The Unknowable

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘I don’t know anything about myself’. That’s where to be in life — in this position of not knowing. We are always piling up informations about ourself. We are so eager to. That’s our money. Knowledge is our currency. But see what knowledge has done to us. This constant knowing that I am this, and I am that. This knowledge hurts us, brings shame on us, or regrets, judgement, suffering, hope, belief — it fills us with what we are not. I understand that you so want to fill yourself up, that you fear being nothing. But try it. Try it once — to not know anything about yourself, which is a position of truth. You can know about anything in life, but see that you can never know yourself as an object. If you know something — anything — about yourself, this thing is in fact what you are not.

Therefore know that what you are has to be kept thoroughly empty. Believe me. Don’t fill it up ever. Yourself must be left unknown, pristine. This is from where you can fully watch and listen, from where you may invite anything and anybody in: In yourself — which is not yourself — and which you cannot know. I know, you have been told on other occasions, to know yourself. But they in fact meant: Know yourself as that which is spotless, innocent, untouchable, and absolutely unknowable. Keep it that way. Don’t crowd it with ideas or beliefs. Don’t think that you know it. You can’t. Keep yourself virgin of knowledge, and invite anything or anybody you meet along the way in that place of emptiness, in that clean spot of sacredness. That’s the place to be in, the place which you borrow from God’s being and which you can never know. This is the place of no suffering, of no shame or regrets, of no hope, and of no thing to battle with. This is what happens when you don’t know yourself: you don’t judge, you have no contempt — for you know that the other is as yourself, unknowable.

That’s the beauty of it, that I cannot know anything about myself. I remain free — free of accumulation, free of being something. Therefore open, available, fearless, which means peaceful and contented. But it is not something you should do or stop doing. Just notice it, that you yourself is the only thing in the picture which you cannot know, that you yourself is the unknowable element of your living experience, the one thing that you cannot touch in any way. Anything that you may do about yourself will be a corrupting factor. For what you are doesn’t need to be changed or improved. In fact you cannot, so you might as well not start in the first place. Stay away. Keep your deepest self or being as that unknowable portion of yourself. Leave it as it is: uncorrupted and incorruptible. Experience the space and freedom that you acquire as you take your stand as that deeply cherished and unknowable self. Be unknown to yourself.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Elsebet Barner

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Finding Relationship

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Hazy Relationship’ – Rinaldo Wurglitsch – Wikimedia

If you think you are having a relationship with another, you’re telling yourself a story. Literally. For this is what ‘relationship’ truly means: ‘to recount’, ’to relate’, ‘to refer’. More precisely, it means that something has been ‘brought back’, or ‘carried back’. So relationship is not an innocuous word. It expresses something fundamental, that for our relationships to be, we have to conjure up the past, or some kind of knowledge. We have to refer to something, to bring back some old memories, some kind of object or image. We have to bring the past into the now. And this is what we have done so far, to attach our relationships to some kind of reference to the past. We have learnt that we cannot be related to another outside the field of memory or images, without making concepts, without burying our relationships into the impasse of storytelling. But in fact, real relationship only takes place when we stop relating anything to another person or object. It is the moment when you are emptying yourself and the apparent other from the past or the future, which is from knowledge.

Relationship as we know it is a process that involves separation. It is an interplay between two entities that have been brought about, fabricated, their reality made into selves out of fear, habit, convenience, or ignorance. These objective, illusory selves are so brittle that they are incapable of making true connection. They are like empty shells with no real substance. The only possible connection between human beings is love. Just think about it for a moment. Why do we hug anybody? Is it because we acknowledge the powerlessness of words and rather mimic our deep connection through the use of body language and silence? How do you convey what cannot be conveyed? What can you do when words come short, other than fall into silence and cancel the space or division between you and another? This annihilation is the act of love itself. It is the acknowledgement of being or ‘isness’ as the only possible connection. It is the truth of ‘what is’ when all conceptualisation has come to an end, when memory has been brought to its knees.

True relationship is the flowering of consciousness. It is the coming to the foreground of the reality that stands behind all apparently existing things. It is the noticing of the reality that is here amongst beings and things — the ciment behind it all, the nature of everything, the deepest connection there is, before which all other connections pale into insignificance. The irony is that you can only have true relationship with another when you don’t make up a relationship, when you don’t bring in any idea or judgement, when you don’t invite fear or former hurts, or condescendence, or even respect for that matter. You must stay silent, empty of qualifications. You have to be who you truly are, to let the natural relationship of love come to the foreground and act itself out through you, and in spite of you. Let it carry you where you are, at the right place of your pure, innocent self where relationship is not anything you do but what you are as being. It is ‘what is there no matter what between beings’ — be they human or otherwise.

