The open secret...

This message has been misunderstood if it is believed that it is saying that there is a "you" who can or can't do anything about becoming enlightened.

The open secret communication can only point to the simple wonder of being and attempt to illuminate the futility of seeking for it. It does not accept or reject the teachings of spiritual path or process but it will expose, without compromise, the singular and fundamental misconception that drives the belief that there is something called a seeker that is able to find something else called enlightenment.

Life is not a task. There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain.

What is sought remains hidden from the seeker by already being everything.

It is so obvious and simple that the grasping of it obscures it. Never found, never knowable, being is the consummate absence that is beyond measure.

Looking for being is believing that it is lost. Has anything been lost, or is it simply that the looking keeps it away? Does the beloved always dance constantly just beyond our focus?

The very intention to seek for a treasure within life inevitably obscures the reality that life is already the treasure.

By seeking the myth it dreams it can attain, the seeker effectively avoids that which it most fears . . . its absence.

Many will reject this message and return to the comforting story of knowing and doing. But there can be a resonance within which the illusion of separation collapses and leaves nothing being everything.

Doctrines, processes and progressive paths which seek enlightenment only exacerbate the problem they address by reinforcing the idea that the self can find something that it presumes it has lost. It is that very effort, that investment in self-identity, that continuously re-creates the illusion of separation from oneness. It is the dream of individuality.

The “me” searches for peace and fulfilment, the “me” searches for self-improvement, purity, presence or detachment. The “me” seeks clarity or any formula which will give the “me” what it thinks it wants or needs. But the “me” not getting what it wants is not the dilemma. The dilemma is the apparent “me”.

Liberation is like a fuse that suddenly blows, and all the little lights go out and there is only light.

There is no answer to life because life is its own answer. It’s happening already. It’s this. It was never lost. When liberation apparently happens people say “it’s amazing because the thing I was looking for has never left. It’s the one thing that never comes and never goes, the one constant that can’t be known or held onto.”

When the assumed sense of being separate seems to collapse, already there is only the constant and unknowable wonder of being.

The open secret’s apparent communication is paradoxical, unreasonable, unbelievable, non-prescriptive, non-spiritual and uncompromising. There is no agenda or intention to help or change apparent individuality. It is prior to all teaching and its resonance is shared energetically, not through the exchange of ideas.

So, should the seeker climb the spiritual mountain or simply let go and surrender to life . . . Is that the question? Or is it possible that there is no question and no answer? Maybe what is sought is already all there is. Perhaps that which is longed for is already constantly happening . . . it never went away . . . the seeker did to look for it.

How can the seeker “Directly Approach” that which is already everything?

As we move from one formula to another, we seem unable to see that freedom does not reside here or there, simply because freedom, by its very nature, cannot be excluded or exclusive. We seem not to see that, as we march towards the next anticipated spiritual high, the treasure that we seek is to be discovered, not in where we are going, but within the simple nature of the very footsteps that we take.

Life is its own purpose and doesn’t need a reason to be. That is its beauty.

Life is simply life, and is not trying to prove anything at all. This springtime will not try to be better than last springtime, and neither will an ash tree try to become an oak.

Because the apparent self can only exist through its own knowing, its search for a deeper meaning will be limited to that which it can know and experience for itself. The separate seeker pursues everything that it can know and do, excepting the absence of itself. That absence is the emptiness which is unknowable, but paradoxically it is also the very fullness, the wholeness that is longed for.

Exclusivity breeds exclusion, but freedom is shared through friendship.

From wherever and whenever this insight is communicated, it has no connection with end-gaining, belief, path or process. It cannot be taught but is constantly shared. Because it is all that is, no-one can lay claim to it. It needs not to be argued, proven or embellished, for it stands alone simply as it is, and can only remain unrecognised and rejected, or realised and lived.

January
2011

........Tony Parsons