Meditation in a Nutshell

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Mediterranean Seacost’ – Isaac Levitan, 1890 – WikiArt

When you have an hour in front of you given to meditation or contemplation, don’t ever think that you are engaging in something that is happening in time and place. It is not an hour that you have, that you occupy with an activity. Nothing is taking place, and nothing is lasting in time. Forget these well-rehearsed notions. Your meditation is a presence in which time and place cease to appear as a frame in which you live. They die out in yourself, are melted in your essence, to never reappear quite in the same way. They are washed by your living presence. You are cleansed of their conceptual limitations. Meditation is like a good bath, and you are the water. Nobody is having a bath. Presence is not what you are in. Presence is what you are, and you are nowhere to be found.

There is only a sinking, a deepening of presence. Borders are discovered to be not there. Walls falling all around. Divisions re-assembled. Your being ceases to be mistaken for a limited entity, but is solely the wild, unlimited, unlocated, dimensionless expanse of the nature of everything and everyone. You are in a place that doesn’t have any location, and where time cannot enter. Presence is the only thing in presence. Your life ceases to take place in time, which appears to be just a tool that finds its expression through your thinking process. And space is the illusion that perceptions are creating for you to have a location. Presence provides you with all the necessary appearances to create a body-mind-world. Meanwhile, you as pure being remain untouched, changeless, massive, solid, teeming. Meditation as an activity has ended. Who could possibly meditate in the absence of a meditator?

You have now landed in a spot where you have no need to be a separate entity, and no advantage for it. You have ceased being a person with a story and a destiny. Your body doesn’t qualify you anymore, and is not the recipient of your self. You have become independent, free, non-aligned. You acquire the proportions of a whole world, which has now become your most intimate body. You have lost all qualifications, all identities, and have surrendered to the one all encompassing, all pervading being. Nothing could describe you now. What you are has been relieved of every objective substance. You couldn’t worry the least for your self, which you discover to be devoid of even the possibility of being harmed, diminished, or impaired. Suffering appears to you like the most exotic thing there is. Hope is not even on the list, and all impulse of seeking is gone and forgotten. Wholeness fills you all, and makes you the thing you had previously sought, hoped and suffered for, in every possible direction except in the direction of your own present, inescapable being.

What you have longed for is what you are, which is being alone. When you have been stripped of all the attributes that pertain to time and place, to qualities, conditionings, situations, objects, including the body-mind-world you apparently live in, then you may come upon what you truly are. A being alone, unattached, empty of place, devoid of time, fierce and fearless like a peaceful, unmovable, gargantuan warrior. Why a warrior? Because you as being have subdued all forms, and have been made the vanquisher and pacifier of every division, limitation, separation, and defect. You have consented to your formless nature. This verily, is meditation in a nutshell.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)

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Website:
– Isaac Levitan (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

Remembrance

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Remember’ – Nicholas Roerich, 1924 – WikiArt

All the things that stand out in us, and that we finally believe to be us — our story — are the rugged parts of our existence. They are what we fear or project. What we separate from and refuse to embrace. What we identify with and refuse to let go. What we have used for our identity, to shape our person, and draw some pride and contentment, or some shame and resentment. All the same. We are the children of circumstances and failures, of successes and apparent choices. Of sufferings. So we have shaped ourself with and from what we are not — from what we can remember and hook on. From events and ideas. From what can give us a form and a semblance of reality. But with all these, we are left only with what doesn’t truly satisfy us, doesn’t quench our thirst, doesn’t make us a rock but only a fragile, elusive entity. There is more to us than story and existence. There is what we cannot remember and make a story of. What we cannot fit into the shape of a person. What we have left unnoticed in the interstices of our life.

Why is it, do you think, that we often have difficulty remembering the happiest parts of our lives, which tend to disappear into thin air? Why cannot we seize happiness? Why is it that we seem to disappear in it and with it? That the best part of what we are, is the part less remembered and graspable? We tend to emphasise the foreground, the highlights, what exists, appears, and disappears. We have little consideration for what stands behind, unnoticed — the still, silent, benevolent matrix of it all. The unfathomable that we are, with its indomitable nature. That which lends a ground to all forms and appearances, including time and space. That which is not an object in our experience. Which is not an idea or a representation. Which is alive and can only be felt in and as the depth of our being. Which has the solidity of a rock that can never be moved. Which will never be a person, never have accidents, never be shamed or shaped by circumstances or events. This most profound nature of our being holds for us the peace and happiness which we are seeking in the foreground. We borrow the happiest parts of our existence to our own nature, while thinking it lies in chances and accidents.

