Introduction and aim of the work

There is not, to my knowledge, any account which is intended to demonstrate that awakening can be experienced in different ways — hence the conventional and deadly hostility which believes that the only legitimate basis for awakening is within the framework of the norms of a particular school of thought. Schools of thought abound. Contradictory rumours are circulating about awakening and I will approach the principal ones, while standing by the notion that the main thing is to discover the unique, permanent self, which is always the same. It is of secondary importance to take what it represents to the awakened one at face value, given that no two people experience it in the same way. Some achieve it without having followed a conventional form of initiation, some have only followed one teacher and others have wandered from one tradition to another.


1 Koan: the shortest path is the most uncertain path

Being pervaded by this intuition which governs many approaches is admittedly not easy. Whilst reading this work, you will be invited throughout to trust in the dynamic of the quest. It is pointless to try to persuade yourself of the truth of the aphorism without being deeply convinced, hence the need to explore the theme of the art of walking without worrying about one's destination. The road itself will provide you with information on obstacles and on the nature of the terrain and so it is pointless to try to adapt your journey to your destination. Dips and bumps, stones and fords, sand or mud, forest or clearing, field or street all require a different way of walking and a greater or lesser degree of attention. However, the mind concentrates on the goal and forgets that what leads to it is deep, spontaneous attention at all times, not constructing beautiful truths to be attained or qualities to be acquired. Before experiencing this walk, therefore, and understanding that the shortest path is the most uncertain, the best way to keep putting one foot in front of the other is to get out of the habit of complaining about failure. Failure implies a goal, and even if we do not know how to give up goals, it is still possible to find the source of a new route in our lack of success. Awakening is a circular and panoramic project, which embraces all our fragmentary aims. If there is still something that can divert you from the path of awakening, then you are approaching success and failure with a great deal of emotional conditioning. In reality, putting down roots in a deep quest, however uncertain, is a much safer state than relying on precise, subjective motives in order to attain the Whole.
If nothing can divert you from your aspiration, you will view failure merely as a detour rather than a catastrophe. Your aims are questionable, not only from the outside, but even for yourself. Failure on a level which is not in direct contact with the deepest part of the self is often, therefore, a spiritual shortcut. It is necessary to identify three points in every failure. Firstly, was the goal really justified? Failure can often be a gift: we come to realize that the path did not lead as far as we had hoped and that we expected too much of it. These hidden things which we have not been able to enjoy would in turn have led onto other things, often in an endless quest for results, gratification and personal satisfaction. However, if what you missed was really worth experiencing, then the second thing to consider is to what extent you were responsible for the failure and the third thing is the role of external factors which you could not foresee. In general, we underestimate our share of responsibility in a failure, in order to overplay the "unforeseeable" part, which absolves us from failure to succeed. In fact, you will discover more and more every day that you are increasingly responsible for your mistakes and successes. Comparing good luck with bad has always been a means of submitting to fate. Only our own personal experience exists, and the factors which we construct about what lies above and beyond what we already perceive are illusory. Nevertheless, — once the path has been followed — it is useful to bear witness to it. We can always learn something by knowing that others have followed the way of Tao before us. Somebody who only knows one language cannot think in any dialect other than their native tongue. The self is a language which does not view the world through thought, but perceives it and thought does not represent it accurately. However, since everybody thinks, then those who show the path to awakening continue to play with this paradox of describing the impossible in a contingent world which rules it out.

Retracing one's steps or going back to zero are phases which are just as natural as moving forward or reaching one's destination. The paths of time are not our own roads; they absorb dualities, rise and fall and alternate between straight lines and winding stretches. We sometimes learn within the space of a few days at the bottom of a dead-end street what we might patiently have taken three years to discover on a conventional avenue. We must not draw the conclusion that we must force ourselves to fail. There is always a sense of complicity between the universe and us. Success constitutes a gratifying and harmonious form of this; it is a form of interlocking in a wider area which takes place in conformity. However this conformity is not yet perfect. It is only from the basis of consciousness of the self that a human being can really feel himself to be in correspondence with totality without comparing its different aspects. Failure, mistakes, dead-ends and the impossibility of making progress are imperfect forms of complicity, which require some readjustment and a broader vision of things, in which more factors come into play. Nothing separates us from Totality, but returning to this fact and, feeling it in every plane of our being is the culmination of a process which cannot be dispersed either by perpetuating the past or by fleeing into an imagined future. Failures, missed opportunities and impulses which are not followed through are valuable reference points — like pain which indicates the impairment of an organ or burning which acts as a warning to the skin. Thought can create a fantasy vision of a Whole which obeys it. The term non-mental, which has been appropriated by Zen, defines the universe of the self, by whatever means we reach it. However, it would be rash to want to stop thought by force.
We do not know how to experience all events as a form of absolute complicity with the universe. Yet this is the case. Even accidents which we do not deserve, or which seem totally unjustified, like being the victim of a reckless driver and being left crippled, are an opportunity to move forward. It is not a case of approving of the accident after the event or trying to find reasons for it. It is simply a case of adapting. There can be nothing worse than remaining ignorant from the point of view of awakening. Submission is still one of the surest ways to push the self to differentiate itself from the non-self, on the trail of a new form of overlap with the Whole, which ceases to be appropriated and dreamed of. This is the testimony of awakened ones, of the precursors, who have used every means at their disposal. Any event can become a source of metamorphosis. Zen and Taoism share the injunction to let go, which enable us to expand the consciousness and discover realities which it would reject by striving to realize its ambitions, flee its fears and hide its imperfections. Buddhism established that thought was a delicate sense, much more subjective than sight or hearing and requiring greater attention, hence the host of meditations designed specifically to enable the self to clarify the indigestible perception of the present moment. Hinduism describes the self as a huge impersonal expanse, which the self perceives because it has itself become detached, huge and free of compulsions. If we do not let into our lives something which can neutralize this overactive subjectivity, which is the source of what we now term projections, then everything perpetuates itself.

Many "successes" are a continuation of the past and do not add anything new to the transformation of consciousness. The non-self, the sum of what is external to us, resists our means of appropriation by definition, and letting go means understanding that the non-self cannot be appropriated and that all reappraisal is a natural process.

Achieving inner silence, also termed liberation of the mind, or fusion with the self, establishes the individual in the totality of the cosmos and in harmony with it. It would seem to me to be necessary to separate this potentiality from the frameworks in which humanity has hitherto enclosed it. In order to do this, I will only mention traces of the realization of the self or Awakening in the traditions and the way in which it is presented, not in order to belittle this heritage, but to pay tribute to it, to raise some formal contradictions between the different movements and, finally, to show how they converge. I therefore call for depth, which will enable us to discover the same principles behind different concepts and the same ascents via different ridges. One inexhaustible source has always been celebrated on Earth — the Hindu Brahman, the Buddhist Sunyata which leads to Nirvana, the Chinese Wu and Chen and the indescribable universe which satori opens up to exponents of Zen. This same state was described by Western mystics and some great Greek geniuses, but rarely with the rigour found in the East, which has made a sort of spiritual speciality out of the revelation of this state, in keeping with the fact that Asia and India let time go by without worrying about its passing. Their seekers adopt more easily the principles of a quest which demands receptivity (Yin) which is not really encouraged in the West. Destroying ignorance or realizing the self come down to the same thing. This is contained in the Scriptures from Buddha to Shankara, from Lao-Tzu to Boddidharma, from Lin-Tsi to Dogen, from Hinduism with its countless teachers to Sufism and even in the great Christian mystics, absorbed in what they call the Silence of God. The path must be followed in time and space , and finding the connection to what lies beyond in Time and space — the mystery of the Self — takes place in duration. An irreversible flux which is not imagined as being an extension of oneself, but viewed as an eternal lever of all growth, a nourishing mystery, a reality without any contours which is our true womb (higher up than, our biological parents on the one hand and our identity on the other) constitutes the real process of consciousness. We cannot find either its origins or its ends, but only experience and discover it. We grasp the Tao in the time which is granted to us, without striving to define its origins intellectually or amusing ourselves by trying to ascribe intentions or aims to it. We join the great current and it is pointless to try to know when it began or where it is taking us in order to do that. The quest for awakening begins by locating the limits of our participation in the whole. This is why the Upanishads, the writings of awakened ones in India, celebrate time as an illusion if it does not refer back to what transcends it and the Buddhist tradition warns us against the fascination of the ephemeral. Gautama denounced impermanence, whilst paying tribute to it because behind its waves lies the unborn, the fire seeker's rest. It is, therefore, a case above all of accepting perpetual changes, in order to reject fossilized continuity in its renewed forms. The reality of permanent transformation cannot be perceived by the Mind.. This is where the path becomes lost in the false description of the map which we draw up of it.



2 A meditation on mental asceticism

Each awakened one belongs to a tradition, unless he founds one himself, and this explains why the experience of illumination is described differently and is ascribed particular characteristics according to race or era. The seeker who is not firmly grounded in his quest fairly quickly confuses ends with means in the fantasy of the other side of the mirror — illumination. If we listen to the sages, depending on where they come from, they do not seem to be in agreement on the ultimate meaning of crossing beyond appearances. Since the loss of the Vedas, the Vedanta praises the Self as the ultimate reality for the individual. Today, for Sri Aurobindo, the teacher par excellence, the Self is just a means, a simple stepping stone to Evolution, from which It orders seekers to rise even higher. For Buddha, the Self is indeed a result — a fruit, but nobody knows if he attributed a truly individual character to this realization. Perhaps he simply viewed it as the definitive defeat of suffering, a triumph of consciousness over death, an "impersonal" flower which miraculously emerged from the hidden roots of life, a form of release for the self and, through the self, for the Earth. For Zen, it is a transition, a form of freedom stolen from the chaos of the world whose terms we refuse to justify. For Lao-Tzu and Gnosis, realization is above all the feeling of being connected to all things, for the glory of Unity and the love of the Unknowable.
It is, therefore, possible for these different images of the same thing to compete to attract you. You must note that the self is just a hoax if it does not surprise you, because nobody can define its contours. Trying to pin it down on the basis of the image which we cultivate of it is an impossible strategy. It is sufficient to know that this transition exists and that you can achieve it. No two individuals have ever achieved it by the same means, but all awakened ones have done what was required to find it, taking their own resistance into account. We are therefore going to state a paradox — a transition to a universal condition which takes place from the basis of individual cases. All awakened ones have eliminated the same blind spots, rooted out complacency and recognized the non-self as their true originOnce again, the origin is seen per se, independently of all natural and divine qualifiers. The other birth, that of consciousness which cannot be reduced to biological birth and which no name can describe, is sought after.. Some recall that path and others stay silent. Those who have passed over to the other side and who speak about it express their view of things with a degree of caution, conscious that describing the sea to somebody who has never seen it does not replace the sight of it for real.
It is at the levels below the teachers that attempts to describe the path become muddled, with everybody pretending to have understood the landscape itself from their own depiction. By dint of imagining that the spiritual exists one will compare one's ideal vision of it with the material realm in a quest which is always being adjourned to find a spirituality which might transcend the simple everyday path in which everything is mixed up — Heaven and Earth, substance and form, matter and energy, the stumble and the linking movement. The spiritual and the material are in reality the same thing — one ascends and the other descends. Matter receives information from the Spirit, but the trace of its possible ascent, the seed of its rehabilitation lie in its very obscurity. All seekers have transcended immediate hunger, the need to always satisfy the body. They then transcend mental hunger, i.e. the belief according to which the right explanations would yield instructions for life. The mind then starts to be reappraised and depth appears. The new process cannot be aimed in any one direction, as rival wills intertwine endlessly — solar aspiration, which is capable of suffering without pain for its divine ideal, the intense will to exist through the self, ready to submit to fascination by and with action, pleasure, power and finally the remains of inertia in its most material form, a force which likes habit, continuity and the appearance of order. The path is an exploration
Hardly any awakened ones have been able to grant the Spirit the use of the body without a struggle, a use which vitality wants to monopolize, hence attempts to experience in a different way the objects which desire imposes, covets or brings closer. It is all very well to imagine the spiritual in a new way, but the seeker always comes back round to their own resistance — the branching out of desire, the subjective will which finds it difficult to submit to the vagaries of existence and the invention of time by thought which incorporates analysis and imagination into the fantasy of appropriating reality. There is confusion between words and what they refer to.
Resistance changes location: it rises from the body to the self through attachments and habits and falls from the self to the body through the decrees of thought which form the basis of habits, legitimize behaviour and justify complacency. On the other hand, realizations are panoramic. They deal with what we think about ourselves, impulses in which desire and will power amalgamate, emotions and the characteristics of feelings. We have chastity or tantric sex for those powerful needs in life, the struggle to moderate our greedy appetite and to preserve good health through diet, meditation to make the mind abandon coveting things in its rapid impulses and in thought which always drives it forward immutably. A return to pure perception, which I am combining with the self in keeping with the Asian tradition, which is just one non-exclusive approach among many, depends on the economy of the self alone. It does not depend on a description of the ins and outs of existence. The purification process can begin without any preconceived ulterior motive. Awakening is not, therefore, the end result of a path (the right path to follow), but purely the result of living by changing all the usual parameters until we have eradicated the very idea of a self which seeks, wants and finds. This rare and paradoxical art is given shape in authentic Zen; it comes naturally to great people like Meister Eckhart, whom no theology will ever fathom, since all theology is an admission of the difference between man and the Divine, whereas awakened ones testify that this difference is illusory, at the end of the journey. Whether these awakened ones are cold or fanatical, exuberant or appear dreary on account of their intense meditation, does not matter. They have always existed, in small numbers, sometimes seeking to be devalued by people in order to enjoy absolute secrecy all the more; whereas others, who are less attached to Mystery, try to act as examples without pride or vanity, in solar rectitude. Each illumination is, therefore, different, in keeping with the person who is favoured with it, even though he has leapt to somewhere where he is not only himself, but also a changeable mystery at the heart of Mystery, with his full consent. Each awakened one constitutes a species in himself, a family of characteristics, a unique union between Heaven, Earth, the soul and the self.

There is, therefore, no need to set one's sights precisely, or, as I said at the outset, to decide on a route. It would just be an invention. It would reject in the name of truth thousands of facts which have been judged before they could be understood, or are hated before they can reveal their place in the whole. If the way of Tao exists, it is the way which would rather go nowhere than acquire a better illusion. It is one which is satisfied with many confrontations between the self and the mystery of life and behind that the mystery of the Spirit which is intuited at or assumed on the basis of imperceptible traces. No single belief is better than any other. Rooting out this need to believe or not to believe in order to experience the facts themselves before attributing some preconceived finality or characteristic to them constitutes the very principle of intellectual honesty, the basis of awakening. The veils must decrease. Whether they be seven hundred, as stated by Iranian fundamentalists, or fewer than ten, if they are classified in deep categories then they exist and must be eliminated. In the conditioned distortion which falsifies all objects, these veils deprive us of the vision. No mechanism appropriates the correct vision. The path is born of itself, without continuing in any preconceived way. The moment becomes deeper, the speed of days changes now that they no longer perpetuate themselves and that they are malleable, steeped in burning questions, fleeting ecstasies and deafening bereavements, because crumbling illusions leave more openings for light to burst through from the darkness. This is the fact of the matter: one way of dealing with it shatters all limits and branches out into totality. The word may seem trivial, but it is the most neutral and the most obvious, which is true in all contexts and it is real because it is symbol of that which contains everything and is the pure image of that which excludes nothing. It is a little-known method, which is indeed mentioned but not understood, requiring commitment. Commitment is often overlooked because it is that of memory, which does not disrupt anything. Few people succeed in doing without a frame of reference. They have always lived with the Christian name and name which will elude them in the grave, along with the mirages transmitted to them by their ancestors, or the values about which society is always harping on. Many people have never learned how to talk to themselves without dispensing with all that they believe that they have experienced or have been. They cannot see their origins elsewhere than in the baby whom they were and in their surviving memories. They can only address their own history and the image of their potential still frightens them because they do not already know how to imagine the incredible lever of the Word deep inside them, which cares nothing for their hurt and suffering but only for fulfilment which has been intuited, or rather, the as yet fragile promise of being — without name, past or history.
This mystery is forbidden, hidden, denied even by the surviving contingent remnants of religious and tribal laws. It is the secret of the lover of the Whole. The route which leads to forgetting all references goes backwards, hence the paradox of awakening: intellect increases as certainty fades and doubts are exploited. Another mind is born, for which uncertainties are as useful as landmarks as are proofs. It can no longer be right or wrong. It does not only work to decipher things, but to vibrate in unison with the stars and life at the junction with huge powers which cluster thoughts around bodies, energy around matter and the Spirit around the word which utters "I".
Because ignorance is a departure point and awakening is the destination, we imagine the process as a defined itinerary, hence our perseverance in trying to describe it. What is the path? It is the art of knowing how to accept everything through rebellion and insubordination — submission to the Whole through rebellion against everything and rebellion against the order established by the painful memory of mankind, perpetuated in the constantly renewed illusion of a better future. It is also becoming a rebel against oneself, against the little interlocking selves which used to submit complacently to all forms of emotional expansion, excessively flattering desires and exacerbating annoyances, cherishing the illusion of possessing the joy of escaping all harm, while writing the score of the cursed value judgement to celebrate the strict ignorance of our mortal birth. Extricating oneself from the mechanical extensions of the self is necessary before making presumptions about awakening, which would be imagined in the context of the very framework which we must finally leave behind — a particular luxury, an impregnable fortress. The destination (the self) embracing everything is an area which cannot be compared to the point of departure. In order to attain the place which is all places, we must not set our sights on anything. In order to free ourselves of the image of distance which confirms the false separation between objects, we can only consider things as a whole. We must grasp that the unknown rubs shoulders with the known and understand the art of changing weakness into strength and that reality is an organism whose principles and morphology are unknown to us. This admission of impotence is not humiliating. Henceforth, in accordance with the I-Ching, which is lost in the mists of time, chaos accompanies order and balance, heterogeneity is the off-spring of homogeneity, novelty adorns permanence, what is created conceals the uncreated on which it is based and alternation becomes the supreme principle which connects the darkness to the light.
It is simply a case of recognizing our condition. The yin precedes the yang. The curious, open-minded child comes before the man. An adult lives out his freedom, but the old man loses his autonomy. We shall subsequently see that all doctrines are based on this — the realization of our well-known inability to detect reality. This is because it is made up of cycles, because its principles interlock with each other and each possesses an arbitrary, heterogeneous function — a kind of elasticity. There is intertwining within the self and between the self and the non-self through feelings, affects, thoughts and value structures. There is nothing but complexity functioning in this disconcerting unity — a conjugating self, often unknown to itself. How can one find one's connection in a universe which is only imagined, the mystery of whose limits does not affect us? The boundaries of the Whole are vague, as are our own boundaries and this is why we strive so hard on the one hand to draw up maps to blaze the trail of the inexhaustible and, on the other hand, are condemned to explore — proportionately. Nothing is established. The ways of men are arbitrary, their laws are casuist and earthly memory is horrific. When thought seizes hold of truth, it goes into decline. There is nothing which can create an authentic image of mankind for us to hold on to. There is no human nature.
Only versatility is established.

Human compulsions (whose repertoire is continuously organizing itself into new branches which are the religious or psychological basis of spiritual curbs), are not definitively real. Any seeker can succeed in freeing themselves from certain things which others cannot eradicate. When it comes to establishing the physical laws of the universe, it has finally been accepted that they are just approximately accurate representations. Laws which we had intuited then reveal themselves, which are flexible and adaptable to particular circumstances — but this is not the place to discuss them.
Establishing things is an illusion in a perpetual world of change. The only alternative is a rigorous approach to the provisional..Otherwise we shut things up in closed universes, which we believe to independent of each other. We shall build the walls of our prison ourselves. We will believe in the objects of the mind as if they were real, whereas politics, religion and philosophy are just ghosts. A statement of the way is not the way. A possible variant on the first verse of the Tao Te Ching. We shall believe in man's nature, even though it is an empty concept and that only a countless number of selves exist, grappling with the mystery of consciousness — all these selves can be made malleable by memory, establishing structures and desire.
These beliefs will take the place of landmarks, yet in reality they are just yellowed, dog-eared relief maps. By making the mental illusion more sophisticated in the realm of Mystery and by transposing the inventions of the mind into the spiritual realm, one would think that the self could be attained using a few evasive tricks and superior schemes extorted from wise men — without taking prior stock of the navel of consciousness which connects the self with the non-self. Seeking the other birth cannot be hidden by higher considerations: we would then be letting ourselves be manipulated by fantasies of big Ideas. This an old trap which still survives, because the mind so enjoys building and inventing to avoid seeing that time escapes it. There is, therefore, no human framework in which to establish the relevance of awakening. Only an inner flame is sufficient, which is ready to burn all forms of lying about human genius, that reassuring art gallery which leads the visitor who is summoned by cursed memory astray.
Beyond the realm of races and historic geneses — the so-called roots where each people's pride grows in contempt of neighbouring peoples, we find the fragility of things, pure balance and the law of motion. — Crossing over. The self transcends culture, religion and race. It substitutes a vertical identity, which is rooted in the uncreated, for contingent roots. The depths of the self are an abyss and this is why certain teachers opt not to plunge definitively into them, whereas others dive in. However they all benefit from them to light the way and to be.



3 Thoughts on the principles of spiritual doctrines


Some awakened ones will dig ever deeper into the self until they represent the Earth and life as mere illusions and will endlessly praise the great Void, become intoxicated on silence and dissolve towards the Uncreated. Others will never forget that their experience belongs to the Whole, that they are just a tiny part of it and they see in the self not some sort of consecration or reward, but a simple means of transforming the world, of making it evolve and giving it principles. A new paradigm. The seeker who is obsessed by the direction of the right path applies himself too hard to comparing accounts and comes up against insoluble paradoxes, harrowing contradictions at the very heart of truth. Two major obstacles arise in this game — two false, but symmetrical, directions which snare most seekers in their toils. In order to bring an end to diversity, the seeker retreats into a particular path whose principles he will eventually imitate, and this is generally the one which most closely corresponds to his own prejudices and expectations or, on the contrary he rejects all paths without taking them seriously, yet is unable to his establish own.

The fact that teachers cannot agree amongst themselves does not invalidate the self and does not make it more accessible by any other path. Some people are reassured by divergences between awakened ones and hail their own capricious freedom as the only authority. Others are bitterly disappointed and declare the supremacy of the system which they adopt, while denigrating the others. It is just as wrong to think that the self is a subjective experience on the basis of the divisions which animate teachers and clans, as it is to think that one system or tradition can lead to it more successfully than the others. The rest of this work will not only discuss theoretical aspects of teachings, but what stems from their differences and gives rise to disagreement between teachers.

If the Whole is one and the truth is one, then there are grounds for surprise at what seems to be contradictory when raising the issue of the Mystery. If we get into the habit of rebuilding beliefs on conditioning which has been destroyed, then progress will be infinitesimal. The new truth which emerges and brings structure must also be able to die in order to be continually reborn from the ashes. Few people acknowledge this because the brightness of their first conquests seems so definitive — immutable. Today the spiritual world has been rocked and new transformations await us. It does not lie within our power to understand why, in the same era, Ramana Maharshi went ever deeper into the self, whereas Sri Aurobindo used it as a tool in the Supermind conquest, with mental silence alone opening the way to the pure energy which the rishis had lost and which Jews believe to be inviolable when they call it the fiftieth door.

Attempting to understand the spiritual in its entirety is the last illusion of the seeker. I am just blazing some trails without imposing any obligation to follow them, but it is henceforth impossible to reach an accommodation with the self so that it fits in with our own vision or tradition. It is as dangerous to suppress it in the name of a new revelation as it is to retain its former status of perfect conquest. These two positions have a paralysing effect. Instead of creating fragmentary pictures, let us look for the way through. Instead of celebrating what seems to us to be the highest truth with all the possible prejudices of our final personal preferences, let us do our best to bring to life within us the realizations which are already incumbent upon us. Let us leave the care of putting respective sources of light in their place up to permanence, without striving to sing the praises of our own current of thought, whose honour it is pointless to defend other than by our actions.

No awakened one or teacher can therefore predict the precise start of this new cycle nor its terms, although some would have to play a historic role in bringing things full circle after close to three thousand years of History dimly illuminated by the Spiritual. An appeal is launched to all sides and any genuine search which submits to the precarious nature of the journey can bring about useful transformations. However, today, as in the past whose various primordial traces I recall here, the question remains concerning what each awakened one can really transmit without condescension and without manipulating the fragile self of a man or woman who is overturning their values to achieve a new form of recognition of the Whole. It would be just as ridiculous to abolish the illumination of the Self in the name of a dazzling transition towards something else, than to continue to view it as the ultimate reality. I therefore describe the framework of unconditional opening to this state of consciousness — the self — without any ulterior motive of making it appear inferior or of overestimating it. I maintain that nobody can claim to have reached any kind of spiritual state unless they have discovered it. This is a radical position, but it is the only one which enables me to warn aspirants against proselytes of all types who win disciples with fancy turns of phrase and are keen to show the spiritual path when they only have a mental approach on which they base the vanity of their teaching and their own glorification.

The number of awakened ones is sufficiently small for a great deal of confusion to reign in the debate surrounding the emergence of consciousness. Some movements delight in returning to the origins while cultivating a piquant form of fundamentalism, like a sort of new-found loyalty. Others, fascinated by the promises of the future, imagine new forms of realization which would almost dispense with the need to follow the perennial paths — the self first and foremost — that uncreated space which is so gentle and empty that all actions are foreign to it and which is the very pivot of the manifestation, the still centre of time, an area without borders. Connecting with the great homogeneous principle (Tao) is the spiritual experience par excellence. Accounts vary because interpretations become deceptive over the course of time and this means that new awakened ones are required to patch up doctrines or to found them. To this extent alone, certain variations within the great movements are justified and I will mention them as a counterpoint to demonstrate the intellectual pitfalls posed by the vulgarization of doctrines. Today, several schools of thought which approach the notion of the self and claim to lead to it are in competition. It is not unhelpful to review the hazards which preside over the formation of a major spiritual trend and which justify its own views and its approach to mental silence, in the light of my fundamental standpoint. I would reiterate that this is not with the aim of discrediting one movement or favouring another, but firstly to give an account of the difficulties involved in discussing the self and initiating spiritual interest on the basis of a personal experience and secondly to get rid of the dead wood to allow people to grasp the essentials — the identity of Kasyapa Buddhism, the Taoism of the patriarchs (Lao-Tzu, Li-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu), Chan and Zen, without forgetting the heart of Hinduism with access to the Brahman.

Awakened ones progress towards the self on the basis of different factors which can be summarized in two principles:

Deprogramming the self on the on the one hand,
discovering universal principles on the other.

Certain paths base deprogramming the self on the prior statement of a universal truth and others do the opposite, i.e. they assert the need to transform the self first and then determine that this impulse alone causes truths to come down into experience. It has to be one or the other: either the transformation of the self is subordinate to the general vision of transcendence, or the discovery of the self is subordinate to a single indispensable precondition — accepting a process of deprogramming whose outcome is not established.

