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#3727 - Friday, November 27, 2009 -
Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
An Extraordinary Absence:
Liberation in the Midst of a Very Ordinary Life
by Jeff Foster
Review by Jerry Katz
Jeff Foster is a young and gifted confessor or
sharer of what is. Jeff's words are full of space. This book is
incredibly effective in getting "you" to see there has
never been a "you." There's only this.
I like the writing styles: Question and answer; confessions of
what is; some writing structured as poems; and a fourth kind of
writing that is set off by its own font, a courier typewriter
style font, that gives a sense of "happening now." This
fourth kind of writing appears throughout the book under the
heading "this"; here's an example:
"Silence. I have no answer for her. This is empty of
questions and answers. I am a child, I know nothing about
nonduality. All I know is car horns, the whiff of aftershaves,
the blowing of noses and aching of feet. This is where I live.
Right here, not in some other dimension. The mouth opens to
speak, even though I have no idea what to say."
An Extraordinary Absence is a book of beauty but it's not pretty.
Jeff talks about pain, including his own extreme physical and
emotional pain. He writes about the spectrum of humanity from
"A little red-faced toddler in blue dungarees" to a man
with terminal cancer:
"He is losing control of his bowels ... I don't tell him
there's no suffering, I don't say `I'm enlightened and you're
not,' I don't even mention nonduality, I just wash his
testicles."
The Foreword by Kriben Pillay and the Introduction by Philip
Pegler are themselves worthwhile documents on nonduality.
Especially Kriben, a writer, observer, researcher, and publisher
of nondualia since the mid-90s, makes strong statements:
"Much of the current nondual scene is ... engaged in layered
deceptions..."
It is essential that nonduality constantly check and undo itself.
If the worldly construction of nonduality -- as it is known in
books, websites, forums, gatherings, conferences, satsangs, all
media -- if it can't stand up to its decimation, what good is it?
Something else I like about this book is the quotations. They
balance the book.
By around page 90 came the insight that I was reading a classic,
even a potential screenplay with Jeff starring and doing the
voiceover.
I also like how Jeff brings in Zen, Advaita, and Christianity.
The emphasis on Christianity and crucifixion convey that Jeff
knows Jesus the man, and resonates with the pain and the utter
humanity exposed in this book, and yields this confession:
"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. ... And in that, all the concepts in the world
dissolve."
Read An Extraordinay Absence and watch how you become comfortable
with wonder.
~ ~ ~
An Extraordinary Absence:
Liberation in the Midst of a Very Ordinary Life
by Jeff Foster
Amazon.com:
Publisher in the U.K:
http://www.non-dualitypress.com/product.aspx?p=d196c94c-b489-46a2-b643-24d09c0fe877
Extracts from
"An Extraordinary Absence: Liberation in the Midst
of a Very Ordinary Life"
from http://lifewithoutacentre.com/2.html
*
This is beyond existence and
non-existence. It’s beyond self and no-self. It’s
beyond subject and object, time and space, past and future. All
those words become redundant when the taste of your cup of tea,
or the tweet-tweet of a bird, or the roar of the traffic becomes
the most fascinating thing in the world.
*
Subject and object arise
together and dissolve together.
And yet, in truth, there is no
subject, and no object.
There is only what’s
happening. And even that is saying too much.
*
What should you do with your
life? It’s always the wrong question. Wait and see what life
does.
“But this will lead to
inaction and passivity!” you say. Well, what I find is that
action happens. It breathes. It moves. It gets out of bed. It
brushes its teeth. It plans, or doesn’t. It talks, or doesn’t.
It travels, or doesn’t. The Mystery has its own way. Fall
madly in love with it all. Or don’t. The Mystery remains a
Mystery either way.
It is the seeker who is
passive.
*
I used to think that it was
very important to have something called a purpose. I spent years
trying to find this purpose. I made myself very miserable in
doing so. Everyone else seemed to have one, but I couldn't find
mine.
How wonderful to see that life
needs no purpose. That its purpose is its purposeless present
appearance. Does music have a purpose? Does a sunset have a
purpose? Does dancing have a purpose? Its purpose is in the
listening, in the seeing, in the dancing. Life is at once
meaningful and meaningless. It’s both and it’s neither.
How wonderful to see that my
purpose – if there is any such thing – is just to be
sitting here, breathing, heart beating, sounds happening. What
awesome freedom in that.
*
Why do we look for God when he
is always staring us in the face? In every sight, sound and
smell. In the trees and flowers and birds, in the roaring of
traffic, in the beating of the heart. In these words and outside
of them. In the white of the paper and the black of the ink. In
the space and in the silence. In the in-between and the unseen as
much as in the visible. In the throb of life and in the peace of
death. In the cry of the baby, and the death rattle of the old
man. In everything, as everything, God sings.
The word ‘universe’
literally means ‘one song’.
*
There could have been nothing.
And yet there appears to be something here. There might have been
a dark, empty void with nobody there to know it. And yet there
appears to be something happening here. There appear to be
sights, sounds, smells, colours, motion. Bodies, trees, flowers,
cars. Wars, cancers, puppies. There could have been nothing, and
yet there is something.
That’s the only miracle.
