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:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A False Impression

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is an impression that I am the one who knows, or is aware. But this is a false impression and an unfortunate one. In fact, we as a body-mind don’t know anything, for the good reason that there is no one here that is in charge of the knowing. We don’t have this ability. It is not for us to know anything. Knowing doesn’t belong to an individual, separate self. We owe our knowing to something that knows us first, and lends us that potential. That really gives a totally different perspective to our existence, and grants us a gorgeous humbleness: Knowing is without a knower. The knower is but a set of thoughts that we have superimposed on awareness. It is entirely made up. It is of our invention, to give us a wee importance — after all, we all want a little attention. Knowing is in the nature of being. And being is the nature of everything. Knowing is all there is. It is the light of our world, indissociable from our experience. We as selves are just shadows. Everything is dancing and taking place without our being in any way party to it. At best, we are just a colouring, a point of view, an avatar governed by some divine rules which we have perilously chosen to ignore. This is our feebleness: wanting to own and appropriate, being more than what we already are. But in doing so, we have in fact belittled ourself. We have made ourself separate from the life we live in. We have created a self where there is none. We have awakened the devil of suffering in us.

So leave the knowing in some more skilful hands. It will spare you a lot of trouble and misunderstanding. You won’t have to be a person — all the heaviness contained in it. You won’t have to be a self that knows, but knowing will appear to be your one and only self — the entirety of your being. This pure and sublime knowing will give a measure of beauty and happiness in your life. It will encompass everything. It will widen your perspective and make you profoundly secure. You will know your being with precision and clarity, and live both in remoteness and intimacy — remoteness for a serene view on your experience, and intimacy for the delight contained in oneness. And love will be your everyday companion, the deepest essence of your being. And you will be clothed in understanding, which you believed could be achieved through your being a knower. Not at all. Understanding comes when you cease being a self, a knower, when you let go of all identities and egoistic purposes. Then it comes: the understanding — the knowing that knowing is all there is, and that you don’t need to be any more than that. So learn to keep at bay all private, egoistic desires to be anything other than this impersonal, undivided presence of yourself, that has the capacity of being and knowing. You have no need to be a knower, or a doer of anything in your life. Let the show run by itself. Only give it your golden, loving indifference. That’s the most glorious thing you can do in this life. You will be showered by the benefits of it.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Read this essay from the blog ‘The Impossibility of Knowing’…

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The Incandescence of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Wharfedale’ – John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1872 – WikiArt

Spirituality is not a contest. It is not in achieving something, and knowing myself is not about aggrandising what I am. It is not in holding on to an idea, be it a most noble one. It is not in perfecting my being. ‘I am’ is self-sufficient and already fully realised. Any desire for perfection or achievement will keep you at the level of a self. You won’t have let go of yourself. You won’t have fully opened the door, will have kept a space which is but an escape or exit out of your primal being — the death that it implies. It is always tempting to not let what is be, to keep colouring our essence, to still want to hold a share, a participation, a glory, an advantage. Somewhat, our desire to be something prevents us to just notice and be that which we are already, without a single addition to it — not even a last little perfecting, not even a criticism or the rectifying of something, not the desire for more freedom or less ego, nothing to compare or compete with, nothing at all. Otherwise we remain just a part longing for the One, and therefore keeping it as an object to be attained, and rendering ourself separate or insufficient just as we are. There is no comparing what is. There is no arguing with the One. So just allow yourself to be, with nothing else behind it. Let go of all that you are, or should be, or will be, in an instant, with not even a second look. Enter where you have never ceased to be, and finally come to be what you are, just as you are. Daring that — to make no further step, to cease wanting anything, to give your last breath and descend into your utmost, pristine being. For there is no ascending being, but simply recognising that being — such as it is — is all there is to myself.

You see: all the spiritual practices, all the teachings, and the long hours of meditation, are only here in the waiting of something very simple to happen. They are here to help you realise that you have it already, that you have already arrived where you want to be, that you already bask in the peace and happiness you covet, and have been trying to secure in a thousand useless, pointless ways. So really, the spiritual endeavour is nothing at all. It is the simple retirement or returning into your essential am-ness, just as it is now, right in the middle of your agony. Why is it such a tedious task: to arrive at last where you are, to be what you are already being, and accept to receive what has already been given to you? The very presence or intimacy in which you are spending your hours and days is all the light you need, and contains all the understanding that you have been striving to possess year after year. And this treasure of life isn’t even wrapped or hidden. It was there all along with you and as you, open and thriving as the very being with which you are now living your present day confusion and suffering. You have been all the way showered by its thousand glorious alleluias, while imagining yourself as deaf and blind. So don’t think that this cannot be enough — what you are. It has all been nicely packed for you, right at this moment, just as you are, offered to your noticing. So don’t keep pushing, adding, expecting. We are far too zealous. Remember that anything you may see, hear, feel, think, is contained in one essential and pristine matrix of being. This matrix is this big light of knowing that we must learn to recognise as our very self, before any sense of time, space, world, perception, quality, or doing, is added to it. We just need a little look — to precise our vision — and we may see, just now, just here, in this present experience, that all the passing objects of our life are but the colouring of an incandescence. This incandescence is our being, and our very self.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)

