That Flickering Flame

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Mary Magdalene with Oil Lamp’ (part)  – Georges de la Tour, 1630-35 – WikiArt

The simple feeling of being — away from the contingencies of being a separate self enthralled, or assailed by objective experience — that feeling, that wee flame, needs to be attended at all costs, watched over patiently, and finally protected. Otherwise it will wither in no time, pushed by the winds of our egocentric activities, wiped out by our stubborn beliefs. Being can be such a shy being. But always remember: it is eager to shine; it is eager to warm your life up with its soft, tender flame. And it will bring you that little light you need, to find your way through the maze of existence. That flickering light is stronger than you think. At first, it might appear to be hesitant, wavering as if to die with any sudden burst of a boastful thought, or the surging of a distressing feeling. But look closer. For the apparent flickering of that little, intermittent flame is yours. You are that angry shadow threatening to shut its light off yourself. You are that cold gust ready to send its warmth far and away from your life, and leave you freezing like a lonely being. So be yourself that shyness, that hesitancy. Watch that you don’t come to disturb the flame of your self. Be that flickering entity, always ready to retire and fade your cumbersome presence off that joyous fire of being. That’s the extent of your attending: your not being there, your acceptance to die or surrender, your willing to fragilise that imposant self which you have identified yourself with along the way — that invention of yourself. That is all this wee flame needs to set fire to your existence, to inflame your being as to show it to be indestructible, and to shed a bright light on your true nature as being infinite and eternal — not that shy, fragile, flickering, coming and going presence. For presence is a wildly enthusiastic blaze if you let it be. It can burn you in a second, so as to render you inexistent. It is a firestorm that will scatter you in a thousand fluttering ashes, to leave you as you truly are: A peaceful being. A flame of happiness. Shining brightly like an ebullient sea of love. See what a little attending can do — a little nurturing! The humble succouring of a wee, flickering flame…

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)

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Websites:
– Georges de La Tour (Wikipedia)
– Magdalene with the Smoking Flame (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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The Harvest of Understanding

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Harvest’ – Zinaida Serebriakova, 1910 – WikiArt

There is a time to retire into yourself. There, is a cavern of knowing and being that was left unexplored, silenced, unable to adorn your life with its presence. This hide is where peace resides, and where life finds its shine and gold. It wasn’t kept secret. Only you needed to abandon an erroneous idea about yourself that had been polished with centuries of conditioning, so that took a little probing. Finally this cavern of being is met with the light of your understanding. And this light is discovered to recede yet another jewel. Happiness. The gentle peace of living, made beauty when your eyes embrace the world, and rendered as love in the company of another being. It is a simple realisation — rare enough I concede — but nevertheless within reasonable reach for whoever is willing to give his or her heart to it. Now the story doesn’t quite end there. For you will be tempted to indulge in your new discovery. The comfort of your newly found home is mesmerising, and you will be drawn to keep yourself cozy in the embrace of your own being. And it is fine, even necessary to a certain point. You need to get accustomed to the new light of your being. But then is when you should finally be kicked out…

There is a time for knowing, and a time to make a harvest out of it. There is a time to equate pure being with the world, to feel it as yourself, to make the transfer, enjoy the catch, go beyond the riddle. This is ultimate realisation. Don’t forget to transform the knowing of your own being into the pure delight and intelligence of being a luminous self in an enlightened world. Be the human that you were meant to be, that you had wanted to be all your life. In fact, we were never given a chance to be a true human. We have been one in the waiting. Only in and as God’s presence can you be made a true human being, an accomplished, apparent individual. One that is so, not for its objective qualities, but in reason of its sublime subjectivity. It is not an impossible attainment. It is here, now, just as you are, no matter the life you happen to have, or the person you believe yourself to be. Make your life proud of itself. Register that your self is gorgeous. Not just the light of pure being that you are of all eternity, but also that very body-mind, here, in this world. I think it is important to live as if. To be again just a human living in a world. Not to keep re-enacting unceasingly the realisation of your identity as pure being. Be yourself a living meditation. Let your life take the fresh wind of true being into a living practice. Give god a chance to wear the clothes of your human experience. Don’t forget the old Zen saying, “In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; later on, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; and still later, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.”

