On the pretext of describing the characteristics of the path to Enlightenment and ultimate knowledge, traditional paths of the past issued prohibitions and advocated compulsory forms of behaviour which stayed within the realm of conventional experience. Quantum meditation advocates completely sweeping aside our feelings, experience, self, self-image and finally the subliminal self - the deepest part of our being in which the Divine already exerts an influence - even though our experience of this is limited.

A spiritual follower who tries to adopt too precise a form of behaviour in order to confront the mysteries of existence finds himself defining convenient truths and inconvenient errors for himself and in the end his spirit never addresses the blind spots. He creates a new and doubtless superior ruts and invents larger blinkers, but this is not sufficient to achieve genuine awakening. Up to now, conventional teaching has been too detached from actual life to which it offered a contrasting “vision” and all experience had to fit somehow into the mould it offered by one means or another. Locked in this dogmatic approach, the self manipulates the criteria for meditation, but lacks its absolute power. Of course this attitude is not a willing one, but is dictated by the specifications of the teaching to be followed, which forces the spirit to praise certain forms of progress and to criticize certain habits, without the centre or source of the spirit - the Self - being reached, precisely because of the constant dualities which emerge between the higher path to be followed and everyday experience full of physical habits.

An exponent of the integral path chooses cardinal meditation, whose principles will be described later, in order to adopt a path stripped of all distinguishing forms, which endeavours to explore reality before passing judgement on its features which would only be based on the past. Inspired by a profound aspiration to participate supremely fully in totality, the meditator instructs the spirit no longer to take hold of what it apprehends and interpret it conventionally according to memory and prejudices. He is starting to become wary of thought, without resenting it in the least, because it is still an integral part of his being, which he must view as one of his own organs in its own right. This wariness on principle, which is detached, serene and paradoxical, but which can be learned, opens up different worlds which will manifest themselves through new intellectual processes as the brain is quite capable of interpreting more subtle forms of vibration than those generated by thought, which produce new forms of perception. In simple terms, thought will subsist, but it will be perceived by a different power when it manifests itself, a form of consciousness which is difficult to define and convey, but which can emerge from within.

In this respect, practising the four Mysteries, or quantum meditation, conforms to the predicates of traditional Eastern teaching. It consists of making the individual confront his own representations, then encouraging him to realize that they are the product of a range of different forms of conditioning which act like filters preventing him from grasping pure reality as it happens. In order to ensure the survival of the human race, the brain associates vital perception (living energy) with mental perception (ordered thought) in order to enable the individual to grasp the dangers and opportunities around him on a continuous basis. Excessive speed of thought is therefore a legacy of the animal world in human beings in search of a spiritual future and generating abstract thought is woven instinctively into that physical awareness of the body to the same end, thus providing feedback on one’s surroundings at all times. Unless the seeker accepts that thought is a hindrance to him and mingles with feelings and he acknowledges that it is a form of prison which condemns him to reacting permanently to the demands of the outside world, then he cannot aspire to the vastness of the non-mental realm or intuit the huge joys which consciousness can experience when higher intuitions connect perceptions in a wholly new way.

Admittedly, exploring the Self does not inevitably lead to the blue, mother-of-pearl and gold of spiritual horizons without first plunging the subject into the structures of the subconscious, where the red of violence and desire is deeply rooted in archaic territories and where the black of death and darkness sometimes resurfaces to bury solar aspirations in the law of the past. It is specifically in order to facilitate these journeys of consciousness into the realms which it has created that I am making quantum or cardinal meditation available to seekers, in the form of exploring the four fundamental fields through which reality is expressed. Although they are the same thing, I will term time spent being carried along by associations in all four fields in random order quantum meditation, whereas the term cardinal meditation will refer to the aim of restricting oneself to exploring just one of the four Mysteries while adopting the appropriate physical position, which is different in each case, as described at the end of the work.

Once the fields have been defined, it will become clear that each has its own sphere of influence and a finality which is specific to it, which will compel us to gather all their individual perspectives in one single approach balanced out by investigation. Meditation uncovers the somewhat hidden and insidious battle between the four fundamental zones which are termed Mysteries so that we can understand the stakes and make a decision, while discovering an unlimited area of psychological content drawn from the subconscious and supraconscious.

We can in fact be certain today that the structure of life has its own laws in cellular organisms and that rules which stem from the evolution of matter do not promote the ascension of the soul towards knowledge of the Divine, but on the contrary determine forms of crystallization of archaic thought for the benefit of the biological system, forcing us sometimes to use animal reactions in lieu of answers, or encouraging us to hold onto habits when relinquishing them would promote greater adaptation. The purpose of various forms of conditioning which we inherit - be they cultural educational or hereditary - is to place spokes in the wheels of the solar approach and to provide new obstacles to it, so that it has to discover its own strength by transcending the limitations imposed on it by the forces of the mortal body.

Targeting knowledge is, therefore, a waste of time, but it reveals itself by breaking up the filters which render it opaque and by working to convince the brain to broaden the way in which it functions. Knowledge constantly moves further away from where we think we have pinned it down, if only on account of the influence of the movement of circumstances and history which means that we are involved at all times in a world which changes on a daily basis. The only truly receptive power is passivity which is fully attentive and panoramic, as both the great masters of wisdom and consummate mystics never cease to remind us and which we shall learn to apply through quantum meditation. As is stated in the Gita, the Hindu “bible” as it were, knowledge is superior to works, but non-action (naishkarma) is superior to knowledge. The seer of truth - the integral seeker - moves towards total inspiration, where all that remains of personal will is the aim of serving the Divine, or - if one has no knowledge of him - the aim of reaching pure integrity in keeping with the highest Ideal of truth and love which we can imagine. The other aims of the will are more practical or subjective. Higher will becomes passive and receives higher vibrations, whereas the spirit stays receptive to all events and learns to deal with them by separating them from the emotions to which they give rise. The more prosaic aims which the individual forms within the context of his life have not necessarily been abandoned and contingent, active will can be retained, but these should be put in perspective and sometimes sacrificed to consecration. One of the powers inherent in practising the four Mysteries is to place behaviours in order, to organize values into a hierarchy and to rapidly eliminate aims which are no longer current.

OVERVIEW OF QUANTUM MEDITATION

The work of the spirit can only repeat itself endlessly and this is precisely what we are going to make use of when practising the four Mysteries, instead of attacking thought head-on.

No special training can knock down thought and we are simply going to follow the path of the spirit whilst teaching it to search for meaning in the four fundamental realities with which we are concerned. Meanings in the third field are limited, contingent, practical and horizontal. In the fourth field, they are open, full and round. In the first field, they are structural and not based on daily events. In the second field, they are transcendent, almost timeless and holistic.

These four zones are so huge and so primordial that it is pointless to try to establish the chronological order in which they appeared, but in the course of this work readers will be able to experience the differences between them in order to practice meditation in their own way without encountering resistance, with a freedom not previously afforded by any other system. Depending on one’s point of view, any one of the four mysteries can be considered to be the original one, but this is purely a subjective convention, which will be treated in a humorous way later on to underscore the specific position of the self which is being formed within these four infinities. In fact, the spirit is bound to be dealing with one of the four zones at all times and if one has to make a distinction between them, it is simply that the four fields are all autonomous, have different interests and each represent us in their own way, while combining easily with each other. Before even defining them, I would therefore ask you to understand that you can be manipulated by any of the four mysteries at all times in your life, though the current situation may call for one in particular to manifest itself strongly and take control. Genuine power lies at the centre with the Self - pure, disinterested intelligence - but it is not unusual for another power to muscle in or to take the upper hand and lead consciousness of the moment towards a new experience which is intrinsically enriching, but which can be dangerous or beneficial and either welcomed or endured, according to the Mystery in question. Alliances also form between the fields, entailing the risk of destabilizing the overall structure.

The first aim in practising the four Mysteries is to discover the unity which lies at their centre: the unconditioned spirit, free of all content, that pure intelligence which no longer seeks to seize anything whatsoever and which is the origin of mental activity. The spirit identifies continuously with what it apprehends in one of these four directions and is grappling with the true meaning of events, which survives all attempts at subjective interpretation.

The real impact of events lies in their practical and objective outcomes and it is very rare for us to understand the overall consequences of our actions.

Description of the mysteries

Mystery number one describes the subject, the Self, individual consciousness which attempts to establish its own sense of permanence, through a feeling of personal identity. We can already state that this primordial space is explored by more or less every individual. Many human beings, especially in tribal societies which have been sheltered from history are not affected by their own individuality. They are happy to follow their instincts and the current laws and taboos, in keeping with ancestral tradition. By contrast, a genuine spiritual seeker is preoccupied by the mystery of his own individuality. He strays from it sometimes, by cultivating fleeting identifications or by imitating, then comes back, often by force of circumstance, when suffering drives him into a corner. Anybody who asks themselves seriously "Who am I?" (a question which the ancients Greeks raised relatively late compared to the Chinese and Hindus) begins consciously to explore the first field and learns how to keep coming back to it until this becomes instinctive and effortless.

