The Second Coming

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Last Judgement’ (detail) – William Blake, 1808 – WikiArt

There has been a seed planted, a first coming. There has been for all appearances to exist, for the world of things to expand, the creative and pervading quality of a ground. This is where all beings and all things have tapped in for their own being. We have all sheltered it without our knowing it, for the ground of being is invisible to our eyes, not accessible to our senses. We have believed ourself to be a body and a mind, and have consequently been busy with the objective world, taking as a fact that our senses were reflecting back to us a true image of a dual universe. We have tried to conform to this idea, to this consensual representation of our reality, and this is the reason for our suffering and our innumerable conflicts. We have accepted our body-mind as an identity, and our life as the toiling for our security and happiness in a generally hostile, mindless, material world. We couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So there has been the promise of a Second Coming. The ‘returning of the Saviour at the end of time’, as some religions have stated. Well, maybe that formula bears some truth, if it wasn’t taken for what it is not. But there won’t be the first sign of a separate entity coming again in the world to free us. The Second Coming is taking place in our heart. This is where it lives and has its home, waiting for our realising, longing for our returning. This is the ground set for a meeting with ourself, with our reality. A truth unmoved, still, unqualified, that is abiding here in and as ourself, but has been forgotten, neglected, therefore left unnoticed. The remembering of it gives us the illusory impression of its coming again. But no. Its coming again is us coming out of our self-imposed dream. It is us seeing the world and everything in it as the many faces of God, which means the world exchanging its believed reality as matter for the luminous vibrancy of infinite consciousness.

So there is a Second Coming. It is only an apparent one for we have in fact never moved out of it. It is our infinite, eternal reality — in fact God’s very being — which we could never part from. This ‘coming’ is rather a revelation, an ‘epiphany’, as the Greek word for the coming again of Christ indicates. In Islam, this is called the ‘return’ (al-raj’ah), the ‘turning again’ towards ourself, our knowing of ourself — consciousness. It is a revolution, the ‘rolling back’ of a false idea, of a belief, to reveal, or return to our own reality as aware being. It is the coming into view of something that was here, but hidden by our looking in the wrong direction. It is our true nature or reality becoming perceptible again, a new light sprouting out of our lazy, habitual, and a thousand times rehearsed imagined identity as body and mind.

In fact, the Second Coming was simply called ‘Parousia’ in Greek, which literally means ‘being present’ — how could we have missed such level of clarity! So now the traditional, religious promise of the ‘returning of the Saviour at the end of time’ could be read in its new light of truth. It is our true nature as God’s being, or infinite consciousness, and its becoming perceptible again when all idea of time, sequence, saviour, hope or belief has left us. It is the ground of being, being present, and shining as our one and only peaceful reality, saving us from a lethal misunderstanding. The last judgment being nothing but the punishment given to the separate self, the fatal blow of its being non existent, and the rise of infinite consciousness as the only self there is, the reward of its quietly blissful nature.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by William Blake (1757-1827)

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Websites:
– Second Coming (Wikipedia)
– William Blake (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Lost in Temptation

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Temptation’ – Odilon Redon, 1912 – WikiArt

You have to keep close to yourself. You cannot escape on a line of thoughts, thinking yourself out of your present experience of being. You cannot bring about another world — imaginations, beliefs, projections — on top of what you are already, on the mountain of being which you sit and already spend your whole existence on. You have to stay with what you are deeply — that unmoved, unchanging identity of being which you have been immersed in from time immemorial. It is too easy to take advantage of your senses and believe the world to be outside yourself. Too easy to pretend that you are separate, and that you live in the limitations of your own world as body and mind. Don’t move anywhere out of the very confines of your unlimited, dimensionless being. Keep very close to that. Believe me, that’s your only solace. They will try to convince you otherwise, but keep at it unreservedly.

