On Retreat

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Hermit in front of His Retreat’ – Carl Spitzweg, 1844 – Wikimedia

There is nothing innocent about going on a spiritual retreat. We come to plead guilty. We want to be delivered from a wrongdoing, to be free from a form of captivity. We come here to be disentangled. To take a step back. Not only from our busy life, from our problems, but from our many false identities. We have too many of them, and we are willing to undress, to disengage for a while from everything that we have wrongly taken to be ourself. From our habitual, rehearsed, believed identification with our mind, our body, and our many thoughts. From our obsession and addiction with the objects of the perceived world, which we think bear the promise of our happiness. From our endless hopes, fears, projections, and our constant seeking. We retreat from the battle that it is to be somebody, and to live in the limitations of the known. We come to be courageous, and to wrestle with what we don’t know. To discover a way of living that is fresh. To be in awe.

We have come to pull back. To leave the periphery of our life — where the superficial is our only landscape — for the deeper ground of our true nature. We are willing to be wronged, to show our vulnerabilities, our ignorance, in a life where we are prompted to pretend. There can be nothing new in staying with what we know. So our retreat is a process of unknowing. It is the journey from what we know to the unknowable. And we know the unknowable by not being qualified. By remembering our primary, unborn identity, which finds its ground in the ground of being, before it is coloured by qualities and identifications. We journey until we fully inhabit experience. Until our retreat is not a retreat anymore.

We have been retreating all our life, resisting from experience, which we call suffering. Our life is mostly the result of our not wanting to engage fully, of our taking refuge in thoughts, feelings, to not fully face the pain contained in experience. We retreat in what we think is our security. So we also come on a retreat to stop retreating. We want to be relieved from the load of our many resistances, from the unbearable weight that it is to constantly retreat from the fullness of living. That’s why we feel so good on a retreat. We put an end to our many retreats. We suspend our journey away from ourself. We come home, where there is no need of a retreat anymore. Where we finally know ourself — who we are truly — and can rest there. Where we can fully and only be, embracing everything, knowing that being is all there is. We cannot retreat from what we are. We come to retreat until we can retreat no more.

Out of our constant worry, of our restless seeking, we happen to have retreated in our mind. We have withdrawn from our heart. We have identified with our thoughts. So we have come here to stop retreating where we do not belong, and return to our heart. A retreat is a stage set for this discovery. That mind is not an identity but a tool. That love is our natural identity — the treasure under the many stones of our false identifications. We have come to be open, to end our many retreats — the shrinking of our heart, and know the meaning of friendship. We did not come here to pull back, to disengage. We have come to remember, and to forget that we have remembered. We have come to be present, full of our own true and gorgeous identity of being. So we both retreat, and stop retreating. We disengage, and engage fully. We come to be both still, and in movement. To disincarnate, and find our natural incarnation in being.

We end our mere existing to re-engage with the aliveness contained in simply and only being. We have come to retreat from our many retreats, to invest the placeless place of being, where there is no need anymore of a retreat. We have come to move from matter to spirit, from being something, somewhere, sometime, to being in the unlocated land of our formless, infinite presence. We have come to be but an eternal now, in which time has now surrendered. We have come where seclusion in being is found to be our openness and our freedom. Where we acquire the dimension of a whole world. Where there is no more path, no more retreating. We have found our home in being, which happens to be not a retreat at all, but the place of a total surrender. Home is not the place where we are, but is found to be what we are. We have come to end every possibility of a retreat.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885)

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Website:
– Carl Spitzweg (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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‘Try to Die Here’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Mount Athos and the Monastery of Stavronikétes’ – Edward Lear, 1857 – Wikimedia

When the young Romanian Ioan Gutu arrived at Mount Athos to spend his life there as a monk, he was welcomed by his spiritual Father Elder Ilie with these few words: “Try to die here.” That’s what you do when you arrive at your true self, at your Mount Athos, you don’t form another thought about yourself, you stop looking for an identity, you don’t take refuge again in your mind, in your body. You leave all things, all identities, all beliefs behind. You stop reincarnating as a self separate from the world, for you have found that you were already fully, and wholly incarnated in being, in the selfless reality of your true nature.

