The Joy of Heaven

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Rocky Bay with Figures’ – J. M. W. Turner, 1830 – WikiArt

There is a special joy in knowing who you are. And there is none like it. A joy that is here no matter what, quietly sitting in the background — you just have to see it. You just have to feel it, a presence which will never let you down. Actually it cannot. It stays with you wherever you go. There are no mistakes for it, nothing that you shouldn’t engage in. It doesn’t mind if you are sad, desperate, lost, furious. It is the best friend you ever had, for it can never leave you. Only it needs to grow, so you can notice it, engage with it, dance with the glory contained within it. You have to leave it the space it deserves, so that it can show you the extent of what you have in your heart. So you have to be still, a little quieter. You have to trust that there is behind everything that entangles you, everything that overwhelms you in experience, a space free from all that you believe yourself to be. A space that is yet your closest, most intimate, truthful self. It will show you that your nature is your friend, and that your identity contains all that you are longing for, which you discover impregnates your very soul and being.

There is a bliss in your being, an otherness in your being aware. Not the happy feeling that is only triggered with the experience that goes your way, with the desired object that you obtain, or with a matched expectation. There is a poignancy to this bliss, for it withstands every turbulence of experience. It is here for your noticing, if you stop identifying yourself with all that stirs and provokes. If you stop being something or someone, sometimes despising, sometimes enjoying your circumstances. You have to be disinterested, and stay with your naked being. You have to keep an eye on what is the deepest, unshakable part of yourself — that unmoved, steady ground. Feel that there is a bliss running behind every activity or experience you engage in. It is not a state of the mind. It is not for the person. You are not a person. You are that which is aware. So only settle for a verb. Make sure that you rejoice, that you delight in simply and only being. This is where bliss lives and thrives in all circumstances.

Bliss is a feline quietly lying in the background, watching over you. If you lose sight of it for a fascination for objects, it will doze off, turn its back on you. But give your whole attention to being solely being, and it will stare at you. You will hear its purr becoming louder and louder. You will feel the gentle breeze of bliss in whatever you do. Imperturbably accompanying every perturbation your body or mind might be the prey of. It is forgiving and compassionate. It is not quite of this world, not in the loud and the foreground. Not in the existing or the flimsy. It is the colour of the solid ground of being. This is why and how it is always here. It is essential, the very essence of what you are. You can snob it, veil it, forget it, but not altogether chase it off. So see yourself as a haven. Feel that you are big and welcoming, not a little thing tossed around. You are a heaven for yourself, the safe harbour for everything that takes place within it. You are a vault. This vault is the bliss of your own being. Some have called this bliss the joy of heaven, to separate it from the mere feeling of happiness that is of the world, dependent on circumstances. Bliss is at the source of what you are. Nothing is before it. It is the nature of everything. It can be seen everywhere, and you are the donor.

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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)

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Love Actually

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Sarbatoarea primaverii’ – Arthur Verona – Wikimedia

Love is the essence of everything, and our very nature. Because we don’t live separate and afar. We are not distant from each other. Nothing is. We have a natural intimacy with everything and everyone. This is not a theory, or a philosophical argument that we posit. This intimacy is our deepest reality, what we are, the property of our natural being, which we can feel, see, experience, but whose evidence has disappeared from our eyes. The reason is, we have preferred a theory to the reality, an illusion to the truth. Our life has stopped being natural. We have been faking it, living it according to beliefs, habits, conformity. But here, blatant in and as our very being, is a reality in which there is no time or place, no distance or separation, no otherness. And as we all know from experience, love is the abolition of time, of distance. Love is the end of separation, of otherness.

Love, which we may call beauty, for everything that we love is beautiful. Love, which we may call understanding, for to see love as the essence of life is the ultimate form of understanding. Love is to ‘stand in the midst of’. It is to stand with everything that is under, everything that is existing in our reality. It is to be connected, to be together with, to be of the same essence. So love is an expression of oneness, of our nature as the one and only reality there is. In the absence of separation — which is truth — we find love. In the absence of otherness — which is our reality — we find intimacy. We make love every time we are aware of our reality as only being. We manufacture love when time is discovered to be an idea, and separation a belief. To be in love is to realise our nature as being one with everything and everyone. It is to be unable to part with anything. It is humility at work. It is where division is only possible in a figment of our imagination. It is to be with what is, with no pulsion of escape or resistance. Love is both in the ache of separation and in the desire to be reunited. All seeking is done in the name of love.

