The Hand of God

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Hand of God, stained glass – Dayton Saint Mary Catholic Church – Wikimedia

Isn’t it extraordinary that our whole life is spent in the present ? That no part of it, ever, happened somewhere, sometime, that was not the time or place of now ? We speak of the past or the future all the time, but in fact, we are prisoner of the now. We can never leave the present, which is in reality nothing but presence. It would be tempting to think that we are a body, somebody progressing in time through a succession of moments. But it is a naive way of thinking, for we can never find that moment — that ‘now’ — in time. It is elusive, doesn’t know a border, is reluctant to have a beginning and an end. The now has a smooth, timeless reality. It cannot move, cannot know place or time. The now is of the order of essence. It is a fundament. You can never go beyond it, or before it. It is you. You are not in the now — you ‘are’ the now. You are yourself where you live in. ‘I Am’ is the only time there is, which is no time at all. And you are not a prisoner, for there is an infinite amount of freedom in the absence of time, an infinite amount of space in the absence of place.

Time is for objects, not for you. If you think to be one such object, then you are in its claws. For your body has a beginning and an end, just like every object in existence. So choose who you are carefully. Don’t be tempted to be exclusively your body and mind, for time will affect you in the most vicious way. It will lie to you, telling you that you have an age and a limit, that you are as fragile as your body or mind can be, destined to wither and die. Time is a handy construct of thought that measures activity, movement, appearance, decay. But before the appearance of body, mind, world, is a space which is immovable, inalterable, inalienable. This space is not to be found outside yourself. It is your very essence, who you are at your deepest, when you have ceased giving your attention to what is only living and thriving at the surface, and are willing to dive in the most substantial essence of who you are.

So notice that where and when you live is only experienced now. This is no accident. See that the future is unattainable, except in the now. Understand that there was only a past as the experience of ‘now’. So now is the only reality — not time, not place, which are only appearances created by thought and sense perception. See through the many appearances of life, to land where and when you have always been — in your own inescapable presence here and now. The now is not a fleeting moment, it is massively here. It is stretching itself to infinite proportions, and renders time a ridiculous, though necessary passing notion. The now has the flavour of something new, for without the conditioning of the past and the expectation of the future, is a life that is fresh, embedded in unknowing — notice that you can only know the past or the future. The now is also something that stands right in the middle of yourself, that is at no distance, that knows no separation as past or future, whose immediacy is total for it is blended in and as your very essence. So comes a time when the now loses its time-related signification to expose its true nature as presence. The now is maintained right through as the very nature of everyone and everything. The now is how the infinite keeps you in its hand. It is the hand of God.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Nheyob on Commons

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Website:
– Hand of God (Art) (Wikipedia)

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On Being Apart

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two Men by the Sea’ – Caspar David Friedrich, 1817 – WikiArt

We are never far from our deepest reality. That’s a fantasy — to think that we are far, separate, apart. To think that truth is at a distance, that there is a god, a reality away from our own reality as being. Ourself is the only reality there is. We won’t find another one, something grander, truer than ourself. There isn’t. It’s all here within, already taking place in and as our own being. But we are limiting ourself with a thought. The thought that we are circumscribed to our body, restricted to our mind, and that we have our own personal being different and apart from somebody else’s being. This is how far we have gone from ourself. This is the distance we have created, the separateness we have invented. We have set ourself apart from ourself with a single thought. That’s our negligence, to have let ourself be governed by a belief, by a lie. To have drowned in our own absent-mindedness. We have, as it were, kept ourself on the sidelines.

But we can play the central role with the single thought that there is, at all time, only one reality. We are the only reality there is. Have this thought, that nothing exists outside yourself, that we have it all in our own reality as being. That we can rely on no other authority than the authority of ourself. That we can seek nothing other than our own self as being. That the world, everything, God, truth, the answer to our suffering, are all gathered within the single reality of our being present here and now. So state quietly in yourself that there is only ‘I Am’, that apart from ‘I Am’, well… there is no apart. No part separate from the totality has ever come into existence. There is only the totality playing the many parts of life, but staying itself complete, unbroken, one, whole as our own being. This is how simple we are — One. This is how much we matter. This is how close we are to the reality of everything, to this intimate, never distant truth that some have called ‘God’.

