The Silent Prayer

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Dawn in the Hills’ – Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1922 – WikiArt

We have been taught that we are only a part. A body with some private thoughts and feelings, an entity separate from everything that we can see, hear, touch outside the boundaries of our body-mind. We have been encouraged to believe in separation, in effort and suffering, in reward and punishment, in a happiness that is only a passing experience which we have to strive for, and in brief, elusive moments of peace. That is the way of our life. But in fact, no.

This is all in our mind, only one particular, rehearsed representation of reality. It is all one wrong path taken, a momentary belief. Life was never meant to be fragmented. It was never meant to be tiresome. Our true reality is one of wholeness, with nothing outside of it. There is nothing out there that is not the expression of our own self, that is not included in our saying ‘I’. We may think that our ‘I’ is just this little, private, separate corner of the vast field of life. But if we look with utmost attention, if we let go of everything that we have been taught to believe, we will notice that our ‘I’, our most common, everyday, every hour mention of ‘I’ refers in fact to the vast field of life with no corner inside it.

Our awareness of everything expands beyond everything that is the prisoner of our senses. There is nothing with a boundary in our saying ‘I’. ‘I’ is the infinite that has been brought for a while in a world of time and space, of within and without, of objects which our body-mind is only a part of. Don’t be deluded by appearances. Don’t have a simple belief running your life. See that there is, beyond the many appearances, beyond the body and the many thoughts, beyond our seemingly suffering life, a reality that knows no limitation of time and space, and that has found refuge here in our simply saying ‘I’, or ‘I Am’.

There is nothing small about ‘I’, nothing that it doesn’t include, no time or space that it doesn’t transcend, no corner that is in fact not the infinite, no moment that has not been dipped in the eternal. So keep in mind that every time we cook a meal, do some shopping, or go for a walk, we are in fact inviting the infinite with us. We are inviting meaning, and beauty, and the peace that goes with being whole. The ‘I’ that we are doesn’t have to be restricted to a body, to the limitations of thought, to our physicality. There is eternity in our daily life if we are willing to look.

‘I’ is the absolute which we have wrongly attributed to our little idea of a limited person. We have squeezed the unlimited inside a belief, mixed it with a few sensations, lost it within the world of our many experiences. We have expelled God outside something that exists only in our mind, pushed It beyond the boundaries of an apparent entity, when it is but our very eternally present reality, hidden behind a wrong attribution, and shared as the one essence for all.

‘I’ was never private. We have belittled it for the sake, or the service of our own fantasy. We have downgraded it to a mere body, and in doing so have invited division and suffering. Think about it the next time you are saying ‘I’. Don’t ever say it mindlessly. Watch to where it extends. See the vast field that it is. Have it constantly with you, as the One that is both your true self and the harbour of every possible appearance.

Make ‘I’ your silent prayer.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Robert Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922)

~~~

.

Website:
– Robert Julian Onderdonk (Wikipedia)

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

.

One Sentence for Truth

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Girls by the River Prut’ – Arthur Verona, 1905 – Wikimedia

Sometimes a simple reminder is worth a thousand books, the simple reminder that this consciousness with which we live everyday, and at every second of the day, that is our companion in all circumstances, that allows us to hear the many voices of the world and be aware of the people and of nature, that is responsible for the knowing of our thoughts and feelings, without which no world, idea, hope, memory, suffering would be experienced, let alone understood, without which there would be no hurts or rushes of joy, no fear or sense of peace felt, or ruthless agitation, this very consciousness that is in fact our life, our only possibility for existing, for knowing and being, for experiencing anything — this consciousness conceals a treasure that is waiting for our recognition, and that is more than what we think and have been accustomed to believe,

a treasure that contains the understanding that this consciousness is so habitual and taken for granted that it seems like almost nothing, hardly felt or thought about, and so humble that it recedes behind our thousands experiences, allowing them the freedom to obsess or fascinate, and the power to conceal the extraordinary and the obvious — that this consciousness is in fact not our personal, private consciousness, that it is not what we have believed it to be, that it is not hidden, casual, a function among others, but the very answer revealed inside our humanity, the one and only thing in presence, the shared essence of everyone and everything, and what all religions have been trying to tell us in the first pristine intention of their founders, sometimes delivering the message with almost painful clarity, sometimes blurring it to the point of corruption and defect,

a message which is that consciousness — our consciousness — is in fact the Absolute, beyond which there is nothing, and before which none has ever existed, that it is our identity, our very self or being, what we are before every mournful identity or qualification that we adopt in our desperate attempt to be somebody, that it is the happiness which we have sought in objects or circumstances, when it is truly only the nature of our being felt, a consciousness which is peace itself, which is one and therefore experienced as love, which is the thing, or power, or being, or reality hidden behind the word ‘God’, behind every possibility of being, every tender blade of grass, every smile on a face, or flight of a bird, or starry night lit, every knowing of woe or wonder — the very reason for beauty and meaning, the One without a second of the Hindus, the Father of the Christians, the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, the Beloved of the Sufis, the before and the after, both contained in an eternal now, the here and there, and everywhere, since the infinite is its body, the only possibility of our immortality, and the I that I am at every second of our life.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1867-1946)

