Eric Baret Éric Let The Moon Be Free

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English Intro
LET THE MOON BE FREE
CONVERSATIONS ON KASHMIRI TANTRA
ÉRIC BARET
TRANSLATED BY JEANRIC MELLER
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Published by: Science and Nonduality, 2018, second edition
Cover art: Erect Shiva (Shivalingam), white marble, 5th century, Gandhara kingdom,
Shahi dynasty, Kashmir, India, private collection.
Cover layout and design: Zaya Benazzo and Melissa White
ISBN-13: 978-1727646269ISBN-10: 1727646266
www.ScienceandNonDuality.com
www.bhairava.ws
Email: info@scienceandnonduality.com
English Intro
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is a collective labor of love. All those who contributed were deeply moved by
Eric’s words and shared a burning desire to make them available to a wider audience.
Thank you:
Robin Winckel, for your availability, your effectiveness, your capacity to simplify awkward
French expressions, and your impeccable timing.
Ellen Emmet, for the instigation of this work, and for all your input, reminding us of to stay
with the essential and not be caught in words.
Annelied Mock for your enthusiasm and your resourcefulness.
Tony Kendrew, for the precision of your language, your perseverance and attention to
detail.
Mary Mann, for the first translation of the initial chapter.
Kathleen Knipp, for your willingness to participate.
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Zaya Benazzo, for your continual inspiration, oversight and support.
Eric Baret, for your presence.
English Intro
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One......................In the silence of intimacy
Chapter Two......................Living with emotion
Chapter Three...................Hope is an escape
Chapter Four.....................Free of all understanding
Chapter Five......................Let fear devour you
Chapter Six.........................Let the moon be free
Chapter Seven...................Tomorrow doesn't exist
Chapter Eight...................Searching is postponing
Chapter Nine.....................No one ever talked to you
Chapter Ten.......................Wake up happy, fall asleep happy
Chapter Eleven.................The situation is an excuse
Chapter Twelve.................The fast of the heart
Chapter Thirteen.............The art of dying
English Intro
PREFACE
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In its traditional form, Kashmir Shaivism is beginning to be known in the West. In the last
thirty years, scholars have introduced numerous texts, which are remarkable for their
depth. The study of these works stimulates the mind and unveils many exceptional aspects
of Indian thought.
Originally, however, the purpose of this tradition was not to enrich our knowledge but, on
the contrary, to free ourselves from it. The burning fire of liberation, hidden under the exotic
fantasies of the spiritual tradition, was revealed to those who found their way through those
initiatory twists and turns. Nowadays, very few of us will have the time or even the impulse
to immerse ourselves in Kashmiri culture of the Middle Ages in order to benefit from this
revelation.
My teacher Jean Klein has passed on to his students an extraordinary transposition of this
art without ever betraying it. Today, the teachings must find their students wherever they
may be, to help them meet the modern world with the freshness which lies at the heart of
every spiritual tradition. No knowledge is necessary to receive the essence of the art, for
the origin of every tradition does not reside in thought, but in silence. Not-knowing is the
way (niveda-sadhana). Spiritual instruction is received straight from the emptiness
(sunyavani). These few dialogues are one of numerous examples of this approach. What is
transmitted is not a body of knowledge, but a listening which is, ultimately, the only
doorway to the essential.
Eric Baret
English Intro
I first encountered Eric in the nineties, through his early writings, before I was lucky
enough to meet him in person. Right from the start, his words were sending shivers down
my spine. Rigorous, clear, down-to-earth, uncompromising, sometimes on the edge of
provocation, his expression shook well-entrenched prejudices; it was rocking my world. I
knew that a world of illusions would not recover from this exposure to the essential. Indeed,
that was the case, and my life took a turn towards the unexpected, the unconventional,
leaving the beaten path to explore avenues that I would never have thought possible from
the rigid environment I was used to navigating.
Years later, I felt a need to explore all the paths that I might have bypassed in my
enthusiasm for the spiritual. I spent almost a decade in therapy and psychological inquiry,
diving deep into my early childhood and family history. The support of Eric’s foundation
was invaluable to that phase of my journey.
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Finally, I came full circle when I found myself in a depressive episode, with one of Eric’s
books as my faithful companion. Like a breath of fresh air, Eric’s words lifted me. Every time
my mind wanted to go into a story, to find a psychological or biological explanation for the
heavy clouds I was experiencing, reading Eric would bring me back to the naked reality of
the moment; it kept inviting me back to the sensations in my body, no matter how
uncomfortable they were. I was released from the conditioned impulse to resolve and to fix,
to run away from the uncomfortable feelings. In the midst of the darkest pain, here was
access to freedom, immediate, closer than my own skin, my birthright.
From this point on, it was clear that I had received an invaluable gift. What else could I do
but share it? How could I let this treasure stay out of reach for those who do not happen to
speak French? My translation is an offering to those who can appreciate the clarity and
unique flavor of Eric’s direct, clear and frank expression. He does not intellectualize,
explain or analyze anything. He does not give you anything to hold on to, or any certainty
to build into a possession. Besides inviting you back to your body, he points out some
truths that are so obvious that we can’t even see them, so lost are we in our imaginary
world of thoughts. Each time, the impact stings, and then the wave of expansion arrives,
flooding the psyche with tears of joy.
Enjoy!
Jeanric Meller
English Intro
Introduction
Glory be to Him who has not carved a path towards Him other than the incapacity to know
Him.
Ibn Arabi: The Meccan Revelations
Born out of fear, the impulse to know and to want is at the root of our psychological
suffering. Our existence is often nothing but a struggle to assert this superficial paradigm.
The constant search for security is the main obstacle to uncovering a freedom which
beckons us at every moment of what we call ordinary life.
To free the world from our projections is the ultimate art, expressed in all the great spiritual
traditions. This listening, free of personal ownership, is the solution to our conflicts,
imagined yet so real within our regimented lives.
Our carefully conditioned psyche fears emotion, yet emotion is to be found at the source of
all perception. When welcomed in its totality, this energy flows free of its projected cause
and becomes the song of life, silencing the individual. Misery, an echo of our original,
irrevocable and natural joy, is revealed as the second-born child of a barren woman.
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At the heart of the non-dual Kashmir Shaivite tradition, the alchemy of emotion puts an end
to intentional thinking.
The following conversations catch us in the midst of our everyday preoccupations which, in
our approach, reveal themselves as portals to what is essential. Swept away by the fire of
the moment, any resistance to a life free of conclusions, to the not knowing so dear to Jean
Klein, is clearly seen as a hopeless struggle. Could the red sulfur of alchemy be anywhere
else but in our very presence?
The transcript of these meetings preserves the spontaneous format of Q&A. What is said
here could easily be contradicted in other circumstances or on other levels and should not
be considered as The Truth, but rather as an exploration of our patterns and habits. The
style of speech is specific to the audience. Out of context, some responses might appear
inappropriate or seem to have little pedagogical value. It is the intimacy and the spaces of
silence pervading these meetings that justify these responses and invite their functional
integration. The reader should not take them literally, but transpose them. Although the
intensity of these moments—in which expression is but a pretext for the transmission of a
sense of listening—can only be tasted in person, a reading without expectation of objective
understanding can bring us back to the same obvious realizations which are at the heart of
our deepest nature.
English Intro
Chapter 1
English Intro
In the silence of intimacy

Security has got you lost
Koran
Indulging in security is contrary to intimacy with God. It gives a temporary feeling of well-
being, but puts happiness forever out of reach, for it destroys spiritual life and ruins the man
who indulges in it by making him waste his time. And when he finally reluctantly comes
back to himself, empty-handed, he realizes he never received anything.
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Ibn Arabi: The Book of Theophanies
O ur meetings do not happen in a context of spirituality, teaching or understanding, for all

these elements belong to progressive paths. Life events are the way, a way which appears
and disappears in the same moment. There is no room for accomplishment, for ownership.
As long as you don’t expect an informative answer, any question is welcome.
Is it possible to know the appropriate moment to change a situation, when you think you
can improve it? Or do you need to let it do its own thing, to let it happen without action?
Can one work on this?
What you can do is to become aware that you cannot choose between acting and being
available to the situation; it isn’t in your control. Sometimes you are able to listen to a
situation—you will then be free to act or not to act; the situation will be the action. On other
occasions you will only be able to witness your lack of listening, the ideological
commentary that you superimpose onto the situation. You pretend to know what is better—
this pretense, itself, is an action.
You cannot decide to react or to listen. Life doesn’t grant you such freedom. Witness the
moments of listening as well as the moments of reaction.
The idea of a personal autonomy that would allow us to act or not act is a fairy tale.
I am touched by a word which you have used: “non-accomplishment.” Could you say that
one can spend his life succeeding or failing and that it would also be a path of
accomplishment? Because this non-accomplishment leaves a bitter taste and brings up a
lot of questions about the meaning of one’s life.
You can spend your whole life imagining success or failure. All this is only ideology; you
cannot succeed nor fail at anything. One day you will be tired of imagining. At that moment,
your imaginary successes and failures, your fantasies of future successes and failures will
also disappear. That is the accomplishment and there is no other. That is what we need to
let take root in us. No room for regret, hope or bitter feelings—all that is a form of agitation.
Stay peaceful, clear. Life is happening inside of you, you are not in life.
If there is no accomplishment, is there no evolution either?
There is no psychological evolution. The old man is not more than the child: he is another
expression of life. He is not less either once he loses his strength, his intelligence, his
memory and his health.
When the old man loses his touch and his memory, he becomes less aware, doesn't he?
What you are referring to is relative awareness, as in fact he wasn’t fully aware. He
imagined succeeding and failing—which is lack of awareness. He imagined that he had a
name, that he could decide what to do… He imagined his entire life. The fact that he now
forgets this imaginary reality does not mean that he is lesser. He recovers something
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essential, something without memory, without ownership.
Observe how painful it is for us to see an old man who has become senile. Why is it so
difficult? What scares me? My identity is threatened. I realize that I too will become like that
and that I won’t be able to pretend—to pretend my success, my failures. I will have to
renounce my dear life, my dear identification with me. That is what hurts.
Leave that old man alone with your projections, your fears. The old man is doing well; we
are the ones who are scared. A salmon at the end of its life is not less magnificent than at
its peak. Degeneration, on one level, is part of our biological process. There is as much
beauty in someone who is dying as in a newborn.
If there is no accomplishment, what is the use of my consciousness?
Consciousness has no use. It is not an object designed to provide you with psychological
stimulation. It is not a red car, a husband or a dog. It is not here to serve; it is your
fundamental emotion, it pushes you to constantly look for yourself through all situations.
The word consciousness is poorly understood. In the East, they talk about consciousness
without an object. There is no such thing as “being conscious.”
The consciousness of people who want to “die consciously” is of little significance. What
gets realized at the moment of death is of a whole different order. The ability to “die
consciously” depends on the functional capacity of your brain. If you get clubbed over the
head, you will not “die consciously,” but you won’t miss anything.
The consciousness of something is a functional consciousness. It is like a leg to walk on.