Basing the teaching of awakening on a priori recognition of transcendent truth has advantages and disadvantages, the advantage being locating the self in the process of transformation in a logical but mysterious universe filled with authorities to be respected but also principles to be discovered. The risk is a lack of freedom in favour of intellectual acceptance of the Divine Order or the evolutionary plan, with the possibility that the mind might imitate knowledge instead of possessing it and that archaic feelings might remain attached to the image of the Whole, the Divine...

By contrast, encouraging awakening by stating the potential of the self and subordinating the vision of universal principles to it has advantages and disadvantages. The self feels greater freedom from its experiences, but runs the risk of losing sight of the fact that these must eventually be brought into conformity with the Whole, in a form of interlocking without submission or freedom — i.e. a connection.

For my part, I would advise against subordinating the experience of the self to the compulsory vision of the Whole, which would constrain one into an evolution dictated by images and presuppositions. However on the other hand, I find it ridiculous to subordinate knowledge of all that is external (including transcendent principles) to the evolution of the self. I would like to clarify the issue. All true impulses of the self towards itself enable one to discover the relationship with the Whole and with others — i.e. the personal and integrated discovery of principles, in exactly the same way as any revelation which comes from the Whole and raises the self (intuitions, insights or profound intellectual understanding) enables it to tackle its own resistances more effectively.

It is equally necessary to see oneself and to see the Whole.

It is a form of convention or gamble to make one of the two visions of progress depend on the other — nothing more. The two concepts are different. Doctrines either subordinate changing the self to a prior vision of the Whole — i.e. we shall explain why this change is necessary, or they subordinate the transcendent picture to the need for inner transformation — i.e. begin to reappraise yourself and the principles of reality will appear.

In the Taoist vision of things there can be no pre-eminence. Placing the emphasis on the self to the detriment of approaching the Whole is an Iron Age concept which we find in certain departures from Buddhism, Zen and Hinduism. Placing emphasis on the "Divine", which must be embraced at all costs underestimates the psychological transformations which are necessary to establish a true relationship with the Spirit and it is also a mode belonging to an Iron Age which is drawing to a close. Previously, i.e. in the era of the Vedas in which Lao-Tzu locates a lost Golden Age, man's impulse towards totality did not draw a distinction between individual realization and fusion with creative forces and with the Spirit. It is only with the loss of light that a dichotomy appeared between the quest for wisdom, which leads to the self through work by the self on the self and mysticism, which leads to the self by purely and simply surrendering oneself to the Divine as an unconditional offering. We are once again entering an era in which the wisdom/mysticism dichotomy must disappear. However I cannot treat this issue here without straying from my subject — the realization of the non-mental, which lies permanently at the heart of all traditions, even Christianity, but whose traces the Churches have tried to bury.


Hypothesis of the path which begins with Yin:


If the self decides to surrender to mystery in order to find its place there, it cannot be on account of a divine image which attracts and fascinates it. This can only occur under pressure from inner Truth, which cannot conceive of any satisfying status for individual consciousness in forms of religion. Attracted by the mystery of the Whole, the subject surrenders itself to it. He does not strive to transform the self, but develops an increasing degree of submission to its demands for perfection and undergoes evolutionary pressure rather than generates it. He learns to differentiate himself and to cease to identify with the whole of his biological and contingent identity.



Hypothesis of the path which begins with Yang:


If the self chooses to transform itself, and does so in its own name, it will only succeed by gleaning states of spiritual consciousness along the way, even if it does not possess names to describe them and if it refuses to grant them divine status. In this alternative scenario, there is no need to submit (to the Tao) before its laws appear in the light of necessities. They are therefore experienced and form the basis of what we term sadhana, i.e. a rigorous approach to the existential mystery. All that remains are exchanges between human consciousness which is in a state of transformation and the ineffable Whole, certain aspects of which stem from another Consciousness, with whatever name we might attribute to it. In fact, man has toppled over into another form of reality and he no longer needs divine imagery. He is learning to identify himself with a will to consciousness which is beyond him and requires him to have another identity.



The two paths eventually meet up, whatever the point of departure. The mystics (Yin) eventually have to address the question of individual identity and the wise men will eventually see the issue of their genuine reliance on the Whole arise, once the psychological transformation which they have initiated themselves has been accomplished. The path to awakening is therefore tricky because two dangers present themselves simultaneously:

   following one's own freedom too closely while neglecting the Whole and scorning the conformity which it demands, or
   obeying conventional — i.e. external — principles too closely in order to improve oneself, but at the price of interpreting the truth in a way which curbs experience.

The self runs the risk of submitting to its own subjective freedom and enjoying it to excess, or, on the contrary it submits complacently to the authority of religious law or practices deemed favourable to spirituality, but without the profound commitment which would allow it to incorporate these new behaviours. Understanding others, the universe and the Whole represents a movement on the part of the self towards the non-selfThe non-self is not a concept in this instance, but the complement of the self. The internal and the external do not exist independently of each other.. It is essential, but the road remains one of identification for a long time. Understanding oneself is a movement of the self towards the self. In this realm there are no safeguards, scapegoats or opportunities for escape.


One can easily cheat with God, love, truth, consciousness, and wisdom while ever they are still objectsi.e. semantic illusions. The self which is confronted with itself plunges deeper and deeper within itself and the tall stories which it tells itself often play tricks on it. Therefore, all work which does not depend on great imagined, preconceived realities (knowledge, God, Truth, salvation, liberation) takes places in depths which open inaccessible doors. There, archaic identifications dissolve and the self gives up trying to see itself from every angle, to declare its nature and to establish itself. This method can be seen clearly in Zen, when a teacher, without any self-indulgence, expresses himself with his whole body, at the risk of behaving ridiculously, in order to put an end to the solemn taste for speculation and naive expectations of his disciples, who are hanging onto every word of the "answers" of the awakened onecf Lin-Tsi, the famous Zen patriarch.

We have already reached the main axis of consciousness around which all our perceptions on the one hand and the teaching of initiation on the other revolve.


4 An outline of the real issue


What really lies between the self and the body, between the self and the other and between the self and the Whole? Is the relationship of the self with itself — which is the basis of the need for change — not just the result of three distinct perceptions — that of the body, the family and cultural world (our ecological niche) and lastly that of the mystery of the Whole? An interplay establishes itself between the vague desire for change and recurrences of a deep, quasi-permanent nature. The impulse towards external perception, in which the senses play a major role, and interior dialogue are constantly combining.

Who truly knows the nature of this to and fro movement?

Phases of moving towards objects through thought and the senses follow phases of interiorization in which what is perceived is in some way judged in relation to our personal needs and interpreted. The two poles interact every three seconds, since recent discoveries suggest that our cerebral intake scans the field of vision every three seconds and automatically takes a new photo. We are continuously making unconscious adjustments which yield little benefit because we are trying so hard to to observe what we already want to see, to the detriment of new information which does not fit into our pre-established code. I will continue to mention spontaneous attention as an inadequate, but nevertheless necessary, means of awakening , which enables us to spot clues to the path in places in where nothing, on the face of it, would seem to indicate its presence.

The phenomenal world and the inner world interact continuously. Opening one's eyes symbolizes freely examining the non-self and closing one's eyes symbolizes freely examining the inner world, the self. A balance must exist between the relationship with the indeterminate Whole (having one's eyes open) and the transforming relationship with oneself (closing the eyes as in meditation). I condemn the loss of balance in all impulses where one tendency ends up by gaining the upper hand over another and consuming it.

The self can transform itself radically without giving its opinion, nor indeed having to, on ultimate reality and transcendence, while avoiding conventional representations of the cosmos and spiritualist visions pervaded by crushing finalities. However the intuition of the Whole is never lost. This proves that we can trust in the process of "closing one's eyes". We owe this certainty to several examples of men who have achieved realization, especially in ChanChan is the overall set of teachings of a succession of Chinese teachers over several centuries, drawing inspiration from Kasyapa Buddhism., and are detached from the notion of giving a name to illuminative experiences (after having experienced them) on the basis of a "picture of the World". As for Shakyamuni, he differentiates himself from many instructors by evading the issue of the Divine, and yet this did not prevent the exceptional success of Buddhism nor make Chan and Zen, which have their origins in his message, false movements. The self can triumph over ignorance alone if it only preserves its aspiration to be and to interlock with the Whole, without attaching any importance to it on the mental plane. However, it cannot cut itself off from phenomena with impunity, however illusory they are deemed to be, once awakening has been achieved. The self which goes deeper down into itself, forgetting its presence in the world and the pressure of Mystery does not achieve awakening, but it is true that many awakened ones withdraw once they have reached satori and no longer feel any kind of attraction to the external world and sometimes even for their own existence. Closing one's eyes to reach the self is not to be taken literally. Pursuing one's quest exclusively in this direction leads to a false self, to seductive counterfeit spiritual experiences which enable the self to believe that it has achieved realization when it is merely separated from the universe by mind-numbing techniques which provide a sort of stupid mental death quite distinct from satori, whilst a logical description justifies this denatured perception with misinterpreted arguments.

"Opening one's eyes" in a preconceived manner is pointless. The name of God can only be associated with the non-self with extreme circumspection, only if experience permits it, which is rarely the case. Cosmic truths present themselves independently of the name which they bear. They are alive. The intuition of Order can establish itself in the open self with remarkable economy and with few, yet nonetheless powerful, means in order to avoid the mind signing the picture with its own signature and pompously describing minor breaches in the ego as spiritual experiences. Admittedly, the world can be almost entirely understood with the aid of sensible interpretation of the most rigorous traditions, but this excellent deciphering and complicity with divine purposes themselves do not necessarily open the way to the evolutionary journey. On the contrary, many people are content with it. Opening one's eyes is not to be taken literally. Once we are intellectually aware of the map of principles we make our life conform to it confidently and elegantly, but without taking the trouble to lay the foundations themselves. This is a frequent risk with esotericism, which is shiny and homogeneous and dispenses with the real experimental work because it has an answer to everything. It is not a case of overestimating the power of the intellect, nor that of external observation, which always leads to refusing to submit to the spiritual in the strictest sense of the term — total inner alchemy. The alchemical struggle against the dragon, the implementation of the unknown self on the basis of elucidating all the impulses imposed by nature, personality and self-image, cannot be neglected in the name of knowledge of a higher world.

We should, therefore, not confuse access to a relatively homogeneous vision of spiritual reality, which I will shortly term the Order above, which remains a representation, an exteriority, with the involvement of the self in its own self-renunciation — the only decree which ultimately forms the potential for metamorphosis in the chaos below, i.e. life with its hidden principles. It is the only real and unpredictable impulse which does not delude itself with words, hopes and enticements. Many learned people and theologians, philosophers and dilettantes, or people with a "religious vocation" have not taken any steps towards transforming their perception, anxious as they are to preserve their doctrinaire, vertical refuge in order to avoid confrontation with the beast of their own unconscious. They have not grasped the illusion of language, even in its inner form, or in any event in its many deceptive appearances. Naming laws does not make one better. We are stating the necessary conditions here for the great transition according to the eastern tradition of Lao-Tzu, Chan and Zen, with the doctrines of the Buddhas as a backdrop. Discovering the finest banners of truth is not enough in order to reach the other side.


The seeker must differentiate between:
A/ work carried out on oneself — — which is often a passive struggle against memory and its repercussions, prejudices, and obedience — confrontation between the self and the self,
and
B/ essential decoding work on the structures of reality —carried out in the impregnable intimacy of each instant by an intellect which is open to the world — confrontation between the self and the non-self.
The two impulses support each other, but as soon as one gains the upper hand then the relationship between the self and the Whole suffers. Either the self forgets about taking part in the Whole by striving to know itself in order to overcome its own limitations and resistances, by caring little for the connection or, on the contrary, the self conceals itself behind higher truths, universal laws and the laws of faith in order to dispense with the need for total exploration and for identification with sickening objects invented by the subjective mind, such as "God", truth and law.

The self does not reveal itself either to the perfect man who scorns what is external, or to the man who has understood everything but does not choose to be a perpetual seeker after integrity and holistic conformity. While it is not a case of fluttering one's eyelashes continuously, I remain convinced that the secret of spiritual transformation lies in alternating the processes of "closing one's eyes" and "opening ones eyes". They can support each other. It would seem to me to be a dead-end to restrict oneself to one of the two and it is difficult even to achieve a balance between them. These distinctions are useful for gaining an overview of the doctrines of the past and seeing how they distribute the two components, namely what they advise the self to do in relation to itself and what they encourage us to discover in the wider order of Reality, i.e. of connection. Not only will you see that the proportions of the two components vary from one doctrine to another, but that each of them eventually develops its own arguments up to the point where they split and the second complementary component is forgotten.

It is true that individual transformation can be subordinated to a broad cosmic vision, which is rich, rigorous and almost infinite, as is the case with most Hindu teaching which tends towards the self, but original Buddhism dispenses with it and also leads to the self. Zen strips things down even further and practically excludes the second component, apart from the spontaneous and mundane perception of the ordinary present moment. There is not much to be said about what comes after satori, the main thing is to achieve it. As for the Way of Tao, it achieves a balance between the two and does not stress the transformation of the self or the relationship with the Whole. The two are combined with equal scope so that the path can be pursued with the greatest possible freedom. The Whole is mentioned more often than in Buddhism and Zen, but less than in all the forms of Hindu teaching. It is less specific about the transformation of the self than the other systems in order to avoid establishing the illusion of moving towards the self on the basis of repetitive practices. However one could say that all these advantages are also disadvantages for those who cannot be satisfied with this lucidity and who need more reference points. A pragmatic form of Taoism therefore exists, which does not correspond to the vision of Lao-Tzu, but adapts its principles at a lower level to find an empirical balance, but in which awakening does not feature, having been replaced by a practical philosophy, as is the case in Buddhism. It is difficult to separate the paths according to their individual character as they do not all target the same types of individual and they bear the hallmarks of their national mentality, which always tends in a particular direction — utility in China, religiosity in India and existential mastery in Japan. The seeker comes face to face with these issues because the paths were formed in the wake of a man, in the soul of a people and took root themselves by adorning the essential with ancillary ideas which were historically opportune.

Finding the fruit under the peel again is only possible if one goes beyond intellectual meanings using pure experience. Let us leave formal contradictions aside to take an overall look at these outpourings of truth, which are as disparate as the number of different ways to turn towards the self and to experience it. I consider knowledge (Buddhism), transcendent harmony or Tao (Taoism), liberation (Hinduism), the spirit (or dharma) of nature (Zen) to be synonymous terms which refer to the same experience and are commonly used to describe the connection between the self and the non-self after illumination (awakening).

Some people cannot tolerate the paucity of presuppositions in Zen and Taoism and view this as a form of poverty. However a process exists by which the mind is systematically put (back) in its place and hunted down when it wants to seize the self and base it around memory, anticipation and an imaginary vision of reality. "Closing one's eyes" seems more important than "opening one's eyes" in certain teachings which are wary of the impressions which the world provides and which the (mental) fascination of its meaning imposes. However, it is in reality a case of finding a virgin present and initially cutting off all the shackles which we drag around with us, which are abstract in the case of beliefs and concrete in the case of habits. The self must first of all learn to close its eyes, i.e. to interiorize in order to overcome the engrams imposed by the senses and their contact with the non-self. After each free interiorization, however, we can open our eyes again and decipher what is external with new grids, less conventional codes and even intuition which lends meaning to things which do not seem to have any. This is in order to get closer to what was there before us, before we appropriated it or stuck our oar in.

The here and now is a pithy, simple expression and yet it is a difficult path. To apply oneself to it with determination is the same as laying a trap for immobility in order to try and grasp it and this cunning trick is a failure. The real now is one which endures, in traditional Hindu expressions and not in the ephemeral moment. It is immobile time which nothing can affect. Wanting to tune into it merely by closing one's eyes is just as unpredictable as grasping it through perfect availability, which puts off the need for inner work.

The internal and the external only exist through each other.

Some people cannot stand the profusion of Hinduism, its numerous presuppositions, its endless Sanskrit jargon, its relief maps of states of consciousness and energy, or its collection of paths which constitute a museum. However this huge repertoire is nevertheless there, before their eyes, causing them to oscillate between fascination and rejection of the exotic. Accounts offer an infinite cycle of images which give rise to intuitions through an infinite number of commentaries and countless perspectives — in a sort of endless exegesis. If thought is not used as a sort of device to construct representations, but as a simple tool for vision (discernment), it dissolves into intellect itself, even though it does not cease to function and this is the path of jnana, which is the opposite of Zen, both of which are effective and permanent for those who dedicate themselves to them. However, they are diametrically opposed because one cuts off thought at its root, whereas the other encourages it to the point of exhaustion.

If nothing is decided in advance, then everything is evolving, whether that be becoming intoxicated with natural speculations or fasting with ease. Exerting one's mind on ideas and key themes, becoming aware of subtle energies and becoming an integral part of the process of awakening if necessary or, we can equally dispense with it and wait for natural contact in which no preconceived plan attempts to cheat with the great Symbols. However, in all asceticism, the process comes up against fundamental invariants — mind, vitality, body — whose representation is deceptive, with the danger inherent in imagining that these three instances are separate. Fundamental differences can be useful for drawing up anatomical maps, but they are nonetheless dangerous tools which can quickly be transformed into tyrannical fantasies. What we are going to leave behind fights back. However, every person is called. The ardent intellectual can become awakened if he abandons his religious belief in reason in order to submit it, without complacency, to his emotions, ambitions, wishes, questions, frustrations and doubts. Indispensable renunciation of preferences. Awakening can take an artist by surprise when he lets himself get carried away by his art to the same extent as he tries to control it. Necessary renunciation of his own talent and asceticism with regards inspiration — opening of the self to what lies beyond. The self can also monopolize the man of action who dreams of an absolute work and places his powers at the disposal of an intelligence which is huger than his own, if his personal ambition and subjective will die. Renunciation of the fruits of action and karma-Yoga. The poet can make his own way better than others, but he needs to look all around, without any blind spots, so that he eventually perceives the need to transform himself and to bring himself into line with a sensibility which manipulates him. Renunciation of complacency. Kind-hearted men and women will make countless detours before transcending their feelings to experience the sole feeling of being, in order to balance the sum of their impulses. Renunciation of attachments in order to give more fully. The path to awakening is neither formal nor specific, otherwise the routes described would have led us there.


5 Koan: is samsara real?

The chaos below is not an unpredictable disorder, but the manifestation of principles themselves, in a form of coagulation which combines, mixes and amalgamates them. In fact, there are very few of these principles, and trying to represent them in intellectual terms is a trap unless this is accompanied by an attempt to track down their equivalents in the physical world. The most relevant systems divide reality into two &mbash; homogeneity and heterogeneity, Yin and the Yang, the Hindu pairing of Purusha and Prakriti, or into three with the gunas, into four, five, seven, or into eight naturally with the I Ching, or even into ten with the Kabbalah or Pythagoras. All these representations can be very useful, and they are operative when used by awakened ones or powerful wonder workers. However, to return to the factual realm, principles do not appear here, thus establishing the legitimacy of a succinct form of metaphysics in all doctrines devoted to awakening. Even in Zen and Chan, which cut representations short, a small number of distinctions are drawn, for example between the ordinary spirit and satori, or between the spirit of Buddha or even the spirit of nature (the dharma of nature) and the mixed perception of the whole and of oneself which prevails before enlightenment and the practices of mental purification. Even if one rejects all forms of metaphysics, because opening to awakening is a change of perspective, this branching out imposes a minimum number of presuppositions, which could be termed philosophical in certain Buddhist paths, for example. If transcendent reality is not mentioned, two conflicting principles nevertheless appear, namely suffering-ignorance and liberation. These two principles conflict and establish a dialectic and then an order through the open-ended finality of awakening, an experience which will escape from the chaotic rules of samsara in order to free itself from it.

Everyone will have noticed that love is mixed with possessiveness and sometimes hatred, that the most rigorous analysis is still coloured by the emotional preferences of its subject, and that inopportune emotions can corrupt the being who is in discord with the world or with himself. The contingent scrambles the principal form. An event which by definition has a probable emotional connotationSee the huge role played by the «lunar function» in traditional and humanist astrology. Natarajan, Astrologie supramentale [Supramental Astrology],1991. dictates its interpretation to the mind. You will also have noticed that the best intentions which seem to spring from a healthy will can have disturbing consequences in acts which initially appear to be innocentit is an opposition between subjective will and non-action for Lao-Tzu, between desire and consciousness for Guatama, or between personal will and chit-tapas (an evolving universal consciousness force) for Sri Aurobindo..

The chaos below reveals a lost order.

However an order is present, waiting to be found. The proof lies in awakening, whether it is located in India in a lover of the Absolute, in China in a connoisseur of the Tao, in Europe in a Christian who falls into the Silence of God, or in a great shaman in Siberia who abolishes the distinction between life and death and tips over during his lifetime into the Uncreated. This is why awakening can be considered to be a perfectly rational hypothesis and not a wild quest for a childish Absolute. Those who find it have all passed through layers, lifted veils, surrendered parts of themselves and abandoned thought, by different means which, when compared, give rise to mistaken views on the transition itself. It is sufficient to assume that man is capable of unravelling the tangle of forces and principles which constitute him in order to correspond to the ultimate reality in the early stages of a perfection which is still unsure of itself.

This is the only way to understand the terrifying notions which place humanity in a hostile environment which it must fight. It is a reductive vision which surrounds our condition in order to stop observing it. Just as there is no human nature other than the unpredictability which establishes the sequence of good and bad, justice and injustice, kindness and cruelty, and giving and appropriation, there is also no blessed or cursed environment which is propitious or unfavourable. This is just imagery which everybody tries to claim for themselves in order to base their values on it; the hedonist then praises the beauty of existence and the self-absorbed man endlessly blames bad laws and suffering. What can we do to change the world however, to enhance it if its beauty moves us and to rid it of its ugliness if its vileness disturbs us?

Whether the Earth is ruled by wicked angels, as is the theory in Egyptian scriptures, whether nature complicates everything with the force of desire, a commonplace belief in all religions, or whether the only obstacle is evolutionary memory with its defence mechanisms — a theory which I support today in the wake of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin — the simplest approach to evil is that it stems from a lost order. The way in which this order was lost and the necessity or inevitability of its disappearance are irrelevant. The fact is that it is no longer there. It is absent.

    Evil grows in the overlap which no longer occurs between man and the universe.

Its seed lies in separativity itself. It is already present in the individual who is isolated in his self and who will only belittle all other selves until he achieves awakening. Buddhist and Hindu samsara, or illusion, is not good or evil. We stare at it in fascination or disgust, as if this fringe of the manifestation to which we all belong could be put away in a drawer under all the other papers so that we did not have to deal with it any more. However even the self is still being experienced in life and we can no more abolish it than a cloud which bursts and empties itself can abolish rain. Only India uses the self to belittle life and this has been the case since the loss of the Vedas. However it is not the only guardian of the secret. Chinese exponents of Tao and Chan have never experienced mental silence as a way of demonizing existence, striving to declare that phenomena are illusory and taking refuge in quietism. The twelve or more exceptional Zen patriarchs did not praise the spirit of nature as necessitating cutting the initiated person off from ordinary physical reality. Western mystics never experienced mental silence in order to forget Christ and earthly transformation. Hindu radicalism which has been celebrating the self as the only reality for three thousand years is a special case. The self gives a profound feeling that phenomena are an illusion, but since it does not separate the subject from the object, each awakened one can locate himself exactly as he sees fit in relation to the phenomenal world. Presenting the self as a sort of power of knowledge which purely and simply destroys the objective reality of things is only half of the reality. The other half consists of a new relationship between the owner of the self and what surrounds him — even if he would term this environment an illusion. Therefore, in this case no logical approach is plausible any longer.

All that remain are paradoxes, the best known of which I will call Shankara syndrome. The great Hindu initiate achieved parabrahman, the self of the self, even more subtle than Brahman, in which even the self appears to be non-existent while perceiving absolute non-existence. One might expect a man who has reached this extreme point to act in accordance with his vision — to abandon all movement. Not at all. Shankara ran across India in all four directions to declare that all things were an illusion, to establish schools and finally to bury his mother. He died young. Those who persevere in presenting the Absolute as the only reality like to waste their time in the phenomenal world which they reject and nobody has yet been able to account for this paradox rationally. Shankara is not the only one. There is a sort of competitiveness among Hindu teachers to shatter the subtle harmony of possession of the self once more and to exaggerate the duality between life and knowledge, to seem greater than the others, given the prestige of realization. Sri Aurobindo put an end to this charade which very few teachers avoided for two thousand years in the spiritual homeland of humanity, genetically linked to God and inept with regard to matter, where everybody was making too much of a meal of praising the great transition to the detriment of the ultimate question:
    can awakening be used to change life?


Life continues in a different way for the awakened one and the wild dream of abstracting oneself from it totally which some pursue for themselves is the fruit of this freedom. This stance is not reprehensible, but some awakened ones are careful that the spiritual never becomes separate from the material, because they cannot forget the context of our asceticism: incarnation. We will continue to be in the bosom of Gaia, the Earth, as accomplices of the Elements, of nature, of plants and animals and of stones which think, in their own fashion. We are in solidarity with this human nature which does not exist, but whose spectre fascinates us. Are we good or bad and what is the point of existence? We are unpredictable and so frightened by our ability to change any how, that establishing laws in order to by-pass them better is our favourite occupation. Everybody is ready to impose a set of rules on others which they would not follow themselves.

This is the mystery of freedom which is cherished when it is a case of our own whim, but condemned when it is somebody else's if it does not correspond to our expectations. Knowing what we can do with our own authority, what we can expect from others, from life and from God is a knot of snakes around which everything hinges. In order to bring this to an end, the real Christ offered love.

We still find ourselves there today, with paradise neither behind us nor in front of us, permanently unpredictable, holding back the movement of time which carries us forward using all sorts of stratagems, established laws, practices to follow, allegiances to respect and obligatory disobedience. We cling on. Even when we let go we cling on even harder to words or rituals and destructive structures. We do everything to avoid surrender. It is a sort of agreed framework for the freedom to wander. The rule of samsara is to deploy everything to exercise our consciousness come hell or high water. What is samsara? It is the great biological ocean in which things have combined in peculiar ways and which the mind, which is attached to vital functions and establishes a contingent identity in perpetuating the scheme of family, culture and race, finds it very difficult to dominate. It is a beautiful and difficult concept — Hindus accommodate it so that it lends support to their quietism, Buddhists use it piously to form the basis of meditation and occultists use it to praise subtle planes and discredit life. It is a very broad word into which several meanings fit inside each other like Russian dolls. Everyone can dive in to anchor their frantic flights or to dissolve their dreams there — now that only solar wishes remain at the heart of the self which drinks life in the mystery of its own thirst. The illusion is indeed real.



    The hypothesis of awakening puts an end to painful mixtures of principles and vindicates another way of living.

