The Dream of a World

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Milton`s Mysterious Dream’ (part) – William Blake, 1816-20 – WikiArt

There is a fraud in our life. An illusion that makes us feel that life is going to get better. That time or circumstance will bring us to a place of understanding, where our troubles will come to an end, where there will be betterment, improvement, change. To believe this will make us miss that we are already here and now in a place of no change, of no betterment, where nothing can improve or get better. This place is our very self, our sense of being that we have never been able to affect or modify, no matter how relentless our life has been, no matter our despair, our sorrow, our losses. Nothing we have gone through has touched it in any way. All our stories and sufferings have taken the shape of our thoughts and beliefs about them. But while we are desperately trying to give a form to our life, a solidity to our body, a reality to our problems, and a truth to our beliefs, right here and now, right where it all is seemingly taking place, hidden within experience, enveloping it all, is already a presence, a vastness, a reality that is embracing everything, and that is our only reality, our only place, our only possible self in this living experience.

For there is not a world there where we could be in. That would be a lovely idea, but the fact is: there is no possibility to prove the existence of such a world. We can only assert it, marvel at it through our senses, study it, analyse it, but of a solid proof there is none. The existence of a world is dependent on our perceiving it, and perceptions are contained in our knowing them. Without the knowing faculty, there cannot be a world. The whole glory and misery of the world, of the whole universe, is all gathered in that fathomless fraction of knowing, or awareness. Without that simple, ungraspable, dimensionless, ethereal element of knowing, no world could ever come into existence. So in fact, knowing is all there is, consciousness is the essence of every single appearance that comes to be seen, heard, touched, or experienced. The world is shaped, or its appearance created, through our being aware of it. So the whole of our living experience is but a dream in consciousness, a game that can be played and enjoyed at the level of our body-mind, but whose reality is only the awareness of it.

Now, where are we if we are not in a world? Where are we if the world is not even there? What is this something that we feel we are in, and exists, and is undoubtedly? What is a world, an experience, when we have passed through all illusions, all beliefs, all shaky appearances? What is left here that holds our experience, that is indomitable, indestructible, present without a shadow of doubt? This place is our self, what we are, our very essence, the reason behind our saying ‘I’. So we live in our self, not in a world. We see our limited existence pass and consume itself within that which is creating it, which is our own aware being, the knowing that we are and could never not be. And there, in ourself, in being, where the world takes its apparent form, is found what we have been looking for in every direction, in a non-existing world, in experience: a sense of relief, peace, beauty, love, and the understanding of our essence, the explanation of it all. An explanation that is not conceptual, but a living one, a subjective one, something made plain by being it. We and life then become self-explanatory. The fraud has been diluted. All imagination has died down. Now our living experience has acquired the rawness of truth. Something that is, unlike the world or our experience, beyond doubt and absolute.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by William Blake (1757-1827)

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Website:
– William Blake (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Overflowing Questions

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Edge of a Lake (Souvenir of Italy)’ – Camille Corot, c.1855-60 – WikiArt

Wouldn’t you like to have a knowledge which cannot be surpassed, which amounts to everything? That has in its core the truth of living, the philosopher’s stone from which everything springs, and to which all appearances owe their existence to? Actually, don’t you already long for it, and have done so for as long as you can remember? Is it not what you secretly hope for in your life? To have this knowledge, this direct access to the peace of your being? To have it here at hand, like a secret bond which you can find under and within every difficult situation, every outrage, every burst of suffering? And wouldn’t you love to harvest what this intimate knowledge contains? Its most reliable sense of joy, of contentment, and see yourself plentiful, complete, enough, in an absence of need? Wouldn’t that be great? To uncover it, and let it find its natural place in you, and as you, easily, without your doing very much about it? Wouldn’t that be great? Would anything be more valuable to you? Would that not be worth a life? Any life?

And what if you were told that you are not this bunch of objects which you have believed yourself to be — these endless qualifications, and the myriad of thoughts and feelings to which you have tied yourself with? Wouldn’t that give you freedom, a sense of release? To be unattached, not bound to your body-mind, at least not in a fundamental way? Wouldn’t that be healing, to be not the body but what holds it in its embrace? Wouldn’t that be soothing, to be not the mind but that which lends it the space to wander about? What is to you more elating and convincing than finding yourself naturally, effortlessly, in a place of health and vigour? The body’s ailments? The mind’s silly wanderings? Well, what if they were not really yours? Wouldn’t you like to find out, what would be their fate when left alone? What could be their trajectory when you rest peaceful in your own healthy, infinite body of awareness? Wouldn’t that be great to make this discovery? To have the final answer behind all that has been troubling you for so long?