In fact, the monastic life is only a metaphor for the truth of your living. You are required to spend your life and die there, because you cannot leave the reality of your own being. A monastery is a place where you reenact reality, where you know no separation, no ‘other’. You are alone, as the word ‘monk’ tells you in its etymology. It is where you know being to be the only place there is, no matter where you are, where you look. You lose your many pursuits and ambitions in being something, someone. You retire where you have never ceased to be, which is in yourself, in your nature, in the truth or reality of your infinite, undivided being. So this is the death that Ilie had in view for Ioan. “Try to die here”. Cease to be other than the One. Stay in your reality as it is, and spend your life there. Don’t leave who you are. Don’t go back to your life of separation, pursuits, hope, envy, comparison. This is prayer.

Wherever you are, try to die there. Don’t pursue your thoughts. Don’t go after anything. Don’t be enthralled by any object on the way. The way is what you are, where you are now, where you have already arrived. To die is to arrive where you are eternally, to stop believing in a destination. But this dying is a strange death. It is not the dying that you may have in mind, for there is no dying to your being. How would the One die? How would you die, if you have already ended all identification, every belief, thought, object, projection about yourself? What is left here that could die, when everything that you believed yourself to be, all your wrongdoings, have naturally, effortlessly ended? Could your essence, your deepest being die? Could that which is not a thing die? What is left here but the immortal, when everything mortal has been left behind?

Maybe there is another hidden twist in Ilie’s words. They could imply: ‘Try to die here if you can!’ You cannot. You cannot die in being, in presence. An appearance can die, but not that in which it appears. So, a monastery is where you can never die, never leave. It is where you leave behind all your many clothings of beliefs and identifications, all your wrongdoings — which is death. It is where you enter into the immortal and infinite nature of your true being — which is life. Everything else can die and follow its natural, mortal course except the One, of which the ‘everything’ is but a movement and a creation with a beginning and an end. So when you arrive at your Mount Athos, try to die here — in the One. When you enter, do your best to leave all your ‘mortals’ outside. Then find out that you can never die. John of the Cross said exactly the same thing upon ascending Mount Carmel:

“When thy mind dwells upon anything,
Thou art ceasing to cast thyself upon the All.”
~ John of the Cross (Ascent of Mount Carmel, I-13:12)

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Text by Alain Joly

Title quote by Schema-Hieromonk Ilie Vulpe (1851–1928)

Quote by John of the Cross (1542-1591)

Painting by Edward Lear (1812-1888)

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Websites:
– Mount Athos (Wikipedia)
– John of the Cross (Wikipedia)
– Edward Lear (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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‘God Runs After You’

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

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

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

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

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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

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

Websites:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

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

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In a Room Quietly

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

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

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

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

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

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Painting by Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936)

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

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

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A Study of Mind

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Landscape with Two Oaks’ – Jan van Goyen, 1641 – WikiArt

Notice that your mind is inapt at staying still. Stillness is not its thing. It has always something to think about. It is always on the road, roaming, judging, comparing, evaluating. Mind you, it is its nature to do so, if you let it. The mind is a restless thing. But its restlessness has a virtue. It pushes you beyond it. It encourages you to go deeper, where stillness is your nature. Where there is quiet. Something abiding. A stability.

Go not to the mind, but to the presence that supports it. Be like the gentle arms that hold it. Notice that your mind is not alone. It needs a space for its functioning. Sink in the mind’s left vacant space. Go in the interstices, between your many thoughts, inside your overwhelming feelings. Attain to the very substance your mind is made of. Be like its gorgeous essence. Not the mind itself, but the depth of being within it.

The mind deals only with the superficies. It is changing its mind at the slightest disturbance. With the latest flip of an opinion. Don’t follow its many thoughts. They will convince you that you are a self separate from experience. They will tell you that you are lonely. They will make you a suffering entity, though there is none. Go to the bottom of your being. Where the mind is only an appearance. See that you don’t disappear. You can’t.