The third Mystery forms the foundation. It is animate matter, i.e. life, which on our own scale means the sphere in which our existence takes place within its own environment. It is the history of our own childhood which is believed to guide us towards the inner Self and it is also our whole span on Earth, seen from the outside, with our animal being perceiving its surroundings through the senses and grappling with time, the body and the environment. Number 3 therefore adds a physical dimension to number 1. Whereas the Self seeks to establish a sense of permanence through his consciousness of the first Mystery as a being and as a separate entity, independently of what is happening, when we venture into the third field we have to deal with everything which we have experienced over the course of time. In this zone, we therefore spontaneously adhere to accidents and opportunities. Sensations and emotions manifest themselves in ephemeral patterns whose meaning can easily escape us in this zone in which we are connected to the present. During childhood, when the permanent Self is not yet fundamentally established, we are subjected to so many pressures that conditioning occurs to falsify any objective interpretation of events. We could caricature human beings confined in Mystery 3 as brutes who are basically concerned with defending their territory, respecting only what is established and scorning any different form of thought. The third field is therefore that of the physical body within its environment, throughout its cycle, animated by many phases which give countless forms to experience, but which fundamentally refer back to the animal state. We are in field three when we are ourselves as normal in a waking state – neither inward-looking nor excessively outward-looking, without any particular sense of tension, in the ordinary course of time and in our usual environment, but with our senses alert, of course. By contrast, awareness of field 1 is always receptive, slightly in the background, for reflection, decision-making and communication. (We are in field 1 (without 3) when we draw a veil over things, eliminate our identifications, feelings, emotions and beliefs, forget our sensations and try to seek to “be”, or to reflect on our relationship with the world.) In the third zone, we feel imprisoned by external constraints and are slaves to our basic appetites (food and sleep). We are sometimes subject to superficial or even artificial relationships and we feel that we are dependent on a large number of factors over which it is difficult to exert any influence. We participate fully in our surroundings.

A considerable number of mental habits can stem from this third mystery and be explored by looking at things in a different light. All memories can be revisited and corrected in order to release traumas and suffering and it is therefore quite normal to venture frequently and for long spells of time into this mystery in order to rid oneself of influences, obsolete identifications and old emotional patterns. This work can enable us to become conscious of bad habits in interpreting experience resulting from violent feelings, particularly during the first three years of existence.

In a square divided into four equal sections we shall put Mystery number 3 in the lower left-hand quadrant, where we see a human being taking shape from embryogenesis, dictated by a powerful genetic code. We imagine our life unfolding within its context like a film in fast forward. This child is already rushing towards the adjoining right-hand quadrant,

Mystery number 4 – duration - but also this current moment, the present, which will shape our existence. By moving through duration chronologically, or by following behind it if one prefers an overall view, the biological entity or “thinking animal” reaches Mystery number 1 in the top left quadrant and tries to find himself in ontological permanence. He explores his character, temperament and personality - similar structures which defy experience and which are sufficiently plastic or flexible to play with the interpretation of events - and he devotes himself to reviewing his past and imagining the future, wanting to make his instant projection in the present correspond to how he feels about himself as an individual endowed with personal free will. He explores those things which resist being distorted by opportunities, accidents, emotions, feelings, failures, successes, disappointments or joys. He constructs a code of values. He claims qualities and character traits for himself.

A minority of human beings wants to pursue the journey beyond this stage and sets off to discover Mystery number 2 (top right) – that part of us which is greater than what we already know and which Sri Aurobindo called the Subliminal self.

Une minorité seulement d'êtres humains veut continuer sa route au-delà de cette étape, et elle part à la découverte du Mystère numéro 2 (en haut et à droite), cette partie de nous-même plus grande que ce que nous en savons déjà, et que Sri Aurobindo a appelé le Moi Subliminal.

(The path therefore describes an "s" shape right from the outset).

In Mystery number 2, we find the potential for our solar future, the fruit of transformations in other mysteries and we can naturally flush out divine energy and consciousness, just as it is also possible to establish conscious contact with the immortal within us - the soul in Eastern esotericism and the psychic being in the new revelation of Sri Aurobindo.

We have to refer back emphatically to the essence of pure duration and invite everybody to acknowledge it as pure virgin matter, like an available stream of permanent clues to the divine quest, as the means to constantly transform the relationship between the other three mysteries. Therefore, if you want to practise quantum meditation, you must experience duration per se by ceasing to attribute any kind of finality to it. If this is not possible on a permanent basis, then you can begin to do it using this treatise as you would learn to do in an ashram, monastery or any place of initiation. You must be able to separate the mind from the mechanical stream of thought before claiming to be able to change the association of ideas which reveals the meaning of things in a new way.

Since we will establish four different types of meditation, each corresponding to one of the Mysteries, it is necessary at this point to set out the characteristics of meditation in zone four. This is where we will surrender ourselves to the present, without worrying about anything else. It will not be a question of knowing who observes what, nor how it might be useful. Moreover, this meditation is the one advocated by many traditional teachings. Practising the fourth field is difficult at the outset. It creates an interplay, new variations within the areas which constitute the four Mysteries, because the present appears more often now as a rich, open and indeterminate state, whereas the personal sphere appears to be built in a subjective manner and less solidly than before. The self suddenly seems to be buried under new questions and overall reality increasingly evades intellectual exploration. The interplay which occurs between the pieces of the puzzle prevents us from controlling thought and situations as usual and threatens the order of the past in order to look forward to a far broader sphere of consciousness, creating a centrifugal movement within the Mysteries which can shatter their limitations. The neophyte sees his brain constantly producing thoughts which spring up out of nowhere and are completely out of context and it can be like being pestered by a swarm of flies. However, when you are simply contemplating, sat quietly or cross-legged, you cannot manage to stay in this simple state and devote yourself entirely to it. All sorts of preoccupations surface which you have not summoned up and which really interfere with the time which you wanted to devote to this simple recreation, or “search for emptiness”. This meditation is intrinsically humiliating because it not only shows that the spirit can neither control nor direct its thoughts, but that it is also incapable of making them stop. This meditation is so fundamental that different virtues are attributed to it according to the cultures which advocate it.

In praise of the present. (Fourth Mystery).

In most Hindu schools, thought is considered deficient per se and practising Mystery number 4 enables one firstly to space out its rhythm and to slow down the pace of psychological content and then secondly, to discover Brahman, the great empty, undifferentiated reality, mere contact with which frees the brain permanently from its dynamic projections. In Chan and Zen, this same meditation is generally accompanied by a physical posture which is somewhat ritualized and this is a double-edged sword, because attributing too much importance to it can stop the mind from really letting go if it believes that there is something at stake and therefore remains tense. It’s fundamental aim is satori or immediate enlightenment, which reveals the unity of all things and puts an end to all feelings of duality. For Taoists, who are not wary of thought but prefer to seek out its quintessence, this meditation does not so much aim for the liberation of the mind as the growth of unlimited receptivity which is likely to dissolve the Self into the Tao or to connect heaven and earth - which comes down to the same thing. Although Buddhists are steeped in their own explanations they still evoke sunyata as the critical step in spiritual ascension – an experience which reveals that the original spirit is empty of all content. When you take into account that races themselves impose somewhat different ways of using the brain on individuals, it is remarkable how unanimity has been achieved across the millennia on the spiritual use of duration in the East.

Even in the Sufi or Christian mystics, who do not systematically wage war on thought but actively seek the soul of the world or contact with God, you find numerous testimonies in which the eventual conquest of inner silence is a form of antechamber prior to piercing the secret of the Divine himself. In ancient Greek times we find ataraxia, which trains the intellect to turn towards principles by detaching itself from rapid forms – thoughts – which the spirit creates.

 By simply abandoning the notion that duration is at our mercy, we open up the real sphere of possibilities. By contrast, permanently striving to achieve something else (even “good” meditation) only prolongs the ordinary mentality which is a prisoner of greed and fear. We can always amuse ourselves by reversing the points of a train but this merely changes its direction, without altering its speed. Furthermore, this same meditation is thought by Buddhists to favour detachment from fear and desire, which form the basis of human ignorance. It can seem paradoxical that in order to free yourself from ignorance you need to embrace higher ignorance – i.e. the random and malleable instant which offers itself to us before we make it a tool for conquest or for some form of appropriation. However, as Lao-Tzu said: “making darkness darker is the gateway to divine origins”. We must see the ignorance of the spirit face to face, find it natural and admit that it only grasps isolated scraps of reality which it sticks together arbitrarily. This admission of our condition opens up immense vistas. It is simply a question of embracing the spirit’s impotence to grasp the One, God and indivisible reality in order to discover ways other than thought, sovereign paths which project the being out of the animal state into the realm of the Spirit, which finally becomes accessible.