And what if you were to uncover some even bigger findings? That behind your long, busy, eventful, suffering life, there has been a stillness, a silence which couldn’t be stirred or broken? And that nothing truly ever happened in your life? That it has been just a passing dream? What would be the implications of that ? And what if you were to find out that the world is just only clothed by the awareness of it? That it is not there in the way you had imagined so far? And that behind it all was also dawning the certainty, the knowing of your immortal, undefeatable nature? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To see, feel, touch the truth of it with your hands, that death is a myth? That it is not there? Not in the least? Wouldn’t that be extraordinary? That things do die but not you? That body does become ashes but not you — not that which you truly are? That mind withers away but not you — not your primal being which you have to concede is eternal, is infinite? Wouldn’t that take your breath away? Wouldn’t that blow your mind?

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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 ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Safe Harbour

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sea against a rocky shore’ – Ivan Aivazovsky, 1851 – WikiArt

In our relative existence, we are always only a simple human being, a disciple of truth. We are seeking to merge the relative with the absolute, and to raise the finite where the infinite compels it to be. There is no being a super human, with a perfected soul. There is no being a specialist in the field of spirituality. The knower is a so shy and humble presence that it won’t show up when you are there. You will hide it with the boastful assertion of your own self. So if you want to espouse your true nature, you will have to feel yourself as almost nothing. You will have to stop reifying yourself, and make your person a servant of truth. There is a soothing freedom from pride and arrogance to be experienced in our human life.

The feeling of separation is what makes you assert yourself. To only and simply be is felt to be insufficient. You need to be or have something that makes you whole and happy, which you then seek through objects, qualities, qualifications, events, circumstances. To be somebody, to be important is the privilege of incompleteness. Being has no privilege, is not a superior position. it won’t make you anything. It won’t give you an advantage. You’d have to be miserable for that. You’d have to be limited. Your nature as peace doesn’t belong to you the person. When you have realised yourself as the one being that you truly are, then it won’t make you anything, it won’t give you a pedestal. Your knowing is in not knowing. In simply being.

There is a special, humble glory that lies in not being a self that feels separate. Peace is the perfume of your divine nature, that stands unaffected before the person that you happen to be. It is the nature that lends itself to the making of the world and to the selfing of its myriad of apparent entities. It is the secret power behind all appearances. Your nakedness is the key for its being seen and felt in your existence. You will then live from the stand of that knowing presence. Your self will cease feeling separate and superior. Your person will be depersonalised, will have infinity as its ‘I’ identity, and love as its guiding principle. But you won’t get any pride out of it, for your person is now devoid of its own, personal substance.

It is no accident that the life of many truth seekers is expressed through poverty and nakedness. In not possessing, in being undefended, as is the case for nuns, monks, hermits, anchorites. There is joy in not owning your own self, and your own identity. There is release in being at the service of the loving, silent being which you have discovered yourself to be. You have lost the prestige and identity contained in being a seeker. For there is no seeking in being. Being contains the gist of that which you want to obtain or achieve through your constant seeking — the juice of it. Being is the heart of life, and its reward. The Eden which you have placed far and away, as a cherished belief or possibility, is now found here, in the simple knowing of your being.

So there are no Shris, Maharshis, Bhagavans, Rinpoches, Maharaj-s, or Your Holiness, at the level of the person. There are even no sages. All these titles are only for ‘being’, for the reverence of truth, for the One. There is always only one Bhagavan. One Rimpoche. One sage. The peace contained in simply being is not another quality that is added to you as a person. A person, a body-mind, doesn’t have peace. Peace or understanding doesn’t belong to you. It is not for the person. It is all contained in that which lends you consciousness. It is in the presence that makes you, out of which you draw your personhood, and which allows you to love, live, and share. You are not an autonomous, self-contained person. You are infinity lending itself to a portion of finitude. How would an appearance be conscious, if it wasn’t for the presence which contains and creates this appearance? This peaceful, infinite presence is all there truly is. The One you have to bow to. Your teacher and your beloved. Your safe harbour in the storm of appearances.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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Website:
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Impossible Deed

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Pond in the wood’ – Albrecht Durer, 1496 – WikiArt


We are used to knowing. We have been trained in it, brainwashed with it, and drained by it. Knowing has been privileged at the expense of being. So we have become expert knowers, professional doers, but at being, we are infants, clumsy, penniless. We are without a self worth the name. We are homeless without knowing it. We are without a solid ground — a trembling, uncertain little thing living in the wilderness of objects, battling in the haziness of beliefs, having no place to truly be, to truly rest. We are a wanderer of ignorance, a nescient soul lacking the elementary knowledge of its own being.

