On Retreat

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘The Hermit in front of His Retreat’ – Carl Spitzweg, 1844 – Wikimedia

There is nothing innocent about going on a spiritual retreat. We come to plead guilty. We want to be delivered from a wrongdoing, to be free from a form of captivity. We come here to be disentangled. To take a step back. Not only from our busy life, from our problems, but from our many false identities. We have too many of them, and we are willing to undress, to disengage for a while from everything that we have wrongly taken to be ourself. From our habitual, rehearsed, believed identification with our mind, our body, and our many thoughts. From our obsession and addiction with the objects of the perceived world, which we think bear the promise of our happiness. From our endless hopes, fears, projections, and our constant seeking. We retreat from the battle that it is to be somebody, and to live in the limitations of the known. We come to be courageous, and to wrestle with what we don’t know. To discover a way of living that is fresh. To be in awe.

We have come to pull back. To leave the periphery of our life — where the superficial is our only landscape — for the deeper ground of our true nature. We are willing to be wronged, to show our vulnerabilities, our ignorance, in a life where we are prompted to pretend. There can be nothing new in staying with what we know. So our retreat is a process of unknowing. It is the journey from what we know to the unknowable. And we know the unknowable by not being qualified. By remembering our primary, unborn identity, which finds its ground in the ground of being, before it is coloured by qualities and identifications. We journey until we fully inhabit experience. Until our retreat is not a retreat anymore.

We have been retreating all our life, resisting from experience, which we call suffering. Our life is mostly the result of our not wanting to engage fully, of our taking refuge in thoughts, feelings, to not fully face the pain contained in experience. We retreat in what we think is our security. So we also come on a retreat to stop retreating. We want to be relieved from the load of our many resistances, from the unbearable weight that it is to constantly retreat from the fullness of living. That’s why we feel so good on a retreat. We put an end to our many retreats. We suspend our journey away from ourself. We come home, where there is no need of a retreat anymore. Where we finally know ourself — who we are truly — and can rest there. Where we can fully and only be, embracing everything, knowing that being is all there is. We cannot retreat from what we are. We come to retreat until we can retreat no more.

Out of our constant worry, of our restless seeking, we happen to have retreated in our mind. We have withdrawn from our heart. We have identified with our thoughts. So we have come here to stop retreating where we do not belong, and return to our heart. A retreat is a stage set for this discovery. That mind is not an identity but a tool. That love is our natural identity — the treasure under the many stones of our false identifications. We have come to be open, to end our many retreats — the shrinking of our heart, and know the meaning of friendship. We did not come here to pull back, to disengage. We have come to remember, and to forget that we have remembered. We have come to be present, full of our own true and gorgeous identity of being. So we both retreat, and stop retreating. We disengage, and engage fully. We come to be both still, and in movement. To disincarnate, and find our natural incarnation in being.

We end our mere existing to re-engage with the aliveness contained in simply and only being. We have come to retreat from our many retreats, to invest the placeless place of being, where there is no need anymore of a retreat. We have come to move from matter to spirit, from being something, somewhere, sometime, to being in the unlocated land of our formless, infinite presence. We have come to be but an eternal now, in which time has now surrendered. We have come where seclusion in being is found to be our openness and our freedom. Where we acquire the dimension of a whole world. Where there is no more path, no more retreating. We have found our home in being, which happens to be not a retreat at all, but the place of a total surrender. Home is not the place where we are, but is found to be what we are. We have come to end every possibility of a retreat.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885)

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Website:
– Carl Spitzweg (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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‘Try to Die Here’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Mount Athos and the Monastery of Stavronikétes’ – Edward Lear, 1857 – Wikimedia

When the young Romanian Ioan Gutu arrived at Mount Athos to spend his life there as a monk, he was welcomed by his spiritual Father Elder Ilie with these few words: “Try to die here.” That’s what you do when you arrive at your true self, at your Mount Athos, you don’t form another thought about yourself, you stop looking for an identity, you don’t take refuge again in your mind, in your body. You leave all things, all identities, all beliefs behind. You stop reincarnating as a self separate from the world, for you have found that you were already fully, and wholly incarnated in being, in the selfless reality of your true nature.