If we consider that nearly all cultures teach us to orchestrate time from the moment we learn to speak, then you can see the huge amount of work required in a reverse direction in order to unlearn this. Locked in the third Mystery, the Self which is sensitive to conditioning believes that it must constantly set an end point to the instants of the day. Time will be cut into slices, each with its own purpose and the individual will thus become a complete prisoner of a planned fabric of different identifications. Those people representing social values will try to make the young disciple of the Absolute feel guilty if he sometimes feels the need to do nothing in order to give himself over to deep thought. It would seem that the basis of middle-class society is the need to appropriate comfort through an obsession with social activity and with the religion of work, which is thought to bring its exponents an enhanced status in which they revel in order to exploit the weak. In these cultural conditions, the spirit will only grasp what is external and never think to look inwards at what it is, at the inner master whom it is serving. The subject will only experience a present which is predetermined by all its memories, habits and outdated plans, whereas the current moment will have to adapt to prior demands of conforming to long-dead models. Admittedly, this moment is sometimes crowned by violent reactions in the ecological environment, an accident which could show the way to the inner sun if it were followed right through, which is rarely the case. In general, the subconscious hijacks prejudices which the non-self inflicts on the self through the spearhead of narcissistic wounds, accidents, bereavements, serious illness or unbearable failures.

While these events should in a sense be construed as awakening agents in a truly divine culture, they are on the contrary represented as curses and maledictions, undeserved obstacles and unjust facts. The mind, obsessed by the paradigm that Reality must not extend beyond the framework of its preferences and hatreds, rejects humiliating factors instead of assimilating them and they can no longer play the role in our society which was represented by spiritual initiation in traditional cultures. The transition from Mystery number 3 to Mystery number 1 can no longer take place “properly” in modern cultures because adolescents are no longer called upon to recognize the sovereign authority of the Whole over existence since religions have lost their edge. Nobody teaches a growing child any longer how to become an adult who is capable of analyzing himself without seeing himself as a victim of circumstances when the outside world fails to correspond to his requirements. By making the socialized self the only form of psychological reality, modern cultures since the eighteenth century have forgotten that the inner being can take precedence over the external being and shape it and they have strived to divide up reality until almost nobody can experience the feeling of belonging to a single great Whole, thus promoting purely superficial identification. However, since we have reached a dead-end and our so-called civilization cannot offer anything other than destruction, we are starting to turn again towards the secret mysteries of our being in a what is perhaps an instinctive burst of integrity - those secrets which want to emerge from within us and give us the satisfaction of living for something more than a social or family role. After being swallowed up by matter in the manner perpetrated by rationalism for more than three hundred years, we have rediscovered the need to see things as a whole, in their unity and in the homogeneity of nature’s systems.

In this immense boundless reality, our own spiritual life consists primarily in finding the true materials of which we are made and examining them in order to understand them. This work initially takes place in the privacy of our own consciousness, with as its sole aim becoming receptive to supreme reality. We will innocently analyze the power of life which establishes the basis for our incarnation in the third zone which always gives us a hard time, with all its issues of the jigsaw of our territory and its combined elements: membership of a profession, family, race, region, political group, religion, heredity or sex, which can all sometimes be painful. Whoever we think that we were in Mystery number one, we find ourselves incarnated in the third field with our mortal body subject to the cycles of time and doubtless imprinted with hereditary characteristics, some of which are poisoned chalices, morbid, fossilized memories carried from generation to generation down to the body which falls to our lot. The question of knowing what to do with our genetic and psychological inheritance arises regularly through family relationships and personal psychological problems similar to those in other members and prone to the same diseases. Paying attention to the body was scarcely advocated in spiritual traditions. Most teachings even compromised themselves by presenting the physical body as the main obstacle to divine revelation. The body has been demonized in every possible way or abandoned in too many paths, under pretext that if we give free rein to our feelings they seize hold of our whole being and plunge it not only into desire, but into cultivating sensual pleasures. But feeling forms the basis of perception and it is necessary to transform it. TodayAgenda de Mère [Mother's Agenda], vol I, published by the Institut de recherches évolutives the Divine wants to seize Matter itself - the physical body can no longer be the focus of opprobrium or be considered an obstacle. It is the pedestal, it even becomes the lever for divine Ascension in supramental yoga, especially in intense moments when the body is actually “crushed” (pounded) by the supramental.

Practising the 4 Mysteries deepens the role of the body and mobilizes the intellect until it understands the mechanisms for appropriating Reality through which it grows – processes which are independent of the mind, especially in times of crisis, danger, disappointment and suffering, in which the subconscious increasingly mingles with consciousness and submerges it, painting a blacker picture of experience, while seeking forms of defence. After essential emotional cleansing, the physical body will become directly receptive to divine energy. Numerous enlightened approaches can supply material for investigation, such as studying parental character, reappraising childhood and the relationships which prevailed then, or a live reading of the horoscope at birthNatarajan, Astrologie supramentale [Supramental Astrology], published by Trédaniel, looking forward towards the transcendent future, where numerous forces are represented in a sufficiently precise psychological context to be useful. Restricting oneself to one’s environment can be one of the forms of meditation in zone 3, which also consists of many others.

Insofar as we can contain everything in the four zones with the Self at their centre, meditation must begin with a very broad representation of the four primordial states, in order to enable the spirit to explore easily in the directions mentioned.

Mystery 3 will contain any sequence of our existence at all from our origins to the present day, just as it also consists of our relationship with the body, with other people and with our environment. It represents our outward-looking experience, the sum of our every moment and therefore also our entire memory. This mystery forms the basis of our contact with the external world and can, therefore, also include our plans, fears for the future, deadlines, house moves, changes of partner and everything which makes up our membership of the non-self through the structures which govern our surroundings.

Mystery 4 represents time in different forms – duration which passes and the present. Devoid of objects, it leads to the pure moment which has not been orchestrated by thought or by emotion which severs it – Brahman..
(The atman – the non-mental – is at the centre of the cross of Mysteries).

The first Mystery represents our sense of personal identity, but it is something very personal coming as it does from the depths, so we can incorporate into it "what we want to be" as well as "what we think we are" – i.e. our self image.

The second Mystery is, at the end of the day, the most difficult to define, because it gathers together all the subtle and divine characteristics available to us. Our psychic being is therefore part of number 2 and the purest solar aspirations of cosmic integrity refer back to it. The psychic being is a fragment of the divine world proper, with the Spirit on one side (Satchitananda) and divine creative energy on the other (maha Shakti), or Aditi, the Supreme Mother and her four supramental manifestations. Meditation in Mystery 2 can take different forms – contemplation, prayer, the need to surrender to the Divine, mantras - and it is likely in theory to awaken the subliminal self, i.e. to create subtle planes of consciousness between the soul and the Self. It is also favourable to developing higher inner centres of energy – the chakras of the heart, throat, pineal gland and fontanelle.

In order to avoid excluding any form of exploration, it is necessary to follow the development of what the four Mysteries represent in the course of our practice. This is an essential theme which enables us constantly to renew the four meditations.

In Mystery number 3, we can not only bring about realizations regarding memory and our past, but we can also have an effect on the representation of our own experience, i.e. we can flush out ready-made images from our history in order to transform them.

In Mystery number 1, access to what we truly are as human beings is sometimes concealed by beliefs about ourselves and by the value which we place on them, which is often too subjective or unduly influenced by the quality of events. When we disidentify from the external world, reflection on self-image is therefore just as necessary as meditation proper on what we are.

In Mystery number 4, we can only come close to the pure moment if our intellect has understood the purpose of de-orchestrating duration. If we do not see the need to suspend the mind or at the very least let it act without any guidance, then we have not discovered the aim of meditation. Reflection therefore plays a part in the process of putting meditative procedures in place so that we truly understand their meaning before putting them into practice.

Meditation in Mystery number 2 can only take place properly if we correct ready-made images which we might have of God or the Divine based on what we have inherited or on embryonic experiences. This meditation is only correct and pure if it is stripped of all our own idols, which are often crude, innocent representations of what an intelligence truly superior to ourselves could be. It goes without saying that zone 2 contains higher energies of compassion and unconditional love and that we can in a sense receive graces there, if meditations in other zones have provided a substantial degree of clarification of our relationship with the non-self and a deepening of our relationship with ourselves.

NB: no single meditation out of the four is better than any other since each one enables us to bring about spontaneous realizations in order to de-mechanize experience and our self-image. It is even advocated that if we do not manage to meditate in the fourth zone we should follow up the information which occurs there. This will immediately provide us with feedback on the inner tensions arising from another mystery. If it is impossible to allow the spirit to roam freely, to let it freewheel without it coming back repetitively to the same object or group of objects, then this is because we have psychic matter there to transform. If we cannot enjoy a present there to which we are closely bonded and which leaves no mark, we can by contrast, determine psychological content which the brain places at our disposal. This is material which it seeks out itself because we have deliberately stopped guiding its work, thus enabling it to let all sorts of feelings which characterize us rise to the surface which we would sometimes like to keep quiet out of an obsessive desire to control the self and its discourse. It is therefore apparent that if meditation in Mystery 4 cannot continue, it opens up analysis in 3 (circumstances and events to be dealt with), initiates a meditation in 1 (malaise, guilt and anxiety) or projects us into a meditation in 2 if the spirit becomes eager to climb towards the psychic being or subtle and divine energies.

