Fear and Trembling

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Plains near Beauvais’ – Camille Corot, 1860-70 – WikiArt

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“The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life,
to depart from the snares of death.”
~ Proverbs, 14:27

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There is an expression that we may find puzzling, maybe slightly paternalist, condescending and outdated, but is well worth looking at. We find this expression mostly in Christianity and Islam, where the mentions ‘fear of God’, ‘fear of the Lord’, or the injunction ‘fear God’ are found far more than a hundred times in the Bible, or in the Quran. This fear is said to be one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, along with wisdom, understanding, guidance, mightiness, knowledge, and devoutness. But why would we be afraid of what we longed for the most in our lives? We should be embracing it with ardour and ease. So what is this “fear of the Lord” that, in Proverbs 9:10, is said to be “the beginning of wisdom”? Why is it given such primary importance?

Maybe we fear god for the same reason that we fear death. We think that we are something, someone, a self that we appreciate and have a fondness for, that we love and want to cling to as something precious. We want it to continue. So we have elaborated strategies to keep our self padded with multiple pleasurable sensations through our various habits as thoughts, daydreams, pleasure oriented activities, routines, manipulations, avoidances, all these addictions that have come to form the main part of what we call our self. But these are vain distractions, for awareness as god seems to have in itself a momentum, a power to draw every thing and being to itself. So this pull can be felt as a threatening force from the limited point of view of a self that feels vulnerable, and finds temporary security in being something, even if this something is in final analysis the cause of its suffering. In Hebrews 10:31, it is said: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

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An essay that inquires into the notion of the fear of god… (READ MORE…)

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The Harvest of Understanding

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Harvest’ – Zinaida Serebriakova, 1910 – WikiArt

There is a time to retire into yourself. There, is a cavern of knowing and being that was left unexplored, silenced, unable to adorn your life with its presence. This hide is where peace resides, and where life finds its shine and gold. It wasn’t kept secret. Only you needed to abandon an erroneous idea about yourself that had been polished with centuries of conditioning, so that took a little probing. Finally this cavern of being is met with the light of your understanding. And this light is discovered to recede yet another jewel. Happiness. The gentle peace of living, made beauty when your eyes embrace the world, and rendered as love in the company of another being. It is a simple realisation — rare enough I concede — but nevertheless within reasonable reach for whoever is willing to give his or her heart to it. Now the story doesn’t quite end there. For you will be tempted to indulge in your new discovery. The comfort of your newly found home is mesmerising, and you will be drawn to keep yourself cozy in the embrace of your own being. And it is fine, even necessary to a certain point. You need to get accustomed to the new light of your being. But then is when you should finally be kicked out…

There is a time for knowing, and a time to make a harvest out of it. There is a time to equate pure being with the world, to feel it as yourself, to make the transfer, enjoy the catch, go beyond the riddle. This is ultimate realisation. Don’t forget to transform the knowing of your own being into the pure delight and intelligence of being a luminous self in an enlightened world. Be the human that you were meant to be, that you had wanted to be all your life. In fact, we were never given a chance to be a true human. We have been one in the waiting. Only in and as God’s presence can you be made a true human being, an accomplished, apparent individual. One that is so, not for its objective qualities, but in reason of its sublime subjectivity. It is not an impossible attainment. It is here, now, just as you are, no matter the life you happen to have, or the person you believe yourself to be. Make your life proud of itself. Register that your self is gorgeous. Not just the light of pure being that you are of all eternity, but also that very body-mind, here, in this world. I think it is important to live as if. To be again just a human living in a world. Not to keep re-enacting unceasingly the realisation of your identity as pure being. Be yourself a living meditation. Let your life take the fresh wind of true being into a living practice. Give god a chance to wear the clothes of your human experience. Don’t forget the old Zen saying, “In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; later on, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; and still later, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.”

