A Holy Formula

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Woman in the Wilderness’ – Alphonse Mucha, 1923 – Wikimedia

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“Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole.”
~ David Bohm

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You cannot suffer when the world in which you live is discovered to be you. That’s mathematical. A formula that will work magic in your life. For you don’t live separated from everything else. You are not limited to your body, and the world is not something that is distinct from you, at a distance from you. You discover that the jump was made long ago, that you have been the totality already from the beginning of ages, eternally one with it, and that there never was an inch that separated you from the world you live in. That’s how you are complete, by knowing no separation, by entertaining no difference, and therefore having no preference. So you cannot be lacking anything, and suffering is always only the lacking of something, which is born of separation. So stay there, in your inseparable essence, in your world of completeness. Notice that this is what you are, or rather what there is, when you stop fantasising yourself being somebody. You never had an existence of your own. You are the flowering of something deeper. If you ignore or overlook this simple truth, well… then the trouble begins, all the travail of life, and the never ending seeking for fulfilment. This never was about you. Life is bigger, wider than that, and you are here only to honour that and to live by its gorgeous rules.

Then you enter into sacredness. You leave the limitations of being somebody — a projection, an idea that thought has sculpted over time — for a merging with infinity, with who you truly are. This is what sacredness is: an entering into your true self. A visiting of the truth of your being. The anointing of your self with its reality. This entering is a sanction from truth. It is the death of an old idea which you have entertained, for a ride into unknowing. It is a ceremony in which you are being elevated to a reality that you have been blind to. You are being sanctified, or made true. You were already that, already living as that reality, already tasting of that firmament, but were distracted. You were drawn to be something, insisted in being exclusively yourself, by yourself, so you have ignored it. You missed the chance to know yourself truly. You worked too hard to be what you are not. You lacked passivity. Not that you don’t have to do anything to come to this understanding. But rather, this understanding is nothing you do. It is here in you, as you, without your doing anything about it. It doesn’t need your participation, or rather it needs your non-participation, your staying away, your keeping quiet. Your abandonment. The hardest thing of all.

Then you enter into holiness. You taste of your true home, which happens to be the home of god. You are made holy, which means whole, uninjured, healthy. You realise where you are, what you are, the stone you are made of. You notice your true body — the consciousness of everything. You connect with a reality that could never be transgressed or violated. A reality which you could only fall in love with, for it is your beloved self, which you have lost sight of, and are now reunited with, consecrated in, and which you would never want to leave, or not live by. You are made of the same golden dust that the stars are made of. I don’t mean just your body, but what you are at the core, the essence of your self, what you happen to be when you say simply ’I am’. You are made into “an internal relationship to the whole”, as David Bohm expressed so beautifully. And you will struggle to see the world as a collection of different parts, or to see yourself as one such part amongst many others. The One will come to be your only experience. But you will be defeated again and again. You will come to feel a part again. You will be seduced to be somebody time and again. You will want to feel separated again, to win another last adventure or advantage for yourself. You know: your little devil wanting to be the likes of god. But keep going. Keep going. Until one day, it may dawn on you: you are no more.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by David Bohm (1917-1992)

Painting by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

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Websites:
– David Bohm (Wikipedia)
– Alphonse Mucha (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
– A page from the blog dedicated to David Bohm: ‘Insights into Wholeness’…

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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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The Fall

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Storm Clouds Sunset’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1825 – WikiArt

What a strange thing to have believed that we are not enough just as we are. That we need to be something other than this very sweet being or presence that makes us whole in a superb manner. Well, there must have been a belief that got in the way, that separated us from this plain and natural contemplation of our self. We must have come across a division, must have lost the thread, fallen down somehow, sometime, from this inner, blatant clarity. Where did the fall take place? How did we come to lose that which makes our very being, and can therefore never be lost, unless we were to disappear into oblivion? Was it just a simple belief, a little thought that did that? That made us think that we had to start from scratch, from a position of being flawed, insufficient, and that we had to do it all ourself: to succeed or fail, achieve even our happiness or our miserableness? That there was no given in being ourself? That we were small, incompetent in just living contented and blessed?

