A Plea Answered

Posted on by Alain Joly

For those of us who complain that god never answers their plea, let me tell you something. God is more subtle than that. He never was an entity, with a voice that could speak. She never even was a kind of object, however subtle, that could soothe at the level you are expecting, through the granting of a favour, the offering of a reward. Neither could god curse you with punishment. He doesn’t take sides. She never takes umbrage. God grants only one thing: Its glorious, infinite, loving presence. The lack of answer, the absence of favour, the withdrawing of reward, the malediction of punishment… it’s all on your side. Because you have blinded yourself to its eternal smile at you. Because you have covered your ears lest you might hear its constant whisper at you. For you were too busy thinking, pleading, complaining, expecting, reaching for an outside object or presence, that could give you, forgive you. For you were too engrossed in overwhelming feelings, worries, disputes, about yourself and others, and had definite certitudes about so many things, and such endlessly running opinions and preferences. In other words, you have isolated yourself, separated yourself, crippled yourself, and as a result made god silent and powerless — an empty void where it isn’t.

But god is never silent, if you turn towards where it lives. Its subtle presence at the core of your being is speaking endlessly, calling you with all the patience required. And that presence is never powerless, for it holds you eternally in its sweet embrace, as you can notice if you look at your own being with the same passion. And please don’t forget that your suffering is god’s answer to you. It is her calling disguised, what you had expected all along, the present that you didn’t bother to wrap with golden ribbons. And god also made you a favour. He came to live right at the heart of your being, so that you could never be at a distance from him; so that you could feel him as your own, ever-present self. And by the way, god wasn’t holding back anything. She is generous, offering you the constant reward of peace and happiness. Only you have to feel it in your heart, and not rush out for an auspicious circumstance or a desired object. And if you have ever felt the pang of a curse, understand that this indeed was of your own making. For you have cut yourself from god’s divine hold, and in doing so have lessened the abundance of its bounties. You have made yourself a lone traveller. You have shut your heart from the fountain of love that is steadily flowing as your own, ever-present, precious being, which is god’s being too. God has no power to curse, but you sure have, until you get the courage to open yourself to the infinite presence that sits in and as your self. That simple feeling of being, that all powerful god eternally crowing your self, will block all possible entry for a curse, and keep you safe.

And now for one last, precious recommendation: To live with the presence of god in your heart not only will protect you from your own talent at cursing yourself, but will open wide the doors of perception for the flooding of beauty. It will make your life a torrent of peace. For god will shower on you gifts after gifts of its benevolent presence. And he will grant you all possible rewards, all answers, all favours, clearing your path towards the blessing of immortal life, of unconditional love and objectless happiness. God was never disingenuous. She never was the void or absence that you took her to be. He/she is a presence so full that you could be his or hers for life eternal. Some have called it the Kingdom of Heaven, some Nirvana. And what blessing and surprise it is to find it right here, right now, as your very own self, veiled only by the plea of not having it, of wanting it, hoping for it, looking for it. Remember: you are not a self in your own right. Your self is nothing but god’s presence espousing you. For you share the same being, as the being of everything and everyone. But I won’t say more. Now you have your answer.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Shallow Well

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘View from the Ganges of the burning ghats’ – Edward Lear, 1873 – Wikimedia

We are but a layer. Our sense of identity has been downgraded to being just a thought whose presence is by now so habitual and pregnant that it is likened to our very self. This shallow well, this dubious layer, seems to be all that we have access to, and our thoughts and feelings have been upgraded to ridiculously important and all-consuming proportions. We have the identity of a thought imbued with itself, satisfied as it is to block the view to any deeper reality. It is ironical that the wonder and blessing of truth can be so effectively buried under the thin layer of a single thought about ourself. A thought that is so pervasive and convincing that few are the ones who have even the idea or curiosity of digging beyond it. But try it. A little probing works wonder.

Try to localise the shallow well of your illusory self. If you have to live your life from its vantage point, you might as well have a security check before embarking in such a serious journey. Is this all we are, this shallow thought that’s tossing itself about in our head? Is this all we are, this little body at the mercy of any impending death? Why such fatuous view about ourself? Was this beautiful mind of ours — that can behold the moon and the starry sky, that can fathom the silence and embrace the vision of beauty, the infinite expanse of love — was this mind created only to end up being likened to a thought? It really is a mystery that we have come to be satisfied with a shallow well, when we have at our hand the infinite and largely unexplored field of consciousness: that thing in us that is responsible for our very experiencing and without which no thing or being could ever exist or appear.

