On Being Apart

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two Men by the Sea’ – Caspar David Friedrich, 1817 – WikiArt

We are never far from our deepest reality. That’s a fantasy — to think that we are far, separate, apart. To think that truth is at a distance, that there is a god, a reality away from our own reality as being. Ourself is the only reality there is. We won’t find another one, something grander, truer than ourself. There isn’t. It’s all here within, already taking place in and as our own being. But we are limiting ourself with a thought. The thought that we are circumscribed to our body, restricted to our mind, and that we have our own personal being different and apart from somebody else’s being. This is how far we have gone from ourself. This is the distance we have created, the separateness we have invented. We have set ourself apart from ourself with a single thought. That’s our negligence, to have let ourself be governed by a belief, by a lie. To have drowned in our own absent-mindedness. We have, as it were, kept ourself on the sidelines.

But we can play the central role with the single thought that there is, at all time, only one reality. We are the only reality there is. Have this thought, that nothing exists outside yourself, that we have it all in our own reality as being. That we can rely on no other authority than the authority of ourself. That we can seek nothing other than our own self as being. That the world, everything, God, truth, the answer to our suffering, are all gathered within the single reality of our being present here and now. So state quietly in yourself that there is only ‘I Am’, that apart from ‘I Am’, well… there is no apart. No part separate from the totality has ever come into existence. There is only the totality playing the many parts of life, but staying itself complete, unbroken, one, whole as our own being. This is how simple we are — One. This is how much we matter. This is how close we are to the reality of everything, to this intimate, never distant truth that some have called ‘God’.

Think of your simple, everyday act of being aware as being everything, as the one and only reality there is. See what it entails, to have no projection of there being something, any kind of reality outside awareness. It means everything you need to know and understand is contained in and as your own sense of self. So watch it. Isolate it from every object that you are aware of, including your thoughts, feelings, perceptions. Feel naked awareness alone, and see how it grows, expands out of proportions, out of time and place, out of the world of objective experience. As you walk on the street, or wash the dishes, or do anything in the course of a day, remember that this simple experience of ‘being myself’ is all there is. That no reality exists outside yourself. That ‘I Am’ is all there is. Feel what it does to you, to think that you are one and alone, the only one being there is. Feel the shock of it, that nothing real, true, reliable, can be found outside yourself. And that this self of yourself encompasses everything, holds every passing, existing thing in its own reality. That you share this being of yourself with the being of everyone, and everything. Feel that you cannot be told apart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

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Website:
– Caspar David Friedrich (Wikipedia)

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

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A Love Affair

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Evening Star’ – Camille Corot, 1864 – WikiArt

It is really just a love affair. Nothing else. If you want to know yourself, you have to be interested, to be passionate. You have to love yourself. And if you love yourself, down the line, you will come to love god. Because god and yourself have had a love affair from beyond the frontiers of time. So love is the key.

And don’t tell me that you cannot love yourself. Don’t serve me this. Don’t argue about the shape of your body, or your insufficient mind. Don’t dive into your story, your failures, your many shortcomings. Don’t blame your circumstances. Be with yourself. That’s all. Be here, now, present with that part of yourself that is untouched by your line of multiple experiences.

The past doesn’t play any part in who you truly are. Neither the future which doesn’t exist at all. Not in the least. Start afresh. Be with what is taking place, all the place, in any experience that you may have. Any experience will do. Don’t be choosy. See that this experience is taking place somewhere, inside a reality. It cannot avoid you. You are always with your experience. Without you, your experience is nothing, has no feet to stand on. See how important you are. The beauty that lies in your being present. That’s the beginning of love.

Don’t think that to love, you have to find the perfect situation, the handsome circumstances. Love is easy to find. It is at every corner of your life, under every stone, every thought, behind even the most tedious moment. In watching yourself passionately, you will come to be drawn to that most charming part of your identity. To that which will never let you down, whatever the conditions you are in. To that which you can only admire, for it withstands every tempest. To that which holds the world in its infinite arms. You will come to love yourself for you will find out that you are a most gorgeous being, which is not the prey of age, limitation, lack, hope, envy, desire for being more, better, different. You will fall for yourself, for everyone, for everything.

Be passionate about who you are — whatever you are. Start wherever you are. Be important. You are significant. You bear weight or consequence, more than you think. You have in yourself the ultimate secret of life. You are interesting, which literally means you ‘are between’, in the middle part, a doorway, halfway between being something, someone, and being the infinite. You hold the key to your own enigma. You stand in the right place. So love yourself. If you do, love will find you. You will find that right here, within your own being, contained in your saying ‘I Am’, is your beloved, the one you were secretly longing for.

