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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Reflecting on how courage is found at the heart of ourself… (READ MORE…)

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Vedantic Logic

Posted on by Alain Joly
Hampi Vijayanagara, Karnataka – India

We are always too late with our identity. We come after. We experience something within, a sensation, an unease, a thought, and then say: I am that. We start from what happens, from experience, out of which we draw some identity. We are lazy. We identify with what comes. We experience our body, and draw the conclusion that this body is what we are at the deepest level. And then we live from there, from this conclusion, from this belief, this concept of ‘me-my-body’ — which we refer to as ‘I’. Our chance has passed. We have drawn comfort in that conclusion, but have invited its many companions of voyage too, which are suffering, fear, lack, and the likes. We have given ourself to the wind of arbitrary experiences. We depend on everything that passes uninvited. No wonder we suffer, finding there no stability, and no peace. We are at the mercy of what comes. So we are desperately trying to shape what comes, in order to shape our identity, and derive from it some elements of happiness. Hence our constant striving, seeking, debating with life, struggling with what we are, and with what the world brings.

We think that all the responsibility falls on us, that we are the designers of our identity. We are little ghosts exhorting themselves to happiness. And every time we fail and fall from this imaginary pedestal, we head for another direction, another hope, another expectation, and so goes our life — dependent and miserable. Until we finally listen. Until we see that there is an identity before any experience of body and mind. It isn’t that difficult to see and understand. This is only logic. This is, as Swami Dayananda Saraswati used to say, Vedantic logic: “Vedantic logic and worldly logic are diagonally opposite. Worldly logic is: ‘I experience sorrow; therefore I’m sorrowful’. Whereas vedantic logic is: ‘I experience sorrow; therefore I’m not sorrowful’.” So we have to go further back, and it takes some courage. For we are so gullible. We don’t have any true, reasonable stand. Yet, the way we speak betrays our intuition that we are not fully identified with our body and mind. After all, we constantly comment on them. We are not fully implicated. We put ourself at a distance from our own identities, but don’t go far enough. We stay somewhere along the way, as a self separate from it all. We don’t finish the journey. We don’t look well enough. We presuppose we are something, a somebody, a person, and leave ourself there, close, so very close from a higher, nobler truth.

Cannot there be an experience where ‘I’ is really, truly ‘I’? Where ‘I’ cannot be projected or conceptualised? Where it is not belittled, depreciated? Where it cannot be coloured, biased, conditioned? Where it is here in ourself, as ourself, like a pure, unalloyed, super subjective identity which is like a tower in our life, knowing everything that comes without having to be anything, without drawing an identity from it? And experiencing every single object of body-mind-world while staying itself unaffected, unaltered, and whole? After all, when we say ’I am depressed’, what we really say is that ’I’ is ‘depressed’. ‘Depressed’ has become my new identity. So ‘I’ is being repressed, suppressed for a while, replaced by ‘depressed’. But the good news is that if there is an ‘I’ that can be depressed, this same ‘I’ is here standing before the state of being depressed. There is a being before being depressed. We have let ourself being coloured, forgetting that we are in fact that which is here to be coloured. We have lent ourself to the first coming visitor. But the Vedantic logic is here to remind us that when depression is on us, or affects us, it only hides our true identity for a while. It conceals us but doesn’t change us. We stay what we are — a being untouched — depression being only what clouds us for a time. There is something here under cover, a reality, a presence, an aware being that is only being itself. This being can never be touched by depression or sorrow. What is touched by sorrow is a belief, an idea, a projection of ourself as an entity that can be affected by the passing weathers of life. Meanwhile, this pure, innocent being that we are, and that is our one only identity, stays on, living its life of being only being, while a non-existing self is playing depressed and being melodramatic.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quote by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930-2015)

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Website:
– Dayananda Saraswati (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Remembrance

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Remember’ – Nicholas Roerich, 1924 – WikiArt

All the things that stand out in us, and that we finally believe to be us — our story — are the rugged parts of our existence. They are what we fear or project. What we separate from and refuse to embrace. What we identify with and refuse to let go. What we have used for our identity, to shape our person, and draw some pride and contentment, or some shame and resentment. All the same. We are the children of circumstances and failures, of successes and apparent choices. Of sufferings. So we have shaped ourself with and from what we are not — from what we can remember and hook on. From events and ideas. From what can give us a form and a semblance of reality. But with all these, we are left only with what doesn’t truly satisfy us, doesn’t quench our thirst, doesn’t make us a rock but only a fragile, elusive entity. There is more to us than story and existence. There is what we cannot remember and make a story of. What we cannot fit into the shape of a person. What we have left unnoticed in the interstices of our life.

