A Holy Formula

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Woman in the Wilderness’ – Alphonse Mucha, 1923 – Wikimedia

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“Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole.”
~ David Bohm

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You cannot suffer when the world in which you live is discovered to be you. That’s mathematical. A formula that will work magic in your life. For you don’t live separated from everything else. You are not limited to your body, and the world is not something that is distinct from you, at a distance from you. You discover that the jump was made long ago, that you have been the totality already from the beginning of ages, eternally one with it, and that there never was an inch that separated you from the world you live in. That’s how you are complete, by knowing no separation, by entertaining no difference, and therefore having no preference. So you cannot be lacking anything, and suffering is always only the lacking of something, which is born of separation. So stay there, in your inseparable essence, in your world of completeness. Notice that this is what you are, or rather what there is, when you stop fantasising yourself being somebody. You never had an existence of your own. You are the flowering of something deeper. If you ignore or overlook this simple truth, well… then the trouble begins, all the travail of life, and the never ending seeking for fulfilment. This never was about you. Life is bigger, wider than that, and you are here only to honour that and to live by its gorgeous rules.

Then you enter into sacredness. You leave the limitations of being somebody — a projection, an idea that thought has sculpted over time — for a merging with infinity, with who you truly are. This is what sacredness is: an entering into your true self. A visiting of the truth of your being. The anointing of your self with its reality. This entering is a sanction from truth. It is the death of an old idea which you have entertained, for a ride into unknowing. It is a ceremony in which you are being elevated to a reality that you have been blind to. You are being sanctified, or made true. You were already that, already living as that reality, already tasting of that firmament, but were distracted. You were drawn to be something, insisted in being exclusively yourself, by yourself, so you have ignored it. You missed the chance to know yourself truly. You worked too hard to be what you are not. You lacked passivity. Not that you don’t have to do anything to come to this understanding. But rather, this understanding is nothing you do. It is here in you, as you, without your doing anything about it. It doesn’t need your participation, or rather it needs your non-participation, your staying away, your keeping quiet. Your abandonment. The hardest thing of all.

Then you enter into holiness. You taste of your true home, which happens to be the home of god. You are made holy, which means whole, uninjured, healthy. You realise where you are, what you are, the stone you are made of. You notice your true body — the consciousness of everything. You connect with a reality that could never be transgressed or violated. A reality which you could only fall in love with, for it is your beloved self, which you have lost sight of, and are now reunited with, consecrated in, and which you would never want to leave, or not live by. You are made of the same golden dust that the stars are made of. I don’t mean just your body, but what you are at the core, the essence of your self, what you happen to be when you say simply ’I am’. You are made into “an internal relationship to the whole”, as David Bohm expressed so beautifully. And you will struggle to see the world as a collection of different parts, or to see yourself as one such part amongst many others. The One will come to be your only experience. But you will be defeated again and again. You will come to feel a part again. You will be seduced to be somebody time and again. You will want to feel separated again, to win another last adventure or advantage for yourself. You know: your little devil wanting to be the likes of god. But keep going. Keep going. Until one day, it may dawn on you: you are no more.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by David Bohm (1917-1992)

Painting by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

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Websites:
– David Bohm (Wikipedia)
– Alphonse Mucha (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
– A page from the blog dedicated to David Bohm: ‘Insights into Wholeness’…

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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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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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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)

Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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A Cathedral of Grace

Posted on by Alain Joly

We always want to be at a distance from experience. In fact, we keep behind, we don’t get involved — at least not entirely. We are aloof. We keep experience at bay. That allows for a certain safety, we think. But that distance is the distance we keep from ourself. This is the chasm we have opened, through which we have numbed ourself. So we had to fill this chasm with a belief in separation, with the idea of a being separate from other beings and things. In this chasm is born our loneliness, and the vast field of our search for happiness. This search is but our desperate attempt to fill the gap we have created and nourished. And this chasm is how we have been made to think ceaselessly about ourself. How we have been made to judge, hope, project, regret, complain, expect, believe. These are — we think — the measure of our control in life. But they are in fact the loss of our innocence. For this chasm or distance is what our suffering is made of. It is the way we have found to not be wholly being — being appearing to be a dangerous flame, of a consuming nature. So we have stepped safely aside. In this keeping away from the flame, in this refusal to die, is our chasm, our whole precipice of pain.

But this flame of being is in fact our fountain of peace. It is what makes us present, uncompromisingly one with experience, with nowhere to go but ourself, and nothing to be but that which we already are. In this place of being, we are not allowed distance, and time is proscribed. There is nowhere to go in being. Nothing to be but being. This flame of being will cancel the distance that was your safety. It will devour you, digest all your hopes and projections, burn your regrets, crush your fear, and debunk all idea of separation. You are thus crashing in being, and are consumed in its flame. Experience is now revealed to be nothing but the experiencing of your self within your self. You are given no room for separation, and are discovering yourself to be the sublime core of all that can possibly exist. You may look all you want, you won’t find yourself anywhere, for the simple reason that there is no location for you to be in. And you will find no space for a self to have experience, for the experiencer has dissolved in experiencing. This merging of your self with experience is how suffering is made impossible. This is how you are made present here and now, one with everything and everyone. And this is how you are made to feel in awe with what you see, hear, and touch. You are ravished to just be, and are suddenly placed at the teeming heart of your self, unable to not fully, gorgeously be. You are entering a cathedral of grace, and are placed in a well of light, amongst songs of glory.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Ultimate Absolution

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Spring Waters’ – Vilhelms Purvitis, 1910 – WikiArt

Isn’t it wonderful to discover that you cannot be destroyed? No matter the magnitude of your heartbreaks. No matter the betrayals and the dishonesties — all that is unforgivable in others or in yourself. No matter the untold suffering inflicted to your body or to your self. Isn’t it a blessing to notice that you cannot be broken no matter what? You can believe to be broken, sullied, doomed and punished for your sins. But in reality you are not and cannot be. You are as beautiful as you ever wished to be. Worse even. No quantity of imagination, no originality of a mind will ever prepare you to comprehend the pure and unsullied nature of your self, which equals to nothing but the beauty of your heart.