So be watchful of what you bring. For the qualities of the world will depend on the quality of your relationships. That’s how a world is being experienced — through relationships. So don’t start with yourself, with a self, any self, and relate from there, from this position of untruthfulness, of deceitfulness. You’d make an insane world. A world where we use, impose, abuse, misuse, mistreat. That’s how wars are launched, through biased relationships and crooked selves. See how fundamental relationship is, how it can make the world a place where hurt, anger, ignorance are being acted out. Or how it can make the world a place of peace, harmony and love.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Rinaldo Wurglitsch

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God’s Favourite Child

Posted on by Alain Joly

You are not alone, not just anybody left in one corner of the world, with no resources. You have been given a world that cannot go wrong, except in your own imagination. So you may relax now, and let yourself be. Just be. You can give it all away, all your worries, all your concerns about a future. Keep only this one reality close to yourself: you are. In that being is contained all that you need. Be only concerned with that, with presence. Feel it to be your nurturing essence, your progenitor. You are God’s favourite child. We all are. We worry and suffer until comes the day when we realise it. Know this filial nature as your only reality, your one solid insurance in life. God is as close to you as your sense of being is. It won’t leave you ever. It has been building a gorgeous house for you to live in. This house is the one you already are in. It is yourself, who you are of all eternity, although you may not have noticed yet. It has soft, silk drapes on the walls. For there is luxury in being yourself. And the only thing that brings you closer to putting an end to your suffering is the knowing of that — the knowing of being — with its inescapability and the soothing comfort contained in it.

There is a special sense of gratefulness that comes with simply being. Have you tried it? To simply be the one which you are. With no supplement needed. No artifice in the least. This very sense of being is God showing to yourself how he cares for you. How much you matter to her. You don’t need to add anything to that. Actually, you shouldn’t: that will make you drop from god’s sweet embrace. So be always under the warm influence of being. Feel that you are it, and that you are in this way as God’s being itself. You will never have to look for an identity outside yourself. For there is only one drama currently running in this world. It is that they made you think that God is far and away. An impossible task while it is in fact the nearest, most accessible thing there is in your life. One that needs only a little attention. The attention of being. The curling up in the warm blanket of your self. Just that. Simple and easy. The only thing you do not have to reach. God gave you the favour to only be. So stay acquainted with it. Do it justice. Return the favour. Be only being. That’s how God can recognise you as its favourite child.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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An Explanation of Reality

Posted on by Alain Joly

You may not be interested in these matters. You may be an atheist, a non-believer. You may have an aversion towards all things spiritual. It doesn’t matter. You will get it all the same, that the world, the universe, everything — including yourself — are not there. Nothing is really there. Not in the way you had imagined. This is not like everybody has been telling you. Not at all. And you will see it with your logic, with your scepticism — a golden value by the way —, with your Cartesian, rational, solid mind. I will explain. You just have to listen carefully. There is no world, and I will expose to you how it is so. I will demonstrate it to you.

You may think there are billions of other people, countless other versions of suffering, a multitude of experiences, a world teeming with crowds and achievements, and all manner of things, from the most sublime to the most appalling. And there are indeed multiple points of views. But all of the world’s sufferings will always ever be experienced as yourself. It will be for whoever you may be now, and be experienced in whatever experience you may be experiencing now. The whole world is always only a first person experience of the world — in whoever you happen to be at this moment. When another person experiences suffering, it will then be this person’s only reality, and so on. So you will always ever be yourself. There are no ways to be another than yourself, to have another experience that your own experience of being yourself — which you experience right now. So the totality of humanity is contained in that one subjective experience of being. It is all there — in being. The billions of subjectivities, the myriad of experiences, the unspeakable suffering, the expansion and the veiling, the gruesome and the awe, the glory and sacredness of truth, and the compelling ignorance. Every experience of every possible being in this world is in essence made of that one experience of pure, ethereal being. And suffering is when you don’t know that.

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The Watcher

Posted on by Alain Joly

I remember the old odd days when I would sit in the woods on a tree trunk, or on a bench by a meadow, and watch nature playing its part in front of me. I would just watch, thinking very little. I’d leave my life aside, with all its worries and miserable sides. It was not worth looking at, not now, not at this point. For now I’d be a watcher. I knew there might have been a secret here, in this watching, in this looking at anything, at shadowing trees, flowers dancing in the breeze, stack of woods, clouds drifting in the sky. I intuited that it was all there, contained in the watching, enveloped within my experience. In this gaze was the answer. In this questioning was life throwing its identity at me, revealing its essence at last. At least I believed so. But it had to be a skilled watching. It had to have no intention intertwined with intention. It had to stand on this fine line. There was a strange alchemy taking place here, somewhere between the seer and the seen. A sacred, secret brew where reality could be unveiled, if only I could watch with the right, finely tuned focus.