~~~

.

Website:
– Arthur Verona (painter)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

The Burning Ground

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Fort George Island’ – Thomas Moran, 1880 – Wikimedia

There is no looking away from God. What we are, think, do, feel, experience, is already belonging to something that is prior. We don’t live inside one limited, time-bound reality and have to look for another grander reality for a form of relief, or resolution. We are already living in the reality that we are seeking, already tasting of the eternal life that we are longing for, already having the infinite as our most precious body. Our many thoughts are prayers, although they don’t seem to be. They are born out of desperation and have a mission. They are seekers, soldiers, working at a form of freedom and happiness, trying hard to go beyond their own limitations. They are clumsy, but they keep their gaze fixed on the eternal which they come from and which they desire to merge with again. We know our home though we have lost touch with it, and are seeking it back in every possible way. So look at what your thoughts are aiming at, the ground of being where they once were born and formed. Be and abide as that place of being, which is their playful ground. Be the motionless where they can live and thrive, and be relieved of their seeking.

Our actions are prostrations before the One. They are not born of an endless line of causation. That is only their superficial clothing. Our feet, and our doing are already treading the infinite that we are looking for, without our knowing it. This vastness without end or dimension is the stage for our many experiences. Everything we do, we do in the hope of retrieving our original essence. Our actions are either escapes from suffering and death, or attempts to reach a state of harmony or meaning. So look only in the direction toward which they prostrate themselves and at which they aim. Find that placeless place where they have the freedom to appear. Be what they are restlessly bowing before. Feel that we are their ground of being, where they come and are consumed one after the other into the One. We are but a burning ground, swallowing everything that comes and goes into the flame of motionless being. Our actions are already ashes, and we are the flame inside which they for an infinitesimal time live before disappearing. In fact, we have our whole life taking place and shape in a spark of eternity. Now see that what we are, think, do, feel, perceive, is better experienced from the position of that burning ground of being. There we acquire unity and meaning, and everything clothes itself in the peace which is our essential being.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Thomas Moran (1837-1926)

~~~

..

Website:
– Thomas Moran (Wikipedia)

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

.

The Prayer of the Devotee

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Angelus’ – Jean-François Millet, 1857 – Wikimedia

Nowadays, we never think too much of the bells ringing from a distant church. Yet they were once set for a reason. They are the reminder of a practice of prayer called the ‘Angelus’. And it was precisely named so, after the moment when ‘The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Spirit’: “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ”. So it is a message from a messenger of grace, lifting our spirit from the body, taking our experience at the level of what it truly is. It wasn’t just the recitation of a prayer. It was for our recalling. It was for being — for being held for a while in God’s bosom. It was for being reminded of our true nature, of our being the children of a deeper, forgotten presence which we are the incarnation of. It was an opportunity to remember. An invocation. A call from within.

This is a unique prayer, that some have named the ‘prayer of the devotee’. It was a prayer meant to be pronounced three times a day: in the morning, at noon and in the evening, accompanied by the ringing bells of the Angelus. A prayer inside which a few words strike with a special resonance. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us“. It was a testament to the sacrifice whereby God has made sure to leave in us a part of himself — his Son. A part of himself within ourself, which is more than our body and our qualifications, more than our mind and our many thoughts, beliefs, and identifications. It is that naked being or consciousness that is hidden in the maze of our many experiences, but is in fact our own, still, peaceful, never born identity.