To love is to stand in the midst of, to see no separation between an ‘I’ and a ‘he’ or a ‘she or a ‘it’. The more we stand as the quality of being aware, as that which knows all things, the more we have love as our daily companion. It is extraordinary that we can feel to be a body and a mind, when there is before these, in the subjective, the vast and unmissable expanse of that which is aware of them, which we have pushed away as a mere function of that body-mind. The body is something that we are aware of. We are not in the body. We are in the ‘aware of’. This being aware is our home, where we live, where we have our life. This is our placeless place. That which we cannot not be in. That which we cannot part from — our most intimate, unchanging identity. To be that knowingly, to live as that, is to love naturally and unconditionally. Every time we notice that there is a reality, a consciousness, a knowing presence before our body, thoughts, feelings, experience, world, then love appears to be the very material we and the world are made of. The first and last brick of our house. Our everything.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Arthur Verona (1868-1946)

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Website:
– Arthur Verona

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God’s Knowledge

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Blue Rigi Lake of Lucerne Sunrise’ – J. M. W.  Turner, 1842 – WikiArt

We know so many things. Everything is based on knowledge, and maybe that’s the way to live, as long as there is a body and a world. Knowledge is the score we need to play our part. But to know something, anything, seems presumptuous. It implies another kind of knowledge — that there is somebody here, a person at a distance, that knows and is a recipient of knowledge. Knowledge fixes us. It gives us a dubious identity — that I am a man or a woman, of a certain age, with certain qualities, and with a whole lot of knowledge, identities, beliefs. That I am unhappy, clever, stupid, happy. That I am a cook, or a carpenter. That there is a chair, a world. That I have skills and preferences. I even have the knowledge of my spiritual attainment.

But there is no knowing anything. To think we know something is a mistake. If we know something, then we haven’t looked well enough. We have stayed at the surface of our illusory world and existence. What we ought to know is the knowledge of our reality, of ourself. That’s the only knowing there is. That’s our world: Knowing. Being aware. All other knowledge is superfluous, is not real knowledge. For what would any such knowledge be, when we discover that there is no entity here with the capacity to possess that knowledge. Go only for the knowing of being, a knowledge which is owned by itself. Notice that you don’t know anything — that’s important to know. We have no knowledge other than the knowledge of our being. Apart from that, everything exists only as in a dream.

We may play the part of the one in the dream, and that’s a beautiful part. There may be a world here that is gorgeous, with many ‘things’ that are known. There may be relationships that have meanings. But this world of things borrows its beauty and making from the reality in which it exists for a time — knowing. And the meaning of relationship is found through its reality, which is love — shared being. Everything happy and true in our life is borrowed from our reality as awareness — the only knowledge there is. If we live or act while ignoring that one knowledge, the world and ourself will appear ridden with conflict and suffering. So notice that the ten thousand things of life — all our knowledge — are transparent, ephemeral, ethereal. What is here massive and solid is their reality as being — the supreme essence of everyone and everything. The truth we live in. Ourself. What is. Not somebody that knows.

There is no other real knowing than the knowing of our essence, of our true nature or identity. This knowledge of ourself is not something we can possess as a person. It is nothing more than pure, objectless, impersonal knowing, and this knowing is all there is, all we are. Everything, everyone, have died in it. That’s why we cannot know anything, for how could we know something without there being first a knower and things with their own reality. The only thing we in fact truly know is ourself, our essence. Our knowledge of anything has died inside pure knowing long ago. It is still available, but its reality is apparent. That’s why we can never be sure that there is a chair, or a world. That’s why every object passes, is not there, is only an appearance.

Even ourself cannot be known objectively. We are alone. Nobody knows us. We as a person are absent. We don’t have a reality as an entity, or a self of any kind. So we are known by God alone, who knows us by knowing Its own being. We are all in the knowledge of God. What follows after the sentence ‘we don’t know anything’ is ‘the only knowledge there is is God’s knowledge’. Or ‘know God, love god, and you will know what you ought to know’. It all boils down to ‘knowing, knowing knowing’. Paul said it all very clearly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know. But anyone who loves God is known by him.” (8:2-3).

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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)

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A Word of Glory

Posted on by Alain Joly

Words don’t apply to truth. What we are cannot be described. We may have a lot to say about our preferences, our thoughts, our body, our circumstances and conditionings, but we won’t be able to say anything about who we are. We may try to. We may give a thousand explanations. We may come as close as possible, by saying that we are that which is aware, that we are consciousness, being, and a thousand other expressions. But we won’t get closer to the truth of who we are. Truth is not something that can be made into a concept, or an object. It is before every concept, before every object. It is before even ourself as a body-mind, as a person. It is before every single thought that we may have about ourself. It is the living, throbbing embrace of everything.

