Nonfiction Book Recommendations #1

This blog post will summarize the main points of a life-changing self-development nonfiction book I would recommend to anyone on a transformational journey.

Book Recommendation #1(Summary of Main Points): The Deepest Acceptance by Jeff Foster

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Author’s Note:

“It seems to me that all of 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 us—it just keeps us comfortably numb.

Spiritual awakening—realizing that you are not who you think you are—is 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 clichés 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.

Part I: Awakening to Deep Acceptance

Story pg.3 – A “scientific/rational” mother discovers Oneness with the birth of her daughter.

“Perhaps wholeness is right here, where we already are—in this world, in this life—and perhaps we have somehow blinded ourselves to it in our obsession with our search for it.”

“Thoughts and words fragment wholeness…”

Story pg. 8 – Deathbed regrets

“Why does it often take extreme life situations to bring back an awareness of the magic and mystery of life? Why do we often wait until we’re about to die before discovering deep gratitude for life as it is? Why do we exhaust ourselves seeking love, acceptance, fame, success, or spiritual enlightenment in the future? Why do we work or meditate ourselves into the grave? Why do we postpone life? Why do we hold back from it? What are we looking for exactly? What are we waiting for? What are we afraid of?”

“Will the life we long for really come in the future? Or is it always closer than that? This book is about the wholeness of life and about the possibility of discovering that wholeness right now—not next year, not tomorrow, not “one day,” but right now, in the midst of present experience, in the midst of whatever is happening, even if what’s happening is discomfort and pain and a longing to be free. This book is about finding out who you really are, beyond who you think you are, beyond who you’ve been taught you are, beyond your story about who you are, beyond all your concepts, and images of who you are. And it’s about discovering the ways in which, in forgetting who we are, in our attempts to build and hold up what basically amounts to a false, thought-constructed image of ourselves, we go to war with present experience, with each other, with the planet.

Our inner conflict becomes outer conflict. When I go to war within myself, I go to war with you. What I reject in myself, I reject in the world. And that rejection leads to suffering of every kind. We kill other human beings in the defense of images. We kill in the name of every kind of image—ideologies, philosophies, belief systems, spiritual paths, worldviews. Violence begins and ends with you. Remember, any suffering within you will inevitably get projected out into the world. The world is nothing but your projection of it. You must be fascinated, curious, willing to see through separation, in all its forms, in the midst of your present experience. You must be open to exploring suffering—how and why it manifests in you, where it originates. You must be willing to take a look at your worst fears, your pain, your sadness, your deepest unfulfilled longings. You must be willing to face them head on and to find the place where even the most seemingly unacceptable parts of yourself can be deeply accepted.

Great freedom lies in fearlessly facing the darkness and finally coming to see that darkness is inseparable from light. When you see and understand the mechanics of suffering in yourself, you gain deep compassion for others’ suffering…”

Division is the root of all suffering and conflict. You are already complete as you are (you are complete in your seemingly incompleteness).

Perhaps, even though you believe that you are not separate from life, you still feel separate from life.

How did I end up like this (severe depression)? To put it very simply, over the course of my life, I had built up many ideas about how life should be. …I came to see clearly that my depression, at the most basic level, was actually the experience of my own deep resistance to life.

Perhaps that was my job, my true calling in life—to accept present experience deeply, to let go of all ideas of how this moment should be, instead of holding up a false image of myself.

What I do see is that many people are seeking. They are trying to escape what they think and feel in the moment. They are deeply resisting present experience, but they don’t realize that this is what they are doing.

*** Seeking that nothing outside of ourselves is really causing our suffering is the key to incredible freedom. Circumstances can never really cause our suffering; it is always in our response to circumstances that we suffer. ***

Definition of Acceptance (what it really means?) pg. 25

…we are not in control of this thing we call life. …We must move away from denial, wishful thinking, and hope, and tell the truth about life as it is. Great freedom lies in admitting the truth of this moment, however much it clashes with our hopes, dreams, and plans.

Any movement that comes from the assumption that life is broken will simply perpetuate the disease it promises to cure.

We are always trying to get there, when here is where all of life is.

Home is not a place, a thing, or a person. It is rest. At its root, the word home means “to rest” or “to lie down.”

…No matter how complete the story of my life is, it could always be more complete. The job could always pay more; the relationship could always be more fulfilling; I could always have more money; more success; more adulation. The spiritual experience could always be deeper, longer. I could always be closer to enlightenment, more present, more conscious, more free, more loved. Or there could be less of what I don’t want—less pain, less fear less sadness, less anger, less suffering, less ego, fewer thoughts.

