The Odyssey

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Odysseus questions the seer Tiresias’ – Alessandro Allori, 1580 – Wikimedia

No doubt that our life feels like an odyssey. It does for everybody. In the ancient, epic poem of Homer, the Odyssey is a journey home. It is with us too. But the fact that we are on a journey home is not always apparent. At least not to begin with. We’re too busy to see anything. We’re fighting demons. We’re full of desires, many of them, constantly assailing us. We think we’re going somewhere, without seeing very well where that is. We’re wrestling with the gods. We have many ideas, beliefs, hopes, sufferings. We feel we are a person in a world, who needs to reach a happy place that never comes. The reason is: home is within. The happy place is in ourself. It is not out there. It is in the ending of a belief, of a misunderstanding, of a bad judgement as to what we truly are. We are stuck in a place that doesn’t exist. We are stuck in a belief.

It eventually dawns on us that our happy place is where we are finally reunited with our inner peace. That’s the journey home: the journey within. But it takes a long and difficult travel of sufferings and errands to understand that there is no travelling back home outside ourself, in the diversity of the world. Home is within. Once we go within, the journey becomes shorter. The odyssey is in fact only the journey to the journey home. But to go back home implies that we were already there, and have left it at some point. So it appears that our going home, our odyssey, is an illusion of some kind. We are going in search of what we already have. We have gone on a war. For to seek what we already are is always a war. It always brings suffering, lack, and the such. It separates us from home. It multiplies monsters. That’s an easy thing to see. There is no need of a long odyssey.

We have the belief that reality is in appearances and forms, when it is in fact in the formless. We have the belief that our body-mind is our identity, when we are only contained in the infinite awareness of being. We have the belief that we need to adjust to a world that is separate from our own being, when we and the world are one being alone, perfectly adjusted to each other. We indulge in the comfort of our illusory view on existence, when this comfort is only the postponing of our journey home, and the fuelling for our own suffering. ‘There’ is our journey within — to go from an illusion to the reality hidden within the illusion. To go from what we are not to what our nature truly is — which really is only to go from what we are to what we are.

Now, if we’re struggling within, it means we are still without. We still see the within as the without. We still have monsters there, and a difficult trip to be engaged in. We’re still on an odyssey. We’re still intoxicated by the Lotus-eaters, who make us forget about our journey home. We’re still captured by the cyclops Polyphemus. Still fighting some giant cannibals; or wrestling with the goddess Circe, who turns us into what we are not. We’re still resisting the enticing song of the Sirens, who keeps us mortal beings. Still being held captive by the false promise of the nymph Kalypso who, by the way, is literally ‘she who conceals’. We’re not yet in a journey within — not yet in a journey home.

Once we have understood that our home is only within, in and as our innermost being, we must be there as a beggar. We never enter our own being, our happy place, as a king in its kingdom. We have to be a beggar, a nobody. That’s what Odysseus does when he reaches home: he comes as a beggar, unknown to all. That’s the way to be home. We leave being a person of any kind, of any rank. Then, the last fights with our few remaining demons is quickly done — not a big deal. It doesn’t take time or distance. Doesn’t take endless coming and going, reaching and leaving, being on the journey. Home is home. We cannot go where we are. Home is an easy place to be in. That’s where we have seemingly started, and find ourself naturally in.

In our own Odyssey, there is always a twist at the end. In fact, we realise that there was no danger or difficulty, no storms or monsters, no length of time, no far-off countries. We had been on a quiet, mirror-like mountain lake all along — just didn’t notice it. The whole story was invented. Beautiful, exciting, painful, maybe necessary, but invented.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alessandro Allori (1535-1607)

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Website:
– Alessandro Allori (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Self Recognition

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Hibiscus and Sparrow’ – Katsushika Hokusai, 1830 – WikiArt

 

Nasreddin Hodja is what could be called a sublime idiot. He is a liar, irreverent, a disturber of peace. But he is also ingenious, free, full of wit, a timeless figure whose stories have spread and been adapted the world over. In the Sufi tradition, they were used for study purposes.

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One day Nasrudin walked into a shop. 
The owner came forward to serve him. 
‘First things first,’ said Nasrudin. ‘Did you see me walk into your shop?’ 
‘Of course.’ 
‘Have you seen me before?’ 
‘Never in my life.’ 
‘Then how do you know it is me?’