Seduce yourself from within. Don’t be sidetracked by your experiences, qualities, thoughts, everything that is the prey of your likes and dislikes. To love is always only about being with the other’s being. So be with yourself. Admire your own home, where you live. Be drawn to your own being. Watch yourself with wonder, like you do for the stars. Be considerate. Stand by yourself. It is all it takes.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Camille Corot (1796-1875)

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

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Joy of Heaven

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Rocky Bay with Figures’ – J. M. W. Turner, 1830 – WikiArt

There is a special joy in knowing who you are. And there is none like it. A joy that is here no matter what, quietly sitting in the background — you just have to see it. You just have to feel it, a presence which will never let you down. Actually it cannot. It stays with you wherever you go. There are no mistakes for it, nothing that you shouldn’t engage in. It doesn’t mind if you are sad, desperate, lost, furious. It is the best friend you ever had, for it can never leave you. Only it needs to grow, so you can notice it, engage with it, dance with the glory contained within it. You have to leave it the space it deserves, so that it can show you the extent of what you have in your heart. So you have to be still, a little quieter. You have to trust that there is behind everything that entangles you, everything that overwhelms you in experience, a space free from all that you believe yourself to be. A space that is yet your closest, most intimate, truthful self. It will show you that your nature is your friend, and that your identity contains all that you are longing for, which you discover impregnates your very soul and being.

There is a bliss in your being, an otherness in your being aware. Not the happy feeling that is only triggered with the experience that goes your way, with the desired object that you obtain, or with a matched expectation. There is a poignancy to this bliss, for it withstands every turbulence of experience. It is here for your noticing, if you stop identifying yourself with all that stirs and provokes. If you stop being something or someone, sometimes despising, sometimes enjoying your circumstances. You have to be disinterested, and stay with your naked being. You have to keep an eye on what is the deepest, unshakable part of yourself — that unmoved, steady ground. Feel that there is a bliss running behind every activity or experience you engage in. It is not a state of the mind. It is not for the person. You are not a person. You are that which is aware. So only settle for a verb. Make sure that you rejoice, that you delight in simply and only being. This is where bliss lives and thrives in all circumstances.

Bliss is a feline quietly lying in the background, watching over you. If you lose sight of it for a fascination for objects, it will doze off, turn its back on you. But give your whole attention to being solely being, and it will stare at you. You will hear its purr becoming louder and louder. You will feel the gentle breeze of bliss in whatever you do. Imperturbably accompanying every perturbation your body or mind might be the prey of. It is forgiving and compassionate. It is not quite of this world, not in the loud and the foreground. Not in the existing or the flimsy. It is the colour of the solid ground of being. This is why and how it is always here. It is essential, the very essence of what you are. You can snob it, veil it, forget it, but not altogether chase it off. So see yourself as a haven. Feel that you are big and welcoming, not a little thing tossed around. You are a heaven for yourself, the safe harbour for everything that takes place within it. You are a vault. This vault is the bliss of your own being. Some have called this bliss the joy of heaven, to separate it from the mere feeling of happiness that is of the world, dependent on circumstances. Bliss is at the source of what you are. Nothing is before it. It is the nature of everything. It can be seen everywhere, and you are the donor.

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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 ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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Love Actually

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sarbatoarea primaverii’ – Arthur Verona – Wikimedia

Love is the essence of everything, and our very nature. Because we don’t live separate and afar. We are not distant from each other. Nothing is. We have a natural intimacy with everything and everyone. This is not a theory, or a philosophical argument that we posit. This intimacy is our deepest reality, what we are, the property of our natural being, which we can feel, see, experience, but whose evidence has disappeared from our eyes. The reason is, we have preferred a theory to the reality, an illusion to the truth. Our life has stopped being natural. We have been faking it, living it according to beliefs, habits, conformity. But here, blatant in and as our very being, is a reality in which there is no time or place, no distance or separation, no otherness. And as we all know from experience, love is the abolition of time, of distance. Love is the end of separation, of otherness.

