Jeff Foster - The Wonder of Being: Awakening to an Intimacy Beyond Words

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 weve 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 thingsin 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 Schrdinger 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, thats 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 youll 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, youll miss that beautiful moon...

Now, Im 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 dont game that we love to play. It is a possibility that cuts through to the very heart of things.