The Secret

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Open Window’ – Pierre Bonnard, 1921 – WikiArt

There is a secret. Do you want to hear it?… So come closer, because like all secrets, it must be whispered. We mustn’t scare anyone.

Are you ready? Here it is: The world is not as it was presented to you. You have been fooled. There is a misundestanding.

It is the best kept secret in the universe. Why? Simply because it is not hidden. Or rather, it is hidden in view of all, in full light. Every religion has tried to conquer it and has failed. Not by lack of believing, as they would like us to think, but by excess of belief, of fascination.

Only the most mystical of their representatives, the most courageous, the most eager to know the truth beyond all other considerations, have approached it, discovered it intimately. Because this secret requires everything, it wants the whole of you. It won’t let you know it from a distance. It wants a total union, therefore a sacrifice.

So, are you ready?

Look carefully. Become impregnated with consciousness, feel it, be ‘it’, to the exclusion of all that you have been taught about yourself. After all, do you really believe that you are your body, to which you gave a name? Do you really think that you have an age, that your thoughts describe you, model you? Do you believe yourself to be so small, so narrow? Is your life just a series of experiences that happen to you, and that will make you either beautiful or stupid, mediocre or refined?

Look again. Are you not experience itself, are you not the world? Are you not absent to the presence of the world? And therefore immense, infinite, eternal, your body marrying the outlines, the confines of the universe? Are you not the very vessel, the One of all things, of which you would be both a part and the totality?

Look. Observe.

The world is not separate from you, doesn’t stand at a distance, and you are not a small thing lost, cut off from everything. You are the experience itself, without any separation between a body, a mind, that would be yourself, and the rest of life and the world that would impose its experience on you. There is only experience, and that is ‘you’.

You are everything, the entirety of what exists. One piece. Nothing that exists is foreign to you. The world is you. Do you hear it? You are the world. Nothing is foreign to you. Nothing that would not be ‘you’. You are your own constituent, and all that, the world, is you! Do you hear it?

That is the secret, God, Love, Life, Death.

It is you !

You are that…

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

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Website:
– Pierre Bonnard (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The ghost in the system

Posted on by Alain Joly

Here is a reminder inspired from the words of Rupert Spira. I love this expression from Rupert: a ‘ghost in the system’, because it gives a vivid image of a reality that is so easily overlooked. It is necessary and terribly efficient to look into these matters for ourselves. This is why I like to share here the parts of a spiritual teaching that sounds like ‘something to do’, something to experiment and verify for ourselves:

‘During the day, doing whatever you do, keep on searching for the ruthless person or entity you have been working for frantically, check that it ever existed, look if it is there at all, if you are not the zealous servant of an illusory master who actually never ever existed… Is there anybody there, an entity to whom all this is happening?… Enquire by looking within…’

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Further exploring on the subject:

“You know so many things about yourself,
but the knower you do not know.
Find out who you are, the knower of the known.
So far, you took the mind for the knower,
but it is just not so. Look within diligently.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

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“All we know is experience but there is no independent ‘we’ or ‘I’ that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced. From the point of view of experience, which is the only real point of view, experiencing is too intimately one with itself to know itself as ‘something,’ such as a body, mind or world.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“The self that we seem to have become as a result of the forgetting or veiling of our essential being is an imaginary one. It is in fact a thought, not an entity or a self, that has caused this exclusive association of our self with an object of the body and mind.”
~ Rupert Spira

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Bibliography:
– ‘Presence’, Vol. I & II – by Rupert Spira (Non-Duality Press)
– ‘I Am That‘ – by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (Non-Duality Press)

Websites:
– Rupert Spira
– Nisargadatta Maharaj (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Fleeing to God (other pointers from the blog)
– Khetwadi Lane (Homage to Nisargadatta Maharaj)

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Suffering Leads to Joy

Posted on by Alain Joly

This is the first of a series of texts or essays that will be presented in the future. Different subjects of spiritual interest will be explored in turn. Writing this text started with answering a simple question: ‘How did it all begin for me?’…

 

“Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come! come!”
~ Rumi

 

How did it all begin for me? This. This deep interest in finding out what life is about. This love of Truth. This spiritual search. In what cradle did it come to existence, in what fertile soil did it come to grow? I remember how acute the desire for change was as a young man. For this was all there was to it at the time. A big, raw, sincere desire to change, to be different. I was unhappy, dissatisfied with what I was. Surely it was the first seed, the primary cause of this journey. The path leading to that change in myself I had no idea about. I had to feel my way along, through random books, exotic places. Except for one intuition though, that there was something more to life than finding happiness solely through acquisitions, through changing the person that I happened to be. Otherwise I would have gone for it in a more acute way. Instead, I turned towards some kind of spiritual call, knowing nothing of it. I rushed into a tunnel of unknowing.

An essay on the subject of suffering. (READ MORE…)