‘God Runs After You’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sea bay’ – Ivan Aivazovsky, 1842 – WikiArt

Through our constant effort, we keep the effortless at bay. Even if we seemingly don’t do anything, we are always after something. So this constant, subtle pleading, asking, begging is closing all doors for truth to come in, to reveal itself to us. We are already dating someone else. Our mind is full of its rushing out in direction of an object, something that is going to satisfy us, to give us an identity, to fulfil us in some way. We are never truly longing. We are never an empty shell — always seeking, filling ourself with one thing or another. We don’t dare giving up, being vulnerable. We think we have to be someone, an entity in charge, a doer, a knower. We live with an armour, with layers that are concealing our true nature, even repelling it.

We have identities. We are full of them. The body is one, which we believe to be and be limited by. The mind is another, which we have adopted as being ourself — the ‘I’ that I am. We too believe in our thoughts, that we think define us, shape our identity. We are in a prison of our own making, made of bricks of memories, beliefs, hopes, desires, fears, that all concur to build a non-existing self of which we have now become the slave, and with which we have a dysfunctional, love-hate relationship. Even our ambition for truth is too much of an identity. Our desire for enlightenment is still a desire for fulfilment, another thing to achieve, a someone to be. Our true identity as pure, infinite being is not a new identity. It is not concealed or limited. It is not resisting, desiring, lacking anything. It is its own fulfilment — an identity that cannot be had, named or measured.

That’s what a true longing is — to be without ambition or desire of our own. To have even not a desire for truth, for which we will need an ego, and which still is a wall against the truth we seek — maybe the thinnest of all, but still a wall. Reality is to be realised, not achieved. It is in the word: ‘reality’ — which is we are that which is. There is no need of even the subtlest move towards it. It is all in the way we long for it. All in the way we build nothing that can go against it, or that could conceal it. This is the meaning of humility. We have to be lowly, on the ground, at the root of ourself, which is to be with our selfless being. We have it already — the being that we are after. It is all a matter of how quiet and accessible we can be. How we can be without a wall, without an identity. This is the most powerful longing there is — to be without any longing of our own making. To be without imagination or belief. To be watching only. Present. Already being — which we are anyhow. Not being an ambitious of some kind. There is no need to run after God. As Krishnamurti once put it so beautifully, “God runs after you.”

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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The quote is the title of a book consisting of eight hitherto unpublished discussions with Krishnamurti held in Malibu, California in 1970.

Bibliography:
– ‘God Runs After You’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Foundation India)

Websites:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

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

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In a Room Quietly

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Gościeradz’ – Leon Wyczółkowski, 1933 – WikiArt

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“All of humanity’s problems
stem from man’s inability to
sit quietly in a room alone.”
~ Blaise Pascal (‘Pensées’)

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We have always our mind racing, going after something. Stillness is resisted. Staying in a room quietly is avoided. Being alone is dreaded. We want to be occupied. We’d rather not be made empty, so we always have a war raging. Is it that we want to be something, someone? Is it that we have judged only being to be not enough? That we have to pursue something, whether it is an identity, a belief, or an idea? We are chasing our own self — what we should have, what we should be. We are on a mission, therefore we can never be quiet. We need to achieve, arrive, get somewhere, be something. We want to satisfy and be satisfied. We won’t rest before we are fulfilled. We won’t stay in a room quietly. We will have our wars to obtain peace. Our escapes to not be where we are. Our resistances to not have what we have. We prefer to possess, which is to sit in the throne of power — in the Lord’s seat — and wonder where God is, or have a belief about Him. We are chasing experiences and circumstances. Anything but only and plainly being.

