A Treasure of Understanding

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Dawn’ – Joseph Farquharson, 1903 – WikiArt

There is no such a thing as conceptual understanding in matters of spirituality. As soon as we form an idea, a concept, an image, a projection about ourself, we are still where we have always been: in our mind, in the known, in grounds we have already trodden a thousand times. These grounds are the grounds of our misunderstanding, where beliefs have already shaped and conditioned the idea we have about ourself. An idea that we rehearse and consolidate with every thought or act springing out of the field of our conceptual world. No understanding can ever come from this barren field. For one good, essential reason, which is that our understanding comes from only being. Being is the field of our understanding. Being is understanding itself. And the mind — with the ego which it gives rise to — is the only thing that is hindering our coming in contact with being in its purest form. That’s why concepts and ideas can never be understanding itself. They hide our clarity. In fact, they trample it.

So, should you ever want to come in contact with the pristine vibe contained in understanding, then a little digging is a necessary prerequisite. Don’t stay in your mind, take a new breath, be an explorer. You may use the tool of mind as you use a spear to dig a treasure. But please don’t take the spear for the treasure. This treasure is the treasure of being that stands unseen below the surface of your wrestling with concepts and ideas. Don’t let being be undermined by the description or explanation of the method. A beautiful image of truth will never be truth itself. It won’t hold the true taste of it. You won’t get its exquisite perfume, unless you see what stands under your mind and your ego. Understand your being by being only being. Throw the spear out. Finish the digging with your bare hands if required. Be yourself your treasure.

You come to an understanding when you stand under everything that is appearing or forming in your experience. Being is what stands under. It is the one thing that doesn’t change, that can never die or dis-appear, and out of which everything objective or knowable come into existence, and is under the scrutiny of your senses. But objective experience can never lead you to any understanding. Not out of its own will. You have to coerce yourself, make your own acquired, conceptual idea of reality recede and reveal its illusory, invented nature. You have to make what was, what will be, what should be, and what seems to be, into what is. That’s where understanding lives, in what is, in the here and now of your essential being. Understanding is implicit to being, and being explicit in understanding. Feel your being in its purest form, and see that you are yourself the understanding that you have craved to achieve through your mind.

So being stands under your apparent self which, in its light, is discovered to be non-existent, or rather only existent as being. That being is your true support, deserving all your praises. Actually, it is the support of everything, the great pervader — that’s why some have called it the creator. Not that it creates while being outside of its creation, but rather it is the substantial essence of everything — what makes a world possible and viable. So to understand yourself is to touch this essence through your being it, and to praise that part of yourself which you can never not be with, and which comes with a special flavour of well-being. That’s how you feel your true nature, through that subtle yet indestructible joy of simply being, which your never satisfied body-mind-self could never give you other than fleetingly. Understanding as being comprehends everything. It holds and embraces all life in the fullness of its presence. So to understand is to rest in your natural being, which requires no commenting or even understanding. You are, and this is that.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935)

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Website:
– Joseph Farquharson (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A False Impression

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is an impression that I am the one who knows, or is aware. But this is a false impression and an unfortunate one. In fact, we as a body-mind don’t know anything, for the good reason that there is no one here that is in charge of the knowing. We don’t have this ability. It is not for us to know anything. Knowing doesn’t belong to an individual, separate self. We owe our knowing to something that knows us first, and lends us that potential. That really gives a totally different perspective to our existence, and grants us a gorgeous humbleness: Knowing is without a knower. The knower is but a set of thoughts that we have superimposed on awareness. It is entirely made up. It is of our invention, to give us a wee importance — after all, we all want a little attention. Knowing is in the nature of being. And being is the nature of everything. Knowing is all there is. It is the light of our world, indissociable from our experience. We as selves are just shadows. Everything is dancing and taking place without our being in any way party to it. At best, we are just a colouring, a point of view, an avatar governed by some divine rules which we have perilously chosen to ignore. This is our feebleness: wanting to own and appropriate, being more than what we already are. But in doing so, we have in fact belittled ourself. We have made ourself separate from the life we live in. We have created a self where there is none. We have awakened the devil of suffering in us.