Think of your simple, everyday act of being aware as being everything, as the one and only reality there is. See what it entails, to have no projection of there being something, any kind of reality outside awareness. It means everything you need to know and understand is contained in and as your own sense of self. So watch it. Isolate it from every object that you are aware of, including your thoughts, feelings, perceptions. Feel naked awareness alone, and see how it grows, expands out of proportions, out of time and place, out of the world of objective experience. As you walk on the street, or wash the dishes, or do anything in the course of a day, remember that this simple experience of ‘being myself’ is all there is. That no reality exists outside yourself. That ‘I Am’ is all there is. Feel what it does to you, to think that you are one and alone, the only one being there is. Feel the shock of it, that nothing real, true, reliable, can be found outside yourself. And that this self of yourself encompasses everything, holds every passing, existing thing in its own reality. That you share this being of yourself with the being of everyone, and everything. Feel that you cannot be told apart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

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Website:
– Caspar David Friedrich (Wikipedia)

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A Love Affair

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Evening Star’ – Camille Corot, 1864 – WikiArt

It is really just a love affair. Nothing else. If you want to know yourself, you have to be interested, to be passionate. You have to love yourself. And if you love yourself, down the line, you will come to love god. Because god and yourself have had a love affair from beyond the frontiers of time. So love is the key.

And don’t tell me that you cannot love yourself. Don’t serve me this. Don’t argue about the shape of your body, or your insufficient mind. Don’t dive into your story, your failures, your many shortcomings. Don’t blame your circumstances. Be with yourself. That’s all. Be here, now, present with that part of yourself that is untouched by your line of multiple experiences.

The past doesn’t play any part in who you truly are. Neither the future which doesn’t exist at all. Not in the least. Start afresh. Be with what is taking place, all the place, in any experience that you may have. Any experience will do. Don’t be choosy. See that this experience is taking place somewhere, inside a reality. It cannot avoid you. You are always with your experience. Without you, your experience is nothing, has no feet to stand on. See how important you are. The beauty that lies in your being present. That’s the beginning of love.

Don’t think that to love, you have to find the perfect situation, the handsome circumstances. Love is easy to find. It is at every corner of your life, under every stone, every thought, behind even the most tedious moment. In watching yourself passionately, you will come to be drawn to that most charming part of your identity. To that which will never let you down, whatever the conditions you are in. To that which you can only admire, for it withstands every tempest. To that which holds the world in its infinite arms. You will come to love yourself for you will find out that you are a most gorgeous being, which is not the prey of age, limitation, lack, hope, envy, desire for being more, better, different. You will fall for yourself, for everyone, for everything.

Be passionate about who you are — whatever you are. Start wherever you are. Be important. You are significant. You bear weight or consequence, more than you think. You have in yourself the ultimate secret of life. You are interesting, which literally means you ‘are between’, in the middle part, a doorway, halfway between being something, someone, and being the infinite. You hold the key to your own enigma. You stand in the right place. So love yourself. If you do, love will find you. You will find that right here, within your own being, contained in your saying ‘I Am’, is your beloved, the one you were secretly longing for.

Seduce yourself from within. Don’t be sidetracked by your experiences, qualities, thoughts, everything that is the prey of your likes and dislikes. To love is always only about being with the other’s being. So be with yourself. Admire your own home, where you live. Be drawn to your own being. Watch yourself with wonder, like you do for the stars. Be considerate. Stand by yourself. It is all it takes.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Camille Corot (1796-1875)

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Website:
– Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Wikipedia)

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Love Actually

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sarbatoarea primaverii’ – Arthur Verona – Wikimedia

Love is the essence of everything, and our very nature. Because we don’t live separate and afar. We are not distant from each other. Nothing is. We have a natural intimacy with everything and everyone. This is not a theory, or a philosophical argument that we posit. This intimacy is our deepest reality, what we are, the property of our natural being, which we can feel, see, experience, but whose evidence has disappeared from our eyes. The reason is, we have preferred a theory to the reality, an illusion to the truth. Our life has stopped being natural. We have been faking it, living it according to beliefs, habits, conformity. But here, blatant in and as our very being, is a reality in which there is no time or place, no distance or separation, no otherness. And as we all know from experience, love is the abolition of time, of distance. Love is the end of separation, of otherness.

Love, which we may call beauty, for everything that we love is beautiful. Love, which we may call understanding, for to see love as the essence of life is the ultimate form of understanding. Love is to ‘stand in the midst of’. It is to stand with everything that is under, everything that is existing in our reality. It is to be connected, to be together with, to be of the same essence. So love is an expression of oneness, of our nature as the one and only reality there is. In the absence of separation — which is truth — we find love. In the absence of otherness — which is our reality — we find intimacy. We make love every time we are aware of our reality as only being. We manufacture love when time is discovered to be an idea, and separation a belief. To be in love is to realise our nature as being one with everything and everyone. It is to be unable to part with anything. It is humility at work. It is where division is only possible in a figment of our imagination. It is to be with what is, with no pulsion of escape or resistance. Love is both in the ache of separation and in the desire to be reunited. All seeking is done in the name of love.

