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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The Immeasurable

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, 1782 – Wikimedia

There is a vast empty field of knowing within our experience, if we’re looking for it. It is vast not in regard to its sheer dimension, for it has none. Its vastness comes from its being without dimension, limit or edge. It is behind or before everything that we have taken to be ourself, including our body, our thoughts, our alleged self. It is here, motionless, massive, lending its very essence to everyone and everything. It’s easy to miss it, for it has not the objective quality that everything has in experience. We live in a field of objects that we can see, hear, touch, measure, be aware of. We are so fond of them that we have made ourself an object too, pretending to be our body, our mind, our thoughts. We have such a fascination for objects that we have become blind to that which holds them, and pervades everything. We are blind to our own essence, to our vastness, limitlessness — to that which makes objects experienced.

The consistency of objects around us has only the consistency of that which is aware of them. Objects do not own their own private essence, and neither do we. They find their essence and habitation in that which knows them. So we live in a world that is not defined by its edges, its limits. We should always understand that we live in vastness. That our world is empty of its own essence, and is only the expression of our being aware of it. It will never have another substance than the substance of knowing. So we live in emptiness, in infinity. The body may have its limits and constraints, but we do not.

We are devoid of what binds and limits our body-mind-world. So we should live our life as if there were around us only an empty knowing. Try it, to live as if unconstrained, unlimited, expanded. See that this is the truth of your being, this being not limited by time or place, this being free. Don’t engage your thoughts as if they were objects, but see them as an emanation of the silence they are made of. Thoughts are variations of silence. They are silence’s oscillations. If we are unaware of that silence, thoughts will come to veil it. If we see silence as our own nature, they will be messengers of its eloquent wisdom.

So the reality of thoughts is only the reality of the silence that holds them. Just as objects have only the reality of the knowing that knows them. And just as we ourself have only the reality of our nature as pure knowing — not as a body, nor as a mind, nor as anything limited. Limitation too is borrowed from the infinity that holds it and allows it, as eternity holds time. Where would an idea of time be, if it wasn’t within the eternity out of which it can be divided in past, present, future? Where would an idea of place be, if it wasn’t in the very infinity that permits it to exist? The structure of time and space is only for the convenience of a body and mind. We ourself have no such convenience, no such limits.

The world has beauty for it borrows its essence from the beauty and purity of that which holds it, and builds its form and structure with bricks after bricks of empty being. Emptiness is the body of this world of beings and things, which it moulds or shapes with its creative fullness. For emptiness can only exist in the fullness of being. We are only because of our being ‘being’. We are full of our own being, which is revealed as the being of everyone and everything. So there is in ourself and of ourself only an immensity. We are immense when we cannot be measured or limited in any way by our thoughts, body, or self. If we notice that this is so, that we are made of that immensity, that we are immeasurable, then we will lend to the world that same immensity of ourself, and we will notice between everyone and everything an impenetrable likeness. This likeness is born of the oneness that is the secret core of everything, and of all apparent multitude.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

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Website:
– Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (Wikipedia)

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Hidden Fragrance

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Autumn’ – Andrew Wyeth – WikiArt

There is majesty in being your own gorgeous, naked self. But thoughts come and spoil it all. We are always running up and down the line of time, feeding on memories, fearing the future we imagine, leaning on our hopes and expectations, bleeding from our constant suffering, building multiple roads of escape. We never leave ourself alone, never stay with the peace that is naturally the nature of our being. We are always on the move, indulging in the landscape of our many objective experiences, getting lost in them — after all, they are so many, so attractive. They seem to hold the secret of our happiness. So we spend a lifetime shaping them to our convenience, but they are reluctant.

In fact our thoughts have become primary when they should be secondary. They have become the fabric of our life, along with our many experiences, when they should have stayed only an ornament. There is a ground that stays still and silent under our many involvements with things, perceptions, sensations. These crowd us by the thousands, but we should not be deceived. They will want us to believe that they are us — our one and only identity, but don’t listen. There is a oneness that is here taking them all in, enveloping them, lending them the quiet blanket of its peaceful, infinite making. So be careful where you put your emphasis on, what you choose to recognise yourself to be. You are not an aggregation of body and mind content. You are the quiet aware presence which holds the ten thousand things of experience in its loving bosom, and gives them a light to be seen and experienced. Put there your life emphasis, for that presence is your very lifeblood.