The mind is ever changing, not you. It has an idea in mind. Forever keeping an agenda, being interested in outcomes, seeking experiences — only happy ones. You have happiness enmeshed within your own being, as the nature of your own gorgeous self. You don’t need to manufacture one, to provoke it with circumstances. Go so deep within the mind that you cease to be involved with its productions. This is called peace.

Stay with your imperturbable essence. It will show you that you are married to the world. The mind believes in the many, in division, in separation. But it is its own invention that it passes on to you as the only reality. Reality is where the mind is only a puppet. Reality is when you are one. It is beyond even your sense perceptions. They have colluded with the mind in making you believe in separation. Reality is aware presence. The mind is not.

Now be careful. For the mind has appropriated the ‘I’. It too says ‘I Am’. But the mind is not ‘I’. It is not your real self. The mind is pretending to be you. It does it all the time. So often that you have come to believe a bundle of thoughts and feelings to be ‘I’. But ‘I’ goes deeper. It doesn’t live in such a shallow land. ‘I’ belongs to the ground, to your innermost being, to that part of yourself that is unmovable. Where there is no past or future. No other, beyond, or away.

So if you happen to meet the mind one day, and be entangled in its mesh, or if you have adopted it as your everyday identity, don’t stay there. Move away. Be bold. See that all that comes here with a beginning and an end, with a limitation, has very little to do with you. See that as you deepen in and as being, your mind will slow down, and acquire a strange transparency. Your thoughts and feelings may even appear to be clothed in the infinite.

Your mind now seems to be no mind at all, and is in no capacity to bring separation. It stops being a brigand, and becomes a precious ally. Thoughts may be used wisely, and feelings are seen as a reflection of love and its indispensable joy. Essence acquires a new meaning, as it pervades the world and every experience that comes your way. Your body is experienced as made of Mind, and Mind as your new body. Spirit is where you live. It is without end.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jan Van Goyen (1596-1656)

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Website:
– Jan Van Goyen (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Our Only Chance

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘A Windmill at Montmartre’ – Camille Corot, 1845 – WikiArt

I wonder if our life is not just spent in avoiding dying. If this is not where all our energy goes: in being a self, in assuming to be a body, a mind, and managing all the challenges that go with having to live that body-oriented life. If we are not applying the best of our mind in controlling our thoughts and feelings, and pretending that we know what we’re doing, and do what we’re choosing, and choose what we’re wanting. We spend our life pretending. But we secretly ache in our heart for knowing nothing of what we are, except for one thing: we want to be, to feel, to know. For we sense that we are not quite living. It doesn’t feel that this is life — what we are going through. It doesn’t feel that this is the end game, to be a person that suffers, seeks security, and dies miserably in due time. It doesn’t feel right. It is not a good situation. Not what we expected from being a human. There has to be more than that.

So we’re seeking, working, slaving at meeting our own expected greatness. We’re toiling at knowing, at being a self that we carry through place and time. We don’t want to die, to let go. We don’t trust that we have it, already know it, be it — the greatness that we seek, the happy living we’re chasing. We’ve got to be a person first, efforting through life. We cannot already be our own dream. We cannot imagine that the purpose of life is in being, which we already are to perfection. We cannot envisage that effort is not our path, and that living is not a thing that we have to work at. We cannot understand that our simply being is already bathing in the peace that we so relentlessly seek to acquire and secure. We cannot be convinced that our joy needs no other circumstance than the simple circumstance of knowing our own being.

So we won’t let go. We need to keep control. We don’t want to just be, which seems like a form of death. We don’t fancy dying. We think that our solace, our happiness, lies only in being a person. The fact that it never worked, that it was never implemented in life, is only accidental. It’s only a matter of time, circumstance, achievement, politics. Being doesn’t feel like a program. Dying to our own separate self is not the dream we expected. We cannot be dying. We’ve got to be a person. We’ve got to toil for our life. We’ve got to deserve being happy, secure, peaceful. Even if we end up missing our own salvation, our own dream, our very own given, gorgeous nature.