We cannot catch truth and put it in a box, or made it into a thought. It is elusive. We won’t find it in the world, no matter how hard we may look. It is within. It is who we are. It is what there is — our very being. We cannot miss our own being, what we are made of, what there is here that we call ‘myself’, or ‘I’. If we do miss it, then we are taking ourself to be what we are not. We have given in to an idea, to a concept. We have given allegiance to everything objective, easy, to stories about ourself, but not to ourself. We have not been ourself yet. Belief doesn’t reveal our true identity. It tramples it. It hides it. Truth requires no thought, no belief, no person or entity, even no world. Truth is only about itself. And to see truth is to see ourself, to be our own self that shines with glory. There is no truth but ourself. We know truth, when we know ourself.

All the words about truth are here to point to the truth without words. For when we know ourself, the reality of who we are, there is no thinking about truth, or about god, for we live and abide where words have melted into the reality they were pointing to. We have given in to our own reality. We have died in our own living presence. We have noticed that we are that which we were looking for, and that there is no looking beyond it. We are settled. We are made real, alive, complete. The relief contained in knowing who we are at last, this falling of ourself into the place of being that we have been and are eternally — that in itself feels like a tremor of peace, joy, and freedom. This place of being is unconditional love, wordless reality, living oneness. All things and all beings find their essence in it, and lose their own, individual reality. They are as if one word — a word whose only function is being its own living, glorious reality.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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The Immeasurable

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, 1782 – Wikimedia

There is a vast empty field of knowing within our experience, if we’re looking for it. It is vast not in regard to its sheer dimension, for it has none. Its vastness comes from its being without dimension, limit or edge. It is behind or before everything that we have taken to be ourself, including our body, our thoughts, our alleged self. It is here, motionless, massive, lending its very essence to everyone and everything. It’s easy to miss it, for it has not the objective quality that everything has in experience. We live in a field of objects that we can see, hear, touch, measure, be aware of. We are so fond of them that we have made ourself an object too, pretending to be our body, our mind, our thoughts. We have such a fascination for objects that we have become blind to that which holds them, and pervades everything. We are blind to our own essence, to our vastness, limitlessness — to that which makes objects experienced.

The consistency of objects around us has only the consistency of that which is aware of them. Objects do not own their own private essence, and neither do we. They find their essence and habitation in that which knows them. So we live in a world that is not defined by its edges, its limits. We should always understand that we live in vastness. That our world is empty of its own essence, and is only the expression of our being aware of it. It will never have another substance than the substance of knowing. So we live in emptiness, in infinity. The body may have its limits and constraints, but we do not.

We are devoid of what binds and limits our body-mind-world. So we should live our life as if there were around us only an empty knowing. Try it, to live as if unconstrained, unlimited, expanded. See that this is the truth of your being, this being not limited by time or place, this being free. Don’t engage your thoughts as if they were objects, but see them as an emanation of the silence they are made of. Thoughts are variations of silence. They are silence’s oscillations. If we are unaware of that silence, thoughts will come to veil it. If we see silence as our own nature, they will be messengers of its eloquent wisdom.

So the reality of thoughts is only the reality of the silence that holds them. Just as objects have only the reality of the knowing that knows them. And just as we ourself have only the reality of our nature as pure knowing — not as a body, nor as a mind, nor as anything limited. Limitation too is borrowed from the infinity that holds it and allows it, as eternity holds time. Where would an idea of time be, if it wasn’t within the eternity out of which it can be divided in past, present, future? Where would an idea of place be, if it wasn’t in the very infinity that permits it to exist? The structure of time and space is only for the convenience of a body and mind. We ourself have no such convenience, no such limits.

The world has beauty for it borrows its essence from the beauty and purity of that which holds it, and builds its form and structure with bricks after bricks of empty being. Emptiness is the body of this world of beings and things, which it moulds or shapes with its creative fullness. For emptiness can only exist in the fullness of being. We are only because of our being ‘being’. We are full of our own being, which is revealed as the being of everyone and everything. So there is in ourself and of ourself only an immensity. We are immense when we cannot be measured or limited in any way by our thoughts, body, or self. If we notice that this is so, that we are made of that immensity, that we are immeasurable, then we will lend to the world that same immensity of ourself, and we will notice between everyone and everything an impenetrable likeness. This likeness is born of the oneness that is the secret core of everything, and of all apparent multitude.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

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Website:
– Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (Wikipedia)

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Our Sole Horizon

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Forest Distant Views’ – Ivan Shishkin, 1884 – WikiArt

The key in spiritual matters, is that we have to keep it very simple. We must not blow it out of proportion, exaggerate it, make a conundrum out of it. It is just a matter of looking, of breaking a little, stubborn habit. Nothing extraordinary. We keep looking away from our own being. We act as if we knew all about who we are, as if it were understood, that we are our body, that we are these thoughts that keep coming, which we judge, influence, direct according to what other thoughts say. We live in a little corner of ourself, feeling like a little king in our kingdom. We are so used to our own ways, to our concepts and explanations, to our beliefs and repetitive actions, that we have taken for granted to be just a person in a world. That’s what we were taught. That’s what we were conditioned to think. In fact, we are only followers. We play small. We are protecting our own establishment.