The idea we have about ourself is not our real self. We are satisfied with a vague representation, with a limited understanding. We don’t go all the way. We feel it okay to live our whole life — even build empires — without knowing who we are. But this essential knowledge of ourself should really be where we start our journey from. And a good look is worth many books of spiritual knowledge. We only have to notice that we have misplaced our focus. We have been seduced by the objectivity implied in the functioning of our sense perceptions. We feel we have to reach for ourself in the same way, and so we create this dubious sense of self as a projected idea. This mesmerisation is the shallow well — or shadow well — where we do nothing but go round and round in repeated circles of self-assumed ignorance. Only step aside once and you will realise that this thin paper-like layer of yourself is but a bundle of accumulated beliefs.

Only step aside once and you will realise that your self is a deep, unfathomable well that cannot be seen unless you merge with it and become of it. Feel your being as being that emptiness with no end. Be the aware quality behind your very seeing and hearing. Be this divine threshold of pure awareness. Don’t take refuge inside a shallow well. Realise its hidden depth. Relinquish the whimsical thought that stands in the way. Move just below or beyond this idea of and about yourself. There is some courage needed in this small death, but the reward is the path taken from limitation to freedom, from suffering to happiness, from death to immortality, from shallowness to infinity, from lie to truth, from pretending to truly being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Edward Lear (1812-1888)

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Website:
– Edward Lear (Wikipedia)

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The Direct Path

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring’ – Ma Yuan, 1190 – WikiArt

We are such complex beings, always confused by endless choices and directions, caught as we are in the repeated convolutions of our thought patterns. Because we see ourselves as an intricate network of thoughts and feelings, we are naturally engaged in finding the solutions for our life conundrum in that same dark cavern of thought. But mistakingly and unfortunately so. For this is a labyrinth from which we can never come out. It has been designed for our loss and suffering. It has been masterly laid down by ignorance, for the sole and only purpose of perpetuating itself. If you want my advice: stay away if you can. But if you are already trapped and caught, well don’t worry: there is a way out. And it might be an easier one than you think.

The problem with thought is that it is constantly crowning itself as the chief master in all deeds and endeavours. It is doing so well in so many fields that its influence overflows beyond its natural area of competence. It is forever engaged in a process of belief and identification. It has persuaded itself that it represents the body, and is by now certain to be a person — a ‘he’ or ‘she’ who commands. It has put the load of finding happiness on itself, and is driving the body out in the world in a constant search for new objects and circumstances, all with the aim to obtain the precious package. And since it has come all the way here, it might as well seek to bring to itself not only happiness but also peace, freedom, love, justice, beauty, and the likes.

This is how we get lost — along that avenue of thought. Along that deceptive, inefficient, never ending seeking. This is madness — this labyrinth we have created for ourself. Thought and its acolytes as feelings, images, body, hope, desire — all that joyous team — out on a mission to find happiness. The danger of such an endeavour is to be found in the thin line down the page on the contract, that stipulates the side effects of such a folly: namely that this mistaken avenue will produce suffering in the forms of all the fears, violence, hatred, confusion, and sorrow that this endeavour brings with itself. And we won’t be able to heal these unfortunate ailments with more of the same as we failingly try to. Suffering can never be overcome using the tools that brought it in the first place. We have to find another way out of this labyrinthine maze and mess.

The good news is that you don’t have to follow every shallow, intricate alleys of this labyrinth, which is understood by now to be only a dark prospect. You are not doomed. Happiness was never meant to be such a dreary, sweaty enterprise. Right there, in the middle of the maze, in your darkest moment of loss and despair, is the secret chamber of peace, and the gate to the freedom you have sought for so long. Right there is the hidden, direct path out of it all. The short cut through the maze. Right here and right now. When you have slowed down and looked for once from the position of the one that has been here, present in all eternity, just below the threshold of your labyrinthine thoughts and feelings, and in fact mingling with them. This is the abode of rest which magically appears when thoughts, feelings, images, body, hope, desire, and world, have been put in their right place. This direct path is not a path. It is ‘it’. It is that very place or thing — which is not a place, not a thing — of your wildest dreams. It is this one silent watcher that precedes what you take to be your self, and presides over your golden destiny as being. The One that is so easily overlooked and missed — so discreet and transparent is it. Thinner than a breath. Space-like. Peaceful. Blissful. Blessed. As simple and direct as your deepest, most intimate sense of being. Just ‘I’. Yes, plainly just ‘I’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Ma Yuan (1160-1225)