That consciousness has no substance. Consciousness with a capital C, that is something
else.
If I manage to be aligned with Consciousness, can I reach Essence?
Try for just a moment not to be aligned with Consciousness…
What else could you be other than Consciousness? You are not a red zebra located
outside of Consciousness, to align yourself with her. Consciousness is yourself when you
stop looking for something, when you stop pretending that you have the freedom to be
aligned or misaligned. In your silence, between two thoughts, two perceptions, in deep
sleep and at all times—because time appears in Consciousness—your life is in perfect
agreement with Consciousness.
Give up every ideological commentary on your life. Your knowledge about life prevents you
from seeing how perfect it is. There is nothing to change. Your life changes, that is life. You
don’t have to align yourself with anything. Otherwise you will always feel misaligned.
Wanting to be aligned is fear. Fear of what? The cause of the fear is imaginary. At some
point you stop shaking. What is showing up is alignment. When I don’t call it positive or
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negative anymore, success or failure, what shows up is nothing but myself, my resonance:
there lies true alignment. It is not the alignment of a subject toward an object, it is a total
alignment, without separation. It is alignment with your body when it hurts or when it works,
alignment with life with what it has to offer, with no demand to accomplish, to get anything.
It is extraordinary to listen. That transcends what you are listening to. Listening is deeply
aligning with life.
To be without demand, without expectation, for a moment, is the simplest thing in the world.
It connects you with every being, every world. There lies symbiosis.
If you try to align with something, whatever it is, what you align with is an ideology: if you’re
a Muslim, you align with sharia or your tarika; if you’re a Buddhist, you align with the
Sangha or the Dharma; if you are an atheist, you stand behind your concepts… That kind
of alignment has very little value.
You need to align with what shows up in the moment. But that you cannot do. It is grace
which calls you and which you turn down at every moment because you want to be aligned
with the next moment. Observe the mechanism.
The emotion that arises in me, that is what I need to align with. There is nothing else.
Yes to being without expectation from ourselves, but what about expectations from the
outside?
You need to love them. It is normal that your dog expects his meal, that your lover, your
husband, your child, your father, your boss, your employee all expect something. But you
are going to realize that you are not here to fulfill the expectations of others. You are here,
in the end, to inspire non-expectation in those around you. Sometimes your environment
will be satisfied, sometimes it will be frustrated; you need to respect that, it needs both. Your
child needs to be both spoiled and disappointed; its maturity depends on both, the yes and
the no. Your friend needs the same thing, so does your camel.
You don’t need to feel guilty. You are not here to fulfill your neighbor’s expectations. There
will always be a neighbor who finds you too tall, and another who finds you too short.
Respect each of them. Some will like you, some will dislike you; all of them are right.
Depending on their emotional state, they see you one way or the other.
At some point, you do not feed from your neighbor’s projections anymore. You respect him
in his hatred as much as in his love. It is a projection; he is only talking to himself. You
understand intimately why, when he sees you, he feels such hatred and wants to strangle
you or he feels such love and wants to embrace you. He cannot do otherwise. It is like the
dogs who want to either bite you or lick you. You are not here to teach the dog that wants to
bite you that he shouldn’t, nor to explain to the one that licks you that he projects a security
on you which he should find in himself. You respect the dog who sees this security in you
and licks you as much as the one who is scared and wants to bite your throat. You act
according to the situation, from respect.
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If you don’t have a problem with yourself, you will not have any with society. Society is
clear, perfect, except if you live in expectation, in intention. There lies conflict.
As long as you want the environment to be different, you will be dissatisfied. If my husband
could become exactly who I want him to be, the next day something else would be missing.
What I am asking from my husband, from my camel, is myself. Something that no camel can
give to me. The moment I do not expect anything from anyone—including from myself—I
realize that listening is my security, my bliss, my satisfaction. I do not need to be listened to,
loved, or hated anymore; I understand, I respect the way the world sees me—it has its
reasons.
The environment does not create any psychological hurt. If it triggers the slightest difficulty
in me, this means that I carry a form of judgment: I see it and I come back to myself. Instead
of living with reality, I think that the environment should be different. The environment is
what it is. If you don’t agree with reality, you have a problem―not with it, but with yourself.
Look clearly within. Realize that your husband, your boss, your dog, can't help but feel
what they feel, act as they act. Through this respect, this love of reality, you become
available again.
Do you believe that parents can accept reality when they have a son who smokes too
much hashish and who ruins his health one way or another? Are these parents too violent
when they attempt to intervene and change the situation?
Depending on your past, your parents, the era you were born in, the circles you have been
part of, you have developed the absolute belief that hashish is either horrific or harmless.
You cannot help but act on this prejudice. You have no choice in the matter, you must
accept it.
Here we do not suggest pushing one belief or the other, but noticing that your projection on
hashish, or anything else for that matter, depends on your cultural, intellectual, or other
conditioning. You have read newspapers, experimented, met some people, studied; you
have adopted certain points of view, according to which you act.
To accept means to listen. To listen means to know nothing. If you reach the listening we
are talking about here, in an instant you free yourself from everything you know about
hashish and about your son. In this absence of judgment, what is left? Non-separation.
This emotion, you share with the child. There, you are going to find the appropriate
expression. What you are going to tell your son does not count; what counts is the way you
will speak, the timing of what you will say. In your listening, you will feel the appropriate
day, the moment, the way to talk to your son. You will not seek to convince him to do what
you think he should, but to touch in him a space of resonance in which he will be able to
hear what you say so that what he hears is going to touch him, to have an effect. Then,
depending on his maturity, depending on whether he is intelligent or stupid, depending on
his whole life, he might resonate with what you will have transmitted. Because you have
transmitted a listening, an invitation to look into the situation.
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But if you want to transmit information, you will remain in a very limited domain. You will tell
him that you have read five books which prove that hashish is bad for you. If he is not
stupid, he will bring you ten more showing that it is not. No deepening is possible that way.
The only thing to do with a child is to invite him to listen to the situation. How does he feel
when he takes hashish? Psychologically? Physically? How does he perceive his
environment?... Bring him to see clearly what this implies. The less knowledge you
transmit, the more he will be able to listen, to deepen, and to draw his own conclusions. If
you tell him, “I forbid you to take any,” he will take it elsewhere. You need to allow him to
understand, to listen, to look at how he feels in this or that circumstance. This requires from
you the humility to not know.
Listen to him, listen to his distress, to his joy.
To put an end to this or that is pointless. The child will stop smoking hashish and start
drinking; he will stop drinking but will start seeing prostitutes, etc. The problem is not there.
The problem is to bring the person, within their capacity, to a place of clear vision. That
way, you avoid the usual conflict between generations when parents pretend to know, for
then the child can then reply: “Is your life such a success, are you so completely happy, to
claim to be able to teach me?” You will quickly run out of arguments.
So, rather than relay second-hand information, it is better to explore the subject with him.
Sharing your fears with vulnerability requires a lot of listening, a lot of humility. But they are
your fears, not necessarily his; the child can hear your fears. If you tell him, “You need to be
afraid,” he will laugh at you, because rolling a joint doesn't scare him. If you say, “I am
afraid when I see you smoke,” it's already more sincere; he can hear that. If you state, “If
you do that you will run into problems,” he has already done it and nothing happened to
him; this discourse is useless.
So, you speak about your fears, not his. You speak about what is difficult for you, not about
what is difficult for him—for that, you cannot know. Through your honesty, he will find his
own, and maybe he will share certain things that push him to smoke or behave in a way
that concerns you.
All this comes from listening, from not knowing.
All religions transmit knowledge. You can see the results! Every war comes from the
pretense of knowing what is right. In a space of humility, no conflict is possible. That is true
on the geopolitical level as much as on the individual one.
Is philosophy also knowledge?
There is no need for philosophy. Simply listen. Soon you will discover that when you think
you know something, your breathing becomes difficult.
Life is designed to question your knowledge, to make your breathing harder and harder,
until you choke. Then grace arrives, you give up your knowledge, letting go happens and
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you breathe more freely. You only breathe well when you don't know anything anymore,
when you die to the situation.
Knowledge gives a feeling of limited breathing. The more mature you become, the less
satisfied you are with objective knowledge. You realize that all knowledge is imaginary.
Your advice is to not think during the practice of an art. However, there is technique. If you
don't master it, you only doodle.
Of course. To express a feeling, to sing, to dance, to make a circle on a white page, to throw
a punch, to shoot an arrow, a whole life is needed.
All arts demand complete dedication, but it is a dedication to joy. You will work incredibly
hard, and better and better. Then, with age, you will weaken, your stroke or your step will
become a little shaky, your punch less effective, you will regress. But since you are in the
feeling, since you haven't put technique first, even when you are very old, when your
painting or your martial art has left its technical prowess behind, the emotion that you
transmit will remain intense.
If there is only technique without maturity, a form of degradation arrives with age. You see
that with dancers. Those who express themselves through feeling still dance after fifty.
Those whose expression was dependent on technique lose the taste for it as soon as they
reach forty.
This is true for all arts. Those who cling to technique are psychologically weakened by
aging, but for those who have evolved through the heart, something else takes charge of
technique in this natural decline. Another body is there, an invisible one.
The body is not the body. You need a form of maturity to realize that.
What happens when this technique becomes difficult, when the feeling is there but
mastering the technique brings suffering?
When you practice a martial art, you can hurt, but it is for joy. The momentary incapacity of
a poet to find a rhyme brings suffering, but there is joy. For a writer who lacks inspiration or
for an artist about to go on stage, it is the same. That anxiety is not psychological. It is a full
part of life... unless something has not been integrated.
Before artistic expression or before meeting with your lover, a kind of fever comes up. It isn't
an anticipation, but a sort of echo. Before the meeting, the meeting is already here. Before
getting up on stage, you are already there. From the outside it looks like stage fright, but it
doesn’t paralyze you. This fire is what makes artistic expression possible.
When the actor or the artist remains in anxiety or difficulty, it means that he has left what is
essential. That happens, even with the greatest painters. Visit the workshop of most
painters and you will find unfinished paintings. Something wasn't present any more, and,
out of respect, they didn't want to finish it using technique alone. You will see that in music
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as well.
Conversely, when he cannot fight anymore, an old martial art master still lives his art, even
if that cannot be seen from the outside.
No matter the medium, you have to learn the technique. Only in the decadent Western
world can one imagine that a poet or writer could write without learning poetry or mastering
the language, that a painter could achieve a masterpiece without knowing the technique of
painting. This doesn't prevent extremely gifted people from doing without; but if they had
had more technique they would have gone even further in their expression.
Jean Klein used to say that working was giving thanks. For him, practicing technique was a
sign of respect towards life. In that respect, no laziness is possible. Passion, intensity and
fervor express themselves. Amateurism has no place. Technique must be learned through
the heart, from the love of art. Then it becomes easy, and even difficulties, obstacles, are no
problem.
Can you shed some light on the way to manage the transition so as to live the duality
between yin and yang? How to control, for example, the transition of the woman who can
be a lioness when she lives in her feminine side, and in her masculine side becomes a
golden retriever? What are the controls of this duality? What is the role of the three middle
ways?
You seem to know these difficult subjects well. There are very good books which are even
more complicated. Here, unfortunately, we do not have an answer on that level. Things are
a lot simpler: feeling will bring you the answer to all these questions—which have their
value and are not unjustified—in a direct way.
Hinduism or Islam also have their subtleties. All these things are true, but beyond this
conceptualization there is feeling. You will spend a fortune on books, on workshops and on
great theories which, despite their depth, all have their limitations.
What's important is not to know something, but to know yourself. When I want to study
Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, whatever it is, I move further away from myself. There is
nothing to study. All these formulations were originally designed to bring us back to
ourselves; unfortunately, it hasn't worked. Sometimes they bring a few sparks, but even that
remains a form of distancing. Some people know a lot about Vedanta but nothing about
their fears: this isn't of much use. People who know everything about Taoism and cannot
put up with criticism do not know anything. I remember a moment of grace with Terence
Gray—Wei Wu Wei—when, moved by the heavens, he repeated three times with an
intensity that could only come from inspiration: “You know, Taoism does not exist. There is
only the Tao!”
So, come back to this felt sense, in humility, in simplicity and realize that this is what is
highest. No treatise can take you that far. Treatises must become silent to allow feeling to
live within you. The only effect of a treatise is to bring about a saturation, a sort of mental
calm.
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Stay quiet. There is nothing to understand. In this appeasement, you will start to let live
what is important.
Beautiful deep theories are only here to calm our fears. One day, you will stop wasting your
time and money with books, teachings or workshops. What will matter to you will be you. It
is free; you always have it around; you do not need to go anywhere to meditate, to be quiet.
It is your gift of every moment. Come back to this constant gift. And, as if by magic, you will
understand why some traditions have expressed the relentless intensity, the roaring of this
gift as five, three or two elements.
All is true. All is a way of expression. But it is an expression that takes us away from the felt
sense.
You need to be beyond the treatise to understand the treatise. That is why reading treatises
is a form of avoidance.
Come back to your own experience of being, which is always available. The most profound
thing is you. When finally, one day you come to understand them from a non-conceptual
place, you will see that treatises only speak about you. More or less awkwardly, they speak
about your beauty. You will read them like you read a poem, like you stroke a knee, like
you look at the moon: without a reason. Then treatises will reveal themselves. But as long
as you seek to understand them, you will become very agitated and not gain much.
That is exactly what I am feeling. I think that there is an early phase where you look for
knowledge and techniques to find your way. Then, when you have found it, you can let go
of all the techniques that have been taught to you.
Power is imaginary. True power is not individual, it is in nobody's hands. The only power
you have is to be one year older every year. Sometimes, intuition develops, you feel that
the table is going to split. If you imagine that you are a great yogi, you say, “I want the table
to split,” and it splits. It does not mean that you made it split; it means that intuitively you
were aligned with reality.
Nobody ever does anything; there is no author to action. Action comes from the heart, it
isn't individual. Powers are like doors, symbols that should not be taken literally.
The real power is to be still. You realize that you don't need anything to be happy, that you
have nothing to accomplish, that you haven't failed at anything in your life; your life is
perfect. That power is extraordinary; it eclipses all the others. But to want something is
vapid, it isn't powerful. Power is to know yourself free from all willpower. That is essential
will.
You have been saying for a while, “Listen to your body and to your emotions,” but who is
listening? Is it my consciousness? Is it the energy that I am? Who is it? I disagree with you
when you say that consciousness is only functional, I think that consciousness is unique
and dynamic and that it really exists.
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You seem to be able to handle these deep concepts well enough. You must have the
answer to that question... I do not. I don't have the question. It is of no use to me: it does not
relate with being.
You can understand the word consciousness in many ways. Words are symbols. Here, it is
true, we use the word without knowing if we are talking about the consciousness of
something, as in Western phenomenology, or the consciousness without object which the
East speaks of. It isn't necessarily innocent. Our meetings do not aim at any understanding.
I haven't understood anything, nor do I transmit any understanding or teaching. We transmit
non-understanding, this absolute conviction that there is nothing to understand. Freedom
can only be found there.
I do not need to be intelligent, to understand anything, in order to discover the space of