To love is to stand in the midst of, to see no separation between an ‘I’ and a ‘he’ or a ‘she or a ‘it’. The more we stand as the quality of being aware, as that which knows all things, the more we have love as our daily companion. It is extraordinary that we can feel to be a body and a mind, when there is before these, in the subjective, the vast and unmissable expanse of that which is aware of them, which we have pushed away as a mere function of that body-mind. The body is something that we are aware of. We are not in the body. We are in the ‘aware of’. This being aware is our home, where we live, where we have our life. This is our placeless place. That which we cannot not be in. That which we cannot part from — our most intimate, unchanging identity. To be that knowingly, to live as that, is to love naturally and unconditionally. Every time we notice that there is a reality, a consciousness, a knowing presence before our body, thoughts, feelings, experience, world, then love appears to be the very material we and the world are made of. The first and last brick of our house. Our everything.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1868-1946)

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Website:
– Arthur Verona

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‘Who Am I?’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘St. Jerome kneeling’ (detail) – Rembrandt, 1630 – WikiArt

The question of who I am is a big question. It is not being asked very often though. At least not in the way it should. We do as if. As if we all knew who we are. As if it wasn’t worth asking. As if it was a waste of time to do so. When we do ask about who we are, it is to fill ourself with objects, qualities, identities. We are gathering informations about our body, our emotions, skills, idiosyncrasies, tendencies, but not about ourself. We live as if on a racing track, never actually stopping the course of our acquired, rehearsed, believed identities. We never watch, inquire as if for the first time, as if we didn’t know. We are bragging. We don’t want to be humble, and learn about something that appears to be so simple, and goes — so we believe — without saying. But the truth is: it scares us. We are afraid to know. We have picked up, from the beginning of times, that this question is a question of immense implications. It is a deadly question. One that changes you, finishes you, shakes your very ground.

It is a question for a sacred remembering, to just notice what we already are, what is already here, but that we have been too distracted to see. It is a question to prevent us from going out all the time, from escaping ourself, to help us return to where we have always been — in the home of our inner being. It is a question for which we have to let go of our bodily refuge. A question for which we have to lose the self that has been our anchor so far. It is a question for the mind, although its answer is to be found outside every consideration of mind, thought, image, memory. It is a free fall that pushes us to look beyond our limitations, and gives us the gift of our limitlessness. It is a question with no end, not because there is no answer to it, but because the answer is a living answer, whose reality can never come to an end. It is an impossible question, for even before we have the occasion to utter it, we find it already answered through the act of our simply being.

The living answer to the question ‘Who am I?’, is ‘I Am’, which contains its own undefeatable, eternal, inescapable reality. ‘I Am’ is before the question ‘Who am I?’. ‘I Am’ is the living answer which swallows every single question on our identity. It takes us into itself, and shows our identity to be only being, a being so pure that nothing can be added to it. It is the only sacred knowledge there is, which all the words and rites of every religion have sought to deliver as the name ‘God’. A knowledge that they have failed to pass on with accuracy for going too far, and postulate outside of ourself the reality that is in fact our very own self, hiding in plain sight in and as our own aware being. So ‘Who am I?’ is a prayer that is clearing the path, recalling God in ourself in the form of ‘I Am’.

It is a question that opens the door for the peace that we have been looking for in every possible direction, except in the direction of our innermost self alone. It is a question that we ask with expectation and inquiry, and answer with the peace and joy that we find already here, beyond any expectation or understanding. It is an implicit question that we cannot help asking in the secrecy of our mind, but that we fail to form explicitly, expecting the answer to be outside our own being. It is an absolute question, that needs no other answer than going to the very aware being that initiated it, because of  its longing to be freed from everything that seems to limit it and veil it. It is our returning to what we have never ceased to be, but are failing to see for reason of looking in a thousand directions outside ourself. ‘Who am I?’ is a question that takes you to ‘I Am’, which is the only accurate description there is of our true identity. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

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God’s Knowledge

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Blue Rigi Lake of Lucerne Sunrise’ – J. M. W.  Turner, 1842 – WikiArt

We know so many things. Everything is based on knowledge, and maybe that’s the way to live, as long as there is a body and a world. Knowledge is the score we need to play our part. But to know something, anything, seems presumptuous. It implies another kind of knowledge — that there is somebody here, a person at a distance, that knows and is a recipient of knowledge. Knowledge fixes us. It gives us a dubious identity — that I am a man or a woman, of a certain age, with certain qualities, and with a whole lot of knowledge, identities, beliefs. That I am unhappy, clever, stupid, happy. That I am a cook, or a carpenter. That there is a chair, a world. That I have skills and preferences. I even have the knowledge of my spiritual attainment.

