Undivided Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Virgin Islands In Bezons’ – Charles-Francois Daubigny, 1855 – WikiArt

We all want to be happy. That’s our most profound desire. Everything we do is only expressing that longing. We want to be whole, free from contradiction and suffering. That’s the quiet or not so quiet battle that our life is, whether we acknowledge it or not. That’s being human in a nutshell. Really, humanhood is a quest. As an individual, that’s all we are seeking. But are we really an individual? Are we really a particle amongst the space of humanity? Are we truly a self contained in a body, an ‘indivisible entity’ as the word ‘individual’ has sought to make us believe? In Latin, ‘individuum’ stands for ‘atom’. But in fact, we feel that we are not yet an individual — we are divided, torn apart, haven’t quite found the person that we have the urge to be. Our limits are blurry. Our qualities are evasive. Our purpose is hazy. We often don’t find ourself in ourself. There is a blank there if we look carefully. So what is truly existing in us? What is here that is worth being called myself, or ‘I’? What is being an individual?

Now, most people don’t like being told. Our being is a much too serious affair to be delegated to another. We want to feel for ourself. We want to feel both what we are, and that we are. That’s why we keep looking, seeking, failing, finding, falling, doubting. We keep dancing the life we are in, by all means. We are seeking ourself in all that comes. In fact, just being an individual doesn’t seem to make it. We feel there is more to us than being a separate entity, delineated by the limits of our body and mind. It doesn’t fit — doesn’t quite match our intuition. It doesn’t feel that we are that limited. It doesn’t feel that we truly know what we are. Maybe it never was about our bodies. Maybe our individuality takes its source in infinity. This is what we were meant to be. This is what an individual is, undivided, not distinguished from everything, devoted to the quality of being that encompasses the universe and beyond. We were never a thing, a particle. Only, it seems that we have squeezed our indivisibility into a body to fit the general consensus.

Paradoxically, it is not in our differences that we find our individuality, but in the sameness of being. Our differences are simply the residues, the negligible expressions of a conditioning at the level of the body-mind. They are not an expression of our individuality. They do not represent us. We are not to be defined by the small, but by the expanded field of our awareness, the immensity of being. In a strange way, this identity-less identity is making us the very person or individual that we have always wanted to be. Do you want to be the best version of yourself? So be. Just be. Be that formless, identity-less being that you are and have missed for wanting to be only qualities or talents. Qualities and talents need our being first for their field of expression. We are their container. Without this silent presence of being that we are, they remain simple goods that we use to buy a semblance of composure, with its flickering moments of satisfaction and pride. Our being identified with them is the cause of your suffering. But there will come a time when being will be seen as the only mark or evidence of our individuality. Being is what our individuality is made of. It is our true body. Idiosyncrasies and differences are but the crumbs left at the table of experience.

In fact, being is what being an individual is. Our individuality is found in the shining of being. Not in the shining of our conditioning and idiosyncrasies. We will learn to see our so-called qualities behind us, almost non-existent, choked by the brightness of being. Bodies are only points of view. And minds are the tools for the government of our body. Our self is not there, not located. It is an expansion. Being an individual is being whole, undivided. It is to find our completeness in and through the world. It is to see and feel that the totality of experience is made of being, and that being is the essence of our individuality. Being an individual means that we are not a divided, broken up, an assembly of body, thoughts, feelings, experiences that makes for a person. How could we be an individual when we draw our identity from scattered objects that tear us apart and leave us confused — unanchored to our deepest self? We own our freedom to the recognition of our individuality, which consists of undivided being. The word speaks for itself. An individual is an undivided being. It is not found in our qualities and idiosyncrasies, not in our body and mind. We draw our individuality from simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878)

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Website:
– Charles-Francois Daubigny (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Face of the Infinite

Posted on by Alain Joly

For many things in life, we are exigent, demanding. We won’t let things be as they are. We are picky — we want more and better. We expect, hope, resist, desire, and are rarely satisfied. We are seekers of advantageous situations, and have a good idea of what they can be. Yet when it comes to ourself, to knowing who or what we are, we lose all inquisitiveness. We take ourself for granted. We may want to be more loving, less violent, have more of the good qualities, and less of the bad ones, but who is the ‘I’ that desires these things, we don’t want to know. Maybe we have an intuition that there is great danger in uncovering our true identity. After all, it was never talked about, a sort of family secret that society doesn’t want you to interfere with. Even religion is not clear about it, that encourages you to rather follow, pray, and submit yourself to God, but not to know who you are. At least not in a clearly stated way. You may know about anything you want, but please keep yourself out of it. In fact, ‘Know Thyself’ is the least encouraged commandment in this world of ours, and that alone should be enough to fuel our curiosity.

