An Abundance of Spirit

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Chateau Noir’ – Paul Cezanne, 1904 – WikiArt

We always go too far, too quick. We jump to the objective display of reality, and in doing so leave our reality behind. It is a strange phenomenon, this forgetting, this negligence, this hurry. In fact, we pass ourself by, and rush towards what we think matters the most, what we believe to be real. This is how we have made this life difficult, an impossible thing to comprehend, and a hardship: in this forgetting, in this passing by. Our suffering is the product of a simple, single act of absent-mindedness. We have put ourself into oblivion by having made the facile postulation that reality is in the objective, in what we can see, hear, touch with our senses. And then have clung to it, to the point of losing our mind inside it, and losing ourself with it. What an absurd thing to have done.

We ought to be slow and still, if we are to meet our nature. We need to be attentive, if we are to notice our being. Not the one-pointed kind of attention, that we are already so well-acquainted with, but the sluggish one. The lazy one, that doesn’t want to go out and stumble into the world. That doesn’t feel like wrestling with thoughts. That cannot be bothered with the threat or seduction contained in the last surge of a sensation or a feeling. I can assure you that there is already a lot to see, hear, feel, on our way to the vast, far-ranging world that our senses provide. So let us not have time or space on our schedule. Let us forget the agenda that our person has and wants to fulfil. Let us not form any concept, idea, or projection, and delve into what is here before every appearance.

We may see, in slowing down, that there is here a presence that stands still, transparent, and aware. We may hear the sound of a silence that stays unaffected by the clamour of existence. We may feel the world to be but the thousand colours of our sumptuous being. We may notice the pregnancy of spirit in what is seen, heard, felt, and realise this pregnancy to be our very own nature felt, heard, seen. This abundance of spirit in our life is but the disappearance of the entity that sees, hears, feels the world, and the surging of the One as our own and only reality or world. Then we won’t pass truth by anymore. Our own nature will be unmistakable, unmissable. It will meet us in the face at the first surge of an object seen, heard, felt. We won’t miss it because it is all there is. Because there is here the absence of a self living in separation, and the absence of a world as world. This absence is our presence, our nature, our self, our world, and there ends our suffering.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cézanne (Wikipedia)

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’katholikos’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Life of St. Ignatius Loyola. Plate 4.‘ – Carlos Saenz de Tejada – WikiArt

You’ve got to respect the whole. That’s how you live the good life, in having reverence for the totality of your experience. Not just for the superfluous, all that is being the foam of life, that exists and appears, that you can see, hear, touch. You will never make a totality from the world of objects, from thoughts and perceptions. These are but occasional appearances, superficies. They are above you as it were, dancing upon you, at the periphery of who you are, but are not the reality covering your experience — its most profound constituent. You’ve got to go beyond the mundane and the obvious. For we keep leaving something out of experience. We don’t take the whole thing. We are choosy, only care for objects, don’t integrate our ‘within’ — where the reality of our being is. Notice that there is a world here, that is encompassing our world — a presence pervading our reality, taking everything in.

Actually, this is what the word ‘catholic’ is about. In Greek, ‘katholikos’ means: ‘pertaining to the whole’. We have to pay due respect to the whole, to the totality. We must look back at what we truly are, and find there the expression of the whole. I am not sure that Ignatius of Antioch had this in mind, when he first coined the term ‘catholic’ in the early 2nd century AD. He probably meant that the new belief, the new credence, was to be the universal truth, meant for everyone, adopted by all. But there was no need for adoption — the baby was already in the womb. There were no beliefs to be had, no hopes to project and entertain, no happiness to seek outside of our common day experience as being. He didn’t see that in this very word was the answer to all religions, to every quest for the divine peace; that what we were looking for was already here, close, so close to our very experience; and that there was no need to form a belief about it, or a new credence.