Even if the new approach, the Process, does not lead straight to the Self, even if the plan fails, the ordinary path is finished. What replaces it is deeper. The precise sequences of finality which characterize that extended consciousness of memory, the ego, become blurred in the exhaustive plan. The mechanism breaks down. The rack which makes the self turn in the teeth of the cogs of evolutionary memory, the mother of compulsions, can become blunt. Samsara becomes Hindu, Zen, Tibetan and Taoist. Experience no longer locates it in the Sanskrit nomenclature, but it is the word itself which becomes a vision, a mantra, an originating idea and provides information about the fundamental concepts of the spiritual world. Samsara separates the subject from the object, desire from pleasure, the self from the non-self, the internal from the external and the one from the many. It creates the illusion of a world of sums, totals, additions and multiplications, i.e. collections and sequences pile up then die, because unity takes pleasure in assuming different forms which are so different from each other that only a supreme eye can pierce the same Self, which has been forgotten by Itself, under different morphological forms.

Hence the step of seeking the single being in all beings, the secret of secrets. This visit comes to the awakened one who has not fallen asleep after enlightenment, not as a force or a power, but a perfect identity shared with all things, all beings and all events. It is so simple. It is not being more one thing and less of another, but being everything without distinction. There is nothing more to master and there is no distance. Two thousand years ago we called this the indistinct identity. Shakyamuni, who would become Buddha, possessed the vision too. He showed the path least adorned with embellishments, so that we could therefore avoid disfiguring it when things went badly. It is a shortcut.

    Jettisoning what invents reality.


The individual will tear himself away from base sensations and his personal will — which is in itself an admission that he is separated from the universal will. He will let himself be crushed in the crucible of the unknown fire. He will no longer sanction the most negative emotions; he will catch himself watching them rise, discover their origin, and find where they locate a blind spot to be scanned or a realization to be achieved. Awakening will not occur until pernicious mixtures of principles have ceased. A mystic ideal coloured by personal ambition and pride in embracing God does not give rise to enlightenment. Paths, which are in keeping with Heaven, decreed by the mind and eroticized by dreams of being better, do not strip the individual of the former man he was unless the self dives into itself without any safeguards. Striving to realize oneself for the luxury of being oneself and flattering ones own image, instead of seeking a supreme form of connection with the whole, does not grant access to the great impersonal clearing either. Attachment to mental speculation creates a superior breed of ordinary men, who will not have tipped over into the great Principle on account of having been too fond of words and Ideas. The failure of the mind is incontrovertible today. Its historical triumph in the twentieth century has not led man to participate more effectively in the whole — i.e. knowledge.

Therefore, the exhaustive approach consists not just of a simple projection into a constellation of golden, well-defined dreams, like the extension of memory to a realm which is beyond it, but of constant renunciation of grasping things in bits and pieces. Some form of rupture must take place, a sort of collapse or supreme surrender as a sign of absolute recognition of everything — without any barriers between good and bad, falsehood and truth, darkness and light and finally between what is earthly and what is heavenly. Those who are further advanced in the mystery, such as Heraclitus, would say that the awakened one is incapable of bearing witness to this other than through figures, symbols and even clumsy imitation.

The idea, therefore, of putting an end to illusion is just one aspect of awakening. The self is often considered in relation to the former mentality which it is leaving behind. The journey is no longer desired, therefore, for its intrinsic qualities (which I have never ceased to praise since several of my journeys on Earth), but it becomes the fantasy of that which disposes of all that is inconvenient — the enticement of a missed opportunity. It legitimizes resentment. The search then becomes corrupted.


6 Description of the Great Image

Awakening is a return to simplicity according to Taoism, in which enlightenment is described as giving rise to spontaneity which is open to connection, stripped of the violent power of desire, of narcissistic complacency towards oneself and of the need to act to be in keeping with norms: an essential difference to post-original Buddhism, which is crippled by prescriptions and claims. Lin-Tsi introduced Taoist principles of pure experimentation into Buddhism in China and contributed to establishing Chan in the 9th century AD. However the movement evolved in Japan by attaching itself to zazen (posture), which Lin-Tsi scorned. (Etudes, P. Demiéville). This essential simplicity has always been sought after by those who have a premonition that the mind complicates things on the pretext of organizing them. The human mind is part of the original chaos whichever way we turn: sinfulness in the West, fundamental ignorance for Guatama and the Vedanta, in the form of generic suffering for Buddha who has become the master of Asia and natural obscurity in India, or else in the pitfall of tangible appearances which disguises the invisible and renders it imperceptible in the message of the Tao te Ching.

The fundamentals are very simple: an assessment of what man is lacking and the possible paths for discovering it. Oddly enough, the picture of a return of simplicity is often complicated, denatured and over-elaborate. A significant amount of idle talk stipulates how to get rid of inner discourse. Endless factors establish how to dispense with thought. Perhaps human beings are sufficiently complex for the use of simplicity to be just as complex as themselves. A teacher who says "Do it" is very unsettling. We would prefer him to say why we have to do it, and then we would apologize for not doing it because it is impossible, or alternatively that he tell us how to do it, which is reassuring. We might then imagine that there was a period of apprenticeship and state that we were incapable of serving it or, better still, pretend to do so. However, the real notion of doing it and living for the whole universe instead of for yourself and seeing what happens is like throwing yourself off a bridge. The idea is appealing, but fear of cold water and of the void can hold you back, even if this leap is supposed to save your life.

Therefore, pictures which establish a justification for awakening in inaccessible places sometimes lead the follower down false trails. Justification can only be found inside the self itself. This is the seat of reasons for change, whether God exists or not, the old so-and-so, whether the self is a fantasy or a possible consequence and whether it yields results or not.

One cannot carve up the ego in the name of a philosophy, belief, cosmic picture or imagery. However the vision, be it ever so fleeting, of the Infinite — the great Image — is enough to initiate the return journey, the passion of the intellect to understand the Whole and the indivisibility of events. A belief or a need for security are not enough to follow the trail, or it will stop at the first opportunity or slightly tricky obstacle and the old self will continue along the way of the old self, embellishing it with contrived divine presences while wearing its clear conscience like a talisman in order to attach its values to some transcendent ghost — like a light in the night which we do not want to end, but which daylight could abolish.

The self has a premonition as soon as it gets out of its habitual rut that what lies above is an Order. If all religions contrast conformity above, Heaven, with the arbitrariness below, Earth, then this is where the fundamental paradigm lies. Representations then change and play with the densest of concepts to establish the duality of the illusion and the self, or the notion of transcending them in the pure, unique vision. This is just wordplay which has unfortunately been taken seriously in a sort of historical alternation. When the movement is lost and disperses, we must go back to the founding terms whilst retaining a degree of compromise, because a clean slate is impossible. Dubious reforms or types of schisms which aim for radical loyalty and a "back to basics" policy come into being. This is the era of hair-splitters, men of authority or even acrobats who supply new interpretations and are forced to re-establish the meaning lost through too much exegesis and not enough practice. New procedures appear which are supposed to re-establish the original vision, connect the principle to the form and the intention to the goal. When we see the way in which Buddhism branched out, it is fascinating to note that it went both in the radical direction of awakening as well as into psychological philosophy — not to mention the religious and popular tendency — and all three trends themselves became mixed with local traditions. There will always have been men to carry out these changes in direction or combinations and the intellectual component which is thrown out of the front door finds its way back into the house through the window or down the chimney. The message survives by corrupting itself with heterogeneous elements, the worst of these naturally is the hijacking by political powers of a message inspired by the Word. Things move on. The opaque river flows from the transparent torrent. It is not short of recruits at every institutional change of direction who will put a lot into the exercises, to the detriment of permanent spontaneous attention, which a cultivated search ends up by corrupting. The procedures then assume a forced character, whether they be Japanese zazen, Buddhist meditation, prayer or even introspection which is quasi-ritualistic in Hinduism and full of ten-a-penny divine invocations.

However, when a great teacher or instructor arrives, he puts an end to stating categories which remain abstract objects, in order to praise the new Self, non-separation, the homogeneous Absolute — forcing everybody to take the plunge. This is a time for new doctrines, which avoid hackneyed paths and abandons little-used byways; it is an era of powerful incentives to follow the path initiated by a man of stature who will cut away the dead wood of the doctrine he represents,like a good gardener. It is also the time to sacrifice the higher illusion, i.e. it is time to own up to the failure of procedures, to take stock of past centuries in which form took the upper hand and the letter triumphed over the spirit.



    Any new doctrine claims to be effective and direct, contrary to the old ones in which commentary ends up by blocking the path of feeling.


Teachers each take different approaches. Some like to separate the here and the now and others consider this pointless. Some combine trends with great skill and perhaps without even knowing it, some are haunted by their predecessors and destroy them in order to create their own picture and others could not care less and do not even try to understand their works or doctrines. Most do not forget the fact that they are born of duality and do not try to hold up the prospect of the self as anything other than a journey beyond that, — beyond numbers, forces and the many — and they retain a cross-cutting view of the description of asceticism (permanent coexistence between the self and life as two independent universes). A minority claim that this description contains a higher degree of illusion and they no longer establish any distinction between the self and life or between those beings who have passed over to the other side, who are in possession of the self and those who remain in a state of ignorance. They offer a spherical vision of things and are probably the most highly evolved.

A whole race needs to have been immersed in — and to have experienced — the spiritual for whole millennia, just to achieve these nuances. This is the case with India. However any kind of excess becomes detrimental and the sheer number of metaphysical perspectives which characterize Hinduism has eventually harmed it, in the same way as the vulgarization of Buddhism and its semantic fragmentation have trivialized its depth while blunting its impact. Before starting to explore, the seeker finds himself confronted with a good dozen maps of the same territory. He could even think that Buddhism, Zen, the Taoism of the patriarchs (Lao-Tzu, Li-Tzu Chuang-Tzu) are different because they were not initiated by the same man, or that Hinduism offers the only truth because its spiritual jargon is much more seductive than all the others.

Therefore the real master steers the disciple away from personification and accounts for Buddha not as a man, but as a spiritual state which characterizes all awakened ones, like many Zen patriarchs, by establishing a founding paradox: if this spiritual state is empty, then it cannot be described in any way. We might imagine that India were superior to Asia in the quest for the self, but this would running the risk of calling Bodhidharma a liar when he said : "«Nothing but emptiness and none of the sacred"». If the self can provide divine feeling, it will never be with the sense that the awakened self brings to it, where the sacred and the divine oppose things which are not this. This is a secret which cannot be transmitted, therefore paths exist which simply avoid making mental representations of objects to spare the mind from cultivating oppositions between things, between good and evil, truth and error, Heaven and Earth. This is the legacy of Asia.

It always returned to this principle when it let itself be distracted from it by paths imported from India and Tibet, which are a separate entity. It is China, therefore, which was to strip Buddhism of all that was superfluous and allow it to continue totally independently in relation to Dhyana (Sanskrit Buddhism) in Chan, which exclusively targets awakening, and rejects the cult of Buddha. The movement would eventually develop in Japan.

Similarly, India always returns to veneration and assimilates the doctrines of the pure Self, such as those of Shakyamuni (Buddha), even if it means transforming them, and it has an excessive taste for personification; it enjoys elevating the best humans to the status of gods, the better to attract their favour — at the risk of widening the already yawning gap between awakened ones and others. However, it is the only one to celebrate the Supreme Spirit and to possess a form of devotion stripped of all superstition in the form of Bhakti-Yoga, which is directed at the "God of gods" and allows those in possession of the Self to go still further forward. It is surprising that the self is divine for Hindus but not for the rest of Asia. However it is the same thing and the same state of consciousness. Everybody is in agreement on the term transcendent.

The seeker who is enamoured of different forms can spend a lifetime deciding which direction his path should follow before taking a single step. Opening up to the Tao and walking towards the self is simple — this is common basis of the masters' teaching. Letting go for Lao-Tzu, trusting in oneself for Lin-Tsi, recognizing the gulf which separates us from the self, which causes suffering in case of Guatama and surrendering oneself to the Supreme for the Gita and mystic teachers from all over the world. If this thought process becomes buried in opinions once more, it will be lost in hesitation, speculation, debate, procrastination and eventually in pointless hierarchical judgements. Although the quest for awakening cannot be justified in any way, presenting it as a necessity reduces it to the level of a moral code and therefore introduces a dual judgement into its heart, making it impossible to practise absence of judgement which forms the basis of the doctrine of Indistinction preached by Shakyamuni, Lao-Tzu and by all the Chan teachers, with slight nuances.

Misuse of doctrines is therefore common, since most disciples devote themselves to exploring a map, which is more reassuring than the territory of the self and they become involved in the conquest of the new transfigured self, without abandoning their former self. This corrupt approach threatens all new accounts of the universal way by founding the supremacy of the path on the walker, as if the route itself could change the traveller of its own accord. The mind can justify the path by one means or another, but it cannot discover it.

This can be pushed to the ultimate paradox: a real or legendary speech by Buddha in which it is claimed his doctrine was to be handed down without writingsthis speech was used by Zen masters to present themselves as saviours of the true doctrine of Shakyamuni.. In this way corruption would have less of a hold, with the master being able to measure the real dedication of the disciple to the path, while the latter cannot hide behind interpretations of the canon (even if this means that no religion might ever see the light of day).

    The issue of the Great Image still arises: where are the reference points for the Absolute and the Infinite?

The opposite danger lies in dispensing totally with permanent visions and being wary of doctrines and systems, because the risk of underestimating the work to be done presents itself just as much as that of rejecting all authority on principle. Many things can be drawn from these "pictures" which I am criticizing, i.e. circles which justify awakening from the angle of causality and finality. Although these perspectives are false on the basis of experience of awakening itself, that is not entirely the case in relation to the mind, which is still dualist and conditioned, preparing for satori. This must be understood and accepted once and for all. What is false in awakening because notions of right and wrong have been transfigured by enlightenment can be more or less true in the realm of thought. One might declare that all affirmations are false when viewed from the point of view of the self, and all negations equally. However, if we look at it from the perspective of non-mental content which has to be transposed into mental terms, claims can be made which merely seek to lay down the very conditions of awakening. In intellectual terms these conditions become what we call "traditional truths", pillars from which to hang our thoughts while they unravel, without trying to settle on anything at all.

False when seen in the light,
true when seen in the darkness,
Such is the route of the path.

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The traditions which establish the path to awakening are like parts of garments which have been repeatedly patched, but which retain their original shape. Some of the seams are crude, but the aim is to bring together different points of view which are all equally necessary. Buddhism, Taoism and Zen are actually the same thing. One cannot implicate only one part of the garment if it does not suit. Attacking the legitimacy of the vision of Lao-Tzu is the same as calling that of Buddha into question and those of the patriarchs in the two traditions of Chan and Zen. However this does not mean that syncretism enables us to understand them more easily, or that it is necessary to penetrate the three movements in order to possess a single one. They are fundamentally the same thing. Awakening is bound up with ceasing to think and this experience brings one into contact with an empty substance, the unborn, the unnameable — Tao. Teachers who see this unborn as an uncreated substance feel a connection with the origin of things and have not therefore tipped over into the void in the physical sense of the term. However, it is possible that assiduous physical meditation or concentration might make one mistake simple (technical) suspension of mental activity for this unborn state. One can claim without risk that a false self has always haunted monasteries and ashrams of Chan and Zen and that the role of the patriarchs of Buddhism, Chan and Zen is to restore access to the unborn, which is sometimes confused with simple mechanical calming of the spirit obtained by force, perseverance or stubbornness.

Certain traditional points of view only become meaningful when associated with others, in the same way as we have to move around to view a solid from every angle to account for its shape. This is why one can advocate studying a tradition thoroughly. It takes a long time to understand different points of view from the inside, as it were, which have no meaning whatsoever when separated from each other. However this is a hard path because intellectual understanding can imitate full understanding which entails committing one's whole being. Rejecting the mind can, therefore, be advocated in awakening and this is the direction chosen by the doctrine of Buddhism which reached its fulfilment in Japanalthough two schools exist within Zen which do not attribute the same degree of importance to rules and presuppositions, via China. This movement complements many others which use Ideas to lead the aspirant into the absolute quest, at the risk of supplying him with crutches which he will hold onto for too long.

Laws which are deemed to lead to what exists before all laws, rules which are responsible for commanding respect for an elusive order, and the prescriptions of language itself which point to the path which leads beyond it are all fleeting backdrops to the Tao and not its essence. To ignore them is to follow too steep a path and to claim to follow them is too flexible a path. Between the arrogance of disregarding all forms of spiritual genesis and spineless submission to statutory doctrine, there doubtless lies a means of recognizing route markers in every spiritual experience.

Teachers in Asia challenge the notion that it is obligatory to look at these pictures and to find them fitting and beautiful, instead of waiting for them to speak to you. Yet describing the self is just like that. We paint something which has always existed without knowing why, or how, or what purpose it serves. It is there. There is nothing further back. You either find it or you do not. End of story. There is nothing more to be said. It is almost banal and some teachers even appear obscene when they cut debate short to shout out or make an inappropriate gesture in company steeped in devotion and solemnity. The Great Image is not a collection of landmarks, but an innermost feeling — which few can experience — that each step reveals meaning, whatever the goal to be achieved.

When it is evoked, the informal great symbol inspires trust and prefigures the self outside the constraints of any kind of timetable. It is something that has been glimpsed by the heart or the spirit and the self makes do with these poor representations of what lies on the other side, which remind it, on the one hand, of its darkness, the self which is intuited but elusive and, on the other hand, of its light. In contrast to the shadowy world is the window of the absolute which we have vaguely sought, where Heaven and Earth intertwine when the ways in which they interlock are still vague and indiscernible. This little opening towards the light lends balance to the seeker's steps and disappears when he forgets his quest. He sometimes has doubts: one path describes the self as a sort of sublime, successful escape, another as mastery of life, another as a process of stripping bare so that nothing remains of oneself, and another, finally, as a marriage with the Divine. The Great Image must remain vague, or even opaque, so that it does not become a precise photo which leads nowhere, an obligatory sign — a caricature.

Whether the self absorbs dualities, which is true, when it is presented as a new way of looking to be used by the contemplative awakened one, or whether it emphasizes the darkness of the world and life by its very transparency, (thus distancing itself from it) an opposite option which tries to make it a separate object from the world — it is the same reality.

However, the conflict over teaching was important to teachers, among whom one finds sublimated forms of categories of humanity — the active and contemplative types on the one hand and the loquacious or taciturn on the other and finally reactionaries and creative types. Each awakened one tinkers with the Self in his own manner and also lets himself be carried away in his own fashion. It would be ridiculous if this battle were harmful to seekers and if the latter stagnated in order to contrast partisans of a Self external to life with and those of a Self external within life, or teachers of gradual awakening (who trust in mental impregnation and consecration) with teachers offering sudden enlightenment who scorn and reject all procedures and claim that all initiatives are a null and void if satori does not release the Self from the ego.

Let us be satisfied with seeing top and bottom, right and left, without striving to find lines of demarcation which would give us a falsely accurate picture by separating them.

Let us be satisfied with acknowledging that the Self exists, whatever it brings and by whatever means we encounter it — inside or out, with our eyes open or closed, or both at once, by refining thought or by rejecting it on principle, by relying on procedures or not, through the heart, sacrifice, stripping bare the intellect, through doubt about all thought or out of a profound sense of conviction in the ultimate Meaning barely glimpsed and intuited through the dawn of the Great Image.


7 Meditation on the alternation of the principle

In reality, consciousness of awakening has nothing at all to do with what precedes enlightenment and it is ridiculous to approach it by means of comparison. There will, therefore, always be different types of awakened ones: those who will let themselves be carried a very long way without worrying about the past or their roots, those who cannot believe that they have achieved it and will discover a means of bearing witness to it in lyrical proselytizing and those who want to assimilate it and place it at the service of life without emphasizing the differences between the order Above and the chaos Below. Awakening is a new dimension which henceforth paves the way for otherstransition to the Supermind, effective since 1956., but which is already self-sufficient and everybody is free to devote themselves to it, considering the great freedom they will enjoy in the Self. Some deny the emotions and others retain them in sublimated form, but nothing enables us to decide between the two. If the level of detachment is deep, then exuberance is a joy and imperturbability is groundless cheerfulness and it is not up to us promote cold awakened ones to the detriment of passionate ones, or vice versa. There is no uniformity in the universal, with all due respect to the mind, which would like to stick once and for all to the standard model of a wise man, no doubt in order to imitate him blindly. What we learn from this is that doctrines resemble their founder, hence their surprising flexibility for methods which all support the same things.

In very general terms, the desire for transmission remains in a variety of forms, especially through teaching, Satsang, free discussions between the awakened one and seekers and more structured forms of witness, doctrinal and practical monitoring and interactive openness to psychology, medicine, ecology and education. Awakening enables one to avoid amalgamating things on the basis of the principle that the mind is finally in possession of pure clarity and that subjective interference — or at least what the Self still avoids — hardly impinges on our position.

The transition from chaos to Order exists and it is the self. It gives rise to new perceptions. It spreads. However, in the past this was unusual, shrouded in mystery, protocols and secrets. Archaic traces remain. A few fossils litter the ground of the revelation of the Word. All traditions monopolize certain legacies and strive to justify their predicates by all sorts of tricks and it is futile to trust them on principle. Each path quickly makes what characterizes it obligatory and the naive seeker allows himself to be deceived. The erosion of time affects positions, atrophies doctrinal expression and blunts the impact of original truths, which sounded like new and powerful words at the outset.

The risk, therefore, lies in losing oneself in contradictory evaluations which can touch on important points. For example, contemplation is often praised as an obligatory stage in Hinduism and Sufism. It could not be voluntarycontemplation is a state of osmosis between the self and the WHOLE which is only possible in a phase of extreme overlap with the non-self. The timing is not determined by the individual, but Tao takes advantage of the passive open-mindedness of the seeker in order to manifest itself to him, in a sense when the latter is ready to receive it. Letting one's thoughts roam free has a greater chance of leading to contemplation than conventional exercises in concentration. As soon as one deals with the functioning of the mind, one must balance Yin and Yang, i.e. compensate for all that is finalized (techniques, Zazen, prayer, special meditation etc.) with totally pure periods of intellectual wandering, which can be promoted by contact with nature, for example. and to describe it as a necessity is paradoxical. Tao also comes to meet those who are seeking it, which is the equivalent of grace and I would like to emphasize at the same time that the aim of asceticism is non-separativity and not the illusory perfection of a triumphant self which dominates life— the same preoccupation exists in the prajnaparamita of the patriarch Tao-Sin on unifying absorption (san-mei in Chinese): "he who remains in a state of unifying samadhi does not see duality in anything at all.". For most teachers, the self is a form of contact. Stopping all mental activity enables one to "bathe" in a new universe. A few teachers forget this fusion with the ether and therefore present awakening as a simple transformation of the self. It would seem incomplete to me to describe the self purely in terms of the self. It also transforms all relationships with the non-self and if phenomena can be viewed as illusory, beyond this there remains the atmosphere of the uncreated, timeless, sidereal universe, which can be perceived by all the senses and consciousness.

As soon as connection is forgotten, whatever difficulties might exist in trying to name the object to which the self connects (Tao), there is the risk of approaching knowledge as the ultimate product of the self which leads to nothing but itself in a sort of apotheosis. In this respect, let us not forget that mysticism complements wisdom by establishing the quest for the divine object, whereas this preoccupation would be pointless purely in the framework of opening up to the self. The self is not inhabited like certain dynamic transcendent spaces such as those described in the Indian Vedas, for example. However, although it is empty, it is perceived as a presence. If this presence is not personified (and it is pointless to do so) it is the presence of the permanent meaning of things in supreme continuity, without any form of break, even in the case of the smallest events and feelings. In the background there is a sense of hugeness which contains everything, permits everything and allows the manifestation to take place in passive benevolence which is the basis of all consciousness.

This aspect is what Hindus use to make the self — Brahman — a divine revelation, because Oneness is achieved outside and inside. For the rest of Asia, however, meaning can only be established in man and in what he observes. Therefore, for the Chinese soul, when the self manifests itself and complete meaning appears and when the unborn becomes tangible, this new reality is self-sufficient, without the need to connect it with divine intention or even any preconceived finality. It was, therefore, predictable that Buddhism would establish itself perfectly well in China and that it would eventually extend the scope of the Tao of awakening which had prepared the way for it, under the name of Chan.

The myth of meditation, which was a feature of some paths but not others, is not the only puzzle confronting the scrupulous seeker. The name of God is always prowling, be it near or far, around the spiritual phenomenon, and it is not unusual for a person who is ready to follow the path to stop along the way because they have not been able to understand the difference between wisdom, which does not look like anything special, and mysticism which basks in the prestige of the incomprehensible, of revelation and the divine touch. This opposition is even fuelled by schools from both sides, which claim to represent the highest truth and roundly condemn the opposing branch. Mystical movements, which I personally deem to be disreputable, but which offer a form of cut-price God, shamelessly claim that the desire for liberation from the wise man figure of the type incarnated in Buddha who is indifferent to the decrees of the Creator, is a pure lie, or even the very worst sort of pride. By contrast, certain schools of wisdom, which struggle to praise the merits of awakening and the self, discredit perceptions of the divine by classifying them, rather too swiftly for my taste, in the category of "emotions". In reality, there are different types of realization and it is apposite to quote the cautionary tale of the elephant. Anyone in the dark taking the trunk, flanks, a single foot or the rump of an elephant to be the whole elephant would be mistaken. One realization does not preclude another and if I lay so much emphasis on the balance between the processes of «closing one's eyes» and «opening one's eyes», it is simply because it is the only way for the mystic not to kill the wise man and for the wise man not to kill the mystic within him.

Mysticism is often rejected by wise men, by whom I mean those in possession of the self, who know that without the realization of the uncreated Void, dynamic enlightenments are just fleeting phases which merely accentuate the dichotomy between the ordinary waking state and the upsurge of enlightenment. By contrast, the unborn — Brahman — becomes established and gives the self a sort of indescribable stability, which is the reason why the Chinese believe this realization to be the ultimate union of Yin and Yang, a stability which bases itself on the transience of sensations now that, thanks to awakening, there is no more opposition between fundamental entrenchment and being open as a matter of principle to each new moment.

Certain states of consciousness only manifest themselves in a wholly Yin attitude in which no tension pulls perception in one direction or the other. The will does not seize these moments of light and it is, therefore, appropriate to allow these phases of pure open-mindedness to alternate with procedures where an impulse is initiated on the basis of some initiative or other. This complementarity between non-action and a given intention which is common in China and is easy to understand against the backdrop of the philosophy of Yin-Yang (Tai-Chi), is more difficult to implement in other traditions where the concept of balance is not so much to the forefront, or else is hidden by other factors. However, we could consider that even procedures within the framework of a precise finality — whatever their original tradition — such as Buddhist meditation, for example, or the free speculation of Jnanin, have as their function not to reinforce the notion of time at the moment when they are taking place, but on the contrary to extend this duration, agreed in practice by a timetable, towards other universes which are more difficult to contact without this prior preparation. The fruits of manifestation often appear outside the periods which are devoted to it and so it is particularly stupid to persevere in trying to schedule periods which are better than others. The aim of conventions which make practices a reality comes before their so-called goal and it must be thoroughly understood and felt so that spiritual exercise does not reinforce a new habit clothed in a transforming fantasy.