freedom in the heart; that is what we are interested in. I respect people who know what
Consciousness or Essence is but here these things are beyond us. Philosophy, with all
due respect, is still conceptual. The possibility to accept life in the moment does not need
any theory.
What you have expressed is eminently profound. But, here, we do not seek profound
understanding. Vedanta or Kashmir Shaivism are equally profound. But what happens in
the silence of the heart is beyond any understanding, beyond any knowledge. What we are
interested in is this revelation of the moment: I do not need any understanding to find this
joy without cause, which is the essence of everything.
I do not disagree with what you are saying. However, even if they do not understand what
Consciousness or Essence is, people who do not have your intelligence must also be able
to become available. In this simplicity, all expressions are right.
How can I access what you want to transmit? What attitude is needed to reach this
receptivity?
Just realize that you reject this receptivity in every moment. “I should be different and so
should the world. When I am different, when I have less fear, less regret, less bitterness,
less expectation, then I will be free. When I have followed a spiritual path, when I am
purified, when I have changed, when I have divorced, when I have remarried, when I am
richer, healthier, a Buddhist, a Christian, when I meditate, when I do yoga, when I am less
violent, when I stop beating my wife…”
I see the mechanism: I am always saying no to reality, always taking up a spiritual project.
Clearly, I realize that. I cannot help it. It is not in my power to stop thinking that Buddhism,
Taoism, Gurdjieff’s teachings, solitary meditation, or marriage with five women is the
solution for me. But I can see that all my dynamics come from this fear of listening.
In being present, simply present, there is no one present. If there were someone present, it
would be the past. All perception is the past. There is perception, just perception, but
nothing is being perceived…
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The mind cannot understand; it takes me further away.
The personality only exists in the future or in the past. When I say no, I find myself as a
personality with a future and a past. When I say yes, there is nobody that says yes. The yes
eliminates the person.
The personality cannot say yes. The structure of the personality is the no. Realize that
deeply.
That is why you cannot relax, you can only become more tense. You can tense your body
on purpose. You cannot deeply relax on purpose. A willful letting go is impossible. It comes
by itself when you stop wanting to let go. Then the yes begins to live in you.
I am constantly living with an agenda, with an intention... What about now: does it not
count? I exclude now from the reality of life. However, it is now that I must be happy― now,
in this moment. If I am not happy now, tomorrow I will live the same misery: you must
discover the mechanism.
Realize to what extent you say no every time you imagine yourself happy or unhappy
tomorrow. Then there will come moments when you are walking down the street and your
lover has left you, your child is sick, your dog broke his leg, you don't know how to pay the
rent and... you experience a moment of radiant joy! You do not understand why you are
joyous. You have perceived within yourself that saying no was a reaction. You have
observed more and more consciously the mechanism that makes you always go toward
something. You can't help it, only witness it. This realization, “I am constantly leaving
essence, leaving presence,” creates a sort of crack; we cannot say in what, because it is an
image. Through that crack, in spite of you, moments of causeless joy will seep in, which will
allow you to see for yourself that joy is not connected to the situation, that it doesn't depend
on anything. You will further integrate the fact that you don't need anything in life, because
it all ends in the present moment. You do not have the time to build a conscious life. You
cannot become anything.
You will realize how extraordinary the present moment is, and that there is nothing else.
This understanding is going to further widen the crack. You are going to surprise yourself,
even have fun sometimes, projecting yourself on this woman, this man, this dog, this car,
this spiritual master; building hope in acquiring a technique, dance, music... There is
nothing to change. You can get married, have a child, divorce, become a Buddhist, but you
are not going to seek existence through these meetings or through these activities. The
dynamic will decrease and all the energy used to grab, to become, to find and to be
somebody will progressively come back to you. You will experience, more and more often,
moments of peace without cause, conscious that nothing makes you peaceful and that
nothing makes you joyous. By integrating these moments of causeless joy, a little more
each time, you will realize surprisingly that nothing makes you unhappy either. A sort of
culture of listening, of presence, is going to develop naturally in you.
It is not in your hands, you cannot decide about it.
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Again, you will see a very attractive woman, a beautiful car, a master with a long beard,
and you will let yourself be caught in a future. Life is what it is: there are women, masters,
dogs, but you will not ask them for anything. Then, if it is Buddhism that inspires you, you
will become a true Buddhist: you will study Buddhism for the mere joy of studying, without
expecting anything from it. Buddhism cannot do anything for you, but you can give it
everything. If it is a woman, you are going to give everything without asking for anything in
return. In all that will present itself, you will find that resonance, because joy is in giving, not
in receiving. All the activities will look that way. Whatever your fantasy may be, it can
happen, but it will happen through something and not in order to receive something. You
will become a true Christian, a true Buddhist, a true whatever you want, without the
slightest demand. There, you will settle in this place of non-dynamic.
If that is your destiny, perhaps, in a moment of non-expectation, you will meet what is called
a master, a place or a text that will further increase this shift. But a master arrives when you
are not looking for one, when you're not asking for anything. As long as you are asking for
something from a master you will not receive anything. You only receive your own sense of
lack. To present yourself in front of a master, you need to have your hands free. It is only at
that moment that transmission can happen. The heart can speak.
A master knows no other. He cannot transmit to someone else. As long as you pretend to
be another, he cannot do anything for you. It's only when you let go of your pretense to the
slightest difference that he can reveal himself as you. In the East, this is what is called
transmission.
For a master to be, the disciple must disappear. All the beauties of life become possible in
this immediacy.
The master is not necessarily in a form that can be seen by his neighbor. Everything is
possible. It isn’t a subject for discussion: it is a direct experience.
“I want to meet a master, I want to follow a tradition, I first want to get married or to be less
violent, to meditate more, to stop eating meat, to do yoga etc.” I see myself constantly
leaving what is essential—the heart. I do not do anything against it; I witness it. This
witnessing is already the echo of peace in me. So, it is enough to become aware of how
much the will to do something takes me further away.
You are condemned to this revelation. But as long as you ask for it or look for it, it will
escape you. In your non-asking, it will reveal itself as yourself. It isn't something that comes
from outside: it is your own heart which wakes up. That, nobody can transmit to you, not
even a master.
Many people have met great masters and remain as miserable as before. When you leave
yourself, master or not, the essential fulfills itself. You need not look for a master, rather look
for yourself. But in fact, in this listening to the moment, you don't even have to look: it looks
for you.
In this state of joy, in the moment, how do you take responsibility, for instance for your
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child's schooling? What does responsibility become in this state?
Love excludes all responsibility, burns all appropriation.
What responsibility? Are you going to prevent your child from getting cancer, from getting
run over or, later, from cutting your neighbor's throat? What is your part in the responsibility
for the fact that your child is mentally retarded or brilliant, tall or short, brave or a coward? It
is a fantasy.
There is only love. You love that which is here. Your child is here. It is not your child, it is a
child. In this love, a clarity blossoms. This love without demands allows listening, allows
you to hear the needs of the child. You do not project your lacks, your miseries, your
failures on the child anymore. You do not seek your accomplishment through him anymore.
You don't ask him for anything. In this availability, you will be able to notice if he has an ear
for music, fists for boxing or legs for hurdles. For that, you need to listen.
The more you project your feelings of lack, the more you want your child to succeed in what
you have failed at. Generally, that doesn't work so well. When you don't have any
expectation, when you don't ask him to succeed at your life, you discover a relationship
beyond any responsibility, a relationship of love, of friendship. Then, there is no more child.
Relationship without separation.
Responsibility is a form of arrogance, of pretense. You are not even responsible for your
body; how could you be responsible for someone else's? Can you decide to get cancer or
not? Are you responsible for getting run over or not? Have you decided to live or to die?
Responsibility is a fantasy.
Love, yes. Love understands. Love can teach. Through it, you will know whether to
homeschool him, to send him to a Steiner school, to a public school or to a Koranic one.
The child will tell you, in her way. But if you have the slightest opinion, you create a fake
child, you transmit your misery. The more you try to avoid it, the more she will feel it. The
child cannot be deceived by what you tell her. She feels. When you listen to her, there is no
parent or child anymore. Something else is there.
What I am feeling in this regard is that, indeed, if we keep the oedipal bond alive, this bond
becomes a ball and chain which prevents life. We need to be able to break that chain in
order to anchor somewhere else, to find new bonds to be able to live our life.
Everything we think is right, in the sense that we do not have any choice. A cockroach sees
the world as a cockroach. When we are unhappy, we see the world as unhappy. When we
are happy, calm, we see the world as happy, calm. We can't help projecting our emotional
state of misery or joy onto the world. We need to become aware of this.
I cannot get rid of my prejudices. I will always feel more in harmony with certain tastes, with
certain smells, with certain touch sensations, with certain kinds of concepts which depend
on my education, on my culture, on my prejudices. All prejudices are as good as another
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and there is no need to change them. At some point, I realize that these prejudices do not
limit me. I no longer identify with them.
My lifestyle is not my business. I do not need to take after Alexandra David-Neel, to go to

India, to become an orthodox priest, a sage or a banker. I do not need to become anything
anymore. Life makes me a banker, a prostitute, a sage, an explorer and I accept that. No
activity, no expression is superior to any other. It is very important to realize that.
I do not have to change my life. I am married: that is what suits me. I am single: same thing.
When my body is in vibrant health, when it is sick, that is what I need. I have a handicapped
child: that is also what I need. That is the first respect. Nothing is better. I face what is here.
If there is war, we go to war. If there is peace, we live in peace. There is no need to have
the slightest opinion about the world.
Lives fully lit or obscure, I begin to understand that, deep down, all lives are the same.
Those who live them do not have the slightest freedom to do or not to do, to manifest or not
to manifest what seems to be happening to them. When I integrate this obvious fact, a form
of relaxation arises. I no longer need to look for myself in newspapers, in books, or through
people who supposedly succeed or fail. My life, my body, and my psyche are what they
are. I am wealthy, I am poor: it isn't my business. I accept my life. The next moment, wealth
might become poverty and poverty might turn into wealth. A form of plasticity arises.
When I fully accept the way my life unfolds, what happens to me changes. As long as I fight
what takes place, I stay stuck and nothing moves. When I no longer seek to modify my life,
a form of clarification, of relaxation, takes place. I begin to be able to see myself. As long as
I want to change, I do not see myself, I only see my project. As long as I am fed up with
being violent, I only see my hatred for this violence; I see my discomfort with it or my hope
of not being violent tomorrow. I am absent to myself... No. When I am violent, I am available
to the violence that lives in me, I feel it in my whole body. I do not pretend to be different.
This presence to emotion is the change. It is the magic. It is beyond all possible siddhis.
Vision brings change. There isn’t vision and change: vision is change.
When I integrate that, life becomes easy. I no longer have a personal agenda, and without
that projection I can feel the currents of existence, the movements. Instead of seeking what
is good for me, what I should do with my life, instead of asking, “What will be better
tomorrow?” I come back to now. I look at what arises in my heart in the moment: practice
karate, boxing, car racing, be a street sweeper, divorce, get married, become a Muslim,
study sexual Taoist yoga... I listen.
I do not listen for what is better for me: I have understood once and for all that what is better
for me is what happens, what is inevitable. I listen. In that listening, I discover if I am made
for dance, for music, for close combat, for Buddhism, Hinduism, for deepening the Vedantic
approach or reading the Upanishads. I become a sounding board for the inevitable... And
finally, I become a good husband, a good monk, a good Christian or a good nothing at all.
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When I listen, I do not ask for anything from society. On the contrary, I do what I can for the
environment, according to my abilities. I fulfill my role with my modest means, according to
my capacity. I am no more and no less. I am exactly the way I am.
Life becomes easy. My creativity can express itself and, as soon as I no longer look for
myself in anything, my limitations magically become more elastic. Of course, I still remain a
musician rather than a potter, a painter rather than a dancer or a celibate rather than a sex
criminal, depending on my biology.
Whatever situation life sends me, it is a favorable one. Every situation contributes to me, it
is the initiation that I need to receive. Be it disease, misery, wealth, what the neighbor sees
as failure or what he calls success, everything becomes my path, what is essential to me,
my teaching… That is only possible when I understand that I do not have to copy anyone,
that I do not have to study, to become anything.
I come back to myself and there is clarity, absence of need. Naturally, I am going to find the
function that is the easiest for me in society. That is the one that matches me. Society needs
policemen, bankers, bakers, truck drivers. It is not a choice, it is inevitable. There are no
more psychological surprises; everything is a surprise.
The mind cannot understand. Nothing is foreign. What happens to me is what is essential.
When I meet somebody, that is the essential. There is no coincidence. When I encounter
disease, difficulty, whatever it is: that is my wish, my will.
To want what happens, totally. If I am disturbed by what happens, I realize that I am

