PART ONE

   FIRST MOVEMENT
- You say that you are an awakened one, that an alternative vision has manifested itself to you and that you perceive things differently. I don't know how to situate your vision with regard to philosophy.
- Do you see Awakening as the Truth?
- Could a philosopher ever stumble upon awakening inadvertently, as it were, one day when he can't think any more, or else changes his perspective?
- We are accustomed to pointing out changes of direction in philosophy (pre-Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, followed by Kant, Hegel and Marx in our own culture) and since Marx there has been nothing. In your opinion, will there be a revival of philosophy?
- We often get the impression that philosophers evade the problem of suffering with the major dualities of action/knowledge and existence/being and that they are playing with building blocks together, indifferent to those who are suffering too much to share their concerns.
- In fact, you seem to miss those eras in which we still believed in something, in the power to organize the world through language, either in order to grasp it better or to transform its real, harmful aspects.

   SECOND MOVEMENT
- Do you think that you can define the conditions whereby a philosopher might become an awakened one?
- Why does it take the truth from the East so long to reach us? Although certain trends are appearing i.e. yoga and India, then Buddhism and meditation...
- Doesn't Buddhist philosophy offer Western philosophy exactly the answers required?

   THIRD MOVEMENT
- You seem to have given up trying to find the essence of philosophy, because its forms are so varied and in the end you warn me about something quite simple: each philosopher tries to convince the reader of his vision with a battery of arguments, skill and particular know-how - all of which manoeuvres are purely and simply a reflection of the author's mind.
- Didn't some people listen to you anyway?
- So awakening is the perception of unity, spontaneous, tangible and direct perception, whereas philosophy tries try to trap this unity in intellectual discourse?

   FOURTH MOVEMENT
- Re-reading the previous interviews, I realized that you were warning me against an artificial, intellectual vision of Oneness which, according to you, is not sufficient to initiate an approach towards a tangible perception of reality.
- So philosophy cannot therefore be a collection of unshakeable certainties which are able to mark out a route?

   FIFTH MOVEMENT
- You have spoken a lot about awakening, and it would seem that you only mention philosophy in order to come back round to your own vision of things. What proof is there that you have understood the philosophers and are not underestimating the scope of their works?
- But don't you seem to hold a grudge yourself against certain philosophers?
- Is an AWAKENED ONE any more trustworthy?
- You say that you have nothing to defend, but at the same time you say that you are different - you are awakened.
- Doesn't an awakened one have any virtues?

   SIXTH MOVEMENT
- I have re-read your answers and I am astounded...You say: "The awakened one has no virtues". If this is the case, then over half of all philosophy is empty, since it aims to educate mankind in the path of virtue.
- So there could, therefore, be a philosophy of awakening, if one were careful to specify that it does not pursue anything?
- If I have understood things correctly then, conflict or conflict of interests form the basis of philosophy?
- Philosophizing one's way to awakening, therefore, means assimilating one's birth by whatever means are available?

   SEVENTH MOVEMENT
- I would have liked to define philosophy, but you keep coming back to man the thinker and although you claim to be neutral you encourage philosophers to surrender to the intellect, rather than produce discourse to which they are attached. At the same time, you say that everybody is different and therefore contributes to the essential process of challenging our cultural structures.
- Does a work have anything to offer to those who did not write it? I am quite willing to believe that Plato achieved fulfilment through his writings and school, or that Descartes came to grips with God in his Discourse on the Method, but what can a text offer the simple reader?
- So Plato was too much of a genius to create a truly inspired work?
- I am still preoccupied by the influence of philosophers and I feel uncomfortable every time I hear that Nietzsche contributed to the birth of Nazi ideology. Perhaps if he had levelled out his works to create just one immortal, credible one we would have had a different image of philosophy. Ever since this figure, everybody believes that philosophy is the preserve of intellectual giants and we therefore think that philosophy only concerns the intellectual elite.
- Where does your requirement to separate the man from the work and to let the man prevail come from?

   EIGHTH MOVEMENT
- By refusing to legitimize philosophical works, you exclude yourself from the category of philosopher. A philosopher looks at discourse and does not care about the author's private life. Aren't you doing exactly the opposite?
- Isn't this what Buddhist philosophy claims to teach us to reconcile?
- I don't understand how you can denigrate works - canons and dogmas - so much on the one hand, whilst being so fond of those who decree or follow them.
- - Aren't you being a bit hard nevertheless?
- Is it still worth writing philosophy and building a language for oneself?
- But the self emerges as a state in which meanings disappear, or are no longer required, as I understand it. We wander from one chain of meaning to the next until the mind gives up combining perceptions to give them meaning... and then do we reach the other side at this point?
- Darkness, ignorance and sin?
- Aren't you being too hard this time?
- So you are referring back to original sin?
- So you are referring back to the notion of commitment?
- What about the Middle Way?
- So a lot of people miss awakening because they are obsessed by it?
PART TWO

   FIRST MOVEMENT
- You say that philosophy is inevitable, that it enables the individual to shape himself by betraying its customs, but is it necessary?
- Should we abandon all forms of generalization? But then what happens to philosophy which is hungry for categories, series and collections?
- Do we know what the point of philosophers and awakened ones is? You have so firmly convinced me that the root of the problem is not the activity but the man, that I see groups of men thinking and reinventing the world and awakened ones ¡°reaching the other side¡± for them... Do they have a role?
- Do you see any signs of progress in what is happening now, or not?
- So for two hundred years, right up until Freud, we have been imagining that what is external or the environment, constituted an obstacle to the development of the individual. It was an obligatory dead end because you demonstrate that the mind tries something new each time it fails. Perhaps we had to experience this to accept that the philosopher wants to become an individual, but that this aim concerns him alone. A philosopher cannot contaminate anybody, although he leaves traces in those who also want to become one too. Those who do not want to become conscious individuals, those who do not want to find a power which lies beyond beliefs, customs and fashion, will never listen to a philosopher, let alone an awakened one.
- Despite all your criticism of Buddhism, you keep referring to what indeed seems to be the basis of its doctrine.

   SECOND MOVEMENT
- How can we avoid becoming disheartened, if mankind is so far removed from reality?
- I don¡¯t understand...
- Are you saying this to encourage me?
- There is a recurring theme: the philosopher and the awakened one are each waging war on belief, but every critic tries to discover hidden beliefs in every philosopher. I liked the story about the potato in the sack of turnips. In fact philosophers are always going to be plagued by some troublemaker who says: ¡°Yes, but you didn¡¯t include that in your system and that throws the whole system into disarray¡±. How do they deal with this?
- I have suddenly realized that you cannot do without awakening, but that at the same time it will always be whatever you bring to it yourself. Each individual can pull Reality where he wants and in whatever direction he wants. A mystic might say that ¡°God¡± is more real than everything else, some awakened ones say that the self or emptiness are real, whereas philosophers seek reality in the movement of History, in order to climb on the bandwagon.
- So reality is always gradual and each species which is conquered then refers to something deeper?
- Some teachers are irritated by Sri Aurobindo¡¯s vision and you also seem to be irritated by their resistance. Does it upset you that you cannot get this new message across more successfully?

   THIRD MOVEMENT
- Do you think that your experience really serves some useful purpose, or that you must discuss it anyway?
- Being categorical is therefore connected to violence?
- So somebody who does not separate themselves sufficiently from the human race cannot discover reality?
- If the philosopher changed the way he used his solitude and used it in the same way as the awakened one, would there perhaps be more spiritual vocations among intellectuals?
- So reality gives way and shows us the path of even greater reality beyond that which is revealed? Is that right?
- So evolution is not, therefore, so easy to grasp?
   
   FOURTH MOVEMENT
- Isn't the mystery of the Whole so problematic that you always end up imprisoning it in a tautology such as "God", "History" or "Evolution"?
- Isn't it dangerous to establish too many similarities between philosophers and awakened ones? Don't you run the risk of encouraging the philosopher to "carry on in the same vein", because I am not convinced that you have differentiated sufficiently between these two lovers of solitude.
- So are you straying further and further away from a morality of awakening?
- Tu affirmes donc que le mental coupe non seulement du Réel en teintant la perception extérieure, mais qu'il coupe aussi de soi-même, en limitant la conscience d'autres zones, comme la vraie sensibilité, l'imagination pure, l'intuition, et même, le sentiment du corps?
- How can the mind represent so many different things? I get the impression that different cultures are never going to agree on all this.
- How do you transform your feeling of helplessness?
- At the end of the day, I had the impression that you were speaking quite freely, but that this remained almost inaccessible. With what you are saying about evolutionary resistance – desire, appropriation and defence - you are cutting every discovery up again. The overall issue only revolves around three complementary ideas.
- So why is it so difficult to pull through?


PART ONE

PHILOSOPHY AND AWAKENING: DIFFERENCES AND OVERLAPPING MOTIFS


FIRST MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You say that you are an awakened one, that an alternative vision has manifested itself to you and that you perceive things differently. I don't know how to situate your vision with regard to philosophy.
ANSWER: When I was young, I was interested in philosophy and I have recently reread some syntheses. If there had been just one form of philosophy, it would not have been worth endlessly inventing forms. I even realized that the aim of philosophy could change from one era to another, or from one culture to another. Some philosophers say that philosophy is the pursuit of truth, and others say that philosophy must not fall into the trap of searching for something so hidden which, at the end of the day, they seem to think depends on a preconceived notion.
By contrast, awakened ones quote each other not in order to tear each other to pieces, but to show that they are indeed sharing the same experience. Although they prefer to refer to teachers belonging to their own tradition, it is not unusual, particularly among modern awakened ones, for them to intersperse their views with aphorisms drawn from different traditions, thus acknowledging that their authors have pierced the same mystery from different starting points. Although the most original of them sometimes appear to reject any kind of connection with the past (a paradox which is too lengthy to explain), most of them draw examples from the past to suit them. What is being transmitted is experience, not just a representation of a particular world, which might dictate special forms of behaviour.
However, there are also philosophers of Awakening, or at least there were in ancient Greece (Parmenides, Democritus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Plato and, in one sense, just a few stoics and the true Epicurus, who was nothing like the image which has been created of him). Even in this century, a French philosopher, who does not incidentally have a French name, seems to have gone far beyond words. On account of his training, however, he retained a jargon and a substantial frame of reference which hide his consciousness. He is not at all well known, considering the quality of his works, whereas others...

QUESTION: Do you see Awakening as the Truth?
ANSWER: In my case, it was the search for the truth which led me to awakening, as it was the only goal which I started to pursue at the age of four or five. But if Awakening brings the feeling of being in the truth, it nevertheless prevents us from making a big deal of it. Consciousness has plunged into a world where everything is present. There is, therefore, no longer any contrast between the truth and what is not the truth. Right and wrong can still easily be distinguished, but truth - that fascinating, mythical word, which brings with it all sorts of mental forms - has no more meaning.
Therefore, an awakened one can no longer philosophize. Conversely, a philosopher is generally someone who would really like to go as far as awakening, but goes about it in the wrong way. He pretends to love Reality, but does not yield to it like a woman. He therefore fails.

QUESTION: Could a philosopher ever stumble upon awakening inadvertently, as it were, one day when he can't think any more, or else changes his perspective?
ANSWER: This is bound to have happened. One day a philosopher calls into question everything which he has built up because there is still something missing from his system, and on that day, instead of looking for corrections or additions, or changing method for the umpteenth time, he breaks down. He is coming close to the point when consciousness rebels and says: "I can't understand all the words which I am using, I can't understand what I am referring to - everything, anything is better than carrying on confusing perceiving and thinking". Yes, awakening can take somebody by surprise in a case like this. But in general, a philosopher ends up becoming attached to his rather tiresome work. The philosopher is constantly tidying up, without asking himself what the point is. He planes and polishes words until their meaning is rounded, so that all words slot into the same descriptive category, because one cannot mix observations with concepts. They must be subordinated by building whole universes of meaning, destroying in the process angular, heterogeneous meanings, unwelcome inconveniences which add nothing and pointless reflections which destroy the path of Ideas instead of reinforcing it.

One such individual, who wanted to do exactly the opposite in order to escape all forms of geometry and take off beyond reason, was not successful. It is unbelievable the degree of enthusiasm which Nietzsche, who died insane (or as a result of organic disease, according to his eulogists), has been able to generate, when everything he says represents a colossal form of escape from reality. He tries to pretend that the spirit can break down all walls, but he did not have the patience to define what they were before hurling himself at them. He states the obvious, but with so much panache that he manages to make us believe that he is shattering what confines us, when in fact he is reinforcing it with puerile, paranoid subjectivity.

If Nietzsche were to have forgotten that he was Nietzsche for just three weeks and simply said to himself : "something peculiar is happening to me which is making me invent all these stories and lies" - i.e. if he had referred to something beyond man, or merely discovered that his intellect was not his own, then the Divine would have looked down on him and said: "You poor fool, there is nothing to shatter, because there is no wall between the wind and vastness".

Nietzsche would have understood and attained awakening. However, he believed himself to be the author of his own works and this killed him. Sri Aurobindo said of him that he "broke moulds". Perhaps he did sacrifice himself after all, by performing feats off the beaten track in order to demonstrate a path which did not rely either on the past, on conventions, or on philosophical fashions, but his path relied on nothing more than dissent, going against the grain and contrariness. Experiencing unity must be the starting point for demonstrating what is in line with reality, because reality is oneness. Subversion pairs up with Reality, because it consists of predicting that the path of Reality cannot be traced. It is divine subversion. It is not a path, but a unique, non-transmissible experience, which can occur anywhere and at any time, through any kind of abandonment of structural values.

Nietzsche would have found awakening if he had rebelled against his own rebellion, but I am not sure that he could have got rid of the latter. He was too attached to his own sense of difference to blur the demarcation line between himself and the universe which, when erased, forms the basis of satori through the identity of the self and the non-self. He's a fascinating character, whom academics consider to be dangerous. The fear of going mad when we already admit to being disorientated is a defect which has always amazed me in human beings. The West has not trained anybody to recognize mystery, which we want to conquer before having assessed it. The East is simpler and less stupid. The Eastern spiritual approach is based on the admission that we are lost and can, therefore, only find. The West is too proud to start from this same basis and has always cheated. It tries to find something better, without cancelling out its starting point and everybody misses out on awakening because of this. The reappraisal process is incomplete. We imagine solutions to something which presents itself in the form of problems, and the solutions just slot into false questions. The East is a hundred times more intelligent. There is no answer, because there are no questions. While ever your life is not connected to the Whole in the pure obvious fact of absolute participation, all your questions and answers are futile. The mind is attacked head-on from the outset, whereas in the West, the mind structures the spiritual approach for ten, twenty, thirty years and this is pointless. Some people cheat by invoking genetic differences because it suits them and this is naturally one of the considerations which Awakened ones scorn. The Western world is based on two monumental illusions which paradoxically shore each other up – Judeo-Christian superiority on the one hand, which is just a distinguished form of jingoism, and our Greek heritage on the other, which can easily be traced, through Aristotle, to the eighteenth-century's enthusiasm for classification, which gave rise to the industrial revolution and the religion of science.

If Nietzsche and Aristotle belong in the same category, then we must define philosophy as the art of saying any old thing, whilst appearing to be profound. Aristotle, like Buddha moreover, was a misogynist, but was it ever really proven? The art of manufacturing Ideas, organizing concepts and suggesting alternative "visions of the world" does not entail a transformation of the mechanisms governing our reactions. Nietzsche was apparently a devoted or at least a habitual onanist, and one could cite many more examples. Descriptive philosophy and operative philosophy, which transforms man in depth, are two distinct things. For me, philosophies which stem from spiritual experience are the true philosophies, and the fact that these philosophers do not fully agree with each other is of secondary importance: they all have a similar experience as their starting point. Lao-Tzu, Sankara, Nagarjuna and even the founder of Buddhism did not abandon structuring a "vision of the world", but it was merely a tool for them. By contrast, descriptive philosophy has no chance of leading to operative philosophy and, in the case of certain authors, it is impossible to know what their actual experience was. Spinoza is the most representative of a combination of these two aspects, but since I cannot read German, I wouldn't like to pronounce on even more contentious and dangerous cases such as Kant and Hegel. You would need to be very shrewd to know whether these men simply conceived a perfect universe with the mind, or if they really experienced unity. One can spend one's whole life on Ideas and decant this to obtain something which resembles awakening, but only on a mental plane – i.e. great, abstract intellectual lucidity. People continue to think and to be absolutely convinced by ideas, when it is clear to me and other awakened ones that ideas are nothing more than minute tools for communication.

However, all philosophy is lovable, in the old-fashioned sense of being worthy of being loved. Philosophy also includes a third family in the form of inspiration, which has revealed itself every two hundred years on average ever since the beginning of the Middle Ages. Those who denied that philosophy could have an aim are also philosophers. The latter have shown that language was a screen and therefore set off in the right direction, but did not necessarily find awakening either, and since they were less smug, you have to look very closely for them because History was reluctant to preserve them. There are no famous names among these killjoys who undermined the idea that real discourse existed and was capable of connecting the world of signs to the real world. They claimed brilliantly that the two things were superimposed and trusted neither definitions, postulates nor paradigms as a means of representing anything at all.

Therefore if you want a definition of philosophy, I would say that, in my opinion, it is the art of knowing how to ask questions which have no answer, in order to find answers which have no questions.

This is why it takes a whole lifetime and that if you give up everything half-way through, you have a chance of realizing that understanding can only grasp what is actually happening at that moment. There is no target any more, actions are free and the mind rejoices. But this transition is difficult for those who hoard their knowledge like treasure. They are afraid of a light which they did not switch on themselves.



QUESTION: We are accustomed to pointing out changes of direction in philosophy (pre-Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, followed by Kant, Hegel and Marx in our own culture) and since Marx there has been nothing. In your opinion, will there be a revival of philosophy?
ANSWER: The sedimentary layers of philosophy are deceptive, because, at the end of the day, philosophy cannot evolve because it is subjugated to the Mind. Things reformulate themselves in every century and attempts at new formulations are bound to be philosophical, because in the final analysis, philosophy is something that has no framework. You define Reality in it, appropriate different layers of it and make it virtual, i.e. you wonder what you will be able to do with new annexes to infinite Reality. History, anthropology, psychology and literature, into which an element of entertainment creeps, have a much narrower framework. All philosophers enjoy classifying things and finding hierarchical tree structures of values or concepts, or they even believe that they spot forms of order which are subordinate to each other and they draw certain conclusions from their arrangement. Utopians arrange potentialities, sceptics organize doubts, materialists stick to what is useful, which varies somewhat from century to century, scholastics create smokescreens, which hard-line dogmatic philosophers always denounce in an excess of abstraction. All these great men entertain themselves and indeed sometimes do battle with words, but it is a world awash with vanity. Nearly all philosophers are caught in the trap of the eroticism of discourse. However the awakened one, even if he is capable of playing at being Socrates and holding his own against Hegel, or putting Schopenhauer back in his place on the shelf, is totally detached from his words.

What the future awakened one rebels against is the fact of "being thought" by a mixture of nature and intellect, which is a condition peculiar to man. He has gone beyond the illusion that he thought HIMSELF and realizes that he is being thought, at least in his desires, fears, unspoken obsessions and fantasies. At the risk of showing off and inspiring a school of thought, I would say that we think what suits us and that we are thought of by everything which disturbs us, because we do not want to accept non-gratifying thoughts. However, they occur anyway. Either we think of what is gratifying, or we are thought of by what is non-gratifying, i.e. all those thoughts which impose themselves on us, but which we do not want because they are humiliating and which we do not know how to curb. Resentment, hatred, jealousy, lust and fear are things which think of us, but we only think of what suits us - nice tidy rationality, the bright imaginary world drawn from the infancy of the universe, virtual beauty, the solar plan or pastel-tinted feelings. The rest, which manifests itself anyway and offends us, thinks of us by passing over and above what we think of ourselves. This is why I like Freud and go even further than him and Buddha, whom I l mention because I feel close to him. Self-righteous spiritualists are sometimes shocked that I like Freud. He realized that we were thought of by something else, something which could not care less about what we want to think, even if he expressed it differently. Well, done Sigmund and I forgive you for all the rest.

Let's be quite frank – a future awakened one is someone who finds thought a pain. The philosopher has a more perverted relationship with thought, because he manipulates language brutally, in what is often a sadomasochistic relationship. I will twist a formula for you so that it joins two different concepts and oh no, what's going on, the chain of signifiers is affected and damn it, I need to go back to the signified and change it a bit for fear the sentence strays from its central purpose by forgetting to refer back to it, and so on.

Sometimes a philosopher sees real things, but he joins them up with patches. This is absolutely hilarious and reminds me of dear old Michaux's experiments with hashish. Thanks to the secondary perception conferred by the narcotic and his prodigious intellectual honesty, Michaux realized that Bossuet was a fraud. He passed beyond the discourse and saw the man. Rimbaud also had this type of experience – uncovering deceit in the very forms of discourse. However, this form of experience cannot be reproduced or summoned up and therefore we cannot rely on any drug to reach awakening, despite the stubborn insistence of Shivaists on "getting high" morning, noon and night. I recall Michaux, of whom I am very fond, to illustrate what is most important. False, artificial ideas connect correct ones, which are more than just ideas - visions, obvious facts and pure perceptions.