People often point to the role of the discriminating mind in Indian paths, but if other methods are effective and replace this exclusive discrimination, a completely different way can lead to the same place — the self — through unconditional love or pure action, which give rise to the surrender of one's own will in the same way, at least in the case of sincere devotees, whereas direct intuition replaces speculative discrimination (viveka). If I were to pursue this further, you would end up by being persuaded that nothing depends on paths (although I shall continue to describe their contrasts and rivalries) and that everything depends on the seeker. This is where I wanted to lead you. I am sparing myself the trouble of fastidious proofs in order to help you understand the main point. The same psychological purification can take place as a result of different movements, based on individual doctrines, because the same resistances are exposed by many means.

Every system, even the one we love, can imprison us, if it is no longer possible to integrate our own "considerations", in the same way that a complete absence of system forces us to make constant u-turns.


Forced vigilance cuts off Yin receptivity,
careless and soothing surrender likewise brings the work of the self on the Self to a close.

The Chinese soul knows that alternation is the principle of metamorphosis. The to and fro movement between pure, trusting open-mindedness and deep surges of concentration follow one another and provide each other with mutual information. In the same way, the to and fro movement between "closing one's eyes" (inner work) and "opening one's eyes" (deciphering the non-self and feelings) can organize themselves dialectically, so that the discoveries made in one process support those in the other. The most striking example is Sri Aurobindo, who in order to draw down the Supermind in the inter-war years, combined the resources of inner work, sadhana, with feminine qualities of pure receptivity to let himself be guided by overwhelming Supramental energy.

However, one can constrain and enclose oneself through perseverance or, on the other hand, one can let oneself go and mistake passivity for a supreme strategy. Becoming closed in through excessive Yang is frequent for a very simple reason: a path has opened up on account of a colour, practice, name or tradition and we insist on establishing ourselves using this route rather than any other, doubtless as a tribute to a previous inner birth which has taken place. The mind begins to cling onto to its higher truths like a dog to a bone and even the sincere devotee becomes locked into the predicates of his allegiance, whatever form that might take, without being able to let go of acquired truths. If a cycle is completed it is a mistake to cultivate its legacy, however deep. One cannot blame traditions for the wastage which characterizes them, nor hold them responsible for the outcasts who abound in their midst, manipulated by doctrinaire truths which they did not how to test. Lack of inner resolve through excessive Yin, i.e. an inability to "close one's eyes" and to forget the factual realm in order to initiate a dialogue with oneself, always creates the same spiritual casualties. They are good, sensitive, idealistic and their identity has never been detached from everyday experience by any kind of interiorization process; their reliance on emotions, thoughts and representations of the world and of the Divine remain and prevent sadhana.

We must, therefore, return to the soul of permanent movements to see the original hard work, whether it was successful or not, and not the superficial flavour of words which hide experimentation — asceticism for all candidates as the art of knowing how to fall and pick oneself up, the pain of incomprehension for an avatar who is worshipped, and the sacrifice of the self to the Self in every scenario. Systems only speak of the hypothesis of awakening, without working out the odds or calculating the chances of achieving it. Mentioning non-separativity in a world of barriers and frontiers is a waste of time. The beautiful unity of the words of a wise man or of his doctrine cannot be felt by those who are still living with a divided self. The single message is divided into philosophical presuppositions, a statement of practice and final aims.


Between the awakened one and the expression of his position, something is lost in the veils of mental representation: firstly in the conventional legitimacy of the search, secondly in the description (and use) of procedures and thirdly in its finality which is supposed to verify the two other points.
The unified man shatters the image of his unity through different perspectives which enable him to describe it. His experience moves beyond the limits of its context. A teacher who puts names to the taste of the experience of ecstasy makes one want to drink it's wine, but he is deceiving himself if he claims to offer the glass himself. Some awakened ones have, therefore, simply chosen to remain silent. There is scarcely any choice. Either they say nothing, or they start again from scratch, because it is wearing to see that demystification — the message of possible awakening — becomes a form of mystification once more. One commonplace is that it is these people who keep quiet who are the great ones, above even instructors; another rumour calls those who do not know how to pass on the torch the lowliest of teachers. However, these opinions have no impact. The awakened one derives a certain pleasure from raising ignorance as a solution. There is no other motivation. Propaganda for awakening is a historical phenomenon, which is different every time and is written into the totality of human progress as merely one formality amongst so many others. The undertaking is worth repeating. Without freshness, testimony does not throw out the past, define the present or reinvigorate love.

Travelling in a distant land and drawing up a map of it are two different things. Traces of one's footsteps in the form of one's words or pure writings will always be superior to plans of the route — i.e. organized doctrine and dogmatics which claim to supply the key to a vision of Buddha, Christ, Sankara or Milarepa. Walking in the footsteps of awakened ones is just simply diving into oneself without any safeguards in order to dissolve thought, overcome the contingent, secure self, to purify memory and anticipation — to dig in the bottomless well of consciousness without prejudging the nature of the quest.

Studying maps, i.e. comparing doctrines, revisiting Zen koans or the jewels of Buddhism, reading and re-reading the Gita or the fundamentals of a teaching, working through the canons and principles of a school in order to immerse oneself in its fundamental truths, carrying out the exercises associated with one particular movement rather than another — in short trying out something else on the basis of established criteria — is a less radical activity. There is no need to subordinate the pure work of dissecting the ego — plunging into the unconscious — to a particular spiritual vision. It is also equally pointless to subordinate the system which one has chosen (and goodness knows there are enough of them stemming from the words of instructors or awakened ones) to one's own inner alchemy. Increasingly flexible and deep connections can combine the experience of the self with the representations which it uses to open up an exploratory path.

Things which are understood outside the self must stimulate inner investigation and vice versa. "Opening one's eyes" and "closing one's eyes" should not work against each other or depend on each other. The radical construction site sometimes restricts itself to "closing one's eyes", as if only the inner world counted. However, it is determined by sensations, the image of the world, one's personal genesis, vitality and the body. It is, therefore, rash to abandon investigations into what constitutes the non-self on the pretext of overcoming one's own psychology. Intuitions develop better in those who continue to be open and open-minded to the outside world than in ascetics who are imprisoned in their own form of retreat. However, since the subject is everything, obviously a sort of prevalence is legitimately granted on principle to the process of "closing one's eyes", which characterizes the work of the self on the self. This is the shifting sphere of the self pervaded by the intellectual awareness of the moment which can operate on psychological structures directly, in the very intimacy of permanent discourse — without the screen of mental positioning which is diminished by pigeonholing its image and its roleenew tribute to authentic Zen which cannot be reduced to Zazen.. Many people who identify heart and soul with a teacher or are scrupulous in their practice stop off along the path, but lack enough detachment from what nourishes them to carry on along the path alone.

What is transformed by pure experience, whatever its external points of reference, allegiances and disciplines, constitutes the soul of the approach. This intimacy with oneself, free of all form, practice and teaching enables one to understand divine paradigms — the redemption of our obscure condition by the self and its branching out — by shattering the circles of servitude to the Whole as such, which is homogeneous and indivisible. There is hardly any need to establish transitions between the world of the self which is constantly changing and the conventional means by which it changes, as this will always favour pigeonholing and ritualism. Deep feeling must remain stable with subtle physical, emotional and mental sensations if practice is to retain its effectiveness. Unconscious, mechanical and conventional links between the perceptions of the self, the objects of vitality and physical impressions must not be broken. A fresh perspective must be able to emerge and observe them. The self remains permanently connected to the Whole by some sort of connection ranging from the most archaic to the most sublime and breathing has always been symbolic of this connection. By contrast, the mind invents reality, whereas the lungs inhale a concrete gas which ensures a close, tacit agreement between the self and the Whole.

An almost blind trust in practice, which is the scourge of post-original Buddhism, inevitably led to the rise of an opposite movement such as Zen Buddhism, which tried to pare down the system to bring about a return to the Self without the catalogue of religious, philosophical and moral presuppositions which had been corrupting it since the transition from Pali to Sanskrit — while keeping the focus on feeling as a whole, a strategy which it shares with Taoism. When a doctrine establishes itself as a reaction against others, it runs the risk of committing the opposite faults to those which it is trying to correct. The doctrinal simplicity of Zen is just as dubious as the drifting off course of Buddhism which was recovered by Sanskrit scholars before it spread worldwide. The process of stripping back can also be excessive and can lose sight along the way of certain realities in a doctrinal stance which must be preserved. The personality of the teacher is more important in Zen than in other paths and it is also in this system that there are the most imitations; exclusive practice of Zazen can transform the self whilst shattering the subtle sensations of connection with the Tao in order to reveal, at the end of the day, an individual self different to the great self which Hindus are constantly mentioning so that no success or breakthrough diverts us from it, in a country where it is common practice to yearn for the light. Certain texts suggest that Shakyamuni also denounced a certain form of realization, or what passed for one in a few prominent triumphalist experts in Benares, who were exhausted by their practices, hemmed in by enforced detachment, but secretly attached to the religious representations of their culture, as well as to a high opinion of themselves. Seeking awakening by specializing in the process which I call closing one's eyes, to the detriment of the complementary process of opening one's eyes to the world and preserving spontaneity, has always yielded the same result everywhere — i.e. chameleons of awakening, men deeply convinced of their spiritual nature which is cleverly backed up by an exemplary timetable, but stripped of the free, detached sensitivity brought about by satori.

If it is dangerous to evoke worlds beyond the real perception which we possess because we might think that we have reached them simply by being able to name them and woo them while luring them with our clumsy imitations, it is just as dangerous to diminish the Whole and to deny subtle universes, praising only the asceticism of the self. A self which does not connect — i.e. its imitation, the taming of thought by various complementary expedients, cannot be that of Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Bodhidharma, Lin-Tsi, Dogen, Sankara, Ramana or Nagarjuna, to name but a few of the greatest advocates of awakening. Cultivated calmness of spirit is not satori. Taming thought is not its explosion.

These factors must be taken into account before embarking on a specific spiritual path. It is clear that the words of an awakened one (from a path other than one's own) are better than teaching followed within a doctrine which one loves if the latter is formal or conventional, and professed by a disciple who, no matter how sincere his imitation, has not yet experienced satori. I am convinced that there is only one path, one authentic form of witness, in different forms moulded by the soul of a race and coloured by the particular being who is undergoing this great experience. There are even awakened ones today who do not represent any tradition, which "approved" transmitters find difficult to accept. A master who is not preoccupied with reforming a teaching and who does not amuse himself by extending a system and modifying it sometimes reveals a simpler, more effective doctrine than those paths dating back to time immemorial which reassure us on the basis of their founder's illustrious name, but which have been constantly patched up, modified and adapted to different cultures when they have changed location, until they form heterogeneous organisms whose backbone has vanished because there has not been an uninterrupted line of awakened ones. This type of memory is deceptive. One can be a professional in the realm of the sacred, wear a robe and still lack realization. This trend is characteristic of the end of this cycle, in which legacies are returning to challenge innovations and unforeseen breakthroughs — under pressure from evolutionary survival. The end of this century reveals dispersed awakened ones who claim to follow nothing more than their aspiration and often denounce the comforting appeal of procedure which consists of following a renowned form of instruction or a charismatic figure. We are, once more, in the grip of samsara. Everything is designed to deceive. A learned man disguised as an awakened one can pass himself off more easily as a possessor of the self than a possessor of the self can pass himself off as a teacher if he describes his own experience and does not carry the robes or the torch of Christ or Buddha. In reality this is all sugar-coating designed to deceive. The highest incarnation may be concealed in a beggar in India, the land of gods. Beware of spiritual teachings. If they are not undertaken with a genuine teacher, they lead the self astray from its true nature. I must lead you to discover the self by yourselves and I am not showing you how to follow me or how to recognize whom you should follow. You need to transform yourselves on the one hand and to connect yourselves on the other.


Never sacrifice one of these two polarities. This is where we find ourselves. Knowing why does not add anything — it is just more memory. The cause will become apparent much later. It will come in the form of osmosis rather than a reply.
We are an "I" surrounded by the universe.

Meditation is not designed for the self to the detriment of its participation in the Whole, nor is it designed to strike a chord with the Whole whilst forgetting the self. To speak of Buddhist, Taoist, vedantic, Christian, sufic, transpersonal or even Zen meditation is a contradiction in terms. Meditation is meditation. The more one tries to define it, the fewer new insights one will have. The more one attempts to direct it, while underestimating it, the more one will miss information it may reveal which erupts spontaneously and appears to be meaningless, but is indicative of chaos. We need to provide a framework for meditation and we can even vary its forms. However, there is no good or bad meditation. It can drift towards introspection, free association of images or concepts, it can lead to resistances or, by contrast, impose a sort of tranquillity out of nowhere, which will fade if we seek out its cause. Meditation is freedom. The more we present it as a necessity which obeys rules, the fewer fruits it will yield, or it will yield only small, specific results which can be pigeonholed and are easy to gather. It is a means by which the self can forget itself and this, paradoxically, is how it discovers itself. All forms of meditation are possible.

We can increase energy to the mind through breathing in order to calm it or, on the contrary, we can make our breath go down into the body to reinforce physical perception and our immune system. All forms of meditation aim to demystify our vitality or personality, which lies above physical energy and below mental consciousness. Its initial effect is to make us aware that the spirit, the personality and the body have relatively separate areas of influence, each of which is brought to the fore by circumstances. The self discovers that it is multiple and is surprised them amazed by this. This is followed by the appearance of mental undercurrents, knots of associated, repetitive, pointless ideas and the resurgence of memories, making patterns appear which govern self-image, the most striking events and existential changes of direction. Traditions have always borrowed methods from each other. The Jew who humbles himself before God, the Taoist who believes that he is an orphan in order to become aware of the principle he lacks, the Hindu surrendering in all sincerity to the image of his favourite divinity, or the true Christian who, as a sinner, accepts his vulnerability and fallibility all use different concepts and representations to reach exactly the same admission. This admission, which today we call realization of the ego, is the basis of our humility vis-a-vis the Whole, before the latter is defined. If this inner process, which is in fact the only precondition for all quests, does not take place, then all forms of spiritual practice are futileTeachers say to \91disciples' who want to seek the light without first surrendering their personalities: "How can one fill a container which has not been emptied?".

Trying to form a clear image of the Whole or even a justification for awakening, are tricks of the mind in order to put off the call. Awakening lies elsewhere, in solar uncertainty ready to dissolve the fossilized self as the tangle is unknotted. Once darkness has been acknowledged, it becomes possible to free oneself from it.this is a principle common to Buddhism and Taoism, whose complementary aspect — searching for the light — is emphasized in Hinduism. The two are inseparable and it is dangerous to dedicate oneself to the light without recognizing the relevance of darkness, just as it is meaningless to devote oneself to exploring darkness without being profoundly attracted by the potential for transition to enlightenment, the self or transcendent Intelligence.


8 Thoughts on the disguises of the Self

The only reason for seeking the self is because one feels that something essential is missing — a feeling of unity and union. All considerations which base this search on anything else are artificial in nature, making the approach more complicated. It now therefore transpires that teaching methods for awakening attributed to major names such as Pantanjali, Guatama, Sankara, Bodhidharma, Nagarjuna and a few other great authorities legitimize the self by mixing up the evidence. There are naturally some pure aspects to be found, but also elements which are a reaction against other doctrines, which gives them a competitive character in order to aim for supremacy and types of utilitarian exhortation to which I object. They may not appear during the founder's lifetime, but the wider and deeper the mark, the more distortions progressively interfere and, moreover, enable a religion to be established if need be. The search for the self, therefore, becomes a sort of immutable convention, whilst draconian measures to conquer it become established, which corrupt spontaneous attention.

Being is no longer praised for itself or for the consciousness which it brings, but for all the burdens which we are dragging along behind us which it enables us to abandon. The self is no longer described as complete enjoyment of non-separativity, but is used as a knife to cut through different knots and release moorings. It almost becomes a means of making the disturbing noise of memory stop. It is no longer the exhaustive transition, the central point for directions, the self containing the whole and the whole containing the self, but purely a pretext for denouncing illusions slotted inside each other which will becoming increasingly real the more we strive to overcome them instead of understanding their place. Therefore, it is not foolish to view spiritual teachers sometimes as amiable tricksters, prepared to sell a high— quality product by using feeble sales arguments to attract regular customers.

Since the self is homogeneous, as are those in possession of it, then the method works perfectly well. The relationships created between the mystery of what cannot be appropriated and the reasons for which it is fitting to appropriate it are admirably well conceived. Original Buddhism is coherent, although suffering and the self have nothing in common apart from being mutually exclusive — hence the eccentric paradox of subordinating the self to what hinders it. One can observe that Chan then Zen placed emphasis on obtaining satori, pushing into second place the institution of suffering-ignorance as a cause of the process of awakening, which is a feature of religious, philosophical and exoteric Buddhism. Advaitism, that anthology of India, is coherent, although by emphasizing unity so single-mindedly, the system reveals an obsession with reducing spiritual experience to a single totalitarian image, to the point of denigrating free use of the self by the awakened one. Learned distinctions to differentiate the self from the great self — parabrahman — shore up a theory which is eager for its own supremacy, whilst forming the basis of a dispute which only really concerns a dozen or so individuals per generation, that small group of teachers attached to their realization, caught in the trap of behaving, on a higher level, like those whose ignorance they denounce. At the same time, those who are ready to reach the level of the self and who are no longer very far from it, see their last movements called into question by rivalry between teachers, because new doubts arise once again over what the self really is and what it obtains through the complexity and clever confusion of ideas which are supposed to describe it — and the struggle for authority among gurus. These clashes make the consecration of the seeker more complicated, while swathing the self in divine sovereignty which eroticises the quest by quantifying the unquantifiable, not to mention the suspicion and discredit which are established concerning the very relevance of incarnation and the finality of the phenomenal world — a recurrent blemish on the spiritual face of India.

Hindu and Buddhist teachers generally push for recognition of reality not by praising its own merits and its flavour, but by presenting it as a cure — a panacea in fact — either for the disease of incarnation or for that of psychological ignorance. In the way of Chan, Zen and Tao, it is not necessary to demonize the starting point in order to get under way and these traditions are sparing with all those presuppositions which denigrate ordinary life by contrasting it with the fantasy of a spiritual life. Nevertheless, all those who feel that they must heal their ignorance have an opportunity to attract the self without coveting what it brings, which is still indistinct, in a form of creative individual therapy, which ranks among the highest achievements of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism.

However, those who do not feel that they need to heal, because they already like their own condition and can adapt to their present life, can only desire the self for itself and have a premonition of the feeling of non-separativity which it will reveal and consecrate.


    Being is not a form of compensation.

Therefore, one must always differentiate between what a journey avoids and what it brings. The path which avoids things must, by definition, be trying to bypass obstacles. The path which brings something, by definition, moves towards and seeks to establish a route. Seeking the self in order to avoid certain things promises a tortuous route. To seek the self in order to enjoy it is the supreme, direct route.



    Fleeing from ignorance does not correspond to attracting knowledge.

These are two different paths which can lead to the same place, but they are profoundly different. The proportions existing between the exploration of darkness and heady opening to the light can change. Nothing is forbidden to the individual who burns for the quest alone — pure knowledge — and all events refer back to his questioning, lack and absence, because he is inexorably scaling the slope of freedom. Everything is difficult for the individual who flees his ignorance without being carried away body and soul in pure consecration, because he is still drawn in the direction of freedom of thought, the soporific enjoyment of the self, the dramatic intensity of vital interplay, the heady sensation of saying "I" and of believing oneself to be the origin of one's thoughts and desires.

The serene benevolence of the Self will continue to capture all seekers, male or female, who are prepared to strip themselves of the dross of chaos by the simple process of reappraising themselves without any blind spots. This movement is not only concerned with values to be abandoned, which is an easy and fragmentary process, but with feelings and emotions to be stripped down to sensations themselves, not forgetting the mass represented by will, steeped in ambitions and greed. The self cannot be obtained by developing the right opinions, but by initially breaking habits of thought, desire and feeling. This break will become more marked and strip back the perspective of our outlook more and more deeply.

Seeing the Order above is not sufficient to change the chaos below, i.e. to transform the contingent self and this is why some awakened ones have been developing a form of teaching since time immemorial which enables them to show others how to move upwards from chaos to order, from the contingent which is highly coloured by the turbulence of time and events, towards the immobile centre which absorbs all facts, frees us from thought and accepts promises of happiness and difficult phases in equal measure. Although it is likely that divergences between teachers are not purely pedagogical and that some are deeper than others, they are all, without exception part of the same essential reality which they express with varying degrees of skill, enthusiasm and appropriateness. There are no evaluation criteria for lovers of God, wise men, avatars, prophets and teachers with different prerogatives and such classifications would not be of any help to an open-minded seeker. He must simply accept his condition, his potential and his suffering at not having already joined the victors of darkness, if the latter still persists. It is, therefore extremely impertinent to judge the value of awakened ones and avatars, i.e. instructors, before having achieved complete silence oneself.

Across the different traditions, some offer rigorous asceticism centred on the self, others would rather trust the relationship between man and the cosmos and their doctrines differ and sometimes contradict each other. Some invent their own rules and establish and innovate, sovereign-style, others take over a common fund and enhance it with their own considerations, at the risk of destroying the homogeneity of their legacy; lastly others renounce all systems and teachings and build indestructible, impenetrable and mistakenly lightweight systems on their ashes. Overall it is perfectly homogeneous. Nobody has ever experienced "closing one's eyes" and "opening one's eyes" in the same proportions. Both are necessary and this work warns against the tendency to sacrifice one of the polarities, or to subordinate one axis to the other with too many connections, which is a more subtle danger. It is wrong to think that a set of instructions for interiority and personal exploration can be derived through a surfeit of detail from a representation, a doctrine or things which stem from a way of opening one's eyes, however subtle. There comes a point when everything that we know and everything against which we lean to carry on along the road becomes an obstacle. Sri Aurobindo expressed this wonderfully in his formula: "knowledge was a help, it becomes a hindrance". Transparency is sufficient and setting too much store by one's chosen allegiance in order to carry out exploratory work ends up by curbing it or making it state impressions which have been decided in advance. By contrast, one cannot subject traditional concepts to one's own inner experience. This would be to deny everything which one has not personally experienced. Although it is not a case of pretending to have enlightening experiences, examining their hypothesis scornfully and criticizing them in intellectual terms does not equip one with sufficient safeguards and true reference points — and does not even provide a better approach to psychological darkness.

Opening one's eyes and closing one's eyes support each other through a natural process, doubtless in the trust which Lin-Tsi placed above all other spiritual characteristics and which seems to me to correspond to the childlike honesty praised by Sri Ramakrishna, which replaces references to yin in the Tao Te Ching. In general, every human being is better either at looking inwards or at opening up to the non-self. It is useful to find a path between the two, to learn to develop the weaker polarity, instead of taking refuge in the other.

Bearing witness and its methods — doctrines — organize themselves in different places with considerable wastage all round. Each nation's mentality draws events in its own particular direction. The pragmatic Chinese yearn for awakening for reasons of health, longevity and social stability. Hindus yearn for it because it supposed to bring contact with God and for the prestige which stems from it. Europeans woo it for its avant garde evolutionary features and for the clarity of its psychological processes, as well as for the synthetic intellectual understanding which it brings. Throwing themselves heart and soul into Zen is the only opportunity for the Japanese to access the notion of individuality. Each nationality uses it differently and attributes different qualities to it. Gems exist which few people discover, appreciate or understand — finely-cut jewels of the Word which are incomparable and incorruptible. They can be discreet or sparkling, simple or finely-worked, lost in time which does not pass. Canons and corpuses often appear to contradict each other with the result that they end up by making generalizations about particular truths and false trails abound. If we do not get used to the efflorescence of awakening from the outset, we will want to impose a model on it based on our own criteria and will once again spurn the essential in the name of truth. This divine dance is not a uniform whole. Krishna would no doubt have found Buddha boring and Krishna would have remained a mystery to Guatama.

Nobody can understand someone who has travelled further than oneself in the mystery, or measure the awakening of another person against one's own yardstick. However, in order to allow this increasingly rich efflorescence, we have to acknowledge that awakened ones often judge each other clumsily — although they are all already playing in the Infinite, they do not share the same corners. A few genetic traces still condition human beings' perception of Tao and although mental liberation is a universal, unique process, awakened ones who achieve it are still separated by a few distinctive elements which prevent them from agreeing once and for all on the ultimate consequences of the Process. One can reach the Self from any starting point because it is the centre.

It is, therefore, positively archaic to boast only of one's own route — it is a way of belittling others who are freely following another route in the name of truth and love.


9 Discovering spontaneous attention

The seeker who is transforming himself generally continues to take texts or decisive encounters into account and to this extent he must take note of the categories available to him. The division of reality always appears, whether it be the constituent parts of man, or external sources such as nature, consciousness, the self, the Intellect or other orders established in nomenclatures which take into account the multiple realm of the spirit and the objects which it encounters. Studying these categories remains an excellent means of understanding both what it is appropriate to transform, as well as basis for doing so. However a purely intellectual approach to these categories is worse than ignorance of them, as the Isha Upanishad says:
   «Those devoted to ignorance enter into blind darkness; how much more so those who are devoted to the light».


And the Tao Te Ching:

   «he who devotes himself to study day by day accumulates; he who devotes himself to Tao disposes of things and continues in this way until he reaches non-action».


Some awakened ones transmit a general message and state points in order to invent a method for which they only retain proven, abstract laws without any context. Sometimes texts are deficient on account of their very pretention to universality and at a second reading one often uncovers paternalism, if not outright manipulation. In fact, in certain cultural contexts awakening does not appear as a probability, but as a luxurious religious necessity and the teaching is therefore ponderous. Unpredictable procedures, i.e. exercises and practices, are presented in such a way that we attribute importance to them in themselves, when in fact only their content counts — new insights which break the habits of the self, liberate associations from ideas which have been perpetuated and confirm the abandonment of conventional forms of perception. Ritualism threatens all new spiritual doctrines and replaces the statement of the path as soon as oral transmission is lost. False practice, which is when the self becomes involved in spiritual behaviour without surrendering to the Whole, is more characteristic of teaching which is rich in exercises than others. It has always been easy to recruit followers by putting in place specific procedures and many seekers pass themselves off as teachers because they have invented new forms of inner work.

Some teachers, particularly in Chan and Zen, reduce behavioural innovation to its simplest expression in order to drive disciples into a corner and to prevent them from trusting in the scenarios of the exercises. A koan designed to demonstrate the inability of the spirit to seize the living truth of the dharma of nature (the spirit of the self) is an incomprehensible claim which forces the follower to confront his futile attempts to understand something that is, by definition, beyond all meaning — immersion into the unborn through satori.

Other awakened ones, especially modernUG, published by Les Deux Oc\E9ans and Stephen Jourdain, L'Irr\E9v\E9rence de l'\E9veil, published by Reli\E9, L'Illumination sauvage, published by Dervy ones, challenge the possibility of establishing a vision of the journey which leads to the Self. The forms of witness borne by the latter are more alive and are addressed directly to the heart and feelings, but do not constitute a teaching method. There is no incompatibility between awakened ones who are reluctant to display their skill and teachers devoted to transmission. Therefore, one must be capable of distinguishing between the two — the authenticity of awakening which can manifest itself in any form and the teaching of transmission. There is a rule that suggests that those who have reached mental silence by themselves are unable to transmit it, with teaching being reserved for all of those who achieve awakening by a traditional path. This rule, which is evoked«De l'unit\E9 transcendante des religions» published by GALLIMARD in the «Tradition» series by the excellent Frithjof Shuon, will no longer prevail in the future.

