A few months ago, while in the sky mercury was retrograding, I moved into a new house. Between two "homes", there is always this space of transition. And in writing this, I hear "treason"... In this no man's land, the body and the heart are on a journey. The mind wanders. Habits are not yet found. Everything is to be created.
On the train that was taking me to this new destination, that day, I met a man named Thal. It wasn't a meeting, but a confrontation ! I was in the grip of my mental and was confronting this man named Thal who, from his train seat, had let way too much loud music come out of his smartphone.
Without realizing what was going on, my mouth had already let out a scream : "you can turn off the music, thank you !", before taking my body back like an animal off its leash. Dry air, closed face, the scene is set. Heart closed against heart closed, the man retorts : "and you, you only have to put your mask ! I answer him : "well, so you see, it's the same...". In a few seconds, here we are in this vice of violence from which one seeks for centuries to leave.
What to do, I say to myself, disappointed, not by the insult, but by this sad observation of incommunicability. Even with the most spiritual of consciences, one finds oneself stupid. With my head in my scarf, I feel that, considering the atmosphere, the trip to the station is going to be long for one hour. But after a few minutes of pause, he calls me again, his face now bright : "Listen, I offer you a mask and in exchange I turn off the music, so we make peace, do you agree ? At the word "peace", I burst out laughing ! Like two children watching a cloud of illusion pass in the sky, we suddenly laughed at our own inner tyrant.
Finally we discovered that we were neighbors, that we played black and white (he at chess, I at the piano), that we loved each other and then hated each other ! In these children's games, these tricks of the mind limited to endless knots, there comes a day when you must go beyond the illusion. For the best ! For illusion is that suffering and suffering breeds violence. To go beyond, is to let go for good of these memories which made us get tangled up in abracadabratic situations. And when we are caught in these knots as old as the mists of time, tact is required...
If I share this personal slice of life - it is never about the characters but about the story we tell ourselves - it is because it resonates with what I observe of the collective diapason. My feeling is that individualism - the ego, as others would say - is being pointed out as never before in this period of presidential elections and global geo-political conflicts...
Inside me, I feel a fragile and questioning heart. Can I still believe in love if everything seems corrupted ? If I have received blows, will I not, naturally, put my arms over my face, close my heart and prepare to draw against the other ?
Certainly it is useless to want peace with one's neighbor when one is already unable to make peace with oneself. But in truth, war itself is a belief that we make exist as long as we make exist the search for peace. Just as the search for healing brings the disease into existence, just as the solution echoes the problem, these two sides are always the other side of the same coin. To seek one is to keep the other alive.
Absence and presence, lack and fullness, are twin brothers and sisters. Ah ! What a charming illusion !
NEW PARADIGM
This sentence from Kierkegaard comes back to me as I write these lines : "Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived."
Living this story of opposites with the man on the train, those where one sees white when the other sees black - and vice versa - without managing to drop the weapons on either side, I saw the real unconscious programming that was playing in me. That were playing with me! I saw centuries and centuries of knots in this violence which is that of taking power over the other, by fear, by reflex. Instead of letting go...
But how can we trust a tyrannical authority ?
By changing the code. By accessing a new paradigm.
This is how we manage to unravel what had been going on in a loop until then.
When I discovered by chance the film France by French film maker Bruno Dumont (2021), I was riveted. I can't think of a better description of how violence works than what he gives us to see and feel through these cold images, these tense faces, and the wars that are played out, in each of the characters, in an attempt to no longer feel their hearts in pain. Echo to ours. Until the day when... the ice breaks. The illusion is to believe that faith would come from the outside. It can only come from within, from the depths of one's being, where love has always been and will always be, beyond the greatest cataclysms.
THE ORIGIN OF VIOLENCE
Violence is a knot. A knot created at an instant T in the immense quantum field of information. When we get angry at violence, we pull on the knot more, like the laces of our shoes that bother us by resisting...
On the contrary, a knot must be taken with all the more delicacy than care and intelligence of fingering, to find the right movement that will allow it to untie.
This is how violence works, whether it is against oneself or against the Other: by pulling harder, it is reinforced; by being gentle, it is released.
RETURN TO HUMILITY
One does not need to be hyper-intuitive to feel that the current period we are living in is a great wave - a tsunami ? - which can be the wave of love or death.
