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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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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