WITH

LOVE AND GRATITUDE TO

everybody who made this book possible.
Special thanks to Philip and Wendy Pegler,
Nathan Gill, Scott Kiloby,
Jenny Bergkvist and Mike Larcombe.

THE WONDER OF BEING

First paperback edition published April 2010 by NON-DUALITY PRESS
© Jeff Foster 2010, 2012
© Non-Duality Press 2010, 2012
Cover photograph by Nic Oestreicher
nhoestreicher@googlemail.com
Author photograph by Fleur van der Minne
Jeff Foster has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the
Publishers.
Non-Duality Press | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ United Kingdom

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9563091-8-1

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9563091-8-1
www.non-dualitypress.org
 “Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
In the boredom and pain of it
no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy
and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis
all moments are key moments,
and life itself is grace.”
- Frederick Buechner

“When you realise how perfect everything is
you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”

- The Buddha
AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am not here to teach you how to become an awakened or enlightened person,

how to have spiritual experiences or enter spiritual states. All states and
experiences, even the most blissful ones, come and go. They may be beautiful,
and very pleasurable, but they are time-bound, and so they come and go.

This book is about that which does not come and go. It points to a possibility
that goes beyond your attempts to awaken, your search for enlightenment, and
your experiences of states of bliss, peace, joy, silence, and so on; a possibility
that goes right to the core of who you really are, beyond who you think you are.
It points to the wordless essence beyond the passing forms of this world, an
essence which, in the final analysis, is not separate from the forms that appear.
This is what I feel is the true meaning of the word ‘nonduality’.

It takes no time to be what you already are, but it appears to take time to
recognise what you are not. As long as words are needed, this book meets you in
your dream of individuality, to remind you of something that you’ve always
known.

And when words are no longer needed, well, that’s when the adventure really
begins.

With love from yourself,

Jeff Foster
Brighton, England, March 2010
Contents

COVER IMAGE

TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS

BEYOND WORDS
SHARING THIS

YOUR OWN ABSENCE

STORY OF A NOBODY

THE EVOLUTION OF THIS BOOK

FALLING IN LOVE

POINTING OUT THE OBVIOUS

EFFORTLESS COMING AND GOING

PERFECTLY FREE

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

NON-SEPARATION
NOT SPECIAL
LIFE WITHOUT A CENTRE

ALREADY AWAKE
LIFE AS IT IS

A WALK IN THE RAIN

THE SOURCE
 NOTHING WRONG WITH SILENCE

THE DIVINE PARADOX

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

GOD IN ALL THINGS

THIS MOMENT

THE MYSTERY OF THINGS

COMING HOME

THE END OF THE SEARCH

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

BEYOND SPIRITUALITY

THE SEEKING GAME

JUST A THOUGHT
VICIOUS CIRCLES

A CUP OF TEA

THE BUDDHA IN A CORNER SHOP

LIBERATION IS... PAYING THE GAS BILL

WHO CARES?

WHAT WE REALLY, REALLY WANT

THE MYTH OF CHOICE

THE ELEPHANT
THE FIRE OF NOT KNOWING

LOVE AND DEATH

 ON LOVE AND ALONENESS

INTIMACY

BEYOND THE IMAGE

A DEADLY MESSAGE

PAIN

THE END OF THE STORY

TO LOOK DEATH IN THE FACE

BEYOND NOTHING AND EVERYTHING

THE ROBIN

THE PLAY OF APPEARANCES

SOUND AND FURY

THE PEACE OF GOD

THE DANCE

NIGHT AND DAY

GENESIS

AN EVENING WALK
BEYOND DOUBT

INTO THE SILENCE

SUNRISE

THE BEGINNING
THE SECRET

BACKCOVER
BEYOND WORDS
 “As it is, life has no meaning beyond itself.
It is always at the point of completion and, simultaneously,
as fresh as the morning dew at the dawn of creation.”
- Leo Hartong
R ight at the heart of life, there is a simplicity that is totally beyond words.

Yet the moment we attempt to speak about this simplicity, the moment we
try to put it into words, in a sense we’ve killed it. As the Tao Te Ching has been
reminding us for over two thousand years:

“The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin
of all particular things.”

This is really a book about something that cannot be put into words: the fact that
right at the heart of life, right where you are, right here and right now, a miracle
is happening.

And what is that miracle?

It is the present moment.

It is everything: present sights, sounds and smells, bodily sensations, the heart
beating, breathing...

It is life itself.

It is everything and it is nothing: No thing. Beyond the stories we tell about life,
beyond our concepts, beyond our beliefs and ideas, beyond our ideologies and
complicated philosophies, beyond time and space, there are no separate
‘things’in existence. Beyond the dream of duality, there is no separation
whatsoever. Here is a timeless truth that goes right to the heart of all religions
and spiritual traditions, and ultimately right to the heart of modern science too.
Underneath all the dichotomies that define our lives, there is a single underlying
reality (call it the Tao, call it Buddha Mind, or Advaita, or Brahman, or Life
Itself, or Energy, or call it nothing at all...) and that reality is not separate from
what we are. As the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger so beautifully put it:
 “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and
variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen
(appearances). The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one
perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot
be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical
sciences, for this barrier does not exist.”

Beyond thought, nothing is separate from anything else. Yet out of that
Unnameable Mystery, the words arise, the thoughts appear, the separation does
its little dance, and this is the play of duality within nonduality – and it is
ultimately impossible to speak about.

So you may ask: Why write a book about something that is too present, too
alive, too intimate, and therefore too paradoxical to put into words?

Why try and use dualistic language to communicate that which is beyond
duality?

Why not simply stay silent and be done with it?

This is a very good question!

Well, although words will never capture this simplicity, perhaps they can point
to it.

You see, that’s what all the words in this book really are: pointers. Nothing
more, nothing less. They point back to the Source, to the origin of all things,
which in the final analysis is identical with what you really are, beyond your
mind-made life story, and identical with life itself, as it dances in emptiness.

Appearance and essence are not-two. Further than that we cannot go in words.
Pay too much attention to the pointers, and you’ll end up missing what the
pointers are pointing to. As they say in Zen, if you pay too much attention to the
finger pointing at the moon, you’ll miss that beautiful moon...
Now, I’m sure that any half-decent philosopher would be able to tear many of
the arguments in this book into shreds. He or she might claim that many
statements in this book are illogical, that parts of the book contradict other parts,
that the text flies in the face of rationality and even common sense, that the ideas
presented here are radical or even downright crazy. That is fine. I am not here to
convert anyone to a new way of thinking, to impose a new belief system upon
anyone, or start a new religion. What is being communicated in this book goes
beyond that whole ‘I have the truth and you don’t’ game that we love to play. It
is a possibility that cuts through to the very heart of things.

It goes beyond ‘my religion versus your religion’, ‘my God versus your God’, or
‘my beliefs versus your beliefs’. This possibility goes beyond everything that
apparently separates us.

It reaches beyond ‘I’m a Christian, you’re a Jew’, beyond ‘I’m black, you’re
white’, beyond ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’, beyond even ‘I’m a man, you’re a
woman’. It is far beyond ‘I’m enlightened, you’re unenlightened’, ‘I’m awake
and you’re not’, ‘I get it and you don’t’, ‘I’m non dual but you’re still dual’, or
even ‘I’m here and you’re there’. Beyond all of these dualistic opposites – that’s
where the true freedom lies.

Beyond logic, beyond rationality, beyond thought itself, to the wordless silence
at the heart of things: that is where all the words in this book are pointing.

You will need to leave the logical mind behind if you are to go any further. This
is a journey into aliveness, into life itself, not into the intellect.
SHARING THIS

I do not consider myself to be a teacher. You see, I don’t have anything to give
you. I don’t have anything that you don’t.

I simply don’t have anything to teach, but perhaps, just perhaps, I have
something to share. And if what is being shared in this book is really seen, you’ll
also see that I’m only sharing this with myself, because I am what you are.
Beyond our life stories, there is nothing that could possibly separate us. This is
not a communication from person to person, from separate individual to separate
individual, from teacher to student, but a sharing from life to itself. So
ultimately, it’s not really a ‘sharing’ at all... But here we reach the limits of
language!
Language cannot say what cannot be said. But perhaps language, used in a
certain way, can help point to that which cannot be said.

Now, here’s the good news: you don’t need to understand anything that is being
said here. Beyond the attempt of the mind to understand, and beyond any
confusion that you may experience while reading, there can be a resonance, a
recognition, a knowing that is deeper than any words. A lot of people read my
books and tell me that they don’t understand what is being said, but at the same
time they know it, and they’ve always known it. They don’t understand it, but
they know it more clearly and more directly than they’ve ever known anything.
I’m not here to teach you anything, but perhaps I’m here to remind you of
something that you already know.
This book may challenge your concepts about what ‘spirituality’ is and isn’t. It
will question the idea that there is, in fact, anything in the world separate from
anything else, that there is a ‘seeker’ separate from what is sought, that there is a
‘me’ separate from ‘you’, that enlightenment is not already here, that the
Kingdom of Heaven lies beyond, that Oneness is somewhere ‘out there’.

This book is really about the end of seeking, the end of striving, the end of
suffering, the end of the idea that you are a little person in a big world, somehow
separate from wholeness. It points to a gentle explosion into something far more
powerful, far more joyful, and far simpler than anything we were promised by
the teachings of the world. It points back home.
The end of the spiritual search is an absolutely radical acceptance of what is.
And this acceptance, this seeing through, is not done by you, the individual. This
acceptance is not a doing, not an achievement, not the result of anything. This
acceptance is in the nature of things, as they already are.

Already, everything arises spontaneously, freely, of its own accord.

Already, the universe accepts everything, unconditionally, as it is.

Already, as the Buddha saw so clearly, there is no separate self.

This is the mystery that we’ll be exploring.
YOUR OWN ABSENCE

W e’ve all had at least a taste of it: the falling away of everything. It can
happen anywhere, at any time: during a walk through the park, or while
listening to your favourite piece of music, or perhaps while looking into the eyes
of a loved one. All past and future fall away, all ideas of a future attainment, a
future happiness, a future ‘enlightenment’ simply dissolve into the vast open
space which embraces everything. In that falling away, there is a simplicity, an
intimacy, a freedom without a name. It’s totally beyond words, and yet it’s as
obvious as breathing. It’s a glimpse into what you really are, beyond any story
about what you are.

We’ve all experienced it. We call it ‘love’, but it is so much more than our
concepts about love. Or we call it ‘peace’, but it is really a peace that goes
beyond any ideas we have about peace. It is also ‘beauty’, but it is beauty
without an object. It is ‘freedom’ too, but it is a freedom without anyone there to
own freedom.
To the mind, these moments (although we cannot really call them ‘moments’
because they are beyond time altogether) are without worldly value. To the
mind, in a sense what we are talking about here is nothing. To the mind, what
value does its own absence have? No value. Why? Because there is nobody there
to claim any value!
Of course, what the mind could never see is that nothing is everything. Your
absence is identical with the presence of the world – this is what the word
‘nonduality’ really points to. Again, we must leave words behind.
It is because there is no solid, separate person at the centre of life that life can
appear as it does.

This book is a journey into that absence, an absence which finally reveals itself
to be life in its fullness, a perfect presence. Emptiness is form, as the Buddhist
Heart Sutra reminds us.
At this point the seeking mind says, “That’s all well and good, but what’s in it
for me?”

You see, the mind always wants something more – some new content, some new
idea or belief system, something new to chew on. It hunts around the world,
feeding itself, ingesting second-hand concept after second-hand concept from
books, from teachers, from perceived authorities. The mind is a seeker; it is
always hungry for more. Whether it’s the search for worldly success, or
happiness, or permanent pleasure, or eternal peace, or spiritual enlightenment,
it’s essentially the same movement of thought. A search always implies that
something has been lost, that something here is not quite right, that there is
something lacking in the universe. That is why the search for enlightenment is
essentially no different from the search for worldly success. This is a very hard
pill for the spiritual seeker to swallow!
The lack seems to be infinite. No matter how much you fill the void, there is still
more of it to fill! No wonder we are always left feeling unsatisfied, discontented,
incomplete.

This book will not exacerbate the problem and give food to an already inflated
ego. Like a Zen koan, it will not add any content, provide any new concepts or
beliefs with which the ego could bolster itself. This refusal to provide something
concrete for the mind to chew on can be very frustrating for a seeker looking for
something.

Yes, this is really a book about nothing, but still, sometimes a book about
nothing can be the most helpful thing – especially when the search for something
has only ever led to frustration and bitter disappointment, and taken you away
from what really matters: that is, the present appearance of life, and the wonder
of Being.
STORY OF A NOBODY

I don’t want to dwell on my past, because really it has nothing to do with this
message, and very little to do with this present life. However, some history
(‘his story’) may help to put this book into context.

Do remember, this is just a story, no more or less important than any other story.
Several years ago I embarked on a full-blown spiritual search, fuelled by the
desire to escape the pain and misery of a lifetime. My life had become
unbearable, and I was desperate for a way out. Modern psychology hadn’t
worked for me – it only seemed to deal with surface issues. I didn’t want to ‘fit
in’ or ‘adapt to society’, I wanted to wake up. I didn’t want to be comfortable, I
wanted to be free. And so I turned to the teachings of enlightenment.

For over a year I shut myself off totally from ordinary life. My only goal was to
awaken once and for all, to shed the sense of being a separate person and live as
Oneness. Nothing else had any meaning to me. I became obsessed.

I did not realise then that the desire to escape my pain and misery was the very
thing that was giving life to it. In resisting the present appearance of what I felt
to be suffering, that very suffering was being maintained and strengthened. In
fighting lack, I was creating lack.

That which is resisted is given power. This seems to be a universal law.

Eventually, after months and months of intense meditation and self-enquiry, of
questioning my thoughts and attempting to see through the ego, of mind-blowing
spiritual experiences and states of deep bliss, I finally came to believe that I was
in the state spoken of by the spiritual masters as ‘enlightenment’. I believed that
enlightenment was a state which only a lucky few throughout the ages had ever
reached, and that I, through my efforts, had finally done it.
However, what I didn’t realise then was that the belief that I was enlightened
was ultimately just that: another belief. A truly enlightened person (and I realise
now that there is no such thing) would never for one moment claim to be
enlightened, as the belief ‘I am enlightened, others are not’ is just another way to
separate human beings from each other, another act of violence, another way to
maintain the very ego which is supposed to be ended in enlightenment.
The belief in personal enlightenment is just another way to maintain a strong
sense of self: how very un-enlightened!

I came to see that ‘enlightenment’ is not a state reserved for the lucky few,
attained only by those who have been on the spiritual path for years, and who
have carried out all the relevant practices and rituals. It is instead our natural
condition, available to all of us, all of the time, and so no effort (or lack of it) is
required. Indeed, it is the very effort or non-effort to reach enlightenment which
obscures the enlightenment that is always already present. It is our search for‘
something more’ which seems to obscure the utterly obvious: the present
moment, and everything that arises in it, is all there is.

Don’t believe this? Check – it’s always now. Whatever happens, happens now.
Is there ever a time when you cannot say ‘it is now’? Can anything happen if it is
not happening now? Even memory –the story of a past – is that not just a bundle
of thoughts arising presently? All the seeking, is that not just a bundle of
conditioning – memory and its projections into the future – appearing right now?

It is so obvious: what I was seeking all those years was not something that could
ever be found, because it had never actually been lost. Indeed, it is not really an
‘it’ at all, not a thing amongst other things, but the very condition that allows the
possibility of ‘things’ in the first place.
Enlightenment is where we always already are, and in searching for it, we
apparently lose it. Unfortunately, almost everything we do throughout our lives
is part of this search, because almost everything we do is underpinned by the
belief that our salvation lies in the future, that peace and happiness and freedom
are things that can be attained by us at some future time.

These days, the search for enlightenment, for happiness outside the present
happiness, for any sort of ‘self-improvement’whatsoever, has simply fallen
away. You see, what had gone right to the root of all my seeking and depression
had been the sense that I was a separate person, someone over here who lacked
something, and who was looking for something over there. It was the sense of
being a separate individual that had been at the core of all my worldly suffering.
When that sense turned out to be an illusion, an assumption and nothing more,
when it was seen in utter clarity that there is only life, and nobody here separate
from life, then the search crumbled to the ground – and something extraordinary
was revealed right where I was standing. It had nothing to do with ‘somebody
becoming enlightened’; it had nothing to do with awakened people, with
transformations of consciousness or energetic shifts or special spiritual
experiences of any kind. It was in fact something so extraordinarily simple that I
had overlooked for my entire life.

What is left? Is it still possible to live in this world when the desire for
something beyond the ordinary has dissolved?
This book attempts to express this wordless seeing, which belongs to nobody
and therefore is totally free.
THE EVOLUTION OF THIS BOOK

T his book began its life as two separate books (how ironic!) called Life
Without A Centre and Beyond Awakening. Both books had been compiled
from writings made in the years following what some might call ‘awakening
from the dream of separation’. The books emerged from the clear seeing that I
was totally free.

Since then, although the essential seeing has not changed – it is always present,
it is life itself, how could it change? – the way in which I express this message
has evolved substantially. The expression has become more balanced, more
inclusive. I have become more aware of how certain words can be interpreted
and, more importantly, mis-interpreted, by a spiritual seeker.
And so for this combined and revised edition, I went back to the original essays,
adding and subtracting words, sentences, paragraphs and sometimes whole
pages, in order to improve the clarity of the writing and bring the expression
right up to date, while retaining the essence of the original ‘outpourings’.

Nearly five years on from the first essay I ever wrote (which appears in this book
as ‘The Buddha in a Corner Shop’), this book appears in your hands! What a
privilege it is to be able to share The Wonder of Being with you now, a book
which emerged from the very depths of Being, from a place so intimate I never
thought I’d be able to communicate it to anyone. Life obviously had other plans.
What a mysterious universe this is...

*
Originally, the seeing was dramatic. These days, the drama of it all has died
down, but it still goes on: gently, sweetly, lovingly, innocently, always there in
the background, whispering so very softly that everything is okay, everything is
always okay.
What a perfect play it has been, and still is: the seeking, the suffering, the drama
of it all, and the falling away, the collapse into presence, into the clarity that
reveals itself in and as the utterly ordinary things of life.
And none of this has anything to do with Jeff Foster. Oh yes, that’s the grand
cosmic joke here: it has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with – well,
everything. This is about life expressing itself, not the experiences or beliefs of
an individual called Jeff Foster. Jeff is a part of this, yes, but ultimately he is
only a story appearing in life, no more nor less important than any other story.
And that is the freedom...
FALLING IN LOVE

T his is all there is – what a deadly message for the seeker!

I would totally understand if you were to take one look at this book and walk
away. I would have done the same at one time. As a very serious and very
intense spiritual seeker, I wouldn’t have been able to hear that my seeking was
the very cause of the sense of lack that I was trying to escape.

Who am I without my seeking?

Is there really anything other than the present appearance of everything?

These are the questions that threaten to undermine the seeker at its very
foundations.

Years ago, my heart was set on a future liberation. The seeing that liberation is
always here and now would have destroyed my seeking on the spot, and
dissolved my identity as a seeker, which was all I had left at the time.

One day you pick up this book and it means nothing to you. The next day, it
resonates. That is the mystery of this, and nobody understands it. Nobody can
tell you when that resonance will happen. Perhaps the seeking needs to fail on
some level before you become open to a possibility that goes beyond seeking.
But no matter: there is a perfect unfolding to all of this, and everything happens
exactly when it needs to, and I don’t ever want to force anyone to listen to what I
have to say unless there is an openness there. The need to convert anyone would
only stem from my own fear, anyway.
You see, everything exists in perfect harmony with everything else, and that
includes the whole spiritual search, the endless seeking of the mind, and perhaps,
finally, the falling away of that seeking, and an effortless resting with what is.
You cannot know what an orange tastes like until you taste an orange. You
cannot eat a meal by studying the menu. This book is not about an intellectual
understanding, but a plunge into an intimacy with everything.
That is true intimacy: intimacy with everything. You see, true freedom is not
about getting rid of anything. It is about falling in love with everything. That
falling in love is also the falling away of the seeker, the falling away of
everything that separates you from life as it is.

As a spiritual seeker, I wanted more than anything to get rid of Jeff, the
individual, the seeker. I saw so clearly that Jeff was the only thing standing
between me and freedom. Jeff and all his problems, Jeff and his difficult life – I
thought that I needed to get rid of this in order to be free. But what I couldn’t see
back then was that the one who was trying to get rid of Jeff, was Jeff. Vicious
circle upon vicious circle. No wonder the seeking ended in despair. I was trying
to get rid of something that wasn’t actually there.

Of course, it was never about getting rid of Jeff. It was always about falling in
love with Jeff, and through him, everything. That is true freedom: a freedom that
denies nothing. Oneness is not about getting rid of the individual, as we are told
so often by spiritual teachers. Why would Oneness reject any part of itself?
Oneness is everything and therefore includes everything. The individual, the
seeker, even that is included in the radical embrace that you are. Even the seeker
is just Oneness dressed up as a seeker, looking for itself...

