Where is True Home

Posted on by Alain Joly

Where can we find what is ‘our own’ in our experience? What is fitting? Where do we draw a sense of belonging from? Most of the time, we do not feel that we fit in, that we have a place. We feel insecure, so we secure an identity in a thousand things. We borrow from an object our appeasement. We make objects our own, we inhabit our thoughts, we adorn ourself with qualities, and we take shelter in a body. That’s what we do to fit in, and find security: we lose ourself in an ‘other’. We beg for anything that we could call our own, for fear of staying alone, and be left a nobody. We make up a self, and then call it ‘our own’. And that place of our own we find — and have defined — in a thousand shaky, unreliable places and things. But it is a bad try. In fact, we have burgled our own home of belongings that are not ours.

How are we going to find a home, if we keep rummaging through experience for every object that fits our needs? We ought to be disinterested for a while. We need to be disowned, dispossessed of every property or belonging that we have so far acquired, clung to, and in definitive stolen. For this is where true ownership is found, in not belonging. This is how a decent property is secured, by having no place to be. We ought to live free from all the accumulations that we have gathered and identified with. For our true home is not placed on the crest of experience, is not built on the sand of insecurity, and is not limited by the fence of limitation. It is not for a self, or a place, to produce the quality of enduring peace. Peace is already here, wholly achieved, in the home that our being truly is.

Live so that you don’t have to steal in your own house. You have it all. Your property extends to infinity and the world is the garment of your whole being. So in being, wherever you are is your home, and whatever you need is found here, in you, as you, with all the peace and security that pertain to a true home. You fit in when there is no space between yourself and what you long for. Being no space, you won’t have an urge to seek outside of yourself your identity and your happiness. Home is the recognition that you are already home. To be is to be home. There is no achieving it, let alone work for it. Be exactly where you are, in and as your own being — the place which you could never not be in. And if you find that a sense of indomitable peace is accompanying you there, then be in no doubt that this is home — what is your own, where you fit in, where you belong. Truly.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Resting Place

Posted on by Alain Joly

“There is no resting place until the real comes into being.“
~ J. Krishnamurti (‘The World Within’)

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Where could we find a resting place, when we are running in a thousand directions for a sparkle of relief or happiness? Where could rest be, when we are constantly afflicted with every form of suffering and doubt? There is always something brewing in our mind, something that needs to be arranged or perfected. Dissatisfaction is rampant, forever displaying its multiple consequences and leaving us gasping for a peace that is eluding us again and again. In other words, we are stuck in an eternal roundabout, with no clear directions on offer, except for the same old directions that we have explored a thousand times, to no avail. Yet rest is an essential. We know it from intuition. We know it as our deepest knowledge, our only certainty in life. There is a home — of this we are certain. Otherwise we wouldn’t be running around in this constant, infatigable search for love, peace, joy, and the likes. Our stubborn seeking is a proof that the stamp of life is to be found in easiness, naturalness. We are not meant to struggle and strive.

It is interesting to notice that peace always comes in the form of a recognition. We are not here on uncharted grounds. We have explored this chamber of peace a thousand times before. Only we keep forgetting it. In fact, our search for peace and happiness in the field of objective experience is nothing but our many clumsy attempts at remembering. Yet in reality, not truly so. For we should rather proclaim that our search in the field of objective experience is nothing but our many successful attempts at forgetting. How do we forget that which cannot be forgotten? How do we miss the obvious? How do we obscure the light? Well, just by being a self in its own right. Just by thinking to be a self separated from the field of experience. And therefore looking in that field for experiences that will relieve us from our constant seeking. That’s the perfect catch-22. So we become choosy, selective, a slave to experience, forever oscillating between being its victim or its conqueror. But this unfortunate manoeuvre is what puts us afar from the peace we are looking for. Peace is in fact nothing but our deepest, most intimate identity as being. And experience is nothing but a vassal of peace when we have recognised who we truly are.