There is a hidden reward concealed in experiencing the humility contained in being just a human in the world. This is how you will feel truly. This is how you will love sweetly, and register beauty beyond understanding. This is how you experience true relationship with others. This is how any moment can become a thrilling new adventure, never to be repeated again. And this is how you will come to experience the special grace contained in thinking and feeling, in having a body, in living in a world. The best wine is only so because of the exquisiteness of its taste. Drink life, drink love, through every pores of your body, through every windows of your feelings and perceptions. Experience it from a promontory freed from the constraint of beliefs. Choose love over wisdom. Your understanding will grow exponentially out of this second incarnation. God hasn’t done all this tiresome work of bodies and world if it wasn’t to build a beautiful home for you to live in. Engage your being in every aspect of your experience. Don’t leave the world aside. Yes, the world is often ugly, ridden with conflict and every kind of suffering, degraded, and often a dangerous place to be. But it may well turn out to be our paradise, if we upgrade it with and as the presence of our true self. It is not a selfish thing to enjoy. It is in fact a selfless act to be a servant of peaceful being. And remember that wherever you are and act can be a haven for everything and everyone coming in your echo chamber. For being attracts being. Be yourself a haven of life. Incarnate the teaching that was passed on to you — that’s how you pass it on to others. Make it a thing. Reap the enjoyment of it. Feel your participation in the world. Let your human experience be soaked with being. Make god resplendent.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967)

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Website:
– Zinaida Serebriakova (Wikipedia)

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God’s Blind Spot

Posted on by Alain Joly

Understand that there is something present now, that stands ready to record your experience. This something or presence is massively here. You cannot budge it no matter what. It is here the moment you are seeing anything, and the moment you are hearing what you are hearing. No matter what it is you are perceiving, that thing is here to allow you to do so. Should you be thinking, and your thinking is immediately known. Should you be feeling, and your feeling spreads itself in the very thing that is knowing it. Your body is under its scrutiny, through its being aware of a sky of sensations. It will follow you no matter where you go, and yet you cannot make it go anywhere. You cannot hide anything from this observing eye — he’d be the one hiding it. This thing has no shadows. It is bright day and night. And should you undertake an inquiry about that sun, she’d be the one conducting it. In short, the whole of life is being played within something without which there would be no life to be experienced. It is conditioning everything to itself without itself being conditioned by anything. But the most extraordinary of all is that we manage to miss it, to not notice it, and finally conceal it. Which means that this presence is itself the one concealing itself. And that bit of shadow that is left behind is who we think we are! We therefore only exist in a vacuum. The self that we believe ourself to be is the only thing that can neither experience nor be experienced. It is not in the picture. Nowhere to be found. Evaporated! Just an invention. The unreal cannot in a thousand years be experienced by the real. So the real is left completely alone. One with itself. And we are that: An ocean of knowing that knows nothing of the wee self we pretend to be. It only knows our having never, ever been here. In other words, we are God’s only blind spot.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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One Sublime Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Winter Night in Rondane’ – Harald Sohlberg, 1913 – WikiArt

The body-mind is not an apparatus that stands on its own. It is an instrument of awareness. It is supposed to bear and implement the innate qualities of its owner as pure, unlimited being. This is why it has pain and suffering: When all such qualities have failed to be transmitted. When awareness is being short-circuited. Suffering is the complaint of God that is inbuilt in the body-mind system. It is God’s intelligence revealing itself to ourself when we have become blind to our true nature. So we have to align ourself to the depth contained in the knowing of our being, to be ourself that vastness, and allow it to shine in our experience. This is the golden avenue to peace: to be ourself an expression of the divine being that is lending itself to our constitution, lending its body to the body of our bones, blood, and skin, and lending itself as a container for our thoughts, sensations, and perceptions.