So Mary has procreated while staying virgin, for the object of her nativity was herself, her true being which she has shown to the world to be the being of every other being. Jesus was a man, but Christ was that part of the man, and of us all, that didn’t need to be given a birth. It is the infinite, naked, ever-present being that is at the source of our sentiment of existing, of that very unique sense which is meant every time we say simply ‘I Am’, — I am, being, throbbing, living, never departing of that pure, godly, unqualified, indestructible essence, where infinity and eternity are like our most fitting attire. Nothing grandiose in these two words. They simply mean that I am not bound by time and place, by birth and death, by now and then, by here and there.

So three times a day, be it in the field as we were gleaning the wheat, or on the fishing boat in the middle of a river, we were called to stop and become a devotee for a timeless moment. Time and place were suspended, and our being recollected. It wasn’t anymore about harvesting the grain, or lifting the fish on the boat. It was for recognising in ourself the true nature of our being, and that special grace contained in being human — the child of a presence that abides in our very sense of being aware. For this apparently fleeting consciousness that is ourself is in fact the solid presence of God’s being, that is both sheltering and giving form to our body-mind-world. In this presence lives the peace that we are seeking everywhere, and that was placed here where it could never be missed, if only we are willing to listen to our inner call.

As very often in the religious world, there is the meaning intended, hidden, and the actual practice. The teaching, the message, and the poor understanding. The lifting grace, and the descent into belief and imagination. Here, the meaning intended, the teaching is: “Just be”. It is a prophetic, loving injunction for our sake, for our knowing, for our recognising. It is saying: notice that there is here and now, in and as yourself, a quality of being in which is contained life itself. It is saying: ‘God is with us’, which by the way is the meaning of one of the names given to Jesus, ‘Emmanuel’. So every time you hear the sound of a bell from a distant church, or the softer chime of your heart aching for peace, treat yourself with an Angelus, be like a devotee of your own being. Pause and go within, where you are forever being given a new birth, kneeling and offering your illusory identity in front of your one and true reality as being.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)

~~~

.

Website:
– Jean-François Millet (Wikipedia)

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

.

The Second Coming

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Last Judgement’ (detail) – William Blake, 1808 – WikiArt

There has been a seed planted, a first coming. There has been for all appearances to exist, for the world of things to expand, the creative and pervading quality of a ground. This is where all beings and all things have tapped in for their own being. We have all sheltered it without our knowing it, for the ground of being is invisible to our eyes, not accessible to our senses. We have believed ourself to be a body and a mind, and have consequently been busy with the objective world, taking as a fact that our senses were reflecting back to us a true image of a dual universe. We have tried to conform to this idea, to this consensual representation of our reality, and this is the reason for our suffering and our innumerable conflicts. We have accepted our body-mind as an identity, and our life as the toiling for our security and happiness in a generally hostile, mindless, material world. We couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So there has been the promise of a Second Coming. The ‘returning of the Saviour at the end of time’, as some religions have stated. Well, maybe that formula bears some truth, if it wasn’t taken for what it is not. But there won’t be the first sign of a separate entity coming again in the world to free us. The Second Coming is taking place in our heart. This is where it lives and has its home, waiting for our realising, longing for our returning. This is the ground set for a meeting with ourself, with our reality. A truth unmoved, still, unqualified, that is abiding here in and as ourself, but has been forgotten, neglected, therefore left unnoticed. The remembering of it gives us the illusory impression of its coming again. But no. Its coming again is us coming out of our self-imposed dream. It is us seeing the world and everything in it as the many faces of God, which means the world exchanging its believed reality as matter for the luminous vibrancy of infinite consciousness.

