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At last, the Satprem business doesn’t bother me anymore. This doubtless comes from my new-found confidence since January 2nd, thanks to the physical sensation of youthfulness which has returned. I see things with great clarity, extreme lightness and with unusual depth. I am taking advantage of this.

First of all, it is not my place to state what is politically correct in the supramental venture and I would like to make quite clear that my “reservations” concerning Satprem stem purely from the fact I am convinced that Mother’s scribe did not have time to become perfect. Secondly, due to some incidental but opportune reading, I have once again been confronting the issue of poetry, pioneers and explorers of the mind. My intellect took great pleasure in creating the category of “unclassifiable”... Yes, some people have become so far removed from the ordinary perception of reality that it would be totally presumptuous to try and pin them down. I respect their mystery, give up trying to confine them anywhere and their enigmatic quality satisfies rather than disturbs me, because I view these explorers’ souls as glittering lights in the memory of cultures which reject them or heap praise on them.

These admirable precursors break the psychological mould of their generation, culture and sometimes also their race and their path can no more be described than it can be followed. Nobody knows exactly where they went and it would be hazarding a guess to invent beautiful lies and to want to say too much about them. This is the case with Rimbaud, Artaud, Daumal and finally Michaux, whom you can hijack or avoid, pigeonhole or forget, because their route remains impenetrable to anybody who has not been forcibly confronted with the absence of his being. They have felt their way, crossed some illegal boundaries and consumed their lives in a passion for a being which hides itself, a passion which buttresses itself with a bitter view of existence, or at least of the human realm. They considered themselves to be creators of the inaccessible, praised the merits of pure experience which differentiates itself from ready-made representations or the opinions of little inner dwarves to whom society asks us to listen. Even if we rightly assume that Satprem took the experience of laying bare the inner self far further than the poets of the inexpressible, he shares a common difficulty with them – that of accepting the world as it is and he also shares with them the will to dig ever deeper beyond what is already known, beyond what has already been authenticated, to reach a new perception of things and primarily of the self. Rimbaud said “I is another” and Michaux dissected himself into past selves who try to live on while the current self is attempting to establish itself, or else he diffracts into three different characters. Artaud was dubious about language, to the point of preferring civilizations without writing. Daumal and Crevel were worn out by the fraudulence of society and the religion of money which definitively abolished the spiritual in European culture and this destroyed them.

I understand them all the more because in my second year of preparation for entry to higher education teacher training college, I nearly jumped from the seventh floor of a building in order to put an end to all this pretence, but then, with my goal in sight, I realized that I couldn’t take myself seriously enough to take my own life. My “unclassifiable” writers live on in my heart and I do not try to penetrate their secrets in the least. For my own part, after this critical period, I had the joy of passing over into unconditional and non-specific love of all things, which I had already had in the previous year. I have been there. So, yes, I do place Satprem in the same category of “unclassifiable” people whom I cannot touch without running the risk of making a vain error of judgement or a vague approximation. Their lives defy all logical representation because they have gone so deep into themselves that the terms failure and success no longer have any meaning in their pure path. None at all. There are no clues to suggest that Artaud’s madness was not beneficial to his soul, despite appearances, because nobody can imagine a better or worse route for him.

Let’s have some respect for the Cathars who annoy us, respect for their commitment which consumes them to excess with a centrifugal force which marginalizes them. Let’s respect them for their radical rejection of all mediocrity or perversity and for penetrating walls against which those without faith hurl themselves, in order to erect altars there. My unclassifiable writers had understood that the mind transforms prisons into gods, letting you go round in circles with an easy conscience and they took the bit between their teeth. What more is there to say?

They shine like stars which have not yet been named and which may hide behind others which are closer and more dazzling. Let us give thanks for explorers of the Word who are sullied by judgements, soiled by praises and hijacked by admiration. They will continue to do their job right under our noses, the dirty job of speleologist which is scorned in favour of climbing towards the clear air of the summits and the superiority of ascensts.

See you on the summit of the Himalayas on 14th July, guys, and don’t forget the champagne or your cameras for the souvenir photo!

Thank you Satprem. When I was suffocating in the depths of nothingness in the winter of 1977, The Divine Materialism was published. I clung to it, believe it or not, and it was my compass in the darkness. All the same, the work goes on.

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Hello,

It was a difficult decision and I nearly made it on the toss of a coin, before deciding to take advantage of my very good physical health to take the plunge and to prevent the situation from deteriorating insofar as possible. So I dipped my toe in the water, and because I love swimming, I accept all the risks involved. I add my own opinions on Satprem, having been stunned for several months by Luc Venet’s testimony. I pondered, reviewed my past, weighed up my responsibilities as one who is convinced that he is touch with the Supramental, all with the sole aim of opening up paths, as I cannot close them down, believing as I do that I am the supreme proponent of individual liberty. The latter can lead to voluntary submission, which cooperates more effectively with the Divine than superficial, forced submission in the name of duty, dharma, etc., which backtracks at the first sign of a serious obstacle. There you have it, I have criticized Satprem - a crime of lèse-majesté for some and an expression of my personal freedom for others. There will always be two camps – free men who say what they think and slaves who lay down taboos and prohibitions and then censure prior to inflicting torture.

Both sides believe that they are doing the right thing, which gives rise to conflicts, dissent and sometimes to fights. However, it is a feature of the strategy of the Divine, that he allows every living being to defend his values, even if the clash of values runs the risk of becoming an eternal crusade which leads nowhere. This is why major upheavals on earth would enable us to reunite essential values, to unite against real problems and to put an end to the complacency of armchair seekers who waste their time on the internet defending minutiae, as if these formed the core of the vision or the soul of the paradigm. Wasting time in comment and polemics is a French shortcoming, inherited at birth perhaps, against which seekers do not close ranks. The perseverance with which people who are not even really “enlightened” defend their position, has something unhealthy and pathological about it, because what we think is not important, the issue is the fact of being, and time wasted in personal justification is hijacked by Untruth, as Satprem would say. If this were true sincerity, then we would find something better to do than to hurl projections at each other like insults.

I had to back up my defence of Satprem as well as my “technical” reservations concerning him, which involved fleshing out the content and forced me to reveal part of my personal history. As this is actually quite serious and I worship balance, I have written a dictionary with a humorous twist to compensate, which I hope will discredit me in the eyes of those people lacking in perception whom I fear will use my vision of things to harmful ends. It is better to get rid of them straight away. I don’t think that you can laugh about everything with Jews – you encounter dark forces in derision, racism in humour and treachery in certain forms of irony – so my dictionary of the silken tongue claims above all to entertain, to bring a breath of fresh air and not to pour scorn on the narcissists who habitually use it. It’s like that famous gobbledygook which consists of venting one’s anger on objects other than those which provoked it in order to spare them violence on the one hand, and to overcome our resentment towards them on the other. We will share a laugh at overinflated egos and sometimes even our own perhaps, since charity begins at home. That will be in the next update, as you can’t rush a dictionary of cosmic trendiness. It will enable us to laugh at our opponents, which is sometimes the best weapon of all, because they are not all so bad.

The firm support which I receive from certain people provides me with encouragement to increase the number of updates, perhaps to every two months or so, in order to include new texts, as well as writings for which I still do not have a publisher – a diary, a novel and a new essay, which the Divine has just instructed me to write... That aside, I don’t intend to make a mountain out of a molehill and I don’t intend to go on and on praising Satprem or providing endless details concerning the interpretation of his experience, because I did not know him and could easily make mistakes by dissecting his texts. We are not living in an era when you can replay the match with the excuse of doing better next time. It’s a question of pruning and not using subjective disagreements on minutiae as an excuse for decimating the ranks. Being turned towards the Supramental is a profound standpoint, which does not require you to be able to compare Mother, Satprem and Sri Aurobindo.

Ifyou find nuggets of gold in each of them, then so much the better, and if you can get help with moving forward from one or other of them, then so much the better too. If you fall by the wayside because you allowed yourself to be enslaved by a myth instead of taking the risk of being yourself, then too bad.

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A vocabulary question

There are two ways of using the word supramental:

The first way is a direct reference to Sri Aurobindo, who gave this name to the original divine energy – the shakti of supreme consciousness. This term is useful in this context as it enables you to group together the four aspects of the Divine mother and also because it contains consciousness, which by definition accompanies this type of energy. At the end of the day, it is a highly technical term, which means very little when taken out of context. The second way of using the word supramental is completely false. It consists of taking the word “mental”, which we all know describes the mind which thinks, and assuming that something exists above this, which is where we have to go. In this context, the word supramental is no more than a meaningless intellectual category, but is likely to cause confusion among the innocent, who will imagine that a wonderful world awaits them if they cross the realm of thought in an upward direction. Personally, I would like those who want to use the word outside the context of Sri Aurobindo's vision to write it with a hyphen between 'supra' and 'mental', so that they can continue to describe the overall planes which they imagine to be above the mind, while abandoning appropriating divine shaktis so easily. Nothing is easier than playing on words and what is in fact peculiar to a consciousness which is truly developing is that it passes through the signifier immediately, in order to savour the signified. Personally, I am even prepared to abandon the term supramental were it to quickly become hackneyed and to carry on being transformed nonetheless by the mother of worlds.