We never had a solid body with a life of its own. A dying body is not just a body that fails to sustain itself. It is consciousness calling itself back to itself, and in that process making the body-mind instrument ever more soft and porous, leaving it ever more shining, ever more acquiring the qualities of its essence as pure being. It is also a mind that is made less ambitious, losing its carapace of wanting, needing, seeking, expecting — the suffering that it all implies. A mind that is slowly giving itself in, to return to where it never left, and espouse its natural receptacle as pure awareness. This is how death comes to be so readily accepted. In the course of this transition. In the gift that death is in last analysis. For your body is not your body. It is God’s being in disguise. As for your mind, it is but God’s infinite mind borrowed. So you never truly lose your body. You never truly lose your self. And you are not confined to your body-mind in this life. You just come to realise the presence of another truer, finer body. A body that extends itself to the width and length of the world. And you notice that your mind is not restrained to the perimeter of your skull, but hosts unbridled, measureless, the world that is your body, with its infinity of variables. This is how body, mind, world, God, life, death are discovered to be one sublime being, bound together by the vital fluid of love.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935)

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Website:
– Harald Sohlberg (Wikipedia)

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Christ (noun)

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Christ Pantocrator mosaic in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’ – Unknown, 13th AD – Wikimedia
. Sometimes, the simplest questions are the ones never asked. Like, for example: ‘What is ‘Christ’?’ Were we ever curious about it? To know why this word was chosen to represent what it represents. Don’t we want to know? A word that has lent itself to a whole religion, that has been used to name a person —Jesus — who was worshipped for millennias, who is nothing less but the son of God, and who claims to be the solution to the relief of our suffering, to our being cleansed of our faults, and to our being reborn, resurrected, and blessed eternally. Don’t we want to know, to approach it with an inquisitive mind? Just once? But it’s like we are being afraid. A sort of strange ‘fear of god’ that we have deep down, both as lovers of god or as atheists. Especially in religious matters, where it feels that we are often satisfied with a hazy understanding, a shaky belief, or a quick judgement, and are never prone to go deeper than that. ‘This is too big for us! Too remote! Where too much is at stake! So we’re not going to shake that boat! Not now!’ And so… This is how we keep a simple misunderstanding safe, how we keep an old stale belief alive, and how we keep at bay the truth of who we are… but we’re not going to do that now. Now is for truth. Now we have come to know at last! And one way to start an inquiry, in our highly conceptualised world, is to humbly dig for the etymology of the word that defines the thing we want to know about. That usually reveals some deeply buried secrets. So… ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek word ‘chrīstós’ meaning the ‘anointed one’. A meaning that is shared with the Hebrew word ‘mašíaḥ’, translated as Messiah. To be anointed is to be smeared or rubbed with oil, typically in a ceremonial way. It is a form of consecration, of elevation. It was used throughout history in multiple ways, for example as a form of medicine, or for the blessing of a king, or to attract the influence of the divine. But behind all the pompousness of it, is simply an act of redemption: We want to be happy, to be brought back to a state of health and harmony. It is the desire to elevate ourself from our conditioned ways of thinking and believing, and find the peace that we all think to deserve. It is the longing to be relieved from our suffering, and to rest at last in our own glorious being. […] An exploration of the meanings hidden in the word ‘Christ’… (READ MORE…) .

What We Have to Do

Posted on by Alain Joly

Well, now you know what to do, don’t you? All this time spent in the contemplation of truth must have served some purpose. The countless hours sitting on the cushion. The days in the company of Meister Eckhart or Rumi. And the sage of Arunachala. All these masters of presence. Surely they must have made a lasting impression on you. Now you won’t be seduced by experience anymore. You won’t be dragged into the train of every thought or worry that passes by. You won’t fall entranced by feelings, no matter how pregnant they may appear to be. You won’t let any of your sensations attach themselves to yourself, and suck your attention. Now you know better. You won’t be caught again. The time has come to find yourself just where you are. In that essential in yourself. Not at the periphery. Not in the weather of life, but deep down, in silence, in that presence that falls to nothing but itself. This is where you have to be. This is where your sacred interest lies. But we know that so well by now, don’t we? No need to stress that point again.