The story of my life will never be complete, which is to say, I will never complete myself in time (explanation: (I’m only complete living in the present moment). The seeker cannot be satisfied, even when it gets what it wants. Even if you get what you want, you can lose what you have.. And, even if you get what you want, you will still feel an emptiness, a cosmic homesickness, an emptiness, a lack, a desire for something else, something more to obliterate the void. Ultimately, there is no security in life. We know, deep down, that nothing, absolutely nothing, can protect us from the possibility of losing what we have, and this is why we experience so much anxiety in our lives. Nothing outside of yourself can bring you home. …

But it’s not really Mother that we are attached to, it is home. For most babies, I would imagine that their mother is the first person who symbolizes home. I wonder if, in a million different ways, with all our seeking, we’re just trying to get back to the womb, the place of non-separation. In the womb, there was no separation between me and the womb, no separation between me and Mother. There was simply wholeness, without an inside or outside. …It was home, without opposite, because in the womb I had no conception of inside and outside. It was the ocean in which every single wave of experience was deeply, deeply accepted. In fact, I wasn’t even in the womb, I was the womb. That how complete it was. …In my deepest essence, I am—and am—the womb. I am the wholeness that I long for. “

As adults, we no longer scream for our mothers; instead, we seek relief from discomfort in more sophisticated ways. We metaphorically scream for the next cigarette, the next drink, the next sexual conquest, the next job promotion, the next spiritual experience, the next release—anything to make things okay, anything to take away the not okay.

The question, “What are you seeking in the future?” is identical with the question, “What are you running away from right now?”

We don’t pain to appear yet it appears. We don’t want fear to appear yet is appears. Because of our conditioning, we don’t see pain, fear, sadness, anger, and all kinds of other feelings as part of the completeness, as part of the wholeness of life. ..We believe that parts of our experience are somehow against life—like they don’t deserve a place in us. …And so I spend my life running away from them.

What we are really seeking is the end to seeking—is home, is the present moment.

Pg. 42—Story of a man and his explosive anger around his children

Much of our suffering comes down to feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, weakness, insecurity, and uncertainty in the face of this moment. Boil all suffering down to this: I want to control this moment, but I cannot!

Underneath our rage, we always find unaccepted pain and powerlessness.

As human beings, we do very complicated, dangerous, and even violent things to escape the discomfort of present experience. But what is happening underneath is always very simple: we are resisting what is.

I remember years ago, when I saw myself as a spiritual seeker, hungry for the release and escape of enlightenment, I used to believe that accepting, or “doing acceptance,” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, was the key to becoming enlightened. If I could just accept everything all the time, I would be free, or so I thought. …I realize now that there was an agenda (in other words, seeking) behind my attempt to accept. I secretly believed that if I accepted my pain, it would go away. My rejection of pain was disguised as acceptance! Acceptance done with any kind of hope, motive, or expectation is not real acceptance—it is rejection in disguise.

We try to cultivate in ourselves qualities such as love, peace, acceptance, and nonattachment. We exhaust ourselves trying to love, trying to accept,, trying to relax, trying to be nonjudgmental, and non-identified, and even trying to stop seeking once and for all. But in discovering who we really are, we come to recognize that these qualities are not the result of the effort of a separate person, but are naturally present in who we are before we identify ourselves as a separate person. Who we are is naturally loving, accepting, deeply relaxed, and always at peace, never attached to any form, and who we are has never been seeking anything.

Yes, right at the heart of our experience we find an intimacy, a total inseparability of all the waves of experience—thoughts, sounds, smells, feelings, sensations. These waves are not separate things that come and go within us or things that come from outside of us and move through us. They are us. This intimacy is what we are all looking for, in a million different ways.

However, we forget that we are experiencing our own stories about the world—our own thoughts, our own labels, our own interpretations, our own memories, our own prejudices, our own fears, our own conditioning, our own dreams. And we fall into the belief that there is actually a separate world out there, with separate objects and people, and that we are experiencing this world objectively and reporting back on it. We forget that we are experiencing a projection of our own dream, and we live as if we are separate from—and slaves t and victims of—a world “out there.” We forget the total intimacy right at the heart of life, and we fall into a world of separation and fragmentation, a world where I’m over here, and everything else is over there, and we are forever at a distance. This forgetting is the origin of all loneliness, isolation, and depression.

We live in our stories of each other. Do we really ever truly meet each other? …Can the past or future ever truly capture this present moment? Without referring to the past or future, who are you, right now? When we talk about ourselves, what we are usually talking about is the story of ourselves. …I am simply what is happening in this moment. That is where my identity truly lies—in the here and now, not in the time-based story of me. I am identical to this moment.

You can feel ugly; but, as open space, you cannot be ugly. Much of our suffering rests on the assumption that if we feel something for too long or too intensely, or at all, we will become it. In our drive to define ourselves, to distinguish ourselves from others, to hold up a consistent story about who we are, what we end up doing is not allowing in feelings that conflict with the image or story of ourselves that we are trying to hold up. We say, “This feeling is me” or “This feeling is not me.” If I see myself as a beautiful, attractive person, I am not going to allow an ugly wave (feeling) in. I cannot allow myself to feel ugly. That wave just doesn’t fit with how I want to see myself and how I want you to see me. …I cannot allow any wave into my experience that threatens my idea of myself. In the world of duality, opposites must appear. If there is beautiful there must be ugly. If there successful there must be failure. If there is strong there must be weak.

We are at war with the opposites; we reject any opposite that doesn’t match our image of ourselves, and we don’t realize something very important: in reality, there are no opposites. Opposites are a creation of the mind. Only the mind splits reality, splits experience into two and then seeks one of the opposites and tries to escape the other.

Experience itself has no opposite.

What images of yourself are you trying to hold up? What do you want to be seen as? Happy, beautiful, successful, peaceful, blissful, enlightened? Expert? Teacher? The one who knows? The one who has worked everything out? What don’t you want to be seen as? Sad, stressed, unpopular, ugly, unintelligent, a failure? What images of yourself are not okay? What do you want to feel? What don’t you want to feel? Which waves are not okay in your world?