In fact, we are always in a room quietly. We just don’t want to see it, or don’t know how to notice it. Ourself is that space where we live and have our many experiences. Ourself is our circumstance. It is where we are, what we have, the peace that we are chasing everywhere but where it actually is, which is in our humble presence — in and as our being. So peace is our nature, if we don’t put it at a distance, if we don’t wish to have it. So don’t start a war. Stay quietly where and as you are, and your nature will slowly be revealed to you. You will find that your identity is in your nature. That you have already what you are chasing. That the experience of being is your so perfect circumstance. And that in the throne of your being is sitting God, for which you now need no belief. You have mastery over your life, not because you control it, but because you know the nature of it and of yourself, and in that process have put an end to your own seeking. You have quietened down, ended a war, and placed yourself in the only place worth sitting, which is in and as your own glorious being.

Now never leave it. That place of yourself. Never be dissuaded that you don’t have it. Never be influenced again that you need to be something other than what you already are. If you have moved away from home, go sit quietly where you are and stay there long enough to be persuaded again in the inevitability of your own being. It’s enough not to wish to be other. It’s plenty to stay unmoved, a humble watcher. To be in a room quietly. To close every exit. To be fascinated by yourself — not escaping the fact of your being. Don’t move away from the way you simply are. From the possibility that being is all there is. From the room you are forever in. Don’t give yourself an escape — there is no escape. Don’t buy the illusion that you can be something other than that — what you are now, what you are in, that very circumstance of your being. So begin where you are. It will bring a rebellion, an insurrection, a mutiny. It will stop you from being just a person. It will make you free, and bring stillness in your life. Resistance will recede, and you might even enjoy your circumstances, that are now pervaded with being. You will notice your aloneness, and have a gorgeous life in it. You will be aware of being as the one and only place you are in. You will have solved your most urgent problem — which is humanity’s too. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Painting by Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936)

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Websites:
– Blaise Pascal (Wikipedia)
– Leon Wyczółkowski (Wikipedia)

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

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The Great Concealment

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet’ (part) – Mary Cassatt, 1890 – Wikimedia

It is the most ingenious, virtuoso act of dissimulation that was ever put on in this world. Something that would require thousands of years of an immense and diverse body of literature and practices to cancel and bring back into the light. In fact, the story goes that, in the beginning, the world was only an undifferentiated spirit. It was all one, knowing no separation, nothing that could make it two, divided, conflictual, or with an ounce of suffering. Although insubstantial and incorporeal, it was a solid world, full to the brim with its own energy. It was a good world, a happy one, and peace was like its very essence, palpable in all circumstances. Place or time had not yet corrupted it, and there was, lingering within it, a quality of impersonal knowing that made it conscious of itself, although not as a thing to be conscious of.

Then, in this ocean of peace came trouble. Out of the growing complexities of bodies, a new idea emerged. Out of pure, undifferentiated being came the belief in a particular, separate being that can be qualified and pointed at. The one knowing presence that we are and that is the world’s essence, was slowly made into many. Entities have suddenly appeared, taking the form of separate objects. Oneness was lost and the world was made fragile, prey to the rising waters of thinking, the absurd presumption of matter, and the belief in the reality of time and place. Under the influence of the body and the senses, grew the belief in the reality of our own separate self. We started objectifying our own being, making it into a thing, a person, an entity separate from other things and entities. We have divided the one and only reality into bits and pieces, and in doing so have invited lack, incompleteness, suffering, and the many conflicts generated by such a belief.

While inventing a self where there was only the Self, we have created boundaries where there was none. While objectifying being, we have concealed the infinite nature of our being. The Infinite disappeared from our sight. We hid it, ate it, made it look as if not there, even though everything and everyone is only made of its humble presence. We have created the sense of a finite entity, and have concealed our true nature in it. Our plain desire to be was a too selfish act. It displaced infinity and made it look as the finite. It created time and concealed eternity in it. It gave us a place for our body, but made the placeless unseen. The claiming of our own personal, separate being broke the peace that is the nature of infinite being. It put truth in jeopardy, and dissimulated it inside a lie. The infinite can never be a thing. It is not in its prerogative. If we make it into one, it goes hiding. It becomes concealed under the false appearance of a separate self, under that which is not there. We have dissimulated the real in the unreal. The infinite in the finite. Happiness in suffering. And the glory of the spirit in the conflicts of a mundane life.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