It is an upheaval of our individualistic habits, of our illusions of a small and illusory independent world, towards a great collective consciousness. Not a preaching of so-called leftist solidarity. No, a real awareness of our universality, of our brotherhood. Of our necessary co-dependence. Of the circulation of energies, of information. In short, we are boomerang.
For centuries, we have thought we were emancipating ourselves, progressing, becoming individualistic and independent. As in a somewhat perverse relationship, we discover in the 21st century that in reality our freedom is conditional, that our independence is a lure : we have never been so dependent on Microsoft, Apple, on our little devices in our pockets, made of electrical connections and digital technologies, as we are now. But our heart is not connected to these performances. So we go to see therapists who tell us the sad diagnostic: "emotional dependence" ! And how not to be !
The circle of violence is launched... That of a perverse relationship where the human being has no more value than an object to meet his urgent need. Until where ?
It is the heart that sounds the alarm ! It offers us this return to our interiority when all the machines of the world have put us at war with each other and no longer meet our needs for a link with the living.
In me, I believe that there is nothing more violent than to be robbed of one's own power and thus to seek to take it back from someone - or something - else. But the suffering that follows is perhaps the good news: it tells us that we are on the wrong track, that it is all an illusion!
It's time to go home... that is, to the heart.
AUTONOMY
If the First Peoples are particularly appealing to us at the beginning of this century, it is because they remind us of what we have forgotten: autonomy, that is, the laws of life. To be autonomous is not to be independent, it is to be able to be in connection, first of all, with one's own laws, one's own rules, that is to say to hear one's needs and to be able to respond to them. When we meet the indigenous people of Amazonia, Mongolia, Australia, when we meet the relays of the spirits, the guardians of the earth, we observe an unshakeable autonomy : that of a link with the living, and therefore with ourselves.
And here is the violence of our world: by dint of having wanted to be independent in our actual needs, we have become thirsty for emotional needs. By dint of having sold a little of our power (reduced to "purchasing power") to the other, we have lost our own power, that is to say the relationship with ourselves.
As in a perverse relationship, we go to the shelves of the FNAC to find the new connection without which our iphone will not be able to work anymore. In the same way, a bit haggard, we look for a partner believing, similarly, that love consists in getting what we want.
Autonomy is about taking back your power, permanently. And realizing, humbly, that we are oh so dependent: on oxygen, on water, on land, on culture (food), on the Other (living), whoever he may be. By recognizing our capacity to be autonomous, that is to say to embody Life in our being, we allow ourselves to live a more intelligent co-dependence.
By being autonomous, we offer ourselves to truly love the Other. Not needing it anymore. To love it, to desire it, or even to want it... is not to need it.
This is perhaps what we are heading towards, consciously or unconsciously: to find this collective momentum like the migratory birds in the sky, like the musicians in the momentum of a symphony naturally taken by the music... Freedom and consciousness!
It is up to each of us to choose if we want to live further in the illusion of individualism or to drop our weapons once and for all by opening our heart to untie the tensions of these infinite times...
THE EMPEROR
Surprisingly, these words come to me while I am preparing Beethoven's 5th concerto entitled The Emperor, composed when Austria was at war with Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1808. Beethoven was initially fascinated by Napoleon and ended up hating him.
There is, I find, in this music, a whole questioning between the power of nature, luminous and collective (as in the 6th symphony called Pastoral) and the caricature of an egotic power of the emperor, controlling or military.
Between all this, there is another power, and not the least, in us: that of poetry and lightness. Of laughter ! Of the beautiful! This is perhaps what allowed Beethoven to sublimate these spaces of fear, violence and fracas. There is, in a knee on the ground, all the power of a chest pointed towards the sky.
In Hebrew, the word shalom or shalem does not only mean peace. It also means complete. Isn't that what autonomy is all about ? After all, it is when I am in my completeness, in my wholeness, that I am at peace, not in the absence of war. More than that : it is then that I realize that I am peace. So I can sing the Ode to Peace *, in chorus, together with the world.
Jung said : "not perfect, but complete". From our ego to our universality, I believe we are deeply accompanied this month by a wave of love, of this love that, as in Bruno Dumont's film, keeps coming back to knock on our door, even if it is fallen, even if it has been violated, even if it has been damaged, to tell us, eternally : "I love you".
To your soul,
A wonderful month of spring !
* Beethoven, 9th Symphony