pretending to know better than God what is right. I am criticizing the divine plan again. I
become aware of the extent of my arrogance. I cannot not be arrogant. I witness this
arrogance which still lives in me and peace descends. I am humbled by the event. It is an
active non-action. That doesn't mean that I become a vegetable. I just stop wanting
anything other than what is inevitable.
Accepting does not mean giving up. It is a double-edged sword. If a situation disturbs us,
we can say that we accept it, but that does not mean that it must stay. We also need to act.
You cannot accept it. The person, the ego cannot accept. It is no use pretending. You can
listen and humbly become aware that a situation disturbs you. First of all, let's not pretend
that it does not disturb me. If I cannot stand the situation, it is because it reveals something
in me which I cannot stand. I listen to what is so disturbing in myself.
Of course, if somebody attacks you on the street, you will not be able to concentrate on this
inquiry at that moment. You do what you have to do and then, back at home, or in the
hospital, you set aside the understanding or not understanding that you were attacked: you
feel your throat, your belly, your chest. You listen to this world of pulsations, of vibrations
which talks to you. There, clarification takes place.
Every situation is unique. For your capacity to fight―or to give up your wallet―to reveal
itself, you need to listen. In the beginning, you will only be able to listen after a violent
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event, you will not have the capacity to do this in real time. Days—or decades—later, you
will be open to listen to what happened to you. If, after any crisis situation, you regularly
practice listening to life, you will become able to do this sooner and sooner. One day, in the
middle of a violent situation, you will have this lucidity which allows for a new way of acting.
Going through these series of steps is inevitable.
You do not have the choice to act or not to act. If tomorrow, three people attack you or me
on the street corner, we will certainly respond very differently. There is no freedom of
behavior. Our response depends on our past, on our abilities... No worries.
Life is action. You cannot not act. Action and non-action are the same thing. Non-action is a
philosophical concept, it does not exist. The same goes for stillness, which is a non-
scientific concept because the body, the table, space are never still. Stillness is an image,
like non-action. Even if you take the punches without moving, you are active.
When you say “accepting,” there is still a choice. For instance, if a person or a situation
disturbs me, okay, I accept them in the moment; but that does not mean that I have to put up
with them. I have the choice to say yes or no to someone I find unpleasant or who doesn't
resonate with me. When you say “acceptance,” is it an acceptance in the moment or one
which lasts in time? To find a balance, I must be able to listen to myself, I must choose…
You cannot decide to find a man attractive or repulsive. You cannot decide if the way he
talks to you will offend you or make you happy. You cannot decide whether seeing a knife
scares you or excites you. You don't have a choice in your reaction. Depending on your
past, your emotional life, your psychoanalyst, you will have one or the other. For anybody
gifted with a certain level of sensitivity, it is obvious which type of man, or dog, or house you
like, which sort of work you will look for and what your father looked like. All of your
emotional, cultural, intellectual life is written in you.
I am not trying to take away your choice, but to allow you to become aware of these factors.
It has never been said, here, to accept anything, but to listen.
When a stranger approaches you on the street, you do not know if he is your future
husband or someone who wants to murder you. How will you know? You are going to
listen, to look, to feel, to be present. You will not be deceived by his appearance. Observe
his body, listen to his pupils, his hands, the position of his feet, his breathing, his head, how
he presents himself, how fast he speaks, the tone of his voice, when his voice falters,
becomes free... and you will know if he is your future husband or if you'd better walk faster.
Only by listening can you perceive that. The right action comes from the right listening. At
some point, this listening takes place instantaneously. If it is not instantaneous, it means
that you still have a bit of fear, a bit of anxiety. You need to listen. That's all.
Listening is the most active thing that can be. The transformation of the world lies in
listening. You see a snake, your heart beats faster, you sweat, your hair stands on end.
Then, in a moment, you realize that it is a rope. You don't have to do anything for your heart
to slow down, for your sweating to stop, and for your hair to come down.
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Vision is action.
You thought that this man wanted to mug you and you discover that he is your future
husband. Instantly, fear empties itself. You do not have to remove the fear. To see
something clearly is the most total action there can be.
When you realize that you have suffered your whole life due to something imaginary, you
don't have to do anything to feel your chest relax and to finally breathe. You always thought
that you needed to be loved more or better, and then suddenly you understand that you
needed to love, that your only misery was to not love enough. Then you are filled with an
immense love; you are freed forever from all psychological trauma, from all need to be
loved. You have found life's key, which is to love. Never again will you go begging for love:
it is you who will give love. That is your profound being. In one instant, this clarity sets you
free from forty years of misery. You don't have to do anything afterwards: everything relaxes
on its own. Clarity creates the breath. It opens your lungs, your brain. All the cells of your
body start to vibrate, to shout, to sing out of joy, because you have stopped oppressing
them with the belief that you must be loved.
Clarity is the ultimate activity, you observe the approach that chooses you.
Is the state of a Sufi master similar to this state of joy and space of which you speak?
A Sufi master does not pretend to be a master, otherwise he is not a true Sufi. There are no
masters among Sufis, only worshippers. A Sufi does not appropriate the qualifications of
the one God. All qualities are His. A Sufi listens to what is beyond him.
Rumi spoke harshly of people who wore the headdress or the robe of dervishes. In the
same way, Abhinavagupta refused to give initiation to those wearing the signs of Shaivism,
because initiation is in the heart and has nothing to do with outer expression. Jean Klein
used to give mauna diksha, initiation through silence, without any romantic flourish.
You cannot appropriate a tradition. Sufism is as direct a path as Tantra, there is no

difference.
The word master is an image, a door, like the words silence, space, God... Do not stop at
the image, be open to what lies behind it.
Everyone chooses their own channel, their tool. Does the Sufi choose to materialize the
divine channel?
It is the channel that chooses you. You need to accept the one your life imposes. For some
it's a celibate life, for others a married life, for others wealth, poverty, sainthood, peace,
violence or war. We need to face what life gives us. The more you welcome what shows
up, the more life unfolds with ease. Then you may find yourself in resonance with a
tradition, in agreement with one of its expressions.
The tradition is beyond the one who transmits it. The one who transmits it has no special
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place. What's important is the transmission. That happens from heart to heart, but there is
only one heart. Thus, there is no master.
The master is an invention of fear. The student wants to find a master because he is
looking for a father. At some point, you no longer look for your daddy, and no master is
possible. There remains a peace that excludes everything external. That is the master you
want to meet.
We should not close this meeting with concepts but, perhaps, for a few moments, give
ourselves to a silence devoid of thought where we really come back to what is essential
between us, beyond knowledge and understanding, which are always limited and useless.
Let's remain for a moment in a silence free of knowledge, free of silence.
English Intro
Chapter 2
English Intro
Living with emotion

Isn't silence the only suitable answer?
Ibn Arabi: The Meccan Revelations
motions of fear, of rage, of love, of sadness, emotions without cause: all these emotions are
cracks through which one can glimpse a molten mass pointing to the heart of things.
Lacking in clarity, we link the emotion to a situation, we think it is disturbing.
Emotion is an opening to the heart. When we refuse an emotion, we are simply postponing
life.
Emotion is free of thought, of knowledge, it wavers freely, away from certainty.
Emotion reveals the mind as completely inadequate, ill-suited to reality; this intuition itself
is a reflection of reality, a reflection of the heart.
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If we live with our emotions, sooner or later the habit of finding a cause will fall away.
Are there any questions?
You have said that when we feel a strong emotion, it is an opportunity to become aware of
its mechanism. I currently have an important problem concerning an inheritance. One of my
sisters is pestering me. Every time she calls, I get very upset and angry. I try as hard as I
can to see clearly that she is incapable of reacting in a different way, and to feel the
sensations arising in my body: my throat and belly tightening... Yet I can’t find a solution to
this conflict. What should I do?
The situation affects you because you carry the capacity to be affected. If it weren't your
sister, something else would upset you. You are lucky that your sister points you towards
that inner place which isn't free of judgments, of knowing, of reactions. When you hang up
the phone, after you have put up with the criticisms, or after you have reacted in whichever
way you do, nothing is complete. At that moment, it becomes simple. Your sister is no
longer here, you no longer need to defend your point of view, to justify what you said, to
criticize yourself... sit down or lie down—whichever is more comfortable—and allow the
drama of the phone call to continue echoing within you. Just as you described, your jaw,
and your belly are all feeling. Let it happen.
When you hold a baby in your arms and it screams and struggles, what do you do? You
don’t do anything, you are present, you hear it scream, you feel its movements. You can’t
do anything to stop it, and psychologically there is nothing to do. The situation doesn’t
trigger any emotional state. This doesn't prevent you from taking any concrete action, from
soothing the baby, from trying to find out what is really happening. You give the child the
opportunity to cry his world out.
Similarly, when you lay your body on the bed, you give it the opportunity to cry out the echo
of the conflict. Your jaw, your belly or another area will express themselves. Well beyond
the habitual patterns of rejection, criticism, giving up or confusion, you will experience
inexpressible sensations which defy any concepts. This is no time for reflection or analysis,
but for letting the sensations have their way with you.
Bodily tension will increase; if you don't have a heart attack, it will eventually peak and then
weaken, until it completely empties in you. Again, what your sister told you will reappear,
your throat will tighten, your saliva will dry up, anxiety will overwhelm you. Surrender. You
have understood the game. You are not anxious, you feel your anxiety; you are not afraid,
you feel your fear; you are not angry, you feel your anger. You let the anger in your belly or
your chest take charge of itself, like this infant you had in your arms. You can't do anything
for its life, for its death. You are very clearly present. Very soon, it will empty out. Later the
same day, you will be able to let these emotions-reactions surface again, and return to
peace.
In the next conversation, your sister will say something, you will again feel shaken, your
impulse to react will arise in an instant, but you will immediately observe your own
violence, and hers, without judgment; this observation will serve as a resonance chamber
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and bring more clarity.
You have to go through these different steps to set yourself free. So, it's after the conflict,
when you still feel the echo of it, that you need to allow these cycles of feeling and letting
go, rather than losing yourself in sleep. Understand the game. That is the most practical
approach.
From an intellectual standpoint, you must see that, if your sister blames you for something
and you can't stand it, on one level it means that she isn't completely wrong. At times, what
she is accusing you of isn't far from what you are indeed feeling.
For instance, if someone accuses you of being dishonest and you react, it is because there
is a grain of truth in what they are saying which resonates in you, for you have already felt
dishonest, even if it was only in your thoughts.
This is an opportunity to look at yourself objectively.
Of course, there is no honesty vs dishonesty—these are images. There is only honesty.

