An Abundance of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Spring’ – Theodore Rousseau, 1852 – WikiArt

There is a subtle recognition that takes place on the way back to yourself, when you stop keeping your mind at the level of avoidance or entertainment. At that binary level you are unrecognisable. You live in a world of your own, in which nothing represents who you are. You live in your mind, pushed around by a never-ending storm of endless reactions and pursuits, unaware of what you are — or even that you are. You are surrounded by opinions and beliefs that limit you, and plunge you into a self-made ignorance. You live in a bubble where illusions have formed the world in which you are caught, and to which you have given yourself up. In there you are as it were hidden from the gaze of god, and the awareness of your divine making or reality is eluding you.

As there is no sense of belonging there, you may feel cut off, lonely, lacking an essential part of yourself. You are suffering from having deviated from your inborn identity. You have forgotten who you are, and are roaming from thought to thought, and from experience to experience, in search of something that will finally complete you. And the tragedy is that you will never find it in the place where you look, for that place is precisely what is separating you from your real self. That place is imaginary, for it is the stage of your misunderstanding. You live in a vacuum, in your world of misunderstanding. All your life takes place within the limits allotted by your false beliefs about life. Where there is only a seamless reality, you have created an illusory boundary between yourself and reality. You have missed that you were yourself that reality. You have lost faith. You committed the sin of being a somebody, and in doing so have pushed reality out of sight, at a distance from you, making it, through the senses, the world in which you live, when you are yourself the reality in which the world appears, and from which it borrows its thousands forms. You have given birth to duality when there was none. Out of oneness, you have invented separation, and have invested all your life in this falsity.

But there is more to it. In veiling your true nature, you have made god unknown to you, and rendered yourself unknown to god. This is why you have religion and the need for a belief in god. But the reality that you have unknowingly pushed away through your desire in being a self separate from it, that reality is in fact what you have been longing for all your life, to complete you. And this completeness is nothing but god coming to live in you, as you, and electing your being as its being, while you yourself recognise God’s being as being your being. That’s how you know god, and are known by god. Simply by being only being, by purifying your identity to its ultimate, indescribable, indestructible, unsoiled essence. So nothing lives away from yourself. You contain it all. You are the receptacle for the spectacle of life. And knowing this will place you right where god has its gaze. It will place you in God’s being, which is the only place where you can be known or seen by god. So knowing yourself is knowing god, and god knowing you, without there being a god or a you. Being only suffices. God is where and when there is an abundance of being.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Theodore Rousseau (1812–1867)

~~~

.

Website:
– Theodore Rousseau (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

The Coveted Jewel

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Meera and Krishna’ – City Palace Museum, Udaipur – Wikimedia

With god, or with our utmost being, one shouldn’t be too clinical. Presence is better seen, better felt, as our beloved. That’s how you have truth nearer, when you’re in love with it, and want to bring it close, so very close to you. Because its most intimate essence is not at a distance from you, but has merged in you, and as you, from the eternal now, so that you could remember him on all occasions, and feel her, feel him, as the very core of your eternal being. So your beloved is already hugging you, forever holding you in its infinite, most loving embrace. That’s where you draw your unabated search from, for who wouldn’t do anything, anything at all, to seek to reunite with the love of his life. And how could you not cross the most ruthless torrent to marry the intimate essence of her wondrous being. So go through love. Seek her in your tender heart, where she has been aching for your presence. Look for him in your innermost bosom, where only he longs to surrender. And feel the pang of separation, for it is itself the pathway to your beloved.

And there is more to it: love is uncompromising. So you won’t fancy being separated, won’t like finding yourself away from the warmth of your beloved. So your gaze will never wander far and away from your lover’s tender eyes. And you won’t find difficult to spot her even in the wildest display of experiences and activities, where objects come to assail you. You won’t be easily seduced by another than your beloved, for who would want to leave the bliss of a shared love for the chill contained in seeking an outside pleasure, far so far away from your lover’s beating heart. But be careful now, for this love for the beloved is a unique love. Beware! You can never love your loved one as an other. Love is indivisible. The love you feel is always only the expression of your own silent being. So you will have to let your lover go, not because you separate from her, but rather because you merge your being with his being, and in so doing become one being. This one beingness of the lover and the beloved is the truth of eternal love. Love cannot be split in two, and the love you feel for the beloved — for any beloved — doesn’t belong to you. Love is a burning flame that consumes itself into itself. For there is always ever one mind, one love, one being, regardless of the number of apparent lovers. This is what makes love the most coveted jewel of our lives. Because you disappear, and in that disappearing, you find your gorgeous, luminous, infinite self.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

~~~

.