The manifestation would no longer be what it is if it did not allow cheats and forgers to create new illusions. While ever the human race continues to be fascinated by the mind, it will enjoy replacing reality itself by words which describe it, in order to become intoxicated easily, just like somebody who enjoys a wine all the more for having switched the label. The supramental can become a lure and this is totally in keeping with our history. Hundreds of Christian sects were created by hijacking the word love - to which Jesus gave a particular meaning - in order to turn it into something else and this was very successful. It would, therefore, be understandable that were the word supramental gradually to become a part of everyday language then it would become a byword for all sorts of movements which would have nothing to do with its origins or its ends. Swindlers come along, forcing every Tom, Dick and Harry to become an expert in discernment and requiring us to be extremely vigilant: they put our aspiration to the test and disguise the path with deceptive signs, so that each person must become truly responsible for their own steps, mistakes and their own discoveries.

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To unknown internet users

«Let's call a spade a spade»

You are all fortunate enough to have understood the supremacy of Sri Aurobindo's vision, but this opportunity can still be wasted for different reasons. I am returning to this point because of what seems to me to be a rather scant inventory of the supramental manifestation since it has become possible, i.e. over the last forty years. First and foremost, a significant number of forces stand in the way of the apparition of the supramental, and it is not absurd to think that seekers who are not vigilant might receive counterfeit versions of the supramental, insofar as they reach out towards it with impure, egoistic, or even desperate impulses, as if the supramental were the solution to all ills and that one must force it to manifest itself through obsessive insistence on flushing it out.

It is, therefore, entirely natural for me to describe the difficulty inherent in contacting the supramental and in working with it, because my journey has lasted thirty years now, requiring an extraordinary degree of adaptability on my part in order not to give up or "go off the rails", and since I would like the experience to spread, I see myself, through force of circumstance, as a lead climber with the right to give his opinion on an ascent which others wish to attempt. Since everything confirms the fact that I have "succeeded" (for now), it is natural for me to broach the subject of the conditions to be fulfilled in order to succeed in this ascent. In all honesty, and at the risk of making small errors of judgement, I have the right to decree that certain overhangs are impassable and that it is better to take a longer, but safer, route than to fall into the void because one believes that one can walk upside down. Everything indicates to me that many "seekers" have not understood Sri Aurobindo's paradigm. They have grasped hold of this vision with their imagination, frustrations, existential missed opportunities and also with their ideals and faith and thus their heart, with some clever arguments on the complementary nature of Spirit and Matter of course, but this runs the risk of being inadequate to aspire to the highest, and also consequently the most difficult, of all forms of yoga.

I am dotting the i's and crossing the t's not in order to dishearten anybody, but to recall the extraordinary supramental paradigm which guarantees both its absolute transcendence and extreme difficulty. Having been "recruited" by the Divine myself, if I look back and contemplate the last thirty years of work, I admit to having encountered almost insurmountable obstacles... Therefore, when I see "seekers" who have no direct consciousness of the supramental playing at predicting what transformation is, I can only pity their naivety or, by contrast, their arrogance, but either way, there is a genuine lack of balance...

It is trying for me to see a myth surrounding the supramental increasingly taking shape every day, propelling followers into theoretically true and perfect worlds, but which have no practical substance and they therefore live by creating their own "smoke screens".

A lot of people who are passionate about the supramental remind me of neophytes who want to start diving, but by making their maiden dive with nitrox, a mixture of gases for breathing safely at a depth of over seventy metres, which they want to achieve in one fell swoop. They will not find a club which allows them to cut out all the stages and a first dive always takes place close to the surface.

The difference lies in the fact that spiritual world is not signposted, other than by a few gurus, few of whom are reputable, therefore each "seeker" believes that they are entitled to approach the supramental with such a degree of subjectivity that the chances of it appearing are practically reduced to nil.

Therefore, it is of course up to you whether you reject me on a variety of pretexts because my approach is not sufficiently trendy, but I am going to deal a blow to a few truths, which will enable some people to adopt a new approach and others to bypass me and to bury themselves even more deeply in their illusions. This is the stake in intervention, because nothing is neutral and I shall, therefore, help a minority at the risk of upsetting a majority and this is a risk which I am taking because I do not seek "recognition" by different right-thinking movements which have already become established among followers of Sri Aurobindo, and it is an honour for me to be rejected by mythomaniacs. Therefore, you should brace yourselves and tell me to go to hell for not buttering you up.

First and foremost, the term supramental means absolutely nothing unless it is associated with the Divine, just as one cannot characterize man without woman, or think of yin without yang being in the background; any description of the supramental which does not imply the Divine as Supreme Consciousness is a misinterpretation. The supramental is nothing other than a form of modulation which appears to us in the form of centrifugal and ultramicroscopic energy, which responds to quantum criteria, but the supramental does not exist per se. It is simply a wave field in time and space, which depends exclusively and wholly on eternal Supreme Consciousness, the Purushottama and Satchitananda.

The supramental, therefore, is the music produced by a frequency and Supreme Consciousness is the instrument. Becoming attached to the sound produced and forgetting its source is purely and simply a foolish mistake.

We must, therefore, re-examine the forms of yoga which existed before the unpredictable arrival of the supramental, because this is only a hypothesis for the time being, given humanity's lack of impatience to TRULY recognize the Divine (even in the case of rogue followers of Sri Aurobindo), the Divine in the strict sense of the word, whom many people amuse themselves by locating further down, on the pretext, which is true, that other forces contribute to the ascension of the Earth.

Prakriti without purusha, as everybody knows, is ghastly. It is the energy which propels itself forward, whereas consciousness-witness does not emerge, it is the control which nature, i.e. the gunas, exerts over an individual who is merely passing through life without becoming aware of either the self or the psychic being.

Admittedly, this is not serious, but this type of individual is, nevertheless, harmful out of ignorance, manipulated by rajas into anger and violence, by tamas into cowardice and indolence and by sattva into fundamentalism, in the case of redressers of past, present and future wrongs.

Supramental energy does not exist without consciousness of which it is merely the instrument or, worse still, by throwing ourselves into it we run the risk of misusing it by becoming attached to its energetic nature, whilst almost forgetting its consciousness nature, because this is where the difficulty lies. The supramental is so active and operational on a physical level and on the level of perception that we have to counterbalance this movement by attempts to move upward, otherwise we will easily lose the Self and lose the Divine from above and what is left of the ego struggles with the uncontrollable, sovereign, blindingly fast effects of the supramental in the physical realm. Assimilating supramental energy is, therefore, particularly difficult because it wants to act in the pure matter of the body, which must be left in its natural state. Supramental consciousness, in the strict sense of the term, is therefore, of necessity, transmuted into energy, since the two simultaneously are mutually incompatible for the time being, as the body could not survive them. Sri Aurobindo withdrew in 1926 to find the path which would enable us to avoid slipping back into the scenario of the rishis – i.e. finding a supramental which animates the spirit without transforming anything. Nobody knows what he did, but he was successful and I am living proof of that. Henceforth, attaining the highest accessible planes of human consciousness (Satchitananda and Purushottama) automatically brings about a conversion of consciousness into energy. Light and omniscience gradually withdraw and former powers are lost over consecutive months and one becomes one of the living-dead, but at the end of this dive into the depths of hell, there is the possibility of increasing supramental energy in the physical body and this will produce a new type of consciousness, which is different from the wonderful supramental of the rishis, which was experienced in an ordinary body.

The problem lies not in attaining the supramental, but in simply and exclusively becoming conscious.

On a supra-cosmic level, before the fragmentation of the universe, we can easily assume that there was an immutable unity in which Supreme Consciousness and supreme energy are combined and this is possible in quantum terms, but in the Manifestation there are two things, and incidentally only two things, as Sri Aurobindo states in Savitri - She and He. She is the original Divine force, the Mother of worlds, the huge divine Mother with four supramental energies which she delegates, and He is the inexpressible "consciousness of Self", the Lord who divides himself between existences and loses himself in them.

That said, if one wants to stop cheating, it is possible.

We know that our "soul" contains in its depths the "involuted" presence of the Lord and we take the pictures we like to imagine of the next supramental era after which we lust less seriously because it is obviously the ultimate one. Instead of expecting something or other from the EXTERNAL manifestation of the supramental, which is overhauled with clean cells, we work, as yogis have always done, towards the inside. We therefore realize that inventing characteristics for supramental transformation out of pure complacency, far from attracting it, actually causes it to flee, in the same sort of way that watching a pornographic film excuses us from loving the woman with whom we are in love. Let's call a spade a spade - trying to imagine the supramental is simply obscene. As its name indicates, it is beyond everything, beyond even the self, which is already hard enough to represent, and beyond the supermind, which is also untranslatable, but wild delusions about the transformation of the physical not only yield nothing if you please (other than first-hand testimony), but clutter up the path with vague, pearly, iridescent projections, which do not support the seeker's efforts, but wrap him in a fluid, ethereal cocoon - a made-to-measure prison for luxury idealists.

The goal of the supramental is not the physical transformation of the body, but knowledge-identity of the Divine through Himself, through a soul and incarnate being who joins in the supreme game, without claiming to know where it leads because new previously unrecorded states appear. If there are gains on the material and physical level, these are simply the CONSEQUENCES of this more intimate contact between man and the Divine and it is, therefore, a nonsense to become attached to the more superficial side of the supramental such as a significant increase in longevity, for example, or even the suspension of the ageing process.

