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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Foster
Awakening doesn’t always feel good or comforting or blissful or ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our deepest fears and darkest shadows – those parts of ourselves that we have cut-off, denied, repressed, numbed ourselves to all these years, and the meeting can get messy to say the least.
Others tried to convince you that you were not good enough, because they too felt not good enough. In your innocence, and with no evidence to the contrary, you believed them.
From the perspective of the paper, even if the story is an epic one, from the first page to the last page, nothing has actually happened at all. The entire story has unfolded in perfect, unchanging stillness. The most incredible story never told.
Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again, until you lose all interest in being on pedestals.
You’ll never reach a point in your life where everything is solved, all neatly tied up in a bow. That’s the point. There’s no ‘final scene’, only the on-going adventure movie, forever unresolved. You learn to love the mess of your life, its constantly changing nature, its unpredictability. And you stand as the immutable silence in the midst of the storm, the wide open space in which joy and pain, ecstasy and agony, boredom and bliss, can arise and subside like waves in the ocean. There are no problems when you know yourself as the space for it all.
Instead of trying to skip to tomorrow’s certainty, trust the uncertainty of today. Instead of rushing towards an answer in the next scene, trust this creative scene of ‘no answers yet’. Instead of trying to run towards joy or bliss in the future, trust this present moment of sorrow or doubt, or whatever shape the cosmic intelligence is taking.
And so anywhere other than Now feels like homesickness and disconnection, death and decay.
The universal law of impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heart-breaking gratitude.
Perhaps even confusion can come to rest here, where you are.
And then, perhaps without any effort, without any struggle or stress, without ‘you’ being involved at all, the true answers will emerge in their own sweet time.
Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is one giant invitation to wake up from the illusion of control and embrace whole-heartedly what is present.
Thoughts, sensations and feelings are constantly parading for you in the present moment. Without your constant Presence, there is no parade. Without You, there is nothing.
THE PROMISE In this presence beyond presence, In this place that is no place at all, In this warm embrace I call myself, Even a ‘no’ is a secret yes, Even resistance is deeply allowed, Even doubt is a celebration of life. Come, all you unloved creatures, All you homeless waves in life’s vast ocean, Pain, doubt, shame, guilt, All you frightened orphans of light, Crawl out of your hiding places, Shuffle out of the darkness, You are invited to a great feast. Come, uncertainty, sit by my side, Come, despair, drink from my cup, Come, fear, do not be afraid of me, I will not turn away from you, I
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Nobody you have loved has ever left you. They only buried themselves so deeply in your heart that it was hard to recognise them for a while. When our imagined boundaries begin to melt, when the protective walls around our tender hearts soften, our loved ones breathe again, and come out of the darkness. When you have been touched by someone, felt the warmth of their presence, even if it was only for a moment and so long ago, you are forever changed, and cannot go back or forget, however strongly you build those defences. Once you know the presence of God you can never be the same.
Waking up doesn’t mean ‘being okay’ with everything all the time, or ‘being fearless’ all the time, or ‘being relaxed’ all the time, or being anything ‘all the time’ for that matter, for why would you place such heavy demands on present experience?
You cannot get it “right”, and that’s why you cannot get it “wrong”, and out beyond both, there is a field...
THE SCREEN OF ACCEPTANCE
Life is the way. So there is no ‘way’. Life does not always go ‘my way’. But ‘I’ never get in the way. So life always goes my way. Even when it doesn’t.
What is sadness, when it is not named? What is anger, when we no longer call it ‘anger’? What is fear, prior to the word ‘fear’? What happens when we profoundly contact these life energies without history?