In fact, the monastic life is only a metaphor for the truth of your living. You are required to spend your life and die there, because you cannot leave the reality of your own being. A monastery is a place where you reenact reality, where you know no separation, no ‘other’. You are alone, as the word ‘monk’ tells you in its etymology. It is where you know being to be the only place there is, no matter where you are, where you look. You lose your many pursuits and ambitions in being something, someone. You retire where you have never ceased to be, which is in yourself, in your nature, in the truth or reality of your infinite, undivided being. So this is the death that Ilie had in view for Ioan. “Try to die here”. Cease to be other than the One. Stay in your reality as it is, and spend your life there. Don’t leave who you are. Don’t go back to your life of separation, pursuits, hope, envy, comparison. This is prayer.

Wherever you are, try to die there. Don’t pursue your thoughts. Don’t go after anything. Don’t be enthralled by any object on the way. The way is what you are, where you are now, where you have already arrived. To die is to arrive where you are eternally, to stop believing in a destination. But this dying is a strange death. It is not the dying that you may have in mind, for there is no dying to your being. How would the One die? How would you die, if you have already ended all identification, every belief, thought, object, projection about yourself? What is left here that could die, when everything that you believed yourself to be, all your wrongdoings, have naturally, effortlessly ended? Could your essence, your deepest being die? Could that which is not a thing die? What is left here but the immortal, when everything mortal has been left behind?

Maybe there is another hidden twist in Ilie’s words. They could imply: ‘Try to die here if you can!’ You cannot. You cannot die in being, in presence. An appearance can die, but not that in which it appears. So, a monastery is where you can never die, never leave. It is where you leave behind all your many clothings of beliefs and identifications, all your wrongdoings — which is death. It is where you enter into the immortal and infinite nature of your true being — which is life. Everything else can die and follow its natural, mortal course except the One, of which the ‘everything’ is but a movement and a creation with a beginning and an end. So when you arrive at your Mount Athos, try to die here — in the One. When you enter, do your best to leave all your ‘mortals’ outside. Then find out that you can never die. John of the Cross said exactly the same thing upon ascending Mount Carmel:

“When thy mind dwells upon anything,
Thou art ceasing to cast thyself upon the All.”
~ John of the Cross (Ascent of Mount Carmel, I-13:12)

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Text by Alain Joly

Title quote by Schema-Hieromonk Ilie Vulpe (1851–1928)

Quote by John of the Cross (1542-1591)

Painting by Edward Lear (1812-1888)

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Websites:
– Mount Athos (Wikipedia)
– John of the Cross (Wikipedia)
– Edward Lear (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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‘God Runs After You’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sea bay’ – Ivan Aivazovsky, 1842 – WikiArt

Through our constant effort, we keep the effortless at bay. Even if we seemingly don’t do anything, we are always after something. So this constant, subtle pleading, asking, begging is closing all doors for truth to come in, to reveal itself to us. We are already dating someone else. Our mind is full of its rushing out in direction of an object, something that is going to satisfy us, to give us an identity, to fulfil us in some way. We are never truly longing. We are never an empty shell — always seeking, filling ourself with one thing or another. We don’t dare giving up, being vulnerable. We think we have to be someone, an entity in charge, a doer, a knower. We live with an armour, with layers that are concealing our true nature, even repelling it.

We have identities. We are full of them. The body is one, which we believe to be and be limited by. The mind is another, which we have adopted as being ourself — the ‘I’ that I am. We too believe in our thoughts, that we think define us, shape our identity. We are in a prison of our own making, made of bricks of memories, beliefs, hopes, desires, fears, that all concur to build a non-existing self of which we have now become the slave, and with which we have a dysfunctional, love-hate relationship. Even our ambition for truth is too much of an identity. Our desire for enlightenment is still a desire for fulfilment, another thing to achieve, a someone to be. Our true identity as pure, infinite being is not a new identity. It is not concealed or limited. It is not resisting, desiring, lacking anything. It is its own fulfilment — an identity that cannot be had, named or measured.

That’s what a true longing is — to be without ambition or desire of our own. To have even not a desire for truth, for which we will need an ego, and which still is a wall against the truth we seek — maybe the thinnest of all, but still a wall. Reality is to be realised, not achieved. It is in the word: ‘reality’ — which is we are that which is. There is no need of even the subtlest move towards it. It is all in the way we long for it. All in the way we build nothing that can go against it, or that could conceal it. This is the meaning of humility. We have to be lowly, on the ground, at the root of ourself, which is to be with our selfless being. We have it already — the being that we are after. It is all a matter of how quiet and accessible we can be. How we can be without a wall, without an identity. This is the most powerful longing there is — to be without any longing of our own making. To be without imagination or belief. To be watching only. Present. Already being — which we are anyhow. Not being an ambitious of some kind. There is no need to run after God. As Krishnamurti once put it so beautifully, “God runs after you.”

