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Any idea of separation is fiction. And all other fictions come from the belief that this fiction is real.
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A friend recently reminded me of a teaching I received in a dream. A good one, I think. Here it is again:

Recognize the nature of reality
Rest there
Remove all doubts
Roam freely, like a happy dog

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"Your life is your path to awakening. Stop and open your eyes: You were free from the very beginning.
"Please understand that it's not you that wakes up; it's reality that wakes up, the truth wakes up. You are not enlightened; enlightenment is enlightened. Ultimately this realization doesn't have anything to do with separate individuals, since there aren't any separate individuals. That is the whole illusion, that there is something separate from the ultimate reality. When it's clear that there's nothing going on other than the ultimate reality, it's a done deal--enlightenment is effortless."

Adyashanti
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Ammachi (Sri Mata Amritanandamayi) is here for her yearly visit, and as always, much-needed rain arrives with her:

"The illusory world has no power to delude you. It is you who have gone after it due to accumulated tendencies. You look at things through the glasses of your vasanas. You weigh things and stamp them as good and bad according to your likes and dislikes."
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"Have nothing to do with thoughts and be, just be. It is the thoughts alone that create the hindrance; they are the trouble. Find out to whom the thoughts occur."

Ramana
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"Attraction, aversion, hope, fear. Be mindfully aware of these, in your life and in your practice. Some teachers actually encourage students, whether consciously or not, to indulge in these."

Garchen Rinpoche
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"So do not be disheartened when during meditation many thoughts disturb you and you think, This is not meditation. The mind may be actively generating thought, but because the mind is empty, thought is also empty. Since whatever arises is a state of total presence, do not attempt any alteration based on judgment and evaluation, but leave it alone in its natural, authentic, uncontrived state. In that way, thought will certainly be released into its own natural purity."

Shabkar Lama
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"The Dzogchen way of dealing with conceptual proliferation is seeing its emptiness. The gradual path is in giving up things as if they were real. But the ultimate goal is the same. In Dzogchen one sees then that anger, etc, is just a thought manifestation and thus illusory--it arises and self-liberates--and so there is no need to try to get rid of or chase after an illusion in order to be happy."

Garchen Rinpoche
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"The life of action need not be renounced. If you meditate in the right manner, then the current of mind induced will continue to flow in the midst of your work. It is as though there were two ways of expressing the same idea; the same line which you take in meditation will be expressed in your activities. As you go on you will find that your attitude towards people, events, and objects will gradually change. Your actions will tend to follow your meditations of their own accord."

Ramana
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"In the immediate here and now we see the face of the Original Lord abiding in the heart center. Identify yourself with it, my spiritual children. Whoever denies it, wanting more from somewhere else, is like the one who has found their elephant but continues to follow its tracks. One may comb the three dimensions of the microcosmic world for an eternity, but will not find so much as the name of Buddha other than the one in their heart."

Shabkar Lama
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"The Supreme Being dwelling in the cavity of the Heart-lotus is called the Lord of the Heart. If by meditating 'I myself am That' the conviction 'I am That' becomes as firmly established as is now the conviction 'I am the body', then ignorance will vanish just as darkness does before the sun."

Ramana Maharshi
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"Know that you are never distracted. You are never away from That. You can't seemingly forget it, because when you are seemingly forgetting it, that is it also."

Bob Adamson
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"Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that shit and just play."

Charlie Parker
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"There is nothing in the world. And yet everyone, some more, some less, feverishly chases after this nothing."

Anandamayi Ma
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All phenomena are from the very beginning
Essentially silent and empty.
When spring comes and the hundred flowers bloom,
The yellow oriole sings on the willow.

Anonymous
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"All defilements and karmic hindrances are fundamentally empty and peaceful. All operations of cause and effect are like dreams and illusion. Actually there is no samsara to escape from. Nor is there any enlightenment to seek after. All beings, human and nonhuman, belong to one universal, undifferentiated Nature. Great Tao is perfectly empty and free of all barriers; it defies all thought and meditation. This Dharma of Suchness you have now attained. You are no longer lacking in anything. This is Buddhahood. There is no other Dharma besides it. All that you need is to let the mind function and rest in its perfect spontaneity. Do not set it upon contemplation or action, nor try to purify it. Without craving, without anger, without sorrow or care, let the mind move in untrammeled freedom, going where it pleases. No deliberate doing of the good, nor deliberate avoiding of evil. Whether you are traveling or staying at home, sitting up or lying down, in all circumstances you will see the proper occasion for exercising the wonderful functions of a Buddha. Then you will always be joyful, with nothing to worry about. This is to be a Buddha indeed!"

