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)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Cathedral of Grace

Posted on by Alain Joly

We always want to be at a distance from experience. In fact, we keep behind, we don’t get involved — at least not entirely. We are aloof. We keep experience at bay. That allows for a certain safety, we think. But that distance is the distance we keep from ourself. This is the chasm we have opened, through which we have numbed ourself. So we had to fill this chasm with a belief in separation, with the idea of a being separate from other beings and things. In this chasm is born our loneliness, and the vast field of our search for happiness. This search is but our desperate attempt to fill the gap we have created and nourished. And this chasm is how we have been made to think ceaselessly about ourself. How we have been made to judge, hope, project, regret, complain, expect, believe. These are — we think — the measure of our control in life. But they are in fact the loss of our innocence. For this chasm or distance is what our suffering is made of. It is the way we have found to not be wholly being — being appearing to be a dangerous flame, of a consuming nature. So we have stepped safely aside. In this keeping away from the flame, in this refusal to die, is our chasm, our whole precipice of pain.

But this flame of being is in fact our fountain of peace. It is what makes us present, uncompromisingly one with experience, with nowhere to go but ourself, and nothing to be but that which we already are. In this place of being, we are not allowed distance, and time is proscribed. There is nowhere to go in being. Nothing to be but being. This flame of being will cancel the distance that was your safety. It will devour you, digest all your hopes and projections, burn your regrets, crush your fear, and debunk all idea of separation. You are thus crashing in being, and are consumed in its flame. Experience is now revealed to be nothing but the experiencing of your self within your self. You are given no room for separation, and are discovering yourself to be the sublime core of all that can possibly exist. You may look all you want, you won’t find yourself anywhere, for the simple reason that there is no location for you to be in. And you will find no space for a self to have experience, for the experiencer has dissolved in experiencing. This merging of your self with experience is how suffering is made impossible. This is how you are made present here and now, one with everything and everyone. And this is how you are made to feel in awe with what you see, hear, and touch. You are ravished to just be, and are suddenly placed at the teeming heart of your self, unable to not fully, gorgeously be. You are entering a cathedral of grace, and are placed in a well of light, amongst songs of glory.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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Tainted Self

Posted on by Alain Joly

Sometime, presence is eluding you. It hides, and you are left with nothing but your old tainted self. These are the sad days. When thoughts have invaded your being and replaced it with ideas and concepts about your self. When feelings have plagued that gorgeous presence which is you, and have contaminated it with worries and rage. When you are caught and find yourself being something and someone, some kind of hard entity that you cannot forget and shake off yourself. That’s when your beautiful, empty being is tiptoeing where it never left and waiting for better days. That’s when you cannot help yourself seeing a world in front of you. That’s when objects have filled your world and animate it with all the inbuilt suffering they imply. Oneness has been choked by them, and has retreated. It won’t fight its way back. It won’t raise a finger for itself. After all, does the sun need to fight for its own light? Is the sun the least bothered when a layer of clouds has formed? No. The sun will continue doing what a sun does. It will illuminate the clouds, sculpting their gorgeous forms, painting them in all shades of whites. The sun illuminates as surely as awareness makes your thoughts and feelings knowable. That’s how you can judge yourself to be anything. An old, tainted, worrisome, raging, hard, stubborn self. That’s how you can know that. Because of your presence. Because of its knowing, illuminating talent. That’s it. That’s what you are. That obvious, inescapable luminosity that is the only thing in presence. The only you in presence. The only presence. And in no time will you then have a clear sky. With no clouds around. No tainted self. And worries blown up. Rage pacified. That’s when the thoughts about yourself are tiptoeing in the empty space where they have come to form themselves. That’s when your feelings are being chased by the wind of knowing, melted by the warm and pure air of being, where you are discovered to be no self. And that’s how you make the thousands objects of your world retreat into oneness. And you are left alone. Here. Now. Sweet and whole. A presence never tainted. Never eluded.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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‘Consummatum Est’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Consummatum Est’ – Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1867 – Wikimedia

I happened to visit a church recently, and was intrigued by one single sentence placed just under the main crucifix, which read in French as: “Tout est consommé”. I had never heard this particular formulation before. These words appear in the Gospel of John (19:30), and have been translated into “It is finished” in modern English. These are the very last words uttered by Jesus on the cross before he relinquished his bodily existence, and was resurrected as pure being. In Latin, it runs as “Consummatum Est’.