It is funny how honest authors are viewed as crooks when a whole clique of verbose people, who spout a lot of hot air, manages to fool a generation or two. In short, the philosopher is caught in the trap of a mosaic made up of approximate pieces inserted between homogeneous, whole pieces. There are grout stains in the middle of lozenges of coloured glass. Pointless effort connects flashes of genius.

Only awakening can put an end to the mixture of large projections and real visions. The philosopher suffers on account of the patches which he is forced to construct between his most beautiful intuitions in order to build bridges between them.

QUESTION: We often get the impression that philosophers evade the problem of suffering with the major dualities of action/knowledge and existence/being and that they are playing with building blocks together, indifferent to those who are suffering too much to share their concerns.
ANSWER: It is true that philosophers are often thought of as navel gazers, as intellectuals protected in their ivory towers, approaching Reality without ever really being brought face to face with it. Since time immemorial, philosophers have nearly all pursued a lofty path through society – an academy, royal court or university – which renders more incisive the discourse of wise fools like Diogenes, Socrates, Heraclitus and Empedocles, who cock a snook at wordsmiths who bask smugly in the approval of the great and are comfortably settled in their lives. I am returning to the subject of eroticism because it is truly a field which fills nearly everything - not merely sex, which is the only legitimate place for it.

Philosophers tend to seek self-esteem by polishing their sentences, tearing their opponents to pieces, finding new propositions and casting doubt on themselves, which represents the ultimate in refinement. They convince themselves that they are capable of thinking better than others and that consequently what they have to say is important. They eroticize their relationship with reality by working on discourse (and in this respect Lacan is the grand master of the twentieth century), and there is nothing wrong with that. Artists do the same thing. However, an artist seeks to express himself, whereas the philosopher aspires to a more general, collective, objective and rigorous status, otherwise he would just write literature.

He is too pretentious to be a writer and lacks sufficient simplicity of feeling to be a painter or musician. In short, we should forgive them. Philosophers are people who are trying to find their place in a universe which they are not content to endure or to sublimate. We have to give them credit for one thing: they decipher values, and there is a shortage of them. We are painfully short of philosophers. There are only chroniclers. The world has become so ugly and oppressive that philosophers have had to take to the streets and fight. The only French people among the philosophers who think about anything today are committed to a real ecological, broadly political, or humanist struggle. This shows that things are stirring and that those who are not supposed to get involved on account of their eagle-like spirit are forced to swoop on the prey of scandal to preserve their integrity and dignity. Bravo!



QUESTION: In fact, you seem to miss those eras in which we still believed in something, in the power to organize the world through language, either in order to grasp it better or to transform its real, harmful aspects.
ANSWER: What is strange is that all these men, who were truly passionate about what lies beyond pure sensation, were able to say such different things. Their experience is praiseworthy. It is their life. It does not matter that they wrote any old thing, or that they seemed, like Hegel, to resolve all the contradictions inherent in philosophy and Becoming at the same time. We might suspect some of them of skilfully plugging the gaps and therefore dismiss the content proper. We give up trying to discover whether a kilo of Hegel is worth more than a kilo of Aristotle and abandon attempting to construct scales for the purpose of philosophical judgement. So what does that leave?

This is what interests me - their vanity or their detachment. For example I nearly died of laughter when I read Descartes admitting sanctimoniously in words I can't exactly remember, but whose gist was "that what had eluded by no means the least of his predecessors had finally appeared to him". His thought is so universally true that those who have not thought the same thing are missing the point. In a word, the whole of Greek philosophy is reduced to nothing. I should mention in passing that for me Descartes represents the epitome of a normalized schizophrenic - an ordinary little man who truly believes that he sees reality because he covers his perceptions with mental projections. Cogito ergo sum! Any awakened one must say exactly the opposite.

Descartes represents a form of pure counter-initiation and is the emblem of France, the most superficial country on the planet, although it has rivals in England, which is redeemed by its host of mystical poets, and Japan, which gives the appearance of being serious, but is a nation in which vanity has the highest credentials. Moving on, however, and even assuming that judgement is arbitrary and dictated by karmic traces, the fact remains that I learned to think in French on this occasion. In short, France preferred Descartes to more profound thinkers who were left in the shade – La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, La Fontaine, who was taken for a fabulist, and Montaigne, of course. Descartes mesmerized generations of people who were forced to convince themselves at school that he was a great thinker. This is false. He committed huge blunders and made serious errors in his scientific experiments, which did not tally with his vision, thus demonstrating that he was hypnotized by his own approach and refused to acknowledge what could not fit into it. There are a lot of Descartes around – intelligent intellectuals who redefine the shape of the world before having absorbed it. For me, philosophy is the history of the defeat of thought, because just beside it there lies awakening. In fact, it is philosophy, rather than religion, which rubs shoulders with awakening without seeing it, because there are constraints in philosophy, but they remains in the mental realm. In the path of awakening this mental constraint is in solidarity with other constraints. You cannot just do anything with your body, desires and relationships. The ordinary philosopher is a great guy in front of his desk, who becomes an ordinary man when he is not thinking. Althusser strangled his wife. In fact, that makes sense as he was the last interpreter of Marx before the cause died out. Nietzsche had his onanism, which seemed to pursue him and the ancient Greeks rather too often let themselves go and seduced their disciples after pronouncing fine speeches. This is not a judgement, just an observation, as everybody can do absolutely whatever they like. The spirit can produce wonderful things, but the body and personality lag behind. Sartre ate like a pig and had an amazingly rich sex life for a man disguised as a toad.

Philosophy is all well and good, therefore - there is something stirring -,but if the rest does not follow then it is pathetic. Generally speaking, the rest does not follow. Rousseau lived in a state of blatant self-contradiction, on education, the scholastic philosophers were wholly lacking in sincerity out of guilt and brainwashing. Saint Augustine seems to have spent his life trying to seduce himself by advertising Christ. Pascal went too far with his hair shirt. I can't help it if the musclemen of representation had so many problems with their bodies, their desires and their "incarnation", as we say these days. Half of philosophy is devoted exclusively to what aspires upward - acknowledgement of the Mystery, the Good, broadly speaking, of Plato in which one can flog a whole army of virtues and qualities, a cavalcade of higher intense wishes - and to the resistance from below, from the cycle, remanence, desire, contingency, the body, what is perishable, concrete, material, the flesh - feelings and notions which are all tangled together, with the need to annoy us as their common denominator.

At the end of the day, being a philosopher is to pronounce in one's own way on this duality, whether one opposes it, bypasses it or is reconciled with it. At some point or other every philosopher will stumble across the enigma of fragmentation and draw his material from it – the subtle and the thick, the bodily (or tangible) and the intelligible, the spontaneous and the restrained, the new and the repetitive and anything else which one might establish by way of fundamental pairs of opposites: the generic and the individual, the actual and the potential – the list is endless. Then one just needs to draw on these and establish the proportions. Philosophy, therefore, refers back to whatever each individual wants to do with it. But once the words have been spun together, what has really changed for their author? What purpose does the approach he has taken serve?

In general, we do not go this far, because the work has the reputation of being real and of counting for more than its author. An awakened one says the opposite. He blithely forgives these fanatical writers and stubborn advocates of representation for missing the point of Reality by dint of having tried to capture it. He can be indifferent to it or sympathetic. He sees Descartes by his woodstove boasting "I know everything", feels Pascal torturing himself, sees Voltaire showing off quite magnificently without really believing in it, and Rousseau getting into a tangle trying to justify what he is not doing by stating the principles behind what he ought to be doing. He sees Nietzsche, who thinks he is God Almighty, and these wonderful attempts at Being, in which contradictions jostle flashes of genius like sheep dogs rounding up a large flock, appeal to him. The awakened one dispenses with the nonsense and writings, or uses then to induce sleep when required, although Montaigne and some other sincere, unadorned ones are far from uninteresting. Remarkable attempts to live and be appear behind the repellent speeches. Schopenhauer established that philosophers spend their time changing the name of suffering to absolve themselves of responsibility for being powerless to curb it. This simple vision redeems all his writings, even the most bitter ones, because it is a true vision.

Which philosopher's life could be exemplary? This could be the criterion, at the risk of drifting towards the mythical word wisdom. However, we become attached to different ways of thinking and not to what these ways of thinking produce inside the self. Representations change and Reality becomes elusive as soon as it is named (The Tao which is described is not the TAO), but the job of classifying orders brings new virtualities, leads to new potential and renews itself. Even morality evolves (lurking in philosophy like a poacher, surreptitiously corrupting it with its recipes). Beliefs change, but illusions remain.

Awakening is often unexpected fulfilment when we have lost everything, even hope, like that little sweet we suck when our shoes hurt while we are walking along. For the awakened one, hope is absolute faith in Reality, whatever it may be, even if it still vague or unknown. It is absolute faith in the present moment, whether it brings suffering or joy is immaterial, and not in that golden slug of a future in which things would sort themselves out and which forces promises to emerge on the path which we challenge. This is wrong, totally wrong. All feelings must be accepted so that awakening can occur. While ever we evade ourselves, with or without the collusion of "God", then awakening is impossible.



SECOND MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Do you think that you can define the conditions whereby a philosopher might become an awakened one?
ANSWER: An awakened one is first and foremost a philosopher who has made a mess of his representation of the world or of his overall vision (I can never remember the technical German term for this, which demonstrates that Germans have a real gift for abstraction which we lack). It is a concept which is absent in France. In short, he has realized that the final picture was impossible or had become impossible. Whereas Aristotle draws up an inventory of knowledge - and why not in those days - and puts everything on little shelves (while also continuing to pass strange judgements on women himself), the awakened one abandons the inventory, which strikes him as bureaucratic and only worries about his breathing, thought and presence. He does not decide conclusively to do anything about it. He does not mechanically declare his own usefulness by setting off to conquer the ocean of Reality by "philosophizing".

The AWAKENED ONE is a failed painter, who admits to himself that he will never be able to paint the landscape and who becomes the landscape. Hey presto! From that moment on, there is no point in painting it any more.

That said, a few awakened ones pass themselves off as philosophers and this is a function of civilization (Greek ataraxia is indeed reminiscent of Zen, Buddhist emptiness and samadhi), or culture, but it is always a disaster. For example, they mention being, and for them it is an experience which they translate into a notion. However, the uninitiated cannot manage to see beyond the notion and a whole load of fools latch onto it as usual, cloud the issue and poison transparent, revealing discourse. They might even peddle the description of being, which becomes gibberish, a soup, a salade niçoise or Russian salad and being becomes a heterogeneous entity bounded by its own qualities and opposed to everything which is not itself – i.e. a maze. The East is alone in never having got caught up in all of this, because it is not interested in representations. It has no intellectual eros. Educated Hindus aside, all the others – the Chinese, true Brahmans, Buddhists and especially Taoists - only attribute a pragmatic value to representation. What are we supposed to do with it? The West has always revelled in it, reflects itself smugly in it and is satisfied with it, because we are all focused on the mental here. Whites, Arabs, Jews and southern Europeans, who are more sentimental, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples are fundamentally focused on the mental and there is nothing to be done about that. They have abandoned natural feeling in favour of subjective or even national dramatization, because Westerners are projected forward. I have never seen this in Asia, except in Japan, which has always imitated what is bigger than it, since time immemorial. I have never seen this with Africans and Hindus. It has been like this since ancient Greek times – reality is cloaked in a bag of representation, sealed in and pushed in front of one to blaze a trail. This is a distinctive trait which has imposed itself everywhere, sometimes with staggering upsurges and now it is unstoppable and is contaminating the whole world... until it will have exterminated the last remaining cyclical tribes. Our civilization is being devoured by representation. Direct contact with nature, with the self and oneself is being cruelly lost. Everything is expressed in formulas. It is the hypnotic power of language, and these days of calculations, as has been expressed by Sollers and Baudrillard. I maintain that the Chinese, Hindus and even Persians are already close enough to their feelings to use what comes out of their spirit in a different way – to religious ends, i.e. participation, or with the aim of finding harmony and a natural entente with life, without the bias of submitting reality to its law, which has allowed us to exterminate non-mental, receptive and intuitive people for several centuries with a clear conscience. Whites want to appropriate and control and even the products of the intellect are used to this end. Thankfully, the whole world is not like this.

Awakening flourished in civilizations in which the desire for power was weak, because trust was placed in life itself and through life itself. It was observed at length before claims were made to attribute a meaning to it. The West has been trained by Judeo-Christian guilt to be suspicious of everything which cannot be contained or controlled. Philosophies often reflect this bias - thinking about the world to create something which might suit us, before knowing what it is. The East thinks that we are stupid and mocks us. It is right to do so.

QUESTION: Why does it take the truth from the East so long to reach us? Although certain trends are appearing i.e. yoga and India, then Buddhism and meditation...
ANSWER: If you use words to pierce words, then other people will follow in your footsteps and give your words a meaning which they prefer – i.e. the exact opposite. You can make any philosopher say the opposite of what he actually said. The signified, in the true sense of the term, is not contained in the series of signifiers. You might say: the weather is fine. No two people will understand this in the same way. A person who has to stay at home might think the opposite, i.e. that it is not fine for him because he cannot take advantage of it. The words do not have any meaning. It is the reader or listener who gives it to them. The words we read are just the mirror of who we are. A murderer and a young middle-class girl do not read the same detective story in the same way. The girl will identify with the victim and experience a cheap thrill of fear and the murderer will identify with the killer. I apologize for repeating myself, but as I say in my seminars - everything is infinitely flexible. All matter can be pulled or twisted in one direction or another. You simply have to melt metal to create a new shape out of something which seemed rigid, fixed and immutable.

Philosophy is like this – you throw the old shapes away and crystallize new ones. We believe each time that everything has been said. Plato shut his predecessors up. Aristotle invented political correctness and definitiveness and closer to home, it is the same thing. Schopenhauer dethrones Nietzsche, who circumvented Hegel, who in turn had got rid of all those others who had knocked scholasticism on the head. Thereafter, Marx executed his predecessors. Could it really be anyone apart from the Divine entertaining himself by doing anything at all to make this meaninglessness meaningful? When everything crumbles, we become infatuated with the East, but with its form and not its spirit, since many people practise yoga to make themselves look good, or become Buddhists to free themselves from their Judeo-Christian guilt. Everything is promising at the outset, but what I would question is the "ceiling effect" – i.e. shutting oneself up in something which initially seemed superior, but which eventually creates paralysing structures. The Divine did not create me in this way, and I am grateful to Him for that. I have stopped at nothing, not even Awakening, but that is a difficult issue to deal with in an unfocused way.

We fill ourselves with new illusions all the time. A philosophical treatise on a library shelf does not represent anything – just neatly formulated approximations, perishable goods with a long expiry date, but which have been frozen in the perfect structure of a method. They last for a hundred or a thousand years, or even two thousand years. Behind them lies the life of a man and this life is bound to be exemplary. We applaud fashion designers who create clothes for women. We think that they are "creators of genius". This is natural since they work in the realm of the tangible and the visual. But the philosopher is also a designer and he is concerned with much more fundamental things than the shape of an article of clothing. He creates mental clothing which we can wear as values in order to change our contingency, see further ahead, gain a better understanding of the overall Manifestation, use the intellect differently, or even spot new archaisms, which all philosophers do instinctively. Their lives are fine and who cares if their works are lousy. They have rejected repetition. They hunt down terrorist conformity and I love them. However, the Awakened one is not satisfied with being a designer. He wears his own designs for a long time before offering his styles to others. He achieves integrity and in order to do that he withdraws to the extremity of the human condition. He does not use solitude in the same way as a philosopher. That is where the difference lies. A philosopher does not abandon the notion of tinkering with the future. His vanity takes refuge in improving the world. He believes that he can see what others have not seen. He dips into knowledge, method and intellect and congratulates himself on it. Nine times out of ten it is pure vanity – (you would have had to tweak Hegel's ear to see where he placed this gesture in his absolute concordance...). Behind this vanity of the thinking self, there is something perfect which seeks a way through without finding it, because the human subject resists the intellect which animates it. It wants to circumvent it in its own project.

QUESTION: Doesn't Buddhist philosophy offer Western philosophy exactly the answers required?
ANSWER: I would reiterate that there has not been any philosophy since a philosopher demonstrated a long time ago that this term could not contain anything other than signs. Do we mean by philosophy the overall collection of knowledge from intellectual thought, the mental category which assembles homogeneous collections of expanded presuppositions, or is it any meaningful action in relation to the senses?

What you find is what you bring to it yourself. Imagine a succession of individuals one after the other, each more attached to discrediting their rivals than establishing their own legitimacy, with the exception of the very great ones. Imagine the mixture of candour and vanity, of idealism and rationalism. Imagine this subjective vanity connecting with universal Intelligence, which shows itself in this great work which the self appropriates, trying to be right and thereby losing the pure impulse of Consciousness which has nothing to justify because it is just being.

Who is humble enough today to analyse Buddhism and to admit that this renunciation of "knowledge" goes a very long way and this is precisely what paves the way to meditation which calms the mind that generates the dross of words? Buddhism does indeed blaze the trail, but we must quickly be wary of it. It can also imprison. It is a sort of system of dues, a functional trap. I will free you from this, that and the other, but in exchange, you belong to me... The whole of life becomes a transaction.

It is already a remarkable thing to attack the mind and locate answers somewhere other than in reason or intellect. Unless one plays on words, Buddhism is metaphysical. Its essence lies beyond the tangible – it is emptiness, freedom.. However, this emptiness must be felt and not imagined or stimulated by some artifice or other. Freedom is evoked as potential, but we refuse to give it the status of finality. Making freedom into a finality would be the same as looking for it in a place where it does not exist: the mental space.

That is just too subtle for Western man.

That said, Buddhist philosophy contains traps. There is too much in it – complications, a hypnotic arsenal, something which wants to draw speed towards slowness, a bias for slowing down movements of whatever kind to make them vertical and tone them down. It is an endless washing process and we can forget the purpose of being clean by dint of too much washing. The Chinese Chan and Zen, which is derived from it, have tried to restore order. Letting oneself go and seeing that things have their own movement – that is the Chinese way. We must really see the movement before channelling it. Otherwise we will remain caught in the trap of substituting some movements for others, but this is not radical. Movement is based in immobility.

We should not try to forge ahead. Let's leave that heresy for those who are "addicted" to what is better – i.e. those who are experiencing the worst. Let's first of all seek to legitimize the universe, before claiming to change the world. The East is intelligent and we are not, but we are forging ahead and, with a great deal of skill, the two might join up.



THIRD MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You seem to have given up trying to find the essence of philosophy, because its forms are so varied and in the end you warn me about something quite simple: each philosopher tries to convince the reader of his vision with a battery of arguments, skill and particular know-how - all of which manoeuvres are purely and simply a reflection of the author's mind.
ANSWER: There are only two possible sources for philosophy: dissatisfaction or satisfaction. The philosopher is either jubilant because he has found something and shared it, or he is groping towards an order which he lacks and draws up reports of what is wrong, in the illusory hope of finding procedures for change. Finders and seekers use the same tricks - deduction, induction, logical development, the removal of sufficient presuppositions – i.e. rules exist. However, there is one major snag: seekers try to pass themselves off as finders. They have not discovered anything at all, but they develop areas of logical representation in which words replace things. As for finders, they are difficult to understand because their accounts do not replace a spiritual method – i.e. they transmit very little of their experience. Perhaps philosophy is a particularly Western trait. What is termed philosophy in the East bears no resemblance to it and the mind does not practise a form of onanism there. No other civilization gives a damn about Reason because they have never suffered such violent contrasts between the basic categories - imagination, sensitivity, intuition, desire, will and logical ordering. Although all traditions say that we must arrange all these orders, they form clusters within the same space, overlap and interpenetrate each other. They must be perceived interdependently. Here in the West, they are arranged in hierarchies and separated, favoured or scorned in an a priori manner. They are contrasted with each other, i.e. the order of reason with that of faith, and the order of what can be observed with what cannot be verified, etc. Our culture is wallowing around in antagonisms and they are venerated in universities. Intuitive types and mystics are fed up! They pass through dualities and nobody wants to acknowledge this; they reveal to others that they are in a cage, but the ignorant stick their heads between the bars to bite and to defend their prisons. This is a serious mistake. This cult of Reason of ours comes from a terrible fear of intuition and sensitivity, a fear which has been transmitted for centuries by Catholicism in particular. Catholicism has inculcated a fear of life in us for generations and a fear of desire; it has established guilt as the driving force behind moral consciousness. It has hardened our natural feelings of spontaneous acknowledgement of existence with the serpent and sin. It has brainwashed us for centuries. This is appalling. It has subordinated existence to the huge fantasy of intimacy with God after death, in exchange for a few sacrifices to which we consent without understanding them. The awakened one appears proud to the Western world because he no longer has a childish need to submit to God, whereas in fact he has submitted for a long time, lifetimes even, to pure reality.

One might say that this is intrinsically false, but it is true in a certain sense. Awakening is a sort of true reward, which cures us of all our lust for immortality. This is what Buddhists teach and it is a good point.

