La lumière de l'Obscur

Jean Bouchart d'Orval

Les Éditions du Relié
1997

(excerpt in English)

Of all those whose talks I have heard, none has gone so far as
to recognize that that which is wise transcends all things.
(Fragment 1)

Man still happily contents himself with a pale light thrown upon a life that
has not yet delivered its enigma to him. His initial quest often becomes a
magma of categories and concepts, ultimately ending up in insignificance.
Very few have succeeded in shaking off this torpor, especially in the West.

If Heraclitus, even in his time, seems to have heard many talks about
wisdom, how many more have we heard over the last many centuries and
millennia! The finding remains roughly the same everywhere: almost all
talks, spoken or written, have fallen far short in front of the blazing light
Heraclitus is speaking about. Everywhere men are busy pursuing mirages.
With very few exceptions, even those who are called philosophers, have
left the depressing enclosure in which Plato and Aristotle had confined
them. If Heraclitus may have stigmatized the spiritual poverty of his
contemporaries, but he would be overworked today.

But it is never too late for a good clean-up. This is what the first fragment
accomplishes, beginning with “Of all those…” Heraclitus beckons man to
being more audacious in his life, because that is what he has been cruelly
lacking. Should we again be happy with living like the sleeping and
stupidly waiting for the inevitable destruction of the body? Far from being
the opposite to audacity, wisdom is the supreme audacity. Audacity does
not consist of throwing provocative slogans and falling into philosophical
sensationalism, but rather in questioning what has not been questioned but
is still continuing to set the tone in our personal life and our clumsy way of
questioning the universe.

Discrimination is yet to come. The beckoning reached us 2550 years ago,

not only in Greece, but also elsewhere, including China and India, and it
still holds. It was renewed in Israel 2000 years ago. This beckoning is
renewed with each generation. That which beckons us is very patient and
always finds appropriate messengers. Heraclitus speaks about a knowledge
that is in fact a recognition (ginóskein), a little bit like when one enters in a
dark room and lets one's vision open up. He beckons to the maturity of the
vision. How does this maturity come about? That is what Heraclitus gets
into later. Here he leaves us a perfume of what wisdom is.

The neutral sophón designates the sage in the sense of that which is wise
and not in the restricted meaning of a wise person. It is not the person who
is wise, but rather That which is wise. That is why in fragment 3 Heraclitus
speaks of “those who listen not to me but to the logos”. The person cannot
be wise; it is only a concept, a convention, and not the reality. When we
are not alert (living like the sleeping), we forget reality and we live in a
personal, or individual, manner. In fragment 21, Heraclitus notices that
“each of the sleeping takes refuge in an individual world”. That which is
wise is what “governs all things” (fragment 4) and which is not itself a
thing.

Like most words, the word “wise” has acquired, after being used so much,
a mundane and vulgar meaning: it has undergone a terrible erosion. Today,
we call wise anybody who tries to look wise, someone who uses the jargon
of wisdom but who is still a person. Or we mix up wisdom and old age,
which is nonsense. Even in antiquity the meaning of wise has been
trivialized. Most of the time we apply this word to phenomenal life and
that always refers to the individual. To do good applies to a person (a
“good” person), that is to a particular center of perception. The behavior of
a wise one, (a human being who refers to That which is wise, doesn’t
consists in doing what is good and avoiding what is evil —these categories
have no meaning for him— but rather in allowing the profound vision, the
intrinsic light, “the logos of the soul which grows by itself” (fragment 8).
One should not conclude that such a person will do anything with anybody
anytime, nor, as we shall see later, brush aside the rules of just life that all
serious traditions have recommended to man.

That is why Heraclitus asserts that “that which is wise transcends all
things.” Its radical nature is therefore underlined, because as long man
tries to find it on the level of “all things”, frustration and sorrow await
him. “All things” designates everything that is an object of perception, all
the elements of the phenomenal world. In other words: everything that ahs
a beginning, a middle and an end! The gathering speech of That which is
wise can only be transcendent. Ah! Another word that does not mean much
these days. Transcendent doesn’t mean disconnected of all things,
separated from all things; it means that it is not something and it cannot be
grasped. When all we know about water is ice, liquid water and water
vapor, we cannot have an idea of what water is in itself and not as one of
its forms. But water in itself is not separated or foreign to the waves, to the
clouds or to the ice floe. In the same way, could That which is wise and
“governs all things”, “the One, the only Wise” (fragment 7), be separated
 even for split second from its own forms, which are “all things”?

From the onset, Heraclitus stresses the special status of That which is wise.
That which is wise has no opposite, which is not the case for “all things”: “
All things happen through opposition and necessity” (fragment 109) and
that is “harmony through opposite tensions” (fragment 108). The harmony
of That which is wise is transcending: this is Heraclitus message. “The
hidden harmony is superior to the visible one” (fragment 112). The light
Heraclitus beckons to is the light of the Obscure, not light as opposed to
the obscure. That is “the true light that enlightens every man”, as heralded
John in the prologue of his Gospel.

