Anatomy of a Desire

Posted on by Alain Joly

You must not desire the truth. You must let the truth desire you. For truth has the greatest desire, the most efficient one, to which yours is but a pale copy. It is the desire to be itself alone, unaccompanied, unsoiled. In the fulfilment of that desire, truth will swallow you, will undress you and render you transparent, nonexistent, naked. You’d be inspired to let go, to give in, to trust that desire which is so greater than yours. For your desires are small, inadequate, vile, selfish. They won’t get you where you truly want to be. They will miss the mark. Every time.

So don’t desire truth. Don’t make it like something you can possess. Truth is in fact already possessing you, the only one in command. So undress your being of the superfluous. The superfluous is all the beliefs attached to yourself, that makes you a self that feels separate, an entity in a body, delineated by its thoughts and feelings, that looks up to experience, and betrays its profound suffering through its constant desire for fulfilment.

Notice that your desire has no true owner. The one that desires is not really there. It is but an idea, a desperate attempt to feel that you are complete. But you won’t feel complete by means of desiring, for desire is already the sign of your incompleteness. The problem with being a desirer is that it places you ahead of your natural identity as being. It is a position of ignorance with a plan and a hope. The desirer is a made-up entity whose unacknowledged goal is to consolidate itself. So don’t make truth like a projected goal to be achieved. The desired object of enlightenment, or realisation, was never intended. It was in fact all for the desirer, to strengthen your false identity as a self, to adorn the temple of separation, to attach yourself to another idea. Liberation is not in desiring to be liberated.

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Continue this exploration of desire in matters of truth… (READ MORE…)

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The Fragrance of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Mist. Autumn.’ – Isaac Levitan, 1899 – WikiArt

There is a time in our life experience, when we come to understand what this complex arrangement of thinking, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling is all about. The source of it all. What it comes down to be, in essence, in feeling — the simplicity of it. It all starts there, from feeling. When we have the feeling, life flows with an intrinsic harmony. When we have the love, sentiments and actions take their right place. Every experience draws its best colours from this primordial feeling of being. It all flows down from that storm of aliveness which is our true nature.

The moment of understanding is when the teaching, the path, the ‘how’, the description, the words, reveal their redundancy and are stopped in their course. When the doing recedes and leaves its place to simply and naturally being. When we cease being a person and recognise our nature as the infinite nature of everything. The words are not here to teach us a new skill, or even develop it. They only come to provoke. They form to enjoin us to look and notice what is already here, fully alive and vibrant — the final word behind our being human.

At the time of creation, a composer is singing or playing his music first in his mind, and then writes it down. Our understanding proceeds on the same line. Truth comes first. It is played, tasted, lived in and as our own being, and the teaching, the words come to only confirm it, to give it the solemn acquiescence of wisdom, or provide the map of the land before us, of which we now espouse the very ground. It is all a question of feeling. Truth is truth-feeling, visiting the land, smelling its atmosphere, merging with its fuming ground, where we are given the grace to taste of the unity of being.

Truth is that which is here before the passing events, below the ups and downs of existence, encompassing everything that forms at the periphery of ourself. Truth is the beauty that our eye or ear seem to catch, but which is in fact within our soul, in our inside, our essence, our being. Truth is only about feeling being, then, and only then, are we gifted with thinking, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling — all the world that forms and makes our experience, and is like the flower of our essence. In the accomplishment of truth, we embellish the world with our being.

The feeling of being is the crowning point of our experience. It is lacking when there is the illusion of our being a self contained within the limits of our body-mind. It escapes us when we exclude the world and take it to be outside our own person. But being is hiding in plain sight. In fact, experience itself, in its totality, is but the feeling of being. There is no experience without first feeling being. The feeling of being is our foremost experience. Yet in a tragic and absurd way, experience itself has been the one concealing that. All it contains of beliefs, identifications, and imaginations, is preventing our being to be felt, and the fragrance of life to be enjoyed. We have hidden this simple fact from our own self: that we may be nothing more than the feeling of being. All else is only added to make a good story. 