Even those accused of dishonesty can be honest with their feelings.
Get rid of this idea of being dishonest. Then, if someone insults you, you will understand
why, in his suffering, he sees you and approaches you in this manner. He behaves in this
way to maintain his self-image. You have to respect him. You can no longer hold anything
against anyone. The one who attacks you is right, because you disturb his world. His
aggression is his way of surviving.
There comes a point in time where you will no longer feel attacked by anyone, including
those who really attack you. The more someone attacks you, the more you feel an
overwhelming affection towards them. You will see their lack, their sadness, their problem.
In this open space, being hated, be it in the moment or over time, automatically brings forth
a sort of affection. The stronger the hate, the stronger the affection. The person who hates
you is searching for the love he denies himself. You are the one who will gradually allow
him to see that the love he feels you are denying him, resides within himself and that he
does not need you in order to find it. It is a natural process, not a concept. You must
recognize that it is an inevitable, on-going process constantly repeating itself, otherwise
you remain stuck in your reactions.
At bedtime, you take off your dirty clothes; you brush your teeth so that they will be clean
when you go to sleep; you wash your face for the same reason. It seems only natural. In the
same way, before falling asleep, rid yourself of all these imaginary attacks. Otherwise, the
next day, you will have a difficult day.
An attack is a gift inviting you to not fall asleep. It’s easy to believe yourself peaceful, to do
yoga or to appear wise. And then suddenly someone “attacks” you, someone says they
detest you. This allows you to awaken to your inner resonance. Does it trigger love? Hate?
You get to see how you operate. That’s real yoga. It’s not about sitting still like a stone
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carving, but noticing how you react to events. You will discover that being attacked is the
greatest gift life has to offer, for the more you are attacked, the more mature you will
become. Life without attack is miserable—and luckily it does not exist.
Be available, don’t try to control everything, to react less, to be wiser. Feel how unhinged
you get when you are challenged. Experience every emotion as an object to be
contemplated, to be studied, with affection and patience.
Don’t expect anything, don’t ask for anything, everything will play itself out.
So, would you say that some emotions are expressions of life painfully seeking itself, while
others are expressions of beauty or affection?
All emotions arise from this magma of joy. But emotions that cause you to lose your head,
to become incoherent come from deep within you.
Why do emotions scare us so much?
When you are emotional, the ego loses all control. It needs to master the situation, to be in
charge, to know. When you are in the grip of an emotion, control is impossible. By allowing
the emotion to spread out, to empty out in the heart, you admit your futility, your inability to
control what is happening at that moment, and you join the vibrating essence of life.
If the ego takes over, you will run like a madman from the emotion, doing everything you
possibly can to forget it, calm it, understand it, analyze it, justify it, criticize it.
Does it become all the more violent and forceful when repressed? I have the impression
that fear is also an expression of violence, a force we want to contain.
There comes a point when a repressed emotion will try and make itself felt, but this is very
short-lived.
In the openness we are talking about here, when an emotion is felt, it is not experienced as
a drama; not knowing is not experienced as uncomfortable, not understanding does not
cause anxiety. In this listening we experience a total openness. The emotion is no longer
emotional: it is cold-blooded emotion. A tear might form, yet it is neutral and does not hold
us back or prevent us from doing whatever is necessary in that moment.
When you begin to feel the force, the beauty of emotion, you realize just how superficial all
thought-based spiritual systems are. Dogma, analysis, knowledge, fantasies about energy
and awakening are nothing but projections based on miserable psychic phenomena which
are merely fleeting glimpses of the deeper emotion. Man’s need to classify, explain,
elaborate a goal and an outcome, all this imagined, pseudo-spiritual ambition has given
rise to the religions of both East and West. Most people are totally incapable of fully facing
their emotions. They are too afraid of lunacy. So, they take refuge in systems, disciplines
and exercises where they can find themselves, feel themselves, purify themselves. Here
they can become someone, become a master, a more spiritual being. In fact, it is better this
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way: madmen need safeguards. At some point, the shallowness of this pseudo-knowledge
becomes self-evident.
What would losing control look like?
There would no longer be any urge to do or not do something, no longer any pretense
about one’s abilities. But the ego cannot endure moments like these. I have spent my life
developing my faculties, creating a world in which I am relatively competent, pretending to
be independent, capable of surviving and of getting myself out of complicated situations
and suddenly, in a flash, I realize it was only a dream. All the abilities I developed through
asceticism, through intellectual or emotional competence, are all a dream... When I wake
up, the fortune, the castles, the stocks I own, the work I have accomplished in the dream,
what remains of them? This moment is charged with deep emotion.
I dreamt my life. I invented everything. None of it exists, only my fear remains. My life is
nothing but an edifice built on fear. If a competent psychiatrist—if such a person exists—
were to ask me to draw a tree, he would see all the ramifications of my fear. If I showed him
a photo of my wife, my children, my dog, my home, my car or my body, he would see
nothing but fear. The fear that led me to buy a wife, a mistress of a particular skin color, a
dog of a certain race, to have children, to work in a way that makes me rich or poor, to buy
a certain type of house, painted in this particular color; the fear that determines the way I
dress, stand, breathe, speak, present myself, adhere to this or that political or social
ideology, the fact that I prefer this film or that form of literature to another. This is nothing but
my fear showing up in all its splendor.
There is nothing to be criticized, simply noticed. I cannot be any other way; it’s an illusion to
imagine that I could live without fear. I become aware that the life I have created for myself,
the abilities I have sought to develop—the strength, courage, intelligence, spirituality,
meditation, wisdom and other fantasies I created—all these elements are simply invented
so as not to face the constant fear in which I live.
In order to escape this evidence which illustrates my total inadequacy, I have created a
world where I can claim to be competent. So, I become a good husband, a good citizen, a
good lover, a good father, a good Buddhist... all so that I can claim I exist. Then all of a
sudden, I wake up, I realize that it's all pretense, that I am none of the above.
We all know this emotion, when we are out of our depth, overwhelmed by something.
When this happens, we say, out of habit, “I’m being emotional, I’m losing control, I must try
to calm down, take a tranquilizer, do some yoga...” What point is there in trying to flee from
the emotion? On the contrary, in a moment of humility, of not knowing, giving up means
truly knowing; it brings true security.
So, it is actually recognition?
Yes, in the deeper sense of the word. Emotion can express itself in two ways. In Benares,
someone once asked the great musician Bismillah Khan what he felt after having mastered
the art of the shehnai to the highest degree, and he replied: “Sometimes I feel the ecstasy
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the music evokes, I am close to God then and I feel the strong emotion of His presence; but
at other times, I am overwhelmed by an immense sadness and I feel separate, like a
beggar at God’s feet.” This emotion of humility, of noticing one’s total lack of capacity, is
identical to plenitude. Presence and absence are the two reflections of it.
But they don’t have the same impact.
When I look deeply at my poverty, this vision is my wealth. It is a non-experience.
When Ibn Arabi wrote about his journey into the spiritual realms where he encountered the
prophets, he specifically said that it was not a journey towards something. You cannot get
close to God, for God is closer to you than your own body; however, it is a journey in the
footsteps of God. At the end of his long journey, he says: “I noticed the total absence of
majesty in myself.” That is to say that after having encountered the highest dignitaries of
these worlds, after having experienced his essential nature, after having accomplished all
that had to be accomplished, it is this vision free of any spiritual attributes that resonates
profoundly in him.
Seeing one's total lack of any qualification whatsoever is the essential emotion. As long as
you claim that you have a quality, this fantasy will stifle life itself.
Those who are humble, who feel a humble joy, feel close to God. How could one not want
to be close to God?
When you attend a concert, you can feel a deep emotion. Don't be concerned about the
concert, rather hold on to the emotion. The joy you feel did not arise because of the
concert. The music is played in such a way that it gives us access to the emotion of fullness
that lives within us.
Each time a desire is satisfied there is a moment free of desire, free of any urge.
If you meet someone who is at peace, you can feel peace in his presence. What’s
important here is to realize that the peace you feel in his presence is your own emotion.
Turn away, forget the so-called cause of the emotion and experience this openness that
you touched in the so-called other. If you perceive humility in someone, it is your own
humility. Stay present to it, without claiming it. There is no one to be humble. There is no
cause. What you feel intensely in the other is your own experience.
Very soon, you will no longer need this so-called other. Life speaks only of you, of this
emotion. So, you might occasionally listen to someone, but when you realize that what you
find true in him is what is true in you, you will no longer need him. You will see that life, in
all its forms, speaks this same truth. Every daily event is a reminder of this profound
emotion.
Following a tradition, having a spiritual teacher is a form of escape.
It is yourself that you must follow when you feel an authentic emotion. You might be reading
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a text by Meister Eckhart and an emotion arises in you; close the book, the text will fall
away. What's important is the tear sliding down your cheek. This is your treasure, your
direction, your teaching. It is what you must follow, must listen to. As long as you are
relating to the text, as long as you are thinking of Meister Eckhart, you are not open to the
emotion.
At a certain point, the emotions of joy and sadness merge into a single emotion—what is
known as bhava in the Indian tradition. When you see the face of someone experiencing
this emotion, you cannot tell whether he is laughing or crying. You see an intense tension
which is beyond joy and sadness, an active volcano.
Can you feel this when looking at a mask of Bhairava, for he seems to be both smiling and
baring his teeth?
The Nepalese mask of Bhairava suggests the quality of astonishment that arises from
looking at something free of any reference. The Newars have produced many beautiful
examples of Bhairava’s head. Many different materials were used: wood, copper plate,
bronze, stone, terracotta, and they gave rise to exceptional art. These masks often
represent the strength of this inner seeing, and in certain cases, this moment of
astonishment or admiration, free of any cause, is clearly expressed. This emotion has been
exceptionally well captured in terracotta. The internal madness, free of conditioning has
been majestically portrayed by certain inspired sculptors. Until recent times, in India,
especially in Gujarat or Karnataka, fabulous heads of the Lord of Tears were created for
processions.
Bhairava also expresses terror, the terror of the ego.
The emotion is multi-faceted. True emotion is beyond emotion, beyond its representation in
time and space. That is why on the Pancamuka lingam, the five-headed linga, only four
heads are shown. The head of terror: destruction of the ego, of fear; the royal head: clear
seeing; the androgynous head: the unification of opposites; the ascetic head: the way of
asceticism of thought and knowledge. The fifth head, Isana, which faces upwards, is not
represented for it is ineffable. It is the shapeless presentiment of truth.
However certain examples portraying the fifth head do exist. In Khajuraho, in front of the
Kandariya Mahadeva temple, one of these five-headed lingams can be admired. The
archeological museum there also possesses an extraordinary example which shows the
fifth head towering over the other four which are not fully carved.
It is not very clear to me whether or not you distinguish between emotion and emotional
reaction. Are they both vehicles that lead to the heart, come from the heart and return there,
or do you see emotional reaction and emotion as separate?
An emotional reaction is an emotion that has not been allowed or welcomed.
There is only emotion. There is no such thing as an egotistical reaction; it is an expression

used in teaching. There has never been an ego capable of accomplishing any egotistical
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action. This also applies to a non-egotistical action. It presumes that another outcome is
possible, that there is a doer. In the same way, reactivity is non-reactivity, for there is
nothing other than the heart.
On a certain level however, you could say that when an emotion is perceived as a concept,
it becomes reactive and separate. When the emotion is welcomed, is felt, it remains a
vibration of the heart, it unites and integrates its so-called cause.
There is only one emotion.
Expressed in different ways?
With different focal points... This is why in the Vijnana Bhairava, the tantra of our lineage, all
situations are regarded as opportunities for this understanding to take place: fear on the
battlefield, the pain caused by a pointed object, contemplation of an empty space, the
sensation of a vacant body, the rapid disappearance of an object, etc.
When you experience any perception free of the whole parade of imaginary causes, it
refers directly to this one emotion. The ultimate emotion is what I am feeling right now. This
is the supreme emotion, the most profound. Everything else is nothing but imagination.
There is no tomorrow.
Could you say that in Vedantic terms this ultimate emotion is “I Am”?
As expressed by Abhinavagupta, yes, although the author of the Tantraloka is not known
for his appreciation of the Vedanta. For him, all the rasa, the eight fundamental emotions
—terror, fear, joy, tranquility, etc.—which in merging give rise to the psyche, reflect the
essential emotion, the I Am. This is at the heart of the Kashmiri approach. What is important
is what is felt.
But you must let the Kashmiri approach and the Vedanta die a natural death. They are only
words.
An emotion arises within me. Sooner or later, I am mature enough to free this emotion from
its cause, to no longer claim to be sad or happy because of this or that, but to savor my
sadness, my rage, my fear, my joy without labeling it, without attributing it to anything. That
is enough. That is the ultimate art, tantric art, alchemy. The resonance of this emotion will
bring me back to the primordial resonance. All emotions bring us back to this center.
This is why, when an intense emotion leaves me, after hearing a raga expressing sadness,
separation, or after an opera portraying human misery, I experience joy. Hearing them
without identifying with them on a personal level, the sadness, the separation, the misery
that I experienced at the opera refer back to the heart, to joy. If this were not the case we
would not pay such a high price to go and applaud an opera.
When you know how to look at a painting, you are moved by the shapes, the volumes, the
harmony. If you do not look in this way, then all you will see is the subject matter.
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As long as you are caught up in the story, you are cut off from the emotion. As long as you
attach the emotion to a cause, you cannot really experience it.
Live with the emotion, allow its cause to die away and let it resonate with its intrinsic
freedom. When there is no longer a situation nor someone experiencing it, then the
vibration reigns in silence.
English Intro
Chapter 3
English Intro
Hope is an escape
Hunter of Phoenix, no one can be. So take back your trap, for here, wind is all you’ll ever
catch.
Hafiz: Diwan
How can you trust if there is no hope?
How can you trust if there is hope? To have hope is to be in a story, a projection.
Trust in yourself...
That’s an even worse target: as long as you have hope, you sense its non-existence and
you cannot trust. Every hope, every goal, every direction, every plan prevents this trust in
life. Born with the fundamental intuition that he is nothing, the human being knows deep
down that his projections are stories. All hope is undermined by this intuition; the only use
of hope is to feed a belief in a separateness that doesn't exist. As long as I hope for
anything, I experience mistrust in life.
I can see that all hopes are fantasies. As soon as I attain something, I want something else.
My hopes can only express my pathology. My thoughts are limited by the contents of my
memory, they brought me to the crisis I am living. So how could I still have hope?
Everyone wants a different life. People who live alone want to meet somebody, those living
in a couple wish to be single. Everyone is convinced that everything will be much better
when that happens. This hope prevents you from listening to life.
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When I realize that there is nothing left in front of me, the energy that I constantly use to
anticipate and to fight a hypothetical future is freed up to face the moment. I become
present, available; this presence eliminates any future.
Future is a thought, it doesn’t exist. We cannot face a situation tomorrow; we always die
before facing tomorrow. I notice that the future is an idea—always a disturbing, worrisome
idea.
To be available―not even present; there is no present, only presence. In this presence, as