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

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The quote is the title of a book consisting of eight hitherto unpublished discussions with Krishnamurti held in Malibu, California in 1970.

Bibliography:
– ‘God Runs After You’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Krishnamurti Foundation India)

Websites:
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
– Ivan Aivazovsky (Wikipedia)

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

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In a Room Quietly

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Gościeradz’ – Leon Wyczółkowski, 1933 – WikiArt

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“All of humanity’s problems
stem from man’s inability to
sit quietly in a room alone.”
~ Blaise Pascal (‘Pensées’)

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We have always our mind racing, going after something. Stillness is resisted. Staying in a room quietly is avoided. Being alone is dreaded. We want to be occupied. We’d rather not be made empty, so we always have a war raging. Is it that we want to be something, someone? Is it that we have judged only being to be not enough? That we have to pursue something, whether it is an identity, a belief, or an idea? We are chasing our own self — what we should have, what we should be. We are on a mission, therefore we can never be quiet. We need to achieve, arrive, get somewhere, be something. We want to satisfy and be satisfied. We won’t rest before we are fulfilled. We won’t stay in a room quietly. We will have our wars to obtain peace. Our escapes to not be where we are. Our resistances to not have what we have. We prefer to possess, which is to sit in the throne of power — in the Lord’s seat — and wonder where God is, or have a belief about Him. We are chasing experiences and circumstances. Anything but only and plainly being.

In fact, we are always in a room quietly. We just don’t want to see it, or don’t know how to notice it. Ourself is that space where we live and have our many experiences. Ourself is our circumstance. It is where we are, what we have, the peace that we are chasing everywhere but where it actually is, which is in our humble presence — in and as our being. So peace is our nature, if we don’t put it at a distance, if we don’t wish to have it. So don’t start a war. Stay quietly where and as you are, and your nature will slowly be revealed to you. You will find that your identity is in your nature. That you have already what you are chasing. That the experience of being is your so perfect circumstance. And that in the throne of your being is sitting God, for which you now need no belief. You have mastery over your life, not because you control it, but because you know the nature of it and of yourself, and in that process have put an end to your own seeking. You have quietened down, ended a war, and placed yourself in the only place worth sitting, which is in and as your own glorious being.

Now never leave it. That place of yourself. Never be dissuaded that you don’t have it. Never be influenced again that you need to be something other than what you already are. If you have moved away from home, go sit quietly where you are and stay there long enough to be persuaded again in the inevitability of your own being. It’s enough not to wish to be other. It’s plenty to stay unmoved, a humble watcher. To be in a room quietly. To close every exit. To be fascinated by yourself — not escaping the fact of your being. Don’t move away from the way you simply are. From the possibility that being is all there is. From the room you are forever in. Don’t give yourself an escape — there is no escape. Don’t buy the illusion that you can be something other than that — what you are now, what you are in, that very circumstance of your being. So begin where you are. It will bring a rebellion, an insurrection, a mutiny. It will stop you from being just a person. It will make you free, and bring stillness in your life. Resistance will recede, and you might even enjoy your circumstances, that are now pervaded with being. You will notice your aloneness, and have a gorgeous life in it. You will be aware of being as the one and only place you are in. You will have solved your most urgent problem — which is humanity’s too. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Painting by Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936)

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Websites:
– Blaise Pascal (Wikipedia)
– Leon Wyczółkowski (Wikipedia)

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

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The Odyssey

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Odysseus questions the seer Tiresias’ – Alessandro Allori, 1580 – Wikimedia

No doubt that our life feels like an odyssey. It does for everybody. In the ancient, epic poem of Homer, the Odyssey is a journey home. It is with us too. But the fact that we are on a journey home is not always apparent. At least not to begin with. We’re too busy to see anything. We’re fighting demons. We’re full of desires, many of them, constantly assailing us. We think we’re going somewhere, without seeing very well where that is. We’re wrestling with the gods. We have many ideas, beliefs, hopes, sufferings. We feel we are a person in a world, who needs to reach a happy place that never comes. The reason is: home is within. The happy place is in ourself. It is not out there. It is in the ending of a belief, of a misunderstanding, of a bad judgement as to what we truly are. We are stuck in a place that doesn’t exist. We are stuck in a belief.