So who am I? What is my identity? What is this last part of my experience that is yet to pioneer and fully settle in? Which has remained untouched, virgin of our constant and fanatic rummaging? Which hasn’t yet been recognised for the simple reason that it is not a place we can know, let alone go to? It is so ourself that it cannot be seen, felt, experienced as something objective, or as an entity. This land of ourself has slipped out of our attention. We are blind to our eternal home. We have left behind us, untackled, unidentified, in the darkness of our wilful mind, the vibrant sky of our being. So what is my true identity? What is this unchanging substance that is the formless form of my being? In other words, what am I identical with, or the same as? ‘Same’, in its most ancient etymology, has the meaning of ‘one’. So we can rule out all the separate, isolated objects that we project ourself to be — that includes our body and our mind, and the many thoughts we’re thinking. Our identity is not in something which we identify with, but in the expression of oneness — the one being that is by definition free from all identification. This identity with the One has been achieved from time immemorial. We don’t need to come back to it, to rehearse it, or affirm it. Our identity has dissolved into the One, which is identified with no other than itself.

Where does unity or oneness live in my experience? In what portion of my conscious being can I feel an absence of otherness? Where do I find in myself no distinction, variation, or divergence, not even a breach that would differentiate me from reality? Where am I wholly and only being? What is it that I truly am, with no intervention of a past or a future? Where is this within that is also without? What is this ‘I’ that I could never ever cease to be? Who am I when all objectivity and multiplicity have died down? Where do I find an absence of ‘me’ in myself? Or rather, where do I find a sense of ‘me’, in me, that is not already the ‘me’ of everything and everyone? Where am I when every remnant of a seeking mind has left? Where do I find an individuality that is not universality? Where could I not find God’s presence in my experience? Where is this ‘where’, where I can never say where, what, when, how, why to what I am? And lastly, where have now all my questions dissolved? Only settle for a living, silent answer. Any other verbal or conceptual answer at this point would ruin it all. It would be like slamming the door in the face of the infinite.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
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The Story of It All

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Large Bathers’ – Paul Cézanne, 1905 – WikiArt

There is a hidden presence everywhere we go, that hides within our experience. It is concealed within its own shining, and is the reason for our seeing and experiencing anything. It seems to be woven into our very being, to have married its being to our being. Would we want to separate ourself from it, that we wouldn’t know where to go. In fact, there is no way outside ourself. We have it all here as we are. Our life is unfolding within that which is ‘myself’. We are the garden of our self, of all our human endeavour, of our quest and of our finding, of our lack and of our glory. All that we live for, when reduced to its core target, is to be relieved from our chronic sense of not having enough. We feel there is a thing here to be found, without knowing what it is. So we become blind to ourself, and are consequently driven into the world, seeking there in the distance of time or place, what is already here in and as our very self. We are our own hidden remedy, our secret paradise. We have shrouded the infinite within ourself, and are erring within our own misconception.

In fact, we have been misled by our having a body, imagining us inside it rather than it inside us. We have belittled ourself, have lost faith, squeezing ourself into a thought that we have aggrandised to being an entity. We are a trick of the mind — nothing more — and have lived caught within our own creation, struggling inside our own mistake, wrestling with a world that we have stripped of its essence. We have divided our experience into separate objects, and have reduced ourself to being one such object. Now we are striving to unravel our own mistake, to defeat our foolish, unfortunate belief — hence our suffering and our struggling. Our life has been made into a scream for peace and justice, and the silence of simply being has retired within us, into the hiding place where we have pushed it. We have shied away from our truthful nature, and wandered off from simply being naked being. We have clothed our emptiness with the garment of a self delineated by thought and identification. We have limited the infinite to our convenience, and squeezed eternity into the burden of time.

But there is a dawn here just as we are. There is a light ready to overcome our night. For we never got lost far from our home, never took our stand away from our own being. So our journey is always only the shortest step from ourself to ourself. We have to return where we never left. We have to get acquainted with ourself, with who we truly are, and get accustomed to our being — much wider than we ever noticed. We have a sky at our disposal when we have dismissed the thousands fascinations and identifications with everything that is at a distance from ourself, and is the prey to our mind and our senses. There, curled within and prolonged without, treated so far with contempt, is our own indomitable self. There, trampled by a belief about ourself that we have imposed on everything, is a magnificence. There, is the being of our being, what we-the-seeker have sought everywhere except in its own place of living, which is ourself. We have missed it because it was the last thing investigated, the last stone lifted, for being too close and intimate. Who could have thought that the sought was the seeker?