If this nature of ourself is not felt, we will live with fear and lack. So this is our worthiest remembrance. This is where we have to be. To live as that field of being is to remember our nature as the rock-like essence of all beings, things and events. Then, this sublime identity that we have found ourself to be will matter more than any life achievement or result. It will be like the air we breathe. It is ourself seen in the conscious light of our being. In this, happiness is prevailing because it is the very colour of being. In fact, happiness is devouring our old self, which is why and how we as a separate entity disappear every time we feel at peace and content. Peace becomes our very identity — the eternal, ever-present nature of our being. Life then puts on the clothes of clarity and well-being, and our self deserts the ruggedness of the eventful life of time and place. What we ‘remember’, according to the etymology, is what we ‘call to mind’. So we ought to be cautious of what we remember or forget. That will condition our being happy or miserable.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947)

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Website:
– Nicholas Roerich (Wikipedia)

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

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The Religious Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two monks’ – Carl Bloch, 1861 – WikiArt

Spirituality is an exaggeration. We need to exaggerate our commitment to truth, and be ‘spiritual’ for a time. We need to take on this role. Being is to be favoured at the expense of experience. This is the way to re-establish a lost truth, to re-assert what we truly are against what we have conditioned ourself to be, by force of habit. It takes a lot to fight an addiction, to forget a well-rehearsed habit, to extricate ourself from our deeply imbedded identifications with our body and mind. What’s running in our head has a persuasive power, and perceptions have a way to project everything perceived as being out there, into what we commonly conceptualise as a world separate from ourself. So spirituality is a sort of rehab. We go to the church or the temple only because of our failure in making a cathedral of our experience. We attend the mass in reason of our not being grateful for the given bread of our life. And we meditate for lack of noticing that the meditator is a superimposition on our simple experience of being. We’re overdoing it, but it’s for the good cause. We need a magnifying glass to notice what is hidden in the cacophony of experience.

But spirituality is not a way of life. it is a temporary overemphasis, a dramatisation. We were never meant to be spiritual, or a believer in a religion. Religion is a teaching, a suggestion to realign ourself with truth rather than with an acquired belief. It is the temporary treatment for our suffering. It is the gentle scolding of a parent when we have made a mistake. It is benevolence — an encouragement towards a happier living. It is a bond and a reverence towards the simple reality of our being. So spirituality is an effort towards effortlessness. It is an attempt to recognise the given in ourself, amongst all the things that we have acquired and wrongly identified with. We have to dig out our true nature as pure, undivided, peaceful being, and have to be for a while a zealot for this, an ultra, a devotee of being, and to leave experience alone, to restrict our commitment with the world of things. It is a descent into spirit, before spirit pervades the totality of experience.

So all the paraphernalia of religion, all the words and practices of spirituality, and the endless commenting on the commenting, are only a means to acquire what we already have and already are, although unknowingly. Practice is to just be, and be happy. Prayer is to live a life that has meaning and clarity. Meditation is to have a vision of what we are, and with that vision, to love and share our deepest nature with others and with the world. It is to restore reality, in order to give ourself back to it. Because we cannot understand, feel, love, and just be, we have elaborated rituals, prayers, teachings. Spirituality is not the truth, only the means to access it, as devotion to a deity is but the path towards true, unconditional love. So we might want to push our practice. We might have to snob experience for a while, to leave it in the marge, in order to concentrate on our being only being. And we might want to stay there, in being — a yogi of presence. We don’t want to be an occasional visitor. We long to be a resident, to have being as our eternal companion. To feel that we are that naturally, and effortlessly. We want to drop all affectation. Effort is only a temporary device, to defeat a bias acquired over life times, and instilled by a whole society. We want to be free of ourself, and to quit being a believer, or a practitioner.