I am not saying that it is impossible, but it will be the result of something much more essential, the establishment of another form of consciousness in the self which is very difficult to obtain because the body contains whole galaxies of natural processes limited by nervous and hormonal exchanges, which raises the problem of installing a consciousness which nature had not foreseen in a particularly ephemeral body on the cosmic scale. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Mother has not achieved physical immortality or that I have not yet obtained any spectacular results on a physical level after thirty years. We tackle millions of ready-made forms of programming and we lay into them, but shedding light on all this is more of an ordeal than anything else. Satisfaction comes from consciousness, from its contact with the Divine and sometimes from new physical sensations, but energy in the body creates many unpleasant sensations in return for gains made. My body is transformed, but it is not "me" and although I know how to connect the self and the non-self correctly, I refuse to identify completely with this human being who is undergoing a major physical transformation through supramental energy. This transformation even reached my genes in 2001 (nearly killing me incidentally in the process) because my genes literally exploded after three months of hesitation, revealing information about terror and Nazi energy (transmitted by my mother who sheltered Jews in 1942). The physical shell of my body was subjected to harsh ordeals for three months (six consecutive doctors were unable to say what was happening to me) and I needed a year's convalescence, followed by five further years in order to get back on top of things permanently...

Therefore, I can but smile at the grand dissertations of rogue followers of Sri Aurobindo, who imagine that changing four million years of integrated biological systems can be contained in a few appealing sentences on divine cells and other mental flights of fancy, which call to mind fruitless masturbation of virgins. They are used to imagine especially that one is playing in the major league and to share illusions because one is interested in the highest possible transcendence ... and I am afraid to say that I can detect in many followers of Sri Aurobindo thriving vanity, the hypnotic effect of a triumphant future, the bewitchment of the holistic mind (and yes, we have gathered that everything is connected so there is no need to make a big deal out of it) and finally the establishment of a salve for one's conscience and self-righteousness, which are contrary to the rules of yoga.

Do not dream any more, therefore, of an immortal body or a golden Eden. The present alone can act as a lever for all the rest, so please disperse your own smoke screens... or the supramental paradigm will suffer the same fate at our hands as Buddha, Jesus and Lao-Tzu and become a certified lie.

You should begin by understanding the old forms of yoga, the difficulty already inherent in attaining the Self (even serious people who would not countenance rambling on about transmuted man do not succeed), the huge challenge represented by not being manipulated by the gunas any longer and in finding and obeying the psychic self. It is pointless to begin with the cherry on the cake in the form of the overtly reverential image of a body with immortal cells, when the real work lies elsewhere; we must simply begin to be, to begin quite simply with that and stop deluding ourselves with the latest spiritually correct avatar. Physical transformation is only a consequence of contact with the Divine and the Divine has other things to be, aside from pursuing such a limited goal. However, it is true that the physical shell of the body, when properly fashioned by the supramental, would testify to a higher condition which is at last accessible.

Therefore, if you are open enough to think about "returning to your roots", then re-read this text once or twice and I am certain that I will enable you to "fantasize" less about your path and the whole Earth will benefit from it... and if I cannot teach you anything new, then welcome to the club for clear-sighted people.

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       I write works which are faithful to a difficult experience because experiencing the supramental is both a major challenge and an absolute necessity. If it had been easy for me to bear this unknown force, I would doubtless have outlined a path concluding with "now rejoice, you are perhaps going to achieve the impossible." However it transpires that thirty years of experience have taught me to go from ecstasy to hell in the same day, hundreds of times and so I am writing from a single optic, that of conveying the difficulty of it in order to help those who will follow so that they do not give up when everything seems to be lost, because that is where everything begins.

For now it is a warrior who speaks, who without being disillusioned describes the front for those who claim that they want to go there as brave little soldiers of the light. Perhaps they thought that it was an imaginary front and that the Divine would give them huge satisfaction in exchange for enlisting. Perhaps they thought that the supramental was just an improved form of self, with perpetual happiness guaranteed on production of receipt, so let's go in quick and purr contentedly forever. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who do not know it talk about it while waving their arms about theatrically, with an eager expression, but the very few who have experienced it directly present things differently: it represents the ultimate in difficulty. It is therefore predictable that cowards will reject genuine testimony and stick to the flowery words of imposters, compulsive liars or fanatics, of forgers who call what passes through their heads "supramental" because it does not cost anything and it allows them to go round in circles, to pace around their cage in their golden dreams whereas others, that I take the liberty of choosing with my books stripped of all complacency, are committed to understanding the first witnesses with humility, circumspection and detachment. As the Mother aptly put it, "They do not want a God whom they cannot deceive."

I would like to make it clear that I do not control access to the self or to the supramental at all and that I offer texts drawn from my own experience. The Divine possesses the true criteria, not me. However it is unlikely that I achieved illumination by chance in 1974 and the supramental by chance again in 1977. It is therefore up to me to bear witness, to speak out, to proffer some certainties nevertheless on all the topics which have been at the core of my existence, at the risk of being general.

1/ "The Root of Awakening" is a heart-felt homage to the impersonal self which, by its very detachment, will enable those in a state of evolution to bear the physical supramental. It is likely that this realization will remain permanent, even during the supramental reign since it makes one infinitely passive and therefore prepares the instrument to receive, without the filters of attachment or personal volition. For me it is a mistake to seek a supramental shortcut by jumping in with both feet beyond authentic traditional spirituality, as if the Divine were making a clean sweep. This is not the case at all. The supramental exceeds everything, but does not refute spiritual continuity in any way. The self finds another place without losing any of its characteristics. We must therefore find it after or before contact with the supramental in order to remain homogeneous.

2/ "Healing through Awakening" is a fundamental work for understanding the resistance of the subconscious to the supramental quest and I wrote it at the end of a long period of convalescence. It may not be very "heavy" on joy, but declaring that one must "do all the hard work oneself" is one of my privileges because it is simply the bare truth of spiritual existence and the opponent is named, which can weaken him.

3/ For me, "Quantum Meditation" is a finely-cut little gem which I offer to the supreme intellect, which I have always loved passionately and although I doubt whether the techniques can yield tangible results in the spiritual order, they yield huge results in the psychological sphere. Free, gratuitous, disinterested involvement in the practice described can be a source of inner enlightenment. Like Christopher Columbus and the egg, somebody had to come up with the idea of this absolute diagram, but I would clarify one important point: quantum meditation is practised in a casual manner, even in emergencies. I would strongly advise against "pulling the force" at the moment, particularly in mystery 2, because "peculiar" entities are just waiting for that opportunity to become embedded in the cerebellum of you young people. Let us be careful not to muddle everything up; quantum meditation is a tool which comes supplied with instructions, but it is easy to think that it is more or less than it really is, then once again you will be referred back to your vulgar expectations, to your attachment to the fruits of your labour, if you want to "use" it in a pragmatic way. It is not a personal development tool.

The supramental manifests itself on its own; it comes in without knocking on the door and does not hear the doorbell – do not force things. Casualness, casualness and more casualness, but true, serious casualness without vanity, is therefore a foretaste of detachment.

Meditation, which I experimented with several times over the course of three years, complements our other encounters on this theme, and I accept that it works differently for each individual, very differently precisely because the original very simple diagram contains every possibility and therefore every particular feature too. It is an inexhaustible source of small realizations. It is feng shui to help the poor brain to function – because ever since it got lumbered with the mind as well as the rest it is overloaded...

4/ "Awakening and Philosophy" cocks a snook, although not unkindly, at "fanatics" of the mind, so that they suffer even more than regular guys from imagining the world in terms of "representations", or so that they take advantage of the opportunity to let go by admitting that they can leave alone this intellect which they try to seize in vain with the pretentions of their petty selves in order to try to rebuild the world with opinions. I like intellectuals, so they should not resent me giving my opinion on the mind and its use. Everyone can say what they want about the role of thought – that is the rule of the game; the mind bites its own tail in a variety of opinions, contradictions, and assertions and in the arbitrary nature of presuppositions. Why not me? I used to love to think, before I realized that it did not lead anywhere. Sartre reduced me to tears for an hour when I was nineteen under the influence of some excellent hash smoked in the spirit of Rimbaud and Nietzsche earned me a trip to the infirmary after a dissertation as a boarder at a preparatory school in Nice for higher education teacher training, when I even thought that I was mad for a few hours. I am rather strong on empathy. Therefore, when I read Yankelevitch while in Mayotte in 2000, I was so moved to see that there were still some good, intelligent "guys" practising philosophy and I took advantage of the results of a meeting with the divine Mother to write this little work quickly, longhand with a fictitious interlocutor like uncle Plato, as it helps to clear the ground more quickly if there is somebody in front of you to contradict you.

Finally, thanks to the web, since publishers refuse to publish Natarajan, (who?), I am convinced that the work "The Principles of the Manifestation" will end up where it can be useful and will leave the mark and the fragrance of the supramental in all sorts of people, however few, it does not matter: in some indigo children soon, in some people who need confirmation that this intuition opens up infinite spaces and that the universe is based on an order which is revealing itself to those who know how to listen to it. I began to write this work longhand, a bit at the time, in 1991 in Sri Lanka, when I felt one morning that my mind was beginning to work differently, naturally, seeing every aspect of things effortlessly. The book then grew over several attempts, sometimes with two or three fallow years, and I rewrote it totally in the summer of 1999 and made the final corrections in February 2007.

I like simplicity, but not oversimplification. Thinking about the human body alone (without considering the billions of possible mind waves) confronts us with complexity: more than two hundred bones, different systems which bring together several organs, the incredible process of circulation of the blood and energies and a whole maze of unconscious symbols housed in the three brains. I have indeed taken the gamble of persuading all those people who claim to decipher reality to come to love complexity in all its worlds, in order to overlap with it and with its principle...