So be watchful of what you take yourself to be. Will you marry your identity with all things objective, or with what gives them the ground where they thrive, are born and die? Will you go with the passing or with the ever staying? Will you have a fascination for the many or for the One? Be careful to always stay where you truly are, where you were never born and could never die, where peace is like your true body — before you venture in experience — and where your silent being is seen as the home that harbours every portion of your life. This is how you stand where only the infinite is, and where place is like its humble attendant. This is how you have your days spent in eternity, and time is like its useful valet, for the sake of your daily activities. And that’s how you view your many activities and relationships as a gorgeous play, and the peace of your being as the space where they thrive and are nourished. Don’t let anybody make you think or feel otherwise: Peace is the crux and heart of your life — its sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed fragrance. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

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Website:
– Andrew Wyeth (Wikipedia)

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Not A Thing

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Seascape’ – Théodore Rousseau, 1831 – WikiArt

Although we feel to be inside the world, there is an identity in us that is not of the world. Rather the world is in that identity. The world — everything — has been made the likeness of ourself, should ourself be seen not as a thing, but as that which could never be made into a form of any kind. That’s how and when you know who you are, when you are not a thing, not an entity, not anything that can be named or qualified. There is not a thing here that you can be. We have inherited this habit, this insistence in being something. So we have pinpointed ourself and have given it a substance of its own. In this trying to be something, we have been rendered suffering adults, drenched in belief and habit, in fear and hope, addicted to security. We have lost our childhood, what is here before every qualification, and that we only worship remotely, as something precious and lost — our innocence, the playfulness contained in living, the not knowing, the absence of urge, the sense of awe, the leisure contained in plainly and simply being.

So be like a child, who has it all. Be like before every incarnation that you have been forced to identify with, in order to fit in, to feel aggrandised. Our urge to be something has deprived us from our being sufficient, fulfilled in and as our own being. By adding to being, we have lost what gave us our true essence, our identity, our security. It all came from that acquired, mindlessly rehearsed, and deeply ingrained belief that we are not enough, that we are separate, that we have to achieve, progress, be competent. There is no joy in fitting, in being proper. There is no competence involved in being who you are. Any child knows it. Babies are masters in knowing being. We’re just the bragging ones, the ones who have made life a travail, an ordeal, for silly reasons of being something. We spend all our precious time in alleviating the suffering and inadequacy we have ourself created.

There is no suffering in being. We should have left it there, when we were only being, contented in our own presence, before the thought arose that there had to be more and better than just being. The thought of it has made a mess. Now we are in the world rather than the world is inside us. Now we are something or someone, rather that being nothing that can be named, objectified, personalised, belittled or limited. Now we have created travail and conflict rather than staying quietly in the joy and peace contained in being only being. Now we are isolated beings rather than all gathered in our one shared being. Now we are many, divided, scattered, broken up, instead of being one before oneness itself, which is like being the one child of God’s undivided, unbroken, one being. This not being something is not a posture of the mind. It is the noticing of our true nature, of what is here in and as ourself that could never be made something. Our sense of being imperfect, isolated beings is born of a simple lack of attention. We have not seen the obvious. That we are the unborn, the infinite, the ‘not a thing’, and that as that, we hold in one single embrace everything that can be named and exists in time and place, everything that can be given a birth and a death, and that is now like the One inside the One. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867)

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Website:
– Théodore Rousseau (Wikipedia)

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The Fantasy of a Self

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Moonlight’ – Winslow Homer, 1874 – WikiArt

We only ever land where we are. There is no escape from where we are. Where we are, is all there is. I mean this deepest place of ourself, from which we have never been separated, is the very thing which we have been looking for in a thousand distant places, in endless situations, in hopes and expectations, in projections, attachments, identifications. Our mind has been thirsting for this place of peace for as long as we can remember, and it has been escaping us with perfect consistency. For there is a rule attached to this place: we can’t find it outside of ourself. And the reason is: there is no place outside of ourself. Ourself — what we are here and now — contains all that we could long for. It is the home which we have left through our contant looking for it in the wrong direction. Our seeking is way too aggressive for its tender being. Our peaceful home lies in the nest that our being is, and this nest of being is where all existence finds its birth and takes its journey.

The problem with accessing our being — our peaceful home — is that we have introduced a self. We have posited a self that is separate from the peace it is looking for. And if peace is situated at a distance from ourself, therefore where we are is the place where peace is not. We have superimposed a self on our peaceful being, and in doing so have invited suffering, which is but the seeking for our lost peace or happiness. It all comes from the connivance of a few thoughts, feelings and sensations, which have set themselves up as a self. It is all part of a scheme on their part, and a gross one if you ask me. For how could something that is coming and going have a self? Something as flittering as a thought, or a sensation, could never produce a self. The self that we think we are, and that we feel is at a distance from experience, is fabricated. It is a product that we have elaborated to feel secure. But we cannot find security in a self. Security is rather the absence of a self, and the merging of ourself with experience, which is felt as oneness.