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)

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Website:
– Isaac Levitan (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Where is True Home

Posted on by Alain Joly

Where can we find what is ‘our own’ in our experience? What is fitting? Where do we draw a sense of belonging from? Most of the time, we do not feel that we fit in, that we have a place. We feel insecure, so we secure an identity in a thousand things. We borrow from an object our appeasement. We make objects our own, we inhabit our thoughts, we adorn ourself with qualities, and we take shelter in a body. That’s what we do to fit in, and find security: we lose ourself in an ‘other’. We beg for anything that we could call our own, for fear of staying alone, and be left a nobody. We make up a self, and then call it ‘our own’. And that place of our own we find — and have defined — in a thousand shaky, unreliable places and things. But it is a bad try. In fact, we have burgled our own home of belongings that are not ours.

How are we going to find a home, if we keep rummaging through experience for every object that fits our needs? We ought to be disinterested for a while. We need to be disowned, dispossessed of every property or belonging that we have so far acquired, clung to, and in definitive stolen. For this is where true ownership is found, in not belonging. This is how a decent property is secured, by having no place to be. We ought to live free from all the accumulations that we have gathered and identified with. For our true home is not placed on the crest of experience, is not built on the sand of insecurity, and is not limited by the fence of limitation. It is not for a self, or a place, to produce the quality of enduring peace. Peace is already here, wholly achieved, in the home that our being truly is.

Live so that you don’t have to steal in your own house. You have it all. Your property extends to infinity and the world is the garment of your whole being. So in being, wherever you are is your home, and whatever you need is found here, in you, as you, with all the peace and security that pertain to a true home. You fit in when there is no space between yourself and what you long for. Being no space, you won’t have an urge to seek outside of yourself your identity and your happiness. Home is the recognition that you are already home. To be is to be home. There is no achieving it, let alone work for it. Be exactly where you are, in and as your own being — the place which you could never not be in. And if you find that a sense of indomitable peace is accompanying you there, then be in no doubt that this is home — what is your own, where you fit in, where you belong. Truly.

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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 Intimacy of Experience

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘First Leaves, near Nantes’ – Camille Corot, 1855 – WikiArt

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I will tell you where to be. Be where every experience feels an equally good experience. Don’t be attached to judgment and comparison. These are the mind’s favorite tools and activities. The mind tricks you to believe that experience is an uneven ground. That according to the content of your experience, you will be gifted with either happiness or suffering, peace or conflict, harmony or disorder. So the experience you are having becomes extraordinarily important. We become dependent on what happens to us, and come to dread it. So we retire into the secure place of our habitual self, with its cortège of worry, control, expectation, and manipulation.

There is a place in us where you don’t find experience to be such a determining factor. Where you will not let experience determine you, fix you, limit you. You won’t be shaped by its content. You won’t be made into something, someone, with qualities and flaws, to be judged, evaluated, compared with — the likeness of experience — in fact, just another object. The mind is a manufacturer of objects, entities, persons, fixing the insubstantial nature of your being into a self to be moulded and made either happy or miserable. To be made happy by an experience is to be cheated on by it: we are being manipulated, and made to believe an illusion. To let experience make us miserable is sheer deceitfulness, it is us being easily dazzled by the treachery and artifice of objects.

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Continue this exploration of the nature of experience… (READ MORE…)

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An Abundance of Spirit

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Chateau Noir’ – Paul Cezanne, 1904 – WikiArt

We always go too far, too quick. We jump to the objective display of reality, and in doing so leave our reality behind. It is a strange phenomenon, this forgetting, this negligence, this hurry. In fact, we pass ourself by, and rush towards what we think matters the most, what we believe to be real. This is how we have made this life difficult, an impossible thing to comprehend, and a hardship: in this forgetting, in this passing by. Our suffering is the product of a simple, single act of absent-mindedness. We have put ourself into oblivion by having made the facile postulation that reality is in the objective, in what we can see, hear, touch with our senses. And then have clung to it, to the point of losing our mind inside it, and losing ourself with it. What an absurd thing to have done.