It eventually dawns on us that our happy place is where we are finally reunited with our inner peace. That’s the journey home: the journey within. But it takes a long and difficult travel of sufferings and errands to understand that there is no travelling back home outside ourself, in the diversity of the world. Home is within. Once we go within, the journey becomes shorter. The odyssey is in fact only the journey to the journey home. But to go back home implies that we were already there, and have left it at some point. So it appears that our going home, our odyssey, is an illusion of some kind. We are going in search of what we already have. We have gone on a war. For to seek what we already are is always a war. It always brings suffering, lack, and the such. It separates us from home. It multiplies monsters. That’s an easy thing to see. There is no need of a long odyssey.

We have the belief that reality is in appearances and forms, when it is in fact in the formless. We have the belief that our body-mind is our identity, when we are only contained in the infinite awareness of being. We have the belief that we need to adjust to a world that is separate from our own being, when we and the world are one being alone, perfectly adjusted to each other. We indulge in the comfort of our illusory view on existence, when this comfort is only the postponing of our journey home, and the fuelling for our own suffering. There is our journey within — to go from an illusion to the reality hidden within the illusion. To go from what we are not to what our nature truly is — which really is only to go from what we are to what we are.

Now, if we’re struggling within, it means we are still without. We still see the within as the without. We still have monsters there, and a difficult trip to be engaged in. We’re still on an odyssey. We’re still intoxicated by the Lotus-eaters, who make us forget about our journey home. We’re still captured by the cyclops Polyphemus. Still fighting some giant cannibals; or wrestling with the goddess Circe, who turns us into what we are not. We’re still resisting the enticing song of the Sirens, which keeps us mortal beings. Still being held captive by the false promise of the nymph Kalypso who, by the way, is literally ‘she who conceals’. We’re not yet in a journey within — not yet in a journey home.

Once we have understood that our home is only within, in and as our innermost being, we must be there as a beggar. We never enter our own being, our happy place, as a king in its kingdom. We have to be a beggar, a nobody. That’s what Odysseus does when he reaches home: he comes as a beggar, unknown to all. That’s the way to be home. We leave being a person of any kind, of any rank. Then, the last fights with our few remaining demons is quickly done — not a big deal. It doesn’t take time or distance. Doesn’t take endless coming and going, reaching and leaving, being on the journey. Home is home. We cannot go where we are. Home is an easy place to be in. That’s where we have seemingly started, and find ourself naturally in.

In our own Odyssey, there is always a twist at the end. In fact, we realise that there was no danger or difficulty, no storms or monsters, no length of time, no far-off countries. We had been on a quiet, mirror-like mountain lake all along — just didn’t notice it. The whole story was invented. Beautiful, exciting, painful, maybe necessary, but invented.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Alessandro Allori (1535-1607)

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Website:
– Alessandro Allori (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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‘Come to Me’

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1845 – WikiArt

Sometimes you’re left with just three words. I read them under a statue of Christ in a cathedral, three simple words from the Gospel of Matthew, but a whole teaching if you listen. “Come to Me”. There is immense simplicity and clarity in these three words. They have a vertiginous meaning, if you follow the course of their true destination. If you accept the invitation. Not from a somebody, a person that existed. Not from a God, or a Son of God. Not from anything in particular, any objective presence which you could go to. The invitation is from yourself to yourself. In fact, ‘Come to Me’ is better read as ‘Come to the me’. Go to the ‘I’. Abide in what you are, be that presence of yourself. Be just as you are — don’t add a thing to yourself, don’t play the game of projection or belief. Don’t give yourself to somebody or something that is not you. Stay right there, right in what you already are, just as you already are. But still, there is a movement implied — a solicitation, a passage from place to placeless place. It says ‘Come to Me’ for a reason. In that paradoxe is contained the totality of our spiritual endeavour.

It is not a place you have to go to, but rather the noticing of the place you are in. The beholding of your true nature. What is this ‘I’ that we stumble on every time we say ‘I’? What is this being conscious, this being aware that I am? Did we look well enough? Did we miss something that we have to come to it, take a new invitation, be encouraged? See that you have made your ‘I’ into an assumption, a pretence, an affectation, something not worth a visit, not worth a discovery or an enquiry. In fact, we have been asked to function and obey, which means to follow. The rest has been wisely swept under the carpet of belief or religion. As if we had already discovered everything about what we are. As if consciousness wasn’t worth a second look. As if from then on, for our nature, we had to rely only on imagination, belief, things fancy, whimsical, hopeful, devoid of reality. Reality has been covered — so we think. There is no new land here, no new discovery or journey within, nothing that hasn’t already been charted.

