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)

Suggestion:
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The Chamber Within

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Woman at the piano’ (detail) – Théodule Ribot – Wikimedia

You have your own little chamber at hand, where you can retire. It is called yourself. A place which has no place to be, and is in fact your own being — what you are, where the totality of yourself is, and which gives you the space to live and act. It is a chamber without a door, without an in or an out, but where you can only be in or be out. You are out of your secret, intimate chamber when you have all your focus on the outside, which means on all the things which you are not, but appropriate as if they were an identity to you. That includes your thoughts which you cherish as being your own production, the outspoken part of yourself, but are in reality strangers that pay you a visit. That includes your perceptions which you take to be a window on the reality of the world, but are in reality facets of your own being, where your whole experience has its home and its refuge. That includes your sense of being a self separate from experience, with a thousand attributes, when of a self you have only empty being, and of attributes only the one attribute of being you, which is ‘I Am’ without an attribute.

You are in your own intimate chamber when you are aware of being. It is a chamber without walls, for it expands beyond anything that you have so far known or been aware of as objects. You are in your chamber when you have no other quality than the quality of being, and when you feel the world you live in to be but your own, shared infinite being. You are in when you have a view on the reality of yourself as being, before you have one on the ten thousand non-existent things of experience. You are in when you have not an object as your subject, which means not a body-mind as an identity. This chamber has nothing secret about it, for it is anywhere you can possibly be. It is openly yourself, though you may hide from it in an infinite number of ways. Your making it a chamber is when you are out of it, and need to go within to find it, in your being which you yourself have made a secret of — something hidden. When you are in it, well then you have no chamber to be in, for the chamber has been discovered to be plainly you, the ‘I’ that you truly and only are, which you find to be neither in nor out.

So your chamber is both within and without, both secret and revealed. You are always abiding in it and as it, though your thoughts and perceptions may have convinced you out of it. So the threshold between being in or out of your intimate chamber of being is wherever you happen to be. You are always on the threshold of being either a suffering, separate, invented entity, or the spacious, unmoved expanse of infinite being. You are always on the brink of yourself, which is you either notice that you are already within that inmost chamber of being, or you ignore, disregard, pay no heed to it. The difference between the two is in the width of a thin hair. You are always on the verge of knowing your identity as being, or of staying behind, in your thoughts, dancing with a belief, being what you are not. There is an edge at any place or moment you are in. A precipice of knowing. You either choose to cling to your living in the limitations of time and space, or free fall where only the infinite and eternal is your reality. The difference between the two is as subtle as the coming of dawn. It is the realisation — the making real — that you have been your chamber of being all along.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Théodule Ribot (1823-1891)

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Website:
– Théodule Ribot (Wikipedia)

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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)

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God’s Knowledge

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Blue Rigi Lake of Lucerne Sunrise’ – J. M. W.  Turner, 1842 – WikiArt

We know so many things. Everything is based on knowledge, and maybe that’s the way to live, as long as there is a body and a world. Knowledge is the score we need to play our part. But to know something, anything, seems presumptuous. It implies another kind of knowledge — that there is somebody here, a person at a distance, that knows and is a recipient of knowledge. Knowledge fixes us. It gives us a dubious identity — that I am a man or a woman, of a certain age, with certain qualities, and with a whole lot of knowledge, identities, beliefs. That I am unhappy, clever, stupid, happy. That I am a cook, or a carpenter. That there is a chair, a world. That I have skills and preferences. I even have the knowledge of my spiritual attainment.

But there is no knowing anything. To think we know something is a mistake. If we know something, then we haven’t looked well enough. We have stayed at the surface of our illusory world and existence. What we ought to know is the knowledge of our reality, of ourself. That’s the only knowing there is. That’s our world: Knowing. Being aware. All other knowledge is superfluous, is not real knowledge. For what would any such knowledge be, when we discover that there is no entity here with the capacity to possess that knowledge. Go only for the knowing of being, a knowledge which is owned by itself. Notice that you don’t know anything — that’s important to know. We have no knowledge other than the knowledge of our being. Apart from that, everything exists only as in a dream.

We may play the part of the one in the dream, and that’s a beautiful part. There may be a world here that is gorgeous, with many ‘things’ that are known. There may be relationships that have meanings. But this world of things borrows its beauty and making from the reality in which it exists for a time — knowing. And the meaning of relationship is found through its reality, which is love — shared being. Everything happy and true in our life is borrowed from our reality as awareness — the only knowledge there is. If we live or act while ignoring that one knowledge, the world and ourself will appear ridden with conflict and suffering. So notice that the ten thousand things of life — all our knowledge — are transparent, ephemeral, ethereal. What is here massive and solid is their reality as being — the supreme essence of everyone and everything. The truth we live in. Ourself. What is. Not somebody that knows.