But OK, I will give us that. I understand this urge to know. Knowing gives us a bright, shiny sense of self. A fantastic ego. It is rewarding. Being gives nothing, is completely unproductive. At least, so we think. But this knowing of our being is not any kind of knowledge. The will to know the ‘I’ is a sacred will, a holy endeavour. If we want to know ourself, we will come to know it. This is a desire that cannot be left unfulfilled. This knowledge cannot resist any serious enquiry. It will give in sooner than we think. But it is a hard one to desire. The difficulty resides in wanting to know. We shy away from that desire. There is something there we’d rather stay away from. We would rather know beforehand what we have to know, and remain on shallow land. We don’t want to rock the boat of our being. After all, this is where we stand. We don’t want to be swept away from our cherished ideas and beliefs, and be deprived of the security we have so dearly earned. We would rather stay a seeker of the known.

But try it now — to know yourself. And do it with your mind, with your usual knowing faculty. Go there, at the heart of your self. Decide it. Make it your goal: to know who or what you are. It doesn’t matter where you begin. But go not to the periphery, to that which you can know as an object. Go to the heart of your self, to that thing which you have called ‘I’ all your life. What is this ‘I’ that you are being all the time? This ‘I’ is never visited. But now is the day. Go there. Find out what it is. See that you will meet there like an impassable, impenetrable wall. You will find closed doors. All your knowing, your ego, your accumulations: this has made a blocking stone. This has barred the entry, has prevented all true seeing, all knowing worthy of the name. Feel that you cannot go there with your mind. But this impossibility is gold. So keep at it. Keep pushing. Don’t be shy. Use both shoulders if needed. Give it all the strength you have. It will recede. I promise you. Everything can be known. This is no exception.

Notice that what you come against is yourself. This impossibility of knowing the ‘I’ lies in your belief in being an entity. The knower is the obstacle, the impassable wall that bars the way. To know yourself is an impossible deed. You can never know who you are, because who you are is only contained in ‘you are’ — in the feeling of ‘I am’, of being. We are so unaware of our being. Being has been forgotten, relegated in the background, replaced by a knower, a doer, a busy self that insists on knowing who he or she is. But to know ourself, the knower has to first realise itself as being. To know is to be, and to be knowingly. This knowledge dips its reality in being. There is no knowing ourself without being first. Knowing here is only achieved through being, which is the knowing of ‘I’ without a knower. The will to know dissolves into being, which is the only knower there is and will ever be.

This knowledge is found in and as the being of the one who wants to know. You can only know who you are by being it, or rather by simply and only being. In that field of self-knowledge, being is knowing. Being is the knowing done without a knower, and therefore without an object known. It is a pure, unalloyed knowing. Everything you ever wanted to know, to be, attain, achieve, all the content of every sacred book, all happiness, all longings, is found in being, in that which you already are. Your amness is the gate code cracked. You will find who you are on the other side of knowing, which is being. And it is delivered with peace, which is the nature of being. This knowledge is the only knowledge that doesn’t take place in duality. It is achieved in the oneness implied in plainly being. So this impossible deed has now been transformed as the infinite being that we were all along, but had veiled through our insistence in being a knower of the known. We don’t know who we are with our knowing faculty. Ourself is the only thing we cannot know as an object. We know our identity through the fact of simply being. There is no other knowing than being. Being is what we are, without a single ripple of a knower knowing. Know that and you will be reborn as the unborn.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

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Website:
– Albrecht Dürer (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Spiritual Wine

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Lovers under the moon’ – Serge Sudeikin, 1910 – WikiArt

The word ‘spiritual’ is quite a nebulous one. It is used indiscriminately, carelessly, for a bewildering array of wildly different practices or beliefs. Krishnamurti didn’t like the word, which he found ‘ugly’, ‘romantic’, ‘unpleasant’, and used it cautiously. So maybe the time has come to clean the word, to give it some of its forgotten brilliance, and dig out its original meaning and raison d’être. I would start with the suggestion that the word ‘spiritual’ simply wants to point something at us: that the world, the whole of it, our experience, everything, is in fact made of ‘spirit’. Spirit is all there is, the only thing in presence. And believe me, this is a timely pointer, for most of us believe the world to be a hard reality, made of something solid, composed of a variety of different objects — our body-mind being considered one such object. So the word has the virtue of reminding us of our true nature, of the nature of everything as spirit, or consciousness.