You cannot move out of consciousness, out of the knowing of anything. You have your eternal home inside that knowing. You have your consciousness always with you, and every place you go to is already soaked in it. You have already curled yourself up in that place of being and found your anchor there. So don’t pretend you have to go out to find the sustenance of objects for your own happiness. You can’t find anything worthy outside yourself. Stay where you have already your essence in. Keep very close. It is tempting I know, to go out for a ride on a fleeting joy, or the promise of temporary happiness. It is compelling to suspend your suffering, even for a moment. But trust me, there is nowhere in this world where you could go and find a peace which you don’t have already within, waiting, sighing for your returning. So keep so very close to your own reality as being. Stay there uncompromisingly.

And don’t think yourself small there. Your being is not what you think. It is not a vague sensation inside your body, lodged in the recesses of your mind. You made it small because you have lost touch with it. You have buried it under the shine of your many experiences. You have scattered it in a thousand wrong identities. Your being is vaster than you think. It is the infinite which you have lost faith in and replaced by the little space provided by your senses. It is the eternal that you have pushed and imprisoned in the cage of time, which is but the activity of thinking. Nourish your inside. See that in doing so, in living in the heart of your true identity as pure, unalloyed being, just under the surface of objective experience, the within will be shown to be without, and the without within. You will come to notice that being is all there truly is. You will see the world finding its true, most fitting place in and as the consciousness from which you have once exiled it from. So pay a constant visit to yourself. Check that you don’t flee from home, no matter the circumstances you are in.

Be under the constant protection of your being. Live there. Find no temptation outside the plain attraction contained in the inevitability of being. You have been placed here for a reason. This is where you find yourself to be whole and therefore peaceful, your suffering being but this covenant broken. This is where the world is clothed in its innate beauty, which is conferred by your being both in this shared place of being. This is where love thrives and finds its origin — in being, when it is seen to be shared by everyone. The same being — not two, not many. One and the same for all, therefore evenly distributed as love. Love is not a feeling that appears when the other fits your own selfish requirements. It is the nature of being and of yourself when you recognise your own, given, divine nature. This is what is meant by the ‘love of God’. Not the love of a parent for its infamous, ungrateful children. But the love immense and unconditional that being shelters and showers upon itself, and which you have now recognised to be your own self, and the self of all.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

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Website:
– Odilon Redon (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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‘God Runs After You’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sea bay’ – Ivan Aivazovsky, 1842 – WikiArt

Through our constant effort, we keep the effortless at bay. Even if we seemingly don’t do anything, we are always after something. So this constant, subtle pleading, asking, begging is closing all doors for truth to come in, to reveal itself to us. We are already dating someone else. Our mind is full of its rushing out in direction of an object, something that is going to satisfy us, to give us an identity, to fulfil us in some way. We are never truly longing. We are never an empty shell — always seeking, filling ourself with one thing or another. We don’t dare giving up, being vulnerable. We think we have to be someone, an entity in charge, a doer, a knower. We live with an armour, with layers that are concealing our true nature, even repelling it.

We have identities. We are full of them. The body is one, which we believe to be and be limited by. The mind is another, which we have adopted as being ourself — the ‘I’ that I am. We too believe in our thoughts, that we think define us, shape our identity. We are in a prison of our own making, made of bricks of memories, beliefs, hopes, desires, fears, that all concur to build a non-existing self of which we have now become the slave, and with which we have a dysfunctional, love-hate relationship. Even our ambition for truth is too much of an identity. Our desire for enlightenment is still a desire for fulfilment, another thing to achieve, a someone to be. Our true identity as pure, infinite being is not a new identity. It is not concealed or limited. It is not resisting, desiring, lacking anything. It is its own fulfilment — an identity that cannot be had, named or measured.

