The Alchemist

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Transfiguration of Jesus’ – Alexander Ivanov, 1846-58 (Tretyakov Gallery) – Wikimedia

The most important thing in life is to understand yourself. Because everything is there, inside what you are. Every question you ever had about yourself will find there, in your very nature, its most precious answer. It will change your outlook on life, and on yourself. It will transform you. It will shape the way you live and love. It will make you inhabit a different world, for this special knowledge of yourself has a profound influence on form. In that realm, knowledge is magic. It is an alchemist of the first order, that will change your condition and your destination.

So if you want to transform the cold metal of your conflicted, suffering self into the warm, peaceful nature of your golden being, you have to give your heart to the alchemical work that is the knowing of your self. You must first separate everything that has a form from the formless, everything that is moving, changing, appearing, and has a beginning and an end, from that which in yourself knows no alteration or evolution. You have to separate movement from that which is still, improvement from that which is for ever perfect as it is. You have to go beyond the length and width of time and space to know yourself as that which is without beginning or end, devoid of duration or limitation.

You will come to see that there is a part of yourself that has no form whatsoever, that you cannot see as an ‘other’, and that is inseparable from what you are. At that moment, you will be transformed. You will notice that your identity is not in your qualities and idiosyncrasies, not in your many experiences and possessions. You will literally change of shape or form — from the solidity and limitations of a body and mind, to the ethereal, infinite, unlimited, aware being that you truly are. You will notice that the world around you has been shaped out of your very identity as being. That the materiality of the world is in fact only apparent, made of the very essence or consciousness that knows it, and is truly yourself.

You will see that you are not bound to your body for an identity. That your mind doesn’t define who you truly are, and that the world you are in is the expression of your identity as infinite being, therefore lives inside you more than you live inside it. So you have the power to be the alchemist of your own self. You have the competence to know yourself, to beat your suffering and forge it as the peace which is the nature of your being. To melt your many conflicts into that which is aware of them, rendering them blunt and inoffensive. You can make yourself undergo a metamorphosis, which is to change in form or nature. Not that you acquire something new, but you come to notice that your being is riding the infinite, and that you have your body and mind joining you there for a life of greater peace and understanding. This is called transfiguration, the ultimate skill of the alchemist that we all are or have the power to be.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alexander Ivanov (1806-1858)

~~~

.

Website:
– Alexander Ivanov (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

.

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.

.

~~~

Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)

~~~

.

Website:
– Isaac Levitan (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

A Frame for Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sunset’ – Claude Monet, 1880 – WikiArt

.

“The Soul, which is eternal Spirit,
Standeth above Time’s sovranty:
Already in this present world
She liveth in Eternity.”
~ Angelus Silesisius

.

There seems to be an inescapable canvas that allows our life to take place and unfold in the world. This is the concept of time and space. It is the frame in which our seeming existence can spread its tentacles in every directions of our four dimensional reality. At least this is what thought tells us. This is our representation of reality. But is that truly so? 

Time seems to work vertically, allowing experiences and events to unfold one after the other, in sequences, allowing for birth and death, progress and becoming. It is intimately related to space, which works more horizontally, allowing objects and selves to move in different directions and places. And of course, time and space require that things and selves in the world are made out of matter and have all a separate, independent existence. Things and selves are like the set and actors on the stage of life, the never ending search for happiness being the script or the story, space being the place of the representation, and time the duration of the play that allows the story to unfold before the audience. As for the latter, it is composed of us all. We are all watching the representation of our existence.

[…]

An inquiring journey into the concepts of time and space… (READ MORE…)

.