Why is it, do you think, that we often have difficulty remembering the happiest parts of our lives, which tend to disappear into thin air? Why cannot we seize happiness? Why is it that we seem to disappear in it and with it? That the best part of what we are, is the part less remembered and graspable? We tend to emphasise the foreground, the highlights, what exists, appears, and disappears. We have little consideration for what stands behind, unnoticed — the still, silent, benevolent matrix of it all. The unfathomable that we are, with its indomitable nature. That which lends a ground to all forms and appearances, including time and space. That which is not an object in our experience. Which is not an idea or a representation. Which is alive and can only be felt in and as the depth of our being. Which has the solidity of a rock that can never be moved. Which will never be a person, never have accidents, never be shamed or shaped by circumstances or events. This most profound nature of our being holds for us the peace and happiness which we are seeking in the foreground. We borrow the happiest parts of our existence to our own nature, while thinking it lies in chances and accidents.

If this nature of ourself is not felt, we will live with fear and lack. So this is our worthiest remembrance. This is where we have to be. To live as that field of being is to remember our nature as the rock-like essence of all beings, things and events. Then, this sublime identity that we have found ourself to be will matter more than any life achievement or result. It will be like the air we breathe. It is ourself seen in the conscious light of our being. In this, happiness is prevailing because it is the very colour of being. In fact, happiness is devouring our old self, which is why and how we as a separate entity disappear every time we feel at peace and content. Peace becomes our very identity — the eternal, ever-present nature of our being. Life then puts on the clothes of clarity and well-being, and our self deserts the ruggedness of the eventful life of time and place. What we ‘remember’, according to the etymology, is what we ‘call to mind’. So we ought to be cautious of what we remember or forget. That will condition our being happy or miserable.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947)

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Website:
– Nicholas Roerich (Wikipedia)

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

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The Religious Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two monks’ – Carl Bloch, 1861 – WikiArt

Spirituality is an exaggeration. We need to exaggerate our commitment to truth, and be ‘spiritual’ for a time. We need to take on this role. Being is to be favoured at the expense of experience. This is the way to re-establish a lost truth, to re-assert what we truly are against what we have conditioned ourself to be, by force of habit. It takes a lot to fight an addiction, to forget a well-rehearsed habit, to extricate ourself from our deeply imbedded identifications with our body and mind. What’s running in our head has a persuasive power, and perceptions have a way to project everything perceived as being out there, into what we commonly conceptualise as a world separate from ourself. So spirituality is a sort of rehab. We go to the church or the temple only because of our failure in making a cathedral of our experience. We attend the mass in reason of our not being grateful for the given bread of our life. And we meditate for lack of noticing that the meditator is a superimposition on our simple experience of being. We’re overdoing it, but it’s for the good cause. We need a magnifying glass to notice what is hidden in the cacophony of experience.

But spirituality is not a way of life. it is a temporary overemphasis, a dramatisation. We were never meant to be spiritual, or a believer in a religion. Religion is a teaching, a suggestion to realign ourself with truth rather than with an acquired belief. It is the temporary treatment for our suffering. It is the gentle scolding of a parent when we have made a mistake. It is benevolence — an encouragement towards a happier living. It is a bond and a reverence towards the simple reality of our being. So spirituality is an effort towards effortlessness. It is an attempt to recognise the given in ourself, amongst all the things that we have acquired and wrongly identified with. We have to dig out our true nature as pure, undivided, peaceful being, and have to be for a while a zealot for this, an ultra, a devotee of being, and to leave experience alone, to restrict our commitment with the world of things. It is a descent into spirit, before spirit pervades the totality of experience.