To accord with the whole is to be reconciled with our true nature — the reality of our being. It is to be ‘of one mind’, which is what reconciliation means, and to be brought together under the vault of one reality. This is achieved by turning towards the One, which is our true and only constituent. Universality wasn’t meant to be achieved in multiplicity. Universality is the quality of oneness noticed. The totality is in every place you happen to be. There is no totality of which you wouldn’t be the vessel. For the whole is not a geography, not a place to be in. It is the embrace of being. There is a totality in and as the being which you are now, here. You are not inside a totality. The totality is inside you. But mind you, this most venerated Christian Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch did say something of the highest order, when he brought up the word. He said that “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” Yes. Yes indeed. Wherever we as our deepest being are, whenever we as our most profound nature-consciousness are, there is the expression of the whole, of oneness — the totality which is the very nature of the Lord’s House, and which is our nature and our house too.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 108/140)

Painting by Carlos Saenz de Tejada (1897-1958)

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Websites:
– Ignatius of Antioch (Wikipedia)
– Carlos Saenz de Tejada (Wikipedia)

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The Impossible Deed

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Pond in the wood’ – Albrecht Durer, 1496 – WikiArt


We are used to knowing. We have been trained in it, brainwashed with it, and drained by it. Knowing has been privileged at the expense of being. So we have become expert knowers, professional doers, but at being, we are infants, clumsy, penniless. We are without a self worth the name. We are homeless without knowing it. We are without a solid ground — a trembling, uncertain little thing living in the wilderness of objects, battling in the haziness of beliefs, having no place to truly be, to truly rest. We are a wanderer of ignorance, a nescient soul lacking the elementary knowledge of its own being.

But OK, I will give us that. I understand this urge to know. Knowing gives us a bright, shiny sense of self. A fantastic ego. It is rewarding. Being gives nothing, is completely unproductive. At least, so we think. But this knowing of our being is not any kind of knowledge. The will to know the ‘I’ is a sacred will, a holy endeavour. If we want to know ourself, we will come to know it. This is a desire that cannot be left unfulfilled. This knowledge cannot resist any serious enquiry. It will give in sooner than we think. But it is a hard one to desire. The difficulty resides in wanting to know. We shy away from that desire. There is something there we’d rather stay away from. We would rather know beforehand what we have to know, and remain on shallow land. We don’t want to rock the boat of our being. After all, this is where we stand. We don’t want to be swept away from our cherished ideas and beliefs, and be deprived of the security we have so dearly earned. We would rather stay a seeker of the known.

But try it now — to know yourself. And do it with your mind, with your usual knowing faculty. Go there, at the heart of your self. Decide it. Make it your goal: to know who or what you are. It doesn’t matter where you begin. But go not to the periphery, to that which you can know as an object. Go to the heart of your self, to that thing which you have called ‘I’ all your life. What is this ‘I’ that you are being all the time? This ‘I’ is never visited. But now is the day. Go there. Find out what it is. See that you will meet there like an impassable, impenetrable wall. You will find closed doors. All your knowing, your ego, your accumulations: this has made a blocking stone. This has barred the entry, has prevented all true seeing, all knowing worthy of the name. Feel that you cannot go there with your mind. But this impossibility is gold. So keep at it. Keep pushing. Don’t be shy. Use both shoulders if needed. Give it all the strength you have. It will recede. I promise you. Everything can be known. This is no exception.

Notice that what you come against is yourself. This impossibility of knowing the ‘I’ lies in your belief in being an entity. The knower is the obstacle, the impassable wall that bars the way. To know yourself is an impossible deed. You can never know who you are, because who you are is only contained in ‘you are’ — in the feeling of ‘I am’, of being. We are so unaware of our being. Being has been forgotten, relegated in the background, replaced by a knower, a doer, a busy self that insists on knowing who he or she is. But to know ourself, the knower has to first realise itself as being. To know is to be, and to be knowingly. This knowledge dips its reality in being. There is no knowing ourself without being first. Knowing here is only achieved through being, which is the knowing of ‘I’ without a knower. The will to know dissolves into being, which is the only knower there is and will ever be.

