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:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Voice in Your Head

Posted on by Alain Joly

There is a voice inside your head that is a true tyrant. It has an opinion on everything, always judging, evaluating, commenting — a gossip of the worst kind. It constantly informs you of its likes and dislikes, without you ever truly asking for it. Notice that most situations don’t fit its expectations, for it is a hard one to satisfy. But more than being a tyrant, it is cunning and deceitful. For it pretends to be the voice of an entity — the very person that you are. And it is a mentor so convincing and attractive, that you would follow it anywhere — anywhere, and at any cost — including at the cost of being unhappy, uncertain, fearful, dispossessed of your beautiful self. So please remove yourself from its spell. And do it now. For this voice is not your self. It is placed much too far ahead of yourself. This fake identity is a hesitant one, desirous, not grounded, forever running after its own projected, illusory, unreachable recipe for happiness.

This constant judging and seeking may look like a quest for happiness but it is not. You are not doing it well. This is not the way to happiness: to be a believer, a follower, gullible to the point of endorsing the first voice that comes up in your mind. But only observe it, and you will see that this voice is as thin as the blink of an eye, as barren as a thought can be when it pretends to be the self from which it derives its trifling existence. You have to rewind it all, back to a place of not knowing. For this voice’s pretentious knowing to which you have succumbed, diverts you from your goal, from this innate peace which is here, quietly dormant at home, in your self, as that which you are before all knowing, all judging, all beliefs, curled as your inborn, unsoilable innocence. This unborn stillness is your true self, innocent but all-knowing, still but with the activity of a thousand suns, unborn but bearing the life of a universe, vulnerable to your noticing, but whose presence is unbreakable and therefore immortal.

That one is a more trustable match if you ask me. That one doesn’t need a voice to represent itself. It is the unguarded one, that needs no protection and no incentive for being itself, wide-open, naked as no one and no thing ever was naked before, and will ever be. Its apparent vulnerability is the measure of its utter invulnerability. This inner being or presence is all that a thought, or a voice in the head, could never be. It is humble to the point of espousing the reality of everything, bright to the point of being transparent, undoubtedly present to the point of seeming not there, and so intimately woven in the now that it is overlooked and sought only in the future, which is nothing but a thought in your head. So leave your outer voice and remain as your inner being only. Or rather see that this assertive voice is rendered to its ridiculous and idiotic redundancy, when you observe it from the right perspective of being. So the voice in your head is found to be just a ghost. It never was there as the self you believed it to be. It is the empty shell of an absent being. But its mimicry is nevertheless hiding the voiceless, headless silent being that is your true and only self.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ 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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Evangelium

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘St Matthew and the Angel’ (detail) – Guido Reni, 1635 – Wikimedia

So many of my thoughts, feelings, and even sensations are here solely because they are sustained by, or dependent on, or conditioned by the representation I have of myself. In more bluntly put words, my belief in being a discrete, separate entity creates the bigger part of them. This is because I think that I am solely this me-person that I indulge in these endless thoughts about myself. This is because I think that I am only this separately existing entity that I am caught in the grip of these disturbing feelings around myself. This is because I think that I am undoubtedly this body that my world acquires a dull and solid reflection where I-myself live and am caught in.

But this apparent suffering reality of our life is only as disturbing, dull, or solid as is the reality of our separate self. This is where our life finds its solace: in the defeating of this illusion; in this looking within to discover the reality of our self, and the truth of our being. This is where the promise of spirituality comes in with its many gifts of release. This is where the ‘good news’ of religion finds its full meaning and effectiveness. And it says something like:

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A meditation on the ‘Good News’ advocated by Christianity… (READ MORE…)

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