A future awakened one draws up his inventory from everything which is not fantasized and which occurs, from everything which escapes the dictatorship of belief and from everything which manifests itself in us in all the orders of perception. The philosopher operates outside himself and does not short-circuit projection. He waxes lyrical about what his spirit grasps, but it is not a transformed spirit which is grasping reality, it is the old generic spirit which is thinking and which believes in the reality of Ideas. All ideas become real as soon as we believe in them. This is the problem. "Killing in the name of God kills God", said a contemporary philosopher fighting on the battlefields of hatred and moving around the scene of recent massacres. What can really he really prevent? It does not matter, he is fighting without being obsessed by results, unlike all those quitters and those who abandon creating a better world using realism as an excuse. This must change. The best contemporary minds are turning away from the idea of knowledge. You cannot change the world by spreading perfect representations of how it ought to be. All thought has power, whether it be true or false. True ideas are less accessible than false ones, because they do not bring with them that glue of smugness. Recognizing ourselves in false ideas is knowing that we are not quite up to scratch and that we will have to work hard, take part, create and transform ourselves. All false ideas exempt us from calling ourselves into question and therefore have a much more immediate and spontaneous power.

Fascination versus rigour.

The war goes on.

Superficial ideas which are well marshalled can lead one or two centuries into the ravine, as was the case with Communism. Real Ideas, pictures of pure visions and the testimony of awakened ones only carry along in their wake those who are prepared to pay the price for their emancipation.

In order for that to happen, we must first acknowledge that we are slaves to our addictions, conditioning, heritage, or to a temperament which can play tricks on us, and the whole of humanity is not prepared to go that far. The awakened one drags the whole of humanity behind him, but does not feel contempt for it. If the AWAKENED ONE is more significant (and there are some who think the sun shines out of their backsides, as the expression goes), then he represents the whole of humanity and no longer contrasts anything with anything else, but absorbs, covers and joins things. He can see that everything makes sense, whereas the philosopher creates abstract mosaics in which to stuff everything, and this is not the same.

Reason in Greece, then in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, right up to Marxist logic (which was as mechanical as the industrial mentality it was fighting) is nothing more than mental pride on the part of the mind which legitimizes itself. The mind allays its suspicions through argument. It is a forger. Discernment is a state of mind, not a logical technique. Reason takes hold of the World and reduces it, since it cannot do anything else. It works for its own greater glory. The unforeseen gulag which comes from the blind spots on a charter which only establishes man within his own contingency is a huge blunder, but nobody sees this! It is extraordinary. I have never been the victim of this kind of thing. When I was nineteen in 1969, all my friends at preparatory school for higher education teaching believed in something – Marxism, Communism, Leninism, Maoism. I was the black sheep of the dorm, denouncing the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia with my guitar. Some people didn't understand. I even found myself saying : you'll be for it, come the Revolution! Hatred was placed at the service of peoples' freedom – that is how it was at the time. There were inquisitors everywhere, looking at you fiercely and asking you what you did in 1968, ready to send you to the gulags if you said: I was on the beach with my first fiancée.

How could I imagine anyone other than the Divine setting such traps for Himself?

I possess awakening and have yielded body and soul to totality. I bent the knee and suffered and used to be obsessed by the knowledge which I lacked. When awakening came to me in January 1974, thought came a cropper, my consciousness was freewheeling and, whatever happened, I didn't need to change gear. There were no more ups and downs and nothing more to seek. The very idea of trying to find answers was totally stupid. Everything was there, without the need for explanations. There was absolutely nothing left to do, find or seek. It was marvellous. The self begins to show the secret connections between things, not as much as the Supermind, which can be found beyond freedom itself - but it is certainly all pretty homogeneous. You are therefore out of step. You are the only one not wearing glasses in the midst of people who are all wearing them, which does not go down well at all. They feel threatened. When you are sincere and say that religion is pointless, that Freudianism is incomplete, that the West is just one civilization among many and that its supremacy is an act of usurpation, or that the Chinese and Hindus are more profound, this is disturbing. It is as if everybody wanted to convince themselves that there were good reasons, scientific reasons, for clinging to their prejudices.



QUESTION: Didn't some people listen to you anyway?
ANSWER: Very few. You have to have been blessed with being born without vanity to be able to understand me. Spiritual seekers are vain too. They are attached to their movement. Some of them are so Manichean that I feel very uncomfortable around them. They really do see evil everywhere, as if it were intentional – in medicine, politics and sects which are not their own. In fact they are all trying to convince themselves that they are doing things properly, and there's the rub. The aim is not to do perfect Zazen, perfect Buddhist meditation, or to say perfect Christian prayers. We are not trying to reassure ourselves with an apprenticeship in perfection. This is false. It is something completely different. We can see the whole universe in sublime unity and in order to do that we have to pass through the self, mental silence and awakening. There is no other way. Unity comes from the dissolution of thought and nothing else. One cannot structure the movement towards dissolution, my dear Watson, but it is true that Buddhism, Zen and other "tricks" try to do so. In my opinion, it is pointless. The need to understand, evolve and truly improve oneself, without this being the product of narcissistic ambition, is difficult, because the path of awakening constantly humiliates us. We constantly need to reassure ourselves by telling ourselves that we are on the right track when, in fact, there is no track.

The self is panoramic, the Lord is in everything and mental silence has no blind spots. When we genuinely reach the self, there is no centre or periphery. The past seems far away and the future is a mirage. The dictatorship of mythical words is over.

The spirit is permanently free.

Nothing threatens it. Error is no longer the opposite of truth. In fact it is like a drug. You can become attached to detachment in the self and refuse to take part or to suffer again. However, the Supermind then transforms pure silence and fulfilment. There is no end, I'm afraid and for some people this is disheartening.



QUESTION: So awakening is the perception of unity, spontaneous, tangible and direct perception, whereas philosophy tries try to trap this unity in intellectual discourse?
ANSWER: That's it exactly. It is the Western attitude of seriousness, that incorrigible thing which confuses solemnity with depth and weight with gravity; it is that metallic layer of the mind which takes itself seriously and screws everything up. The future awakened one fights against self-importance, sadness, melancholy and even abstraction, because this group of things freezes natural perception and destroys it. At the same time, we must be able to stand back. We must stand back without imprisoning ourselves in our own discourse and its modes of representation. We must distance ourselves and also be open like a child at the same time. Water becomes gas under the influence of heat and is steam. It becomes a sort of Earth because it becomes solid in the form of ice with the cold. Air, which avoids sparks, is fire unbeknownst to itself, but is also consumes itself with the help of burning wood. It is true that the same thing can take not only different, but also opposite, forms. This is the basis of things. But the more you evolve, the more you realize that it is the same thing - the same single thing which assumes different guises. Even the four Elements are variations on the Ether, whose substance is extremely fine, a hundred times finer than that of air. There are hundreds of foregrounds, backgrounds and middle grounds, and they all fill up with countless metamorphoses at great speed. But there is only one thing, in two forms: consciousness and energy, nothing more. Matter is sleep, extreme slowing down, the periphery of seething atoms filled with infinite consciousness. I have experienced it ,just like Sri Aurobindo and Mother. Admittedly, this is even further on than awakening, but you have to pass through it to reach the Supermind, or at any rate to make it descend as far as the body and begin the work so that the body becomes a sort of plasticine permeated by a microscopic movement, a fire which does not burn.

This reality is all marvellously homogeneous and it is astounding, quite astounding.

INDESCRIBABLE.

Every one can think what they like and it enters into the order of things. It is a seamless reality. The seedy shantytown sits beside hotels for millionaires. Bombay is the symbol of the Manifestation. Homogeneity explodes into multiple variations, like a Polynesian coral garden. Everything makes sense; the self begins to reveal it and the Supermind confirms it. What it is appropriate to transform or throw out is the mind. It cannot tolerate the shantytown next door to the luxury hotel, or the brothel next door to the convent. Efflorescence disturbs it, because it constantly reminds it that it is impotent to change anything at all. The mind feels guilty for not transforming the world and knows that it cannot do it. It is like Sisyphus. It pushes its boulder up the hill, displays its philosophies, invents forms of Marxism that tally nice and naturally with the gulags and then starts all over again ad infinitum. It pretends to believe that it is good to roll the boulder to the summit, because that is the only thing that it knows how to do. It tells itself that if it tries once more, it might be lucky this time.

Awakened ones must clear out the dead wood and say what is really going on: the mind can only be used to order perceptions. It cannot do anything else. An ordered self deciphers the world differently and intuition stems from this, because there are no more blockages. Changing things is fine, but only by taking reality as a starting point, i.e. the naked eye of the self which does not have anything to defend. If you think that it is dreadful of me to call Catholicism dreadful, I would agree with you – there have been some good things too, but what I attack in particular is the mental Judeo-Christian legacy, not the works or the sincere men who believe in this fable. They have nothing to defend and yet they still point out the birds in the sky to those who never look up.



FOURTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Re-reading the previous interviews, I realized that you were warning me against an artificial, intellectual vision of Oneness which, according to you, is not sufficient to initiate an approach towards a tangible perception of reality.
ANSWER: If you want this Oneness to correspond to the what is already inside your head, then of course it does not work. The Earth is not just a blue ball destined to be saved by baby Jesus in the last split second of his genesis. The Earth is not the playground of History, which can only perpetrate crimes and divide men in the name of new illusions. The Earth is not the universe of miasmas, which Buddha abhorred when he said that no object was worthy of being desired. An intellectualized form of Oneness is sometimes used as the basis for esoteric fascist visions. The intellect has accepted oneness, but the self is not prepared to understand it and a false follower is a truly vile thing. He thinks that he is truly superior, just because he has opened his mind hungrily to a hidden concept which requires initiation, and he is full of contempt for those whom this dry, sterile vision does not seduce.

Oneness is only truly perceived in the Self, even if it can be understood before, or foreseen at the outset.

It seems rather to be the case that the Earth is filled with consciousness and that this consciousness spills out everywhere - in crystals, plants and animals - and that it provisionally completes its course in the Man who appropriates his own life through the Mind. In fact, awakened ones say that the consciousness which appears when the mind is destroyed is not personal consciousness. Once the mental wall has been shattered, the consciousness which comes through sees itself with disconcerting ease in all other forms of existence. This is perhaps part of the reason why some awakened ones used to establish religions: to encourage respect for consciousness, which manifests itself everywhere, as soon as the mental veil is dissolved.

If we wax lyrical about the path of awakening, we might believe that there is a philosophy of AWAKENING, i.e. we establish presuppositions, draw circles around them and end up somewhere. Another inner state is legitimized which does not refute anything, but contains everything. Is all this worth dying for? No. The human race is stupid. All Giordano Bruno had to do was keep quiet and, in the more prosaic order of descriptive truth, Galileo could have recanted more quickly. Why risk being killed because one does not think like fools? They are still the ones who rule the world. Isn't life our most precious possession? If I were threatened with imprisonment for saying that I was an AWAKENEND ONE, or that everything was the Divine, it is obvious that I would say: "OK chaps, I was having you on. I'm an ordinary guy, I have only ever seen what you have seen yourselves. I see things just like you, so you don't have to put me in a straitjacket...".

Today, I would undoubtedly be a shameless perjurer, without the slightest trace of guilt. I have already been persecuted in previous lives for showing the way, I had to persevere and was made to pay for it. Now, if the Supermind only exists for my predecessors, to whom I owe so much, and for myself, then that's already not too bad. I don't campaign anymore, and what is more, the Divine does not expect me to. Telling people what is happening to me and enjoying writing about the ultimate order of things is not forcing anybody's hand. It is just a nod to those who, like myself, are ready to make a fair number of sacrifices to see things more clearly, and there are not very many of them, even among so-called "spiritual seekers" who expect to draw some personal gain from liberation, which is idiotic and is enough to make you die laughing, or die of sorrow.

As a Zen monk once said: "a robber has stolen everything I own, but who can deprive me of the light of the moon through the window?" I have nothing to defend and I will recant whatever you want. This is the basis of my dignity. You are what you are and I am what I am. If that bothers you, then I'll be on my way and if you want to follow the same path, then you must throw everything away. We can begin to come to an agreement on the basis of what is left.



QUESTION: So philosophy cannot therefore be a collection of unshakeable certainties which are able to mark out a route?
ANSWER: Each individual has unshakeable certainties, but they are not all the same. Every Chinese person instinctively knows that nothing exists apart from their transaction with Time. He hoards up the present and is the only one to do so. He does not need distractions. He may die on his hoard of treasure without ever deriving any benefit from it and nobody will ever know what this fortune meant to him. Take Hindus, for example, they become queasy at the at the idea that God might not exist. Just asking the question constitutes blasphemy and fills them with fear. Take the Japanese – the very idea of not finding the best means to one's end makes them ill. You have to succeed (you really, really do!). You have to stop thinking in order to achieve awakening, but how should you go about it? Half of Zen is a swindle. Awakening is sometimes described in it as the fruit of skill, and you are forced down this path, without any mystery. It is reminiscent of the circus, with its wild animal trainers or a trapeze artists. Bad luck – awakening is not a circus! While ever we are content with practising Zazen together in the eroticism of seriousness, which contains even more voyeurism than other forms of eroticism, then we will always be dealing with faking awakening perfectly, i.e. miming it perfectly, playing sneaky tricks with formulas, pretending to be awakened ones because we are looking for awakening without really looking for it, etc.

Every instant is Zazen, whatever the circumstances. The notion of superimposing on the plane of real time the deliberate intention of observing it causes a rupture in the natural continuity of duration. True meditation becomes apparent of its own accord and to try to schedule it stems, once again, from the pride which the mind takes in looking at its best side in the mirror. Or else we have to do things properly, light-heartedly and in the right frame of mind, without attributing any higher value to this moment. Otherwise, when we come out of the meditation, we think that we are no longer working at full capacity and recreate the dualities which we were trying to erase during the meditation.

A lot of people know how to meditate perfectly and this pulls the wool over their eyes. But it is often the same as for philosophers. Once they come out of the dojo, temple or sanctuary, their reactions are generic. They listen to you even less because they think that they are close to the truth, with all their artificial aids. It is easy to create areas of consciousness. Fasting, for example is a sure means of getting off the ground. You can also suffer from spiritual addictions and do lots of things to enhance performance or self-image. If vanity becomes involved, then it is pointless. This is the Divine sense of humour. He makes you wear masks, until the most beautiful one, of which you are so proud, strikes you as the worst one. Then you have a chance of getting through.



FIFTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You have spoken a lot about awakening, and it would seem that you only mention philosophy in order to come back round to your own vision of things. What proof is there that you have understood the philosophers and are not underestimating the scope of their works?
ANSWER: I like authors. I have a fractal vision of things and I do not have to read everything by each one to see what I am dealing with. This is the first point: perhaps I do not need to have models any more, or to learn how to think, because I have done all the work myself. I am not impressed by philosophers' work. I have done just as much in previous lives and even during this life and the composition of my spiritual legacy, The Principles of the Manifestation, could be considered philosophical work. I would then say that reading is different for an awakened one. Words no longer deceive. The way in which discourse is organized reveals the author's intention and the philosopher often appears to contradict himself. Being inclined towards indulgence, I would say that he is evolving, as it is more elegant. If I catch him ranting, then I tell myself that he has not resolved such and such a problem and it would suit him for things to be as he describes them, in order to stifle his personal issues and this is my second point. Finally, the third point is that I don't see myself becoming an expert on mazes. It may be a great job, but it isn't a job for me.

All philosophy (except in the case of awakened ones of course) can be summed up by the question: "How can I do without God, now that I have given up on knowing him?". Descartes remains the undisputed champion. He turned his desire for God, which he was unable to control, into a cathedral of words, a mechanism of concepts all perfectly articulated to fit into each other. However, there is no trace of anything other than ointment to salve nostalgia for an hour or even less, during which time the veil begins to tear.

This is where we have to forgive the Divine. He peeks through the window and then we never see him again, or else it is too late and we are old. The Divine caught me when I was very young. I shouldn't complain and yet sometimes I do so anyway because I cannot stand what my body is experiencing any more. I am the most blessed of men and sometimes it is still difficult nevertheless.

I don't mind philosophy existing if it is a means of reviewing the difficulty of Being from scratch and evicting complacency from its homes in the mind. Grappling with God, nature, oneself, or grappling with Reality, if one does not wish to add intent to evolution, is perfectly legitimate and very honest. However, discernment has no motive. It is an end in itself, which can just as easily be applied to the most trivial emotions as to the most abstract mathematical calculations. Discernment is a state of mind which is really curious about everything and not a policy which is specifically reserved for philosophers' general ideas, female emotions, or for the business man's benefit.

I reject the notion of specialist discernment.

If that is the case, then it is just self-interested vigilance. True discernment is not something which just follows behind something else. This is how I view those troublemakers Diogenes, Socrates, Empedocles and Krishnamurti. They knock things over. Their discourse is a bowling ball which scores a strike in the ranks of the best conceived ideas. On the other side, starting from a similar experience, you have the complacent ones who establish things. This is reassuring, but the spirit soon starts to identify with notions which are deemed to represent reality, instead of identifying with reality. – i.e. with nothing which is known, but with something in which everything makes sense. While ever we still shudder when cats play with mice, then something is not right. We would like things to be different, but that is impossible. We cannot transform Reality without having felt what it really is, beyond our dislikes and preferences.

This means that I can immediately discover in a philosopher the method by which he manages to escape the realities which disturb him. I am fundamentally opposed to all those who adopt the postulates of their culture. I am anti-Christian, because I know that a man, even an avatar, cannot represent God all by himself and show us the one and only path. Firstly, this is disrespectful to all men who are not Christ and, secondly, hundreds of awakened ones have saved themselves in past millennia without identifying with any supreme father figure. I cannot accept either that a Buddhist should believe at face value that Buddha and Buddha alone defined the only supreme truth and discovered the ultimate meaning of life. Far from helping spiritual progress, this type of belief corrupts it at the outset, by creating a false background which always comes forward to meet the foreground - what we are actually experiencing without any other considerations. It is precisely these considerations which will channel perception of the moment towards preconceived dead-ends, filled with so-called meaning. This is what philosophy should do: produce new representations which disagree with beliefs. In fact, as soon as philosophy stops denouncing things, it doesn't have much left to say, because it then plugs the breach between it and the unknown, that different place, which could reveal itself to be a pure present, free of archaic finalities. It is different for an awakened one: the Self does not seek to reproduce itself. If an AWAKENED ONE has followers, it is because he cannot help it, or because the Divine has arranged things for him in this way. The annoying thing about philosophers is that they always want to be right. This is what disturbs me. I am flabbergasted by the hatred thinkers have for each other...



QUESTION: But don't you seem to hold a grudge yourself against certain philosophers?
ANSWER: Not in the least. I view them as legitimate on their own terms, but I think that what they say does not always tally with what an awakened one calls Truth. Yes, I do tear Descartes to pieces, but he is my only bête noire along with Sartre, and it all makes sense. At the time, belief in God was looking for a dogmatic message and the scientific feel of his approach in a period when observation and analysis had finally gripped the Western mind meant that Descartes was in tune with his era as a precursor, but one who lacked the timelessness which the Self reveals. As soon as we read these writers it is amazing - they shudder at the mere thought of each other. Plato hijacked all his predecessors, but here is one thing he could not come to grips with - Morality - which he never mentioned. Democritus did not exist for Plato. The mind is agile enough to bypass what cannot be hijacked – bravo! Cioran, who was as upright as he was quirky, which is indeed a record of sorts, bore a grudge against Valéry and then blamed himself for it! What's it to him? In the end, there are no philosophers. There are men who offer their opinions while pretending to follow the rules of the game which is pompously called philosophy. Furthermore, these rules are not really unchanging, so that the philosophy enthusiast has to specialize excessively in the techniques of discourse to compare these so-called great minds of our civilization with any degree of relevance. I applaud them all for expressing themselves, but I do not trust them.



QUESTION: Is an AWAKENED ONE any more trustworthy?
ANSWER: This isn't a question for an awakened one, because he would be promoting his own cause by saying yes and would be suspected of coyness for saying no.



QUESTION: You say that you have nothing to defend, but at the same time you say that you are different - you are awakened.
ANSWER: In fact, I don't shout it from the rooftops. I find it deeply interesting that humanity is evolving and the Divine Mother sometimes dictates to me what I have to do for myself. A trace remains of what I do for myself - expressing what happens to me. This might legitimately help others, in so far as nothing extraordinary happens to me, other than perceptions which are beyond the current abilities of the majority of human beings. In fact, my spirit is nearly always rejoicing. Everything is a source of wonder and discovery and I welcome every form of suffering if it manifests itself. At the same time, it pains me that man lets himself be manipulated and I present awakening as something which can bring this manipulation to an end. Neither belief, other people, or the Self can manipulate the awakened self. Desire is no longer a problem: it can be just as artificial to satisfy it as it is to sublimate it. The conflict on which philosophy is founded - the perishable flesh versus a spirit capable of rebelling, conceiving, choosing, loving, abolishing time - without which philosophy or religion would never have existed, comes to an end with awakening. The most difficult thing is how to escape from the manipulation exerted by a mixture of the spirit and nature, without inventing a new, more subjective one, a made-to-measure version, as it were. We can manage to curb a certain number of mechanisms and to infuse consciousness into a fair number of things. However, there are primary tendencies which would simply like a change of scene, instead of being transformed.

