The Incidental Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

I would like to live the incidental life. Not the one that is a toil. Not the one that finds its significance in happenings and accidents, in various changes or transformations, in happy or sad expressions. I don’t want to be dependent on the forms of life for my happiness. I don’t want to be bound to its many injunctions, be they ones that are imposed or desired. For this is how life acquires its tragic quality. This is how life becomes something that we have to endure or bear with. Something that we have to go through with clenched teeth — which is with hope and belief. Something that we can be happy with, or grateful for, only if we take the right decisions, make the right efforts, and have some good luck too. I don’t want my life to be so brittle and uncertain. To be so imprisoned in endless causes and conditionings. And to have fear as its background music. No. I don’t want to be so grandiose. I want the incidental life.

To have an incidental life is to forever place our gaze on the horizon of being. This gaze implies surrendering to what is, or not minding what happens, as Krishnamurti once affirmed. This gaze will make you see life as being drenched in beauty and love. And this gaze will render you to your eternal, inborn, given nature of peace, happiness, and freedom. This is when experience clothes itself in a sumptuous dress of truth or understanding. One that will allow you, in familiar terms, to leave your life alone. For it can verily and simply take care of itself. Life doesn’t need your painstaking involvement. It doesn’t fancy your pity or concern or greed. Doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. Let your life be in its right place, which is the place of humility. This is where it will find its true colours and expressions. This is when it will rid itself of all the suffering that encumbered it. This is how it will find its own sacred purpose. Don’t give your life an undue position. Don’t take what is secondary to be foremost. And what is foremost to be secondary. See only being as foremost. This is the sun of life: this being. Its essence and direction. The rest? Well, let it be incidental.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Highest Language

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Silence’ – Odilon Redon, 1911 – WikiArt

In our language, the word ‘silence’ is defined as the complete absence of sound, or the abstinence of speech. Yet silence has fascinated us beyond these elementary descriptions to evoke the unknown and the mysterious. Something in silence speaks to us, and is a presence beyond its apparent nature as absence. Spiritual teachers from all traditions have abundantly used the word for its richness of meaning and its powerful evocative dimension. So pregnant and profound is this experience of silence that the word has often been likened to awareness or the nature of god’s silent being. Among others, Ramana Maharshi has often pointed silence as being the ultimate teacher in these matters, and Krishnamurti has described it in supremely effective and graceful words just below. This page is dedicated to their many expressions of silence:

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“The experience of silence alone is the real and perfect knowledge.”
~ Ramana Maharshi (‘Be as You Are’)

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“Keep silence, that you may hear Him speaking
Words unutterable by tongue in speech
Keep silence, that you may hear from that Sun
Things inexpressible in books and discourses.
Keep silence, that the Spirit may speak to you.”
~ Rumi (‘Masnavi i Ma’navi’)

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”Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
~ Wendell Berry

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Read these many quotes on silence by various teachers… (READ MORE…)

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The Craving

Posted on by Alain Joly

Why do you keep falling, my heart
To all that impart an immediate pleasure
Truth is not an easy catch that can be met
In the petty, neither one that you can grab
In the temporal and all its passing hues
There is more to it than mock or parody

You have to only stay where you are, to
Not take that first step ahead, allured by
The fire of thoughts, elated by feelings
Be only so present so as to sight
A calm within a space, a space within a calm
That nothing can stir or move or shake

And you shall stay there, not concerned
By all that in you shout and scream
By all these thieves that claim your fall
And beg in the usual, the false order restored
A peace so cheap as to be no peace at all
You know what an imitation of truth is

This is an endeavour of unbounded courage
You need some heart to inhabit your heart
You’ll be surrounded by liars and impostors
All these preachers of facile commands
They too dwell where you truly dwell
They go only by effort or indulgence

Presence is a magnetic field that attracts
Always only itself. No need for exertion
No need to launch a campaign for truth
Desire is their last treacherous injunction
So repulsive when it comes to being home
You are already where you crave to be

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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The Angel of Death

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Stranger Things Graffiti’ – Paul Sableman (Jher Seno & the Arty Deeds) – Wikimedia

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“A myth is a mask of God, a metaphor
for what lies behind the visible world.”
~ Joseph Campbell (‘The Power of Myth’)

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There is an astounding profundity in popular culture. It is just for us to see when it pops up, when it arises above the sea of confusion that our life is for the most part. What is designed to be just light entertainment, what appears to have no depth or consistence other than being an easy escape out of ourself, can hide the brightest of gems if we can elevate ourself to its hidden meaning. I stumbled across one such meaningful gem recently.

‘Running Up That Hill’ is a song created by pop singer Kate Bush in the eighties. It recently got a second life and triumph by appearing in one scene of the famous sci-fi thriller series ‘Stranger Things’. In this particular show, there is a hideous monster that roams in an imaginary city, and feeds on the minds of teens deeply affected and traumatised by their past, luring them into its parallel and ultimately illusory reality. In that particular scene, the girl is trapped in some dark chamber of her mind. The ugly beast keeps her prisoner there — a cave like place where she is about to be engulfed in the monster’s hideous mind. She manages to escape the grip and run towards an opening in the distance where is her true self and salvation. Pieces of rocks are falling all around her to stop her course, but she keeps running one-pointedly ahead while hearing Kate Bush’s song ‘Running Up That Hill’. The reason for her escape is to be found with her friends playing this song she deeply loves, and creating in her that powerful call and incentive.

Why does a particular blend of a scene and a song suddenly hit a target, move people beyond what could be possibly expected? Just one glance in the comments of that particular scene on YouTube makes it clear: “Best scene of the series”, “This scene made me want to live”, “Cathartic”, “A metaphor for what’s battling your mind”. Why does anything hit us and move us to feel in ourself a feeling of being alive? Tears may come, a feeling of thankfulness, maybe even some sense of profound happiness. What is tilting in our minds in these ineffable moments is the recalling of our life’s most essential meaning and purpose, and the remembering of a place in ourself that we have neglected. This place is the forgotten but obvious target for all our thirsty mind-arrows. It is the open space of our deepest being that we keep missing at every moment of our lives, precisely because of its total intimacy and openness. How do we manage to miss it? Because we focus on the periphery of objective experience. We are enclosed in a dark chamber of our own making that lures us into itself, and makes us fragile, hopeful dreamers with fearful minds, forever caught in the prospect of impending death.

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See how popular culture is infused with non-dual reminiscences… (READ MORE…)

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