‘Consummatum Est’

All is consummated, which means all is finished, accomplished, brought to completion. It means we are wholly with the ‘highest’, nothing is left that lingers in separation. All that is other than god, other than the very presence or being that we are, has been consummated, put into the fire of consciousness, eaten, devoured, transformed into its very essence. The truth of it has been exposed, and the objects — all that seems to have its proper existence — have been revealed to be of one single essence. The ten thousand things have been digested, transformed into the truth of their being. They have been revealed as the One. The illusion of multiple existence has been seen for what it is: one being giving no room for an other. Anything that stood as separate or ‘other’, has been consummated into the fire of emptiness. Not a barren emptiness, but a living one, a fertile emptiness, teeming with possibilities, with creativity. Everything that was objective has been devoured into supreme subjectivity, which is nothing but the feeling of being, in which all existing things have found their home, have dissolved their separate identities, have bargained their many names for the Nameless. The many have been revealed as being one. Therefore whole, complete, in need of no ‘other’, or ‘better’, or ‘more’. The many shadows of obscurity or illusion have returned into the light of their essential being. They have disappeared, have relinquished their illusory separateness, incompleteness, or ignorance to return into the truth of their ultimate being as oneness, fullness, or understanding. The shadow of existence always shows up as many. But the pure light of being is revealed as one. This is an end, a finish line, because there is no more to be revealed, no more to be added, understood, analysed, enquired. This is a natural completion, a form of creative death, which means the realisation of the very nature of death as the living aliveness of pure being. It is whole, therefore unattached, innocent, incapable of being sullied or diminished, immune to death, and open to the infinite. Finally, you come to the understanding that this consumption is the sublime alchemical process, the transfiguration through which suffering is metamorphosed into peace, separation into oneness, and death into eternal life. This is the realisation, awakening, or resurrection of our true essence that was buried under, or veiled by, our illusory sense of self and the constant toil of life in the forms of suffering and death. In other words, you have been crucified on the altar of ultimate being. ‘Consummatum Est’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)

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Websites:
– Jean-Léon Gérôme (Wikipedia)
– ‘Consummatum Est’ – Painting (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Substance of God

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Neubrandenburg’ – Caspar David Friedrich, 1816 – WikiArt

How can we account for the beauty of the world? Because in spite of everything that is happening within and without, and afflicts us, leaves us distressed, the world bears at its core an intrinsic perfection. It’s not difficult to see. You only have to stand back, to release the grip, be less involved. To look afresh at the blue sky above your head. To see that a blue sky is an extraordinary thing. As is a tree, and the song of the wind in its foliage. As is a cloud, and the sudden tapping of the millions of drops that come to wet the land. As is any human endeavour, and the skill it takes to play a symphony from Beethoven. As is a chair, a blanket, a paper bin, anything that exists. Existence is a baffling thing. It is the core of the matter — that anything exists — and to understand it is to crack the nature of reality. What is the secret hidden behind any appearance? How can a form acquire beauty, a movement express harmony, a shape provoke love? And more interesting even, how is beauty made ugliness, harmony turned into disorder, love transformed into enmity, perfection changed into chaos? What are the workings behind it all?

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A meditation on the beauty and substance of the world… (READ MORE…)

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The Natural State

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The natural state’ is an expression borrowed from Joan Tollifson that refers to enlightenment. This is a beautiful way to look at what is often thought to be an extraordinary event. Rupert Spira says nothing less, when he defines it as ‘the absence of resistance to what is’, or simply: ‘this’.

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“Thought doesn’t know truth; it dissolves in it. 
Feeling doesn’t find love; it merges in it. 
Perception doesn’t see beauty; it dies in it.”
~ Rupert Spira 

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“Enlightenment could be defined as the absence of resistance to what is, 
the total intimacy with whatever is taking place 
without any desire to reject or replace it; 

so intimate that there is no room for a self to separate itself out from the whole, 
to stand apart and look at the situation from the outside, 
to judge it as worthy or not worthy, good or bad, 
right or wrong, desirable or undesirable; 

so intimate that there is no room, nor any time, 
in which a separate self could take refuge inside the body 
and so finds itself without boundaries or borders 
pervading the whole field of experience; 

so intimate that there is no ‘me’ on the inside 
and no object or other on the outside,
but only seamless intimate experiencing; 

so intimate that there is no room for a ‘self’ and an ‘other’, 
a ‘me’ and a ‘you’, a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, a ‘now’ and a ‘then’. 

So utterly now and here that there is no time for time 
and no place for distance or space.”

~ Rupert Spira

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“Wouldn’t it be a wonderful relief to recognize that nothing could actually be any other way right now than exactly how it is, that THIS is how the universe IS, that everything belongs? And already, it has completely changed! Can you feel the freedom in knowing that there is no “you” who “should” be doing a better job? How wonderful to see that enlightenment is not a special attainment that only a special few can reach, but rather that enlightenment is the natural state, the groundlessness that is always already fully present. Rather than something we lack and need to attain, it is what we always already ARE.”
~ Joan Tollifson

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“As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. 
In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and 
in its fullness it is known as happiness. 
In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape 
(including the apparent veiling of its own being), 
it is known as freedom and, 
as the substance of all things, 
it is known as beauty. 
However, more simply it is known just as ‘I’ or ‘this’.”

~ Rupert Spira

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Picture by Alain Joly

Bibliography:
– ‘Presence’, Vol. I & II – by Rupert Spira (Non-Duality Press)
– ‘Nothing to Grasp’ – by Joan Tollifson – (Nonduality Press)

Websites:
– Rupert Spira
– Joan Tollifson

Suggestion:
– Fleeing to God (other pointers from the blog)
– The Inconceivable Actuality Here-Now (a text by Joan Tollifson)

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