Now we only have to be that ground of being alone, at the exception of all that is moving and changing in it, and that isn’t us, not truly us. We only have to sink beneath the moving sea of our multiple, insatiable experiences, and let ourself reach that part of ourself that cannot be known or possessed, and is yet our undeniable self and identity. Here we discover that our being is the being of everyone and everything, and that we are bound to this totality by love. Here every single thing in our experience is unraveling itself back to its essence, taking its right place within it — and that essence is found to be our essence. And god’s being too finds its right place and meaning in and as ourself — and we too have our place in god. And our so precious peace is now teeming as our own being, and justice is found right under every step we are taking. Now we have silence as our very best companion, and our seeking — which was our suffering — has been buried under it. Now we are right where we were supposed to be when the world became a world, and the son of god became a woman or a man. And now…

Now let me rest and live and walk the world as I am, alone and one, and all in I.

 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cezanne (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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A Treasure of Understanding

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Dawn’ – Joseph Farquharson, 1903 – WikiArt

There is no such a thing as conceptual understanding in matters of spirituality. As soon as we form an idea, a concept, an image, a projection about ourself, we are still where we have always been: in our mind, in the known, in grounds we have already trodden a thousand times. These grounds are the grounds of our misunderstanding, where beliefs have already shaped and conditioned the idea we have about ourself. An idea that we rehearse and consolidate with every thought or act springing out of the field of our conceptual world. No understanding can ever come from this barren field. For one good, essential reason, which is that our understanding comes from only being. Being is the field of our understanding. Being is understanding itself. And the mind — with the ego which it gives rise to — is the only thing that is hindering our coming in contact with being in its purest form. That’s why concepts and ideas can never be understanding itself. They hide our clarity. In fact, they trample it.

So, should you ever want to come in contact with the pristine vibe contained in understanding, then a little digging is a necessary prerequisite. Don’t stay in your mind, take a new breath, be an explorer. You may use the tool of mind as you use a spear to dig a treasure. But please don’t take the spear for the treasure. This treasure is the treasure of being that stands unseen below the surface of your wrestling with concepts and ideas. Don’t let being be undermined by the description or explanation of the method. A beautiful image of truth will never be truth itself. It won’t hold the true taste of it. You won’t get its exquisite perfume, unless you see what stands under your mind and your ego. Understand your being by being only being. Throw the spear out. Finish the digging with your bare hands if required. Be yourself your treasure.

You come to an understanding when you stand under everything that is appearing or forming in your experience. Being is what stands under. It is the one thing that doesn’t change, that can never die or dis-appear, and out of which everything objective or knowable come into existence, and is under the scrutiny of your senses. But objective experience can never lead you to any understanding. Not out of its own will. You have to coerce yourself, make your own acquired, conceptual idea of reality recede and reveal its illusory, invented nature. You have to make what was, what will be, what should be, and what seems to be, into what is. That’s where understanding lives, in what is, in the here and now of your essential being. Understanding is implicit to being, and being explicit in understanding. Feel your being in its purest form, and see that you are yourself the understanding that you have craved to achieve through your mind.

So being stands under your apparent self which, in its light, is discovered to be non-existent, or rather only existent as being. That being is your true support, deserving all your praises. Actually, it is the support of everything, the great pervader — that’s why some have called it the creator. Not that it creates while being outside of its creation, but rather it is the substantial essence of everything — what makes a world possible and viable. So to understand yourself is to touch this essence through your being it, and to praise that part of yourself which you can never not be with, and which comes with a special flavour of well-being. That’s how you feel your true nature, through that subtle yet indestructible joy of simply being, which your never satisfied body-mind-self could never give you other than fleetingly. Understanding as being comprehends everything. It holds and embraces all life in the fullness of its presence. So to understand is to rest in your natural being, which requires no commenting or even understanding. You are, and this is that.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935)

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Website:
– Joseph Farquharson (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Huang Po

Posted on by Alain Joly
’Zen Encounter (Niaoke Daolin and Bai Juyi)’ – Kenko Shokei, 16th AD – Wikimedia

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“This Dharma is Mind, beyond which there is no Dharma;
and this Mind is the Dharma, beyond which there is no mind.”
~ Huang Po (Ch.7)

