Love is Personal

“I am officially no longer an ‘Advaita teacher’ or ‘Nonduality teacher’ – if, indeed, I ever was one. Life cannot be put into words, and however beautiful the words of Advaita/Nonduality are, they must be discarded in the end. I could never claim to be any sort of authority on this stuff. I will continue to speak, to sing my song to those who are open to listening, but gone is the need to adhere to any tradition, to use ‘Advaita-speak’ to avoid real, authentic human engagement, to pretend that I am in any way more or less special than you, to kid you that I know more than you, to play the ‘teacher’ by refusing to meet you in the play, to stop listening to you because I see you as ‘still stuck in the dream’ or ‘still a person’. This message is about love, in the true sense of the word – otherwise it is simply nihilism masquerading as freedom. The ‘Advaita Police’ reply ‘Who cares?’ I say I do. I do...

I spent years pushing away the personal, trying to get rid of my personal story, trying to dwell in the Absolute, to get rid of my ‘someone’ and become ‘no-one’. Jeff was the enemy and I had to get rid of him. The personal self was the devil, and it was only in the destruction of the devil that I would meet God. The ego was the lie that had to be annihilated. Or at least, that’s what I believed at the time. I had read a lot of spiritual books, and had come to a lot of conclusions about reality – not realising that my conclusions were actually personal beliefs…

My personal story (relative existence) had become hell – I hated my life, suffered terrible social phobia, felt like a total failure, saw no point in existing at all – and so it made sense at the time to escape into the impersonal heaven promised by the Advaita teachings. “There is no me, there is no you, there is no world, there are no others, suffering doesn’t exist, there‘s no responsibility on any level” – wow, what a comfort for the exhausted seeker! A one-way ticket to freedom from all worldly problems – Hallelujah! No responsibility, no past, no choice – what a relief!..

So, I was living in my impersonal castle, believing that I was free from the personal, but secretly I was at war with the personal. I was afraid of the personal, it terrified me – we attack what we are most afraid of. Real, honest, authentic human interaction? Scary. Opening myself up to life, admitting that I was wrong about certain things, letting go of my most cherished identities and beliefs? Terrifying. The risk of exposing myself to others and being rejected? No, better to pretend there are no others to interact with. Personal experience is for ignorant dreamers. The impersonal is much more real…

I claimed to be free from the personal, but secretly, behind the scenes, I was still suffering very much – there were still relationships that didn’t feel clean, places where I knew I wasn’t being honest, places where I was holding back from life, where seeking was still happening. I still felt disconnected from others, blocked, unfulfilled in many ways – but since I believed that I was liberated, or that I was ‘no-one’, I couldn’t admit this to myself, let alone other people. The radical Advaita teachings were a great comfort at this point – it was a comfort to know that ‘after liberation, suffering can still arise but now it belongs to no-one’. Great! Suffering was okay – I didn’t have to do anything about it, and anyway, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, because there was nobody here to do anything. “I’m still miserable – there is still misery appearing – but now nobody is miserable”. The radical Advaita message provided great relief…

Only the wave speaks. The ocean remains silent – it has nothing to say. It does not ‘exist’, because it does not ‘stand out’ – it cannot separate itself from itself in any way.

1.Only (the appearance of) a person would divide the personal from the impersonal, and then claim that their expression or teaching is one or the other.
2.Only a person would claim to not be a person, because only a person would see that division (person / no-person) in the first place. In the same way, only a self would claim they had no self, only an ego would claim to be free from ego…
3.Only a teaching rooted in duality would reject other teachings as dualistic. Only a teacher at war with their own ignorance would label other teachers as ignorant. The world is a perfect mirror of yourself.
4.If a teaching was truly impersonal, it would not exist, and the holding of meetings and retreats would not be possible. The ocean does not speak. In order to call itself impersonal, a teaching must be first rooted in the personal, and then deny it. Ingenious.

Anyway, this is all wonderful! It means that nobody has the answers. It means that when it comes to the ocean, none of the waves can be an authority. It means that none of the waves in the ocean can transcend the ocean – because they are only expressions of the ocean. A wave that claims to have transcended or gone beyond the ocean, is still just a wave, making certain claims. Even the most radical Advaita teacher is still a wave. Nobody has ‘reached’ the impersonal, or ‘gone beyond’ the personal, because the wave cannot go beyond itself. All waves are equal in essence – they are water.

In other words, the impersonal cannot be impersonal until it radically includes and embraces the personal… You won’t find the impersonal anywhere else except right at the heart of the personal – a total paradox, and yet as simple as breathing. I think what tends to happen is this:

1.The wave sees that it is the ocean.
2.The wave uses this insight to deny that there was a wave in the first place – or ever was.

Yes, it’s a tricky one. That’s why you have to be very careful when you’re talking about nonduality! You see, the seeker wants to be fed. Once the seeker gets hold of a concept – “there is no me, no world, no suffering”, etc – then if it’s not seen with absolute clarity what those words are pointing to, the seeker will actually use those words to deepen the seeking and the identification. So for example, if there is no free will, and if there is no choice, and if there are no others, and if there’s nobody suffering, then “I can do whatever I want to do. I can go outside and murder someone now, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s just Oneness – it doesn’t matter because there’s no choice.” That’s when nonduality just becomes another belief system, another religion, another form of separation.

When I drive my car too fast on the motorway, and a policeman pulls me over and asks me my name, I say “Jeff Foster”. I don’t say “I am no-one” or “Jeff Foster does not exist”. And although in an ultimate sense all of this may be true, still, when I say it, it’s not true – it’s simply another concept. Nobody lives in ‘ultimately true’. We cannot live in ultimates. We live here, in this world of time and space and apparent things, and so I meet the policeman and say “Jeff Foster” – and that is love. (Yes, love, even with a police officer!) Even the most fundamentalist nonduality teacher answers to their name when pulled over by a policeman. Who can deny name and form? Who can deny the story? Who is going to deny the personal? Who would even want to?

Yes, everybody is free, really free, thank goodness, to use whatever words they want to, to talk about their human experiences in whatever way feels right and honest and true to them, to tell their story. Stories are allowed – all human experience is allowed…

True freedom is not about escaping from the personal into the impersonal – it is to be found right at the heart of even the most intimately personal human experience. And so what a relief it is, to be a living, breathing, human being again, to allow life to express itself as this human name and form, as this beautifully personal human experience, and to know that it is none other than the impersonal dancing, playing, celebrating itself in every moment. I thank the teachers of radical Advaita for singing their song, and I respectfully break with their tradition once and for all – for all traditions are limited, and the song of life cannot be contained. Fundamentalism cannot stand; love will destroy everything in the end.

So tell me your story, and let the impersonal shine.”

~ Jeff Foster studied Astrophysics at Cambridge University. In his mid-twenties, after a long period of depression and illness, he became addicted to the idea of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ and embarked on an intensive spiritual quest for the ultimate truth of existence.

The spiritual search came crashing down with the clear recognition of the non-dual nature of everything, and the discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. In the clarity of this seeing, life became what it always was: intimate, open, loving and spontaneous, and Jeff was left with a deep understanding of the root illusion behind all human suffering, and a love of the present moment.