In fact, we have spoiled the game. We started with the wrong move. We have introduced a defect, a grain of sand that jammed the whole machine. That is: we have made ‘I am’ into ‘I am this’, have blemished being by objectifying it, have introduced a new entity where there was no need for one. I suppose we just wanted to do well, to bring our own contribution, presupposing that something was lacking when all was already perfectly whole and harmonious. So the first thing now is to stay away, to not indulge in being anything, to stop characterising our self when it is already fully characterised by itself, full to the brim with its own being, in no capacity of being more or better than what it is. How would you embellish splendour? How would you add anything to the sublime? Try it and it is but a fall from heaven to hell, from the inherent happiness contained in being complete to the suffering induced by separation and lack. So stop thinking that you can bring anything to yourself. Leave your ambition to be perfected, arranged, aggrandised. Notice that the simple fact of being cannot be improved on. You will never do better than God. Leave your self as pristine as you found it when you first breathed into its transparency.

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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 ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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God’s Favourite Child

Posted on by Alain Joly

You are not alone, not just anybody left in one corner of the world, with no resources. You have been given a world that cannot go wrong, except in your own imagination. So you may relax now, and let yourself be. Just be. You can give it all away, all your worries, all your concerns about a future. Keep only this one reality close to yourself: you are. In that being is contained all that you need. Be only concerned with that, with presence. Feel it to be your nurturing essence, your progenitor. You are God’s favourite child. We all are. We worry and suffer until comes the day when we realise it. Know this filial nature as your only reality, your one solid insurance in life. God is as close to you as your sense of being is. It won’t leave you ever. It has been building a gorgeous house for you to live in. This house is the one you already are in. It is yourself, who you are of all eternity, although you may not have noticed yet. It has soft, silk drapes on the walls. For there is luxury in being yourself. And the only thing that brings you closer to putting an end to your suffering is the knowing of that — the knowing of being — with its inescapability and the soothing comfort contained in it.

There is a special sense of gratefulness that comes with simply being. Have you tried it? To simply be the one which you are. With no supplement needed. No artifice in the least. This very sense of being is God showing to yourself how he cares for you. How much you matter to her. You don’t need to add anything to that. Actually, you shouldn’t: that will make you drop from god’s sweet embrace. So be always under the warm influence of being. Feel that you are it, and that you are in this way as God’s being itself. You will never have to look for an identity outside yourself. For there is only one drama currently running in this world. It is that they made you think that God is far and away. An impossible task while it is in fact the nearest, most accessible thing there is in your life. One that needs only a little attention. The attention of being. The curling up in the warm blanket of your self. Just that. Simple and easy. The only thing you do not have to reach. God gave you the favour to only be. So stay acquainted with it. Do it justice. Return the favour. Be only being. That’s how God can recognise you as its favourite child.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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

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An Explanation of Reality

Posted on by Alain Joly

You may not be interested in these matters. You may be an atheist, a non-believer. You may have an aversion towards all things spiritual. It doesn’t matter. You will get it all the same, that the world, the universe, everything — including yourself — are not there. Nothing is really there. Not in the way you had imagined. This is not like everybody has been telling you. Not at all. And you will see it with your logic, with your scepticism — a golden value by the way —, with your Cartesian, rational, solid mind. I will explain. You just have to listen carefully. There is no world, and I will expose to you how it is so. I will demonstrate it to you.

You may think there are billions of other people, countless other versions of suffering, a multitude of experiences, a world teeming with crowds and achievements, and all manner of things, from the most sublime to the most appalling. And there are indeed multiple points of views. But all of the world’s sufferings will always ever be experienced as yourself. It will be for whoever you may be now, and be experienced in whatever experience you may be experiencing now. The whole world is always only a first person experience of the world — in whoever you happen to be at this moment. When another person experiences suffering, it will then be this person’s only reality, and so on. So you will always ever be yourself. There are no ways to be another than yourself, to have another experience that your own experience of being yourself — which you experience right now. So the totality of humanity is contained in that one subjective experience of being. It is all there — in being. The billions of subjectivities, the myriad of experiences, the unspeakable suffering, the expansion and the veiling, the gruesome and the awe, the glory and sacredness of truth, and the compelling ignorance. Every experience of every possible being in this world is in essence made of that one experience of pure, ethereal being. And suffering is when you don’t know that.

