Love Actually

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sarbatoarea primaverii’ – Arthur Verona – Wikimedia

Love is the essence of everything, and our very nature. Because we don’t live separate and afar. We are not distant from each other. Nothing is. We have a natural intimacy with everything and everyone. This is not a theory, or a philosophical argument that we posit. This intimacy is our deepest reality, what we are, the property of our natural being, which we can feel, see, experience, but whose evidence has disappeared from our eyes. The reason is, we have preferred a theory to the reality, an illusion to the truth. Our life has stopped being natural. We have been faking it, living it according to beliefs, habits, conformity. But here, blatant in and as our very being, is a reality in which there is no time or place, no distance or separation, no otherness. And as we all know from experience, love is the abolition of time, of distance. Love is the end of separation, of otherness.

Love, which we may call beauty, for everything that we love is beautiful. Love, which we may call understanding, for to see love as the essence of life is the ultimate form of understanding. Love is to ‘stand in the midst of’. It is to stand with everything that is under, everything that is existing in our reality. It is to be connected, to be together with, to be of the same essence. So love is an expression of oneness, of our nature as the one and only reality there is. In the absence of separation — which is truth — we find love. In the absence of otherness — which is our reality — we find intimacy. We make love every time we are aware of our reality as only being. We manufacture love when time is discovered to be an idea, and separation a belief. To be in love is to realise our nature as being one with everything and everyone. It is to be unable to part with anything. It is humility at work. It is where division is only possible in a figment of our imagination. It is to be with what is, with no pulsion of escape or resistance. Love is both in the ache of separation and in the desire to be reunited. All seeking is done in the name of love.

To love is to stand in the midst of, to see no separation between an ‘I’ and a ‘he’ or a ‘she or a ‘it’. The more we stand as the quality of being aware, as that which knows all things, the more we have love as our daily companion. It is extraordinary that we can feel to be a body and a mind, when there is before these, in the subjective, the vast and unmissable expanse of that which is aware of them, which we have pushed away as a mere function of that body-mind. The body is something that we are aware of. We are not in the body. We are in the ‘aware of’. This being aware is our home, where we live, where we have our life. This is our placeless place. That which we cannot not be in. That which we cannot part from — our most intimate, unchanging identity. To be that knowingly, to live as that, is to love naturally and unconditionally. Every time we notice that there is a reality, a consciousness, a knowing presence before our body, thoughts, feelings, experience, world, then love appears to be the very material we and the world are made of. The first and last brick of our house. Our everything.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1868-1946)

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Website:
– Arthur Verona

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Effortless Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Quiet Moonlight (beyond Catalina Island)’ – Granville Redmond, 1907 – WikiArt

Be effortless. That’s the clue you need if you want to meet yourself. Because yourself is for ever here, a natural presence, a stillness in the background, that is your silent being. If you look, you will see it, feel it — who you are, the nature of yourself. So don’t assume too quickly that you know who you are. That who you are is in your body, in your thoughts, in being someone, an entity. Don’t believe that what you are is tied to and dependent on your body-mind, and that you find your true expression in being a person, preferably a successful one, that can be improved, and is subject to death. These are beliefs, concepts that you have learned but never took the time to verify. Don’t accept the subtle tension that is implied in being someone. Go for that part of yourself that is here without effort, that never moves or changes, that is beyond the apparent boundaries of birth and death.

Don’t even try to be spiritual, for the effort you will apply to bring that identity in, will ruin everything. Be exactly as you are, when you are not anything that can be pointed at. Learn to go beyond everything that you are not, so that you can land on the true ground of your effortless being. That may require just a little bit of effort, a redirecting, a gentle looking, the release contained in a moment of relaxation. That is enough. Don’t go for a strain, an ambition, a glory of any kind. These go too far, will take you to a self, a fake identity that will stand in the way of your innate nature. You are already yourself. Nothing new or other than what you already are is needed. Spirituality is a gentle reminder. It is for you to remember that you are almost as nothing, a breath within a breath, a spirit that you will never in a thousand years be able to own. Spirituality is only about being — being effortlessly. This is your natural, unavoidable skill — what you could never not be.