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Websites:
– Ma Yuan (Wikipedia)
– On a Mountain Path in Spring

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At the Crossroads

Posted on by Alain Joly

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
~ Robert Frost

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There are two parallel lives in our life. There are two different roads on offer in front of us. One has a signpost that indicates the destination of death and suffering, of constant uncertainty and tiresome conflicts, with a success that is one hundred percent reliable. You will reach your destination no matter what. The other one is another story altogether. No destination is indicated there. For it all depends on the first step you take. After that it is not well indicated. It is a road with no destination away from your self. A destination that is at no distance from your self. A destination not reachable through time. A predestined destination. You will just have to look behind, above your shoulder, to notice that the distance has already been covered, that you are already at the placeless place of your eternal self as being, and already made of the happiness you are looking for. And all this is right at the beginning, contained in the very first step you take. A timeless step into timeless being.

Take that less traveled road, and your life will have a wholly different perspective. It will become directionless, and yet open to a thousand possibilities. Whether these possibilities are incarnated or not will be of no importance at all. Because you have already reached all that you ever wanted to reach. You have already arrived at your destination. Replete. Complete. In no need of reassurance, or results, or of anything that would prove of your so dearly sought after happiness. This is very different than wanting to incarnate a possibility with the belief that it conceals in itself the recipe for your happiness. And when it is found dry and empty of such promise, pursuing another possibility, never incriminating the process itself but only the object that didn’t meet the required expectation. It is like trying a thousand medecines for a cure, and when proved unsuccessful, only questioning their efficacy and never the diagnosis of the illness.

So the road to suffering is paved with a thousand directions, while the road to happiness shows itself to have no direction at all, for the simple reason that its efficacy is not in self-improvement through the acquisition or pursuit of objects, but in the quiet and peaceful realisation of your being’s directionless and objectless nature, and its hundred percent reliability in matters of happiness, which is all life is about. The thousand possibilities are then only left to express that already achieved happiness, not bearing on themselves the expectation of, and responsibility for happiness. The reason why the road towards suffering is so unfailingly chosen is that as long as you grant objects the power to give you happiness, the direction on the signpost will indicate ‘Happiness’. How could you ever choose an unknown direction over a clearly defined one towards the dearest purpose of your life? Bear in mind that the right indication on the signpost is for you to see, understand, and write. Then the directionless place of your own being will be choicessly chosen and implemented. What you already are is never a matter of choice. What you are not and never could be is only a matter of choice. The less travelled road then becomes the only possible road, and the direction to which it points is the direction of your self, where happiness resides.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quote by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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Website:
– Robert Frost (Wikipedia)

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The Puzzled Self

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Bridges’ – Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, 1905 – WikiArt

We succumb to this original mistake again and again. That error has been enforced in the system through thousands of years of repetition, belief, conditioning, habit, and its illusory power has strengthened itself to the point of being a truth. The mistake is: we’re looking for something outside ourself. We’re reaching out. All the time. We’re craving for. We are deemed insufficient. Needy. In consequence, we have broken the world apart, have created chasms and distances, have invented time when it is not needed. We have made life into a battle and a struggle. We have given rise to suffering and confusion. And the worse of it, we have isolated ourself. We have projected everything that is not our body and mind as something that is ‘other’, different in nature, and have made that ‘other’ the only open source available for the rising and falling of happiness in ourself.