I’m not even telling you to stop seeking, because it wasn’t you that started
seeking. Seeing through the seeking is enough. And the seeing through of the
seeking is the ending of it. Falling in love is the falling-away. Seeing life for
what it is, is love. Not the love of the mind (possession, expectation, desire), but
a love with no name that has always been calling you back to itself.

Love is the death of the seeker, the death of two. As Jesus said, “You have to
lose your life to save it”.
If you are ready to open your eyes and look afresh at life, if you are willing to
leave behind all of your concepts and see with the eyes of a child, who knows
what the words in this book may evoke?
POINTING OUT THE OBVIOUS
 “You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

–Franz Kafka
R ight now...

Is breathing happening?

Are sounds appearing?

Are thoughts coming and going?

Are feelings in the body happening?

Could it be that you are already awake?

Could it be that you were never actually asleep?

This is all there is.

What’s happening is all there is.

Pretty obvious, right?

Yet you believe that you are an entity, a ‘person’ somehow separate from life.
An individual who experiences life. Someone to whom life happens. A ‘me’ at
the centre of everything.

But is there really anyone here experiencing life, or is there just life happening?
Is there somebody there pulling the strings, somebody in control? Somebody
seeing, hearing, tasting and touching? Or are seeing, hearing, tasting and
touching just happening by themselves?
Is there a dancer doing the dance, or is there only the dance?

Does life have a centre, or might that have been a dream?

Have you ever stopped to look? Really look?
EFFORTLESS COMING AND GOING

N otice: sounds come and go, effortlessly. There’s nothing you need to do, or
give up doing, for this to be. Sounds simply happen. They appear here. Right
here, where you are. They arise spontaneously in this aliveness.

Have you ever heard a sound that wasn’t right here, where you are?
Have you ever heard a sound that wasn’t a present sound?

Notice: feelings in the body happen. Perhaps a tightness in the chest. Perhaps a
rumbling in the stomach. Sensations appear and disappear. They arise and fall
away, continually.

Right here and right now, an entire world appears, a whole universe of present
sights, sounds and smells, thoughts, sensations in the body...
And there is something here that gently and effortlessly notices all of that.

Don’t try and think about any of this. Thinking won’t get you here.

Is there not a sense of a presence that sits ‘behind’ everything, watching

everything?

Is there not something here that is effortlessly aware of sounds coming and
going, of feelings in the body coming and going?
Something that is not really a ‘something’ at all, because it is not part of that
which comes and goes?
Could that ‘something’ be the no-thing that allows everything to be?

Has it not always been there? Right from the beginning?

PERFECTLY FREE

L ook again: thoughts come and go. See how they arise, linger a while, and
pass. (If you have ever meditated, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

There is something here that watches silently as all thoughts come and go. All
the thoughts in the world come and go in this: this presence, this awareness, this
consciousness, this being. (Call it whatever you want to –it’s not an ‘it’ anyway.)

Thoughts come and go, and what becomes clear is that there is something here
that is already free from all thoughts.

Something here is already liberated from the entire story that thought has
constructed about ‘me and my life’.

Something here is already free from ‘me and my problems’, ‘me and my
spiritual seeking’, ‘me and my difficulties’, ‘me and my successes and failures’.

There is something here that is already free from past and future. Something here
that is already free from ‘you’.

‘You’ are just a bundle of stories, arising presently. What you really are cannot
be touched by any of those stories.

Notice:
Sounds come and go. Clouds in the sky come and go. Cars and trees and people
come and go. Smells and tastes come and go. Feelings in the body come and go.
Thoughts come and go. Pain comes and goes. The body itself comes and goes.
An entire world comes and goes, an entire lifetime, yet there is something here
that is not touched by any of that coming and going. There is something here that
never enters into the stream of coming and going, cause and effect, time and
space. There is something here that is already totally, radically free from all
duality.
There is a freedom here that does not come and go. Could this freedom be
identical with what you are?
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

I s there really an inside and an outside? Or is that just another thought,

another concept that comes and goes?

Notice: sounds in the room come and go. Bodily feelings come and go. Thoughts
come and go. None of these are ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. They are just happenings.
‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are just more labels that appear. ‘Inside and outside’ is just
another story that comes and goes in this awareness. Just another happening.
Prior to the story of ‘inside and outside’ can anything really be inside or
outside?

That bird singing. Is it happening inside of you, or outside of you? Is there really
any division there, or is that just another creation of thought?

Come back to the bird singing. Is there really an inside and outside, or is there
just the bird singing? Going on present evidence, what is more true? That you (a
separate person) hear a bird? Or that birdsong just appears here?

Is there even a ‘bird’ that’s outside of you, or is there just the singing? Without
the concept ‘bird’, how would you know that it was a bird singing?

Without the concepts (assumptions), you hear that ineffable birdsong for the
very first time, and you recognise that it is not separate from what you are.
Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet!
NON-SEPARATION

E verything seems to arise within presence, within awareness, within

consciousness, within being; we can give it a million different names, but
should we really call it anything at all? Should we even speak about it? Doesn’t
speaking about it suggest that it is an ‘it’, something (some thing) separate from
everything else?

How can we speak about it when it’s not an ‘it’ at all?

Again, I ask: should we even speak about it?

Drop the words for a moment, and notice: you have no way of separating
yourself from what you are seeing, touching, hearing. Presence-awareness-
consciousness-being (let’s call it ‘aliveness’) seems to mix and mingle with
everything that you see, hear, touch, taste. So much so that it seems to be
identical with everything that arises.

You see, this aliveness is not separate from the sounds in the room, from the
feelings in the body, from the thoughts that arise and fall away. In fact, aliveness
is the sounds, aliveness is the feelings, aliveness is the thoughts that arise.
Aliveness is the ground and substance of all things, and everything is ‘made’ of
it: the one who hears the sounds as much as the sounds themselves. You are
made of the same substance as everything that you see, feel, smell, taste, and
touch. What we call ‘experience’ is really a love affair with everything that
arises...

Can you find anything – anything at all – that separates you from the sound of
that bird singing? From that feeling in the stomach? From these presently-arising
thoughts?

In the final analysis, you have no way of separating yourself from life.
So, who are you? Are you the sounds in the room? Well no, you might say: you
are aware of sounds, so you are not those sounds. Are you feelings in the body?
No, they arise and fall away, and there is something here that does not fall away
when they fall away. Are you any of the thoughts that arise? No, you are aware
of them, so you are not them. They come and go. Everything does.
There seems to be something here that is already free from the world of passing
forms. There seems to be something here that remains when everything else has
come and gone. A ‘peace that passes all understanding’. An openness that is
already open and never closed up. A gentle seeing that welcomes everything as it
is born and dies.

So you are not sounds, smells, thoughts, feelings. But it would be equally true to
say that you are those sounds, smells, thoughts and feelings.

Non-duality does not just mean ‘not duality’. It also includes apparent duality. It
is not duality, but it is also duality, because it is everything.

You are everything that arises. And, at the same time, you are nothing, no-thing,
because you are the wide open space that holds everything. You are everything,
but because you are aware of everything, you cannot be any of the things of
which you are aware. Nothing, everything. Everything, nothing.

Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet!

What about that bird singing over there? You are not that, because you are aware
of that. But at the same time, you have no way of separating yourself from that.
At the same time, you are that.

The bird sings, and you are the bird singing. The bird sings, and that is you. How
intimate this is!

Notice, even these are just more thoughts that arise. I am nothing, I am
everything. I am nobody. I am somebody. Self, no self. Me, not me. Just thoughts.
What are these thoughts trying to capture?

Forget the words. Going on present evidence, what is clear?

Is it not clear that you are no-thing, that you are the empty space, the vast
openness in which an entire cosmos arises? Yet because that spaciousness can in
no way be separated from everything that arises, is it not clear that you are
everything too?
Don’t believe me. I don’t want you to believe me. Come back to what’s actually
happening, right now.

Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet!

A bird sings. Aliveness dresses up as a bird singing, and as the one who hears
the bird singing.
“Upon hearing the sound of the bell ringing,” the Zen master said, “there was no
I, and no bell, just the ringing.”

No bird, no I, just the singing.

And perhaps not even that.

NOT SPECIAL

N otice that what we are pointing to is very ordinary and everyday. Nothing
special. Just sounds, thoughts, feelings happening, as they happen. Just life
happening, as it is happening. What is, as it is. A bird sings, a dog barks, a car
beeps its horn. Just that, and nothing more.

Do you believe that there is an event called ‘awakening’ that will suddenly
transform everything? An experience called ‘enlightenment’ that will come
along and solve all of your problems? A ‘transformation of consciousness’ or
‘energetic shift’ that will strike you if you’re lucky enough or dedicated enough?
A ‘falling away of the I’ that will happen one day, if you just wait long enough,
attend enough spiritual meetings or read enough spiritual books?
Who told you that? Why did you believe them? Didn’t that just lead to feelings
of inferiority? To the sense that you weren’t good enough? To exhaustion? To a
sense of lack? Toa further not-seeing of life? To more seeking?

Notice that all of these ‘spiritual’ ideas, all of the ‘carrots’ dangled by gurus in
front of hungry spiritual seekers throughout the ages, are just thoughts, arising in
this ever-present aliveness. All beliefs are just present thoughts arising now. All
ideas about a future ‘transformation’ are just thoughts arising now. The beliefs
and concepts about awakening, about spirituality, nonduality, Advaita,
enlightenment – all of these arise and fall away in what you are, which cannot be
touched by any belief.

You see, there is something here that is already awake, and that has no need for
any ‘future event’ to be so. This aliveness is what you already are. You are not
asleep, you are awake! And this aliveness is not separate from every thing. It is
not separate from the world. You could go so far as to say that this aliveness is
the world in its entirety. “You are the world, and the world is you”, as
Krishnamurti said.
There is only now (and of course even ‘now’ is just another idea). So who cares
if you were ‘awakened’ yesterday? Who cares if you’ll be ‘awakened’
tomorrow?
If there is any awakening, it is here and now. If there is any awakening, it is this.

This is life, awake to itself.

You are the awakening. You are life seeing itself. Meeting itself in a million
different forms, and delighting in that.
LIFE WITHOUT A CENTRE

N otice, there is nothing to awaken from. And nobody there who could do that
awakening. The person who would awaken, or not, is just a thought-story,
arising here. The person and all of his seeking, all of his suffering, all of his
problems, is just a huge bundle of thoughts arising in this ever-present aliveness,
an aliveness which is already fully awake to itself.

That is why, ultimately, nobody ‘notices’ this. There is nobody there who ‘sees’
this. Nobody who is awakened, nobody who is enlightened. Nobody there who
thinks, breathes, hears, smells. Everything just happens but there is nobody there
doing any of it. Ultimately, this life has no centre. There is only life happening,
but to no-one.
The person who thinks that he owns life, the person who thinks that he has
‘attained enlightenment’, the person who believes that he ‘gets it’ and you don’t,
the person who claims to have ‘transcended’ the ego, the person who sees
himself as different from you in any way – this person is a mirage.

The thought ‘I see’ cannot see anything. The thought ‘I hear’ cannot hear a
thing. The individual is only an apparent individual – that is, the individual is
just a play of appearances, a dance of thought, a bunch of stories about an
imagined past and a projected future arising in, and as, aliveness.
And yet this is not about rejecting those stories. This is not about rejecting the
apparent individual. Notice that nothing could ever be rejected in this aliveness,
because this aliveness is everything that arises. Notice that any rejection would
just be something else happening in this aliveness. Rejection would be aliveness
dressed up as rejection!

Even the appearance of the individual is welcomed here.

ALREADY AWAKE

T his is already awake. This is already enlightened. Can you see how
enlightenment has nothing to do with a separate person becoming something?
Can you see how enlightenment does not exist outside of a thought story about
it?

Enlightenment. Literally: to en-lighten, to shine light upon. Notice that

everything is already enlightened, because the light of awareness is already
shining upon everything, allowing everything to be. Allowing everything to arise
and dissolve exactly when it does, and not a moment before.
Breathing happening. Heart beating. Hunger in the belly. Cars beeping their
horns.

There is a perfection here that could never be reached by a seeking mind. It is

perfection because in this moment life couldn’t be anything other than what it is.
This is a perfection that is not at war with imperfection. It is not at war with
traffic jams, with bodily infirmity, with natural disasters, or with anything that
appears, because it is everything that appears.

Only thought would say “This should or could be otherwise”. Beyond that story,
life is as it is – and it is enough.

I am describing the state you are already in. And there is no other state. Or if
there is, it is something that comes and goes in this. All ‘experiences’, all
‘states’, all ‘events’ arise and dissolve in this. This is the stateless state, if you
will. The event-less event. The eternal experience.
I am describing what you already are.

I am describing what is already the case.

This is not about an intellectual understanding, because all the intellectual
understanding in the world is just something else that comes and goes in this.
The truth cannot be told, but whether or not it can be told, this is.
In other words, this aliveness was never born and will never die. And it is what
you are. You are already free.
LIFE AS IT IS

A nd so what does all of that mean? To where is it all pointing? Where does it
leave us?

Here, right here. Radically so:

Breathing happening.

The heart beating.

A bird singing.
Feelings in the body happening.

The refrigerator buzzing.

Right here, right now, the miracle shines.

This is the only miracle: that anything is happening at all.

This is the awakening: here and now.

This is the grace: drinking a cup of tea. Watching the sunset. Chatting with a
friend. Ordinary life, as it is. Ordinary awareness, as it is. Aliveness dances in
and as everything. It is aliveness drinking a cup of tea, or watching a sunset. The
tea is aliveness playing at being tea, and the sunset is aliveness playing at being a
sunset. The seeker running around the world looking for aliveness is really
aliveness dressed up... as a seeker running around the world looking for
aliveness!
In everything, as everything, life dances.

You spent a lifetime looking for what was always right under your nose.
No matter. That ‘lifetime’ is just a thought arising now.

Good to notice.
A WALK IN THE RAIN
“In the gap between subject and object
lies the entire misery of humankind.”

- J. Krishnamurti
I was walking through the rain on a cold Autumn evening in Oxford, wrapped
up warm in my new coat. It was getting dark, but there were still a few people
about.

Then suddenly and without warning, the search for something more apparently
fell away, and with it all separation and loneliness. With the death of separation,
I was everything that arose: I was the darkening sky, I was the middle-aged man
walking his dog, 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 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.

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. Perhaps in my spiritual seeking, in my desperate search for
enlightenment, for awakening, for some sort of transformation of consciousness
or energetic shift, I had missed the miracle that is life itself. I had missed the
ordinary, and in it, the utterly extraordinary.

And the utterly extraordinary on that 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”, and 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.

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 in existence; it was as though everything was simply a manifestation
of this peace, as if nothing existed apart from this peace, in its infinite guises. I
was the peace, and the duck over there was it too, and the wrinkly old lady still
hobbling 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”, as they say in Zen) 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.

Yet this so-called experience is not really an experience a tall, 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.

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; it was 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, and that nothing was
separate from anything else. It said 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, but because this was
simply the way of things, this was the nature of manifestation: we were all
expressions of something infinitely larger than ourselves.

Even the word ‘ourselves’ seemed to imply that we were separate (separate from
other ‘selves’) and so this was a compassion which was totally beyond words,
beyond language; indeed this compassion transcended any idea or belief about‘
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, truly: 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 hobble 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.

Compassion – beyond the concept ‘compassion’ – seems to be built into the very
fabric of the universe.

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, and nothing exists apart from anything else. To say that on that day there
was no ‘I’ is really to say that there was only Oneness, and Jeff had exploded
into it all. 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.
Yes, there were tears. What else is there to do but cry at such a discovery? A
discovery which really wasn’t a discovery a tall, because nothing had been
found, since nothing had 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 that he was elsewhere.

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 the Buddha, the love that passes
all understanding had always been there, waiting patiently for me to come 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 all the seeking, 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 Kingdom of Heaven had always been present, the
grace of God had always been an open invitation.

In the following weeks and months, there were other times like this, when Jeff
melted away and with him all separation and isolation; there were times when
tears flowed at the awesomeness of this thing we call life, at the fact that there
are ‘things’ at all; there were times when there was a love so fierce that the heart
nearly burst open, and there were times when there was simply nothing: no
existence, no world, no manifestation at all.

These times were attached to and given importance. They were labelled
‘spiritual experiences’ or ‘awakenings’ and there was a great excitement.
These days, all the drama has faded away. There is just the living of an ordinary
life. Whether ‘Jeff’ is there or not is of no importance. I can’t even say ‘I’m not
here’ or ‘Jeffdoes not exist’ because that would just be another thought, another
identity, and this is the fire that burns up all identity, leaving you as a total
mystery to yourself.

Yes, the whole thing has collapsed back into a very ordinary life. But through it
all, there is a sense of equanimity, an ‘okayness’ with everything that arises, a
deep, unshakeable certainty that everything is happening exactly as it should,
and this includes the pain as well as the pleasure, the sadness as well as the joy.

Perhaps what has been seen is this: whatever we take ourselves to be, whatever
character has been assigned to us in the great play of life, this character arises
out of something infinitely larger than itself. This character cannot sustain itself
by itself: it has no foundations (as the great existentialist philosophers have
seen). No, a greater power is at work, an infinitely greater power. Call it God,
call it the Tao, call it by a thousand different names, it is That which gives rise to
all things, it is That without which there are no things at all. It is not something
that can be reached through thinking, as it gives rise to thinking. It is not
something that can be found at the end of a long search, for it is the very thing
that allows seeking in the first place. In fact, it is not something that can be
spoken of, as it is that in which speech arises.

And what is it?

It is this moment, and everything that happens in it.

*
All sounds are present sounds, all feelings are present feelings, all thoughts are
present thoughts.
This moment is the only place where all things arise, indeed nothing can arise if
it does not arise now. Any idea of yourself, if it arises, must arise now.
In this moment, you (what you take yourself to be) only exist as thought. Which
is to say, right now, in this moment, ‘you’ do not really exist at all. This is
exactly what was seen – by no-one – on that rainy day: the individual is only an
apparent individual, the individual is just a body of thought, arising in the
present moment. The individual does not ‘exist’ as this tree exists, or this flower
exists. It could never have that solidity, that certainty, that definite shape and
form. We are without foundation, we swim in a sea of nothingness. As Jean-Paul
Sartre would say, we are always fleeing ourselves, always grasping desperately
at what we call ‘self’ but ending up with a handful of nothing.

Somewhere, deep down, we know that we are simply ‘castles in the air’, that we
have no greater reality than a thought-story. So we try desperately to build
foundations, to grow roots, to anchor ourselves, and we begin to cling to things,
to attach ourselves to jobs, to other people, to ideas and ideals and ideologies,
hoping desperately that these things will save us, that they will provide the
foundation that we lack in ourselves. We cling desperately to beliefs, to idols, to
mind-made, man-made philosophies and religions, but all beliefs exist in the
shadow of doubt: underneath it all, we are terrified that what we cling to will
dissolve. As Buddhists have always known, and as we all know deep down, all
forms are impermanent. Thus we cling ever more tightly, and the vicious circle
goes on, round and round, until death.

What was seen on that rainy day cuts through all of these feeble attempts to
anchor ourselves. What was seen is the secret that is not really a secret at all.
What was seen is that we are always already anchored in something far beyond
ourselves. We are always already anchored in the present moment, in the divine,
in Oneness, and yet in virtually everything we do is implicit the idea that we are
not. Everything we do to become more present, everything we do to get closer to
enlightenment – these are the very things that magnify our alienation from the
Source. The secret is that what we are so desperately seeking is always right in
front of us. The divine is already present in the utterly ordinary things of life.

God is always with us. And that is not something that we can achieve; it is
something that already is.

It was a very ordinary walk on a very ordinary, and very wet, Autumn day. 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, this description 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.

‘Something happened to me’ implies time. It implies a somebody who

experienced something. It implies a ‘me’ separate from a ‘world’. That is exactly
the illusion that was seen through, and so how could I ever call this an ‘event’ or
an ‘experience’? In the telling of it, it sounds like ‘something happened to Jeff’,
because language is inherently dualistic. Once we start to write and talk about
this, we’re always back into the world of time and space...

Now here’s the part that’s impossible to communicate: nothing happened to Jeff.
All that apparently happened was a very simple seeing-through of illusion. It
wasn’t a superhuman feat. It was something very ordinary, very simple.

The seeing had always been there.

It is there right now.

It is here right now.

It is reading these words...

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
deep and profound and in some ways shocking, and yet 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 no more than a 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, in this 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.
But still, out of infinite possibilities, you are here, and it is now. It didn’t have to
be this way, but it is. It won’t be this way forever, but it is now.
This is not the story of ‘Jeff’s awakening’ although undoubtedly that story will
arise. Yes, the story ‘Jeff is awakened’ is a good story: it sets up ‘awakening’ as
something to get; something that can be found, given time; something that some
individuals have apparently ‘attained’. What delusion! There is only ever this,
that which is presently arising, and no fictional character (and this includes any
so-called ‘awakened’ fictional character) could ever be anything other than a
good story, arising now.

There’s no such thing as an awakened person – it’s the person (awakened or

not) that is seen through!
This is the only miracle: that you are here (whoever or whatever you are) and it
is now. It doesn’t take a walk in the rain to see this, not at all. In fact there are
no requirements whatsoever. You don’t need to be anyone or anywhere else.
You can start from exactly where you are. Indeed, that’s the only place you ever
start. Here and now.