So leave the knowing in some more skilful hands. It will spare you a lot of trouble and misunderstanding. You won’t have to be a person — all the heaviness contained in it. You won’t have to be a self that knows, but knowing will appear to be your one and only self — the entirety of your being. This pure and sublime knowing will give a measure of beauty and happiness in your life. It will encompass everything. It will widen your perspective and make you profoundly secure. You will know your being with precision and clarity, and live both in remoteness and intimacy — remoteness for a serene view on your experience, and intimacy for the delight contained in oneness. And love will be your everyday companion, the deepest essence of your being. And you will be clothed in understanding, which you believed could be achieved through your being a knower. Not at all. Understanding comes when you cease being a self, a knower, when you let go of all identities and egoistic purposes. Then it comes: the understanding — the knowing that knowing is all there is, and that you don’t need to be any more than that. So learn to keep at bay all private, egoistic desires to be anything other than this impersonal, undivided presence of yourself, that has the capacity of being and knowing. You have no need to be a knower, or a doer of anything in your life. Let the show run by itself. Only give it your golden, loving indifference. That’s the most glorious thing you can do in this life. You will be showered by the benefits of it.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Read this essay from the blog ‘The Impossibility of Knowing’…

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

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Pathways

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Court in the Alhambra’ – Edwin Lord Weeks, 1876 – WikiArt

The spiritual endeavour is really such good fun. You may happen to experience some suffering in your life and feel entangled — with thoughts rushing into your mind and problems seizing the entirety of yourself. The web of experience is overwhelming you and you can find no space to breathe within. You may then have to have a little conversation with yourself. You may have to disentangle yourself from your stubborn identification with thoughts and with the overcrowding objects born of the senses. That’s when you may present yourself with a simple question like: “What is this part in myself that is aware of my experience?” And so are you now taken amongst the scents of 8th century India, treading its immemorial dust with Shankara, debating with the great Vedantic master. He will show you how to move inwards right at the core of that aware presence in yourself. You will be taken with him to the core of this investigation, which is but the separation of the multiple objects of experience from the one aware, pervading presence of consciousness that is your true identity. That’s when Shankara leaves you with this one infaillible recipe:

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“I bow down to that all-knowing One
which is pure Consciousness, all-pervading, all,
residing in the hearts of all beings
and beyond all objects of knowledge.”
~ Shankara (Upadesasahasri, 1:1)

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You may then find yourself sitting in your kitchen, cutting vegetables, with your thoughts suddenly wandering in the 17th century Paris, surrounded by the walls of a Carmelite monastery’s kitchen, chatting along with Brother Lawrence. He might tell you with his big generous smile: you know brother, “nothing is easier than to repeat often in the day these little internal adorations.” That’s when you understand that this investigation can be made into a joyful, often repeated practice, where you go and meet yourself within, have a little chat with this hidden presence, spontaneously, as you gaze into the eyes of a friend. Amongst the frantic sound of knives hitting the wooden board and the fumes of the next meal simmering on the stove, you meet Brother Lawrence’s glance offering you this last precious advice:

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“I renounced, for the love of Him,
everything that was not He;
and I began to live as if there was none
but He and I in the world.”
~ Brother Lawrence

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Continue this journey into the investigation of your true nature… (READ MORE…)

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Divine Presence

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Dance at Moulin de la Galette’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876 – WikiArt

You know sometime truth has its ways and character. You may be quietly sitting at home in silence, listening to some wise teaching. You may want to feel this unconditioned essence of yourself with your eyes closed, within — oh so within! — and feel enclosed in your beautiful, limitless, eternal self. But that appears to be difficult, not quite the day for it, not quite where you want to be. The ‘I am’ door is making a squeaky sound. Today is to see the face of god in all and everything, out in the world. Today is for the car horns and the smell of exhaust fumes. Today is for being in love with the cigarette butt lying in the gutter at the bus stop, and seeing that there is no more, no less here of presence than there is in the melodious swaying of trees in the summer breeze. Today is to feel my essence borrowed by the facades of buildings and by a nearby, wandering canal. It is to feel my own being shared with all passing strangers — oh, so many friends everywhere! — and with an inquisitive pigeon, or a happy dog coming along. Today is for being a seer and a hearer of beauty. It is for a wedding with truth, in the church of experience. It is for the world marrying its presence with freedom and ease, to the presence of my self. Today is to feel with my hands and eyes and ears, that the whole temple of life, from the hard matter-like objects to the thin air caressing my cheeks, and to the pregnancy of sounds — all that is produced by the senses — is but empty of its own substance, and full of the silent, pristine, ethereal presence of the divine.