But there is a coming that is subtle to the point of not implying time or place. A coming that cannot be measured by instruments, that cannot be objectified, seen by the senses. There is a coming where we already are, but with a new light shed on it. A light that we have missed for directing it all on objects, with the complicity of the senses. So the light of what we truly are was lost in its being misdirected. Our true nature was lost in our belief in being a body, a self, a person. Our purity of being was hidden inside our fascination for qualifications and objects. Our happiness was lost in our suffering. Our peace squandered by our restless seeking. So there is a journey within. A journey with no distance to be covered. A coming to where we already are. A coming or moving into view. A becoming perceptible. A coming back to ourself.

‘Come to me’. You may discover that you have God within. That this is what the God of religion is — what they meant — the ‘I’ within, your true being. Come back to yourself. Become perceptible. Come into view. Know yourself as you are. Come into the light which you are already in. See that you are, and who you are. Abide in the purity of plainly being. Be yourself for the first time. Be ‘I Am’ alone. ‘Come to me’.

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Text by Alain Joly

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

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Website:
– J. M. W. Turner (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Study of Mind

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Landscape with Two Oaks’ – Jan van Goyen, 1641 – WikiArt

Notice that your mind is inapt at staying still. Stillness is not its thing. It has always something to think about. It is always on the road, roaming, judging, comparing, evaluating. Mind you, it is its nature to do so, if you let it. The mind is a restless thing. But its restlessness has a virtue. It pushes you beyond it. It encourages you to go deeper, where stillness is your nature. Where there is quiet. Something abiding. A stability.

Go not to the mind, but to the presence that supports it. Be like the gentle arms that hold it. Notice that your mind is not alone. It needs a space for its functioning. Sink in the mind’s left vacant space. Go in the interstices, between your many thoughts, inside your overwhelming feelings. Attain to the very substance your mind is made of. Be like its gorgeous essence. Not the mind itself, but the depth of being within it.

The mind deals only with the superficies. It is changing its mind at the slightest disturbance. With the latest flip of an opinion. Don’t follow its many thoughts. They will convince you that you are a self separate from experience. They will tell you that you are lonely. They will make you a suffering entity, though there is none. Go to the bottom of your being. Where the mind is only an appearance. See that you don’t disappear. You can’t.

The mind is ever changing, not you. It has an idea in mind. Forever keeping an agenda, being interested in outcomes, seeking experiences — only happy ones. You have happiness enmeshed within your own being, as the nature of your own gorgeous self. You don’t need to manufacture one, to provoke it with circumstances. Go so deep within the mind that you cease to be involved with its productions. This is called peace.

Stay with your imperturbable essence. It will show you that you are married to the world. The mind believes in the many, in division, in separation. But it is its own invention that it passes on to you as the only reality. Reality is where the mind is only a puppet. Reality is when you are one. It is beyond even your sense perceptions. They have colluded with the mind in making you believe in separation. Reality is aware presence. The mind is not.

Now be careful. For the mind has appropriated the ‘I’. It too says ‘I Am’. But the mind is not ‘I’. It is not your real self. The mind is pretending to be you. It does it all the time. So often that you have come to believe a bundle of thoughts and feelings to be ‘I’. But ‘I’ goes deeper. It doesn’t live in such a shallow land. ‘I’ belongs to the ground, to your innermost being, to that part of yourself that is unmovable. Where there is no past or future. No other, beyond, or away.

So if you happen to meet the mind one day, and be entangled in its mesh, or if you have adopted it as your everyday identity, don’t stay there. Move away. Be bold. See that all that comes here with a beginning and an end, with a limitation, has very little to do with you. See that as you deepen in and as being, your mind will slow down, and acquire a strange transparency. Your thoughts and feelings may even appear to be clothed in the infinite.

Your mind now seems to be no mind at all, and is in no capacity to bring separation. It stops being a brigand, and becomes a precious ally. Thoughts may be used wisely, and feelings are seen as a reflection of love and its indispensable joy. Essence acquires a new meaning, as it pervades the world and every experience that comes your way. Your body is experienced as made of Mind, and Mind as your new body. Spirit is where you live. It is without end.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Jan Van Goyen (1596-1656)

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Website:
– Jan Van Goyen (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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