In actual fact, ‘you’ cannot start at all. There is no path that could ever take you
to where you already are, and even if there were, the person who would follow
that path has no more reality than a presently arising story.

You are already Home.

THE SOURCE
 “Oneness is like the clear blue sky.
Everything arises, unfolds, and subsides
within its all-compassionate love.
Everything is an aspect of Oneness,
and our quest to know this comes from Oneness.”
- Abhinavagupta
NOTHING WRONG WITH SILENCE

T his is the unnameable mystery – yet we give it a name.

Having named the unnameable mystery a thousand times over, and taken
those names to be the reality, we then live according to that reality, forgetting
that the names were arbitrary, and a product of the mind.
Then the names torture us. We are caught between the polarities, imprisoned by
the dualistic opposites: good and evil, love and hate, right and wrong, rich and
poor, ugly and beautiful, sacred and profane. This dualistic prison is of our own
making, although it’s not really a prison at all, because it doesn’t exist outside of
thought.

We spend our lives trying to escape a prison that isn’t really there.

The mind is interested only in the opposites. It is not interested in the mystery,
because the mystery cannot be an object of knowledge. Indeed, it is that from
which objects of knowledge arise; it is the Source, the fertile void which gives
birth to all life. Without it there is nothing.

Call it the Tao, call it God, call it spirit, call it consciousness, call it life, call it
nothing at all or even deny its existence; even the denial of it is simply it denying
itself. No proof is needed for it. Why? Because this moment is. You are here. It
is now. That, and just that, is the ultimate reality. There is no need for belief.
You don’t need to believe in something if that something is staring you in the
face.
When this is seen, how quiet everything becomes! All mental noise dies away,
and is recognised for what it is: a false reality, an illusion, nothing more.

When the prison is seen through, so is the prisoner.

Then you are no longer a person: not a man, not a woman, not English, not
American, black, white, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, atheist, rich or poor, good or
bad, happy or sad. You are not any of these things. You are not this, not that, not
any object of consciousness. You are not the body, not the mind. Those feet are
not yours, those hands, those legs. That face doesn’t belong to you. That head is
there, but you do not own it. No eyes, no tongue, no nose, no throat, no heart. No
form. Before you are all of these things, you are. You are consciousness,
awareness, an open space, a vastness in which the world is allowed to arise.
You are life itself, not an individual cut off from the whole. You are one with all
things, and all things are manifestations of what you are. The illusion of
individuality arises, yes, but it is seen that this too is a manifestation of the
divine, and you are not doing it. It is not personal. And the manifestation need
not be denied. No self-denial is necessary. Oneness is everything and includes
everything, even the appearance of the separate individual, and you cannot get
rid of an appearance! Who would get rid of an appearance? Another appearance?
Remember, what you deny, you affirm. What you reject you give life to.

The apparent individual arises. Let it be. It is an illusion, after all, a construction
of thought. You are the openness in which the construction arises. This is not
clever wordplay but the actuality of things. If you wish, you can look for
yourself right now. Meditate on it. Come back to present awareness (and this is
true meditation). Is there anything solid there called ‘self’? Is there any clear
distinction between ‘you’ and ‘not you’?
Can you really pinpoint the place where you end and the world begins? Where is
the boundary?

Without referring to the past, can you know who you are? Without using
thought, can you say who you are, really?

Ultimately it’s futile, this attempt to name the unnameable, to describe that
which is prior to all description, to put words to the wordless.
Really, there is nothing more to say. Silence is the only honest way to go. Once
you reach this point all words are just noise. Noise to fill the silence which is
prior to, and envelops, all noise. Why do we pay so much attention to the noise?
What is wrong with silence?
*

Silence.
We reach the point of creation.

Why is there anything at all?

Why isn’t there nothing?

What is wrong with silence?

The noise comes, anyway, but now we see it in a new way. It has no particular
purpose, in the sense that it is equal to silence. Neither better nor worse, but it is
undeniably there – so we honour it. We do not deny it.

Life then becomes a play, a game, a divine, purposeless dance, existing for no
reason other than to be itself. Noise and silence are inseparable. Being and non-
being are inseparable. Me and not-me are inseparable. Everything exists in
divine union, not as fragments but as aspects of a whole, each part important,
each part enabling every other part to be. Nothing is out of place, nothing is
unwanted, nothing is disposable. Being and non-being are the two aspects of
consciousness, the two faces of the divine.

Ah, but the words are just ripples on the surface. Plunge back into the silence.
No words are needed. No words are really necessary.

Just the simple feeling of being is enough, the simplicity and aliveness of this.
Just a simple relaxation into what you already are.

*
There is only this. There is only ever this.

The sound of breathing. The hum of the computer. The creaking of the radiator.
A tingling in the toes. Hands moving over keys. Words coming out. Breathing.
A sense of deep ease, a sense of ‘okayness’ with the whole world as it arises and
dissolves. This is life, damn it! Here! Right here!
Words do not even scratch the surface of things. Yet we spend our lives
scratching on the surface, thinking that we have the answers. We do not realise
that there are no answers, because there are no questions. There were never any
questions, because this moment is always already perfect the way it is. Any
question would take you away from the perfection, although every question is
part of the perfection too.

Nothing is excluded. Not even exclusion itself.

THE DIVINE PARADOX

“I am not here.”

That is a common pointer used in nonduality teachings. But what does it

really mean?

Well, what do you see when you look over here, at what you call ‘me’? You see
a bag of flesh and bone which appears to move and act and speak in fairly
predictable ways. You see this behaviour, and tell your story of Jeff Foster. That
is your ‘me’. That is me, to you.

But is there actually a ‘me’ over here to which you are referring? Is there a ‘Jeff’
in here that you are somehow recognising and putting a name to?

Over here, all I can find is an open space, filled with sights and sounds, smells,
thoughts and feelings. But here’s the great discovery –there is simply no ‘me’ to
be found at the centre of it all, no ‘me’ in charge of things. There is nothing solid
here, only an openness to the constantly shifting scenery of the world, and ‘me’
or ‘I’ or ‘myself’ is just a story appearing in this open space.

All I can find here, when I look afresh at life, is the rumble of traffic, the
tweeting of birds, the beating of the heart, breathing happening, and the story of
a person called Jeff Foster. And this story can be a wonderful story to tell, but it
cannot even begin to capture what I really am.
*

Now, when you look over here at this bag of flesh and bone and its associated
behaviours, and when you address it as ‘Jeff’, there is a response here, because
that seems to be the appropriate thing to do. Not to respond would be socially
unacceptable, and this bag of flesh and bone might then be cast into the loony
bin, or at least heavily medicated.
Yet, one can’t help wondering whether perhaps it is dishonest to answer to a
name, to identify who I am with who the world says I am. Because I certainly do
not experience myself as a person, as an individual, as something separate from
the world. No, if I am anything, I am this open space in which the whole world
appears, and indeed I am not separate from the world which appears. If I am
anything, I am what is happening, right here, right now, in this moment. If I am
anything, I am this, this and this. That is the true meaning of nonduality. And it’s
what the Buddha meant when he said:
“Suffering alone exists, but none who suffer;
the deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana there is, but no one seeking it;
the Path there is, but none who travel it.”

‘Jeff’ does not even begin to capture it. ‘Jeff’ is a relic from the past, part of a
narrative that everybody seems to spin for themselves and by themselves.
Indeed, there appears to be as many ‘Jeffs’ as there are people who know him!

This is not to deny that there is an idea here of a ‘Jeff’ floating about in
awareness, as thought. But that is all there is, over here. There is no Jeff having
thoughts of ‘Jeff’ – that’s the illusion. There is only the thought of ‘Jeff’ here,
only the narrative floating through.

It all happens for nobody, it all arises in this open space, in the vastness that
holds everything, lovingly, unconditionally, in the clarity that allows everything
to be. And there is simply no ‘Jeff’ outside of the vastness –which is to say, there
is no ‘Jeff’ at all. I simply do not exist. ‘I’ am not here.

No self, no problem, as an old Zen monk once said.

*

And yet, and yet... to all intents and purposes, I do exist. In the eyes of the world,
anyway, there most definitely is a Jeff Foster – he has a birth certificate and a
National Insurance number and everything! To function in the world, a basic
assumption seems to be necessary: that there is an individual here, a person. But
it is an assumption, an idea, nothing more; it has no deeper reality.
With that realisation, the entire world self-liberates. Freed from the stranglehold
of thought, freed from the burden of ‘me and my problems’, there is a great ease
which permeates everything. Freed from goals and meanings, every moment is a
goal in itself, everything is intrinsically meaningful, because every moment is all
there is, or ever was. Set free from self-consciousness, anything is possible: there
is no authority, there are no rules, and whatever happens just happens.

However, that doesn’t mean you go round beating up old ladies. No, when it is
seen that there is no separate self, it is also seen that there are no separate
‘others’ either. No others separate from yourself, at any rate. So this is the end of
violence, the end of me-versus-you.

Beyond that me-versus-you illusion, there is such intimacy, such unconditional

love and acceptance, that the idea of beating up old women, or anyone else for
that matter, simply falls away. That old woman is myself, and I don’t find
myself beating her up. I find myself helping her across the road. The paradox:
there are no others, and yet there is such love for others, such spaciousness to
allow them to be exactly as they are.

Beyond the sense of separation, there still may be pain, anger and sadness. Yet a
funny thing happens: pain, anger and sadness are no longer owned by anyone.
They are no longer claimed by a seeker hungry for an identity. We could say that
they still happen, but because they now happen for nobody instead of somebody,
they simply don’t matter anymore (since there’s nobody there to whom they
could possibly matter!). There’s pain, anger and sadness, but since there is
nobody there at war with experience, these sensations just dissolve of their own
accord, in their own time, as they always have done. There’s pain, anger and
sadness, but there’s no problem whatsoever, and therefore no desire to be ‘free
from suffering’.

Everything being talked about here is already the case, for all of us, and yes, that
includes you, of course.

Already, there is freedom. Already, there is nobody in control. Already, things

simply arise of their own accord.
Look: The heart beats, and you are not doing the beating.

Breathing happens, and you are not doing the breathing.

Sounds in the room happen, and you are not making them happen.

Pain arises, and you are not causing it. Joy happens, and you have no choice.
The sun rises and sets, flowers grow, wither and die, seasons change in the blink
of an eye, and you are not in charge of this astonishing dream world.

The play of opposites plays itself out, and there is an undetectable silence that
continuously embraces it all, allowing everything to arise exactly as it does.

The entire world arises in this open space, in this vastness which is utterly free
from separateness and solidity, but which embraces separateness and solidity the
way a mother embraces her newborn baby.
The secret is there in your heart beating, in your breathing, in the sights and
sounds and smells manifesting themselves exactly where you are, right now.

The secret is here. Do you see?

*

This cannot be understood intellectually. But somewhere beyond the words,

there can be a resonance, a recognition, and that is the place to which these
words are pointing right now, a place that has no location –which is to say, it is
nowhere, and everywhere. It’s there in your heartbeat. It’s there in the breathing.
It’s there in the sensations in your body and the space around those sensations.
It’s there in your thoughts and the gaps between them, and in the sights and
sounds and smells in the room.

Yes, all life asks of you is that you see it for what it is.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

“Boundary lines, of any type,

are never found in the real world itself,
but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.”

- Ken Wilber

O ut of purest emptiness the entire manifest world arises. Thought is nothing

but ripples on the surface of this infinite ocean of emptiness, this vast
landscape of silence.

The cosmic dance of colour, form, and motion plays out in this vast spaciousness
that I cannot separate myself from, or find myself in. In this emptiness, in this
nothingness without beginning or end, there is only this, only what is, and
nothing more. Only this, and no eyes to see it, no ears to hear it, no tongue to
taste it, no nose to smell it. Eyes would blind it, ears would deafen it, a tongue
would render it tasteless.

When the mind stops its chattering you can sense it, this raging silence, this
volcanic peace out of which all things arise, and to which all things eventually
return.

But to think of it is to lose it, for it can never be an object of knowledge, it can
never be captured by thought.

*
Throughout the ages, individuals have sought the eternal silence beyond the
noise of life. But they have never found it, because it cannot be found. For it is
that which is prior to seeking and finding, prior to thought, prior to knowledge,
prior to logic, prior to rationality. It is that which you see before you. It is this
moment. It is now.

When you think about it, it’s already gone, it’s already a new moment, and your
search prevented the seeing of it. A moment captured by thought is already an
old moment, it is already dead, and you killed it yourself.
If you think you’ve found it, you’ve really lost it.

Yet in truth there are no lost moments, no dead moments, no old moments, only
the eternal present. Think about the past, and those thoughts appear in this
moment. Think about the future, and those thoughts appear in this moment too.
All thoughts appear now, now, and now, and yet still we fall for the illusion of
past and future as concrete realities.
But, of course, nobody has ever touched the past, except in present thoughts.
And nobody has ever touched the future, except in present thoughts. Past and
future are illusions, nothing more. And they happen now, now and now. Even
these words are being interpreted through the filter of the past, through memory.
How else would you understand?

But look! Listen! A plane rumbles overhead, a bird chirps away on the branches
of that tree, somebody behind me coughs, flowers sway gently in the breeze, and
where in any of this can you find a past? Where in any of this can you find a
future?

*
Past is only memory, and future only projection based on memory – yet they
both drive us insane. Identification with past and future brings a sense of self, a
sense of ‘me’. I have the sense of who I am, who I was, who I will be. I have the
sense of being someone trying to orchestrate my life, trying to make it go in a
certain direction, trying to perfect it. This heavy sense of responsibility for my
own life is what ultimately becomes such a burden.

And yet, as the little bird hops off the tree and flies away, I cannot find a ‘me’
anywhere.

*
Somewhere deep down, we all know that we swim in illusions.
You see, I call that thing over there a ‘bird’, but really I have no idea what it is. I
call that thing over there a ‘cat’, but really it is a divine mystery that leaves me
speechless with bewilderment when I begin to contemplate it. I call that thing
over there a ‘tree’, but is that really what it is? The whole thing is a mystery, and
any explanation I’d give would simply be an interpretation after the fact, a
theory, mind-stuff overlaid on a reality that is prior to interpretation, and that
exists perfectly well without the interference of the human mind.

Do you really want to know what that thing over there is?

Then let the mind be still. Go, walk over there. Touch that thing we call ‘tree’.
Feel its shape, its texture. Listen to it, smell it, even taste it. See the little
creatures who call it a home. Look closer: those incredible patterns in the grain
of the bark, the moss that grows along its trunk. Look closer, closer.

Is it really a ‘tree’? Does that word capture what it is?

You see, it’s really nameless, isn’t it? It’s not a tree at all, is it? It’s an
experience, an experience that changes with each and every passing moment, an
experience which therefore cannot be named. The word ‘tree’, the concept, the
knowledge of it, that is a thing from the past, that is a dead thing. This, whatever
this is, is alive. It is never the same from one moment to the next.

A living thing can never be captured by a dead thing. Only thought would tell
you otherwise.
*

This ‘tree’ is not separate from the little creatures who live in it, from the
nutrients and micro-organisms in the earth that it feeds on, from the moss that
crawls up its side, from the raindrops that it would die without, from the squirrel
that has just scrambled up to its tallest branches, from me, as I place my hand on
its trunk, as I breathe the air that it too depends on. Everything depends on
everything. This ‘tree’ is not separate from everything else. ‘Tree’ is not separate
from the rest of reality, from everything that we call ‘not tree’. Where would I
draw the boundary between ‘tree’ and ‘not tree’? Where would I slice reality?
How would I ever know where to slice?
Reality is a unified whole, and thought kills it, cuts it up into little bits, processes
it in terms of the past, turns it into stale knowledge, because thought cannot
comprehend the enormity of it all, it cannot begin to fathom the great mystery
that we call life, it cannot tolerate the fact that this life has no centre, therefore it
reduces reality, fragments it, calls this a ‘tree’, groups it with all the other things
that look similar and calls them all ‘trees’, and does this in the name of
knowledge, in the name of rationality, in the name of science.

But it’s a lie, a lie that most of us have been swallowing our entire lives. It’s not
a tree. It is what it is, and we point to it and call it a tree, and forget that it’s not a
tree, that it’s the divine Mystery, and that ‘tree’ is mind-stuff, a mental object, an
illusion.

But the word ‘tree’ satisfies the mind, doesn’t it? Once it has the concept ‘tree’,
it can go off and tell all sorts of stories, fabricate all sorts of complicated
narratives, generate all sorts of theories about trees and how they function.

But the trees of knowledge, the trees of science, are trees of the mind.

“You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you
eat of it you will surely die.”
You will surely stay locked in the past, a past which tortures you.

But come over here. Feel this bark. Feel it as you contemplate your ‘tree’.

Which is real?
GOD IN ALL THINGS

“So waiting, I have won from you the end:

God’s presence in each element.”

–Goethe

T he separate individual is terrified of the vibrant, powerful, alive stillness out

of which all things arise, because that stillness is the fire which consumes
everything, all identity, all past and future, all hope and fear and pleasure and
pain. We are simply terrified to lose our humanity and sink into this divinity, but
therein lies our salvation: to die, literally, into God, which is death into all things
– for all things are God.

The trees, the birds, the roads, the cars, the pollution, the people going about
their daily business – all of that is God. The suffering in the faces of these
people: that, too, is God. The smiles as they greet each other, the tears as loved
ones part, the anger and the violence and the fear and the longing to be free from
it all, all of that is God, too. There is nothing, literally nothing, that is not God.

So to split God up into various religions and doctrines and ideologies, to shrink
him into belief-sized chunks, to reduce him to mind-made ideas –that is nothing
but idolatry, and yet it is never seen as such, but is considered ‘the way to God’.
Any ‘way’ to God implies that God is not already here and now. That is a denial
of the God who stares you in the face in this moment.

Look around you. Is this not God? If not, where is he to be found? And when
will you find him?
The search for God is in vain, for he stands in front of you now, in and as all the
things of this world. Hold out your hand: there is the hand of God. Look down at
your legs: the legs of the divine. The bird landing on that branch over there: are
you seriously telling me that this is not a manifestation of God?

Look! Look around you! God is in all things! A god that is not in all things is a
small god, a god of the mind, a god of belief, religion, thought. Is that not
idolatry? Is that not just a mind-made, man-made idol?
So drop it all! Drop your superstitions, drop your beliefs, come back to this
moment, and stare at the very God you’ve been searching for your whole life.
Coming back to now is real worship, real prayer, real meditation, real faith, for it
is only now that God can be seen, felt, heard, experienced. Feel your breath? Is it
not God who breathes through you? Feel your heart beating inside your chest? Is
that not the work of God? Do you really need a future to find him? Is he not with
you right now?
As Saint Augustine put it:
“God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”
THIS MOMENT

A nything said about this moment is never really about this A moment, for this
moment is already gone the moment it is spoken of, and it is already a new
moment... and a new moment... and a new moment... bringing new delights, new
wonders, new sights and sounds and smells and thought sand feelings.

This moment will never be captured in words – which is to say, it will never be
captured at all. It will also never be understood, because it is impossible to get
behind the moment, look back at it and say what it is. It is simply the divine
mystery, permeating all creation. Anyone who claims to understand the moment
is just a person with some concepts about the moment. It cannot be understood,
and that is its beauty.
Ah, the madness and innocence of the human mind! In its attempt to understand,
it creates the very confusion it is trying to overcome. In its thirst for knowledge,
it creates ignorance. In its quest for truth, it speaks in untruths. In its longing for
peace, it goes to war.

And yet, all of this plays out in complete innocence. As Jesus said, “Father,
forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Our ignorance of the wholeness of life is also our innocence.

*
Let it all drop, be still. Come to see the story – the conceptual filter through
which the world is experienced – for what it is. Come to see that there is no
world outside of your story about it; there is no world outside of mind. Mind is
world, and world is mind.

Come to experience the freedom and release in dropping everything that you
believe, everything you think you know – everything you’ve learned from your
parents, your teachers, your gurus. Taste liberation in the realisation that you
don’t know anything, not a single thing – not about this moment, anyway.
Realise that you were never a little subject in a world full of nasty little objects,
but you are the presence, the awareness, the consciousness that allows this
apparent world to arise in the first place. Finally, see that this presence-
awareness-consciousness is not separate from everything that arises. The world
is you, and you are the world. Did you ever think otherwise? Did you really
believe that you were a small self, an ego, an individual cut off from the whole –
a small wave in a vast ocean?
Did you really believe that life was a burden, a chore, something separate from
what you are?
THE MYSTERY OF THINGS

“I confused things with their names.

That is belief.”

- Jean-Paul Sartre

T his world only has any meaning because there appears to be a ‘me’ for whom
it has any meaning – that is to say, there is no world outside of ‘my’ world.
This is not a descent into solipsism, or nihilism, nor a denial of reality of any
kind, but a description of what is actually and quite obviously the case.

The thing in front of me that I call a ‘mug’, for example, has meaning for me in
the dream of my own life, and mine alone: it is something that holds my hot
drinks, something that I have used in the past and will most likely continue to
use in the future. This mug is part of me, part of what I take to be myself. What I
take to be myself cannot in any way be separated from the concept ‘mug’ and
what that concept means to me.

