Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20329 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 164 pages

Synopsis
We try to escape from the play of life and the suffering that being "a person in the world" entails. Our efforts to find spiritual enlightenment have the opposite effect and reinforce an underlying feeling of lack, of separation. In Life Without a Centre, Jeff Foster suggests that there is only ever the present appearance of life, with no individual at its core who could ever escape even if they wanted to. The entire spiritual search is nothing more than a game we play with ourselves, the cosmic entertainment. Jeff cuts through the confusion and frustration surrounding the search for escape through spiritual enlightenment, by pointing to the utterly obvious: This moment, and everything that arises in it, is already the liberation that is sought. Life, just as it is, is already what we've been searching for our entire lives. Jeff Foster graduated in astrophysics from Cambridge University. Soon after graduation, life events propelled him onto an intense two-year spiritual search, culminating in the realisation that there was never anything to find in the first place.He currently writes and talks on what some people have called "non-duality", but which he just refers to as "the utterly, utterly obvious".

Customer Reviews

Fozzie on good form
There's a lot to be said for depressed, confused people living out their personal therapy in public. Sometimes they go to the extent of writing books and lecturing on their introspection and techniques for accepting the phenomena of the human drama. This gives us raw human theatre, emotions laid bare, and there's rarely anything better. But sometimes this can actually be helpful. After all, the longevity of the spiritual "guru market" owes little to its genuine effectiveness in bringing about profound revelations and more to the fact that its many "psychological pills" often means there's inevitably a brand just for you; something your fragile, restless mind will swallow and feel better for having done so. Who needs enlightenment, ego-death or whatever else you want to call what is ultimately a dissolution into Consciousness, when you can get a far easier and quicker respite from your woes with any number of appealing psuedo-formulas? Nothing really matters anyway.

Sporting a dashing stubble and plummy English accent with just enough street edge to keep him accessible to a broader market, Jeff Foster shows in his videos that he has plumbed the depths of spiritual literature well enough to rehash its key points with all the requisite features on display: the aloof self-amusement, the self-knowing grin, the must-have deep pauses, the me-so-wise eyes, and so on. But's he's young and fresh and with that retro Miami Vice-style stubble you may find yourself affectionately coming to regard him as Jeff "Fozzie" Foster and find him more and more endearing as you get to know the man and his words.

Peddling a nice, user-friendly strand of non-duality, Fozzie does an admirable job of encouraging you to consider that you, and the contents of your mind, are actually all just thoughts floating through Awareness, and that the Awareness itself is what you really are. He's right of course. We all share Awareness as our common ground and True Self; thoughts of individuality and personal "doer-ship" arise within this common Consciousness and a characteristic of this process is that a particular, remarkably endowed strain of thought - called the Ego - actually produces a procession of sub-thoughts and basically thinks it's running the show, including being separate from everything else. And hey presto you have the imprisonment of the Me, seemingly cut off from your Source, which is there all along of course.

Bewildered by how difficult it appears to be to reconnect to your Source-Consciousness? Fozzie says, just accept it. Accept everything. Reject nothing. Deny nothing. Relax into whatever is happening right now. Forget spiritual pursuits. Let it all play out the way it must. He's right. After all, just consider how your own thoughts come and go, usually of their volition. Why would the strain of thought which is the Ego be any different? It has arisen and can dissolve only of its own accord, the same as most other thoughts do. Nothing you can do, say or think will dissolve the strain of thought which is the Ego because, inevitably, the more thinking you do about it, the more you prolong the Ego experience in the first place.

Fozzie then says, but oh dear even trying to stop thinking about it all is a trap, because that's the mind seeking for an end to seeking, i.e. more thought! So, what should you do? Well, do whatever you like. When the thought that is the Ego is ready to stop and drop, it will. If it won't, you'll just have to appreciate the sheer comedy in the whole facade. Because if you don't, me and Fozzie surely will.

To his credit, whether he's truly at one with Pure Consciousness or not, the likeable Fozzie gives us a decent little book on Acceptance, with some astute pointers towards trust and patience in the whole process, i.e. what's meant to be will be, plain and simple. Whilst at times his blocks of writing come across like self-therapy sessions written more for his own peace of mind than the reader, it's nonetheless a worthy "pill" for your dream character to swallow in the hope of seeing through the dream itself.

the 'last book'...yeah right. dream on.
And so Jeff Foster spends his days tirelessly promoting the 'utterly obvious' that all spiritual searches are worthless. Why would he bother? What is 'he' striving for when there is nothing there? He unknowingly carries out the circle myth of eternal return- that one has to travel a thousand miles before they can end up back home and realise what was there all along- like if one traverses the entire globe they eventually end up where they started but it doesn't make the 'journey' futile. Such a pattern is contained in many mythologies of the world which are essentially non-dual in their most genuine form.

So all spiritual paths are poitnless and yet Foster had to spend 2 years on his own path in order to break down the affective barrier between self and object. Yes, for a whole 2 years he voraciously sampled various superficial oriental delights before coming to his grand finale- yes HE has discovered that all spiritual paths and religions are in fact 'worthless'!!! Great. good for you. no need to start a cult over your little revelation Jeff. Those who are screaming 'yes!!! this is the LAST book, the END of the spiritual search etc etc etc...you may be merely embarking on the grandest delusion yet.

Do yourself a favour. DO the searching and come round full circle for yourself. Don't let a jumped up wannabe guru try to 'save you' from your search. As Jospeh campbell once said "the moderns tell us..we move straight from infancy to maturity...to which i say is..great all you've missed is life"

this book is rubbish
if you are questioning life and really want to find answers then you should pick up a copy of 'doing nothing' by steven harrison. harrison cuts straight to the truth, the nature of the mind. there are many imitators such as jeff foster who's book did absolutely nothing for me. on one page there are grainy images including a soldier in the trenches, next to it says "this is liberation". yeah right jeff! don't be fooled by the other reviews, go and get a harrison book instead, or even eckhart tolle, you will thank me.