God’s Knowledge

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Blue Rigi Lake of Lucerne Sunrise’ – J. M. W.  Turner, 1842 – WikiArt

We know so many things. Everything is based on knowledge, and maybe that’s the way to live, as long as there is a body and a world. Knowledge is the score we need to play our part. But to know something, anything, seems presumptuous. It implies another kind of knowledge — that there is somebody here, a person at a distance, that knows and is a recipient of knowledge. Knowledge fixes us. It gives us a dubious identity — that I am a man or a woman, of a certain age, with certain qualities, and with a whole lot of knowledge, identities, beliefs. That I am unhappy, clever, stupid, happy. That I am a cook, or a carpenter. That there is a chair, a world. That I have skills and preferences. I even have the knowledge of my spiritual attainment.

But there is no knowing anything. To think we know something is a mistake. If we know something, then we haven’t looked well enough. We have stayed at the surface of our illusory world and existence. What we ought to know is the knowledge of our reality, of ourself. That’s the only knowing there is. That’s our world: Knowing. Being aware. All other knowledge is superfluous, is not real knowledge. For what would any such knowledge be, when we discover that there is no entity here with the capacity to possess that knowledge. Go only for the knowing of being, a knowledge which is owned by itself. Notice that you don’t know anything — that’s important to know. We have no knowledge other than the knowledge of our being. Apart from that, everything exists only as in a dream.

We may play the part of the one in the dream, and that’s a beautiful part. There may be a world here that is gorgeous, with many ‘things’ that are known. There may be relationships that have meanings. But this world of things borrows its beauty and making from the reality in which it exists for a time — knowing. And the meaning of relationship is found through its reality, which is love — shared being. Everything happy and true in our life is borrowed from our reality as awareness — the only knowledge there is. If we live or act while ignoring that one knowledge, the world and ourself will appear ridden with conflict and suffering. So notice that the ten thousand things of life — all our knowledge — are transparent, ephemeral, ethereal. What is here massive and solid is their reality as being — the supreme essence of everyone and everything. The truth we live in. Ourself. What is. Not somebody that knows.

There is no other real knowing than the knowing of our essence, of our true nature or identity. This knowledge of ourself is not something we can possess as a person. It is nothing more than pure, objectless, impersonal knowing, and this knowing is all there is, all we are. Everything, everyone, have died in it. That’s why we cannot know anything, for how could we know something without there being first a knower and things with their own reality. The only thing we in fact truly know is ourself, our essence. Our knowledge of anything has died inside pure knowing long ago. It is still available, but its reality is apparent. That’s why we can never be sure that there is a chair, or a world. That’s why every object passes, is not there, is only an appearance.

Even ourself cannot be known objectively. We are alone. Nobody knows us. We as a person are absent. We don’t have a reality as an entity, or a self of any kind. So we are known by God alone, who knows us by knowing Its own being. We are all in the knowledge of God. What follows after the sentence ‘we don’t know anything’ is ‘the only knowledge there is is God’s knowledge’. Or ‘know God, love god, and you will know what you ought to know’. It all boils down to ‘knowing, knowing knowing’. Paul said it all very clearly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” (8:2-3).

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)

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Website:
– J. M. W. Turner (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Hidden Desire

Posted on by Alain Joly

If you have any desire, any craving, make sure that you crave for yourself first. Make sure that you want yourself more than anything else. Check it. That before you go for something, you have first the will for yourself, for your sweet inner being, for that which sustains you, for that which is behind every one of your desires. Make sure that the one who desires is really you, not an impostor, not a fake self that mimics you but is not you. Make sure that you desire from that part of yourself that is real, that is here, not the will of a secondary thought, of an illusory, separate self, not a fake desire. Fake desires won’t work, won’t take you where you want, won’t give you what you seek. Go for a desire that comes from real you. Check that you know who desires your desire.