P.S. I am not a purveyor of dawns, but a potholer in the memory of evolution and it is towards this meaning that my future works will lead in part. The supramental can dissolve the accretions of subconscious reactions right down to their individual or collective principle perhaps. We must continue the experiment and see if the body can withstand it. And perhaps there will be more of us... Are you really surprised that the "price" for a project like this is so high and that I am laying my cards on the table? I am sorry, but I do not strike bargains. The Divine plan for all of humanity is to deprive us of illusions, although we have to agree to accept it – i.e. to prefer disturbing truths to reassuring lies – in every field, without exception.

In other words, sabotage the mind and retain only an understanding of love.

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      The Earth's invitation (1991)

       One evening, as I was worrying about the future of mankind, the Earth spoke to me in these terms: "although it is legitimate to hope for a dazzling future, do not try to steal its light by force, because love alone can lead you to the gold of celestial waters and it will start on its way as soon as you examine yourself without complacency, like a vague mystery, or a clumsy mind which roams from dream to illusion and from bitterness to ephemeral pleasure. If this solid ray of love does not become established, then you will not be offered any opportunity to break open the egg which encloses you in sleep.

Free that fluid intellect from your mind, which makes light of the complicated structure of your actions and reactions, in order to reveal to you the sublime path which absorbs all currents without getting lost. Your disappointments are more useless insults directed at the sun, because everything is redeemed through total offering. Even your choices will be snatched away from you by hostile powers if you think that the heavens owe you anything, when you have not even acknowledged them.

I could teach you at length and show you the transition from blue to red, from white to black, from orange to indigo, from green to violet and from yellow to turquoise and you would doubtless go into raptures over the fact that each thing gives rise to its opposite, just as night creates day, or resting when tired adds a keen edge to activity. I could persuade you that it is not you combining the sentences which go through your mind, but an incandescent power condemning you to the words by placing you in thrall to the direction of time. There, your emotions entwine with your ideas, your feelings disguise your fears, and your hopes make your desires more attractive, as you let yourself get carried away. I have heard you utter 'I' emphatically when you were celebrating some very ordinary success, as if you had tamed the world and then a little while later I caught you in a rage which almost incited you to kill the person you claimed to love.

Death gathers up your illusions like precious booty, but be aware that love fertilizes dreams and gives them the power to ripen. The heavens are waiting for you to plant wonderful wishes and the earth requires you to harvest them in unlikely achievements.

Opposites combine in secret laws which are the keys to your home – existence and many doors reveal the path of the warrior to you. Darkness and light want time to be at their service. This is the origin of all the conflicts which buttress the future against the past using the present, which nobody can grasp, as a lever. If you reject the ocean of the heavens in which you represent just a single wave which froths all the time, then nothing will redeem your many sufferings; they will become pointless and you will be a dead weight for me.

However, each of your victories is akin to the sun and what you win for yourself spreads and celebrates the heavens. Unknown inspiration will lead you to inaccessible mysteries. You will be able to conquer the terrifying or charming masks of God, which had forced you to seduce or fear that same intensity which you dared not look at directly. You will see a God who is searching for himself in the heathen, one as inept as you and no scandal will be able to overwhelm you any longer because you will have a presentiment of the contentious nature of evolution in what is foul, that cursed part which your awakening is helping to transform.

You will see God admit through your own suffering that he has lost himself in you in order to animate you and you will reject the former tortures which an unfair creator seemed to inflict on you. You will even feel that your pleasure is no longer just vague, electrically charged joy, but a gift, a moment of gratitude offered by the flesh to life.

Nothing belongs to you except your illusions, on which death feeds. Your dreams are the sun's wishes diluted by your heart; your aims are the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which is beyond you; your personality emanates from a primordial number whose geometry is hidden; your ideal is the fragrance of a star and your opinion is a cascade of radiant hypotheses.

War is a battle to discover you."

I had listened patiently to the earth and it had nourished me. I would have liked a rest in order to meditate on what I had received, but on the contrary, all the new truths which had taken shape in me summoned up others. Perhaps this was necessary to stop me from going backwards.

The spirit of fire suddenly manifested itself in the stars which I was contemplating and sang in counterpoint: "Tear your consciousness away from the inertia of the mineral realm because it fossilizes your lines of vision. It seeks out permanent torpor by demanding absolute answers. Just as a stone evolves towards a metal, so too your sleep offers a presentiment of serenity when a timid thought takes hold of your shadowy nights to aspire towards infinitude.

The flower is still within you, in those fragile emotions which cause you to weep, in dreams which look towards a magnificent sun, whose rays dapple your hopes which can sometimes be dignified or daring and are often naive and puerile. However, you pay for the persistence of the flower within you when one drop of sorrow too many causes the smile of life which animates you to fade and makes you lose your staying power.

The animal is still within you in your genetic memory, layered but alive. How else can one explain your rages other than as the return of a forgotten power which protects you somewhat ineptly? How could you accept those family laws in which you believe if you had not inherited from animals the spirit of sacrifice in favour of your descendents and an obsession with safety? Everything is encoded far beyond the reach of your intellect in inaccessible kingdoms. You can rediscover a horse which is master of the great expanses and choose to dare to make the permanent journey. You can flush out the bird of prey and freeze your desires in order to achieve the solitary discernment which unravels clan identity. You can discover the elephant and its timeless memory to measure time by the span of the centuries. You can meet the wolf who still dictates tribal law and the preservation of the hierarchy in you. The monkey can still be found in your imitative gestures; the cow and the lamb feed in your dreams which dissolve cruelty; the dog still beats in your heart when you sacrifice what you call freedom to the master you love, whoever he might be. The bear within you wants to glean some sacred time without being disturbed. The traces of these creatures overlap on the fringes of your personality.

Sometimes the eagle needs to fly, even at the expense of frightening those whom you are pushing away by your gaze and you will see living examples of these creatures follow one after the other in the forefront of your consciousness in an enchanting display which will surprise you. The return of the tiger can inspire crime and that of the fox perfect tricks. When the cat passes it strikes down all oversensitivity and then makes the mind drift into too much splendour. When the dog is resurrected, ineffable tenderness is offered to love which is distant, but already intuited. The goat is sometimes a threat and comes under the rule of the great Pan, to celebrate the powerful intoxication of the senses, whereas the message of the bird leads you towards pearly escapes, which rescue you from banality. Let these creatures, which have returned from a time which history banished without being able to destroy their ghosts, go past. Let them surface through you: they bear witness to the earth and they are the avatars of time, just as the gods are the avatars of immortality.

All eras take root in the present moment and stones and metals, plants and animals and demons and angels come face to face in you. I am freeing you from the enchantments of the azure sky and the spells of the ideal, because war alone can bring transformation. Everything is founded on the destruction of what is out of date, every seed becomes a tree which will wither and die. Duration dominates birth and death without making any distinction between them. Birth falls on the shores of the future just as death runs aground in the sidereal river of the Milky Way. The present moment branches out into the chaos of the initial geneses, as well as into the divine order of the most distant futures.

Accept the law: everything is in motion, every genesis has a funereal dimension and birth and death are as one."

This new command showed me the work to be undertaken so clearly that my strength deserted me. I was overwhelmed by a gentle but persistent emotion, as if my brain were refusing to absorb so much new information. However fire resumed his speech, as if to encourage me:

"The moment will become a marvellous sort of giddiness if distance does not frighten you. Filled with a hugeness to which you have acquiesced, suns will come forward to meet you. You will savour the delights of frontiers which have been abolished. You will experience the magic of numbers which have melted into a single cluster of stars which can yield every possibility. The mystery of shapes will be revealed to you. You will see the total complementarity of all opposites and the marriage of darkness and light, which will appease your desire for perfection, will be yours. The wings of imagination will carry you right up to the architects of creation.

Azure and black mix for silver which whispers to the moon; blood red and the amber of dawn mix the oranges of reconciliation. Green and yellow permanently weave the renewal of all things and grey and pink subdivide impulses. Gold awaits the offering of your spirit when you will have exhausted the rainbow of your dreams and the thunder of your passions. Suns will then return to serve you.

Do not, therefore, bemoan lost time. Regrets are tears from eyes which grow stagnant. Remorse is a chain which keeps you enslaved to the past. Abolish the time through which you have lived, let memories of torture surface and pass on your way. Do not wallow in evoking what is unbearable. I can burn your most painful memories if you let me and if you offer me your aspiration."

Then it was the turn of the spirit of water to manifest itself, several days later, when I was defenceless, stunned and my memory was full of cosmic echoes, which seemed to expect some sort of participation from me.

"You can embrace at a single glance the rainbow of feelings which follow one after the other right up to the sublime ecstasies which melt you into the Self of all beings. You can become Air and travel through all the secrets of space, understand all symbols and create a grammar of signs in which syntaxes follow on to reveal the history of mankind. You can leave your footprints on the Earth and the smiles of your works will cause future generations to marvel. You can build temples in the golden fibre of intellect, safe from the ruins which History forces human buildings to become.

You will even be able to attain my opposite - fire, which burns and consumes without being extinguished and which was already present in the incandescent atom revolving on its axis so fast that all sense of rotation is an illusion. Matter is simply an outward appearance, just as duration is merely the surface of a motionless mirror.

My own transparency welcomes your new fluidity.

Dig beneath the masks and the face appears.

Pierce the past and the source of the present reveals the first foundations of your former memory. Dig into the Present, releasing all moorings and the Earth will lead you out into an ocean of possibilities reflected by the unfathomable Heavens.