Then life becomes a temple, whether we are in the busy heart of a city, or in a monastery, whether we live the active life of a working hero, or the silent one of a dedicated monk. There will be a day when our life will take place in the clarity of being. When our daily activities will receive the flow of a constant radiance of meaning and beauty. When love will be the very canvas of all our relationships. When our duties and chores will be clothed with a flavour of sacredness. On that day, this tragic and magnificent exaggeration that spirituality is, will be replaced by a life that is discovered to be unaffected, spontaneous, uninhibited, relaxed, and genuine. Maybe this truly is the religious life.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Carl Bloch (1834-1890)

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Website:
– Carl Bloch (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Creep

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Radiohead @ TD Garden (Boston, MA)’ – by Kenny Sun – Wikimedia

I wonder if you have ever seen the face of love, what loving indifference is? I have some days ago, while watching a concert by Radiohead on the internet. It was during the band’s most celebrated hit, called ‘Creep’. This song is the stage of an unrequited love. But I suggest it goes further than that. It is the story of a rage, of not being enough. We all have lived through expectations that were turned down. We all have made efforts that didn’t pay off. We all want to feel special, to belong, to be at peace. We abhor being behind ourself, faking our contentment and control. So we all have known this feeling of being a ‘creep’, or at least of not being good enough. That’s why we live so hectically, constantly looking for better and more, wanting to feel complete, enough at last. Maybe that’s why the song happened to be such a hit, beyond its obvious musical qualities: it is like an echo of the secret battle we are engaged in, of our quiet desperation, and of our repeated attempt to put an end to our suffering.

I was watching the song being played, the singer yelling its rage amongst the gnashing saturated blasts coming from Jonny Greenwood’s guitar, lights illuminating the stage like a flash of lightning would. Then it surprised me. For just a few seconds, the camera caught in the public a young woman whose attitude was quiet, mildly concerned, but deeply tuned to herself. Everybody around her was involved, shouting, dancing, taking their share, drawing their identity and happiness from the vibes of the music. But she was not. Didn’t need to. Her need was to be quiet. Peace was her home. Beauty was where she was, and where she had landed on. She was tasting her being. She was taking it all in, but with a peaceful, loving indifference. For her, separation had been slain, and she had become a silent watcher, a taster of being, a madonna.

There was no need for her to dance and shout the lyrics of her favourite Radiohead song, for she dwelled in silence. It was all taking place somewhere else, in a placeless place where time was nowhere to been seen or experienced. All our objects of adoration are never the point, are never the goal. They are the means to feel and taste in ourself this most profound sense of peaceful being that is always here, always now with us, and that we miss in reason of our obsessive attachment to objects, with their derived outcomes and rewards. When the love or enthusiasm for an object — a song, a piece of art, a football match — is brought to its paroxysm, we merge with it, and in this merging forget our own person. This forgetting is the stage set for a meeting with ourself, for an encounter with our own silent being. We feel what we could call, a paradoxical serenity. So the pleasure of the senses is never the object of our desire, and never what our seeking is about. We are after something more elusive, the harder catch that is our own being. We long for this profound sense of peace and security that lives there as our identity. This serenity is not dependent on circumstances, but lies naturally in and as our most intimate being. This pure being is our true identity, and is in fact what we are really seeking behind all our pleasure oriented pursuits. Pleasure can never be a match to being. Pleasure is but the child of separation, while being is the realisation of our deepest identity as love, and its expression as oneness.

Love takes over experience. Love dominates experience, it brings it down to its knees, reveals what it is made of. Experience appears to be of secondary importance, not because it is not important, but because its importance lies in the light that shines on it and gives it its reality and meaning. We cease to be personally involved. We are just present, and this presence is our most precious and efficient involvement. We are indifferent not because we do not care, but in reason of the preeminence of love in our heart, with its acute, unfocused awareness. Love responds to the whole. There is no personal self present, that feels separate and insecure, fearing and seeking. That one is absent, leaving all the place to the quality of simply being, with no preferences in it, but with a total, impersonal, peaceful engagement. This peace is the most profound signature or identity contained in every experience that we go through. To recognise the nature of ourself as peaceful being, is to recognise the nature of experience as that one same peaceful being. We will never have to complain: ‘I wish I was special’. Never have to say: ‘I don’t belong here’. In love, there is no being a creep.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Kenny Sun (Wikimedia)

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Website:
– Creep (Radiohead Song) (Wikipedia)