How do you know who desires your desire? Well first desire yourself, give at your sweet being a loving gaze, then see if your desire is still there. If it didn’t swiftly go, escape, disappear suddenly, didn’t have the guts of showing up, let alone showing off. If your desire doesn’t stand yourself, doesn’t survive the plain looking at your inner self, at your sense of knowing, of being aware, then your desire is not worth the name, doesn’t deserve to be fulfilled. Make that simple effort first. To watch your own being, to check your presence, melt for a second in it, with it, and then welcome any desire that comes. Sometimes desire can surprise you. Sometimes desire desires the most unexpected thing. Sometimes you find yourself desiring yourself more than anything else.

So please, before having the desire for something, desire yourself first. Stay there, in yourself, with yourself, have a sweet moment in the company of your being. See that you might be desiring it with all your heart, that no desire could ever compete with the desire for your self. See that could make a life of the desire for yourself. That you’d never want to leave yourself, even for a second. That what you want is to fully inhabit yourself — being yourself, which is being your sweet being, ravishing in its presence. Make sure that it becomes your primary desire. The most important one, which you want to fulfil, expose, indulge in. Indulge in yourself first. Don’t part from yourself, break up, and then indulge in the most silly, inefficacious, incompetent things. Don’t ever do that. Indulge after you have indulged all your might in yourself. Then see what you might further indulge in.

So always see yourself as the first object of your desire. This desire doesn’t always need to be expressed. You will notice that it is fulfilled by simply being. You have all your desires — expressed or in potential — fulfilled through the act of simply being. Being is like a magical formula, a universal recipe, the desire behind all desires. Being is the sweetest object of desire. Yourself is your bliss, where peace lives, where love is like your very essence. Your many desires for so many things have concealed yourself. So it’s only a matter of desiring the only thing worth being desired — yourself. Then you may have a thousand more desires, it doesn’t matter. They are not yours anymore. They have come from the hidden, unfathomable, inexpressible place of your inner self and being. Desire this place of no desire, of completeness. Respect it. Try to fulfill it. This is God’s hidden desire. After you have fulfilled God’s desire, be wild and determined with any other desire that may remain.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
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The Immeasurable

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, 1782 – Wikimedia

There is a vast empty field of knowing within our experience, if we’re looking for it. It is vast not in regard to its sheer dimension, for it has none. Its vastness comes from its being without dimension, limit or edge. It is behind or before everything that we have taken to be ourself, including our body, our thoughts, our alleged self. It is here, motionless, massive, lending its very essence to everyone and everything. It’s easy to miss it, for it has not the objective quality that everything has in experience. We live in a field of objects that we can see, hear, touch, measure, be aware of. We are so fond of them that we have made ourself an object too, pretending to be our body, our mind, our thoughts. We have such a fascination for objects that we have become blind to that which holds them, and pervades everything. We are blind to our own essence, to our vastness, limitlessness — to that which makes objects experienced.

The consistency of objects around us has only the consistency of that which is aware of them. Objects do not own their own private essence, and neither do we. They find their essence and habitation in that which knows them. So we live in a world that is not defined by its edges, its limits. We should always understand that we live in vastness. That our world is empty of its own essence, and is only the expression of our being aware of it. It will never have another substance than the substance of knowing. So we live in emptiness, in infinity. The body may have its limits and constraints, but we do not.

We are devoid of what binds and limits our body-mind-world. So we should live our life as if there were around us only an empty knowing. Try it, to live as if unconstrained, unlimited, expanded. See that this is the truth of your being, this being not limited by time or place, this being free. Don’t engage your thoughts as if they were objects, but see them as an emanation of the silence they are made of. Thoughts are variations of silence. They are silence’s oscillations. If we are unaware of that silence, thoughts will come to veil it. If we see silence as our own nature, they will be messengers of its eloquent wisdom.

