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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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:
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The Nature of Everything

Posted on by Alain Joly

We don’t apprehend reality, or ‘what is’, directly, fully. Thought is in the way. There is a thin screen — in fact not so thin — that prevents us from seeing reality. This layer between ourself and our true being has the consistency of an old, worn out thinking habit. We have projected a pseudo reality of ourself as an entity, before we have even comprehended the reality of everything. So we have made a mash up of it all. We have made thought into a confused and a confusing device, entangled as it is with feelings and perceptions. So thought is slowing us down. And the result is that we as thought have created this world such as it is: divided, broken up, split apart, and therefore confused, angry, in capacity to hate another. Then, thought has set itself up as the one that can solve it all. Don’t get me wrong here, thought can help solving many intricate problems, and can create the most wonderful things. But it can never be the saviour of our world, or of ourself. It has first to go down its pedestal and take a step aside.

For thought is not just thought. It is much more than that and this is where the problem lies. Thought, strengthened by feelings and experience, has developed to the point of being us. We are a thought that has grown two legs. This is how we imagine ourself to be separate: by thinking ourself to be a body and mind; and by thinking the world to be out there. But thought has here produced an illusion. In trusting thought, we have failed to see that we are not on an equal footing with the world. We are not an existing thing along with ten thousand other existing things. We are the presence that is hosting every single existing thing including our body-mind, in its one infinite, all-pervading embrace. So we never have the right focus. We are always wrongly favouring the dictates of thought, which is the most conditioned instrument there is. So thought has become that bit of haziness in front of our vision. It is that made up confusion in front of our inborn clarity. It is an illusion made entity. But a well-conducted thought can be of help to see itself as being the problem. It can be the thorn that helps removing the thorn, and then is discarded. When the thought of ourself gets out of the way, our being is then seen to have espoused reality. The distance between ourself and ‘what is’ is seen to be non existent. And we will then have vision and clarity, for our self as a being separate from reality is nowhere to be found.

Without a self, whose structure is nothing but a thought swollen by its many identifications with feelings and experiences, the nature of reality is seen in a new light. Without a self to break it up, the structure of reality appears undivided. Because it is undivided, it is one. Because it is one, nothing in it can appear that is other than itself. Not a person. Not a thought. Not a world. Nothing. The world, the person, the thought, everything, has been revealed as being the One — a reality so infinite that nothing can be by its side, with its own separate existence. Therefore this reality can only be who we are, since it is the only one thing that is in capacity to be. So we are that. Or rather ‘that only is’, since there cannot even be a ‘we’ to be it, let alone to become it. So we don’t need a thought to exist, or to represent us. We don’t need an idea of ourself. And our identity is not dependent on objects of any kind. We are ourself by ourself. And this recognition can never be made by thought. It is alive. A living truth whose reality can only be seen, like something that suddenly comes into focus. Then our self, the world, everything, is that living truth — what we all participate in. This shared being is sometimes called love. Unless you prefer to call it happiness. Or God.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
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An Explanation of Reality

Posted on by Alain Joly

You may not be interested in these matters. You may be an atheist, a non-believer. You may have an aversion towards all things spiritual. It doesn’t matter. You will get it all the same, that the world, the universe, everything — including yourself — are not there. Nothing is really there. Not in the way you had imagined. This is not like everybody has been telling you. Not at all. And you will see it with your logic, with your scepticism — a golden value by the way —, with your Cartesian, rational, solid mind. I will explain. You just have to listen carefully. There is no world, and I will expose to you how it is so. I will demonstrate it to you.

You may think there are billions of other people, countless other versions of suffering, a multitude of experiences, a world teeming with crowds and achievements, and all manner of things, from the most sublime to the most appalling. And there are indeed multiple points of views. But all of the world’s sufferings will always ever be experienced as yourself. It will be for whoever you may be now, and be experienced in whatever experience you may be experiencing now. The whole world is always only a first person experience of the world — in whoever you happen to be at this moment. When another person experiences suffering, it will then be this person’s only reality, and so on. So you will always ever be yourself. There are no ways to be another than yourself, to have another experience that your own experience of being yourself — which you experience right now. So the totality of humanity is contained in that one subjective experience of being. It is all there — in being. The billions of subjectivities, the myriad of experiences, the unspeakable suffering, the expansion and the veiling, the gruesome and the awe, the glory and sacredness of truth, and the compelling ignorance. Every experience of every possible being in this world is in essence made of that one experience of pure, ethereal being. And suffering is when you don’t know that.

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An explanation on how the reality of everything is only being… (READ MORE…)

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A Speck of Light

Posted on by Alain Joly

What you are is nothing ordinary, nowhere near being ordinary. We have gotten used to seeing ourself small, a speck of consciousness in the wider picture of the universe, with its trillions of other specks. We have made consciousness a mere apparatus, something that allows us to apprehend reality. For most of us, reality as the world is the real thing. Consciousness is nothing to speak about or even mention: just a tiny, taken for granted sparkle in the mind. A mere instrument at the service of a limited, separate entity. This instrument is nearly transparent, hardly worth considering, and is often reduced to what is called conscience, which is in fact only mind. But could it be that the most important aspect of our lives resides there, in and as that speck, in and as that sparkle that we have ignored and misunderstood for millennia? We have been exclusively fascinated by the content of our minds, by our bodies, and by this enthralling world, and we have stopped there, leaving the most precious jewel of our lives aside. But this attitude is in fact an elaborate system of avoidance. As Krishnamurti once said: “Your whole concern is with escape.”