You were formed to heal breaches, to hide the cracks in your existential egg in order to live in the blissful continuation of the maternal placenta. You fled what was essential in order to weave between events, understanding them at their own level. Your people's culture confines you to your egg by polishing it further and it becomes hostile when it assumes the right to nobility and dignity by hinting that its truths are superior to those of distant philosophies. Those who treat you like a stateless person and a renegade idolize the masks of God who surrounds them. It is a blessing to be excluded and this opprobrium is the mark of your fragile, singular saintliness.

Belonging to nothing is the first solar initiation, which blazes the trail when certain stable certainties yield to the intoxication of restless questioning, but in order to achieve this, you must be weary of shallow sentiments and petty satisfactions.

You have simply been taught sometimes how to change Master without freeing yourself.

Belonging to nothing and to nobody is the best path when only the Heavens and the Earth are party to your burning questions. If you embrace a path without having understood it, you will be forced to go backwards to avoid blindly following the most beautiful routes which have already been traced. Any road where it is not sufficient simply to follow in the footsteps of one's predecessor will yield more clues than the tracks of a god which several hunters have already falsified in order to claim the discovery for themselves.

I would urge you to walk alone through hundreds of millions of almost identical years, which all end up at a tiny little nugget of star - man - confronted with sidereal expanses and his own genesis beyond the realms of memory. Everything is present and concentrated in that "I" which clumsily seizes the moment, an unstoppable power which forces the brain to look ahead with the same degree of intensity as it uses to remember.

We rarely achieve an eternal present, either because the here and now is merely the extension of the dreams of the egg, or perhaps because it only represents the prelude to aims which remain hidden, or to ambitions which swallow the freshness of the day in a plan which is in keeping with the cocoon of the past. The Earth does not hope that your steps will be uniform with those of your predecessors. It destroys and innovates, perfects and reinvents and the structures of the mind in which wishes are formed are its most delicate fruits.

This is why some people find the original purpose of existence in the bliss which comes from breaking free of one's chains, when the last of one's baggage has disappeared in the sweetness of dawn which gives birth to every new morning, revealing their meanings scattered in a cluster of inner stars. Once the eggshell has been broken, the mind discovers its own mystery in the wind and dust, the flower which celebrates numbers in the symmetry of its petals, in the serene animal which is better embedded in precise time than man, who complains or hopes, desires or calculates.

Once the eggshell has been broken, nature becomes a womb from which we detach ourselves, a mother whose dramas we no longer sanction, a homeland whose illusions we no longer respect. The Sun, however, announces new decrees: the wish that all human lives should free themselves from the countless things which dominate them, in order to find the dazzling immensity of a spirit which is free of desires and fears and which appreciates the works of life without becoming caught in its toils.

Your spirit would like to reach radiance without having finished with the opaque. It would like to reach happiness without having dismantled misfortune and its spells; it wants to run without learning to walk. If it eats time to collect victories it will become insatiable for triumphs. Your mind would like to conquer fear without looking at danger head-on. It would like to avoid anguish, without analysing the emotional twists and turns from which it rises in order to trickle into its nightmares.

See how memory is a form of escape, as soon as you call on it to replace the present moment with faded images. See how anticipation is also a form of escape as soon as it leads you away from the present towards imaginary performances in which you have the starring role. You move around comfortably in what does not exist for anyone else, because neither your dreams nor your nostalgia are tangible and you wrap yourself up in your own timeframe to the point where you lose sight of matter and its perpetual demands.

You think that you own a vast space and you even boast about crossing the great expanse. However your memories are too violent not to dye the present with their own colour and your hopes are too naive to be in keeping with the future. You navigate in the subtle fragrances of what was, but that is not where you will find today's perfume. What is the point in going back over the path you have already traced – can you not see that it ties you to the same maze, unless you recall only the lights of the passages and the symbols on the thresholds...

Your mind sweats as it labours to appropriate your preferences and it suffers because things resist it; it is surprised that it cannot force them to acquiesce. You try to catch what is behind the wall before even having climbed it, on the pretext that things will be better on the other side. You forget your prison by taking delight in imagining what you will do on escaping, but you do not know if you will ever get out and your desires are not locks. If all you had to do for the doors to open was to look at the sky through the bars, I would advise you to daydream about your future, but laws govern the boundaries of time right up to its unsuspected core and if you do not discover what they are then you must endure them.

However, you are right to expect something new. It will not come from circumstances or spring from events, but will overcome your catalogue of identical days, your series of habits, your layers of prejudices and your grains of truth. Novelty will trample on your personal museums in which your attachments are filed.

The sky is not a collection of stars, nor knowledge a sum of truths. Love is not the total of feelings added together and light cannot be accumulated – it disperses into the expanse to embrace everything.

In the depths of your most sordid days, at the very end of their gloom, you will step through the door of the unexpected which will flood you with the bliss of a path with no beginning. A dazzling experience is watching out for you so that zeniths, which are a mere breath away, carry you beyond your merciless timetables to the promises of the inner Self, which buries the pipe dreams of your past. You must become a lookout and examine the stream of your ideas, which combine the currents of several torrents into one tamed river... Do you not know that your desires mix their substance with your observations and that your wishes come from the meeting between cascades of pure water and the shadowy lakes of underground caves which nourish the dormant roots of the Earth? Are you unaware that emotions are like rainfall which gathers in your mind and heals the dryness of your heart or lays waste to and floods the soul when it is too heavy? Typhoons and floods prowl around your path to drown it at a time when only sorrow and resignation perpetuate themselves, but water's soul is benevolent if you let yourself flow with it and flooding saves you and reveals humility and the disintegration of opinions.

Have you not located some swamps in which your consciousness gets dangerously bogged down when you recall them and in which events which you will never accept lie rotting? Have you never encountered your river, your Ganges or your Nile, which can collect all waters and flow impassively, fertilizing the land along its way?

Beware of artificial locks which embellish doctrines with systems tied to the past; do not immobilize butterflies with eternal delights in dogma. The worst mistake which awaits you is to want to tame time, to make it pace around in your mental cage without biting you. Tame it instead and offer it time just for itself. Yield to its vastness without demanding anything... contemplate its age against the yardstick of the stars and realize the inanity of your ambitions. If you were to stand by and do nothing, if the river of your mind were really to agree to flow into the eternal Ocean by merging into the single river of duration, you would be led towards the mysteries of existence which flows copiously, your sorrows would pass, your limitations would drown, taken away by the suns of day and your ordeals would punctuate this experimental descent into the flux of eras like periods of apnoea.

Your choices would collude with the direction in which the water flows and you would surrender yourself to wisdom, which does not care about the things which do not depend on it and gathers each moment like a divine kiss. You would not resist the absolute. Your regrets would dissolve in the majestic course of the river, your remorse would be welcomed by new banks and your achievements would be to avoid the reefs by relying on permanently watching the riverbed. You are well aware that watching the wake would lead to your ruin, because you have to steer by the crest of immediacy."

All these fine words just served to emphasize the contrast between my position and what I had to achieve. How could I believe in the starry path when the monster demonstrates its cruelty, war succeeds war and genocides try to outdo each other in horror? Why is there so little love in solemn offerings, why are there all these rituals which want to call the truth as witness, or these rival liturgies which are sources of hatred, in order to celebrate a single God?

Enough stupidity and horrors – I have too many causes for indignation and my gaze is too piercing for me to be bowed by improbable revelations. Others before me in eras before remembered time believed in the enchanted power of the spirits of the stars or the strength of the Earth and what came of it? Their word has rotted and they have become idols and nobody, or almost nobody, followed them. Where is harmony, where is the living god in every man? I accept that the light wants to recruit me since it is relying on my aspiration, but how can I believe that it will transform me? I will fall back into the pitfalls of my species; huge forces are waiting for me to ascend in order to flatten me to the ground. I do not have any wings and if I imitate an angel who would be fooled? Me, no doubt, long enough to live for higher illusions and absolute values banned from the sleeping mud of matter. Then I would recognize my mistake: a stubborn pretention to change the order of the world on the pretext that Good is better than evil and that day is better than night. I no longer want to be torn. I just want to be.

I wandered for days and days, torn between the world filled with living nightmares which I was hesitant to leave, and the one awaiting me between dream and reality, which disappeared if I abolished it with my doubts and was reborn if I summoned it like a victory from the future, glittering beyond all sufferings, condemning them to wither and rot. My body became a sort of living puppet which toyed with me, cursing life and making me want to die, then giving me violent desires, merciless cravings and bright spells of delirium. When I was no longer anybody at all, an unknown voice seized hold of my spirit without saying its name:

"I have plunged into the marine ecstasy of the first cells which attached life to the immemorial rocks of the sidereal shores. I watched the development of the first blind bodies of animalcules propelled by a radiant impulse in the unified mass of the opaque ocean. In my sleep, which I offered to unfathomable kingdoms, I rediscovered the promise of the first dawns, lighting life in its infancy with eternal perpetuity. I saw the first fits and starts of quivering desire begin to form. I emerged from immensity through the countless bodies of animal species to embrace at a glance the works of the Spirit revealed by its laws and disguised by its aims. Every meaning had been found, every answer gleaned, piling up in one single direction, the arrow of existence, while intentions triumph over multiplicity and reveal the best part of the human being. Time bows down and surrenders its arms to the Eternal and at last I can see what the gods proclaim: one single origin is responsible for all the objects which succeed it; the process reproduces the secret of the immutable and immobility's scattered forms are the basis from which motion becomes animate, in which life takes root and it shines with an invisible light of which the mind is a trace. Time is my own shape and I sculpt it to fix it to the secret kingdoms of the Absolute sun which is conscious of itself. The accidents of my appearances all illustrate my unique principle; all lives cry out my name, all existences are mine, thousands of eras reflect me and every creature represents me. I emanate from myself – there is no higher secret or deeper mystery."