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

.

God Unveiled

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Illustrated Depiction of God with Holy Bettmann’ – Tintoretto, 16th AD – WikiArt

.
For many of us, god is nothing more than the idea or belief we have inherited of such a being, an idea that is conditioned by religion as the lazy representation of an omniscient, omnipotent entity that is both our creator and protector — in the popular Christian imagery an old bearded figure who lives far and away from us, in a lofty, elevated place for a good view on its creation and creatures. The existence of such a god is almost only a matter of belief or faith, and the relationship we have with it one of reward and punishment, devotion, fear, prayer, praise, but rarely of understanding and exactitude. It seems that we better have god in a hazy place, feel more at ease with not knowing too much about the wisdom that may hide behind that term. So our ignorance is a calculated one, a refusal to rock the boat, and a patting of our carefully assembled opinions from which we derive our sacrosanct identity and security. But let’s tackle god here. Let’s undress the myth and have a thorough eye-contact with the divine. Let’s dare some experiential understanding. Let’s have god out of its hiding place.

Maybe god was never defined because it is the one thing in life that is indefinable. Everything objective that we can know, see, hear, touch, smell, taste — qualities and all — can be described with words and given a name. We have our life surrounded by objects. The objective has filled our experience to the brim, and we are being choked in it — with no breathing possible, and no space allotted to the unknown. God is one such unknown. But how could we describe something that we cannot know as an object? So to god we can only give a generic, provisional name. Because god cannot be pointed at and recognised as an object or entity. God is not an easy catch. The divine defies our understanding, and this defiance is at the core of our misinterpretation of god. So if you want to know god, you have to look for it in your life, and turn every stone and pebble that crowd your experience. So start by removing everything in existence that you can know, see, hear, touch, smell, taste — qualities and all — that have an objective quality and can be given a proper name. You know: everything that you can show to another fellow, and that he too can see, hear, know, understand, and comprehend, just like you. Take it all away, and then see what remains behind.

[…]

An explanation of the nature and reality of God’s being… (READ MORE…)

.

Excessive Imagination

Posted on by Alain Joly

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.

.

~~~

Text and photo by Alain Joly

~~~

.

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

The Voice in Your Head

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is a voice inside your head that is a true tyrant. It has an opinion on everything, always judging, evaluating, commenting — a gossip of the worst kind. It constantly informs you of its likes and dislikes, without you ever truly asking for it. Notice that most situations don’t fit its expectations, for it is a hard one to satisfy. But more than being a tyrant, it is cunning and deceitful. For it pretends to be the voice of an entity — the very person that you are. And it is a mentor so convincing and attractive, that you would follow it anywhere — anywhere, and at any cost — including at the cost of being unhappy, uncertain, fearful, dispossessed of your beautiful self. So please remove yourself from its spell. And do it now. For this voice is not your self. It is placed much too far ahead of yourself. This fake identity is a hesitant one, desirous, not grounded, forever running after its own projected, illusory, unreachable recipe for happiness.

This constant judging and seeking may look like a quest for happiness but it is not. You are not doing it well. This is not the way to happiness: to be a believer, a follower, gullible to the point of endorsing the first voice that comes up in your mind. But only observe it, and you will see that this voice is as thin as the blink of an eye, as barren as a thought can be when it pretends to be the self from which it derives its trifling existence. You have to rewind it all, back to a place of not knowing. For this voice’s pretentious knowing to which you have succumbed, diverts you from your goal, from this innate peace which is here, quietly dormant at home, in your self, as that which you are before all knowing, all judging, all beliefs, curled as your inborn, unsoilable innocence. This unborn stillness is your true self, innocent but all-knowing, still but with the activity of a thousand suns, unborn but bearing the life of a universe, vulnerable to your noticing, but whose presence is unbreakable and therefore immortal.

That one is a more trustable match if you ask me. That one doesn’t need a voice to represent itself. It is the unguarded one, that needs no protection and no incentive for being itself, wide-open, naked as no one and no thing ever was naked before, and will ever be. Its apparent vulnerability is the measure of its utter invulnerability. This inner being or presence is all that a thought, or a voice in the head, could never be. It is humble to the point of espousing the reality of everything, bright to the point of being transparent, undoubtedly present to the point of seeming not there, and so intimately woven in the now that it is overlooked and sought only in the future, which is nothing but a thought in your head. So leave your outer voice and remain as your inner being only. Or rather see that this assertive voice is rendered to its ridiculous and idiotic redundancy, when you observe it from the right perspective of being. So the voice in your head is found to be just a ghost. It never was there as the self you believed it to be. It is the empty shell of an absent being. But its mimicry is nevertheless hiding the voiceless, headless silent being that is your true and only self.

