You are hereJoan Tollifson
Joan Tollifson
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Joan Tollifson
 Non-duality, Zen, Advaita, Enlightenment, Awakening -- What's it all about? Everything and nothing. The sounds of traffic, the smell of rain, the hum of a vacuum cleaner, the cheeping of a bird, rain splashing in the street, colors, shapes, sensations, breathing, seeing, hearing, thinking, dreaming, waking, appearing, disappearing, being, not being -- this vast, ever-changing, ever-present, boundlessness. Thought divides this boundlessness up into mind and body, form and emptiness, awareness and content, relative and absolute, spiritual and mundane, enlightenment and delusion, me and everything else. The dividing lines are always imaginary. Reality is seamless.
talk to Joan at: wakeupjt (at) opendoor (dot) com
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TV interview from Ashland RVTV
Joan TollifsonNo words can ever capture the actuality of this one eternal present moment. It can be talked about and pointed to in various different ways, but anything we say about actuality is never actuality itself. We may nod in agreement upon hearing that; nevertheless, we habitually tend to mistake the map for the territory, the concept for the actual. We then get into endless debates and confusion over imaginary dilemmas such as whether there is or isn't free will, or whether any kind of spiritual practice is worth doing or not, or whether the world is real and deserving of our attention or only a dream-like illusion that is best ignored.
This mind-spinning goes in circles leading nowhere. Reality can't ever be captured in concepts (like free will or no free will, self or no self, this or that). Whatever you say is never quite right. No word or concept is ever complete enough. If you say that you can't learn to ride a bicycle because there's no you to do it, or no free will, you'll be foolishly disempowering yourself. And yet, if you look carefully at who or what is riding the bicycle or "choosing" to do so, you won't find anything or anybody, nor can you really explain how exactly "you" do this bicycle riding.
I am doing well in Ashland and presently writing 2 books. Here is an interview that we did on RVTV in 2009. It is called "Right Here Right Now", with Craig Comstock.
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Joan Tollifson in 2008
Talk and Dialog
We only have to turn on the TV to discover that. Consciousness enjoys stories of all kinds: melodramas, horror shows, crime dramas, happy love stories, tragic love stories, war stories, comedies, documentaries, adventure stories -- and it also enjoys turning off the TV. It enjoys silence. It enjoys waking up from stories. It enjoys playing hide and seek. It enjoys finding and being found, and then hiding again, and again being found. It enjoys going to sleep; it enjoys waking up. It enjoys the play of birth and death, of appearing and disappearing, expanding and contracting -- the play of evolution and dissolution. Before Joan left Chicago in 2008
This was Joan's apartment for many years
We started the quiet morning going for a walk in a fresh snow. We stood by a duck pond for many minutes, then returned to the house and set up the cameras.
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