Tainted Self

Posted on by Alain Joly

Sometime, presence is eluding you. It hides, and you are left with nothing but your old tainted self. These are the sad days. When thoughts have invaded your being and replaced it with ideas and concepts about your self. When feelings have plagued that gorgeous presence which is you, and have contaminated it with worries and rage. When you are caught and find yourself being something and someone, some kind of hard entity that you cannot forget and shake off yourself. That’s when your beautiful, empty being is tiptoeing where it never left and waiting for better days. That’s when you cannot help yourself seeing a world in front of you. That’s when objects have filled your world and animate it with all the inbuilt suffering they imply. Oneness has been choked by them, and has retreated. It won’t fight its way back. It won’t raise a finger for itself. After all, does the sun need to fight for its own light? Is the sun the least bothered when a layer of clouds has formed? No. The sun will continue doing what a sun does. It will illuminate the clouds, sculpting their gorgeous forms, painting them in all shades of whites. The sun illuminates as surely as awareness makes your thoughts and feelings knowable. That’s how you can judge yourself to be anything. An old, tainted, worrisome, raging, hard, stubborn self. That’s how you can know that. Because of your presence. Because of its knowing, illuminating talent. That’s it. That’s what you are. That obvious, inescapable luminosity that is the only thing in presence. The only you in presence. The only presence. And in no time will you then have a clear sky. With no clouds around. No tainted self. And worries blown up. Rage pacified. That’s when the thoughts about yourself are tiptoeing in the empty space where they have come to form themselves. That’s when your feelings are being chased by the wind of knowing, melted by the warm and pure air of being, where you are discovered to be no self. And that’s how you make the thousands objects of your world retreat into oneness. And you are left alone. Here. Now. Sweet and whole. A presence never tainted. Never eluded.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Masters of Knowing

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘At the discretion of River’ – Shitao, 1656-1707 – WikiArt

It seems to me that, at some point, we have to cease worrying about our lives. There will always be something to worry about, to be concerned with, to hope, regret, project, expect, envy. This is an endless, futile road with no visible finish line. And it also seems to me that, at some point, we have to question our constant spiritual reading, listening, this position of being forever a stranger, one who needs to know, to gain his or her position as being. Not that there is no beauty in reading an expression of truth from a talented seer, or listening to a perfect line of reasoning that brings you to the open field of your eternal self. Not that there is no necessity of seeing oneself as a humble beginner in matters of truth. Not at all. But we must come to the simple realisation that we have it all exposed in front of us, in our everyday, every moment experience of being. We are innate specialists of being.

Any sincere and thorough looking at our simple sense of being, any visit to the temple of our presence, always at hand, always on the map of the now, always accessible, contains in itself treasures of learning and understanding. This is our place of abiding — this being. Our cherished home. Never at a distance. Not a painstaking enterprise. Not requiring the perfect set-up or circumstances, the right number of retreats, the sufficient amount of reading, or the many hours spent on the cushion — for being is always present, always on display, in no need of practice or effort whatsoever. Being has the naturalness of something that can never leave us. It is closer than our blood and breath. So we have to abide by its rules, and notice it rather than seek to attain it.

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Continue reading this praise to being’s intrinsic, evident nature… (READ MORE…)

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The Impossibility of Knowing

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘All Pervading’ (detail) – George Frederick Watts, 1887 – WikiArt

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“Beat on that thick cloud of unknowing
with a sharp dart of longing love,
and do not give up, whatever happens.”
~ The Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous)

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Habit is a driving force in our lives, yet it doesn’t have good reviews: it is an object of critics. It is making us dull and repetitive. It is non-creative, indolent, designed for our self-protective needs. It is born out of fear, uncertainty. It is a shield for what we feel bullies and thwarts us, and is thereby blocking our sensitivity and vulnerability. Habit debases love. But habit is not the real culprit in this affair: it is a victim of the one more fundamental habit of knowing.

