Of Dimitry’s Prayer

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘A Quiet Monastery’ – Isaac Levitan, 1890 – Wikimedia

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“Open, O doors and bolts of my heart,
that Christ the King of Glory may enter!”
~ Dimitry of Rostov

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Prayer is an invitation for what is already here to show itself up. It is not that you already know who you are, and that you-the person are begging for a supreme entity, or for an other, to come and soothe you, for an external, benevolent providence to shower you with its benefits. Remember that there is no other entity than the entity of your self, no other providence than the providence of recognising who you are. Nothing, in matters of peace and happiness, could ever enter into you that is not already there. So don’t make that mistake over and over again: to wait for someone knocking at your door, to hope for something to fulfil you, to expect a new element to enter your life. The benefit of life is not with something you receive, but in what you recognise yourself to be. So prayer is prior. It is not in reaching but in realising, not in expecting but in recognising, not in receiving but in noticing, and not in having or possessing, but in being.

So always pray as if you were utterly alone. Pray as if you couldn’t ask anything, anyone, any favour or event, to give you something that is not already there in you, as you, expressed as your very own being. Notice that nothing of worth could ever enter your house that is not already present, already eating at your table, already thinking the thoughts you think, already dreaming the dreams you dream. This is how Dimitry’s prayer ought to be uttered.

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More reflections on a prayer by Dimitry of Rostov… (READ MORE…)

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The Adventure of Thought

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Head with Flowers’ (part) – Odilon Redon, 1907 – WikiArt

Thoughts are a strange thing. For they seem to be both indelibly ours and strangers passing in our sky. We have an ambivalent relationship to them. Sometimes they are part of us like a lover can be, so intricately woven to our being that they seem to have been sculpted out of our very essence. On other occasions, we see them from afar, unwanted, a despicable thing that we judge unworthy — thieves that have come to set us on a wrong course, rendering us unrecognisable to ourself. We have a love-hate relationship to our thoughts. We love the ones we judge to be good and worship them, befriend them, glorify them, and hate the ones that come to upset us, the bad ones that we refuse to endorse, or have a responsibility for. The ones that we leave scared and alone, ready to multiply and threaten our very being. They are like the obeying soldiers of our wounded self, the dark agents of our fears and of our rancour.

Thoughts end up being prey to our likes and dislikes, treated like objects are, judged as being often disloyal, incompetent, insufficient. We seem to be separated from them, to have little to do with them. But thoughts have been supremely important to us. In a way, they have created us, through our identifying with them. They have formed the limits of our self as a separate entity. In fact, thoughts are thinking us. We are the prey to their conditioned making, and are at the mercy of their limited expression. So we are most of the time reduced to being ourself a thought, a thought thinking itself out, and believing that it is representing nothing less but what we are at the core. Yet we are truly far from the mark. Thoughts have deluded us, have drifted from their being a simple tool to stealing our very identity by faking the appearance of a self separated from its thoughts, when that self is in fact just a magnified, engrossed, elaborated thought that bears no resemblance to what we truly are. Thoughts thrive on confusion, they flourish and fatten on the prosperous soil of ignorance.

But try to go beyond thoughts, to pass them by, to ignore them as being unimportant and move on, deeper, towards the very centre of your self. Notice the sense of being that is here before them, and that hosts them in last analysis. Touch the silence behind thought. Embrace who you are before you associate with things. Go to the place where no identification is possible, where you are free from conceptualisation, where thoughts have become unrelated to yourself, lost entities that have no relationship whatsoever to your truest being. You will begin to disconnect thoughts from yourself, to render them innocuous, and stop looking to them for your security or identity. You will discover a way of living where thoughts are scarce and rarify. You will have no room for thoughts. You will have disencumbered yourself, and will stop being blind to what is. For you will notice that your being extends to all possible things, and all times and places. It is a presence so unified that thoughts are being gradually expelled from your deepest being by losing their unifying justification. They become redundant to your self. They become what they should never have ceased being: a wonderful tool at the service of unity, a practical thing that is but the expression of the one. You will have stripped them of their being an impostor. That’s how you stop being a thought. Because you don’t need one to be yourself.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

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Website:
– Odilon Redon (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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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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The Shallow Well