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Website:
– Mary Cassatt (Wikipedia)

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

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‘Come to Me’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1845 – WikiArt

Sometimes you’re left with just three words. I read them under a statue of Christ in a cathedral, three simple words from the Gospel of Matthew, but a whole teaching if you listen. “Come to Me”. There is immense simplicity and clarity in these three words. They have a vertiginous meaning, if you follow the course of their true destination. If you accept the invitation. Not from a somebody, a person that existed. Not from a God, or a Son of God. Not from anything in particular, any objective presence which you could go to. The invitation is from yourself to yourself. In fact, ‘Come to Me’ is better read as ‘Come to the me’. Go to the ‘I’. Abide in what you are, be that presence of yourself. Be just as you are — don’t add a thing to yourself, don’t play the game of projection or belief. Don’t give yourself to somebody or something that is not you. Stay right there, right in what you already are, just as you already are. But still, there is a movement implied — a solicitation, a passage from place to placeless place. It says ‘Come to Me’ for a reason. In that paradoxe is contained the totality of our spiritual endeavour.

It is not a place you have to go to, but rather the noticing of the place you are in. The beholding of your true nature. What is this ‘I’ that we stumble on every time we say ‘I’? What is this being conscious, this being aware that I am? Did we look well enough? Did we miss something that we have to come to it, take a new invitation, be encouraged? See that you have made your ‘I’ into an assumption, a pretence, an affectation, something not worth a visit, not worth a discovery or an enquiry. In fact, we have been asked to function and obey, which means to follow. The rest has been wisely swept under the carpet of belief or religion. As if we had already discovered everything about what we are. As if consciousness wasn’t worth a second look. As if from then on, for our nature, we had to rely only on imagination, belief, things fancy, whimsical, hopeful, devoid of reality. Reality has been covered — so we think. There is no new land here, no new discovery or journey within, nothing that hasn’t already been charted.

But there is a coming that is subtle to the point of not implying time or place. A coming that cannot be measured by instruments, that cannot be objectified, seen by the senses. There is a coming where we already are, but with a new light shed on it. A light that we have missed for directing it all on objects, with the complicity of the senses. So the light of what we truly are was lost in its being misdirected. Our true nature was lost in our belief in being a body, a self, a person. Our purity of being was hidden inside our fascination for qualifications and objects. Our happiness was lost in our suffering. Our peace squandered by our restless seeking. So there is a journey within. A journey with no distance to be covered. A coming to where we already are. A coming or moving into view. A becoming perceptible. A coming back to ourself.

‘Come to me’. You may discover that you have God within. That this is what the God of religion is — what they meant — the ‘I’ within, your true being. Come back to yourself. Become perceptible. Come into view. Know yourself as you are. Come into the light which you are already in. See that you are, and who you are. Abide in the purity of plainly being. Be yourself for the first time. Be ‘I Am’ alone. ‘Come to me’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)

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Website:
– J. M. W. Turner (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Study of Mind

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Landscape with Two Oaks’ – Jan van Goyen, 1641 – WikiArt

Notice that your mind is inapt at staying still. Stillness is not its thing. It has always something to think about. It is always on the road, roaming, judging, comparing, evaluating. Mind you, it is its nature to do so, if you let it. The mind is a restless thing. But its restlessness has a virtue. It pushes you beyond it. It encourages you to go deeper, where stillness is your nature. Where there is quiet. Something abiding. A stability.

Go not to the mind, but to the presence that supports it. Be like the gentle arms that hold it. Notice that your mind is not alone. It needs a space for its functioning. Sink in the mind’s left vacant space. Go in the interstices, between your many thoughts, inside your overwhelming feelings. Attain to the very substance your mind is made of. Be like its gorgeous essence. Not the mind itself, but the depth of being within it.