We are constantly privileging the content at the expense of the vessel that holds it, and the known at the expense of the unknowable. We want to possess and control, and feel the satisfaction of it. We prefer having experiences to exploring the nature of all experiences. But there is a seed waiting in the tender soil of our mind, that needs our attention and care. It thrives when being observed. It grows under the scrutiny of a loving contemplation. Its infinite proportions are a thing to watch, that can turn your life upside down, and sweep it clean of its erroneous foundations.

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Consciousness: from its being veiled to its being realised… (READ MORE…)

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The Watcher

Posted on by Alain Joly

I remember the old odd days when I would sit in the woods on a tree trunk, or on a bench by a meadow, and watch nature playing its part in front of me. I would just watch, thinking very little. I’d leave my life aside, with all its worries and miserable sides. It was not worth looking at, not now, not at this point. For now I’d be a watcher. I knew there might have been a secret here, in this watching, in this looking at anything, at shadowing trees, flowers dancing in the breeze, stack of woods, clouds drifting in the sky. I intuited that it was all there, contained in the watching, enveloped within my experience. In this gaze was the answer. In this questioning was life throwing its identity at me, revealing its essence at last. At least I believed so. But it had to be a skilled watching. It had to have no intention intertwined with intention. It had to stand on this fine line. There was a strange alchemy taking place here, somewhere between the seer and the seen. A sacred, secret brew where reality could be unveiled, if only I could watch with the right, finely tuned focus.

After all, what other reality do we have than this one simple reality of ourself? What other than this presence? Just this presence, this watching, this being, this feeling. Just this. After all, this is all there is. I may look as much as I might, I won’t find anything outside of it. It is all there. I am stuck with it. So I might as well be there, stay there, dissect it, pull it apart. I might learn something of myself, of this looking at something, at anything. As if right there was concealed a hint never caught before, never encompassed, something which could resolve a miserable life. I was quite certain that if I looked hard enough, not at what I was seeing, not at anything out there, but at what this watching is made of, what it consists of, then I might free fall a long way within myself, to land in a new place, a new way of being, a freshness. So I stayed silent, enclosing myself with myself, and watched. Some may call it meditation. But I didn’t know that.

Well, my intuition was right. There is right here, a secret to be felt, guarded behind the limitations of my mind. A hint that my thoughts had concealed, along with my feelings, my identifications, memories, perceptions, sufferings — all that endless, formidable toil. And just there, right in the middle of it, something awakens, slowly pervades it all, and shows me what I am. Ah! If only we could clothe all that we are doing with this quality of watching. And all that we are watching with this quality of being. When all that you are looking at is looking at you. When all that is seemingly other is discovered to be yourself. When you can live and breathe at last, and feel who you are truly. And stay there, in the woods, in the sunlight, amongst shadows, but above all in your newly discovered self. There only exists the song of a bird, the river rushing by, and the silence breathing into it all, the fantasia of my life suddenly melted within one single being. This is where duality is stripped of its reality. Where the One has it all. And where the thousand things — including my old self — are clothed and replaced by their essence.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Flame without Smoke

Posted on by Alain Joly
©️ Krishnamurti Foundation India

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“Love is the only flame without smoke.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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The flame and the smoke is an analogy Krishnamurti referred to sometimes. For him, the flame is this burning centre of being that “can never be expressed with words”, that “is beyond the clutches of time”, and that is often expressed as love. The smoke is of the mind. It is “the smoke of envy, of holding, of missing, of recalling the past, of longing for tomorrow, of sorrow and worry; and this effectively smothers the flame.” The smoke is often what we take to be the flame but is not. It is all that is passing, all the thoughts, feelings, perceptions — the smoke that we have gathered to form experience, and that we take to be ourself, our centre of being. This wilful, separate, time bound, suffering self has appropriated the feeling of being when it is in fact the very smoke that is veiling our true nature. Being only is that flame without smoke. It is our true identity and “the source of all happiness”.

I have gathered, over the years, on social medias, many of the most striking quotes by Krishnamurti, that popped up on my screen. These, I found, acted on me like little koans, that had the power to pierce the smoke of the mind, and reveal the subtlest truths. They are like candies which, when chewed upon carefully, reveal the flame of what we truly are. They are short and easy, but need to be taken seriously. They can crack open our resistance, and show us that flame without smoke. I share them here with you…

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“Do not pursue what should be,
but understand what is.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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“Love is not at the end of time.
It is now, or it isn’t.
And hell is when it is not…”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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“Thought is never free because it is based on knowledge,
and knowledge is always limited.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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“It is essential to understand the seeker,
before you try to find out what it is he is seeking.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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“The ego is a ring of defence around nothing.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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Discover more of this selection of quotes by Jiddu Krishnamurti… (READ MORE…)

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