For we were given a very simple work to do. An easy realisation. The realisation that any addition to being — being a self, a person, a qualification, otherness, separation, the whole enchilada — is but an avoidance. It is not real, not in the way we think it is. It is but an illusion that we have created for ourself. Our solace is in dying. It is to stop being that which we are not and never will be. To stop manufacturing an entity where there is only seamless aware being. We don’t need to be grandiose. It is all here, in the simple looking at our own being — in going within. It couldn’t be more easy, if only we would accept to slow down, and die to our being a person. If only we could feel all that is hiding here, in our very act of being — this infinity that is the totality of our identity and the greatness of our humanity. There is no being anything, or anyone. Being alone is, and suffices. This is our only chance to know who we are. To be truly being, knowing, feeling. And paradoxically, to be at last the ‘something’, the ‘someone’, that we have always wanted to be.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Camille Corot (1796-1875)

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Website:
– Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Wikipedia)

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

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The Person

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair’ – Rembrandt, 1628 (Rijksmuseum) – Wikimedia

There is immense pleasure in being a person when we are not a person. Then, the body-mind, the person, is not a burden anymore, it is a companion. We begin to enjoy its gentle presence, for it is rid of the constant search for happiness, peace, freedom. It is not on him anymore. She doesn’t have to bring about her joy. Doesn’t have to condition her freedom to her circumstances. The person is delivered. It doesn’t have to resist and be a fighter. Doesn’t have to struggle, suffer, hope, be in the constant grip of personal achievement and success. He can stop being a seeker, endlessly looking for what could make him good, content, relieved. She can stop having peace on her everyday agenda. These are given — naturally — as our nature, as ourself. They stop being the work of a person, his everyday load that he has to achieve, perform, be a success at — all the tyranny of it.

There is a presence that we feel is our own, our identity, that already gives us everything that we as a person would spend a lifetime looking for, and would for certain — that’s a universal secret, believe me on that — fail to secure. We already have a wonderful, pristine self in the form of our naked, unconditioned being, so the person doesn’t have to create a non existent self for itself. It doesn’t need to have this belief, that it is a self, that it is separate, that it lives inside a body and a mind. Self and identity are already provided. We share them with everyone and everything. We don’t have to be lonely. Don’t have to be limited by a form, and imprisoned by the boundaries of birth and death. Appearance and age stop being an issue. Comparison dies down. We expand as limitless being, outside even the boundaries of time. The body-mind acquires transparency.

Then we take him or her by the hand — the form, the limited body-mind, the person. Then it is like our best friend, freed from everything that made it small, separate, fearful. Then our body, although limited, will acquire and ride on the infinite nature of its beholder. Then our mind, which is bound by the boundaries of time and thought, will wander on the grounds of the eternal, where our being has its permanent home. Then our personhood shines, precisely because we are not a person. We become beautiful, attractive, and our actions bear the signature of the infinite. Then, being a person is important. And it is not a hindrance to our recognising who we are. On the contrary. The person becomes an emissary of truth, both within and without.

Then ‘what is’ is what we desire, and we don’t mind our circumstances. They satisfy us. We are free. We can be a person and find it a beauty to be so. The person is only here to pass on the impersonal desire of the infinite. It is here for God’s will, which is to be and act on God’s premises, in Its gorgeous name. Not to have a private agenda, in the name of the endless insecurities of a nonexistent, separate self. Not to be burdened by life, but to be the messenger of its secret glory. Then, she as a person is clothed in the dress of a delightful being, shining with an identity that she borrows from God’s identity, and partaking of a self that is the very self of universal being. Then he doesn’t find his person to have an existence separate from his not being a person. Person, no person, being, consciousness, God, life, existence — all one same infinite thing and being. And the person, against all odds, thrives in it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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