‘Girls by the River Prut’ – Arthur Verona, 1905 – Wikimedia
Sometimes a simple reminder is worth a thousand books, the simple reminder that this consciousness with which we live everyday, and at every second of the day, that is our companion in all circumstances, that allows us to hear the many voices of the world and be aware of the people and of nature, that is responsible for the knowing of our thoughts and feelings, without which no world, idea, hope, memory, suffering would be experienced, let alone understood, without which there would be no hurts or rushes of joy, no fear or sense of peace felt, or ruthless agitation, this very consciousness that is in fact our life, our only possibility for existing, for knowing and being, for experiencing anything — this consciousness conceals a treasure that is waiting for our recognition, and that is more than what we think and have been accustomed to believe,
a treasure that contains the understanding that this consciousness is so habitual and taken for granted that it seems like almost nothing, hardly felt or thought about, and so humble that it recedes behind our thousands experiences, allowing them the freedom to obsess or fascinate, and the power to conceal the extraordinary and the obvious — that this consciousness is in fact not our personal, private consciousness, that it is not what we have believed it to be, that it is not hidden, casual, a function among others, but the very answer revealed inside our humanity, the one and only thing in presence, the shared essence of everyone and everything, and what all religions have been trying to tell us in the first pristine intention of their founders, sometimes delivering the message with almost painful clarity, sometimes blurring it to the point of corruption and defect,
a message which is that consciousness — our consciousness — is in fact the Absolute, beyond which there is nothing, and before which none has ever existed, that it is our identity, our very self or being, what we are before every mournful identity or qualification that we adopt in our desperate attempt to be somebody, that it is the happiness which we have sought in objects or circumstances, when it is truly only the nature of our being felt, a consciousness which is peace itself, which is one and therefore experienced as love, which is the thing, or power, or being, or reality hidden behind the word ‘God’, behind every possibility of being, every tender blade of grass, every smile on a face, or flight of a bird, or starry night lit, every knowing of woe or wonder — the very reason for beauty and meaning, the One without a second of the Hindus, the Father of the Christians, the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, the Beloved of the Sufis, the before and the after, both contained in an eternal now, the here and there, and everywhere, since the infinite is its body, the only possibility of our immortality, and the I that I am at every second of our life.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Arthur Verona (1867-1946)
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Website:
– Arthur Verona (painter)
Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
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