“If we seek sincere reconciliation with ourselves and with those who have hurt us intensely, it is because we want a profound transformation of our life. A transformation that removes it from the resentment in which, ultimately, no one is reconciled with anyone and not even with themselves. When we come to understand that in our interior does not dwell an enemy but a being full of hopes and failures, a being in whom we see in a short succession of images, beautiful moments of plenitude and moments of frustration and resentment. When we come to understand that our enemy is a being who also lived with hopes and failures, a being in whom there were beautiful moments of fulfilment and moments of frustration and resentment, we will be putting a humanising look on the skin of monstrosity.
This path towards reconciliation does not arise spontaneously, just as the path towards non-violence does not arise spontaneously”.
(SILO, Days of experience, Speech, day 3, Punta De Vacas, Argentina, 5th May 2007).
By Isabelle Chapre
Path of Reconciliation – Behind the Wounds of Love, the Unitive Act of Consciousness
I live in Paris. I think it is 2005. It is a beautiful afternoon; the sun is shining and the sky is a clear blue of late summer. I am walking in the Bastille. I walk down the stone steps. I walk past the boats and imagine them with their inhabitants. I love this port in the centre of the capital. I walk through the little rose garden: red and pink, with its stimulating fragrances and bright colours. My senses are open, I am not in a hurry: I take advantage of this moment.
I am with Mr. M. We are sitting by the water, between the harbour master’s office and the gangway.
We talk about our possible future, or not, together. We talked for a long time: what it could be like, what kind of project we would like to carry out, what we would like to live.
Suddenly, something happens in my interior: in a millisecond, a space of freedom opens up.
I will try to explain this moment when I no longer hear anything. I feel I am somewhere else.
It is as if I am being lifted upwards as if a new space is opening up its interior: a channel has just opened up.
This channel came from somewhere else, from another time, from another place: the limits of the self, had just exploded. I felt suspended. New, unexplored spaces were opening up to me. With a huge register of freedom: I had just been offered wings. I had been given them.
Freedom to choose what I wanted. A freedom offered for Life.
Full freedom, unrestricted, as a full recognition of who I am. Which path was I going to take?
In a millisecond, something bigger than me was on its way.
In a millisecond, everything happened and an out-of-the-ordinary experience took place.
In a millisecond, something good and great came along, which nuanced an event and turned all proportions upside down.
This became something very important, which resonated within me, in each of my cells.
This register came about because I was respected, whatever choice I made. Here my dignity as a human being was respected and, at the same time, I could feel my own dignity.
Here I became fully dignified, fully human.
Coming back to “me”, I realise that something has changed:
There, in that moment, the water has sparkling, silvery reflections, the wind ripples the surface of the water. Everything is much more dazzling, everything is sublimated. My look has changed. My face has also changed: I try to explain this transformation that is happening to me. I point out that my eyes are indeed much brighter. I think of the phrase: “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no” (Bible, Epistle of James 5:12). I am at a crossroads.
The wind rippling the water reaches the surface of my skin. I look away, towards the silver water and the blue sky.
After a while, after embracing each other, we leave, leaving this place and this physical space.
Today, that space remains hidden, but also present in my heart, engraved in my memory.
This place is a corner where I often come, alone or accompanied, one of my favourite places, with the ingredients to open up to something bigger than myself, to open up to the sacred.
Thanks to this experience, today I want to remember to pay attention to these “small” moments, to take consciousness of these milliseconds that sometimes become a thousand times more important than anything else.
This experience in which, suddenly, new spaces resonated in me and in which I saw “reality in a new way” (Silo, Silo’s Message, Chapter V, paragraph 8).
Today, June 2023, this “decompressed” experience is a turning point in my biography. Being in a period of reconciliation, in process, I can reread the story of my life under the loving look of the divine and discover the pearls of these milliseconds.
Today, to you, my former loves, I dedicate this writing, this note, as a song that springs from these spaces of life.
Today, to you my old loves, I say thank you for having crossed my path, explored moments of life, with joys and sorrows, openings and closings, edges and wounds.
Thanks to you who have opened me to life, to you whom I had lost behind my dross, to you whom I have just rediscovered in a purer way.
Because behind my wounds there is now the joy that had remained hidden, there is the love of life, there is hope.
These notes are not a unitive act in the sense of action, but a unitive act of consciousness of reconciliation. With the desire to repeat it, to open up to others.
I recognise it as an act of inner unity in which nothing seems to detain it.
Then I can see all acts of consciousness from the angle of a unitive act.
This opens up a new space for me: I look more broadly at my unitive acts: my actions, but also my thoughts, my presence with regard to myself, more precisely the register of presence with regard to myself, and even my daily routine, which sometimes takes up a lot of my time, my thanks, but also the fact that I recognise these acts… they are like Russian dolls that fit into each other, amplifying the register of rebirth; and in this word, there is “rebirth”…
In a millisecond, I can feel my actions and, above all, my thoughts.
In a millisecond, I can give thanks for my progress and my understanding. In a millisecond, my life changed.
Certain milliseconds in certain minutes of the day change everything.
Until my death, these “special” milliseconds continue and will continue to add up as unitive acts that nourish my being.
I think of the friends who left, during the last passage, who had a millisecond or more to reconcile everything, to turn everything into a whole.
I think of the millisecond before my death, when everything will be “decompressed” and compressed at the same time when I will be at the crossroads when my Being will be able to say Yes, and only Yes:
Yes, to this new birth. Yes, to these new spaces. Yes, to these places that we can sometimes glimpse, like presentiments.
Then I say to myself: what a joy to be mortal.
In symmetry, like the movement of the pendulum in the watchmaker’s shop, I say to myself: what a joy to be alive. What a joy to be able to feel all this, here and now, thus accumulating new unitive acts of consciousness.
This frequency is a gift of life, a timeless, comforting gift, which I receive with a certain gratitude.