But it is only a provisional word, one for our time of misunderstanding. There will come a time when the suggestion that experience is made of spirit will be a matter of fact, something integrated, not to be thought about anymore. The word will then become redundant, to be replaced by another word of a higher intensity and meaning. Or maybe there won’t be any need for a word to describe reality. Reality will have been understood, digested, lived as the fact of simply being. Spirituality will have become useless. There will be no need of spirituality, no need even of the word ‘happiness’, or ‘peace’. Once you are wholly, and only spirit, which is peace, which is happiness, what need is there to mention it? There will be no seeking either. After all, what you are, you are. Identity will have been achieved. No suffering around. Seeking obsolete. Out of date. To be disposed of. What will remain is a splendour, indescribable, filling the world of experience to the brim with its essence.

Also, spirit means ‘breath’. It is the breath of life, a thing invisible, transparent, quietly sitting in the background, and yet essential and life-giving. It is what is playing us, giving us an identity and a sweetness of living. For spirit is like the air we breathe. It is still, silent, empty, yet a breath that can blow our mind and make us like an inextinguishable fire. It is the breath of god that we have left unnoticed time after time, but whose presence is holding us in its firm embrace. It is a breath of devastating effects, laying us waste, destroying all traces of suffering and separation, blowing our self away, not by slaying it but by showing this self to be just the air within the divine breath of god. You had thought yourself a hard, solid, but fragile entity, and are now shown to be empty yet as indestructible as is a fire in the wind. That’s what being spiritual, or spirit-like, truly means.

Spirit also means character, and courage. It doesn’t pretend, and rejects a lukewarm understanding. It is uncompromising and free. It is not afraid, not conditioned by the hazards of life. It stays firm, alone, whole, undisturbed. Spirit is eternally high, but mingles with the lowly too, for it is humble by nature. And it has clarity as its best asset, for it is blessed with the purity contained in knowing without being itself a knower. This knowing is undivided, self-contained, total, applying to all and everything. This is what makes it holy, a spirit which cannot be taken apart, and which contains universes beyond universes. It has a religious quality, a sanctity that is beyond what humans have called sacred. The wholeness of spirit cannot be broken, dampened, violated, injured, or even changed. Its holiness lies in the fact that it is one without any division or addition.

And spirit is music too. It has a sound to it, and it is our duty to play it, or rather being played by it — the musician being god, or spirit itself. Our being is found to be the breath of god, the movement of consciousness singing our life on the reed of our apparent self. As that, we may become the vessel of a life whose notes have risen above the ten thousand things of existence, to be taken by various harmonies of silence, peace, love — all carried by a quiet but devastating breeze of inner joy, like a hum. We are like God’s music, and our experience is bathing inside it, and being made melody. This is what spirituality is, and what a life lived in and as spirit sounds like.

“‘Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ‘tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine”, Rumi once wrote in the Masnavi. So spirit is a delightful beverage too. It is what gives us this gentle drunkenness which is the state of our self when it recognises itself to be but God’s being. In Spirit, we are intoxicated by the ‘Love that is in the wine’. For this nectar, we are willing to pay the price of surrender at the tavern.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Serge Sudeikin (1882-1946)

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Website:
– Serge Sudeikin (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A False Impression

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is an impression that I am the one who knows, or is aware. But this is a false impression and an unfortunate one. In fact, we as a body-mind don’t know anything, for the good reason that there is no one here that is in charge of the knowing. We don’t have this ability. It is not for us to know anything. Knowing doesn’t belong to an individual, separate self. We owe our knowing to something that knows us first, and lends us that potential. That really gives a totally different perspective to our existence, and grants us a gorgeous humbleness: Knowing is without a knower. The knower is but a set of thoughts that we have superimposed on awareness. It is entirely made up. It is of our invention, to give us a wee importance — after all, we all want a little attention. Knowing is in the nature of being. And being is the nature of everything. Knowing is all there is. It is the light of our world, indissociable from our experience. We as selves are just shadows. Everything is dancing and taking place without our being in any way party to it. At best, we are just a colouring, a point of view, an avatar governed by some divine rules which we have perilously chosen to ignore. This is our feebleness: wanting to own and appropriate, being more than what we already are. But in doing so, we have in fact belittled ourself. We have made ourself separate from the life we live in. We have created a self where there is none. We have awakened the devil of suffering in us.