The only thing that can ever be hurt or sullied is a thought or a belief. You will be hurt in proportion to the extent of your identifications. The greater your illusion, and the sharper will be the pain when it is challenged, or diminished, or trampled. A belief is a living thing. It is not just a dead abstraction that can be easily ignored or overcome. A belief is as alive and sensitive as a self can be. We are made of that belief, we have clothed ourself with it and have become vulnerable to all that can undermine it. That’s how you become a sufferer. That’s how you can imagine to be sullied, diminished, destroyed. It is all contained in one single belief about yourself. And it can be released in one single act of contemplation: Seeing yourself as you are, and not as you imagine yourself to be.

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An exploration into the true nature of forgiveness… (READ MORE…)

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A Tangible Now

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘News’ – Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, 1905 – WikiArt

Everything that we truly have is now. In the unplanned. In the unprojected. Only we have to be very still to see it, to comprehend that truth. Not busy. To be busy is to plan, project, think, believe, fear, suffer. All these can never experience the now. For the sufferer and the believer have left the still, untouched, virgin presence of the now to venture into the past or the future. And in doing so, have somewhat died. They have stopped being. The reason for this is that being can only thrive in and as itself. That’s what makes it eternal, infinite, unformed, whole. To move from it, to have the slightest impulse away from it, is to trade being for becoming, eternity for time, infinity for limitation, and wholeness for separation. This is what makes the now into an unknown, unlived passage between two ideas: ‘that which was’, and ‘that which will be’. Both being some phantoms that we have invented to make one single thought about ourself viable. A thought that has separated itself from the true reality of being. A thought whose only purpose is to bridge ‘that which was’ to ‘that which will be’, and whose fate is to forever seek in the future its lost happiness. We are enclosed in our own fake self and reality. And the now has been lost, replaced by time and becoming. And the peace of being has been buried, replaced by a self that thinks itself separate and lacking, therefore suffering.

So this is the new world we have invented for ourself. This is the new situation. We are now looking to possess, attain, and reach. The now has been made into something negligible, not worth anything, a mere ‘obligatory passage’. We have killed the wide expanse of the now, and have jumped into a train of thoughts. We have deserted vastness and freedom for the prison of a mind. We have made ourselves merchants, mere traders of objects with an idea in view. Our feelings, our body, our sense perceptions, have come to define us. We have come to believe that we are what we are not. And we have, in consequence, become blind to what we truly are. We live in a fantasised world, forever running and rushing between beliefs and concepts, filling the space of being until it has become indiscernible, crowding the now with the whole paraphernalia of time. This is how the now is trampled. This is how its noblesse is sullied over and over again. For the loss of the now is our loss. It is therefore important, and some vital enterprise, to return to the now its forgotten grandeur, and to restitute its position at the very centre of our lives.

The now is not a fleeting moment in time, but the solid presence of the eternal. It cannot be known as an object — which would make it finite, situated, graspable — but as the very being of the very nature of ourself. The now is made of our presence. We are filled with it. The now is foundational. It is the unseen ground and walls of our being. The now isn’t one of the innumerable bricks of time. But time is refracted in the now as one of its many possibilities. The now is the space in which the whole of life unfolds its many mysteries. And its presence cannot be dissociated from that which we are in essence. We can try as we may, we will never be ‘not now’. Our being is forever stretched in and as the eternal and unlimited field of the now, curling up its true body in and as the own, ungraspable body of the now. We will never experience the now as ticking in our life at regular intervals. For it is the very life that we are made of and that refracts itself as a thousand experiences. It is hosting ourself, lending its structure to the very structure of our being. It can be felt as the tangible aspect of the intangibility of time. It is the only thing we have. It is had in us before even the concept of time appears, let alone the past and the future; let alone the body and the world; let alone thoughts, feelings, and the sense perceptions that give our many experiences their contours and qualities. Time is the now having limited itself to accommodate the limitations of thought. And space is the now having limited itself to accommodate the limitations of the world as sense perceptions. Behind all that is fleeting and overwhelming in the flow of experience, ‘now’ is the only solid, peaceful, tangible ground we have.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911)

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Website:
– Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (Wikipedia)

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Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Essence of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

We hardly ever listen to the sound of a dog’s bark,
or to the cry of a child or the laughter of a man as he passes by.
We separate ourselves from everything, and then
from this isolation look and listen to all things.
It is this separation which is so destructive,
for in that lies all conflict and confusion.
If you listened to the sound of those bells
with complete silence, you would be riding on it —
or, rather, the sound would carry you
across the valley and over the hill.
[…]
Meditation is not a separate thing from life;
it is the very essence of life,
the very essence of daily living.

~ J. Krishnamurti (‘The Only Revolution’)

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Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Photo by Alain Joly

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Bibliography :
– ‘Krishnamurti’s Notebook’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Publications of America, US)

Website:
– J. Krishnamurti

Suggestions:
– Beauty in Essence (other pointers from the blog)
– A Day at Brockwood Park (Homage to J. Krishnamurti)

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