‘God Runs After You’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sea bay’ – Ivan Aivazovsky, 1842 – WikiArt

Through our constant effort, we keep the effortless at bay. Even if we seemingly don’t do anything, we are always after something. So this constant, subtle pleading, asking, begging is closing all doors for truth to come in, to reveal itself to us. We are already dating someone else. Our mind is full of its rushing out in direction of an object, something that is going to satisfy us, to give us an identity, to fulfil us in some way. We are never truly longing. We are never an empty shell — always seeking, filling ourself with one thing or another. We don’t dare giving up, being vulnerable. We think we have to be someone, an entity in charge, a doer, a knower. We live with an armour, with layers that are concealing our true nature, even repelling it.

We have identities. We are full of them. The body is one, which we believe to be and be limited by. The mind is another, which we have adopted as being ourself — the ‘I’ that I am. We too believe in our thoughts, that we think define us, shape our identity. We are in a prison of our own making, made of bricks of memories, beliefs, hopes, desires, fears, that all concur to build a non-existing self of which we have now become the slave, and with which we have a dysfunctional, love-hate relationship. Even our ambition for truth is too much of an identity. Our desire for enlightenment is still a desire for fulfilment, another thing to achieve, a someone to be. Our true identity as pure, infinite being is not a new identity. It is not concealed or limited. It is not resisting, desiring, lacking anything. It is its own fulfilment — an identity that cannot be had, named or measured.

That’s what a true longing is — to be without ambition or desire of our own. To have even not a desire for truth, for which we will need an ego, and which still is a wall against the truth we seek — maybe the thinnest of all, but still a wall. Reality is to be realised, not achieved. It is in the word: ‘reality’ — which is we are that which is. There is no need of even the subtlest move towards it. It is all in the way we long for it. All in the way we build nothing that can go against it, or that could conceal it. This is the meaning of humility. We have to be lowly, on the ground, at the root of ourself, which is to be with our selfless being. We have it already — the being that we are after. It is all a matter of how quiet and accessible we can be. How we can be without a wall, without an identity. This is the most powerful longing there is — to be without any longing of our own making. To be without imagination or belief. To be watching only. Present. Already being — which we are anyhow. Not being an ambitious of some kind. There is no need to run after God. As Krishnamurti once put it so beautifully, “God runs after you.”

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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The quote is the title of a book consisting of eight hitherto unpublished discussions with Krishnamurti held in Malibu, California in 1970.

Bibliography:
– ‘God Runs After You’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Foundation India)

Websites:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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In a Room Quietly

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Gościeradz’ – Leon Wyczółkowski, 1933 – WikiArt

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“All of humanity’s problems
stem from man’s inability to
sit quietly in a room alone.”
~ Blaise Pascal (‘Pensées’)

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We have always our mind racing, going after something. Stillness is resisted. Staying in a room quietly is avoided. Being alone is dreaded. We want to be occupied. We’d rather not be made empty, so we always have a war raging. Is it that we want to be something, someone? Is it that we have judged only being to be not enough? That we have to pursue something, whether it is an identity, a belief, or an idea? We are chasing our own self — what we should have, what we should be. We are on a mission, therefore we can never be quiet. We need to achieve, arrive, get somewhere, be something. We want to satisfy and be satisfied. We won’t rest before we are fulfilled. We won’t stay in a room quietly. We will have our wars to obtain peace. Our escapes to not be where we are. Our resistances to not have what we have. We prefer to possess, which is to sit in the throne of power — in the Lord’s seat — and wonder where God is, or have a belief about Him. We are chasing experiences and circumstances. Anything but only and plainly being.

In fact, we are always in a room quietly. We just don’t want to see it, or don’t know how to notice it. Ourself is that space where we live and have our many experiences. Ourself is our circumstance. It is where we are, what we have, the peace that we are chasing everywhere but where it actually is, which is in our humble presence — in and as our being. So peace is our nature, if we don’t put it at a distance, if we don’t wish to have it. So don’t start a war. Stay quietly where and as you are, and your nature will slowly be revealed to you. You will find that your identity is in your nature. That you have already what you are chasing. That the experience of being is your so perfect circumstance. And that in the throne of your being is sitting God, for which you now need no belief. You have mastery over your life, not because you control it, but because you know the nature of it and of yourself, and in that process have put an end to your own seeking. You have quietened down, ended a war, and placed yourself in the only place worth sitting, which is in and as your own glorious being.

