Entangled Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

There’s been a trend here for millennia. I would call it the trend of entanglement. Or maybe it is rather a habit, a belief, an erroneous view that we are bound, attached, entangled to our life, to its situations and circumstances. We are enmeshed in our thoughts, worries, conditionings, capacities, habits, patterns of living from which we get no release. Thankfully our sleep comes timely everyday to deliver us from the demon of entanglement. Yet we have to bow to the evidence that our perpetual seeking is nothing but our repeated attempts at freeing ourself from the prison of entanglement. We have tied ourself to its relentless effects, and are suffering consequently. We have failed to see that our entanglement is born out of our belief in being separated from the life we are in. We most of the time feel alone, detached, broken up, disconnected from our surroundings which as a result challenge us, and against which we have to fight, or from which we must repeatedly flee into further separation. That’s the life we live in for the most part. That’s what we have. An entangled life.

Now, the reason we feel so overcome and ruled by our circumstances — and often defeated by them — is that we take our many entanglements for a reality. Through our being a person, we have made everything that is ‘other’ a possible threat or cure, and live therefore in constant insecurity — hence our compulsive seeking or avoiding. But we haven’t gone far enough, to find out that there is a supreme, sacred entanglement, which ties us to our self in an irrevocable way. This entanglement with our being is devoid of all previous entanglements. It ties us in an embrace so total that our person feels merged with the being it is made of, and discovers itself to be not there, or rather to be only one, undivided being with no need or possibility to be tied to anything but itself. That’s how the feeling of being entangled is vanquished: by a more radical, ultimate, terminal form of entanglement. An entanglement with no entanglement in it, for it has disentangled itself from all objectivity or otherness, and be made into a subjectivity so absolute that it has only itself as a possible other — which means no otherness at all. This absence of otherness is the surfacing of a life that we discover to be devoid of inner suffering or conflict. It is a life of freedom, untied, disentangled, and therefore spacious, peaceful, and bound only to its essence, which is love.

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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 Distant Country

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The return of the prodigal son’ – by Elena Murariu, 2018 – Wikimedia

How ironic this life is, isn’t it? How incongruous to have imagined that this is the real deal: being a person locked in and bound to the limits of a body. How astonishing to have this certainty to be a self that feels separate and needs to be fulfilled. To think we have to fight our way through the world, and suffer with such consistency. To have been persuaded that seeking is our way of life, without which we are doomed to poverty and stagnation. Yet the illusion of our being in a world is so convincing that we had to buy its many effects and constraints, and be subjected to its perils. So we have gone far away, thinking that we could live remote from our true home and identity, that we could roam the world on our own, and snob our essence. So we have landed into what we are not. We have lived the adventures of a person, gone through challenges and despair, carried ourself through time and space, and lived attached to worries and hopes, to the aches of regrets and loneliness, and the brief consolation contained in the occasional relief from our wrestling with the physicality of the world. So we have paid the price of such a lonesome, faraway trip. As Augustine of Hippo once said: “Distant country signifies forgetfulness of God“. We have left our father behind, despised his presence, judged his love as unworthy. Unhappiness is intrinsic in having mistaken an illusion for the reality, just as it is natural to be in the shadow when we hide from the sun. But maybe there is a return from our erroneous view. Maybe the time has come to stop being tied to a false idea, and to return from our adventures into deceitfulness.

Now see that this faraway trip is but the following of a belief. It is our being led into an illusion, a fantasy — shared by all — that the life in and as this body-mind is all the reality there is, and that the way we live and believe is our truthful condition, to which we have to submit ourself. We have swallowed that suffering is the condition of life, and the way to alleviate it resides in either circumstances, good luck, or smart choices. But in fact, suffering is but the consequence of our departure from our true, forgotten nature. It is the natural outcome of our prodigality, of our obsessive desire to possess and be more than what we already are, of our seeking happiness inside the development of our adventures into ego-land. But as far as we may have erred into agony and chance, there is chiselled in our very nature, a return into the open arms of our simple, inescapable being. This quiet resting as our innermost being is the home from which we should never depart, no matter how enticing is the call for an adventure in the distant land of separation. There is a father or mother here, a being eternal, always waiting for the return of their prodigal son or daughter. And it is in the nature of this return to be a welcoming one, for the simple reason that you are yourself the embrace contained in being only being. So your return to the father was never a return from any kind of reality, but the noticing that we had in fact never left its loving embrace, and that all that was needed is our letting go, our bowing to the grace contained in simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Elena Murariu (born 1963)