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘View from the Ganges of the burning ghats’ – Edward Lear, 1873 – Wikimedia

We are but a layer. Our sense of identity has been downgraded to being just a thought whose presence is by now so habitual and pregnant that it is likened to our very self. This shallow well, this dubious layer, seems to be all that we have access to, and our thoughts and feelings have been upgraded to ridiculously important and all-consuming proportions. We have the identity of a thought imbued with itself, satisfied as it is to block the view to any deeper reality. It is ironical that the wonder and blessing of truth can be so effectively buried under the thin layer of a single thought about ourself. A thought that is so pervasive and convincing that few are the ones who have even the idea or curiosity of digging beyond it. But try it. A little probing works wonder.

Try to localise the shallow well of your illusory self. If you have to live your life from its vantage point, you might as well have a security check before embarking in such a serious journey. Is this all we are, this shallow thought that’s tossing itself about in our head? Is this all we are, this little body at the mercy of any impending death? Why such fatuous view about ourself? Was this beautiful mind of ours — that can behold the moon and the starry sky, that can fathom the silence and embrace the vision of beauty, the infinite expanse of love — was this mind created only to end up being likened to a thought? It really is a mystery that we have come to be satisfied with a shallow well, when we have at our hand the infinite and largely unexplored field of consciousness: that thing in us that is responsible for our very experiencing and without which no thing or being could ever exist or appear.

The idea we have about ourself is not our real self. We are satisfied with a vague representation, with a limited understanding. We don’t go all the way. We feel it okay to live our whole life — even build empires — without knowing who we are. But this essential knowledge of ourself should really be where we start our journey from. And a good look is worth many books of spiritual knowledge. We only have to notice that we have misplaced our focus. We have been seduced by the objectivity implied in the functioning of our sense perceptions. We feel we have to reach for ourself in the same way, and so we create this dubious sense of self as a projected idea. This mesmerisation is the shallow well — or shadow well — where we do nothing but go round and round in repeated circles of self-assumed ignorance. Only step aside once and you will realise that this thin paper-like layer of yourself is but a bundle of accumulated beliefs.

Only step aside once and you will realise that your self is a deep, unfathomable well that cannot be seen unless you merge with it and become of it. Feel your being as being that emptiness with no end. Be the aware quality behind your very seeing and hearing. Be this divine threshold of pure awareness. Don’t take refuge inside a shallow well. Realise its hidden depth. Relinquish the whimsical thought that stands in the way. Move just below or beyond this idea of and about yourself. There is some courage needed in this small death, but the reward is the path taken from limitation to freedom, from suffering to happiness, from death to immortality, from shallowness to infinity, from lie to truth, from pretending to truly being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Edward Lear (1812-1888)

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Website:
– Edward Lear (Wikipedia)

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Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Direct Path

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring’ – Ma Yuan, 1190 – WikiArt

We are such complex beings, always confused by endless choices and directions, caught as we are in the repeated convolutions of our thought patterns. Because we see ourselves as an intricate network of thoughts and feelings, we are naturally engaged in finding the solutions for our life conundrum in that same dark cavern of thought. But mistakingly and unfortunately so. For this is a labyrinth from which we can never come out. It has been designed for our loss and suffering. It has been masterly laid down by ignorance, for the sole and only purpose of perpetuating itself. If you want my advice: stay away if you can. But if you are already trapped and caught, well don’t worry: there is a way out. And it might be an easier one than you think.

The problem with thought is that it is constantly crowning itself as the chief master in all deeds and endeavours. It is doing so well in so many fields that its influence overflows beyond its natural area of competence. It is forever engaged in a process of belief and identification. It has persuaded itself that it represents the body, and is by now certain to be a person — a ‘he’ or ‘she’ who commands. It has put the load of finding happiness on itself, and is driving the body out in the world in a constant search for new objects and circumstances, all with the aim to obtain the precious package. And since it has come all the way here, it might as well seek to bring to itself not only happiness but also peace, freedom, love, justice, beauty, and the likes.