We ought to be slow and still, if we are to meet our nature. We need to be attentive, if we are to notice our being. Not the one-pointed kind of attention, that we are already so well-acquainted with, but the sluggish one. The lazy one, that doesn’t want to go out and stumble into the world. That doesn’t feel like wrestling with thoughts. That cannot be bothered with the threat or seduction contained in the last surge of a sensation or a feeling. I can assure you that there is already a lot to see, hear, feel, on our way to the vast, far-ranging world that our senses provide. So let us not have time or space on our schedule. Let us forget the agenda that our person has and wants to fulfil. Let us not form any concept, idea, or projection, and delve into what is here before every appearance.

We may see, in slowing down, that there is here a presence that stands still, transparent, and aware. We may hear the sound of a silence that stays unaffected by the clamour of existence. We may feel the world to be but the thousand colours of our sumptuous being. We may notice the pregnancy of spirit in what is seen, heard, felt, and realise this pregnancy to be our very own nature felt, heard, seen. This abundance of spirit in our life is but the disappearance of the entity that sees, hears, feels the world, and the surging of the One as our own and only reality or world. Then we won’t pass truth by anymore. Our own nature will be unmistakable, unmissable. It will meet us in the face at the first surge of an object seen, heard, felt. We won’t miss it because it is all there is. Because there is here the absence of a self living in separation, and the absence of a world as world. This absence is our presence, our nature, our self, our world, and there ends our suffering.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

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Website:
– Paul Cézanne (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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’katholikos’

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Life of St. Ignatius Loyola. Plate 4.‘ – Carlos Saenz de Tejada – WikiArt

You’ve got to respect the whole. That’s how you live the good life, in having reverence for the totality of your experience. Not just for the superfluous, all that is being the foam of life, that exists and appears, that you can see, hear, touch. You will never make a totality from the world of objects, from thoughts and perceptions. These are but occasional appearances, superficies. They are above you as it were, dancing upon you, at the periphery of who you are, but are not the reality covering your experience — its most profound constituent. You’ve got to go beyond the mundane and the obvious. For we keep leaving something out of experience. We don’t take the whole thing. We are choosy, only care for objects, don’t integrate our ‘within’ — where the reality of our being is. Notice that there is a world here, that is encompassing our world — a presence pervading our reality, taking everything in.

Actually, this is what the word ‘catholic’ is about. In Greek, ‘katholikos’ means: ‘pertaining to the whole’. We have to pay due respect to the whole, to the totality. We must look back at what we truly are, and find there the expression of the whole. I am not sure that Ignatius of Antioch had this in mind, when he first coined the term ‘catholic’ in the early 2nd century AD. He probably meant that the new belief, the new credence, was to be the universal truth, meant for everyone, adopted by all. But there was no need for adoption — the baby was already in the womb. There were no beliefs to be had, no hopes to project and entertain, no happiness to seek outside of our common day experience as being. He didn’t see that in this very word was the answer to all religions, to every quest for the divine peace; that what we were looking for was already here, close, so close to our very experience; and that there was no need to form a belief about it, or a new credence.

To accord with the whole is to be reconciled with our true nature — the reality of our being. It is to be ‘of one mind’, which is what reconciliation means, and to be brought together under the vault of one reality. This is achieved by turning towards the One, which is our true and only constituent. Universality wasn’t meant to be achieved in multiplicity. Universality is the quality of oneness noticed. The totality is in every place you happen to be. There is no totality of which you wouldn’t be the vessel. For the whole is not a geography, not a place to be in. It is the embrace of being. There is a totality in and as the being which you are now, here. You are not inside a totality. The totality is inside you. But mind you, this most venerated Christian Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch did say something of the highest order, when he brought up the word. He said that “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” Yes. Yes indeed. Wherever we as our deepest being are, whenever we as our most profound nature-consciousness are, there is the expression of the whole, of oneness — the totality which is the very nature of the Lord’s House, and which is our nature and our house too.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 108/140)