Self-image is crushed in the stage preceding awakening. Many people do not get beyond this stage. They prefer to remain in their ignorance rather then lose the false reference points which deceive them. They lack joy and an archaic feeling of security keeps them in a rut which they mistake for roots. This is why I say "do not pretend to be interested in awakening if you are not prepared to give up everything you have". Christ said the same thing in a different way. By contrast, this is why Buddhism is questionable – intensity is hidden and it rambles. There are lots of little answers to fragmented problems. Morality is based on detachment, but detachment is not moral, religious or ethical. It is not something which can be cultivated. It is physical. For example, it is refusing to seduce somebody if one likes the pleasures of the flesh and the opportunity presents itself. How many philosophers could do that? It is being indifferent to what others think of you. How many great thinkers, always ready to draw their swords to defend their system, "the truth", could do that? Detachment is knowing that one can be wrong, and being prepared to admit this immediately, as soon as the mistake appears, without feeling guilty, humiliated or demeaned.

Fine words on the ultimate meaning of things have never changed anything much, but philosophy can, nevertheless, lead to detachment through its opposite: commitment, passionate involvement in interpretation. But beware of cheating - one cannot commit half-heartedly. Buddhist philosophy has become rambling; it offers the opportunity to fulfil one's mediations, to forge a life without any vices, and encourages one to be dispassionate, etc. Exoteric Buddhism is psychoanalysis diluted to infinity, a series of microscopic little reappraisals in the main areas of the self.

Fear thinks within me, desire thinks within me, heredity thinks within me - these are the major discoveries which a Buddhist must follow to clarify his consciousness and achieve emptiness. However, others must elevate this moment in which they feel thought of by the universe and offer it to the Divine, instead of dividing up one's spirit and letting it fall back into mental ruts where the mind amuses itself by contrasting good resolutions with insurmountable disappointments. Beware of minute forms of progress, scraping the surface or polishing, which gets rid of a few disturbing rough patches, but extinguishes the flame. We must burn with a desire to change so that Buddhism is not merely a practice, like Confucianism, which ends up being triumphantly hypocritical - a facelift for an old building. The same thing obviously applies to Christianity.



QUESTION: Doesn't an awakened one have any virtues?
ANSWER: None whatsoever. He has nothing to compare with anything. He does not redeem his faults with overzealousness in the areas where good qualities appear. The awakened one is pure, not because he has conquered impurity, but because his state of mind is not adulterated. Too bad for those believe that they bear the stain of original sin, or any other stain that would make them go through life with a curse upon them. There is no curse other than refusing to see things as they are. There is no stain apart from enduring the infinite mystery of consciousness which animates us without trying to understand it. The awakened one has no more sin, or stain and can be more or less satisfied with his relationship with desire, other people and himself, but this leaves no trace, because he is constantly changing his own perceptions. Anyone who is fed up with not being whole enters the path of awakening, keeps a low profile, and eventually understands the huge manipulation process. He comes through it and cries victory. You have to be constantly hurt until you become invulnerable. Hurt by what is missing, by overly powerful appetites, by an inability to love and to forgive. We must be in direct contact with everything that is wrong, in order to find a way through. We must sometimes decide one way or the other, destroy things, and sometimes take deep breaths, before taking up arms again on the battleground of psychological knots, without the will to conquer. We must expend a colossal amount of pain in order to abolish suffering.

We can dissolve suffering through pain just as we light a fire with a flame. Fire and flame are not the same thing and nor are suffering and pain. I am an awakened one who does not believe in models, who does not approve of Plato and who is convinced that suffering does not exist. I do not even like the idea of a general concept to represent the fact of pain. This sanctification of pain in the myth of suffering, along with Christian original sin, Buddhist and Hindu samsara, which believes that all reincarnations are painful, the cult of suffering which does not even spare Jews who pay for the privilege of being God's chosen people by a surfeit of tortures - frankly all this just creates a vision of life which encourages man quite legitimately to complain about what is happening to him. The roots of complacency lie not only in the emotional body, but in the entire cultivated memory of peoples who make pain into an entity by calling it Suffering.

We seek AWAKENING because it is a genuine state of consciousness and not in order to avoid suffering. Subordinating the quest for awakening to the fantasy of no longer suffering is a serious form of depravity in Buddhism.

AWAKENING and nothing else.

Awakening is for relieving life and allowing it to suffer less, as in the prajna paramita - awakening for life itself and not in order to free oneself. The only thing from which we must free ourselves is the self which hides the Self, the self which is hooked by life and hypnotised by it. Freeing oneself is just a way of giving life back to the Spirit; it is not personal, although we are necessarily present when it happens, but it is another self. This is the mystery, because it stays partly identical to the previous one. This is why quantum theory is providential for metaphysics.

It does not cure anything or provide relief from anything, it simply crowns depth, because its whole extent is suddenly accessible. We no longer feel distant from anything at all, we cannot build walls any more and we can let ourselves go. Letting ourselves go is not carelessness, but spontaneously feeling that everything that happens has a meaning and we try a lot less hard to control, avoid or obtain. A rat must not try to be an eagle. A utilitarian form of awakening in order to get off the wheel of reincarnations, or to bring suffering to an end, is really disgusting. I don't want to know about it. There is no more a Buddhist philosophy than there is a Christian or Chinese one. There are broad panoramas which reduce Reality to the dimensions of the human mind, for better or for worse. There will always be people who grab the knife by the blade, either through absent-mindedness or because they are in a hurry.



SIXTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: I have re-read your answers and I am astounded...You say: "The awakened one has no virtues". If this is the case, then over half of all philosophy is empty, since it aims to educate mankind in the path of virtue.
ANSWER: The awakened one has simply become pure, i.e. unadulterated. He has gathered up all his motives, undercurrents of ambition, bursts of desire and his wishes - the whole collection ranging from desire to the wish to be - and brought them to the spiritual fire, where they have all become the one flame. In order to reach this point, the awakened one is bound to have suffered, but it is quite obvious that the amount varies from one individual to another and we cannot, therefore, establish that suffering is necessary for achieving liberation. Irrespective of whether this was a long process or not, he will have worked hard. He is bound to have been ground down by questions such as "Who am I?", "What must I do?" or "What can I afford to do?" and by all the desires which we, rightly or wrongly, believe constitute real obstacles on our path.

But this work in the crucible has nothing to do with what hypocrites advocate: cultivating one predominant quality which we develop and master so that we have a clear conscience and can bury all the rest. It is true that in the West, as well as in China or India, half of all philosophies offer some form of all-purpose formula. Popular religious and even atheist philosophies can be summed up as the art of having a clear conscience by a process of normalizing our relationships with family, institutions and God. The generic spirit takes a sort of subtle, abstract, opportunistic line - a global intuition that doing good is better than doing harm after all, because we reap what we sow.

This getting to grips with Reality, which stops immediately as soon as security is achieved, is deceitful.

The self does not dive inwards any more because it has "correctly" identified with those external spaces which threaten its stability. Therefore, in some respects, stability is death. We need to take things further, but at this point there is nobody to encourage us apart from awakened ones themselves, who are not satisfied with family and cultural ties and religious play-acting.

True philosophy says: "You poor fool, you are dithering between Plato and Nietzsche, Fourier and Marx, or even between Buddha and Jesus, because you are incapable of producing your own vision of the world". This endless sum of disparate visions serves no purpose in the end other than to reveal human subjectivity to us in all its glory. Descartes believes he is proving the existence of God, but lovers of God ask what the point would be. If Descartes had known God, he would not have needed to prove his existence. The Divine has never asked anyone who loves Him to prove his existence to humankind. He simply throws them into a heated battle – evolution – but that is not a mental issue. The Divine can only manifest Himself from within an individual and all the external pressures which we strive to develop in religions are only used in the end to establish moral systems. The call to awakening comes from within, in such a way that a child or adolescent can feel it, whatever their original background, be they atheist or believer. In fact, the call can be irresistible and independent of all belief, as in my case. I never "believed" in God prior to my supramental experience. It is not necessary, even in awakening. Religion is not concerned with the feeling of being connected with the Whole, the Mother, or the Supreme force, but with an imitation of this. If we truly love the Divine, we love Him before even knowing whether He exists or not. Words which were previously meaningless gradually come to mean something on the basis of experience.

I am coming back round to the idea, therefore, that philosophy can only be a personal thing and that it is above all a method for eliminating belief. If this movement grows, it is clear that we understand awakened ones a lot better. The mind will no longer offer resistance by erecting the barrier of personal beliefs between the awakened one's discourse and the act of reading it.

If the philosopher is a masked redresser of wrongs, then he is not a philosopher. It is simply a case of saying what one has to say, and even the bias of drawing others to one's own vision is already not philosophy any more. This is where we get down to the essence of this discipline, because a cunning author manages to obtain his reader's support without forcing him, by mastering logic. This is what Reason aspires to – imposing itself from the inside on every sincere individual who wants to use logic to uncover eternal truths. However, logical inner conviction, which determines whether one becomes a Cartesian, Hegelian or Marxist, does not affect the whole self. The individual will have succumbed to external factors and will have been conquered by an infallible system; he will have been recruited into it while having the impression that he took part in this recruitment process himself, by sticking closely to the discourse. It comes down to the same principle for religions, none of which can do without dogma, or for Buddhism - there are lots of unverifiable claims and nothing to believe at face value, so that we have to know where to draw the line at what we have really assimilated and to throw the rest away, or retain only the hypothesis.

However, the inner call of awakening cannot be compared to that afforded by belief in an external system. The future awakened one is, therefore, forced to smash up all the abstract modes of representation which tie him to a political, religious or even spiritual concept of reality.

This work can sometimes be initiated by philosophers, who only want to follow themselves, but the mind eventually gains the upper hand and only allows them to create a regular polygon with a variable number of faces, a complex mirror which they use to articulate their existence, a polygon for which they can at least take the credit for inventing by putting a stop to imitations. Somebody who has never rejoiced at creating a synthetic vision of Reality (including his relationship with the world) cannot understand philosophy. Philosophy, like awakening, is a state of mind. If you do not like to wonder, then you cannot become a philosopher. If you prefer answers to questions, you must develop along a different path, of which there are many. Philosophy is merciless: if you practice somebody else's, you are heading for disaster. If philosophers were not so caught up in the business of what they are creating, they would stop criticizing awakened ones for their lack of rigour, a lack which in fact constitutes a superior form of rigour, absorbing opposites and including paradoxes, to the point where it forces mental structures to become broader or else break.

QUESTION: So there could, therefore, be a philosophy of awakening, if one were careful to specify that it does not pursue anything?
RÉPONSE: ANSWER: Of course, but it is too subtle for the Western mind, which is obsessed with mastery, control and the appropriation of the future. The Eastern world can do thousands of things without being certain of achieving goals, and that does not disturb people. They are much more sensitive to duty than to goals. This is why their civilizations evolve slowly. The notion of a goal to be achieved is a Western one. Primitive peoples go hunting and it is just as normal for them to come back empty-handed as it is to catch prey and if they stop hunting after coming back empty-handed several times on the pretext that they had not achieved their goal, then they would die of hunger or be short of protein. The simplest of men and those who are the most highly developed act without any goals, which limits their personal ambition, their taste for power, wealth and prestige. They accept what eludes them and this does not make them anxious, mean or withdrawn. Most of the time, setting goals is like trying to manipulate one's life according to one's personal interests and subjective instructions.

From this perspective, I would even go so far as to say that the future awakened one does not feel ownership of his own desire for awakening. He accepts that he is pervaded by mysteries and does not fight against an imperative that is superior to all others and whose origin is in fact unknown to him. This immutable impulse, this abyss to which the fire seeker commits himself, is perceived from the outside as the manifestation of an irrational consciousness. This is perhaps what is most difficult to accept in the path to awakening: when we let ourselves be possessed by a higher intelligence it appears to others to be a lower, feeble-minded, intelligence, hopeless naivety, or even a form of absolute pride.

This misunderstanding bothers me, because I know of many philosophical thinkers who are so very close to becoming candidates for awakening... Narcissistic attachment to Reason prevents a good number of great thinkers from letting go and accepting that their works are futile, because they have become so satisfied with producing mirrors for forgetting what they really are – mysteries. They repress mystery by spending their time organizing it. Organization is a drug. Organizing one's speeches, one's literary output, one's diary, eroticizing one's timetable and sharpening that primary sensation of wasting or saving time... This kind of thing prevents awakening from maturing. It is stupid to manipulate time. The Eastern world does not do it; it is not stressed and does not create artificial needs. We have to know how to do nothing, to feel useless. We need to be churned, to torture ourselves a bit, in order to know who we really are in those time slots when nothing is happening. There we can no longer cheat with the future. I suspect that "Reason" is satisfied with regular polygons, dice with twelve, twenty or thirty faces which come close to being spheres. Human beings move around in mental bubbles, which roll beneath their feet. They are cut off from what lies above and below. They do not see Reality. If all our mental energy is reserved for organizing a schedule, then there is no means of letting the true inspiration of God in.

It is purely gratuitous. Each individual rolls a uniform boulder as it is less tiring that way.

We smooth the rough edges and the fundamental requirements are lost. Utopians become bankers. It is Reason which governs all of this - realistic surrender, compromise, loss of innocence, regulation of pressure - contrasted with isolated patches of leisure and freedom, or moments when we recover. This is feeble. Fighting for awakening is also about wanting to change our material circumstances, to liberate man from matter. The only fight which is truly essential is the struggle against lust. The rest all follows on from this.

QUESTION: If I have understood things correctly then, conflict or conflict of interests form the basis of philosophy?
ANSWER: There cannot be any other basis. Conflict begins as soon as a baby understands that it is not its mother. He realizes that she will never be totally at his disposal. Conflict is any form of separation with the Whole, which forces us to lust after what will enable reunion to recur. Love, money, security and everything which we lust after is done so to reduce separation. When we have realized this, there is nothing more to be said. It is over. Each being can legitimately be viewed within their own subjective process of achieving reunion by their own means. Even addiction to sex is a fantasy of union with the Whole, like religious fantasies, false appropriation of God through the play-acting of liturgies and ever more prayers and emotional frills. Awakening is absolute victory: nothing can separate you from the Whole any longer, whether you be single or part of a couple, rich or poor, or even ill, in the case of elderly awakened ones – the self gives you everything, time belongs to you because you have nothing in particular to do with it and you can become a truly great philosopher. Your presuppositions bury themselves in the very Earth, your inspiration intoxicates reason itself, which falls in love with the Divine. Awakening is the only solution – I am quite categorical about that. On an earthly timescale, it does not matter that there is approximately only one awakened one for every million inhabitants, or even less at the moment. The proportion is bound to increase rapidly. The churning process continues and there is nothing to be done. Nobody can stop something which comes from within.

QUESTION: Philosophizing one's way to awakening, therefore, means assimilating one's birth by whatever means are available?
ANSWER: Exactly. The thinker rebels against anonymity. Man as a bureaucratic entity is a philosopher's nightmare. I do not demand that philosophers be awakened ones, as some have not received the call, but that they do their job properly, that they fight against cloning, levelling and a standardizing tendency and that they keep denouncing things, until politicians find themselves confronted with a real counter-political force. Those who know how to use the mind better than others can play an important role in this world, in which the norm has become being greedy for action and experiencing social addictions as a privilege. The high degree of responsibility which wise men dread has become the cocaine of social man. We are experiencing the religion of decision-making. Never before on Earth has vanity found so many methods, ruses and stratagems to legitimize itself. Proof lies in the absolutely shameful lack of solidarity between men, even within the same community.

Whereas the awakened one seeks out what is not acceptable, the philosopher respects his era and so he should take advantage of it to fight on the battleground of contingency, to wave the flag for what he is, because it is indeed the mind which encourages us to differentiate ourselves. We might as well do it by respecting our own true nature and by straying off the beaten track. Philosophers used to imprison themselves in their genius, but nowadays the situation is so urgent that every thinker becomes a militant. The ferment of social and historical matter is reaching critical point. Today, every thinking being is coming to the same conclusions as me: we cannot trust mankind manipulated by the generic mind. Genocides are thriving and man's first steps on the moon have not changed anything. Reality is, therefore, flexible, but it remains homogeneous. The progress which we were anticipating has not happened.

This is where we need to look.

We must learn not to expect anything from what is external any more. This is difficult as we want to trust an idol, god, teacher or political regime. We want to commit to faith in the future, but this is unfortunately impossible, or else the world would already have changed.

SEVENTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: I would have liked to define philosophy, but you keep coming back to man the thinker and although you claim to be neutral you encourage philosophers to surrender to the intellect, rather than produce discourse to which they are attached. At the same time, you say that everybody is different and therefore contributes to the essential process of challenging our cultural structures.
ANSWER: What experience does the philosopher's discourse stem from? From a reaction or vision, from resentment or from an embrace? Can he be creative without criticizing other systems, or does he need to establish his own based on the flaws in other people's? These questions seem innocent, but they contain the polemical substrate which not only prevents religions from being reconciled, but also prevents the convergence of philosophies towards modelling a universal man. Let us not be deceived. Beneath the coercive appearance of religious dogmas, which encourage the follower to adopt a certain number of values and behaviours, is hidden in reality the prototype of a man possessed by the universal being. The more we dig behind appearances, the more we begin to know this and the more essential analogies reveal themselves behind the specific traits of the great traditions. As soon as we think, we think of something else and the awakened one is merely the person who has found this something else, who wholly possesses the legitimacy of his own existence. This experience is so powerful that he cannot help but sketch out a model for universal man, not because he particularly wants others to be like him, but because he is in fact being inspired by an intelligence which is not his own and which absolutely legitimately shows him the tools for his own metamorphosis. Dante was not an Italian genius and Goethe did not represent German thought either. The best of the Greek sceptics closely resembled those old Brahmans throughout the ages, who died in the Self, after founding a family and governing the spiritual life of their city. Although stripped of illusions, they were not disillusioned. All these men created philosophy without knowing it, or by cultivating it and they all accepted that their intelligence would not be tied down to the small land of their birth and they all realized that abstraction abolished distance and could therefore confirm the infinite in man's spirit. Philosophy could, therefore, be an expansion of the little generic mind towards the living springs of reality through the touch of intelligence, a sense which can be trained in the same way as a musician trains his ear or a painter his eye. Admittedly, a certain amount of thought can help the self to discover itself, but this thought must develop by itself, beyond the will of the subject, so that it takes him where he does not want to go, but where the key to the mystery appears.

QUESTION: Does a work have anything to offer to those who did not write it? I am quite willing to believe that Plato achieved fulfilment through his writings and school, or that Descartes came to grips with God in his Discourse on the Method, but what can a text offer the simple reader?
ANSWER: I must say that it is fascinating, because all sorts of philosophers are springing up. Take Sartre, for example. He is all just hot air from beginning to end, except in one respect: commitment. That is a stroke of genius. Although Bergson might ring more true, he remains just a solid middle-class type, limited to his lectures, who was never really intrigued by contingency because he was always able to sublimate it or circumvent it thorough lofty speculation and boundless creativity. Sartre was a free man fighting a political battle, possibly the first philosopher to feel the urgent need for discourse to intervene in the history of the present, instead of dominating it from above with chaste, abstract, idealistic supremacy. Sartre turned a blind eye to the gulags: he was so committed that he was spared clear-sightedness. Isn't that amazing? Take Foucault. He was the first to analyze the (social) structures of exclusion, quite without prompting. A true philosopher is a creator, somebody who hits the bull's eye, ten or twenty years before the generic mind even notices the problem. Tomorrow's philosopher will encroach on medicine if he locates disease in the spirit, on ethnology if he reveals the codes of universal dominance and on sociology if he establishes some links between the individual and his environment. Fundamentally, ever since Plato, philosophers have been mixed up with History. This is fantastic!

By contrast, the awakened one never invents or creates anything, but returns to what has always been there before him. He asserts that awakening will be necessary at the heart of any society. He has got rid of his genius. This was the hardest sacrifice, letting go of his genius, or letting go of that differentiation for which he strives, in order to grasp time and himself. Letting things come to him, instead of always announcing this needs and avoiding his weaknesses. The fundamental trap is to seek self-esteem through Art, creation, intellectual know-how, mastery of a field, in short a great role to develop. It is tempting to track oneself down. There is an element of vanity there which we mistake for self-love or perfectionism and therefore we can create a satisfactory mirror-image of life. But the Self is not a reward for geniuses, or a crown for intellectuals who know how to create meaning.

The Self descends on the individual who cancels out all meaning, to the point where he is pure, summed up in a cry, offering, or a single question which takes root in the source of intelligence.

QUESTION: So Plato was too much of a genius to create a truly inspired work?
ANSWER: His Republic is a pathetic text. You can sense that the role of philosopher has overtaken that of the man, who extends his approach to areas which are foreign to him. This is why I persist in liking philosophers and distinguishing them from their works, in order to stay true to myself by encouraging all men to stray from the beaten track and think for themselves, independently of the result.