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Website:
– Elena Murariu (Your Portal to the Art of Icon)

Suggestion:
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Twisted Rainbow

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Hope’ (detail) – George Frederick Watts, 1886 – WikiArt

Unhappiness is a strange thing, for against all appearances, and under serious investigation, it is not really found. We are making it up as we go along. In fact, there is no such thing as an absence of happiness. Yet we are nurturing this absence with great consistency, designing our so called unhappiness with care, through our thoughts, our memory, our attachments, our stubborn persistence. But only try to experience its effects outside your thoughts and feelings, in the absence of your mind, and you’d have to confess that you can’t find here anything like a misery. The reason is: unhappiness is not a thing in itself. It is veiled happiness. It is the covering up of your innate peace. It is past residues and future expectations tossing the tranquillity of the now. But all such disturbances, discomforts, or distresses, are always only temporary events, passing weathers distracting us from what is always here, always faithful, always to be trusted: the peace contained in simply being. This peace is in fact the very making and backbone of our lives, its solid background. It could never leave you no matter how hard you may try. Its not being felt is a form of snobbery. You have missed your innate joy in reason of your not looking in the right place. You have neglected your true, natural being for wanting to be somebody. You have been scorning yourself out of vainglory. In fact, unhappiness is but the simple mourning of a loved one who is missed: our true self. It is but a distraction from the boredom of our ignorance. Or a warning for a wrong turn taken.

Unhappiness is not found in physical pain, or in the natural grief following a loss. These are all compatible with happiness, as is a shared, compassionate sorrow. These are wise and healthy responses to life situations and challenges. Unhappiness is of a different nature. It is more like a habit or an indulgence. Often, we would rather be unhappy than shatter a well-rehearsed idea of ourself, in which we have invested our most cherished identity. Unhappiness is also the result of a fallacy, and a form of delusion. It is a shadow which we nourish through our belief in being a person caught between seeking and resisting, and the reward of fulfilment. Unhappiness is only as real as our limited self is. One will follow the other both in death and in birth. So really, unhappiness is a self-inflicted pain. In a way, we could say that it is a sin. It is ourself being driven away from our happy, forgotten nature, and bound to the suffering self which we have identified ourself with. It is our twisted rainbow in the sky of ignorance, that appears naturally without being truly there. It is created by the rain of all our renouncements, of our constant search for security and approval, through accumulation and avoidance. So next time you meet some measure of unhappiness in your life, don’t believe it. Don’t be caught up and allured by its convincing appearance. See through it until you find its referent. See that unhappiness is not real as affliction or suffering. It only exists as the sum of all that hinders the happiness which is the nature of your self as being. Your misery may in fact only be a passing, unassuming thought, maybe an innocent, unchallenged belief, or just a feeling hovering about, which you are taking too seriously. Not very much really. Hardly enough to send you far and away from the delight of simply being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904)

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Websites:
– George Frederic Watts ( Wikipedia)
– Hope (Watts) (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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The Reluctant Messiah

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ – Paul Gauguin, 1889 – Wikimedia

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“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me:
nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
~ Luke, 22:42

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Maybe it is more serious than you think. Maybe the line has been crossed without your noticing. Maybe there is no return to being what you imagined to be: A self, a person, self-contained in a body, armed with all the thoughts needed to represent you. Maybe there is no memory left of this old belief, and that you have to let it all go, all the kaleidoscope of separation, all the daunting suffering, all the interplay and thrill contained in being just one piece in the puzzle of life. Now all pieces have been joined to fade into one single presence with no pieces in it, a presence that you have espoused, that you have recognised to be your home — inherited and inhabited since before the dawn of time. Now you may have to move in with fear and reverence, for living in that new identity has consequences. It might transform you beyond your recognising, and in more drastic ways than you had expected.

It might shatter your dearest hopes and expectations, that were here in your heart, entertained to the point of cultivation. It might give you what you have sought all along, and stop dead every single desire for an ‘other’ to satisfy and fulfil you. It might demolish a dream, and disintegrate the map of yourself, that described who you were in such lively, never-ending details. It might silence you, when you so much enjoyed the delightful babbling of your anxious mind. And I won’t mention all your intimately held treasures of belief, all your ideas and opinions, that have put together that carefully built image of yourself: how they might be dampened, damaged, discarded for being found redundant.

