Excessive Imagination

We have it all already, independently of any spiritual consideration. All that we ever wanted to acquire or achieve, which we have been aiming to possess without ever truly succeeding, the core object of all our desires before objects multiply and confuse us in their multiplicity — that precious thing: that plenitude — well… we have it. It is there, just as we are, in this experience that we have, in our present feeling and sensation, breathing in our senses, singing as our identity, a kit already assembled, a world designed for us to live in, live for, and live by. Religions have sent us warnings for millennia, but the message was unclear, diffused by authoritative hierarchies to frighten, separate, and control. Yet some got it all through the religious maze, dissecting even the most obscure teaching to its crystalline, original clarity, as Meister Eckhart has done. For he knew — the great master — that our being is a sky knitted of awareness. He knew that this emptiness is all there is, and that our thoughts, feelings, preceptions, the ‘creatures’ as they were called in his words, are all secondary appearances, that draw their multiple existence from the one single identity of our self as pure, unlimited, shared being.

But we have yet to see it. That our present being is the final deal. That what we experience right now contains it all, and is the expression of the silent being that we are in our utmost reality. So there is really no experience other than the experience of this deepest reality of ourself. There is no other than yourself. It is all about what I am, or that I am — all about that which is felt now, before the rise of experience, before the ‘creatures’. That is the landscape that all spiritualities have ploughed for millennia. What you are being now is it, the whole mystery of it. So don’t even try to be it, let alone become it — that would ruin it all. The work is done. You only have to notice yourself in the maze of objective experience. You only have to develop a passion for yourself. To be inquisitive of your being. You don’t have to go through the paraphernalia of spirituality, if you are not inclined to. Just watch your being intensely. Make it the biggest interest of your life. As Krishnamurti once said: “You have only to watch, see, listen; it is all there open and clear.” Don’t tell yourself endless stories about a so-called spiritual path, about advancement — the pride of it all. Jump directly inside the experience of your being. “Take a swift step into yourself” was Krishnamurti’s advice. And swift it has to be.

Swift it has to be for we are too happy to endorse the role of the spiritual seeker and indulge in it, to identify with the means and believe in a path. For the fact is that we are all so attached to being something. This is where we draw our pride and security from, in being something — anything. And if we were to be nothing, or that pure, quintessential empty being that we have learnt we are — well, then we want to be that too. Being something is a reflex that is a hard one to get rid of. This is our refusal to fully and irreversibly die. So you have to bypass your ambitious drive, as sacred and precious as it may be. You have to abandon all willingness to succeed, all impulse to be anymore than what you already are. Any desire to be more, or have more, than what you are, than what you have right now, is another escape into separation. Realisation is nothing but the end of your belief in not being realised, complete, perfect just as you are. You have to let yourself go. The totality of the spiritual quest is about removing a simple belief or misunderstanding, a stubborn bad habit, a single complexity that we have inadvertently introduced in the system. That there has to be something more than just what is — that’s a blatant excess of imagination. We cannot improve on the reality of our self as being, for its substance is of the realm of the non-objective. You cannot object on that. And this mistake can be unveiled with just a little application and a measure of common sense. With the simple dropping of something that isn’t even there.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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