Another day may present you with something entirely different. You may find yourself wearied by the world out there and crossed with experience. You may want to be at home, simply at home, and take a long journey within, to be taken into the purity contained in being only being. Today is for sitting quietly and for closing your eyes. It is for the feeling of being — unmixed, unadulterated, whole and held within. It is for the seeing of my interior, where thoughts now come one after the other, to die of their natural death. It is to feel that there is here a space which is ready to welcome my all, and has the power to look and to embrace. Today is for letting my feelings melt in the safe harbour of my being, and for marrying my sensations to the infinite space that contains them. It is wholly for the wondrous feeling that I am. Alone. Pregnant. The one that brings all identifications back to their original womb of presence. Today is to be without characteristics of any sort, and to bathe in emptiness and anonymity. It is for the caress of being, and for the never ending gaze towards infinity. Today is for the merriness in my heart, at the wedding of my self with the eternal now. It is to be showered with the knowing of my reality, and to have my being anointed with the peace contained within it. Today is for a honeymoon with my loving essence, and for a sacred communion with the nameless. It is to feel my own substance full of the silent, pristine, ethereal presence of the divine.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

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Website:
– Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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An Abundance of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Spring’ – Theodore Rousseau, 1852 – WikiArt

There is a subtle recognition that takes place on the way back to yourself, when you stop keeping your mind at the level of avoidance or entertainment. At that binary level you are unrecognisable. You live in a world of your own, in which nothing represents who you are. You live in your mind, pushed around by a never-ending storm of endless reactions and pursuits, unaware of what you are — or even that you are. You are surrounded by opinions and beliefs that limit you, and plunge you into a self-made ignorance. You live in a bubble where illusions have formed the world in which you are caught, and to which you have given yourself up. In there you are as it were hidden from the gaze of god, and the awareness of your divine making or reality is eluding you.

As there is no sense of belonging there, you may feel cut off, lonely, lacking an essential part of yourself. You are suffering from having deviated from your inborn identity. You have forgotten who you are, and are roaming from thought to thought, and from experience to experience, in search of something that will finally complete you. And the tragedy is that you will never find it in the place where you look, for that place is precisely what is separating you from your real self. That place is imaginary, for it is the stage of your misunderstanding. You live in a vacuum, in your world of misunderstanding. All your life takes place within the limits allotted by your false beliefs about life. Where there is only a seamless reality, you have created an illusory boundary between yourself and reality. You have missed that you were yourself that reality. You have lost faith. You committed the sin of being a somebody, and in doing so have pushed reality out of sight, at a distance from you, making it, through the senses, the world in which you live, when you are yourself the reality in which the world appears, and from which it borrows its thousands forms. You have given birth to duality when there was none. Out of oneness, you have invented separation, and have invested all your life in this falsity.

But there is more to it. In veiling your true nature, you have made god unknown to you, and rendered yourself unknown to god. This is why you have religion and the need for a belief in god. But the reality that you have unknowingly pushed away through your desire in being a self separate from it, that reality is in fact what you have been longing for all your life, to complete you. And this completeness is nothing but god coming to live in you, as you, and electing your being as its being, while you yourself recognise God’s being as being your being. That’s how you know god, and are known by god. Simply by being only being, by purifying your identity to its ultimate, indescribable, indestructible, unsoiled essence. So nothing lives away from yourself. You contain it all. You are the receptacle for the spectacle of life. And knowing this will place you right where god has its gaze. It will place you in God’s being, which is the only place where you can be known or seen by god. So knowing yourself is knowing god, and god knowing you, without there being a god or a you. Being only suffices. God is where and when there is an abundance of being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Theodore Rousseau (1812–1867)

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Website:
– Theodore Rousseau (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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God Unveiled

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Illustrated Depiction of God with Holy Bettmann’ – Tintoretto, 16th AD – WikiArt

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For many of us, god is nothing more than the idea or belief we have inherited of such a being, an idea that is conditioned by religion as the lazy representation of an omniscient, omnipotent entity that is both our creator and protector — in the popular Christian imagery an old bearded figure who lives far and away from us, in a lofty, elevated place for a good view on its creation and creatures. The existence of such a god is almost only a matter of belief or faith, and the relationship we have with it one of reward and punishment, devotion, fear, prayer, praise, but rarely of understanding and exactitude. It seems that we better have god in a hazy place, feel more at ease with not knowing too much about the wisdom that may hide behind that term. So our ignorance is a calculated one, a refusal to rock the boat, and a patting of our carefully assembled opinions from which we derive our sacrosanct identity and security. But let’s tackle god here. Let’s undress the myth and have a thorough eye-contact with the divine. Let’s dare some experiential understanding. Let’s have god out of its hiding place.