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      The way of Tao

       Tao is simultaneously one of the least precise and most representative terms in a Chinese culture which is losing itself in the mists of time and one whose existence the West was forced to recognize during its colonial conquests. The bond between Chinese and modern civilization is still fragile insofar as the European mind struggles to use those Chinese concepts which attract it without seriously distorting them. This is essentially why the philosophy of yin and yang has not been revealed to date, all the more so because it seems likely that China itself has lost the last guardians of the metaphysics of Tao over the ages.

We can understand the basis of the system of yin and yang by placing ourselves back in a paradigm which is simple, but very different from our own. The idea of changing the world which lies at the heart of the Judeo-Christian system is just a distinctive identity from which we must free ourselves to approach the original essence of Taoism. We must concur, in accordance with the facts, that the world is vast enough to have developed mentalities which differ greatly from each other in different places and eras. What we mean by mentality is the universal spirit's ability to grasp external reality and adapt to it, while uncovering principles and laws which allow one to anchor certain permanent criteria in the rapid movement of duration. As soon as a civilization seizes criteria which are not its own, it is forced to reject them or run the risk of losing its own representative structures, or it corrupts and distorts them to fit them into its own arsenal of concepts, in order to be able absorb them in some way into a global view of history. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that nobody can experience the basis of another cosmogony unless they have completely freed themselves from the mentality of their own origins. In simple terms, this means that a westerner cannot become a Taoist unless he has completely rid himself of the mental constructs which his brain has inherited from his own history in time and place.

We must adapt to the notion that perception of reality can be completely different in human beings who possess a different culture. For a Chinese Taoist, every transformation is merely the result of a new relationship between things and as such it cannot be viewed as a goal, a target or finality, and it will only ever be a provisional and limited part which it is dangerous to separate from the whole. Admittedly we can produce visions of the best we can achieve, as in the advice of Lao-Tzu to the emperor, but these are wishes and recommendations and not a political will as such, articulating precise methods. All positive or negative transformation is merely the natural fruit of the perpetual change which animates things and claiming to achieve preconceived transformations because that they would be convenient is not a vision which features in Chinese philosophy. In fact, particular decisions emanating from the intellect bring answers in a specific sphere, but it remains impossible to foresee all the consequences they bring, which make ripples in the water spreading out from the initial place where they fell. The best example of analytical policy which claims to resolve a particular problem by abstracting it from its system as a whole is the modern medical industry, which is flooded with prescriptions for easily identifiable symptoms which will disappear with medication, while causing side effects.

Ever since its origins, Chinese thought has liked to consider itself to be holistic, based on an integrated vision viewed in broad terms which is always sufficient to adjust the details, i.e. the permanent flux of small transformations which affect daily life. In fact it is a case of feeling the way in which all factors entwine with each other so deeply that this process will allow one to deduce the consequences which will emerge, to reject those which probably seem harmful and to retain those which will be favourable. The will to change events and situations by force would seem to be an outside import to this extremely deep philosophy, in which we know that things follow their inexorable course and that it is difficult to change their direction. Success will not be the outcome of a fight or of a will obsessed by objects, but of a patient assessment of factors, an evaluation of their proportions and this entails painstaking work, adjournments, playing for time, waiting for the right moment, giving up sudden impulses, emotions and reactions.

This is the opposite strategy to rushing, for example, into armed conquest, where violence and force disturb the world order to create artificial states. (It would be interesting to observe that language constitutes a more fundamental historic state than nations or political empires, cf the disintegration of the empires of Alexander the Great, the Romans and Napoleon).

The Tao appears to be more like a huge river, whose bed is so broad that it has no boundaries, than an authoritative principle. One can, however, try to conform to it, conformity being in the final analysis one of the only concepts of Taoism (conformity to the way, to the superior essence and to "return"), through a sort of luxury of the soul and not because it is necessary to do it. This is an important point, because unlike the many exoteric religious revelations which want us to fear the superior authority of the principles - God, cosmic laws, etc. - Tao pours forth freedom and distributes consciousness without asking for anything in return, thus excluding from the outset all moral attitudes from the search for pure unity. Joining this current which leads time itself ever further downstream and admitting that a reality exists which scoffs at our emotions and absorbs all opposites into itself – this is the paradigm of a vision of the world which may also have been lost, but whose traces we find in Li Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lao-Tzu.

It is a mistake to view earthly spirituality as a large accessible jigsaw puzzle in which any piece can interlock perfectly with the others. One must first abandon one's own framework in order to understand a foreign one. It is impossible to superimpose visions of the world, even if the mind succeeds in order to pull the wool over its own eyes and to appropriate on a superficial level things whose depths are beyond its reach. It is wrong to think that a believer can understand the humanism of an atheist other than by making a mosaic, as Gurdjieff would say, or that a pure yogi who is progressing through discrimination alone can put himself in the place of a mystic possessed by the Divine, transported above the Self, in Iswara, for example, the consciousness of the Lord. Each individual defines their path as a function of their needs and skills, but it is a mental lie to claim that one can justify one's own route by comparing it to somebody else's. What we will know about it must, by definition, be superficial and read off a map, whereas the other person will actually be experiencing this map in living spiritual territory, which we cannot imagine.

The Tao is broad enough to encompass all opposites, contradictions and journeys and although we cannot define it, we can however infer some aspects in order to gain some objective results, like in quantum mechanics, starting from the hypothesis of its indivisibility: if it contains everything then nothing can contain it. It can only be defined by itself and moreover there are several Sanskrit expressions which correspond to this mental explosion: I am that, meaning all and nothing, in a unity with no edges or cuts. The Tao is therefore the Hindu Brahman, and this is moreover the reason why the way of Chan was able to develop by saving original Buddhism which also targeted the Self, while impregnating it with Taoist symbols. Perhaps Buddha avoided defining the result of his quest as immersion in Brahman, but if he was in fact able to be assimilated to an avatar of Vishnu, it must be because his system leads to liberation, Hindu moksha by another means, bypassing the issue of the existence of God and advocating personal, trustworthy effort in order to free oneself from fear and desire. What is unknowable through intellectual means can sometimes reveal itself through a split in our mode of perception.

The Tao will obviously lie beyond all characteristics and is therefore reminiscent of the Self without any attributes upheld by certain Indian wise men, who abandon trying to make people believe that some sort of model for the truth can enable us to achieve it. This brings them into conflict with didactic teachers who are anxious to establish a school of thought and who maintain that the Self can be considered, a like a diamond, through the facets which it offers the intellect, although its volume is invisible. It adorns itself with attributes and it is true that for those of superior intelligence this clothing process can paradoxically give rise to progressive exposure, as the attributes constitute layers which gradually become more relative, or even opaque, because they are limited intellectual images. We emphasize representations in order to move beyond them, but it is a difficult living art, which we may well only be able to explore with a teacher ,but which is particularly unpredictable. Thought which does not lead to meditation and contemplation remains in the mental sphere and does not open the doors which it enumerates. Moving to higher states of consciousness, where the mind is neither a screen nor a filter is difficult to achieve and this is why it is pointless to criticize teachings for their lack of success. Their very aim lies in being transcended, which is not possible if we cling to their letter. Rigidity is the culmination of the yang principle, which kills it. An intellectual dead-end must lead to greater receptiveness and an admission of the limitations of the mind and only then can new views establish themselves in the self.

However, for the majority of human beings, conceptualizing the spiritual universe, which is by definition beyond the realms of conception, remains a double-edged sword as a method for discovering Tao. This is why Lao-Tzu restricts himself to the most basic properties (which are empty, invisible, intangible and insipid or unable to receive any characteristic), stating nevertheless that they are insufficient to encompass his being since the named path is not integral, eternal or in conformity with the Principle. He swiftly reveals his intentions: any picture which depicts supreme reality is not commensurate with or equal to it, but any attempt to evoke it, however inept or incomplete, can make us feel like making "the return journey". In ancient Chinese, te ching even means simply 'a statement of action in accordance with the principle' and not 'the book of the way and of virtue', which creates an opposition between the two terms.

One cannot in all sincerity let oneself be penetrated by a system which offends one's own perceptions without cheating or becoming compromised by a misleading form of composite. Similarly, a staunch Buddhist, whatever the nature of his philosophy and his practical skill, or even his "realization", cannot understand the many forms of Hinduism if he does not personally feel the presence of a Spirit in the world, which can be associated with general representations of God or of a creative intelligence. He will find everything which refers to the possible "submission" of the individual being to the Divine pointless and will therefore consider his own system to be superior and much more economical as an evolutionary strategy. It is therefore probable that only minds which are concerned with freeing themselves from programmes of perception which have been inflicted on them by their contingent origin can really benefit from sources other than those which are immediately available to them. We can already find this aim as a prerequisite for awakening in the vision of Sankara, which in the end only opposes the self and the avidya, the natural state of ignorance concealing impersonal consciousness, as all the rest are just intermediaries between the two – the mind which deals with perceptions and the intellect which would like to appropriate reality, but merely collects its countless paths like equations in quantum mechanics.

