The En Vie in all its beauty – Valérie J’espère for the book “Envier ou avoir envie”

EXCERPT FROM THE NEW COLLECTIVE BOOK OF THE CERCLE DU LEADERSHIP “Envier ou avoir envie”

“The word is not the thing.”
Krishnamurti

To investigate this concept of envy, it is appropriate to define what this word reveals to us. A mental listening suggests giving meaning to the word and playing with its synonyms to better apprehend it in what it suggests, in its nuances. We can then perhaps understand it according to our level of knowledge, from our references, our cultural, scientific, philosophical filters…
But is this to understand this word? “To understand is not to know, it is to resist¹,” to resist being overwhelmed, invaded, inhabited by the word! Thus, if we take the time to listen to it, to grasp it, to feel it, not from a mental point of view, but in its entirety, in the inner listening of what it then reveals to us, we can already hear what it suggests.
In “en vie” (alive) or “envie” (desire/envy), the two words meet and separate as if to better express what is at play within us.

THE 3 bodies of our lives

In ordinary consciousness, we consider the fact of being alive as normal, even as a due. We have little awareness of being a miracle of Nature… in what is most sacred.
It will take many little deaths of our surface personality (ego) and maturity to perceive along the path the grace of having a body that vibrates with this life. And to want to experience it fully. This is what is called the full and entire acceptance of one’s incarnation. To accept living freed from the nostalgia of elsewhere or from the wound of separation from the original matrix. To accept no longer feeling separated from something that is not visible and of which, however, we carry the stigmata at the level of the heart…
We are alive and yet most of the time we act as if we were not. Because we do not feel life in its entirety. We have not learned to distinguish the different parts of ourselves that contribute to creating our unity of being.
We perceive our life in fragments, through impulses of our different bodies:
the physical body, which allows us to be alive and to experience through our senses. It sends impulses regarding its needs to function (eat, drink, be warm, be safe…). As soon as it goes “bad,” we quickly understand that this life which seemed to be a due is not acquired;
the emotional body, which allows us to record the emotions aroused by the perceptions transmitted by our senses. It records, according to a state of well-being or ill-being (being loved, recognized…), the needs of love, trust, welcome, listening…;
the mental body which analyzes, classifies, gives meaning according to what has been recorded on our hard disk in childhood… to give coherence to what is perceived, experienced.
It is in our construction as a human being that envie (desire/envy) and en vie (alive) intertwine and play with multiple meanings. Because as we develop, we will adopt masks to feel reassured (physically, emotionally, and intellectually). And we will not be alive, but in survival…

life journey

As a child, the being will vibrate simultaneously with en vie and envie. By discovering the world, he will learn to observe the reactions he arouses when he manifests more precise, more pressing, more insistent desires. He discovers the rules, little by little, and begins to be totally conditioned by the beliefs, the values, of his parents, his entourage, the culture of the country where he was born, the time and the heritage of his elders… The construction of his personality is established. Depending on the responses of his environment, he will integrate what he can or cannot do. The fact of being alive and of being oneself is no longer enough, he must behave in such and such a way to feel emotional security (to feel loved, welcomed, recognized, validated…). His pleasure of being is conditioned by the Other. It is the discovery of conditional love…
As an adolescent, envie and en vie will be two notions of capital importance in the process of individuation, in the feeling of proper, unique, whole existence.
It is at this period that the mental body develops more deeply, asking the being to structure his thought, to learn to communicate with accuracy his needs, his desires, his impulses, while respecting his environment.
It is the time of a malaise, of a crisis between what the body impels and the desires to discover his intimacy and sharing with an Other, outside the reduced family environment.
The opening to the world asks him to begin to prove that he is maturing, that he is capable of stating his needs, defending them while being polite and within the frame of reference of his family.
Once again, the being is torn between his own desires (physical, emotional, and mental) and those allowed by the environment!
As an adult, the being will go through many stages between the desires of his surface personality (ego: his pleasures, his dreams, desires more or less assumed), and his real desire to touch, taste, feel, savor what truly makes him alive. Everything is dictated by what his subconscious has recorded since childhood. It is the discovery through life experiences of who he really is.
Then occurs a deconstruction of the personality to return to the essence of ourselves.
To get out of comparison, out of the mind, and to free oneself from the known, from well-thinking society or from the latest pseudo-successes of some who impose their way of being and living as an example.
All this to fill a void, a lack inside oneself: one’s own presence to oneself. We are constantly projecting for tomorrow, planning, managing risk… or else stuck in the past, repeating, brooding over the sufferings lived… or else we are in the Other, his needs, his desires, we lose ourselves in him in a need for fusion to fill our own solitude, our difficulty in loving ourselves as we are.