So there is a Second Coming. It is only an apparent one for we have in fact never moved out of it. It is our infinite, eternal reality — in fact God’s very being — which we could never part from. This ‘coming’ is rather a revelation, an ‘epiphany’, as the Greek word for the coming again of Christ indicates. In Islam, this is called the ‘return’ (al-raj’ah), the ‘turning again’ towards ourself, our knowing of ourself — consciousness. It is a revolution, the ‘rolling back’ of a false idea, of a belief, to reveal, or return to our own reality as aware being. It is the coming into view of something that was here, but hidden by our looking in the wrong direction. It is our true nature or reality becoming perceptible again, a new light sprouting out of our lazy, habitual, and a thousand times rehearsed imagined identity as body and mind.

In fact, the Second Coming was simply called ‘Parousia’ in Greek, which literally means ‘being present’ — how could we have missed such level of clarity! So now the traditional, religious promise of the ‘returning of the Saviour at the end of time’ could be read in its new light of truth. It is our true nature as God’s being, or infinite consciousness, and its becoming perceptible again when all idea of time, sequence, saviour, hope or belief has left us. It is the ground of being, being present, and shining as our one and only peaceful reality, saving us from a lethal misunderstanding. The last judgment being nothing but the punishment given to the separate self, the fatal blow of its being non existent, and the rise of infinite consciousness as the only self there is, the reward of its quietly blissful nature.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by William Blake (1757-1827)

~~~

.

Websites:
– Second Coming (Wikipedia)
– William Blake (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

Lost in Temptation

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Temptation’ – Odilon Redon, 1912 – WikiArt

You have to keep close to yourself. You cannot escape on a line of thoughts, thinking yourself out of your present experience of being. You cannot bring about another world — imaginations, beliefs, projections — on top of what you are already, on the mountain of being which you sit and already spend your whole existence on. You have to stay with what you are deeply — that unmoved, unchanging identity of being which you have been immersed in from time immemorial. It is too easy to take advantage of your senses and believe the world to be outside yourself. Too easy to pretend that you are separate, and that you live in the limitations of your own world as body and mind. Don’t move anywhere out of the very confines of your unlimited, dimensionless being. Keep very close to that. Believe me, that’s your only solace. They will try to convince you otherwise, but keep at it unreservedly.

You cannot move out of consciousness, out of the knowing of anything. You have your eternal home inside that knowing. You have your consciousness always with you, and every place you go to is already soaked in it. You have already curled yourself up in that place of being and found your anchor there. So don’t pretend you have to go out to find the sustenance of objects for your own happiness. You can’t find anything worthy outside yourself. Stay where you have already your essence in. Keep very close. It is tempting I know, to go out for a ride on a fleeting joy, or the promise of temporary happiness. It is compelling to suspend your suffering, even for a moment. But trust me, there is nowhere in this world where you could go and find a peace which you don’t have already within, waiting, sighing for your returning. So keep so very close to your own reality as being. Stay there uncompromisingly.

And don’t think yourself small there. Your being is not what you think. It is not a vague sensation inside your body, lodged in the recesses of your mind. You made it small because you have lost touch with it. You have buried it under the shine of your many experiences. You have scattered it in a thousand wrong identities. Your being is vaster than you think. It is the infinite which you have lost faith in and replaced by the little space provided by your senses. It is the eternal that you have pushed and imprisoned in the cage of time, which is but the activity of thinking. Nourish your inside. See that in doing so, in living in the heart of your true identity as pure, unalloyed being, just under the surface of objective experience, the within will be shown to be without, and the without within. You will come to notice that being is all there truly is. You will see the world finding its true, most fitting place in and as the consciousness from which you have once exiled it from. So pay a constant visit to yourself. Check that you don’t flee from home, no matter the circumstances you are in.

Be under the constant protection of your being. Live there. Find no temptation outside the plain attraction contained in the inevitability of being. You have been placed here for a reason. This is where you find yourself to be whole and therefore peaceful, your suffering being but this covenant broken. This is where the world is clothed in its innate beauty, which is conferred by your being both in this shared place of being. This is where love thrives and finds its origin — in being, when it is seen to be shared by everyone. The same being — not two, not many. One and the same for all, therefore evenly distributed as love. Love is not a feeling that appears when the other fits your own selfish requirements. It is the nature of being and of yourself when you recognise your own, given, divine nature. This is what is meant by the ‘love of God’. Not the love of a parent for its infamous, ungrateful children. But the love immense and unconditional that being shelters and showers upon itself, and which you have now recognised to be your own self, and the self of all.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

~~~

.