There is a hidden reward concealed in experiencing the humility contained in being just a human in the world. This is how you will feel truly. This is how you will love sweetly, and register beauty beyond understanding. This is how you experience true relationship with others. This is how any moment can become a thrilling new adventure, never to be repeated again. And this is how you will come to experience the special grace contained in thinking and feeling, in having a body, in living in a world. The best wine is only so because of the exquisiteness of its taste. Drink life, drink love, through every pores of your body, through every windows of your feelings and perceptions. Experience it from a promontory freed from the constraint of beliefs. Choose love over wisdom. Your understanding will grow exponentially out of this second incarnation. God hasn’t done all this tiresome work of bodies and world if it wasn’t to build a beautiful home for you to live in. Engage your being in every aspect of your experience. Don’t leave the world aside. Yes, the world is often ugly, ridden with conflict and every kind of suffering, degraded, and often a dangerous place to be. But it may well turn out to be our paradise, if we upgrade it with and as the presence of our true self. It is not a selfish thing to enjoy. It is in fact a selfless act to be a servant of peaceful being. And remember that wherever you are and act can be a haven for everything and everyone coming in your echo chamber. For being attracts being. Be yourself a haven of life. Incarnate the teaching that was passed on to you — that’s how you pass it on to others. Make it a thing. Reap the enjoyment of it. Feel your participation in the world. Let your human experience be soaked with being. Make god resplendent.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967)

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Website:
– Zinaida Serebriakova (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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One Sublime Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Winter Night in Rondane’ – Harald Sohlberg, 1913 – WikiArt

The body-mind is not an apparatus that stands on its own. It is an instrument of awareness. It is supposed to bear and implement the innate qualities of its owner as pure, unlimited being. This is why it has pain and suffering: When all such qualities have failed to be transmitted. When awareness is being short-circuited. Suffering is the complaint of God that is inbuilt in the body-mind system. It is God’s intelligence revealing itself to ourself when we have become blind to our true nature. So we have to align ourself to the depth contained in the knowing of our being, to be ourself that vastness, and allow it to shine in our experience. This is the golden avenue to peace: to be ourself an expression of the divine being that is lending itself to our constitution, lending its body to the body of our bones, blood, and skin, and lending itself as a container for our thoughts, sensations, and perceptions.

We never had a solid body with a life of its own. A dying body is not just a body that fails to sustain itself. It is consciousness calling itself back to itself, and in that process making the body-mind instrument ever more soft and porous, leaving it ever more shining, ever more acquiring the qualities of its essence as pure being. It is also a mind that is made less ambitious, losing its carapace of wanting, needing, seeking, expecting — the suffering that it all implies. A mind that is slowly giving itself in, to return to where it never left, and espouse its natural receptacle as pure awareness. This is how death comes to be so readily accepted. In the course of this transition. In the gift that death is in last analysis. For your body is not your body. It is God’s being in disguise. As for your mind, it is but God’s infinite mind borrowed. So you never truly lose your body. You never truly lose your self. And you are not confined to your body-mind in this life. You just come to realise the presence of another truer, finer body. A body that extends itself to the width and length of the world. And you notice that your mind is not restrained to the perimeter of your skull, but hosts unbridled, measureless, the world that is your body, with its infinity of variables. This is how body, mind, world, God, life, death are discovered to be one sublime being, bound together by the vital fluid of love.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935)

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Website:
– Harald Sohlberg (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Arise, O Krishna!

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Rasa Mandala Dance of Krishna and the Gopis’ – Anonymous, 1760 – Wikimedia

Arise, O Krishna! This is not a time for discretion. There is enchantment around the lake of experience. Ladies have come with fine clothes and jewellery to be adorned by you. You have to be their cup-bearer, the one presence giving to every forms of experience their gorgeous light. For what is a thought without the cup in which it grows, stands for a second, and disappears? Krishna, you alone are the meaning and beauty attached to every object that inhabit our daily living. So this is not a time to hide, but to reveal, to shed light, to glorify. The Gopis — the milkmaids of the Krishnaite folklore — have come to you in the effervescence of their longing. You are the reason for their looking so beautiful. They come to you to be revealed and embellished by your presence, by the one being that is their most precious jewel. So enter the round, O Krishna, and dance with every one of them.