We avoid this confrontation with the “inside” which frightens us, because it implies truly looking at ourselves, taming ourselves, welcoming ourselves with our shadows, our unexpressed violence, truly assuming our true needs and desires of soul. It implies accepting one’s vulnerability, recognizing oneself, becoming one’s own master.
It is leaving behind the fears of others’ judgment, the guilt of truly taking care of ourselves. It is being truthful, authentic, and sincere towards our deep aspirations. This therefore implies a death of the surface ego.
The pleasures resulting from the satisfaction of the ego’s desires feed dependence, the pleasures of the true being feed freedom. The pleasure from the ego exhausts, generates chaos, the pleasure of the being opens the heart, generates coherence and unity within.

All our desires

Desire (envie), in one word, evokes in its movement, an impulse.
Something that emanates from the body, from our belly very often… and which tends to launch itself towards the outside.
There are then all the desires that illusion us, that mask our true aspirations.
The desires that many philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and therapists have dissected…
The malicious envy, jealousy, the desire for possession. So many states linked to the ego which loops on the surface of our being in a repeated suffering of lack and compulsion, and ephemeral satisfaction. All this maintains a void that never truly fills and plunges beings into a more or less increasing dissatisfaction.
This part being developed in this book with knowledge and wisdom, let us look at desire from a more virtuous, more interior point of view as well…
This other desire which comes from the belly, from the heart or from the head and sometimes even which emanates profoundly from the three places at once, in a perfect alignment. The kind of desire which provokes a creative momentum, an enthusiasm, a direction, almost a certainty that “This is it, yes! This opens, it is just, this wow!”
This desire as a call! A call from our deep nature which has been able to make its way through our ego.
Very often, we lack knowledge of our inner life and we have a lot of trouble truly discerning where it comes from. A mixture of truth of the moment, of intuition. It is often blurry but it engages our whole being.
It is desire in all its beauty. A desire that emanates from the depth of our being and not from our surface personality (the ego). It is a healthy desire, true, an authentic desire because, precisely, it radiates our inner life. It is our consciousness of being life that expresses itself. It is our whole being that follows the inner movement in the consciousness of the moment.
What do we find in this movement?

Connected to this emanating desire, we feel our own presence expressing itself. It is imbued with the quality of what we knew as children… before conditioning!
We find again:
a feeling of freedom of being, of allowing ourselves to welcome and respond to this desire without guilt or judgment, just as the healthy expression of what vibrates in the depths of our being, as it is, with its imperfections and its qualities;
a feeling of creativity of openness which pushes us to act and to create what is close to our heart. This momentum which guides us on our own path;
a wonder, by this desire which brings us again to that place within ourselves where we can taste the joy of discovery, like a first time. A unique time, full of intensity, because we are totally there, in the present moment, completely merged in the experience in all our body. We feel deeply alive (En Vie) and conscious of being so. We vibrate totally with Life! And we are no longer afraid of this, of this power, of this explosion of meaning, of the explosion of our perceptions, sensations. We do not seek to lock up what we feel by the analysis of the mind which puts a label, an evaluation on it. We are this state, we feel connected again to the Whole, we no longer live this original separation…

Let us learn to rediscover this virtuous desire and to respond to the desire to be, the one which allows us to fully taste the privilege of life.

¹ L. Devillairs, Guérir par la philosophie, PUF, 2017.
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