So all the paraphernalia of religion, all the words and practices of spirituality, and the endless commenting on the commenting, are only a means to acquire what we already have and already are, although unknowingly. Practice is to just be, and be happy. Prayer is to live a life that has meaning and clarity. Meditation is to have a vision of what we are, and with that vision, to love and share our deepest nature with others and with the world. It is to restore reality, in order to give ourself back to it. Because we cannot understand, feel, love, and just be, we have elaborated rituals, prayers, teachings. Spirituality is not the truth, only the means to access it, as devotion to a deity is but the path towards true, unconditional love. So we might want to push our practice. We might have to snob experience for a while, to leave it in the marge, in order to concentrate on our being only being. And we might want to stay there, in being — a yogi of presence. We don’t want to be an occasional visitor. We long to be a resident, to have being as our eternal companion. To feel that we are that naturally, and effortlessly. We want to drop all affectation. Effort is only a temporary device, to defeat a bias acquired over life times, and instilled by a whole society. We want to be free of ourself, and to quit being a believer, or a practitioner.

Then life becomes a temple, whether we are in the busy heart of a city, or in a monastery, whether we live the active life of a working hero, or the silent one of a dedicated monk. There will be a day when our life will take place in the clarity of being. When our daily activities will receive the flow of a constant radiance of meaning and beauty. When love will be the very canvas of all our relationships. When our duties and chores will be clothed with a flavour of sacredness. On that day, this tragic and magnificent exaggeration that spirituality is, will be replaced by a life that is discovered to be unaffected, spontaneous, uninhibited, relaxed, and genuine. Maybe this truly is the religious life.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Carl Bloch (1834-1890)

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Website:
– Carl Bloch (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Creep

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Radiohead @ TD Garden (Boston, MA)’ – by Kenny Sun – Wikimedia

I wonder if you have ever seen the face of love, what loving indifference is? I have some days ago, while watching a concert by Radiohead on the internet. It was during the band’s most celebrated hit, called ‘Creep’. This song is the stage of an unrequited love. But I suggest it goes further than that. It is the story of a rage, of not being enough. We all have lived through expectations that were turned down. We all have made efforts that didn’t pay off. We all want to feel special, to belong, to be at peace. We abhor being behind ourself, faking our contentment and control. So we all have known this feeling of being a ‘creep’, or at least of not being good enough. That’s why we live so hectically, constantly looking for better and more, wanting to feel complete, enough at last. Maybe that’s why the song happened to be such a hit, beyond its obvious musical qualities: it is like an echo of the secret battle we are engaged in, of our quiet desperation, and of our repeated attempt to put an end to our suffering.

I was watching the song being played, the singer yelling its rage amongst the gnashing saturated blasts coming from Jonny Greenwood’s guitar, lights illuminating the stage like a flash of lightning would. Then it surprised me. For just a few seconds, the camera caught in the public a young woman whose attitude was quiet, mildly concerned, but deeply tuned to herself. Everybody around her was involved, shouting, dancing, taking their share, drawing their identity and happiness from the vibes of the music. But she was not. Didn’t need to. Her need was to be quiet. Peace was her home. Beauty was where she was, and where she had landed on. She was tasting her being. She was taking it all in, but with a peaceful, loving indifference. For her, separation had been slain, and she had become a silent watcher, a taster of being, a madonna.

There was no need for her to dance and shout the lyrics of her favourite Radiohead song, for she dwelled in silence. It was all taking place somewhere else, in a placeless place where time was nowhere to been seen or experienced. All our objects of adoration are never the point, are never the goal. They are the means to feel and taste in ourself this most profound sense of peaceful being that is always here, always now with us, and that we miss in reason of our obsessive attachment to objects, with their derived outcomes and rewards. When the love or enthusiasm for an object — a song, a piece of art, a football match — is brought to its paroxysm, we merge with it, and in this merging forget our own person. This forgetting is the stage set for a meeting with ourself, for an encounter with our own silent being. We feel what we could call, a paradoxical serenity. So the pleasure of the senses is never the object of our desire, and never what our seeking is about. We are after something more elusive, the harder catch that is our own being. We long for this profound sense of peace and security that lives there as our identity. This serenity is not dependent on circumstances, but lies naturally in and as our most intimate being. This pure being is our true identity, and is in fact what we are really seeking behind all our pleasure oriented pursuits. Pleasure can never be a match to being. Pleasure is but the child of separation, while being is the realisation of our deepest identity as love, and its expression as oneness.

