The Sober Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

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“To be sober means not to let the heart cling to anything except God.
Cleaving to other things makes the soul drunk,
and it begins to do quite unaccountable things.”
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~ Theophan the Recluse

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Quote by Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)

Photo by Alain Joly

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Bibliography:
– ‘The Art of Prayer: an orthodox anthology’ – Compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo (Trans. by E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer) – (Faber & Faber)

Website:
– Theophan the Recluse (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Beauty in Essence (other pointers from the blog)

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The Poetic Genius

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Job Confessing His Presumption to God’ (detail) – William Blake, 1803 – Wikimedia

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“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.”
~ William Blake (‘Jerusalem’)

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Artists, through their sensitivity to perception, their pointed quest towards beauty and harmony, are natural candidates for delving into the depth of reality and understanding their true nature. Many poets, painters, musicians, have been able to explore their being in ways that are traditionally the privilege of mystics. Indeed, they wrestle with eternity, and strive to find a way to convey it. William Blake was one such wrestler. He was a poet, painter and printer born in London in 1757. Although not recognised during his life, his art is bursting with creativity, intelligence, and vision. His profuse work, soaked with spiritual explorations, symbolic and personal mythologies, is not to be easily classified. Of William Blake, the 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti wrote that he was “a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors“. Besides, his poetry is infused with pearls of the most profound non-dual understanding, which I invite you to explore here.

In his childhood, William Blake was fascinated by the work of great masters such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer. He was educated at home, was given drawing lessons, and began writing poetry at an early age. Profoundly influenced by the Bible and Christianity, he was all his life gifted with visions and insights, from which he drew guidance and inspiration for his poetry and paintings. He was nevertheless not a follower, and developed his own vision and understanding. He was very critical of narrow-minded religiosity, or what he named the “general truth” or “general beauty“, writing uncompromisingly that: “To generalize is to be an idiot; To particularize is the alone distinction of merit“. William Blake wrote these enlightening verses about his religious endeavour and passion:

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“Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination.”
~ ‘Jerusalem’ (Ch. 1, plate 5)

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“When will the Resurrection come, to deliver the sleeping body
From corruptibility? O when, Lord Jesus, wilt thou come?
Tarry no longer; for my soul lies at the gates of death:
I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave:
I will go down to the sepulchre and see if morning breaks.
I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death
Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate
And I be seized and given into the hands of my own selfhood.”
~ ‘Milton’ (Book the First)

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An exploration of William Blake’s non-dual pearls and poetry… (READ MORE…)

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The Little Bud

Posted on by Alain Joly

Could there be a bigger relief than to realise, after a life of struggle and constant pursuit of fulfilment, that everything in our experience is already perfectly still and at rest, and already fulfilled? That we have it all as our birthright? That there is no need to run after ourself, to make everything up, to win our peace through our many efforts and achievements? That there is no need to believe and hope, to project and attain. No need to make life into a war, everlastingly caught between desperation and elusiveness, between all our ‘not quite’, ‘not yet’, and other ‘almost’ or ‘not really’. We put everything at a distance, therefore making happiness into an object, and pursuing it as something to attain or achieve; something dependent on how smart we are, or hard-working, or focused, or lucky, or god knows what. This is to make peace and happiness into something puerile and vulgar, some kind of expensive item to be bought in the marketplace.

Should we not get it right once and for all? Should we not have a definite and thorough look at ourself, and have it all crystal clear? There is no self, inside this body and mind of ours, that is placed at a distance from the objects of experience, and that can use them for its own fulfilment. To believe that there is such a self is what makes life into a battlefield, what renders us small and lacking, suffering our way through existence. We have invented this self. We have fabricated it with all the leftovers of the thousand things and events of experience. We have made ourself into an inextricable bundle which we can never fully know and get hold of. For the simple reason that it is not there. And yet, unfortunately so, this apparent self is our veil. This invented self is our loss. It is what makes us blind to the real life, transforming peace and happiness into objects that this self must attain and never can. How could it in a million years? This self has no reality!