the case may be, that which we call past or future may register as an intuition; but then it is
no longer the future. It is as if you are asked what you will be doing in six months’ time. You
can open your appointment book and, if you are free, you make a note in it, but it isn't the
future. The request is now, you look into the book and this suggestion resonates with you
now, you make a note, you close the book, and then it's over, there is no psychological
future. The future is the present, now, as a mark in the book.
It's the same when an echo of the past comes up, it is now. What happened ten years ago, I
can feel in my belly, in my throat now; it isn't in the past.
The past and the future are present. The more you develop this sensitivity, the more you
notice this present space.
To trust in oneself is impossible, to trust in the future is unthinkable. Oneself and the future
are not trustworthy: you cannot trust something that does not exist.
The felt sense knows no trust. There is nobody who trusts, there is only feeling. When I feel
my arm move in space, where is the present, the future, trust? When I listen to a concert,
taste an apple pie or feel bodily pain, where is trust? I feel and there is presence. I don't
need trust. Trust is the space in which these situations, these sensations appear.
Trusting something proves a lack of maturity. As long as you trust anything, you do not
really trust. Sooner or later you will be disappointed, for you project your security into that
which you trust. You imagine that a situation can bring you fullness. But neither I nor that
which we call others are in a position to give that to me. Therefore, trusting anything is an
illusion.
When I no longer trust myself nor the environment, there remains a trust which is not
directed towards anything but is simply an absence of the narrative. I stop criticizing my life,
thinking that it should be or could be different. I stop knowing anything. What is left is
availability. Any psychological reaction is absent, life’s simplicity appears. Everything that
happens to me is presence. Trust is born when I give up all hope; trust without any object.
Hope is a form of postponement: “Tomorrow I will be happy.” That is not acceptable. For all I
know I could be dead before then. There is no time to be happy tomorrow. “When I do more
yoga, when I am wiser, less angry, wealthier, married, divorced, when I eat less sugar,
when I am in better shape, when I live elsewhere... only then will I be happy.” That is hope!
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Why wait? What more will there be tomorrow? Nothing. I will project the same misery as
today. If I stop today, that will stop tomorrow as well. If I keep going today, it will keep going
tomorrow. I must stop now, in this moment. I listen, I feel, and in that feeling, the mechanism
of running away towards the future, towards tomorrow, is seen for what it is. So always
come back to the sensitivity of the moment. Listen to the moment without tying it to the one
before or the one after, without comparing it, without knowing anything, without anticipating
and without remembering.
Hope is an escape.
And is that the same for resignation?
Yes, both are a lack of listening. Resignation refers to the past, while hope looks towards
the future. In both cases, I am not present.
All thoughts are born from the past. Hope is the past colored over with the words of
tomorrow. “Tomorrow, in ten days, in ten years, in thirty years…” Those are words, words in
the present. Everything happens in the present. Agitation leads us to project ourselves
forward or backward, but neither forward nor backward exists. In resignation, as in hope, I
am not available, I am lost in the situation. Hope is born when I become resigned to a
situation.
What is of interest to us, here, is precisely this listening to the listening. The body is a
pretext. I learn to listen to my hand, to my shoulder, to my neck, to my sadness... I am
getting prepared; I become familiar with this ability to listen. Little by little, this listening of
something sets itself free from what is listened to, and collapses into the listening itself.
What appears is a listening to the listening. That is the key to all futures, presents, pasts—
which are all concepts.
The somatic approach, the Japanese tea ceremony, and all traditional arts are designed to
stimulate this listening in us. What is the hope of the person who practices the tea
ceremony? Every day, for thirty years, he has been making the same movements. What is
his hope? To get rich, get married, divorced, acquire qualities, cultivate himself, read? No,
he makes the few gestures of the tea ceremony. They are the center of his life. Whether he
a youth, an adult, an old man, or even sick, he performs the same gestures. It is this lack of
hope that gives the ceremony its beauty. It has no goal, it is an art.
Art is to be without hope, without a future. Otherwise you have no time for art, there is
always something better you could be doing. Those who have hope will be artists later,
when they have time. But art is the art of living, the art of living without hope.
When there is even the slightest movement toward something, then once again I have left
the resonance. I can't help it, I observe. When I notice that I have left the resonance, I am in
it again. I can never own this opening. When I tell myself, “I am in resonance,” it becomes a
concept, like the poor soul who thinks he is realized. I notice that I am not in resonance, I
see myself in my dynamic and instantaneously, this noticing halts the dynamic. That space
doesn't belong to anyone. It starts to resonate when I stop wanting to own it.
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To place oneself in the hands of God, does it mean anything?
If it is a felt sense, if it means total surrender to Life, yes. But if the focus is on the word God,
it remains an image. Like the Islamic Jihad’s militants who think that blowing up a few
Israeli friends will transport them to the other world where they can meet women who
resemble Ornella Muti. For many, that's what God is all about.
If “to place oneself in the hands of God” means to humbly stop pretending to have any
ability whatsoever to manage one's life, in that case, yes, it makes sense.
Surrender is enough. I do not need God. I realize now that I am not in charge when it
comes to the unfolding of my life. In in the hands there is a listening; I become available. It
is not my task to plan my life, to make decisions about my health, about my age, about my
intelligence, my financial resources, my love life, my culture. Nothing is in my hands. I am
open to what I receive in the moment. If I want something else than that which happens to
me, I show that I am not really listening. I am like those who go to church and thank God
when they feel that everything is okay in their lives, but as soon as their child is sick or they
are sad, they pray and ask God to put things right. Meister Eckhart is very clear about this
kind of attitude. You simply cannot accept this and reject that.
Accepting means not focusing on the situation, but on being available. Sometimes, within
this deep welcoming, I sense my inner no and I accept that too. It is not about forcing myself
to accept. Depending on my intellectual or cultural background, some things are
unacceptable to me. I am able to witness that. To say “I accept” is a pretense, a fantasy.
When I realize that something is above my tolerance level, I become available to non-
acceptance, it is a part of me.
To agree or to disagree is the same thing. I accept my own moments of being available to
life, as well as my resistance to it. I no longer choose one over the other.
The more I integrate this capacity to accept both types of moments, the more this so-called
black and white will mix. My life will leave behind it its moments of immense joy or sadness
for a temporary neutrality. Then, nothing will be in my hands anymore—as if anything had
ever been…
A woman lives in fear that her husband might cheat on her. She hates the idea. She cannot
say, “I will force myself to accept.” I am honest with myself, I am incapable of accepting that.
I realize that it is due to a lack of maturity and I accept my lack of maturity. I do not pretend
that I can or that I ought to be different. Thus, what I do not accept will point to acceptance.
But no one accepts! When somebody accepts, there is no acceptance. When I say, “I
accept,” it is false, it is a strategy. It is because I think that it’s better for me to accept.
To accept is to see. I do not accept anything; I look, I see. Thus, acceptance includes
acceptance and non-acceptance. Just like relaxation includes relaxation and tension. Just
like health includes health and disease. One day, there is no longer any struggle between
the two.
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I would like to talk about doubt. Yesterday, you said that doubt was a doorway. I understand
that certainty is a prison. But still, to always remain in doubt is difficult. How would you
know if an action is correct when you doubt all the time?
When you doubt, you doubt something. Rightly so, because what you expect from the
situation that you doubt is always peace, and peace can never be found in any situation.
When I no longer expect a situation to bring me deep satisfaction, I no longer evaluate my
actions as correct or incorrect. I do not ask myself the question: “What is better for me?”
That is an unthinkable question. There is nothing that can be better for me. What is better is
what is happening. When I see this mechanism clearly, then doubt disappears. Doubt
signifies postponement.
I answered someone’s question differently yesterday, but for that person doubt was
something different.
You said that doubt was a doorway and I reacted to that idea, that's all.
It is a doorway if you follow it to its end. As long as you doubt something, doubt doesn’t go
deep enough. One day, doubt will start doubting itself. Energy comes back to its source.
Doubt is a state of availability. True doubt does not project non-doubt. To doubt is to live
outside conclusion. Well understood, this doubt is what Muslims call “the fear of God.”
Doubt is not an obstacle. I doubt that any perception, any future, any past or any
experience can tell me about myself. That is the doorway. There is no more dissipated
energy.
So, I only suffer if I think that I know something?
Only if there is still a future, an expectation. To know something is to create a future. We

want to know what the future is to make it less painful.
What happens when you despair?
In despair, there is desperation. When you are no longer affected by situations then
despair becomes impossible. The word despair cannot enter. There is aloneness, not
knowing, empty space.
A desperate person still has hope.
It is very easy to put a carrot in front of a desperate person; their despair will disappear
instantly. Some people have had two, three, or even twenty or thirty bad outcomes and they
are still ready to repeat the experience as soon as they get a chance. When a woman says,
“I never want to meet a man again,” you can be sure that within three months she will fall in
love... That is the nature of despair. It says no but it is attached to what it pushes away. It
carries a seed of hope.
Desperate people easily fall in love. On some level you need to be desperate to fall in love
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and to believe that somebody has the power to bring you security―when that person can
die tomorrow!
It isn't enough to be desperate.
So, we only fall in love if we lack presence, if we feel empty inside?
Falling in love is a projection. A dog comes by, we fantasize about the dog. He is the dog of
our life, a faithful dog, a nice dog, he is not like the other dogs, etc. Notice the projection
mechanism. Two years later, we have a different opinion of the dog. Yet the dog hasn’t
changed. Observe this automatic reflex to project on all dogs that come by. We can't help it,
but at one point, we notice the mechanism: we still have this expectation, this hopeful
fantasy of finding security, comfort, affection, love in the arms of somebody—we deny our
own integrity.
This is no criticism. At a certain age a child needs to be nursed; he doesn't have a choice.
For a part of our life, this fantasy, this need to be loved, is necessary. Then something
moves on and we can no longer fall back into that kind of melodrama.
What does it matter if I am loved or not? When I am on my deathbed and someone is

holding my hand and repeating, “I love you,” what can that bring to me?
It is pure fantasy. That person loves me until the moment she sees another dog and
becomes infatuated with him. Nothing more. That love, she can keep. It has no substance.
This does not prevent affection, but you don't have to fantasize, to pretend to love and to be
loved. When you no longer expect anything from a relationship, a deep bond is created.
Hope hides fear. Fear triggers desire, need… and when you want, you don't give anything.
You need to realize that. In a deep relationship, you give without needing anything in
return. When you no longer have expectations, you are taken by this non-need.
As long as I make demands, I live in misery. When I give, I live in fullness. Giving brings
balance. The slightest expectation brings me back to misery. Understand the mechanism.
Being happy because someone loves me brings suffering, constant suffering, because
doubt is always present. I can't ever be a hundred percent sure. I am convinced that I am
loved, yet deep down there is something that says: “Maybe it isn't exactly that, perhaps
tomorrow will be less, when another dog passes by…” I always worry. When I realize this,
then I no longer feel the need to be loved; I discover real love.
That is good news because nobody ever loved me. Beings cannot love, they only know
how to want. They believe they love, but they are after something else. My girlfriend loves
me a lot, but if I sleep with the neighbor, she will love me a lot less. That is what love is!
That kind of love, nobody needs.
When I realize that I do not need to be loved, a deep psychological transformation
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happens. From then on, I can love somebody without any demand. I am not afraid of
anything. I no longer love someone in order to get anything.
When we really love somebody, whether they stay or they go, we love them. That is
unconditional love. But love under conditions— “I love you if you do this, I don't love you if
you do that”—that kind of love is not worthwhile.
The more you realize that you don't need to be loved, the more you discover this
unrestricted love. Your love life stops stagnating. You are present to what is here. With a
child, you are present no matter what his health is. Whether a baby is born or dies, you are
present.
The slightest demand, the slightest asking, and I live my conflict. Being untrue to myself is
what disturbs me. When I pretend to suffer, I deny the intuition of autonomy. I lie to myself.
There lies the discomfort. Non-autonomy is the lie. Suffering doesn't come from pain, but
from self-deception. When I am dissatisfied, I deceive myself. I justify my discomfort by
inventing a cause. That is phony.
You need to have the maturity to look at that.
To find an excuse for my sorrow shows a lack of the humility which is needed to discover
the joy of Life. When I become aware of this and I stop justifying my dis-ease, distress can
remain, or very strong pain, but I no longer link it to a situation—except in a symbolic way.
It is a very important transition.
If I have the maturity to never associate my suffering with any condition whatsoever, to live
it somatically only and independently of any context, then a kind of extreme dryness, a sort
of constant inner death will arise in me. I will die to all my relationships, whether they are
affective, social, friendly, intellectual... This transition period is unavoidable. One day, this
sadness will reveal itself to be its exact opposite. It is enough to have the maturity to live it
without objectification, without reference to a situation.
When I return to my fantasy and I pretend to be desperate because of this, I have lost my
honesty, and with it any way out. Today this cause affects me and tomorrow I will find
another reason for my distress; there is no solution.
When suffering sets itself free from so-called situations, when I have the maturity to feel a
sadness without cause that nothing can alleviate, then sadness allows my own death. That
is a moment of great intimacy.
But most often, I try to keep my head out of the water to breathe and not drown in that
suffering. On the contrary, we need to surrender. The only risk is to die, and without dying,
we can't be born.
As a matter of fact, I find it rather practical to remember what we have lived... Is it really of
no use anymore?
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Photo albums aren’t of much use. The idea of remembering disappears. Remembering can
happen, but you no longer really think in terms of your past or your future. You can refer to it
on a functional level, but not in psychological terms.
You become convinced that what happens to you is exactly what you need in order to
discover this autonomy and that is the only certainty you need. What happens to you—
health, illness, wealth, poverty, family, the way you will die, etc.—has been decided for you.
You don't have anything to do with it. You don't have to become involved with your life on a
psychological level. This attitude allows you to become a lot more active on a functional
level.
The usual psychological way of functioning constantly condemns you to prudence, to