QUESTION: I am still preoccupied by the influence of philosophers and I feel uncomfortable every time I hear that Nietzsche contributed to the birth of Nazi ideology. Perhaps if he had levelled out his works to create just one immortal, credible one we would have had a different image of philosophy. Ever since this figure, everybody believes that philosophy is the preserve of intellectual giants and we therefore think that philosophy only concerns the intellectual elite.
ANSWER: We have always been wary of philosophy because you don't have to be a genius to work out that it really has the power to change the lives of those who devote themselves to it. This power appears to be mysterious because it is not sanctioned by the church, or by the true cultural memory of a people. A philosopher, by contrast, is always somebody who attacks subjugation to religion on the one hand and denounces mythological belief on the other. If a philosopher entertains himself by resurrecting the mythological roots of a race, people or nation, he changes category and becomes an ideologue. Ideologues are the black sorcerers of philosophy and they know how to exhume material from the history of races to establish new types of fundamentalism. This is why I can state that mental activity is not innocent and that philosophy can be a trap for certain individuals because it lends them its substance, but it does not lead them beyond their own passions.

QUESTION: Where does your requirement to separate the man from the work and to let the man prevail come from?
ANSWER: As a matter of fact, I don't believe in ideas. For nearly thirty years now I have been pondering the impact of religions and spiritual doctrines, and the further forward I go, the more I realize that the ideas adopted have been totally distorted at the same time. When we compare the small number of readers of Yankelevich with the success of Sartre, it is astonishing! The more noble an idea, the less it becomes embodied. The more vulgar and common it is, the more widespread it becomes. That's how it is! It has taken me more than twenty years to accept this, but now that I have, it spares me the necessity of imagining any sort of future. I do not want to predict any intellectual trends, and I am not even sure that the growth of a wide audience for spiritual matters is the sign of a true revolution of the soul. However, I am forced to sanction all movements which try to get out of the rut and in this context any philosopher who says anything at all is more appealing to me than a manual worker or a middle-class citizen who keeps a low profile and has no personal opinions. I will not be drawn into saying that all human beings are up to scratch just by the very fact of being alive. You only have to look at the number of pregnant women who continue to smoke until just before giving birth, and if you were waiting for that as a reason to judge me, then you have finally got what you wanted. Although it is impossible to establish rules for an apprenticeship in consciousness, it is clear that there are many gradations and in fact this is the real problem. According to the evolutionary category to which they belong, human beings feel entitled to scorn and indifference vis-a-vis the lower and higher categories which they instinctively sense. Christ, whom we encounter in the subtle planes, tried to level things upwards, to enable people from all categories to recognize in themselves the same founding principle, so that they could become aware of the expansion of the inner space through the opening up and growth of the heart (chakra).

I was surprised at first to observe the failure of his message, but through the power of the Supermind, which I mentioned at the beginning, I was able to see that a very specific process of differentiation encouraged each person to preserve only the really homogeneous materials from their past and their culture. Beliefs are only assimilated into the most superficial plane of the self, but never give rise to any noteworthy form of metamorphosis because they are external to the individual. They therefore lead him to conform to things which he does not know, but whose basis he establishes blindly, out of intellectual laziness and indifference to what is fundamental. The control exerted by experience and memory on the self is so intense that popular culture even believes that those who reflect deeply on their being have their heads in the clouds.

The whole of humanity is fleeing consciousness and it is my role to encourage those who love it to form a united front against the standardizing tendency of spiritual correctness, which will corrupt true impulses of the soul as soon as the masses inevitably come to rediscover a keen interest in mystery, the paranormal and the occult.

We may well follow a new religion with the same docility with which we stupidly followed the principles of Marxism. Every means is acceptable to the generic mind, as long as it seems to appropriate time without the need for reappraisal. One ideology follows another, religions run out of steam, but philosophers and seekers after the truth are worth more than their works and what they represent, thus allowing Consciousness to carve out the path it requires among the least resistant humans.

We will not buy made-to-measure happiness at the expense of sacrificing our fundamental joy: strolling serenely and clear-sightedly from mystery to mystery on a track which will never culminate in the ultimate human conquest.

EIGHTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: By refusing to legitimize philosophical works, you exclude yourself from the category of philosopher. A philosopher looks at discourse and does not care about the author's private life. Aren't you doing exactly the opposite?
ANSWER: Yes, but it is the opposite for Awakened Ones, believe it or not. I am not drawn to many awakened ones as human beings, but I adore some of their writings. For example, I can't stand Krishnamurti the man. For me, he is somebody who has spent his life convincing himself that he was the best. He is extremely condescending towards the bhakta, those who love the Divine. He cannot understand the impulse towards the Divine. He could have gone and talked things through with Sri Aurobindo and become his follower, but he preferred his own self, who had an answer for everything and his interviews are systematic, undermining the basis of the mystic temperament. What does he care? He does not see the heart and mistakes it for mental confusion. It is completely reductive to try to fit the whole of spirituality into a plan to free man from violence. He visits his teachers and somewhat condescendingly interprets his vision of things and one has to understand that he is the best, naturally. He mocks Scripture, but is happy to flood the market with his own commentaries. He defends himself against the charge of being a teacher, but is happy to have a large horde around him and even issues dates, moreover, when people can approach him, like all the other gurus who admit to what they are. It is all very funny, but there is no trace of the Divine. At Krishnamurti's so-called "level" of consciousness, it is staggering not to recognize the Divine straightaway and I find it frankly incomprehensible. Just at the time when René Guenon, who was really rather scathing towards him, acknowledged Sri Aurobindo, Krishnamurti was acting the dandy and, if another Hindu with the same name is to be believed, he told him that he would not achieve liberation without him. The Supermind comes as a huge breath of fresh air in a world in which people think "They don't come any better than me" or "There's nobody greater than me". These people still exist and I have met some of them and would not want to be included in that category. I contest the authority of teachers, superteachers and anti-teachers. I contest it and let it express itself, because the naive and the weak need it. For me, Sri Aurobindo outclasses everybody. In spite of everything, the dandy about whom I am speaking is enlightening in a general sense, if, and only if, one does not dwell on the detail. Some of his works are magnificent. I haven't read them all yet, but I must get round to reading The Awakening of Intelligence. There is another elderly awakened one who is beginning to be known and whose enlightenment goes back a long way, as he was sixteen when he made the transition. I am not shocked that this champion of precocity had to all appearances such an ordinary life - on the contrary, it does not surprise me at all. When you change path so quickly you are bound to be able to accept Reality as it is and to move forward without straining yourself or creating a persona. I baulk a bit at him because he plays jazz piano and with my prejudices I would have preferred Mozart, or that he were a composer. But all things said and done, it's alright because with the Supermind, which shows me lots of things, I am well placed to know that individual differentiation is absolutely staggering and that it is very foolish to try to draw analogies between awakened ones. This chap can say with a straight face "I don't have any lungs" when he is nagged about his three packets of French cigarettes a day. He therefore experiences his identity as separate from his physical body, if I am not mistaken, but he has children and smokes like a chimney. While I'm on the subject, perhaps he is greedy, I don't know. In any case, he is a surprising awakened one amidst a totally normal life and I cannot help feeling that he could have done better, although in fact it is none of my business. Something grey surrounds him - his middle-class life, his smoking – and yet I am forced by the Supermind to be physically perfect. I thank the Divine for forcing me to let go of my addictions, when I am not complaining about being unable to drink a drop of claret without feeling out of sorts for forty-eight hours afterwards. Yet he has written wonderful, extraordinary pages which brought tears to my eyes although I am less emotional than before. It is an acknowledgement of existence, expressed in Christian terms, in a few pages, which immediately makes you want to summon Krishnamurti and say: "How did you manage to live in this tedious construct within a construct, watching yourself not thinking from morning till night, without suspecting that all this came from elsewhere?"

The dryness of this teacher of the non-mental contrasted with a love of being alive, attributed to a Consciousness above oneself, really touched me.

I am beginning to understand, therefore, that certain Awakened Ones detach themselves from the Divine and that they are really foolish. It is true that with the Self we feel that we are all square with God and that is restful. But new manifestations can occur and I would never forgive teachers under any circumstances for denying that there are spiritual circumstances which are beyond them, or for belittling them. This vanity clings to even the best of them and this is pathetic. Claiming that one's own vision is truer than the next man's is truly a vestige of our animal nature. I am not made this way. I place Sri Aurobindo above me and I have not written anything on a par with The Life Divine, but I express a lower vision which is a stepping stone between the testimony of the Self and pure supramental inspiration. Philosophy cannot merely be the expression of oneself; it must also constitute an admission of the place which we occupy or wish to occupy in the evolutionary movement of humanity. With a little less vanity, each individual could do excellent work in a specific field, but the mind is still weak and even good authors are incapable of gauging the true impact of works which are not their own, but which are heading in the same direction. They debate the detail fiercely, especially in France. We can try to find our place through philosophy, i.e. by constantly pondering on where we stand vis-a-vis our desire to understand the universe and to be a part of it.

This is a free, personal activity.
The art of asking oneself important questions is neither narcissistic nor inward-looking. It is an impulse on the part of the deep self which uses the mind to explore the issue of identity and environment. Today, a philosophy of personal development is being born and nobody can predict where it will lead – either to the more subtle satisfaction of a more refined ego, or to a transition to awakening. It is all very strange.

Even if your system takes you as far as awakening, be prepared to abandon it. Sons can become jealous of their fathers and your philosophy can manipulate you. Stringing words together produces meaning, which ties man down to matter and to his environment through sensations and feelings. You will not function correctly while ever you continue to peddle other people's meanings. Your instinct and intuition side with each other on the one hand, and on the other hand there are your mind and reason.



QUESTION: Isn't this what Buddhist philosophy claims to teach us to reconcile?
ANSWER: Of course, but I am objecting to the background. It's not my fault, but the background is wrong. The Divine exists and I have personally met him, as have Sri Aurobindo and Mother. You have to retain this hypothesis, otherwise you become subjugated to a belief. Believing in the Divine is ridiculous and does not facilitate contact in reality, and not believing is pretentious. But the hypothesis must be retained, with a favourable bias, and why not, because this splendour can seek me out if it decides to do so. This is better than trying to lure its favours or excluding them. Sri Ramakrishna and Ma Ananda Moyi also found the Divine, but it doesn't give the right impression to present the self, liberation, as the ultimate option.

Under the pretext of suppressing belief in God, who is an illusion, Buddhist philosophy establishes the kingdom of the absence of God, emptiness, which is even worse. Yes, we must find awakening and that is indeed emptiness, but dissolving the mind does not have anything to do with the realm of the hypothesis of the existence of God. The two are not connected. I wonder how you can be a Buddhist without feeling dishonest, when you know that Sri Aurobindo came to announce the next phase of our evolution. You have to be attached to the notion that things do not change and love yourself more than the whole Earth. Not everybody can favour their psychological transformation over their involvement in a new phase of consciousness with complete humility. Buddha represented one possible peak before the supramental impulse and Buddhism will always be useful for establishing psychological transformation as a necessary prerequisite for awakening. But this is only one step in the process.

Those who do not know how to philosophize for themselves are reassured by the large regular polygons of "spiritual teachings", which break down the work for them. This facade of authenticity is reassuring, but soporific. Pascal was already wondering if it wasn't the protocol, decorum and costumes of judges which was making their work much easier. This is where things currently stand. I inspire less confidence when I wander around in my underwater hunting gear than a good old Tibetan lama who has never experienced awakening, but who knows the theory off by heart... What a waste it is to trust appearances.

Philosophy ought to learn to be wary of them.



QUESTION: I don't understand how you can denigrate works - canons and dogmas - so much on the one hand, whilst being so fond of those who decree or follow them.
ANSWER: Many people think that the Divine Mother is a myth, a beautiful invention to complement the masculine aspects of the Divine, such as Consciousness or spiritual authority. My masculine rigour makes me criticize objectively what emerges from the human intellect and claims to be leading mankind somewhere. But it is my feminine side which makes me embrace men and women as my children and allows me to love the philosopher or wise man - or the teacher who is to some extent taking his place by overrating himself, as is very often the case. A mother defends her child, even if he is in the wrong, whereas his father scolds him. I feel as if I am the mother of all beings and my favourites are those who pierce a hole in the crust of the mind. Even if a mother claims to love all her children equally, when she compares them, there is always one whose company she prefers. This cannot be explained. I'm just the same. I like people who ask themselves questions, which women are often quicker to do, whereas men tend to be quite quick to specialize in asking questions, hence the large number of male philosophers and teachers, compared to women who live at peace with themselves and do not boast about the principles guiding their lives. As soon as they start asking themselves the question "Why?", they take charge and do not see the point of distance for distance's sake. They step back and then return to the matter in hand. Men take a step back on principle and then use this to wash their hands of everything that happens. I don't like many philosophical texts and only very few spiritual doctrines, especially as I am convinced that I was an expert on the subject in previous lives and it is a field where I don't let anything get past me.

However, I can't help liking real men and women, actual living beings in front of me, even if I say that I do not trust mankind. That is irrelevant. You can appreciate the fascinating mystery of consciousness pervading living beings who say "myself" and "I" with insolent conviction and you can even like those beings who are not aware of what animates them, or only very occasionally. However, when it comes to applauding what they say on the pretext that they are awakened ones, philosophers, doctors or psychologists, then that's another matter. The mind is a feeble force and this is really what separates one person from another. Each person has it as a means of differentiation, but does not know how to use it unless he commits himself totally to interpreting his own life. Few people accept that this interpretation is rigged from the outset by heredity, fear which thinks, desire which pervades, the need for appropriation and vanity, all of which nag the self to reveal itself to others and even to itself in a false light.

QUESTION: Aren't you being a bit hard nevertheless?
ANSWER: Anyone who thinks I have any aim other than promoting awakening is mistaken. I am not interested in putting people back in their place - life will take care of that. If I lambast redressers of wrongs, it is not in order to be like them. I don't belittle anybody. I say what I feel and so I admit that I am inclined to want to turn this into general laws, and that may be wrong, but everybody is equally free to refute my claims after all. I say that moving towards Awakening by following the recommended route makes a mockery of awakening. Those who do not want to remain ordinary or to surrender to the path fuel the whole industry of charlatans, psychotherapists, minor teachers and Hindu or Tibetan ashrams and it is strange that I can't say this plainly without people imagining that I feel contempt for followers. I simply wish that they would take shortcuts, but they stray into the byways. What I called an organized lie is being created, namely that you either have to be part of the group, in which case you will be listened to, sometimes even reverentially, or else you are on the outside and therefore suspect. Internal exchanges are full of smugness and the what is external is feared much more. The split found within families is recreated. This is true in monastic orders, be they Christian or Buddhist. The mind is so weak that the average man, even if he is sometimes superior, cannot strike up a conversation with a believer if he is an atheist, or with a Buddhist if he is a Christian, etc. It is worryingly stupid. I have just made a wonderful trip to a Muslim island and I had a mystic crisis, as happens more or less three times a year, in which the Mother truly descends on me and transports me. I realized that I could pray just as well anywhere. I saw images file past me and this almost became a song. I saw myself going to pray at the mosque, church and then the synagogue and in front of those little Hindu temples which I love, all at the same time... What would a Muslim say if he saw me going into a church or synagogue, or coming out of a mosque? He would give me a boot up the backside!

You really can ditch liturgy and dogma, but you must not stop there and you can also ditch teaching and the spiritual. All that remains is pure truth - the self confronted with the great ones, upon whose words we sense that we can meditate, even if we cannot imitate them.

QUESTION: Is it still worth writing philosophy and building a language for oneself?
ANSWER: It is essential to create one's own language in order to escape from an imitated language. I lived in Auroville near Pondicherry in 1979, where a bunch of morons with no spiritual experience at all manipulated Sri Aurobindo's jargon, especially the convenient adjectives "mental", "rajasic" and "tamasic". They were a part of everyday language. Somebody who didn't want to listen to you would say: "That's mental" and that was it, you had to shut up. If somebody you didn't like did something that irritated you, then you would say: "Oh him, he's rajasic anyway", i.e. you would dismiss him by accusing him of acting on his own behalf because he is full of lust and greed. If somebody did not acquiesce to what you asked him to do then he was "tamasic, a creature of habit, who is reactionary and lazy". I couldn't take it any longer.

The philosophy of Awakening is free inner activity. How much do we understand of what we read? What do we do of our own accord and what do we imitate? What do we adulterate? How much do we really assimilate of what I call the "flowery words" of teachers? You read Master Eckhardt every night, but does that really affect you, or are you reassuring yourself with edifying reading matter? Do you admire the man to spare yourself the trouble of being like him? Are you imagining things by assuming that he has seen more than Dante and Boehme, but less than Lao Tzu? What do you care?

It can even be an unconscious magic ritual, an easier way of trying to tap into a star, like Hindus with their little household shrines packed with representations of divinities. I am sorry to say that every single act must become deeper so that it is cleansed of its mechanical elements, unconscious finality and approximate nature.

QUESTION: But the self emerges as a state in which meanings disappear, or are no longer required, as I understand it. We wander from one chain of meaning to the next until the mind gives up combining perceptions to give them meaning... and then do we reach the other side at this point?
ANSWER: Yes, that's it. What is fundamental is understanding things – lots of things – and realizing that it is never enough. However, we must first understand before we can test the limits of understanding. We must become weary of skill – that is the crucial step. We must discuss it – and this is where philosophy usually comes a cropper. If you really have an answer to everything and you accept that something is still lacking, something which would connect you fully to the universe and to yourself, then yes, you are close to AWAKENING. But it is very difficult when you develop the mind, because the mind is content with itself and it takes another power to humiliate it, otherwise it will feed on its representations, admire its own methods and flatter its own doubts. Fear not – I know it well. The mind is like a beautiful, liberated woman. Either you subordinate eroticism to love and manage to cope, come what may, or you do the opposite and curse yourself for having met her when things go wrong and she leaves you or deceives you. The more a person or thing reveals itself, the more dangerous it is to toy with it. The mind can be a wonderful tool precisely because it is also a fierce adversary.

It is stupid to think that the unfurling of consciousness stems from the individual. This unfurling comes from an ability to direct the spirit towards forbidden areas, but this spirit is already there, it pre-existed. The spirit is there and can be filled with intelligence on condition that we stop wanting to dominate it. Underground lairs and peaks meet up beyond the realm which we cannot leave without true surrender. We must know how to confront what we are trying to flee.

QUESTION: Darkness, ignorance and sin?
ANSWER: No, these are objects. The process itself is to go beyond that, deeper than the one wants to go. Committing oneself to observing the self and seeing that one is not as "good" as one thought, that egoistical motives are hiding behind altruism, such as that attractive picture of the self, be it cultivated or otherwise, that you love lots of things which don't bring you real satisfaction, ananda or bliss and that you still need them, and addictions are still present and are terrible – but what belongs to you out of all his jumble? If you refuse to go through the sieve, then the consolations of religion, esotericism and of the so-called luminous sect remain. You have changed a few principles, but you have not followed it right through. I condemn that prostitute religion, which justifies cowardice in the name of forgiveness. It says: "Don't go so far, lick the boots of God, Buddha or Sri Aurobindo", like the most cultured Hindus. It is horrendous. The Supermind torments this evil vibration of narcissistic devotion and concern for security, this frail little emotion which is fostered to persuade us that we are worth something and are on the right track.

Buddhism denounces the notion of buying God through prayer, but I denounce Buddhism which preaches buying emptiness through meditation. Or as usual you have to go and see a teacher, so that the mind does not get muddled up. How much longer can you go on believing that behaviour takes the upper hand over the intention behind an action? If the self's intention is pure, if it surrenders to awakening, then no form of practice is necessary. I upset a lot of those who have thirty years of yoga under their belts, or who spend every summer in ashrams or somewhere similar and cite their age as a foil and as proof of their authenticity. Some people even try to overawe me, when they only have a vague idea about awakening and do not even know what the Supermind is, even in intellectual terms. Vanity, stupidity, incompetence, existential intoxication, a metaphysical temper tantrum? Others actually resent me for not recognizing that they are superior beings, because they interpret their little moments of realization as extraordinary things and expect me to approve, congratulate or admire them and consider them to be awakened ones...

Vanity, arrogance, self-image – all these things get on like a house on fire. Even the notion of a self which will "live its own life" is an illusion. While ever we fail to acknowledge that a single fairly minute proportion of what happens to us pleases us or suits us, we will continue to use the mind to falsify matters, to identify with things which do not concern us, but from which we cannot free ourselves.

I condemn all that dross which bases escape on a course which passes itself off as revelation. Theology is a lie in any religion, Redemption is a milleniarist myth, Resurrection from the dead is a tall story and the end of reincarnations a mere hypothesis. When it comes to messy situations, the East has just as many as the West, but wisdom and sainthood are, however, much more widespread. While ever we base perception of the here and now on this type of belief, we will stay in the bottom of our pit, on a tainted Earth which we do not know how to transform. We will pretend to live while pursuing a lure.