Some contemporary teachers claim to offer initiation to disciples, but is it really that of the Self? We must ask ourselves this question because unprecedented popularization has occurred since the nineteen sixties in the West. A lot of movements claim to be an expression of spiritual knowledge in order to offer numerous techniques of varying degrees of effectiveness whose goal is psychological transformation. Energy transmitted passes through the chakras, and however positive its aspects, it does not replace immersion in the Self. Developing receptivity to energy through procedures is not necessarily a means of getting closer to the Self. In fact, unless one is capable of receiving energy (which exists on several levels) naturally through the chakras then procedures are a sign of a certain degree of dependence and specific agreements, or even contracts. A lot of movements destined to let the follower receive energy easily and almost independently of his spiritual qualities end up by corrupting, or at least reducing, the energy transmittedThis idea would bear further development, but the scope of the present work is the realization of mental silence, its image in the different traditions and the role of the awakened one who becomes the «awakener»..

If one is searching for a radical point of view and a radical path, there is no need to take part in experiments of this sort, which give one a taste for easy transcendence and which often subsequently leave the same traces: the subject will have a tendency to overestimate the benefit of contact with energy in the sphere of awakening which, in reality, is only concerned with consciousness and is neither enhanced nor prejudiced by transmission. In many cases contact with energy creates a sort of dependence, followed by comfort which prevents the self from plunging towards the Self. Increasing the number of methods of achieving awakening is a pragmatic illusion. Contact with energy must be seen for what it is, without amalgamation. Its impact and therapeutic usefulness are a function of time.

The self is not dependent on duration and it is crucial to avoid confusing psychological and therapeutic work (both of which deal with contingent changes) with consciousness linked to the pure present — without memory. Psychology and therapy — even when combined — are not the beginnings of the Self. Awakening reveals a non-contingent identity which adapts to the contingent and transforms it. Hindus have developed this theme better than others with their radical opposition between purusha (conscious witness) and prakriti (nature and its movements). Non-dual consciousness, the Self, is no longer connected to nervous or vital energy as before. It is the mystery of enlightenment in which identity is suddenly different, liberated from opposites and from the impulses of thought, whereas the connections between the self and the body become flexible. One can, therefore, refuse to identify with one's body and simply tolerate it or, by contrast, try to make it a more conscious instrument, which entails physical and sometimes even vital practices, using breathing differently, a change of diet and even a different type of sexuality.

Work on memory, on the mechanisms of perception and on everything which can lighten the burden of our biological and historical identity is welcome in asceticism, but must not be confused with it. A dangerous form of confusion is becoming established these days with the popularization of advanced research into consciousness, whose outcome — mental liberation, the Self — is our concern here. The Self continues to be found by those who devote themselves fully to a non-fragmentary understanding of reality. This concept can be found at every step in all forms of yoga, of which there are many in India, offering different means of accessing Brahman. However, the work to be done is the same in each of the methods offered:



    passing from the unconscious and homogenous amalgamation of the different physical, vital, subtle and mental bodies to a unifying reality which could not take place without a new perspective — which is deeply focused on the inside.

The amalgamation of perceptions (sensations, desires, thoughts, wishes and key ideas) takes place in a form of uncontrollable automatism which is brought to an end by consecration. According to Chan teachers, the eye of dharma comes into being and leads the follower to discover new forms of perception. When thought stops on its own definitively, the spirit is that of Buddha. The Tao Te Ching suggests the same thing through the moderation of desires, complete acknowledgement of Tao which is partly similar to Brahman (Chapter 11) and renunciation of the values of study, thought and social and cultural prestige. Making breathing more conscious is a process described in China, as in most spiritual teachings, but receptivity is praised there in the method of awakening to counterbalance the use of voluntary procedures, however justified they might be.

«Spontaneous attention» is a universal prescription. Irreversible realizations take place through it, which are deeper than intellectual apprehension. Through it desires are seen at their source, the origin of thoughts is discovered and the role of the body is understood. Through it the escape of the spirit into imaginary constructs is identified, appetite is brought into line with physical rather than vital desires and through it also time, which has been wooed or dreaded according to our desires and fears, becomes the raw material for transformation. Through it painful remnants of memory come back to the surface, prompted by an image, place or word, which continuously want to refer the present back to the past. A large part of what is pompously termed meditation is nothing more than a statement of spontaneous attention, which has become mandatory in the body of doctrine.

What remains of the self after enlightenment cannot be represented, because everything is the same as before and yet everything has changed. This quirk of awakening, which only the ancient Zen teachers of Japan stress, offers new perspectives. There is nothing spectacular about the transition to the Self. Everything remains as before, but is held together by an informal, invisible cement which joins everything together. Opposites are joined symmetrically, almost geometrically and therefore opposites no longer split reality — they form it. Even the most disparate objects seem to belong to the same family. Appearance and reality share the same space, falsehood and truth overlap, but this mixture is seen and recognized from the perspective of a unified consciousness — freed of all amalgamations. The connoisseur has emerged. This is no longer the self of the mental person who identified with their name and history. Yet it is still him in all the circumstances in which form, context and environment bring about the persistence of the self separated from the Whole by its body, name, age, sex and individuality;This implacable unity of the contingent self and the solar self, although they are separate, defies intellectual description and recalls the unity of light which is both a wave and a particle, although one can only envisage one of these aspects at any one time..



    Ignorance cannot conceive of knowledge.

Hence a code to define the limits of the mental approach, to denounce erudition and to avoid being caught in the trap of representations — however attractive they might be. The fight still continues today between pure representatives of the school of the self and supporters of mental refinement who suggest simple modifications to the ego accompanied by panoramas on the creation and finality of the world as a complacent formThe archetype of this struggle is the implacable opposition between Lao-Tzu and Confucius, with Confucius seizing the idea of the principle of Order (little Tao) from Lao-Tzu in order to establish a philosophical ritualism which, by definition, prevents even the radical search for wisdom in favour of constant compromises and the simple, reassuring, opportunistic correction of character compulsions. Chan and Zen similarly opposed the drift away from conventional Buddhism in which awakening was forgotten in order to promote moral qualities and philosophical detachment, which are closer to quietism than to the spontaneous detachment brought by satori. Similarly, Hesychasm is the esoteric path of Christianity which the church is not keen to promote, since God features in it as an experience and not as a creator figure. of modus vivendi. At some point or other we must, therefore, chose between reassuring anthropomorphism, which would like to imagine man created in the image of God, and deep, universal maturity, which is similar in all cultures, offered by awakened ones. The Greek, Antisthenes, claimed that we could not create images of the Divine, which is perfectly true, but not very gratifying, and this is in keeping with esotericism in every way. Subtle principles can be discovered in matter, if need be, and this brings us face to face with the notion of numbers, i.e. a muddle. However the Divine has no face and it takes a lot of effort to stop personifying it because our cultural heritage and symbolic thought work together to enable us to imagine the "great watchmaker", for example. The history of our own civilization has preferred to hold onto the pompous inventions of Plato or the prejudices of Aristotle, disguised by his scientific spirit, rather than the strict demands of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Epicurus and many more. Few human beings suffer on account of the limits of semantic perception, but these are the ones passing through the mental plane. The philosophy of the self has never adapted to social values and to very few religious ones, therefore it has been silenced in the West, even to the point of keeping it hidden. However it is very much alive. The Greeks who advocated ataraxia (suspension of thought) were neither courtiers of the city nor socialites — a striking analogy with Eastern awakened ones.

The Tao Te Ching roundly denounces prestige and honours (before Jesus denounced the liturgy and materialism) and like Shakyamuni (Buddha), whom he could have known, its author expounds spiritual detachment in accordance with the lofty Indian vision according to which: The wise does not consider himself to be the author of a work, which means that his activity is in fact an extension of the Whole in a particular form and not purely the expression of his personal will. By contrast, all the philosophies which are hand in glove with the City only defend human causes and end up being hijacked by culture. The search for awakening has never been found in the acknowledgement of human and social values anywhere. Diogenes and Socrates celebrated man stripped of identification with gods or customs and ignorant of the glorifications in which the self seeks apotheosis by its own means — philosophical representations, science or political power.

The mind can try to hijack the self at any time in the name of the intellect, especially in the case of seekers who try to give shape to the intuited Order of the world. The human plane obstructs the background of Tao most of the time and this is in fact my point, since I would now like to offer a deep reflection on the primordial worlds (the Self and the Whole) and the relationships which you have with them. Awakened ones have nearly ways abandoned identification with their own culture, or they have only retained the gems, the texts which establish the potential of consciousness, rather than those which praise a religion, form of politics, or morality, which are all transient.

À tout moment le mental peut essayer de récupérer le moi au nom de l'Intelligence, en particulier chez les chercheurs qui éprouvent de l'exaltation à mettre en forme l'Ordre pressenti du monde. Le plan humain obstrue la plupart du temps l'arrière-plan du Tao, et c'est en réalité là que je voulais en venir, puisque je vous proposerai par la suite une réflexion profonde sur les univers primordiaux (du moi au Tout) et les relations que vous entretenez vous-mêmes avec eux. Les éveillés ont presque toujours abandonné l'identification à leur propre culture, ou ils n'en ont conservé que les joyaux, les textes qui fondent le potentiel de la conscience, et non ceux qui vantent une religion, une politique, une morale — des choses qui passent.

It is presumptuous to draw conclusions from new spiritual experiences concerning their outcome and it is an illusion to want to attribute a role to them in the environment. The status of awakener is not recognized in society with the exception of the shaman who rarely attains the self although he operates largely with values which are forbidden for the vast majority of people. The awakened one sometimes finds his natural place in India, independently of his own value, because many charlatans exploit the tradition to play a gratifying role. Since ancient Greece, no culture has truly been interested in Reality without subjugating it to religion or science, which mutilates its unifying approach by contrasting the heart with reason, which is not only false, but ethically wrong, because awakening could never come to an individual rejecting his intellect in the name of the heartThis is a difficult concept to define. It is a safeguard which refers the non-self back to the self and the intellect to incarnation. The heart enables one to discover the legitimacy of becoming and consecrates incarnation in a plan without end. It likes to reconcile the parts of the self or reconcile the self with the non-self., or vice versa. If we can learn some lessons from the spiritual stages through which we have passed it is that we should not allow ourselves to go any further and to form a mental image of them in order to refer to it excessively, under the pretext that the self is already sufficiently well-initiated to find the next stage itself. This is how the superstructures of ignorance — religions — form, leading to growing confusion between the heart and the spirit, on the pretext that a final direction has been established. Only duration provides material for experience. The truth is purely a convention to isolate evolutionary realizations from the rest. It is simply a symbol.

The true impulses of man are the aspiration of the soul, openness to the discovery of the Whole, deep humility before the mystery of life and the journey of consciousness and circumspection towards ones own self, from which a "renewal of consciousness" will be born when our other — non-biological — birth is sought sincerely. As soon as these real impulses become enslaved to external truths, religious concepts, specific cosmogeneses or even exclusive personal plans, the self is restricted to obeying rather than to adapting. It is constrained to follow specific strategies by sacrificing its true feelings vis-a-vis life, itself and the mystery of the future — wide open to the unknown by virtue of its own indetermination and challenging the complete and irreversible past with its virgin supremacy.

Representations trap the future in final necessities with all those images of goals to be achieved, targets not be missed, mistakes to avoid and triumphs of truth. All this clutters up our feeling for the present with a preconceived idea of what it ought to be and ignorance is thus perpetuated in the name of obligatory change. The greatest reserve is appropriate when stating finalities. If they are used to mask the pure material, the present, then finalities are a trap. On every scale, goals surround the present, reduce it, manipulate it and denature it. Awakening is a prison when it becomes a goal, a terrible paradox which forms the basis of authentic Zen. Emotion, the moon and receptivity accompany the formation of a mental image; the sun accompanies determination, firmness and structuring. Everything which the self experiences in the present moment reveals its true spiritual aspiration and if emotions are transformed in the course of asceticism, then asceticism itself revives them and sometimes causes regression into compulsions, thereby demonstrating the discrepancy between solar aspiration and factual experience — with a view to future integration. Realizations therefore take place. The tools of awakening are numerous and effective by virtue of their newness. Once they have been mastered they become dangerous.

Only the insightsdeep, spontaneous realizations which are not the fruit of reasoning, but the sudden emergence of a vision which frees us from the ancient structures of thought, behaviours and reactions etc. The term intuition is frequently equivalent to it, but insight is often sudden, unexpected and occasionally painful when it destroys cherished illusions or points out a false position. Vanity prevents insight from manifesting itself because it never acts on behalf of the ego. It is a breach in the narcissisistic order of the self. It brings a more accurate positioning. which stem from them have any value and they generally demonstrate hitherto unconscious mechanisms, fears, desires which were too fixed and various attachments. Insights enable us to transform the image of the self and to strip it back because they promote better relations between the foundations of our being, soul, mind, self, vital self and physical self. However, experience must prevail over the fruit, or the self will reach its ceiling and imprison itself by choosing tailor-made confinement.


10 Meditation on the spirit of the novice


We cannot reproduce a formula which was successful in the past. Remaining vulnerable gives us the appropriate sensitivity to abandon outdated strategies and false innovations, while constantly exploring emotional impulses without any locking mechanism. In the very suspension of a directed impulse lies the form of contact which offers the least resistance to the immobile Self, as is stipulated on several occasions by the Tao Te Ching. The question Who am I?, which Ramana Maharsi used to present as the gateway to awakeningSee the absolute masterpiece on initiation to Indian culture : "A Search in Secret India" by Paul Brunton., can only be properly asked if the self has just abandoned its plan of living on through its goals, ambitions and beliefs.

Although the Self is at odds with the entire universe which precedes it, its perception is not the ultimate reality, but a huge haven which it is necessary to reach in order to be truly free. This freedom will continue to develop in directions which are specific to the seeker, who can use the Self as a vessel for supramental power since Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), as long as he does not become attached to what it brings and passionately aspires to establish the spiritual status of the incarnation.

Such a beautiful fulfilment of the Self is all too rarely encountered, because it is often evoked in a way which preserves the archaisms of the tradition which describes it with inappropriate terminology and some people turn away from it because they have received a false or partial image of it, or even one which does not suit them. It would seem that apart from exceptional cases which are exempted, contact with an awakened one is always useful for the seeker, but this perspective does not in fact make the issue any easier — although it legitimizes the status of the spiritual teacher. Many people who consider themselves to be teachers have not assimilated the spiritual truths which animate them and are, therefore, useless. The Self cannot be approached more easily via Zen, Chan, Taoism, Buddhism or even the flexibility of Hinduism. These movements are difficult to understand, but they are necessary phases, since coming closer to the Self is very rarely mentioned in the Western world and even more infrequently transmitted. The belief that the Christ's message abolishes the need for this fulfilment stems from the arrogance peculiar to Roman emperors who hijacked the Church, from European jingoism and from an ancient Judeo-Christian inability to free itself from overwhelming divine dogma. If the legacy of Greece and Hellenic Christianity had not been buried for so long or chosen so selectively, then perhaps we would have a Western tradition of the Self, but this is not the case. The modern seeker is, therefore, forced to acquaint himself, admittedly with some difficulty, with Eastern arts dedicated to the Tao, often represented by concepts which are lost in translation.

There has always been a large degree of semantic corruption in the specialist terminology used to represent transcendent states. This corruption is largely responsible for the ineffectiveness of traditional teaching, whose key words are falsely interpreted. It is preferable to dispense with jargon, despite the beauty of the Sanskrit and the original roots peculiar to the traditions of awakening, than to use it incorrectly. To describe the Self as the Void strikes a chord with all those who are familiar with the Buddhist tradition and do not mistake this void for simple nothingness, or for the opposite of fullness. However, this is an impossible approach for modern man as this term never refers to any metaphysical context whatsoever for him. The same is true for Hindu concepts. The affinity of the West for action prevents it from understanding the meaning of karma, which is neither laudatory nor pejorative and is dependent on dharma with which it interlocks to all intents and purposes. To bandy these terms about unless one has achieved realisation oneself is obscene, naive or proud — common attitudes in the current era, which is troubled and steeped in imaginary futures, be they catastrophic or divine. A large proportion of the disrepute hanging over spirituality and blocking the path to it for simple, sincere people comes from the abuse of traditional concepts by those greedy for power, who are empirical or just naive and superficial and shamelessly appropriate transformative tools in order to test them at random.


    Words belong to everybody and it is easy to appropriate them.
This is why I am warning you against symbolic thought, which is in reality archaic and seeks maternal security and the feeling of paternal authority in representations transposed into a context which will enable one to feel taken care of by a group, school or philosophy. This is the complete opposite of the true process advocated by Shakyamuni and Lao-Tzu and then by Chan or Zen masters, who did not rely on anything in order to move forward and certainly not on presuppositions which were reassuring, soporific, atrophying and brought the here and now to completion in some sort of salvation. The intellectual approach is only liberating if the meaning of the terms used is verified experimentally, and this is rarely the case. Importing sacred terminology only succeeds in confusing the issue and the same signifiers can have several meanings. There are many paradoxes which can lead even the expert astray. Nobody views "Buddha" from the same perspective in Buddhist schools or in the transmission of Zen, just as the theory of reincarnation has widely differing meanings according to the tradition. The term Tao is reduced to the notion of simple natural balance in all the Chinese movements which reject enlightenment as a pointless extravagance and this is a theme encountered in men of letters and Confucians throughout the ages.



    The mind loves to hijack what can strike it down.


In the past, contact with teachers used to promote understanding of transcendental terms, as they are the only ones able to use them correctly. These "metaphysical" terms are not actually so abstract since, at the end of the day, they refer, for the most part, to states of consciousness or to probable insights, true realization of the internal and external obstacles to be overcome. The map is not separate from the territory in the best Sanskrit, which describes wisdom, unity, compassion, discrimination, unifying contemplation, resorption, etc. In reality, these visions have no contours and are feelings, which awakened ones experience naturally and which offer the self after consciousness of satori profound variations on the feeling of union with the Tao. Masters generally recognize the features of non-mental states in earlier texts, having experienced them themselves and, therefore, establish their permanence rather than their transmission. Intellectual appropriation of doctrinal concepts is, more often than not, illusory, not to say dangerous. It is absurd to force oneself to feel compassion. A feeling does indeed exist after awakening which spontaneously reveals the burden of man's ignorance and how this is responsible for material and spiritual poverty. However, it is spontaneous and causes the heart to expand while leaving the spirit detached. It is pointless to attempt to have this experience before satori, or to confuse it with any sort of virtue. This kind of detour inclines one to end up imagining that spiritual life is about learning qualities, when it actually consists, on the contrary, of rejecting all forms of complacency vis-a-vis oneself, which are easily fuelled by one's plan to become a better person. "Becoming a better person" never stopped one from thinking. This would be "better" from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, a form of "better" steeped in duality, liable to demonize, condemn and forbid. This would be the "better" of thought, which we know to be bad (separative). It would, therefore, be worse.

Teachers used to check whether practice conformed to principles, corrected errors, demonstrated correct movements and encouraged seekers. Notions which are felt as spontaneous, deep and sensitive are sufficient. Others are the basis of falsely constructed approaches and judgements. Many seekers encumber themselves with things that they have not understood, no doubt to reassure themselves rather than to move forward one step at the time, albeit steadily, using only the truths which they have tested. Therefore, awakened ones, contrary to the widespread opinion which discredits them, do not try to force the hand of those who consider themselves to be their disciples. True teachers ascertain that their transmission does not remain in the minds of those who listen to them, and even if they can enjoin certain forms of behaviour or establish certain rules, they require the free consent of seekers to what they are offering, rather than their obedience. In a sense, teachers check the quality of spontaneous attention — its detours, weaknesses and what can still frustrate it. At least this is how the best teachers act, who are detached from the fruit of their labours and do not strive after results from their disciples. Follow-up allows for maintenance work on inner concerns, punctuated by virtual arbitration by the teacher.

This fulfilment of the self is not mentioned much in Christianity and is even pushed to one side, but it would seem that Jews and Sufis posses certain accounts of it and prescriptions. We must recognize the spiritual value of the East in order to approach the Self without turning it into a new Western challenge. Hence the need to repeat to the European soul that its determination, inventiveness and will are tools which are ill-suited to the search for the Uncreated, because it will never submit to human strategies in order to surrender and manifest itself. Feminine qualities are essential in this quest in which everything must first and foremost be accepted and then only later rejected or retained. Making fundamental ignorance disappear, on the pretext that we are destined to free ourselves from it in a sort of sensuous will to conquer the truth, leads to failure. This is a Western approach which is too positive and which underestimates the enemy in order to have greater trust in the outcome of the battle. The East takes the opposite approach. The Chinese are not humiliated by difficulties. They will derive so much satisfaction from each small sign of progress, that each step will allow them to go further and to conquer without any plans or strategy, without having to form a mental picture of success or failure. Hindus underestimate themselves either in order to avoid undertaking anything, or to surrender their lives to the Divine. These two mentalities which have experienced the self the most for thousands of years do not have the positive a priori assumption of (new) activity which has been a feature of the Western mentality for over four centuries. Therefore, it is difficult to import to the West the vision of the fulfilment of the Self stemming from civilizations with a cyclical, circular view of time, which might be considered archaic because they reject History and progress. In terms of trying to situate the issue in the context of its relationship with contemporary culture, it was Ren\E9 Guenon who first found a simple and profound vision of the status of awakening. It is impossible to pass over it in silence without remaining indifferent, by the same token, to the introduction of genuine, traditional Eastern elements into our spiritual world. The attributes of the Self which are the most difficult to understand in the Western world were first addressed by Guenon, who established the generic term of impersonal consciousness to describe the Self liberated from thought and its dualities and in full possession of itself. He then defended this fulfilment by always stating that it was of a purely spiritual order and, therefore, did not require any recognition of "spiritual hierarchies" deemed to guide humanity on the basis of celestial plans.

The occult, the use of mediums, recourse to messages from disembodied teachers are totally pointless in the quest for the self, which requires simple methods without any embellishments. Impersonal identity, so dear to Vedantans, rejoices in all history and every situation without fascination or envy. Similarly, it is dangerous to confuse psychological and therapeutic work with complete spiritual opening, which requires us to let go totally and surrender all our usual values — it is pointless to rely on external revelations when we feels the call of the Self. All information is useful or useless, debateable or deeply felt, but it is difficult to establish a hierarchy for all that we hear. To establish a system is to return to the mistake which we left behind, by cutting time up into preconceived pieces again — full moments and all the rest. Somebody who is in possession of the self ensures that all events and moments are full of the same indeterminate richness, the same incorporeal flavour and the same immensity. Having a preconceived idea of what things will bring and trying to pre-programme events before experiencing them is a form of deception. A meditation can turn out badly, as it were, reveal something which we did not want to see and be affected by it. Likewise, a sudden inspiration can take place in an unexpected context and time.

The natural spirit remains healthy through practice, at the risk of creating a spiritual ego — the persona of the seeker. This concept is addressed in the Hua Hu Ching attributed to Lao-Tzu, a work transmitted orally which has been largely lost. The illusion of determining the path of awakening is denounced:

«Simply characterizing what leads to the goal is sufficient for it to become an obstacle.» . This assertion can be found throughout Chan, formulated in different ways by teachers who combined the message of Shakyamuni with the soul of China, such as Bodhidharma, Tao-Sin, Lin-Tsi (Rinzai) and yet neither the author of the Tao-Te Ching nor the Chan or Zen patriarchs forbade the practice of meditation. We do not know which sacred texts preceded Lao-Tzu in China apart from the pragmatic I Ching, but Buddhist teachers of Awakening based themselves on a few sutras. No one has, therefore, ever been able to state what place the canonical frame of reference and exercises really occupied in relation to the aspiration of the future awakened one. Similarly, no teachers will recommend that the same proportions be followed between "closing one's eyes" and its complementary opposite "opening one's eyes". This is a very personal balance and it is up to each seeker to determine it himself. It is not impossible for some people to evolve by nearly always keeping their eyes open, if their ability to interiorize is perfect, quick and clear. Others are continuously forced to refer back to themselves, as contact with the non-self disperses them excessively, either making them forget asceticism, or causing them problems with interpretation. The emotional core can only purify itself by returning to opening with the non-self (keeping one's eyes open). Paths which advocate the superiority of "closed eyes" and therefore praise interiorization as the panacea, always end up by offering a truncated spiritual vision in which the world, incarnation and life are devalued. The "spirit of the novice" is praised by Zen teachers who know the extent to which Zazen is dangerous if it becomes a habit, furrow or rut. The very notion of know-how which can brought to completion does not correspond to the uninterrupted movement of inter-related universes. All things interpenetrate each other. A system comes to a close when it has achieved perfection, just as a perfect curve becomes a circle if it keeps the same proportions as it evolves. A philosopher becomes pernicious when he masters his "vision of the world", just as an awakened assumes the wrong role when he proclaims in the name of his own path that all other paths are more questionable. Disorder complements order, in the same way as any homogeneous whole passes through heterogeneous phases which preserve it when it is under threat (pathologies). Perfect consciousness is dead consciousness. Completion and perfection are impossible. Certain Hindu texts mention that "the gods themselves" must liberate themselves from the mind in order to possess Brahman, which is a clear indication of the genuinely sovereign and powerful status of this realizationQuoted by Alain Dani\E9lou in «Yoga, m\E9thode de r\E9int\E9gration», published by ARCHE, 1951. This image of sovereignty is wonderfully appropriate to the experience whereby the self recognizes itself as a witness to all its perceptions, rather than as an active and volitional subject, steeped in greed for the future and with the determination to mould it.

A few Westerners in our times have travelled, experienced this and have returned to pass on this mystery. They are not well-known. Therefore, we have to put up with all these countless approaches to the self which stem from any old direction and describe something which resists description, whose symbols and approach do not reveal its morphology, merely one corner of its surface. Viewed in this light, the role of revelations is small since they often hide the mystery which is already dense by implying that an approach will penetrate it, when it is actually a case of working in order to feel oneself surrounded by the Whole. The last "gods" or alleged instructors have been hijacked by culture. They wanted to establish the verticality of man and we were left with the impression that they turned heaven into a standard to rally around in order to justify the flight of the Earth. The so-called revealed approach is an image. The love of Christ was not experienced on a large scale because it did not lie beyond feelings — one of the difficult layers to cross to discover unfounded feeling, the absolute feeling celebrated by mystics. Presenting Shakyamuni's stance as a revelation did not add anything to his teaching and even corrupted it by transforming the wise man who conquered appearances into a divinity (Buddha). Indian Brahmans slumbered in the security of having an answer for everything and ended up by confusing religious rules with spiritual practice which uproots false roots, because they stayed so attached to their wonderful collections of gods, dogmas and paths, as if they were the very memory of the Infinite and the Absolute to be preserved untouched. The failure of spirituality stems from amalgamations which the spirit forms between emotions, feelings, thoughts and Ideas. These amalgamations are ordered in various ways, i.e. they are homogeneous and capable of deceiving and they resist mechanical meditations, applied imitations and weak spiritual intentions.