Love, which we may call beauty, for everything that we love is beautiful. Love, which we may call understanding, for to see love as the essence of life is the ultimate form of understanding. Love is to ‘stand in the midst of’. It is to stand with everything that is under, everything that is existing in our reality. It is to be connected, to be together with, to be of the same essence. So love is an expression of oneness, of our nature as the one and only reality there is. In the absence of separation — which is truth — we find love. In the absence of otherness — which is our reality — we find intimacy. We make love every time we are aware of our reality as only being. We manufacture love when time is discovered to be an idea, and separation a belief. To be in love is to realise our nature as being one with everything and everyone. It is to be unable to part with anything. It is humility at work. It is where division is only possible in a figment of our imagination. It is to be with what is, with no pulsion of escape or resistance. Love is both in the ache of separation and in the desire to be reunited. All seeking is done in the name of love.

To love is to stand in the midst of, to see no separation between an ‘I’ and a ‘he’ or a ‘she or a ‘it’. The more we stand as the quality of being aware, as that which knows all things, the more we have love as our daily companion. It is extraordinary that we can feel to be a body and a mind, when there is before these, in the subjective, the vast and unmissable expanse of that which is aware of them, which we have pushed away as a mere function of that body-mind. The body is something that we are aware of. We are not in the body. We are in the ‘aware of’. This being aware is our home, where we live, where we have our life. This is our placeless place. That which we cannot not be in. That which we cannot part from — our most intimate, unchanging identity. To be that knowingly, to live as that, is to love naturally and unconditionally. Every time we notice that there is a reality, a consciousness, a knowing presence before our body, thoughts, feelings, experience, world, then love appears to be the very material we and the world are made of. The first and last brick of our house. Our everything.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1868-1946)

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Website:
– Arthur Verona

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Living Thing

Posted on by Alain Joly

The emphasis that Krishnamurti places here on space and silence is very important in my view. Space and silence are what connects us to everything, and gives us a sense of intimacy. To not be confined in the borders of our mind, but be aware that we live in a place of expansion and no borders. To not be limited by what thought tells us, but to touch that deep silence that is our reality deep down, and where everything takes place and has its birth and death. Unless we make space and silence our home, we won’t know what being alive truly means. Mind is not just function. It is the whole thing. It is life itself…

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“If your mind has space,
then in that space there is silence —
and from that silence everything else comes,
for then you can listen,
you can pay attention without resistance.

That is why it is very important
to have space in the mind.
If the mind is not overcrowded,
not ceaselessly occupied,
then it can listen to that dog barking,
to the sound of a train crossing the distant bridge,
and also be fully aware of what is being said by a person talking here.
Then the mind is a living thing, it is not dead.

~ J. Krishnamurti (‘Think on These Things’, ch.18)

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Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Photo and introductory text by Alain Joly

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Bibliography :
– ‘Think on these Things’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (HarperOne)

Website:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Beauty in Essence (other pointers from the blog)
– A Day at Brockwood Park (Homage to J. Krishnamurti)

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‘Who Am I?’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘St. Jerome kneeling’ (detail) – Rembrandt, 1630 – WikiArt

The question of who I am is a big question. It is not being asked very often though. At least not in the way it should. We do as if. As if we all knew who we are. As if it wasn’t worth asking. As if it was a waste of time to do so. When we do ask about who we are, it is to fill ourself with objects, qualities, identities. We are gathering informations about our body, our emotions, skills, idiosyncrasies, tendencies, but not about ourself. We live as if on a racing track, never actually stopping the course of our acquired, rehearsed, believed identities. We never watch, inquire as if for the first time, as if we didn’t know. We are bragging. We don’t want to be humble, and learn about something that appears to be so simple, and goes — so we believe — without saying. But the truth is: it scares us. We are afraid to know. We have picked up, from the beginning of times, that this question is a question of immense implications. It is a deadly question. One that changes you, finishes you, shakes your very ground.

It is a question for a sacred remembering, to just notice what we already are, what is already here, but that we have been too distracted to see. It is a question to prevent us from going out all the time, from escaping ourself, to help us return to where we have always been — in the home of our inner being. It is a question for which we have to let go of our bodily refuge. A question for which we have to lose the self that has been our anchor so far. It is a question for the mind, although its answer is to be found outside every consideration of mind, thought, image, memory. It is a free fall that pushes us to look beyond our limitations, and gives us the gift of our limitlessness. It is a question with no end, not because there is no answer to it, but because the answer is a living answer, whose reality can never come to an end. It is an impossible question, for even before we have the occasion to utter it, we find it already answered through the act of our simply being.

