The Silent Prayer

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Dawn in the Hills’ – Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1922 – WikiArt

We have been taught that we are only a part. A body with some private thoughts and feelings, an entity separate from everything that we can see, hear, touch outside the boundaries of our body-mind. We have been encouraged to believe in separation, in effort and suffering, in reward and punishment, in a happiness that is only a passing experience which we have to strive for, and in brief, elusive moments of peace. That is the way of our life. But in fact, no.

This is all in our mind, only one particular, rehearsed representation of reality. It is all one wrong path taken, a momentary belief. Life was never meant to be fragmented. It was never meant to be tiresome. Our true reality is one of wholeness, with nothing outside of it. There is nothing out there that is not the expression of our own self, that is not included in our saying ‘I’. We may think that our ‘I’ is just this little, private, separate corner of the vast field of life. But if we look with utmost attention, if we let go of everything that we have been taught to believe, we will notice that our ‘I’, our most common, everyday, every hour mention of ‘I’ refers in fact to the vast field of life with no corner inside it.

Our awareness of everything expands beyond everything that is the prisoner of our senses. There is nothing with a boundary in our saying ‘I’. ‘I’ is the infinite that has been brought for a while in a world of time and space, of within and without, of objects which our body-mind is only a part of. Don’t be deluded by appearances. Don’t have a simple belief running your life. See that there is, beyond the many appearances, beyond the body and the many thoughts, beyond our seemingly suffering life, a reality that knows no limitation of time and space, and that has found refuge here in our simply saying ‘I’, or ‘I Am’.

There is nothing small about ‘I’, nothing that it doesn’t include, no time or space that it doesn’t transcend, no corner that is in fact not the infinite, no moment that has not been dipped in the eternal. So keep in mind that every time we cook a meal, do some shopping, or go for a walk, we are in fact inviting the infinite with us. We are inviting meaning, and beauty, and the peace that goes with being whole. The ‘I’ that we are doesn’t have to be restricted to a body, to the limitations of thought, to our physicality. There is eternity in our daily life if we are willing to look.

‘I’ is the absolute which we have wrongly attributed to our little idea of a limited person. We have squeezed the unlimited inside a belief, mixed it with a few sensations, lost it within the world of our many experiences. We have expelled God outside something that exists only in our mind, pushed It beyond the boundaries of an apparent entity, when it is but our very eternally present reality, hidden behind a wrong attribution, and shared as the one essence for all.

‘I’ was never private. We have belittled it for the sake, or the service of our own fantasy. We have downgraded it to a mere body, and in doing so have invited division and suffering. Think about it the next time you are saying ‘I’. Don’t ever say it mindlessly. Watch to where it extends. See the vast field that it is. Have it constantly with you, as the One that is both your true self and the harbour of every possible appearance.

Make ‘I’ your silent prayer.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Robert Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922)

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Website:
– Robert Julian Onderdonk (Wikipedia)

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One Sentence for Truth

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Girls by the River Prut’ – Arthur Verona, 1905 – Wikimedia

Sometimes a simple reminder is worth a thousand books, the simple reminder that this consciousness with which we live everyday, and at every second of the day, that is our companion in all circumstances, that allows us to hear the many voices of the world and be aware of the people and of nature, that is responsible for the knowing of our thoughts and feelings, without which no world, idea, hope, memory, suffering would be experienced, let alone understood, without which there would be no hurts or rushes of joy, no fear or sense of peace felt, or ruthless agitation, this very consciousness that is in fact our life, our only possibility for existing, for knowing and being, for experiencing anything — this consciousness conceals a treasure that is waiting for our recognition, and that is more than what we think and have been accustomed to believe,

a treasure that contains the understanding that this consciousness is so habitual and taken for granted that it seems like almost nothing, hardly felt or thought about, and so humble that it recedes behind our thousands experiences, allowing them the freedom to obsess or fascinate, and the power to conceal the extraordinary and the obvious — that this consciousness is in fact not our personal, private consciousness, that it is not what we have believed it to be, that it is not hidden, casual, a function among others, but the very answer revealed inside our humanity, the one and only thing in presence, the shared essence of everyone and everything, and what all religions have been trying to tell us in the first pristine intention of their founders, sometimes delivering the message with almost painful clarity, sometimes blurring it to the point of corruption and defect,

a message which is that consciousness — our consciousness — is in fact the Absolute, beyond which there is nothing, and before which none has ever existed, that it is our identity, our very self or being, what we are before every mournful identity or qualification that we adopt in our desperate attempt to be somebody, that it is the happiness which we have sought in objects or circumstances, when it is truly only the nature of our being felt, a consciousness which is peace itself, which is one and therefore experienced as love, which is the thing, or power, or being, or reality hidden behind the word ‘God’, behind every possibility of being, every tender blade of grass, every smile on a face, or flight of a bird, or starry night lit, every knowing of woe or wonder — the very reason for beauty and meaning, the One without a second of the Hindus, the Father of the Christians, the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, the Beloved of the Sufis, the before and the after, both contained in an eternal now, the here and there, and everywhere, since the infinite is its body, the only possibility of our immortality, and the I that I am at every second of our life.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1867-1946)