Love takes over experience. Love dominates experience, it brings it down to its knees, reveals what it is made of. Experience appears to be of secondary importance, not because it is not important, but because its importance lies in the light that shines on it and gives it its reality and meaning. We cease to be personally involved. We are just present, and this presence is our most precious and efficient involvement. We are indifferent not because we do not care, but in reason of the preeminence of love in our heart, with its acute, unfocused awareness. Love responds to the whole. There is no personal self present, that feels separate and insecure, fearing and seeking. That one is absent, leaving all the place to the quality of simply being, with no preferences in it, but with a total, impersonal, peaceful engagement. This peace is the most profound signature or identity contained in every experience that we go through. To recognise the nature of ourself as peaceful being, is to recognise the nature of experience as that one same peaceful being. We will never have to complain: ‘I wish I was special’. Never have to say: ‘I don’t belong here’. In love, there is no being a creep.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Kenny Sun (Wikimedia)

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Website:
– Creep (Radiohead Song) (Wikipedia)

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

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Undivided Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Virgin Islands In Bezons’ – Charles-Francois Daubigny, 1855 – WikiArt

We all want to be happy. That’s our most profound desire. Everything we do is only expressing that longing. We want to be whole, free from contradiction and suffering. That’s the quiet or not so quiet battle that our life is, whether we acknowledge it or not. That’s being human in a nutshell. Really, humanhood is a quest. As an individual, that’s all we are seeking. But are we really an individual? Are we really a particle amongst the space of humanity? Are we truly a self contained in a body, an ‘indivisible entity’ as the word ‘individual’ has sought to make us believe? In Latin, ‘individuum’ stands for ‘atom’. But in fact, we feel that we are not yet an individual — we are divided, torn apart, haven’t quite found the person that we have the urge to be. Our limits are blurry. Our qualities are evasive. Our purpose is hazy. We often don’t find ourself in ourself. There is a blank there if we look carefully. So what is truly existing in us? What is here that is worth being called myself, or ‘I’? What is being an individual?

Now, most people don’t like being told. Our being is a much too serious affair to be delegated to another. We want to feel for ourself. We want to feel both what we are, and that we are. That’s why we keep looking, seeking, failing, finding, falling, doubting. We keep dancing the life we are in, by all means. We are seeking ourself in all that comes. In fact, just being an individual doesn’t seem to make it. We feel there is more to us than being a separate entity, delineated by the limits of our body and mind. It doesn’t fit — doesn’t quite match our intuition. It doesn’t feel that we are that limited. It doesn’t feel that we truly know what we are. Maybe it never was about our bodies. Maybe our individuality takes its source in infinity. This is what we were meant to be. This is what an individual is, undivided, not distinguished from everything, devoted to the quality of being that encompasses the universe and beyond. We were never a thing, a particle. Only, it seems that we have squeezed our indivisibility into a body to fit the general consensus.

Paradoxically, it is not in our differences that we find our individuality, but in the sameness of being. Our differences are simply the residues, the negligible expressions of a conditioning at the level of the body-mind. They are not an expression of our individuality. They do not represent us. We are not to be defined by the small, but by the expanded field of our awareness, the immensity of being. In a strange way, this identity-less identity is making us the very person or individual that we have always wanted to be. Do you want to be the best version of yourself? So be. Just be. Be that formless, identity-less being that you are and have missed for wanting to be only qualities or talents. Qualities and talents need our being first for their field of expression. We are their container. Without this silent presence of being that we are, they remain simple goods that we use to buy a semblance of composure, with its flickering moments of satisfaction and pride. Our being identified with them is the cause of your suffering. But there will come a time when being will be seen as the only mark or evidence of our individuality. Being is what our individuality is made of. It is our true body. Idiosyncrasies and differences are but the crumbs left at the table of experience.