Quite a mouthful isn’t it? What an inextricable bundle we have created! And our self? Well, it has been reduced to something marginal, that forever needs to be reassured, consoled, fulfilled, aggrandised. We have created an insatiable monster that destroys everything in its path. Its hunger can never be satisfied. And its thirst is unquenchable. It will want to be forever filled. And that process will make us the target of unbelievable constraints. It will divide our world into fragments, and will scatter them around like a gigantic, incomplete jigsaw puzzle. With ourself being only one of its lost pieces. What a dreadful prospect! Well, we have made it ourself, all alone; and the responsibility for it goes nowhere but in the direction of our very own self. But don’t try to fix, arrange, mend, repair. Don’t go back in the wrong direction. Don’t go again after your lost happiness. Don’t do more of the same. There is no hero needed here. What’s needed is something a bit more subtle. And way easier believe me.

You have to look. Just to look. To look and to see. To look is on your part. To see is not. It’s a given. You have to look at your self, at all the scattered pieces of your self. And you have to remove just one element of the puzzle that acts like a wrongdoer, a confusing piece, the error in the system. Remove your well-rehearsed tendency to look for happiness outside yourself. Just take that possibility away from yourself. That’s the grain of sand that blocks everything, and engages you on a road a thousand-time trodden, to no avail. Feel the wonder of that one last element of escape out of the system. Nowhere to go. Nothing to be. Dare for once to look at that simple truth in the eyes, which is: you won’t find anything of value outside your own being. It all falls back on you now. The whole world. The thousand scattered pieces of yourself. The suffering. The confusion. The whole paraphernalia. Everything. On yourself. Then…

Then you will see that you are alone. All alone. Not isolated but alone. You will see what you truthfully are. You will see that you are made of one single piece that only works for and as your self. That piece is the missing element of your puzzle. The one that was unseen, forgotten, and which had been replaced with a clumsy, invented, unfitting one that placed your life into this unresolvable puzzle of suffering and loss. That piece is the unifying factor, the one that will make chasms into a bridge of Life, and your broken world into a fitting piece of Oneness. For that piece has a magical touch that will make every pieces of yourself fall back into place. For there were never any scattered fragments in your Self. There was only Being, the one and only owner of that which you are, and of all that which can possibly be. And that feeling of being, with its supreme knowing, is enough to give you the peace and happiness that you looked for in a thousand directions or scattered pieces. Being is your aloneness. And in that aloneness is the golden spring from where happiness is seen as your only possibility. That’s it. This is the given. What you needed to see… Puzzle completed!

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911)

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Website:
– Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (Wikipedia)

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Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Imagine a Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

Krishnamurti said it in very clear, unmistakable terms nearly a century ago. So did the ancient sages of India, the early Sufis, the original Zen masters of China, and the great Meister Eckhart, all in their own way. So there is no room for confusion anymore. Cease being entangled in your own, unfounded beliefs. Stop breeding and comforting them by thinking them out, perceiving them away, and feeling them in, therefore giving them a reality of their own. Be reasonable for once. All this ceaseless activity must come to an end. Remember what Krishnamurti said in such irrevocable terms.

Stop giving the world a reality of its own by pushing it at a distance from yourself. It will make you retreat in your body, where you will feel small, unsafe, required to manage a universe, and make impossible choices. Stop thinking to be your body only, squeezing your self in such pitiful way, bullying it, hurting it to the point where it is made unhappy and careless, fearful and resentful, its original innocence and beauty transformed into some hideous thing. All this could be avoided in one single glance and action, if only we had truly listened …

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A meditation invoking a famous statement by J. Krishnamurti… (READ MORE…)

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The State of Things

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Self-portrait’ (detail) – Rembrandt, 1658 (Frick Collection) – WikiArt

It is crucial in life to have a clear view of the state of things. Not to be left behind with an erroneous understanding or interpretation. For there are wolves out there, that want you to go astray. They will lure you to adopt their own inherited beliefs. They will push you in the direction of your fall. So be watchful of everything you don’t fully understand.

They will want you to believe that you are surrounded by people or others. That these ‘others’ are objects of fear, pain or pleasure, that you will be drawn to either avoid or use for your own happiness. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. At no time or place will you be asked to meet anybody but yourself. Your own glorious self who happens to be also the self of all apparent others. People are but the varied and beautiful expressions of the one being that stands as your being too. In consequence, they will become colleagues, partners, sharers of that same one being, and therefore beloveds. You will see them as blooming flowers that belong to the same aware field of consciousness. This field is the only self there is, present in everyone and every being as your very own being too. This, truly is the state of things.

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A meditative reflexion on the state of things in our experience… (READ MORE…)

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