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Website:
– Arthur Verona (painter)

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The Burning Ground

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Fort George Island’ – Thomas Moran, 1880 – Wikimedia

There is no looking away from God. What we are, think, do, feel, experience, is already belonging to something that is prior. We don’t live inside one limited, time-bound reality and have to look for another grander reality for a form of relief, or resolution. We are already living in the reality that we are seeking, already tasting of the eternal life that we are longing for, already having the infinite as our most precious body. Our many thoughts are prayers, although they don’t seem to be. They are born out of desperation and have a mission. They are seekers, soldiers, working at a form of freedom and happiness, trying hard to go beyond their own limitations. They are clumsy, but they keep their gaze fixed on the eternal which they come from and which they desire to merge with again. We know our home though we have lost touch with it, and are seeking it back in every possible way. So look at what your thoughts are aiming at, the ground of being where they once were born and formed. Be and abide as that place of being, which is their playful ground. Be the motionless where they can live and thrive, and be relieved of their seeking.

Our actions are prostrations before the One. They are not born of an endless line of causation. That is only their superficial clothing. Our feet, and our doing are already treading the infinite that we are looking for, without our knowing it. This vastness without end or dimension is the stage for our many experiences. Everything we do, we do in the hope of retrieving our original essence. Our actions are either escapes from suffering and death, or attempts to reach a state of harmony or meaning. So look only in the direction toward which they prostrate themselves and at which they aim. Find that placeless place where they have the freedom to appear. Be what they are restlessly bowing before. Feel that we are their ground of being, where they come and are consumed one after the other into the One. We are but a burning ground, swallowing everything that comes and goes into the flame of motionless being. Our actions are already ashes, and we are the flame inside which they for an infinitesimal time live before disappearing. In fact, we have our whole life taking place and shape in a spark of eternity. Now see that what we are, think, do, feel, perceive, is better experienced from the position of that burning ground of being. There we acquire unity and meaning, and everything clothes itself in the peace which is our essential being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Thomas Moran (1837-1926)

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Website:
– Thomas Moran (Wikipedia)

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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)

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The Odyssey

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Odysseus questions the seer Tiresias’ – Alessandro Allori, 1580 – Wikimedia

No doubt that our life feels like an odyssey. It does for everybody. In the ancient, epic poem of Homer, the Odyssey is a journey home. It is with us too. But the fact that we are on a journey home is not always apparent. At least not to begin with. We’re too busy to see anything. We’re fighting demons. We’re full of desires, many of them, constantly assailing us. We think we’re going somewhere, without seeing very well where that is. We’re wrestling with the gods. We have many ideas, beliefs, hopes, sufferings. We feel we are a person in a world, who needs to reach a happy place that never comes. The reason is: home is within. The happy place is in ourself. It is not out there. It is in the ending of a belief, of a misunderstanding, of a bad judgement as to what we truly are. We are stuck in a place that doesn’t exist. We are stuck in a belief.

It eventually dawns on us that our happy place is where we are finally reunited with our inner peace. That’s the journey home: the journey within. But it takes a long and difficult travel of sufferings and errands to understand that there is no travelling back home outside ourself, in the diversity of the world. Home is within. Once we go within, the journey becomes shorter. The odyssey is in fact only the journey to the journey home. But to go back home implies that we were already there, and have left it at some point. So it appears that our going home, our odyssey, is an illusion of some kind. We are going in search of what we already have. We have gone on a war. For to seek what we already are is always a war. It always brings suffering, lack, and the such. It separates us from home. It multiplies monsters. That’s an easy thing to see. There is no need of a long odyssey.

We have the belief that reality is in appearances and forms, when it is in fact in the formless. We have the belief that our body-mind is our identity, when we are only contained in the infinite awareness of being. We have the belief that we need to adjust to a world that is separate from our own being, when we and the world are one being alone, perfectly adjusted to each other. We indulge in the comfort of our illusory view on existence, when this comfort is only the postponing of our journey home, and the fuelling for our own suffering. There is our journey within — to go from an illusion to the reality hidden within the illusion. To go from what we are not to what our nature truly is — which really is only to go from what we are to what we are.