The problem is: we have fabricated, given flesh to something — a self — that is inexistant, and by doing so have made our true and only self and reality into something that appears to be absent, fleeting, elusive. This fabricated self veils a presence that is immediate and intimate. A presence that doesn’t need to be projected. A self that doesn’t need to be arranged or perfected. This self is in fact that thing which we are taking to be just an instrument or function — a consciousness for our invented self — when it is in fact that very perfected self which we are desperately trying to attain. Our fascination for the world of objects has transformed a magnificent and fully grown flower into a little, hidden bud that we have seen and ignored a thousand times. This fully grown self is already what we are unknowingly, and its hidden presence grants like an intuition or memory to the illusory ’me’ which we are desperately trying to perfect. This self owns also, entwined in and as its very nature, the peace and happiness which we are looking for, already achieved and at hand, therefore never lacking, and never in need to be pursued.

Another thing is: there is singleness in our experience. Don’t look at the many, but contemplate the one as being their unique reality. See this reality as pervading everything to the point of being the very fabric of experience. See this reality as being your dearest self. And see this self as being the self or essence of all seemingly other apparent selves and things. This is how we vanquish conflict and suffering. This is how we annihilate struggle and effort. This is how separation is seen through. This is how we make our world a world of peace and harmony, whatever the forms the present dance may temporarily acquire. For you have seen yourself and the world as they are: pure, unbreakable peace. This is why some have called this presence God, on account of its grand, pervasive, loving, and all-encompassing nature or quality, and because it is forever here, forever now, therefore infinite and eternal. Our self and world have been discovered to be god’s being. The little, lost, suffering bud has been discovered to be flower. Its beauty and power therefore self-explanatory.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Ultimate Absolution

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Spring Waters’ – Vilhelms Purvitis, 1910 – WikiArt

Isn’t it wonderful to discover that you cannot be destroyed? No matter the magnitude of your heartbreaks. No matter the betrayals and the dishonesties — all that is unforgivable in others or in yourself. No matter the untold suffering inflicted to your body or to your self. Isn’t it a blessing to notice that you cannot be broken no matter what? You can believe to be broken, sullied, doomed and punished for your sins. But in reality you are not and cannot be. You are as beautiful as you ever wished to be. Worse even. No quantity of imagination, no originality of a mind will ever prepare you to comprehend the pure and unsullied nature of your self, which equals to nothing but the beauty of your heart.

The only thing that can ever be hurt or sullied is a thought or a belief. You will be hurt in proportion to the extent of your identifications. The greater your illusion, and the sharper will be the pain when it is challenged, or diminished, or trampled. A belief is a living thing. It is not just a dead abstraction that can be easily ignored or overcome. A belief is as alive and sensitive as a self can be. We are made of that belief, we have clothed ourself with it and have become vulnerable to all that can undermine it. That’s how you become a sufferer. That’s how you can imagine to be sullied, diminished, destroyed. It is all contained in one single belief about yourself. And it can be released in one single act of contemplation: Seeing yourself as you are, and not as you imagine yourself to be.

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An exploration into the true nature of forgiveness… (READ MORE…)

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‘Consummatum Est’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Consummatum Est’ – Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1867 – Wikimedia

I happened to visit a church recently, and was intrigued by one single sentence placed just under the main crucifix, which read in French as: “Tout est consommé”. I had never heard this particular formulation before. These words appear in the Gospel of John (19:30), and have been translated into “It is finished” in modern English. These are the very last words uttered by Jesus on the cross before he relinquished his bodily existence, and was resurrected as pure being. In Latin, it runs as “Consummatum Est’.