Pg. 98- Story of a woman who lifelong quest was to be beautiful. …Deep down, neither the woman nor we really want to be beautiful; we want to be whole. And being whole means being open to all experience. …We long to allow everything. The woman no longer wanted to be beautiful. She wanted to be honest instead. She wanted to be authentic instead. She just wanted to feel what she felt—no more, no less. Everything we once called “negativity” is now seen to be a celebration of life.

Do you want to be beautiful? Then you have to deeply accept your ugliness, to come to see that it’s allowed in what you are. That’s the deal. Do you want to be strong? Then you have to be deeply accepting of weakness, to come to see that it’s only when you completely allow all feelings of weakness to be there that a real strength emerges—a strength that is not at war with weakness.

Pg. 104 – Story of a businessman and what will happen to him if he fails.

The core of his fear was that he would be unloved and unwanted in his failure, and believed that he would be loved in his success. …If you drop down through your deepest, darkest fears—the fear of being ugly, the fear of failure, the fear of poverty, the fear of illness—as you approach rock bottom, what you’ll nearly always find is the basic fear “I will be unloved.”

What you are is not an image, and it cannot be threatened by any wave (feeling). Only an image (story of ourselves) can be threatened. Who you really are accepts all waves, it is only the separate self (the ego, the story/the image) that feels threatened by a particular wave. Who you really are that accepts and embraces all waves of experience is the love you have been seeking.

There is no such thing as a negative thought. This is one of the many illusions that we believe that we are the thinkers of our thoughts; however, thoughts appear and come and go without any effort. Thoughts are impersonal, but we believe that they are owned by us. …you are not in control of your thoughts. Another illusion is that if I think it, it will come true. If I think it, it will happen. If I think it, I will attract it. If I think it, I will become it. If I think it, my parents, or my partner, or my boss, or my ?? will find out and I will be punished and unloved. If I think it, people will know that I am thinking it and judge me. They will see me for who I really am, and I will be rejected by the world. If they find out what I am thinking, they won’t love me.

Story of a positive person (she couldn’t make her negative thoughts disappear no matter what she did) pg. 110

The truth is, the more I simply allow a thought to appear, the less likely it is that I will end up acting it out.

Story of the father who took out anger and repressed negative thoughts continues on pg. 112

Somehow we believe in allowing our “negative” thoughts to be there they will somehow take up over. In fact, it is the other way around—when we reject thoughts, try to escape them, and punish ourselves for thinking them, they tend to grow and grow and grow in size and importance. The seeking, the desperation to escape, becomes so intense that even the most seemingly peaceful person can end up becoming violent.

All of these thoughts that we reject simply wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t trying to hold up an image of ourselves. “I’m a nonviolent person.” “I’m a positive person.” “I’m a happy person.” “I’m a 100-percent-loving light being.” Wonderful! But that image means that you will go to war with any thought that doesn’t fit that image.

We try to banish all “negative” thoughts and only have “positive” thoughts. Positive thinking has become quite a craze in recent years. But this tactic ultimately doesn’t work, because the opposites always arise together. You could say that in seeking the positive, we actually create the negative. They cannot exist without each other. ..It’s almost as if life wants to be in perfect balance—it wants beautiful and ugly, not just one or the other.

Pg. 118 A woman free from identity was her identity

Part II: Deep Acceptance in Everyday Life

Chapter on Pain and Illness

The concept “There is no pain” can simply be a way for seekers to avoid feeling the pain they feel in the moment! The concept “This is not my body” can be used to avoid facing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings they have about their body. The concept “There is no self” or “Everything is impersonal” can be used to deny intimate, and very personal, human feelings and emotions, which are simply asking to be deeply embraced in the impersonal space that you are. The phenomenon of using spiritual concepts to deny unacceptable human emotions and feelings has often been called “spiritual bypassing.”

Freedom is always about what’s true, right now—not what I think is true, not what I’ve been told is true, not what I believe is true, not what my spiritual teacher told me was true, but what is actually true in this moment, in this present experience, in these thoughts, these sensations, these feelings. True freedom is about admitting what’s true. …You cannot intellectualize, philosophize, or think your way out of pain.

True healing is not about escaping suffering and reaching wholeness at some point in the future---it’s about seeing that wholeness here, right now, at the very heart of suffering.

Pg. 129 – Story of a woman in pain (she thought she was enlightened and able to handle any struggle until she had issues with pain)

It was the stories she was telling about her pain—how bad it was, how much worse it would get, how it would end up killing her—that made her situation feel intolerable, unbearable, desperate. It was her identity as a woman in pain that was the real burden—not the pain itself.

Now, since thought operates in the world of opposites, the moment it labels present sensations as “pain,” it immediately starts to compare and contrast it with something called “pleasure” or “lack of pain.” And so there is already a judgment built into the word pain. Pain is now the opposite of something, and for many people, the word pain has all sorts of negative connotations: Pain is bad. Pain means danger. Pain is evil. Pain is a punishment from God. Pain means I am unloved. Pain means I am weak. Pain means I have failed. Pain means there is something wrong with me. Pain is a very heavy word.

