A Speck of Light

Posted on by Alain Joly

What you are is nothing ordinary, nowhere near being ordinary. We have gotten used to seeing ourself small, a speck of consciousness in the wider picture of the universe, with its trillions of other specks. We have made consciousness a mere apparatus, something that allows us to apprehend reality. For most of us, reality as the world is the real thing. Consciousness is nothing to speak about or even mention: just a tiny, taken for granted sparkle in the mind. A mere instrument at the service of a limited, separate entity. This instrument is nearly transparent, hardly worth considering, and is often reduced to what is called conscience, which is in fact only mind. But could it be that the most important aspect of our lives resides there, in and as that speck, in and as that sparkle that we have ignored and misunderstood for millennia? We have been exclusively fascinated by the content of our minds, by our bodies, and by this enthralling world, and we have stopped there, leaving the most precious jewel of our lives aside. But this attitude is in fact an elaborate system of avoidance. As Krishnamurti once said: “Your whole concern is with escape.”

We are constantly privileging the content at the expense of the vessel that holds it, and the known at the expense of the unknowable. We want to possess and control, and feel the satisfaction of it. We prefer having experiences to exploring the nature of all experiences. But there is a seed waiting in the tender soil of our mind, that needs our attention and care. It thrives when being observed. It grows under the scrutiny of a loving contemplation. Its infinite proportions are a thing to watch, that can turn your life upside down, and sweep it clean of its erroneous foundations.

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Consciousness: from its being veiled to its being realised… (READ MORE…)

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The Sieve of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ – Paul Cezanne, 1890 – WikiArt

Consciousness wants to have it its ways. That’s how we meet life on such a bumpy road: Because we oppose the naturalness of being or consciousness, with our views and ideas. We too want to have it our ways. So there is a friction here at play. This friction is our suffering. This friction is the expression of our ego. It is our way of fighting through life, of being stubborn, willing, desiring, at the expense of the truth of our being. The world is not just a world. It is truth in action, with its laws and momentum. They cannot be ignored. They require our understanding, our consensus, our unanimity and harmony, our unison. This unison commands us to look in the same direction, in that very sacred meadow where being can be met. Don’t look for the world to be such a place of meeting. There is an obligatory passage before you can meet the world and your life at the level they must be met. This passage is yourself at its deepest. It is but the hidden expanse of your being. So being is your exploration field. It is your developer liquid, that will give your life its true colours. This is how the world is to be met — through the intercession or filter of being. This is where you will be handed the gift that you have been relentlessly looking for. A gift that will never disappoint you, for it has been uniquely designed for your needs.

So meet the world in being. Meet your life in being. You will smoothen your bumpy road into a path of truth. Life will stop being an achievement, to be only the natural consequence of your internal exploration. Contemplate your being in all occasions, and you will render to your life its ultimate, pristine, innate perfection. You will stop using your life for your own private objectives, distorting it to your conditioned, egoistic convenience. Cease trying to acquire things, bending them to meet your own preferences. Notice that the harshness of life is always on your side. We command suffering and conflict, we invite difficulties. They are the pointed head of the army of our egotistical tendencies. Remember separation to be your worst enemy. Don’t let it come through your door, no matter how seductive it may appear to you. Don’t make it your special guest. Any entity that forms inside your self as an object is only a treacherous self. Trust only formless, undivided being. Pass your life experience through its sieve. Let being be your guide, that one thing which comes first, which is preeminent in your life, and through which life ought to be lived. Sieve your life through the natural influence of being. That’s how you avoid friction. That’s how you annihilate conflict. That’s how you kill all possibility of suffering in the egg. And that’s how you invite the gift of happiness, love, beauty, and eternity in your life — these coveted needs of yours.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cezanne (Wikipedia)

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Isn’t Life a Simple Thing?

