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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The Person

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair’ – Rembrandt, 1628 (Rijksmuseum) – Wikimedia

There is immense pleasure in being a person when we are not a person. Then, the body-mind, the person, is not a burden anymore, it is a companion. We begin to enjoy its gentle presence, for it is rid of the constant search for happiness, peace, freedom. It is not on him anymore. She doesn’t have to bring about her joy. Doesn’t have to condition her freedom to her circumstances. The person is delivered. It doesn’t have to resist and be a fighter. Doesn’t have to struggle, suffer, hope, be in the constant grip of personal achievement and success. He can stop being a seeker, endlessly looking for what could make him good, content, relieved. She can stop having peace on her everyday agenda. These are given — naturally — as our nature, as ourself. They stop being the work of a person, his everyday load that he has to achieve, perform, be a success at — all the tyranny of it.

There is a presence that we feel is our own, our identity, that already gives us everything that we as a person would spend a lifetime looking for, and would for certain — that’s a universal secret, believe me on that — fail to secure. We already have a wonderful, pristine self in the form of our naked, unconditioned being, so the person doesn’t have to create a non existent self for itself. It doesn’t need to have this belief, that it is a self, that it is separate, that it lives inside a body and a mind. Self and identity are already provided. We share them with everyone and everything. We don’t have to be lonely. Don’t have to be limited by a form, and imprisoned by the boundaries of birth and death. Appearance and age stop being an issue. Comparison dies down. We expand as limitless being, outside even the boundaries of time. The body-mind acquires transparency.

Then we take him or her by the hand — the form, the limited body-mind, the person. Then it is like our best friend, freed from everything that made it small, separate, fearful. Then our body, although limited, will acquire and ride on the infinite nature of its beholder. Then our mind, which is bound by the boundaries of time and thought, will wander on the grounds of the eternal, where our being has its permanent home. Then our personhood shines, precisely because we are not a person. We become beautiful, attractive, and our actions bear the signature of the infinite. Then, being a person is important. And it is not a hindrance to our recognising who we are. On the contrary. The person becomes an emissary of truth, both within and without.

Then ‘what is’ is what we desire, and we don’t mind our circumstances. They satisfy us. We are free. We can be a person and find it a beauty to be so. The person is only here to pass on the impersonal desire of the infinite. It is here for God’s will, which is to be and act on God’s premises, in Its gorgeous name. Not to have a private agenda, in the name of the endless insecurities of a nonexistent, separate self. Not to be burdened by life, but to be the messenger of its secret glory. Then, she as a person is clothed in the dress of a delightful being, shining with an identity that she borrows from God’s identity, and partaking of a self that is the very self of universal being. Then he doesn’t find his person to have an existence separate from his not being a person. Person, no person, being, consciousness, God, life, existence — all one same infinite thing and being. And the person, against all odds, thrives in it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

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God’s Alliance

Posted on by Alain Joly

God is not a romantic. He wants the best for you, and will make sure that you have no peace until you know yourself exactly as you are, which is as He is. God is a tough mother. She will lead you to feel that you come from her very womb, and that you have within yourself the memory that you are as She is, which is infinite and eternal. God has no idea that you exist as a person. He knows none of your ideas or beliefs, none of your attachments or suffering. Your problems are of no interest to Her. If you want God to know you, make sure that you go to that part of yourself that is without qualifications, that is like your naked essence — what gives you the consciousness of everything. Make sure that you become just as Her being, and that you share of Her divine characteristics. Then God will know you as surely as He knows Himself. And you will know God as firmly as you know yourself. But don’t play the part of the poor little me. For you won’t see a single tear on the face of god, and will attract no compassion from Him. God knows you the moment you know God. That’s the beauty and magic of Her infinite presence.

Partake of the same ground of being that is God’s being, and you will come to love everyone in the way She loves you. Share the being of God Himself and you will bathe in the peace that God knows, and that is your own peace too. Know your being as being God’s being, and you will experience the joy that comes from the ease of simply being. The only way God can know you is through that part of yourself that is of the nature of His being. And the only way you can see God is by seeing yourself in the way He sees Himself. There is no knowing God through relationship. He is knowable through sameness only. Oneness is the common home that we all share. Everything and everyone partake of the same ground of being, and find their identity in God’s identity. This alliance of God with the ten thousand beings and things of existence is one of supreme intimacy. Once this intimacy with God has been established in your life, you will come to know God as you know yourself, and to know everything and everyone as God’s intimate being. Her interior as to say. His loving heart.

