‘The River of Light’ – Frederic Edwin Church, 1877 – WikiArt
If you happen to feel your being one day, don’t let it go out of sight. Follow it everywhere it is. Let it be your only guide. Be gently intoxicated by it, by yourself, by who you are, truly, when you have relinquished this obsession of being a body, and a mind. This is your one and only duty, to stay there, with being, to abide in it, and let yourself be moved by its unmoving current. Don’t go off at a tangent. Don’t take a single step, unless you have with you, as you, this being that you are, and that you could crush at any time, with the single thought that you have your own, separate being. Remember it to be your ultimate identity, the widest circle of your self, without any border, limitless, unfettered by any condition whatsoever.
Feel it in you, as being you, when you go to apparent places. Being tends to stay at home and let your body do the moving. For being never goes anywhere — it is not the travelling type. This is how you can simply go to buy some bread in your street and live a captivating adventure, or explore the farthermost recesses of the earth while feeling quietly at home. Feel that you as being are housing the world, that being is the landscape in which your life is taking place. So be only concerned with the landscape and life will then flow of its own accord. Don’t start believing that you have a life of your own. That’s only the prerogative of the suffering self. No life can be lived happily with an architecture or a design outside being.
And remember that being is a love affair. A renouncing of your own limited self, for a marriage with the beloved truth of your being. A free, princely, bounteous bowing to the infinite. So don’t start making an effort to be, for any effort is an attempt from the part of a belief to reassess its position as a distant, separate, other being. That’s how your nature becomes unseen, when you have replaced it with your own fake one, with your own invented self. For being never hides, if you don’t let it disappear under the weight of your seeking it, of your being somebody that is lacking. So don’t let your being escape you. Don’t lose its trail of joy and glory. Don’t be the one fleeing, running away, desiring to be yourself, by yourself, and then seeking to bring yourself back to the happiness that you have lost, in so many, so many immoderate, superfluous, inappropriate ways. Seek your bliss in being — where it only lies.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)
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Website:
– Frederic Edwin Church (Wikipedia)
Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…
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The Dawn Within 
Alain
Thank you for your weekly offerings. The Dawn Within is my favourite email and I save all of them.
This is an exchange I had with someone online who was also speaking of nonduality. In his article he said, “Nothing needs to be changed or fixed. Everything is fine just the way that it is.” Following from this was my question: “What, then, do we say or do about poverty, homelessness, starvation, and all those dying from the lack of the basic necessities of life? Does this not need to be fixed or changed?”
His response was this: Does not your question start with a preconceived ‘judgment’ that those parts of What Is – poverty, starvation and homelessness – are ‘bad’ and ‘wrong?’ Even calling them ‘problems’ asserts that they are something that shouldn’t be, and must be eliminated. But all such judgments emanate only from the illusory ’separate’ ego-mind, not from the Whole The Whole only knows its own Wholeness and includes *everything. At the Absolute level, Being isn’t sitting back going, “Oh, yeah, those ‘problems of poverty and suffering, were mistakes I somehow made…gotta fix those:-) Only the dream-character insists some parts of the dream are ‘wrong’ and should never have existed. But What Is must be *all of What Is, or there is no What Is.”
And my response was: “So, from this I understand that those who work for the eradication of poverty, homelessness and starvation are also a part of What Is, or there is no What Is.”
So, Alain, what am I missing?
bruce
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Thank you Bruce for your kind words and appreciation. 🙏
It is true that to do something from a position of judgement, of should or shouldn’t, is not a position of clarity and understanding. And this is what we have been doing all along anyway, with no or very little result. But in my understanding, ‘what is’ doesn’t quite apply to poverty, homelessness, and the likes. Poverty is not what is. It has already been stained by endless conditionings born of the belief in separation. ‘What is’ is a term that represents the quality of something that is present here and now, and is not subject to change or deterioration. This changeless, objectless reality is in definitive all there is, and all we are, and to see that is a position of clarity and understanding.
From this position, which is the position of the absolute, nothing is lacking indeed. Poverty can then be seen as an expression of what is, only in the sense that ‘what is’ hasn’t been truly seen. Poverty becomes therefore a natural consequence of this lack of clarity. Anything we might do about it will not go to the root cause of it, and will perpetuate it.
But this position of clarity and understanding, of no separation, of no judgement, is a highly creative, healing energy that has within itself the power to bring forth in life such qualities as love, compassion, and harmony. This and only this can truly change the world and make it an expression of true love, without bearing the scars and expressions of misunderstanding, such as poverty, violence — all these things that violate our deep, innate intuition of truth.
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Alain
Thank you so much for this and for taking the time to reply.
This is very helpful. It provides a deeper and clearer understanding.
And now I have a bit more light for the path.
bruce
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