Posted on by Alain Joly

We as an apparent body and mind are nothing but the conditions met for the apparition of a world and all the resulting experiences that take place within it. We are simply housing the thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions necessary to enact experience, and give it a shine of reality. But the essential of what we are is neither in thoughts, nor in feelings, nor in sense perceptions. The essential of a mind is made of consciousness. Awareness is its structure and its backbone, without which there would be nothing left. If it wasn’t for its awaring quality, our mind would be no mind. Our thoughts would crumble and disappear to never reappear. Our feelings and sensations would suddenly blacken and decay in an instant, to be never formed again. And the world would be swallowed back into infinity, if it wasn’t for the consciousness that gave it its essence and knowability. Look as you may, you won’t find a mind of your own anywhere. At best, just a few scattered thoughts, and the momentary and illusory appearance of a self.

Observe carefully. A few thoughts can never make a mind; and neither could some random feelings. You couldn’t own the necessary self that you need to function in a world, without some inseparable and indispensable measure of knowing. So it is all about knowing. It is all about being conscious. Awareness holds it all together — your body; your thoughts and feelings; your world as sense perceptions. All of these come into existence at the only condition that an ‘awareness’ is present. If awareness goes, you go. If consciousness goes, everything with you go. The world goes. No bodies viable. No flower fields. No Milky Way. Everything falling apart. Universe shut black. Just a mess! That’s the power of consciousness! Far from being a mere function of the body, awareness is what holds the body and the world together. It is the essence of everything. It is the indispensable matrix. It is the ocean in which the waves and currents of thoughts, sensations, and world are dancing. And it has no home where to rest but itself. In fact, it is itself a resting place for all apparent minds, bodies, things, selves that make up a world. Consciousness gives existence with its being, allows relationship with its knowing faculty, and brings the consolidation of happiness with its loving nature. Then it returns into itself and stays there, in utter peace and completeness — replete with itself. And when you have seen it all as it is, and yourself as you are — indivisible being — then might come simply a swell of awe. God, isn’t life a simple thing?

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Ardent Disciple

Posted on by Alain Joly

We are strolling down a lane of a thousand gorgeous temples. Only we need to see it, to give ourself the gift of sightseeing. We need to open our life to this reality. But first, we must release this tension present in believing to be a self, and honour this temple of pure being that we are when all our beliefs and identifications have been met and dismantled. Then open your eyes. You are living in a beautiful, never yet visited land. Every fellow human being met, is a temple of consciousness. Every animal encountered, a temple of presence. Every living being that crosses our eyes, our ears, our touch, a temple of awareness, a reflection of our being. We are touring in a world of our self. Never in a distant, exotic land. Always in the comfort of our home as being. Forever linked to and as our deepest presence. We are visitors of presence, being both the presence that visits — as our self, and the presence that is visited — as apparent others.

Down this lane of presence, you will meet countless other temples. Every tree that stands majestic in your gaze, every flower that attracts you with its net of beauty, every fallen leaf on your path, every drop of rain landing on your skin, all temples of your own, scrumptious being. And every object surrounding you, a temple of isness. The clothes you are wearing are existing things. So is the watch at your wrist. Or the chair you are sitting on, or a pen, or a musical sound — the thousand fellow objects of your life. All sharing this same quality of presence, of isness. All temples that reflect the inner beauty or quality of your self, that can be met at every step. See them. Hear them. Touch them. Feel them as your own. Sense their making as your own. Honour them every time you can. They will tell you the story of your self. They are like sculptures of being in the temple of your life.

Don’t forget that every traveller or companion of life, is an altar of friendship, a temple for love. And every object distant or at hand, a recipient for beauty. And every felt presence, an echo of peace, and an occasion for happiness. All are hymns of the divine. All praises to god. But don’t stop here, for there is more to pray, or meditate on; more invitations to honour; more temples to enter; ever more heart openings to experience. Life is a dynamic thing. Bow to everything that shows up. Do not bypass the fact that behind every glance of most human beings you meet, and of many animals too, is also a temple with a cross of suffering. Be sensitive to it. That’s how you will come to exercise your compassion. And notice that within any word uttered by any conscious self, or behind any cry of a distant animal, is a sermon to learn from, by a priest in being. Listen to it carefully. That’s how you will come to exercise your humbleness, or your understanding. And in many actions or behaviours of many of your living friends battling through existence, you will be offered a lesson in equanimity, in courage. Be aware of it. Take it as the expression of your own living self, and an occasion for you to face your unmet challenges. These are the many temples placed at every step of your everyday life. A lane of temples to rest both your broken soul or your radiant being. Enjoy the sight. Be the ardent disciple of it all.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Little Bud