‘Mug’ has meaning for me on a multitude of levels. There are associations with
my past; for example, I remember how throughout my childhood my mother
would always take her coffee in a mug, while my father would insist on having
his tea in a cup and saucer. Mugs have provided me with great pleasure over the
years; I have had countless mugs of tea and coffee, and made countless mugs of
tea and coffee for friends and acquaintances, day after day, year after year, and
without the humble mug, none of this would have been possible. Without ‘mug’,
my entire dream would have been totally different. A whole universe of meaning
is contained in the word ‘mug’.
How then can I separate myself from the idea of a ‘mug’?

And how can I separate myself from this particular mug in front of me?
This mug exists for me and me alone: I give it meaning, I give it value, I give it
purpose. Without this projection of values, I have no way of knowing what this
thing in front of me actually is. Without the projection, the knowledge, the
associations, the memories, I would be discovering this overwhelmingly
mysterious thing in front of me for the very first time. Without concepts, I have
no way of knowing what I am looking at. ‘Mug’ – the knowledge of it – gives
me certainty and familiarity, gives me some sense of permanence and continuity
in a mysterious and unknowable world.
Not just the mug, though, but all things: all things are part of me. I give meaning
to all things, give value, give a history and future to them. Things arise and
dissolve with me. Therefore we come to the shattering conclusion (and it is not
really a conclusion at all): I am the world, and the world is me. That is to say,
there is no world ‘out there’, at all. That is the primary illusion.
No, there is no world ‘out there’, because this – right here, right now – is the
world in its entirety. There is simply no need to postulate a world ‘outside’. Even
if there were such a world, it would only be a present projection. I would have to
quite literally create it out of nothing in this very moment. Even if that were at
all possible, it would still be my world, it would still be of my own substance.
The world can never be ‘outside’ – it is me.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us in a world which is no longer alien, no
longer full of strangers, no longer cold and uncaring, but a world which can be a
friend, or even a lover. What we see is full of nothing but our own projections,
our own images, full of nothing but mind. We see mind wherever we look;
indeed, to look is to see mind. There is nowhere it is not; there is nowhere we are
not. This is an intimacy beyond words.

So, to look around the world, to walk about and to interact with apparent things
and apparent others is, in a way, to be completely in love. To fall completely in
love with all things is to end all violence, inner and outer, because violence is
nothing but separation, and separation is nothing but violence. When all is self,
when there are no others, when the self-other split is healed, when there is total
selflessness (which is total selfishness, however paradoxical that may sound to
the rational mind), there is a love and an equanimity which permeates everything
and everyone. It saturates all interactions between all apparent others; it is a love
which was always there, a love which we had perhaps forgotten in our pursuit of
something more.

Look at all the things that surround you: the towel which only has any meaning
because it is the towel that you have used to dry yourself every morning; the
chair which only has any meaning because you have sat on it countless times,
resting your body after a weary day at the office; the kitchen sink which only has
any meaning because you have washed up your dirty plates and cutlery in it,
bathing your hands in its warm soapy water, scrubbing the knives and forks and
spoons until they reflected an entire world.

You have lived this life; you have become familiar with these things; you have
made your own unique sense out of them.

You own this world, you make it, you bring it into existence out of nothing. You
are a magician, a sorcerer, a god, even, taking an emptiness and filling it with
meaning and purpose and a sense of past and future.

You take emptiness and fill it up with yourself.

So, if the world is cruel and uncaring in your eyes, then you have made it that
way. If the world is lacking in love and compassion, then it is your
responsibility, and yours alone, to bring love and compassion back into it. If
there is violence in the world, that is because there is violence in you. You live
your own dream.

This is your world, and it will end when you end.

This is your day, this is your moment, this is your last chance to experience
anything at all. Right here, right now, reading these words, this is all there is.
This is the beginning and end of all things, this is the Alpha and the Omega, this
is who and what you are, and there is nothing more, and there never was
anything more.

Your whole life, all your hopes and dreams and ambitions and goals –
everything comes down to this:
Sitting on the toilet. Attending the funeral of a loved one. Listening to Mozart.
Reading your favourite book. Screaming with pain in the middle of the night.
Crying your eyes out. Laughing so hard your stomach hurts. Being diagnosed
with cancer. Holding a newborn baby in your arms, looking deep into its
gorgeous little eyes, and feeling shocked and saddened for a moment by the
beauty, sacredness and fragility of this mysterious thing we call ‘life’.
COMING HOME

T his is timeless, deathless, eternal.

This is without equal, and never-to-be-repeated.

This is utterly unique and totally new, in each and every moment, although there
are no ‘moments’ at all.

This is empty of all qualities, even the quality of being empty of all qualities.
And yet, this is totally full, pregnant with infinite possibility, possibility that
over flows again and again into a world of form.

This is peace, but it is a volcanic peace, a peace which does not deny noise but
embraces it fully; it is a peace which does not rest, an ecstatic peace which
throws itself out of itself again and again.

This is completely unknowable, and yet it is filled with the knowledge of things,
clothed in the infinite guises of an apparent world ‘out there’.

This is something that cannot be spoken of by anyone, and yet words are tossed
out, day after day after day.

This is not of this world, and yet it is nothing but this world.
This is completely extraordinary, and yet it is as simple and as obvious as the
sound of the rain splish-splashing on your rooftop.

Splish! Splash!
This is a wide open space, with enough room for an entire world. It is pulsating
with a radical and unconditional love that will never be grasped by a mind
locked in the search for something more.
This is simple, obvious, and ordinary.

This is what everybody is seeking, but nobody can find, because it is everything
– the best place to hide!
This is Jesus dying on the cross.

This is the Buddha seeing through all confusion.

This is the world falling away when two lovers embrace.

This is a mother cradling her newborn baby.

This is watching an old man limping down the pavement, and seeing only
yourself.

This is your heart breaking at the sight of an old woman, her shopping bags full
of groceries, struggling to cross a busy road, and finding yourself rushing over to
help her, without hesitation, because you have no choice.

Finally, this is realising, at long last, that choice is illusion, that you were never
for one moment separate from this thing we call ‘life’, that we were never for
one moment separate from each other; that no man is an island, that we affect
each other in more profound ways than the mind could ever hope to grasp.

Oh, this exquisitely fragile world, this mind-blowingly impermanent, iridescent

parade of sights, sounds and 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!

How fragile it is, how fleeting.

How... beautiful. How... indescribable.
And yet, how simple, how utterly obvious.

Yet 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 the original
One. It is an utterly convincing trick of light, always already released from the
need to be anything other than what it is.
There is only this – only life in its totality, in its infinite, intimate manifestations.

Just this, shimmering and impermanent.

Just this, ineffable this.

THE END OF THE SEARCH
 “Not knowing how near the truth is,
We seek it far away, what a pity!
We are like one who, in the midst of water,
Cries out desperately in thirst.”

-Hakuin
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

“And his disciples said to him

‘On what day will the kingdom come?’
And Jesus replied:
‘It will not come while people watch for it;
they will not say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Look, there it is!’,
but the Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth,
and people do not see it.’”

-Gospel of Thomas

T he Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it.

The reason people do not see it is because they are looking for it. Their
attention is focussed on the future, and so they miss the gift of this moment.
They are so caught up in the game of asking-questions-and-waiting-for-answers,
so busy trying to be a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’, that they miss the
astonishing intimacy that is already here, an intimacy that simply burns up all
questions and answers, leaving only the wonder of what is.

The mind just loves to ask questions, because as long as it is asking questions, its
continuity is assured: there is a sense of past, future, individuality. There is a
person who has questions, and who will eventually find the answers. There is a
seeker who, one day, will come to rest. Curious how it’s always ‘one day’...

Do you not think that if there were answers to find, you would have found them
by now? Have you not already been given enough answers? Are your
bookshelves not full of answers, overflowing with them?

You see, the questioning must continue, because thought must continue. It
doesn’t want to give up, it doesn’t want to die. Answers to your questions have
been given over and over again, but the mind cannot accept these as the real
answers. If it did so, not only would the questions be annihilated, but also the
one who asks them. The questioner arises and dissolves with the questions. They
depend on each other. Ultimately, they are each other. If the questions go, so
does the questioner.
What is the questioner but a bundle of conditioning, a mass of assumptions,
collected over the years? The one who asks the questions, and waits for answers,
is actually made of the answers that he has collected! So to let go of this
knowledge, to let go of the questions and answers, would be to let go of his very
self. No wonder we don’t want to stop seeking. The end of seeking is the death
of the questioner, the death of the seeker!
It is inevitable that the mind must continue to ask questions and wait for
answers, for its very existence is at stake! So the great search goes on: “One day
I will be liberated! One day I will be free!”

Why not today? Why not now? If not now, when?

What answers are you waiting for?

What questions are you asking?

For how much longer will you seek the Kingdom?

Perhaps, eventually, the futility of the seeking will be seen through, and then
maybe you will burst out laughing when you see the ridiculous knots that you
have tied yourself up in, trying to be free, trying to be liberated. Yes, there is
plenty of laughter when the dream of individuality and the struggle to be free
from it all is seen through – indeed, there is very little to be serious about then!

The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth, and yet people do not see
it. Even that – even our ignorance of the Kingdom, even our search for the
Kingdom – even that is part of the Kingdom.

There is nothing that the Kingdom is not. It embraces everything. Everything.

BEYOND SPIRITUALITY

“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

- Wu Li

O nce upon a time, I believed that I was enlightened, and that others were not.

At the time, I did not see this as a belief at all, because I believed it to be
true.
I came to believe that I was somehow special.

However, the belief in my own importance could not hold itself up – no belief
can, ultimately.

I eventually saw through this idea of exclusive personal enlightenment, and I

came to believe that in fact everyone was enlightened; it was just that some
people hadn’t‘ realised’ it yet. I came to believe that it was somehow my duty to
let other people in on the secret, in order to bring an end to their suffering. I
became a nonduality missionary.

However, I wouldn’t let myself get away with that either. I soon realised that
nobody could ever be ‘enlightened’ in the first place – that would just be another
belief. After all, enlightenment was supposed to be the seeing-through of all
beliefs, was it not?
Yet even that was just another belief!
I realised that everything was just a belief, just a thought, just a concept.
Literally everything. Nothing I believed could possibly be true, and even that
was just another belief!
How can we ever know anything, and if we can’t really know anything... well,
how can we even know that?
If I were enlightened, how would I ever know it? Those people who claimed to
have reached ‘liberation’ or ‘seen through all beliefs’ or ‘lost their self’, how
could they ever know? On what basis could they make their assertions?
‘Enlightenment’ and ‘liberation’ – were those terms not ultimately just more
words, more beliefs, more concepts?

I could not get around this. I was going round in circles. I was driving myself
mad, quite literally mad. It was all just belief! No matter what I thought had been
‘seen’, or ‘realised’, or ‘understood’, by somebody or by nobody (yes, I had
picked up the language of nonduality!), this was just more thought, more
separation, more language, more of the search. It was a vicious, violent circle,
and there was no escape.
There was a great frustration and exhaustion, and a deep, dark despair at the
ridiculous nature of the futile spiritual search.

And in the midst of that despair, something gave way.

These days, all seeking has apparently died. This is not something that I have
achieved, not at all, not at all! There is nobody here who could possibly own the
end of seeking, because the end of seeking is also the end of owning.
So, what is left?

Breathing.

Heart beating.
Sensations in the body.

A tuna salad.
The crunch of the lettuce leaves.

The faint fishy smell of the tuna.

The fork coming up... up... up... CRUNCH!

Owned by no-one, understood by no-one. Just this. Awash in nothingness,

bathed in emptiness, and yet totally full, full as full can be.
And beyond all these words, beyond any thought anyone has ever had, there is
that fork coming up again, undeniably so... here it comes... and the teeth
chomping down... CRUNCH!

This CRUNCH! is the end of all spirituality.

*
Before enlightenment – crunch tuna salad.

After enlightenment – crunch tuna salad.

Of course, there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ at all, and certainly no ‘enlightenment’.
That’s just a good story that we tell to make ourselves feel special, and superior
to the tuna salad. When you see that you are essentially equal to a tuna salad,
you also see that specialness is no longer possible!
THE SEEKING GAME

“Spiritual seekers look for self-realization

or enlightenment in the future.
To be a seeker implies that you need a future.”

- Eckhart Tolle

T he spiritual search can only ever end in frustration, because what is sought is
identical with that which is doing the seeking.

The seeking implies that there is something to be found, and somebody there to
find it. It implies a seeker separate from what is sought. In fact, the entire search
rests on that assumption. That assumption, indeed, is the search itself.

Is it really surprising that the search could go on for an entire lifetime, if this
assumption is not exposed?

With the search comes identification as ‘the one who seeks’. Seeking implies
identification as a seeker. One of the seeker’s favourite games is to look for
something called ‘the end of the seeker’. This future ‘seeker-free’ existence is
sought desperately, and is mystified and given fancy names such as
‘enlightenment’ or ‘spiritual awakening’.
As long as there is seeking, there is a ‘me’ who is seeking, which is exactly the
thing that the seeking is eventually supposed to eliminate!

The point is that the one who seeks, and the one who is supposed to do any sort
of ‘seeing through’, is present right now, in this moment, as a thought-based
story, and indeed that’s the only reality any person has. Even if it were possible
to reach something called ‘enlightenment’, if it cannot be done now, it cannot be
done at all.
Time is the seeker’s worst enemy, for without time, seeking is not possible. It
takes time to find what you are looking for! The seeker cleverly keeps himself
alive by setting up ‘the end of seeking’ as a new goal, which implies time, which
in turn implies the continued existence of the seeker in time.
You need time to find enlightenment. You need time to transform yourself. You
need time to reach an awakened state.

We seek the timeless using time: no wonder the seeking never seems to end.
*

This is all there is, and a future is not required for this to be the case. The search
implies that this is not all there is, that there is something more. The search is a
denial of the utterly obvious and utterly simple presence which is identical with
this moment.

Yet we carry on seeking, hoping that one day we’ll become like those
enlightened guys, the ones who talk endlessly about peace and love and joy and
the end of suffering, and who offer a path which you can follow.

But peace and love and joy are right here, right now.

Peace and love and joy are so simple.

This is what they look like:

The heart beating.

The tap dripping.

The washing machine whirring.

Breathing.

Thoughts floating through.

Hunger.

Pain in the back, a tenderness in the stomach.

The television buzzing.

This is the miracle we’ve been seeking our whole lives: a miracle disguised as a
very ordinary world. It is Oneness playing the game of being two; it is nothing
playing at being everything. It is aliveness dressed up as breathing, thoughts
floating through, hunger, pain in the back, tenderness in the stomach and the
television buzzing. Oneness was always here, and that’s why we missed it.
Because here is the last place the seeker wants to look.

Here and now is the destruction of the seeker.

JUST A THOUGHT

“There are no steps to self-realization.”

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

N o wonder the search fails. Being what you already are has nothing to do
with time, with effort, with somebody doing something to get somewhere.

It has nothing to do with understanding.

Nothing to do with process, nothing to do with praxis.

Nothing to do with lack of process or praxis.

It is not about seeing anything new, or getting rid of anything old.

It is not something the mind could ever grasp. Nor does the mind need to give up
its grasping.

It is nothing personal, nor does it have anything to do with the ‘impersonal’.

It cannot be expressed using concepts. Nor will it ever be expressed in the

absence of concepts.

It is not about words. Not even these words.

It is not about getting anywhere.

It has nothing to do with any kind of future achievement.

It is not about following a path: there is no path, although there may be the idea
of a path.
It is not about reaching some higher state: there are no higher states, although
there may be concepts about higher states.
It is not about becoming something special and rare and unique, although beliefs
about that may arise too.

It is certainly not about ‘putting an end to the I’. Only an ‘I’ would want that.

It is most definitely not about ‘becoming more present’ – presence was never
lost in the first place.
It is not about waiting for an event called liberation – that would require time,
and a ‘me’ who would eventually become liberated.

It has nothing to do with going ‘beyond’ anything – there is nothing to go

beyond, and nobody who could go beyond even if they wanted to.
It is not about enlightenment. There is no such thing as personal enlightenment.

It is not about awakening. There is no such thing as an awakened person.

It is not about enlightened individuals passing on their understanding to non-

enlightened individuals. That’s a good story, and a compelling one, but it’s just a
story, and has no deeper reality.

It is not something that could be of any use to anyone.

It is not something that anyone would ever want.

But no matter – the ‘me’ who would want this is just a thought anyway.

Just a thought.
VICIOUS CIRCLES

T he ‘I’

who wants to be free from the ‘I’

maintains and strengthens the very ‘I’
from which he seeks to free himself.
The individual
who claims that he is liberated from individuality
is more of an individual than ever.

The person who claims to be enlightened

and free from desire
is still not free from the desire
to go on about
his so-called ‘enlightenment’.

The self
who claims to have lost his or her self
is still only a self:
a self claiming to have lost a self!

Only a self would claim to be free from self.

Only an individual would claim to be free from individuality.

Only somebody entrenched in his or her beliefs would proclaim freedom from
all belief.
This is not to condemn anyone.

No doubt the character ‘Jeff’ has at times been guilty of some or all of these
things.
But now, I would ask, with respect:
Who gets enlightened?
Who sees through the self?
Who becomes liberated?
Who reaches an awakened state?
Who transcends beliefs?
Who goes beyond the story?
Who ‘gets’ this?

You see, this message has nothing to do with personal achievement.

If anything, it has more to do with personal failure. Total failure, utter

disappointment.

In that total failure of the seeking, something else may shine through, but it has
nothing to do with a ‘somebody’ becoming ‘enlightened’. If anything, it’s that
very idea that is seen through. How could that ever, ever, be a personal
achievement?
A CUP OF TEA

“Our life is frittered away by detail...

Simplify, simplify!”

- Thoreau

P erhaps the inexpressible will never be expressed. There is no way of

knowing. Today, there is only life being played out on the screen of
awareness, with nobody in control. It all happens spontaneously – which is to
say, nothing really happens at all. There is only this, undivided, unfragmented,
perfectly itself, arising spontaneously, leaving no trace.

I drink a cup of tea. And yet really there is no ‘I’ doing this. ‘I’ is merely a
figure of speech, a convenient sound that might be used to confirm that it is this
body-mind, rather than any other, which apparently drinks the tea. The hand
goes out, the cup comes up, the liquid goes into the mouth and down the throat
and into the stomach, and I am the silent observer behind all of this, I am the
space in which it all appears. There is no meaning and no purpose behind this
play. It happens spontaneously, of its own accord, and the thought ‘I’m drinking
a cup of tea’ is all part of this wonderful show.

Of course, I do not drink the tea, for there is no tea and no ‘I’ who can drink, and
certainly no ‘I’ separate from any drinkable tea. There is only the liquid rushing
through the body, but nobody here who does anything. Tea is drinking itself!

*
Nevertheless, I drink a cup of tea. It’s simpler just to say that, and be done with
it. I do not drink a cup of tea, but apparently I do.

And what a lovely cup of tea it is!

Perhaps drinking tea can save the world. When you drink tea, all violence,
division, anxiety and fear dissolve, because there is only the moment, only the
drinking of the tea, and in the moment suffering is always just a projection, a
belief, based on memory.
Come back to the tea, and where is the past?

Where is the future?

Where is the outside world?

Where are your enemies?

Perhaps this will save the world: people coming back to the simple things of life,
and finding the joy inherent in them.

Or perhaps not.

Would you like a biscuit?

THE BUDDHA IN A CORNER SHOP

“There is no language of the holy.

The sacred lies in the ordinary.”

-Deng Ming-Dao

O ne day, I met the Buddha in a corner shop.

I went into a little shop on the way home from a day in town. After paying for
my bread and milk, I asked the man at the counter if I could have some change
for the washing machine. I gave him two pound coins and he gave me back some
twenty pence pieces with a broad smile, and I said, “Thank you,” and he replied,
“You’re welcome.”

Enlightenment is not some future event that will leave you in a state of
perfection. No, enlightenment happens in each and every moment. It is the
simple joy of everyday interactions. It is the buying of bread and milk, the
exchange of coins here and there, the ‘thanks, bye!’ as you leave a shop. It’s just
that, and nothing more.

You cannot find enlightenment. At no point can you become enlightened.

Enlightenment simply is, and in searching for it, you lose it... although of course
it can never really be lost.
Enlightenment in a corner shop, and who would have ever guessed?
LIBERATION IS... PAYING THE GAS BILL

“Everything
just as it is,
as it is,
as is.
Flowers in bloom.
Nothing to add.”

- Robert Aitken Roshi

O nly this.

Only ever this.

Arising spontaneously.

Leaving no trace.

How could it be otherwise?

Emptiness and fullness, being and non-being.

All is here. All is now.

But those are just words.

No words are really necessary.

Just this is enough.
*

Cat miaowing. Kettle on the boil. Heart beating. Munching cornflakes at the
breakfast table. Milk tastes a bit sour. Bills plopping through the letterbox.

Breathing.
Breathing.

Liberation.

Eating.
Liberation.

Drinking.

Liberation.
Going to the toilet.

Liberation.

Pain in the foot.

Liberation.

