Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: I think there are as many interpretations and ways as
there are people.
TRIP: So Jeff, what would be an example of some other form of
spirituality being practiced today?
JEFF FOSTER: Well, I'm a bit like you, I don't really have any
formal training either. I mean, I don't know what spirituality
really means, I think it's one of those words that means a lot of
different things to a lot of different people. What's spirituality?
We talk about the material world and the spiritual world, and is
there any division, is there that division between material and
spiritual? I don't know. For me really I can only really talk about
my own experience, I can only really talk about my own journey,
my own story.
For me really, years ago I wasn't really interested in spirituality, it
was really I was just suffering, and I was just deeply miserable. I
mean, I think my whole life it got worse and worse like in my early
20s. I was just suffering, I mean everything was suffering for me,
everything. Waking up in the morning and having breakfast was
suffering, and then having to talk to other people was suffering,
and having to go to school or go to work, that was suffering. I
mean it was just non-stop suffering. So for me two years ago the
suffering became so intense that I just wanted a way out of
suffering, I wasn't really interested, and I didn't really care what I
called it. I just wanted a way out of suffering. And then in my
search for a way out of suffering, I started reading spiritual books.
I was just desperate for a way out, and back then I didn't really
care what it was, whether it was spirituality, or whatever, I don't
know, it was just what can bring me relief, what can end the
suffering. And that's what it was really all about for me was the
end of suffering.
And then I read all sorts of books on Buddhism, on Zen Buddhism,
and Christianity, and Judaism, and nonduality books, Advaita
books, traditional Advaita, Neo, everything. My ideas of what
spiritual was or is, it changed over the years, it kept on evolving. I
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