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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Hypothesis of the path which begins with Yin:

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

Hypothesis of the path which begins with Yang:

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

The internal and the external only exist through each other.

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

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

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

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

The chaos below reveals a lost order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    can awakening be used to change life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Jettisoning what invents reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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