Only be that eternal being curled in and as your self, and no experience will ever be a source for joy or a cause for suffering. Let your being infuse in and as eternal being, and peace will appear to be the very structure of your self — its indestructible nature. Don’t ever go out for peace, but rather find it within, as the revelation of your utmost being. There is a cabinet of peace waiting for your noticing. It is that very place of rest that you have been longing for, and expecting to find in situations and circumstances, when it is simply the very expression of your inner sense of being. See this peace as your only reality. Be of it, as much as it is of you. And let it pervade your being until it has conquered every corner of experience. Peace will then be seen as the fabric of every thing and being encountered. You will start noticing it in the many figures of life. In every bird flying across the sky. In every towel used to dry your hands. In the business of city hassle. Even in the harsh words addressed to hurt you. Peace is like a torrent of rain falling at your doorstep. It will wash your self clean of any impurities of experience. As it will equally clean experience of any residue of your self. Then will you and experience walk hand in hand under the vault of an unbreakable peace. Each intimately woven with the other, yet both being the children or emanation of an indissoluble unity.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Bibliography:
– ‘The World Within: You Are the Story of Humanity’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)

Website:
– J. Krishnamurti

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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peace (noun)

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Garden of Eden’ – Thomas Cole, 1828 – WikiArt

It is always revealing to reflect upon a certain word in the context of spirituality, and see how it came to appear and be chosen. Why this one and not another word. There are many synonyms to the word ‘peace’, amongst which tranquillity, calmness, or quietness, which all seem better suitable to an entity or an object than peace. Peace is profound. It stands on its own. Just its pronouncing deepens you, fills you with its referent. ‘Peace’. The word takes you somewhere else, makes you leave your habitual field of suffering, desiring, projecting, coping, aiming, all that renders life a battlefield. ‘Peace’. Peace is a mantra in itself. A prayer. An occasion to go within. It has the automaticity of something fundamental, inescapable, and the simplicity of something that everybody knows or has experienced.

The word ‘peace’ comes from the mid-12th century root ‘pes’, meaning ‘freedom from civil disorder’ or ‘absence of war’. Likewise, in the dictionary, the first meaning for peace is stated as ‘freedom from disturbance’. Peace is always negative. It is here when something else has receded or died down. It is revealed through an absence. After all, in common parlance, the word ‘peace’ has always been used to refer to the state of things that exists in the absence of conflict or disorder. The word was almost invented to refer to this moment when a war ends and one can return to the state of affairs that existed before the conflict started. It is never a new state or occurrence. It is what is usually here in the background and is disrupted by the incursion of movement, conflict, war, thought. The tiniest thing, as long as you believe it to be you, will disrupt your peace. Peace is a return. A recognition of something known but forgotten for a time, or rather eclipsed by the incursion of time. Peace is something that is always here in the background, waiting patiently for your return. Our mind as ego is the disruptive factor, the war in which we have decided to engage, and found ourselves caught and lost. Make it end and peace will come automatically. It is not a new state invented, but the pre-existing state of your deepest self as being, which only a quietening of your wrestling with the objective world will make apparent. Peace is the very foundation of your self. It is the cornerstone of the edifice of life, as is easily seen in nature, which seems to have peace as its very fabric.

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An exploration of the meanings behind the word ‘peace’… (READ MORE…)

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The Hypochondria of Being

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Imaginary Invalid’ – Honoré Daumier, 1860-62  – Wikimedia

There may have been a time in your life when you had a glimpse or experience that you had considered to be a major event or happening, some breaking news coming from god’s mouth. And yet you were left after it with only scattered shreds of truth. You had failed to inhabit your experience and make it yours. You had stayed on its threshold and didn’t dare to visit its interior and be blessed by it. You remained where and who you always were, with the bitter taste of a failed enlightenment as a topping. So you have entertained the memory of it. You have placed this experience on a pedestal. Worshipped it as something to be attained or achieved.

So you have searched for it. You have enquired, read, experienced, shared. Slowly, almost inadvertently, you have gathered some understanding. You have sailed on the sea of existence, harvesting here a tiny piece of truth, there a hazy recognition, maybe even a glimpse of a wee realisation, which you have again locked behind closed doors. And you have sailed further. It made you push or widen your understanding even more. Silently. Surreptitiously. Until one day home is coming closer to you. You find yourself inhabiting this truth. It is making itself known as being only who you are, or that which you are. It suddenly takes you by surprise and clarity. This is what it is!

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A playful interpretation of the nature of spiritual experience… (READ MORE…)

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