QUESTION: Aren't you being too hard this time?
ANSWER: I am simply issuing a warning to arrogant people, who come to an arrangement with their self-image by polishing it every morning to flatter themselves, that their manoeuvres are futile. Just for good measure, I am also warning those who represent the opposite view, the cowards, who would like to be saved by casting a few emotional, tear-filled glances heavenwards. Hiding behind Scripture, taking cover behind practice, surrendering to an obscene faith full of emotion - there's enough of all that around already. Neither the self, or to an even lesser extent the Divine, let themselves be duped by sycophants. There are only two pure options. You can remain simple and be guided by nature, trusting in it without becoming attached to what it offers, appreciating it and loving it without ever worrying about what people think, but acting irreproachably with one's heart to the fore, trusting nobody. Or you can commit fully to the Self. All the intermediary stages are pathetic and that is why civilizations are pathetic. You have not achieved the integrity of an awakened one and have left the natural movement. The mind encourages you with the incentive of free will and everything goes wrong. I find it difficult to forgive the Divine for this situation, but I am relying on the Divine Mother to have the last word in this story.

QUESTION: So you are referring back to original sin?
ANSWER: I'm sorry, but we do not bear the burden of original sin, we are not responsible for it. It is God's fault not ours if the mind causes this revolution in nature and if the individual wants to appropriate life for his own enjoyment by crushing everything in his path. We want everything for ourselves, that is part of our animistic make-up. God must redeem himself with mankind and this is virtually what happens when awakened ones make the transition then come back to found a religion. Religion has a symbolic level, it is not the right leve, of course – it is God finally becoming answerable. Unfortunately this is just one step short of prodding him in the stomach. Seeking awakening is about going much further, it is not about being satisfied with having one's life sanctioned by a higher being, it is about calling it quits with God. It is the first instant when we realize that the manifestation is really justified. But it still has to happen when you are young. An elderly man who reaches the self may not have this impression and he prepares himself to avoid further reincarnation. I can often discern an abortive attempt at awakening in philosophy.

Philosophers would like to invite God, the one who is lost in the mists of time, or indivisible Reality if you prefer, to their table, so that they can tell him: "It's time to come clean and no nonsense. You are mystery, timeless consciousness and you are ultimately responsible for this whole shambolic mixture of spirit and animal. I don't care whether you are called God, Evolution, Consciousness, Reality or whatever. I demand an explanation!"

But the Whole only begins to justify itself in the awakened one, because it pervades him and shows him in the aftermath why things have to be that way.
Hence the legendary intransigence of teachers : "That's just how it is - wallow in your own complacency, or surrender yourself to the dark night... but don't sit on the fence." This recalls the parable of the rich man's son who was happy to admire Jesus, but would not follow him in order to transform this admiration into something positive. Admiration is just rubbish, the opposite of contempt.

What lies between innocent trust in nature and consecration to awakening is pretty disgusting. Hedonists are still appealing if they are not corrupted, because they can take the satisfaction of appreciating something even further and thus transform it into pleasure, but they are addicted to objects. Hedonists are really dependent and this is what undermines their system. They need wine, sex, luxury, broad-mindedness, esteem and a permanent party is contrary to the alternative movement of nature. They may not have much worth, but they are committed. They require satisfaction, even if it is not at a very high level and do not abandon feeling, like certain "social insects", whose life is entirely functional and cerebral and who often try to sweep humanity along in their wake because they frequently have important jobs. They have no feelings, just different forms of security. They make me shudder.

What I question are individuals who do not allow themselves to feel pleasure, think or devote themselves to awakening and who reproduce age-old patterns without changing anything. They are redressers of wrongs, judges, conformists, forgers and self-satisfied types.

We have to live with them, because they are not all insincere. For many of them, their life is a personal possession which cannot be touched. They can beat their wives or children with a clear conscience in the name of duty, religion or justice. What a zoo! But others give you a desire to live and to preserve the Earth. Everybody who is committed and really involved in what they do is dear to me and I like true mothers, true professionals, true cobblers. There is no social hierarchy – that is utter nonsense, it is a purely mental, false world. If you observe humanity closely, over half, or even three quarters, of people are pretending and this is not a class issue - they can be upper or lower class. Some people really seem to be involved in something which does not concern them. They have learned their part and that's it. Individuals are fundamentally repressed and on hold. Even their leisure pursuits are sad and lacking in creativity. They play card games and collect stamps and the women strive for the umpteenth time to recreate a cake that nobody is interested in and chatter over it, spreading gossip, preferably malicious. This absence of self is what appals me, if I really think about it (otherwise it is quite amusing in passing). But I cherish a slight hope that this is really changing thanks to the Supermind and the growth in individual differentiation.

The absence of the self is even something which can be established at the age of forty or fifty because perception becomes standardized and the body begins to shrink. The mechanical sets in. We have to see the situation as it is and accept it, but all of our efforts must be directed towards getting rid of this gap which is already within us and testifying that consciousness is something integral and profound. I break down the barriers which make a mockery of the major issues and invite everybody to consider who they truly are. If you are scared of being laughed at by your neighbour, then living for somebody else's opinion is the problem. The West has lost the habit of asking "Who am I?" and I would like to know where this comes from, because the ancient Greeks were interested in this question. How can it be repressed to such an extent in a whole civilization which has very advanced technology and science? I can't believe it. The mind is active on the outside, but avoids what is internal. This is extraordinary.

QUESTION: So you are referring back to the notion of commitment?
ANSWER: That is all there is. One cannot dissociate materials from life, or relegate a transformation to a convenient corner - emotions, relationships or work - and manage to avoid letting go completely. If we stay on the same track of directing and controlling we will not let revealing realizations in, those which would truly enable us to leave our secure position, our own self-image and obsession with control. Many people only know how to let go when in pain. Things must be beyond them before they stop their pantomime of appropriation, control and will-power.

QUESTION: What about the Middle Way?
ANSWER: It simply consists of having made observing the self permanent and having distanced oneself from intense excitement. When you begin to have a lot of experiences which break the mould, you grow to like the present and unintentionally wait for those special moments when perception alters, expands and the self sets down roots in a new dimension in which it ascends vertically without fear. However, since many things occur because they are sanctioned by facts, there can be periods when localized major events decrease. There are fewer ecstasies, changes of direction, sparkling realizations, because you must establish a form of perception which is starting to become autonomous. If you grow weary at this point because you have reached a plateau compared to the period of initial change, you run the risk of backsliding, which is common. The Middle way allows you to distance yourself from gratifying experiences and to put up better with the concentration of obstacles. But intensity remains, even if it is projected forwards and is less dependent on events.

You do not invent an excessive passion for the Divine, avoid spiritual feats and stop wanting to rely at all costs on practices, like an athlete relies on training. I've got nothing against practices, but it is not clear that they are natural. The Middle way means ridding our mental processes of obsession and not creating an awakening scenario at all costs to replace all the rest.

QUESTION: So a lot of people miss awakening because they are obsessed by it?
ANSWER: I was obsessed by awakening, I tortured myself with not having reached it and that is how I obtained it. Its absence tortured me rather than the idea of missing it or achieving it. It was very pure. "Why aren't you here, I can't call you any louder?"

What I am denouncing is speculative obsession. You know that awakening is the key, but it refuses to yield and you behave like an awakened ons anyway. You reassure yourself with the persona of the seeker who has already made some plans. This is odious. While ever awakening is absent, you are at the same stage as anybody else. There are no gradations of ignorance. You may get by more successfully and find that you have evolved further by comparison, you can pontificate about love, the meaning of life or anything you like and you can even be fulfilled. But awakening is different - it is an experience, an encounter, the universe's sanction for the self which cannot stand being separated any more. It is automatic. The idea of getting there faster by employing a strategy is a legacy of willpower, control and mastery. This is not the path.

Having said this, it is possible to put up with not being awakened much better than I did and to live honestly with this hypothesis, calmly and without taking yourself too seriously. Discoveries can occur every day, but we must not think that awakening is the result of a series of progressions. On that score, I concur with those radicals Krishnamurti and U.G. However, you can always practice something to exert real feelings. It is not of the same order as legitimizing it because one is expecting some sort of fruit.

PART TWO

A RETURN TO PHILOSOPHY


FIRST MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You say that philosophy is inevitable, that it enables the individual to shape himself by betraying its customs, but is it necessary?
ANSWER: We will find out in the course of this century, because for the time being we do not know what to replace Marxism with and on the whole our elites accept the failure of ideology. The door is therefore open for a return to religious fundamentalism on the one hand and to bourgeois conservatism on the other hand (i.e. the triumphal assertion: I told you that there's no point in trying to change). However if things go badly, the philosopher will find his place again. Instead of trying to seduce or recruit, he will show the way. Philosophy has become a social and political critic and has abandoned propaganda. It has to find other ways of making itself known and it is interesting to observe that media coverage is casting its spell over the whole world, including thinkers who are detached. I am not passing judgement, merely taking part. In fact it is wonderful. In an era when models and professional sportsmen have replaced female lawyers and doctors as our role models and when a degree of collective regression is apparent, individuated individuals still mange to appear on TV doing something other than purring contentedly. Who are they? They are not news-hungry journalists, or writers who dream only of big sales, but philosophers. I could name them, but there is no point. They may have very different views, but they are doing the same job – reminding us that the twentieth century is the most awful in History, on account of the methods used to eradicate peoples, races and nations.

In fact, a true philosopher, anybody who knows how to think properly, makes the same discovery: man is a barbarian and that never changes. The veneer of culture, the smugness of civilization and the consolations of religion are all superficial. Philosophizing is recognizing that disturbance disturbs, that a respectable social man can become a victim or torturer as soon as the wind changes. Philosophizing is about discovering principles and they are always hidden by the very form of their manifestation. I would reiterate that you see the outside and you instinctively like beautiful people. What if your eye penetrated deeper and you could see muscles, veins and organs, wouldn't this be somewhat less erotic? The mind is useless unless it allows you to go beyond sensations. It distances itself from them then organizes them when it realizes that there is no point in running away. An individual with the right mental attitude is bound to want to change human reactions, abolish hatred, end violence and eradicate war. However, we do not manage to do this. The awakened one therefore says: begin with yourself, by truly transforming yourself, instead of persevering in cursing.

The origins of philosophy lie in chaos and chaos is pure conflict - contrast or alternation between chaos and order, homogeneity and heterogeneity. We must each give our opinion on this mystery and do something.

Our civilization has just recognized that it is not enough to invent systems and that the problem lies with their application. At last! What blindness. Mankind stupidly does what those in power ask and some of the nouveaux riche even suffer on account of becoming wealthy, but cannot think of anything else to do, as they have no other values. Unless big upheavals take place, philosophy will patiently tackle the economy, not like Marx, but from the inside. We have to take advantage of the collapse of ideology to return to the individual. History is not a collective process and that is my message to philosophers which might open up some new lines of enquiry and this comes to me from the Supermind, not my own little mind. It is an individual process. The sum of all individuals does not constitute a collective. No two people will have the same perception of reality even if they pretend to belong to the same group because they have interests in common.

QUESTION: Should we abandon all forms of generalization? But then what happens to philosophy which is hungry for categories, series and collections?
ANSWER: It would be wonderful if I were wrong and a monster could pull a rabbit out of a hat – a coherent vision which would make all minds change tack effortlessly. Every time people predict the death of philosophy, it takes off again. It discerns the mood of the moment. Today dissatisfaction is lurking and perhaps a good logistician could invent something to make powerful people and others alter their vision of the economy and politics. Climate change could help us to stop deceiving ourselves. That would be marvellous and it could team up with personal development which disguises itself as the spiritual, but nevertheless helps to summon it up for the most sincere individuals. But is this still possible? Isn't the world moving too fast? We lack a pure philosophy of relationships and things always go wrong, with or without God, as Communism is obviously a bit like compulsory Christianity. Philosophy has its ups and downs. Something rises steadily to a peak then drops down again. It is the same movement, incorporating a few paradoxes, from Plato right through to Hegel. Discourse organizes broader and broader representations and never stops justifying itself from the inside. There are no limits any more. This culminates in a sort of spiritual game in which becoming is to some extent a mere formality. At that point one can go no further. The philosopher has raised himself as high as an eagle and understood everything, but he cannot change anything. He is therefore obliged to come down again. Whether we like Hegel or not, the great seething of matter continues and is even accelerating with major technical discoveries and this is where Matter reveals itself. What is the point of inventing spherical universes - playgrounds for angels – if murderous time remains so heterogeneous?

Heterogeneity is the thorn in the side of philosophy.

It is the lone potato in a sack of turnips, which means you don't have a kilo of potatoes or a kilo of turnips, but a collection of turnips enhanced by one potato with a combined weight of one kilo. But things become tricky as you have to weigh the single potato. Therefore, in order to avoid getting it wrong, you say a kilo of vegetables. This is true in terms of representation, but false in real terms. A vegetable does not exist and must necessarily be something else such as an aubergine, carrot, turnip or potato.

Any observer can see that reality is heterogeneous and abandons the claim to define and understand things through discourse. Words cannot replace things and categories level off singularity and torture specificity, until everything becomes vague, because we find that easier to comprehend intellectually. But at that point comprehension has already been buried and then retrieved in pieces which we stick together with ideas, but they are not facts by virtue of their scope or development. This is how the philosopher's nightmare of injustice creeps in - fate, chaos, malign invariance, the non-causal and the causeless - that whole jumble which prevents us from finishing the painting, the big bumble bee that got stuck in the paint at the last minute.

I really came to understand this in 1986 with the "butterfly effect" and chaos theory. There is bound to be an indeterminate degree of fluctuation within a set of parameters whose impact it is impossible to foresee. The more you collect proven data which combines, then the more movements, spirals, undertows, eddies and unquantifiable feng shui come into it. I was prepared for this by quantum mechanics, as I have followed the different phases of physics and the major paradoxes from a distance and the "butterfly effect" was the culmination of that work. Moreover, on an intellectual level, it is in keeping with what the Supermind shows me all the time - thousands of threads of wonderfully precise permanent interactions, a clockwork marvel. Everything combines, even within the individual – different types of memory, receptivity to the present moment, the psychological structure, the vital or energetic structure - yang, the emotional structure - yin, one's intellectual quotient, in which height and depth form a specific channel and also an approach to oneself guided by unconscious archetypes which produce a favourable or unfavourable self-image! This mixture of complexity and spontaneity is astounding. We must look at this more closely and encourage the philosopher or even the non-worldly intellectual to attach particular importance to the way the mind grasps information, since we know that it is in perpetual motion. Why shouldn't we be able to grasp what is elusive? That is right and we should respect it. Let us respect iconoclasts even if they do not know how to replace the idols which they have smashed. The philosopher studies the coherence between the world and his vision, which forces him to do two things – to pursue his analysis of reality and to pursue his own designs. He is a charioteer whose two horses rarely cooperate. One is always more spirited or more lazy than the other.

I would reiterate that I am attached to expressing my freedom and the philosopher tramples all over that and is in fact a choreographer, but you have to love the mind to share in its wisdom and madness. I can vouch for him as a man - even if his work is dull - and invite him to pursue it further.

The awakened one is freed from all that. He perceives Reality and has no more designs on it because he and it are one. He can amuse himself by describing its transcendent nature, but this comes as naturally to him as breathing. The mind is entirely at his disposal – it is passive.



QUESTION: Do we know what the point of philosophers and awakened ones is? You have so firmly convinced me that the root of the problem is not the activity but the man, that I see groups of men thinking and reinventing the world and awakened ones ¡°reaching the other side¡± for them... Do they have a role?
ANSWER: No, because this would be attributing a finality to philosophy and Awakening. This would be hijacking them. These things are expressions. Heraclitus expresses himself, Plato expresses himself ¨C that¡¯s all. The reasons for which we remember them are the responsibility of historians and ethnographers. Through our freedom, but by their learning, we have access to everything which has been thought for thousands of years and of what has been ¡°counter-thought¡± - another neologism - by awakened ones. We must do something about it, because soon there will be esoteric supermarkets opening up and thousands of people called thinkers, ¡°counter-thinkers¡± and healers of wounds. With the advent of computer technology, the mind is required to perform difficult technical operations and becomes used to abstract processes, so let¡¯s hope that lots of taxpayers learn to philosophize naturally, without really noticing, as this would change people¡¯s mentalities. You must form your own personal view and defend it, but push it as far as feeling and abolish political correctness in every sphere. The fundamental divide will remain nevertheless, as is the case with philosophers. The philosopher of the inside can only refer the notion of being back to his own presence, to his own psychology and then leave the world to get on with it for better or for worse. He can be direct or radical: he dispenses with so many levers, cogs and intermediaries that he can promote the individual without worrying about anything. But if you try to argue that a manual worker¡¯s son is less likely to go onto to pursue his studies than the son of a middle-class father, then the whole system collapses. Modern philosophy has abandoned positing man per se and has bogged him down in his cultural context, as if this were the determining factor. The basis of the spell cast by Marxism is the exaggeration of the limited, but real, role of social background. We would like people to believe that individual awakening is dependent on one¡¯s background. This is wrong. Those who really achieve something, be that awakening, high-level political positions, or setting up big companies, can come from anywhere - from either privileged or underprivileged backgrounds. Complacency concerning contingency is a terrible thing. You cannot explain individuals by their background or heredity. You cannot judge life on the basis of averages.

In any case, the real issue is to free ourselves from conditioning and from the past, be it good or bad, princely, like Buddha, or working class. The awakened one is one step ahead of the philosopher, who still believes in the more or less positive controlling influence of family, background and culture. This is utterly wrong. There is no such thing as good control, a good upbringing and no model which can transmit the pure movement of Intelligence to the self from outside. Brahmans do not all have a vocation for awakening, despite being taught its theory and we find angels and saints emerging from the most working-class backgrounds.

The spell cast by contingency is the enemy of the philosopher. The facts speak for themselves - things do not change and that¡¯s that.

You cannot derive individual potential from an external matrix, but it is clear that education can be completely transformed and that we must fight for a fairer society. The contingent universe must undergo some improvements, but we cannot expect miracles from changes of scenery which remain external realities. That said, bad memories impede our awareness of existence and although we may not know how to promote awakening, we do know how to put people off it.

It is clear that the philosophy of the individual per se has failed and this is why philosophers have included context and History in their theories. If the individual cannot change by himself, then let¡¯s try to change him through a change of scenery, i.e. through a transformation of society. This has been the new philosophical trend since the eighteenth century. Diderot outlined a culture which would enable man to use his intelligence fully to discover mechanical principles and the laws of nature. Rousseau dreamed of a new theory of relationships ¨C but in order for it to be new, society had to change its own patterns. Everybody was heading in the same direction, i.e. that of a fundamental missed opportunity and they wanted to hold our environment responsible for our alienation. It did not matter that there were exceptions to this general trend. In fact, Marx gathered up all the problems, subordinated identity to one¡¯s background and founded a philosophical movement which distanced itself from the individual in order to base development on collective structures.

Given that this attempt also met with no more success than the old philosophy which focused exclusively on the relationship between the self and the individual being, the time has come to refer back to the latter in an entirely new way. This return, underpinned by neuropsychology and psychoanalysis, is legitimate today, now that the gulags and ghettos can testify once and for all to the failure of philosophies based on politics or events, which are indifferent to the unconscious.

The pendulum is swinging back towards the origins of philosophy: what is the point of thinking? There is less interest in the ancillary issues which surround the whole process. You must either focus on truly learning what the mind is and accept the ontological challenge of discovering how the faculty of thought enables you to experience your identity, or else reduce the Mind to a direct little critical faculty, a natural machine for saying yes and no and testing or rejecting sensory impressions.

I accept the fact that philosophy has tried out all sorts of directions, but the fact remains that none of these avenues has really brought any lasting change to a historic society. While traditional societies function perfectly well on the basis of a few unshakeable foundation myths as long as no forms of progress threaten them, variations between civilizations just add more and more discourse and glosses on all the natural processes of consciousness. Philosophy just operates alongside the growth of law, economy, knowledge, trade and language acquisition, whilst jargon develops in hundreds of branches.

However, when you look closely at where all this is leading us, no answer appears. The world is not run by a humanist philosopher of the individual ¨C far from it ¨C and the works lining the bookshelves of the great thinkers of our civilization only encourage nostalgia. Those thinkers and intellectuals who reject the ontological paradigm in order to focus better on social change also come up against all sorts of opposition which renders pragmatic philosophy ineffectual. The upright, intelligent man runs the risk of being hijacked by a political party, the true innovator falls foul of reactionary institutions and the visionary of the future unsettles the leaders of economic powers who are attached to their profits.

Therefore, creations of the mind are subject to material pressures which corrupt their power, wherever they come from or aim to go. This unfortunate fact is the cause of revolutions or, if you lack the courage for that, the same failure can lead to fundamentalism. As soon as you accept that thought is unable to stir things up sufficiently to lead to progress, then dictatorship shows its face, superstition revives and the powerful use their privileges and power to protect themselves from historical circumstances. They offer the masses new bread and circuses and they can rely on technology to provide a favourable alternative to the colosseum and gladiators.