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

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A Chronicle of Thought

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1797 – WikiArt

Most of our thinking is so much unnecessary work. Consider all the worries we had, that have been fuelled by thought, and have now evaporated into thin air. Think of all our expectations and dreams that were never fulfilled, replaced by just being what we are now. There’s been so much energy wasted in these internal fights with reality. So much presence that we have missed or hidden for being tied up with these endless rounds of endless thoughts. Thinking can be a damaging factor in our being aware of our utmost reality. And we most often don’t need to have thoughts to actually be caught in their net. Thoughts are good at delegating. They will sooner than we think be replaced by chronic tensions, nasty feelings, diffuse depression, and the uneasiness of being a self. All the troubles contained in being a person — the endless suffering that goes with it, and the seeking that never seems to stop. In fact, we have been sculpted by our thoughts. We owe thoughts all that we have seemingly become. It really gives me shivers to think about it.

Our thoughts are both the cause and result of the idea of ourself they have imposed on us over time. We have been a follower of thoughts. We have been conditioned by them. They have us in their spell, and we could spend a lifetime without confronting them, without going right to the bottom of their essence. Have you ever met a thought face to face? Do it now. Ask your next unnecessary thought that simple question: ‘Why are you here?’, and see its reaction. See how it will shy away and retreat. Thoughts are not courageous beings. They thrive out of our carelessness. They love our being inattentive. It goes the same way with the self they have made us into. If it is left to act alone, that self will never leave you out of its own will. It will keep hiding your most truthful identity. It will continue feeding you with its thoughtfully rehearsed beliefs and illusions. You will keep being an entity. You won’t see the infinite that your being is made of. Silence and eternity will keep evading you. They too are shy — they don’t like when that boastful self is around.

Thoughts are silent workers, and pernicious ones. We think we have them when they in fact have us. The problem is not so much in their being there, but in what they have left in their trail for us to believe in. That’s why we call them ‘thought’ — a past participle. Thoughts are known when they have already been thought. They are agents from the past, that are here for a mission. They have created an entity that is in turn thinking them with the view of keeping itself strong and alive. So we are caught and doomed, aren’t we? Well… maybe not. Maybe thoughts too have their weaknesses, and I’ll tell you one. Pierce your thoughts through to get to their ground of being. Your freedom from thoughts is in your looking beyond them. And your freedom from being a self is in giving attention to what beholds that self, to what gives it the light necessary for its appearance, and for the knowing of your thoughts. Everything that you can know is lit by a knowing faculty. Be engrossed by that light, be only that one, for there is no thinker behind any of your thoughts, and no knower behind any of your ‘knowns’. Espouse the being in you that is responsible for being aware of everything — thoughts, objects, experiences, the feeling of being a self separate from the world. Just stay present in, as, and to this deepest, most intimate presence — the one which you cannot know, or even be as an object, and which will deliver you from being a self. In that deliverance is contained the severing of all the thoughts that are like the bricks and walls of your illusory self. You will hear the sound of the rubbles crashing at your feet. This sound is the sound that freedom makes. Silence comes afterwards — and this silence is you, who you are before the coming of any thought, truthful or not. But really, nothing is new here — after all, Paul the Apostle said it all long ago in far more succinct terms:

“Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory,
are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.”
~ 2 Corinthians, 3:16-18

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Paul the Apostle (5-64/65 AD)

Painting by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

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Websites:
– Paul the Apostle (Wikipedia)
– J.M.W. Turner (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The End of Self-Improvement

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Shores of Normandy’ – Gustave Courbet, 1866 – WikiArt

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“To know that your Self has not changed,
this illustration itself is enough.”
~ Ramana Maharshi

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There is no ameliorating emptiness, developing the unborn, aggrandising what is, and expecting the timeless to be anything more or different than what it is. Being leaves no room for improvement because it is not a thing, it is not a result, a something that has a cause. How do you improve the non-objective? How does the infinite progress? How do you make better a self that is absent as self — as something different or separate from experience? So self-improvement is a misunderstanding and a form of violence. It is an imposition, a belief that we squeeze to fit our idea of reality, an objection to the innate perfection of what is. It is mind-made, a product, a progeny of conditioning. It is designed for the continuation of our belief in being a self or entity that can be objectively defined. And remember this: every object, every ‘thing presented to the mind’ — as Latin word ‘objectum’ stands for — is in fact nothing but something thrown in the way of your knowing who you are. This is the meaning of Latin ‘obicere’ — ‘ob-‘: ‘in the way of’ and ‘jacere’: ‘to throw’. The self that you believe yourself to be, and that you strive to improve, is your hindrance. It is what makes you blind to your true nature.