smallness. Fear freezes you. You always worry about the consequences of your actions.
When you realize that you don't have anything to lose, everything becomes possible. You
can destroy yourself in every imaginable way, everything is welcome.
Fear restricts life. Approach life without a direction and everything will open to you,
everything will be available. You can become a saint, a dictator... You will not find any limit
to life's creativity.
When you know or when you want something, you incarnate your own mediocrity. You get
tunnel vision. You project a pitiful concept of some psychological refuge. Like a room
padded with fabric, sealed, without too much noise, too much violence, with enough to eat,
to survive. It's only fear. Some lives look like that, some apartments look like that.
When you have the intuition of non-direction, all directions become available to you: that is
creativity. Everything is possible in life, why restrict yourself to the few patterns of bourgeois
society? Knowing something makes you repetitive. You try to survive. Why survive?
When I survive, I do not live.
When the intuition arises that there is nothing to accomplish, that there is no hope, nothing
ahead, the present moment becomes its own rich meal. I do not need anything else, I do
not need tomorrow, I do not need manifestation. The situation of the moment is the
richness. Everything else is philosophy.
The art of yoga is to give yourself more and more consciously to this availability of the
present, without anyone being present.
What is the place of memory in the present?
Memory is a thought.
There is no memory, only the present exists. Everything that appears arises in the moment.
What we remember about twenty years ago is a present experience. The blows that hit you
twenty years ago are felt now, the fear you have felt lives on in you in this very instant.
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What is memory? When I observe your body, I see your past. It hasn't passed, it is present,
your body is present. The present body contains all of the past. There is no memory.
On another level, everything is memory. The present is memory, it is already the past.
Nothing can be present. The body is only memory, that is why we can function. It is not a
psychological memory which fades away when you listen to life. It is a physiological
memory which is needed for our system to function.
One day you will see that the terms memory, present, past are only words, images that you
throw on the table to play the game. They are wonderful images, but unreal ones. That is
not what is here, that does not exist. What exists is indescribable, it cannot be turned into
concepts.
Do not think too much; thought takes you away. Come back to somatic experience: I am not
in the sensation; the sensation is in me. Give space to that aftertaste, that discomfort. There,
clarity is on its way. But in philosophical discussions on memory, past and present just
remain debates. Mentally, everything can be justified. An intelligent man can prove
anything and its opposite. A Buddhist can show thesis and antithesis. Both will be right and
both will be wrong. It is a mental exercise that is not of much use. Leave that to agitated
people. Come back to the felt sense.
Is there a difference between constant sadness without cause and depression?
The feeling of sadness is in the moment. It doesn't have any past. When I say, “I am
depressed,” I link the sparks of the present into a necklace. There is no necklace. Sparks
are always present. They are one within another, they are not left and right so you can
make a necklace out of them.
When the idea of depression leaves, there remains this extraordinary sensation of total
sadness without cause. I cherish this state as my deepest treasure. I sit on it, I protect it from
all understanding, from all escape, from all treatment, from all desire to look elsewhere. I let
the sadness rise; my love is the yeast.
One day, this sadness will blow apart everything that is not directly related to it. Its origin is
the intuition of autonomy. If I didn't sense autonomy, I couldn't be this sad. It is because I am
feeling it without being able to live it that the sadness lives in me. The sadness isn't a
consequence of my difficult life, it is here because I glimpse something else without being
able to reach it.
The yeast of my sadness is that intuition. It needs darkness, warmth. As soon as I look
somewhere else, a ray of sunshine lights up the sadness and, again, the dough flattens
out. The slightest hope, the slightest understanding, the slightest attempt to do or to reach
and, again, the dough flattens, the sadness fades. As soon as I understand the mechanism,
I lose all aggressiveness towards my sadness and I let the dough rise. Once again, the
intuition for being and my availability to this intuition are the yeast. The yeast will break the
box open. Those moments of humility toward that sadness will allow the box to burst. But
there again, if I find an escape, if I look elsewhere, the puny clarity of mediocre security
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comes to me and the dough flattens.
We need to forget our intellectual, technical elaborations. Those things only have value in
the moment. They are here to create a resonance chamber which will lift us up.
If you forget everything, there is something that doesn't forget you. That something is going
to interfere, at first imperceptibly, then more concretely, in our lives. Any attempt at
understanding, memorizing, owning, accepting or rejecting what was said remains a form
of agitation.
As soon as I know, I leave my honesty. I notice it; this noticing is honesty itself. In that
availability, life reveals its true creativity.
Knowledge is death.
English Intro
Chapter 4
English Intro
Free of all understanding

We follow what is inspired in us,
not what we want.
Abd-El-Kader: The Book of Stops
W e all know moments of very great joy and beauty in our lives. These moments are but a
weak reflection of the essential emotion which we all feel at night when letting go into
sleep—when everything we have ever wanted, desired, or contemplated dies in the heart.
This is the deepest bliss for human beings. No fabrication, no situation can compare with
this absolute intensity experienced when entering into sleep. Allow the body and the
psyche to die in peace.
To sink into sleep, every night, is to let go of the most beautiful woman, the greatest wealth,
the most vibrant health. After three or four days without deep sleep, there is no greater
fortune on earth than the simple possibility of filling that gap.
This forefeeling will shed light on everyday life. This doesn't prevent you from making a
fortune, from meeting women, men, dogs. But at a certain point, we realize that beyond all
experience, all acquisition or qualification, a deep joy resonates. All our conditions die into
peace.
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Are there any questions on this subject?
What about duality and nonduality?
Words are images. The word nonduality is an image made for children, because they need
representations. When they ask questions, since no answer comes to us—because
nothing can be explained—we communicate the incomprehensible through an image. We
call this poetry, myth. Nonduality is a teaching myth.
We need to grow up and stop living with childish images. Nonduality, duality, all these
concepts described as so much candy for children in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, are only
a preparation. These words can be compared to preparation postures in the martial arts:
they have value for beginners, to build strength in the legs, but in a fight, you cannot use
them.
Duality and nonduality are only symbols. They help to divert your thoughts, to make you
think of something else than your mistresses or your bank account. You engage in
reflection on duality and nonduality in order to allow questions to become more essential
than, “Is this woman, this work, good for me?” or “Should I make more money? Follow a
diet? Buy a car?” etc.
Sanskrit scriptures which use the expression advaita exist through a rhythm, through a life
current. When you read them, you feel a caress making its way inside of you and when you
close the book, a flavor, a joy remains. This joy is present because you haven't built any
mental image on the subject. With nonduality, you cannot build much—except perhaps a
useless career as a false guru!
These concepts have their value, until the moment when they lose all meaning. Meaning
does not exist, it is only produced by fear. Understanding, wanting to give significance to
things, to situations, is a childish attitude coming from helplessness. When I'm scared, I
want to understand. But you cannot explain or justify anything, because nothing is
separate. To understand something is to cut it off from the whole. I want to understand this,
but this does not exist as such. It's like wanting to understand a dog's tail while ignoring the
dog. You cannot understand the dog's tail, it is impossible.
The so-called beginning or end of a situation only exists in the mind of the one who
projects it. There are no such things. Totality cannot be understood by mentally cutting it
into parts. The tiniest part of the cosmos can only be understood as a function of its totality.
When this is clear for you, you realize that no understanding is possible. From there on,
you will give up trying to use a concept or a traditional structure to approach life. You will
become attentive. The situation that looks like an attack on you is what you will meditate
on; that which touches you, insults you, disgusts you, that is your field of inquiry.
Simply notice that concepts, as beautiful as they may be, are useless. When you have a
toothache, when a loved one is on their deathbed, when somebody you love leaves you, or
whatever your emotional fantasy may be, metaphysical images cannot help you. What
helps you is to be present, to be physically and psychically available to receive the
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situation.
The words duality or nonduality have the same value as the world descriptions that you
find in the puranas, they can just help you to understand that the world does not exist. The
image has a justification. The Samkya describes the evolution of this world from the
ultimate principle to its most concrete manifestation. Even Kashmir Shaivism allowed itself
to play with these concepts. This brings a sort of psychological security to children.
Wanting to understand is a form of misunderstanding. When you are in a situation and you
give up trying to understand, what happens? You let the situation speak, you stop your
psychological meddling. When you mentally remain within yourself, you notice that nothing
in the situation can disturb you. To get lost in the situation is what is disturbing. Don’t do
that. The situation is within you, but psychologically you have nothing to do with it.
Acceptance allows you to see your environment, your body, your psyche with clarity: no
more surprises. Amazement remains, with nothing to be amazed about. Since you are
without expectation, psychological discomfort is no longer possible.
You have no hope: you are available to what presents itself. That is nonduality in everyday
life. That nonduality is not conceptual.
Can you get lost in joy?
No, because in joy there is no one to be joyous or to get lost. In joy, everything is already
lost. In awe, there is only presence, without an owner. Joy does not allow a subject. When
you say “I am joyous,” it comes from memory.
You speak of the bliss of falling asleep. Does it belong to the emotional realm?
We need to liberate ourselves from words. No word is correct. That is a fantasy. Leave that
to the academics. Words do not need to be right: they are all wrong. We always use them
with different meanings, because they speak of nothing and nothing is understandable. If
the goal were to make you understand something, we would use precise words. Instead,
we want to arrive at the certainty that nothing can be understood. When you say, “Yes, I
understand,” you are clinging to a childish concept. Let this concept leave you. There is
nothing to understand.
Emotion is an explosion in space, a roaring fire in which everything is alive. For this
sensation to deploy, the word must die. Your task is to feel what we are talking about; no
word can convey this. It is a sort of intuition that cannot be conceptualized.
It is very important to stop before understanding. Stopping before intellectual

understanding is the art of living in the deep sense of Kashmiri yoga. You hear something,
you observe in yourself the mechanism of wanting to explain and you stop before that
happens. It's like a dog who sees a bone which gets taken away when he goes to grab it.
There is an instant―as if suspended; that is the essential instant. There is not yet an
absence of bone, the dog hasn't had the time to realize that something has been taken
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away.
Emotion, sensation... All is right, all is wrong. We cannot understand what we are talking
about. Sometimes poets can express what cannot be conceptualized.
When I feel the fantasy of understanding arise in me, I observe the way I function. Like the
dog who wants the bone, I live in fear, I need to grab onto something, I need reference
points to feel safe.
Some people want to define the type of relationship that they are having with someone in
their social environment. They want to know if that person is their lover, their husband, etc.
They want to locate themselves... It is impossible to know anything. The beauty of a human
relationship is to be undefined. In every instant, everything is new. Intimacy happens in the
moment, not in memory nor in the future. When you approach someone, or life, without
knowing anything, all is possible. The value of every situation that you encounter only
exists in the present. One situation cannot be superior to the other.
So, look inside this mechanism that wants to know, to understand, to own. It is the same
fantasy as wanting to be realized. It is fear in action. I know this mechanism in myself. I
respect it. I leave it free of pretense, of fear. I am available. I do not pretend that I should be
free of anything. This vision is clarity.
Wanting to understand is expecting something. Witness how often in life we are in

expectation. There is nothing to hope for. What could be stronger, more beautiful, more
amazing, more extraordinary than what happens in the moment, right now?
Observe the fantasy: I'm not interested in what happens in the moment. It's always
something else, somewhere else that grabs my attention, that excites me; the present
moment is insignificant. We spend our life projecting: tomorrow, when I’m married, when
I’m divorced, when I’m wise, when I do yoga, meditation, when I have a third car, a second
child, then life will truly be beautiful... Observe the mechanism.
You can't help your fantasy when it desires change. You can't be different. You carry your
fears, your anxieties, your sickness, your violence, and it is wonderful as it is. There is
nothing to change.
To want to change is postponement. What I feel is essential—that is the tantric approach.
We need to be open to all expressions of beauty. We need to read Nicolas de Cues, Ibn
Ata Allah Iskandari, the great Taoists or the Chan masters. Every time the translators use
different words so that we do not get attached to an expression. Beauty is without form. To
understand it is to want to give it form.
Does this imply that there is no meaning to life?
There is: the meaning you assign to it. But at one point, you no longer justify anything. This
sets you free from all concepts, all meaning-makers. Then only an emotion remains,
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independent of any story.
Even meaninglessness it still a meaning that you project. Mind works in such a way that
you cannot conceive of an absence of meaning without making it into a meaning.
So, you get rid of both meaning and meaninglessness.
When sensing, no question arises. When you get punched, when you fall in love, when you
bite your tongue, when you contemplate the beauty of a child or a galloping horse, you are
so taken by the power of the event that you don't try to find significance in it.
Make yourself available to what is, before the psyche creates meaning or non-meaning;
that is beauty. When you listen to poetry, you feel the beauty before understanding. When
you say, “This is what it means,” you fall back in the soup. It’s the same thing when you look
at a painting: you feel the charm before you understand.
I'd like to hear about celebration, singing, dancing.
In a deep sense, dance is the intuition that stillness is a thought. A still body is a concept:
the body is always moving. The nature of the body, as of all things, is made of rhythms. In
thoughtless moments of somatic intimacy, you become available to these internal rhythms.
Music isn't anything else. Some dances arise from this intimate rhythm, just as some forms
of music bring us back to peace.
Depending on the sound frequency, we discover different chambers of resonance in our