Practising the four Mysteries therefore cannot fail, since it merely supplies a huge amount of information which can always be used if the spirit is keen on integrity. At that very moment, the intellect has a remarkable quality which we must allow it to express instead of distorting it with our preferences, fears and the work of the ego, which would invent preconceived ideas instead of letting the real work of awakening take place.

Cardinal meditation is an infallible means of learning to distance oneself from one’s experience (by meditating in 4, 1 or 2 in order to move away from the past and memory). Similarly, we can leave aside our personality, which is still more or less crystallized, by surrendering ourselves in 4 and then in 2. Analysis of the fabric of experience in 3 refers back to the other zones again. By placing ourselves in zone 3, we can really take note of our responsibilities in our surroundings in relation to the body – locating evasions, compromises or habits which stem from alienation from our surroundings. By going into mystery number 2, which can occasionally serve as a refuge, the whole of our life can be viewed in a final or evolutionary manner and one can feel the highest degree of involvement in the growth of the universe. Experience, the way in which we use time with less determination, and work on the personality can sometimes appear synthetically and spontaneously in meditation 2, which must be practised with enthusiasm and sincerity because it is the highest and deepest. I therefore warn practitioners against the massive illusion of overindulging in field 2, because this excess systematically hides the work to be done in other fields.

Quantum meditation roams around the mysteries and sometimes reaches their centre – the Self – if the four fields balance themselves in a natural order.

It is harmful to believe in the pre-established value of one meditation out of the four as being more appropriate than the others. A preference may be legitimate at the outset, as I have pointed out in seminars, because new participants often feel the need to rebalance the whole by attacking the deficient Mystery which they have just discovered. But, with practice, intuition must allow us to change direction when the attention deficit with regards the weakest mystery has been filled. When sustained work has been accomplished, in order to reintegrate the field which had been neglected, a new, subtle balance reveals itself and each field’s progress can be divided up equally so that we do not keep hounding one single field. The success of the system depends more on a permanent, rapid, light, frequent and unforeseen adjustment of the four fields than on a plan for practice pre-established by the mind. If each of the areas is explored properly, it is likely that the Self will begin to emerge at the best moments in any of the four zones and enable an objective realization of the work of the spirit in each of these directions. We will return to this issue. By contrast, transforming one, two or three mysteries in a privileged manner, leaving a deficit of attention, cannot produce the harmony necessary to reveal integral silence and this prevents the evolutionary spiral from occurring: one part of the person does not move forward and whatever its achievements in the other zones, the inertial force in the neglected field will mean that it levels out indefinitely until it turns towards the mystery which has been left out.

One of the dangers of traditional teaching is that it only promotes our attention in certain zones. We cannot refer all work back to 4 and 2 without running the risk of being naively unrealistic, despite the obvious beauty of pure mysticism, or we lose sight of the legitimacy of incarnation, like the Cathars for example. In other systems, work takes place in 3, 4 and 1, but the divine aspect is overlooked. Since the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the future of the human race belongs to a higher order of which religions and spiritual traditions were unaware, with the exception of the Vedic rishis, whose ideas gradually spread through the Vedanta and Upanishads. In the twentieth century we discovered psychology and it is now obvious that education enriches the natural mirror of the spirit by distorting it and the shuttle movement between 3 and 1 must be much more conscious if it is to clean up the past which intercepts our interpretation of the present. As he practises the 4 Mysteries, the seeker will discover the complementary nature of these fields and their constant, mutual interference and combinations which create the global field of the individual’s perception by gathering together all the information, including the moral or emotional limitations to which it gives rise. Even though the mind is able to amalgamate things, to combine the Self with the non-self through all sorts of opinions and identifications which enable it to grasp objects, it is still the case that our identity is stratified: furthest back and deepest of all is the psychic being, for which existence is just a simple journey or item of clothing. Below that lies the permanent personality which is an intermediary point between the physical body (and therefore the brain) and the soul. Then there is the cellular animal completely imprisoned in lifeThis rather drastic description came to me as the result of very deep supramental experiences. I realized that some of my organs were not informed by my spirit but by that of my parents and grandparents and I began to want to explore this in order to facilitate the transformation of my body. The physical body is fairly anonymous and common to all and trying to infuse it with one’s own personal consciousness is something that tempts some people, but it requires regular practice which the system of four Mysteries does not claim to offer. The supramental acts spontaneously in our cells and frees all sorts of engrams.

Personality in the first field gives us each the feeling of being unique and encourages us to differentiate ourselves. It creates values itself, i.e. reference points. Further down, our physical constitution and the subconscious (3) process the subject’s information in his surroundings and in relation to himself (emotional reactions) and do not concern themselves with moral or ethical values. This field is autonomous and has a form of room for manoeuvre which operates within us and unbeknownst to us, creating all sorts of psychological knots and complexes which are the legacy of problems which the personality has encountered in the external world, and there is also the issue of whether or not the permanent self in field 1 can integrate what happens to the historic subject connected to the event. This is also where the supramental mutant discovers the physical mind which is at the service of death, a little autonomous conscience, higher up than the vital, which organizes the process of somatisation, creating diseases on the basis of psychological content in order to legitimize the lack of harmony between the self and the whole. It is therefore a particularly dark force, which is the most shadowy power of the subconscious, because its work consists of accelerating ageing and death in the physical body. The more clear, limpid and effortlessly vigilant the spirit is, the more able it is to feel deeply the nature of the relationship between the Self and the non-self and the nature of the contact between consciousness in the third field and consciousness in the first.

This stratification reveals different speeds at work in the layers. The self in 3 moves about at a steady speed and perception stays stuck to emotions and events. By tracing a path back towards consciousness of the Self proper in meditation1, we encounter a much slower speed of psychological content and with a degree of training ideas even follow on from each other - pure abstractions devoid of characteristic forms, which can give meaning to any event. With practice, consciousness can stay motionless in the centre, without thinking, mingled with the self. At last, the psychic being becomes conscious in immutability, and movement is merely one attribute of life, one characteristic of its incarnation. Practising the four Mysteries enables us to exploit all the spirit’s potential, without ever forcing it to crystallize its efforts in a single area of reality. By surrendering to its action in the 4 primordial directions which characterize our incarnation, we learn to straddle the present, without worrying about turning it into a preconceived future, whilst ridding the past of negative or crystallized traces.

Descriptions of the Mysteries distort them to some extent because their reality is not designed to be represented. It is therefore naive to think that an intellectual approach can account for the whole of a field using an appropriate description and thus enable us to meditate better. This would be like believing that the score contains the orchestra’s particular playing style. The same piece has an amazing number of formal variations and it is only by stepping back from the notes rather than by sticking to them that we can discover their content and richness. Intuition of the four zones is sufficient to practise meditation by following the broad lines, i.e. by creating an X-shaped diagram of the four special fields. What is important is to differentiate between them and to see how the spirit jumps from one mystery to another, whether it does so harmoniously or whether frictions arise between interests in particular fields. Seekers who might think that the system is “vague” will realize in this way that they lack innocence, which is a valuable tool for dismissing the mind, or that they underestimate it. Yet it refers back to the “spirit of nature”, virgin intelligence devoid of goals, as described by a few ancient teachers who savoured pure instant.

It is up to each individual to fill the Mysteries with their own psychological content, just as we might put fish in a fish tank. Then, with the Self in still and quiet watchfulness, we see what happens. Some “fish” knock against the glass – these are psychological content which is easy to understand and they come tamely right up to the observer - consciousness-witness - and yield meanings, which can trigger feelings while shedding light on the management of the field in question. Others are more difficult to observe and reveal themselves later, as if working themselves up to an admission. It is likely that the different breeds of fish will behave differently for each person. Some practitioners understand the structure of a mystery quickly and others take longer and actually struggle in the last one. This is quite normal given the complexity of our nature, which is open to all possibilities, possessed by duration and able to dig down or take wing, preserve or innovate. There is no success in principle and if yoga is skill in works, it stems from commitment and not stubborn determination to do well, because constant commitment will triumph over the usual mechanisms of the brain, not a special process applied to an ordinary vision of life.

IMAGE OF FIELD THREE:

The body functions on its own behalf, without the approval of the mind, which only grasps small parts of it’s principle in action. Our metabolism incorporates psychic data since events in the consciousness have an effect on physical behaviour, modify the respiratory rate and exchanges between endorphins. Emotional feelings serve as a link between the subject’s body and consciousness and this is why the Chinese developed techniques six thousand years ago which enable us to act from top to bottom or vice versa, by creating gentle or controlled emotions believed to promote harmony between the physical base (3) and personality (1) through work led by the body in field 4.

Homeostasis, which regulates body temperature, is autonomous and we are not aware of what is going on within us, although hundred of parameters organize themselves towards one purpose, which continues to exercise biologists because the central organizer which groups together the different specialist processes in order to maintain equilibrium cannot be pinpointed. Several hundred measures converge simultaneously towards the same goal right under our noses to bring about a general equilibrium out of constant small variations. This confirms that a magnificent intelligence pervades living matter - life - and synthesizes all functions at all times, without the mind being directly involved. Meditation, hypnosis and certain mystical practices enable us to infuse information into the apparently autonomous body, of which it will take account. In a way the supraconscious can compensate for the subconscious which does the opposite. Information from the physical body rises to the level of consciousness and if it is painful it affects our sense of self.