Posted on by Alain Joly

Could there be a bigger relief than to realise, after a life of struggle and constant pursuit of fulfilment, that everything in our experience is already perfectly still and at rest, and already fulfilled? That we have it all as our birthright? That there is no need to run after ourself, to make everything up, to win our peace through our many efforts and achievements? That there is no need to believe and hope, to project and attain. No need to make life into a war, everlastingly caught between desperation and elusiveness, between all our ‘not quite’, ‘not yet’, and other ‘almost’ or ‘not really’. We put everything at a distance, therefore making happiness into an object, and pursuing it as something to attain or achieve; something dependent on how smart we are, or hard-working, or focused, or lucky, or god knows what. This is to make peace and happiness into something puerile and vulgar, some kind of expensive item to be bought in the marketplace.

Should we not get it right once and for all? Should we not have a definite and thorough look at ourself, and have it all crystal clear? There is no self, inside this body and mind of ours, that is placed at a distance from the objects of experience, and that can use them for its own fulfilment. To believe that there is such a self is what makes life into a battlefield, what renders us small and lacking, suffering our way through existence. We have invented this self. We have fabricated it with all the leftovers of the thousand things and events of experience. We have made ourself into an inextricable bundle which we can never fully know and get hold of. For the simple reason that it is not there. And yet, unfortunately so, this apparent self is our veil. This invented self is our loss. It is what makes us blind to the real life, transforming peace and happiness into objects that this self must attain and never can. How could it in a million years? This self has no reality!

The problem is: we have fabricated, given flesh to something — a self — that is inexistant, and by doing so have made our true and only self and reality into something that appears to be absent, fleeting, elusive. This fabricated self veils a presence that is immediate and intimate. A presence that doesn’t need to be projected. A self that doesn’t need to be arranged or perfected. This self is in fact that thing which we are taking to be just an instrument or function — a consciousness for our invented self — when it is in fact that very perfected self which we are desperately trying to attain. Our fascination for the world of objects has transformed a magnificent and fully grown flower into a little, hidden bud that we have seen and ignored a thousand times. This fully grown self is already what we are unknowingly, and its hidden presence grants like an intuition or memory to the illusory ’me’ which we are desperately trying to perfect. This self owns also, entwined in and as its very nature, the peace and happiness which we are looking for, already achieved and at hand, therefore never lacking, and never in need to be pursued.

Another thing is: there is singleness in our experience. Don’t look at the many, but contemplate the one as being their unique reality. See this reality as pervading everything to the point of being the very fabric of experience. See this reality as being your dearest self. And see this self as being the self or essence of all seemingly other apparent selves and things. This is how we vanquish conflict and suffering. This is how we annihilate struggle and effort. This is how separation is seen through. This is how we make our world a world of peace and harmony, whatever the forms the present dance may temporarily acquire. For you have seen yourself and the world as they are: pure, unbreakable peace. This is why some have called this presence God, on account of its grand, pervasive, loving, and all-encompassing nature or quality, and because it is forever here, forever now, therefore infinite and eternal. Our self and world have been discovered to be god’s being. The little, lost, suffering bud has been discovered to be flower. Its beauty and power therefore self-explanatory.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Golden Speaker

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Saints John of Damascus and Cosmas’ – Menologion of Basil II, 11th AD – Wikimedia

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“The knowledge of the existence of God is implanted in us by nature.”
~ John of Damascus