After all, what other reality do we have than this one simple reality of ourself? What other than this presence? Just this presence, this watching, this being, this feeling. Just this. After all, this is all there is. I may look as much as I might, I won’t find anything outside of it. It is all there. I am stuck with it. So I might as well be there, stay there, dissect it, pull it apart. I might learn something of myself, of this looking at something, at anything. As if right there was concealed a hint never caught before, never encompassed, something which could resolve a miserable life. I was quite certain that if I looked hard enough, not at what I was seeing, not at anything out there, but at what this watching is made of, what it consists of, then I might free fall a long way within myself, to land in a new place, a new way of being, a freshness. So I stayed silent, enclosing myself with myself, and watched. Some may call it meditation. But I didn’t know that.

Well, my intuition was right. There is right here, a secret to be felt, guarded behind the limitations of my mind. A hint that my thoughts had concealed, along with my feelings, my identifications, memories, perceptions, sufferings — all that endless, formidable toil. And just there, right in the middle of it, something awakens, slowly pervades it all, and shows me what I am. Ah! If only we could clothe all that we are doing with this quality of watching. And all that we are watching with this quality of being. When all that you are looking at is looking at you. When all that is seemingly other is discovered to be yourself. When you can live and breathe at last, and feel who you are truly. And stay there, in the woods, in the sunlight, amongst shadows, but above all in your newly discovered self. There only exists the song of a bird, the river rushing by, and the silence breathing into it all, the fantasia of my life suddenly melted within one single being. This is where duality is stripped of its reality. Where the One has it all. And where the thousand things — including my old self — are clothed and replaced by their essence.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Truth

Posted on by Alain Joly
Grundtvig’s Church – Bispebjerg, Copenhagen

You cannot get away from truth. You may try. You may try as hard as you may. You may flee from yourself into some ideas, or chase wrong deeds, or hope for unattainable achievements. You may want to obtain what your feelings dictate, or what your miseries ordain, or what your selfish, envious self hungers for. You may go wilfully on that slippery road, but be careful. For sooner or later, you will have to be wiser. For no matter what, you will be called back to stay where you are, in yourself, as yourself. There is no escape from who you are. There are no ideas attainable, no deeds possible, no hopes to be granted, away from the truth of your self. This is your one, given, golden achievement — this self that you are and that you keep seeking in endless, groundless projections. Truth is not to be found amongst scattered objects. Truth is not desirous, impatient, not to be sought away from the constancy of your deepest self as being. This is what disappointment is, to seek truth where it is not, to miss the point, to not meet yourself where you are, at the very point of your most naked being. There is a whole panorama of being to be discovered when you do not disdain or disrespect the truth of who you are for a few adventures out of yourself. These adventures are all part of a big, forgetting scheme. And truth comes when you cease being forgetful, and remember ‘being’ to be your one and only truth.

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The River of Peace

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Landscape with a River’ – Aleksey Savrasov – WikiArt

I think it is important to rest in the peace of our being. To gain that position and stay there, rejoice in it, find one’s home in it. To have peace as our perennial identity. To live in its aura. Then we might hang one thing on the door of our sweet cabinet of peace, a notice with these simple words written on it: ‘Do not disturb’. Why should I be disturbed? Should a thought come, out of habit, and visit me, claiming to break my peace for an adventure out of myself, in search of a moment of excitement, a share of happiness, or an elusive instant of peace, then I might gently tell her to stay away. Why should I break my peace for an activity whose only purpose is to find the peace that I already am? Peace then becomes my best manual to navigate through the many demands of life. It will ease my many battles with choice. It will bring my thousand little craving digressions down to a few necessary ones, that will serve me with something that I don’t already have. It will simplify my quest. I won’t have to be so dispersed, grabbing every opportunity to gain a shadow of peace when peace shines for me like a thousand suns. Peace is like a wide, silent, powerful river that follows one destination only: itself. It won’t deviate from its course. It is already made of the many rivulets that come unable to really feed it, of the thousands raindrops that fall and won’t trouble it, of the ocean that it never in a thousand years needs to expect. As for the storms, they only become an opportunity for the river of peace to flood every single thing found on the shore of experience, drowning them in its everlasting course and presence. What would a storm of peace be? What could it be but the sweetest of contamination, where every possible experience is discovered to be peace itself being stirred out of itself, and landing back within itself. This is when you might change the notice on your cabinet’s door and write simply: ‘Come in for peace.’

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alexei Savrasov (1830-1897)

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Website:
– Alexei Savrasov (Wikipedia)

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