    According to the Tao Te Ching,
«Disentangling the inextricable.

is the same as originating in oneself all the impulses which make us conjugate "I", the self, in a particular way. The Self, I AM, is, strictly speaking, the first conscious end result of forces which combine within us and mix the spheres of influence of the senses and thoughts. In reality, this liberating end result does not exert any control over thought because the very intention of control is no longer appropriate. Duality has collapsed. This should be emphasized because the term mastery is misunderstood by the Western soul, which is possessive, enterprising, determined and attached to the passage of time. In reality, mastery is a natural agreement between the self and the non-self, which does not require much of a struggle. Vigilance is nevertheless called for, proportionate to the aspiration to awakening which is still unknown, such as a firm inner process rather than constraint to follow disciplines. This process which the patriarch Tao Sin, the successor to the three first founders of Chan, called "retaining unity without deviation", once more curbs the tendency to use "stratagems" to achieve awakening, of the type which evolved naturally in monasteries to fill out the monks' timetable. The resistance of the great teachers (Patriarchs) of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism to techniques which were supposed to lead to awakening enabled Buddhism to survive in an esoteric form, whereas as it is hard to tell the overall religious movement apart from pure ritual psychology.

If the statement that man is all suffering and ignorance offers the seeker a brutal realization — an upheaval and a starting point — this statement is, by contrast, just a definition without any great impact, an a priori assumption or a terrifying, inexplicable truth for the individual who is happy with his existence and does not foresee the need to transform his perception.

> Revealing one's hidden genesis offers the seeker a motive for attaining the light, but the means available are a double-edged sword. They still depend on the spirit which is troubled by traces of its physical genesis, yet they already share in the clarity and purity called for. Only awakening can separate the pure from the impure.




11 Thoughts on the limitations of spiritual teachings

Doctrinal models are general and do not adapt well to specific cases unless they are totally pure and universal. Examples cannot be followed because nobody should follow the same path as anybody else, and yet they all propagate something, not because those who embody them watch over our paths or signpost them for us, but simply because they lend permanence to our own questioning and provide answers to our questions. Profound intuitions can emerge from this confrontation and these exchanges. Therefore, we must always understand the intention behind something which is said, because the intention is in fact the true context.

An awakened one who claims to show you the path is offering his services, his assistance. The individual who assures you that he cannot help you because no path exists, does not really want to look after anybody. However, the person who shows you the path is sometimes able to do a lot less than you thought and the person who does not want to reveal anything might in fact be doing a lot for you. Whereas each individual defends their own freedom with unfailing fierceness, nobody really accepts another person's freedom when it upsets his own plans. Relationships are woven out of a tangled web of misunderstandings. The dominant pattern of the mind lies in appropriating the other person and this is perpetuated in couples and across generations, with children having to conform to their parents and archaic authority still prevailing in all forms of family and sometimes in social relationships. Some awakened ones refuse to be teachers in order to avoid being objects of worship, fathers or life preservers. However, witness must continue in order to shed light on the many rumours about what awakening is, what it enables us to obtain and, finally, on its "usefulness". If we have to prune back constantly in order to reach it, then awakened ones have certain qualities in common. It is likely that they have all surrendered countless representations of things and of themselves — without surrendering understanding and love.

Awakening will never descend on somebody who demands that something conform to him and he must, therefore, free himself from inherited patterns of conformity which subjugate him to his culture, religion, in short to his tribe, in sociological terms. He is also fighting against his own demands produced by his personal and specific strain of will. Veils must be torn and, with all due respect to certain people, subjectivity in all its compulsive (i.e. non-creative) aspects must be demolished, dissolved and assassinated. The impersonal then manifests itself, detached, boundless and transparent, in complicity with all things. The spirit must be free of projections, the will must be free of envy and the body itself must avoid sensual excess or become weary of it. If there were not certain conditions to be met, then there would be more awakened ones and teachers would not emphasizes the constraints.



    Bearing witness to the self is mainly naming what prevents it from manifesting itself, in order to avoid false trails.

The real trails are within you. This need to make other people conform with oneself, to believe that the universe is how we imagine it to be, constitutes the most obscure root of our perception. We want to see things in a way that suits us, we invent God according to our whim, or we cancel him out according to our fantasies, without ever daring to raise the problem of his existence independently of what He represents for us. Religion offers psychological acquisitions, secure investments, but in fact the Divine does not ask to be venerated or even to be known. Those who would really like "God" to exist are believers, and those for whom it is convenient that He does not exist are unbelievers. The same principle applies to awakening — those who are not interested in it are prepared to swear that it is impossible and those who seek it believe that they will soon stumble across it, just because they assumed that it existed. These big concepts — enlightenment, God — are in fact just hypotheses until one has sampled them, and to give them substance is a strategy which I would venture to call totally foolish. I am not alone. The Chinese tradition's choice of first paragraph for the Tao Te Ching is not random: " The Tao that can be named is not the unchanging Tao". This corresponds to the whole of spiritual transmission of the self, wherever else one might find it. The Divine beyond dharmas cannot be conceptualized and the Gita, therefore, invites Hindus to abandon images of God. Chan and Zen do not dwell on describing the nature of the unborn, but always come back to the possibility of experiencing Awakening, once links with the past have been severed. Heraclitus, Diogenes and Socrates rejected cosmic representations, because they had already passed beyond them.

Thought tries to name the non-mental reality of the Self, on the pretext of qualifying it or locating it. Any name which is attributed to it can only represent a minute part of it, in the same way as having somebody's business card does not mean that we already know them. Nothing that you can be told about somebody can replace actually meeting them.

The more awakening which we glimpse assumes forms, the more this ghost falsely determines the self and leads us mistakenly to believe that we already know its shape and that we can lure it like a fish — by perfecting our bait. The more this scarcely intuited "God" becomes a personal fantasy, the more it hides the Divine, which will no longer be able to take the place of this growing inner image which conforms to the subject's imagination and is connected to his will. As far as I know, there is only the self which frees us from false ideas of God, and that is why I recommend it to pure mystics, and it also frees us from false ideas about ourselves, which is why I recommend it to all those who are suffering because they are no more than what they are. Because it brings things together, it is a reality which must always look at itself from two different points of view,
what it gives to the self having stripped it of everything,
and what it grants in the way of immediate perception of external reality.

Do not imprison yourselves in a search which presents the self purely as personal gain, which the term liberation might imply, nor in a search which is described simply as new support for external (cosmic) experience, which would leave the self more or less the same and miraculously connected to the Whole. These are both lies, incomplete strategies. We cannot distinguish between what the self brings to oneselfor what remains of it from what it brings in the new perception of the Whole, other people and life. It has made the self and what it feels about the world homogeneous. Inter-relationships between the internal and the external have changed. We must refer back to this basis because teachings present it either in relation to oneself, or in relation to the Whole and we could commit to a false vision.

On this point, I would like to pay tribute to Zen (a path which I normally criticize constantly) because this approach outlaws the existence of subtle beliefs and does not encourage any representations of awakening: all mental imagery could distract from it. Teachers who share my views cannot help but smile at awakened ones who strive to blaze a trail which will unfortunately promote higher projections onto the truth. The strength of Zen's system lies in relying on nothing. However, it also has many weakness, with its stripping back which does not always correspond either to life itself, to the richness of man, or to the order of the universe. Its economy can sometimes seem miserly if one likes to indulge in evolutionary ecstasies and to embrace the rehabilitation of man with open arms — which requires us to recognize a creative Intelligence which is absent from the system. All presuppositions have been sacrificed to the emergence of the non-mental, which sometimes appears to be a conventional and doctrinaire lack of trust in the qualities of intelligence in the strict sense of the word, which dominates the self and animates the mind deeply before projections.

It would be wrong to think that this criticism is aimed at the movement itself. Past teachers are not all of equal merit and although they all claimed to follow Bodhidharma and Shakyamuni, there is no true consensus in doctrinal Zen. Some teachers offer more forms of practice than others, and if we look closely we can see a dispute among their followers which is equivalent to that between Buddhists and Hindus on ultimate reality. Does one retain one's individuality in the self or not? This is an insoluble problem which divides the clans and causes much condemnation. Many teachers who have lost conscious use of their bodies after satori claim that the self is based in the Whole, that the drop of water returns to the ocean and, in short, that there is nothing left except a mystery perceiving the mystery without oneself or I to conjugate the verbs. However, other teachers retain the use of their bodies and strive to do so, developing consciousness of the hara in order to be more actively involved with the Earth, whether or not they claim that a soul deep within them constitutes an individual. The drop of water has returned to the ocean, but it remains a drop and does all it can to stay that way.

Today it seems that only a transformation in the earth's atmosphere could put an end to this eternal controversy. If Sri Aurobindo is right and his prophecy fulfilled, then awakened ones will bring themselves into line with the plan for the divine transformation of the earth and will remain drops. The powerful supramental vibration will prevent possessors of the self from forgetting themselves in samadhi.

For the time being, we are not criticizing paths in their historic manifestations, but in their doctrinal flaws, which stem either from the limited experience of teachers or from their persistence in wanting to transmit their teaching in forms which allow the mind to hijack what is essential to preserve its territory. Spiritual teaching permanently dismisses the mind's prerogatives and only encourages pure understanding of progress to be obtained, while establishing the means of verifying it, without fantasy or complacency. As soon as something becomes a panacea or a magic formula to achieve something, then the balance is lost. Meditation is the master key to Buddhism, just as Zazen is for Zen, or contemplation in a spirit of veneration is for Hinduism.

Nevertheless, like all the great paths, Zen is still helpful by virtue of its deep consistency and takes us a long way in order to bring us back as closely as possible, distracted from coarse and subtle illusions — at the expense of embracing everything. Therefore, we must come back to the needs of each individual, acknowledge that paths cannot be compared, despite their common aim, and be wary of their limitations. It is a waste of time to believe in the superiority of one system or another. Depending on one's point of view, Hinduism, Zen, Chan, the Taoism of the three Fathers or Hesychasm is superior. It is not my intention to list the superiority of each particular variety in its own sphere, as this study would then become more of an anthropological investigation of the sacred than an exhortation to return to the Self and I may still be incapable of it, as I lack learning in Eastern paths. My role is to praise the Great Homogeneity (Tao), where awakened ones of all races and times have sought refuge.

Nobody can know all the movements which are based around the experience of the Self, arrange them in a hierarchy, discover their changes or even define for each individual exactly what each one yields and what is missing from the others. They correspond to historic necessities by virtue of their emergence and then they are corrupted by interpretation until their very essence, their rasa, the perfume which they give off and transmit disappears like a vibration of clarity in an almost underground world. We recall all the traps laid for the new truth — the notion of being forbidden or obligatory which has been deceptively rebuilt around the vulnerable manifestation of the Word, which is free for all eternity to possess a man, while running the risk that its footsteps will be venerated, its words mummified, its example faked, and its message misrepresented. Pandits and Brahmans in India, those professionals of all that is sacred, have been allowing Scriptures to become mired in ritualism and formalism for three thousand years in the name of an illusion of life and predestination, whereas a few awakened ones rescue each century from disaster through experience and the tradition of the self, whose myth is more intoxicating than reality. The words of Buddha appear in Sanskrit and are swallowed up by India with its tradition of veneration, appropriating them like a diamond to add to its collection and then filling them with the hair-splitting tendency of the mind and a healthy dose of idolatry. Countless quarrels over the pre-eminence of the prophets and the real name of God, with their three principal contenders in Judaism, divide the different tribes. The amalgamation of Confucianism and Taoism enables one to discern a common vision between the founding fathers (Li-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu and Lao-Tzu) and Confucius, which is completely false and corrupts the breakthrough to awakening. The incredible professionalism of Muslim clergy, which nearly compromised Islam and sullied it with fratricidal struggles between the highest authorities, is a naturally recurring fact, since Islam and politics have had close and highly dubious links since their origins. The ridiculous repeated councils of the church of Rome agreed to fight over words, divide Christians and produce a homogeneous surface for mystery in a quarrel between soulless rivals, pushing the gospel of love into the background, using the legacy of the fear of God which is a feature of Judaism to dominate the masses. Its exuberant and pompous liturgy is clearly designed to impress and to make the sinner feel inferior. One can never repeat too often that the collusion between the Church and the Roman empire under Constantine condemned the West to metaphysical scorn and superstition.

Revelations have been gone over with the fine-tooth comb of darkness and have returned to it, just as a flower will eventually wither. On every occasion, mental representations of the goal, salvation and the path have pointed to false trails, which are easy to follow, but illusory. On every occasion, the difficulties were stated loudly and clearly in order to lead to a complete upheaval of the self. On every occasion, this initial upheaval was deferred, then replaced by insipid promises of rescue, access to wisdom and purely imaginary complicity with the divine. On every occasion, adverse hidden forces have corrupted these movements, doubtless more so in the Judeo-Christian world, but these things have not yet been revealed.

Therefore, the truths which the self can discover within itself can help it to root out external truths, whereas the opposite is more debatable. Spiritual teachers are indeed those who encourages their disciples to look within themselves and not to obey them without understanding. There is, therefore, no need to get rid of them. They will simply change their way of bearing witness, by increasingly reducing their authority. The self appeals to the seeker who is weary of explanations, dissatisfied with the causes of human ignorance which are always the same and who leans towards the light without the pretention of reaching it. The past can only be a model in the rare moments when permanence reveals itself, entirely pure and informal, above all forms of bias, sects, specific religions and movements in the strict sense of the word.

The procedure of opening one's eyes, of experiencing the non-self deeply, examining it and reconnecting with it can only take place on solid foundations: first and foremost by knowing how to close one's eyes in the as yet fragile and mysterious acknowledgement of a birth other than that from our human mother — an inner birth. That is to say, we must recognize ourselves as a consciousness searching for its own authority — the seed of a new being.


12 A positioning exercise vis-a-vis primitive fields

The awakened one can increase his awareness of the place of the external world in traditional pictures, since this is extremely variable and because it is useful to understand how they promote or devalue broad categories such as the Whole, the self, the body and the human. The four main planes \A8C the relationships between the self and the self (identity), the self and the body, the self and others and the self and the Whole are never expressed in the same way in the major forms of spiritual teaching. The proportions vary. The body is sometimes placed in the category of the self and sometimes in that of the non-self, which complicates matters and makes certain doctrines irreconcilable. Feeling and emotion belong to the self by virtue of their processes and to the non-self by virtue of their objects. This would all be quite amusing were it not for the contempt which eventually characterizes the categories out of the four which were skirted around somewhat at the outset, when doctrines have become marked by successive centuries. All that remains are a few deep, caricatured furrows and the nuances will have disappeared. Hence the problem of knowing whether a spiritual allegiance facilitates a holistic transformation or, on the contrary, just a single specialization, which would make it suspect. Bad teaching methods dissect reality like a corpse and end up by pushing you in one direction to prevent you from going in another, in a so-called initiatory path, to make the cost of the journey seem more palatable. These coercions are ordered in the name of the Truth.

However, in reality, none of the elements referred to here as primitive fields is separate from the others and they are even blended into a sort of unconscious homogeneous end result. Few people consciously position themselves


A/ vis-a-vis themselves and their requirements
B/ vis-a-vis the body
C/ vis-a-vis other people (what we are entitled to expected from them, be they close or more distant) and from the cultural field.
D/ vis-a-vis the Whole (Do we experience it as an authority, a spatio-temporal universe, a sum of consciousnesses, an origin, a father, a mother, an adversary, a form of immersion, an Intelligence, a chaos or a mystery? etc.)

Positioning vis-a-vis the body is unconscious or changing and is often neglected in our culture. The body is often even confused with the self, since it is true that its events can affect the mind and the personality and the opposite is equally true.


    These primitive fields are interwoven.


Positioning vis-a-vis one can have repercussions on the others, hence the necessity for traditional arts, such as meditation, which enable the spirit to ruminate in order to digest its perceptions again; questions are thus managed immediately and do not degenerate into conflicts. Everything which happens to the self alone, to the body alone, solely in the framework of relationships or in fusion and mingling with the Whole contaminates other sectors by natural means, because a person is homogeneous. Symbolic thought carries out amalgamations. A bad relationship with another person — a parent, child or partner — can bring about a corrupt economy vis-a-vis the Whole (authority/security), give rise to a poor self-image or to compensatory physical neglect. You must learn to meditate on these considerations which will become operative and which one finds in traditional and holistic medicine, which constantly explore the problem of \A1\B0connected vessels\A1\B1 between the self and the non-self \A8C vessels whose valves are often riddled with unconscious processes. You can become more attentive to each of these fundamental universes, which allows us constantly to clear out the emotions and to have immediate awareness in all sectors of new information.

Conflict, for example merely means that the homogeneity of primitive fields must be stretched taut to be maintained, but it persists. This serves as a warning to demonstrate the limitations of elasticity between the fields. Making conflicts disappear does away with permanent exchanges between the self and primitive fields. Conflict must be resolved not repressed. If negative experience in one field contaminates the others then the opposite must also be true: what affects one single field in evolutionary terms must contribute to the evolution of the others, by the same process of contamination. If the self resolves conflictthis thesis, resurrected by Dr Hammer in his highly controversial approach to cancer, seems to be corroborated by other approaches and practitioners and is frequently described in traditional forms of medicine where disease takes on the role of expelling subtle waste when the self is unable to adapt to a traumatic event (shock). Research continues and is being qualified., then the disease which it caused purifies the physical (and astral) body and leaves no trace. By developing spontaneous attention and permanent awareness of the self and its reactions, the homogeneous self evolves continuously and avoids crises, or weathers them without fear as natural necessities. The self is homogeneous despite its division into body, vitality, universal mind and individual self. Everything joins up and organizes itself. Spiritual paths rarely address the fundamental universes of perception with equal rigour. Progress can be made in different orders. Some paths tackle the contingent self first and offer to do the groundwork on factual events which are always hand in glove with emotions, which are in turn riddled with affective dependencies (priority fields B and C).

Some paths require a transformation of our image of the world as a prerequisite and force us to discover a more objective representation of cosmic laws (priority field D). Some require a profound reassessment of our self-image and quickly open the way to the self if they convey how we can change our self-image which intervenes between the self and what it thinks of itself in order to keep it the way it is (priority field A). Some subordinate other fields to work on the physical and are, therefore, more concrete paths (Hatha yoga, reintegration by the union of the sun and moon, traditional Tai Chi and Chi Kung) (priority field B).

Others, finally, bypass definitions of obstacles in order to celebrate sowing the seeds of the Self, virtually \A8C passing over individual genesis to consecrate transcendence independently of any appraisal and of the genesis of the self. This is the pure solar path, which systematically transforms difficulties into tools for evolution by working on all axes at once. The will to universal consciousness can virtually carry out the transformation work alone. This path can only become established in the future when increased vibrations in the atmosphere will make solar intuitions more effective and the need to connect with the Whole will be more natural and pressing.

For the time being, this sort of cleaning process is essential because all seekers are confronted with following the stages of their psychological transformation closely, streamlining former patterns in behaviour, relationships and representation (values) \A8C while keeping a critical eye on their self-image, which can be usurping and narcissistic or demeaning.

Zen attacks the self head-on — it is pointless to have an image of the world or even to want to correct it. Taoism attacks the image of the world — it is pointless to state the case for asceticism to somebody who is happy with their existential picture and who does not already want to show an interest in the original mystery, Tao. True Christianity used to tackle the image of the other and the archaic imago of the jealous and formidable Jewish God, in order to bring the self to itself by forbidding it from demeaning what seemed to be foreign to it. Buddha tackled the relationship between the self and the world head-on by calling it suffering-ignorance, without worrying in the least about the shadowy image of the Whole. He then situated suffering in relationships in the self itself and not in its object, in order totally to destroy any identification between the subject and his environment and his psychological policies. It is a masterpiece. Hinduism combines the forms of attack and raises entire armies to overcome the slightest little adversary. It is weighed down by scruples, hates all form of innovation, splits hairs and then puts them back together and trusts rules blindly. It ritualizes all movements at the risk of paralysing them. Nevertheless, it trusts any aspect of man if it can erected into a means of knowledge and even the mind has an illustrious history because jnana yoga transforms it not by fighting it, but, on the contrary, by glorifying it. The self is venerated as the remains of higher states of consciousness which are mistaken for the Divine. All paths end up being coloured by a haze of religiosity, as the memory of transcendence glosses every path which would claim to be free with its silvery sheen \A8C and in any case all forms of emancipation end up in the arms of God.

When the issue lies is juggling with fundamental colours, those great invariants which contain everything (the self/self circuit, the self/body circuit, the self/other circuit and the self /Whole circuit) and changing their feedback so that something else emerges, we always wonder not only how to proceed, but whether there is a valid reason for differentiating between them, given that the individual works continuously to rebuild a sort of overall vision of itself, its body, its human relationships and its global position. On reflection, however, it seems clear today that these universes have separate and interdependent jurisdictions, as was stated by Sri Aurobindo in his Synthesis of Yoga, and was eventually discovered and established in the same era by the inventors of modern psychology. Disease is often caused by a crisis of identity and the conflict of separation occupies a prominent position among the possible sources of turbulence, which refers us back to the indivisibility of the universe and the repercussions in specific fields of what happens in other fieldsthe movement of a symptom in Chinese medicine and in the discoveries of Dr Hammer regarding cancer.. .

When the traditions raise the notion of imbalance, it is between the fundamental components of existence whose number can vary according to the optic envisaged. The Tao Te Ching opens up one perspective after another, which never close with a formula, a precise finality or even with injunctions. This is because its author was well aware that primitive fields bounce off each other and that all that is required is to mention the Tao for the self to seize hold of it, or to talk about the self to position it at the heart of Tao in a constant to-and-fro motion. Therefore, the work does not favour fusion with the Tao to the detriment of deep experience of the self, which means that this doctrine belongs to that category of testimony in which the awakened one remains a drop, even though he has joined the oceanone can testify to non-action, i.e. set an example which some people reject as a compromise or as a suspect interest for the manifested one (Chuang Tzu). However, testifying to non-activity is in keeping with the Gita: yoga is a skill in his works, which fixes the self securely and permanently to the manifestation and its transmission is a duty, necessity, or an extension of the principle itself (revelation through the avatar)., although the experience of dissolving is also described. These days some awakened ones still represent the drop which joins the ocean and is lost in it. They will never speak my language or that of Sri Aurobindo. Their views are often more tempting and pompous and the spirit which takes pleasure in them lets itself be fascinated by the idea of the annihilation of the self, of bodily sensation and of individual identity. In reality, the self survives all experiences and realizations, even if only as a witness and the preoccupation with knowing \A1\B0who\A1\B1 constitutes the identity of the self does not arise. Experience itself evolves and it is, therefore, futile to position oneself in the spiritual quest on the basis of the requirement of seeing what liberation is in intellectual terms, with a degree of precision which is inappropriate.

The wise man takes a close interest in the fourth field, the Whole, which most people scorn or ignore, and contemplates the human field (which monopolizes nearly all ordinary activity) with a kind of detachment which the non-seeker can neither accept nor understand. The true legacy of the self is almost exclusively viewed by culture \A8C in whatever form it takes \A8C as an attack directed at it.

Consciousness devolved by the self into an investigation of the four primitive fields largely determines its evolution. For all candidates for awakening, the Whole is an ecological field which is just as important as family, relationships, the self and the body. It is necessary to devote one\A1\AFs attention to it, to renew its positioning regularly and sometimes to subordinate the three other fields to it, which implies ever deeper recognition of the Tao. Admittedly, the self remains at the centre and is not lost in identification with the Whole, but there are times when it is the Whole itself which dictates what the self should do before withdrawing and leaving the way clear for inner transformation. Certain things must be sacrificed for the Tao to become a respectable interlocutor, a real presence and a benevolent mystery.

This is what the Tao Te Ching suggests: nothing is demonized, but the notion of putting the components of life in the right place by changing their habitual, cultural, instinctive or mental position constantly guides the follower. Nearly everything can be retained, but in a different order, by a process of permanent adjustment. The emphasis to be accorded to the primitive fields must always vary, taking circumstances themselves into account to some extent and nothing is decided in advance. The ephemeral and change are used as deep justification for practising spontaneous attention, like in original Buddhism. However, the backdrop of Tao is hidden in the foreground — the self, as well as in middle or subsidiary planes — nature, the human race, the body, and in the permanent procedure of principles on every level \A8C the reciprocal transformation of Yin and Yang . Before claiming to disrupt, the Tao offers another interpretation, with disruption sometimes being found in the permanence of order as one of its modes which has a heterogeneous form, according to a close reading of the hexagrams of the I Ching. If this new interpretation is perfect, then transformation will take place on its own. This is its secret (working without fighting or rivalry is the way of the wise man) \A8C the final sentence of the traditional Tao Te Ching.


The question which arises for all paths, instructors and those bearing witness is:


   «\A1\B0Just how far must one go in establishing certain things if stating them leads us astray rather than bringing us closer? Which truths are worth uttering, because their arrows are powerful and failure to understand them is not very harmful? Which truths should be kept silent because their evolutionary impact is inferior to the harm caused by failure to understand them? In what order should we speak about transformations?\A1\B1


The spirit not only changes from age to age, but each teacher tries something new which suits him and he is allowed to do so in order to revive a current or to launch a transcendental initiative. Admittedly, some initiatives are more unfortunate than others and it is often these which praise a difficult solution the most, framed by dubious hierarchical considerations, where all sorts of so-called planes come into play. The field of Testimony, be it true or false, which promises another life to those who know how to go about it, is huge and heterogeneous, ranging from carnivorous plants best designed for eating inattentive souls, which are the prerogative of the doctrines of false awakened ones or mediums who are being manipulated, right through to the inaccessible edelweiss of one such as Hallaj or Saint John of the Cross, passing through the great traditional gardens often left untended for three or four centuries. It is all too rarely rigorous and is often filled with naive fantasy which casts its spell on all visions of the future.

    The wider open eyes are, the more it will be necessary to know how to close them \A8C to experience the purely exploratory adventure of the self deprived of flags and torches \A8C of objects to be conquered.

It is a huge game in which everybody is a participant, whether they say so or not according to the ever plausible background of deviations which can have their origins in an incomplete, biased or overly precise description. In this respect, believing in the authority of a doctrine or revelation does not have any meaning. Or else we must acknowledge them all. The only issue is to know what is speaking to us through a teacher, a book or a meeting with somebody more advanced than oneself in evolutionary terms and who, therefore, holds the virtual title of one who reveals and who assists in the birthing process. If veils must be lifted, what sort of fear is it that holds us back from listening to those who have already \A1\B0got rid of\A1\B1 some of theirs? Even if the veils are personalized, they have a common root and we all know that we are held back by the same obstacles as others, and the only thing that changes is the specific way in which they are expressed. There is no boundary between the generic and the specific . We carry our own baggage, but this is partly made up of that of our species. To know what lies above — Order, is to come back to cast a spell on the chaos below, to fight the unconscious, to cajole forces and to free what has always been there. In the art of bringing multiple events back to their common source — ignorance — the spirit of the self expresses itself without any object and demystifies the tangle of obscure forces. It denounces false finalities rather than pointing to actual goals.

    To pursue a goal is to raise the possibility of not achieving it, it is to place it outside oneself like an object.