The living answer to the question ‘Who am I?’, is ‘I Am’, which contains its own undefeatable, eternal, inescapable reality. ‘I Am’ is before the question ‘Who am I?’. ‘I Am’ is the living answer which swallows every single question on our identity. It takes us into itself, and shows our identity to be only being, a being so pure that nothing can be added to it. It is the only sacred knowledge there is, which all the words and rites of every religion have sought to deliver as the name ‘God’. A knowledge that they have failed to pass on with accuracy for going too far, and postulate outside of ourself the reality that is in fact our very own self, hiding in plain sight in and as our own aware being. So ‘Who am I?’ is a prayer that is clearing the path, recalling God in ourself in the form of ‘I Am’.

It is a question that opens the door for the peace that we have been looking for in every possible direction, except in the direction of our innermost self alone. It is a question that we ask with expectation and inquiry, and answer with the peace and joy that we find already here, beyond any expectation or understanding. It is an implicit question that we cannot help asking in the secrecy of our mind, but that we fail to form explicitly, expecting the answer to be outside our own being. It is an absolute question, that needs no other answer than going to the very aware being that initiated it, because of  its longing to be freed from everything that seems to limit it and veil it. It is our returning to what we have never ceased to be, but are failing to see for reason of looking in a thousand directions outside ourself. ‘Who am I?’ is a question that takes you to ‘I Am’, which is the only accurate description there is of our true identity. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

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

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God’s Knowledge

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Blue Rigi Lake of Lucerne Sunrise’ – J. M. W.  Turner, 1842 – WikiArt

We know so many things. Everything is based on knowledge, and maybe that’s the way to live, as long as there is a body and a world. Knowledge is the score we need to play our part. But to know something, anything, seems presumptuous. It implies another kind of knowledge — that there is somebody here, a person at a distance, that knows and is a recipient of knowledge. Knowledge fixes us. It gives us a dubious identity — that I am a man or a woman, of a certain age, with certain qualities, and with a whole lot of knowledge, identities, beliefs. That I am unhappy, clever, stupid, happy. That I am a cook, or a carpenter. That there is a chair, a world. That I have skills and preferences. I even have the knowledge of my spiritual attainment.

But there is no knowing anything. To think we know something is a mistake. If we know something, then we haven’t looked well enough. We have stayed at the surface of our illusory world and existence. What we ought to know is the knowledge of our reality, of ourself. That’s the only knowing there is. That’s our world: Knowing. Being aware. All other knowledge is superfluous, is not real knowledge. For what would any such knowledge be, when we discover that there is no entity here with the capacity to possess that knowledge. Go only for the knowing of being, a knowledge which is owned by itself. Notice that you don’t know anything — that’s important to know. We have no knowledge other than the knowledge of our being. Apart from that, everything exists only as in a dream.

We may play the part of the one in the dream, and that’s a beautiful part. There may be a world here that is gorgeous, with many ‘things’ that are known. There may be relationships that have meanings. But this world of things borrows its beauty and making from the reality in which it exists for a time — knowing. And the meaning of relationship is found through its reality, which is love — shared being. Everything happy and true in our life is borrowed from our reality as awareness — the only knowledge there is. If we live or act while ignoring that one knowledge, the world and ourself will appear ridden with conflict and suffering. So notice that the ten thousand things of life — all our knowledge — are transparent, ephemeral, ethereal. What is here massive and solid is their reality as being — the supreme essence of everyone and everything. The truth we live in. Ourself. What is. Not somebody that knows.

There is no other real knowing than the knowing of our essence, of our true nature or identity. This knowledge of ourself is not something we can possess as a person. It is nothing more than pure, objectless, impersonal knowing, and this knowing is all there is, all we are. Everything, everyone, have died in it. That’s why we cannot know anything, for how could we know something without there being first a knower and things with their own reality. The only thing we in fact truly know is ourself, our essence. Our knowledge of anything has died inside pure knowing long ago. It is still available, but its reality is apparent. That’s why we can never be sure that there is a chair, or a world. That’s why every object passes, is not there, is only an appearance.

Even ourself cannot be known objectively. We are alone. Nobody knows us. We as a person are absent. We don’t have a reality as an entity, or a self of any kind. So we are known by God alone, who knows us by knowing Its own being. We are all in the knowledge of God. What follows after the sentence ‘we don’t know anything’ is ‘the only knowledge there is is God’s knowledge’. Or ‘know God, love god, and you will know what you ought to know’. It all boils down to ‘knowing, knowing knowing’. Paul said it all very clearly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” (8:2-3).

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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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