Sadness, joy, boredom, excitement, anger, love, fear, illness, death, pain,
pleasure.

Liberation, liberation, liberation!

No need to seek anymore.

Was there ever a past?

Was there ever someone here who searched? Someone who suffered and longed
to be free from it all?

Someone who believed in anything?

Oh, God! What madness! To want anything other than this...

Now, I wonder how much British Gas has charged this month...
WHO CARES?

W hat is understanding,
but the falling away
of all attempts
to understand?

What is knowing,
but the dissolution
of the one who
wants to know?
What is enlightenment,
but the seeing-through
of the very idea of
enlightenment?

What is liberation,
but the end of liberation
as ‘you’ know it?

What is the search for liberation

but a fun little game
we play with ourselves?
And what is this fun little game
but a story
arising now?
What is anything
but a story
arising now,
for no-one?
A story arising
in this open space
which allows everything,
in this nothingness
which accepts all forms,
effortlessly,
choicelessly,
presently,
simply.

And what are these words

but another
futile attempt
to talk about
this?

No words
are necessary.

No words
have ever
been necessary.

But hey,
talking about this
can be fun.

Yes, fun!
If words come, who cares?
If they don’t, who cares?
WHAT WE REALLY, REALLY WANT

Y ou cannot have what you want, ever.

It is the wanting itself which destroys the possibility of ever having what you
want, for the wanting is the very lack that you are trying to overcome. Wanting
is lacking. You try to use the wanting mechanism to put an end to lack, but any
relief is only temporary, and the lack soon returns, which feeds the wanting. It’s
a vicious circle.

Wanting implies that something can be captured and owned by someone. But
who could ever capture, and who could ever own?

There is only this, only what’s happening, only the present appearance of
everything. And this can never be captured, because it is not a thing amongst
other things, but the open, spacious possibility of all possibilities which gives
rise to all things in the first place. It cannot be captured because it is not an ‘it’.

If we are honest, we don’t really want what we want.

What we really want is an end to our wanting.

But here’s the problem: wanting an end to wanting is another want, perhaps the
biggest want of them all.
Perhaps the wanting obscures the obvious: we already have everything we could
ever want, because right now, an end to all our wants, all our seeking, all our
problems is already with us, and that end is so simple: these desires, problems,
wants, troubles, annoyances do not really exist, in that they are simply thoughts
arising now. That’s all they are, all the troubles of the world: thoughts.

So isn’t it the end of thought that we really, really want?

Wouldn’t that just be more thinking?

An end to thought is not really needed. Thought happens, thought appears, and
there is nobody there doing it. Isn’t this obvious? Thought simply appears, and
so already thought is not ‘mine’, it’s not personal, it’s just happening in this
infinite awareness, in this open space, which is not separate from its content.
Like clouds floating through the sky, like drops of rain trickling down the
window pane, thoughts aren’t really a problem at all.

Thoughts are only a problem when an individual wants to be free from them. But
how could an individual ever be free from thought? An individual is the very
thought he seeks to free himself from! It’s a merry-go-round, and there’s no way
out for an individual seeking a way out.

So an individual can never, ever have what he wants, because the individual is
actually nothing but those wants, those desires, those problems. To be free from
wants would be to die, and why would an individual ever want that?

To be free from wants you would have to be free from the one who wants to be
free from wants – and who could ever make that happen?

No, there is no way out: life is just as it is, and any resistance actually creates the
very individual who thinks that he needs to be free from life and all its problems.
The seeker is resistance, and resistance cannot end resistance, not in a million
years.
Still, resistance may be seen –in clarity. And in that seeing, there is freedom.
And in that freedom, you want nothing, and so you lack nothing. And then, when
nothing is yours, you discover that everything is yours, and always has been.

And then you can still play at wanting. But whether or not you ‘get what you
want’, the intimacy remains, always.
THE MYTH OF CHOICE

“Freedom is precisely the state

of not having to choose.”

- J. Krishnamurti

“I am a person who can choose” – the root of all confusion!

“I choose” is a good story, spun by a storyteller who creates himself in

choosing himself.
In reality, what happens, happens. The story of choice is simply an interpretive
overlay, a narrative superimposed onto what happens.

Imagine you are walking down the street. You come to a junction, and then you
can, apparently, choose to go left or right.

You go left, and you tell the story: “I made the choice to go left.”

Now, replay the same scene but without the soundtrack of thought, without the
story of choice, without the “I’m choosing! I’m choosing! I’m choosing”
monologue. What do you see?

You see a body moving down the street, and going left. You see legs moving,
legs that have no idea that they are going left. They just move, without a
concept.

“I made the choice to go left” is just a story, told in hindsight, after the fact, and
is identical to the story “I could have chosen to go right.”

But is that really true? Could you have chosen to go right?

Going left happened. That’s all you can know. Going right was not a possibility:
it didn’t happen. It only appeared to be a possibility within your dream.
The only possibility is what actually happens.

But this is not a predestined universe, because that would imply an entity
‘behind the scenes’, something beyond the appearance that is controlling the
appearance in some way.

However, there is only the appearance, and anything ‘beyond’ the appearance is
just part of the same appearance.
That which is beyond life, is life.

Beyond choice or lack of it, there is just the awesome simplicity of what is. What
a relief it is, to see that you are always free from choice... and lack of choice!
Whatever happens, happens. Whatever will happen, will happen. Whatever has
happened, couldn’t have happened any other way.

“It could have happened differently” is a story, an illusion. It is the root of guilt,
regret, suffering.

Life happens, and we have no control at all. It seems as though we do, at times,
but ultimately we don’t. Illness and old age show us this: we simply wouldn’t
choose to get old and get ill and die, if we had the choice!

And even if you believe in personal choice and free will, you must admit that
ultimately we have no control over the consequences of the apparent choices we
make. Even when we make what we think are the correct choices, things still
don’t always go according to plan. As the old Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans,
and God laughs.”

*
You can apparently choose to go and make a cup of tea right now, but where did
the idea to make a cup of tea come from? If you trace it back, right back, you
will find that at some point the idea just ‘popped’ into your head. Who is
responsible for that ‘popping’? Did you make the ‘popping’ happen? Did you
choose it into existence? Or did it just ‘pop’ in by itself?

How wonderful: life plays out, presently, and everything happens exactly as it
should, when it should, just like in a perfectly choreographed play. What
freedom in that!

The idea of choice is at the root of all violence, separation, narcissism, and
therefore suffering. The idea of choice implies that there is an individual who is
separate from life, who somehow creates his own life in choosing it. What
violence! How could I ever separate myself from this? Who am I, to claim that I
have power over this? What arrogance, to think that I can control life!
Yet how wonderful, how exciting, to believe in choice, to believe that I am an
individual who can change the world, who can make things happen, for myself
and for others!

So let’s not deny apparent choice! It can be fun, to play at choosing to make a
cup of tea, or choosing, go for a walk in the park, or choosing to try and change
the world. The world is nothing but a play of apparent choices! When it’s all
seen as a play, you play along. What else is there to do?

Did you choose to read this book?

Did you choose to move your eyes over these words?

Or is reading simply happening? Are the eyes simply moving by themselves?

Yes, the thought “I chose to read this book” may arise. But to whom does this
thought arise? And did you choose to have that thought?
Can you choose to think or not think about this?
THE ELEPHANT

“W hat should I do with my life?”

Ultimately, this question can never be answered, because the one who is trying
to work out the answer is the very life that is being thought about.

“What should I do with my life?” implies that there is somebody there who is
separate from life. What if this is just an illusion?
Is it really possible to live the wrong life? Is it really possible to mess up your
life? Or are you Life Itself... and therefore already whole?

Here’s what to do with your life: do what you do. That is all.

That is to say, whatever happens, happens. See, it’s already happening: now,
now and now. Life is only a problem when the questions begin:

‘Have I made the right decisions?’

‘Should I be doing something else right now?’ ‘What will become of me?’

There is the idea that once the questions are answered, there will be freedom
from confusion.

But can we really think our way out of confusion? Wasn’t it thinking that got us
into this mess in the first place? Do we really have any choice in the matter?

Try this experiment: don’t think of an elephant. Whatever you do, don’t think of
an elephant. Can you choose not to think of an elephant?
Go on, try really hard. Choose not to think of an elephant.

See, there’s no real choice, is there?

If you can’t even choose not to think of an elephant, you don’t have much
chance in choosing the big stuff, do you?
*

What if our attempt to end confusion is actually the very confusion that we are
trying to put an end to?
What if life is infinitely simpler than you ever imagined?

What if the question “what should I do with my life?” has already been
answered, before it is even asked?
What if the answer is life itself, as it is?

What if your ‘destiny’ is staring you in the face?

Whatever happens, happens. And then the person comes in, and doesn’t want
what happens to happen.

Hopeless!

Now, the person can claim that they have total control over what happens, or
they can claim that they have no control, and are just a victim of fate.

I can believe in choice, or I can believe that there is no choice. I can believe in
free will, or I can believe in the absence of free will.

‘Choice’ or ‘lack of choice’ –ultimately both are just extreme conceptual

positions, and life is the fire that simply burns up all conceptual positions,
leaving only presence.

You cannot think your way out of life.

THE FIRE OF NOT-KNOWING
 “Love has befriended Hafiz so completely.
It has turned to ash and freed me
of every concept and image my mind has ever known.”
- Hafiz
J eff: We always seem to be looking for something more, but if we are honest
with ourselves, we’ll admit that we don’t really know what we’re looking for.
What we do know is that this – this present life – is a problem on some level.
The search implies that problem, doesn’t it? If we were totally content with the
present moment, totally at ease right here and right now, why would we ever
search for something else?

The search – for material wealth, for power, for success, for liberation, for God,
for perfect peace, for perfect happiness, for spiritual enlightenment, and it goes
under a million different names – is ultimately just an attempt to escape what is
presently happening. It is an attempt to move away from lack, and into
wholeness. Ultimately, it’s all a disguised search for the end of separation, for
Oneness.

Now, the secret that we are sharing here, is that the ‘me’ – the seeker, the one
who is looking, the one who wants to be free, the one who wants to reach
Oneness – is really just a story arising presently in Oneness! The one who
searches for freedom is already appearing in freedom! The one who searches for
the end of lack is already appearing in this, which lacks nothing, because it is
everything.

Already, the individual, the seeker, is just a story, a belief, appearing in

everything. And you can’t find everything or lose everything, because everything
is all there is.

We read spiritual books, and we take on the belief that in order to achieve
enlightenment we have to end the ‘me’, destroy the ‘ego’ or transcend the ‘self’.
That’s a common story, isn’t it, that we have to put an end to the ‘me’, that we
have to destroy the individual and move into Oneness?
But who would want to put an end to ‘me’, but a ‘me’? Who would want to
destroy an individual, except an individual? And so you go round and round in
circles, and it becomes very frustrating, very tiring, trying to destroy yourself,
trying to escape separation and move into Oneness, trying to go from here to
there. In the story of Jeff, that’s what happened for years. Round and round in
circles of thought, trying to put an end to ‘me’ and move into a place of ‘no me’.

And of course, as long as there was a search for ‘no me’, there was a ‘me’ there,
doing the searching!

Q: Haven’t some people searched and actually found what they were
looking for? Aren’t there some people who have arrived at Oneness?

Well, there’s the story that there are people out there who have reached Oneness
or are in some sort of ‘higher state’, some state that is better than your state. “I
want their state – this state isn’t enough!” And that is the spiritual search.
For a lifetime, we continue to search, and what do we really want but an end to
that search? That search is the problem, because it implies that there’s something
wrong with this. The search implies lack.

The only reason that I’m sitting here giving this talk is that at some point (and I
don’t really like to say ‘at some point’ because it sounds like something definite
happened, something concrete) there was a seeing through of this futile and
exhausting search for something more. That seeing through of the search was
also the falling away of the search.

The search was based on a faulty assumption, a lie. When that lie was exposed,
the search dissolved and there was a relaxation into what is.
Some people may ask, “If the search is the problem, how do I end it? I’ve been
trying to end it for many years, but it still goes on.” What we don’t see is that the
desire to end the search is more searching! The mind will turn anything into a
future goal, even ‘the end of the search’.

Beyond seeking and not seeking, everything is resolved in the clear seeing of life
as it is, which always happens right here and right now. No future is required.
No seeker is required.

The search only ever brought us here. An entire lifetime of seeking in a billion
different ways – trying to improve ourselves, trying to become something else,
trying to reach‘ higher states’ – only served to bring us here, to hear this
message: that there was never anything to find in the first place, because nothing
had ever been lost.
Q. Are you saying that we should surrender?

The real question is this: is there really anyone here separate from life who can
surrender? Is surrender even possible? Is it something that we can do? Or is it
something we already are?

What is seen is that life itself is already fully surrendered, because it resists
nothing. It resists nothing because it is everything that arises! So it was never
about ‘me’ surrendering to life. It was always simply about seeing life as it is. If
there is any surrender, it is this.

Q. So for you, the desire to change things has gone away, has it? And is that
liberation?
It is the very story that there is the possibility of a future liberation that
perpetuates the search for liberation. Along with it, there is a story that you are a
seeker who is not already liberated. This is the trap. There is no liberation from
this – there is just this. And paradoxically, this is the liberation that is sought.
But it cannot be owned by the seeker. Whether Jeff desires to change things or
not is beside the point.

Q. So is there no freedom from this?

Doesn’t the idea that there is a freedom outside of this just make this into a
problem, which further perpetuates the search?

Q. So if there’s a sense of boredom here, for example, then that is just

what’s arising...

Yes, and it’s only a problem if ‘you’ want to be free from it. In this moment,
there are never any problems – there is just the clarity of what is. What is could
include the appearance of boredom. Life itself cannot be a problem – life is just
life, being itself. Problems arise with the individual; there are only problems in
the story of ‘me and my life’, and in my attempt to control life.
Beyond your life story, life is simply as it is. Before thought, what is wrong with
this moment? What is wrong with boredom, when it is no longer owned?

When boredom is simply boredom, where is the problem? True freedom

includes the freedom to be bored! Life denies nothing.
Q. There’s a suggestion in the literature that some people have found a
place of ease...
Yes, there is that story: that liberation is something that in time a person can
find, which brings positive benefits. In the story of my life, I devoured the
literature in pursuit of this! I did all the meditations and self-enquiry, and I had
mind-blowing spiritual experiences, and so on. But it’s all just a story! It’s
simply a story about a character called Jeff, arising now. It is a story about a past
being told now. That’s the only reality I have! Just a story!

Perhaps if there is any place of ease, it is here and now. Perhaps it is simply the
seeing through of the story that “some people have found a place of ease”, that
truly brings ease! This ease is not attained or owned by anyone – it is right there
at the foundation of your experience.

Q. But the sages have had a consistent story: when the self is seen through,
an ease will appear.

But who would see through the self, and when? Only a self could attempt to see
through the self. And only a self would then claim to have seen through the self.
And since the self is time, the seeing-through of the self is also the seeing-
through of time, which can only ever happen in the timeless present. But yes,
you are right, there are stories about people who have seen through the self and
put an end to their individuality.

Q. That’s your story as well, isn’t it?

That’s a story I could tell.

Q. Does it have any significance?

No, it doesn’t.

You see, what you truly are, is already at ease, and always has been.
But you have to be very careful not to make a mental image of this ease.
Because then ‘ease’ will be turned into a future goal, and you will begin to
constantly compare your present experience with your image or concept of ease.
There will be a gap (uneasiness) because an image can never match the living
reality. And that gap between what is and what should be is the search...
You have to be very careful when talking about nonduality, because anything
you say can be turned into a goal, something for the seeker to pursue! What we
share here are descriptions of life as it is, not prescriptions for the seeker. If you
think that I’m giving out prescriptions, you have not really been listening.

Q. What exactly do you mean by ‘story’?

A concept, a belief, a thought – a narrative about a personal past and future. So,
there’s this! [bangs on table]. The undeniable present. This moment. Life
happening. And then there’s a story, a narrative, a bunch of concepts about a
‘Jeff’ character, his life, his past, his seeking, and so on. And that’s it – that’s the
only reality Jeff has: a bunch of stories arising in this, which is always free from
stories.

Undeniably, beyond all stories, there’s this [bangs on table again]. The heart
beating. Breathing. There’s a clock ticking. Sighing. Thoughts might be
happening. And stories will never capture this, the incredible presence of
everything, because stories arise in this presence. This presence is the vastness –
stories are merely ripples on the surface of the vastness.

Q. You have said that at one time you thought you were enlightened. What
has changed?

How would anybody know that they were enlightened? “I’m enlightened” is a
story. Because there’s only this, the present appearance of everything, and it is in
this that the story ‘I’m enlightened’ happens. And it’s such a tiny, insignificant
story compared to the vastness of this!

Yes, a while back, I used to believe that I was a rare, special, enlightened
individual. What arrogance! What separation! How exhausting, to have to
maintain that identity! All of that has faded away now. The absurdity of it was
seen through, and it fell away.
This message has nothing to do with personal specialness. “I’m enlightened,
you’re not! I get this, you don’t! I’ve ended the search, you haven’t! I’m not a
person but you’re still a person! Liberation has happened here but it hasn’t
happened there!” – these are just different ways to separate me from you. There
is a violence there, and it’s exactly that violence that is seen through.

There cannot be any ‘enlightened individuals’ – it’s a contradiction in terms. If

there is any enlightenment, it is the seeing-through of the individual and their
claims of enlightenment. This is the end of specialness, and the beginning of true
humility.

Q. So... who are you now?

That is no longer a question I can ask myself, because the question explodes the
moment it is asked. Of course, if I were asked such a question, I might reply,
“I’m Jeff.” A dream question is responded to with a dream answer. There is no
need to reply, “I am no-one, I have no name, I was never born and will never
die.” That merely becomes another identity. What I truly am cannot be put into
words, and does not need to be.

Q. Is suffering an identification with the thought-story?

Yes, identification is suffering, and it is also seeking. They are one and the same.
The moment there is identification as an individual (in other words,
identification as a thought-story) there is separation (something separate from
something else). And the moment there is separation, there is lack, and so
seeking arises, which is the attempt to put an end to lack. Separation and seeking
the end of separation always go together.

The moment you are a seeker, you are in time, and suffering is always in time.
Without time, suffering has no duration, and therefore it cannot be called
suffering at all. Without time, suffering has no oxygen – it cannot breathe.
Without time, there can be no seeker; you need a future to find what you are
looking for, or get rid of something you don’t want.
Without time, there is nobody there separate from suffering, and so there is
nobody there who suffers. Identification is suffering, and seeking, and it is also
time itself.
In simple terms, suffering is the attempt to escape what is presently happening.
Take physical pain, for example: it is simply not a problem until I want to be
free from it. This pain is not a problem, until the search begins. And ‘I’ am that
search! The one who wants to be free from pain is the search. We search, in
time, for the absence of pain, which actually creates the problem of pain.
Without the search, there is no problem. When it is seen that the pain belongs to
nobody, the search dissolves.
Beyond all concepts of pain, and the search for its absence, there is this, this
burning sensation in the leg, undeniably so, happening now, now, now! [slaps
leg] And it’s not a problem until I want to be free from it. Suffering implies a
future time when I will be free from suffering, and it’s a vicious circle.

Nobody can end suffering through effort. Because it’s not freedom from
suffering we’re talking about here. It’s the possibility of freedom in suffering.
It’s not freedom from pain – it’s freedom in pain. Because at the heart of pain
there is simply nobody there who is in pain. There is just pain happening.

At the heart of suffering, there is nobody there who is suffering. This is the
radical possibility that is being shared here.

Q. Can you repeat that? So pain is there...

Not the idea of pain, but present sensation, moment by moment. Present!
Present! Present! [Slaps leg several times] Now, now, now! And then the story,
“Why is this happening to me? When will the pain stop?” Which implies,
doesn’t it, that I don’t want this to be happening? But it is happening, whether I
like it or not!

Whatever happens is not a problem as such. Anger is not a problem, pain is not a
problem, sexual desires are not a problem, something catching on fire is not a
problem... until ‘you’ come along and reject what is happening. But absolutely,
if there is a fire, go and put it out! Don’t just sit there and go, “There’s no fire, so
I don’t need to put it out!” That’s ridiculous! (Laughter) Don’t be spiritual!
There’s no fire? Of course there’s a bloody fire! Go and put it out! (Laughter)
*

Q. Is this just about living in the moment?

There’s always the struggle, isn’t there, to live in the moment? It just becomes
another form of seeking. We’re always living in the moment. This moment
already is. It is impossible not to live in the moment!
The attempt to live in the moment requires time. We are trying to use time to
reach the timeless, and this tactic will ultimately always lead to failure.

All that self-improvement stuff, all that ‘being in the moment’ stuff, there’s
nothing wrong with it, and it may be helpful to the individual, but it implies a
tomorrow. It implies a future. It implies that this moment may not be your last.
This is an assumption, that we’re going to be alive tomorrow! So yes, this
message is really about living in the moment! This moment is all there is! It’s all
we have! This could be your last moment!