This self, without our noticing, has created untold damages, it has made life into a havoc. It has invented a within and a without, a here and there, a now and then, when there is in fact only a seamless experience. All these distinctions are of course necessary for our functioning in a world, but they are not the reality. And to ignore their reality is to transform them from a few peaceful, useful devices into brigands that have made experience either something to be feared and avoided, or desired and pursued. In other words, being a self has made experience into a dependence, a battlefield for our own imaginary benefit. But in fact, there is in reality only a now that is ever present and eternal, and a here that has no boundary, no limit, and is infinite. And there is a within that we will cease seing within, for after all thoughts and images are filtering experience to the point of making it their own creation. Thoughts are not just within. They are scattered all over the field of experience, colouring everything we see or hear. And the without will cease being without. For where could without be if not in our intimate experience. So the trees, the houses, and the dog we meet in the street are part of our very own being, for there is only one being out of which they could make an appearance. Where would another being than our being be? To posit another being than our being, or a without without, or a within within, or a there, or a then, is to be absent to our true being or nature, and to live in a world scattered about and fragmented, where reigns every bit of suffering and conflict. But to live as the One renders without within, within without, there here, then now, and our being just only one being. The rest is but a fantasy which we can either buy and suffer from, or borrow and play with.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

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Website:
– Winslow Homer (Wikipedia)

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The Intimacy of Experience

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘First Leaves, near Nantes’ – Camille Corot, 1855 – WikiArt

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I will tell you where to be. Be where every experience feels an equally good experience. Don’t be attached to judgment and comparison. These are the mind’s favorite tools and activities. The mind tricks you to believe that experience is an uneven ground. That according to the content of your experience, you will be gifted with either happiness or suffering, peace or conflict, harmony or disorder. So the experience you are having becomes extraordinarily important. We become dependent on what happens to us, and come to dread it. So we retire into the secure place of our habitual self, with its cortège of worry, control, expectation, and manipulation.

There is a place in us where you don’t find experience to be such a determining factor. Where you will not let experience determine you, fix you, limit you. You won’t be shaped by its content. You won’t be made into something, someone, with qualities and flaws, to be judged, evaluated, compared with — the likeness of experience — in fact, just another object. The mind is a manufacturer of objects, entities, persons, fixing the insubstantial nature of your being into a self to be moulded and made either happy or miserable. To be made happy by an experience is to be cheated on by it: we are being manipulated, and made to believe an illusion. To let experience make us miserable is sheer deceitfulness, it is us being easily dazzled by the treachery and artifice of objects.

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Continue this exploration of the nature of experience… (READ MORE…)

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’katholikos’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Life of St. Ignatius Loyola. Plate 4.‘ – Carlos Saenz de Tejada – WikiArt

You’ve got to respect the whole. That’s how you live the good life, in having reverence for the totality of your experience. Not just for the superfluous, all that is being the foam of life, that exists and appears, that you can see, hear, touch. You will never make a totality from the world of objects, from thoughts and perceptions. These are but occasional appearances, superficies. They are above you as it were, dancing upon you, at the periphery of who you are, but are not the reality covering your experience — its most profound constituent. You’ve got to go beyond the mundane and the obvious. For we keep leaving something out of experience. We don’t take the whole thing. We are choosy, only care for objects, don’t integrate our ‘within’ — where the reality of our being is. Notice that there is a world here, that is encompassing our world — a presence pervading our reality, taking everything in.

Actually, this is what the word ‘catholic’ is about. In Greek, ‘katholikos’ means: ‘pertaining to the whole’. We have to pay due respect to the whole, to the totality. We must look back at what we truly are, and find there the expression of the whole. I am not sure that Ignatius of Antioch had this in mind, when he first coined the term ‘catholic’ in the early 2nd century AD. He probably meant that the new belief, the new credence, was to be the universal truth, meant for everyone, adopted by all. But there was no need for adoption — the baby was already in the womb. There were no beliefs to be had, no hopes to project and entertain, no happiness to seek outside of our common day experience as being. He didn’t see that in this very word was the answer to all religions, to every quest for the divine peace; that what we were looking for was already here, close, so close to our very experience; and that there was no need to form a belief about it, or a new credence.

To accord with the whole is to be reconciled with our true nature — the reality of our being. It is to be ‘of one mind’, which is what reconciliation means, and to be brought together under the vault of one reality. This is achieved by turning towards the One, which is our true and only constituent. Universality wasn’t meant to be achieved in multiplicity. Universality is the quality of oneness noticed. The totality is in every place you happen to be. There is no totality of which you wouldn’t be the vessel. For the whole is not a geography, not a place to be in. It is the embrace of being. There is a totality in and as the being which you are now, here. You are not inside a totality. The totality is inside you. But mind you, this most venerated Christian Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch did say something of the highest order, when he brought up the word. He said that “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” Yes. Yes indeed. Wherever we as our deepest being are, whenever we as our most profound nature-consciousness are, there is the expression of the whole, of oneness — the totality which is the very nature of the Lord’s House, and which is our nature and our house too.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 108/140)

Painting by Carlos Saenz de Tejada (1897-1958)

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Websites:
– Ignatius of Antioch (Wikipedia)
– Carlos Saenz de Tejada (Wikipedia)

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