The first layer of illusion is the word pain with all of its judgments, beliefs, and fears that are attached to it. The second layer of illusion is “my pain”. Is there a solid, fixed person who owns pain, or are there sensations happening in the present moment? They are deeply accepted by life and they are not personal. You can’t own it because you are not separate from life, you are life. The third layer of illusion is the attempt to escape the pain. Suffering is an attempt at an impossible movement (have the present moment be pain-free, instead of with pain), and that’s why it hurts so much.

Suffering is not the path to future freedom; suffering is an invitation to present freedom. Painkillers may be able to ease physical pain, but the real pain of life is in the suffering, the seeking, the identity, the attempt to control present experience. And there is no magic pill for that.

I think this is a huge misconception for spiritual seekers—that they, personally, need to be okay with everything that happens. What a huge burden it is to believe that you need to be okay with everything, all the time—to have to pretend that you are okay with everything even when you are not!

Pain is such as wonderful teacher because it shows you that in the end, in the moment, you have no choice. You are not in control!

You’ll always find that your story about reality is much worse than reality itself!

Pg. 149 – Plane turbulence (how stories make it so much worse)

Avoiding pain exaggerates pain.

Perhaps we make up all of these stories because we don’t want to face the truth: life is beyond our control. Perhaps it’s easier to make up a story about our own failure to control life than to face the truth!

It really does feel like illness gets in the way of “my life.” …pain can seem like a threat to my life (the life had planned out).

I have met many people who say that one of the hardest things to deal when they are ill is the sense that they are somehow missing out on life, especially if they have to lie in bed all day. We tend to associate pain and illness with incompleteness—with feelings of being unwanted, unloved, somehow abandoned by life.

That’s the point, really—pain and illness shatter our stories about life, about control. When we suffer over pain and illness, what we are really doing is grieving over our dreams of what should have been. Without those ideas of what should have been, what should be now, what should be in the future, there is simply what is. The constantly changing landscape of this moment is not exactly as it should be. We can’t know that things aren’t meant to be exactly as they are right now. We can’t know that our lives have strayed from any kind of cosmic script. We can’t know that there is a cosmic script at all, in fact.

Chapter on Love, Relationships and Radical Honesty

As in other worldly pursuits, people use the pursuit of relationships to feel complete. Love from another will take away the emptiness, the sense of dis-ease and lack, the longing for home that I feel deep down. Love from another will heal me from my cosmic loneliness. More than anything, we seek each other for wholeness. The seeker lives in the world of “something’s missing,” the world of lack, and he looks out at the world and sees others who have what he lacks. …You see, the love that we seek is not contained in any one person, in the same way that spiritual enlightenment is not contained in any one teacher or guru. The love we seek is everywhere, but our eyes our closed to it, because we are looking for it.

At some time in your life, you’ve probably had the experience of falling in love. Suddenly, in the presence of another person (or a work of art, a flower, a piece of music, a sunset—you can fall in love in all sorts of ways), there is simply wonder, fascination, awe. Past and future fall away, the illusion of time collapses, and there is only what is—and it’s an unspeakable miracle. ..It feels like you’ve finally found what you were looking for. What you were always seeking is right here in front of you. If feels like coming home, as if something in you has eventually come to rest.

But in truth, you didn’t find love. Nobody has ever found love—as if love were something you could lose in the first place! You didn’t really find what you were looking for. What really happened was that,for a moment, your search for love fell away. The seeker didn’t find love—the seeker disappeared! The search came to rest. You briefly stopped looking for love, and the love that was always there revealed itself.

“I” don’t fall in love with “you.” It’s the illusion of “I” and “you” that falls away—and that is love. No two people have ever fallen in love. Love is the death of “two.” It is the falling away of the illusion of separation. The moment I believe that anyone can complete me, I begin to want to hold onto them, to possess them, to own them, to keep them with me. Does anyone really have the power to complete you? Does anyone else contain the wholeness you seek? Can anyone really give you love? Or is the love that you seek from another, in reality, the love—the deep acceptance—that you are? Are you really looking for yourself, in a million different ways?

When you are trying to keep hold of someone, you will inevitably begin to manipulate them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. When you are seeking love, approval, acceptance, praise, or even understanding from another human being, no matter who they are, you inevitably begin to say and do things to please, influence, and control them; to win them over; to keep them in your life; to prevent them from leaving you. And it all stems from your fear of loss, and ultimately your fear of being alone and incomplete again. How is your seeking causing conflict in your most intimate relationships? How are you holding back from really expressing yourself in the presence of people that you care about, out of fear of rejection or of losing them totally? It is likely that if you experience conflict in your intimate personal relationships you may be looking for something that the other person cannot give you.

I would like to argue that when we are seeking, we cannot be truly honest, no matter how hard we try. You want to tell the truth, to admit what is really true for you, to your partner, your friend, your mother, your father? Wonderful. But as long as you are seeking something from them---whether it’s love, approval, acceptance, or security—or you simply want them to think well of you, there is always fear involved, fear of loss. …You are secretly adapting your behavior, changing what you say, hiding what you really feel, being careful, in order to ensure that they keep giving you what you want. You hide what you really think, what you really feel, in order not to lose them and, thus, not to lose the possibility of becoming complete. You start performing, rather than relating. You relate as an image to another image, rather than as open space to open space—and your relationships can end up feeling totally incomplete and unsatisfying.