But the mind doesn’t want to hear that, because it wants to have all of its
projects, and so it needs a future, to be free, to improve, to be happy, to be in the
moment! The mind doesn’t want to stop. It wants to carry on, churning away,
trying to be free, trying to be happy. And that’s all fine, I suppose, until it’s not.
And at some point, for this character anyway, all of that just didn’t work
anymore. At some point, working on yourself ceases to work, and perhaps you
begin to open up to the possibility that we’re sharing here.

This message goes beyond the individual’s attempts to heal him or herself. It
goes beyond the dream of individuality (which is the dream of time) and points
to the obvious: this moment is all there is. We do not have a tomorrow! That’s
an assumption, a story. We could get killed on the way home tonight. It’s
possible! One of us could have a brain haemorrhage or heart attack in the next
few seconds. It’s possible, it happens!
Right here and right now, this life is so infinitely precious and fragile – it is
really too beautiful for words...

Q. So ‘tomorrow’ is an assumption?

Yes, an assumption. Past, present and future are assumptions, concepts,

thoughts, stories, beliefs. ‘Tomorrow’ has no reality outside of a thought-story
about ‘tomorrow’, which always appears now. Tomorrow happens now.
Yesterday happens now. The entire history and future of the cosmos happens
now.
*

Q. If we become more present, is the mind calmer?

If you can become more present, you can also apparently become less present!
“Damn it, I lost presence!” (Laughter) As I said, ‘becoming more present’ is just
another process, another path, more seeking.
“I need to be more present!” But you are just a bundle of thoughts, concepts,
memories. You are just the past! It is the past that comes in and says, “I need to
be more present!” So the search for presence is ultimately going to burn up in
this aliveness. The search for ‘more presence’ just becomes a burden...

When I take a fresh look, without the baggage of past knowledge, all I find is
what’s happening presently, and nobody here (outside of a thought-story) who
needs to become anything. Wholeness is already here, and it has nothing to do
with Jeff improving himself in any way. You are already perfect the way you
are! Of course, worldly ‘self-improvement’ could still happen (for example,
attending a course to learn Spanish) but it wouldn’t touch this – it would just
improve the dream. And there’s nothing wrong with having a happy dream!
And the seeker cannot accept this. That this is all there is! Because what happens
to all our ideas about a future enlightenment, and improving ourselves... what
happens to all of that if this – this moment – is it? If we’re going to be happy in
the future, if we’re going to be joyful in the future... what happens to all of that?
What happens to our search for enlightenment when time is stripped away?
What happens to our identity as a ‘spiritual seeker’ if our spiritual goals are seen
through?
Yes, this strips you totally naked, and leaves you face-to-face with life, with
reality, with things as they are. The illusions are stripped away (you become
‘dis-illusioned’) and what you are left with is a love with no name.

Q. But I think there are things that we can do to bring us closer to the
moment...
But we don’t have time! We don’t have that luxury! The whole idea of process –
it’s a nice idea but it implies that we have time! What if we don’t have time?
What if it was time that created the seeking illusion in the first place?
*

Q. If this is it, what about making plans for the future?

Oh sure, make plans, of course. But they’re just assumptions. We never know
what’s going to happen. How could I have known that one day I’d be sitting in
front of people giving a talk like this? How surprising this is! What can we ever
know? How can we ever know anything for sure? It’s a comfort, of course, to
think that we can know. The mind loves to know! “I know who I am, I know
what I want, I know what the future will hold, I know that I have a tomorrow, I
know what is true and what is real.” But if we’re honest, we just don’t know. We
don’t know, but we pretend to know. This is about the end of pretending.

Q. What about motivation? If this is it, why would you be motivated to do

anything?

You find yourself doing things. Coming here tonight, for instance. Whatever
happens, happens. And the mind will not accept that it’s that simple. The mind
wants to choose, wants to plan, wants to be in control, wants to think that it’s in
control anyway. It wants to play God. To feel that you are in control can be a
great comfort...

What I find is that life just happens. It’s so incredibly simple. This happens, that
happens. Plans get made. Food gets eaten. Travelling happens, or travelling
doesn’t happen. Friends appear and disappear. Words are spoken or not spoken.
The body sits, stands, walks, doesn’t walk. Sounds, smells, tastes, all sorts of
sensations arise, and it’s all happening here, in the intimacy that I am.

Everything simply arises when it arises, and falls away when it falls away, and
the intimacy remains, no matter what happens. It’s that simple. It is a life lived in
freefall, a life lived without reference points, and the problem of motivation falls
away when this is seen. And then you find yourself doing things or not, and it’s
perfect either way. And you never know what’s coming next – that’s the
adventure!
It was never a question of you being motivated or not. There is always a
response to life, whether you like it or not, because you are life, and life is both
stimulus and response. Stimulus and response are not-two. Even a perceived
‘lack of motivation’ is still a response to something. Inertia and detachment from
life are not possible when you are life!

Beyond motivation or lack of it, this is happening, and it is already complete.

Beyond motivation or lack of it, there is the adventure. You get to see what
happens next in this movie which hasn’t been written yet.

Perhaps our beliefs about life, choice and motivation are really just there to
comfort us, to cover up our fear of life and death, to block out the awareness of
our powerlessness in the face of the infinite, and our inability to control
everything.

Q. What is the role of ‘spiritual experiences’?

‘Spiritual experiences’ are just experiences, that’s all, and all experiences come
and go. They are in time, they have a beginning and an end, and so they come
and go. They arise and pass, leaving no trace, except perhaps a ‘memory’ which
is really a present story about a ‘past experience’.

This message is not about having special, spiritual experiences. But by all
means, go off and have spiritual experiences if you want to! Thought is infinitely
creative, it can generate all sorts of experiences. However, they will all pass in
the end, they will dissolve into nothingness. What is left when all spiritual
experiences – even the most mind-blowingly blissful ones – have come and
gone?

In what do all experiences arise? That is something that no experience, however

blissful, joyful or profound, can give you.

We are seekers of experience. We always seem to be craving the next

experience, or remembering, or even pining for, a past experience. In the story,
for example, there may be times when thought dies away, and there is only the
clarity of what is, with nobody there to experience it. And then thought (‘the
person’) comes back in and says, “Wow, all thought died away, that was a ‘no-
thought’ experience. This is significant! I must be close to enlightenment!”

And then thought says, “I want another one of those ‘no-thought’ experiences!”
(Laughter) And then the search for the next ‘no-thought’ experience happens.
But of course, the absence of thought cannot be an ‘experience’, because the
absence of thought is also the absence of the experiencer. You cannot
‘experience’ your own absence.
In seeking the next ‘no-thought’ experience, thought keeps itself alive. Only
thought would search for the end of thought. Thought feeds on thought, and the
cycle seems to be never-ending. People get so stuck here, looking for the next
‘spiritual’ experience. This is such a trap. We are essentially at war with thought.
But look: thoughts are simply not a problem. They just happen. They aren’t
yours.

There are stories about ‘enlightened masters’ who have freed themselves from
all thought. That’s the myth, anyway. And maybe you believe that in order to be
‘enlightened’ you need to get rid of all thought too. But the strange thing is that
when the search for the end of thought is seen through, it is also seen that
thought was never the problem. Thoughts are so innocent, when seen for what
they are. And then you have no desire to get rid of thoughts, because they simply
arise in unconditional love, and are themselves expressions of unconditional
love. Thoughts appear in the intimacy that you are.

Q. But that can take a while to see, can’t it?

It can, as long as you are trying to see it! As long as you’re trying to get
something or somewhere, it will apparently take time!

What we are sharing here is the possibility that you don’t need time, and that you
never needed time.

This is it! What’s happening right now is it! There’s nothing more. We can’t
have anything more. It’s the idea that there’s something extraordinary to get in
the future that makes this – what is presently happening – so ordinary. As long
as there’s the search for the extraordinary ‘out there’, this is so ordinary! How
very dull this is, if you’re searching for excitement in the future! How lacking in
love this is, if you’re searching for love! How meaningless this becomes, when
you’re seeking meaning!
*

Q. What about spiritual paths?

To an individual, of course it may be helpful to have a ‘path’. Paths appear in
your dream exactly when they do, and when they are needed. They meet the
seeker exactly where they are, and lead the seeker from one part of the dream to
another. But ultimately a path just perpetuates the illusion of ‘me’. It simply
postpones a face-to-face encounter with life, and in that, the dissolution of the
seeker. This is because a path implies a future, it implies there’s something more
than life as it is. Where is the future? How could life ever be not as it is?
I think we cling to paths out of fear of standing alone, face-to-face with life, out
of the need to know. Can we accept that we are essentially powerless in the face
of life, that life itself is the only power? Can you accept that in the face of
everything, you are nothing, and that no path can save you from the reality of
life, as it is, right now?

[Silence]

Q. Well, we’re all thinking, so no! (Laughter)

Beyond all theories, beyond all the books we have ever read, beyond all our
knowledge, beyond all past and future, there is this – what is arising now. And
the past – the idea of you and your lives, your families and your possessions,
your achievements and so on – is dead and gone. The past only arises now as
thought. That’s the only reality it has.

Right now, your home, your possessions, all your loved ones could have
disappeared. How would you know? Right now, how could you know? You see,
that’s how little power the mind actually has! It’s comforting to think that there’s
a world ‘out there’, and it’s all very knowable and stable and predictable. And
yes, it does appear to be, at times. Yet ultimately this ‘outside world’ is made up
of stories happening now, and there’s nothing beyond that. How could there be?

Any idea of ‘something beyond this’ is just a story, happening in this. The whole
universe is here.
Q. Don’t yesterday’s thought patterns bring us to where we are today?

No. It’s almost the exact opposite. It’s now, it’s always now – undeniably so.
You are here now, aren’t you? You are here, awake and present, right? And then
the story arises, the story of the character, the person, the ‘me’, who became
interested in nonduality and drove to this meeting tonight. But that story is just
something arising now, and now is ever free from cause and effect.

Q. What about emotions? Don’t they influence us?

There’s the separation again: ‘me’ versus ‘my emotions’. Thought has created
that separation. When there is anger, for example, when anger arises, that is all
there is. There’s not ‘somebody being angry’ – that is a creation of thought.
Thought separates itself from the aliveness of anger, creates the rigid concept
‘anger’, creates the ‘me’ who is angry, tells the story ‘I am an angry person – I
want to be free from anger’, and in doing so perpetuates the anger!

This is not about allowing everything to happen either. Who would ever allow
this? It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you all to allow the present
moment. But ultimately that’s just more separation, more seeking. The present
moment is! Nobody can allow it, because nobody is separate from it! It is
already allowed, because it’s happening. Nothing has prevented this from
happening! Allowing becomes unnecessary when this is seen.

Although, ultimately, if allowing or not-allowing happens, that is just something

else happening in this. Even not allowing is allowed in this!

Q. This is so difficult for a person to understand...

Yes, but that’s because the person is trying to understand! The person will just
go round in circles trying to understand this. This is not to be understood. It is
too simple to be understood, not too complicated! The attempt to understand this
creates the very confusion that you are trying to overcome.

How can nothing possibly be everything? How can emptiness possibly be form?
The mind sees one great big paradox here, and drives itself mad trying to resolve
that paradox.
But what is wrong with non-understanding? What is wrong with not-knowing?
You see, in this, the non-understanding is equal to the understanding. And who
could ever understand that?

Who is the one trying to resolve the paradox? Who is the one who wants
enlightenment? Who is the one who wants to become one with everything?

Q. I’d like to become one with a chocolate biscuit! (Laughter)

As a Zen teacher once said, “Nothing is left to you at this moment, but to have a
good laugh.”
LOVE AND DEATH
“Biting into an apple as I sit before peonies –
that’s how I’ll die.”

- Shiki
ON LOVE AND ALONENESS

“Bind me like a seal upon thine heart:

love is as strong as death.”

-Song of Solomon 8:6

I am alone in the garden. The sun is rising. A little robin tugs at a worm in the
grass.

In true love, there is no object of desire, affection and tenderness, for the beloved
has collapsed into the lover. The object has collapsed into the subject, and there
is only love. Only love, and nobody to be aware of it, nobody to know it and
nobody to deny it. Only love, both radically alone, and intimately connected to
all things.
A subject and an object can never be in love. They are forever divided from each
other, split from each other. They can only gaze longingly into each other’s eyes
across an unbridgeable divide, with the fervent hope that one day, perhaps one
day, love will bridge the chasm, and the isolation of multiplicity and
fragmentation will give way to the joy of intimate companionship, togetherness,
and unity.

But no, love cannot and will not bridge the gap, for the gap is inherent in the
subject-object split. Indeed, the gap is the subject-object split, and nothing can
fill a gap which is so deeply engrained into the very foundations of our
experience. No, love cannot bridge the gap, because a subject and an object, a
lover and the beloved, are inherently, fundamentally separate. It is unlikely that
they will ever truly meet as people, as human beings.

True love is the death of this terrible divide, and with it, the ending of all
division between two people. This will never be achieved through effort. The
very effort to end the division strengthens the division, gives power to the
division. This is because the division is not there. It has never been there, and it
will never be there. The division is an illusion, and when you fight an illusion
you are bound to lose.
Lovers can never meet through effort, although they may die trying.

*
So, our lovers continue to gaze longingly at each other across this unbridgeable
divide, a divide that, in their innocence, they have created for themselves. How
to help them? Any effort they make to come together will pull them more
strongly apart. Are they doomed to live and die like this? Is there a way out?

Yes there is, but it involves death. Not physical death, but death of the ego, death
of everything that separates, death of everything that fragments, death of
everything that divides, death of everything that isolates, death of everything that
has been carried over from the past, death of everything that projects into a
future. Death of the idea of love itself. Finally, it will involve death of the
beloved, death of the lover. Death of you and me, and with it, death of all that
comes between us. A descent into pure nothingness, a plunge into the unknown.

He who plunges in this way may taste it, the sweet and simple joy of radical
aloneness that is true love. Look! The robin tweet-tweets as he hops over the
dew-soaked grass, and the morning sun begins to warm and wake the slumbering
creatures in this Garden of Eden that we have named Earth, and nowhere can I
find isolation, loneliness, separation, because all things are in all things, and
everywhere is mother, everywhere is home.

And I smile to myself with the realisation of the utterly, utterly obvious. I have
not found you, but I have recognised something that has eluded me for a
lifetime: you are not out there, but in here. You are part of the experiencing
structure I take to be myself. So I do not love you, for there is no ‘me’ to love
and no ‘you’ to be loved. No, I do not love you, for you are an integral part of
that which loves.

*
The great search ends here, now, in this moment. There is only love, and you are
that – you are love itself. You are what I feel now, you are the thoughts bubbling
up from nowhere and dissolving into nothingness, you are that robin over there,
and the fresh dew on the morning grass, and the sun in all its radiance, and we
are eternally, timelessly bound in this way, you and me, together with all things.
Except there is no ‘me’, no ‘you’, and no ‘things’. So we will never be apart –
no, we cannot be apart, not now, not ever.

So, this morning, I am alone in the garden, and you are herewith me to see it all.
INTIMACY

W hy do we pretend to be separate from each other?

The ground of all things is love. Yet we erect boundaries and divisions,
and then claim that these boundaries and divisions are part of the natural order of
things. This gives weight to the illusion of an objective world ‘out there’ – when
of course the world, as every child knows, is just a play of light.

If you look with innocent eyes at this world we have created, you will see that
there is something very peculiar going on. People, for the most part, seem
scared, rigid, closed-in, set in their ways. They see themselves as pawns of fate
in a deterministic universe, slaves to their Gods and to their work. They live as if
the world ‘out there’ (whatever that means) has some bearing on who and what
they are in the moment.

With this illusory separation comes anxiety, loneliness, and boredom. Perhaps
this is ultimately a blessing though, because in the midst of the frustration and
despair a new possibility may arise.

Right now, who are you?

Right now, in who or what are these words being perceived?

Who, in this moment, is aware of the sights and sounds in the room?

You? What is ‘you’? Are you the ‘you’ you were five years ago? Are you the
‘you’ you were when you were a child? Has this ‘you’ changed? And who is
aware of this change?

The idea of yourself as an individual, a person, an entity of some kind with a

past and a future: in what does all of this arise, right now? If you’re honest,
radically so, you’ll have to admit this: There is no-one there. There are sights
and sounds and smells – not the words, not the concepts, but the actual reality to
which these words point. Yet there is simply nobody there seeing, hearing and
smelling. Only purest sensation, only the rawness of experiencing, and nothing
more. It is true, the idea ‘I am seeing, I am hearing, I am smelling’ may arise, but
this is to beg the question – who is at the centre of all this?
*

And what about others? Let’s see: someone appears on the scene, and then there
is the thought, “Here is another person, another individual, just like me, but
separate from me.”
There the violence begins.

In reality, when ‘someone else’ appears, I have no idea what it is in front of me.
Before the story, before the concepts, you have no way of knowing what you are
looking at.

Then this person speaks, and two individuals appear to be having what’s known
as a ‘conversation’, but is there really any separation between us? Is this
separation not just a construction of thought? Are we not the same, you and me?

Underneath everything that appears to separate us (our beliefs, our religions,

our philosophies, our successes and failures, our opinions, our prejudices and so
on), are we not in love, you and me?

Are we not embraced by an unconditional love that belongs to nobody?

Do we not appear in this love, together?

I ask again: are we not in love?

*
The world goes on, and with it, the illusion of separation. We live our lives as
though we’re separate. With that comes isolation, loneliness, anxiety, the
longing to be loved, the desperation to succeed, the need to be somebody in the
world. Separation is violence, and violence is separation. Would the Holocaust
have been possible if the Nazis hadn’t promoted the idea that Jews were
fundamentally very different from Aryans? Was it not separation and ‘us-and-
them thinking’ that was at the root of it all? Is this not true for all wars and
genocides? For all violence?
Right now, because there is no ‘me’, there is no ‘you’ either. Yes, these ideas
may arise, but ultimately they arise for nobody. They float in awareness, along
with all the sights and sounds in the room, including the image of your body. We
are surrounded and embraced by a love with no name, before we have uttered
even one word to each other.

Perhaps the division will never be healed, I don’t know. Certainly the world goes
on, and the insanity of violence continues. The violence is part of the fabric of
what we take to be human nature and cannot be healed by practising what we
call ‘love’. Only when the violence dissolves – in other words, is seen through –
perhaps, only then, do we have a chance.

Love is not something that we do, love is something that we are, but this simple
fact seems to be obscured by the illusion of separation. Of course, it is never
truly obscured – it is always present, always here, and we are always it. Perhaps
in our quest to ‘be someone’ in this world, we forget what we knew. Perhaps as
children we knew the truth: This – this moment – is all we have. In this moment,
and this moment alone, we are one.

Perhaps this is love: this moment, and everything that arises in it.

Just perhaps.
BEYOND THE IMAGE

“The salvation of man

is through love and in love.”

- Victor Frankl

T o confine love to that which falls within boundaries is not to love at all. To
confine love is to possess, and to possess is to destroy. We destroy each
other in the name of love, and the heart remains unfulfilled.

We possess each other because we are afraid to lose each other, and yet in truth
there are no others, only images. We cling to these images for dear life, but love
is the death of the image, and with it, the death of you and me.

We dissolve into each other, you and me. We become what we always were:
whole. Only then do we really see the one who is in front of us. Only then do I
really see you.

To love fully, to love wholeheartedly, is to love beyond all boundaries, all

duality, all notions of right and wrong, of good and bad, of this and that, of you
and I. To love truly is to love without restriction, without temporal limitation,
and finally, without fear.
To love fully, is to die.

And then perhaps, in love, God will look back at me through your eyes, and it
will be undone, all of it. Then your eyes will be my eyes, and your mouth will be
my mouth, and the body will dissolve into the open space that embraces us all.
No eyes, no ears, no tongue, no nose, no throat. No thing. Finally, nothing.

Perhaps only then should we dare to call it ‘love’.

A DEADLY MESSAGE

“Whoever finds his life will lose it,

and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

- Jesus

T his message of nonduality points to nothing less than the destruction of the
seeker, the annihilation of the one who wants answers.

This is a deadly message, and who really wants to die? Do you really want to
hear that all of your hopes and dreams, ambitions and achievements –indeed
your entire life-story – is nothing but a dance of awareness, a play of
consciousness, playing itself out now, in this moment? That everything you take
yourself to be is nothing but thought? And perhaps not even that?
Do you really want to die? Of course you don’t. That which you take to be
‘yourself’ is nothing but a defence against death, a fight against impermanence, a
search for something more than what is obviously, simply, presently the case.
What you take to be ‘you’ gives some feeling of permanence, some sense of
comfort in a seemingly terrifying and contingent world.

Yes, this message is death, but in that death there is also life. The end of seeking
is the beginning of the true adventure. It is the beginning of a life lived without
pretence, without illusions, without the mythology. It is the beginning of a love
affair with everything.

You have to die to really live; you have to let go of everything to get everything
back.

Right now, everything that has ever happened to you has already faded into
nothingness. In a sense, you are already dead. The worst has already happened!
You are already dead!

You spend your life fearing the nothingness of death, only to come to see that
there is nothing – and never was anything – to fear. Fear of nothing becomes
nothing to fear. Because there is only ever the present appearance of everything,
from which you are not separate.
Nothingness is fullness. Emptiness is form. The void is resplendent, shining – it
is fully alive.