Now never leave it. That place of yourself. Never be dissuaded that you don’t have it. Never be influenced again that you need to be something other than what you already are. If you have moved away from home, go sit quietly where you are and stay there long enough to be persuaded again in the inevitability of your own being. It’s enough not to wish to be other. It’s plenty to stay unmoved, a humble watcher. To be in a room quietly. To close every exit. To be fascinated by yourself — not escaping the fact of your being. Don’t move away from the way you simply are. From the possibility that being is all there is. From the room you are forever in. Don’t give yourself an escape — there is no escape. Don’t buy the illusion that you can be something other than that — what you are now, what you are in, that very circumstance of your being. So begin where you are. It will bring a rebellion, an insurrection, a mutiny. It will stop you from being just a person. It will make you free, and bring stillness in your life. Resistance will recede, and you might even enjoy your circumstances, that are now pervaded with being. You will notice your aloneness, and have a gorgeous life in it. You will be aware of being as the one and only place you are in. You will have solved your most urgent problem — which is humanity’s too. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Painting by Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936)

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Websites:
– Blaise Pascal (Wikipedia)
– Leon Wyczółkowski (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Odyssey

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Odysseus questions the seer Tiresias’ – Alessandro Allori, 1580 – Wikimedia

No doubt that our life feels like an odyssey. It does for everybody. In the ancient, epic poem of Homer, the Odyssey is a journey home. It is with us too. But the fact that we are on a journey home is not always apparent. At least not to begin with. We’re too busy to see anything. We’re fighting demons. We’re full of desires, many of them, constantly assailing us. We think we’re going somewhere, without seeing very well where that is. We’re wrestling with the gods. We have many ideas, beliefs, hopes, sufferings. We feel we are a person in a world, who needs to reach a happy place that never comes. The reason is: home is within. The happy place is in ourself. It is not out there. It is in the ending of a belief, of a misunderstanding, of a bad judgement as to what we truly are. We are stuck in a place that doesn’t exist. We are stuck in a belief.

It eventually dawns on us that our happy place is where we are finally reunited with our inner peace. That’s the journey home: the journey within. But it takes a long and difficult travel of sufferings and errands to understand that there is no travelling back home outside ourself, in the diversity of the world. Home is within. Once we go within, the journey becomes shorter. The odyssey is in fact only the journey to the journey home. But to go back home implies that we were already there, and have left it at some point. So it appears that our going home, our odyssey, is an illusion of some kind. We are going in search of what we already have. We have gone on a war. For to seek what we already are is always a war. It always brings suffering, lack, and the such. It separates us from home. It multiplies monsters. That’s an easy thing to see. There is no need of a long odyssey.

We have the belief that reality is in appearances and forms, when it is in fact in the formless. We have the belief that our body-mind is our identity, when we are only contained in the infinite awareness of being. We have the belief that we need to adjust to a world that is separate from our own being, when we and the world are one being alone, perfectly adjusted to each other. We indulge in the comfort of our illusory view on existence, when this comfort is only the postponing of our journey home, and the fuelling for our own suffering. There is our journey within — to go from an illusion to the reality hidden within the illusion. To go from what we are not to what our nature truly is — which really is only to go from what we are to what we are.

Now, if we’re struggling within, it means we are still without. We still see the within as the without. We still have monsters there, and a difficult trip to be engaged in. We’re still on an odyssey. We’re still intoxicated by the Lotus-eaters, who make us forget about our journey home. We’re still captured by the cyclops Polyphemus. Still fighting some giant cannibals; or wrestling with the goddess Circe, who turns us into what we are not. We’re still resisting the enticing song of the Sirens, which keeps us mortal beings. Still being held captive by the false promise of the nymph Kalypso who, by the way, is literally ‘she who conceals’. We’re not yet in a journey within — not yet in a journey home.