This knowledge is found in and as the being of the one who wants to know. You can only know who you are by being it, or rather by simply and only being. In that field of self-knowledge, being is knowing. Being is the knowing done without a knower, and therefore without an object known. It is a pure, unalloyed knowing. Everything you ever wanted to know, to be, attain, achieve, all the content of every sacred book, all happiness, all longings, is found in being, in that which you already are. Your amness is the gate code cracked. You will find who you are on the other side of knowing, which is being. And it is delivered with peace, which is the nature of being. This knowledge is the only knowledge that doesn’t take place in duality. It is achieved in the oneness implied in plainly being. So this impossible deed has now been transformed as the infinite being that we were all along, but had veiled through our insistence in being a knower of the known. We don’t know who we are with our knowing faculty. Ourself is the only thing we cannot know as an object. We know our identity through the fact of simply being. There is no other knowing than being. Being is what we are, without a single ripple of a knower knowing. Know that and you will be reborn as the unborn.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

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Website:
– Albrecht Dürer (Wikipedia)

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Spiritual Wine

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Lovers under the moon’ – Serge Sudeikin, 1910 – WikiArt

The word ‘spiritual’ is quite a nebulous one. It is used indiscriminately, carelessly, for a bewildering array of wildly different practices or beliefs. Krishnamurti didn’t like the word, which he found ‘ugly’, ‘romantic’, ‘unpleasant’, and used it cautiously. So maybe the time has come to clean the word, to give it some of its forgotten brilliance, and dig out its original meaning and raison d’être. I would start with the suggestion that the word ‘spiritual’ simply wants to point something at us: that the world, the whole of it, our experience, everything, is in fact made of ‘spirit’. Spirit is all there is, the only thing in presence. And believe me, this is a timely pointer, for most of us believe the world to be a hard reality, made of something solid, composed of a variety of different objects — our body-mind being considered one such object. So the word has the virtue of reminding us of our true nature, of the nature of everything as spirit, or consciousness.

But it is only a provisional word, one for our time of misunderstanding. There will come a time when the suggestion that experience is made of spirit will be a matter of fact, something integrated, not to be thought about anymore. The word will then become redundant, to be replaced by another word of a higher intensity and meaning. Or maybe there won’t be any need for a word to describe reality. Reality will have been understood, digested, lived as the fact of simply being. Spirituality will have become useless. There will be no need of spirituality, no need even of the word ‘happiness’, or ‘peace’. Once you are wholly, and only spirit, which is peace, which is happiness, what need is there to mention it? There will be no seeking either. After all, what you are, you are. Identity will have been achieved. No suffering around. Seeking obsolete. Out of date. To be disposed of. What will remain is a splendour, indescribable, filling the world of experience to the brim with its essence.

Also, spirit means ‘breath’. It is the breath of life, a thing invisible, transparent, quietly sitting in the background, and yet essential and life-giving. It is what is playing us, giving us an identity and a sweetness of living. For spirit is like the air we breathe. It is still, silent, empty, yet a breath that can blow our mind and make us like an inextinguishable fire. It is the breath of god that we have left unnoticed time after time, but whose presence is holding us in its firm embrace. It is a breath of devastating effects, laying us waste, destroying all traces of suffering and separation, blowing our self away, not by slaying it but by showing this self to be just the air within the divine breath of god. You had thought yourself a hard, solid, but fragile entity, and are now shown to be empty yet as indestructible as is a fire in the wind. That’s what being spiritual, or spirit-like, truly means.

Spirit also means character, and courage. It doesn’t pretend, and rejects a lukewarm understanding. It is uncompromising and free. It is not afraid, not conditioned by the hazards of life. It stays firm, alone, whole, undisturbed. Spirit is eternally high, but mingles with the lowly too, for it is humble by nature. And it has clarity as its best asset, for it is blessed with the purity contained in knowing without being itself a knower. This knowing is undivided, self-contained, total, applying to all and everything. This is what makes it holy, a spirit which cannot be taken apart, and which contains universes beyond universes. It has a religious quality, a sanctity that is beyond what humans have called sacred. The wholeness of spirit cannot be broken, dampened, violated, injured, or even changed. Its holiness lies in the fact that it is one without any division or addition.

