Isn’t Life a Simple Thing?

Posted on by Alain Joly

We as an apparent body and mind are nothing but the conditions met for the apparition of a world and all the resulting experiences that take place within it. We are simply housing the thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions necessary to enact experience, and give it a shine of reality. But the essential of what we are is neither in thoughts, nor in feelings, nor in sense perceptions. The essential of a mind is made of consciousness. Awareness is its structure and its backbone, without which there would be nothing left. If it wasn’t for its awaring quality, our mind would be no mind. Our thoughts would crumble and disappear to never reappear. Our feelings and sensations would suddenly blacken and decay in an instant, to be never formed again. And the world would be swallowed back into infinity, if it wasn’t for the consciousness that gave it its essence and knowability. Look as you may, you won’t find a mind of your own anywhere. At best, just a few scattered thoughts, and the momentary and illusory appearance of a self.

Observe carefully. A few thoughts can never make a mind; and neither could some random feelings. You couldn’t own the necessary self that you need to function in a world, without some inseparable and indispensable measure of knowing. So it is all about knowing. It is all about being conscious. Awareness holds it all together — your body; your thoughts and feelings; your world as sense perceptions. All of these come into existence at the only condition that an ‘awareness’ is present. If awareness goes, you go. If consciousness goes, everything with you go. The world goes. No bodies viable. No flower fields. No Milky Way. Everything falling apart. Universe shut black. Just a mess! That’s the power of consciousness! Far from being a mere function of the body, awareness is what holds the body and the world together. It is the essence of everything. It is the indispensable matrix. It is the ocean in which the waves and currents of thoughts, sensations, and world are dancing. And it has no home where to rest but itself. In fact, it is itself a resting place for all apparent minds, bodies, things, selves that make up a world. Consciousness gives existence with its being, allows relationship with its knowing faculty, and brings the consolidation of happiness with its loving nature. Then it returns into itself and stays there, in utter peace and completeness — replete with itself. And when you have seen it all as it is, and yourself as you are — indivisible being — then might come simply a swell of awe. God, isn’t life a simple thing?

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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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Turner’s Moon

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Moonlight, A Study at Millbank’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1797 – WikiArt

This text is directly inspired by an analogy used by the teacher of non-duality Rupert Spira. I found it to have such evocative power that words started to pour out and I couldn’t stop them. This text is therefore dedicated to Rupert and his timeless vision and teaching.

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Sometime a painting just comes timely to move your heart. It is a gorgeous landscape painting, depicting a coastline and the sea, with boats and fishermen in the moonlight. At Millbank, Turner was painting in dark, subtle hues of black, blue, and purple browns, to define a night, leaving here and there traces of light, golden reflections on the water. In the wide expanse of the sky, he had left one portion of the painting untouched. Pure as white. Undarkened. For the painter had a view in mind. He was to paint a moon, bright and resplendent. And no moon was ever so bright.

This part of the scenery that wasn’t painted, it was you. You, before you were made a person, before the identification with thoughts, feelings, body, story, hurts, memories, projections, beliefs. The nature of the moon was that part of you that was left unseen, unexplored, but that had quietly illuminated you all along, giving you a self and an identity without your knowing, lending you a hidden strength for your bruised self, and bathing you in its unheard silence. It was the trusted one, the one reliable thing in a life of relentless changes and challenges. It was the peace of your true self, the precious being that had been covered up by the night of objective experience. This is the moon Turner had meant to convey.

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A meditation on the evocative power of Turner’s painting… (READ MORE…)

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Lectio Divina

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Great Boulevards’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875 – WikiArt

I have been feasting on some words recently. I was sitting leisurely on a cafe’s terrace, watching life coming and going, browsing through my phone with some ideas in mind. And there it came, and took me by surprise, like a koan suddenly unveiled, a pathway revealed without my knowing. There it came, taking the form of one single, simple phrase that seemed innocuous, by Saint Augustine:

