The emptying of fear

Over a week ago I came across some words in a book by Jeff Foster, and I keep coming back to these words again and again.  I'd like to share them with you:


In liberation, everything changes and nothing changes.


Everything changes because it's no longer 'your' life, and it's now seen in absolute clarity.  Everything changes because it all becomes so wonderfully light and transparent.  Everything changes because now life is no longer in opposition to death.  Everything changes because everything you rejected, everything you denied, everything you pushed away is now seen to be nothing but an expression of unconditional love.


And yet, nothing changes.  Chop wood and carry water.  Eat, shit, grow old.  Get cancer.  Scream in pain in the middle of the night.  None of that stops.  This isn't about living in some New Age fantasy world.  This isn't about taking on comforting concepts and surrounding yourself with cotton wool.  This is reality at its most raw.  Nothing can be blocked out any more.  It's the end of control.  It's a free fall into an intimacy with everything.  It's a love affair with what is.  It's an absolute alignment with life.


(An Extraordinary Absence, p. 100)

While the life energy here that calls itself Colleen hasn't opened up into liberation, there's not much worry about that.  It is glimpsed that 'my' life is in no way apart from the one life, that 'my' life is a notion riding along with the one life we all are.  I have never been apart from the whole, even when I imagined I was.  Whether it's seen or not, oneness is the reality.  There is no one and nothing to fear, since I am apart from none of it.  While fear still arises, there is a real decrease in the amount of fear in any given day.  Less fear.  Less fear!  That has become the 'direction' of this life: toward less fear.  Less fear through recognition of the lack of separation.  Life becomes not about accumulating more of anything (there is such abundance in every breath that 'more' becomes an absurd notion) but about a natural shedding of psychological fear.  Shedding the erroneous notions that produce fear.

A powerful tool for releasing fear-producing notions is the meditative inquiry taught by Byron Katie.  Attending Katie's school and workshops has changed my life profoundly. Here is a link to her website:
http://www.thework.com/index.php

Thanks to Jeff Foster for his clear and powerful words. Here is a link to his website:
http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/

Seeking completion versus being complete

Here are some words that gave me pause:

"At the root of a lifetime of seeking was always the assumption that life wasn't complete...And out of this assumption, in a million different ways the individual tried to reach completion, and turned to drink or drugs or meditation..."
Jeff Foster, foreward to Everyday Enlightenment by Sally Bongers

The hamster wheel of futile seeking is highly addictive and I've often felt enslaved to this compulsion to strive toward one mirage of future fulfillment after the next. Secretly I know that the seeking itself is digging the hamster wheel deeper into the mud rut of suffering.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, says Will Rogers. Yet just stopping, just resting, is strangely terrifying. It means I'm lazy or missing the boat or wasting time or sinking into the jaws of stagnation. There is an imagined need to plunge into activity and seek completion through grabbing as much knowledge or satisfaction or recognition or enlightenment as I can before death overtakes me, as it could at any moment.

The mind puts forth many arguments against allowing the nondoing and silence into which it disappears. There is an enormous taboo against "nonproductive" use of time, and this taboo keeps us sprinting after endless wild goose chases. And the mind also thinks, "Even if activity isn't really getting me anywhere, at least it's staving off the dreadful feelings of boredom and uselessness." Meaningless activity is a universal anesthesia for the angst of being alive as a small, separate ego self. It makes the world go round.

There's no recipe or formula for getting off the hamster wheel or for recognizing the presence of wholeness, and that is good. It's not a mechanical process but something unique and spontaneous and creative and it happens by itself when we're not occupied with seeking it or avoiding it.

I had a rough weekend butting heads with my teenage daughter. Now we've worked things out and life goes on, and every day fresh-minted love for her arises in me out of nowhere. There is a strange comfort in not knowing. I can't pretend to know who my daughter is or what life is or what love is. When I thought I knew I was living in a small, cramped room. Not knowing feels so much more honest and unbounded.

Resting doesn't mean literally laying in bed all day. What rests is the anxious voice in the head that says "I have to get somewhere." Resting means moving through activities without attention being completely absorbed by the inner narration of a protagonist-me hacking its way through the neverending obstacle-course of daily life. It means gazing silently into present reality and sensing deeply the awareness in which everything appears.

There is plenty we can do to express the good will that is at our core, but that doing does not spring from a sense of incompletion. It is an outpouring from the completion we all experience on the level of being. There may still be times of feeling like a hamster on a wheel, an ego in samsara, but the dimension of silence is also here, and it is always possible to fall backwards into its arms.