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An explanation on how the reality of everything is only being… (READ MORE…)

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Know Thyself

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Putti, detail from The Sistine Madonna’ – Raphael, 1513 – WikiArt

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γνῶθι σεαυτόν

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Know thyself. Know who you are. That’s how simple it is. You may start from the far end, from a belief, a philosophy, an exotic term. You may call it religion, or spirituality, or non-duality — whichever name you want. You may go through the rugged path of belief, faith, practice, meditation, prayer, philosophy — all the names and concepts, the endless thinking about it, and the seeking that seems to never end. But now, when you stop and consider it all at last, you will come to the realisation that, deep down, it all comes down to that simple sentence. ‘Know thyself’. Not the knowing of your thoughts, ideas, opinions, feelings. Not your idiosyncrasies, or character, or outer shape, or preferences. None of that. To know oneself points directly to the knowing of your essence, of your innermost being, what you are made of at the core, when every other thing that can be pointed to has been discarded as superfluous. This is who you truly are. This maxim was once carved in golden letters on the front of the Temple of Apollo in Ancient Greece. That’s what this wisest of civilisations gave to the world as its supreme and most fundamental advice. ‘Know Thyself’.

So self-knowledge is the key. Of course, you may analyse it, take it apart, trace the endless chain of philosophers that gave their stand on this famous maxim, but I would not encourage you to do so. Sometimes, what’s really of crucial, definite importance resides at the simplest, closest address. The one you never truly considered for fault of being almost as nothing, a child’s play unworthy of your attention. Could it be that simple? That the meaning of the whole of life, the solution to our happiness, and the key to the whole riddle of existence could be found there, in the simple knowing of ourself? Let’s assume that it can and consider it seriously. Let’s embark on this shortest of journeys, the one going within, in the direction of our own self, where no distance is needed, no time necessary, and no special expertise required. This simple journey is the one of which the Ancient Greek poet and philosopher Ion of Chios wrote in the 5th century AD: “This ‘know yourself’ is a saying not so big, but such a task Zeus alone of the gods understands.”

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A reverie that explores the path towards the knowing of our self… (READ MORE…)

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Unto the Ages of Ages

Posted on by Alain Joly

If people only knew. That they are so close. So close to living with the most profound peace in their heart. So close. So close to having a panoramic understanding of what it is to be who we are. So close to knowing the reason behind the word ‘God’. What it means. What it is, here, now, in this human life. If only they knew. If only we knew. How there is a joy that stands hidden just behind our everyday suffering. A joy, quiet and indestructible, that is present now, at the time of our indomitable sorrow. A joy that permeates our most stubborn feelings of despair. If only they knew. That silence is the very temple of their being, where the most sublime healing can take place. A silence where we can let everything go, to be the pristine self that we have always been. At last. Ah! If only they knew.

If only people knew. That life has an inherent, unnoticed simplicity. That the world that stands in front of them, is not quite the world they had in mind. If only we knew. That we own the beauty we see, we hear. That we hold the world, right here, close, so close to our being. That we were never parted from it. That it is our expression, and that we make it just the way we are. If only we had noticed. That love is not another feeling. Not something we choose to give or to hold back. That there is a love, so wide, so close, so natural. A love we cannot help. A love that is the structure of our self. Its profound nature. Ah! If only they knew. We. Us all. How it could change the dice. How it could make love our shared temple. To live in. Now. Here. If only we knew. How close it stands from us. If only. Ah!

And yet we know. Don’t we? We all know. We know that what we get is not the real deal. That this life is not quite the life we were meant to live. This is why we have hopes, dreams, expectations, projections. This is why we place love, friendship, happiness, beauty at the top of our list. We have that hint, that intuition. We know that the promise is here. That it stands close. So close. Ready to wash our eyes. Ready to speak its word to our ear. A word that we haven’t yet deciphered. Haven’t yet pronounced. That will bridge what we know with what we don’t know yet. And this word is ourself. What we are. A logos in our sky. That needs to be uttered once. Just once. A crossing of our bridge. To finally know what we knew. What we forgot. That which is eternally ours. Unto the ages of ages.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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