IN THE ABSENCE OF THE PERSON

No wonder "you" cannot see this : This is a freedom that a "person" will never see. 

How could a "person" ever accept that everything happens spontaneously, of its own accord, in the absence of the person? 

The Tao (or Oneness, or God, or Life, or Spirit, or Emptiness…) has no centre, no mind, no personal volition. It appears as everything, but itself is nothing. Nothing manifesting as a world, as everything there is and is not. And there is only the Tao, which is to say there is no Tao at all.

And even to speak of it, even to think of it, even to do that is to lose it forever. 

And yet the thinking and the speaking are fully the Tao; there is nothing that it is not. 

It is the no-thing by which everything appears. And it’s not even that, because it’s not an “it” at all.

When speaking of the Tao, silence is the only way…

---

Yes, only the Tao, only Oneness, only One without a second, appearing as a “world”, endlessly, continuously, without beginning or end.

The “mind” could never see this. How blind it is to all this, and yet howperfectly blind it is, how it couldn’t be otherwise!

This world is a perfect world, perfect in its apparent imperfection, extraordinary in its ordinariness, Divine in its perfectly acceptable and appropriate and inevitable search for “something more”.

In the absence of the person, in the absence of the world “out there”, everything is. And that’s the miracle that will never be spoken of. These words hint at the miracle, but will only ever hint. Pointers will only ever point. 

The futility of trying to communicate the incommunicable is at once comical and utterly Divine, as it is. It couldn’t be otherwise.

--

Everywhere you go, people believing they are separate from each other, arguing, wanting to be right, wanting to know.

How to communicate to them that nobody is speaking? That there is only noise, and nobody doing it?

No, there is no way.

The silence is always apparently ignored. Because what is silence to a person? What use is it?

No use, of course. To a person, only noise is of any value at all. Hence separation, hence suffering, hence the human condition.

But Forgive them Father, because the silence is All, and All is the Silence. And even the noise arises in the Silence of all Silences, and so there is nothing to forgive, nothing at all.

But how could a person ever see this? A person is nothing but noise, nothing but an attempt to fill the silence, to avoid it, to resist the Nothingness at the heart of all phenomena.

Because to a person, silence is death.

And yet, what the person cannot see is that he has no existence at alloutside of the silence. Without the silence, he is nothing. No thing at all. And so the person is really always at war with the ground of existence itself.

And it never ends. Computing, competing, the mind searching for something it can never really have. Until it all ends, that is.

But never mind. Searching is all a separate person can do, because a separate person believes they have lost something. Forgive them Father, they have no choice, no choice at all.

--

And really there are no “people” in the first place. No people separate from the silence. The mind itself has created “silence and noise”, created them and separated them, separated them and kept them apart, never to be reconciled.

But in the absence of the person, in the space where  a person once was, the noise never began, and the silence never ended, and there is no death.

No death, no life, just this, beyond all knowing and all knowledge and all words and concepts, beyond all beyonds.

And nobody here to know all this. Nobody writing it. Pen moves over paper. No volition, no control, no centre.

No idea what the pen will say next. God Himself writes, Spirit writes, the Buddha writes, Life Itself writes, and yet Nobody writes at all.

What freedom in this – a freedom that isn’t really a freedom at all, because there was never any bondage to be free from!

When the person is no more, when the search is undone, when the demand for life to be anything other than what it is collapses, the noise and silence, the freedom and bondage, the Yin and the Yang are all seen to be illusory, simply the mind’s attempt to cut the world up into manageable little pieces, and the truth is revealed: there is only the whole.

And that “When” is now, and there is no other time, and the whole spiritual search will only ever be a cosmic entertainment.

 

---

By Jeff Foster