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In spiritual matters, it is always a pleasure and a thrill to find a new gem, to mingle with a different formulation, to venture for a while with an old, unexpected description of the perennial understanding; in more simple terms, to stumble on a new exponent of the eternal truth. John of Damascus is one such talented teller, to the point of having been named, in his own remote time, the ‘golden speaker’, or literally — and even more poetically — ‘streaming with gold’ (from the Greek ‘Chrysorroas’). John of Damascus was born in 675-676 AD to a prominent and wealthy Arab-Christian Damascene family. He is known to have composed many hymns and canons that are still sung today, and has written treatises, teachings, and other works, amongst which a highly influential synthesis of Christian philosophy called ‘The Fountain of Wisdom’.

Although raised in a rich and influential family, John became so dissatisfied that he relinquished all his possessions at around the age of 40, becoming a priest and a monk in a monastery near Jerusalem, where he spent the rest of his life studying, writing, and composing. The excerpts presented here are borrowed from the last volume of John’s work ‘The Fountain of Wisdom’, translated by S. D. F. Salmond, called ‘An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith’. In Book I, Chapter 1, John shows in a few eloquent quotes, that God is not to be apprehended in objects. It is empty and unreachable by thought or the mind. However, God is not knowable outside of, or away from ourself, but only in and as our very own self. In consequence, the nature of God as awareness is self-sufficient, and doesn’t need to find peace and happiness outside itself, in the objects of experience, which would rob God — and ourself — of Its/our divine nature…

“No one hath seen God at any time. […]
The Deity, therefore, is ineffable and incomprehensible.”

“God, however, did not leave us in absolute ignorance.
For the knowledge of God’s existence has been implanted by Him in all by nature.”

“No one knoweth the Father, save the Son, nor the Son, save the Father. […]
[no one] has ever known God, save he to whom He revealed Himself.”

“The Divine nature […] is both passionless and only good.”

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Discover the life and insightful writings of John of Damascus… (READ MORE…)

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The Buddha Nature

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Buddha Painting at Amazing Banyan Tree’ – Utsav Rock Garden – Wikimedia

When you see the representation of a Buddha in meditation — or a Shiva or a goddess —, it is not about a person or a god, not about an entity, no matter how mythical or divine he or she might be. It is yourself represented. It is the description of your own aware being. Present. Self-sufficient. Undisturbable. Undivided. Not dispersed. It is a representation of consciousness — that thing or essence of which we are made, and with which we are all having our many experiences. It is the very form of being. It is an attempt to make seen what cannot be seen, to make graspable that which cannot be grasped. It is the form of the formless. It is teaching itself. It is truth in a condensed and visible form.

To see it that way will never make you laugh again at the expressions of devotion in front of statues. It is not to say that the immense majority of believers do not see in these statues the representation of a person or a god, but rather to emphasise the truer significance behind these objects of devotion. They are reminders of truth, wake up calls from the bottomless being contained in your own being. They are beseeching you to direct your attention inwards. You are being asked to devote your attention to your self, to worship your own being, to not disperse yourself in the ten thousand things and the endless dance of thoughts and feelings, but to focus on that which is before them, that which is seeing them all. That is your true self, and that true self is Buddha-nature.

A Buddha in meditation is not a Buddha in meditation. It doesn’t tell you that you should meditate. It is rather the expression of the very being that sits as your very self or awareness. In other words, it is you. You are this close to a Buddha sitting in meditation. A breath away. Less than a breath, you are it to a point that you can never even envisage. That’s what keeps you so far remote from it. This is the real belief: to think of yourself as being a common person and not a Buddha. Imagination is taking you far away from your true self. Don’t let it do that to yourself. Don’t be so malleable as to follow the injunctions of a voice in your head. Sit down in yourself and look within. Surrender to the presence of your innermost being. Stay with it. Admire it. Your true nature is nothing but Buddha-nature. It is the only thing that you must not be asked to believe. It’s just for the realising.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Utsav Rock Garden

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Website:
– Utsav Rock Garden

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