Connection does not aim for anything because it abolishes distances.
Spontaneous attention sometimes undermines the mind\A1\AFs constant attempts within closed worlds to build and order open truths, which we cannot experience without categorizing them in an ethic, concept or picture of our own relationship to the indefinite Whole, whose serene presence we miss all the more because we can already intuit it behind several walls which we still have to break down. Although this dazzling brightness does not linger, it shatters the objects which we held to be the most faithful. The fleeting vision reveals that love is just a word and that it will never be an object, it will never be located anywhere and it will never be formal or acquired. It will be without boundaries forever; it is some kind of thing which transfigures, which is impalpable, which we do not possess and which is too huge to correspond to a feeling. It cannot be given or received — it is like a form of immersion, whose dealings cannot be measured, a tune full of the gold of possibility and free from all memory. The Names become clearer. God? What do we mean by that? Living vastness, Intelligence, Consciousness which gives birth to the world, the whole lot jumbled together \A8C like the memory of a wound which we must name, an absence which we refuse to put behind us at the risk of living with a few gloomy memories? The immense and legitimate things which we targeted with the archaic methods of the self are evasive. Can knowledge be an object? If so would it be a round or a square one? What is enlightenment? How many seconds are necessary for the self to make everything explode? One? Five? Ten? What is the Truth? Is it a collection of objects whose weight, surface area or shape can be measured? How many truths does one need to know to become an initiate? One hundred? One thousand? Ten thousand?

    We must lift veils right up until the only process has been understood.



The journey is the same for everybody, via thousands of roads which cannot be compared, just as a thousand routes can connect the same two points.


13 An exercise in locating male and female aspects of the self

A true spiritual teacher will always appear to be a killjoy. Living in the void of the self, he perceives and measures external energies and identifies them in a sort of endless interplay. Free from ignorance, he knows better than anybody what lurks in and around man to prevent him from accessing divine areas. Some awakened ones are not affected by the terrible collective difficulty of finding the other shore, whereas others suffer somewhat from loneliness or feel empathy for others. Some let the world get on with it, since the self allows them to do so, but others want to engage with it. It is wrong to imagine that the truth lies on one side or the other. This separates the movements which unify meanings, holds followers back and creates false rivalries between convergent movements. Although the seeker ought to abandon a large amount of baggage, it is pointless to surrender a deep part of himself which will survive after the awakening of the self and which, according to a peaceful ascetic, will make him a solar militant or warrior, even a simple man or woman going about everyday things in normal life, or a secret teacher, pedagogue or artist. The number of those awakened to the self can in fact increase greatly in line with a change of cycle and it is not, therefore, a case of destroying the authority of teachers who point out the path, but of putting things into perspective, demonstrating common origins, so that a far broader path, which widens out without danger, enables everybody to find their own path.

If the numbers increase, the number of doctrines will not increase, i.e. there will be fewer teachers among awakened ones, which will facilitate a new form of testimony to the self, which is creative and integrated into its environment. Nevertheless, a priori authority must be retained. Permanent testimonies are part of the history of awakening. What we must fight against is the exclusivity of the journey, i.e. all the forms which want to impose a particular type of behaviour as a guarantee of success, or a vision of the world claiming to be the Truth, which develop surreptitiously in proportion to the number of followers and commentators in thrall to the establishment of their rule.

The purest form of commitment comes freely from oneself on the basis of the purest of sources, either in the oral expression of an awakened one whom one knows, or in irreproachable and uncorrupted written texts composed by those in possession of the self, whether they have subsequently penetrated other mysteries or not. Understanding is the only safeguard against misuse of practices, which, by their concrete nature and their inclusion in the timetable, reassure and console us, allay suspicion and sometimes offer the illusory feeling of progress. Understanding can naturally also take place within practices themselves. However they can structure things excessively on account of their repetitive, tamasic nature, as a Hindu teacher would say. As soon as one veil disappears others constantly appear.

If we now understand that each individual tends to underestimate rather than to overestimate himself, or vice versa, depending on circumstances, then we are getting to the heart of the problem of awakening. Some people do not allow themselves to establish a radical spiritual approach through lack of self-esteem, often combined with a fear of failure, whereas others view themselves lightly as first-class spiritual chosen ones, and approach awakening almost as a formality, because they enhance themselves to such a great extent in order to conquer what they lack, in passionate faith in which pride (the oldest placebo of all) holds pride of place.



    Measuring oneself objectively is a delicate art.


Those who are too strong do not want to submit sufficiently and the weak do not want complete responsibility. Humanity is kept in its rut of passivity or arrogance because a slight imbalance between yin and yang contaminates the individual's entire psychological chain and has a knock-on effect by multiplying in all functions pertaining to relationships and introspection. The path to awakening forces us to correct this imbalance. It is a form of squaring off, a true asceticism because the natural tendency keeps returning. For the weak there is a feeling of guilt for failure when they stumble on the path and for the strong, shameless self-satisfaction mixed with too much vital energy, as they see themselves progressing and anticipate their enlightenment without any apparent insincerity, while making grandiloquent speeches with regard to the facts. Too much easy self-satisfaction for yang types, which places limits on demands, and too much self-deprecation for yin types, which impedes their trust and involvement — these are the generic residues of darkness which are profoundly embedded in the self and which a teacher can point out without necessarily judging a person struggling with these shadows.

A receptive person must exhaust his sensitivity to the point of crying out that he wants to find his self, at whatever price. An active person must exhaust all initiatives, personal undertakings, successes and wasted efforts until he opens himself to activity which he has not originated himself, in line with the principles. The intellectual will have to surrender and abandon his own methods and visions of the world in order to let himself be led where the framework is limited in the pure experience of painful separation from the self and from the Whole, which philosophical language cannot patch up any more. Certain constraints are defined, necessary and sufficient.


Man must discover his feminine aspect and accept it without subjugating it, which promises to bring endless and unexpected emotions and a few u-turns in his self-image. Women must discover their masculine aspect without being subjugated by it, which heralds rebellions, taking a stand, a requirement for a certain degree of autonomy in decision-making and an end to emotional complacency.


What I have just said in italics figures in analogous form in a logion of the gospel of Thomas, which paints a totally different picture of Jesus, but, as with the rest of his story, it is impossible to know if this gospel is any more genuine than the others. In any case, the representation which I will henceforth establish of awakening is straying further and further from the description of a path to follow and is getting closer to reality:
   a confrontation between the self and all the sensations,
    in the present,

which comprises thoughts, emotions, the image which we create of ourselves and the global image of reality (a concept absent from French, which borrows it from German). Why not acknowledge the existence of a few filters behind the reality of the moment, which interpret it, like the feeling we cultivate of our personal identity with the adjectives which sit most easily with "I am" or like the picture of the world, a sort of synthetic opinion on the meaning of life, which branches out with values and beliefs, prejudices and ideals which combine, albeit with some difficulty. In this way, the self would cobble together a few mirrors to reflect back an image of itself.

The search for awakening short-circuits the feedback which interprets all events in the same way as an extension of personality. New interpretation and sometimes a transforming insight can slip into a self which suspends judgement, avoids grasping what it perceives via thought, in order to preserve a critical eye to cast over all feelings. Therefore, it is dangerous to want to impose a structure on this new way of looking at things in the name of a particular doctrine, because it is open to the unknown and has the power to deprogramme the self, break habits and change our interpretation of the facts — i.e. simply to find new meanings for events which would previously have always led to the same conclusions, the same prejudices, the same consequences — until the temperament became atrophied or diseases appeared testifying to bad relationships between the self and the external world or between the self and the self.

As for the picture of the world, which is riddled with divine ghosts or incisive atheist rigour, it is one of those veils which inserts itself between the self and what it perceives, intermingled with hereditary beliefs, mythological personifications, messiahs, ideal or rejected fathers, loving or cruel mothers — powerful traces which dictate a certain primary, archaic relationship with reality, a colour which is light or dark, dull or shiny. There is no shortage of events which fit in with the self to carve an image of the universe which is gentle or overwhelming, muddled or clear, comprehensible or enigmatic, favourable and benevolent, or exacting and underhand. This veil has acted as a filter since childhood and we cannot leave it without fearing the knowledge of what will replace it. It is through this dark image that the subject invents what life expects of him. If the picture of the world is slack, then the self lacks principles and rigour and likes carelessness, letting go and dreads objectivity. If the picture of the world is taut ,then the self desperately tries to conform to laws, to demand rules and to correspond to preconceived value systems, at the risk of sacrificing individual experience to imitation. Each individual being is a battleground between the circle and the square, between transgression and submission.

This is where the Word feels its way, hesitates in its own tracks, in the magic of childish fantasy — refusing all obedience and recognition of the Whole as a principle of oneself in the first place, or, on the contrary, having superstitious and ritualistic respect for family, religious, moral or political principles which are factors in triumphalist fundamentalism. The two archaic and opposite imagos prevent us from discovering evolutionary consciousness — one because it confuses fantasy with reality in the huge fatality of things, and the other because it mistakes fickle individual autonomy for conformity to the Whole, by denying that we must submit to it. The need for a relationship between the self and the Whole on the one hand and between the self and the self on the other is very impoverished and devoid of potential if no to-and-fro movement is established between the individual and the universe and between the individual and himself, through awareness of the need for this unforeseen movement.



   To adapt is to reappraise oneself.

   Reminder of the essential polarity and its subdivision which can be seen in the self, the relationship between the self and the self, the self and the body, the self and others and the self and the Whole:

   Yin: feminine, receptive, passive, welcoming, open, weak, slack, relaxed, flexible, moist, fluid, cold (negative aspects — dominated, treacherous)..
   Yang: masculine, transmitter, active, enterprising, closed, strong, rigid, taut, inflexible, dry, structuring, hot (negative aspects — dominant, usurping).

Each principle tends to atrophy when pushed too far, i.e. when deprived of the presence of its opposite in small doses. The qualities of the two principles can be balanced, with care. The preponderance of one threatens the survival of the other.

Relationship of the self to the self:
Yang:being demanding, will, discipline and/or atrophy. Trust in decisions and decisive action.
Yin : ccomplacency and unpredictability, letting go and/or inspiration. Trust in thought and prevarication..
Relationship of the self to the body:
Yang: a lot of physical activity, an overly rich diet, too much meat, too much salt.
Yin : very little physical activity, a faddish diet, too heavily based on flavour, too sweet, dependence on psychological states.
Relationship of the self to others:
Yang: a need too shine, to lead and to carry others along, seeks to defend his position to the point of conflict, rather than understand the other person's position by making concessions.
Yin: a need for approval, to take part and to conciliate, gives ground and acknowledges the positive arguments of the other person (dialogue) rather than trigger conflict.
Relationship of the self to the Whole:
Yang: trust in individual action, will, determination, the straight line, mastery, the square. This path has a tendency to be (too) closed.
Yin: trust in non-action, listening, surrender, change, undulation, osmosis, the circle. This path has a tendency to be (too) open and unpredictable.



14 Meditation on the depth of the Tao and the darkness of the self

According to the terrestrial law of freedom, which constitutes a very flexible degree of latitude in the definitions which characterize us, widely varying causes can lead to the same surrender of the self in the quest without name. This freedom, which is a vexed question for philosophers and legal experts, does not present any particular problems for the awakened one. The manifestation of chaos, an unpredictable impulse, forms a part of it, because nobody knows what they will be thinking or doing in three minutes\A1\AF time. However, the manifestation of a hidden higher order (i.e. a universal will which is deeper than the conditioned self) can surface in the self and enable an inward inversion of consciousness prior to potential for realizations.

Human beings enter into contracts with their bodies, which civilizations actively encourage, because they find it difficult to live in harmony with their desires, either because they do not express themselves sufficiently (which does not make sublimation obligatory) or, on the contrary, because they allow them too much scope. Positioning vis-a-vis desire forms the basis of Buddha\A1\AFs sermons, but for him, desire cannot be reduced to sexual appetite. All covetousness binds the self securely in some obscure way to the manifestation and it is a desire for appropriation, which prevents the mind from purifying itself, rather than desire in the strict sense of the term, which can remain in its natural place if it is not encouraged. We can overcome sexual desire, without necessarily overcoming more serious forms of covetousness. If sublimation is not successful, desire which has been prevented from seeking satisfaction in the natural order of things will move towards power, wealth, the need for recognition, or the cult of the self, not to mention a sort of emotional eroticization of the spiritual quest. Every spiritual seeker realizes the importance of the body to the feeling of self, through his own relationship with desire.

Many paths claim to change our psychology on the basis of physical practices, which I do not condemn. However, the self of the body is not the self per se and we must recognize the limitations of bottom-up processes which start at the base and work their way up, from the material to the spiritual planes. The self must learn to cease identifying with the body, vitality and even the mind and thus it can always see them reunite again in a new combination.

The feeling of personal identity is made up of a mixture of cultural identifications and instinctive manipulations, as well as of images of oneself, but the intelligence is surprised to find itself increasingly distancing itself from experience. We can view this intelligenceThis intelligence cannot be named without being reductive, but it has different names according to the tradition. When it is achieved, it can accompany the movement towards the self and disappear into great silence, never manifest itself, or only manifest itself after enlightenment. It is difficult to talk about it because it is fleeting. While one can try to describe the conditions for reaching awakening, it is impossible to describe the path of pure intellect, of which some awakened ones are unaware and which seekers know through intermittent intuitions independently of awakening. This power is neglected by Buddhism, the Indian illusionist sects and Zen. It is of no interest to those who want to escape reincarnation, but legitimizes the manifestation itself. It is likely that Krishna and Sri Aurobindo strived for the self to lead towards this Mystery, whereas Buddha drew the realization of the self towards the great self, which is a pure form of extinction. Supporters of the divine manifestation and of pure non-material spirituality cannot offer the same pictures of the world to the Earth. However, it is undeniable that they all passed through the self, before continuing towards the non-manifest (Buddha, Sankara) or divine creation (Krishna, Sri Aurobindo). I derive great personal satisfaction from giving an account of the self which is not closed, exclusive or an absolute definition. The individual soul does as it pleases and if I side with divine manifestation, I have no argument with partisans of the self who establish the phenomenal world as being a pure illusion and who would smile at the notion of terrestrial evolution. This note makes it clear that some of the claims which surround the final status of awakening are in reality associated with the personality of the teacher or instructor and not with the spiritual status of the non-mental. While ever the seeker does not give up understanding ultimate reality from an intellectual point of view, he will be caught in the trap both of the dispute between teachers and of defending artificial or emotive positions. This is why the only true form of spiritual teaching is that of leading others to the self and not conditioning them before awakening or considering the world to be an illusion or divine plan. These differences are a luxury and time itself undergoes metamorphoses which drive the soul according to cosmic cycles towards non-material spirituality or the divine manifestation. as independent of the self, involuted in the self, and some Zen teachers state that returning to the self is in fact rediscovering the spirit of nature \A8C human consciousness \A8C which has not yet been made specific by an individual and which expresses itself in accordance with the universe as a whole as a natural, \A1\B0raw\A1\B1 extension, according to the expression used in the Tao Te Ching. From this perspective, we can no longer allow ourselves to contrast the self with the ego. Admittedly, an opening towards the unknown can occur in the ego itself and consciousness can pass through thought and eventually free itself. However, it is impossible to characterize the movement and all those who have amused themselves by trying to do so have led their disciples astray. By trying to observe the spirit of nature in ourselves in a conscious manner, we cause it to flee. By contrast, if we abandon certainties and opinions, then the opening which we had initially feared becomes a mysterious form of recognition of the hidden meaning of things. Insights occur as soon as the self gets beyond the tyranny of reason on the one hand and that of the emotions on the other.



    This is the sign of a joint adjustment of archaic Yin and Yang.


This is how we must interpret the complete letting go of Master Dogenthirteenth-century Zen master, who travelled in China and founded the Soto school in Japan., which was said to lead to the spirit of Buddha. Strictly speaking, nothing should be retained over the self and it is the spirit of satori, therefore, which will put the permanent structures of the self in place. Consecration and rigour are sufficient before that, whilst all mental approximations are rejected as dross. Thoughts are no longer taken seriously as their bias seems to defend prejudices, desires, fears, preferences, conditions and ill-considered values. Rigour is no longer only based on what can be observed, but on the scale of the deficit which rejects any kind of complacency concerning progress made and shrugs off masculine triumphalism, whilst wholly feminine consecration tends towards unconditional surrender. This is the first breach in the homogeneous edifice of the ego, allowing the truth of the illusion itself, which is still dangerous, to take shape. We must follow it until the impression becomes more pronounced and until each person as an individual in the making feels a conspiracy taking place against his potential through the power of memory, the pressure of his desires and fears and the limitations of his mind, which is interpreting instead of understanding.

When part of the path has been followed, the relationship with the body changes and a certain respect for it is established. Emotions are no longer cultivated or feared. They supply the necessary information for the self and the non-self to have a genuine relationship. The subject can no longer deprive himself of the external world, nor lose himself in it exclusively. In reality, emotions are a very safe reference point if they appear of their own accord, without us trying to give them any pre-established meaning. We can learn to distinguish true emotions from all other forms of emotional complacency. The line between the two categories is very fine at the start of asceticism. Sensations associated with primary emotions are transformed. Weeping and fear in the case of women and anger and authoritarianism in the case of men are less easily expressed, whilst still indicating the transformations to be carried out. The self no longer systematically prolongs sensations. It has doubts concerning the value of some of them and, in the same impulse, it has doubts about the truth of thoughts which pass through it. The essential step has certainly been taken, whatever other more subtle mental edifices still remain to be dissolved.

The symbolism of bones becomes important and the body is experienced as a structure and not just as an object to be pleasured, or as the self itself. Although we cannot approach the self gradually, it should be noted that certain signs indicate that our efforts are heading in the right direction. Deeper awareness of the body, which ranges from the respect owed to it right up to the fight against the unconscious, forms the basis of the fundamental aim: to change our generic status. At the risk of being reductive, applying the term ignorance to this conspiracy on the part of the forces of life, which divide the self into heterogeneous elements — the mind which uses thought to dominate, the shadowy, greedy mentality of vitality which finds submission difficult and the body which is forced to follow the decrees imposed by one or other of them — is understandable in so far as the word covers better than any other the starting point which imposes a radical change. I would reiterate that every culture tends to hijack this ignorance without denouncing it particularly, and this manifests itself in Buddhism itself: the more it becomes a religion, the more its foundations become fragile and the original ignorance-suffering which justifies the search for the self in the authentic tradition of Buddha will gradually become just an assessment of philosophical, religious and moral ignorance to be harnessed by religious observance. There is a striking parallel here with the Judeo-Christian concept of "sin".

Freedom, therefore, has two aspects: it is an expression of chaos which creates even more chaos, i.e. it continues to stray from principles into deviation in the strict sense of the word and, conversely, there is the recognition that chaos must decrease and lose its imprecision in order to discover the lost Order which gave birth to it, prior to withdrawing. The image of freedom getting back on its feet is permanent everywhere. Freedom, which obeys the Tao in order to have the opportunity eventually to conform to it, is the path of the awakened one \A8C a journey in reverse from disorder towards Order.

It is a journey into the heart of the deepest traditions: the very trace of God where he appears to be absent for Jews, who refer to an empty vessel although it still retains a scent and a thin coating of oil; the labyrinth which has one exit in Crete and one in Greece; Plato\A1\AFs cave and the geometry of Pythagoras; the churning of the ocean of milk for Hindus, who have an abundance of different myths to describe what corresponds to our \A1\B0Fall\A1\B1. It can also evoke teachers from the past who were in natural harmony with the world which has now been lost, whose rehabilitation involved writing the Tao Te Ching, a form of transmission which resurrected the paradigm of man interlocking with the Tao if he can discover its principle. Tao means route, method, code, principle and path, at one and the same time, and maybe also a tree structure, before the concept even appeared in scientific thought in our own century. Freedom and submission can even combine in one single non-mental approach to the Divine for the greatest mystics, where Heaven and Earth share in the same ineffable transcendence, without opposition.

Freedom can thus continue to descend and manifest itself in chaos to produce beings who are increasingly identified with the surface of the mental process, with the fringes of their emotion and are drunk on subjectivity. Or, by contrast, it is a process which climbs back up towards the lost OrderThis order, as mentioned previously, does not need to be represented. It manifests itself in fleeting touches, connective clues, insights, pure intuitions — i.e. visits to the world of the self. of which it is a product. According to the context, this upward climb leads to transcendence of the self, or naturally to obedience to God in a religious framework. However, the same principle lies at their origin, establishing the self in the non-self without limits, thwarting the passions in the broad sense of the term and no longer letting go of oneself to fantasize about life according to one\A1\AFs own desires. With watchwords in all religions to avoid the path to damnation, this freedom increasingly descends into the chaos of forms and imprecision by denying all authority, whilst injunctions establish themselves to make us choose divine ascension and to recruit chosen ones (but is this really an expression of freedom?).

If there is, therefore, one form of freedom which enjoys getting even more lost in the tangle of the manifestation and savouring the delights of the trap and the quagmire of sensations, there is another orphan freedom which sets off on the trail of lost order on the basis of a sort of mental instinct and comes to life in the exploration of the connections which unite constraints with actions.



    How can the field of awakening be better defined?


This freedom existed before founders of religion got the notion (in certain cases) of making it obligatory, with subsequent mixed results. This freedom is effective when it emerges from the self as a necessity, as something it is impossible to evade. Subjectivity and objectivity then cooperate. A universal path opens up, which takes a particular route. There is no more cause to submit fearfully to the Tao than there is to scorn it. The Tao lies beyond opposites. If the heart can approach it with love, out of sheer gratitude, then the spirit must refrain from attributing intentions to it, whatever they may be. Instead of attributing anthropomorphic motives and imaginary finalities to the Whole, let us simply be satisfied with reducing our darkness. This is the path advocated in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching when it says:



   36; making the darkness darker is the gateway to the subtle originfrom darkness to depth, from depth to darkness, the mysterious journey to all wonders..

Let us acknowledge our frailty, vulnerability, confusion and impotence without fighting. They will establish themselves and will show the true nature of the self, which is to be separated from reality. Firstly, because it is not good at perceiving itself since the process of \A1\B0closing one\A1\AFs eyes is not taught; secondly, because it only perceives reality through sensations, thought being an abstract sensation, but in line with a consciousness which is incapable of locating itself vis-a-vis itself and experiences sensations, emotions and thoughts in the same homogeneous flow. Inner processes grasp a mass of lies, approximations and weaknesses, which are viewed without complacency. This same principle is the basis of original Buddhism, but has changed name while remaining the same: the interwoven tendencies of the Tao Te Ching (which we must unravel) have become "suffering-ignoranceHence the legend that Lao-Tzu was a disciple of Buddha and that Buddha was inspired by Lao-Tzu in Taoism. If the "aim" is awakening then it is identical and deep recognition of the state of ignorance is a feature of both doctrines. For Buddha, ignorance is believed to be real; for Lao-Tzu, it is a natural inability to use the materials of life consciously and properly, an inability to rise by taking note that the self depends on the Whole (personal will negates this dependence). Taoism is less dogmatic and has remained esoteric.".



    Meditation can only take place in the dangerous territory of ignorance which has been acknowledged.

Otherwise it is a fantasy, a mental parody, an invention or a scenario. Meditation is a pretence for anybody initiating himself from the outside who has not had a harrowing insight into his own powerlessness in order to understand himself and to understand the Whole and connect properly with the universe. Part of the role of the teacher has always been to lead the disciple to recognize and accept the incompetence of the will and thought in the face of mystery. Trying to express a practice before an admission of darkness has swept the self away in the desire for its own metamorphosis is pointless. In a sense, the spirit must recognize that it is ill so that meditation can act as a cure. A fully conscious spirit would no longer need meditation, or would be in a state of permanent meditation, carrying out the two process (opening and closing one\A1\AFs eyes) at the same time. We have to agree to live with the dark veil as this is an opportunity to get rid of it. The technique of Zazen should not become an excuse for forgetting this veil or establishing a counterfeit self. However, it is tempting to do this, just as it is appealing in Buddhism to resort to meditation in all its forms in order to create an artificial self. The calm achieved through these practices should not be mistaken for definitively achieving "samadhi".

We have a yin soul which can accept this original darkness without feeling humiliated. This darkness is so deep that that if we observe it, pass beyond it and fight it, then inner depth will manifest itself \A8C an indelible trace of the Tao itself, a form of ambassador. This depth manifests itself in all radical asceticism and guides the ascension of freedom towards the lost order. Fear and threats, pressures and duty corrupt the spiritual movement, hide it and terrify it even more, hence the necessity at some point for our whole race to go beyond religion. The manifestation resembles a divine game by offering the possibility of trying out both movements before deciding \A8Cdescent or ascent \A8Cin a divine game whose rules are learned with joy and openness, with error and suffering as a sanction. It is an unpredictable game governed by a few rules like all games and one which is no longer a quagmire, but a return to the substance of reality as soon as the self looks into its own chasm, which is as deep as it is dark, as shadowy as it is wonderful.

This is where Judeo-Christian belief and Islam reveal their limitations, by presenting God as an authority to whom one must submit on principle, forcing the seeker to become bogged down in inaccessible esotericism in order to escape the feeling of an overwhelming divine power and to approach the issue differently. This is where the East bypasses creation and surfaces in the pure essential, indifferent to entities or immortals who show the way as intermediaries, in order to find the Supreme force in the self more easily in man\A1\AFs own way, because gods themselves are subject to (or in rebellion against) the same Supreme force.

Submission to the higher Order happens come what may, but it cannot be born out of fear or desire. It is a form of submission which the seeker for the self knows without needing to shroud it in the divine presence and which establishes him in its exploratory rigour. Nothing can order it from the outside, impose it, decree it, or justify it \A8C not religion, spiritual doctrine nor even a teacher himself.


    Nothing can order the self to be free,

by definition. Freedom is permanently present. At any time we can choose to venture in our own subjective direction, at the risk of deceiving ourselves, and at any time we can kill off the complacency of the self which clings to the experience of separation in order to tear ourselves away from its closed dreams and base deeper wishes on the acknowledgement of ascension towards principles. This is the law. By obeying oneself, one can discover freedom. The principle is that of the manifestation as expressed in the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao treats men like straw dogs". Men do not use the same thing in the same way, i.e. some take advantage of it to deny the evolutionary seed which freedom holds in its search for the Order above and they glorify the self and its vagaries, covetousness and attachment to power \A8C in short, its powerful subjectivity composed of veils. Others change track and search in themselves for what defines them and discover more and more forms of conditioning which they henceforth refuse to obey.

These stratifications run very deep, ranging from beliefs about the world and the values of the self, false notions, the compulsions of a personality seeking a secure connection with the world and the mental self, right up to the memory of the race itself, whose mark every individual bears, not to mention, of course, the discreet interlocking of forms of hereditary programming. Overestimating the image of this lost order and representing it in order to overcome the chaos and the freedom tendency which increasingly loses itself in subjective efflorescence, is not an appropriate method. Resorting to the principles of the order above to let oneself go in the chaos of the order below is a universal tradition, which is familiar to instructors, who like me, eventually stop mentioning it so that it is not abused any more. The map representing the order above, whether it be true or false, always created a desire to abandon the Earth and to live instead for a soul which was more of a fantasy than an actual experience, as if heavenly vistas irresistibly attracted the follower towards negating his own condition. However, it now seems as if the order above must be sought like the secret of matter itself, in order to connect intellect to form, life to the Divine and the power of Time to the Self. Our iron age has taken refuge in heaven and has located authority there in order to follow simplistic orders, stick to laws which it does not understand and refuse the exploratory mystery.