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Read more about how our resistance can be made into surrender… (READ MORE…)

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A Trail of Glory

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The River of Light’ – Frederic Edwin Church, 1877 – WikiArt

If you happen to feel your being one day, don’t let it go out of sight. Follow it everywhere it is. Let it be your only guide. Be gently intoxicated by it, by yourself, by who you are, truly, when you have relinquished this obsession of being a body, and a mind. This is your one and only duty, to stay there, with being, to abide in it, and let yourself be moved by its unmoving current. Don’t go off at a tangent. Don’t take a single step, unless you have with you, as you, this being that you are, and that you could crush at any time, with the single thought that you have your own, separate being. Remember it to be your ultimate identity, the widest circle of your self, without any border, limitless, unfettered by any condition whatsoever.

Feel it in you, as being you, when you go to apparent places. Being tends to stay at home and let your body do the moving. For being never goes anywhere — it is not the travelling type. This is how you can simply go to buy some bread in your street and live a captivating adventure, or explore the farthermost recesses of the earth while feeling quietly at home. Feel that you as being are housing the world, that being is the landscape in which your life is taking place. So be only concerned with the landscape and life will then flow of its own accord. Don’t start believing that you have a life of your own. That’s only the prerogative of the suffering self. No life can be lived happily with an architecture or a design outside being.

And remember that being is a love affair. A renouncing of your own limited self, for a marriage with the beloved truth of your being. A free, princely, bounteous bowing to the infinite. So don’t start making an effort to be, for any effort is an attempt from the part of a belief to reassess its position as a distant, separate, other being. That’s how your nature becomes unseen, when you have replaced it with your own fake one, with your own invented self. For being never hides, if you don’t let it disappear under the weight of your seeking it, of your being somebody that is lacking. So don’t let your being escape you. Don’t lose its trail of joy and glory. Don’t be the one fleeing, running away, desiring to be yourself, by yourself, and then seeking to bring yourself back to the happiness that you have lost, in so many, so many immoderate, superfluous, inappropriate ways. Seek your bliss in being — where it only lies.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)

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Website:
– Frederic Edwin Church (Wikipedia)

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

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Being’s Glorious Life

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is no being inside you. Being is a presence that knows no inside and no outside, unless the inside is outside, and the outside inside. What a strange thing to have believed that there is a space inside us that could accommodate being. It would make ‘being’ just a wee sensation, maybe located in our chest, side by side with the pressure experienced at the moment of anxiety, or any other kind of sensation. We would have being like a thing that we possess in our body, a feeling that belongs to ‘me’, that would be one just for me, cherished as being me and only me, and to which I would attach all the things that I believe belong to me — like my qualities, my thoughts, my experiences and failures, and that sticky, stubborn feeling of suffering. And that’s how being gets lost: because of these many other grandiose feelings and sensations in ourself, that bring much excitement, when being is so discreet, so unassuming, doesn’t want to show off, and gets forgotten. Really—we think—there is not much to it.

But being has resources. For being is not only being. It is not just that I am. I also feel that, know that — that I am. Being has the capacity to know, to be aware. So it extends itself to all things. It has no frontiers, doesn’t like to be located, doesn’t fancy being imprisoned inside something, anything, be it a body. Being is adventurous. It likes to go for an outing, and experience its intimacy with all things that can be seen, touched, heard, and multiplied to constitute a world. So being creates the world by being aware of it. Being is the architect of everything, for without its patient knowing and nourishing, nothing would be in capacity to exist. I don’t like to say so, for you won’t fancy that, but you are superfluous to being — I mean you as your body, your thoughts, qualities, excitements, failures, sufferings, all the mountain you have accumulated, all that: just a small, secondary, inessential, barely noticeable expression of being. Being has stolen the show long ago, and you haven’t yet noticed it: That your body is just an interface between being and being. That what seems to be inside you is in fact just as much outside you. That what seems to be outside you is in fact just as much inside you. That your wee sense of being is all there is, and all that you are, of all infinity and of all eternity. That being’s glorious life is what love is, and where it lives. That being is one for all. And that there is no else or besides it.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
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