Well. But let’s rehearse it again. Just in case. Some part of it may have slipped away from our attention. There is never any harm in repeating what really matters: The important is never in the many, but lies secret in the reality that hosts every seeming appearance. So now we know, don’t we, where to look, where the promise hides, where that non-spoken truth is spoken. We know where is our duty to God. It is there, where you know, close to yourself, behind the behind, present as your most intimate identity. Don’t let yourself be drawn outside of it. Don’t fall to any passing occurrence, to anything that is not the entirety of you. That’s simple enough to make the difference. Stay with that part of yourself that is unmovable, that cannot be divided, set apart, isolated, looked at. That part that will never fail you, no matter hard you may try. And if you find anything, any thing, that stands to be noticed in your mind, an obstacle in yourself, then be unconcerned, go behind it, go for the space that holds it, that last frontier beyond it. And should that obstacle, that thought, that feeling, that perception, be so pregnant as to occupy the whole space of your self, then be bold, dive into it, right at the centre of it, free fall into it, on the other side of yourself, in this unknown, never visited part of you. Then… Then, you may come to that spaceless space, to that newness. Let it shower you, cleanse you. Be it and don’t move away from it no matter what. You won’t regret it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Elsebet Barner

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Let’s be very Clear!

Posted on by Alain Joly

What a pity! That truly is a pity isn’t it, that the Divine isn’t an object? Consider for a moment: if God’s nature was objective, a thing to be acquired, we’d all be running after it with eagerness. Nothing could stop us from getting it. The path to it would be clear, easy, rehearsed a thousand times, with unmistakable steps. We would all be happy — the shy, lazy ones only in a small measure, but clearly so; and the greedy ones probably piling chunks after chunks of happiness at home, for the bad, chilly days. No doubt that after a while, happiness would be placed in the market place, to be simply bought — a democratic God, available to all. Only, God would then become so pricy, that only the rich amongst us could afford it. The poorest would have to stay unhappy, miserable. After some time, the rich ones would no doubt find God boring, to be replaced by another more exotic good. And happiness would be set aside, discarded as a thing of a time past. Dreadful prospect, isn’t it?

But thank God, the Divine wasn’t made into an object! So none of this could ever have happened. Not to God! To anything else yes, but not to god, not to happiness! The price for God had been set, right from the beginning, as an inestimable one. And the way to acquire true happiness was made into such a subtle, noble pursuit, that no money could ever be of any use for it. We may try, as we did for centuries, to make God’s being into another subtle object, something convenient, setting methods, churches, temples, ashrams, where it could be practised, and happiness made into a precious ornement to be obtained. But none of that was found to be effective, in final analysis. Only a few rare, lofty, unmatchable seekers were able to find God where it truly lived, and make themselves so available to it as to become of it themselves. These rare beings have found there a joy so ineffable as to appear unreachable, and God was downgraded to a celestial being or an exotic state, to be idealised and worshipped. That’s not yet an ideal situation, is it?

So let’s start again and be very clear from the beginning! God has never been, will never be, and could never be found as any kind of object. It is not something to be attained, and its presence is not at a distance from us. The difficulty in recognising its presence lies in God’s utter subjectivity, and in the abundance of it in ourself. So don’t move from where you already are. This place of yourself is the only suitable enough spot for happiness to thrive, and a precious enough container for God’s humble, sublime home. And don’t wait for another time than this present time of now. God is only accessible here and now. You will find it nowhere else. Stay there. In yourself. As yourself. But go to the very heart of it, at the core of what you are and always have been. Who you already are is the secret cabinet where God dwells, and has dwelled all this time, without your noticing.

Now I’ll tell you a secret. Ask yourself the question: What is the only portion of my present experience that is exempt of objects, of things known? Find this place in yourself where you cannot be any thing, where you cannot be located, where you cannot even be named, where you are made no existence at all, where you cannot know anything but your own present being, where you and the whole world can be embraced in one subtle presence that cannot be found but is paradoxically all there is, all that you were, and all you will ever be. Feel this presence in yourself, as yourself. See that you have been in God’s home all along. Gently notice its glory being slowly revealed. Delve in it, and as it, patiently. This is what God’s being feels like — that subtlest presence that you are in fact referring to when saying ‘I’. There! Do you feel it? Rest and live only as that.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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