IMAGE OF FIELD FOUR:

Duration is quasi-eternal, like the pure present and was not invented to correspond to any description specified by a somewhat mad animal species which is the last to reach the very end of evolution and which thinks that it can submit time to its whims on the pretext that it can manipulate it mentally. No representation of time exists which would yield its secrets or instructions for use, whether we measure it in fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, weeks or years. Knowing the speed of an arrow from a bow is not what makes it hit its target. Passing time is neither wasted nor saved and it is only when we learn not to attribute an end to it that it reveals its true nature. The present is not at anybody’s disposal and encountering it in its huge, indeterminate atemporal virginity, free of all concepts, feeds the brain in a new way and establishes a new, intuitive conception of existence.

IMAGE OF FIELD ONE:

As for the permanent self, if it were simply an object to be represented in three dimensions we would know what it is and what it is used for, but no psychology is exhaustive and comparing cultures does not yield very much. Everywhere we look, some people progress further than others and hold secrets, as it were, for which they are either banished or consulted. They do not use ordinary language and their mental field of “vision” is way beyond the norm. It doesn’t matter if they explain that they gained their knowledge or their power by sacrificing commonly held values, that they left the beaten track and crossed other thresholds, people still try to extort their knowledge through flattery or torture, threats or corruption, as if the ordinary mind cannot accept that “certain individuals” transgress it totally by devoting their lives to something else – in this instance the seamless Whole, Unity. (Given the scope of the project it is obvious that everything has to be sacrificed to this quest). The permanent self is not necessarily accessible as a whole, nor is it limited by the characteristics of the ego either. However, each individual knows that he is himself and suffers when he moves away from his true nature, even if he does not know how to define it.

IMAGE OF FIELD TWO:

Everything which makes us aspire to the light, integrity, truth and the abolition of earthly suffering. Everything which dictates higher forms of behaviour and ideas to us to raise consciousness, embrace unity and feel love for the mystery of our own existence. Everything which enables us to envisage solar transformations, greater intimacy with what is fundamental. Everything which encourages us to seek the path to greater conformity with the infinite, Tao, the Divine.

The subtle planes of our being which take part in cosmic evolution.

The mind will defend different options with equal pertinence if it analyzes the diagram of the Mysteries with its lofty inquisitorial spirit, with the stupid aim of examining it from all angles. “There is no consciousness of self if there is discontinuity, therefore the permanent self takes the upper hand over the other three fields. The first Mystery is the most important”. It will be proud of its analysis. Then it will change its mind and will contradict itself impatiently, proud to have found a new perspective: “That’s not right, everything begins with the body, with the journey from baby to old man, and that is the fundamental reality – emotional discourse and the sensations. Experience forms the basis of the human being. Mystery number 3 wins.” Satisfied, it will place number three at the front, but then as it continues on its way it will shout: “I’m such a fool! It is time which gives birth to everything so it is the fundamental mystery and earns first place” . Finally, after analyzing the infinite possibilities of field three, it will proclaim after hours of prevarication: “Let me see now, of course, it is the Divine which is the origin of all things obviously, or in its absence that intelligence which is constantly organizing itself for the better, which assembles and consciousness while pervading it with enormous energy.” Then it will pace around again only to come back with new arguments for what could establish the definitive pre-eminence of one field, on the pretext that, all things considered, “they are virtually equal.” Let’s leave him to hold forth on the subject. Let us get back to the issue of the dynamic of the method and abandon his plan.

Let’s avoid the issue of pre-eminence, since in practice we will inflict a wound on ourselves which is harmful to the “lower” mysteries in relation to the “higher” mysteries and which would pervert the practice of cardinal meditation from the outset and poison with duality the very method which is deemed to liberate us from it. Quantum meditation accepts wholesale all the thoughts, emotions, dross, fantasies, insights, memories, impulses of hatred, lust and anger - i.e. all our psychological content - without any mark sheet which would award good marks to some and black marks to others. The self is happy to receive all this material and to sort it straightaway without following any procedure based on a model, morality or teaching - i.e. a bias. The emotions which then occur in the self are liberating and if it is true that realizations can sometimes appear “harsh”, the flavour of conscious emotions differs from that of instinctive emotions. Conscious emotions are physical impulses which accompany flashes or insights into oneself, blinding illuminations into matter in transformation, appropriations to drop, errors committed or disappointments inflicted, which liberate new energies which we shall term “resolutory”. Forgiveness is one such example, or forgiving oneself, which is a radiant emotion, sometimes accompanied by physical manifestations such as tears, rapid breathing, etc.

Wrong turns which occur along the way are merely viewed as stumbles on an objective and distant path and in this way there is no need for guilt in order to get back on track and find one’s route again, or it may manifest itself and then dissolve with conscious emotion. The concept of error is in fact a wonderful thing, because something which has been accomplished without any benefit can be seen as sterile or harmful, thus opening up the path to other strategies, thoughts, intellectual routes and of course to diverting harmful consequences. When the self is truly present, there is no reason to keep making the same mistakes. The subject becomes attentive to the quality of all its initiatives based on new approaches, in the knowledge that there is naturally scope for error on a trail that has not yet been blazed. The material nature of the fourth field is accepted and we know that the present is the sovereign of opportunities and accidents. It deals out what appears to be favourable or unfavourable according to its whim in the huge field of intermingled circumstances. The ludicrous idea of trying to incorporate all events into one’s own overall strategy, which is the final fantasy of the mind, is abandoned as a childish superstition. Mistakes are acknowledged with good grace, as in any other apprenticeship, corrected without resentment and accepted without any sense of drama if they cannot be avoided.

It is peculiar to individuals who practise meditation to enjoy discovering their mistakes. Now that they live in the pure present, admitting to a mistake is no longer humiliating because it is in the past, an area of the self which has already been abandoned, and bringing it to light opens up a better path. Making mistakes is necessary, firstly because the subject is so small compared to all the categories of the non-self which surround him that he cannot constantly watch all fronts at once and conform perfectly to everything come what may. Secondly, it is always difficult to make decisions based on the unified self. The historic subject (3) can be opportunistic and commit the whole self to a siding where surface interests dominate and drown the inner being. The historic subject can be manipulated by fear, threats, gratification and interest. Passion in the present (4) can on rare occasions mask certain character traits and push the self blindly into a seductive but discontinuous dimension which becomes heterogeneous and then dangerous, before finally forcing it to backtrack. Sometimes the permanent self (1) turns in on itself, lacks the piquancy of 4 and is wary of experience and refuses to become involved, which is something which it might regret later if it is attached to its own image. Sometimes so much work takes place in Mystery 2 that any decision to be made of a contingent or material nature can seem unreal, out of place or even hostile. This is a feeling which can lead to postponements which may or may not be wise.

Admitting to our mistakes is simply a way of rediscovering our own direction when we have lost it for whatever reason. Many things lead us to make mistakes and in the West we have a tendency to think that they stem from lack of knowledge of external data. In the East, by contrast, people recognize that if they make mistakes it is because they do not know themselves sufficiently well to avoid compromising themselves in heterogeneous situations. Cardinal meditation welcomes observations on mistakes in everyday life and relationship problems, but it also welcomes the theory that the facts in question, external facts, were only able to occur because of a state of mind which allowed them to. When a train comes off the tracks, this is an accident, but it is caused by faulty points - an omission. Therefore, failures in field 3 provide us with information on our own temperament which is too slack or too tense, too forward-looking or too reserved in relation to the requirements of our environment.

If we consider ourselves to be students of the universe strangely confronted by a self which we cannot escape, then at every instant our achievements and failures provide us with information on the basic nature of what we are and encourage us to vary our approach to things, to transform our territorial consciousness, test our solar aspirations which we place unconditionally before the Divine and to let our self-image die and be reborn in a glittering present. This present is so pure that not one fragment of it is an extension of the past and this is infallible for severing our beliefs, abolishing obsolete representations of who we are and of what we want to achieve.

The body can take longer than the self to free itself from pointless memories and cardinal meditation can be an adjunct to all forms of exercise which enable the physical body to free itself from the past. A huge repertoire of techniques is currently available, but in every scenario the physical body being worked upon must reach a significant state of rest to eliminate the toxins of memories. Slow, conscious breathing from the stomach generally brings immediate relief after all the emotional reactions which triggered a radical split from certain structures and attachments from the past. Tears are liberating when they occur spontaneously and it is not necessary to stifle them when they genuinely come from the body. On the other hand, allowing a sequence of negative thoughts to occur in which one goes round in circles until quasi-artificial tears are summoned up is an old strategy from field 3, devoid of all intelligence, which digs the ruts of the ego even deeper and consecrates vanity through complacency.

