‘The Great Boulevards’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875 – WikiArt
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I have been feasting on some words recently. I was sitting leisurely on a cafe’s terrace, watching life coming and going, browsing through my phone with some ideas in mind. And there it came, and took me by surprise, like a koan suddenly unveiled, a pathway revealed without my knowing. There it came, taking the form of one single, simple phrase that seemed innocuous, by Saint Augustine:
“Is any man skilful enough to have fashioned himself?”
~ Augustine of Hippo
And that emptied my mind. It made me sink into no content, aware of all that is now; my self suddenly made a container for life. We all feel that we are so smart and powerful, or so stupid and powerless. That we have made ourselves what we are, and feel in consequence the pride or shame of it. That we have destroyed, or elevated ourselves. That we are responsible for our happiness, our success, our failure. That we have moulded our thoughts and actions, wilfully designed them. That our beliefs are believed. Our thoughts thought. Our words uttered by a ‘somebody’ here, inside the skull. But these are all beliefs, and beliefs are flawed from the start. Beliefs need a believer to believe them, and look as you may, you will never find such one behind your deeds. For the simple reason that there is no self behind our selfing. We have therefore never been in charge, never been truly responsible for collecting what we have collected, for misusing what we have misused, and for making the mistakes that we have made. Except in hindsight, in thoughts and beliefs, in cascades of randomly built illusions and memories in which we are caught and made blind. And these are what we have busied ourselves managing and arranging into a sensible self. And that self has gotten in the way of our living harmoniously.
So this was my ‘Lectio Divina’ of the day, my divine reading: “Is any man skilful enough to have fashioned himself?” I kept chewing these words, milking the understanding that fashioned them, extracting the last drop of meaning they contained. There is a huge relief for our self in that question. It says: There is no need for superimposing a self to your self. Please don’t unnecessarily double your ‘I’. Your empty self is smart enough, loving enough, intelligent enough, full enough, to make your life a life lived plentifully, and meaningfully. Don’t waste that self. Your thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions were never meant to produce a self. It was never their functions to do so. They have been encumbering the true presence that you are, have contaminated it with their beliefs, and have made a self where there was no need for one. Our actions are soiled by our belief in doing them. And through our belief in being a self able to fashion himself or herself, we have created the wars that we are in, have manufactured the confusions in which we drown, and have darkened the light of our being.
Man has not fashioned the stars, the Milky Way, never created the oceans and the towering mountains, was never responsible for managing the millions of interactions contained in the human body. Our body was not of our choosing, and neither was our place of birth, our family, our language, our culture, even our education, our friends, our health for the most part. In fact we find ourselves living the life that we live, and learn to accept it as it is. Yet the beauty and meaningfulness of it is in direct proportions to how much is supposedly controlled or suffered by a self. You can choose to live a life with a self in mind, with its belief in separation, and the consequential suffering that goes with it. Or you can see things as they are, in wholeness and simplicity — without the drama of a self separate from existence — where not a single concept about yourself arises, in the form of a thought. Then, you are made a living answer to a question that arrives from the dawn of ages. “Is any man skilful enough to have fashioned himself?”
I looked carefully. Those words had blessed me with their meaning. It appeared that I couldn’t locate a self encumbering my experience. I discovered my self selfless — my experience made whole, its existence married to my being. And my relationship to it was infused by love. There was no judge. No controller. No doer. Not a grain of sand in the system. And beauty was made apparent, with not a thing, or a being, that was discovered to be outside my self. Life was flowing without any skill necessary. It took the form of simply being. A self in no need to be fashioned. And no entity in need to be made better, more perfect. Completion was my only observable identity. And peace my only noticeable quality. It was all there was. Is is-ing itself. My self diluted in it. And God’s being revealed as ‘I’.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
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Websites:
– Augustine of Hippo (Wikipedia)
– Lectio Divina (Wikipedia)
– Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Wikipedia)
Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
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