The Russian Dolls

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Ornement, Matriochka, Babushka’ – Schwoaze – Pixabay

In fact, all we have to do is this: To open to our fact of just being. To let go of our acquired resistance, this tightness running in the background. It’s just an old habit. Our fear too — just an old habit born out of a concept. That concept runs something like this: we are a time-bound self that is separate and needs control and protection. Let this representation go. It’s not fundamental. It’s a narrative. It can be easily rid of. It is but a late creation in our timeless life as being. Just an idea lingering at the surface of our being, with no foundation. A simple belief that has once emerged. Just shake it off, it is utterly vulnerable and lonely, scared to be looked at and unmasked. So don’t let yourself be controlled by it. Don’t let your fear and resistance rule your life. Know better. I understand if you were your body, your mind, and your feelings — if they were being the whole of you — I see in that case how your fear and resistance could infiltrate you, take possession of you, and change you, ruin your innocence, harden you, damage you. I get the point. But you’re not. You’re not your body and mind, let alone your feelings. This is only an unchallenged, primal belief, which gave rise to the idea of you being a self separate from the world, a self which is then both the cause and the recipient for all your fears and resistances, for all your suffering, which then will continue the process: solidifying your idea of being a body; making your whole mind an asset of that body; giving rise to the idea of a self within that mind; which will in turn be a cradle for a whole array of consequential feelings; then god knows what feelings can make you do… Let all these Russian dolls go. Rest in that part of your self that is neither an idea, nor a concept, nor a representation, nor a thought. Go to the very heart. Start there. With Being. This is your illusory self’s weak point, where your primal belief cannot stand. This is what will disintegrate it. What will send you back to the truth of your being, and render your fears and resistances like these vain little clowns who are running around to disturb the show but never can. Be like the bigger doll, with infinite dimensions, in which all the other dolls fall back into place, unable to really act on your gorgeous being, powerless in diminishing it. Let the many dolls within your self be like humble and devoted attendants. Some of them dying of their natural death. Some of them appearing as having never been there in the first place. And some of them painted with the glorious qualities contained in the knowing of your own being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Schwoaze in Pixabay

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Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…

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Wherever You Go

Posted on by Alain Joly

Listen to this: you are not meant to go anywhere. You may travel to the end of the earth and beyond. You may climb mountain after mountain, and dive deep into seas and oceans. You may visit the heart of the busiest cities, or be quietly at home. Wherever you go, please give it a close look. For you will never be where you go. Where you go is not where you will find yourself. The reason is: there is no geography outside yourself. Your self is the only geography for everywhere you go. Your self has mountains, cities, oceans and a home for you to live in. Your self has a body attached to it, for you to play the role of a person having a life in a world. But don’t be deluded. It is not because you always happen to be where your body is, that your self is located inside your body. There is a temporary, secret connection between your body and your self. But the truth is: your deepest self is free from any contingencies. It is not to be found anywhere in space, for it is itself owning the space you appear to be in. It has no habitation to live in. It cannot be conditioned, and its essence is impossible to move, or be transported from one place to another. So be always interested in that deepest part of yourself. Dedicate yourself to always know where you truly are. Not the superficial location of your body — not at the levels of names and forms. For where you are is not a place you can go to. It is not a place you have to reach or make an effort to attain. And your body is useless for you to know the place where you are. Where you are has no ‘where’. So in order for you to be where you are, well, then you have to only ‘be’. ‘You are’. Be only interested in that. In the fact that you are. That will give you your true location — where you truly are, wherever you are. That alone matters. Not your diving into seas and oceans. Not your roaming through cities. Not your being quietly at home. These are only distractions, making you head in the wrong direction. Where you have to go is always to your self first. Be there, in your self, in being, and all will appear pristinely simple. All places will fall into place — into your place as being. Then, wherever you may roam, you will reach the highest peak of your self. Then, wherever you may wander, you will be in the beating heart of your self. And wherever is the mellow sofa you may rest in, you will be resting in the sweet home of your self. See: you are not meant to go anywhere.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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

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Cleansing the Temple

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple’ – Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1724 – Wikimedia

Maybe this is where peace in fact resides. In the fact that peace or happiness can never be found, never be reached. It will be nowhere where you expect it, not in any objective appearance or event, not in any wish granted, not in any kind of alignment between what you want and what you have. You will never obtain what you want. Truth is not there, in what you wish. It doesn’t care for your egoistic projections, for your own private self-interest. Truth is not a mere good to be bargained for, or hoped for, or waited for, which, if not granted will disappoint you, and make you like a rejected lover, or a bruised self. Truth is not any kind of crude object. Remember Jesus who cast out the merchants in the temple. Were you really thinking that there was a physical Jesus actually chasing the merchants from the temple, on the ground of some kind of moral rule?