Tao-hsin
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"Do not deceive yourselves! I care nothing for your high positions in the world, or for your flowing eloquence, or for your intelligence and wisdom; I only care for your true and authentic insight and genuine perception. Followers of Tao! Even if you were able to expound a hundred sutras and sastras, you would still be no match for a simple person with no concern for anything."

Lin-chi
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You are "That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything..."

Nisargadatta Maharaj
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"Do you know what liberation is? Getting rid of non-existent misery and attaining the bliss which is always there; that is liberation."

Ramana
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"Once you know with absolute cetainty that nothing can trouble you but your imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone."

Nisargadatta Maharaj
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*"The Absolute looked at through thought-forms is phenomenon. The latter freed of the superimposed thought-forms, is the Absolute. Nagarjuna therefore declares that there is not the least difference between the world and the absolutely real. Transcendent to thought, the absolute, however, is thoroughly immanent in experience. ...this immanence, the phenomenalisation of the absolute...is of two kinds: one through avidya and its satellites, the klesas; and the other is the free conscious assumption of phenomenal forms activated by prajna and karuna. The former is the unconscious activity of the ignorant and the latter is that of the enlightened Buddhas and Bodhisattvas."

T.R.V. Murti
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*"The phantoms were out there to get me but I wasn't afraid. ...I wanted to get mad...but somehow I couldn't get angry like I used to, so I gave up trying. Then I wanted to get sad...but I couldn't, so I gave up on that too.
*"Suddenly I realized...that there was nothing the phantoms could do to me. ...phantoms lurched out swiftly and tried to make me trip over the precipices, but my will was stronger than they were. They must have sensed that, because they stopped pestering me. After a while they simply stood by my path; from time to time some of them would leap towards me but I stopped them with my will. And then they quit bothering me altogether."

Don Genaro, in Carlos Castaneda's Journey To Ixtlan
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*"The true follower of Tao...sees the fundamental emptiness of things, which are real only to those still subject to change but not to the immutable. The three realms are only a manifestation of the mind, and the ten thousand things arise from consciousness. What then is the use of grasping at a dream, an illusion, a flower in air? Only the being who is right now listening to my words is authentically real. Afflictions and trials exist because you believe in them. But if you do not believe in them, how can they disturb you? Spare yourself the vain labor of discriminating and grasping at appearances and in a single instant you will realize Tao with spontaneous ease."

Lin-chi
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*"You can doubt and question everything but how can you doubt the 'I' that questions everything? That 'I' is your natural state. Would you have to do labor or do sadhana to come into this natural state?"

Ramana Maharshi
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*"But realize that right now you are present and aware, first and foremost. That is prior to any thought. Realize that that is ceaselessly and spontaneously arising, prior to any thought. Realize that.
*"You are an intelligent person. You found the answer to a lot of things through working them out in the mind. But you never found the answer to this. Now, wouldn't you conclude after a while, 'I haven't found the answer yet, and I'm not a dummy. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction. Maybe the answer is not there'? As soon as you have come to that conclusion, you stop seeking for something that you already are. You just relax into it, and it reveals itself to you."

Bob Adamson
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Just part of a poem from Don's Conscious Living Journal today:

Nothing separate
*or distinct
*to ponder, struggle with
*fix, or integrate.
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"Wonderful is the Eternal Reality
*Beyond delusion and enlightenment."

Tung-shan
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Who apprehends all this?
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"One answer that the student finds for himself is worth more than a hundred answers hammered into his head by a teacher." *

John C.H. Wu
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"And summoned now to deal
*With your invincible defeat,
*You live your life as if it's real,
*A thousand kisses deep."

Leonard Cohen
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"Understand that when the Self is realized as the Reality by the death of the ego, the Real Self which is Absolute Pure Consciousness remains."

Ramana Maharshi
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