.

~~~

Text and photo by Alain Joly

~~~

.

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

A Gorgeous Feeling

Posted on by Alain Joly

Have you ever tried being yourself? Being me is the most valuable experience one can have. But most of the time, we are not being ourself, we don’t know what it feels to simply be me. We are being anything but me. We are being our thoughts that haven’t asked for this, that were just passing by, and never solicited our identifying with them in such unreasonable proportions. We are being our so-called material body that limits us all the time, even more so when growing older. We are being our identifications, our justifications, our longings and stubborn desires, our most hideous feelings, but never do we simply stop and remain with the gentle expression contained in simply being me and nothing else. We are being our attachments to fear, worry, hope, security, avoidance. We love them and forget ourself in them. And we are being our beliefs, all kinds of them — endless expressions of them — especially the ones which tell us that we are separate from everyone and everything around us. These are the worst ones, rendering us sad, lonely, insecure, suffering from not simply and courageously being ourself. ‘Being me’ is being crushed under the weight of it all.

The feeling of being myself doesn’t come from our various experiences, qualities, memories. These may be feeding our conceptual idea of ourself, yet our formidable inner state of corruption makes us believe that we are them, that this is what ‘being me’ is: to be caught in a forest of objective experiences, to be coloured by their endless expressions, and to be filled by the dark shades contained in them. But the feeling of being me is not located there. It is not coming from any particular. On the contrary, it derives its gorgeousness from its being whole, unstained, unqualified, unconditioned. We owe this feeling of ‘I am myself’ to the pure, simple, hidden reality of awareness. ‘Being me’ is like a sumptuous light that is intimately connected to our deepest reality, and is teeming with beauty and simplicity. Let’s imagine a life where I would be me all the time, with clarity. The feeling of it all. Being me. Being me being all there is. Being me being not anything in particular. Being me being the essence of life — its most intimate and gorgeous component — common to all beings and all things. Being me is the purest expression of ourself, the jewel contained in every possible experience, but which is felt only when being independent from every such experiences, while containing them all. All beings ought to be feeling that very quintessential feeling of ‘being me’, that gorgeous self which was prepared for us all, and which we have longed for again, and again, and again. In fact, it is as simple as this: finally being me — who I am — and that is that.

.

~~~

Text and photo by Alain Joly

~~~

.

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

.

Four Variations on Love

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Branch of apple blossoms’ – Gustave Courbet, 1871 – WikiArt

.

“God is love, and he who dwells in love
dwells in God and God in him.”
~ The Bible (1 John, 4:16)

.

I have been reading Meister Eckhart’s sermon n°5 lately, in the translation by Clare de B. Evans, from an old publication named simply ‘Meister Eckhart’. It’s a sermon dedicated to love and its many aspects. At the very beginning, Meister Eckhart sums up the nature of love in four magistral sentences that had a deep effect on me. So I decided to write down some of my take and understanding on each of these quotes by the Meister and present them to you. I hope they will be of interest…

.

“‘God is love’. That is so, inasmuch as all that can love,
all that does love, he compels by his love to love him.”
~ Meister Eckhart

It is greatly convincing to think that we can love someone or something. That there is something inside us, a quality or emotion, that can spring out of our mind and body and direct itself towards an object, a someone loved, a something loved, and that this love is a personal affair. Well now the question arises: What is it in us that can love, and what is this other that is loved? Notice first that there is nothing in you that can love but love itself. Our mind is in no capacity to love. Rather love happens, shows up naturally, when our mind is set aside for a while — for our thoughts, most of our thoughts, have the power to defeat love, to render it unfelt, dormant, as if inexistent. So if you love anything, anyone, it is not because of him, or her, or it. It is because you have been freed from yourself as a private, separate self or mind, and that in this freedom, love can arise, unfettered, can stretch its dormant limbs, and shine in all directions. After all, have you ever been in love with someone without at the same time loving everyone, everything, around that one? Love is an awakening, an opening. And in that opening, in that crack, reality shows its profound nature. Love is the profound, intimate nature of everything. So when you love someone, there is nothing there, and nobody, no other, that can be loved, except the essence that this one is. Therefore you can only ever love the essence. And you could not love the essence of anything if you were not yourself the essence of everything. That’s how you are compelled, when you love anything, to love god first, which is the essence of both the lover and the loved.

[…]

More reflections on some Meister Eckhart’s statements about love… (READ MORE…)

.