Maybe god was never defined because it is the one thing in life that is indefinable. Everything objective that we can know, see, hear, touch, smell, taste — qualities and all — can be described with words and given a name. We have our life surrounded by objects. The objective has filled our experience to the brim, and we are being choked in it — with no breathing possible, and no space allotted to the unknown. God is one such unknown. But how could we describe something that we cannot know as an object? So to god we can only give a generic, provisional name. Because god cannot be pointed at and recognised as an object or entity. God is not an easy catch. The divine defies our understanding, and this defiance is at the core of our misinterpretation of god. So if you want to know god, you have to look for it in your life, and turn every stone and pebble that crowd your experience. So start by removing everything in existence that you can know, see, hear, touch, smell, taste — qualities and all — that have an objective quality and can be given a proper name. You know: everything that you can show to another fellow, and that he too can see, hear, know, understand, and comprehend, just like you. Take it all away, and then see what remains behind.

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An explanation of the nature and reality of God’s being… (READ MORE…)

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Excessive Imagination

Posted on by Alain Joly

We have it all already, independently of any spiritual consideration. All that we ever wanted to acquire or achieve, which we have been aiming to possess without ever truly succeeding, the core object of all our desires before objects multiply and confuse us in their multiplicity — that precious thing: that plenitude — well… we have it. It is there, just as we are, in this experience that we have, in our present feeling and sensation, breathing in our senses, singing as our identity, a kit already assembled, a world designed for us to live in, live for, and live by. Religions have sent us warnings for millennia, but the message was unclear, diffused by authoritative hierarchies to frighten, separate, and control. Yet some got it all through the religious maze, dissecting even the most obscure teaching to its crystalline, original clarity, as Meister Eckhart has done. For he knew — the great master — that our being is a sky knitted of awareness. He knew that this emptiness is all there is, and that our thoughts, feelings, preceptions, the ‘creatures’ as they were called in his words, are all secondary appearances, that draw their multiple existence from the one single identity of our self as pure, unlimited, shared being.

But we have yet to see it. That our present being is the final deal. That what we experience right now contains it all, and is the expression of the silent being that we are in our utmost reality. So there is really no experience other than the experience of this deepest reality of ourself. There is no other than yourself. It is all about what I am, or that I am — all about that which is felt now, before the rise of experience, before the ‘creatures’. That is the landscape that all spiritualities have ploughed for millennia. What you are being now is it, the whole mystery of it. So don’t even try to be it, let alone become it — that would ruin it all. The work is done. You only have to notice yourself in the maze of objective experience. You only have to develop a passion for yourself. To be inquisitive of your being. You don’t have to go through the paraphernalia of spirituality, if you are not inclined to. Just watch your being intensely. Make it the biggest interest of your life. As Krishnamurti once said: “You have only to watch, see, listen; it is all there open and clear.” Don’t tell yourself endless stories about a so-called spiritual path, about advancement — the pride of it all. Jump directly inside the experience of your being. “Take a swift step into yourself” was Krishnamurti’s advice. And swift it has to be.

Swift it has to be for we are too happy to endorse the role of the spiritual seeker and indulge in it, to identify with the means and believe in a path. For the fact is that we are all so attached to being something. This is where we draw our pride and security from, in being something — anything. And if we were to be nothing, or that pure, quintessential empty being that we have learnt we are — well, then we want to be that too. Being something is a reflex that is a hard one to get rid of. This is our refusal to fully and irreversibly die. So you have to bypass your ambitious drive, as sacred and precious as it may be. You have to abandon all willingness to succeed, all impulse to be anymore than what you already are. Any desire to be more, or have more, than what you are, than what you have right now, is another escape into separation. Realisation is nothing but the end of your belief in not being realised, complete, perfect just as you are. You have to let yourself go. The totality of the spiritual quest is about removing a simple belief or misunderstanding, a stubborn bad habit, a single complexity that we have inadvertently introduced in the system. That there has to be something more than just what is — that’s a blatant excess of imagination. We cannot improve on the reality of our self as being, for its substance is of the realm of the non-objective. You cannot object on that. And this mistake can be unveiled with just a little application and a measure of common sense. With the simple dropping of something that isn’t even there.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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