The mind deals only with the superficies. It is changing its mind at the slightest disturbance. With the latest flip of an opinion. Don’t follow its many thoughts. They will convince you that you are a self separate from experience. They will tell you that you are lonely. They will make you a suffering entity, though there is none. Go to the bottom of your being. Where the mind is only an appearance. See that you don’t disappear. You can’t.

The mind is ever changing, not you. It has an idea in mind. Forever keeping an agenda, being interested in outcomes, seeking experiences — only happy ones. You have happiness enmeshed within your own being, as the nature of your own gorgeous self. You don’t need to manufacture one, to provoke it with circumstances. Go so deep within the mind that you cease to be involved with its productions. This is called peace.

Stay with your imperturbable essence. It will show you that you are married to the world. The mind believes in the many, in division, in separation. But it is its own invention that it passes on to you as the only reality. Reality is where the mind is only a puppet. Reality is when you are one. It is beyond even your sense perceptions. They have colluded with the mind in making you believe in separation. Reality is aware presence. The mind is not.

Now be careful. For the mind has appropriated the ‘I’. It too says ‘I Am’. But the mind is not ‘I’. It is not your real self. The mind is pretending to be you. It does it all the time. So often that you have come to believe a bundle of thoughts and feelings to be ‘I’. But ‘I’ goes deeper. It doesn’t live in such a shallow land. ‘I’ belongs to the ground, to your innermost being, to that part of yourself that is unmovable. Where there is no past or future. No other, beyond, or away.

So if you happen to meet the mind one day, and be entangled in its mesh, or if you have adopted it as your everyday identity, don’t stay there. Move away. Be bold. See that all that comes here with a beginning and an end, with a limitation, has very little to do with you. See that as you deepen in and as being, your mind will slow down, and acquire a strange transparency. Your thoughts and feelings may even appear to be clothed in the infinite.

Your mind now seems to be no mind at all, and is in no capacity to bring separation. It stops being a brigand, and becomes a precious ally. Thoughts may be used wisely, and feelings are seen as a reflection of love and its indispensable joy. Essence acquires a new meaning, as it pervades the world and every experience that comes your way. Your body is experienced as made of Mind, and Mind as your new body. Spirit is where you live. It is without end.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jan Van Goyen (1596-1656)

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Website:
– Jan Van Goyen (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Person

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair’ – Rembrandt, 1628 (Rijksmuseum) – Wikimedia

There is immense pleasure in being a person when we are not a person. Then, the body-mind, the person, is not a burden anymore, it is a companion. We begin to enjoy its gentle presence, for it is rid of the constant search for happiness, peace, freedom. It is not on him anymore. She doesn’t have to bring about her joy. Doesn’t have to condition her freedom to her circumstances. The person is delivered. It doesn’t have to resist and be a fighter. Doesn’t have to struggle, suffer, hope, be in the constant grip of personal achievement and success. He can stop being a seeker, endlessly looking for what could make him good, content, relieved. She can stop having peace on her everyday agenda. These are given — naturally — as our nature, as ourself. They stop being the work of a person, his everyday load that he has to achieve, perform, be a success at — all the tyranny of it.

There is a presence that we feel is our own, our identity, that already gives us everything that we as a person would spend a lifetime looking for, and would for certain — that’s a universal secret, believe me on that — fail to secure. We already have a wonderful, pristine self in the form of our naked, unconditioned being, so the person doesn’t have to create a non existent self for itself. It doesn’t need to have this belief, that it is a self, that it is separate, that it lives inside a body and a mind. Self and identity are already provided. We share them with everyone and everything. We don’t have to be lonely. Don’t have to be limited by a form, and imprisoned by the boundaries of birth and death. Appearance and age stop being an issue. Comparison dies down. We expand as limitless being, outside even the boundaries of time. The body-mind acquires transparency.