There’s no need to make one movement away from that. We’re
always seeing the miracle unfolding right before our very eyes.
Do we realise how lucky we are?
*
It’s the shift from
a person sitting on a chair,
to sitting on a chair just
happening.
The shift from a person
walking down the street,
to walking down the street
just happening.
From a person living their
life, to life just happening.
This shift doesn’t
happen in time.
In truth, it’s already
happening.
*
The individual looks around
the world and asks “What is the point of all this? What is
the meaning of life?”
If there’s any point to
this manifestation, it’s in the seeing of it. Everything is
there to be seen.
It’s like waking up from
a dream, and wondering what the point of the dream was. Well,
from within the dream, there could be a million different answers
to that question. A million different meanings, explanations,
theories.
But when you step out of the
dream - and of course, that’s not something that you can do
- what’s seen is that the dream was only ever leading to one
place.
Within the dream of time and
space, it seemed as though A was going to lead to B. In the
waking up, it is seen that A was only ever leading to the waking
up. And so it wasn't really 'leading' anywhere at all, because
outside of the dream there is no time, and so no causation.
Everything in the dream points
to the possibility of liberation.
*
this...
I am talking to a woman. She
is telling me about a passion of hers. Her dream is that one day
she will own and run a small hotel, a bed and breakfast by the
sea. I notice that her eyes begin to well up with tears as she
relates her dream to me. And then I notice that these eyes start
to well up with tears too. It’s like what’s happening
there is being mirrored here. Because there is nothing to get in
the way, what is left here is just a total openness to others,
just an open space which welcomes everything that appears. Her
eyes well up, my eyes well up, what’s the difference?
When there is nobody here,
there is nothing to block ‘you’ out. Because there is
no ‘me’, there is no separate 'you' either. There are
just voices, faces, the welling up of tears, or not. Just what’s
happening. What’s happening fills all space. As that woman
relates her story to me, I become her. I long to own a little bed
and breakfast by the sea. It is my heart’s true desire. I
feel the passion deep within my bones, and the tears come.
I’m watching television.
It’s a game show. A man has just won a large sum of money.
He says he is going to use it to take his family on holiday. They’ve
never been on holiday before. The man laughs and shouts and weeps
with joy. This laughs and shouts and weeps with joy. There is
nothing to separate us. Oh, my family will be so happy when they
find out!
Images of famine on the
television. A young Somalian girl, all skin and bone, with
hollowed out eyes and sticks for arms, gazes into the camera.
There is nothing to block that poor child out. I am the child. I
am gazing at myself. She enters me, and everything heals itself.
I am on the train. A large
bald-headed man starts to shout at me for no reason. I think he
is drunk. He shakes his fists. His face is red with anger. I am
the man. I feel the anger, the violence, and underneath it, the
anxiety, the fear, the contraction that goes along with being a
separate person. I have been this man. I am this man now. He is
myself, coming to meet me on the 12.23 to
And then the woman stops
talking about her bed and breakfast dreams, and the tears are
wiped out. There is no memory of them. Everything is wiped clean,
and it begins again.
The game show ends, and I
change channels on the television, and it’s now a shopping
channel, and the laughter and joy and money and family are wiped
out, and now there is only fascination with item number 176387,
what beautiful colours! It becomes absorbed in the shopping
channel, and the game show vanishes without a trace. The game
show might have happened a million years ago for all I care: this
replaces everything.
The doorbell rings and I walk
away from the image of the starving child. It’s my friend at
the door. The starving child is wiped out, and my friend replaces
her. The beauty of this is that it’s everything and it’s
nothing. It’s no particular thing. One thing replaces
another, and there’s no way of knowing what’s coming
next. Friend replaces dying child, brother replaces friend,
shopkeeper replaces brother, cat replaces shopkeeper. It emerges
out of the Unknown, innocently, playfully, ceaselessly.
I walk away from the angry
man. The anger disappears immediately. It’s like it never
happened. Something else takes its place. And then something
else. And then something else. There’s enough space here for
an entire world. Joy, anger, fear, sadness, laughter, tears.
Everything is welcome here.
I have no way of blocking life
out anymore. Because there is nobody here, there is only raw,
unedited, uncensored, unfiltered experience. And you can’t
even call it an 'experience': there’s nobody here to
experience anything. There’s just this, happening to no-one.
Nobody sheds tears, nobody senses anger, nobody watches
television.
But it’s not an empty
void. It’s a space that’s constantly filled by life. By
the woman who wants the bed and breakfast by the sea, by the
starving child, by my friend at the door. You provide the
solidity that I lack. The story of time and space is dead here,
but you keep it going for me. There’s nobody here, but then
you enter the picture, and suddenly ‘there is nobody here’
is – like any concept – not true.
When you are not, what else is
there but to be all that is?
When the witness collapses into everything that’s witnessed, when awareness collapses into its contents, all that remains is a deep and total fascination with whatever is happening.
An Extraordinary Absence:
Liberation in the Midst of a Very Ordinary Life
by Jeff Foster
Publisher in the U.K:
http://www.non-dualitypress.com/product.aspx?p=d196c94c-b489-46a2-b643-24d09c0fe877