Once we have understood that our home is only within, in and as our innermost being, we must be there as a beggar. We never enter our own being, our happy place, as a king in its kingdom. We have to be a beggar, a nobody. That’s what Odysseus does when he reaches home: he comes as a beggar, unknown to all. That’s the way to be home. We leave being a person of any kind, of any rank. Then, the last fights with our few remaining demons is quickly done — not a big deal. It doesn’t take time or distance. Doesn’t take endless coming and going, reaching and leaving, being on the journey. Home is home. We cannot go where we are. Home is an easy place to be in. That’s where we have seemingly started, and find ourself naturally in.

In our own Odyssey, there is always a twist at the end. In fact, we realise that there was no danger or difficulty, no storms or monsters, no length of time, no far-off countries. We had been on a quiet, mirror-like mountain lake all along — just didn’t notice it. The whole story was invented. Beautiful, exciting, painful, maybe necessary, but invented.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alessandro Allori (1535-1607)

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Website:
– Alessandro Allori (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Our Last Delusion

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Løvsprett’ – Frits Thaulow, 1889 – Wikimedia

You won’t see a world outside the confines of the mind. The world is not there as an ultimate reality. It draws its many shapes out of the limitations of mind. It is sculpted by our senses. Thoughts are giving it its colour, shaping it for the purpose of a self. We blame it for our suffering, or praise it for our happiness. But its existence is a passing, illusory one, as it is for all thoughts, and for the body.

Although we as a body live in a world of limitation and finiteness, we in truth have our stand and our anchor in the deeper, conscious reality of our own undefeatable, limitless being. Happiness in the world never comes from experiencing the world. It comes from beyond the senses, beyond experience. It comes from beauty, which is the nature of the world when it is experienced from that part of ourself that is infinite.

Contentment in our mind is not given by our thoughts and our many feelings, but through experiencing them from the peaceful nature of our deepest reality as being. To live in the world is to be lost and to know suffering, but to have the world living within ourself is to know a joy that is free and independent from the ruthlessly changing nature of experience.

So free yourself from the world; it is not where you live. Rather, have the world close to your being, and see its nature as your own. This is the way to live in the world. See that it is still of the nature of mind. That it doesn’t own its own reality, but borrows it from the infinite, from the limitless, which is the nature of yourself as being.

So everything you seemingly do, you in fact never do. What you think you are, you are not. We live in a world of imagination. In fact, we only ever live in and as a reality that is shared, and that is our very nature. There, in that reality, is found the reality of our body-mind-world. This reality is the nature of everything and everyone we encounter in experience. It is our real world, our only home.

The impression that we live in a world that has its own reality is created, believed. The belief in being a body has created the world, has made it sprout out of a duality that we have ourself made up and manipulated. Outside this belief, everything re-enters the place it has never left, and the oneness it has never been separated from: infinite, eternal, seamless being.

This reality is what there only and ever is. Nothing exists beyond it, whether it is a world, a body, or a mind. To live as a body-mind in the world is to feel separate from it. It is to see ourself as a self. It is to have the arrogance of being our own self, and to see the world and circumstances as the provider of happiness. This is why we always look for contentment, security, stability, constancy. We mimic what we are before we actually know it.

And enlightenment is sill part of the world, still part of a belief. Its reality is invented, created for the sake of a self or an ego. Enlightenment is not about being enlightened. There is no such a thing as enlightenment, unless you want to cling to the reality of yourself as a body-mind. The belief in enlightenment is our last, ultimate delusion. It belongs to a non existent world, to a non existent self.