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Website:
– John Atkinson Grimshaw (Wikipedia)

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The Frailty of Naming

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Still life with Apples’ – Paul Cezanne, 1890 – WikiArt

We really have made a muddle of it all, by believing that all things nameable are so in reason of their being there. It has made what is truly here — formless, absolute, undeniable being — seemingly absent in reason of its not being perceivable and nameable. Our true and essential being is unnameable because it has no objective quality. To name it is to spiritualise it, to give it a form, and finally destroy it. It is to set ourself as a being outside of it, which we are able to name, or describe. So if you have named yourself, know that you are therefore not there. You are still a shadow, a belief, a repetition, a form incompatible with the formless. And if you have qualified yourself as this or that, know that these limits, expressions, or colours you have imposed on yourself are illusions, the clothing of your reality, but not reality itself, not your nature, not the truth of your essential being, not the nameless, not that which is here and now, beyond any shadow of doubt. The named is for absence, and the nameless for presence. For how could you name presence, how could you give a qualification to something which is so here that it could never be there, so now that it could never be then, therefore never made into an object there and then, at a distance from yourself, in capacity to be named.

What is truly here, when it is recognised, ceases to be named. It is the nameless, the unnameable. The names we give to consciousness, to god, to that which is aware and constitutes us for the most part, are only provisional names, given when we are still part of the things that are named, still a person, an entity, a self. But this entity is not truly here. If we can name ourself, it is in reason of our being made into something objective through endless names and qualifications. So make yourself nameless, approach yourself so fully, investigate it so thoroughly, that you cannot name it anymore. Un-name yourself, strip it from objectivity or qualification until you are recognised as being only being. Then notice that you cease to be nameable. You are too close to yourself for that. Then the only way to name that reality of yourself is to not give it a name but to say simply ’I Am’. ‘I Am’ is the only name we can give to God’s being, and its supreme subjectivity indicates that its reality can only be felt as your own reality or being. It is the intensity of its subjective nature that prevents it from being given a name.

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A reflection on what can be named and what cannot… (READ MORE…)

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Pathways

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Court in the Alhambra’ – Edwin Lord Weeks, 1876 – WikiArt

The spiritual endeavour is really such good fun. You may happen to experience some suffering in your life and feel entangled — with thoughts rushing into your mind and problems seizing the entirety of yourself. The web of experience is overwhelming you and you can find no space to breathe within. You may then have to have a little conversation with yourself. You may have to disentangle yourself from your stubborn identification with thoughts and with the overcrowding objects born of the senses. That’s when you may present yourself with a simple question like: “What is this part in myself that is aware of my experience?” And so are you now taken amongst the scents of 8th century India, treading its immemorial dust with Shankara, debating with the great Vedantic master. He will show you how to move inwards right at the core of that aware presence in yourself. You will be taken with him to the core of this investigation, which is but the separation of the multiple objects of experience from the one aware, pervading presence of consciousness that is your true identity. That’s when Shankara leaves you with this one infaillible recipe:

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“I bow down to that all-knowing One
which is pure Consciousness, all-pervading, all,
residing in the hearts of all beings
and beyond all objects of knowledge.”
~ Shankara (Upadesasahasri, 1:1)

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You may then find yourself sitting in your kitchen, cutting vegetables, with your thoughts suddenly wandering in the 17th century Paris, surrounded by the walls of a Carmelite monastery’s kitchen, chatting along with Brother Lawrence. He might tell you with his big generous smile: you know brother, “nothing is easier than to repeat often in the day these little internal adorations.” That’s when you understand that this investigation can be made into a joyful, often repeated practice, where you go and meet yourself within, have a little chat with this hidden presence, spontaneously, as you gaze into the eyes of a friend. Amongst the frantic sound of knives hitting the wooden board and the fumes of the next meal simmering on the stove, you meet Brother Lawrence’s glance offering you this last precious advice:

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“I renounced, for the love of Him,
everything that was not He;
and I began to live as if there was none
but He and I in the world.”
~ Brother Lawrence

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Continue this journey into the investigation of your true nature… (READ MORE…)

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Divine Presence

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Dance at Moulin de la Galette’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876 – WikiArt