Often seeking is experienced as a feeling of disconnection—from others, from life itself. …Getting honest about what you are seeking is always the key. And this honesty always begins and ends with you. …What you really long for is a deep intimacy with your own experience—the deepest acceptance of every thought, every sensation, every feeling. And that cannot come from outside of yourself.

What you seek is what you are already without the stories about yourself, others, or the world. Once you’ve someone else the power to complete you—you’ve also, unconsciously, given them the power to take the completion away, at any moment.

The moment you give someone the power to give and withdraw love from you---the moment you make them into a guru (every seeker has some kind of guru as I will explain later)—on some level, you begin to fear them because they now have the power to make you incomplete again, to reject you, to make you feel unloved and unacceptable, to make you feel like nothing, at the drop of a hat. So you begin to feel the need to be careful around them. Don’t upset them, or they will withdraw completion. Don’t talk about this, don’t mention that, tiptoe around this, pretend that never happened, don’t express yourself too freely, tell them what they want to hear, be careful to say the right thing.

Or, you begin to feel the need to control them, to have power over them. Through displays of your strength, intelligence, sexiness, and superiority, you will keep them with you. Either way, whether your seeking express itself as passivity or dominance, as inferiority or superiority, the aim is the same: don’t reveal yourself too completely. Hold back. Stop admitting what’s really true for you, and start holding up an image of yourself in order to please them, pacify them, or control them. Stop admitting who you are, and live out of what you are not.

This power dynamic begins to explain why many people experience so much drama in their relationships, drama that can seemingly burst out of nowhere. …It is those from whom we are seeking the most that seem to have the power to hurt us the most. Love that is conditional, love that is based on seeking, on possession, on me getting what I want and trying not to lose what I have, can easily turn to frustration, aggression, and even emotional or physical violence.

Waves (feelings) that are not seen as already being deeply accepted will inevitably be brought to the surface in an intimate relationship. Your parents will bring up waves in you that may not have surfaced since childhood, waves you may have been avoiding your whole life. Your boss, your colleagues, your closest friends, your lovers, your enemies will bring up old rejected waves.

People will always confront you with your own rejected waves, waves that are not accepted and unloved. I’m going to avoid relationship altogether. However, this avoidance of relationship is a type of relationship. So, in the end you can’t avoid relationship, even the anti-relationship relationship.

The end of seeking and honest, clear, fearless communication go hand in hand. In fact, I would say it’s impossible to write a book about deep acceptance and the end of seeking without including a large section on honest speaking and listening. When you are seeking something from someone you want them to see you in a certain way. You are trying to manipulate their image of you (which is actually your image of their image of you),. And in their presence you want to see yourself in a certain way. And what else could be the reason for this but fear?

We try to protect ourselves from life and from each other because we are afraid, and what the seeker fears more than anything is being exposed. Exposure of the seeker is like death. To put this in simple language, if you saw me for who I really am, in all my weakness, failure, insecurities, incompleteness, you would reject me. If you saw me in all my rawness, in all my nakedness and humanness, without the masks I wear, stripped of my façade, without defenses, without the games I play—if you saw what’s really here, if you saw beyond the image—you’d reject me. If you saw my fear, my frustrations, my doubts, my sadness, my feelings of failure, ugliness, incompetence, helplessness, you would not love me. Or, if you loved me before when the image is gone you would soon lose that love for me. I fear that in the light of truth, in the light of life, all the little games I play would be exposed, and I would be left standing there, naked and ashamed, unloved and abandoned, an outcast far from home.

The fear of being an outcast is the fear of being cold and alone, unprotected, forgotten, vulnerable, and near to death. Although we may no longer fear being torn apart by wild animals In the forest, we still somehow unconsciously associate social rejection with a kind of death. If I expose myself to you, I might die. That’s how it feels. Being an outcast is a deeply not-okay wave in the human ocean. And so we spend much of our lives avoiding intimacy—and instead pursue more superficial goals such as popularity, fame, or just fitting into the crowd. …No matter how many relationships we have, no matter how full our lives are with people and possessions, if there is no deep connection, no real honesty, no intimacy in the true sense of the word, you simply will not feel fulfilled. There will still be something missing. There will still be emptiness and a sense of lack.

The only true security is radical honesty in the here and now, which means risking the loss of your self-image and fearlessly meeting the other as yourself, undefended and unprotected.

What would it mean to meet (someone)—really meet—without history, without projection, without imagination, without stories or images of them?

As a story trying to complete itself through you, seeking resolution through you, trying to come home through you, I will end up manipulating you, being dishonest with you, playing a role with you, hiding how I really feel out of fear of losing you, punishing you when I feel hurt by you. But as open space, I am free to communicate honesty and authentically with you, knowing that I am already the love I seek; knowing that I do not need you to complete me; knowing that, deep down, I cannot ever lose you, I do not need you in order to be fully who I am. I do not need you to keep my story together.

Real love asks nothing in return.

Pg. 188 example of a man using his image and inauthentic communication to repeatedly get rejected by enlightened teachers except for Jeff Foster (had no image of himself as anything, so he was able to listen and communicate with someone who was attacking and attempting to save Jeff from his illusions).