The merchants in the temple, it is you. It is all of us when we have decided to argue with reality, to buy our happiness with some kind of object obtained, to bargain or negotiate with some invented superior entity the responsibility of what is happening to us, to come to god with pockets full of expectations and desires, making peace a simple object to be bought in the market place of our likes and dislikes. “Wouldst thou be free from any taint of trade?” did Meister Eckhart ask. Imagine the relief that it is: to know or realise that you will not have what you want, that ‘what is’ is all there is, all that you will ever have. What a relief! What a load finally put down, and got rid of! All that you want, desire, expect, all that, will never ever be granted to you. You can forget it all. ‘What is’ is the deal. The grandiose enlightenment you were waiting for lies there, in what simply is! It will never get better than that! You have it all here, in front of you. That is the gift that was specially designed for you. Happiness resides in what you have, in what you are, here and now. This is the secret that Krishnamurti meant when he said: “I don’t mind what happens.”

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On how truth is not an object to be bought in the marketplace… (READ MORE…)

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What We Have to Do

Posted on by Alain Joly

Well, now you know what to do, don’t you? All this time spent in the contemplation of truth must have served some purpose. The countless hours sitting on the cushion. The days in the company of Meister Eckhart or Rumi. And the sage of Arunachala. All these masters of presence. Surely they must have made a lasting impression on you. Now you won’t be seduced by experience anymore. You won’t be dragged into the train of every thought or worry that passes by. You won’t fall entranced by feelings, no matter how pregnant they may appear to be. You won’t let any of your sensations attach themselves to yourself, and suck your attention. Now you know better. You won’t be caught again. The time has come to find yourself just where you are. In that essential in yourself. Not at the periphery. Not in the weather of life, but deep down, in silence, in that presence that falls to nothing but itself. This is where you have to be. This is where your sacred interest lies. But we know that so well by now, don’t we? No need to stress that point again.

Well. But let’s rehearse it again. Just in case. Some part of it may have slipped away from our attention. There is never any harm in repeating what really matters: The important is never in the many, but lies secret in the reality that hosts every seeming appearance. So now we know, don’t we, where to look, where the promise hides, where that non-spoken truth is spoken. We know where is our duty to God. It is there, where you know, close to yourself, behind the behind, present as your most intimate identity. Don’t let yourself be drawn outside of it. Don’t fall to any passing occurrence, to anything that is not the entirety of you. That’s simple enough to make the difference. Stay with that part of yourself that is unmovable, that cannot be divided, set apart, isolated, looked at. That part that will never fail you, no matter hard you may try. And if you find anything, any thing, that stands to be noticed in your mind, an obstacle in yourself, then be unconcerned, go behind it, go for the space that holds it, that last frontier beyond it. And should that obstacle, that thought, that feeling, that perception, be so pregnant as to occupy the whole space of your self, then be bold, dive into it, right at the centre of it, free fall into it, on the other side of yourself, in this unknown, never visited part of you. Then… Then, you may come to that spaceless space, to that newness. Let it shower you, cleanse you. Be it and don’t move away from it no matter what. You won’t regret it.

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Text by Alain Joly

Photo by Elsebet Barner

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

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Arise, O Krishna!

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Rasa Mandala Dance of Krishna and the Gopis’ – Anonymous, 1760 – Wikimedia

Arise, O Krishna! This is not a time for discretion. There is enchantment around the lake of experience. Ladies have come with fine clothes and jewellery to be adorned by you. You have to be their cup-bearer, the one presence giving to every forms of experience their gorgeous light. For what is a thought without the cup in which it grows, stands for a second, and disappears? Krishna, you alone are the meaning and beauty attached to every object that inhabit our daily living. So this is not a time to hide, but to reveal, to shed light, to glorify. The Gopis — the milkmaids of the Krishnaite folklore — have come to you in the effervescence of their longing. You are the reason for their looking so beautiful. They come to you to be revealed and embellished by your presence, by the one being that is their most precious jewel. So enter the round, O Krishna, and dance with every one of them.

Give to the thoughts that come and wander for a time in our minds their chamber of peace. Clothe them with clarity and intelligence. Appease the suffering of which they are the vehicle, and offer them the rest they deserve. Don’t let anyone unattended. Not a feeling should be left alone, frightened or sad, without benefiting from your warm embrace. No sensations should come along without your building for them a temple of awareness. Be the one present for all, infallible, unswerving. Should a Gopi be lost in the contemplation of nature, and you are here showering her vision with beauty. You are the noble harmony of every experience, and what confers to the dance of life the sweetest of melodies. And have you noticed, O Krishna, how your absence can throw a shadow of sorrow on every experience that passes unseen by you? And have you witnessed how acute is our longing for you, when you withdraw your loving gaze from the many happenings of our lives?

