‘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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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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Our Last Delusion

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Løvsprett’ – Frits Thaulow, 1889 – Wikimedia

You won’t see a world outside the confines of the mind. The world is not there as an ultimate reality. It draws its many shapes out of the limitations of mind. It is sculpted by our senses. Thoughts are giving it its colour, shaping it for the purpose of a self. We blame it for our suffering, or praise it for our happiness. But its existence is a passing, illusory one, as it is for all thoughts, and for the body.

Although we as a body live in a world of limitation and finiteness, we in truth have our stand and our anchor in the deeper, conscious reality of our own undefeatable, limitless being. Happiness in the world never comes from experiencing the world. It comes from beyond the senses, beyond experience. It comes from beauty, which is the nature of the world when it is experienced from that part of ourself that is infinite.

Contentment in our mind is not given by our thoughts and our many feelings, but through experiencing them from the peaceful nature of our deepest reality as being. To live in the world is to be lost and to know suffering, but to have the world living within ourself is to know a joy that is free and independent from the ruthlessly changing nature of experience.

So free yourself from the world; it is not where you live. Rather, have the world close to your being, and see its nature as your own. This is the way to live in the world. See that it is still of the nature of mind. That it doesn’t own its own reality, but borrows it from the infinite, from the limitless, which is the nature of yourself as being.

So everything you seemingly do, you in fact never do. What you think you are, you are not. We live in a world of imagination. In fact, we only ever live in and as a reality that is shared, and that is our very nature. There, in that reality, is found the reality of our body-mind-world. This reality is the nature of everything and everyone we encounter in experience. It is our real world, our only home.

The impression that we live in a world that has its own reality is created, believed. The belief in being a body has created the world, has made it sprout out of a duality that we have ourself made up and manipulated. Outside this belief, everything re-enters the place it has never left, and the oneness it has never been separated from: infinite, eternal, seamless being.

This reality is what there only and ever is. Nothing exists beyond it, whether it is a world, a body, or a mind. To live as a body-mind in the world is to feel separate from it. It is to see ourself as a self. It is to have the arrogance of being our own self, and to see the world and circumstances as the provider of happiness. This is why we always look for contentment, security, stability, constancy. We mimic what we are before we actually know it.

And enlightenment is sill part of the world, still part of a belief. Its reality is invented, created for the sake of a self or an ego. Enlightenment is not about being enlightened. There is no such a thing as enlightenment, unless you want to cling to the reality of yourself as a body-mind. The belief in enlightenment is our last, ultimate delusion. It belongs to a non existent world, to a non existent self.

You have been the light of yourself — of selfless being — all along, but have played within the illusion of a world and a self, therefore concealing your own reality within that illusion. Re-assign yourself to your true nature. Then it doesn’t matter what you experience. It is not in what you experience — it is in what you are. It is all there. Nothing and no one exists beyond it. You have no use of enlightenment.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906)

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Website:
– Frits Thaulow (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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The Person

Posted on by Alain Joly

‘Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair’ – Rembrandt, 1628 (Rijksmuseum) – Wikimedia

There is immense pleasure in being a person when we are not a person. Then, the body-mind, the person, is not a burden anymore, it is a companion. We begin to enjoy its gentle presence, for it is rid of the constant search for happiness, peace, freedom. It is not on him anymore. She doesn’t have to bring about her joy. Doesn’t have to condition her freedom to her circumstances. The person is delivered. It doesn’t have to resist and be a fighter. Doesn’t have to struggle, suffer, hope, be in the constant grip of personal achievement and success. He can stop being a seeker, endlessly looking for what could make him good, content, relieved. She can stop having peace on her everyday agenda. These are given — naturally — as our nature, as ourself. They stop being the work of a person, his everyday load that he has to achieve, perform, be a success at — all the tyranny of it.