To make an effort is to pull yourself out of your natural being. It is also the veiling of yourself, for any movement that takes you away from your true nature, will own an identity that is acquired, not innate, and that will close the door in the face of your awareness of being. This little bit of effort is you trying to be a person — what you are not — and refusing to be who you are. Through the absence of effort, you will be introduced to yourself, to your true nature. There is a vast expanse there — in fact infinite — that is the very ground of your being. There is a life there, in yourself, as yourself, that some have called bliss or paradise. Not because it is giving you a new place to be, but in reason of the lack of effort or tension there is in being yourself. In effort is contained suffering, fear, lack, hope, conflict, separation, everything that makes your life a burden. To be yourself without effort is the meaning behind the word ‘bliss’. It is the sweetest fall you will ever experience — to be yourself in this free, unconstrained, unforced way. To be without strain, even of the most subtle kind. The blissful is in the absence of effort. In being carefree. Not that you don’t care. But you have your care — which is love — lodged in naturally being, and don’t need any kind of effort for it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Granville Redmond (1871-1935)

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Website:
– Granville Redmond (Wikipedia)

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Hidden Desire

Posted on by Alain Joly

If you have any desire, any craving, make sure that you crave for yourself first. Make sure that you want yourself more than anything else. Check it. That before you go for something, you have first the will for yourself, for your sweet inner being, for that which sustains you, for that which is behind every one of your desires. Make sure that the one who desires is really you, not an impostor, not a fake self that mimics you but is not you. Make sure that you desire from that part of yourself that is real, that is here, not the will of a secondary thought, of an illusory, separate self, not a fake desire. Fake desires won’t work, won’t take you where you want, won’t give you what you seek. Go for a desire that comes from real you. Check that you know who desires your desire.

How do you know who desires your desire? Well first desire yourself, give at your sweet being a loving gaze, then see if your desire is still there. If it didn’t swiftly go, escape, disappear suddenly, didn’t have the guts of showing up, let alone showing off. If your desire doesn’t stand yourself, doesn’t survive the plain looking at your inner self, at your sense of knowing, of being aware, then your desire is not worth the name, doesn’t deserve to be fulfilled. Make that simple effort first. To watch your own being, to check your presence, melt for a second in it, with it, and then welcome any desire that comes. Sometimes desire can surprise you. Sometimes desire desires the most unexpected thing. Sometimes you find yourself desiring yourself more than anything else.

So please, before having the desire for something, desire yourself first. Stay there, in yourself, with yourself, have a sweet moment in the company of your being. See that you might be desiring it with all your heart, that no desire could ever compete with the desire for your self. See that could make a life of the desire for yourself. That you’d never want to leave yourself, even for a second. That what you want is to fully inhabit yourself — being yourself, which is being your sweet being, ravishing in its presence. Make sure that it becomes your primary desire. The most important one, which you want to fulfil, expose, indulge in. Indulge in yourself first. Don’t part from yourself, break up, and then indulge in the most silly, inefficacious, incompetent things. Don’t ever do that. Indulge after you have indulged all your might in yourself. Then see what you might further indulge in.

So always see yourself as the first object of your desire. This desire doesn’t always need to be expressed. You will notice that it is fulfilled by simply being. You have all your desires — expressed or in potential — fulfilled through the act of simply being. Being is like a magical formula, a universal recipe, the desire behind all desires. Being is the sweetest object of desire. Yourself is your bliss, where peace lives, where love is like your very essence. Your many desires for so many things have concealed yourself. So it’s only a matter of desiring the only thing worth being desired — yourself. Then you may have a thousand more desires, it doesn’t matter. They are not yours anymore. They have come from the hidden, unfathomable, inexpressible place of your inner self and being. Desire this place of no desire, of completeness. Respect it. Try to fulfill it. This is God’s hidden desire. After you have fulfilled God’s desire, be wild and determined with any other desire that may remain.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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A Word of Glory

Posted on by Alain Joly

Words don’t apply to truth. What we are cannot be described. We may have a lot to say about our preferences, our thoughts, our body, our circumstances and conditionings, but we won’t be able to say anything about who we are. We may try to. We may give a thousand explanations. We may come as close as possible, by saying that we are that which is aware, that we are consciousness, being, and a thousand other expressions. But we won’t get closer to the truth of who we are. Truth is not something that can be made into a concept, or an object. It is before every concept, before every object. It is before even ourself as a body-mind, as a person. It is before every single thought that we may have about ourself. It is the living, throbbing embrace of everything.

