Tony Parsons
The Open Secret is presented by Tony Parsons.
Tony has been leading discussions about non-duality for over 20 years. Meetings are typically run monthly in London, with occasional meetings outside of the UK. He also runs weekend events and retreats.
Here is a short introduction taken from his website:
This is a communication which illuminates the paradoxical nature of non-duality and exposes the deluded idea that it is something that can be acquired and experienced.
“It is so obvious and simple that the grasping of it obscures it. Never found, never lost, never knowable, being is the consummate absence that is beyond measure.”
It seems that in the boundless energy that is oneness there can also arise a contracted energy which brings about apparent self-awareness. A powerful and convincing sense of self-identity seems to arise together with a belief in personal free will and choice in what is experienced as a real life story.
All of these personal experiences can only apparently arise in what seems to be a very real but dualistic reality in which everything appears to be separate.
This sense of separation can bring with it a sense of loss and a need to seek guidance, an understanding or a path or process that can promise fulfilment. There are attempts to seek unity which are totally futile because the separate seeker is apparently the very dualism from which it is trying to escape.
“Looking for being is believing that it is lost. Has anything been lost, or is it simply that the looking obscures? Does the beloved dance constantly just beyond our focus?”
This dilemma is illuminated in this unique communication which makes no demands, has no expectations and does not cater in any way to the seeker’s need for answers, processes or a path to follow. This uncompromising message can be both confronting and liberating.
“Life is not a task. There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain.”
The whole personal investment in making spiritual progress, becoming more aware, more still, more open or more anything at all can simply unravel in this radical revelation. The whole perception of “the self” or “the world” it seems to live in, can be transformed and leave nothing to support the illusion of personal separation, control and continuation.
Suddenly, the absence that was feared is the absence which is unknowable, but paradoxically is also the very fullness, the freedom that was longed for.
Published in 2015, This Freedom (ISBN 978-0-9533032-4-3) is a book of essays and also dialogues from the UK and Europe.
Published in 1995 (revised 2011), The Open Secret (ISBN 978-0-9533032-0-5) is a clear, radical and uncompromising expression of non-dualism that speaks of the fundamental liberation which is absolutely beyond effort, path, process or belief.
Published in 2003 (revised 2012), All There Is (ISBN 978-0-9533032-2-9) is a book of in-depth dialogues from meetings in the UK, Europe and USA.
Published August 2007, Nothing Being Everything (ISBN: 978-0-9533032-3-6) Dialogues from UK and Europe.