‘Transfiguration of Jesus’ – Alexander Ivanov, 1846-58 (Tretyakov Gallery) – Wikimedia
The most important thing in life is to understand yourself. Because everything is there, inside what you are. Every question you ever had about yourself will find there, in your very nature, its most precious answer. It will change your outlook on life, and on yourself. It will transform you. It will shape the way you live and love. It will make you inhabit a different world, for this special knowledge of yourself has a profound influence on form. In that realm, knowledge is magic. It is an alchemist of the first order, that will change your condition and your destination.
So if you want to transform the cold metal of your conflicted, suffering self into the warm, peaceful nature of your golden being, you have to give your heart to the alchemical work that is the knowing of your self. You must first separate everything that has a form from the formless, everything that is moving, changing, appearing, and has a beginning and an end, from that which in yourself knows no alteration or evolution. You have to separate movement from that which is still, improvement from that which is for ever perfect as it is. You have to go beyond the length and width of time and space to know yourself as that which is without beginning or end, devoid of duration or limitation.
You will come to see that there is a part of yourself that has no form whatsoever, that you cannot see as an ‘other’, and that is inseparable from what you are. At that moment, you will be transformed. You will notice that your identity is not in your qualities and idiosyncrasies, not in your many experiences and possessions. You will literally change of shape or form — from the solidity and limitations of a body and mind, to the ethereal, infinite, unlimited, aware being that you truly are. You will notice that the world around you has been shaped out of your very identity as being. That the materiality of the world is in fact only apparent, made of the very essence or consciousness that knows it, and is truly yourself.
You will see that you are not bound to your body for an identity. That your mind doesn’t define who you truly are, and that the world you are in is the expression of your identity as infinite being, therefore lives inside you more than you live inside it. So you have the power to be the alchemist of your own self. You have the competence to know yourself, to beat your suffering and forge it as the peace which is the nature of your being. To melt your many conflicts into that which is aware of them, rendering them blunt and inoffensive. You can make yourself undergo a metamorphosis, which is to change in form or nature. Not that you acquire something new, but you come to notice that your being is riding the infinite, and that you have your body and mind joining you there for a life of greater peace and understanding. This is called transfiguration, the ultimate skill of the alchemist that we all are or have the power to be.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Alexander Ivanov (1806-1858)
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Website:
– Alexander Ivanov (Wikipedia)
Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
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