To improve on a self is to make it continue, it is to give it credit, to give it the existence it never had. After all, we all want to feel real, to see that we can act, and have a power on our self. So we have the desire to consolidate and sculpt our being through rendering it an object that we can manipulate. We want to make a profit of our self, and see a return on our investment. In fact, to improve myself is nothing but a form of merchandising. It is a trade and a transaction. It is retail management, the ‘cutting off’ of our self with the aim of maximising profits. But don’t ever forget that if you are able to improve yourself, you can therefore also make it deteriorate, worsen, decline, decay. So what then?… is self-improvement decay, error, illusion? Is it ourself going astray, being mislaid? Are we really so sure that our being could ever decay? That awareness is a so fragile thing?

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On how there is no improving our self and being… (READ MORE…)

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The Story of It All

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Large Bathers’ – Paul Cézanne, 1905 – WikiArt

There is a hidden presence everywhere we go, that hides within our experience. It is concealed within its own shining, and is the reason for our seeing and experiencing anything. It seems to be woven into our very being, to have married its being to our being. Would we want to separate ourself from it, that we wouldn’t know where to go. In fact, there is no way outside ourself. We have it all here as we are. Our life is unfolding within that which is ‘myself’. We are the garden of our self, of all our human endeavour, of our quest and of our finding, of our lack and of our glory. All that we live for, when reduced to its core target, is to be relieved from our chronic sense of not having enough. We feel there is a thing here to be found, without knowing what it is. So we become blind to ourself, and are consequently driven into the world, seeking there in the distance of time or place, what is already here in and as our very self. We are our own hidden remedy, our secret paradise. We have shrouded the infinite within ourself, and are erring within our own misconception.

In fact, we have been misled by our having a body, imagining us inside it rather than it inside us. We have belittled ourself, have lost faith, squeezing ourself into a thought that we have aggrandised to being an entity. We are a trick of the mind — nothing more — and have lived caught within our own creation, struggling inside our own mistake, wrestling with a world that we have stripped of its essence. We have divided our experience into separate objects, and have reduced ourself to being one such object. Now we are striving to unravel our own mistake, to defeat our foolish, unfortunate belief — hence our suffering and our struggling. Our life has been made into a scream for peace and justice, and the silence of simply being has retired within us, into the hiding place where we have pushed it. We have shied away from our truthful nature, and wandered off from simply being naked being. We have clothed our emptiness with the garment of a self delineated by thought and identification. We have limited the infinite to our convenience, and squeezed eternity into the burden of time.

But there is a dawn here just as we are. There is a light ready to overcome our night. For we never got lost far from our home, never took our stand away from our own being. So our journey is always only the shortest step from ourself to ourself. We have to return where we never left. We have to get acquainted with ourself, with who we truly are, and get accustomed to our being — much wider than we ever noticed. We have a sky at our disposal when we have dismissed the thousands fascinations and identifications with everything that is at a distance from ourself, and is the prey to our mind and our senses. There, curled within and prolonged without, treated so far with contempt, is our own indomitable self. There, trampled by a belief about ourself that we have imposed on everything, is a magnificence. There, is the being of our being, what we-the-seeker have sought everywhere except in its own place of living, which is ourself. We have missed it because it was the last thing investigated, the last stone lifted, for being too close and intimate. Who could have thought that the sought was the seeker?

Now we only have to be that ground of being alone, at the exception of all that is moving and changing in it, and that isn’t us, not truly us. We only have to sink beneath the moving sea of our multiple, insatiable experiences, and let ourself reach that part of ourself that cannot be known or possessed, and is yet our undeniable self and identity. Here we discover that our being is the being of everyone and everything, and that we are bound to this totality by love. Here every single thing in our experience is unraveling itself back to its essence, taking its right place within it — and that essence is found to be our essence. And god’s being too finds its right place and meaning in and as ourself — and we too have our place in god. And our so precious peace is now teeming as our own being, and justice is found right under every step we are taking. Now we have silence as our very best companion, and our seeking — which was our suffering — has been buried under it. Now we are right where we were supposed to be when the world became a world, and the son of god became a woman or a man. And now…

Now let me rest and live and walk the world as I am, alone and one, and all in I.

 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cezanne (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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