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, who 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:
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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:
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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)

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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)

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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)

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A Study of Mind

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Landscape with Two Oaks’ – Jan van Goyen, 1641 – WikiArt

Notice that your mind is inapt at staying still. Stillness is not its thing. It has always something to think about. It is always on the road, roaming, judging, comparing, evaluating. Mind you, it is its nature to do so, if you let it. The mind is a restless thing. But its restlessness has a virtue. It pushes you beyond it. It encourages you to go deeper, where stillness is your nature. Where there is quiet. Something abiding. A stability.

Go not to the mind, but to the presence that supports it. Be like the gentle arms that hold it. Notice that your mind is not alone. It needs a space for its functioning. Sink in the mind’s left vacant space. Go in the interstices, between your many thoughts, inside your overwhelming feelings. Attain to the very substance your mind is made of. Be like its gorgeous essence. Not the mind itself, but the depth of being within it.

The mind deals only with the superficies. It is changing its mind at the slightest disturbance. With the latest flip of an opinion. Don’t follow its many thoughts. They will convince you that you are a self separate from experience. They will tell you that you are lonely. They will make you a suffering entity, though there is none. Go to the bottom of your being. Where the mind is only an appearance. See that you don’t disappear. You can’t.

The mind is ever changing, not you. It has an idea in mind. Forever keeping an agenda, being interested in outcomes, seeking experiences — only happy ones. You have happiness enmeshed within your own being, as the nature of your own gorgeous self. You don’t need to manufacture one, to provoke it with circumstances. Go so deep within the mind that you cease to be involved with its productions. This is called peace.

Stay with your imperturbable essence. It will show you that you are married to the world. The mind believes in the many, in division, in separation. But it is its own invention that it passes on to you as the only reality. Reality is where the mind is only a puppet. Reality is when you are one. It is beyond even your sense perceptions. They have colluded with the mind in making you believe in separation. Reality is aware presence. The mind is not.

Now be careful. For the mind has appropriated the ‘I’. It too says ‘I Am’. But the mind is not ‘I’. It is not your real self. The mind is pretending to be you. It does it all the time. So often that you have come to believe a bundle of thoughts and feelings to be ‘I’. But ‘I’ goes deeper. It doesn’t live in such a shallow land. ‘I’ belongs to the ground, to your innermost being, to that part of yourself that is unmovable. Where there is no past or future. No other, beyond, or away.

So if you happen to meet the mind one day, and be entangled in its mesh, or if you have adopted it as your everyday identity, don’t stay there. Move away. Be bold. See that all that comes here with a beginning and an end, with a limitation, has very little to do with you. See that as you deepen in and as being, your mind will slow down, and acquire a strange transparency. Your thoughts and feelings may even appear to be clothed in the infinite.

Your mind now seems to be no mind at all, and is in no capacity to bring separation. It stops being a brigand, and becomes a precious ally. Thoughts may be used wisely, and feelings are seen as a reflection of love and its indispensable joy. Essence acquires a new meaning, as it pervades the world and every experience that comes your way. Your body is experienced as made of Mind, and Mind as your new body. Spirit is where you live. It is without end.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jan Van Goyen (1596-1656)

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Website:
– Jan Van Goyen (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Our Only Chance

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘A Windmill at Montmartre’ – Camille Corot, 1845 – WikiArt

I wonder if our life is not just spent in avoiding dying. If this is not where all our energy goes: in being a self, in assuming to be a body, a mind, and managing all the challenges that go with having to live that body-oriented life. If we are not applying the best of our mind in controlling our thoughts and feelings, and pretending that we know what we’re doing, and do what we’re choosing, and choose what we’re wanting. We spend our life pretending. But we secretly ache in our heart for knowing nothing of what we are, except for one thing: we want to be, to feel, to know. For we sense that we are not quite living. It doesn’t feel that this is life — what we are going through. It doesn’t feel that this is the end game, to be a person that suffers, seeks security, and dies miserably in due time. It doesn’t feel right. It is not a good situation. Not what we expected from being a human. There has to be more than that.

So we’re seeking, working, slaving at meeting our own expected greatness. We’re toiling at knowing, at being a self that we carry through place and time. We don’t want to die, to let go. We don’t trust that we have it, already know it, be it — the greatness that we seek, the happy living we’re chasing. We’ve got to be a person first, efforting through life. We cannot already be our own dream. We cannot imagine that the purpose of life is in being, which we already are to perfection. We cannot envisage that effort is not our path, and that living is not a thing that we have to work at. We cannot understand that our simply being is already bathing in the peace that we so relentlessly seek to acquire and secure. We cannot be convinced that our joy needs no other circumstance than the simple circumstance of knowing our own being.

So we won’t let go. We need to keep control. We don’t want to just be, which seems like a form of death. We don’t fancy dying. We think that our solace, our happiness, lies only in being a person. The fact that it never worked, that it was never implemented in life, is only accidental. It’s only a matter of time, circumstance, achievement, politics. Being doesn’t feel like a program. Dying to our own separate self is not the dream we expected. We cannot be dying. We’ve got to be a person. We’ve got to toil for our life. We’ve got to deserve being happy, secure, peaceful. Even if we end up missing our own salvation, our own dream, our very own given, gorgeous nature.

For we were given a very simple work to do. An easy realisation. The realisation that any addition to being — being a self, a person, a qualification, otherness, separation, the whole enchilada — is but an avoidance. It is not real, not in the way we think it is. It is but an illusion that we have created for ourself. Our solace is in dying. It is to stop being that which we are not and never will be. To stop manufacturing an entity where there is only seamless aware being. We don’t need to be grandiose. It is all here, in the simple looking at our own being — in going within. It couldn’t be more easy, if only we would accept to slow down, and die to our being a person. If only we could feel all that is hiding here, in our very act of being — this infinity that is the totality of our identity and the greatness of our humanity. There is no being anything, or anyone. Being alone is, and suffices. This is our only chance to know who we are. To be truly being, knowing, feeling. And paradoxically, to be at last the ‘something’, the ‘someone’, that we have always wanted to be.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Camille Corot (1796-1875)

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Website:
– Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Wikipedia)

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