You have been the light of yourself — of selfless being — all along, but have played within the illusion of a world and a self, therefore concealing your own reality within that illusion. Re-assign yourself to your true nature. Then it doesn’t matter what you experience. It is not in what you experience — it is in what you are. It is all there. Nothing and no one exists beyond it. You have no use of enlightenment.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906)

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Website:
– Frits Thaulow (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Great Concealment

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet’ (part) – Mary Cassatt, 1890 – Wikimedia

It is the most ingenious, virtuoso act of dissimulation that was ever put on in this world. Something that would require thousands of years of an immense and diverse body of literature and practices to cancel and bring back into the light. In fact, the story goes that, in the beginning, the world was only an undifferentiated spirit. It was all one, knowing no separation, nothing that could make it two, divided, conflictual, or with an ounce of suffering. Although insubstantial and incorporeal, it was a solid world, full to the brim with its own energy. It was a good world, a happy one, and peace was like its very essence, palpable in all circumstances. Place or time had not yet corrupted it, and there was, lingering within it, a quality of impersonal knowing that made it conscious of itself, although not as a thing to be conscious of.

Then, in this ocean of peace came trouble. Out of the growing complexities of bodies, a new idea emerged. Out of pure, undifferentiated being came the belief in a particular, separate being that can be qualified and pointed at. The one knowing presence that we are and that is the world’s essence, was slowly made into many. Entities have suddenly appeared, taking the form of separate objects. Oneness was lost and the world was made fragile, prey to the rising waters of thinking, the absurd presumption of matter, and the belief in the reality of time and place. Under the influence of the body and the senses, grew the belief in the reality of our own separate self. We started objectifying our own being, making it into a thing, a person, an entity separate from other things and entities. We have divided the one and only reality into bits and pieces, and in doing so have invited lack, incompleteness, suffering, and the many conflicts generated by such a belief.

While inventing a self where there was only the Self, we have created boundaries where there was none. While objectifying being, we have concealed the infinite nature of our being. The Infinite disappeared from our sight. We hid it, ate it, made it look as if not there, even though everything and everyone is only made of its humble presence. We have created the sense of a finite entity, and have concealed our true nature in it. Our plain desire to be was a too selfish act. It displaced infinity and made it look as the finite. It created time and concealed eternity in it. It gave us a place for our body, but made the placeless unseen. The claiming of our own personal, separate being broke the peace that is the nature of infinite being. It put truth in jeopardy, and dissimulated it inside a lie. The infinite can never be a thing. It is not in its prerogative. If we make it into one, it goes hiding. It becomes concealed under the false appearance of a separate self, under that which is not there. We have dissimulated the real in the unreal. The infinite in the finite. Happiness in suffering. And the glory of the spirit in the conflicts of a mundane life.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

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Website:
– Mary Cassatt (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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‘Come to Me’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1845 – WikiArt

Sometimes you’re left with just three words. I read them under a statue of Christ in a cathedral, three simple words from the Gospel of Matthew, but a whole teaching if you listen. “Come to Me”. There is immense simplicity and clarity in these three words. They have a vertiginous meaning, if you follow the course of their true destination. If you accept the invitation. Not from a somebody, a person that existed. Not from a God, or a Son of God. Not from anything in particular, any objective presence which you could go to. The invitation is from yourself to yourself. In fact, ‘Come to Me’ is better read as ‘Come to the me’. Go to the ‘I’. Abide in what you are, be that presence of yourself. Be just as you are — don’t add a thing to yourself, don’t play the game of projection or belief. Don’t give yourself to somebody or something that is not you. Stay right there, right in what you already are, just as you already are. But still, there is a movement implied — a solicitation, a passage from place to placeless place. It says ‘Come to Me’ for a reason. In that paradoxe is contained the totality of our spiritual endeavour.

It is not a place you have to go to, but rather the noticing of the place you are in. The beholding of your true nature. What is this ‘I’ that we stumble on every time we say ‘I’? What is this being conscious, this being aware that I am? Did we look well enough? Did we miss something that we have to come to it, take a new invitation, be encouraged? See that you have made your ‘I’ into an assumption, a pretence, an affectation, something not worth a visit, not worth a discovery or an enquiry. In fact, we have been asked to function and obey, which means to follow. The rest has been wisely swept under the carpet of belief or religion. As if we had already discovered everything about what we are. As if consciousness wasn’t worth a second look. As if from then on, for our nature, we had to rely only on imagination, belief, things fancy, whimsical, hopeful, devoid of reality. Reality has been covered — so we think. There is no new land here, no new discovery or journey within, nothing that hasn’t already been charted.