And God is a lover of the strictest reality. The idea that you have of yourself can never know God. And God can never know the belief that you have formed about yourself. They are mutually exclusive. If you want to be a person of your own, away from God, then God will retire and become absent from your life although still holding you in the most humble and loving way. The person that you believe yourself to be has no reality and cannot share of God’s reality. This is why you suffer, and know the plight of loneliness and separation. Give the idea of yourself up, and you will find yourself as having the self of God Himself. This is God’s special bond with you, to know you through His very being, which is your being too. This alliance with God suffers no approximation. Be of God’s humble nature, and She will share with you Her blissful being, offering Her infinite body as the world you live in and mix your being with. But be with your own limited, separate self, and God will know nothing of you, and you nothing of Him. You will be just a passing cloud with no reality, absent from even the most insignificant thought of God.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Resurrection

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Resurrection’ – Piero della Francesca, 1460 – WikiArt

There is a sleeping involved in our present living. It doesn’t seem to be so, but experience has become so habitual that it has put us in a sort of slumber, in a lethargy, so that we never feel what we are as we are. We live according to an idea, to a belief, and this idea of ourself is limiting us at every moment. It is hiding our own true, essential being in plain sight. And in this sleeping, in this ignorance of our own nature is contained all our suffering, all our many lacks, and the never ending conflicts that our life seems to harbour day after day.

Yet in our slumber is a reality that is only asking to rise to our noticing and to our knowing. It wants to resurrect. It longs to rise again. To show up after having been forgotten. It was never far — an already formed reality that we only need to remember, to re-form in its original and never diminished splendour. We have forgotten it because we overlooked that our self has been consistently made up over the years. We are the result of a long standing habit or belief. We have formed a belief of ourself, of who we are, unwaveringly, unceasingly, experience after experience, and then have forgotten that we ever did that.

We still believe to be pure, virgin, real, when we have in fact already pre-fabricated ourself, and have been soiled by experience. When the awareness of our being has been mixed, degraded, corrupted by the overwhelming presence of our senses, and by the many prints and traumas they have left in their wake. We have lost the freshness of our being to venture into time and space. We have lost our infinity for believing to be an entity, a person with personal qualities, fragilities and idiosyncrasies.

But notice that you are an already risen reality. That we have been raised eternally above the limitations of our body and mind, and have received the gift of our living in the peace of our spaceless being. We are a fully awake and never ending being, rising above all existing objects, entities, experiences. We are a being unmoved, that gives its indestructible reality for the possibility of time and place, of birth, movement, and death, but being itself unborn, immobile, and immortal.

The resurrection is the moment when we rise again, not as a body after its death, not as a mind after its dissolution, but as the unlimited nature which we are now the sons and daughters of — the undivided being that we are the being of. Our resurrection is the simple noticing of this true nature of ourself, that rises not because it was diminished or laid on the ground, but because it is eternally risen in and as our glorious being, were it not for our looking in the wrong direction, towards the only blind spot where it disappeared for a time from the slumber of our mournful gaze.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Piero della Francesca (1415-1492)

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Websites:
– Piero della Francesca (Wikipedia)
– The Resurrection (Painting) (Wikipedia)

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A Word Almighty

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Plains of Heaven’ – John Martin, 1853 – WikiArt

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“While all things were in quiet silence,
and night was in the midst of her course,
Thine almighty Word, O Lord,
leapt down from heaven from thy royal throne.”
~ Book of Wisdom (Ch.18, verses 14-15)

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There is a night in our life, a place dark and covered by our constant and obsessive attachment to experience. We never go there, for it has become as if inexistent, not there, not here. It is hidden, absent, and our fascination for objects, for the surface of things, for everything seen, heard, touched, has pushed it in pitch darkness, unseen, unheard, untouched, inaccessible to sense perceptions, therefore not here. This is our night, for we only care for what is exposed by the blinding light of our senses. Would we go for the night, when we have in constant access the bright day of our many and overwhelming experiences?