What meditation teaches us is precisely how to distinguish emotional discourse, which is by definition plaintive, from the abstract vision of the problem which is causing us to suffer and which has not let itself be caught up in the closed monologue of complaining. It testifies faithfully like a stubborn animal at its own biological level that a breaking point has been reached between the self and the non-self. Inner suffering is divinely calculated to serve as an alarm bell when we begin to drift towards an agreement where the self and the non-self interweave and become confused. The emotion is so sincere that it embarrasses most people because it is forced on them in order to break the bars of the cage of ready-made representations and to shatter the mirror of self-image which is often simply an idol. Accepting emotion, whether it terrifies or delights us, allows us to respect the authority of the universe with regards to us and to understand that it warns us permanently through this emotion of the structures existing between ourselves and the whole which require transformation, as well as between ourselves and what we think of ourselves, now that our line of conduct has been called into question by inopportune moods, excesses which suddenly orphan the self without any object on which to project its need for security and without any internal or external force of authority.

The self changes its interpretation of things because it has nothing to defend and no longer attempts to interpret anything. It is simply there, enduring the whole manifestation without being fundamentally alien to it – a state which only skilled physicists could establish using abstruse equations because it is so difficult for the mind to grasp this status. However, if evolution moves towards conscious complexity, we will eventually be able to make the materials of our global being converge with the Supreme Being, who has instilled them with his own Presence while separating them from each other - hence our conflicting, material, spiritual horizontal, vertical, immediate and permanent position. Every option is offered to us but for some mysterious reason we reject them all. When they survey the issue, awakened ones are unanimous – if we content ourselves with nature we will relish our tragedies and passions and we will find happiness in the keen fight for existence which is intense and multi-coloured, sanctioning violent impulses wholesale as if they were legitimate as well as our justifiable hatred of peccadilloes. Our ambition, which we cultivate religiously will, by contrast, survive all sorts of meaningful failures and our inflexible and shadowy self-image will be fiercely preserved. We will remain in a crude state of unity which can be compared to the animal state and which comprises unbearable degrees of tension at irregular intervals.

By contrast the idea of turning inwards towards the centre of the self offers the possibility of freeing ourselves from the dualities which block our path – those fundamental dualities which we express in the transverse axes of the Mysteries. The whole starting position will be abandoned then destroyed and unity will be rebuilt on new criteria from the inside, which will give a new status to perception of the senses. The permanent immediacy of field 4 is implacably opposed to the mysterious motionless unity within us which we call ourselves and which has accompanied us since childhood and strives to conjugate the verb “to be”. Consciousness of the physical body, the pressures of survival in its environment and also its weakness and weight contrast with the majesty of field 2, where the Divine gives the shape which suits him directly to the intelligence, soul, chakras and the subliminal self through the powerful ideal which he imposes on those who want to join him and who receive the strength to love obstacles.

All representations of life other than those which stem from our own experience in the infinite adventure, here and now, are futile presuppositions and subtle conditioning for dealing with the present according to a preconceived frame of mind. Aspirations are sufficient to overcome abuses of power on the part of the mind, which grasps the highest realities and kills them with the limitations which it imposes on them. The will does not have to do anything at all, other than aspire to be revealed by preventing the mind for as long as possible from setting the rules, which it does by loading the dice, to avoid being banished from its realm.

Once the major worlds of higher consciousness have been described, the main issue lies in finding the path to them rather than in enriching them with futile considerations. Cardinal, or quantum, meditation is simply the fullest and the most synthetic reappraisal to date. Sri Aurobindo borrowed a significant number of Sanskrit terms which specifically describe those fundamental realities which we have lost and which the supramental enables us to rediscover. Reading his works would seem to be an effective aid to understanding the supremacy of field 2 in our own system, the need for self or Brahman and the complementary nature of divine consciousness and the creative energy of worlds. For our part, we face the need to establish a new spiritual method which, without renouncing the splendours of the past, will take into account the spectacular advance of human consciousness in the twentieth century, because our species has just rediscovered the supramentalSri Aurobindo, La Manifestation supramentale [The supramental Manifestation] published by Buchet-Chastel after several thousand years of eclipse, opening up completely new horizons as described by Sri Aurobindo and practised by the Mother and the author of this work for nearly thirty years.

It was during the twentieth century that the intellect developed in a new way and somehow learned to go back over its workings with new vigilance, as quantum physicists blazed the trail in parallel with the most rigorous psychologists. Once Western intellectuals acknowledged that the characteristics which we attribute to things are merely provisional representations, overall Reality suddenly became an unfathomable mystery. The best minds in many disciplines have got into the habit of only trusting immediate results, ready to call a theory into question as soon as it comes to light and to enlarge it as soon as it has been born.

The well-known saying “The map is not the territory” has led to the establishment of a new school of thought which included the most profound thinkers. By adopting a form of intellectual discipline which they arrived at empirically, they were keen to distinguish constantly between how they apprehended reality - a totally internal process - and the groups of objects which the spirit was trying to decipher. The results of this new intelligence have admittedly not reached the public domain yet and very few people today know that what they call reality has almost no relevance to it. However, the vision is directly derived from particle physics, whose paradigm consists of establishing that reality will always move away from that place where we thought we had comprehensively grasped it.

This paradigm constitutes scientific proof that the mind is not designed to grasp reality, but merely to represent its immediate materials to the self, which is subject to the ceaseless work of the spirit. The more the self decides to broaden the spatial field of this immediacy, the more it finds it normal to be simultaneously interested in things which infinitely transcend the boundaries of sensations and environment, and the more the mind gropes to represent apparently remote still virgin territories. However, intelligence is delighted to expand its realm and is triumphant on rediscovering a free, broad activity in the human brain which is conducive to its elevation.

A new phase therefore occurs in which the intelligence begins to get to know itself and knows how to avoid all sorts of useless processes. It learns to abandon representing things which are too huge for it, whose image would merely be a grotesque caricature. Therefore it is possible to abandon our model of the Divine and, contrary to what most people think, this opens up the presence of the Divine to a greater extent than modelling based on the limitations of the mind, if it is guided by sincere aspiration. In fact, whilst anticipating a divine which conforms to a model, perception will lean towards catching feelings in the present instant which concur with the model we have in mind, rejecting all spontaneity, every state of grace which has not been through the mill of this imaginary conformity, which is by definition critical. Similarly, Chan and Taoist teachers insist that the Path cannot be represented, although this in no way invalidates its existence. Lao-Tzu even goes so far as to say in one chapter that history places at the beginning of the Tao-te King that the path which can receive a name cannot be the supreme route. Viewed in this light, all religions could fundamentally be denounced as a pure counterfeit versions of the spiritual idea. However, if this point of view is right per se, when taken out of context, it is false in relation to the empirical history of mankind. Managing to turn towards the Divine without first having imprisoned him in a cage of values and ideas is not a process which we can inflict on culture. This would be equivalent to extolling the virtues of a staircase with out any steps which would rise like a wall, on the pretext that it would be quicker but would require an impossible leap. It is likely that each self attached to matter, each being must work on the use of the brain in the field of representations to avoid mistaking what one feels with the senses with what one perceives with one’s inner being, as the mind amuses itself by futilely appropriating objects to which our being aspires – knowledge, Good and Right. For thousands of years, this simple truth has formed the basis for the need for consecration, which is not so much offering one’s existence to absolute Mystery as a firm daily resolve to pay careful, close attention to how we use time (4) and the body (3) to prevent the discourse of thought from appropriating reality through the words it projects onto it.

This is why it is not unusual to meet certain teachers who think that it is necessary to do very little for a whole day in order to let the spirit work unhurriedly on everything it grasps and also so that it learns to surrender to it. This is a necessary stage during the transition towards the spiritual life in which the mechanical spirit tries by any means or activity to fill the moment, to avoid turning inwards where the proof of its ignorance would appear in the mirror. Once we have passed through this phase, mental pride is quashed and a new form of lucidity appears in which the complexity of decision-making surfaces, because friction occurs between instinct, the moral code and the need for the personality to express itself against the background of totality which becomes a vague sort of partner, but one whose role will continue to grow.

Our intelligence encounters the rough edges of the object which it is exploring at all times. We do not really know to what extent far we can gather together the necessary parameters which will give rise to a more favourable situation, or we are struggling with the issue of working out if we are “on the right track”, i.e. the one which will lead to the implosion of thought, revealing integral silence, or contact with a higher shakti (energy) . If we are being taught, it is not unusual to realize that we have got a statement the wrong way round, because the spirit will only project its own experience on the idea contained in the phrase which is written or heard. This weakness on the part of the mind legitimized the authority of teachers in the past, as they were the only ones who could immediately unscramble a novice’s distorted representation of the spiritual world by making signifier and signified tally through dialogue. There is no call for this process of listening to the awakened one in order to liberate intelligence to disappear, but it is not sufficient to enable consciousness to grow. It is time for most people to understand that the brain is a sort of extremely complex biological machine, but one which works mostly on information from the senses and nervous system to decree what is real and what is not.