The word used by Heraclitus (kechorisménon) is in fact the past

participant of the perfect tense of the verb choréo, which means “to
withdraw”, and the word chóra means “space”. The idea of distance, of
withdrawal is there. That strangely echoes the Sanskrit word kaivalya,
used by Patanjali to designate the state of final liberation, or total
awakening: that word also means “isolated”. The realized being perceives
reality without mixing (samyoga) it, that is identifying it, with any form of
the phenomenal world. The discrimination has come and it is the cessation
(nirodha) of confusion (literal translation of samyoga), the abolition of
ignorance (avidyâ) 1. Heraclitus has perfectly grasped the radical aspect of
That which is wise. His reader should not expect a collection of vague
platitudes and mushy generalities. Fragment 42 sends an explicit warning:
“Lets not agree so easily on the greatest subjects.” Heraclitus speaks with
the authority of That which knows.

(1) The reader unfamiliar with these terms can consult the Patanjali Yoga Darshana,
especially sutras IV-35, II-17, I-2 et II-2, in Patanjali, Jean Bouchart d’Orval, Éditions du
Relié, Avignon, 1999.

Voici aussi un passage du livre d'Osho Rajneesh sur Héraclite : «L'harmonie

invisible»

"Il y a 25 siècles le Bouddha Gautama et le maître Jain Mahavira naissaient en Inde, Lao-
tseu et Chuang-tseu en Chine, Zarathustra en perse, Héraclite en Grèce... Jamais sans
doute cette planète ne fut à ce point lumineuse. Aujourd'hui, nous nous acheminons vers
une nouvelle ère de dégel, de fluidité. Les choses révolues sont vidées de leur substance ; le
passé n'a plus de sens pour l'homme contemporain et l'avenir est un immense point
d'interrogation. L'opportunité est offerte à l'humanité de changer de cap, comme jadis au
temps d'Héraclite. Le fleuve de l'existence va couler de nouveau pleinement et emporter
aisément ceux qui s'y baigneront. Vous avez de la chance de vivre en ce temps de
liquéfaction. Tout périclite, les certitudes ataviques sont emportées, les principes et les
valeurs anciennes sont usés et de nouveaux schémas ne sont pas encore mis en place.
Mais soyez vigilant, l'effervescence ne durera pas, l'homme supporte mal de vivre sans
garde-fou, dans l'insécurité. La sclérose reprendra ses droits, comme toujours.

Héraclite était un être merveilleux, une des plus belles âmes qui ait jamais existé. On l'a
appelé Héraclite l'Obscur. C'est une erreur. Mais il est vrai que pour le comprendre, il faut
accéder à une nouvelle façon d'être, ce qui n'est pas facile.
Les gens peuvent être classés en deux catégories. Les plus nombreux n'écoutent
qu'Aristote. Aucune mutation intérieure n'est exigée des aristotéliciens ; il leur suffit de
suivre un enseignement quelconque, de mémoriser des informations, d'acquérir une
habileté intellectuelle. Pour comprendre Aristote, vous pouvez rester ignorant de votre
propre nature et vous contenter de ce que votre mental appréhende, le monde dit objectif.
Il n'est pas nécessaire d'approfondir votre intelligence consciente, le monde intérieur du
sujet. Aristote n'est pas déroutant. Moyennant quelques efforts, tout être humain peut
apprendre son mode d'appréhension : le raisonnement. Avec Héraclite, on s'aventure en
terre inconnue. Le savoir et l'érudition ne servent à rien. Héraclite est limpide, mais le
niveau de conscience de la majorité des hommes est trop bas pour le percevoir. En
l'appelant l'Obscur, l'homme exprime sa propre cécité (...)

Héraclite effraie. Il parle de la vie et de ses apparentes contradictions. Le Bouddha, Lao tseu
et les autres éveillés utilisent un langage qui vous laisse perplexe parce que la vérité est
déroutante. Elle n'est ni chaos, ni logique. Elle est Logos, cosmos. Essayez de comprendre
ce que signifie ce terme Logos. IL figure dans les fragments de l'enseignement d'Héraclite
qui nous sont parvenus.Ce que vous appelez "réalité" n'est pas la "vérité". Votre réalité (de
res en latin, qui veut dire objet) est une chosification, une objectivation de la réalité. Par le
biais de son mental, de sa psyché, l'homme non éveillé scinde la vérité en sujet (le "moi")
et objets (le "non-moi"). Sa raison émet des hypothèses et ratiocine sur la nature des
phénomènes ; elle est binaire, réductionniste, déformante. Le Logos désigne la vérité elle-
même, la nature ou l'essence de tout ce qui existe, et non leur interprétation. Le Logos est
existentiel. L'existence est un mystère, un paradoxe. Ce que vous appelez "vie" est un
processus mis en route à la naissance qui inclut la mort. Vous êtes vivant-mourant, car vie
et mort sont deux aspects d'un seul phénomène, d'un seul processus.

Osho Rajneesh "L'harmonie invisible" Les éditions du Gange 1996 (épuisé)