We cannot catch truth and put it in a box, or made it into a thought. It is elusive. We won’t find it in the world, no matter how hard we may look. It is within. It is who we are. It is what there is — our very being. We cannot miss our own being, what we are made of, what there is here that we call ‘myself’, or ‘I’. If we do miss it, then we are taking ourself to be what we are not. We have given in to an idea, to a concept. We have given allegiance to everything objective, easy, to stories about ourself, but not to ourself. We have not been ourself yet. Belief doesn’t reveal our true identity. It tramples it. It hides it. Truth requires no thought, no belief, no person or entity, even no world. Truth is only about itself. And to see truth is to see ourself, to be our own self that shines with glory. There is no truth but ourself. We know truth, when we know ourself.

All the words about truth are here to point to the truth without words. For when we know ourself, the reality of who we are, there is no thinking about truth, or about god, for we live and abide where words have melted into the reality they were pointing to. We have given in to our own reality. We have died in our own living presence. We have noticed that we are that which we were looking for, and that there is no looking beyond it. We are settled. We are made real, alive, complete. The relief contained in knowing who we are at last, this falling of ourself into the place of being that we have been and are eternally — that in itself feels like a tremor of peace, joy, and freedom. This place of being is unconditional love, wordless reality, living oneness. All things and all beings find their essence in it, and lose their own, individual reality. They are as if one word — a word whose only function is being its own living, glorious reality.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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A Universal Cure

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Creation of the World XIII’ (part) – Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, 1906 – WikiArt

The part that we’re playing is not small. We are not living in a corner, limited by the skin of our bodies, and the world is not limited to the time and space in which it seems to unfold and have its conflicts and sufferings. The world has a foot in the infinite. In fact not just a foot, it is bathed in infinity, in eternity, and so are we, we who have been made small and suffering entities by our limiting beliefs and prejudices. We are ruling the world with our thoughts and then blame ourself for it. For the results are of course as limited as our thoughts can be. We have made the world the hostage of our limitations, and its hostility is in fact our own, that we have projected unto it. We believe and think we can only play small and limited, but in fact, we haven’t quite seen ourself as we are, and from this blindness comes the entirety of the world’s agony, and ours too.

Fortunately, ours and the world’s true essence comes spilling over in every possible way through the manifestation of beauty, and through the many expressions of love or peace. That’s what makes it so attractive in spite of all, and that’s where we should be way more curious than we are. Beauty, love, intelligence, peace, are not created by the random structure of a body and the passing thoughts in our mind. This is not where they are manufactured. They are born of infinity and wholeness. They are the expressions of the One, which we can never own. We are in fact rather owned by them, embraced by the infinity that is their reality. We must surrender to this god given identity. We don’t have to play small. Would we think of god playing small? So why would we of ourself, who are like the arm and willpower of God in God’s dream? So we don’t have to play small in this world. We ought to play our given, sacred part. We ought to be what we are and recognise ourself and the world as a whole, indivisible being. A being that is nothing but our own, that is experienced here and now every time we say ‘I Am’, and that we are fortunate enough to share in.

Act on the world from within. Mould it from there, from the source of yourself and of the world, from the ground of being that you feel as your own being, and that is the common ground of all beings and all things. This ground has the best ability. Religions haven’t called it Paradise or Eden for nothing. There is always a truth behind every misunderstood word. This ground of being is where you can play big, from within, from the interior of everything and everyone. You don’t have to create a new reality. It’s already there within and without, for the taking and for the looking. This reality is already here, already yours. There is love and harmony woven in the fabric of life, just here and now in and as our given experience. Our efforts to heal ourself and the world are veiling this reality, and so are our limited thoughts, which carry the false reality of there being persons and separation instead of the reality of one being and the peace contained in the infinite. Our own unlimited being is the ground where we can play big, for it is as large as God’s being if we are willing to notice its real, undefeatable nature. In fact, being is a universal cure, and it’s always at hand.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911)

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Website:
– Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (Wikipedia)

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Intimacy

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Untitled’ – Charles-Francois Daubigny – WikiArt