Those who feel the difficulty inherent in absorbing other cosmogonies dispose of the problem in a fairly conventional manner, consisting of saying that races find their own systems which suit them and to which they are attached. Thus Taoism is suited to the Chinese people and their purely analogical and structural language. Animism is suited to black peoples who do not separate themselves from nature and use magic to bypass the frontier between life and death. Sentimental deism suits Caucasians, who full of resourcefulness in action and, unlike Asians, are always ready to confront what is with what should be, which predisposes them to have a subjective and personal relationship with a God endowed with many anthropomorphic characteristics. Total asceticism suits Hindus, who have never really liked matter and consider it inferior to the mind as a base or collaborator - a vision which is particular to Taoism, tantrism and supramental revelation. Shamanism is appropriate for those who approach time in a cyclical manner and for whom the written word has never gained widespread acceptance.

The first job that needs to be done is to eliminate what God represents in our cultures, to avoid reducing him to the proportions of history or to characteristics which are genetically our own in a way. To this extent it does not matter what name we give to the supreme Reality, and in some respects the Tao can be a fairly cautious means of designating it, since the three patriarchs insisted that no image could be made of pure reality since it preceded heaven and earth and these two worlds are filters through which we perceive all and nothing from our intermediary position between the two. We no longer have to search for this supreme reality in life, any more than on the inside, in our being any more than in the principles of the manifestation, because the idea of parcelling up the sphere of reality would seem to be wrong from the outset.

Avoiding seizing anything with unshakeable conviction, but staying open to unity is a superior principle to calibration, which splits things up then does not know how to reconstitute the whole again. Just as it is easy to strip down a car engine to understand its components, but more difficult to put it all back together when one is not a mechanic, thus breaking down reality and claiming at the outset to explain its workings only uncovers its processes and once the universe is unfolded as it were, the instructions are not always obvious. What must the supreme art of decision-making be based on?

The path entails grasping the alternating phases of the principle, the reversal of yin and yang and vice versa when it manifests itself. Fixing the pattern in a diagram can at most be useful at the beginning and then it is of no further use. Accounting for the existence of day and night or becoming aware of the complementary nature of sleeping and wakefulness or of desire and satisfaction, may be necessary to inspire birth initially, but then it all falls out of the framework of the present on which we are required to surf, as darkness can become light and light can grow darker at any time under the general impulse of combined elements.

You do not become a good chess player by repeating the rules of the game, but by memorizing them and practising as many games as possible. Thus Chinese philosophy establishes the chessboard of yin and yang and as soon as we have accepted, understood and internalized it, the game unfolds. Am I inspired or am I reacting? Am I acting creatively or mechanically? Am I really listening or are miasmas, resentment and suffering causing interference? Separating the two principles is not that easy because they are combined from the outset, associated by an indivisible force, with one leading the other irremediably, although a third term, median emptiness, can sometimes separate them and put them into perspective.

For traditional Chinese minds, concepts have no real existence beyond their practical application. Philosophers of science are coming to the same conclusion today and every theory only has a limited sphere of application beyond which it is irrelevant. The complexity of quantum mechanics has led to the rejection of the notion of an ontology of theories because there are a great number of them and their results often overlap and diverge again. The simplest thing is to consider that each one has its own use, but its effectiveness is only limited to a restricted number of processes. We must use each in the area in which its processes are the best while conceding that they are rivals in a sphere of countless potentialities which, by its very nature, defies any attempt at reductionism.

It is perhaps because it is difficult to define what freedom brings in terms of precise benefits that Chinese thinkers preserved the message of the patriarchs for a sort of elite, often artists, who dreamed of discovering the feeling of being as one with the Whole. For others, the appeal of the oceanic feeling (whose spiritual legitimacy was never acknowledged by Freud) is too vague to represent anything interesting and requires a particular approach in the form of abandonment and non-action. The abstract (Tao) leads to the concrete (Tao). (The path stems from the principle and the path leads to the Principle in a fundamental and direct way which is unknown in Hinduism other than in tantrism and in the supramental revelation of Sri Aurobindo). In Hinduism, reaching the self, which fundamentally alters the subject's consciousness, seems to be a sufficient end in itself and allows the self to be free of obligation to the "manifestation". The phenomenal world is like dross which we have finally got rid of and all that remains is to advocate the way out, as it were, from a form of impersonal consciousness, independent of the physical body. As for the Chinese mind, it cannot "forget" material reality in any circumstances and use the excuse of accessing the Tao to reject the earthly condition which is worthy of being experienced "differently" once illumination has been achieved, whereas Hindus extrapolate easily, by deciding, for example, to escape from the wheel of incarnations.

There is nothing to reject. Observation separates action from rest, the clear from the cloudy and thought opens up the possible higher branches, the universe of extreme overlaps between the subject and the whole, which the Taoist learns to achieve through passive concentration, combining the characteristics of yin and yang - feminine abandonment and masculine vigilance. It is, therefore, a philosophy, a religion or a tradition which dispenses with a large number of presuppositions which renders it inaccessible to the philosophical mind and it is content to draw up an inventory of reality which can be deciphered through yin and yang on the basis that beyond them a source transcends them both. If there is anything to "quibble" over it would be over the actual measurements of the concrete proportions of things and situations and not over the ideas or concepts.

Tao can be felt in nature, tamed by the intellect, deciphered in the course of things which alternate phases of activity and rest, failure and success, light and clarity. All we have to do to come close to the Chinese vision is to view each pair of opposites as a whole. Day is not the opposite of night, but the same thing in its reverse phase. The same is true of evil, which is merely the mirror image of Good and is in no sense its opposite. These are independent realities which can expand into vastness according to their own standards, which become mirror images and persevering in trying to differentiate between them is an intellectual undertaking which is doomed from the outset. All good is transformed into evil when it becomes excessive, which is apparent, for example, when a state or kingdom takes such care of each subject that he loses own individuality (the excesses of the welfare state and Communism) and all evil is transformed into good when it is saturated with itself, just as peace regains the upper hand after war and discussion comes after an argument, etc... A mind which naturally sees opposites as two faces of the same coin cannot conceive of the world in such Manichean terms as a mind which spends its time contrasting opposites, which perseveres in trying to make the face of the coin which it prefers prevail. For the Chinese, reality is a Moebius strip, a single-sided strip (one end of which has simply been twisted once before it is joined to the other end) and it is only perspective which affects this single side which can be viewed from above or below without altering its unity. From this point of view, ontology seems to be a pointless concept in Chinese philosophy.

It is, therefore, a system which does not state where we must search for the truth because it only exists on the plane of a better overlap between the self and the Whole. It is cement between the stone and the keystone, between the individual and the universe. Aspiration to be lacks ostentation, does not wallow in liturgy and devotional practices and it places itself squarely in a position where it listens totally to what comes from the self, inside, and to what comes from the great magic force, Te, which forms the world and manipulates it. There is nothing to add to this dual way of observing the Moebius strip. Its internal face is, broadly speaking, introspection and the need to be forced to function for oneself and its external face asks 'Who am I in this world?' The problem therefore lies in identifying where things come from - the self or the non-self - and this disentanglement is a necessary and sufficient process for coming back to the Tao. Everything will be gone through with a fine-tooth comb, without any lyrical flights of fancy and without the pretension of succeeding (as is also the case in the Gita) and forces will have to be answerable. Desire will have to submit, along with all the gratifying little expectations by which ordinary men set such great store, such as fame and triumphant prosperity whose envy engenders permanent and pernicious mental activity which runs counter to essential Tao, one of whose first characteristics is quiet immobility beyond accident or circumstances.

If an appeal to the Tao is not natural, then it is not trustworthy. We are, therefore, a long way from other cultures which want to impose their religious beliefs and moral ethical system on the greatest number of people by force and who believe that they can change the course of the great River Tao with their petty locks made up of various forms of intimidation and sacred advice, which the priests of different religions know so well how to implement. Bringing somebody into line with one's thinking, however good it might be, is a human undertaking which is doomed to failure, based on a deep misunderstanding of real laws and idealistic bias, which is puerile, not to say stupid. In Taoism there is nothing to prove, because everything is a sign of the supreme Tao, which allows human beings to be masters of their own existences, as Lao-Tzu says in chapter 5. It is a question of knowing how to promote a return towards the Principle, the call towards the divine, the spiritual vocation and this question is not clear-cut. Lao-Tzu sows without trying desperately to reap and advises the prince, but Chuang Tzu refuses a ministerial post. They both nevertheless demonstrate the same thing – the supremacy of a single, indescribable, reality which eludes concepts, but which can be felt and liberates all human ambitions in favour of vision without blind spots which does not need to appropriate things to enjoy them.

The philosophy of yin and yang enables us to see the intellect which leads to the world in motion and when we start by observing whether we are active, receptive or a mixture of both, then the spiritual work is beginning. Receptiveness must tend towards abandonment and allow inner associations to occur, wherever they lead and activity must be directed and controlled without interference. However, in general, human beings live by mixing the two areas in which they are neither really receptive - because the mind continues to grasp sensations - nor really active because their activity is not very creative, fairly conventional, rather drowsy or mechanical. The two poles can grow alternately and one ought only to distinguish between them. The more we learn to "let go", the more creative our return to personal activity becomes and this is the direction in which work should be undertaken. It does not work in the opposite direction. Developing the subjective, controlled, willing, focused projection does not ever lead to a reversal of yin (except in disastrous cases!), because nature derives deep satisfaction from always creating new ties with the outside.