This blind faith in the workings of the brain yields terrible results, like those great religious intellectuals ready to burn everything in their paths on the pretext of revealing the kingdom of God. Both neurobiologists and psychologists must continue to explore patiently the different ways in which the spirit makes what it perceives its own by calling this “reality”. We know the extent to which other people can become part of us, a child for its mother, a mother for its child, a teacher for his disciple, a loved one for their lover and sometimes, as we see in British culture, an elderly retainer who identifies completely with his employer whose every requirement he anticipates, as if he were himself although the relationship has never been an intimate one. Beyond identifications, which are just like a distorting glimpse of knowledge through identity, the self is already the non-self: consciousness is supreme in relation to all objects snared by the spirit in order to make them oneRupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At published by Editions du Rocher with it.

The self can be considered to be like this immobile, quantum spirit, which is simultaneously identified with the object and profoundly external to it. It is a wall which reason cannot scale, which is fundamentally difficult to reach and yet until we scale it, life is just a long unfolding process which we endure, whatever our own scope for manoeuvre invents and whatever the merits of free will.

A search which is detached from the self and from anticipation of enlightenment which will crown our existence releases the mutual forms of blackmail which the four Mysteries maintain between themselves and it is therefore necessary to separate the merits of either pole of the fundamental reality – consciousness and energy, purusha and prakriti. If these two realities converged naturally it would not have been necessary to distinguish between them. Energy (prakriti) would have been placed at the service of the spirit and we would thus have a very reassuring model of the human being – unity in motion which continuously interweaves ideas and actions effortlessly and totally automatically, moving from one piece of knowledge to another and from development to realization. However, the whole of human history is a symbol of how impossible it is to reconcile consciousness and energy. Energy is always out at the front; it supports countless movements on its own and lives for itself, in a sense, as is evident in the grammar of animal communication in which dominance codes play the main role and prevail over embryonic individual identity, with the dominant and the dominated dividing themselves up in appropriate proportions.

If we give free rein to prakriti, Mystery 3 and Mystery 4 support each other to create a human being who will be permanently intoxicated by experience and by the powers of life, whilst leaving the moral self behind there, because he will let himself be “consumed” by the power of the moment or of desire – which are one and the same thing. If, by contrast, the self becomes taken only with purusha, then Mystery 1 will combine with Mystery 2 and allow access to a form of ascetic holiness, dominating life without touching it and the existence of the body will be referred back to its simplest form. The mind and the representations which it will be capable of creating will end by dictating a priori the interpretation which the senses will have to attribute to the objects explored. Therefore, for example, the founders of Jainism had become taken with non-material consciousness (without any movement) to the point of virtually denying their physical existence. This is still the case for a few followers of Shivaist or other sects seeking to obtain the self or contact with the Divine through dogmatic but practical contempt for the body, in which case it is quite appropriate to submit it to all sorts of privations. In fact, the appeal Cathar vision, which demonizes life, resurfaces at regular intervals and it can only recognize consciousness by shutting itself off proportionally to matter and energy which still leads to serious mass suicides to this day.

By contrast, investigating the four Mysteries allows us to harmonize consciousness-witness and the material energy of the body with its different energy flows – the “chi” devoted to the organs and the breath of life - whilst the still deeply mysterious subconscious will reveal the processes of amalgamation between the self and the non-self, which will then be able to dissolve (complexes, knots of energy and obsessions). The movement of prakriti and the immobility of purusha can be joined harmoniously with extreme care and in this respect I am merely updating the Isha Upanishad which, in just a few verses, makes light of all the contradictions and antagonisms which we encounter on the spiritual path. Purusha and prakriti are not completely distinct since our mental activity ground down intensely by our brain cells (or vice versa) mingles with the pure energy of life, while simultaneously creating sort of virulent inner ghosts which escape from us like sub-personalities, such as chronic obsessions, serious compulsions or minor reactive diseases which are caused by the same events. Obviously, what interests us is the absolute convergence of purusha and prakriti, where neither one suffers from the attention being paid to the other, which can still be found in a very small number of secret teachings, generally referred to as tantric, in which the idea of opposing principles is completely abandoned. From our point of view, only the self at the centre can absorb in its vastness, or its neutrality if one prefers, the movements of energy without getting lost or fighting them in vain. Enlightenment therefore seems to be an obligatory stage for reconciling ethics and the ideal (which have a tendency to rise of their own accord or to become abstract to the detriment of feeling) with vital and behavioural energy which tends to sink under pressure of fear and desire and trivialize the present or fourth field which prepares and performs situations and roles and their constant maelstrom. Enlightenment is prepared by all incursions into a more pared-back mental field, which is slower and tends towards the void.

Traditional forms of wisdom which seem to prefigure the descent of the supramental have tried to reconcile opposites rather than to praise the higher, “celestial” pole and life after death to the detriment of permanent observation. However, since the union of opposites, alchemy, is more difficult to achieve than forward transcendental flight movements which never abandoned incarnation whilst seeking higher wisdom only affected a few elite groups. Anything which is subtle escapes the vulgar masses and it takes at least three generations for a revealed religion to become its own counterfeit. I would say that Buddha preached a radical vision which was likely to lead to the self, in which meditation on fear and desire played a role, as advocated and recorded by Chan, which has nothing to do with standard Buddhism which has spread throughout Asia and is steeped in morality, common sense and complacency. In the Baghavad Gita, a few luminous passages denounce rites and liturgies in veiled terms, whereas the injunction “Take refuge in me alone” stipulates that it is sufficient to surrender oneself sincerely to the Divine without further ado in order to meet Him. Christ’s gospel preached genuine politics, an on-going initiative to be carried out in daily life outside the framework of time in order to listen to others, share the same intelligence and build a society which is no longer based on greed. The Taoist fathersLi Tzu, Lao-Tzu, Chuang Tzu wanted to unite heaven and earth by learning the intricacies of yin and yang which, when revealed by a teacher, account for the purusha/prakriti polarity in a different way.

Consciousness-witness is passive – it receives and transforms movements from energy and nature which are always active and part of us dreads this passivity, because humiliating truths will take advantage of our complete openness to pass through our defences and to show us in a different light what the “material” part of our being would rather not have seen. Awakening is difficult to achieve because prakriti is always one step ahead – our reactions precede our thoughts and our desires precede our consent to realize them. Our fears precede an objective evaluation of danger and our anger precedes our so-called control of it. In short – how can we find the strength not to be swept up in spite of ourselves by prakriti’s head start?

It is necessary and sufficient to be able to counter it with the proportional counterweight of perfect stillness, which characterizes the self, so that nature’s head start is slowed right down and can be observed at source by the truly awakened one. Actions then conform to the traits of the inner being, because they are no longer impulses tugged by nature or pushed by the past, but true expressions of a being who has achieved mastery over his senses. Few paths deal in detail with the work which the inner being must carry out on the physical body in order to reconcile the antagonisms represented by the Mysteries. But without the self, which acts as a bridge between the ideal and the contingent, between the self and the subject plunged in desire and fear then opportunities and accidents have too great an impact on determining our perception of the moment. Therefore we have to be able to be present, fully attentive to each moment, without losing ourselves in what we are listening to, as if it were possible to allow the meaning of things to occur on its own at the point of intersection between the open, detached, non-judgemental self and the uncontrollable non-self, which is likely to challenge our expectations, beliefs, values ideals and most deeply-held wishes. The aim of supramental activity on earth is to make the self one and the same thing, because the unity in question is so total and so whole that consciousness of the self by embracing the universe in one go becomes the universe itself. This is a new experience which Mother and Sri Aurobindo shared in the twentieth century, without daring to state that we would manage to achieve it.

The system of the four Mysteries enables what are called obstacles to meditation to become part of meditation itself and to be absorbed into it purely and simply. In this respect what we advocate represents a departure from Zen belief which is too precise and seemed to want to monopolize the image of meditation and disseminate it in Europe for several decades based on its reputation for authenticity and seductive simplicity compared to Hindu or Buddhist schools of thought. In order to practise the four Mysteries correctly, it is necessary to move away from former beliefs or conceptions about meditation and to be keen for past experiences to be viewed as preparation rather than as reference points. It is not a handicap to have no experience in this area since our method can then be grasped in all innocence without interference from the double-edged sword of erudition in this chapter.

This is a new form of practice and its aims differ from those which, for example, the great expert on these matters Maharishi Mahesh Yogi[The Science of Life and the Art of Being], published by Robert Laffont wanted to develop and which we will quote shortly because he knew how to clear out dualist presuppositions which prevent us from understanding the essence of meditation. Cardinal or quantum meditation is simply something different which cannot be compared to anything else because it is a sort of dialectical combination of traditional arts necessitated by the descent of the supramental in 1956, which added to the quest for one’s being the possibility of physical experimentation with the Divine (Mother and Satprem). The aim is not to gather together a percentage of meditators to make peace easier to achieve, nor merely to de-stress us, any more than realization of the Self can claim to be the only good. Cardinal meditation frames our whole lives, but it does not have a frame itself and it prepares us for all events - be they subjective or objective, individual or historical - because it has the power to transform the tree structure of individual ideas and, therefore, to transform perception itself and, as a result, the meaning of all things.

