Finding Relationship

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Hazy Relationship’ – Rinaldo Wurglitsch – Wikimedia

If you think you are having a relationship with another, you’re telling yourself a story. Literally. For this is what ‘relationship’ truly means: ‘to recount’, ’to relate’, ‘to refer’. More precisely, it means that something has been ‘brought back’, or ‘carried back’. So relationship is not an innocuous word. It expresses something fundamental, that for our relationships to be, we have to conjure up the past, or some kind of knowledge. We have to refer to something, to bring back some old memories, some kind of object or image. We have to bring the past into the now. And this is what we have done so far, to attach our relationships to some kind of reference to the past. We have learnt that we cannot be related to another outside the field of memory or images, without making concepts, without burying our relationships into the impasse of storytelling. But in fact, real relationship only takes place when we stop relating anything to another person or object. It is the moment when you are emptying yourself and the apparent other from the past or the future, which is from knowledge.

Relationship as we know it is a process that involves separation. It is an interplay between two entities that have been brought about, fabricated, their reality made into selves out of fear, habit, convenience, or ignorance. These objective, illusory selves are so brittle that they are incapable of making true connection. They are like empty shells with no real substance. The only possible connection between human beings is love. Just think about it for a moment. Why do we hug anybody? Is it because we acknowledge the powerlessness of words and rather mimic our deep connection through the use of body language and silence? How do you convey what cannot be conveyed? What can you do when words come short, other than fall into silence and cancel the space or division between you and another? This annihilation is the act of love itself. It is the acknowledgement of being or ‘isness’ as the only possible connection. It is the truth of ‘what is’ when all conceptualisation has come to an end, when memory has been brought to its knees.

True relationship is the flowering of consciousness. It is the coming to the foreground of the reality that stands behind all apparently existing things. It is the noticing of the reality that is here amongst beings and things — the ciment behind it all, the nature of everything, the deepest connection there is, before which all other connections pale into insignificance. The irony is that you can only have true relationship with another when you don’t make up a relationship, when you don’t bring in any idea or judgement, when you don’t invite fear or former hurts, or condescendence, or even respect for that matter. You must stay silent, empty of qualifications. You have to be who you truly are, to let the natural relationship of love come to the foreground and act itself out through you, and in spite of you. Let it carry you where you are, at the right place of your pure, innocent self where relationship is not anything you do but what you are as being. It is ‘what is there no matter what between beings’ — be they human or otherwise.

So be watchful of what you bring. For the qualities of the world will depend on the quality of your relationships. That’s how a world is being experienced — through relationships. So don’t start with yourself, with a self, any self, and relate from there, from this position of untruthfulness, of deceitfulness. You’d make an insane world. A world where we use, impose, abuse, misuse, mistreat. That’s how wars are launched, through biased relationships and crooked selves. See how fundamental relationship is, how it can make the world a place where hurt, anger, ignorance are being acted out. Or how it can make the world a place of peace, harmony and love.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Rinaldo Wurglitsch

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God’s Favourite Child

Posted on by Alain Joly

You are not alone, not just anybody left in one corner of the world, with no resources. You have been given a world that cannot go wrong, except in your own imagination. So you may relax now, and let yourself be. Just be. You can give it all away, all your worries, all your concerns about a future. Keep only this one reality close to yourself: you are. In that being is contained all that you need. Be only concerned with that, with presence. Feel it to be your nurturing essence, your progenitor. You are God’s favourite child. We all are. We worry and suffer until comes the day when we realise it. Know this filial nature as your only reality, your one solid insurance in life. God is as close to you as your sense of being is. It won’t leave you ever. It has been building a gorgeous house for you to live in. This house is the one you already are in. It is yourself, who you are of all eternity, although you may not have noticed yet. It has soft, silk drapes on the walls. For there is luxury in being yourself. And the only thing that brings you closer to putting an end to your suffering is the knowing of that — the knowing of being — with its inescapability and the soothing comfort contained in it.

There is a special sense of gratefulness that comes with simply being. Have you tried it? To simply be the one which you are. With no supplement needed. No artifice in the least. This very sense of being is God showing to yourself how he cares for you. How much you matter to her. You don’t need to add anything to that. Actually, you shouldn’t: that will make you drop from god’s sweet embrace. So be always under the warm influence of being. Feel that you are it, and that you are in this way as God’s being itself. You will never have to look for an identity outside yourself. For there is only one drama currently running in this world. It is that they made you think that God is far and away. An impossible task while it is in fact the nearest, most accessible thing there is in your life. One that needs only a little attention. The attention of being. The curling up in the warm blanket of your self. Just that. Simple and easy. The only thing you do not have to reach. God gave you the favour to only be. So stay acquainted with it. Do it justice. Return the favour. Be only being. That’s how God can recognise you as its favourite child.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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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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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 Truth

Posted on by Alain Joly
Grundtvig’s Church – Bispebjerg, Copenhagen

You cannot get away from truth. You may try. You may try as hard as you may. You may flee from yourself into some ideas, or chase wrong deeds, or hope for unattainable achievements. You may want to obtain what your feelings dictate, or what your miseries ordain, or what your selfish, envious self hungers for. You may go wilfully on that slippery road, but be careful. For sooner or later, you will have to be wiser. For no matter what, you will be called back to stay where you are, in yourself, as yourself. There is no escape from who you are. There are no ideas attainable, no deeds possible, no hopes to be granted, away from the truth of your self. This is your one, given, golden achievement — this self that you are and that you keep seeking in endless, groundless projections. Truth is not to be found amongst scattered objects. Truth is not desirous, impatient, not to be sought away from the constancy of your deepest self as being. This is what disappointment is, to seek truth where it is not, to miss the point, to not meet yourself where you are, at the very point of your most naked being. There is a whole panorama of being to be discovered when you do not disdain or disrespect the truth of who you are for a few adventures out of yourself. These adventures are all part of a big, forgetting scheme. And truth comes when you cease being forgetful, and remember ‘being’ to be your one and only truth.