Give to the thoughts that come and wander for a time in our minds their chamber of peace. Clothe them with clarity and intelligence. Appease the suffering of which they are the vehicle, and offer them the rest they deserve. Don’t let anyone unattended. Not a feeling should be left alone, frightened or sad, without benefiting from your warm embrace. No sensations should come along without your building for them a temple of awareness. Be the one present for all, infallible, unswerving. Should a Gopi be lost in the contemplation of nature, and you are here showering her vision with beauty. You are the noble harmony of every experience, and what confers to the dance of life the sweetest of melodies. And have you noticed, O Krishna, how your absence can throw a shadow of sorrow on every experience that passes unseen by you? And have you witnessed how acute is our longing for you, when you withdraw your loving gaze from the many happenings of our lives?

So now, with flowers in their hair, and boundlessness in their hearts, do the Gopis join in your endless round, O Krishna. You hold everyone, every experience, every object that stands lost and alone, in your loving arms. You create around them an armour of beauty, and clothe them in truth’s brightest apparel. That’s how we find the peace at the heart of experience: by marrying every appearance to the gentle presence that holds them. And that presence is ourself — who we are — now giving shape to every perception, every occurrence, sheltering them in the being that gives them protection and form. That’s how the Gopis are experienced as an emanation of Krishna, and how Krishna is seen to be their primordial cause. So now arise, O Krishna! Truly arise! We have come here in celebration of truth, to contemplate you and be contemplated by you. The set for the dance has been arranged. We have come to you enamoured as humble milkmaids, as the fervent Gopis of your heart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Anonymous (1760-65)

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Website:
– Raslila (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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The Straight Story

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Straight Story’ – by David Lynch (with Richard Farnsworth)

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“When I catch an idea for a film,
I fall in love with the way cinema can express it.”
~ David Lynch

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Have you ever seen a film made of love? Well, I have. And no further than this morning. A modest, not very well-known masterpiece by David Lynch, called ‘The Straight Story’. It is based on a true story: In 1994 in the United States, Alvin Straight — an old man — decides to pay a visit to his brother who has just suffered a stroke. They haven’t spoken for ages, out of an old rancour, so he wants to repair and reunite. With a clear mind, he embarks on a 390 kilometres journey from Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion in the Wisconsin, but he does it in his own inimitable way. On a riding lawn mower!… With bad hips and two sticks for help, and a refusal of doctors. With a maximum speed of about 8 kms per hour, and a trailer to pull. And with love as a luggage.

As often when it comes to starting a spiritual journey, it all begins with a fall and the subsequent realisation that something needs to be changed. And in order to make our quest a successful one, we have to make the journey just as important as the destination. And this is what Alvin does. His trip becomes an occasion for adventure. Everything he meets, he does with the eyes of wonder, and the now is the only time in which his travel takes place. Everything is important. Everything matters. The journey is not just a means to an end. We don’t reach infinity step by step anymore than we meet eternity in time. Every meeting with truth is made in truth’s home. And every encounter with our true nature is made within, in and as our innermost sense of being. No matter the extent of our understanding, in order to be, we have to be being. And Alvin, clearly, knows it all too well.

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Some reflections on seeing this film by David Lynch… (READ MORE…)

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Anything at All

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Fenêtre ouverte sur la Seine’ – Pierre Bonnard, 1911 – Wikipedia