So leave the knowing in some more skilful hands. It will spare you a lot of trouble and misunderstanding. You won’t have to be a person — all the heaviness contained in it. You won’t have to be a self that knows, but knowing will appear to be your one and only self — the entirety of your being. This pure and sublime knowing will give a measure of beauty and happiness in your life. It will encompass everything. It will widen your perspective and make you profoundly secure. You will know your being with precision and clarity, and live both in remoteness and intimacy — remoteness for a serene view on your experience, and intimacy for the delight contained in oneness. And love will be your everyday companion, the deepest essence of your being. And you will be clothed in understanding, which you believed could be achieved through your being a knower. Not at all. Understanding comes when you cease being a self, a knower, when you let go of all identities and egoistic purposes. Then it comes: the understanding — the knowing that knowing is all there is, and that you don’t need to be any more than that. So learn to keep at bay all private, egoistic desires to be anything other than this impersonal, undivided presence of yourself, that has the capacity of being and knowing. You have no need to be a knower, or a doer of anything in your life. Let the show run by itself. Only give it your golden, loving indifference. That’s the most glorious thing you can do in this life. You will be showered by the benefits of it.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Read this essay from the blog ‘The Impossibility of Knowing’…

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

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An Abundance of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Spring’ – Theodore Rousseau, 1852 – WikiArt

There is a subtle recognition that takes place on the way back to yourself, when you stop keeping your mind at the level of avoidance or entertainment. At that binary level you are unrecognisable. You live in a world of your own, in which nothing represents who you are. You live in your mind, pushed around by a never-ending storm of endless reactions and pursuits, unaware of what you are — or even that you are. You are surrounded by opinions and beliefs that limit you, and plunge you into a self-made ignorance. You live in a bubble where illusions have formed the world in which you are caught, and to which you have given yourself up. In there you are as it were hidden from the gaze of god, and the awareness of your divine making or reality is eluding you.

As there is no sense of belonging there, you may feel cut off, lonely, lacking an essential part of yourself. You are suffering from having deviated from your inborn identity. You have forgotten who you are, and are roaming from thought to thought, and from experience to experience, in search of something that will finally complete you. And the tragedy is that you will never find it in the place where you look, for that place is precisely what is separating you from your real self. That place is imaginary, for it is the stage of your misunderstanding. You live in a vacuum, in your world of misunderstanding. All your life takes place within the limits allotted by your false beliefs about life. Where there is only a seamless reality, you have created an illusory boundary between yourself and reality. You have missed that you were yourself that reality. You have lost faith. You committed the sin of being a somebody, and in doing so have pushed reality out of sight, at a distance from you, making it, through the senses, the world in which you live, when you are yourself the reality in which the world appears, and from which it borrows its thousands forms. You have given birth to duality when there was none. Out of oneness, you have invented separation, and have invested all your life in this falsity.

But there is more to it. In veiling your true nature, you have made god unknown to you, and rendered yourself unknown to god. This is why you have religion and the need for a belief in god. But the reality that you have unknowingly pushed away through your desire in being a self separate from it, that reality is in fact what you have been longing for all your life, to complete you. And this completeness is nothing but god coming to live in you, as you, and electing your being as its being, while you yourself recognise God’s being as being your being. That’s how you know god, and are known by god. Simply by being only being, by purifying your identity to its ultimate, indescribable, indestructible, unsoiled essence. So nothing lives away from yourself. You contain it all. You are the receptacle for the spectacle of life. And knowing this will place you right where god has its gaze. It will place you in God’s being, which is the only place where you can be known or seen by god. So knowing yourself is knowing god, and god knowing you, without there being a god or a you. Being only suffices. God is where and when there is an abundance of being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Theodore Rousseau (1812–1867)

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Website:
– Theodore Rousseau (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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