Then we take him or her by the hand — the form, the limited body-mind, the person. Then it is like our best friend, freed from everything that made it small, separate, fearful. Then our body, although limited, will acquire and ride on the infinite nature of its beholder. Then our mind, which is bound by the boundaries of time and thought, will wander on the grounds of the eternal, where our being has its permanent home. Then our personhood shines, precisely because we are not a person. We become beautiful, attractive, and our actions bear the signature of the infinite. Then, being a person is important. And it is not a hindrance to our recognising who we are. On the contrary. The person becomes an emissary of truth, both within and without.

Then ‘what is’ is what we desire, and we don’t mind our circumstances. They satisfy us. We are free. We can be a person and find it a beauty to be so. The person is only here to pass on the impersonal desire of the infinite. It is here for God’s will, which is to be and act on God’s premises, in Its gorgeous name. Not to have a private agenda, in the name of the endless insecurities of a nonexistent, separate self. Not to be burdened by life, but to be the messenger of its secret glory. Then, she as a person is clothed in the dress of a delightful being, shining with an identity that she borrows from God’s identity, and partaking of a self that is the very self of universal being. Then he doesn’t find his person to have an existence separate from his not being a person. Person, no person, being, consciousness, God, life, existence — all one same infinite thing and being. And the person, against all odds, thrives in it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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God’s Alliance

Posted on by Alain Joly

God is not a romantic. He wants the best for you, and will make sure that you have no peace until you know yourself exactly as you are, which is as He is. God is a tough mother. She will lead you to feel that you come from her very womb, and that you have within yourself the memory that you are as She is, which is infinite and eternal. God has no idea that you exist as a person. He knows none of your ideas or beliefs, none of your attachments or suffering. Your problems are of no interest to Her. If you want God to know you, make sure that you go to that part of yourself that is without qualifications, that is like your naked essence — what gives you the consciousness of everything. Make sure that you become just as Her being, and that you share of Her divine characteristics. Then God will know you as surely as He knows Himself. And you will know God as firmly as you know yourself. But don’t play the part of the poor little me. For you won’t see a single tear on the face of god, and will attract no compassion from Him. God knows you the moment you know God. That’s the beauty and magic of Her infinite presence.

Partake of the same ground of being that is God’s being, and you will come to love everyone in the way She loves you. Share the being of God Himself and you will bathe in the peace that God knows, and that is your own peace too. Know your being as being God’s being, and you will experience the joy that comes from the ease of simply being. The only way God can know you is through that part of yourself that is of the nature of His being. And the only way you can see God is by seeing yourself in the way He sees Himself. There is no knowing God through relationship. He is knowable through sameness only. Oneness is the common home that we all share. Everything and everyone partake of the same ground of being, and find their identity in God’s identity. This alliance of God with the ten thousand beings and things of existence is one of supreme intimacy. Once this intimacy with God has been established in your life, you will come to know God as you know yourself, and to know everything and everyone as God’s intimate being. Her interior as to say. His loving heart.

And God is a lover of the strictest reality. The idea that you have of yourself can never know God. And God can never know the belief that you have formed about yourself. They are mutually exclusive. If you want to be a person of your own, away from God, then God will retire and become absent from your life although still holding you in the most humble and loving way. The person that you believe yourself to be has no reality and cannot share of God’s reality. This is why you suffer, and know the plight of loneliness and separation. Give the idea of yourself up, and you will find yourself as having the self of God Himself. This is God’s special bond with you, to know you through His very being, which is your being too. This alliance with God suffers no approximation. Be of God’s humble nature, and She will share with you Her blissful being, offering Her infinite body as the world you live in and mix your being with. But be with your own limited, separate self, and God will know nothing of you, and you nothing of Him. You will be just a passing cloud with no reality, absent from even the most insignificant thought of God.

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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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