Isn’t it humbling to realise that whatever experience you or anybody may have, whatever experience there is anywhere, anyhow, from any thing, at any time, in any dimension of life, will come down to being just this, this pure and impersonal sense of being that is the source and essence of all selves and things. You may live a child’s experience deep in the Amazon forest or a tree standing proudly in the Californian air. You may be a woman or a man in Paris, Kathmandu, or a lost, forgotten village in Greenland. You may live rich and imbued with yourself or excruciatingly poor, sleeping on a pavement somewhere, forgotten from all. You may be an ant living the life of an ant, in a scrumptious colony of fellow ants, or a dignified elephant leading the herd, the matriarch in her world. You may be an expression of utmost violence or anger, or lingering in total peace and appreciation of the world. Or an energetic horse running in the morning dew, or a distant owl hooting quietly before falling asleep. Or maybe a wave crashing in the ocean, or a whale flapping the water, or a little anchovy swimming in the big silver mass of its shoal. Or a soaring eagle, or any wild flower of any wild mountain meadow, or that heavy stone there, resting in a river bed. Or the lamp at your bedside. You may be anything that stands, sits, lies, flies, swims, exists, loves, suffers, ages or dies. You may be the majestic suns and planets of the universe dancing around, following their laws and trajectories. You may be god himself, or the goddess herself. The thousands and thousands expressions of devotion towards the divine, any human being lost in prayer. You may be just a thought. One word ushered at a lover’s ear. Or a gentle wind. Or a wonder. Or a tear. Or a sigh. Or nothing at all. A dream. Empty space. Anything. You may be anything at all. — And this is eternity. And the infinite is at your door. Here. Now. Love expressing itself. Being being ignited. Sameness. God’s presence felt.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

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Website:
– Pierre Bonnard (Wikipedia)

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A Plea Answered

Posted on by Alain Joly

For those of us who complain that god never answers their plea, let me tell you something. God is more subtle than that. He never was an entity, with a voice that could speak. She never even was a kind of object, however subtle, that could soothe at the level you are expecting, through the granting of a favour, the offering of a reward. Neither could god curse you with punishment. He doesn’t take sides. She never takes umbrage. God grants only one thing: Its glorious, infinite, loving presence. The lack of answer, the absence of favour, the withdrawing of reward, the malediction of punishment… it’s all on your side. Because you have blinded yourself to its eternal smile at you. Because you have covered your ears lest you might hear its constant whisper at you. For you were too busy thinking, pleading, complaining, expecting, reaching for an outside object or presence, that could give you, forgive you. For you were too engrossed in overwhelming feelings, worries, disputes, about yourself and others, and had definite certitudes about so many things, and such endlessly running opinions and preferences. In other words, you have isolated yourself, separated yourself, crippled yourself, and as a result made god silent and powerless — an empty void where it isn’t.

But god is never silent, if you turn towards where it lives. Its subtle presence at the core of your being is speaking endlessly, calling you with all the patience required. And that presence is never powerless, for it holds you eternally in its sweet embrace, as you can notice if you look at your own being with the same passion. And please don’t forget that your suffering is god’s answer to you. It is her calling disguised, what you had expected all along, the present that you didn’t bother to wrap with golden ribbons. And god also made you a favour. He came to live right at the heart of your being, so that you could never be at a distance from him; so that you could feel him as your own, ever-present self. And by the way, god wasn’t holding back anything. She is generous, offering you the constant reward of peace and happiness. Only you have to feel it in your heart, and not rush out for an auspicious circumstance or a desired object. And if you have ever felt the pang of a curse, understand that this indeed was of your own making. For you have cut yourself from god’s divine hold, and in doing so have lessened the abundance of its bounties. You have made yourself a lone traveller. You have shut your heart from the fountain of love that is steadily flowing as your own, ever-present, precious being, which is god’s being too. God has no power to curse, but you sure have, until you get the courage to open yourself to the infinite presence that sits in and as your self. That simple feeling of being, that all powerful god eternally crowing your self, will block all possible entry for a curse, and keep you safe.

And now for one last, precious recommendation: To live with the presence of god in your heart not only will protect you from your own talent at cursing yourself, but will open wide the doors of perception for the flooding of beauty. It will make your life a torrent of peace. For god will shower on you gifts after gifts of its benevolent presence. And he will grant you all possible rewards, all answers, all favours, clearing your path towards the blessing of immortal life, of unconditional love and objectless happiness. God was never disingenuous. She never was the void or absence that you took her to be. He/she is a presence so full that you could be his or hers for life eternal. Some have called it the Kingdom of Heaven, some Nirvana. And what blessing and surprise it is to find it right here, right now, as your very own self, veiled only by the plea of not having it, of wanting it, hoping for it, looking for it. Remember: you are not a self in your own right. Your self is nothing but god’s presence espousing you. For you share the same being, as the being of everything and everyone. But I won’t say more. Now you have your answer.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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