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#3371 - Thursday, December 4, 2008
- Editor: Jerry Katz "
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Jeff Foster is featured, claiming that the nonduality game board and the "men" we move around are mirages. Jeff says there's no specialness about him, but I think that anyone who can speak so emptily AND make you hungry for fish n chips at the same time, is pretty special.
THE NONDUALISTIC
COMMUNICATION:
NOTHING TO GET, NOTHING TO DEFEND
by Jeff Foster - November 2008
“…a sense sublime
of something far more deeply
interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns,
and the round ocean, and the living
air…”
- Wordsworth
This is not a teaching. It’s not
even a communication from one person to another.
It is a sharing, from nobody to
nobody, from Source to Source, of something so intimate, so
present, so damn alive that words cannot even begin to
touch it.
From the moment I started talking about this,
I knew that not a single word I said about it could ever be true.
*
The wonder and the grace of this: nobody can
own it. It cannot be held, cannot be possessed, cannot be grasped
in any way. Although I’ve been writing and talking about
this for a few years now, I have never, ever had the sense that
it has anything to do with me, with the character called Jeff.
Never felt that I was in any way special.
In fact, that’s exactly what fell away:
the specialness of Jeff. Yes, that was the shocking
realisation: this had nothing to do with anything I’d ever
done, or not done. Nothing to do with a separate “me”,
a separate self. Nothing to do with effort or attainment or
adding anything to the seeker.
No, no. The seeker is destroyed, once
and for all.
*
And so of course, there is nothing – and
will never be anything - to defend here. There is no
need to make any claims or promises about “my”
communication of this message (and I’ve never, ever, seen it
as “mine”.) No need to compare and contrast Life
Without A Centre with any other teaching or non-teaching. No need
to condemn teachers who aren’t quite as
‘nondualistic’ or ‘awakened’ as me. (Whatever
the hell any of that means.)
No. This speaks for itself, and doesn’t
need me to defend it. It’s not a teaching; it is simply an
expression of the inexpressible, a putting-into-words of that
which is totally beyond words.
I don’t own it. And even if I
could own it, I wouldn’t want to. It’s too precious.
And with that I think, comes a certain
humility. If there is any “hallmark” of liberation (or
whatever you want to call it) perhaps it’s that. I can only
speak from experience. You see, Jeff is constantly humbled by the
wonder of what is, by the grace of this divine, purposeless,
priceless play. And he knows that his words are always and
forever equal to the barking of a dog or the miaowing of a cat.
They are simply part of the song of being, the divine dance of
nothing and everything which reveals itself in and as
everything and nothing, which sings and shines from the
toothbrush as I brush my teeth in the morning, from the fish and
chips that I munch on the beach, from the cold autumn breeze as
it lovingly caresses my cheek, from the dog shit that I step in
on the way home, ruining my new shoes, for a while, anyway.
Life happens, but there is nobody there to
whom it happens. And when there is nobody there, there is
nobody there who could ever become defensive, possessive or even
smug about their own understanding or expression of this.
There is nobody there who could ever
believe their own bullshit anymore.
Nobody there who could possibly care about
what the world thinks, or doesn’t think, of them.
Yes, nothing to defend – that
goes right to the heart of this message.
*
To the individual, this freedom, this grace,
will always seem out of reach. The moment you have an
individual, you have separation, and the moment you have
separation you have the longing to end that separation, to heal
the divide, to come home. It’s the wave longing to return to
the ocean. And of course on some level the wave knows that it was
never for one moment separate from the ocean - that the sense of
being a wave is merely a temporary contraction of the whole.
The little wave is inherently a seeker, and
he runs around the world like a headless chicken, trying to find
something which of course he never lost in the first place. And
he never lost this because he never had it. He always was
it. The wave was always, always, a perfect expression of that
which cannot be expressed. You – the character, the person,
the individual – were always the divine expression,
expressing itself perfectly, completely, and exhausting itself in
that expression, leaving no trace, no residue.
And the cosmic joke? Even the
individual’s endless and exhausting search to come home
– even that was always the divine expression. It was always
Oneness seeking itself.
Well, of course it was. There is only
Oneness.
*
And so when the search collapses, what goes
along with it is the sense of being an individual separate from
the whole, the sense of being a little wave in a big ocean.
It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s a collapse into
Intimacy. Totally beyond the intellect. Totally beyond words.
But here’s the rub: it’s not
something that you could ever have, or do.
Why?
Because you are looking for this in all the
wrong places, and all your doing is directed towards a future
that will never arrive. You are looking for this within the
world. That is to say, you are looking for it within your world. And
there is no other.
You see, the character and the
character’s world are inseparable. Once you have a
character, you immediately have a world in which that character
functions. A world in which that character lives and breathes and
sees himself. An angry character sees an angry world. A depressed
character sees a depressing world. A spiritual seeker sees a
world full of things to look for, a world full of teachers and
teachings and the hope and promise of salvation.
The seeker only ever sees his own world.
And within that world, the seeker hears about
awakening or liberation or whatever you want to call it. And he
begins to look for it within his world.
Anything is possible within the seeker’s
world. Within the seeker’s world there are a million
different spiritual paths and processes and practices and goals.
A million things to do, a million things on offer. Within the
seeker’s world, you can look for enlightenment, you can wait
for liberation, you can anticipate some sort of energetic
transformation. Within the seeker’s world, you can go to
meetings and hear about future events that might or might not
happen to you. You can believe that “there is no
person” or “there is nothing to get” or that one
day separation will fall away. It’s a world full of belief.
It’s a world full of second-hand concepts passed down by
well meaning people who really believe what they tell you.