You know sometime truth has its ways and character. You may be quietly sitting at home in silence, listening to some wise teaching. You may want to feel this unconditioned essence of yourself with your eyes closed, within — oh so within! — and feel enclosed in your beautiful, limitless, eternal self. But that appears to be difficult, not quite the day for it, not quite where you want to be. The ‘I am’ door is making a squeaky sound. Today is to see the face of god in all and everything, out in the world. Today is for the car horns and the smell of exhaust fumes. Today is for being in love with the cigarette butt lying in the gutter at the bus stop, and seeing that there is no more, no less here of presence than there is in the melodious swaying of trees in the summer breeze. Today is to feel my essence borrowed by the facades of buildings and by a nearby, wandering canal. It is to feel my own being shared with all passing strangers — oh, so many friends everywhere! — and with an inquisitive pigeon, or a happy dog coming along. Today is for being a seer and a hearer of beauty. It is for a wedding with truth, in the church of experience. It is for the world marrying its presence with freedom and ease, to the presence of my self. Today is to feel with my hands and eyes and ears, that the whole temple of life, from the hard matter-like objects to the thin air caressing my cheeks, and to the pregnancy of sounds — all that is produced by the senses — is but empty of its own substance, and full of the silent, pristine, ethereal presence of the divine.

Another day may present you with something entirely different. You may find yourself wearied by the world out there and crossed with experience. You may want to be at home, simply at home, and take a long journey within, to be taken into the purity contained in being only being. Today is for sitting quietly and for closing your eyes. It is for the feeling of being — unmixed, unadulterated, whole and held within. It is for the seeing of my interior, where thoughts now come one after the other, to die of their natural death. It is to feel that there is here a space which is ready to welcome my all, and has the power to look and to embrace. Today is for letting my feelings melt in the safe harbour of my being, and for marrying my sensations to the infinite space that contains them. It is wholly for the wondrous feeling that I am. Alone. Pregnant. The one that brings all identifications back to their original womb of presence. Today is to be without characteristics of any sort, and to bathe in emptiness and anonymity. It is for the caress of being, and for the never ending gaze towards infinity. Today is for the merriness in my heart, at the wedding of my self with the eternal now. It is to be showered with the knowing of my reality, and to have my being anointed with the peace contained within it. Today is for a honeymoon with my loving essence, and for a sacred communion with the nameless. It is to feel my own substance full of the silent, pristine, ethereal presence of the divine.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

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Website:
– Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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The Scrutiny of Now

Posted on by Alain Joly

You cannot understand truth in the future. For one good reason which is simply: there is no such thing as a future. The future is forever doomed to be a projection of thought. In reality, you will never meet anything that is not now. You are eternally married to the now as presence. The now is where you are, when you are, and also what you are. The now is encircling you from all directions, and you are bound to it, caught in its perpetual enchantment. So if you long to understand who you are, look at yourself now. Don’t postpone it for another moment that exists only in your imagination. To postpone truth is to never come anywhere near it. Understanding will never happen in another place than the place where you happen to be now. Now is your cathedral of understanding. You are being showered by its benefits every time you look for its presence within, for this presence of now is nothing but who you are, what you are. So if you think of the now as a moment that exists outside or independently of yourself, you haven’t looked well enough. For you are in fact the now. I mean it: you, the totality of who you are, your purest essence, is that thing which is called, amongst various other names, now. The now is that which you refer to when you say simply ‘I’. I know it doesn’t look like it, but you actually draw your identity from the now, for there exists nothing under the sun but this timeless presence whose place of living is in and as the now. This is why you can only understand yourself now. No other moment is fit for it, for any other moment is nothing but your hiding place, your desperate attempt to avoid drowning into the timelessness of now.

So don’t ever run away from now. Face it now — the now. Don’t think you can meet it again tomorrow. Now is a rendezvous that you can never miss. It will happen only once, which is now. But the good news is that you have never been anywhere but now. You are under the scrutiny of now. You live by its rule. Only you have to see that, and to see it now. Don’t think about it, for any thought you may have about anything — including the now — belongs to the past or the future, which actually don’t exist outside thought. Don’t think that you live separate from the now, as an entity bound to the effects of time. So let us not be so malleable, so easily cheated on. We all play so many tricks to avoid being now — which we are anyway, and anyhow. Oh! The silliness of it all — that constant stepping away from that which we are; that repeated removal from our being simply now; and the fear and suffering involved in not abiding as and by the now. The effort that it takes — to be away from home, displaced, a self in denial of its true and inescapable identity, refusing to die in the grip of truth. ‘Not now! Not now!’ Well, ok… But when if not now? Truth is for every-where and for every-when. It has no place to live outside of now. We are an ocean of presence that is so inevitably present and pregnant, that it appears to be not here. The reason is: it has lent its being to timelessness. Now is the Eternal that we have mistakenly taken to be a moment. A mishap that hides only one thing: Myself — the ‘I’ that is the now, for times eternal.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Elsebet Barner

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