“Is any man skilful enough to have fashioned himself?”
~ Augustine of Hippo

And that emptied my mind. It made me sink into no content, aware of all that is now; my self suddenly made a container for life. We all feel that we are so smart and powerful, or so stupid and powerless. That we have made ourselves what we are, and feel in consequence the pride or shame of it. That we have destroyed, or elevated ourselves. That we are responsible for our happiness, our success, our failure. That we have moulded our thoughts and actions, wilfully designed them. That our beliefs are believed. Our thoughts thought. Our words uttered by a ‘somebody’ here, inside the skull. But these are all beliefs, and beliefs are flawed from the start. Beliefs need a believer to believe them, and look as you may, you will never find such one behind your deeds. For the simple reason that there is no self behind our selfing. We have therefore never been in charge, never been truly responsible for collecting what we have collected, for misusing what we have misused, and for making the mistakes that we have made. Except in hindsight, in thoughts and beliefs, in cascades of randomly built illusions and memories in which we are caught and made blind. And these are what we have busied ourselves managing and arranging into a sensible self. And that self has gotten in the way of our living harmoniously.

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The ‘Lectio Divina’ of a quote by Augustine of Hippo… (READ MORE…)

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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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Tainted Self

Posted on by Alain Joly

Sometime, presence is eluding you. It hides, and you are left with nothing but your old tainted self. These are the sad days. When thoughts have invaded your being and replaced it with ideas and concepts about your self. When feelings have plagued that gorgeous presence which is you, and have contaminated it with worries and rage. When you are caught and find yourself being something and someone, some kind of hard entity that you cannot forget and shake off yourself. That’s when your beautiful, empty being is tiptoeing where it never left and waiting for better days. That’s when you cannot help yourself seeing a world in front of you. That’s when objects have filled your world and animate it with all the inbuilt suffering they imply. Oneness has been choked by them, and has retreated. It won’t fight its way back. It won’t raise a finger for itself. After all, does the sun need to fight for its own light? Is the sun the least bothered when a layer of clouds has formed? No. The sun will continue doing what a sun does. It will illuminate the clouds, sculpting their gorgeous forms, painting them in all shades of whites. The sun illuminates as surely as awareness makes your thoughts and feelings knowable. That’s how you can judge yourself to be anything. An old, tainted, worrisome, raging, hard, stubborn self. That’s how you can know that. Because of your presence. Because of its knowing, illuminating talent. That’s it. That’s what you are. That obvious, inescapable luminosity that is the only thing in presence. The only you in presence. The only presence. And in no time will you then have a clear sky. With no clouds around. No tainted self. And worries blown up. Rage pacified. That’s when the thoughts about yourself are tiptoeing in the empty space where they have come to form themselves. That’s when your feelings are being chased by the wind of knowing, melted by the warm and pure air of being, where you are discovered to be no self. And that’s how you make the thousands objects of your world retreat into oneness. And you are left alone. Here. Now. Sweet and whole. A presence never tainted. Never eluded.

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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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A Course in Abandonment

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Meadow at Bezons’ – Claude Monet, 1874 – WikiArt

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“You only have to receive everything and let it happen.
Everything is directing you, straightening you out, carrying you.
Everything is a banner, a litter, a comfortable vehicle.
Everything is God’s hand; everything is God’s earth, air and water.”
~ ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’ (Muggeridge)

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Truth is its own advocate. No matter where or when or in what obscure circumstances an expression of truth has been composed, it will find its way out into the light. This is what happened to a small book allegedly written by the French Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751). Written in the first half of the eighteenth century, it remained unpublished until 1861, before being praised for its quality and lyricism, and appeared in multiple editions over time. It is known by the title ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’. Jean-Pierre de Caussade was the author of many letters of spiritual instruction, and some of them appear in his book along with a treatise in self-abandonment. This latter text particularly ignited attention and was in style and quality so far removed from the other ‘letters’ that it became apparent that the author could not have written it.

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Discover this eighteenth century treatise on abandonment… (READ MORE…)

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The Glorious Reality

Posted on by Alain Joly

“Do nothing that may be unworthy of the
glorious reality within your heart and you
shall be happy and remain happy.”

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981)

Photo by Alain Joly

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Bibliography:
– ‘I Am That’ – by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj – (Chetana Pvt.Ltd)

Website:
– Nisargadatta Maharaj (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Beauty in Essence (other pointers from the blog)
– Khetwadi Lane (Homage to Nisargadatta Maharaj)

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