This is how we get lost — along that avenue of thought. Along that deceptive, inefficient, never ending seeking. This is madness — this labyrinth we have created for ourself. Thought and its acolytes as feelings, images, body, hope, desire — all that joyous team — out on a mission to find happiness. The danger of such an endeavour is to be found in the thin line down the page on the contract, that stipulates the side effects of such a folly: namely that this mistaken avenue will produce suffering in the forms of all the fears, violence, hatred, confusion, and sorrow that this endeavour brings with itself. And we won’t be able to heal these unfortunate ailments with more of the same as we failingly try to. Suffering can never be overcome using the tools that brought it in the first place. We have to find another way out of this labyrinthine maze and mess.

The good news is that you don’t have to follow every shallow, intricate alleys of this labyrinth, which is understood by now to be only a dark prospect. You are not doomed. Happiness was never meant to be such a dreary, sweaty enterprise. Right there, in the middle of the maze, in your darkest moment of loss and despair, is the secret chamber of peace, and the gate to the freedom you have sought for so long. Right there is the hidden, direct path out of it all. The short cut through the maze. Right here and right now. When you have slowed down and looked for once from the position of the one that has been here, present in all eternity, just below the threshold of your labyrinthine thoughts and feelings, and in fact mingling with them. This is the abode of rest which magically appears when thoughts, feelings, images, body, hope, desire, and world, have been put in their right place. This direct path is not a path. It is ‘it’. It is that very place or thing — which is not a place, not a thing — of your wildest dreams. It is this one silent watcher that precedes what you take to be your self, and presides over your golden destiny as being. The One that is so easily overlooked and missed — so discreet and transparent is it. Thinner than a breath. Space-like. Peaceful. Blissful. Blessed. As simple and direct as your deepest, most intimate sense of being. Just ‘I’. Yes, plainly just ‘I’.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Ma Yuan (1160-1225)

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Websites:
– Ma Yuan (Wikipedia)
– On a Mountain Path in Spring

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Awareness is All

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Conscious Capability’ – George Harvey (1806-1876) – WikiArt

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“The very fact of being aware of what is is truth.”
~ J. Krishnamurti

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If you observe yourself carefully, awareness can be felt as a truly overwhelming presence. It is actually all there is, and that can be easily proved. Let’s take an experience like our current experience, since no other than this one present, living experience, has ever existed and will ever do. We cannot divide experience, make it into bits and pieces to be compared or analysed. Experience is not limited to its content. You cannot separate content from its recipient. That’s the first clue for our investigation: Experience is undivided, unbroken awareness.

But let’s not be too quick on this, and jump to an easy conclusion. Let’s look thoroughly at our experience. What are the things that occupy us? What is actually filling this presence of ours? Let’s take our thoughts for example. There seems to be a steady arrival of them in our mind. All kinds of thoughts. The organised ones and the messy ones. The scared, confused, barely audible ones, and the vindicative ones. The happy ones and the weeping ones. Some that are useful in the course of a day, and others utterly useless and gratuitous, that are here solely to soothe our broken sense of self, or escape from a dreadful, imagined reality. Let’s face it: most of our thoughts are actually mad thoughts owned by a barely identifiable owner.

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Explore how the nature of our experience is made of awareness… (READ MORE…)

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The Coronation

Posted on by Alain Joly

I want to be all alone with you.
Who cares of these hundreds
relentless thoughts. I’ll let them
be and live their own thinking-life.
I’m not concerned with them.
They’re none of my business.
Have a good journey folks!
I’ll just stay here alone
with my silent friend.

I want to be all alone with you.
I have nothing to do with these
endless stories and beliefs.
All these far-fetched ideas
that keep giving birth to
that constant flow of suffering.
Waves after waves of feelings.
Don’t involve me. I want to be
in unaccompanied solitude.

I want to be all alone with you.
I won’t busy myself with these
ten thousand things. Not this time.
They have helped me well, with
pleasures and necessities.
To fight my fears off and
seek a hidden peace.
But god they’re clumsy! So
please, leave me alone for now.

I want to be all alone with you.
And when I’ll feel your presence
in me, so as to be just only you,
then I’ll return to all and everything;
To the feelings and the spicy;
To the world and its troubled affairs.
I shall welcome the weird and the inept,
and the thinking rendered innocuous.
I’ll make them my loyal attendants
And I’ll crown them with glory.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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