Spirituality is about intimacy. Nothing else. That is all you will feel, when you go to the right place, when your most tender being comes towering in your life: intimacy. Intimacy with everyone and everything. When you are not content about being a person, about only living the life of body and senses, about all things objective that can be seen, heard, felt, then is left something that you could never comprehend. Then comes that innermost part of yourself which is now found to impress and impregnate both you and your experience. Then comes something measureless. This was already your most familiar experience, although you have made it a stranger in your life, for engaging only with the shallow, with the surface, the easy, the habitual, the measurable. These will never take you to intimacy but to separation, remoteness, distance, and finally discord. So go to what is not only passing, but to what is inmost, intrinsic, that cannot be discarded and dispensed with. Your world will open to something precious beyond understanding, which is the intimacy contained in experience as a whole, when it is not dampened by your insistence in being something separate from experience.

Intimacy feels like being with a close friend, when nothing needs to be said other than simply to live, enjoy, and taste presence. Intimacy is to make yourself and experience as precious as a lover. In that process, it melts you down, so that you are nowhere to be found. This absence of yourself is love, which is your freedom, and the thriving of this presence which you are and have always been without your noticing. It will bring everybody and everything — the whole world — close to your self. So close that you won’t see a difference between your experience and your own self. You will be revealed as one boundless presence — the undefeatable essence of your being, before the thousands things of experience come to soil it, dampen it. You will be in love, inside love, for intimacy is just another word for it. Intimacy is about shared being. It may seem personal, but it is not. What makes it seem personal is that we involve the body-mind, that we think binds it. In fact, intimacy has nothing to do with the body and the mind. It is a warmth without limit or end.

In its purest form, being sends us in a place of immediate intimacy with everyone and everything, a sense of togetherness, of belonging that cannot be helped. Intimacy is a gathering in and as being, whether we are two people, or ten, or a hundred. We feel an absence of plurality, or otherness. It can be informed in a split of a second, deploying itself from a place unknown and unknowable. Its appearance is free, unconditioned by time. Its disappearance is impossible, only apparent or believed. It comes from a place which has neither a beginning nor an end, and is not bound to the limitations of space. It reveals itself as something fundamental to our living this life, but which we have failed to notice was here. It is the highest degree of your essence. Being intimate is the last place in yourself you will ever visit. There is no beyond it. It will come as your last day, your final breath, for there is no living as a separate entity, as a private being, once you have drunken at its source, and suffered its irrevocable implications. To be intimate is to die to yourself, and disappear in the radiance of only and simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878)

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Website:
– Charles-François Daubigny (Wikipedia)

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God’s Flower Bed

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Fleur’ – Jean Benner, 1860 – WikiArt

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The difficulty in the spiritual endeavour is that we have to question the unquestionable. We have to doubt the obvious. We have to turn the stones that we have carefully placed here to pave the road. One such indisputable truth is that we choose our thoughts. That the decisions or actions we are taking, the thoughts or attitudes we are having, are the products of a controller, of a self that has them, chooses them. But is it so? Have we even tried to question it? Have we ever looked if there truly was a self here in capacity to choose? What if there wasn’t? What if this self, this ‘I’ that we seem to be, only drew its existence from our imagination? What if our own self was just another thought? If this entity that we love to pamper and strengthen was not there, not at all? If we have played a game with ourself? If there is here no person outside our indulgence in having the thought of one?

Many of our conflicts and problems in life come precisely from the belief that we are the chooser of our thoughts, that there is an ‘I’, a person here that runs the show when there is not. That’s the mistake, the original sin, to think of ourself as a doer, a thinker, a separate entity that has control, that manufactures happiness, freedom, and is responsible for our experience such as it is. We want to carry the load of our DNA, of our body, thoughts, habits, suffering, or even happiness, and not let them go. We want to be grandiose. The truth is: there is no personal ’I’ that can act on our thoughts or decision-making. These are better left alone, and informed by the only ‘I’ there is, that finds its true essence in the infinity of being, which is selfless. With this understanding or realising, we would come to treat what we have as a jewel of the most precious kind — beyond control but lovingly tailored for us by the universe and its supreme intelligence.

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An enquiry on our ability to choose our thoughts or not… (READ MORE…)

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