Effortless Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Quiet Moonlight (beyond Catalina Island)’ – Granville Redmond, 1907 – WikiArt

Be effortless. That’s the clue you need if you want to meet yourself. Because yourself is for ever here, a natural presence, a stillness in the background, that is your silent being. If you look, you will see it, feel it — who you are, the nature of yourself. So don’t assume too quickly that you know who you are. That who you are is in your body, in your thoughts, in being someone, an entity. Don’t believe that what you are is tied to and dependent on your body-mind, and that you find your true expression in being a person, preferably a successful one, that can be improved, and is subject to death. These are beliefs, concepts that you have learned but never took the time to verify. Don’t accept the subtle tension that is implied in being someone. Go for that part of yourself that is here without effort, that never moves or changes, that is beyond the apparent boundaries of birth and death.

Don’t even try to be spiritual, for the effort you will apply to bring that identity in, will ruin everything. Be exactly as you are, when you are not anything that can be pointed at. Learn to go beyond everything that you are not, so that you can land on the true ground of your effortless being. That may require just a little bit of effort, a redirecting, a gentle looking, the release contained in a moment of relaxation. That is enough. Don’t go for a strain, an ambition, a glory of any kind. These go too far, will take you to a self, a fake identity that will stand in the way of your innate nature. You are already yourself. Nothing new or other than what you already are is needed. Spirituality is a gentle reminder. It is for you to remember that you are almost as nothing, a breath within a breath, a spirit that you will never in a thousand years be able to own. Spirituality is only about being — being effortlessly. This is your natural, unavoidable skill — what you could never not be.

To make an effort is to pull yourself out of your natural being. It is also the veiling of yourself, for any movement that takes you away from your true nature, will own an identity that is acquired, not innate, and that will close the door in the face of your awareness of being. This little bit of effort is you trying to be a person — what you are not — and refusing to be who you are. Through the absence of effort, you will be introduced to yourself, to your true nature. There is a vast expanse there — in fact infinite — that is the very ground of your being. There is a life there, in yourself, as yourself, that some have called bliss or paradise. Not because it is giving you a new place to be, but in reason of the lack of effort or tension there is in being yourself. In effort is contained suffering, fear, lack, hope, conflict, separation, everything that makes your life a burden. To be yourself without effort is the meaning behind the word ‘bliss’. It is the sweetest fall you will ever experience — to be yourself in this free, unconstrained, unforced way. To be without strain, even of the most subtle kind. The blissful is in the absence of effort. In being carefree. Not that you don’t care. But you have your care — which is love — lodged in naturally being, and don’t need any kind of effort for it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Granville Redmond (1871-1935)

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Website:
– Granville Redmond (Wikipedia)

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

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A Trail of Glory

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The River of Light’ – Frederic Edwin Church, 1877 – WikiArt

If you happen to feel your being one day, don’t let it go out of sight. Follow it everywhere it is. Let it be your only guide. Be gently intoxicated by it, by yourself, by who you are, truly, when you have relinquished this obsession of being a body, and a mind. This is your one and only duty, to stay there, with being, to abide in it, and let yourself be moved by its unmoving current. Don’t go off at a tangent. Don’t take a single step, unless you have with you, as you, this being that you are, and that you could crush at any time, with the single thought that you have your own, separate being. Remember it to be your ultimate identity, the widest circle of your self, without any border, limitless, unfettered by any condition whatsoever.

Feel it in you, as being you, when you go to apparent places. Being tends to stay at home and let your body do the moving. For being never goes anywhere — it is not the travelling type. This is how you can simply go to buy some bread in your street and live a captivating adventure, or explore the farthermost recesses of the earth while feeling quietly at home. Feel that you as being are housing the world, that being is the landscape in which your life is taking place. So be only concerned with the landscape and life will then flow of its own accord. Don’t start believing that you have a life of your own. That’s only the prerogative of the suffering self. No life can be lived happily with an architecture or a design outside being.