Jeff was free to hear what the man was really saying underneath his message and to find the truth in what the man was saying.

There is no thought you can have that I can’t have. There is nothing you can feel that I can’t feel. You are not fundamentally different from me—it’s not possible. All of human consciousness passes through us, and so we can always meet somewhere—even if it takes a while to find that place.

And who knows? I may even learn something from the one I previously called an enemy. My enemy can be my greatest teacher, because in bringing up discomfort in me, he also brings me into contact with the image of myself that I’m still defending. In other words, he shows me which parts of my own experience I’m still at war with (where I am not yet free). He shows me the waves that I’m not allowing into my ocean. He reflects back at me the enemy within, so to speak—the parts of my own experience that I have made into an enemy by not seeing their inherent completeness. He is my greatest teacher, shining the light on my rejected waves, although he probably doesn’t realize this.

The end of conflict lies not in reactivity (survival response of the seeker), but in this total responsibility, which emerges from the discovery of the deepest acceptance of this moment.

You could say we are all looking for love. We just have different ways of expressing that search. Even the serial killer, the rapist, the murderer are all looking for the womb, in their different ways. We are all womb-seekers on legs. For some people, the only way they know how to get love is to hurt others. For those who feel completely powerless, helpless, beaten down by life, and long to feel powerful and in control again, hurting or even killing seems to provide some temporary release.

When I am holding onto an idea, belief system, or ideology, and have made that belief system my path to wholeness—my only path to wholeness—and you suggest, by your words or actions, that my belief system is wrong you are threatening my wholeness. You are blocking my way home. You are threatening my life—as in the story of my life. We don’t argue over ideologies; we argue over our paths to wholeness. Deep down, even suicide bombers are simply trying to come home, like anyone else. ..In their search for completeness, they end up destroying everything that they perceived as incompleteness “out there,” in the world.

*** All that we see as evil in ourselves (shadow), all of those waves of experience that are not deeply allowed to arise and fall, all of those waves that are a threat to our self-image, we will project onto our so-called enemies (scapegoats) out there in the world. In trying to hurt or wipe out our enemies, we are secretly trying to wipe out the evil in ourselves. In trying to destroy impurity in others, we are really seeking our own purity. In trying to destroy the dark in others, we are secretly seeking the light. I want to destroy incompleteness in you because I secretly want to destroy it in myself and become complete. ***

What I do not allow in myself, I will not allow in you. The waves I want to get rid of in myself, I try to get rid of in you. And how easy this mechanism is to see in others! Can we see it in ourselves? That is the question. Who are your scapegoats? What do you reject in others that you secretly reject in yourself? Weakness? Failure? Fear? Homosexuality? Violence? What thoughts and feelings do you not admit in yourself, in order to hold up to the world an image of who you are?

When I’m no longer transferring my seeking needs onto you, I am free to see you in your incompleteness too. I can see you as you are. I can see your human flaws, your failings, your weakness, your sadness, your pain. I can finally love you for who you are, not who I thought you were or who I need you to be. I can love you in your pain, in your grief, in your imperfections, in all your humanity. Beyond the roles, beyond the stories, your imperfections are so perfect.

Everybody is just seeking unconditional love. Not getting it form our parents, our partners, or our careers, we then go looking for it in the form of a spiritual guru or healer. Most of the time we don’t realize that we are seeking anything.

We are seeking the deepest acceptance everywhere (gurus, lovers, other people, objects, etc.) except the only place it can be found—here and now. …The seeker can’t just walk away from an abusive situation—there’s too much at stake. However much you are hurting me, I need your live. I need your enlightenment. I need your approval. I fear its loss. This is the dark side of the projection game: we lose our common sense; we ignore our discernment; we repress our intelligence; we ignore our gut feelings and intuition; we silence our doubts, many of which may be valid—all in the pursuit of our own completeness. We end up going against our own present-moment truth in search of an abstract truth in the future. ..We begin to live in hope of a future salvation that never comes.

Krishnamurti says, “If you do not follow somebody, you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty, and anxious—a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.”

In seeing beyond the story, everyone is forgiven, in the true sense of the word. All of these people who disappointed you because they didn’t live up to your expectations of them are forgiven—father, mother, sister, brother, friend, lover, spiritual teacher. They couldn’t complete you; they were too busy trying to complete themselves.

So now it’s no longer two seekers in a relationship two waves trying to reach the ocean through each other. It’s no longer two people using each other to complete themselves. It’s no longer a tug of war, a battle of self-images. Now it’s two people who see each other as they really are, who see each other as they really are, who see each other in all their failings, insecurities, and flaws, and who are no longer trying to fix each other, to make each other match the perfect-partner image—the “perfect partner” who was supposed to complete me. Now it’s two people who see clearly what’s in front of them.

Two people who can finally be honest, in the true meaning of the word. To be honest means “to tell the truth without expectation,” without aiming for a particular result, without trying to hurt or manipulate the other person in any way. Honesty means telling the truth and being willing to experience everything that follows. It means telling the truth not with the aim of changing or fixing the other person, but simply because the truth is what I long for the most. What I long for the most is to let go of the burden of trying to hold up a false image of myself in your presence. In the end, we don’t need a reason to tell the truth, to admit what is. Truth is its own reward.