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Nasrudin’s Pointers:
I happen to be me, apparently located in, and certainly connected with this body, amongst billions, trillions of other possibilities. I am me, I can be addressed, recognised, challenged, by other beings or things without them ever having the experience of being this particular ‘me-form’ that I am. I am uniquely built. And yet how silly it would be that the consciousness that I am was just but one version of trillions of other consciousnesses. If it was, what would be the chances for these different consciousnesses — including animals’ — to be so closely related to each other, let alone meet in any deep way? Separation does’t seem to make sense. Like Nasrudin is implying, how would we even recognise each other? How would we know, when we address another person, that we could relate at all, that she is a ‘me’ in the same way that I too am a ‘me’? This simple recognition of the ‘I am’ in me, or her, or him, is the very experience of our own true nature, the oneness that reverbates in each and every human ‘I am ness’. It is said in one Upanishad, “When a man directly realises this effulgent Self, the Lord of all that has been and will be, he no longer wishes to hide himself from it.” So even though we think we are, nobody is in fact hidden, private, with his essential being. We are being in full light. We think we are hidden because of a few petty thoughts, images, or memories. But the essential and fundamental part of our being is shared. Stephen Jourdain once wrote: “Somewhere behind you, someone calls for you. Hey, John! Or Peter, or Paul, or Annie. You turn around. I give the name ‘me’ to the gentle and saintly reason of this movement. It’s as simple and luminous as that. No reason to search further. (…) To aim for another encounter other than this one is furious folly.” I had this thought one day that if a young man, a westerner, rich, educated, were to suddenly experience the being of an old, poor, uneducated Indian woman, it would take him a long time to notice that a change had occurred. Such is the power of ‘I am’, of the sense of ‘me’ in every being, of the pervasiveness of our shared being in — or more accurately said, beyond — our apparently different forms. Maybe that’s why, as Nasrudin once asserted, “everything is true”…

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One day a fool asked Nasrudin ‘is God true?’
‘Everything is true’ replied Nasrudin.
‘Even false things?’
‘Even false things are true’, said Nasrudin.
‘But how can that be?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t do it’, shrugged Nasrudin.

 

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The Nasreddin stories are borrowed from ‘The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin’ by Idries Shah, and ‘Sufism/Nasrudin’ Wikibooks.

‘Nasreddin’s pointers’ is by Alain Joly

Bibliography:
– ‘The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin’ – by Idries Shah – (ISF Publishing)
– ‘Nasreddin Hodja: 100 tales in verse’ – by Raj Arumugam – (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)
– ‘Radical Awakening: Cutting Through the Conditioned Mind’ – by Stephen Jourdain – (Inner Directions Publishing)

Websites:
– Nasreddin Hodja (Wikipedia)
– The Idries Shah Foundation
– Katsushika Hokusai (Wikipedia)
– Stephen Jourdain

 

Ishani’s Quest

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Girl Streched out on the Grass’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1890 – WikiArt

C13B4E22-B500-482A-B5FA-8105E1A2E541here was once a young girl of about ten years old, called Ishani. She lived on a mountain farm with her father. Her mother died a few years ago, and since then her father has grown bitter, hard, a gruff man. He started drinking, stopped seeing anybody, and forced his daughter to the same isolation. He wasn’t a bad man, but was saddened by the loss of his wife, and exasperated at not being able to communicate with his daughter.

Ishani had long black hair, and large greenish eyes. Martyred by her father who expected her to replace her mother with the chores of the house, she had become fearful and shy. She spoke faintly and her demeanour was hesitant. Yet, despite her misfortune, she has kept an angelic face and her innocence was intact.

Although still a little girl, Ishani was ahead of her age, because of the work and responsibility that fell on her, the suffering that went with it. As for her father, he was exasperated by Ishani’s silence and withdrawn attitude, by her lack of courage at work, her mistakes and forgetfulness. He could easily get angry, which further frightened Ishani. She no longer knew if she should hate him, submit, run away, feel guilty, or take pity on him. These two beings were caught in a spiral where each fed the other with his or her inability to break this burden. […]

A fairy story, about the inner quest of a little girl… (READ MORE…)