And spirit is music too. It has a sound to it, and it is our duty to play it, or rather being played by it — the musician being god, or spirit itself. Our being is found to be the breath of god, the movement of consciousness singing our life on the reed of our apparent self. As that, we may become the vessel of a life whose notes have risen above the ten thousand things of existence, to be taken by various harmonies of silence, peace, love — all carried by a quiet but devastating breeze of inner joy, like a hum. We are like God’s music, and our experience is bathing inside it, and being made melody. This is what spirituality is, and what a life lived in and as spirit sounds like.

“‘Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ‘tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine”, Rumi once wrote in the Masnavi. So spirit is a delightful beverage too. It is what gives us this gentle drunkenness which is the state of our self when it recognises itself to be but God’s being. In Spirit, we are intoxicated by the ‘Love that is in the wine’. For this nectar, we are willing to pay the price of surrender at the tavern.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Serge Sudeikin (1882-1946)

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Website:
– Serge Sudeikin (Wikipedia)

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The Possibility We Are In

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Old Sarum’ – John Constable, 1834 – WikiArt

Whatever there is is God’s presence felt. And whatever we may feel of God’s presence, is what there is here and now, including what exists and appears. It is all here for our recollecting, all here that we can be and be god like. Every experience that we may have, every sorrow and every joy, every fear or trust, every ugly or beautiful appearance, is felt and seen because of our being first. To watch anything is to be watched in return by a presence watching. We can make ourself disappear in it, and be without a self, without the self we have always known and colluded with. And we can share of that impersonal, infinite being that is not ours, but that we can be and embrace as our own. So ‘I am’ is the secret door opener within us, that will give us the world we are in. We will have an aggrandised property, or a world made of the very size of ourself, infinite, manageable, and towards which our being may shine a benevolent beam of light and peace. That I feel is a possibility.

The world will have its secret identity disclosed to us. And we too will have our secret identity revealed. Both being made one, and ourself being of it. Others will cease being others. They will join us as that shared one being. There won’t be any jealousy or comparison, but a rejoicing in and as that oneness felt. Our fate and destiny will be contained inside us, within our own being. There won’t be a time to hope for, or a place to fail in, or a self to mess up. There won’t be a fear of tomorrow, or a regret of yesterday, for both will have merged in and as the being that we are. Time and place will have come to be only convenience. And our very being will have come to be the time and place we are in. That too is a possibility.

The knowing of our own being will have come to be our only experience. The many will have shrunk into the one, and the infinite will have subdued our senses, and made itself seen, heard, touched, and contained within our experience. Happiness will cease being a temporary achievement, and will become the flavour of our shared being with people and things. We will have joy woven into every single corner of our life. That’s the possibility we have at hand.

Movement will be seen as the manifold expression of stillness, and silence recognised as the only component of our living symphony. Turmoil will be felt as this last bit of ourself that we have yet to embrace — not something to be afraid of, but an opportunity that we welcome. We have to see this as a possibility.

So this life is the garden of Eden we once extricated ourself from, but have in fact never left otherwise than in our imagination. And love is not an occasional encounter, but the very air we take our breath from. I’m just throwing the possibility in the air.