There is a presence that we feel is our own, our identity, that already gives us everything that we as a person would spend a lifetime looking for, and would for certain — that’s a universal secret, believe me on that — fail to secure. We already have a wonderful, pristine self in the form of our naked, unconditioned being, so the person doesn’t have to create a non existent self for itself. It doesn’t need to have this belief, that it is a self, that it is separate, that it lives inside a body and a mind. Self and identity are already provided. We share them with everyone and everything. We don’t have to be lonely. Don’t have to be limited by a form, and imprisoned by the boundaries of birth and death. Appearance and age stop being an issue. Comparison dies down. We expand as limitless being, outside even the boundaries of time. The body-mind acquires transparency.

Then we take him or her by the hand — the form, the limited body-mind, the person. Then it is like our best friend, freed from everything that made it small, separate, fearful. Then our body, although limited, will acquire and ride on the infinite nature of its beholder. Then our mind, which is bound by the boundaries of time and thought, will wander on the grounds of the eternal, where our being has its permanent home. Then our personhood shines, precisely because we are not a person. We become beautiful, attractive, and our actions bear the signature of the infinite. Then, being a person is important. And it is not a hindrance to our recognising who we are. On the contrary. The person becomes an emissary of truth, both within and without.

Then ‘what is’ is what we desire, and we don’t mind our circumstances. They satisfy us. We are free. We can be a person and find it a beauty to be so. The person is only here to pass on the impersonal desire of the infinite. It is here for God’s will, which is to be and act on God’s premises, in Its gorgeous name. Not to have a private agenda, in the name of the endless insecurities of a nonexistent, separate self. Not to be burdened by life, but to be the messenger of its secret glory. Then, she as a person is clothed in the dress of a delightful being, shining with an identity that she borrows from God’s identity, and partaking of a self that is the very self of universal being. Then he doesn’t find his person to have an existence separate from his not being a person. Person, no person, being, consciousness, God, life, existence — all one same infinite thing and being. And the person, against all odds, thrives in it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Rembrandt (1606-1669)

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Website:
– Rembrandt (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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A Manual for Happiness

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Field of Poppies’ – Claude Monet, 1873 – WikiArt

We can’t get hold of happiness so easily. It is elusive, coming at odd times, sneaking in surreptitiously without our noticing. When we know it, it had already been there for a while, although we realise it only now — its quiet presence — a thing that seems to come from eternity, and that we could live with for ever. It doesn’t have the crude expression of a boastful, egoistic eruption of joy, or the bourgeois, replete manifestation of satisfaction. Happiness is more charming, something rare, valuable, that comes uninvited, on a propitious moment. By the way, this is the etymology of ‘happy’: ‘hap-‘, which means ‘lucky’, ‘good fortune’. Happiness seems to come by chance, ‘falling’ on us, as the Latin ‘cadere’ for ‘chance’ conveys. There is an exception though, in Welsh, where the word ‘happy’ had once the meaning of ‘wise’. Maybe after all, being happy is not a matter of chance. Maybe it better comes with some understanding and wisdom.

So what is this chance, or this bit of luck that comes propitiously for happiness to appear? Maybe our good fortune is simply in what is present now, shining beyond any shadow of doubt. Being happy is when we have the good fortune to let ‘what is’ be, occur, without any interference. Being happy is when we let ourself plainly be. This allowing may be the best manual for happiness. And this has nothing to do with a person or entity being happy. Happiness doesn’t belong to us personally. It is not in the obtention of something we desire, but rather thrives in times of desirelessness. Happiness is a detachment. It is a permission. It is a confrontation with truth, and therefore the abandonment or removal of our idea of being a person. There, in that removal of oneself, is the advent of truth or reality, and the blooming of happiness. Truth, having no perturbation in itself, no friction, no contradiction, no lie, or illusion, or pretence, is manifesting its pure joy of being just as it is. Happiness is a manifestation of truth. An indication of presence. The bubbles of being that come at the surface with a fizzing sound of well-being.