But there is no knowing anything. To think we know something is a mistake. If we know something, then we haven’t looked well enough. We have stayed at the surface of our illusory world and existence. What we ought to know is the knowledge of our reality, of ourself. That’s the only knowing there is. That’s our world: Knowing. Being aware. All other knowledge is superfluous, is not real knowledge. For what would any such knowledge be, when we discover that there is no entity here with the capacity to possess that knowledge. Go only for the knowing of being, a knowledge which is owned by itself. Notice that you don’t know anything — that’s important to know. We have no knowledge other than the knowledge of our being. Apart from that, everything exists only as in a dream.

We may play the part of the one in the dream, and that’s a beautiful part. There may be a world here that is gorgeous, with many ‘things’ that are known. There may be relationships that have meanings. But this world of things borrows its beauty and making from the reality in which it exists for a time — knowing. And the meaning of relationship is found through its reality, which is love — shared being. Everything happy and true in our life is borrowed from our reality as awareness — the only knowledge there is. If we live or act while ignoring that one knowledge, the world and ourself will appear ridden with conflict and suffering. So notice that the ten thousand things of life — all our knowledge — are transparent, ephemeral, ethereal. What is here massive and solid is their reality as being — the supreme essence of everyone and everything. The truth we live in. Ourself. What is. Not somebody that knows.

There is no other real knowing than the knowing of our essence, of our true nature or identity. This knowledge of ourself is not something we can possess as a person. It is nothing more than pure, objectless, impersonal knowing, and this knowing is all there is, all we are. Everything, everyone, have died in it. That’s why we cannot know anything, for how could we know something without there being first a knower and things with their own reality. The only thing we in fact truly know is ourself, our essence. Our knowledge of anything has died inside pure knowing long ago. It is still available, but its reality is apparent. That’s why we can never be sure that there is a chair, or a world. That’s why every object passes, is not there, is only an appearance.

Even ourself cannot be known objectively. We are alone. Nobody knows us. We as a person are absent. We don’t have a reality as an entity, or a self of any kind. So we are known by God alone, who knows us by knowing Its own being. We are all in the knowledge of God. What follows after the sentence ‘we don’t know anything’ is ‘the only knowledge there is is God’s knowledge’. Or ‘know God, love god, and you will know what you ought to know’. It all boils down to ‘knowing, knowing knowing’. Paul said it all very clearly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” (8:2-3).

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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)

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A Virtue of Old

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Portrait of an old man’ – Paul Cézanne, 1868 – WikiArt

Od age and ailments have an astonishing virtue. They teach us that our body and our mind have a weak reality, that they soften, do not last, crumble. They are like everything else. Their reality is passing, illusory, and ours is not what we have taken it to be. For we notice that as our body weakens, falls apart, we do not with it. We stay as strong as ever. We shine as something else. Not a body. Not a mind. Not an apparent self. But spirit. Our spirit strengthens. Our presence widens — if we care to look at all, to be aware, to not attach ourself to a dying object, to a withering skill. If we stay as our solid being, as that which we haven’t been attentive to so far, for reason of an irrational and obstinate fascination for our body-mind-experience, and our puny self.

So when these, that didn’t have a true reality, go; when these, that didn’t stand the mark of eternity, wither; then our fascination shifts for that which cannot go, wither, or crumble. For what stays massively behind. This reality of ourself hits us in the face — what we are, what we were even when we weren’t looking, weren’t interested, had our life within the limitations of our body-mind. Then it comes soothing us, telling us of our nature, of our grandeur. Then, what falls apart is not just our body or our skills, but also our beliefs about our mistaken reality. Our error as to what our nature is. Now we have a conversation with the infinite, and a rising love affair with the eternal. Now we have a compassion for what we believed ourself to be — body, mind, self, skill, experience — and that now have the humility to show their frail existence. Now we stop minding so much about them, and we find the peace that it is to do so.

So where do we choose to go when we cannot go anywhere, when places become fewer, when time stops being a promise, when circumstances lessen? Where is this place that our body cannot take us to, and that comprehends all that we as a body were chasing relentlessly? What is it that our thoughts cannot give us, and that we now find is here behind and before every thought, every belief, hope, or fantasy? There is a sumptuous gift behind every body or mind that loses grip on the objective world. There is a treasure in the quiet home of our self, when we are asked to stop seeking our happy self in a thousand places, practices, or experiences.

There comes a time when we cannot chase our preferences anymore. When we have to leave behind our dearest experiences. When we have no more time to become, attain, grasp that which we want to grasp, attain, become. But there is offered a time for letting go, for a sweet abandon, for uncovering that which in us can never wither, weaken, age, crumble, suffer any kind of ailment. There is a place which holds the whole world in its loving heart, and this place of love is ourself when we have renounced to find it within time, place, or circumstance. There is a virtue in not expecting from body, mind, world, experience, what they can never give us. There is a virtue in resting where we are, where we swallow body, mind, world in an instant, and are free in spite of circumstances.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cézanne (Wikipedia)

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