Story of woman and her ill husband (who cheated on her repeatedly) concerning honesty on pg. 217

The question to ask yourself is always this: what is my truth in this moment? In other words, what do I really think and feel right now? Can I simply admit what is appearing in present experience? Can I begin to admit these thoughts, these sensations, these feelings, however much I don’t want to admit them, however much they threaten my image of myself? Can it then be seen that what I admit is already admitted into present experience? Can it simply be noticed, right now, that these waves have already been allowed into the ocean—that what I am has already said yes to this moment, that the acceptance I seek is already here?

If I am to truly accept this moment, as many spiritual teachings tell me to do, I must accept everything—simply everything—that’s appearing right now. And that everything could include any resistance or nonacceptance that is appearing right now. From the point of view of the ocean, all waves are accepted, including all the ones we don’t like or want in this moment.

When I’m no longer seeking your acceptance, what is there to fear in being honest with you? Deep acceptance always destroys our false stories. The pain, the sadness, the disappointment, the helplessness were all embraced. They were admitted.

Honesty is connection. It’s one thing telling your truth—perhaps that’s the easy part! The harder part is to be able to hear someone else’s truth, to really hear their response, their perspective, or their viewpoint, especially if it’s about you, and to find the place where that viewpoint is okay—where it’s okay for them to think what they think and feel what they feel, in this moment, even if you strongly disagree with what they have to say, even if right now you do not understand how they could possibly feel he way they do.

Can I simply allow myself to feel hurt, to feel pain, to feel sadness, to feel anger, to feel unloved, to feel helpless and powerless in your presence, and not do anything about it, just for a moment? Can I allow that hurt fully into myself, just for a moment? Can I find the place where the hurt is already allowed?

Yes, here is the key to breaking through all relationship conflict: if I want to stay connected with you in this moment, I must deeply allow any hurt that appears. This goes against all our conditioning, which tells us to protect ourselves against hurt. …If I want to love you—really love you—I must find the place where I can love the hurt as well. Love is not something you do; it’s what you are.

Can I simply be here with the hurt and the urge to escape the hurt? This can be a wonderful place to sit without any expectation. …Often the most violent people are the ones who are the most repressed emotionally. They try hard to keep their feelings and urges down—feelings of sadness, of powerlessness, of fear, of failure and impotence—and because of that repression, these feelings and urges end up bursting out in other, destructive ways.

Remember, acceptance doesn’t mean that the pain or the hurt goes away. I think that’s a huge mistake that people make. They expect that once they discover this deepest acceptance, all the hurt and pain and strange urges will magically disappear.

One of my favorite things to do is sit with my elderly father. It’s a beautiful thing just to sit in a place of profound not-knowing with him, a place where I do not know what to say or do. I sit, without expectation, without trying to fix him, without trying to manipulate his or my experience in any way. I just listen, without trying to make things better in the moment, without playing the role of “the one who knows.”

Chapter on Addictions

We human beings seem to be able to become addicted to pretty much anything. ..but at the root of all of these addictions is our main addiction: our addiction to ourselves. WE are addicted to the story of “me.” We are addicted to holding up that image of ourselves and defending it to the death; to constantly working on that image, improving it, comparing and contrasting, it with other images; to creating the perfect image, completing that image before we die, and making sure that image is upheld by others even after our deaths. What are addicts really looking for?

People we call addicts are basically no different from the rest of us. In a sense, a seeker is always an addict—addicted to the future, addicted to moving away from this moment, addicted to finding release in any way he or she can. We find release through sex, through drugs, through cigarettes, through ear-bleedingly loud music, through finally getting that new Gucci bag or that exclusive sports car or the latest computer game. And for a short while, it seems like we are relieved of the burden of seeking, the burden of lack. For a few precious moments, as I inhale deeply from my cigarette, I forget all my troubles, the past and future fall away or recede into the background, and all that’s left is the warm, soothing smoke moving down my throat and into my lungs. The empty feeling has gone away. There is a kind of fullness that seems attainable only with this cigarette. In a way, the ciagarette, the glass of wine, the ear-bleedingly loud music become a lover, a mother, a guru, providing the release I crave. It takes me back to the womb. It releases my burdens. It removes discomfort. It brings me home—temporarily.

On some level, the addiction object enables us to satisfy the deepest longing that every human has—to disappear, to be absorbed into life, to die into this moment, to come home, to return to the womb, to be relieved of the heavy burden of the separate self, to dissolve back into the ocean., and to rest, finally rest. As I gulp down another pint of beer, as I inject the trendy drug, as I drive home in my new sports car, everything feels okay—for a while.

It would be wonderful if this mechanism actually delivered what it promised—permanent completeness. Alas, it does not, because there is always the comedown. The glow wears off. The discomfort resurfaces. The pain returns. The incompleteness comes back, sometimes more intensely than ever, and then I crave my next hit, my next release, my next experience. The seeker reappears, still incomplete, still unsatisfied—maybe more unsatisfied than ever.

You see, we aren’t really addicted to the cigarettes; we’re addicted to the apparent release, the absorption into life, the temporarily reprieve from lack that the cigarette seems to bring. We aren’t really addicted to objects or people; we’re addicted to the release they seem to bring. …I may be healed from my cigarette addiction, but if I don’t face the underlying lack, the addiction will pop up in some other area of my life.

