved by everything now, your sensitivity to even the subtlest movement of consciousness, your heart that cannot be closed.

“You vow never to lose your love for these evenings. They have brought you so much.

“Presence is not a destination, friend, it is the ground.

“You are wild now, and unbound.”

Jeff Foster The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2016

Jeff Foster’s website is: http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com

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June 8, 2016

DIRTY LOVE

Jeff Foster on ‘dirty love’ and the place of rawness in lives that we package as ‘spiritual’ – a word that sometimes goes with a certain kind of polish.

“Love is … a living, breathing, real-time reality. The poets and sages were right. …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 way 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 bones 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 within 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?

….

“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.”

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

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May 13, 2016

HUMAN

Some people, having vaguely heard of non-dual traditions, get a notion that they turn us away from our messy human lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are two brief passages by (respectively) a mid-twentieth century and a current non-dual teacher.

BEING AND BECOMING

“To be, to exist with a name and form is painful, yet I love it …. It is the instinct of exploration, the love of the unknown, that brings me into existence. It is in the nature of being to seek adventure in becoming, as it is in the very nature of becoming to seek peace in being.” Nisargadatta Maharaj.

SACRED WORK

Cherish your doubts. They are the seeds of Mystery.

Embrace your sadness. Great joy lies within.

Turn to face your fears. At their core lies peace beyond words.

Celebrate your boredom. It is radically alive.

Hold your grief. Let it break your heart wide open.

Befriend your anger. Know it intimately as the life power that burns suns.

Acknowledge your pain. It is the body’s plea for attention.

All feelings are deeply intelligent. Get out of their way.

Let them do their sacred, universal work.”