But what the word ‘nonduality’
points to has nothing to do with any of that. It allows it,
embraces it fully, but really what we are pointing to has nothing
to do with that whole seeking game. It’s not something that
the seeker could ever find in his world, because what we are
pointing to is the dissolution of the seeker and, along with it,
his world. It’s a falling away of seeker and
world, and a plunge into something much more mysterious, vibrant,
and alive than the second-hand concepts ever promised – and
that’s not something that could be found within the world!
And that plunge, well the moment we talk
about it, we are into the language of seeker and world. But of
course that’s the only language we have. All
teachings function within this realm of seeker and world (taken
together, we could call this the “dream world”). Even
these words, and the words expressed in the meetings, function
within the dream world, and that is why, as I said before, I know
that the moment I speak about this, it’s simply not true.
The moment I speak about this, I’ve made it into something,
something in the dream world, something for the seeker to hold
onto and attempt to understand. I’ve turned it into
something for you to get in the future.
In a sense, if you want to talk about
nonduality you’re doomed from the beginning. That’s
part of the humility too: the seeing that you will never be able
to express this. And that even the idea of a perfect nondualistic
communication (if that was even possible) is still totally and
completely within the dream world.
*
In this dream world, everything is in perfect
balance. A depressed character is met with a depressing world. A
fearful character is met with a terrifying world. A seeker is
always met with teachers who will cater to the seeking, feed the
seeking.
In fact, the teacher needs the student as
much as the student needs the teacher. The student functions in
the teacher’s world in the same way as the teacher functions
in the student’s world. He meets a need. Because of course,
a teacher cannot know himself as a teacher unless he, in some
way, uses the students to create and maintain that
identification. And so he clings to them as tightly as they cling
to him. In the dream world, in your quest to be a person, to
be a somebody rather than a nobody, in your attempt to make your
life work, you always meet your own reflection.
And the teachers promise you so much! They
promise a future event called enlightenment, or awakening, or
liberation, or some sort of shift or change in perception that
you can or cannot obtain.
But in the falling away of the
self-contraction and along with it, the contracted world space in
which all teachers and teachings operate, the grace is revealed,
and it has nothing to do with any sort of future event, or
spiritual experience, or shift in perception, or transformation
of consciousness, or anything else that was promised by the dream
teachers. And it’s shockingly ordinary. It’s drinking a
cup of tea. It’s eating fish and chips. Except now, nobody
drinks the tea, and nobody eats the fish and chips. Drinking tea
just happens. Eating fish and chips just happens. Tea drinks
itself. Fish and chips eat themselves. That’s about as close
as we can get in language.
It’s totally beyond anything you
expected. And it’s not something new that appears -
it’s a revelation of something that was already there,
apparently hidden but really always in plain view. This ordinary
life has always been longing to reveal its secrets. The fish and
chips and the cup of tea (and yes, even the dog shit on the
pavement) were always the Beloved trying to calling us home.
This is not an intellectual realisation. If
it were that simple, it would just be a matter of changing your
thoughts, for example from “this isn’t it” to
“this is it”, or from “I’m not awake” to
“I am awake”. Within the dream world, of course,
changing thoughts can be a wonderful thing. If you’re going
to have a dream, it’s probably better to have a happy dream.
If you’re going to have a dream, why not think positively
instead of negatively! Why not think you’re awake instead of
asleep! Within the dream world, the individual can do a million
different things to their thoughts, and thoughts in turn can
create a million different experiences. But what we’re
talking about here is totally beyond all of that. It cannot be
captured by any thought-created formula. In fact, “there is
no person” and “there is a person” both miss the
point. “There is choice” and “there is no
choice” both miss the point. Within the dream world, these
pairs of opposites arise together and fall away together. But
they cannot take you to where you really want to go: your own
absence.
*
Beyond the opposites of the self-contraction,
this grace, this wonder constantly shines, and in fact it is only
because of this grace that the self-contraction can appear to
operate at all. Being plays every role, even the role of the one
who appears to be ignorant of Being. It’s all Being. That is
the revelation. For no-one.
The person was always imprisoned by their
world, without ever realising it (and then they imagined that
freedom could be found within that world!). In the falling
away of person and world, there is no person to be imprisoned, of
course. There is just what is. Just nothing being everything.
Just this – and even that is saying too much.
All we can really do is try to point back to
this as clearly and as honestly as possible, using words to go
beyond words. And in the dream world the arguments go on:
“My teacher/teaching is better than yours! Teacher X is
completely dualistic, she gives people a spiritual practice,
which means that she still sees separate people! Teacher Y
teaches purely from the intellect! Teacher Z still uses the word
“I", he couldn’t possibly be liberated!” (You
wouldn’t believe how often I hear comments like
this!).
And in the dream world, some of these
arguments may have some validity. But they all completely
miss the point: nobody can teach this. Nobody owns
this freedom. There are no enlightened people, no awakened
people. No person has ever reached liberation. Because there
are no people at all. The person is the mirage.
Nobody owns this freedom. And
that’s the beauty of this, that’s the joy of it: what
we’re talking about is totally free, constantly available,
always and forever offering itself unconditionally. And when this
message is really heard, when the seeking dissolves and the
self-contraction heals, what these words are pointing to are
revealed in absolute clarity, and the my-teaching-or-teacher-is-better-than-yours
game that gets so very serious and tedious is seen to be what it
always was: an intellectual game, a battle of egos, a distraction
from what, for this character anyway, has always been at the very
core this message: unconditional love, and the revelation and
expression of that.
And all the while, beyond the futile attempts
of the character to communicate this message and defend their
communication, this intimacy which is beyond measure and yet
totally so ordinary lies quietly in the background, whispering so
very softly that all is well, and that, of course, there is “nothing
to defend… nothing to defend…”
Jeff Foster’s website is