That’s what a true longing is — to be without ambition or desire of our own. To have even not a desire for truth, for which we will need an ego, and which still is a wall against the truth we seek — maybe the thinnest of all, but still a wall. Reality is to be realised, not achieved. It is in the word: ‘reality’ — which is we are that which is. There is no need of even the subtlest move towards it. It is all in the way we long for it. All in the way we build nothing that can go against it, or that could conceal it. This is the meaning of humility. We have to be lowly, on the ground, at the root of ourself, which is to be with our selfless being. We have it already — the being that we are after. It is all a matter of how quiet and accessible we can be. How we can be without a wall, without an identity. This is the most powerful longing there is — to be without any longing of our own making. To be without imagination or belief. To be watching only. Present. Already being — which we are anyhow. Not being an ambitious of some kind. There is no need to run after God. As Krishnamurti once put it so beautifully, “God runs after you.”

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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The quote is the title of a book consisting of eight hitherto unpublished discussions with Krishnamurti held in Malibu, California in 1970.

Bibliography:
– ‘God Runs After You’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Foundation India)

Websites:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

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

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In a Room Quietly

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Gościeradz’ – Leon Wyczółkowski, 1933 – WikiArt

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“All of humanity’s problems
stem from man’s inability to
sit quietly in a room alone.”
~ Blaise Pascal (‘Pensées’)

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We have always our mind racing, going after something. Stillness is resisted. Staying in a room quietly is avoided. Being alone is dreaded. We want to be occupied. We’d rather not be made empty, so we always have a war raging. Is it that we want to be something, someone? Is it that we have judged only being to be not enough? That we have to pursue something, whether it is an identity, a belief, or an idea? We are chasing our own self — what we should have, what we should be. We are on a mission, therefore we can never be quiet. We need to achieve, arrive, get somewhere, be something. We want to satisfy and be satisfied. We won’t rest before we are fulfilled. We won’t stay in a room quietly. We will have our wars to obtain peace. Our escapes to not be where we are. Our resistances to not have what we have. We prefer to possess, which is to sit in the throne of power — in the Lord’s seat — and wonder where God is, or have a belief about Him. We are chasing experiences and circumstances. Anything but only and plainly being.

In fact, we are always in a room quietly. We just don’t want to see it, or don’t know how to notice it. Ourself is that space where we live and have our many experiences. Ourself is our circumstance. It is where we are, what we have, the peace that we are chasing everywhere but where it actually is, which is in our humble presence — in and as our being. So peace is our nature, if we don’t put it at a distance, if we don’t wish to have it. So don’t start a war. Stay quietly where and as you are, and your nature will slowly be revealed to you. You will find that your identity is in your nature. That you have already what you are chasing. That the experience of being is your so perfect circumstance. And that in the throne of your being is sitting God, for which you now need no belief. You have mastery over your life, not because you control it, but because you know the nature of it and of yourself, and in that process have put an end to your own seeking. You have quietened down, ended a war, and placed yourself in the only place worth sitting, which is in and as your own glorious being.

Now never leave it. That place of yourself. Never be dissuaded that you don’t have it. Never be influenced again that you need to be something other than what you already are. If you have moved away from home, go sit quietly where you are and stay there long enough to be persuaded again in the inevitability of your own being. It’s enough not to wish to be other. It’s plenty to stay unmoved, a humble watcher. To be in a room quietly. To close every exit. To be fascinated by yourself — not escaping the fact of your being. Don’t move away from the way you simply are. From the possibility that being is all there is. From the room you are forever in. Don’t give yourself an escape — there is no escape. Don’t buy the illusion that you can be something other than that — what you are now, what you are in, that very circumstance of your being. So begin where you are. It will bring a rebellion, an insurrection, a mutiny. It will stop you from being just a person. It will make you free, and bring stillness in your life. Resistance will recede, and you might even enjoy your circumstances, that are now pervaded with being. You will notice your aloneness, and have a gorgeous life in it. You will be aware of being as the one and only place you are in. You will have solved your most urgent problem — which is humanity’s too. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Painting by Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936)

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Websites:
– Blaise Pascal (Wikipedia)
– Leon Wyczółkowski (Wikipedia)