True asceticism always loses its way when it wants to define itself and get its bearings vis-a-vis external reference points. Therefore, following the signs of ascension towards the principles of the order lost by conventional obedience to rules, by imitating behaviour or adopting religious or abstract values constitutes nothing less than an escape.




15 Koan: what would usefulness be without uselessness?

The truth can never be compared to an animal which is being tracked whose trail is lost and then found again; it remains a gulf and if it is approached it flees while becoming even more appealing, and the more it reveals itself, the more there is left to reveal. It appears in our dreams when the impossible is achieved: we fly like birds, breathe in the depths of the ocean and travel between stars. The truth is not a goal. If it were a target we would just need to locate it and hit it. It evades the sharpshooter and dodges the virtuoso who has become a master in the art of laying traps. It flees its determined courtesans and dissolves in the hand of the person who has just picked it. When it is named it becomes a lie.

It associates itself with all sorts of things, accompanies justice, Good, Beauty and would be the Word of God, whom I maintain is dumb and is betrayed by our revelations. We must, therefore, consider that this concept is worn out and has become dull and eroded by time. Currently, those who are the most attached to the truth are either neophytes, fundamentalists or sectarians. No serious person dares use this term, although the need for truth survives in them. However, the path between this deep, vital need and the objects which represent the truth and claim to nourish it no longer fits anywhere. The believer's truth is already riddled with his divine fantasy, just as the atheist's is sullied by his quasi-deliberate will to avoid any trace of transcendence. The sectarian's truth conforms to the presuppositions of his own path and rejects the truth of neighbouring paths with the overwhelming arrogance with which we are familiar and which borders on the absurd, as is the case in China in the open hostility between Buddhism and Taoism, when the two doctrines have their origins in the same revelation of the self in order to free life from violence.

The docile seeker's truth is something which he repeats because he has learnt it without perhaps even having tested it. The rebel's truth is often experienced first-hand and is intense, but it is riddled with the intransigence of those who do not want to adapt to any rules and whose fire is not always pure enough to lead to complete non-separativity. Yesterday's truth is not today's truth, although its permanent forms survive and we must grasp them with a superior intellect which dominates closed contexts, distinctive features and contingencies.

The truth which remains is the concept which opposes approximations, disorder, chaos and even what is wrong, i.e. it is what is correct. This is because what is correct can be checked, whereas the truth remains a subjective bias, declaimed with vehemence and coloured with idealism. Humans beings mistake the truth, which is always coloured by abstraction, for what is correct, which is always based on observation. The mind does not separate itself sufficiently from subjective personality for things to appear as they truly are, without us projecting surprising amounts of adversity or benevolence onto them, yet a whirlwind can carry them away and the situation can change at any moment.

To say that something is true is to demand more than correctness and to expect too much of it. Correctness is cold, dispassionate and (almost) objective. Truth is hot, heady and totalitarian. The truth cannot be an object — it can only be a state of mind, which feeds on the Whole without limits, while embracing the shadow and the light. The truth transcends oppositions. Reality is starting to show itself where nobody expected it — in a circular, visionary self free from the mental dread of making things say what we want them to say, using the least contestable language. This habit can be lost in the quest without object and while it is fading a look can flatten the masks of the mind right down to the nodal point where everything is transformed. When the self no longer needs reasons to seek and no longer needs divine images or its own prestige to continue along the path, when the fire is established without any need for justification or, dare I say it, cultivated legitimacy, it finally burns naturally while losing the memory of what lit it — that first mystical call which collides with the self — while at the same time losing sight of its concern about its finality and its obsession with success.

This is the teaching of the East, which knows how to free itself from goals and causes and lets itself be soothed by the present. The need for truth does not however, disappear for all that. It will feed itself in other ways. The emotional forms which accompanied its birth decrease and a new stamina to endure the conflicts which have become natural, on account of the friction which has been accepted between the self and the non-self, asserts itself between the self about which we have a premonition and the contingent context bristling with pikes and traps. The mind relinquishes delicacies and the well-organized considerations of teachings which do not change anything without profound practice.

Because the body has been acknowledged, with all the transformations that this entails to make it the basis for metamorphosis, and the churning process has begun, then the personality surrenders. Biological power is tamed because it is attacked in a sense from below due to the new-found integrity of the body, and from above, thanks to permanent appraisal which has been established. The old snake is shedding its skin. Mental passions, preferences and attachments become sickly; the violent desires of ambition diminish and ancestral fears dissolve.

This is when the promise is fulfilled.

The route widens out without danger, truth is no longer a goal, but just a reference point which is continuously renewed, a series of sparks, without the path ever being lost. Mistakes come to support inspirations in a free adjustment of inner impulses. The idea of truth becomes an old disguise which we throw away because each moment reveals unknown sources of ecstasy, understanding and branching out towards the principles — whereas difficulties are accepted without resistance. Intellectual rigidity becomes corrupted. Sometimes evil even appears in terrifying splendour, as an ally of the Divine which is manifesting itself, but this vision, which is one of the most profound which exists, is only accessible to those who can endure it without being seduced by the face of freedom again, which plunges into the chaos of subjective forms — i.e. the neglect of existential carelessness. The reasons for which the self is not easy to obtain vary from one individual to another, but the same laws prevail. We are over-attached to abstract visions, to the canons of the path, to the model of the chosen route which wants to force things into a dualist conquest of the truth, whilst continuing to have opinions on the quality of events, values and facts for mental beings. We are over-attached to vital prerogatives, to the use of the senses, or on the contrary to excessive practices cultivated for people with powerful personalities, or we are simply attached to our contingent identity, our social persona on an everyday basis. It could even be that memory persists and the self identifies exclusively with the past without discovering the virtual, without rising to the potential vision of transfiguration through commitment. In every scenario, the interpretation of things does not renew itself sufficiently and the perception of the present perpetuates programmes which are already in place to an excessive degree.

Not merely one of these surviving sources can prevent access to the self; it is not unusual for two or even three to combine in a relatively homogeneous system. Although I try to promote awakening in every being, because I have the good fortune to live with it and through it as a result of several of my journeys on Earth, the help which I bring should not be mistaken for popularization, which would imply that the self lets itself be captured by any path whatsoever. The fact that I have experienced several lives encourages me to praise the self as a spiritual dimension par excellence, from which other horizons will open up in the future and without which the most beautiful wisdom, the most lively ecstasies and the most energized contacts cannot produce many fruits.

Admittedly, conventional paths fail because the truth figures as a purely intellectual fantasy which the conventional path disposes of, but unconventional paths are no more reliable if deviation, fantasy and casualness prevail over patiently deciphering the chaos through careful observation of the self and the growing inner need to conform to real principles.



    Therefore, denouncing convention is not the same as praising improvisation for its own sake and once again a paradox appears.

If a traditional path is truly understood, respected and assimilated it can lead to the self just as much as free, deep asceticism which flits about. What I would question is whether it is easier — in this day and age, to find an authentic traditional path than to launch oneself into exploratory alchemy on one's own. I am, therefore, contributing not to assassinating the last vestiges of the revelations which I retain, preserve and defend, but to spreading a new paradigm. I am convinced that esoteric elements are now widespread and uncovered and that unblemished frankness combined with genuine depth lead to true experiences, which are the precursors of awakening, by a widening path.

All that is required is to draw psychology upwards in order to associate it with an approach without any blind spots, by taking note of the violence of personality (as Buddhism has always done). Modern psychology then establishes it by listing the compulsions, archaic loops of instinct and the relationship between memory and defence and aggression mechanisms. All that is required is to draw science upwards for it to admit to the inextricable compatibility of the spirit and matter, across all forms of energy and to legitimize the preferred postulate on which the Tao Te Ching is founded — the non-separativity of all events, beings and principles. (The indivisibility of the universe).

All that is finally required in our own sphere is to broaden the approach of doctrines and to deepen them in order to discover in their origins a surprising vision of identity which we can call universal, lying beyond deceptive words and concepts which do not tally. As for the means themselves, they are constantly diversifying and multiplying if we list all the forms of meditation, disciplines and therapies which emerge from a wounded era, promising change, rightly or wrongly.

What poses a problem is the arrangement of all these objects and evolutionary processes — how do we make a vision, which borrows principles, means and predicates from here there and everywhere, homogeneous. Not so long ago, we were still suffering from the paucity of spiritual testimony in both doctrines and practice combined, today we are collapsing under an avalanche of information in which the spiritual realm broadens until it becomes lost in adjoining spheres or is diluted in the occult, psychology, the art of humanist divination, a range of therapies and new medium messages.

Hitherto, paths were safe and hidden, scarce and religious and guaranteed by a genuine authority which was in possession of the transforming word.

Today the paths are countless and open, but nobody guarantees their effectiveness anymore, because real teachers are virtually disappearing, whilst usurpers are on the increase. This situation favours the imaginative, cheerful, responsible, creative and fluid seeker, who is into everything and never stops anywhere for fear of imprisoning himself. It is unfavourable for the straight-forward individual, who finds structures reassuring, who loves certainty and is solid, who seeks a safe place out of reach of fantasies, in order to carve out a focused path. Receptive types are being favoured again, who had missed the chance to act in accordance with their deepest nature in the last four centuries, in a Western world dominated by strong masculine individuals greedy for knowledge and power. This new efflorescence also favours the spiritual approach of women, who are better than men at basing themselves on their feelings in order to follow their path and can bring them flexibility, acceptance and letting go, if they know how to embody these values as an extension of their biological nature.




16 Koan: Abandon the way to find the path


It has now been established that the things on which we relied are giving way. Traditions all contain the same basic, deeply hidden analogies — the affirmation of awakening and its price and the same myths. Dogmas everywhere disguise, falsify and prostitute. The personification of instructors everywhere replaces their words and the more they are deified, the more what they say is exempt from being practised and verified. One cannot but conclude that this is a rule, a fate which is common to all revelations, from which the only way out is to forsake words in favour of experience — as is stipulated by the Gita itself. Once beliefs start to weaken, a certain degree of archaic exploration of spiritual objects can nevertheless remain, as these are deemed to possess an intrinsic value and this is the case for all tools which are features of forms of esotericism. There are a number of them and they are all aimed at freedom from our contingent condition, i.e. an upward impulse which awakens the senses to something other than repetitive daily life and which helps the seeker to position himself in his own life. Techniques must not only provide the means to reappraise experience, but also to enable the self to change itself. It is not sufficient to change behaviour. Perception as a whole — our sensations, relationship with life and feeling of selfhood — is transformed. Our sensations must change because they constitute the basis of perception. This is why our attachment to pleasure is uniformly condemned, because the sensation of pleasure contaminates the whole of oneself, by encouraging the personality to seek it out constantly and encouraging the mind to produce values in which the search for pleasure remains essential to the approach, whether this is acknowledged or not. What I am exposing here is the foundation of Buddhism itself, which by establishing that suffering-ignorance is made up of the interplay of sensations, attacks the problem at its root, by calling into question our most archaic means of experiencing the world — the branching out of pleasure and pain, with fear guiding us to avoid anything unpleasant and lending its approval to the quest for fantasized pleasure. However, sensation is only the basis of perception. Any means which will let us view its interference in the self objectively is valid and as soon as the subject recognizes the limitations of sensations, he seeks to free himself from them of his own accord and struggles against the archaic elements of the vital personality which calls for anger and aggression, sadness and flight, carnal lust, greed and complacency — the heavy burden of all that the non-self brings to the self to nourish it, perpetuate the species, defend it and preserve it. The non-self is everything which is not ourselves, but we identify so closely with it that it manipulates us through desires and emotions, then feelings, and finally through Ideas. Therefore, freeing the self from the non-self, separating the subject from the identifications which it undergoes or generates vis-a-vis all external objects is the only means to find an identity. Love not only survives the great process of disidentification on the part of the self from its environment and other people, but also transfigures relationships. Conquering generic sensations by one means or another, either by exhausting one's pleasures, or by taming them, is the first necessity. This work is carried out by the self in the self and nothing external can help it. Therefore, this is often like plunging into the depths as a range of limitations becomes apparent. Authentic Buddhism was satisfied with demonstrating the sameness of suffering and ignorance, while remedying this obscure origin through realizations and practices which detach us from this suffering, which is liable to be perpetually reborn from its ashes through attachment. Detachment does not, therefore, appear as a sort of goal in itself which is characteristic of the wise man or chosen one, but as the sole means by which the self can live in perfect harmony with itself, without relying on objects which are liable to be coveted or dreaded and which corrupt our mental openness in order to subject it to contingent ends. Once it is established, it then brings pure mental receptivity, which connects with the Whole because active thought has disappeared. However, other paths do exist. A seeker who develops the subtle senses, intuition, intellect and the invisible touch which can feel the most delicate natural energies, can become weary of ordinary sensations of his own accord and partially abandon them without any effort. This work is sufficient to free the mind from its artificial thirst for knowledge which disguises generic ignorance. This is the path advocated in the Tao Te Ching — becoming interested initially in the universe beyond what is tangible, intuiting it, loving it and learning that the informal exists and thus demystifying objects of whatever kind. We must become used to the unlimited, have premonitions of an identity without contours, abandon always trying to establish things and search instead for perfect coincidence with nature and the Whole, without initiating action oneself. The individual who adopts this path becomes enamoured of what is not himself, but which contains him. Nature speaks, the heavens whisper, and cycles weave relationships between things. A form of order emerges naturally in the integrity of what is not human or not corrupted by the descendant action of freedom which ties man to a harsh experience of reality. While we assimilate deeply the extent to which humanity is deviating from the rigour of creation and the extent to which arbitrariness with its succession of violence, crime and privilege, i.e. cunning cruelty, is a feature of it, the self which turns to the Tao values the things which social man fails to recognize or avoids. Once simplicity has been rediscovered, the Taoist passes through the human world, leaves it behind him without either scorn or resentment; he may perhaps take part in it, but which such a degree of detachment that the traps constituted by masks and roles to play no longer work. A person seeking coincidence becomes aware of his body, loves to breathe and develop his feelings, but not in order to use them for pleasure. He becomes aware of the lack of energy which results from being oversexed and will choose to reduce this of his own accord, or even to control it as is taught in tantrism, prior to giving it up. He will avoid idle talk which bogs him down in the contingent. The feeling of heaviness brought about by too much rich food will induce the alchemist to fight to reduce his food intake and to take pleasure, on the other hand, in greater physical and mental prowess. However, the practice of non-action is not a goal, merely one of the most effective means of reaching the self. This model for a path does not necessarily preclude others. The speculative seeker, who truly loves the intellect, chooses another route. He can forget his body and desires in contemplative absorption and work on the separation of feelings from above, sometimes without even realizing it. If he sets little store by the things of life but is fired by a real passion for depth, his mind can simultaneously enjoy permanent peace and receive heavenly influences, which can open chakras, dictate behaviour and subdue the contingent self. If the self goes deep within itself, the risk of forgetting the body — that former danger for those who proceeded merely by elevation — will be avoided, and now, with the new supramental cycle, a clearer bond is being established between what lies above and what lies below, between matter and the spirit. But lofty speculation mixed with contemplation and meditation is nothing if it is not the process, however subtle, by which the self analyzes its limitations and surrenders them by referring them back to the Mystery, in order to begin melting in this way into what prefigures the self — a vast feeling of being more than a body, will or mental being. Lastly, others are capable of rejecting all the preceding aspects — focusing on transforming sensation, a priori meditation, a sense of the subtle and development of the intellect — in order to experience extraordinary devotion from which all facile forms of religiosity (eroticism of sorts with the Divine) are banished by their upright passion, avoiding all representations of what they love — mystery, reality and the Ineffable that all names serve to push further away. In this path, the common risk is to live just for the non-self in higher identifications, to forget that the self is the subject and that it will only fully become itself with the self that will give its credentials. The devotional way can produce beings who seem to be perfect on the surface and have impeccable relationships with what is external. There is nothing to indicate that they have plunged sufficiently deep into themselves to be witness to consciousness. Sometimes they are good, pure and exemplary, but they stop short, without even suspecting, in certain cases, that they are within reach of the self which would make their realization perfect. This is why it is useful to establish the self in relation to the non-self and vice versa, i.e. to bear in mind that the internal and external complement each other. A middle way thus emerges from the environment which fluctuates between the pure work of disidentification and differentiation (closing one's eyes) and nourishing opening to all levels of the Tao — everything which comes from outside which transforms us and ties us back to the transcendent planes of the manifestation, the non-mental, pure vibrations of energy and the shaktis (essential energies). One single path can combine the two aspects of opening and closing one's eyes, as is stipulated in the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

The way which is traced is not in keeping with the eternal process

The names which describe it do not make it immortal

By not naming you return to the origins of Heaven and Earth

By naming you follow the mother of ten thousand beings

In the void without will the great mystery contemplates itself

The manifestation of forms and limitations is grasped in universal desire

Both their origins are the same — the Mystery of this Two in ONE —

To see their identity is to be deep

From depth to darkness and from darkness to depth,

the gateway to all wonders opens.

17 A statement of the basic principle


If, as is often the case, practices cause us to lose sight of their true objective then they do not yield the anticipated results. Meditation, even if all its forms cannot be reduced to this law, is not merely time salvaged from ordinary time to remind us of verticality, but a means of letting the non-contingent self grasp experience, memory and what has happened in order to disidentify with it and to pay back its dues to Maya, the energy of forms. If I may be allowed to caricature meditation somewhat in order to bring out its essential form, it enables us to leave behind roles and functions, to strip ourselves of them and find the self which is not lost in them. It enables us to carry out an investigation untrammelled by all that is dynamic and hence restrictive, since all movements involve us with the world, with other people and their view of us, as well as with the relevance of their consequences.

Meditation offers a slowing down, a model in a sense, of the self which borders on immobility. To this extent, it can be considered as an intermediary between mental activity and the self which evades the will alone. For Zen patriarchs, or at least for some of them, it allows the spirit of nature, pure, human, universal consciousness to surface, stripped of engrams; for others it initiates contact with the unborn, the uncreated substance of the void. It moves closer to silence, dissolves images of the self which are linked to the representation which we give to others, to the conscious and unconscious role which we assume for them in a rather broad and confused spectrum. It also refers to the contingent and to limitations. It opens up pure intelligence, which does not seek anything, to wide-ranging investigations, in which little inner selves, full of conventional finalities, appear like ghosts.

Meditation teaches us that we are not our actions (although they carry our own imprint) in order to chose them more carefully and to make decisions about them without getting carried away by the mechanical movement of life and the speed of our reactions. However, it also teaches us the opposite — we are our actions and for the huge world, our self is just the imprint of our actions which become manifest in their consequences. This is the path of pure responsibility, which is not dedicated to any role in particular or devoted to any system, but which is consecrated to the ineffable Mystery. This is in fact a natural process, which society prevents because everything in it is representation and memory. One's free individuality, which is no longer mixed up with its life, context, milieu and history, is the only one which can one day obtain the self. We will have had to transform the contingent self to reach this identity, which is no longer mistaken for the body, desire, will or thought. Therefore, the very notion of meditation prevents true meditation, just as the idea we have formed of Zen proves that we have not yet understood anything. If a mental agenda directs meditation (or prayer) behind the scenes, then these are no more than dreams, intense imaginings, or higher illusions. I cannot prove this, but, as an instructor qualified to weigh things up, I can demonstrate it by highlighting the number of paths and their followers who practise this and that with infinitesimal results. Few individuals attain the self because they have fantasized ways of attaining it instead of digging deeper into the raw material of their ignorance. Some people are satisfied with this, with a compromise between below and above; others, like myself and Sri Aurobindo, try to awaken humanity not only to the spiritual in the mind, but in all aspects of the self. This makes our doctrines deeper and more demanding than others, but also more trustworthy. It remains important for the Earth that people consecrate themselves completely to the Mystery and truly attain the self. There are fewer illusions here than in the spiritual worlds, where there is an answer for everything — for creation, for man's duties — but which do not know how to bring in their wake any concrete realization. I cannot cite any of these movements among the paths which lead to the self, which boast that they synthesize knowledge, rekindle the flame, bring the new word and which are always tarnished either by the occult or by some sort of messianism. It is not my role to pronounce on the value of these movements, which are based on cosmogeneses and the presumption of a "cosmic finality" in due form and in too precise a way to be true — but simply to forbid them from claiming to hold the key to man, which their well-organized representations can imply by compressing everything into a relationship between cause and effect where the self is never mentioned, or is cited as something exotic or even archaic.

The individual seeking the self does not escape into any vision of the world and does not seek to champion any cause. Only his intuition can provide him with information on the soul of things and it develops in the patient work of the constant fire which burns thoughts and projections and counters personality with distance, calm and detachment. Sensations must be rejected right down to the roots if they monopolise the impulses of the soul and stop it from achieving distance. They will remain, transformed, with a new place at the end of asceticism. However this enlightenment of peripheral nature is only the first step. Resistance to non-separativity can be proudly rooted in the mind by the believer's own feeling that he is the self, that he is seeking the truth and loves God, etc. Attachment to the idea of oneself is often as deep as the manipulation of which the senses are the object and which the vital personality endures, with its cluster of residual memories and inherited characteristics.



    Therefore, because the fundamental obstacle is different for everybody, the path must correspond to that obstacle.

Some people are hindered first and foremost by all that they believe about the world. They constitute a category. The first thing for them to do is to learn to "open their eyes" in a new way. Others are hindered first and foremost by everything which they believe about themselves. While ever they cannot "close their eyes" correctly, it is futile for them to change their external perspective. This is another scenario. Yin types can make progress towards themselves on condition that they first understand relationships and the world. Yang types can experience recognition of the Whole, the Tao and the Divine on the condition that they can first and foremost establish themselves within themselves. It is necessary for both sorts to get out of the mud metaphorically and this involves radical letting go — of what one believes oneself to be, in the case of Yang types and of what one thinks one perceives of reality, in the case of Yin types.

    It is then necessary to reverse polarities — Yin types must perceive themselves as subjects and disidentify with all that is external, whilst Yang types must perceive themselves in the potentiality of connection and disidentify with themselves.

In reality, it must be said that an individual who receives the self has lost himself along the way. He has abandoned his prerogatives, illusions, goals and outcomes. He has relinquished cultivating his own image and the feeling of perceiving reality. He has become circumspect and attentive and freed himself of all mental reactions. Experience brings a change of track, changes goals, reverse priorities, tames ambition and develops flexibility. To this extent, it is clear that various forms of submission which establish the definitive value of an allegiance, system or practice can often dig ruts. Asceticism is informal and perpetuates itself by changing form. There is no aesthetic without morphology, nor a path to a place which can be found everywhere and nowhere. The most beautiful spiritual characteristics cannot be described and no imagery can represent them. You cannot measure things without contours, they are essential. There cannot, therefore, be a philosophy of awakening, because the self cannot be reduced to an object. Constructive thought is an illusion. Certain things cannot be modelled and all mental activity expended to constitute the ins and outs of reality is a fantasy, because the problem lies not in drawing up a map of the universe, but in living at the heart of it, in perfect connection with it. The objects of Reality which survive the collapse of the spirit in awakening, are very few in number and no name is appropriate for them. It is futile to pursue them and difficult to organize them without in-depth experience (although I have been working on it myself for several lifetimes). The mind operates on the basis of duality.

Impermanence cannot become a model without propelling the self into perpetual restless wandering, and permanence cannot take the place of a reference point without propelling it towards conservatism. Remaining on the fringes as forms of desire, impressions and thoughts are constructed and allowing objects to be created and dissolved is a hands-off policy which enables the self to constantly renew its investigations into itself (having one's eyes closed), to the same extent as it spontaneously examines the non-self (having one's eyes open). Consciousness can even navigate naturally between these two poles using spontaneous attention which either encourages us to deepen the inner representation supplied by an object (i.e. what is perceived) or to observe the object better until it becomes a part of oneself. Language changes meaning when this to and fro movement becomes natural and deep.

Everything is possible, ranging from enlightened dilettantism, which experiences and understands a great number of traditions one after another, through to giving up fitting oneself in anywhere while being familiar with and practising various movements simultaneously. The path is inextricable for each individual and the wastage in what is really integrated from a doctrine, teaching or example is enormous. Therefore, limiting oneself to one type of influence is not a good strategy unless one is visiting a particular teacher continuously, in which case an adequate, evolutionary framework is put in place. Currently, many people are setting out on a spiritual adventure and it is not possible for the majority of them to have an actual teacher at their side, who can support them for several years. In this context, it is up to me to show how one can do without the safeguard of an awakened one who is available for consultation, while still having a chance of achieving awakening by one's own synthesis. I am not the first person to commit to this path, but unlike others (who shall remain nameless) who have just described it by rejecting all authority on principle, I offer the same testimony whilst recognizing all spiritual authorities — which comes down to the same thing in a sense. Where some people say "reject all gurus", I say "embrace them all", which is a means of setting awakening squarely in a historical, material and human context — i.e. a concrete one which eludes systems iconoclasts, who, moreover, become incontrovertible spiritual authorities by virtue of having denounced them all.

Although this permissive and unpredictable optic, which consists of describing awakening of the self by one's own means, is still considered to be a fantasy in traditional quarters, a few awakened ones like myself are working towards freer emergence of the non-mental, and we are teaching those who want to liberate themselves by themselves to respect a few fundamentals and understand a few principles mentioned in this work.

Influences can be pitted against each other and thus force the self to make a decision. If there are a number of them, the ability to imitate, which is so serious, decreases and drives the subject into a corner so that he will renounce a vision of the world which he did not originate and which he obeys. Harassed by counsellors, teachers and therapists, even the most docile, the most yin self can eventually look inwards and form their own opinion by discovering the reversal of yin into yang. By contrast, the individual who has always proudly chosen his path can, one day, recognize the opinions of other authorities, acknowledge that he can deceive himself to the same extent as others can lead him astray and reverse yang into yin. Everything can be a clue, a trail mark, on condition that we recognize at the outset that Reality is an ocean to be deciphered, which seeks to evade us and to which we do not have the key. However, the alternation of the principle opens all locks and so it is perhaps a key.

The path which is in keeping with the principleTao Te Ching, or the path which is in keeping with the principle, the authentic translation of the work by Lao-Tzu. reveals itself through ever greater surrender and not by pinpointing certainties which one merely has to trample to be on the right track. The individual whom the self approaches surrenders like a loving lover to something unknowable, disfigured by the name which invokes it, whether that be the cold, indistinct Absolute, the divine Lover who imposes a torturous wait on a suitor, the Whole, or the One. The individual who wins the self for his own destroyed his transcendent fantasies as soon as he realized that their image was another obstacle to knowing oneself and surrendering to the Whole. What was jettisoned is boundless. It is a self which refused to legitimize itself. It will have obtained its own legitimacy from the radical experiment of non-separativity which transfigures. There is nothing to establish which was not already established. There is nothing to preserve which could disappear.

Natarajan, March 1999.