Happiness doesn’t happen to us. It is in the air, in the essence of everything, in what makes us intimately. It is indivisible from who we are when we have removed this block of beliefs, concepts, certainties and doubts, that constitutes our alleged self, with its regiment of hopes, regrets, and resistances. Happiness has no relationship whatsoever to our body and mind, but they will find a great relaxation in experiencing its echo. Thoughts will rarify accordingly. Of course there may be an appropriation of happiness by the so-called person we have convinced ourself to be. The mind recuperates it to its advantage. The self is using this timeless moment to boast itself up. It objectifies happiness and reduces it to being simply an emotion — the equal of fear, or anger. It reduces happiness down to a form of tension that consolidates its belief in being a person, a body-object that is the only subject of its life.

In contrast to happiness, suffering belongs to us, and so do fear, anger, hatred, which are all tensions coming from a misappropriation or misapprehension of life — a violation of truth. We are mistaking ourself for what we are not. We are resisting what is with what is not. And it generates all manners of conflict and discomfort. But if we don’t react; if we let ourself feel this pure, unattached inner being, and don’t leave it, don’t conceptualise it, don’t distance ourself from it for a refuge in the comfort of our body-mind. If we stay there, in the subtle identity of our most intimate self. If we rest still and in complete harmony with our purest sense of being. If we stay humble, and enjoy the delicacy contained in just being, for no reason other than simply being. If we enclose ourself within it, and let ourself be permeated by its most subtle essence. If we feel it to be our lifeblood, and let our old sense of self be seized, or snatched away by it. If we don’t resist in any way, including through our appropriation of happiness, which is a subtle form of resistance. Then… Then happiness is revealed as just the ease of being — what comes naturally when we connect to the truth of our deepest self. It is then what we could call, our good fortune.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Claude Monet (1840-1926)

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Website:
– Claude Monet (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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On Being Apart

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Two Men by the Sea’ – Caspar David Friedrich, 1817 – WikiArt

We are never far from our deepest reality. That’s a fantasy — to think that we are far, separate, apart. To think that truth is at a distance, that there is a god, a reality away from our own reality as being. Ourself is the only reality there is. We won’t find another one, something grander, truer than ourself. There isn’t. It’s all here within, already taking place in and as our own being. But we are limiting ourself with a thought. The thought that we are circumscribed to our body, restricted to our mind, and that we have our own personal being different and apart from somebody else’s being. This is how far we have gone from ourself. This is the distance we have created, the separateness we have invented. We have set ourself apart from ourself with a single thought. That’s our negligence, to have let ourself be governed by a belief, by a lie. To have drowned in our own absent-mindedness. We have, as it were, kept ourself on the sidelines.

But we can play the central role with the single thought that there is, at all time, only one reality. We are the only reality there is. Have this thought, that nothing exists outside yourself, that we have it all in our own reality as being. That we can rely on no other authority than the authority of ourself. That we can seek nothing other than our own self as being. That the world, everything, God, truth, the answer to our suffering, are all gathered within the single reality of our being present here and now. So state quietly in yourself that there is only ‘I Am’, that apart from ‘I Am’, well… there is no apart. No part separate from the totality has ever come into existence. There is only the totality playing the many parts of life, but staying itself complete, unbroken, one, whole as our own being. This is how simple we are — One. This is how much we matter. This is how close we are to the reality of everything, to this intimate, never distant truth that some have called ‘God’.

Think of your simple, everyday act of being aware as being everything, as the one and only reality there is. See what it entails, to have no projection of there being something, any kind of reality outside awareness. It means everything you need to know and understand is contained in and as your own sense of self. So watch it. Isolate it from every object that you are aware of, including your thoughts, feelings, perceptions. Feel naked awareness alone, and see how it grows, expands out of proportions, out of time and place, out of the world of objective experience. As you walk on the street, or wash the dishes, or do anything in the course of a day, remember that this simple experience of ‘being myself’ is all there is. That no reality exists outside yourself. That ‘I Am’ is all there is. Feel what it does to you, to think that you are one and alone, the only one being there is. Feel the shock of it, that nothing real, true, reliable, can be found outside yourself. And that this self of yourself encompasses everything, holds every passing, existing thing in its own reality. That you share this being of yourself with the being of everyone, and everything. Feel that you cannot be told apart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

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Website:
– Caspar David Friedrich (Wikipedia)

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

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