And remember that being is a love affair. A renouncing of your own limited self, for a marriage with the beloved truth of your being. A free, princely, bounteous bowing to the infinite. So don’t start making an effort to be, for any effort is an attempt from the part of a belief to reassess its position as a distant, separate, other being. That’s how your nature becomes unseen, when you have replaced it with your own fake one, with your own invented self. For being never hides, if you don’t let it disappear under the weight of your seeking it, of your being somebody that is lacking. So don’t let your being escape you. Don’t lose its trail of joy and glory. Don’t be the one fleeing, running away, desiring to be yourself, by yourself, and then seeking to bring yourself back to the happiness that you have lost, in so many, so many immoderate, superfluous, inappropriate ways. Seek your bliss in being — where it only lies.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)

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Website:
– Frederic Edwin Church (Wikipedia)

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

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The Nectar and the Mouse

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘A Mouse as a Monk’ – Shibata Zeshin – WikiArt

We ought to love our being. That’s what animals do. The ones “that cut the airy way”, and feel “an immense world of delight”, as the poet William Blake wrote. The ones that sit on the window sill, in a pool of light, with eyes clinched in full appreciation of it all. The ones in the meadows, chewing and ruminating away their abundance of presence. Animals have being as their intrinsic companion. They live there, in being, as being, that’s how they have their life in such perfect order. That’s how they are alert, awake, aware, and know patience, diligence, scrutiny, care. They draw their intelligence from their sweet, sublime being, and their fierceness too — their courage, their laws, and their absolute well-being. We humans haven’t been doing so well. We have deviated. We have taken it all so personally. Maybe there is some lesson here to learn. A little wisdom from our friends.

Should we be in any need of a little guru here, I think I dug up the best of all. I didn’t find Its Highness amongst the large and the spectacular, but in the teeming world of our cereal fields, hopping around in the vegetation, feeding on seeds and on nectars. The harvest mouse is a four grams precipitation of the highest wisdom, wrapped in a brown and reddish fur coat, and equipped with a highly prehensile tail for the climb to heavenly heights. This mouse performs a unique sadhana. At the ripest of time, it climbs the stem of a chosen flower, and cuddles itself up in the cup of its petals to have a feast of the most delicious pollen. It stays there, inebriated by the scent and taste of it all. And it so happens that it sweetly falls asleep there. That’s it. This is Its Highness’ special sermon for you. This practice will act on you as a metaphor of the most sacred spiritual endeavour, of the highest understanding. It is saying, or rather showing, that you have to fall asleep to your self, or to sleep your regular self off. To so cuddle in your being as to realise yourself as being only being. To so impregnate yourself with the perfume of being as to be made of its very fragrance. And to so crawl into its blossom and bliss as to be yourself consumed by them both, and revealed as the flower of being itself, as the blooming of happiness.

Its Highness, if it could talk, would say something like this: You have to so totally and one pointedly devote yourself to your being as to feel to be made of it, with devotion fading and appearing as only a residual part of your sense of being a separate self, a somebody other than pure, essential being. You have to love being only being, so that love is no more a bridge between yourself and being, but the very nature of being — of who you are. You will feel the world and experience to be the very scented petals of being. And the stem of your bodily existence will draw its unabated strength and pliability from the rich soil of your selfless self — from its inseparable essence. You will feel yourself to be like a furious, furry ball of being. And experience will appear to you as a sweet, loving cuddle with your own nature. And your life will be made into nothing but a swift disappearance into God’s eternal embrace. That’s how you happy-sleep and wake up to your own nectar of beingness. When you harvest it all. As a mouse simply does.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891)

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Websites:
– Shibata Zeshin (Wikipedia)
– William Blake (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other posts from ‘Eternity with a Smile’ in the blog…

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The Hypochondria of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Imaginary Invalid’ – Honoré Daumier, 1860-62  – Wikimedia

There may have been a time in your life when you had a glimpse or experience that you had considered to be a major event or happening, some breaking news coming from god’s mouth. And yet you were left after it with only scattered shreds of truth. You had failed to inhabit your experience and make it yours. You had stayed on its threshold and didn’t dare to visit its interior and be blessed by it. You remained where and who you always were, with the bitter taste of a failed enlightenment as a topping. So you have entertained the memory of it. You have placed this experience on a pedestal. Worshipped it as something to be attained or achieved.

So you have searched for it. You have enquired, read, experienced, shared. Slowly, almost inadvertently, you have gathered some understanding. You have sailed on the sea of existence, harvesting here a tiny piece of truth, there a hazy recognition, maybe even a glimpse of a wee realisation, which you have again locked behind closed doors. And you have sailed further. It made you push or widen your understanding even more. Silently. Surreptitiously. Until one day home is coming closer to you. You find yourself inhabiting this truth. It is making itself known as being only who you are, or that which you are. It suddenly takes you by surprise and clarity. This is what it is!

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A playful interpretation of the nature of spiritual experience… (READ MORE…)

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