Now we recognise after all, that the being of God is what we are — the possibility we are in, without there being a God or a ‘we’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by John Constable (1776-1837)

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Website:
– John Constable (Wikipedia)

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The Birth of Personhood

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Flower of Blood’ – Odilon Redon, 1895 – WikiArt

It is consciousness — not body, not thoughts — that gives us the impression that we are a person with a continuity. There is absolutely no chance that a bundle of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, could give us that impression. We borrow our personhood to consciousness, to the fact of being aware — to this light that creates us in the darkness that are otherwise thoughts, feelings, body. Our sense of continuity belongs to consciousness, to presence — that portion of ourself that is empty, unchanging, not objective, but full to the brim with itself. Our thoughts are but isolated events that are changing over the course of time, and so are our feelings and bodily sensations. The content of our mind is like a passing, unpredictable weather. So continuity in that area is absurd. Our essential self is to be found in and as being. What makes us is in that which is unmade. That impersonal part of ourself is what paradoxically gives us the chance of being a person. We are therefore nothing but empty, undivided being playing ‘being a person seemingly characterised by body and thoughts’. We have got it all upside down: Our person is not prior to consciousness. Consciousness is prior to our person, and the sine qua non of our existence or appearance.

Our thoughts are far away from each other, inconsistent, contradictory, confused, hesitant. They are not the voice of our self, are incapable of forming an identity of any kind. Our identity is to be found somewhere else, in something that we cannot get hold of, or limit, or name. The only thing that could link the different events of thoughts, feelings, sufferings, bodily sensations, and perceptions — all that for us constitute our self, a person with a name and form — is the presence of consciousness. We owe the impression that we are something solid, a real person, to emptiness, silence, stillness. So our person is actually non-existent, or rather has its existence in that which stands unseen between the happenings or events that we think make us. So our story, our thoughts, our body, become evanescent, losing their reality, disappearing within the experience of our massive sense of being — its coming to our attention. Being is seen to be the nature of ourself, which we had imagined in passing, isolated, impermanent, objective events and qualities. And believe me, that makes for a beautiful, gorgeous person — the one we have always wanted to be! A person is infinity being born.

The fact that there is a certain coherence in being a body-mind, and that we are able to live a life, is nothing but the expression of a play, a ‘lila’ as the Hindus are saying. We are nothing but a character in the hands of an actor. A body-mind is the little necessary to carry our wider identity to its term. In fact, all that we seemingly are — a person with an apparent life — is just the vehicle for a bigger quest. We are pretending a body-mind, so that we can realise our divine being. We are carrying infinity on our back, on the back of the finite, giving it the seeming, temporary life of an entity progressing in time and space. But this story, this appearance of a life, is but an excuse, something marginal that serves a wider purpose. We are meant to carry God on our shoulders for a while. At first unknowingly. Until we know God knowingly. Until God has acquired enough substance, and has sufficiently widened Its being in our life. Until God can in return carry us on Its own shoulders. And move us. And swallow us. Then, we find the security and courage to surrender ourself in God’s solid being and be like God Itself. We transfer our being in and as God’s being. And die there.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

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Website:
– Odilon Redon (Wikipedia)

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On Courage

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Turn of the Tide’ – John Duncan – WikiArt

Not to suffer is not as desirable as we like to proclaim. We have mixed feelings towards our agonies and traumas. In fact, we have come to like the beastly thing. Suffering has given us many of the things we cherish in our life. Suffering has given us the hopes that we love to entertain, the pleasures we have developed as a routine of escape, and all the little addictions we enjoy in secret. It has shaped our drives and the nature of our beloved possessions. And our best friendships may have developed as a result of this beating pang in our heart. So this is not easy to let suffering go. A lot will go with it that is like the backbone of our beloved self. Being at peace and happy comes with a price.

There is some identity in our suffering, where is hidden a private treasure that we’d rather keep and nurture. If we are honest, we have to confess that our wounds have made us what we are, have formed the self that we believe we are, the personality that we have come to befriend. We haven’t fought our suffering with constancy, and have come to collude with it, socialise, associate, fraternise. We have indulged in every bit of it. We have surprised ourself having feelings for our pain, entertaining a secret love affair with everything that bites us. So to end suffering requires clarity and courage. For we won’t abandon a dream so easily, or put an end to a pleasure without balking. We need to be convinced. Our road to true happiness is paved with reluctance. We have a natural and well-rehearsed resistance to bliss.

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