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Every religion has its mystical counterpart, where beliefs, rituals, and book studies are replaced by self-investigation, direct experience, and understanding. Buddhism is no exception. Out of the nimbus of Buddha’s awakening came a single practice called by the simple word ‘chán’, which means ‘meditation’ (‘dhyāna’ in Sanskrit). Bound by the rigorous practice of watching their mind and recognising its true nature — which is called Buddha-Nature in Buddhism — a whole dynasty of influential Patriarchs and Masters have transmitted this tradition known as Zen in the West. Huang Po was one such eminent Chinese Master. His concise work called ‘On the Transmission of Mind’ is one of the world’s major expositions of truth. Recorded by the scholar of the time P’ei Hsiu, this collection of Huang Po’s sayings and sermons opens with this simple, illuminating phrase:

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“All the Buddhas and all sentient beings
are nothing but the One Mind,
beside which nothing exists.”
~ Huang Po (Ch.1)

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In this book, Huang Po wants to make very clear and very simple, that all understanding, all mystery, all the content of Zen practice, is to be found here, in ourself, as ourself, as our Mind, and that this Mind of ours, of all of us, is the Buddha. In other words, what we take to be our everyday little, separate, private self is, when investigated, nothing but the one supreme being that we share with all other beings. This understanding is what Huang Po calls the Way. This is the only recognition that we need:

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“To awaken suddenly to the fact
that your own Mind is the Buddha,
that there is nothing to be attained
or a single action to be performed –
this is the Supreme Way.”
~ Huang Po (Ch.13)

[…]

Read more about the teaching of Chinese Zen master Huang Po… (READ MORE…)

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Twisted Rainbow

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Hope’ (detail) – George Frederick Watts, 1886 – WikiArt

Unhappiness is a strange thing, for against all appearances, and under serious investigation, it is not really found. We are making it up as we go along. In fact, there is no such thing as an absence of happiness. Yet we are nurturing this absence with great consistency, designing our so called unhappiness with care, through our thoughts, our memory, our attachments, our stubborn persistence. But only try to experience its effects outside your thoughts and feelings, in the absence of your mind, and you’d have to confess that you can’t find here anything like a misery. The reason is: unhappiness is not a thing in itself. It is veiled happiness. It is the covering up of your innate peace. It is past residues and future expectations tossing the tranquillity of the now. But all such disturbances, discomforts, or distresses, are always only temporary events, passing weathers distracting us from what is always here, always faithful, always to be trusted: the peace contained in simply being. This peace is in fact the very making and backbone of our lives, its solid background. It could never leave you no matter how hard you may try. Its not being felt is a form of snobbery. You have missed your innate joy in reason of your not looking in the right place. You have neglected your true, natural being for wanting to be somebody. You have been scorning yourself out of vainglory. In fact, unhappiness is but the simple mourning of a loved one who is missed: our true self. It is but a distraction from the boredom of our ignorance. Or a warning for a wrong turn taken.

Unhappiness is not found in physical pain, or in the natural grief following a loss. These are all compatible with happiness, as is a shared, compassionate sorrow. These are wise and healthy responses to life situations and challenges. Unhappiness is of a different nature. It is more like a habit or an indulgence. Often, we would rather be unhappy than shatter a well-rehearsed idea of ourself, in which we have invested our most cherished identity. Unhappiness is also the result of a fallacy, and a form of delusion. It is a shadow which we nourish through our belief in being a person caught between seeking and resisting, and the reward of fulfilment. Unhappiness is only as real as our limited self is. One will follow the other both in death and in birth. So really, unhappiness is a self-inflicted pain. In a way, we could say that it is a sin. It is ourself being driven away from our happy, forgotten nature, and bound to the suffering self which we have identified ourself with. It is our twisted rainbow in the sky of ignorance, that appears naturally without being truly there. It is created by the rain of all our renouncements, of our constant search for security and approval, through accumulation and avoidance. So next time you meet some measure of unhappiness in your life, don’t believe it. Don’t be caught up and allured by its convincing appearance. See through it until you find its referent. See that unhappiness is not real as affliction or suffering. It only exists as the sum of all that hinders the happiness which is the nature of your self as being. Your misery may in fact only be a passing, unassuming thought, maybe an innocent, unchallenged belief, or just a feeling hovering about, which you are taking too seriously. Not very much really. Hardly enough to send you far and away from the delight of simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904)

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Websites:
– George Frederic Watts ( Wikipedia)
– Hope (Watts) (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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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)

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