Orwell and Huxley had already warned us and those things which seemed to be suddenly moving towards Orwell have veered towards Huxley¡¯s vision, since Gorbachev came to power. Today the real threat lies with pharmaceutical companies and those manipulating DNA, who strangely enough, would be far less diligent, but for the enticing prospect of big profits in the long term. Whatever the direction of the pendulum, the form is always the same. Out of all the possible hypothetical dangers, one always ends up becoming fact, because the collective mind is not sufficiently conscious to avoid aberrations. This is why you must speak out, without any paternalism or without wanting to tell people what to do, but in order to testify that the search for integrity continues.

In fact, the dilemma will never be resolved. First of all, the individual must change so that he can transform his surroundings, or the surroundings must improve to promote the individual.

QUESTION: Do you see any signs of progress in what is happening now, or not?
ANSWER: I am not qualified to answer this question, because what interests me is the inner individual and not where he comes from. The philosophy of awakening makes a clear distinction on that point - true agents are internal, not external. That is the crux. For me, ethnic, cultural, religious and social conditioning are secondary.

Primordial conditioning (I apologize for juxtaposing these words) is what is imposed on the self by nature. It is the visions of Buddha or Lao-Tzu, which help us let go of the feeling of being separated, or the vision of Christ, that absence of love and gratitude towards the Father, located in the heart of bellicose man. It is also the vision of Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, who deem that Consciousness is able to transform its memories and take ever greater pleasure in itself. It is also the vision of Indian awakened ones, who for three thousand years have reduced our condition to an interplay between just three principles, on which I also expand in my Principles of the Manifestation.

When all earthly contexts will have been rendered uniform by globalization, then perhaps we will come back to the philosophy of the self alone, closely accompanying the philosophy of awakening, because powerful psychological knowledge is constantly growing.

QUESTION: So for two hundred years, right up until Freud, we have been imagining that what is external or the environment, constituted an obstacle to the development of the individual. It was an obligatory dead end because you demonstrate that the mind tries something new each time it fails. Perhaps we had to experience this to accept that the philosopher wants to become an individual, but that this aim concerns him alone. A philosopher cannot contaminate anybody, although he leaves traces in those who also want to become one too. Those who do not want to become conscious individuals, those who do not want to find a power which lies beyond beliefs, customs and fashion, will never listen to a philosopher, let alone an awakened one.
ANSWER: The philosopher and awakened one must commit themselves, whilst respecting freedom and avoiding making anyone feel guilty. In order to dismiss me, I am often told that I am only accessible to a minority. It is not my fault if Awakening only affects a minority and if I speak of awakening willy-nilly to those who are not interested, this does not work either. I am not prepared to lower myself to gain followers. I refuse. I am in the same boat as a philosopher. A philosopher is caught up in a striking paradox because he is using propaganda against propaganda. He attacks the power of the media and, in the past, he used to denounce the ¡°deeds of princes¡±. The position of the awakened one is even worse: if he seems to be telling those willing to listen to him something, then he could be considered to be manipulating the mind.

This confirms what the Supermind has been showing me continuously ever since 1977. The Mind, or Thought if you prefer, is a heterogeneous thing in nature, because realms predating our own only function harmoniously if the individual is sacrificed. Because there are only slight differences between animals within the same species, systems of relationships and rules of dominance allow for homogeneous alternatives within the group, and as it happens, although the mind is present, it is not the same size as in our own species, which is tortured by free will and individual differentiation. Thought, which assails us, forces us to say ¡°me¡± and ¡°I¡± whether we are ecstatic or horrified, which enables us to base our feeling of identity on a totally subjective appropriation of time, which is so broad, deep and fluid that it simultaneously underlies the discourse of the misanthrope or killer, as well as the philosopher or awakened one.

Therefore we cannot notice this fundamental freedom of thought because we are not only disturbed by those who do not share our views, but we would like to impose the values of our discourse on those all around us. We have an enormous amount to let go of if we want to experience the mind without feeling imprisoned by its inventions and this is very simple ¨C the mind does not perceive the object, but simply the relationships between objects. It doesn¡¯t really touch things, but organizes abstract systems to interpret sensation. The eye sees the object that you sit down on and the mind calls it a chair.

But the chair has never been a chair and never will be. While ever you continue to confuse what you see with your eyes with what you name with the mind, then you are not out of the woods yet. As Buddha pointed out, distortion operates of its own accord through fear and desire. Desire manipulates thought to justify obtaining gratifying objects, fear structures thought to make it skirt around all the areas where a threat might be perceived.

QUESTION: Despite all your criticism of Buddhism, you keep referring to what indeed seems to be the basis of its doctrine.
ANSWER: It is obvious that Buddha doesn¡¯t trust mankind when you see the arsenal of things he advocates to change generic nature. Neither do I, not just on account of the lessons of contingency - i.e. the supremacy of wars - but because it is fundamentally obvious to me that human nature, however vague, is just a failed animal, unless a true need for consciousness seizes hold of this mixture of spirit and nature of which we are composed. Buddha and I are not alone! Sri Aurobindo said at the outset that he was creating his yoga for mankind and at the end he said it was for the Divine. Even he must have lost some of the lofty illusions so dear to him. But vanity is such that we cannot approach the issue of human negligence without unsettling people. You would need to say that the gulags, Vietnam and genocides were nothing and that we would pull thorough by using the internet and e-commerce. Everybody would applaud and I could become a really trendy guru by saying that the Divine got it wrong before, that it isn¡¯t your fault, but that I¡¯m here now and matter and Spirit are going to coexist happily, honestly! Before, nothing was real, the extermination of the Jews was just part of samsara, but from now on don¡¯t worry anymore or work hard ¨C everything is just fine. I¡¯ll take care of everything. Just leave me your bank card pin number. You just have to turn a blind eye and it will go like a dream.

But I can¡¯t turn a blind eye, and what I really love is that the Supermind can transform samsara. Everybody had given up, then Sri Aurobindo comes along. He knows that he is going to discover a new power and throws himself into the adventure. The lucky thing is that the Supermind is so far away for the time being, that those who reach it have no desire to corrupt it and turn it to their advantage, because the Power will be withdrawn if you mess about. This is, therefore, an opportunity for evolution because you cannot cheat anymore. You move forward, break, or give up, of course, which will be quite common if it becomes more accessible. For the time being it is the emergency exit.

Generic man is a cunning creature. All our acts of philanthropy are disguises. Everybody is familiar with the notion of giving, but nobody is familiar with that of sharing riches. The mind is permanently distorting things and I pay tribute to even the least talented philosopher who challenges distortion. The spirit can even amuse itself by saying that reality does not exist, in order to replace reality all by itself. This is the most slippery slope and I wouldn¡¯t advise you to go there, as it is the realm of fake philosophy and fake awakened ones. I can testify that reality precedes and succeeds us and that we can be worthy of it, that it is worthwhile living for it and that it reveals a part of itself to each individual to rid him of distortion. This reality is incorruptible, whether it takes the form of the Divine countenance or of immutable silence and it reveals itself as something perceived, i.e. as a presence.

SECOND MOVEMENT



QUESTION: How can we avoid becoming disheartened, if mankind is so far removed from reality?
ANSWER: The question doesn¡¯t apply.

QUESTION: I don¡¯t understand...
ANSWER: Awakening is not a goal, but an option. If you are disheartened, then you are disheartened, but that has nothing to do with your potential for awakening.

QUESTION: Are you saying this to encourage me?
ANSWER: It¡¯s as if you were to say to me: ¡°Oh, I¡¯d like to go to the cinema, I must go and see that film¡± and then simultaneously say: ¡°But it¡¯s so much hassle to get there!¡± You have to decide what it is you want. If you are interested in awakening, then you go for it, whether you are disheartened or not. If you are not really very interested, then you¡¯ll miss it, even if you are encouraged. It is complacent to believe that missing awakening is a failure, and it is also complacent to convince yourself that you can get there. The Whole proposes and the Tao disposes. There is no divine design where we are concerned and I am categorical on that score. The Self and the Divine meet automatically. They do not interfere at all. When you enter a room, the room was not waiting for you, you just walk in and that is all. The Divine is similar, you come across it, but it does not do anything to catch you, unfortunately for believers.

QUESTION: There is a recurring theme: the philosopher and the awakened one are each waging war on belief, but every critic tries to discover hidden beliefs in every philosopher. I liked the story about the potato in the sack of turnips. In fact philosophers are always going to be plagued by some troublemaker who says: ¡°Yes, but you didn¡¯t include that in your system and that throws the whole system into disarray¡±. How do they deal with this?
ANSWER: The fundamental presupposition is that the philosopher is honest. Let¡¯s suppose he limits his vision and restricts it, he will always be in a position to say: ¡°You are right to raise the question, but it lies outside my system¡±, and so it is outside the scope of the subject, as it were. He proves that the argument lies right outside his conception and that he cannot refute it. Or the philosopher mixes all the realities together and then anything which does not fit into his system stands out untidily. Philosophies are changing and they have gradually renounced their claims. The notion of defining what is exhaustive has slowly disappeared and relativity has entered into the picture. By restricting their scope, philosophies are becoming more concrete and effective and this has been the case since Hegel. We used to think, not so very long ago, that Marxism would triumph because it did not take into account man¡¯s reactions to ideas, but only to social structures. It was a horizontal philosophy which wanted to change things from the bottom up, by predicting the chaos which a heterogeneous and insatiable economy could create. However, these predicates lacked something. A sum of individuals only constitutes a collective in the category of language and philosophy. In actual fact, these individuals confront one another, fight for power or to find their place in the hierarchy or relationships, just like in any group of primates. For an apple, raspberry, pineapple and strawberry to become homogeneous, they have to be pureed in the blender. Communism made the individual anonymous and put living beings through the blender to mix them for the good of the party. Thus, you can see just how weak the mind is when it imagines it can reduce the structures of reality to the simple interpretation which it decides to give it, because reality is a real puff pastry cake, incredible sedimentary layers of forces and movements which interact, which we will never be able to grasp in their entirety, with all their dynamism.

Evolution targets the progress of the individual and not the group. Or if it does target the whole race, then it begins with certain individuals who are the most interested. Satisfaction is the very basis of life.

All homogeneous tribes who keep society at a distance, sometimes for thirty million years without changing anything, only produce fairly basic individuals. We must not forget that if a true individual appears, he breaks up the group, liberates himself from his family and clan and goes to look elsewhere. There has never truly been such a thing as collective thought. As soon as you really think, you think of something different from your neighbour, father or chief. The mind germinates. It may or may not grow and if it does grow, it does not obey anything or wait for the others. Inventers, scholars, poets, warriors, politicians, wizards - all those categories of man who came before the philosopher and the awakened one - used time differently. This growth in intelligence is what escapes from the contingent world and dreams of better things by wishing or establishing them through abstract thought.

The mind¡¯s first steps are homogeneous within the self and heterogeneous in the environment. Individuality is the gamble of being on your own against everybody. Philosophy and awakening mean sacrificing your social instincts.

QUESTION: I have suddenly realized that you cannot do without awakening, but that at the same time it will always be whatever you bring to it yourself. Each individual can pull Reality where he wants and in whatever direction he wants. A mystic might say that ¡°God¡± is more real than everything else, some awakened ones say that the self or emptiness are real, whereas philosophers seek reality in the movement of History, in order to climb on the bandwagon.
ANSWER: Yes, but the real issue does not lie in choosing between an exhaustive, motionless Reality and a mobile Reality. You could go on at length and patch the Manifestation into the fabric of eternity, but this is what I call the ¡°sugar coating¡± of Hindus and teachers. No, the really fundamental question is knowing whether reality is external to man. If it were, then man would be a sort of living illusion on account of his blind subjectivity, an illusion which is lost in the heart of the universe, grappling with its own mirages which are difficult to quantify in scientific terms. Humanity would just be a vehicle for immortal DNA, since individuals would have no role other than to act as links in the chain. (After all, animals never wonder if they are real or not). But there is another hypothesis - man is the means by which Reality is trying to discover itself and in order to do this it must use the individual as well as the inextinguishable chain of generations which perpetuate DNA.

The third hypothesis is not an extension of either of the other two and this is namely that man is a random creature, who can quite legitimately say that reality is whatever is going through his mind. We are constantly establishing dreams and the very fact of establishing them, makes them real, or at least concrete. How can we reconcile mental constructs which imbue reality with our likes and dislikes and the pure perception of reality which predates our own view of it? I would say that awakening enables you to see the bare object or, if you prefer, to understand that there is no object, because it does not represent anything and the evidence of our eyes is sufficient. Of course, this is on the mental plane, but the self is a whole and the personality and body recognize that things exist, if only because they within the realm of the senses. Buddhists like to talk about the illusory nature of phenomena, but they can still trip and break a leg in the stairs if they are not careful. The only people who can claim that phenomena are illusory are people who can walk through walls. There is a disconcerting lack of simplicity on this planet and this comes from the mind. As soon as you start examining reality and unreality or illusion, there¡¯s no way out.

We have already established a duality, and in order to get back to unity, you have a lot of things to worry about. Nagarjuna is right, you cannot establish any difference between things, not even between samadhi and ignorance, because this would be the same as cutting yourself off from what you perceive in order to establish distinctions. However, philosophers do not like my hypothesis, which consists in saying that an object is real when seen by the eyes, but false when named by the mind. To be frank, I haven¡¯t seen chairs, tables or cars for a long time. Admittedly, I see objects in so far as they are attractive or useful but I do not think of them as names any more. Trees do not exist, but there are different plant species. I advocate a return to this visual approach, to stripping consciousness of semantic content.

Whether an object exists or not according to one¡¯s own point of view, is a concept which has appealed to physicists and mathematicians ever since Heisenberg sowed his paradoxes in the fertile ground of logic. No, the philosopher accepts that what we perceive is in any case real (each to his own truth) in a homogeneous whole - humanity - which absorbs and levels off heterogeneous peripheral visions such as that of the awakened one, for example. Or the philosopher will admit that Reality constantly evades us and that we can always put it out of reach again, whatever our experience of it, assuming that this experience is not the last one.


QUESTION: So reality is always gradual and each species which is conquered then refers to something deeper?
ANSWER: This is the vision which emerges from my experience. I reached the Self within the space of three weeks and it was inconceivable that I could discover any more. Everything was there and it was comprehensive. Then I realized that enlightenment changed very little on the outside and I found it incongruous that reaching this peak was not more effective. I came across Sri Aurobindo a year later and thought that it was marvellous, but very distant.

Then the Supermind descended two years later and it had absolutely nothing to do with the Self. Since the Supermind has been transforming me it is apparent that there is no upper limit to human consciousness. But in order to get there I have had to go through periods when it really seemed as if it had reached the end. It is phenomenal. A lot of teachers reject the hypothesis of going even further. They view life as scenery and the eternal Self as the only reality.

They are mistaken!

QUESTION: Some teachers are irritated by Sri Aurobindo¡¯s vision and you also seem to be irritated by their resistance. Does it upset you that you cannot get this new message across more successfully?
ANSWER: I am just fed up with people citing their own experience in order to say : ¡°this is the truth and if you don¡¯t realize that, then it¡¯s too bad, because I did warn you¡±. Everybody does exactly as they like and I am not going to use the Supermind to belittle teachers or philosophers, or even those who are not seeking anything.

I hate categorical assertions.

There are very few things which you can assert to be fundamentally anti-evolutionary, but on the other hand, you cannot describe the final summits or show the way like a mountain guide. Spiritual morphology is not spatial. Going up and down is pretty meaningless in terms of consciousness. As soon as you rise, things start to resist, and as soon as you go down then guilt appears. It is the interplay of movement and freedom, the pleasure of choice and the element of the unknown or of challenge which presides over difficult decisions. As soon as you establish too many rules, the self prevents itself from living and operates within a preconceived framework of experience. As soon as you abolish them, integrity dissolves, and regressive forces, wondrous illusions and parallel states of chaos full of false promises appear in the free for all.

It is therefore difficult to establish proscriptions and duties. Even the philosopher skirts around taboos and recommendations in order to try to seduce the reader more effectively by using reason. If you do succumb to the temptation of naming prohibitions and pointing out proscriptions and duties, you always find exactly the same thing: reality is what fits into the preconceived framework of what you must accept and avoid. Reality can be conquered by the little technique of appropriating meaning in a circumscribed, fragmented universe carved out between what is inaccessible above and repressed down below.

There is no strategy for conquering reality - it reveals itself progressively if you stay on the right track - without ever really knowing whether it is the right track.

That is it. You keep on walking without justifying the steps which you are taking, stay open to everything which spills out beyond the frame of your concerns and never try to distinguish between the impossible and the possible.

THIRD MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Do you think that your experience really serves some useful purpose, or that you must discuss it anyway?
ANSWER: That is a matter for the Divine. For seven years, the Divine and I were as one. Asceticism was perfect and then it didn¡¯t work any more. I realized that there were me, the Divine and a reluctant body. I stopped. But a year later, I felt my cells swelling again and I was stunned. The Supermind was completely overriding my own will in order to continue operating in my body. I conceded defeat before such a display of power. My seven years of perfection had left sufficient traces for the work to be able to resume ¨C virtually against my will!

At times like this you really feel touched by something huge: ¡°I¡¯m going to carry on, whether you like it or not, old chap.¡± After a year¡¯s deliberate break my legs and calves were throbbing, my strength was returning without passing through the head or the chakras ¨C straight into the muscles. Ever since then, I no longer have the power to be categorical, except under provocation, or when I go a bit too far.

QUESTION: Being categorical is therefore connected to violence?
ANSWER: Being categorical is mental violence. While ever you make an effort to be tolerant you are just a bundle of violence. I find it impossible to be tolerant or intolerant. I see everybody¡¯s freedom expressing itself and as long as nobody tries to harm me, I accept the legitimacy of each individual being spontaneously.

Everyone expects others to be like them. Fundamentalism is a power which says: I have reasons for demanding that you be like me because I am the truth. Human beings are often repellent. I do not hold it against them, but that is the way I see things. Repellent by virtue of their vanity.

QUESTION: So somebody who does not separate themselves sufficiently from the human race cannot discover reality?
ANSWER: No!

ANSWER: No! That¡¯s why false Christianity exasperates me. Emotional attachment and attachment to relationships easily monopolize the spirit¡¯s activity and cause the self to stick to the archaic structures of generic patterns. We must love the Father. It is impossible to love mankind without loving the Father. Human beings are not sufficiently perfect to receive our love and to benefit from it. Believing and making others believe that we can love others unconditionally is hugely hypocritical. You have to at least bask in the Self before you can love anybody, even if he spits in your face. The love between the Father and the Self cannot reveal itself.

You cannot deny the human world and you can even come back to it after raising yourself as high as the cosmic principles and spiritual presences. But human beings form a narrow section of the sedimentation of the universe and it is really a serious mistake to tie up one¡¯s whole mind in the register relating to that segment. Below the human being proper (although still within him) the whole of evolutionary memory resists gratuity, freedom, love, the unknown and taking flight. Above us, gravitational forces, the energies of earthly cycles and oceans of consciousness are enormous.

Other people present us with an excuse not to look at ourselves head on. Other people are sensitive to our expectations and our expectations lay traps for their integrity. The philosopher and the awakened one both have in common a deliberate need for solitude which posits looking at oneself head on as the only alternative to headlong flight into the judgement of others and even further away to the mirror of one¡¯s environment.

The philosopher and the awakened one study the labyrinth of the self, navigate in the solar layers of pure abstraction, while struggling with everything which resists the realm of meaning - the body and exhaustion, life and its demands, the environment and its constraints.

We are dying on account of referring everything back to man, even God. God has never existed for man and He will never exist for him. The whole of the Judeo-Christian world is corrupted by this paradigm of complacency, this charter of vanity which would have us believe that the supreme intelligence is watching us. Our existence has not got any better under the so-called watchful eye of God. That is to say that Judeo-Christian civilization is in no way superior to civilizations which have never placed themselves in God¡¯s care and which, by the same token, have refrained form imposing their own values on those around them.

Profound solitude does indeed reveal the anthropomorphic architecture of beliefs and myths and it also cuts the umbilical cord which connects us to the unconscious womb of races, dreaming of complicity with the Divine to justify their crimes, guarantee their illusions and preserve their ignorance.

QUESTION: If the philosopher changed the way he used his solitude and used it in the same way as the awakened one, would there perhaps be more spiritual vocations among intellectuals?
ANSWER: Awakened ones have given up claiming to find the answer. Firstly, answers from within a given problem refer back to external facts, because no problem can be separated from all the rest, circumscribed and dissected from the flesh of reality. As for finding an answer to the one single problem - existence - and the necessity of examining it subjectively, it is obvious that this issue is so big that thousands of different ways of approaching it govern the whole of its subsequent development. As soon as the intuition becomes established that reality is indivisible and that it is the mind which amuses itself by dividing adjoining material in time and space, then it is possible to uncover other aspects of intelligence, which are neither analytical nor synthetic, but truly unifying and which remain almost incommunicable.

Beware of exclusively internal activity, because the mind is cunning and the self always looks at itself in the mirror in the best light. Even if it changes angle, this is just vanity: "I am clear-sighted enough to see my defects and I congratulate myself on that!"

Personally, I trust these special unifying moments in which the self even forgets what it is, but in which it is perfectly connected at that moment to such a huge expanse, that the segment of belonging to humanity is lost in silence and peace which had seemed beyond our reach.