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

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‘Come to Me’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1845 – WikiArt

Sometimes you’re left with just three words. I read them under a statue of Christ in a cathedral, three simple words from the Gospel of Matthew, but a whole teaching if you listen. “Come to Me”. There is immense simplicity and clarity in these three words. They have a vertiginous meaning, if you follow the course of their true destination. If you accept the invitation. Not from a somebody, a person that existed. Not from a God, or a Son of God. Not from anything in particular, any objective presence which you could go to. The invitation is from yourself to yourself. In fact, ‘Come to Me’ is better read as ‘Come to the me’. Go to the ‘I’. Abide in what you are, be that presence of yourself. Be just as you are — don’t add a thing to yourself, don’t play the game of projection or belief. Don’t give yourself to somebody or something that is not you. Stay right there, right in what you already are, just as you already are. But still, there is a movement implied — a solicitation, a passage from place to placeless place. It says ‘Come to Me’ for a reason. In that paradoxe is contained the totality of our spiritual endeavour.

It is not a place you have to go to, but rather the noticing of the place you are in. The beholding of your true nature. What is this ‘I’ that we stumble on every time we say ‘I’? What is this being conscious, this being aware that I am? Did we look well enough? Did we miss something that we have to come to it, take a new invitation, be encouraged? See that you have made your ‘I’ into an assumption, a pretence, an affectation, something not worth a visit, not worth a discovery or an enquiry. In fact, we have been asked to function and obey, which means to follow. The rest has been wisely swept under the carpet of belief or religion. As if we had already discovered everything about what we are. As if consciousness wasn’t worth a second look. As if from then on, for our nature, we had to rely only on imagination, belief, things fancy, whimsical, hopeful, devoid of reality. Reality has been covered — so we think. There is no new land here, no new discovery or journey within, nothing that hasn’t already been charted.

But there is a coming that is subtle to the point of not implying time or place. A coming that cannot be measured by instruments, that cannot be objectified, seen by the senses. There is a coming where we already are, but with a new light shed on it. A light that we have missed for directing it all on objects, with the complicity of the senses. So the light of what we truly are was lost in its being misdirected. Our true nature was lost in our belief in being a body, a self, a person. Our purity of being was hidden inside our fascination for qualifications and objects. Our happiness was lost in our suffering. Our peace squandered by our restless seeking. So there is a journey within. A journey with no distance to be covered. A coming to where we already are. A coming or moving into view. A becoming perceptible. A coming back to ourself.

‘Come to me’. You may discover that you have God within. That this is what the God of religion is — what they meant — the ‘I’ within, your true being. Come back to yourself. Become perceptible. Come into view. Know yourself as you are. Come into the light which you are already in. See that you are, and who you are. Abide in the purity of plainly being. Be yourself for the first time. Be ‘I Am’ alone. ‘Come to me’.

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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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God’s Alliance

Posted on by Alain Joly

God is not a romantic. He wants the best for you, and will make sure that you have no peace until you know yourself exactly as you are, which is as He is. God is a tough mother. She will lead you to feel that you come from her very womb, and that you have within yourself the memory that you are as She is, which is infinite and eternal. God has no idea that you exist as a person. He knows none of your ideas or beliefs, none of your attachments or suffering. Your problems are of no interest to Her. If you want God to know you, make sure that you go to that part of yourself that is without qualifications, that is like your naked essence — what gives you the consciousness of everything. Make sure that you become just as Her being, and that you share of Her divine characteristics. Then God will know you as surely as He knows Himself. And you will know God as firmly as you know yourself. But don’t play the part of the poor little me. For you won’t see a single tear on the face of god, and will attract no compassion from Him. God knows you the moment you know God. That’s the beauty and magic of Her infinite presence.