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An exploration into the nature and meaning of truth… (READ MORE…)

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The Sieve of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ – Paul Cezanne, 1890 – WikiArt

Consciousness wants to have it its ways. That’s how we meet life on such a bumpy road: Because we oppose the naturalness of being or consciousness, with our views and ideas. We too want to have it our ways. So there is a friction here at play. This friction is our suffering. This friction is the expression of our ego. It is our way of fighting through life, of being stubborn, willing, desiring, at the expense of the truth of our being. The world is not just a world. It is truth in action, with its laws and momentum. They cannot be ignored. They require our understanding, our consensus, our unanimity and harmony, our unison. This unison commands us to look in the same direction, in that very sacred meadow where being can be met. Don’t look for the world to be such a place of meeting. There is an obligatory passage before you can meet the world and your life at the level they must be met. This passage is yourself at its deepest. It is but the hidden expanse of your being. So being is your exploration field. It is your developer liquid, that will give your life its true colours. This is how the world is to be met — through the intercession or filter of being. This is where you will be handed the gift that you have been relentlessly looking for. A gift that will never disappoint you, for it has been uniquely designed for your needs.

So meet the world in being. Meet your life in being. You will smoothen your bumpy road into a path of truth. Life will stop being an achievement, to be only the natural consequence of your internal exploration. Contemplate your being in all occasions, and you will render to your life its ultimate, pristine, innate perfection. You will stop using your life for your own private objectives, distorting it to your conditioned, egoistic convenience. Cease trying to acquire things, bending them to meet your own preferences. Notice that the harshness of life is always on your side. We command suffering and conflict, we invite difficulties. They are the pointed head of the army of our egotistical tendencies. Remember separation to be your worst enemy. Don’t let it come through your door, no matter how seductive it may appear to you. Don’t make it your special guest. Any entity that forms inside your self as an object is only a treacherous self. Trust only formless, undivided being. Pass your life experience through its sieve. Let being be your guide, that one thing which comes first, which is preeminent in your life, and through which life ought to be lived. Sieve your life through the natural influence of being. That’s how you avoid friction. That’s how you annihilate conflict. That’s how you kill all possibility of suffering in the egg. And that’s how you invite the gift of happiness, love, beauty, and eternity in your life — these coveted needs of yours.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cezanne (Wikipedia)

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A Place of Leisure

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is a place in ourself where we are not, strictly speaking, meeting anything. This is what ‘emptiness’ means, that we are not bumping into anything, that we don’t encounter any resistance whatsoever. There may be objective appearances showing up, but they are not met from the position of being ourself an object, a self, a thing with properties and qualities. As long as we believe to be a self separate from the world, and identified to a set of thoughts and feelings, we are placed in a loud and busy world, a world crowded with objects, where conflict is at home and suffering is the norm, both outside and inside. But only feel to be the empty presence that your self truly is, and your world will appear as a qualitatively empty and silent being. And this silent being is ourself, our being which had been previously crowded by our identification with perceptions, muted by our thoughts, and dumbed by our feelings. So, as empty being, we are never meeting objects and conversing with them, for the only reality we ever come upon is ourself — infinite, empty being. That being is that which we eternally converse with. So we keep company with being only, not with objects and persons. This meeting, or melting, with being — with the essence — is paradoxically the only source for a true, loving, and meaningful relationship between apparent people and objects. Any meeting that takes place only at the level of people and objects is a promise for suffering and conflict.

There is one easy and direct consequence of living, or relating, as and with being. It is that our life becomes a place of leisure. We are liberated from the constraints of objects. Therefore we have a free time, a free space where we are not occupied, not busy working it all out, being puzzled, grabbed by conflict, seized by suffering. We are therefore in for leisure. We are in a position of freedom from where we can contemplate the world and ourself as we are. We are on a holiday, a holy, consecrated day when we release our chronic identification with the objective world, and find behind it relief and an intrinsic peace. This freedom from identification bears joy as its DNA because we are finally allowed to just be. And this being forever shines through experience, which is seen as secondary. And this being renders the world back to its original transparency. Furthermore, being clothes experience with a space like quality. This is a space of ability and creativity, for we are not possessed by our entanglement with experience. This is a space of free will, for we are not constrained by our limiting faculties. This is a space of easiness, for it takes us home, in the loving harbour of our true self. This place of leisure is absolute freedom — freedom from space and time, and from the contingencies of appearances. It is a place of no haste, where you are with your spacious self alone, and enjoy its interior, which is nothing but the world. You stay in the perimeter of your self wherever you may go. And there is the loving influence of infinity in whatever you may do, which means that peace is coming forth in spite of circumstances. Above all, this place of leisure is the burial ground of your self as a limited and separated entity.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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