Often addicts talk about “getting their fix.” What are they trying to fix? Deep down, although they probably don’t know it, they are trying to fix a primal sense of separation, trying to fix incompleteness. The only fix for incompleteness is a radical and total embrace of that very incompleteness—the embrace that you are in you essence.That’s what we really long for, deep down—intimacy with ourselves.

It’s when we can’t embrace and totally accept feelings of powerlessness; helplessness; fear; uncertainty; anger; grief; ugliness; lack; loneliness; boredom; indecisiveness; despair; longings; emptiness, disconnection, urges; numbness; not belonging; being an outcast; being different; hate; jealousy; resentment; guilt—the so-called “negative” thoughts, sensations, and feelings (forbidden waves)—fully in the present moment because they don’t fit our image of ourselves as (strong, beautiful, positive, enlightened, etc.) that we become addicts or seekers seeking an object or person to complete ourselves and/or we project those "shunned shadows" onto others through violence and conflict to escape present-moment discomfort.

We do this in order to re-bring ourselves back home to the present moment in a different and acceptable feeling state, to temporarily rest and cease the seeking mechanism again instead of being with and embracing all of life—especially the unacceptable and despised aspects of ourselves (outcast waves) that we keep at bay and hidden from ourselves and others because we believe we can’t handle those waves, or those waves will tear our ocean apart, or people will abandon us if they find out, or those waves will never end, or those waves will somehow come true if I allow them.

Making the cigarette into the enemy isn’t going to help. When you see—really see—this seeking mechanism at work, in all its intricacies and subtleties, you see how the cigarette is innocent. It has no power over you and it never did. You were using it to try to reach wholeness. You’re not really smoking the cigarette—you’re trying to smoke wholeness. You’re not really smoking the cigarette---you are using it to get somewhere.

You get the picture. Substance and activities—sex, drinking, eating chocolate, waging bets at the casino or on the stock market—in themselves, are not problems. These all can be fun, enjoyable, innocent parts of life. It’s when the seeker starts to use these activities to get something that the problems start.

All urges—in fact, all seeking—always begin with a general sense of lack, and then this general lack becomes the lack of something specific. The beginning of great freedom is to realize that nothing is ever missing from present experience. There is only ever the story that something is missing, the feelings that something is missing. And all stories and their associated feelings appear in the wide-open space that you are, which is always complete in itself.

Over the years, I’ve met many people who were desperately trying to get rid of all of their wants, because they thought that was the way to enlightenment. They truly believed that an enlightened person doesn’t have any wants. First, their want to get rid of all wants is the biggest want of all. Second, a life without any wants would be a very dull life indeed. There are healthy wants and there unhealthy wants based on seeking such as seeking out a cigarette. Anything we try to repress will eventually come out in some distorted form. The life force simply wants to express itself; it won’t be restrained. Not all wants are expressions of lack.

As we have seen, you really don’t want a cigarette. What you really want is for the present moment to be deeply okay again. What you really want is to no longer be in want. What you really want is to no longer be in lack. What you really want is for all of this discomfort to be deeply accepted. You want to be deeply okay where you are; you want to be at home here and now, and you think having a cigarette is the only way to get there. The longing is not for a cigarette (or a drink or sex or the next high), but for the deepest acceptance.

When a craving is simply allowed to be there, with all the discomfort that entails, and when the urge to escape the discomfort is simply allowed to be there—when every thought, every sensation, every feeling is simply allowed to be there, and when this present experience is seen to be deeply accepted right now—I no longer need the cigarette to complete me. This is where they cycle of need can be broken—right at the very heart of that need. This is freedom in need—freedom in craving, not freedom from craving. The end of addiction is in a deep and total embrace of wanting, however paradoxical that may sound at first.

It can be a very strange thing to deeply allow a want. Most of the time we’re either trying to ignore a want (which only makes the want grow) or we’re indulging the want. Deeply accepting the want is the middle way. Between rejecting and indulging lies seeing—and allowing, and finding freedom in even the most uncomfortable places.

So your new spiritual practice is this: Sit with discomfort, and with its best friend, the urge to escape the discomfort. Sit without doing anything about them. Sit without expecting them to change. Sit without trying to fix yourself. Sit without hope of any particular outcome. And notice that every thought, every sensation, every feeling—including any expectation, frustration, lack of acceptance, or attempt to change this moment—has already been allowed into this moment. Find the okayness in the midst of not-okayness.

Faced with the impossibility of getting what you want, faced with the failure of your search, you can experience total powerlessness, total helplessness, total fear, total lack of control. It really does feel that you are about to die. You come up against everything you wanted to escape, against your own powerlessness in the face of life. Facing these things is very much like facing death.

The seeker wants more than anything comfort, certainty, and security; however, has the seeker ever found his ever-changing life to be comfortable, certain, and secure for more than a few brief moments, and is it possible that the seeker was really looking for the deepest acceptance of each moment, especially when those moments seemed the most insecure, unsafe, uncomfortable, and uncertain. Maybe, the seeker was really looking for and wanting total acceptance of the seemingly unacceptable—the feelings of insecurity, uncomfortableness, and uncertainty.

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