I don't need to convince anybody of anything. I don't need to show anything to anybody. I have nothing to prove to anyone.
If not for the reunion, I would not have found the part of me that was missing. If not for finding that part of me, I doubt I would have ever found peace within myself.
-- Brian William Drisko, 26-Apr-2009 1723 bwd@advaitism.com
If find I worry a lot about how to act or respond in certain situations. I'm always trying to work out the best way to respond, to such an extent that my mind seems to lock and just won't function at all.
Only because there is no best way to respond - except in the mind. The character that you are will respond in whatever way that character will respond.
But also, go beyond that and see that however you respond, it doesn't matter. It matters to the mind that the right path is taken, but ultimately it doesn't matter at all. If there is the beginning of an opening to the realisation that it doesn't matter, then there is more of a letting go. There isn't that 'I've got to get it right!' You never got it wrong -- never in your whole life. Everything that has happened in your life -- from what you think of as a major event or a major choice down to every last little nuance -- has been absolutely perfect.
-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 163
Let's be simple about it, and say that the year after you were born and living in pure being and not knowing it, suddenly one day you met this thing you suddenly realised was your mother calling you Philip. That moment of separation is the beginning of fear and the feeling of alienation. From that moment onwards, you always long to find that which you knew in that first year. We long to be children and live in the simple wonder of this as it is.
-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 17
But that's a hugely powerful conditioning, to play this game of being two.
And all the people that you meet in your life are uniquely and exactly the people you need to be with to build up and reinforce that sense of separation. But also they arise for you to discover that separation is unreal. It's a paradox - you live in a world that separates you very powerfully from oneness, in order to discover that there is only oneness.
-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 18
Awakening ... is only about dropping of the one that's looking for something.
As a little child, you weren't looking for anything. As a little child, you were in total love. Everything was just what it was. And then the game of separation began. And from that very moment of separation, you were looking - 'Oh, I've lost it! Where's it gone?' You were looking for love; you were looking for what you are. And now you've come to discover that you don't need to look anymore because everything you're looking at is that. It's absolutely as simple as that, and there's no one there who can do anything about that.
-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 70
When we are babies, basically there is simply oneness, but there is no recognition of that. There is only paradise, but there is not a knowing of being in paradise. At some point, our mother says to us, 'You are Mary' or whoever; and then there is a dropping into a sense of there being someone looking at something else called a mother. That is the first moment of separation.
Fear is rooted in separation. Fear -- the most powerful emotion we have -- is actually instigated by the sense of separation. Separation is the root of apparent suffering and loss and longing and need.
That separate one ... tries to create a world that is comfortable and safe and predictable and known.-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 127
... in the game of separation, we tend to feel threatened and what we do is we try to create a womb, we try to get back to the womb. We build that womb and by doing that we try to make it known. The way to make this dangerous, alien world safer is to try and know it.
-- Tony Parsons in All There Is, pg 171
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