So now, with flowers in their hair, and boundlessness in their hearts, do the Gopis join in your endless round, O Krishna. You hold everyone, every experience, every object that stands lost and alone, in your loving arms. You create around them an armour of beauty, and clothe them in truth’s brightest apparel. That’s how we find the peace at the heart of experience: by marrying every appearance to the gentle presence that holds them. And that presence is ourself — who we are — now giving shape to every perception, every occurrence, sheltering them in the being that gives them protection and form. That’s how the Gopis are experienced as an emanation of Krishna, and how Krishna is seen to be their primordial cause. So now arise, O Krishna! Truly arise! We have come here in celebration of truth, to contemplate you and be contemplated by you. The set for the dance has been arranged. We have come to you enamoured as humble milkmaids, as the fervent Gopis of your heart.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Anonymous (1760-65)

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Website:
– Raslila (Wikipedia)

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

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The Greatest Trick

Posted on by Alain Joly

In fact, the understanding of our true nature is the simplest thing on earth. We have to, repeatedly, not be doing anything. The problem is: we cannot help but doing something, hoping something, trying something, anything, to get us where we think we should be. Where we are is never enough; never somewhere we should go to. What we are is not satisfying; we have to attain something that is better, no matter what. Even being, we think that we have to be being it — as if we were not already being. In all analysis, there is in fact such a thing as ‘nothing to do’ in spirituality, but only at the point when we are already not doing anything. If we are doing something, well, then we are doing something. This doing is an expression of our belief in not being ‘there’ yet, in our incompleteness, in our striving to get somewhere, to be someone. Then we have de facto missed all possibility of realisation: for we are already established in doing, in efforting. At this point, it is too late to not be doing anything. We need to revise our judgement.

We have been overtrained in doing. Maybe this doing is in fact what we have become — the essence of our self as a seemingly separate entity. We are born the moment we have the impulse of doing something, of being a doer, a knower. This is our original mistake, what we should never have been doing. We think we have to be somebody; to be nobody is a curse, a shame, an emptiness that we have to fill at all cost, even at the cost of losing ourself. So there is comfort in being a self, a somebody, in achieving something, in doing anything at all. The fact that we should be suffering for it, and be limited by it, well that’s the nature of existence, are we told. We are willing to pay that price for doing something, for being somebody. So let me do. Let me be. That’s how to feel ‘I am’ for now. That’s the story which was handed down to us. That’s how we have been regimented by society. And we have by now rehearsed it long enough, to perfection. We think that we’re not doing it when the doing has already been achieved. We are in fact implementing doing all the time while believing we are not doing it. This is the greatest trick that was ever performed on us.

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A playful reflection into the question of the doer… (READ MORE…)

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The Falling of a Feather

Posted on by Alain Joly

The most extraordinary thing about this understanding is that nothing needs to perish inside you in order to access your essential being. Not a supposed self that might be getting in the way of your realisation. Not some kind of entity that you painstakingly have to dismantle before you can access the truth of your being. There is nothing to dismantle. Not a single little thing. That apparent, undesirable self is made of the fully formed self that is yet to be revealed. So don’t be fooled. Don’t even be interested in that limited self that you have bought into. There is no such self. Just a few random thoughts hanging around, and being amused by the trick they have played on you. Don’t give that self even a second glance. What kind of spiritual seeker would you be, wasting your precious time and energy on a self that has not even the beginning of a reality? Don’t get involved with any single idea about yourself.

So don’t fiddle with yourself, get busy suppressing, controlling, practicing, re-ordering. No toughness is required. No crime needed here, and not a bit of violence necessary. Only the noticing that the self you imagined yourself to be is not here. Believe me, there is an awful amount of effort that you can spare yourself. The path is already all cleared. Your true nature is in plain view just as you are. See that what you are looking for is no more than the quiet and gentle falling of a feather of awareness on your experience as it presents itself. Nothing more. A non-happening. The letting go of an idea. So be vigilant. Keep your heart open. See how wide your vision is already. Get accustomed to the light of simply being. You may need time to make it your default experience. But don’t forget that non-violence always prevails with God’s grace. But could you expect any less coming from such a loving being?

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Meditating on the gentleness of the recognition process… (READ MORE…)

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