Yet the night has secrets to tell. Here, in the silent, invisible, unspoken part of ourself, in the deep recesses of our mind, in the night of our being, is a heavenly world. Only we have in order to see it, to go where objects have become silent, where appearance has not yet done its ruinous work, before the disgraceful influence of the senses. We have to go deeper into ourself, into our own being, into that which has become a night to our own eyes. We have to get accustomed to this darkness, to this absence. We have to let it reveal itself to us. For there is a light here, which the bright day of our many experiences is only a pale reflection. There is a light here, both immense and fragile. Immense because it is the only light in presence. Fragile because we have chosen to live exclusively where the dim glow of the senses are. We have chosen to live in the fragile, in the frail existence of things, turning away from the massive radiance of our own being. We have chosen the light of suffering and uncertainty, and we live there with our own invented certainties.

But in silence, there is a Word. In the night, there is a Radiance. It is brightly here, to be seen, contemplated, admired. It is loudly here to be heard, listened to, savoured. It is where we are — exactly there — right within the light of our many experiences, although rendered dark and mute in reason of our focusing on the objective only. We have become interested only in what is outside ourself, in what can be reached through the senses. We have given importance to mind, body, thought, world, to what can be understood, reached, grappled with, grasped, had. We have left ourself out of the picture. We have left that space of being out. So the Word is inaudible. God shouting, singing psalms after psalms for our own benefit, has no effect. We are deaf and blind to our own self and being, although learned and scholarly to everything objective. We have left behind what mattered in our life, and that forgetting is at the source of all suffering and conflict in the unfortunate realm of experience and existence. We have the royal throne of our own silent being to sit on and occupy. So let us do just that. The rest has its own, natural course — and it’s a happy one.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote from the Book of Wisdom

Painting by John Martin (1789-1854)

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Websites:
– John Martin (Wikipedia)
– Book of Wisdom (Wikipedia)

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The Hand of God

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Hand of God, stained glass – Dayton Saint Mary Catholic Church – Wikimedia

Isn’t it extraordinary that our whole life is spent in the present ? That no part of it, ever, happened somewhere, sometime, that was not the time or place of now ? We speak of the past or the future all the time, but in fact, we are prisoner of the now. We can never leave the present, which is in reality nothing but presence. It would be tempting to think that we are a body, somebody progressing in time through a succession of moments. But it is a naive way of thinking, for we can never find that moment — that ‘now’ — in time. It is elusive, doesn’t know a border, is reluctant to have a beginning and an end. The now has a smooth, timeless reality. It cannot move, cannot know place or time. The now is of the order of essence. It is a fundament. You can never go beyond it, or before it. It is you. You are not in the now — you ‘are’ the now. You are yourself where you live in. ‘I Am’ is the only time there is, which is no time at all. And you are not a prisoner, for there is an infinite amount of freedom in the absence of time, an infinite amount of space in the absence of place.

Time is for objects, not for you. If you think to be one such object, then you are in its claws. For your body has a beginning and an end, just like every object in existence. So choose who you are carefully. Don’t be tempted to be exclusively your body and mind, for time will affect you in the most vicious way. It will lie to you, telling you that you have an age and a limit, that you are as fragile as your body or mind can be, destined to wither and die. Time is a handy construct of thought that measures activity, movement, appearance, decay. But before the appearance of body, mind, world, is a space which is immovable, inalterable, inalienable. This space is not to be found outside yourself. It is your very essence, who you are at your deepest, when you have ceased giving your attention to what is only living and thriving at the surface, and are willing to dive in the most substantial essence of who you are.

So notice that where and when you live is only experienced now. This is no accident. See that the future is unattainable, except in the now. Understand that there was only a past as the experience of ‘now’. So now is the only reality — not time, not place, which are only appearances created by thought and sense perception. See through the many appearances of life, to land where and when you have always been — in your own inescapable presence here and now. The now is not a fleeting moment, it is massively here. It is stretching itself to infinite proportions, and renders time a ridiculous, though necessary passing notion. The now has the flavour of something new, for without the conditioning of the past and the expectation of the future, is a life that is fresh, embedded in unknowing — notice that you can only know the past or the future. The now is also something that stands right in the middle of yourself, that is at no distance, that knows no separation as past or future, whose immediacy is total for it is blended in and as your very essence. So comes a time when the now loses its time-related signification to expose its true nature as presence. The now is maintained right through as the very nature of everyone and everything. The now is how the infinite keeps you in its hand. It is the hand of God.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Nheyob on Commons

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Website:
– Hand of God (Art) (Wikipedia)

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