Now, if we’re struggling within, it means we are still without. We still see the within as the without. We still have monsters there, and a difficult trip to be engaged in. We’re still on an odyssey. We’re still intoxicated by the Lotus-eaters, who make us forget about our journey home. We’re still captured by the cyclops Polyphemus. Still fighting some giant cannibals; or wrestling with the goddess Circe, who turns us into what we are not. We’re still resisting the enticing song of the Sirens, which keeps us mortal beings. Still being held captive by the false promise of the nymph Kalypso who, by the way, is literally ‘she who conceals’. We’re not yet in a journey within — not yet in a journey home.

Once we have understood that our home is only within, in and as our innermost being, we must be there as a beggar. We never enter our own being, our happy place, as a king in its kingdom. We have to be a beggar, a nobody. That’s what Odysseus does when he reaches home: he comes as a beggar, unknown to all. That’s the way to be home. We leave being a person of any kind, of any rank. Then, the last fights with our few remaining demons is quickly done — not a big deal. It doesn’t take time or distance. Doesn’t take endless coming and going, reaching and leaving, being on the journey. Home is home. We cannot go where we are. Home is an easy place to be in. That’s where we have seemingly started, and find ourself naturally in.

In our own Odyssey, there is always a twist at the end. In fact, we realise that there was no danger or difficulty, no storms or monsters, no length of time, no far-off countries. We had been on a quiet, mirror-like mountain lake all along — just didn’t notice it. The whole story was invented. Beautiful, exciting, painful, maybe necessary, but invented.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alessandro Allori (1535-1607)

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Website:
– Alessandro Allori (Wikipedia)

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Our Last Delusion

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Løvsprett’ – Frits Thaulow, 1889 – Wikimedia

You won’t see a world outside the confines of the mind. The world is not there as an ultimate reality. It draws its many shapes out of the limitations of mind. It is sculpted by our senses. Thoughts are giving it its colour, shaping it for the purpose of a self. We blame it for our suffering, or praise it for our happiness. But its existence is a passing, illusory one, as it is for all thoughts, and for the body.

Although we as a body live in a world of limitation and finiteness, we in truth have our stand and our anchor in the deeper, conscious reality of our own undefeatable, limitless being. Happiness in the world never comes from experiencing the world. It comes from beyond the senses, beyond experience. It comes from beauty, which is the nature of the world when it is experienced from that part of ourself that is infinite.

Contentment in our mind is not given by our thoughts and our many feelings, but through experiencing them from the peaceful nature of our deepest reality as being. To live in the world is to be lost and to know suffering, but to have the world living within ourself is to know a joy that is free and independent from the ruthlessly changing nature of experience.

So free yourself from the world; it is not where you live. Rather, have the world close to your being, and see its nature as your own. This is the way to live in the world. See that it is still of the nature of mind. That it doesn’t own its own reality, but borrows it from the infinite, from the limitless, which is the nature of yourself as being.

So everything you seemingly do, you in fact never do. What you think you are, you are not. We live in a world of imagination. In fact, we only ever live in and as a reality that is shared, and that is our very nature. There, in that reality, is found the reality of our body-mind-world. This reality is the nature of everything and everyone we encounter in experience. It is our real world, our only home.

The impression that we live in a world that has its own reality is created, believed. The belief in being a body has created the world, has made it sprout out of a duality that we have ourself made up and manipulated. Outside this belief, everything re-enters the place it has never left, and the oneness it has never been separated from: infinite, eternal, seamless being.

This reality is what there only and ever is. Nothing exists beyond it, whether it is a world, a body, or a mind. To live as a body-mind in the world is to feel separate from it. It is to see ourself as a self. It is to have the arrogance of being our own self, and to see the world and circumstances as the provider of happiness. This is why we always look for contentment, security, stability, constancy. We mimic what we are before we actually know it.

And enlightenment is sill part of the world, still part of a belief. Its reality is invented, created for the sake of a self or an ego. Enlightenment is not about being enlightened. There is no such a thing as enlightenment, unless you want to cling to the reality of yourself as a body-mind. The belief in enlightenment is our last, ultimate delusion. It belongs to a non existent world, to a non existent self.

You have been the light of yourself — of selfless being — all along, but have played within the illusion of a world and a self, therefore concealing your own reality within that illusion. Re-assign yourself to your true nature. Then it doesn’t matter what you experience. It is not in what you experience — it is in what you are. It is all there. Nothing and no one exists beyond it. You have no use of enlightenment.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906)

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Website:
– Frits Thaulow (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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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:
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