What we have to defuse is a taste for action, which is difficult, as it stems from animals which have no means of abandoning themselves to existence other than in tiredness and sleep. Succeeding in persuading the mind to remain passive is a strategy which does not vary in all the traditional arts – Buddhism, Chan, Taoism and Hinduism. This reversal is never advocated in the cultural realm because the mind lives in order to appropriate reality by grasping it and one can only learn from a wise man how to turn the mind back towards its source, i.e. to ask the intellect to go against the current instead of letting it weave its web of images downstream with the same warp and weft which it has inherited. We find this same fundamental concern in Indian tantras, in which the same path is described differently, with less economy and with flourishes which seem pointless to the Chinese mind and intellectual refinements which the Taoist challenges as mere delicacies. There is much intellectual eros in Hindu and European thought and previously in Greek thought also, but this is replaced by the Chinese with a pragmatic sense of being in the right place at the right time, which is a more all-encompassing emotion closer to sensation. Hindus and Europeans find the sanction of a rational mental impression indispensable and comforting.

The Chinese language promotes abstraction since the same ideogram or sign can have different signifiers. Thus the same picture has different layers of interpretation which are consistent and often the concrete will lead to the abstract or the object to an attribute. Seeing the world outside recorded memory and the ancient Chinese language as becoming lost in the mists of time is a habit and the "subject of the verb", so to speak, is less resonant than in our languages; infinitives lay down the law, whereas connections, circumstances and behaviour define the subject in relation to the position which it occupies rather than to a unique identity.

Underestimating the depths of China has become a sort of natural attitude since it has lost its own soul in the last thousand years, leading right up to the total apostasy represented by Communism - an atheist religion which prevailed for a while here or there over moribund religious values. If Taoism and Christianity had stayed alive, then Communism could never have seized the soul of the great populations of the East, but since humanism was dead, solidarity was lost and transcendence forgotten, the temptation to act on man through external effects was ready to unfold, right up to the point of failure, to emphasize the lost heritage which remains for us to rediscover now that coercion had proven to be a useless method and levelling a monstrous notion. The summons must come from the self and this is the only power which can transform the ready-made interpretations of feelings and events which are encoded in our all-powerful collective and cultural memory.

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       I am becoming increasingly aware that role-playing is an integral part of the experience of consciousness in nature. Animal groups divide up relatively precise roles between fellow creatures in the same clan and establish hierarchies in which we constantly find the strong and the weak complementing each other in an interplay of yin and yang. All our education leads us to believe that we will conquer the future through roles, i.e. extricate ourselves in the most profitable way. It so happens that in the spiritual world, playing a role is becoming an increasingly unpredictable form of behaviour. It is more difficult to play the role of disciple in an era in which each individual is required to focus on their own means of differentiation, at the risk of calling their teacher's injunctions into question and even disobeying him, rather than mechanically following a path which has been imposed. As for the role of teacher, it would also seem that it can quickly become a limitation if one identifies with it smugly, because receptiveness to the Divine can disappear and be replaced by manipulation of one's past experience with the aim of getting oneself noticed.

Real transmission can, therefore, occur today in a much more flexible manner, in which neither teacher nor disciples are tied into their roles of the dominant and the dominated, naturally producing a relationship of a completely different order, full of chaotic elements which rigid minds cannot cope with. It often appears that "awakened ones" do not have the same opinions on the same things, which is disheartening for seekers, who would rather trust in an external authority than look deeply into themselves in search of what really concerns them. What we must accept is the efflorescence of the truth, even if it is difficult to accept in all its richness and variety and we must reject doctrinaire fundamentalism - even if we could justify it in intellectual terms, by establishing the supremacy of Sri Aurobindo, for example.

As far as I am concerned, although I continue to work on creating processes for spiritual transmission, I would certainly not identify unduly with the role of teacher, since function of the supramental consists merely of opening up a new plane of consciousness to human beings. It is in the general cultural perception that the supramental mutant becomes a guru of necessity, because he cannot hide the fact that his consciousness has reached such exceptional hugeness which is even greater than that claimed by awakened ones and spiritual masters of the past. In this respect, let us not forget that Sri Aurobindo himself worked in solitude a lot and only appeared in public on rare occasions, preferring to maintain personal relationships via correspondence rather than to indulge in spectacular displays of skill. I continue to work to make the supramental available to all those who are interested, without considering that my own experience in this area gives me any ill-advised rights over others.

We must enter into a period in which the authority of the Divine himself will make itself felt in a noticeable and spontaneous manner, through the senses themselves, our bodily impressions and liberating intuitions and to this extent it is no longer appropriate at this time to submit complacently to a human authority. The idea that submission to a particular being would bring huge spiritual benefits is not entirely false and was even appropriate during the era of Kali Yoga. However today when great spiritual energies are sweeping over the Earth, encounters with people who are already benefitting from theses contacts simply ease the path towards evolution rapidly without rebuilding the heavy structures of obedience and dominance which enclose the search for pure unconditioned present in a ready-made framework. My aim is not to belittle gurus systematically, but to recall their essential role: to act as intermediaries between the Divine and others. This is an achievable, but difficult, job, which can easily curb the evolution of somebody who attaches too much importance to it to the detriment of their own intimate, secret relationship with the Divine.

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Eulogists of suffering
we transform death itself
our eye sees the worst create the best like eternal night breaking its immobile seal
giving birth to the first sun

All the rest happened like a unique dance
through the friction of opposites
love split hatred
pain crumbled into joy
silence cut noise up into notes
the number gave to the one the intimacy of the finite and contours aspiring to caresses

the blinding dazzle of meaning seized the universe
everything would produce novelty to tire emptiness
darkness would seek bedazzlement and the fragment the whole

The Spirit would cleave time like froth and the foam of pleasure would offer itself to mystery
chasms and summits would embrace in the unfathomable mystery
peaks and gulfs would overlap without levelling the expanse
everything would return unceasingly to its own route in order to curl up in the Infinite
and discover disguised bliss in suffering
nothing will have been in vain,
uselessness celebrating carefreeness
imperfection praising the future
what is complete sowing informal seeds

Even stone would tremble for aeons
with gratitude
under the giant eye of the day

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      Many of those human beings who think that they are better than others because they are seeking the so-called Truth forget breadth along the way because they are so caught up in developing height and depth. Without breadth, the mind remains fanatical or at the very least obsessive. Breadth is what enables us to embrace that whole disreputable part of reality – the reality of appearances, of the charnel house of history and of gloomy repetition. Using the excuse that we must raise our eyes to the gold of the future and that only the depths can allow the secret source of vision to rise, we overlook the legitimacy of the banal, the authenticity of everything which annoys us with its triviality and the persistence of ordinariness attacks us with panache and wounds us. This why one finds followers of Pantanjali who are more bitter than old peasants, philosophers keen on dialectics wallowing in indignation as if this could take the place of a cure and souls which are rich nevertheless reaching their limit on the infinite path because they somehow cannot forgive the Divine for the ignominy of what they term evil. Breadth enables us to thank obstacles and to establish their legitimacy on a route which is so huge that we must welcome it without blinkers as a path which is open to all possibilities, the fearless way of the fire seeker – the one who accepts.

Admittedly, if this breadth is not proportionate to height and depth and if it is excessive and dominant, then it opens the way to abuse and can even sanction faults in line with the famous formula "If God does not exit, anything is permitted." Without breadth, however, height becomes scornful, depth becomes proud and the seeker deprives himself of the love of the Earth, which is benevolent, saves and forgives.

Whereas depth is reassuring and all wise men recommend it and height spontaneously gives cause for envy as if we all felt nostalgic for the eagle in a recess of our memory, breadth can be terrifying because it is the prerogative of the rebel, the foil of the traitor and the fantasy of the conqueror. However ,we can also view it as the guardian of immensity, because breadth can indeed already be within us, truly present, but buried under petty goals and ancestral fears. In other words, without a certain love of the unknown it runs the risks of being lmissing forever, however lofty our easily definable aspirations, and however deep our quest. Of the three measurement criteria, breadth is finally the most objective. Height and depth are what we grant ourselves by intimate decree in order to place too much emphasis in a way on our natural existences. However breadth must remain completely at our immediate disposal to avoid decapitating reality and leaving us with just its head, to absorb dualities in the vast space in which opposites hold hands and finally to embrace in the fire of our quest all those daily events which only seem to be attached to it by undesirable or scabrous bonds. Welcome to breadth, without which evolution would be confined to a chessboard instead of surging forward to all the living and many-coloured, endlessly new jigsaw puzzles, which are hungry for change even within structures. What is firm and what is malleable may continue to support each other through as yet undetermined ways until the apparition of that new man of whom Sri Aurobindo is the prophet and to whom the Mother provided the impetus. The work of he solar alchemist consists of rising up, becoming deeper and broader while maintaining an appropriate level of vigilance in these three directions. Blind spots will thus be reduced and sadhana can embrace reality in every sense.

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       The supramental is not something where you only find what you have brought to it yourself. Many so-called seekers spare themselves the trouble of studying the main works of Sri Aurobindo and scorn the Mother's agenda and yet they nevertheless want to be able to appropriate the "Supramental" and to do with it as they will. The Supramental is only a technical term to describe a sphere of consciousness which has so far virtually eluded human consciousness. Its loftiness makes it virtually inaccessible and when this plane manifested itself recently, only several thousand years ago, human beings were incapable of maintaining contact with it. Sri Aurobindo expresses himself brilliantly on this point in his study of the Vedas. I am not personally responsible for the "return" of the Supra