It is utterly paradoxical when you try to put it into words. And yet, it is as simple
as breathing. It is as easy as being here, right now.
Life is death. These words will never be understood by the seeking mind.
PAIN

T here is no freedom from pain. This body is nothing but a pain machine. This
body will decay: cancers may ravage it, the heart may seize up. Perhaps the
limbs will fail, or breathing will become excruciating, making a future freedom
seem like an impossibility – a fancy story dreamt up by people with too much
time on their hands. Are we ready to accept this?

Concepts like ‘I am not the body’ and ‘there is no self’ – these are wonderful
pointers, but how easily they just become comforting beliefs, defence
mechanisms, ways for us to block out or deny aspects of experience! But in the
face of intense physical pain, all attempts to rationalise or intellectualise or
‘understand’ simply crumble: an individual cannot think pain away, no matter
how hard he or she thinks or doesn’t think. The pain is there. It’s only in the
resistance to pain that the trouble begins; it’s only when ‘I’ come in, with my
dislike of pain, that the pain becomes a problem.

Only humans turn pain into a problem – that is to say, we weave a story around
what is in fact completely natural for a physical organism. Then, what is really
only a moment to-moment sensation, a dynamic expression of aliveness,
becomes part of a complex narrative, usually a scary one, with an uncertain
duration and an often miserable conclusion.

In fact, no narrative is needed: the pain is enough, and it is very real. Indeed, the
pain is all there is. And ‘we’ are nothing but the attempt to flee that pain.

We create ourselves in the act of fleeing ourselves.

*
Now, spiritual concepts can be very helpful... if you are somebody who needs
help! But concepts are just concepts, and no concept can fully capture what is
real and alive. What is real right now is this burning sensation in the throat, this
crushing pain in the leg, or perhaps this throbbing in the head – not the words,
but the undeniable actuality.
In this real, intense pain, there is no suffering. That is a story that comes later.

‘I’ come along and label the pain as pain, and with that, I imply that I don’t want
the pain to be there. I call myself a ‘victim’ and desperately wish for a future
time when the present pain will vanish. In other words, I do not want this
moment to be as it is.

The pain is not the problem: I am the problem.

Can anyone really accept that no matter what the spiritual teachings tell us, this
body is at some point going to stop functioning? Can we really accept that at
some point in the future, imagined or not, there may be excruciating physical
pain?

Even Jesus cried out when they nailed his hands to the cross.
And yet, Jesus knew that this, too, was an expression of God.

This is what we have all forgotten: intense physical pain is as much an

expression of God as a beautiful sunset or an embrace from a loved one.

So this message is not about denial or transcendence of physical pain, for that is
not even possible. This message is about the realisation that God is everything,
literally everything.

Yes, unconditional love includes extreme physical pain, if and when it happens.
THE END OF THE STORY

“We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;

This is our world.
All we have to do after that –
is to die.”

- Ikkyu

U pon death, only the story of ‘me’ is lost. Only the story of an individual dies,
and what remains was never born in the first place.

Only the story of ‘me’ ever enters the stream of time. Indeed, this narrative is
time as we know it, so at the point of death, what falls away is time itself. That is
to say, at the point of death, all that is false dissolves into the nothingness that
embraces all truth and falsehood – the nothingness that is not separate from
everything that arises.
A person dies, that is undeniable, but that in which the person arises in the first
place is indestructible, because it is not part of the apparent world of time and
space.

*
Death is already here, for all of us, because death is not separate from what we
are. This is because absence is not separate from presence. As long as there is
the belief that death is something that will happen to ‘me’ in the future, then
death is exactly that: something that will happen to ‘me’ in the future. What you
believe becomes your world. When there is no belief, there cannot be a world.

And so let us celebrate death. It is not the enemy. It apparently comes to an

individual when it comes, and indeed, from a certain perspective, it is the only
certainty in life.

From another perspective, there is no death at all.

And from yet another perspective, death is right here, in the present moment.

Really, there are no perspectives at all.

*
Everything simply arises and dissolves in this open space, this vastness which
holds all manifestation. ‘I’ arise in this vastness, as does the story ‘one day I will
die’. And no matter what arises or dissolves, the vastness remains untouched,
always. The vastness accepts everything, unconditionally, including the arising
and dissolving of the individual – that is, including my apparent life and my
apparent death.

You will never really die, because you were never really born. There is only this
wide open space in which all ideas about birth, life and death arise and dissolve.
And so all is well, because all your problems, and indeed all the problems of the
world, are just stories arising in this vastness, a vastness which allows everything
to be exactly as it already is.

Yes, all is well. In the pain and the sadness, the joy and the madness, all is well.
And death was always just a story told to frighten us.
TO LOOK DEATH IN THE FACE

“Death is not an event in life:

we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal
duration but timelessness, then eternal life
belongs to those who live in the present.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

T he ultimate secret of our existence is perhaps this: death is liberation. It is

liberation from all of the forms of this world, from all suffering, mental and
physical, from all problems, hopes, dreams, desires, ambitions, goals, memories,
feelings, from the whole human condition.

This begs the question, perhaps the ultimate question: why do we fear death?

It looks like this: “I am afraid that I will be no more. I am afraid of not existing.
I am afraid of nothingness, afraid of the unknown.” But here’s the catch: even
the unknown is known. The moment I think about the unknown, the unknown
becomes an object of knowledge, an abstraction, an image in the mind, a
concept, and therefore, of course, it is known.

Beyond knowledge and ignorance, what is truly Unknown will never be captured
by the mind, and therefore death will never, ever be understood.

So what do I really fear when pondering my own death? It is simply this: the end
of ‘me’. The end of ‘myself’. The end of ‘I’.
The end of my life story, my journey, my myth, my saga, my Hollywood epic.

However, if you look deeply, you will see that the ‘I’ is not actually separate
from the entire structure of thought through which this apparent world is
perceived. That is to say, when the ‘I’ goes, the whole world goes with it! There
is no world apart from my experience of it, in my experience! Perhaps that
sounds obvious, but if this is really taken onboard, then it is clearly seen that
death is not the end. It is merely the end of the personal experiencing structure
that you take to be yourself.
Death is the end of the personal, the end of the known, and a plunge into the
Unknown.

Nobody takes that plunge. Again, this is totally beyond words.

*

Will you be present at your own death?

Who will you be at the moment of your death?

Who were you at the moment of your birth?

And a moment before that?

Did you simply spring into existence at a specific moment in time, so many
years ago?

Will you simply spring out of existence at a specific moment in time, so many
years from now?

This is the dream. The dream that you were born. The dream that you will die.

The end of this dream, the plunge into the life that you are, is liberation.
Liberation can happen now, in this moment... if you would only drop your entire
belief system, your religions, your superstitions, your concepts, everything you
have taken on authority. If you would only drop everything that you take to be
true, you would see truth, not the word, but the undeniable reality.
Of course, you cannot drop anything. The more you try to drop your beliefs, the
more they stick.

Perhaps, these things will be seen through, by no-one. Then, in that seeing-
through, truth will reveal itself – the truth that was there all along.
And truth looks like this:

Breathing.
A cough.

A bird landing on an electricity pylon over there.

The wind blowing.

The sound of children playing in the garden.

The thud of the heart beating.

A dull ache in the left arm.

The warmth of the mug in your right hand.

A thought popping up about last night’s football match.

The buzz of the television.

In this moment, right now, where is death?

Is it not a mental projection, a projection that creates the illusion of a future?

You can’t find it, can you?

*

Until death happens, it is always a projection. The moment death happens,

projection ends, fear ends.

In truth, death is the end of fear, because it is the end of the one who fears.
So death, or fear of death, is really the grand cosmic joke. The one thing that we
truly fear is the one thing that, when looked into deeply, will ultimately liberate
us – liberate us from itself. Death liberates you from death!
So let people die! Let them! They die when they die, and you can’t prevent that.
Yes, you might be able to help to ease their pain, and that might be the kindest
thing to do in the circumstances, but ultimately you won’t stop them from dying,
which is what you really want. So you must let goof them. Say goodbye, because
ultimately you will not save them, and keeping them alive, even if that were
possible, will not save you.

You will not stop yourself from dying. You can try, of course, but you will be
fighting a losing battle. You will be running in circles your whole life, for the
fight against death – the fight against the end of the self – is nothing other than
the striving of the self to prevent its own destruction, a striving which is the self.

Immortality is the ultimate dream of the ego. It is the ultimate hope, and ultimate
madness, but it seems that we’re all caught up in the madness. We all want to be
immortal, or at least, we all want to live. Certainly, we don’t want to die, not yet,
anyway. Hopeless! Madness! You will die. You will die in spite of your efforts
to live. You may die tomorrow.

The clear seeing of this destroys all fear.

Yes, you may die tomorrow. So why are you spending today suffering, believing
in your non-existent problems? Go on, live! Live totally! Live joyously! Live
without fear! Live as though you have nothing to defend! Drop your rigid belief
systems, drop your ideologies, drop your prejudices, drop every form of
suffering and live! Do it now, you may as well; it will be done for you anyway
the moment the body stops functioning. But why wait until then? The time is
now, there is no other time!

“While alive,
be a dead man,
thoroughly dead,
and act as you will,
and all will be good.”
- Bunan

To look death in the face, and to fall on the floor laughing, that is enlightenment.
BEYOND NOTHING AND EVERYTHING
“And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities.
An infinity, and at the same time, zero.
We try to scoop it all up in our hands,
and what we get is a handful of zero.”

- Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

THE ROBIN

N othing to hold onto anymore.

Nothing tangible.

No safety net.

No security.

No comforting beliefs.
Nothing. No-thing.

Void.
And in that void, everything.

An empty fullness, a full emptiness.

And beyond these words, beyond these strange little squiggles that symbolise
nothing beyond themselves, beyond all philosophies, beyond the intellect,
beyond all attempts to understand, beyond the absolutely futile attempt to put all
of this into words that can be understood, beyond it all, there is a little robin in
the tree over there, and I have no idea what he is doing, or why he is there, or
why any of this is happening at all (and there is undeniably something going
on!); but I expect that this little robin has never struggled with life the way
humans do, he has never for a moment tried to intellectualise it all, tried to figure
it out, tried to understand it, and certainly, I expect, he has never tried to escape
it.
And that robin, chirping to himself as he hops from branch to branch, singing his
little song, reminds us all that there is simply nothing to get, that the idea that
there is something to get is at the root of all human misery and confusion, that
this present appearance is all there is or ever was, which is not a problem until
‘you’ arrive on the scene and want it to be other than what it is.
The robin understands. Or rather, it wouldn’t ever occur to him to try to
understand. He jumps about on that tree, chirping his little song of joy and
heartache, and that is the world, that is his world, and there is no other.

Oh, little robin, you know this: Nothing matters.

And precisely because nothing matters, everything matters absolutely.

THE PLAY OF APPEARANCES

“Things are always changing,

so nothing can be yours.”

- Shunryu Suzuki

I mage upon image upon image; appearance after appearance after

appearance. No end to this crazy, beautiful show, no point at which life ceases
and some sort of ‘enlightenment’ happens. No desire for this to happen, even if it
could. Who would want an end to this life anyway? Only an apparent someone,
but is it not this apparent someone that is seen through?

Image upon image: apparent people having apparent conversations about

apparent problems with the apparent outside world, apparently being frustrated
at their apparent lack of power in the face of it all.

Appearance after appearance: me and you and our apparent life stories; going to
work, coming home, doing the dishes, taking out the rubbish, buying food from
the supermarket, going to the toilet, paying the bills, cleaning the house, getting
ill, getting old and writhing in the most excruciating pain. No end to it all, no
point at which life ceases.

This is life, and life is this. No explanation required, only the present happening
presently, happening in a vastness that accepts everything, including the lack of
acceptance known as ‘I’.

‘I’ already arise in this vastness, and so there is nothing more that needs to be
done.

‘I’ am already a fiction, arising presently, and anything that ‘I’ could ever do
would just be more of the fiction.
There is no escape from the fiction. No movement is possible from the ‘unreal’
to the ‘real’. That’s just a nice story which perpetuates the search.
The unreal is as real as the real. And what exactly does this mean?

It means the heart beating presently, the sound of breathing presently, the table
and chairs and floor and ceiling of this room appearing presently, feelings in the
body appearing presently.

It means this obvious present appearance, which is not something that ‘I’ could
ever get closer to, or ‘understand’ better, or ‘know’ more intimately, because
already ‘I’ am just an appearance in this totality, and a present appearance could
never become anything other than a present appearance. It’s all a present
appearance – all of it.

These are not ‘my’ thoughts – these are just thoughts.

These are not ‘my’ problems – these are just problems.

This is not ‘my’ life – this is just life.

Life plays itself out, and I am both utterly immersed in it, and utterly absent.
These are not polar opposites: To be immersed fully, is to be fully absent.

Fully immersed, fully absent. And yet there is still the noise of traffic outside,
still the click-click of the boiler switching on and off, still the sound of breathing,
still the tap-tap of the rain at the windows, still the tiredness in the body, still the
sensations, moment by precious moment.

Even though I am fully absent, life carries on.

Even though I am nowhere to be found, life cannot – will not – cease, not now,
not ever.

Oh, words will never capture it, the absolute freedom of this, the undeniable and
mind-blowing clarity that is life itself... and yet, the utter ordinariness and
simplicity of it all, and how a mind locked into the search will never understand.
SOUND AND FURY

“To grasp life and meaning, we assume constancy

where it does not exist. We name experiences,
emotions, and subjective states and assume that
what is named is as enduring as its name.”

- James Bugental

N othing ever happens. Everything passes before the eyes, and nothing stays.
From moment to moment, there is no build up, no residue: each moment is
an entirely new world, and any similarity to the previous world is an illusion, an
illusion which gives rise to the idea of permanence, of there being some entity
here who carries himself from the past to the future. But there is no such entity,
only the passing of content through awareness now, now and now, an awareness
which is identical to that content.

So nothing ever happens. ‘Something happening’ is a story without a storyteller,

a tale told by no-one, a tale ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

There is only this: flashes of colour, bursts of sound, passing sensations, varying
temperatures, smells hitting the nostrils. Only this, and nothing more. Only this,
and nothing ever to show for it.
Like sand passing through the fingers, this life cannot be grasped. In fact, the
more we try to grasp it, the less ‘alive’ we really are.

Actually we can never be more or less alive. We are life, and anything we do, or
don’t do, is still a perfect expression of life, of Oneness.

There’s no escape from this. None whatsoever. And that’s the freedom.
THE PEACE OF GOD

“Many people are afraid to empty their minds

lest they may plunge into the void.
They do not know that their own mind is the void.”

- Huang Po

Everything is empty, as Buddhists have always known. I find no basis for

anything, nothing upon which anything can stand. The world whirls in a vacuum
of nothingness, and I, whatever the hell I am, cannot separate myself from that
nothingness.

We spend our lives resisting the nothingness at the heart of creation. But
nothingness is what we really are, if truth be told. So in fact we resist ourselves,
we resist life, and deny the ground of being, the very ground we stand on! And
this is considered to be normality. The man who sees into the nothingness and
who tries to express it in thoughts and language– the world calls this man ‘crazy’
or ‘dangerous’ and tries to silence him or even crucify him.

How to express nothingness? How to name the unnameable? Try to talk about it
and you assume an ‘it’ to talk about! You’re damned if you talk about it, damned
if you don’t.
Silence seems to be the only option. To speak about something implies that there
is something to speak about. It implies someone who is speaking and something
that is said. It implies knowledge. It implies past and future. It implies the
division of consciousness which is at the root of the human delusion.
How is it possible to be free from this delusion, for the one who wants to be free
from the delusion is already part of the delusion – is the delusion itself! So no
escape is actually possible.
Really, no escape is needed. Embrace it, embrace it all, damn it! Delusion, self,
thought, past, future, escape, imprisonment, seeking and not-seeking: embrace it
completely! And the embracing of everything is death – and to die into this
moment is to really live.
To drop all thoughts, all preconceptions, all interpretations, and to see, with the
eyes of a newborn baby; to really see what is directly in front of you, to
disappear in favour of this; to collapse into the Unknown, into the mystery of it
all, to relax into the moment, which is all there is: therein lies our salvation, and
therein lies the peace of God.
THE DANCE

“My silence sings.

My emptiness is full.”

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

A ll arises without purpose.

Shapes, forms, images, imaginations, hallucinations, flares and flashes of colour

and rhythm; ordered and disordered spirals of infinite complexity, dancing and
swirling without intention, meaning, value or goal.

It is a dance, and the purpose of the dance is the dance. The dance has no
purpose but itself. Its purpose is no purpose. But to try and grasp this dance, to
attempt to hold it, to keep it, to make it my own: there’s the sorrow, there’s the
suffering. How to grasp the ungraspable?
To grasp the ungraspable one must first un-grasp one’s grasp of the graspable.

Yeah, right.

Life will grab you, shake you and wake you up from your slumber. It will tear
your insides out and put them back in back-to-front, so that insides are outsides
are insides in a complete and undivided wholeness, so that you return to and
become the All. And you always have been one with the All, and so there was
never really anything to return to or become.
Back to the beginning of all things, the Source, the Alpha and Omega, and now
cascading down, deep into the infinite Abyss from which the Alpha and Omega
arose, and to which all things eventually return.
The Abyss will consume everything in the end.
*
Words, endless words. Black on white. The creation of apparent worlds of form
and structure, time and space. Contrast upon contrast. Words always attempting
to point beyond themselves, and ending up pointing back to themselves again.

The finger cannot point to itself, but perhaps I can point to the finger trying to
point to itself. Perhaps I can point to the self trying to point the finger.

The rumble of lorries outside, the whoosh of the boiler, and now the click as it
turns off, voices in the street calling to one another (or are they calling to
themselves?), and they are all me, and I am all they. Not fragments, not parts, not
things, but each thing being also part of another thing, and another thing, and yet
another thing, so no thing is by itself, for itself, or of itself, but only a thing
insomuch as it is part of a greater thing; and in fact it is only when a thing is part
of a greater thing that it can be called a thing at all, for a thing is a boundary,
and a boundary is a thing, inside torn from outside, both torn from the All. But
the voices in the street call to each other, and it is still night. A thing or not a
thing, there are those voices. God calls to himself late at night on a street corner
–and nobody hears.

Silence.

What else is needed? Is it not all just a game to fill the silence? What is there to
say, and who would want to say it? And to whom?

The world was always here, but the world tricks you, it claims to be out there.
No, no. It was never out there. There were never any things, people, places,
events. The dualistic happy-unhappy dream is over, which is to say, it never
happened. Now there is only breathing which I do not do, and the beating of a
heart which I do not have, and the sights and smells and sounds of a room in
which I have never been. If the room is anywhere, it is in me. And perhaps, but
only perhaps, I am in it.
Words, they point to the clarity but never touch it. Or perhaps they only touch it
the very moment they are written. Creation, destruction. Black ink on a white
background. Nothing happens at all.
No, we are not people, miserable, wretched little people, struggling to make ends
meet, working towards our individual goals that remain unreachable as long as
we are trying to reach them. No, we are not people, flimsy bags of flesh and
bone animated with a divine breath, cast out into an unloving world where
disease and poverty, hunger and old age wait just beyond the edges of things to
snatch away our fun when we least expect it. No, we are not people, we who
walk along the boundaries of a false reality, caught between the polarities, torn
apart by the yes and the no of the world, the single and the multiple, the dual and
the nondual, the east and west.

No, we are not people, but we are that which allows people to be there in the
first place, we are the conditions by which people can know themselves as
people. We are not people, but we are peopling, and we define ourselves only
now, now and again now, never stopping to keep a record of what has gone
before, or projecting what is yet to come.
Lift a rock and you will find us there. Open a door and you will find us there.
Look to the heavens and you will find us there. Beyond good and evil, beyond
all things, and beyond even that, right at the heart of all phenomena, our dance
originates, our passion and compassion embracing all forms equally, so nobody
and nothing are excluded. Nothing excluded but exclusion itself. And perhaps
not even that.

No, we are not people, but what we are, we will never know.

In the end it is all for nothing, this attempt to clarify what is inherently muddled,
jumbled, messed up, torn, tattered, fragmented, and divided. We are shreds of
what we could be, and alienated from what we are. Where do we start when the
devastation runs this deep? Perhaps from the beginning. Perhaps we start from
where we went off course, and work from there. Or could this just be another
ploy to deepen the devastation?
If you have to ask, you are already off course. But the course itself is off course.
And there was never any course to leave.

*
You will remain unmoved. A broken heart needs more than empty words to heal
it. The void at the heart of all things will never be filled, and these words are just
another attempt to fill it. Nor do we need to empty the void of the attempt to fill
the void. The void will remain, whatever we do or don’t do to it. Let the void
be.

And the moment you do that, it’s over. The whole thing. Not only is it over, but it
never really happened. See, it’s gone – like a childhood monster that was never
really there.

*
Night-time voices, voices in the street, calling to each other, across and within
and through the void from which I am not separate, the sounds mixing and
meshing and swirling until it all becomes as clear as a punch to the stomach:
there is only the void.

So I die and become the void. And the void is me and I am the void. I am unity
in diversity. I am nothing appearing as every thing. I am those voices calling to
each other. Separate and whole at the same time. One and many together. This is
a this is a not-this is a this in an infinitely regressing spiral of being and non-
being – and suddenly it’s all dancing, motiveless, purposeless, pointless again.

