Bhārata Mā

Posted on by Alain Joly

We continue here our series of texts or essays on different subjects of spiritual interest. The question here is: ‘Why is India so often such a determining factor in our spiritual life?’ Let’s explore it…

 

“For our goal was not only the East, or rather
the East was not only a country and something geographical,
but it was the home and youth of the soul,
it was everywhere and nowhere,
it was the union of all times.”
~ Hermann Hesse, “The Journey to the East”

 

India. I visited her and fell under her spell and her charm. If I look back, my spiritual journey started as a big cliche: I went to India to find truth, and I found it. Well, I didn’t find a neatly arranged package of truth, ready made and understood to be lived for ever thereafter. No, I rather found a messy bundle of bewilderment and puzzling questions about the nature of truth. But it had a lasting impression on me. Mind you, it came in the form of a big, exotic, full-fledged, but short lived awakening experience. Nothing less for this little big man who knew nothing about spirituality, and woke up to his first Indian trip burdened with a memory and experience that would take him a lifetime to understand. So why? Why does India take such a large part in shaping not only my life, but the life of so many people, when it comes to spirituality? What lives there that is so potent? Let’s find out. Let us all embark on a journey in Bharata, which the Brahma-Purana describes in this way: “The continent situated north of the Ocean and south of the Snow Mountain is called Bhârata. There resides the descendants of the tribe of Bharata. Its width is seventy-two thousand times the distance traveled by a cart. A land where deeds are fruitful for those who seek deliverance.”

An essay on the discovery of India’s spiritual heart (READ MORE…)

 

The livelier dances the sea

Posted on by Alain Joly

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Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Poet’, as he is affectionately known in India, is the author of some delicate, lyrical poems, often with devotional accents. This gem comes from the lesser known ‘A Flight of Swans’:

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My footstep
I know you hear night and day.

Your pleasure
Blooms in the purple of Autumn’s dawn,
Sparkles in the springtime shower of blossoms.

The nearer I come to you on your path,
The livelier dances the sea.

Like lotus-petals my life unfolds
From birth to birth,
And your crowding suns and stars
Circle me in wonder.

The blossom of the world woven of light
Fills your offering hands,
And your shy heaven
Unfolds its love,
Petal by petal,
In my sky.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

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From ‘A Flight of Swans’ (Poems from Balākā) – Translated by Aurobindo Bose,
John Murray Publishers 

Picture by Alain Joly

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Bibliography:
– ‘Gitanjali’ (Song Offerings) – by Rabindranath Tagore – CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Website:
– Rabindranath Tagore (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)
– The Heart of Tagore (Homage to Rabindranath Tagore)

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The Secret

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Open Window’ – Pierre Bonnard, 1921 – WikiArt

There is a secret. Do you want to hear it?… So come closer, because like all secrets, it must be whispered. We mustn’t scare anyone.

Are you ready? Here it is: The world is not as it was presented to you. You have been fooled. There is a misundestanding.

It is the best kept secret in the universe. Why? Simply because it is not hidden. Or rather, it is hidden in view of all, in full light. Every religion has tried to conquer it and has failed. Not by lack of believing, as they would like us to think, but by excess of belief, of fascination.

Only the most mystical of their representatives, the most courageous, the most eager to know the truth beyond all other considerations, have approached it, discovered it intimately. Because this secret requires everything, it wants the whole of you. It won’t let you know it from a distance. It wants a total union, therefore a sacrifice.

So, are you ready?

Look carefully. Become impregnated with consciousness, feel it, be ‘it’, to the exclusion of all that you have been taught about yourself. After all, do you really believe that you are your body, to which you gave a name? Do you really think that you have an age, that your thoughts describe you, model you? Do you believe yourself to be so small, so narrow? Is your life just a series of experiences that happen to you, and that will make you either beautiful or stupid, mediocre or refined?

Look again. Are you not experience itself, are you not the world? Are you not absent to the presence of the world? And therefore immense, infinite, eternal, your body marrying the outlines, the confines of the universe? Are you not the very vessel, the One of all things, of which you would be both a part and the totality?

Look. Observe.

The world is not separate from you, doesn’t stand at a distance, and you are not a small thing lost, cut off from everything. You are the experience itself, without any separation between a body, a mind, that would be yourself, and the rest of life and the world that would impose its experience on you. There is only experience, and that is ‘you’.

You are everything, the entirety of what exists. One piece. Nothing that exists is foreign to you. The world is you. Do you hear it? You are the world. Nothing is foreign to you. Nothing that would not be ‘you’. You are your own constituent, and all that, the world, is you! Do you hear it?

That is the secret, God, Love, Life, Death.

It is you !