Humanity is steeped in apparent knowing. We all have a posture of knowing. To know is the great pretension. Games are invented to praise and reward the people who know. The injunction to know is overwhelming. It is the believed road to success and wealth. Not knowing is a humiliation. We could take pride in knowing anything, in being ignorant, in the most ridiculous things, only to save us from being suspected of not knowing. For knowledge is believed to be gold. But although conceptual knowledge is indeed of great value in our society, the posture of knowing is nevertheless the greatest impediment to seeing who we truly are, and how to live our lives free and happy.

We don’t speak here of knowledge in the sense of conceptual or relative knowledge. Most of the knowledge necessary for our body and mind to function in the world is valid and necessary, of course open to mistakes and misinterpretations, but is not what we are discussing here. We are investigating fundamental knowledge, or knowledge as essence, the primal act of being.

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An essay on the articulation between knowing and not knowing… (READ MORE…)

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The Great Replacement

Posted on by Alain Joly

You can always add to experience. You can always have more thoughts. Or different ones. More refined ones. Changes can always occur and always will. You can always fall down to the lowest of the lowest, and judge yourself undeserving. And that is more thoughts about yourself. You can always imagine anything. This is endless, all this activity. It will never stop. It will never reveal any truth worth of the name. It will keep going, headlessly, aimlessly, meaninglessly, like an illusion feeding on itself in order to give itself a seeming reality. Go anywhere in your objective experience, be it your feelings, your sensations, your perceptions, your body, the world out there, none of these will bring an inch of the happiness you are desperately running after. This enterprise is doomed to bankruptcy. It will leave you broke, feeble, mortal, prone to regular fits of unhappiness. It will leave you with not a penny of certainty, not a pebble of solidity, and a very little share of that life-giving energy which you are naturally entitled to. So what are we going to do now? We cannot stop thinking, feeling, perceiving, doing. We need a new comer in the picture. A special adviser. A rock of solidity in our changing sea of uncertainty. Who is going to win the game? When we have turned round and around the table for a new name, a new shareholder, another hope, another fake answer, another bout of shaking certainty, then maybe, it might dawn on us that:

The prodigal son is already at home. Everything we need is present within and without, here and there, now and then, enveloping our vey experience with its all pervading knowing. This something cannot be named, cannot be emptied of itself, and will not make the slightest effort for you. It was here all along, ignored, unnoticed, yet having the dimension of a sky, the solidity of a rock, and the certainty of something that was here before the coming of universes beyond universes. It is like discovering in yourself the wisest of gurus present at hand, in all circumstances. It is your eternal refuge waiting for you to come in. But beware now, for that unfailing refuge, that wisest of gurus, that beloved amongst the beloveds, is you. It is you, you understand? Not something to be reached. Not something far and away. You have nowhere to go, nothing to be, no time to wait for, except being your own unfailing, wise, beloved self. You are it all. Here. Now. Whatever. Whenever. Wherever. Release that old, worn out Chief Operating Officer of yours, and replace it with being. Look around now and relax. Being is all there is.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Riddle of Ignorance

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Landscape’ – Sergey Vasilkovsky – WikiArt

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There is a truer, hidden reality lying just under the veneer of life. Don’t think that what you have is the real thing. It is not. This hidden reality is being covered by the thick blanket of our deceptive representation of reality, made of a whole array of thoughts, feelings, memories, worries, beliefs, conditionings, that have numbed our aliveness, blunted our sensitivity, and rendered our god-given natural endowment as if inexistant. This is why, in some religious traditions, man has been proclaimed ’ignorant’. This is a word that indicates that simple fact — the plain and unfortunate forgetting of a nature in us that has been temporarily hidden, and that craves in the background for our recognition, our remembering. This is why all men and women on this earth are seeking peace and happiness in one form or another.