So the reality of thoughts is only the reality of the silence that holds them. Just as objects have only the reality of the knowing that knows them. And just as we ourself have only the reality of our nature as pure knowing — not as a body, nor as a mind, nor as anything limited. Limitation too is borrowed from the infinity that holds it and allows it, as eternity holds time. Where would an idea of time be, if it wasn’t within the eternity out of which it can be divided in past, present, future? Where would an idea of place be, if it wasn’t in the very infinity that permits it to exist? The structure of time and space is only for the convenience of a body and mind. We ourself have no such convenience, no such limits.

The world has beauty for it borrows its essence from the beauty and purity of that which holds it, and builds its form and structure with bricks after bricks of empty being. Emptiness is the body of this world of beings and things, which it moulds or shapes with its creative fullness. For emptiness can only exist in the fullness of being. We are only because of our being ‘being’. We are full of our own being, which is revealed as the being of everyone and everything. So there is in ourself and of ourself only an immensity. We are immense when we cannot be measured or limited in any way by our thoughts, body, or self. If we notice that this is so, that we are made of that immensity, that we are immeasurable, then we will lend to the world that same immensity of ourself, and we will notice between everyone and everything an impenetrable likeness. This likeness is born of the oneness that is the secret core of everything, and of all apparent multitude.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

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Website:
– Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Our Sole Horizon

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Forest Distant Views’ – Ivan Shishkin, 1884 – WikiArt

The key in spiritual matters, is that we have to keep it very simple. We must not blow it out of proportion, exaggerate it, make a conundrum out of it. It is just a matter of looking, of breaking a little, stubborn habit. Nothing extraordinary. We keep looking away from our own being. We act as if we knew all about who we are, as if it were understood, that we are our body, that we are these thoughts that keep coming, which we judge, influence, direct according to what other thoughts say. We live in a little corner of ourself, feeling like a little king in our kingdom. We are so used to our own ways, to our concepts and explanations, to our beliefs and repetitive actions, that we have taken for granted to be just a person in a world. That’s what we were taught. That’s what we were conditioned to think. In fact, we are only followers. We play small. We are protecting our own establishment.

But we know more than that. In fact, we are all experts at being, without our realising. We are masters of freedom. We know that with just a little looking, a little asking, we could rock our lifeboat. We could make our life sensational, attractive, happy, tranquil. We have that hint in ourself, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeking, or working for happiness, improvement, progress, with such undeterred faith. We know that in spite of everything, the world has magic, and our life keeps inside it secrets of glory. That’s how we can face unspeakable suffering, trauma, violence, and the looming threat of death. Because we have in ourself the warmth and security of being, which we try to reenact in every possible and unreasonable ways, in our pleasures and our hopes, in our beliefs and our addictions.

The problem is that we have put a belief in front of what is. We have invented a self where there is only the wide expanse of being. Our whole identity is in being. We have no space to be anything else than being. Our whole life is being. Our body doesn’t even come close to being what we are, and neither does our mind. Being as consciousness takes it all, the whole of what we are, and of what everything is. Every appearance finds its essence in it, and lives in the gorgeous space it provides. We have all our senses embedded in being, and the world finds its reality in the reality of being. Consciousness has it all. It is all we will ever find. All that ever is. It may hide from our gaze, that being is our only landscape, our sole horizon, but it shows blatantly in every corner of experience, if we are willing to look.

In fact, it is so much here, so reachable, so knowable, that we are blind to it, unable to know it. That’s because we have attached ourself to another pseudo reality inside our own reality of being. We have chosen the lie of being somebody over the truth of being only being. We have chosen to be something, a body, a thought, an idea, a self, and have as a result lost, forgotten, limited the infinity of being, that is pervading our life to the point of being the only thing in presence. The truth is that we can never be something other than being. It’s a nice try to believe it, but it won’t happen, to be a suffering self, a limited body, and a mind with its own separate agenda. Everything that we think we are, we are not. We have to distance ourself from every qualification, from every belief, from every identity. We have to be naked of every addition to being in order to see our naked being, and to be in its gorgeous grip.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898)

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Website:
– Ivan Shishkin (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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The Word ‘God’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Italienische Landschaft’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes – WikiArt

Long before any idea of a God, before any belief or possibility of a deity, of a divine command, God is already here, hiding within yourself. Or rather you yourself have just come hiding God. It means, don’t make God into an idea, a form, a projection born of your fears, of your eagerness for peace or relief. God is not ahead of you, or before you, or above you. God is not an entity, or anything that would not be your own.