Website:
– Odilon Redon (Wikipedia)

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

.

On Retreat

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Hermit in front of His Retreat’ – Carl Spitzweg, 1844 – Wikimedia

There is nothing innocent about going on a spiritual retreat. We come to plead guilty. We want to be delivered from a wrongdoing, to be free from a form of captivity. We come here to be disentangled. To take a step back. Not only from our busy life, from our problems, but from our many false identities. We have too many of them, and we are willing to undress, to disengage for a while from everything that we have wrongly taken to be ourself. From our habitual, rehearsed, believed identification with our mind, our body, and our many thoughts. From our obsession and addiction with the objects of the perceived world, which we think bear the promise of our happiness. From our endless hopes, fears, projections, and our constant seeking. We retreat from the battle that it is to be somebody, and to live in the limitations of the known. We come to be courageous, and to wrestle with what we don’t know. To discover a way of living that is fresh. To be in awe.

We have come to pull back. To leave the periphery of our life — where the superficial is our only landscape — for the deeper ground of our true nature. We are willing to be wronged, to show our vulnerabilities, our ignorance, in a life where we are prompted to pretend. There can be nothing new in staying with what we know. So our retreat is a process of unknowing. It is the journey from what we know to the unknowable. And we know the unknowable by not being qualified. By remembering our primary, unborn identity, which finds its ground in the ground of being, before it is coloured by qualities and identifications. We journey until we fully inhabit experience. Until our retreat is not a retreat anymore.

We have been retreating all our life, resisting from experience, which we call suffering. Our life is mostly the result of our not wanting to engage fully, of our taking refuge in thoughts, feelings, to not fully face the pain contained in experience. We retreat in what we think is our security. So we also come on a retreat to stop retreating. We want to be relieved from the load of our many resistances, from the unbearable weight that it is to constantly retreat from the fullness of living. That’s why we feel so good on a retreat. We put an end to our many retreats. We suspend our journey away from ourself. We come home, where there is no need of a retreat anymore. Where we finally know ourself — who we are truly — and can rest there. Where we can fully and only be, embracing everything, knowing that being is all there is. We cannot retreat from what we are. We come to retreat until we can retreat no more.

Out of our constant worry, of our restless seeking, we happen to have retreated in our mind. We have withdrawn from our heart. We have identified with our thoughts. So we have come here to stop retreating where we do not belong, and return to our heart. A retreat is a stage set for this discovery. That mind is not an identity but a tool. That love is our natural identity — the treasure under the many stones of our false identifications. We have come to be open, to end our many retreats — the shrinking of our heart, and know the meaning of friendship. We did not come here to pull back, to disengage. We have come to remember, and to forget that we have remembered. We have come to be present, full of our own true and gorgeous identity of being. So we both retreat, and stop retreating. We disengage, and engage fully. We come to be both still, and in movement. To disincarnate, and find our natural incarnation in being.

We end our mere existing to re-engage with the aliveness contained in simply and only being. We have come to retreat from our many retreats, to invest the placeless place of being, where there is no need anymore of a retreat. We have come to move from matter to spirit, from being something, somewhere, sometime, to being in the unlocated land of our formless, infinite presence. We have come to be but an eternal now, in which time has now surrendered. We have come where seclusion in being is found to be our openness and our freedom. Where we acquire the dimension of a whole world. Where there is no more path, no more retreating. We have found our home in being, which happens to be not a retreat at all, but the place of a total surrender. Home is not the place where we are, but is found to be what we are. We have come to end every possibility of a retreat.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885)

~~~

.

Website:
– Carl Spitzweg (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.