This particular reality is the subject of countless religious books and spiritual traditions in the world. This was never about having many different beliefs like we sometimes think it is. It was about revealing this truer reality of ours. In the process of doing so, approaches may vary depending on the times and cultures where they arose, and misunderstandings have sprung proportionally, but the fact of our ignorance is the same for all, at all times, in all places. And the reality discovered behind its dispelling is not only the same for all, but is one whole and single reality present here and now as the rock-like experience of being in all beings — be they human or not. This is not a small affair to be pushed around and despised as being mere ‘beliefs’, but is the very core, substance, and meaning of our lives. So why is such an obvious reality being missed by so many of us? What has made it so commonly invisible, and inaccessible?

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Some reflections about how reality is being ignored by man… (READ MORE…)

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To Know Better

Posted on by Alain Joly

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“Knowledge about yourself
binds, weighs, ties you down.”
~ J. Krishnamurti (‘Notebook’)

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Humility is the mother of all virtues. For it places us in the right attitude of not knowing, not arguing. To know is to be situated, to have a perspective, a point of view. To know implies to be a person, to be apart, external. And it also implies to suffer. It’s so easy to know, to boast, to show off. We don’t want to be unmasked as ignorant. To know has become a reflex. To know is to claim ‘I am here’, ‘I count for something’, ‘I need fulfilment’. Therefore to know is to fear death. To know is to project, to be the hostage of time, of becoming. ‘What if I don’t become anything?’ To know is to posit a person that needs and lacks. To know is to lock ourself in a world of finite things. It is to exist only in the limits of our own self-created boundaries. To know is to block creativity. To know is to dismiss god, life, for not being competent. It is to invite the big rock of our conditioned thoughts, feelings, and memories, and in doing so, conceal all other entrances or exits. No flow is possible.

Have you ever felt these moments when you don’t know? When you taste the presence of your own absence? When you discover your sense of separation to be imaginary? At the moment you feel one with all beings and things, you are bound to be in the unknown, to not know. How could you possibly know to be anything, when you are merged with presence, with experience? You don’t have the necessary distance to do so. And this absence of distance is the experience of your sweet self. Don’t be the one who knows, but the one who is the knowing. Don’t affirm yourself, but be affirmed in the knowing presence that you are. By just being, you will know everything that needs to be known. You will have everything that needs to be had. And it will be offered to you on the silver plate of love, beauty, and happiness. You cannot know better.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

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Bibliography :
– ‘Krishnamurti’s Notebook’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Publications of America, US)

Website:
– J. Krishnamurti

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How Difficult is That?

Posted on by Alain Joly

Isn’t this strange to have that constant race towards being when we are already fully being, and furthermore, doing it with absolute perfection? We keep projecting another better being than our present being, which we have judged not enough, un-sufficient, un-perfected. But we couldn’t be being any more or better than we are now already doing. What would I want to be but what I am? Why this be-coming? It is such a plain, inescapable evidence: I am this awaring presence. Presence, or being, is my natural abode. This is who I am.

Yet I’ve had all sort of ideas about it. And fanciful ones, believe me! That this presence was a me-person located inside a body. That it was an idea, a point of view that needed nurturing and developing as I — the me located inside this body — desired it. And if ‘I’ couldn’t do so, that would make this ‘me-majesty’ a sad, upset little ‘me’. And that sad little ‘me’ would go on living the life of a body located in space, projecting all the beings and things it senses as representing an ‘other’, a ‘world’ out there in which he roams about alone, gets scared, and craves, until he finally dies. That’s the end of ‘sad little me’. Body dies, he dies.

Hell no. That’s not the way it is. God forbid. There is no sad little me. That’s not there. It’s an idea, an image with no reality. I am not sad. I am not small. Not located. I am presence itself. I am this sweet, loving, sensitive, subtle knowing of everything that presents itself in this field. I am this field of knowing. This tenderness taking all in. I am the big, soft, loving eye of knowing. Knowing is my home. As for the rest, I am homeless. I don’t need to crave, grab, grip, grapple, grabble. None of that. God forbid. I am free. Unattached. Deep diving into the very substance of my self. Experience is my constituent and I am in love with every bit of it.

How difficult is that?

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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