God wouldn’t be God if it were an idea, a conceptual form far away from your self. For God is not something abstract, vague, distant. God is resplendent. God is shining. Not in a far away, unreachable place. God is brightly here, just as you are. You are, because of God. Because God is, you are. God is the very essence and quality of your being.

There is nothing above or beyond your being. It seems that there is, because you have limited your being by giving it a qualification. You have found it better to clothe your being with something. Then God goes hiding. Or you yourself are hiding your own divine self or essence, the possibility of your being only being. For there — in being — is the key to god.

In that being, God is. God is doing your being. That’s the extent of the presence of God in your life. In that, there is not even the possibility of a belief in God. In that, you feel God’s presence every time you feel your own presence, which makes God very present indeed in your life. In that, a belief in God would in fact trample God. It would make it an entity. A distant thing. A poor meaning. Not God at all.

Who do you think is ‘doing’ your being right here, right now? Think of that for a while. What is this being that I am? What is this I am that I am? Answer that in verity, through your actual experience, and God won’t be a secret to you anymore. God will cease being distant. You will be yourself made of the presence of God. No belief in God could ever match that.

But remember that once God’s being is recognised to be your being, then you won’t find room anymore to have your own personal being. Your own being will be lost to God. Now there is only God, which actually means there is no God at all. The idea of God is for when you have distanced yourself from God, when you don’t know yourself — that you are God’s being. In recognising yourself as God’s being, you will have lost both your being, and the idea of a God. It is a form of death.

So think twice before you say that you want to know God, or to know yourself. For this knowledge will leave you with being only. There won’t be a you. And there won’t be a God. There will be the purity of being, which is the everlasting life in death, which is to live as the One. You will lose your apparent doership, the control that you think you have, every objective identity that you believe makes you.

But in that loss is the finding of yourself, of who you are. In that loss is the end of your suffering, and the discovery of your nature as peace. This finding of your essence is the meaning behind the word ‘God’. In finding God, you will have rid of God, and of yourself. What is left is more than any word can tell. More than the word ‘God’ could ever convey. There would be no word at all. Except you. You would be the living word for ‘God’. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

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Website:
– Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Not A Thing

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Seascape’ – Théodore Rousseau, 1831 – WikiArt

Although we feel to be inside the world, there is an identity in us that is not of the world. Rather the world is in that identity. The world — everything — has been made the likeness of ourself, should ourself be seen not as a thing, but as that which could never be made into a form of any kind. That’s how and when you know who you are, when you are not a thing, not an entity, not anything that can be named or qualified. There is not a thing here that you can be. We have inherited this habit, this insistence in being something. So we have pinpointed ourself and have given it a substance of its own. In this trying to be something, we have been rendered suffering adults, drenched in belief and habit, in fear and hope, addicted to security. We have lost our childhood, what is here before every qualification, and that we only worship remotely, as something precious and lost — our innocence, the playfulness contained in living, the not knowing, the absence of urge, the sense of awe, the leisure contained in plainly and simply being.

So be like a child, who has it all. Be like before every incarnation that you have been forced to identify with, in order to fit in, to feel aggrandised. Our urge to be something has deprived us from our being sufficient, fulfilled in and as our own being. By adding to being, we have lost what gave us our true essence, our identity, our security. It all came from that acquired, mindlessly rehearsed, and deeply ingrained belief that we are not enough, that we are separate, that we have to achieve, progress, be competent. There is no joy in fitting, in being proper. There is no competence involved in being who you are. Any child knows it. Babies are masters in knowing being. We’re just the bragging ones, the ones who have made life a travail, an ordeal, for silly reasons of being something. We spend all our precious time in alleviating the suffering and inadequacy we have ourself created.