Painting by Carlos Saenz de Tejada (1897-1958)

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Websites:
– Ignatius of Antioch (Wikipedia)
– Carlos Saenz de Tejada (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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Vedantic Logic

Posted on by Alain Joly
Hampi Vijayanagara, Karnataka – India

We are always too late with our identity. We come after. We experience something within, a sensation, an unease, a thought, and then say: I am that. We start from what happens, from experience, out of which we draw some identity. We are lazy. We identify with what comes. We experience our body, and draw the conclusion that this body is what we are at the deepest level. And then we live from there, from this conclusion, from this belief, this concept of ‘me-my-body’ — which we refer to as ‘I’. Our chance has passed. We have drawn comfort in that conclusion, but have invited its many companions of voyage too, which are suffering, fear, lack, and the likes. We have given ourself to the wind of arbitrary experiences. We depend on everything that passes uninvited. No wonder we suffer, finding there no stability, and no peace. We are at the mercy of what comes. So we are desperately trying to shape what comes, in order to shape our identity, and derive from it some elements of happiness. Hence our constant striving, seeking, debating with life, struggling with what we are, and with what the world brings.

We think that all the responsibility falls on us, that we are the designers of our identity. We are little ghosts exhorting themselves to happiness. And every time we fail and fall from this imaginary pedestal, we head for another direction, another hope, another expectation, and so goes our life — dependent and miserable. Until we finally listen. Until we see that there is an identity before any experience of body and mind. It isn’t that difficult to see and understand. This is only logic. This is, as Swami Dayananda Saraswati used to say, Vedantic logic: “Vedantic logic and worldly logic are diagonally opposite. Worldly logic is: ‘I experience sorrow; therefore I’m sorrowful’. Whereas vedantic logic is: ‘I experience sorrow; therefore I’m not sorrowful’.” So we have to go further back, and it takes some courage. For we are so gullible. We don’t have any true, reasonable stand. Yet, the way we speak betrays our intuition that we are not fully identified with our body and mind. After all, we constantly comment on them. We are not fully implicated. We put ourself at a distance from our own identities, but don’t go far enough. We stay somewhere along the way, as a self separate from it all. We don’t finish the journey. We don’t look well enough. We presuppose we are something, a somebody, a person, and leave ourself there, close, so very close from a higher, nobler truth.

Cannot there be an experience where ‘I’ is really, truly ‘I’? Where ‘I’ cannot be projected or conceptualised? Where it is not belittled, depreciated? Where it cannot be coloured, biased, conditioned? Where it is here in ourself, as ourself, like a pure, unalloyed, super subjective identity which is like a tower in our life, knowing everything that comes without having to be anything, without drawing an identity from it? And experiencing every single object of body-mind-world while staying itself unaffected, unaltered, and whole? After all, when we say ’I am depressed’, what we really say is that ’I’ is ‘depressed’. ‘Depressed’ has become my new identity. So ‘I’ is being repressed, suppressed for a while, replaced by ‘depressed’. But the good news is that if there is an ‘I’ that can be depressed, this same ‘I’ is here standing before the state of being depressed. There is a being before being depressed. We have let ourself being coloured, forgetting that we are in fact that which is here to be coloured. We have lent ourself to the first coming visitor. But the Vedantic logic is here to remind us that when depression is on us, or affects us, it only hides our true identity for a while. It conceals us but doesn’t change us. We stay what we are — a being untouched — depression being only what clouds us for a time. There is something here under cover, a reality, a presence, an aware being that is only being itself. This being can never be touched by depression or sorrow. What is touched by sorrow is a belief, an idea, a projection of ourself as an entity that can be affected by the passing weathers of life. Meanwhile, this pure, innocent being that we are, and that is our one only identity, stays on, living its life of being only being, while a non-existing self is playing depressed and being melodramatic.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

Quote by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930-2015)

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Website:
– Dayananda Saraswati (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
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