In fact, being is what being an individual is. Our individuality is found in the shining of being. Not in the shining of our conditioning and idiosyncrasies. We will learn to see our so-called qualities behind us, almost non-existent, choked by the brightness of being. Bodies are only points of view. And minds are the tools for the government of our body. Our self is not there, not located. It is an expansion. Being an individual is being whole, undivided. It is to find our completeness in and through the world. It is to see and feel that the totality of experience is made of being, and that being is the essence of our individuality. Being an individual means that we are not a divided, broken up, an assembly of body, thoughts, feelings, experiences that makes for a person. How could we be an individual when we draw our identity from scattered objects that tear us apart and leave us confused — unanchored to our deepest self? We own our freedom to the recognition of our individuality, which consists of undivided being. The word speaks for itself. An individual is an undivided being. It is not found in our qualities and idiosyncrasies, not in our body and mind. We draw our individuality from simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878)

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Website:
– Charles-Francois Daubigny (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Formula of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Rocks and sea’ – Paul Gauguin, 1886 – WikiArt

There is something mathematical about the spiritual life. You need to get the formula right, which is simply to recognise being as your one only identity. Simply being, with no addition to it. Concentrated being. If you cannot recognise yourself as that, then life will bounce back at you in endless, nasty, different ways. You will be made into somebody frail, vulnerable, suffering. Out of your failure at being who you truly are, you will draw an idea of who you are, a belief in being a separate entity, identifying yourself with your body-mind. This invented self is a diminution of your real identity. It has, inscribed in its very making, an imbalance, a lack. You will feel small, incomplete, at the mercy of beliefs and images, assailed by objects. You will be made uncertain, needy, a seeker of your lost identity. So you will then receive many of your experiences as a threat, as something that can hurt you, diminish you. That’s how fear arises, out of incompleteness, when there is a flaw in the equation of being. You are as to say behind yourself, mistaken. You have failed at just being, and are now being this and that. You have lost your anchor for a trip into objectivity. You have exchanged wholeness for separation.

Now you look everywhere frantically for something to complete you, and you find it a hundred times, in a passing object, in a success, an achievement, a bout of luck, a relationship. But these are fake friends that will fail you. For there is nothing here in the objective world that can match being. Dissatisfaction will hover over you again and again, no matter how many objective goals you may set your heart on, and attain. You will never resolve that equation. A flaw will remain, and your life formula will be left empty of meaning, unable to find its resolution. These objects that were your hope for fulfilment will finally come biting at you, for they are but the tricks that you have used as an escape from yourself. They are your being that you have let down, and split apart. They are your means to mend and repair yourself. But to project yourself in objects is to hope, expect, envy, and open the door to endless suffering. This wound is the sign of your incompleteness, the symptom of your failure at recognising your true identity. Every neglect or rejection of your true nature creates openings where experience will come and stand in front of you as something to be afraid of, or to desire. So you are never safe, never alone. It all comes back to you as a mirror of your own insufficiency.

Remember that you will attract to yourself everything that you cannot hold as your own, and understand. To be at peace in this life is a very simple matter. It lies in only one experience, which is the experience of being. Being is your universal health insurance. Being is your completeness, and therefore your well-being. If you don’t own in and as yourself your well-being, if you fail to occupy the totality of your experience — finding safety there — then you will be assailed by life. Experience will send its soldiers at you, which are but all that you cannot hold or recognise as being your own being. Hurt, confusion, fear, misunderstanding will become your usual, well-rehearsed environment, that you will accept as normal. They will become the weapons that turn against you every time you don’t fully integrate experience as the very blood and bones of infinite being. So don’t let experiences down, to live on their own, lost, clothed in separation and enmity. The enmity of experience is of your own making. You are responsible for what hits you or heals you. And you have in yourself, as yourself, the remedy for every hurt or suffering that overcome you. You have in and as your own being the ability to feel whole, complete, self-satisfied. There lies your natural competence at living. This is how you have experience always on your side, like a friend that you never fail to embrace. This is how you complete the formula of life — through clarity and brightness of being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

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Website:
– Paul Gauguin (Wikipedia)

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

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