The purpose of the dance is the dance. God himself dances, and it all ends here,
where it all began.
Here. Now. This moment. It is all undone. It is accomplished.
NIGHT AND DAY
“There is neither creation nor destruction,
Neither destiny nor free will;
Neither path nor achievement;
This is the final truth.”

- Ramana Maharshi
GENESIS

“And the Earth was without form, and void;

and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

- Genesis 1:2

T his morning, the eyes opened, and there was a world. Incarnation. Spirit
made flesh. There was something new under the sun, something that had
never been there before, something that could never be there again. A world had
been thrown out of the void, something had emerged from nothing. I looked
around. There was a room. Curtains, a cupboard, a stack of books, a chest of
drawers. Two feet dangling off the edge of the bed.

This was a new world, an undiscovered country. Nothing in the history of the
cosmos could compare to this.

The duvet was thrown off the bed, and a body appeared: the first body, the first
man, Adam himself. Two legs, two arms, and the rest. A miracle had occurred!
Creation ex nihilo! But it was a dynamic, restless miracle: the body moved, first
to eat breakfast, then into the bathroom to wash itself, then to the door. Nothing
could stop the miracle from unfolding.

Outside, there was a bitter wind that chilled the face. The body boarded a bus.
That is, I boarded a bus, but there was no I, and no bus, and certainly no body
that could possibly board any bus. Nevertheless, I boarded that bus, and on the
bus the miracle continued. I looked around. There were others, others like me!
Arms and legs and torsos and heads with funny little scrunched-up faces, some
smiling, some gazing into the middle distance, some filled with the sorrow of the
world. But they were my brothers and sisters, all of them! We were all the same,
there was nothing to divide us, nothing at all. One family under the sun, bound
together in more profound ways than we ever could imagine.
We were all one, which is to say, there was nobody on that bus, nobody at all.
And yet, there were all those bodies: that was undeniable.
I got off the bus, and walked around the town centre. Humanity throbbed.
Thousands of people, packed into shops, bustling around bus stops, chatting on
benches, drinking coffee out of little paper cups with fancy logos. Lovers
embracing, husbands and wives quarrelling, bus engines roaring, children
playing hide-and-seek.

What were these creatures? And how was it possible that I had woken up this
morning as one of them? I caught my reflection in a shop window. Oh, the
miracle of the human face! The miracle of arms, of legs, of a unique appearance
distinguishing me from the others!

And although we were all wrapped up warmly in our winter clothes, I knew that
the miracle went deeper than the surface. Under these clothes that marked us out
as seemingly separate individuals, there were things that bound us tightly to each
other, things that showed that we were all in exactly the same situation, that we
were all of the same blood. Dirty things, shameful things, secret things. Penises,
vaginas, breasts, sweat, urine, pus, incontinence, missing limbs, growths,
deformities. We tried so desperately to cover these things up, but today I saw
through the disguises; today I saw our common humanity, and it was almost too
beautiful to bear. I saw the lies and half-lies and half-truths and props and masks
that we use to divide ourselves from each other, to hide ourselves, and I saw
how, in the end, these things only ever serve to make us more human, to disclose
exactly that which we try so desperately to hide. Yes, today I saw through the
façade, I saw to the heart of what it meant to be human, of what it meant to be
alive on this day; on this day of all days.
What I saw was nothing more than what met the eyes, and what I heard was
nothing more than what met the ears. What I saw was so obvious, so painfully
obvious, so obviously present, that it was perhaps another miracle that we all
didn’t see it, all of the time.

And yet on that day I actually saw nothing, for there was no ‘I’ to see anything at
all.
*

It was growing dark now. The body was becoming tired. There was hunger and
thirst. I boarded the bus back home. Still the miracle, still the miracle. Always
the miracle.

A key in the lock. Light switches flicked on. Shoes off.

Today I lived my entire life, without remainder, and now there is nothing else to
do, nowhere else to go. It is nighttime, and I find myself back here, in my bed,
where the world first appeared this morning. Perhaps a world will appear
tomorrow. I don’t know. For now, just this is enough. Just this is the miracle.
Today I lived my entire life, but it has already faded into memory, back into the
void which gave birth to it.

Today I lived my entire life, and as I lie here beneath my duvet on the verge of
sleep, no less comfortable than I was in my mother’s womb, I am ready for death
– the Womb of all Wombs.

But for now, there will be sleep. And tomorrow, there may be a world.

With this, the eyes close, and the world dissolves.

AN EVENING WALK

“Seeing into nothingness is

the true seeing,
the eternal seeing.”

- Shen-Hui

T he vastness annihilates me. It literally destroys me. Walking through these

empty streets, the vastness is there, consuming everything, every thought,
every sensation. Yet the vastness is not separate from everything that appears:
the glow of the street lamps, the shadows of lovers walking arm-in-arm, the
rumble of night buses, the sound of footsteps on the cold pavement. And once
again the secret that is so utterly obvious reveals itself: I am nowhere to be
found, and yet I am everywhere. I am nothing, and yet I am one with all things,
because there are no ‘things’ at all.

I am annihilated in this, I am dwarfed by the vastness, I am made totally

insignificant by the smallest detail: by the little cracks in the pavement, by the
flicker of a street lamp, by a dog barking, by the trees rustling in the evening
breeze. Every little thing puts an end to me.

The eyes dart about, and with each movement of the eyeballs there is a new
world, an undiscovered country. Nothing is the same from one moment to the
next – which is to say, there are no ‘moments’ at all. Only this, only the utterly
obvious revealing itself now, now and now.
Thought is not there: thought comes afterwards, thought is always an
interpretation in hindsight, a useless addition, after-the-fact. Thought is dead –
this is alive. Thought is of the past – this is so clearly present. This obliterates
the past, this destroys it totally. How useless the past is! How useless, those little
stories, the ones about ‘me and my life’! They too are annihilated with every
footstep, with every breath.
Every moment new, every moment fresh, every moment a revelation, a miracle
beyond all words.

So I walk alone, homeless, faceless, without a past, without a future, without

beliefs. Yet these things may still arise, and that is fine. These things may arise,
and if they do, who cares? Where is the problem? There is no problem, not even
the possibility of there being a problem. Because what ever arises, arises.
Whatever happens, happens, and we only suffer to the extent that we don’t want
what happens to happen. Yet even suffering, if it happens, has its rightful place
here, but then you can’t really call it ‘suffering’ at all...
This is a radically all-inclusive freedom. A fierce unconditional love, a raging
fire that lovingly burns anything and everything without discrimination, leaving
no trace.

Beyond all ideas of suffering, beyond all thought, beyond any idea of a future
‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment’ or ‘awakening’, beyond all beyonds, those street
lights are flickering, and the wind is picking up, and there is hunger, and the
body moves towards the bus stop, and presumably it’s time to go home again.

Consumed by the vastness, there is no longer anything to do, nowhere to go.

There is nothing that needs to be done and nobody here who needs to do
anything. There is only this, and it is already complete in itself.

Nothing has changed and everything has changed, but even that is saying too
much. Nothing can be known about this, and nothing can really be said, although
the words come again. And that’s wonderful. Wonderful because it can’t
possibly be any other way.
Tonight the silence consumed me, and the silence was everything, but in that
silence a world arose, and yes, it was only an apparition, but what an apparition
it was! An apparent world, apparent to no-one.
Although, in the story, I have walked through the city a hundred times before,
this night was the first night I had ever walked through the city – no doubt about
it. Tonight, the city was new, it was truly an undiscovered country. Nothing was
known about it. Nothing. And so it wasn’t really a ‘city’ at all. It was everything.
It was the universe in its fullness. It was a vast emptiness; it was an empty
vastness. And I was fully annihilated by the vastness, and fully present too. And
there was no contradiction, none whatsoever. Contradictions arise only for a
mind seeking something.
BEYOND DOUBT

“The Life I am trying to grasp

is the me that is trying to grasp it.”

- R. D. Laing, The Bird of Paradise

You can doubt everything except doubting. You can doubt everything except
this moment, in which there is, undoubtedly, doubt arising. You cannot doubt
that. You can doubt the language that is being used to point to the current
experience of doubt, you can doubt the verifiability of the experience, but you
cannot doubt that there is something happening, presently, in this moment.

You can doubt that there was an experience a moment ago, you can even doubt
that there will be experience in a moment’s time, but you cannot doubt this
moment. And although you may doubt everything that can be said about
existence, and doubt that there is even such a thing as ‘existence’, you cannot
doubt the reality to which the word ‘existence’ points, the reality of this moment,
the reality of this, this and this.

And so you find yourself walking in the darkness, the night sky glimmering
beyond the warm orange glow of flickering street lamps, and you doubt it all.
You are, you exist, that is primary, and all else is nonsense, all else is just mental
noise. Before you are something, you are. Before you can know what you are,
you are. Before you can doubt that you are, you are.

This undeniable reality of I am-ness is not a mental concept, not a theory to be

debated, but a reality to be experienced. It is fully in your awareness, right now.
Indeed it is your awareness, right now, so you can never lose it or gain it. It
simply is.

When all else has been doubted and discarded, only awareness will be left, only I
am-ness.

Then you will literally melt into the divine mystery of this moment, you will
simply dissolve in bewilderment at the astonishing fact that you are here at all,
that any of this is happening. You will not believe it is possible, you will fall to
the ground in amazement at your own existence, at the apparent existence of
other things, at the fact there can be apparent relationships between things,
between yourself and others, even though in reality there are no others, nothings,
and certainly no self. You will die, literally die, into the nothingness of it all, the
nothingness that contains all things, the nothingness that is total fullness. You
will realise at long last that yes, of course, you are that nothingness/fullness, and
you always have been. With utter clarity, it will be seen that nothingness/fullness
is the essence of it all, the reason for it all, the cause of it all, the beginning and
end of it all, for all eternity and beyond. And there will be great laughter, and
great lightness.
You will laugh at even these thoughts, which like all thoughts are just pointless
mental noise. You will come to rest in the simplicity of being, in the obviousness
of present-moment awareness. You will come to deeply accept what life throws
at you now, now and now. You will have found your true home, and nothing will
ever be able to hurt you again.
INTO THE SILENCE

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on;

and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

N ow the day fades away, and there is silence. And everything that has arisen
from the silence will fall back into the silence. And I am nowhere to be
found.

Yet there is typing of these words. And there are sounds, too: the hum of the
computer fan, the boiler clicking and whooshing, my flatmate treading on the
floorboards, the sound of cars outside. And tingles in the body, and the thump-
thump of the heart, and everything else that pretends to be a world.
If the world is anywhere, it is here, right here in this room. Although it’s not
really a ‘room’ at all: it’s the entire universe in its fullness. Why do we have to
lie and call it a ‘room’? That makes it sound so small, so insignificant. But it is
totally significant, because it is quite literally all there is!

Words claim to describe a world ‘out there’ (as opposed to ‘in here’) when it
was the words themselves that created that division in the first place. All
language is circular. Words claim that they have been written by somebody, but
I can find nobody here writing these words, and certainly nobody here who
knows what any of these words actually mean. All I find are words appearing
spontaneously on the computer screen. Just life expressing itself in the moment.
Yet the character ‘Jeff’ is very much a part of this appearance. The character
‘Jeff’ apparently got up this morning, apparently went to work, apparently came
home, and is apparently now sitting in a chair, writing these words.
But ‘Jeff’ is just another elaborate appearance in this great play. He has no
greater reality than that.
What a relief, to be free from myself! What a burden it was for all those years,
pretending to be an individual with a heavy past and an uncertain future,
struggling to ‘find my way’ in life, trying desperately to succeed in both my
career and ‘private life’ (and how private my life used to be!).

Nevertheless, these days, there is still apparently a ‘Jeff’ who lives his life. It’s
just that it’s all been seen as a play, a game, a dance. And what a strange and
beautiful dance it is! A dance that includes pleasure as well as pain, joy as well
as heartache, health as well as illness. Anything can happen in the play of life.

The play arises in this silence, the silence of all silences, and falls back into it,
continually, endlessly, without rhyme or reason or purpose or meaning. Still,
everything is intrinsically purposeful, and drenched with meaning.

Meaning or no meaning, purpose or no purpose – no difference, truly.

Just open your eyes, and an entire world appears, without asking anything of
you. Isn’t this a gift? For nothing, we get a world. And not just now, but now,
now, and now too!

This is not some special ‘state’, this is not something that I have attained; no,
this is true for each and every one of us. For all of us, the world appears for free,
out of nothing, now, now and now. This requires no belief, no effort, no choice.
It simply is.

So at last, the utterly obvious reveals itself: there is only love, only this wide
open space which welcomes everything, literally everything. It has always been
this way – we’ve just been running round like headless chickens our whole lives
trying to find it.

There is only love, only unconditional acceptance as the essence and ground and
condition of all things, although there is nobody here who could grasp what any
of that means.

The seeking implied that there was something other than the entire world
appearing now. Well, it was a nice game, a nice way to pass the time, but it was
ultimately futile – for this is all there is, and all there ever was.

*
And so the journey of a lifetime ends here. The eyes grow tired, and yet again
sleep beckons. This day has been a dream, nothing more, nothing less, and not
just this day, but all days: all is dream. This entire human life is nothing more
than an elaborate and often convincing play of consciousness, a cosmic
entertainment.

Everything arises, does its little dance, and dissolves back into the openness that
I am in my essence, and I remain untouched by any of it. I am the wide open
space in which a world is allowed to arise, again and again and again. I am not
here, and yet I am fully immersed in the world. I don’t care what happens, I
simply don’t care. And yet, I care absolutely, because I am not separate from
any of it.
And so to bed. Another day has passed, and yet nothing has happened at all.

The eyes close, and the world dissolves once again.

Goodnight.
SUNRISE

“What is, right now, is perfection;

presence has not arisen from the past
and is not leading to the future.”

- Nathan Gill

T he eyes open. Again, the miracle: a world appears out of the void. A
pointless world, a purposeless world, and yet still it appears!

The search is over: this present moment is the Answer of all Answers. The
spiritual search, the search of a lifetime, is no more.

Nothing more needs to be done.

Well, that’s not true at all.
There is lots to do: get up, shower, make breakfast, read the paper, go for a walk,
meet up with friends. Chop wood and carry water.
Nothing to do, and yet an entire world presents itself now, now and now; a world
full of riches, just waiting to be discovered! And yes, it may just be an apparent
world, but non-duality is not about denying the appearance. Who would deny it?
And so go, play, play in the appearance, play like a child in the Kingdom of
Heaven! Live your life, explore its richness and its intimacy... even though it is
just an apparent life, even though you swim in a sea of nothingness, even though
it’s all an illusion with nobody there at the centre of it all.

Live your life – that’s what it’s here for. It’s all a great play, a wonderful cosmic
game, an adventure...

And everything is ‘spiritual’ in this adventure: seeking the source of the ‘I’ as
much as having a beer down the pub, ‘being present’ as much as wetting the bed
at night when you’re ninety years old and your bladder is no longer functioning
properly.

Everything is empty, and so everything is divine.

Everything is illusion, and so everything matters absolutely.

Everything is simply an appearance, and so everything

touches the heart in unimaginable ways, day after precious day.

And the search of a lifetime only served to bring us back here, to this moment,
so that we could read these words pointing to the utter futility of the search.

There is no such thing as enlightenment.

There are no awakened individuals.

There is only ever this – what is presently happening.

But please, don’t take my word for it.

Go, and search if you want to. Search and search and search until you are blue in
the face. Meditate, and enquire into the nature of the self, and seek the source of
the ‘I’, and watch your breathing, and practise yoga, and undergo years and
years of psychotherapy, and try to become more present, and think positively,
and attempt to ‘manifest your destiny’, and eat vegetarian food, and move to
India and worship a guru, and have wonderful spiritual experiences, and
discover ‘ultimate truths’ about the universe, and reach enlightenment, and go
round telling everyone that you’re enlightened, and that they can become
enlightened too if they follow the same path as you.
Do all those things, and believe as many stories as you want to, and separate
yourself from life in a billion different ways, and maintain and strengthen the
very ego that you want to be free from.

Yes, do anything you like, experience whatever you want to experience,

experience everything the world has to offer.

But all experiences pass. Nothing lasts, and whatever has apparently happened
in the past, we are only ever left with this present appearance, arising right now.
Whatever story is told about you and your life and your desperate search for
enlightenment, it is only ever a story arising now. A story that belongs to
nobody.

How terrifying this is to a mind seeking something more! It’s the last thing the
seeker wants to hear: there is only ever this present appearance, and the past is
always dead and gone, and the awakening that was sought for an entire lifetime
was never something that you could actually find.

And so, where does this leave us?

Right here:

The beating of the heart.

Breathing. In, out. In, out.

The radiator creaking.

The television buzzing.

Thoughts arising, dissolving, arising, dissolving.

Hunger arising.

Pain in the back.

The phone ringing: your father loves you and misses you and wants to hear your
voice...

Nothing special. Totally ordinary. And yet, completely and utterly

extraordinary, because it is quite literally all there is.

You see, the search lied: it claimed that life was a problem and that escape was a
possibility.

But there is no escape, and life is not a problem, and the search never happened
in the first place.
THE BEGINNING

“Life can never be bad.

It’s a contradiction in terms.
Life is life.”

-Eugene Ionesco

A nd so, we come to the end. And the end is really the beginning.

This is it. We have found Heaven at last. And Heaven was always here,
literally right here in front of us. It never left us. So we didn’t really find it at all,
because you can’t find something that you never lost, can you?
This is Heaven:

Holding this book in your hands.

Breathing. In, out, in, out.
The heart beating in the chest.
The feeling of your bum on the chair.
Thoughts buzzing around in awareness.
Noises in the room.

And all the forms that surround you. Their apparent solidity. Their shape, their
colour, their texture. Their hardness, their softness. The way they reflect the
light. Their stillness.

See, the miracle is all around, but for some reason we’ve spent our lives
searching for something more.
But when this futile search is seen through, by no-one, this, what is presently
happening, becomes very interesting indeed. When the search for meaning
dissolves, this becomes infinitely meaningful, infinitely worthy. When the search
for the sacred and divine drops away, God is revealed in and as all the things of
this world, and life becomes fascinating.
So take a few minutes now.

Put down this book.

Look around you.

This is the only mystery, the only miracle: the fact that you are here, that it is
now, that there are things, apparent or other wise, that there can be movement,
time, space, that there appear to be others, that any of this is at all possible.

And the miracle includes everything. Pain as much as pleasure, sadness as much
as joy. Hearts break, tears flow, cancers ravage bodies all over the world, and the
miracle embraces all of it, unconditionally.
This is not a book about how ‘everything is perfect’ or how ‘suffering does not
exist’ or how ‘there is no self’. That would be to reduce the extraordinary
richness and undeniable mystery of life to a simple belief.

Life is, whatever we believe or don’t believe. This moment is, however much we
resist it, however much we try to escape it.

But no escape is really necessary. This world is only a problem from the point of
view of the separate individual struggling to make something out of his life
before he dies, trying to stay safe, to succeed, to find meaning in a seemingly
meaningless world, to find love, to avoid pain and suffering, to reach
enlightenment.

But when the existence of the separate and isolated individual is seen through,
this apparent life story is seen for what it always was: a dream, no more, no less.
A narrative playing out in awareness, a story, a movie, a great cosmic game.

A game is only serious when you forget it’s a game.

On the surface, then, nothing has changed. There is still emptiness and form,
pain and pleasure, bodies in motion and at rest, ‘me’ and ‘you’ and our
complicated life stories; there are still clouds, trees and rivers, flowers and birds,
and babies are still born, while loved ones still die; and the sun still rises and sets
– day in, day out.

But underneath it all, there is this love and equanimity which you will never be
able to put into words.
THE SECRET

“There’s nothing equal

to wearing clothes and eating food.
Outside this there are
neither Buddhas nor Patriarchs.”

-Zenrin Kushu

W hat a miracle it is to be alive right now, on this new day, on this day of all
days! What a gift, what indescribable joy: to eat breakfast. To go to the
toilet. To shower. To put on clothes. To walk out into the fresh air. To
experience pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, even though it’s all a play
of consciousness, even though everything happens for nobody...

To live, even though life is not separate from death. To move about this
beautiful, fragile, transitory world, to meet yourself again and again in a
thousand different places, to enjoy everything that life has to offer, even though
you know that you will eventually die; even though this body may be ravaged by
cancer, or the heart may fail, or the limbs may be shattered beyond all
recognition in a car accident...

To love others with all of your heart, and all of your soul, and all of your might,
to love them without conditions, to love them fiercely, passionately, to love them
until it hurts, even though you know they will all die, all of them, every single
one...
To go on, to insist on life and nothing less, even though every experience you
ever have will fade into nothingness, even though one day you will struggle to
remember if any of it really happened at all...

Yes, at last – here is the secret:

The only meaning of life is this moment.
“The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.”

- Li Po
“The moon’s the same old moon,
The flowers exactly as they were,
Yet I’ve become the thingness
Of all the things I see!”

- Bunan
 Visit Jeff Foster’s website:
www.lifewithoutacentre.com


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