Jeff Foster - The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life

JEFF

THE DEEPEST ACCEPTANCE

Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life

FOSTER

I wish I could show you

When you are lonely or in darkness

The Astonishing Light

Of your own Being.

HAFIZ, from My Brilliant Image

Acknowledgements

With love and deep gratitude to:

Amy Rost

Tami Simon

Matt Licata

Julian and Catherine Noyce of Non-Duality Press (UK)

Menno van der Meer and Jeannine de Klerk

Sherie Davis and Amy ONeil

Lynda and Sid Foster

Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo

Mike Larcombe, Nic Higham, and Scott Kiloby

Arlene Eastland

and all the other wonderful beings Ive met on this incredible journey.

Authors Note

It seems to me that all our problems, all our suffering and conflicts, both personal and global, stem from one basic problem: our ignorance of who we really are. We have forgotten our inseparability from life, and so we have started to fear it, and out of that fear we have gone to war with it in various ways. We have gone to war with our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our bodies, with the present moment itself. In our efforts to protect ourselves from pain, from fear, from sadness, from discomfort, from failure, from the parts of life we have been conditioned to believe are bad or negative or dark or dangerous, we have stopped being truly alive.

The armor we wear to protect ourselves from a full experience of life is called the separate self. But our armor does not really protect usit just keeps us comfortably numb.

Spiritual awakeningrealizing that you are not who you think you areis the answer to this basic problem of humanity. These days there are many books available on this topic, and it seems that more people than ever are discovering ancient teachings that used to only be available to a select few. But there is a trap here. Spirituality can easily become just another layer in our armor. Rather than facilitating our opening up to life, it can shut us off even more. Spiritual concepts and clichs like There is no self or This is not my body or Duality is just an illusion can simply be new beliefs to cling to, new ways of avoiding life and pushing the world away, which result in more suffering, for us and for those we love.

The spiritual awakening I talk about in this book is not about protecting yourself more; its about realizing that who you really are does not need protection, that who you really are is so open and free and loving and deeply accepting that it allows all of life into itself. Life cannot hurt you, because you are life. So the present moment is not an enemy to be feared, but a dear friend to be embraced. Yes, true spirituality does not strengthen your armor against lifeit destroys it.

Spiritual awakening is actually very simple. It is the timeless recognition of who you really are, the consciousness prior to form. But actually living that recognition in day-to-day life, not forgetting or losing it or letting it go to your headthats where the real adventure of life begins. And thats where many people seem to strugglespiritual seekers and spiritual teachers alike.

Its one thing to know who you really are when life is easy and things are going well for you. Its another thing to remember this in the heat of the moment, when things fall apart, when life gets messy and your dreams turn to dust. In the midst of physical and emotional pain, addictions, relationship conflicts, and worldly and spiritual failure, often we can feel less awakened and more separate from life, from each other, and from who we really are, than ever. Our happy dreams of our enlightenment can quickly evaporate, and acceptance can seem a million miles away.

We can see the messiness and beauty of day-to-day human existence as something to be avoided, transcended, or even obliterated, or we can see it for what it really is: a secret and constant invitation to wake up now, even if we believe we already woke up yesterday. Life, in its infinite compassion, wont let us rest on our laurels.

If my earlier books were descriptions of spiritual awakening, this book addresses far more important questions: How can that awakening be lived day-to-day? How can we accept the present moment even when the present moment seems totally unacceptable to us? Is How can we accept the present moment? even the right question? Are we actually separate from the present moment in the first place?

I teach one thing and one thing only: a deep and fearless acceptance of whatever comes your way. This is not passive surrender or cold detachment, but an intelligent and creative emergence into the mystery of the moment. This book comes after many years of listening and speaking to thousands of people on the spiritual pathhearing their concerns, answering their challenging questions, meeting them in their pain and grief and daily struggles and fears, and gently pointing them not to a future enlightenment, but to a deep and unconditional acceptance within their present-moment experience, the deep acceptance that they are in their essence.

Welcome to ordinary life, dear explorerthe final frontier of spiritual awakening. May you boldly go where no one has gone before!

With love from yourself,

Jeff Foster

Part I

AWAKENING TO DEEP ACCEPTANCE

The Wholeness of Life

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST

The wrinkles on your elderly fathers hands. The cry of a newborn baby. A sculpture in an art gallery. A certain combination of notes in a piece of music. A dewdrop on a blade of grass. A momentary look on a strangers face, suddenly and unexpectedly melting your heart. Wholeness suddenly piercing through separation.

Life is rich with mystery.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who had just given birth. My friend is a scientist, a rational thinker, and an atheist, with no interest in spirituality or religion or anything that cannot be proved through peer-reviewed research, as she calls it. She believes that life is all about working hard, providing for your family, saving for old age, and eventually retiring and enjoying the good life before you die.

And yet, as she talked about her experience of her daughters birth, her words were not those of an atheist; they were religious words, spiritual words, words pregnant with awe and wonder and the overwhelming miracle of creation. She talked about the miracle of life itselfthe mystery of birth and of death, the cosmic riddle that permeates all things. She told me that as she held her newborn daughter for the first time, all self-centered thoughts fell away, past and future dissolved, and suddenly there was only thisonly life itself, present, alive, mysterious. There was only this precious moment, here and now, and nothing more.

She told me how she wept with gratitude upon seeing her daughters tiny little fingers for the first timehow delicate they were, how fragile. She told me how amazed she was that something so mysterious and alive could have emerged from her, how something could have come out of nothing, how life could produce life out of itself, how the same life that was present at the Big Bang is somehow also here, in the form of this tiny, pink creature. She was suddenly consumed with an unconditional lovefor her daughter, for all babies and mothers everywhere, for all existence. It was a love she had no words for. All peer-reviewed research crumbled in the face of the incomprehensible vastness of present-moment experience.

My friend, the scientist, the rational thinker, the skeptic, had temporarily become a nondual mystic, and she didnt even know it. For a moment, she had touched the wholeness of life, the wordless mystery that permeates all creation. For a moment, she had