A Holy Formula

‘Woman in the Wilderness’ – Alphonse Mucha, 1923 – Wikimedia

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Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole.”
~ David Bohm

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You cannot suffer when the world in which you live is discovered to be you. That’s mathematical. A formula that will work magic in your life. For you don’t live separated from everything else. You are not limited to your body, and the world is not something that is distinct from you, at a distance from you. You discover that the jump was made long ago, that you have been the totality already from the beginning of ages, eternally one with it, and that there never was an inch that separated you from the world you live in. That’s how you are complete, by knowing no separation, by entertaining no difference, and therefore having no preference. So you cannot be lacking anything, and suffering is always only the lacking of something, which is born of separation. So stay there, in your inseparable essence, in your world of completeness. Notice that this is what you are, or rather what there is, when you stop fantasising yourself being somebody. You never had an existence of your own. You are the flowering of something deeper. If you ignore or overlook this simple truth, well… then the trouble begins, all the travail of life, and the never ending seeking for fulfilment. This never was about you. Life is bigger, wider than that, and you are here only to honour that and to live by its gorgeous rules.

Then you enter into sacredness. You leave the limitations of being somebody — a projection, an idea that thought has sculpted over time — for a merging with infinity, with who you truly are. This is what sacredness is: an entering into your true self. A visiting of the truth of your being. The anointing of your self with its reality. This entering is a sanction from truth. It is the death of an old idea which you have entertained, for a ride into unknowing. It is a ceremony in which you are being elevated to a reality that you have been blind to. You are being sanctified, or made true. You were already that, already living as that reality, already tasting of that firmament, but were distracted. You were drawn to be something, insisted in being exclusively yourself, by yourself, so you have ignored it. You missed the chance to know yourself truly. You worked too hard to be what you are not. You lacked passivity. Not that you don’t have to do anything to come to this understanding. But rather, this understanding is nothing you do. It is here in you, as you, without your doing anything about it. It doesn’t need your participation, or rather it needs your non-participation, your staying away, your keeping quiet. Your abandonment. The hardest thing of all.

Then you enter into holiness. You taste of your true home, which happens to be the home of god. You are made holy, which means whole, uninjured, healthy. You realise where you are, what you are, the stone you are made of. You notice your true body — the consciousness of everything. You connect with a reality that could never be transgressed or violated. A reality which you could only fall in love with, for it is your beloved self, which you have lost sight of, and are now reunited with, consecrated in, and which you would never want to leave, or not live by. You are made of the same golden dust that the stars are made of. I don’t mean just your body, but what you are at the core, the essence of your self, what you happen to be when you say simply ’I am’. You are made into “an internal relationship to the whole”, as David Bohm expressed so beautifully. And you will struggle to see the world as a collection of different parts, or to see yourself as one such part amongst many others. The One will come to be your only experience. But you will be defeated again and again. You will come to feel a part again. You will be seduced to be somebody time and again. You will want to feel separated again, to win another last adventure or advantage for yourself. You know: your little devil wanting to be the likes of god. But keep going. Keep going. Until one day, it may dawn on you: you are no more.

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Text by Alain Joly

Quote by David Bohm (1917-1992)

Painting by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

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Websites:
David Bohm (Wikipedia)
Alphonse Mucha (Wikipedia)

Suggestions:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
– A page from the blog dedicated to David Bohm: ‘Insights into Wholeness’…

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Insights into Wholeness

‘Science against Obscurantism’ – Giacomo Balla, 1920 – WikiArt

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

~ William Blake 

 

It really was a thrill. The day when David Bohm was announced to come and participate at our staff meeting. This was back in the years when I was working in Brockwood Park, the school founded in England by J. Krishnamurti. Just realise: one of the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century, who worked closely with Albert Einstein and had numerous insightful dialogues with Krishnamurti — participating in creating this very school we were in — was here a humble friend amongst us. My poor English at the time was making rather challenging the understanding of this man’s soft, monotonous voice. But the quality of his thinking and analysis, the speed with which he would come up with and express meanings to the questions that were raised during our dialogues, were indeed impressive. Above all, his humble and unassuming demeanour was touching beyond measure. He was truly a gentle man. 

David Joseph Bohm was born in 1917 in Pennsylvania, USA to a Jewish family of Eastern European descendance. His early career around the Second World War started rather spectacularly, since he was asked by Robert Oppenheimer to work with him in the secret laboratory created to design the atom bomb, but was refused access because of his youthful acquaintances with communist ideas. Soon after this, while completing his Ph.D., he made some calculations that proved useful to the very project which he had just been barred from! But because they were now classified, he “was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!” wrote his biographer F. David Peat.

 

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David Bohm – Wikimedia

Science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view, in the sense that
the present approach of analysis of the world into independently existent parts
does not work very well in modern physics
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~ David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)

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