There is no other real knowing than the knowing of our essence, of our true nature or identity. This knowledge of ourself is not something we can possess as a person. It is nothing more than pure, objectless, impersonal knowing, and this knowing is all there is, all we are. Everything, everyone, have died in it. That’s why we cannot know anything, for how could we know something without there being first a knower and things with their own reality. The only thing we in fact truly know is ourself, our essence. Our knowledge of anything has died inside pure knowing long ago. It is still available, but its reality is apparent. That’s why we can never be sure that there is a chair, or a world. That’s why every object passes, is not there, is only an appearance.

Even ourself cannot be known objectively. We are alone. Nobody knows us. We as a person are absent. We don’t have a reality as an entity, or a self of any kind. So we are known by God alone, who knows us by knowing Its own being. We are all in the knowledge of God. What follows after the sentence ‘we don’t know anything’ is ‘the only knowledge there is is God’s knowledge’. Or ‘know God, love god, and you will know what you ought to know’. It all boils down to ‘knowing, knowing knowing’. Paul said it all very clearly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” (8:2-3).

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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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The Immeasurable

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, 1782 – Wikimedia

There is a vast empty field of knowing within our experience, if we’re looking for it. It is vast not in regard to its sheer dimension, for it has none. Its vastness comes from its being without dimension, limit or edge. It is behind or before everything that we have taken to be ourself, including our body, our thoughts, our alleged self. It is here, motionless, massive, lending its very essence to everyone and everything. It’s easy to miss it, for it has not the objective quality that everything has in experience. We live in a field of objects that we can see, hear, touch, measure, be aware of. We are so fond of them that we have made ourself an object too, pretending to be our body, our mind, our thoughts. We have such a fascination for objects that we have become blind to that which holds them, and pervades everything. We are blind to our own essence, to our vastness, limitlessness — to that which makes objects experienced.

The consistency of objects around us has only the consistency of that which is aware of them. Objects do not own their own private essence, and neither do we. They find their essence and habitation in that which knows them. So we live in a world that is not defined by its edges, its limits. We should always understand that we live in vastness. That our world is empty of its own essence, and is only the expression of our being aware of it. It will never have another substance than the substance of knowing. So we live in emptiness, in infinity. The body may have its limits and constraints, but we do not.

We are devoid of what binds and limits our body-mind-world. So we should live our life as if there were around us only an empty knowing. Try it, to live as if unconstrained, unlimited, expanded. See that this is the truth of your being, this being not limited by time or place, this being free. Don’t engage your thoughts as if they were objects, but see them as an emanation of the silence they are made of. Thoughts are variations of silence. They are silence’s oscillations. If we are unaware of that silence, thoughts will come to veil it. If we see silence as our own nature, they will be messengers of its eloquent wisdom.

So the reality of thoughts is only the reality of the silence that holds them. Just as objects have only the reality of the knowing that knows them. And just as we ourself have only the reality of our nature as pure knowing — not as a body, nor as a mind, nor as anything limited. Limitation too is borrowed from the infinity that holds it and allows it, as eternity holds time. Where would an idea of time be, if it wasn’t within the eternity out of which it can be divided in past, present, future? Where would an idea of place be, if it wasn’t in the very infinity that permits it to exist? The structure of time and space is only for the convenience of a body and mind. We ourself have no such convenience, no such limits.

The world has beauty for it borrows its essence from the beauty and purity of that which holds it, and builds its form and structure with bricks after bricks of empty being. Emptiness is the body of this world of beings and things, which it moulds or shapes with its creative fullness. For emptiness can only exist in the fullness of being. We are only because of our being ‘being’. We are full of our own being, which is revealed as the being of everyone and everything. So there is in ourself and of ourself only an immensity. We are immense when we cannot be measured or limited in any way by our thoughts, body, or self. If we notice that this is so, that we are made of that immensity, that we are immeasurable, then we will lend to the world that same immensity of ourself, and we will notice between everyone and everything an impenetrable likeness. This likeness is born of the oneness that is the secret core of everything, and of all apparent multitude.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

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Website:
– Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (Wikipedia)

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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:
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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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