But we know more than that. In fact, we are all experts at being, without our realising. We are masters of freedom. We know that with just a little looking, a little asking, we could rock our lifeboat. We could make our life sensational, attractive, happy, tranquil. We have that hint in ourself, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeking, or working for happiness, improvement, progress, with such undeterred faith. We know that in spite of everything, the world has magic, and our life keeps inside it secrets of glory. That’s how we can face unspeakable suffering, trauma, violence, and the looming threat of death. Because we have in ourself the warmth and security of being, which we try to reenact in every possible and unreasonable ways, in our pleasures and our hopes, in our beliefs and our addictions.

The problem is that we have put a belief in front of what is. We have invented a self where there is only the wide expanse of being. Our whole identity is in being. We have no space to be anything else than being. Our whole life is being. Our body doesn’t even come close to being what we are, and neither does our mind. Being as consciousness takes it all, the whole of what we are, and of what everything is. Every appearance finds its essence in it, and lives in the gorgeous space it provides. We have all our senses embedded in being, and the world finds its reality in the reality of being. Consciousness has it all. It is all we will ever find. All that ever is. It may hide from our gaze, that being is our only landscape, our sole horizon, but it shows blatantly in every corner of experience, if we are willing to look.

In fact, it is so much here, so reachable, so knowable, that we are blind to it, unable to know it. That’s because we have attached ourself to another pseudo reality inside our own reality of being. We have chosen the lie of being somebody over the truth of being only being. We have chosen to be something, a body, a thought, an idea, a self, and have as a result lost, forgotten, limited the infinity of being, that is pervading our life to the point of being the only thing in presence. The truth is that we can never be something other than being. It’s a nice try to believe it, but it won’t happen, to be a suffering self, a limited body, and a mind with its own separate agenda. Everything that we think we are, we are not. We have to distance ourself from every qualification, from every belief, from every identity. We have to be naked of every addition to being in order to see our naked being, and to be in its gorgeous grip.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898)

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Website:
– Ivan Shishkin (Wikipedia)

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One Living Being

Posted on by Alain Joly

Truth is when the one who desires truth is not there. That one is a flaw. It is superimposed on the truth it is looking for, and veils it, makes it unreachable. It tramples it, literally. It makes it misty, obscure, mysterious. But truth is an obvious reality, if we don’t put it at a distance. If we don’t imagine it as something. Truth is not a thing, a concept. It is what we are — present, alive, real. Only we have to leave, recede, tiptoe. It’s all it takes, to not be boastful about it, to not think we don’t have it, to not assert the lie of our being someone. Being someone will push truth into the darkness, unseen therefore forgotten, hidden therefore to be sought. Our looking for it is the difficulty. Truth is to be approached with subtlety and utmost delicacy. Not that it is fragile, it is not. But it is sensitive to our feeling separate from it. It doesn’t like it. It shrinks at the thought of it, that we are looking for it, wanting it, being ambitious about it. Truth is not to be conquered, practised, refined. Truth is here fully dressed. It is our most fitting attire. The very being of our being. Massive. Obvious. If we let it open up, unfurl, spread its all-pervasive presence, and its creative, mind-blowing, self-evident, undeniable power and eminence.

But if we think we’re not enough, well then we’re not enough. If we want to indulge in being a person, a poor me, then we fall from a great height. We suffer from being separated from our essence, our quintessence. We feel the burden of our constant, intrinsic, congenital seeking. It becomes our identity, to be a self seeking, to live in separation, to be fearful of this condition, and a believer of ideas. We live in our mind, struggle with our beliefs, conflict with experience. We are not what we should be, and we feel it, know it, dread it. And we are crippled by our impending death, which we cannot understand, fathom, and marvel at. So it really comes down to ending a belief, a simple belief, that cheated us. That our body, our thoughts, feelings, senses are substantial when they are but a dream. That our being finds its reality in our body and mind when our essential is not there. Our essential draws its reality from a presence that is infinite, eternal, unfathomable, loaded with love, peace, and a creative impetus. Nothing else than this presence is at play in our experience. We realise that we are just one living being, which cannot be divided, and has no other than itself. We realise that we are that, in spite of all evidence and impression. This self that we believe ourself to be is in fact secretly made of that, if the mist of its fallacious reality breaks apart and reveals its hidden nature. There is no separate, distinctive, solitary self. Only this shared, glorious one being. Then it falls into place that, for exemple, “I and my Father are one.” (John, 10:30) And that “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts, 17:28)

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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