You are that…

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

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Website:
– Pierre Bonnard (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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On Labyrinths, Grace and the Via Creativa

Posted on by Alain Joly
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Labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral

Miriam Louisa Simons is a retired artist and educator, and the creator of several excellent blogs on the non-dual journey. I’m happy that she is the first friend invited to contribute here. Out of a lifelong dedication to art and spiritual inquiry, she invites us to delve into the image of the Labyrinth, uncover its connections with our life, with grace, until ‘we arrive naked at the freedom that was always there’…

 

 

 

“Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
or the ball can guess where it’s going next.”
~ Rumi

 

The Labyrinth is a familiar symbol. Its enigmatic presence has left footprints that fade back into the beginning of the human story. Its origins and its purpose have been rich fodder for research and speculation.

I don’t pretend to know the truth of its tale, but see the archetypal labyrinth as apt visual shorthand for the map of a life, and that’s how its symbolism is used in this little essay.

The many lanes of the Labyrinth are in fact only one long path that winds and twists and turns back on itself as it explores all the territory of a life before arriving at its Heart.

By ‘Heart’ I mean the natural essence of the ‘walker’ of the Labyrinth – beyond both conception and perception – the unknowable and ineffable awareness we nevertheless recognize as our changeless Being.

An essay from Miriam Louisa Simons (READ MORE…)

 

The ghost in the system

Posted on by Alain Joly

Here is a reminder inspired from the words of Rupert Spira. I love this expression from Rupert: a ‘ghost in the system’, because it gives a vivid image of a reality that is so easily overlooked. It is necessary and terribly efficient to look into these matters for ourselves. This is why I like to share here the parts of a spiritual teaching that sounds like ‘something to do’, something to experiment and verify for ourselves:

‘During the day, doing whatever you do, keep on searching for the ruthless person or entity you have been working for frantically, check that it ever existed, look if it is there at all, if you are not the zealous servant of an illusory master who actually never ever existed… Is there anybody there, an entity to whom all this is happening?… Enquire by looking within…’

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Further exploring on the subject:

“You know so many things about yourself,
but the knower you do not know.
Find out who you are, the knower of the known.
So far, you took the mind for the knower,
but it is just not so. Look within diligently.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

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“All we know is experience but there is no independent ‘we’ or ‘I’ that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced. From the point of view of experience, which is the only real point of view, experiencing is too intimately one with itself to know itself as ‘something,’ such as a body, mind or world.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“The self that we seem to have become as a result of the forgetting or veiling of our essential being is an imaginary one. It is in fact a thought, not an entity or a self, that has caused this exclusive association of our self with an object of the body and mind.”
~ Rupert Spira

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Bibliography:
– ‘Presence’, Vol. I & II – by Rupert Spira (Non-Duality Press)
– ‘I Am That‘ – by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (Non-Duality Press)

Websites:
– Rupert Spira
– Nisargadatta Maharaj (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Fleeing to God (other pointers from the blog)
– Khetwadi Lane (Homage to Nisargadatta Maharaj)

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Let us all set out on a long journey

Posted on by Alain Joly

Let us all set out on a long journey
One for which time doesn’t count
For it has to be lived in this very moment
This only is the mark of eternity

It is a never return engagement
For we know not the winds and rains
Neither the heights of the waves
The traps that go with such an endeavour

Sailing is indeed a hard work
For the clouds seemingly beautiful
Attractive in their so pristine shades of white
Could turn suddenly our deadliest enemies

We look so frail in our vessel
So fragile in front of great nature
Not the oceans and skies and clouds
Though grand they are indeed

It is time for keeping up the sails of willingness
Roaming along the raging roads
For now it is our own Nature
That claims to be marvelled at

Looked at with wonder
And curiosity
At last

At last!

 

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Poem by Alain Joly

Painting by Marek Rużyk

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Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

 

The Whirling World

Posted on by Alain Joly

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“A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning.”
~ Rumi

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“What is the significance of this dance? See that if you experiment yourself, turning and turning around in circles, you may realize that it is the world that rotates while you stand still. Here, in our center, and for ever, is the Immobility. When Rumi turned and turned, he must have seen around him the trees, the ground, his disciples, the sun, the moon and the stars. He must have seen his body, his arms stretched out, his feet, all moving. But closer than that, there was Immobility, Silence, Peace. While he was turning and turning, while he let go of the turning world, his sense of oneness with the Source probably got deeper. The depth, the jewel and the mystery of Immobility must have swallowed him and washed him wave after wave. In this Ocean of Love where he drowned, he dissolved until only the Ocean remained. While Immobility lies in the center of the whirling world, without anything that neither comes nor goes, like a rock that is always present and sure, joy sprung forth everywhere around, and so did the ecstasy of the dance. In the midst of the fuzzy world, spinning again and again, he had capitulated, drunk with the beauty, the wisdom and the love of the Beloved.”

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Text by Ergin Ergül – ‘La sagesse de Rumi’
(Translated from French by Alain Joly)

Painting from Iranien artist Hossein Irandoust

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Bibliography:
– ‘365 Days With Rûmî’ – Ergin Ergül

Website:
– Rumi (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
Other articles from the same category ‘Shreds of Infinity’
– Rumi (Homage to Rumi)

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