‘Consummatum Est’

All is consummated, which means all is finished, accomplished, brought to completion. It means we are wholly with the ‘highest’, nothing is left that lingers in separation. All that is other than god, other than the very presence or being that we are, has been consummated, put into the fire of consciousness, eaten, devoured, transformed into its very essence. The truth of it has been exposed, and the objects — all that seems to have its proper existence — have been revealed to be of one single essence. The ten thousand things have been digested, transformed into the truth of their being. They have been revealed as the One. The illusion of multiple existence has been seen for what it is: one being giving no room for an other. Anything that stood as separate or ‘other’, has been consummated into the fire of emptiness. Not a barren emptiness, but a living one, a fertile emptiness, teeming with possibilities, with creativity. Everything that was objective has been devoured into supreme subjectivity, which is nothing but the feeling of being, in which all existing things have found their home, have dissolved their separate identities, have bargained their many names for the Nameless. The many have been revealed as being one. Therefore whole, complete, in need of no ‘other’, or ‘better’, or ‘more’. The many shadows of obscurity or illusion have returned into the light of their essential being. They have disappeared, have relinquished their illusory separateness, incompleteness, or ignorance to return into the truth of their ultimate being as oneness, fullness, or understanding. The shadow of existence always shows up as many. But the pure light of being is revealed as one. This is an end, a finish line, because there is no more to be revealed, no more to be added, understood, analysed, enquired. This is a natural completion, a form of creative death, which means the realisation of the very nature of death as the living aliveness of pure being. It is whole, therefore unattached, innocent, incapable of being sullied or diminished, immune to death, and open to the infinite. Finally, you come to the understanding that this consumption is the sublime alchemical process, the transfiguration through which suffering is metamorphosed into peace, separation into oneness, and death into eternal life. This is the realisation, awakening, or resurrection of our true essence that was buried under, or veiled by, our illusory sense of self and the constant toil of life in the forms of suffering and death. In other words, you have been crucified on the altar of ultimate being. ‘Consummatum Est’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)

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Websites:
– Jean-Léon Gérôme (Wikipedia)
– ‘Consummatum Est’ – Painting (Wikipedia)

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

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Treasures of Grace

Posted on by Alain Joly
In Basilica di Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

.“The heart is but a small vessel;
and yet dragons and lions are there,
and there likewise are poisonous creatures
and all the treasures of wickedness;
rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms.

There also is God, there are the angels,
there life and the Kingdom,
there light and the apostles,
the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace:
all things are there.”

~ Macarius of Egypt (Homilies 43:7)

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Quote by Macarius of Egypt (c. 300-391)

Photo by Alain Joly

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Bibliography:
– ‘Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Saint Macarius the Egyptian’ – by Macarius of Egypt – (Aeterna Press)

Website:
– Macarius of Egypt (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Sayings of the Church Fathers
– Beauty in Essence (other pointers from the blog)

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The Glory of ‘I Am’

Posted on by Alain Joly
Stained glass by Adeline Hébert-Stevens in Church of Passy, France

First, you have to dig. You have to dig beneath every thing that qualifies you. You have to find that pure ‘I am’ hidden under all that this ‘I am’ is or can be. You have to find the raw substance of that which you are referring to when you say simply ‘I am’. What is this pure, unqualified ‘I am’? Over the years, piles over piles of experiences, beliefs, conditioning, have acquired substance and have overwhelmed this simple experience of ‘I am’. This substance has mutated into an apparent self, and ‘I am’ has been buried under it, and made into a collection of ‘I am this’, ‘and this’, ‘and this’, ‘and also this’. So that we can never ever truthfully feel ‘I am’ anymore. It is gone. ‘I am’ is gone with the wind of endless qualifications.

So we have now to resurrect that ‘I am’. To un-qualify it. To strip it bare of its qualities, of its acquired competences and idiosyncrasies. We have to purify the wine of our self, distil it to its essence. An essence that was never lost but only diluted, made secondary and unimportant, when it is in fact the only thing there is. This essence is simply the realisation of an emptiness that is the core of our being, that we never had the guts to look at, or enquire into, but which a simple question and a good-will to find out, could simply reveal with a dumbfounding ease and precision.

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A celebration of the purity of being, before it becomes qualified… (READ MORE…)

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