But there is a coming that is subtle to the point of not implying time or place. A coming that cannot be measured by instruments, that cannot be objectified, seen by the senses. There is a coming where we already are, but with a new light shed on it. A light that we have missed for directing it all on objects, with the complicity of the senses. So the light of what we truly are was lost in its being misdirected. Our true nature was lost in our belief in being a body, a self, a person. Our purity of being was hidden inside our fascination for qualifications and objects. Our happiness was lost in our suffering. Our peace squandered by our restless seeking. So there is a journey within. A journey with no distance to be covered. A coming to where we already are. A coming or moving into view. A becoming perceptible. A coming back to ourself.

‘Come to me’. You may discover that you have God within. That this is what the God of religion is — what they meant — the ‘I’ within, your true being. Come back to yourself. Become perceptible. Come into view. Know yourself as you are. Come into the light which you are already in. See that you are, and who you are. Abide in the purity of plainly being. Be yourself for the first time. Be ‘I Am’ alone. ‘Come to me’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)

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Website:
– J. M. W. Turner (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Chamber Within

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Woman at the piano’ (detail) – Théodule Ribot – Wikimedia

You have your own little chamber at hand, where you can retire. It is called yourself. A place which has no place to be, and is in fact your own being — what you are, where the totality of yourself is, and which gives you the space to live and act. It is a chamber without a door, without an in or an out, but where you can only be in or be out. You are out of your secret, intimate chamber when you have all your focus on the outside, which means on all the things which you are not, but appropriate as if they were an identity to you. That includes your thoughts which you cherish as being your own production, the outspoken part of yourself, but are in reality strangers that pay you a visit. That includes your perceptions which you take to be a window on the reality of the world, but are in reality facets of your own being, where your whole experience has its home and its refuge. That includes your sense of being a self separate from experience, with a thousand attributes, when of a self you have only empty being, and of attributes only the one attribute of being you, which is ‘I Am’ without an attribute.

You are in your own intimate chamber when you are aware of being. It is a chamber without walls, for it expands beyond anything that you have so far known or been aware of as objects. You are in your chamber when you have no other quality than the quality of being, and when you feel the world you live in to be but your own, shared infinite being. You are in when you have a view on the reality of yourself as being, before you have one on the ten thousand non-existent things of experience. You are in when you have not an object as your subject, which means not a body-mind as an identity. This chamber has nothing secret about it, for it is anywhere you can possibly be. It is openly yourself, though you may hide from it in an infinite number of ways. Your making it a chamber is when you are out of it, and need to go within to find it, in your being which you yourself have made a secret of — something hidden. When you are in it, well then you have no chamber to be in, for the chamber has been discovered to be plainly you, the ‘I’ that you truly and only are, which you find to be neither in nor out.

So your chamber is both within and without, both secret and revealed. You are always abiding in it and as it, though your thoughts and perceptions may have convinced you out of it. So the threshold between being in or out of your intimate chamber of being is wherever you happen to be. You are always on the threshold of being either a suffering, separate, invented entity, or the spacious, unmoved expanse of infinite being. You are always on the brink of yourself, which is you either notice that you are already within that inmost chamber of being, or you ignore, disregard, pay no heed to it. The difference between the two is in the width of a thin hair. You are always on the verge of knowing your identity as being, or of staying behind, in your thoughts, dancing with a belief, being what you are not. There is an edge at any place or moment you are in. A precipice of knowing. You either choose to cling to your living in the limitations of time and space, or free fall where only the infinite and eternal is your reality. The difference between the two is as subtle as the coming of dawn. It is the realisation — the making real — that you have been your chamber of being all along.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Théodule Ribot (1823-1891)

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Website:
– Théodule Ribot (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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