Hidden Fragrance

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Autumn’ – Andrew Wyeth – WikiArt

There is majesty in being your own gorgeous, naked self. But thoughts come and spoil it all. We are always running up and down the line of time, feeding on memories, fearing the future we imagine, leaning on our hopes and expectations, bleeding from our constant suffering, building multiple roads of escape. We never leave ourself alone, never stay with the peace that is naturally the nature of our being. We are always on the move, indulging in the landscape of our many objective experiences, getting lost in them — after all, they are so many, so attractive. They seem to hold the secret of our happiness. So we spend a lifetime shaping them to our convenience, but they are reluctant.

In fact our thoughts have become primary when they should be secondary. They have become the fabric of our life, along with our many experiences, when they should have stayed only an ornament. There is a ground that stays still and silent under our many involvements with things, perceptions, sensations. These crowd us by the thousands, but we should not be deceived. They will want us to believe that they are us — our one and only identity, but don’t listen. There is a oneness that is here taking them all in, enveloping them, lending them the quiet blanket of its peaceful, infinite making. So be careful where you put your emphasis on, what you choose to recognise yourself to be. You are not an aggregation of body and mind content. You are the quiet aware presence which holds the ten thousand things of experience in its loving bosom, and gives them a light to be seen and experienced. Put there your life emphasis, for that presence is your very lifeblood.

So be watchful of what you take yourself to be. Will you marry your identity with all things objective, or with what gives them the ground where they thrive, are born and die? Will you go with the passing or with the ever staying? Will you have a fascination for the many or for the One? Be careful to always stay where you truly are, where you were never born and could never die, where peace is like your true body — before you venture in experience — and where your silent being is seen as the home that harbours every portion of your life. This is how you stand where only the infinite is, and where place is like its humble attendant. This is how you have your days spent in eternity, and time is like its useful valet, for the sake of your daily activities. And that’s how you view your many activities and relationships as a gorgeous play, and the peace of your being as the space where they thrive and are nourished. Don’t let anybody make you think or feel otherwise: Peace is the crux and heart of your life — its sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed fragrance. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

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Website:
– Andrew Wyeth (Wikipedia)

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

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The Nectar and the Mouse

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

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

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

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

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891)

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

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

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