QUESTION: So reality gives way and shows us the path of even greater reality beyond that which is revealed? Is that right?
ANSWER: This is all there is, but if you get off to a shaky start, one illusion leads to another – it is the same principle. One's attitude at the outset is critical. The more one wants to hold on to, the more difficult it is to truly understand new perceptions. I say that our entire culture encourages us to hold onto worthless baggage. Anybody who is starting a spiritual experiment can see that the hallmark of consciousness is to go forward and discover. In the case of some individuals, consciousness surrenders to what lies behind life, which we cannot naturally circumscribe or name. The initial difficulty lies in reaching the evolutionary experience, which reveals that consciousness is expansion. Consciousness and not one's own consciousness. That is positive and you meet up with something greater and better than yourself and you no longer imagine yourself evolving for yourself – which is a ridiculous, schizophrenic vision. As soon as the self feels at ease in all the universe which it crosses, takes pleasure from its journey whatever happens and accepts its limitations, sufferings and enthusiasms, as soon as time becomes a mine of something other than oneself, then major mistakes are eliminated.

However the self cannot subordinate this expansion to its own desires. This is where the Gita, Buddha and Lao-Tzu are right. You cannot want more consciousness by wanting things to happen in the way which you have decided. You can act irreproachably, but even this is not enough if you do not have a deep interest in humanity and therefore in its mystery.

This is where History falls down.

We will return to the subject of appropriation, because I do not just mean material appropriation.



QUESTION: So evolution is not, therefore, so easy to grasp?
ANSWER: As soon as the individual, or the mind if you prefer, interacts with the animal, we do not know what is going on. We have virtually the same DNA as the higher primates, our brains are similar, but I am sorry to tell you that what is particular to man is perhaps merely a new way of experiencing the universe. We come to terms with anthropomorphism and tell ourselves that there isn't a problem and that "God" wanted things to be that way. It is easy to say this. If the Divine wanted that, then He also wanted absolutely everything which happens, because we cannot attribute to him what suits us and absolve Him of responsibility for the rest. This has not been proven. There is certainly something extraordinary up there and I am one of the few human beings to have experienced it. However, the relationship between "it" and us really is not obvious. The Divine does not think - it is pure presence and pure consciousness - it is absolutely incomprehensible and we cannot even describe it. It is amazing and it is in everything, inside the atom. You cannot see how it could amuse itself by inventing what happens by foreseeing how it happens. That is a different dimension.

We have to get back to basics. Everybody has a mind, but it is a multiple power of differentiation. It works at the speed of light in each individual and completely dictates their vision of the world. The mind subordinates the perceptions of the senses. Pure perception is very difficult. It is always coloured by thought, which is like an additional layer of colour. When the mind stops colouring what happens, it is true that we want to tell everybody but to do that we have to use sentences and sentence structure can, by its very nature, suggest that these are just subjective opinions. We can mistake the fruit of the experience of an awakened one for a simple subjective opinion on the essence of things.

This obstacle is insurmountable.



FOURTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Isn't the mystery of the Whole so problematic that you always end up imprisoning it in a tautology such as "God", "History" or "Evolution"?
ANSWER: This is the point I wanted to come to. All men need to slot their existence into a broader framework which legitimizes it. You only have to look at primitive tribes to see that none of them has done away with fundamental myths. There is always a contract between what came before and what comes after. This framework is fantasized and imagined and, according to time and place, the whole of existence is compressed and squeezed into it - i.e. you end up no longer living, but thinking of life in relation to death, or in relation to what created it. But instead of remaining pure and becoming a stepping stone to the Divine, or to the unknown if you prefer, this very legitimate movement is codified in advance by previous generations. Our entire inherited mental legacy, which in this instance is mythological, allows us to justify our ignorance, flee mystery and avoid the fire of looking at ourselves face to face, which could make our lives a conscious experience of the universe itself.

The philosopher and awakened one destroy mental connections, thoughts which worm their way into our individual perceptions in order to tie them into current social representations. We are coming full circle – we only really think a tiny part of our psychological content. The rest makes its presence felt because the mind is sufficiently fluid and powerful to stop up the gaps between our true thoughts with external meanings which occupy the spirit.

Awakening is, nevertheless, an experience which enables you to dissolve all useless representations, because you can stand upright with perfect integrity without Heaven or Hell, fear or lust . It is therefore appropriate to present awakening as perception which has been freed from what does not belong to it – the weight of the past, coercive traces of memory and eagerness for the future (which is supposed to make up for fundamental missed opportunities, the mystery of our presence in this world).



QUESTION: Isn't it dangerous to establish too many similarities between philosophers and awakened ones? Don't you run the risk of encouraging the philosopher to "carry on in the same vein", because I am not convinced that you have differentiated sufficiently between these two lovers of solitude.
ANSWER: My position is rather a tricky one, as I do not want to discourage the philosopher or to cast him in the mould of a future awakened one. I would simply like to invite anybody who is wondering to understand that the mind can only offer partial answers. Hence the first problem, which is describing the philosophical field, the part of reality which we will grind down first in order to make it give up its ghost and to cleanse and uncover it. What is important for me is that the philosopher should fight against his mind, try to leave the beaten track and never give up on the mysteries of intelligence.

Too bad if there are failures.

Success has no intrinsic truth: it depends on prejudices on the one hand and on fashions on the other. The spiritual is not pragmatic. It is the aim, the comprehensive aim of being, which guides pure spirituality. A talented philosopher understands or feels that an immutable integrity governs the universe, but avoids naming it and simply places himself heart and soul at its service. He can then enjoy being what he is and taking part in the great movement of history, because he has brought his own contribution to it - i.e. his own form of expression.

For me, this aim of integrity is joyful.
Perhaps others find it more dry and formal. It is an aim which has its ups and downs, but is not self-sufficient. It is pointless to force it. If you lose it – you have to wait for it to come back.

QUESTION: So are you straying further and further away from a morality of awakening?
ANSWER: Consciousness is not morality. Say what you like, but the need to experience seems to be totally associated with the manifestation of consciousness. This is where I say that this natural tendency can be diverted or curbed by religious or political diktats, because we imagine that encouraging experience is like encouraging vice, placidity and complacency. However many individual who are profoundly aware of their consciousness are able to experience in many areas, without focusing for example on the quest for pleasure, power or money.

Encouraging a taste for experience is not encouraging pleasure, but positing a framework for confronting oneself, which takes place across a wide variety of emotions and activities, feelings and behaviours, information and values. Of course it is necessary to find a counterbalance to this love of experience, which is withdrawal, distance and permanent disidentification. In this instance there is a procedure – you increase identification slightly, but get much less caught up in things so that disidentification eventually gets the upper hand. The work is done and what you experience nourishes you. You naturally go back over what you are experiencing and if you need to throw anything away, then you do so without any calculation, to preserve your integrity.

The only genuine morality comes from inside - what you allow or forbid yourself, individually - and this can only be linked in very general terms to founding myths or codes of social ethics. Monasteries are full of people who are fed up with forcing themselves to be polite, loving, respectful, fair and upright. Our vital being - which we share with animals and which is riddled with patterns of desire, appropriation and defensiveness - comes under pressure. The external line compresses the internal movement and this only works for a minority of people who are utterly devoted to mystery. Nature and spirit are different, but emphasizing this difference by contrasting them until they are two parallel entities does not help matters. It is good to fight against nature to avoid being dragged into the complacency of desire and most awakened ones, philosophers and moralists are in agreement on this score. But nature is not bad and or else we would have to imagine a corrupt God who is excellent on the one hand, when it comes to rising consciousness and downright bad, or even evil on the other hand, when it comes, broadly speaking, to the perpetuation of the physical body across the generations. This is where contempt for the body fits in and consequently the absence of true feeling which is the hallmark of our civilization. It comes down to depriving ourselves of experiences because we have established artificial categories, whereas time invites us to taste everything, love everything and refuse everything - it all depends - in the secrecy of each moment. We must rediscover feeling, and this has nothing to do with emotional complacency. The subtle connection with what is external is being lost and we no longer know how to breathe or eat properly.

What I mean by experience is not just what is gratifying, but everything which is not and which pushes us into an entrenched position – the experience of the loss of our loved ones, illusions and self-image. Duration can be infinitely rich, but we must open ourselves up to it completely and hunt down the least hint of manipulation, which wants an object to conform to our expectations. "Suffering" can be marvellous if we know how to use it, but in order to do that, we must first accept it. If we do not succeed, then we can develop things like cancer... The individual can take the form of a failed evolutionary experiment. I am sorry. We are not simply what we think we are. Contracts connect our bodies to our identity and sometimes nature's mechanisms take the upper hand over what we think we are. Many human beings are sacrificed to the experience of the universe. If we do not venture into mystery, if we follow what we are supposed to think or not to think, then we will inevitably replicate patterns which will conceal what is essential and the emotions do not let go, because they do not foresee any evolution in these changes.

QUESTION: So you state that the mind not only cuts us off from Reality by colouring our external perception, but it also cuts itself off from itself, by restricting consciousness of other areas, such as true sensitivity, pure imagination, intuition and even awareness of our own bodies?
ANSWER: Absolutely. Traditional systems generally attack it completely, but as an overall whole, without really explaining themselves fully, or only from a specific angle. Certain teachers will therefore say that the mind is bad for this reason and other teachers for different reasons. This is annoying because we are trying to get rid of it for the reasons mentioned and not because we are aware of its limitations for ourselves. This is also why it is difficult to achieve a consensus among teachers. For the Chinese, the mind inhibits receptivity to the delicate energies of heaven and Earth, but it is not, and never has been demonized for preventing the self from knowing itself. Chinese culture has therefore retained some very abstract practices such as the I-Ching, where you place your trust in an intelligence which draws on the world of the mind, whether you like it or not, in certain precise and specific areas. It is subtle and it is a superior culture which hunts down any kind of imbalance.

In India, the opposite is true. They are indifferent to whether the mind prevents contact with what is external in its deepest and most natural dimension because nature is looked down upon and life inspires mistrust. But it is denounced as the creator of multiple thoughts which paint a false picture of identity and divert us from contemplating "God". In India it is very difficult to know if people consider Brahman to be an external reality or a subjective feeling of having passed away from this life, because Brahman for them is so empty and fluid that its very existence refers back to divine non-existence! Hindus tangle everybody up. Buddhism is more ambivalent and attacks the generic mind because it reinforces the mechanisms of the unconscious if we do not intervene (the fear-desire pairing must be dissolved) and it also deprives us of emptiness, whose status is difficult to understand. It is not an illusion, which prevents it from belonging to the phenomenal world, but it is impossible to qualify because it is has no definition.

I find this very complicated and I stick to the characteristics of awakening which I have experienced, i.e. the suspension of dynamic thought, when the spirit no longer seeks anything and this is a feeling of absolute non-separativity with the outside which calls the tune, but in a form of detachment in which things can exist and not exist at the same time.

I cannot transmit this experience and the Supermind which has transformed it. Today, I am absolutely convinced that everything is totally real, even the most deeply held illusions, the most perfect voids and the deepest sleeps. We cannot separate anything. However, I have always used my intelligence, which enabled me to see the ruses of the mind, which I do not mistake for the mind itself. A certain form of intelligence can be used on the path, and the ancient Greeks, for example never eliminated it. I know that this is debatable because we can become attached to it and Heraclitus' opinion of so-called initiates who were still cultivating intelligence is very harsh. Heraclitus was fundamentally right, but not everybody can allow themselves to go that deep and, moreover, I have already mentioned that intelligence is a double-edged sword.



QUESTION: How can the mind represent so many different things? I get the impression that different cultures are never going to agree on all this.
ANSWER: This is no longer important as culture is dying, for better or for worse. There will soon be coca-cola warehouses in the desert and perhaps this will be cheaper than digging wells. The Western mind is dynamic and therefore wants to impose its values everywhere. If large-scale milleniarist movements which regularly predict the end of the world exist, it is because we are afraid of this, afraid of the definitive appearance of urban man, alienated by work, in the furthest reaches of the planet.

The most likely hypothesis is that the mind enables the universe to become conscious of itself through biological creatures - in this case man - and even one mental experience per galaxy or megagalaxy creates an appalling mess both in nature and within the forces themselves. We have managed to split the atom! Thermonuclear bombs are accidents along the path. This is the major snag compensated for by the simultaneous discovery of the Supermind on the other hand. The Supermind also penetrates Matter, but without the use of force. As far as I know, Sri Aurobindo is the first human being who has been given the mission of pulling the world out of its stagnant state. The means may seem a little quirky, because Christ and other avatars on the same level were not aware of it, but it is the only way for the Earth. This may not be the case for souls which can take refuge elsewhere, but for the Earth, it is the only way.

In order to clear ourselves of responsibility we present the thermonuclear explosion as a "reconstruction of what takes place in the sun" – except for the fact that the sun brings life. Scientists are actually beginning to become more dangerous than politicians and this is where philosophers must rise up and take a stance to stop them going too far. Creating the EARTH took billions of years, whereas plutonium stores can be released in five or ten thousand years by a cataclysm, for example. Man is fundamentally not a competent creature and this reveals itself on a daily basis and yet in spite of this everybody is continuously jubilant. This really baffles me This destructive existential intoxication is truly appalling.



QUESTION: How do you transform your feeling of helplessness?
ANSWER: Everything is evolving. There are still armed regiments on borders and there is unrest even within Europe. This is obvious to the cosmic Supermind which pervades me when I allow it to and forget my human condition in pure perception, because it sees everything simultaneously. It delights in the ruses of the Manifestation and in the things It does to trip Itself up in order to grow. However, as soon as I am no longer in the supramental ananda (which is sometimes done deliberately) I wonder how human beings do not realize that they are one and the same thing, the same being many times over. Then you see the influence of shape: variations in skin, changes of culture and language and these tiny little morphological differences which disguise the generative principle, the identity of all beings through the same things which they share – existence, desire and the mind. It's crazy! Individual differentiation has shattered, fragmented, separated and dismembered everything, but things cannot be otherwise. Unless each individual enters into the spiritual process, he moves away from all the others at the speed of light on account of the mind. It is colossally hypocritical to strive for peace. This foments conflict. It is about as stupid as walking into a brothel and preaching abstinence.

Peace is an appearance or a form of respite. The future awakened one is in a constant state of war and even if this is a war against violence or against his own violence, it is still a war, a fight. There are things at stake in crucible of each instant. It is not peace that we should be establishing, but genuine fights. What philosophers and awakened ones have in common is this search: finding a fight, going to the root of the problem without pretending or reassuring oneself by sticking plasters on a wooden leg.

Movements which are accepted with a view to preserving things make me howl with laughter – that's just blackmail. It is like saying: "I don't mind giving that up, but you have to offer me something in its place."

The implication is that you will move, as long as you can cover your back. This is the spitting image of the mind. This is a really sticky thing which claims to subordinate duration to its whim, but I will not let it have its way.

QUESTION: At the end of the day, I had the impression that you were speaking quite freely, but that this remained almost inaccessible. With what you are saying about evolutionary resistance – desire, appropriation and defence - you are cutting every discovery up again. The overall issue only revolves around three complementary ideas.
ANSWER: Everything evolves. Buddha is right with his system in which fear and desire are two sides of the same coin. But there is more to it than that. Modern research in physiology, ethnology, psychology and even psychiatry (not to mention genetic transmission) demonstrate with a little extrapolation, that territorial consciousness is deeply rooted in our biological being and is almost incorrigible, with one layer leading to another. Appropriation is not merely possessive, that is the superficial, epidermal, morphological aspect of it.

Appropriation is also more subtle – it is forming an image of the world which is of course infinitely reduced, which means that the world, or Reality becomes the territory of the self once more. But it is not true space or genuine extent. Space is a physical dimension. Extent is a boundless vision which comes from within if it really turns towards mystery and consciousness and abandons the quantitative.

Subtle appropriation is a photo of reality taken with an amalgamation of sensations, desires, goals, emotions, values and self-awareness. It is an ordinary picture which fits into the squares of the sights and everything which does not fit into the little squares is rejected. Our mental filter is the real obstacle. This is what supports what happens next. It is a viewfinder with a false geometry and misunderstood symmetry where anything becomes the opposite of anything else when seen back to front. This fragmentary, mixed vision of the Manifestation which is subjective to the point of arbitrariness, is what is worst. But the failed thinking animal which is forced to say "me" or "I" has to go through this. He is no longer in the purity of natural automatism and he is not in the non-mental which perceives the concrete or abstract objects which it grasps without clothing them in anthropomorphism.

The mind is a machine for making infinite Reality, that mysterious, elusive other and the fluid movement without beginning or end suit itself.
As for defence, it is a mechanism for preventing Reality from entering the filter. Since Reality is very powerful, you need very powerful defences to prevent it from breaking the filter and they are present. This is the legacy of evolution. If the antelope discovered goodness it would let itself be eaten by the lion and soon all that would be left would be lions condemned to die of hunger, to eat each other, or to become vegetarians. If all herbivores simultaneously discovered that they were designed not only to reproduce but to feed carnivores and that they accepted this by throwing themselves into the jaws of the wolves, then nature would not survive. However the situation is different for man and it is of course those who have nothing to defend who are the most free, but undoubtedly also the most conscious. They have let their defences down at the risk of being less able to identify with their family and cultural origins. They have transformed territorial consciousness, and Christ, amongst others, worked towards this transformation. Abolishing filters is not a natural process – it should come from above and it shatters natural homogeneity.

Subsequently, the individual is more conscious, but less automatic.

Predators spend their time chasing away from their own species other nearby predators who could covet the same prey. I get the impression that it is the same up above. Groups of truths confront each other to monopolize the moment which is the ultimate prey. Depending on whether you want to defend your security or your freedom, your affective ties or your asceticism, your image or your identity, your role or your integrity, different groups of representations appear and confront each other to each assert a rival future, because two distinct futures can never occupy the same single available duration. Morality, ethics, religious faith and philosophical conviction mark the borders of the mental territory of the self with their scent to prevent the intrusion of the Absolute, pure perception, the Tao. Man is attached to his vision of the world. As long as it is his own, then it is better than anybody else's.
There is then nothing more to be said.

Sceptical philosophers knew that it worked this way and everybody resented them for being disabused, when all they had done was to leave the cult of the subjective vision behind. If you find awakening you can keep it to yourself or expose yourself – it comes to the same thing. You can win divine universes much to the scorn of others, which does not help, but it does not rule the possibility out either. In spite of everybody, an openness which doesn't look like anything special can attract the self and then the Divine. The funniest thing is the impossibility of tracing the complete path.

I have picked up the same text for years, which really came down from somewhere else and the only recurring leitmotif was dominance. It cropped up absolutely everywhere – even in the paternalism and neo-colonialism inherent in the right to interfere of the founders of international law. This is something we have to go through, I don't deny it, it is an uncontrollable movement, but that is not the problem. Things really do correspond to their causes to a certain extent.

Substituting one form of dominance for another is like moving the same pile of stones to a more appropriate location. This is why some people are careful when they change religion, philosophy or teacher. They know that a part of the self is seeking security in submission and they are wary of their preferences.

The need for transcendence is not located in the same place everywhere by History. For many religions it is the consecration of the soul which is paramount and terrestrial time is subordinated to that. The terrestrial is subordinated to the celestial and the mine of available experience is subordinated to a plan. Incarnation becomes a lever for something which I personally find risky.

Lao-Tzu, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo say no: we cannot expect anything from the terrestrial project for transforming the Earth and the facts bear this out. Let us transform what we are and then we can see where this leads.

When we locate the need for transcendence somewhere other than in life itself, when we justify it in fear of death, nostalgia for a pre-birth state or in escape from immanence, then the movement towards time is impure.

As soon as the mental filter is caught out then transcendence rushes in and it has nothing to save because it manifests itself.



QUESTION: So why is it so difficult to pull through?
ANSWER: Because we want our motives to succeed. We only let give up if it is in our interests to do so. The Divine exists and I am not responsible for that, nor am I responsible for the fact that He has chosen me. Perhaps I had a favourable karmic curve which made things easier, but I find contemporary man particularly obscene and this is what prevents him from evolving. I am not talking about obscenity in the sense of lack of modesty. I am talking about mental obscenity – imagining that the Divine is virtually at the service of our own desire for personal fulfilment. There is something deep in what I have discovered and called subtle appropriation - the key.

Managing to live without any mental territory is the solution. Then there are no issues of borders, adversaries and legitimacy. We must stop approaching reality via discourse and approach it, discover it and never imprison it in what we already know about it, because it has some surprises in store for us!

No human being is responsible for the Divine – either you must be joking or have you never felt the gravitational pull in your body or experienced the absolute cohesion of the planets which neither fall inwards nor outwards because their speed is appropriate? The Divine really exists and all our complaints and attempts at seduction are a matter of indifference to Him. The dance of Shiva, the atomic whirlwind which penetrates everything, is an extraordinary reality. I have penetrated Matter and found that it is simply SPIRIT.

But each individual is free to search where they please, like Nasruddin who was looking for his glasses under a lamppost because it was light there, although he knew that he had lost them in the dark but did not want to grope around for them.
The only true thing is freedom.