There is no suffering in being. We should have left it there, when we were only being, contented in our own presence, before the thought arose that there had to be more and better than just being. The thought of it has made a mess. Now we are in the world rather than the world is inside us. Now we are something or someone, rather that being nothing that can be named, objectified, personalised, belittled or limited. Now we have created travail and conflict rather than staying quietly in the joy and peace contained in being only being. Now we are isolated beings rather than all gathered in our one shared being. Now we are many, divided, scattered, broken up, instead of being one before oneness itself, which is like being the one child of God’s undivided, unbroken, one being. This not being something is not a posture of the mind. It is the noticing of our true nature, of what is here in and as ourself that could never be made something. Our sense of being imperfect, isolated beings is born of a simple lack of attention. We have not seen the obvious. That we are the unborn, the infinite, the ‘not a thing’, and that as that, we hold in one single embrace everything that can be named and exists in time and place, everything that can be given a birth and a death, and that is now like the One inside the One. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867)

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Website:
– Théodore Rousseau (Wikipedia)

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

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Intimacy

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Untitled’ – Charles-Francois Daubigny – WikiArt

Spirituality is about intimacy. Nothing else. That is all you will feel, when you go to the right place, when your most tender being comes towering in your life: intimacy. Intimacy with everyone and everything. When you are not content about being a person, about only living the life of body and senses, about all things objective that can be seen, heard, felt, then is left something that you could never comprehend. Then comes that innermost part of yourself which is now found to impress and impregnate both you and your experience. Then comes something measureless. This was already your most familiar experience, although you have made it a stranger in your life, for engaging only with the shallow, with the surface, the easy, the habitual, the measurable. These will never take you to intimacy but to separation, remoteness, distance, and finally discord. So go to what is not only passing, but to what is inmost, intrinsic, that cannot be discarded and dispensed with. Your world will open to something precious beyond understanding, which is the intimacy contained in experience as a whole, when it is not dampened by your insistence in being something separate from experience.

Intimacy feels like being with a close friend, when nothing needs to be said other than simply to live, enjoy, and taste presence. Intimacy is to make yourself and experience as precious as a lover. In that process, it melts you down, so that you are nowhere to be found. This absence of yourself is love, which is your freedom, and the thriving of this presence which you are and have always been without your noticing. It will bring everybody and everything — the whole world — close to your self. So close that you won’t see a difference between your experience and your own self. You will be revealed as one boundless presence — the undefeatable essence of your being, before the thousands things of experience come to soil it, dampen it. You will be in love, inside love, for intimacy is just another word for it. Intimacy is about shared being. It may seem personal, but it is not. What makes it seem personal is that we involve the body-mind, that we think binds it. In fact, intimacy has nothing to do with the body and the mind. It is a warmth without limit or end.

In its purest form, being sends us in a place of immediate intimacy with everyone and everything, a sense of togetherness, of belonging that cannot be helped. Intimacy is a gathering in and as being, whether we are two people, or ten, or a hundred. We feel an absence of plurality, or otherness. It can be informed in a split of a second, deploying itself from a place unknown and unknowable. Its appearance is free, unconditioned by time. Its disappearance is impossible, only apparent or believed. It comes from a place which has neither a beginning nor an end, and is not bound to the limitations of space. It reveals itself as something fundamental to our living this life, but which we have failed to notice was here. It is the highest degree of your essence. Being intimate is the last place in yourself you will ever visit. There is no beyond it. It will come as your last day, your final breath, for there is no living as a separate entity, as a private being, once you have drunken at its source, and suffered its irrevocable implications. To be intimate is to die to yourself, and disappear in the radiance of only and simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878)

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Website:
– Charles-François Daubigny (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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