The Formula of Life

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Rocks and sea’ – Paul Gauguin, 1886 – WikiArt

There is something mathematical about the spiritual life. You need to get the formula right, which is simply to recognise being as your one only identity. Simply being, with no addition to it. Concentrated being. If you cannot recognise yourself as that, then life will bounce back at you in endless, nasty, different ways. You will be made into somebody frail, vulnerable, suffering. Out of your failure at being who you truly are, you will draw an idea of who you are, a belief in being a separate entity, identifying yourself with your body-mind. This invented self is a diminution of your real identity. It has, inscribed in its very making, an imbalance, a lack. You will feel small, incomplete, at the mercy of beliefs and images, assailed by objects. You will be made uncertain, needy, a seeker of your lost identity. So you will then receive many of your experiences as a threat, as something that can hurt you, diminish you. That’s how fear arises, out of incompleteness, when there is a flaw in the equation of being. You are as to say behind yourself, mistaken. You have failed at just being, and are now being this and that. You have lost your anchor for a trip into objectivity. You have exchanged wholeness for separation.

Now you look everywhere frantically for something to complete you, and you find it a hundred times, in a passing object, in a success, an achievement, a bout of luck, a relationship. But these are fake friends that will fail you. For there is nothing here in the objective world that can match being. Dissatisfaction will hover over you again and again, no matter how many objective goals you may set your heart on, and attain. You will never resolve that equation. A flaw will remain, and your life formula will be left empty of meaning, unable to find its resolution. These objects that were your hope for fulfilment will finally come biting at you, for they are but the tricks that you have used as an escape from yourself. They are your being that you have let down, and split apart. They are your means to mend and repair yourself. But to project yourself in objects is to hope, expect, envy, and open the door to endless suffering. This wound is the sign of your incompleteness, the symptom of your failure at recognising your true identity. Every neglect or rejection of your true nature creates openings where experience will come and stand in front of you as something to be afraid of, or to desire. So you are never safe, never alone. It all comes back to you as a mirror of your own insufficiency.

Remember that you will attract to yourself everything that you cannot hold as your own, and understand. To be at peace in this life is a very simple matter. It lies in only one experience, which is the experience of being. Being is your universal health insurance. Being is your completeness, and therefore your well-being. If you don’t own in and as yourself your well-being, if you fail to occupy the totality of your experience — finding safety there — then you will be assailed by life. Experience will send its soldiers at you, which are but all that you cannot hold or recognise as being your own being. Hurt, confusion, fear, misunderstanding will become your usual, well-rehearsed environment, that you will accept as normal. They will become the weapons that turn against you every time you don’t fully integrate experience as the very blood and bones of infinite being. So don’t let experiences down, to live on their own, lost, clothed in separation and enmity. The enmity of experience is of your own making. You are responsible for what hits you or heals you. And you have in yourself, as yourself, the remedy for every hurt or suffering that overcome you. You have in and as your own being the ability to feel whole, complete, self-satisfied. There lies your natural competence at living. This is how you have experience always on your side, like a friend that you never fail to embrace. This is how you complete the formula of life — through clarity and brightness of being.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

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Website:
– Paul Gauguin (Wikipedia)

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

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A Holy Formula

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘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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