Voluntary Simplicity

The things you own end up owning you. Less. This is the solution. Less is good. Fair and softly goes far in a day. He who can do more, wants the least. I feel less but I feel good.

Mini indeed is mine. But please, don’t make me say what I don’t say. It is not a matter of feeling less, rather feeling better. Less for your eyes, your heart feels great. Your soul feels great. Eat peanuts, they’re good for you. Being well, being less, but keeping smart. Why keep on running after money? Why only looking for what money can buy?

Stand naked, since there is no top designer to cut a better dress for you. Rich people are not better people. The richest don’t deserve such great deal of money. Nobody can. They don’t care. Then they made us believe that money is sexy, how stupid! It is not. The real luxury is time ahead. And behind, too. Time all around us. Time enough to see our oak trees growing.

Nowhere I am something that belongs to someone, and nowhere there is something that belongs to me.

Life ahead. That’s a start. “Some people make us believe that happiness is having our cupboards full of goods,”From the French song Foule Sentimentale by Alain Souchon but just have a look at your DVD collection, you won’t have time to review them all before the Blue-Ray is dethroned by a new standard, far better, far more expensive, for you my friend. How many times haven’t we bought the same movie? By dint of encouraging that thing, it will never end.

Between the system and you, the more intelligent should know when to stop. Before dying with your pockets full and discovering that a shroud has no pockets. See all what you amass, ridiculous ant, instead of dancing all summer? 

Voluntary simplicity. May no one be deprived when the winter comes. 

Stop running after the maximum. Maximum work, maximum to show off, maximum cash. Maximum troubles. Destitution is pure enjoyment. He who has a Rolex when fifty years old has missed his life. Even if he is “Resident resident of the Republic.” (source)Alain Bashung

Things take only the importance we give them, and people only take that they rob us.

“I could never wear a watch. Whether mechanical or electronic, I stop them all. At my wrist, the mechanism goes awry in no time. I have become accustomed to do without. And I discovered two things: the wrist, that’s where we feel pulse in China. It is the source of Ki or Chi, this is through the wrist that flows our most meaningful energy. Without the interference of a watch, Ki feels better for it, and so do I. The second advantage is to find back the wonders of the internal clock.

To learn to tell time to the minute, with no watch. Do you want me to show you?” (source)Stephane Kervor, unpublished

There is nothing to show, nothing to expect, nothing to sell. Nothing we can’t add to our original perfection. The light which we come from. “Because you are born of light before being born of women” (source)Jesus, Gospel of Thomas 

The adventures of our physical body, the genetic line that is ours, whatever it is, must not make us forget the obvious: my body is not me. I can live without it.

Remember. Find your memory back beyond this pathetic aphasia. We are all suffering from amnesia, all we have inner light, so please, don’t be afraid to take the lampshade away!

Meanwhile popes are entangled in their perversions, their betrayals and compromises; meanwhile men of God are preaching war, hatred of difference, love of sadistic murder; meanwhile false wizards mutilated girls, stealing their pleasure, introducing them to the male suffering; meanwhile lamas amass in Annemasse while llamas graze our pastures, and we do not know which ones spit in our face. Let them sink. Their old world will eventually burst. Out of shame.

Any compulsory activity is unbearable. But nothing weighs down as much as to remain inactive. The solution is to retire. Not to retreat, but to move aside. Move to a salutary point of view. Get out to the in time. Love needs only clear water. Discovering all the joys you’ve been stolen, you return to the only school that should not be skipped, i.e. hooky school. And be sure to visit the Papuans and the Yanomamis, the last free men, before they have satellite TV. And the web!

No one is more enslaved than the one who falsely thinks he is free.

Down here everything of real value is free. Anything that is not given, is theft. “Changer les femmes, changer les hommes, avec des geraniums” sings Alain Souchon. “Change money, Sir?” sing the small scammers in the streets of Bogota, Cairo or Bombay. Changing money! If only it were possible! Turning it into happiness, into honor, or good humor! Turning the financial into cobbler, it was believed that the crisis would do it, no way! Here we go again, back to the same old story, hope is flying away, forget it! Hello darkness my old friend… What is the better price for freedom?

Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he’s free.

However, as tenuous as it is, hope remains. It was hidden in the box of Pandora. This may be why we still have some. The reign of money is it, yes or no, in decline? In this world mercantile and arrogant, don’t you feel this glow growing?

Growing?

And GROWING more?

Each one, every one of us, let’s ask ourselves what we can do today to push back the horizon of money. And tomorrow, too. Every small gesture of free love does more than the revenues of the Telethon.

Uniting our inner divinity is the ultimate purpose of human existence.