Just two right angles which bisect each other perpendicularly, define four specific fields for exploration, fields which give us directions for observing the pile of layers which constitute us, each of which makes the brain work. In simple terms, four motors make the machine work on different types of fuel as it were, but only the centre – which does not move – can give everything its place and function in relation to others. This provocative caricature underlines the fact that because human consciousness is based on different components it must have a mechanism, a secret law governing how it works, which organizes bonds between the physical body, energetic bodies and a sense of permanent self, the three stages being pervaded by duration which is malleable on the one hand due to our choice of schedule and inflexible on the other with the alternation of occasions and accidents which do not depend on us. Once we have understood and memorized the diagram, all the rest comes down to practice and experience, because the passive spirit of the self which is integral and present will welcome identifications and their objects in order to de-dramatize them, re-centre them in relation to the essential being which is sovereign in respect of circumstances, acts and emotions.

Forgetting our references is not that easy and it is always tempting to imprison oneself in a stated tradition or freedom in order to put an end to exploration which seems, rightly or wrongly, to be dangerous or risky. There is always the same risk that one danger will hide another, i.e. that the emphasis placed on one particular truth will leave other not insignificant aspects in the background. The great advantage of the supernatural is that its scanning cannot miss anything or leave anything to chance and I would therefore say that it is Divine energy which encouraged me to explore the four fields, something which I would not otherwise have done because I wanted to remain in my superior “bubble” of somebody awakened to the self. Supramental consciousness is direct, based on immediate identity and does not need constructions anymore, although significant linkages occur. I would never have “found” the diagram of the four mysteries without the profound and varied experience dating back to the start of 1977, which opened up a new world to me. Since then, I have been forced to go back endlessly over all aspects of my personality in order to offer a relevant experimental field to the Divine in this area and I accepted the critical importance of the physical body in this form of yoga. It was becoming necessary therefore to weave a web of representations to describe the third field to which I was able to connect evolutionary memory: effective subconscious programmes to assure the survival of the physical body and take advantage of lack of conscious attention or difficult events in order to transform our brain chemistry and produce regressive states of consciousness. The obstacles encountered in Mystery three, the field of the ecological self, can resolve themselves as soon as the self has reflected them through the determination of the subject in the first field, his aspiration in the second and his ability to let go in the third, and all their combinations.

Thanks to Divine aspiration and to the powerful mantra I have been using since1982, I generally manage to recover from my descents into the very depths of life, sometimes to the frontier with death, and in this way have been able to rigorously counter Mystery 3, which is concerned with our passage into incarnation with the weight of the body and its survival mechanism, and Mystery 2, which is particularly aptly named because most direct action by the Divine on us cannot be predicted and is secret, right up to powerful, supreme supramental energy felt in every fibre of the body which often decides to intervene on whim. As for Mystery number 4, it brings together time in its objective forms – duration which takes its course, the present moment, the here and now – but it is pointless to include the past, because it is our past and our deeply subjective and limited memory and it is pointless to add the future which has no objective reality because it does not exist yet. Faced with the apparent irreversible speed at which duration flows, consciousness of field 1, or the permanent self, plays at juggling with time because we are very well aware of how to remember and anticipate, to create virtual forms of duration independent from the authentic flow of time in which we are just as likely to see ourselves in the past as in future situations, through the powerful intermediary of collections of memories or a range of images of the gratification to be obtained. These range from quasi-subconscious fantasy to the purest wish, passing through all sorts of desires, blueprints for plans, more or less wishful thinking and hopes followed up to a greater or lesser degree by the steps necessary to make them happen.

In fact, depending on what happens in actual practice, the person conducting the experiment will be able, if he so desires, to make a new realization coincide with content already recorded in another system whose name is not important. Only flavour - rasa - counts in meditation and it is not used for collecting higher memories. A particularly inspired shuttle movement between Field 4 and Field 1 can produce the equivalent of a Jnana-yoga or Samkhya meditation. The subject suddenly discovers in duration itself a new form of sustenance, capable of satisfying his thirst for knowledge, which it now feels to be at its disposal (whilst refusing to “submit” to this availability), while experiencing a new intelligence, which is henceforth less driven to react to different opinions. Invigorating and conscious sessions of walking, snorkelingLooking underwater from the surface, with freediving. In water at 27 or 28 degrees one can rediscover the original happiness of the womb. or strolls during which Field 3 yields to 4, while Field 1 explores consciousness of the body can be equivalent to advanced Tai-chi, Ki-kong or hatha yoga exercises, reinforce the immune system and awaken hara. They can enable us to free ourselves from ancestral fear or to purify the vital, if breathing exercises are correct (which calls for a particular type of letting go).

An equilibrium between the four Mysteries which would come close to perfection fairly and without friction by virtue of its neutrality and detachment in all four directions can produce so-called tantric experiences, without any opposition occurring between the Self and the Manifestation. Desire finds a new paradoxical place which the mind cannot represent. Meditation in 4, untroubled by emotional or semantic remanence, is in keeping with the living anthology of devotees of Chan and Zen, or teachers of Advaita. Increases in consciousness in field 2 through the intermediary of the self which unites the other mysteries give rise to experiences analogous to those described by mystics – vibratory frequency fields which are normally forbidden reveal themselves within perception itself, linking the moment to Eternity.

In fact, the intelligence is always free to try all sorts of approaches to make the physical body more conscious and at the end of the day practising the three mysteries is simply an accelerated method for enriching the self through multiple confrontations with the physical body (and its defence of its territory), with the framework of a present stripped of all finality (in which the centre and 4 merge) and the higher mystery of the subliminal self, in which secret energies work to open the chakras, Intellect and the psychic being. Although we start from the basis of division - the four fields - meditation takes place in unity because the self at the centre will end up blurring the antagonisms which naturally emerge from the four sectors through its consciousness of them and the need for us to abandon habits and work in new directions. In simple terms, we assume that that the form of the four Mysteries is constantly changing and it is thought that meditation enables us to sort the puzzle out so that the four pieces join properly so that we can enjoy wonderful unity as the four fields become one. Each realization in whatever zone frees the self and keeps it present whilst other identifications continue to take place. As Maharishi Mahesh admirably put it, “if the self remains present, he does not need to try to eliminate identifications, he takes advantage of them, they confront him and provide him with information. The spirit then becomes quantum – identification and non-identification merge.

"The thought of freedom, even if it seems good, is just a thought, not a state. The thought of freedom is just as alienating as any other thought. By its very nature, thought takes us out of our Self. When the spirit begins to have a thought, it penetrates the realm of duality and thought hides the essential nature of the spirit. Consequently, all thought, whatever it might be, entails identification.

Therefore the problem of identification was not resolved at all by the thought of the Self, the Divine or of God. This is why these practices have not managed to bring freedom and it is also why the quest for freedom has remained unfulfilled and the paths leading to it have been blurred by our habits of entertaining the idea of the divine Self or God at the level of thought.

The fundamental error came from the fact that we mistook identification itself for alienation. In fact, identification is not alienation. What constitutes alienation is an inability to hold onto the Being at the same time as identification. What constitutes alienation is an inability to hold onto the Self when there is apperception and we are active.

If identification were alienation, freedom would not be possible in the state following death in which all perception and activity cease. While ever a man is alive, he continues to have experiences and to act, so that it is impossible for him to avoid identification during his lifetime.

Identification is not the same as alienation because freedom is lived out in the real world and living in the world involves identifying with everything there, with experience and activity as our aim."

In this respect, the self can consider that memories of behaviour which hinder “pure” meditation to be external to it without avoiding them and that thought in field 3 faithfully brings them to the surface like a stubborn dog who keeps bringing his master objects for him to throw when the master does not want to move. In certain schools, it is said that meditation can only take place when you have got rid of the dog. This is not the answer. The self absorbs everything which appears and finds evolutionary meaning in it and does not have to deny the past because it can transform it. Absolute silence will occur eventually without having to be summoned when intelligence becomes weary of fragmented thoughts and finally moves towards its own source. The brain does its work perfectly when it places before us everything which disturbs it and it is simply because we do not have the self to welcome this painful material that we seek to cheat with the truth and repress what we do not want to see, using checks to deny access to awkward information which generally deals with a lack of skill in different sectors which we do not wish to acknowledge. As soon as the self manifests itself, the meditator confronts the shame which arises, dissolves it, consigns it to the past and can eliminate the processes by which it could recur. It does the same thing with all sorts of guilt as it can also absorb humiliating images of the self into its own neutrality without being affected, realigning itself by drawing strength from within or from field 2. When grappling with the pure present , the Self dissolves what we could call “sins”, cancels out mistakes by the absence of any need ever to make them again which he is now able to do because tamas is stronger than rajas and even stronger then sattva. The self has the power to turn over a new leaf, to abandon ipso facto what we thought we owned, just like a snake changes its skin, whether that be the smug virtue of vanity, recurring faults or weaknesses which it throws away like worn-out clothes if aspiration in field 2 is sufficiently strong. Imperfection is not an obstacle, but the actual path to perfection, which becomes apparent by pr