Partake of the same ground of being that is God’s being, and you will come to love everyone in the way She loves you. Share the being of God Himself and you will bathe in the peace that God knows, and that is your own peace too. Know your being as being God’s being, and you will experience the joy that comes from the ease of simply being. The only way God can know you is through that part of yourself that is of the nature of His being. And the only way you can see God is by seeing yourself in the way He sees Himself. There is no knowing God through relationship. He is knowable through sameness only. Oneness is the common home that we all share. Everything and everyone partake of the same ground of being, and find their identity in God’s identity. This alliance of God with the ten thousand beings and things of existence is one of supreme intimacy. Once this intimacy with God has been established in your life, you will come to know God as you know yourself, and to know everything and everyone as God’s intimate being. Her interior as to say. His loving heart.

And God is a lover of the strictest reality. The idea that you have of yourself can never know God. And God can never know the belief that you have formed about yourself. They are mutually exclusive. If you want to be a person of your own, away from God, then God will retire and become absent from your life although still holding you in the most humble and loving way. The person that you believe yourself to be has no reality and cannot share of God’s reality. This is why you suffer, and know the plight of loneliness and separation. Give the idea of yourself up, and you will find yourself as having the self of God Himself. This is God’s special bond with you, to know you through His very being, which is your being too. This alliance with God suffers no approximation. Be of God’s humble nature, and She will share with you Her blissful being, offering Her infinite body as the world you live in and mix your being with. But be with your own limited, separate self, and God will know nothing of you, and you nothing of Him. You will be just a passing cloud with no reality, absent from even the most insignificant thought of God.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
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On Being Apart

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two Men by the Sea’ – Caspar David Friedrich, 1817 – WikiArt

We are never far from our deepest reality. That’s a fantasy — to think that we are far, separate, apart. To think that truth is at a distance, that there is a god, a reality away from our own reality as being. Ourself is the only reality there is. We won’t find another one, something grander, truer than ourself. There isn’t. It’s all here within, already taking place in and as our own being. But we are limiting ourself with a thought. The thought that we are circumscribed to our body, restricted to our mind, and that we have our own personal being different and apart from somebody else’s being. This is how far we have gone from ourself. This is the distance we have created, the separateness we have invented. We have set ourself apart from ourself with a single thought. That’s our negligence, to have let ourself be governed by a belief, by a lie. To have drowned in our own absent-mindedness. We have, as it were, kept ourself on the sidelines.

But we can play the central role with the single thought that there is, at all time, only one reality. We are the only reality there is. Have this thought, that nothing exists outside yourself, that we have it all in our own reality as being. That we can rely on no other authority than the authority of ourself. That we can seek nothing other than our own self as being. That the world, everything, God, truth, the answer to our suffering, are all gathered within the single reality of our being present here and now. So state quietly in yourself that there is only ‘I Am’, that apart from ‘I Am’, well… there is no apart. No part separate from the totality has ever come into existence. There is only the totality playing the many parts of life, but staying itself complete, unbroken, one, whole as our own being. This is how simple we are — One. This is how much we matter. This is how close we are to the reality of everything, to this intimate, never distant truth that some have called ‘God’.

Think of your simple, everyday act of being aware as being everything, as the one and only reality there is. See what it entails, to have no projection of there being something, any kind of reality outside awareness. It means everything you need to know and understand is contained in and as your own sense of self. So watch it. Isolate it from every object that you are aware of, including your thoughts, feelings, perceptions. Feel naked awareness alone, and see how it grows, expands out of proportions, out of time and place, out of the world of objective experience. As you walk on the street, or wash the dishes, or do anything in the course of a day, remember that this simple experience of ‘being myself’ is all there is. That no reality exists outside yourself. That ‘I Am’ is all there is. Feel what it does to you, to think that you are one and alone, the only one being there is. Feel the shock of it, that nothing real, true, reliable, can be found outside yourself. And that this self of yourself encompasses everything, holds every passing, existing thing in its own reality. That you share this being of yourself with the being of everyone, and everything. Feel that you cannot be told apart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

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Website:
– Caspar David Friedrich (Wikipedia)

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

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