body. Some forms of music stimulate vitality, others mental clarity, emotions or affection.
Beauty is everywhere, even if all forms of music are not identical. Even if a musician’s
capacity to create is not always the same. Some of Bach’s or Mozart’s works were written
for commercial purposes. Even if they seem less inspired than those more directly
channeled, they still show the extraordinary signature of their composer. Similarly, in
painting, Kaii Higashiyama’s folding screens made for the temple of Toshodai-ji are an
explosion of beauty. Some of his paintings are less remarkable. For him, as for many other
great painters, all expressions do not live in the same silence.
The more you make yourself available to deep sleep, the more you get sensitized to what
this space expresses. Pieces of music which evoke this tranquility and which, at a certain
time, would have bored you, will now seem magical to you. Those who used to resonate in
you on a vital, intellectual or affective level, while still keeping their value, will seem lighter
to you. Just as children practice children’s sports and adults more mature sports, some
forms of music are more adapted to children while others are more mature.
Dances born out of the forefeeling of rhythm are extraordinary. The vital rhythms of African
dance give it its infinite beauty. Other dances are more conceptualized. Well performed, the
tango is magnificent; it is an art that influences our affectivity in a noble way, but it remains
on the emotional level.
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Classical Indian dances reveal more in the form of mental clarity. They do not all resonate
from silence because some of them were codified at a later stage. Nevertheless, Kathakali,
reformulated in Kerala early in the twentieth century like a lot of its ancestors, offers a
breach in time and space. Krishna Menon and Jean Klein were staunch admirers of it.
Sometimes a dancer breaks free of the dance’s codification and bestows on us a moment
beyond expression. Some of Caroline Carlson’s movements are perfect stillness. Modern
art allows as much beauty as traditional art, yet with a different expression.
Some time ago, Marie Chouinard, a dancer from Quebec, invited me to a rehearsal of her
latest creation. For an hour and a half, she carefully observed her magnificent dancers and
then, notes in hand, she made her comments. Nothing had escaped her. I was struck by
the fact that her corrections were merely an invitation to feel more, to be more present. This
feeling carries itself into expression. We go from the inside to the outside: that is art’s true
teaching. That is when you understand the superb quality of her choreographies.
What about the desire to celebrate?
When you want to celebrate, you leave your deep resonance, which is celebration. There
is nothing to celebrate. Celebration is living while knowing that there is nothing to celebrate
—because everything is a celebration.
It's a bit like late Japanese art which tries hard to point to the absolute, to the point of
becoming superficial. Chinese art is rougher but more powerful; it causes space to explode
in a bigger way. Japanese art tries so hard to talk about space that sometimes there is only
talk left. We find the same observation in the second generation of Buto dancers.
To want to celebrate is a lack of living celebration. Deep emotion is beyond all celebration.
Your felt sense is celebration. Then, according to your mental, intellectual or affective
capacity, you are going to transpose the moment. Make sure that the ritual does not
become an attempt at perfection; make sure that what you are talking about does not
become too framed into a ritual form of codification. As we can witness in late Japanese
martial arts, this hollow ritualism locks the art form. When all fallen leaves have been raked,
it is no use kicking the tree to get more. That which is natural does not need to be helped.
It's like someone who would want to use the extraordinary expression of tantric art on a
sexual level, while the emotion of which the tantras speak was conceptualized as “a couple
united in the flesh” for purely metaphysical reasons. Tantras communicate something
completely different from the usual male-female relations. Khajuraho’s sculptures do not
speak of eroticism but of silence. The same goes for the Song of Songs or for the
drunkenness of great Muslim mystics, which does not evoke wine. Contrary to what often
happens, the image should not be taken literally.
It is from the emotion of being nothing that the tantric ritual will manifest on a sexual level. A
hand, a body without intention will discover what the tantras are about. But these are not
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exercises to learn and to rehearse in order to celebrate something.
Some fake forms are more intelligent than others, but all are caricatures. Parody brings a
form of fatigue.
Ajit Mookerjee, ex-curator of the New Delhi Arts and Crafts Museum and a famous
collector, spent his life looking for so-called tantric objects. Later, he sold the collection to a
family of merchants specialized in exports. More for commercial than metaphysical
reasons, a new concept was thus created: tantric art. It is in this way that a part of the ritual
art of India and the Himalayas was revealed to the lay world in the seventies.
A member of the Mookerjee family was studying tantric rituals in Bengal. To my teacher
who visited him, this man revealed that very big drops in energy happened a few weeks
after each ritual union. In a ritual that goes from the outside to the inside, this is inevitable.
The ritual must progress from the inside to the outside. Then only, in this resonance, can
some technical elements be transmitted.
Fire comes from the inside. To learn to fight, you must have the madness of combat in you.
The teacher only points out to the student a few elements which will sharpen his natural
inclination.
But the one who comes without boldness learns only gestures and, even if his movements
become fast and powerful, he often won't be able to apply them in the trauma of a real fight.
Learning the art of combat does not create a fighter; you need to be a fighter first, and then
acquire the art. Yes, you can teach competitive fighting... but that is not art.
From the Kashmiri viewpoint, ritual always comes from the inside and moves towards the
outside—there is its strength. The power and the craziness needed to live life have their
foundation in that vibration, in that peace.
What is a ritual? It is world creation and destruction. It is the person's creation and
destruction. There is no other ritual. You cannot live it from the outside.
I am often told that illness has a psychological origin. This makes me feel guilty. Do you
think it is a concept?
You cannot feel anything other than what you feel in the moment. You cannot choose what
you feel either. That is determined by your heredity, your past, your gentle or violent
childhood. Your nature will choose the way you react to situations. Some faint when they
see blood, others get excited; you do not get to decide.
There is no reason, period. A reason is a philosophical concept. Do not seek to justify

events that take place in your life. Trying to analyze life is petty. Explaining one’s
experience is a form of stupidity. You can only witness your own immaturity. Every year, you
see more of your immaturity. So, put aside all attempts at understanding your life. Forget
explanations, especially interpretations from therapists and psychologists. They may be
worth something in the moment when they are spoken, but they are not a subject for
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reflection. Take them as life winking at you. The comments that your neighbor has about
you are right, but right only in the sense that he cannot perceive you any other way than he
does. What you are told is always legitimate for the one who tells it, but it is never your
business.
So, set aside anybody else’s judgments or interpretations. Set aside your own as well, for
they only come from your environment’s opinions that you have internalized.
When you no longer speak and you no longer listen to anything, what's left? A sensation is
left: tension in your shoulders, your throat, your belly… all emotion is sensation. Come
back to this level. Listen.
What does listening mean? It means to love. Without love, listening is impossible. To love
means to be available to what's here. There is nothing for you, you do not seek to
understand anything, but to fully feel. You cannot do anything else in life. And that is
enough.
What we call our birth and our death is the birth and death of the body. On that level, there
is only the body. Before the body leaves us, it would be appropriate to question what is
being born and what dies. Not in a conceptual way, not the body of which doctors and
psychologists speak, because that is the body of their fear. But another body exists, the
feeling body in which fear, emotion, greed, desire, anxiety all register. The body that
shakes, the body that clams up, the body that sweats, the body that resists, all these bodies
are doorways to the real body.
Put all understanding, all knowledge aside and, a few times during the day, especially at
night when going to bed, give yourself to these moments when you remain silent and when
you let the body speak. Everything else comes from that.
As soon as you listen, all ideas of guilt disappear. There is no more responsibility, no more
remorse, no more regret, and later, no more hesitation. You are present to what is here—
there is no more direction. At that moment, you only wish for the body, the psyche, the
money that you have.
All this is only true in the moment; tomorrow everything will be different—but you are no
longer trying to change.
It is extraordinary when, just for a moment, you desire that which is here. The pain, the fear,
the jealousy, the loneliness, the uncertainty which are here. To want that which is here is
the ultimate and only step. There are none before, and none after.
The present isn’t a concept but a felt sense. You will discover that there is nothing there
either. Your availability will explode what is there; a sensation of freedom will remain. The
more you notice how much you are made of conditioning, the more freedom you will feel.
Whereas before, the more you wanted to be free, the more you felt conditioned. Feeling
your conditioning opens you to the sensation of freedom. The more you discover that your
body is only constriction and defense, the freer you will feel from constriction and defense.
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The more you feel that your psyche is only fear and greed, the more you set yourself free
from these forces. Remain on a somatic level, there is nothing to think about.
What happens to you is a gift that you give yourself. No one has chosen it for you. It is your
own maturity in the making.
When illness arrives in our life, there is no more happiness, as if happiness was
conditioned by health. Thus, it is a concept, but I am happy when I am healthy.
Enjoy it, it is a wonderful moment. If one day you are in poor health, you will notice that you
can also be happy. You cannot prepare for that. When you live with a woman, you cannot
prepare for being a widower, you live with her for all eternity, in the moment. If you are in
radiant health, that is the only truth.
Illness and pain are also extraordinary gifts. They teach us a lot about the way we function.
Do not become sick on purpose, but use it when it's here. Your good health shows you that
you do not need to be sick. When you need to know that side of yourself, your needs will be
met.
The practice of yoga makes the notion of illness disappear. Pleasure and pain are very
abstract areas; yoga allows you to hover in those places. You become more and more
intimate with your body. Then, disease is no longer a surprise; you feel it coming years
ahead. You have a hunch without really knowing, and when it happens, there is a sort of
smile. Past and future are concepts. That is also true on a psychological level.
Observe a child's body; you can easily read everything it expresses. There is no causality,
and in fact, it is your present life which explains your childhood and not the childhood that
explains your current life. Past doesn't come before future. Thought cannot understand that.
Your actions shed light on some of your past behaviors. That is inconceivable, yet that is
the way it is.
We are the ones who create a boundary out of fear. It's the same fear that makes us see
our room the same way every day, the same fear that makes us say, “I know my room”—
notions that a single LSD pill would easily question. You do not know your room, you know
the fear room that you want stable, identical, precise. Under the influence of LSD, you
would see another room and it wouldn’t be more true or more false. Your room isn't fixed, it
is movement; it constantly gets wider, narrower, longer. Out of fear we create a supposedly
constant room, a reassuring room that we recognize with a sigh of relief when we “come
home.” My garden, my body, my wife—I recognize everything. How safeguarded and how
possessive! Out of fear of the elasticity of life, fear of knowing nothing, of having nothing.
When you challenge the notion of a supposedly dense and localized body through the
practice which you are familiar with, your body and your breath will appear different. In
those moments, you feel that certain bubbles burst—past and future are in those bubbles.
Worry leaves you.
Everything that happens to you is a gift for dying. A gift that allows you to recognize your
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pretending to know. Stop fearing what challenges you; on the contrary, it's only about
letting go of your immense suffering.
Is there a last question before we end?
Death... When we leave the body?
Stop right there, with that first word. Death is death's business, not yours. But fear of death,
fear of death is your gift for living. Just look, without criticism, at everything the word death
evokes for you. When we leave this building, we can get run over, there is nothing to think
about, everything is okay.
If you're lucky enough to carry it with clarity, fear of death is beautiful. It is a very strong
emotion. You need to approach it somatically. When you feel that death has become
unavoidable, since you can't do anything about it, fear leaves you. Then something else
presents itself; an extraordinary intensity, a joy arises. But if you hope for a chance to
escape it, things become more complex.
Once, on a journey on mescaline, I felt the sidewalk open under my feet and faced my
incapacity to cope. I was lying down in an apartment overlooking the Vieux-Port in
Marseille, overwhelmed by the music, the visions, the most horrible sensations according
to my imagination of that time. I understood that I wouldn't come out of the experience alive.
I didn't have the capacity to win that fight. I completely accepted defeat; faced with
inevitable failure, I stopped struggling... and in a single moment, all the music, all the
visions were transformed into something you could call divine. Then I understood with my
senses what my teacher had tried to relate to me so many times.
Life can only find the space to reveal its beauty in complete surrender, in total inability to be
anything.
Recently, during a visit to Canada, in a dream, I saw myself on a flight. I was beginning to
catch sight of the top of the trees and I thought to myself that we were flying a little too low.
Then the trees got to the level of the window and I observed: “We are going to crash.” For a
brief moment, a fear reaction came up, immediately replaced by an extraordinary curiosity:
“I am finally going to know if all the absurdities I have uttered make any sense!” Then an
immense joy came over me. The wing of the plane was torn off by a tree and I woke up in a
trance of joy. This joy emerges when death is obvious and inevitable.
The feeling of fear is extraordinary. The fear of dogs, of loneliness, of being struck, of losing
your money or your children—to each their fantasy; it's always the same fear. When I feel
this fear come up, no matter what fear, and if I am available, the fear remains somatic and
finds its freedom again.
There is nothing to think about, nothing to understand. You can't explain anything: you can
only tell yourself stories. Sensing is very easy, very accessible; but all that you can read or
think about death is only fantasy. Every tradition has created its own repertoire of
absurdities. All artistic expression lives off this repertoire—that is its value: art and beauty. It
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is an excuse for expressing beauty, just like fear, loneliness, sadness, all these emotions
which are at the source of Indian art or European music.
Death is only a word, nothing else. Everybody dresses it in their own way. When you go to
sleep at night, you leave your life with joy; it is a form of death. If you regularly give in to
sleep with clarity, if you let your body fall into you, the psychological fear of death can very
much decrease. It will come back for a few moments in certain situations, with air
turbulence above the Himalayas for instance, but as fear it cannot last.
Don't be afraid of fear. Some people jump from a bridge or from an airplane, some enter
the lion's cage, all that to feel fear.
Clearly respect the fear in yourself. Feel the fear—that is practical nonduality.
Do you sometimes look at people?
There are many ways to look. You sense the environment. When you are with your favorite
dog, you do not spend your time looking at him. Of course, sometimes when he passes by,
you admire the way he functions. When he's behind you, you feel him, you know that he is
very close. When he is in another room, he is still here. Eyesight has its limitations.
To admire a dance performance, you often close your eyes. When you look at the dancer,
you are beguiled by her beauty, her movement, the perfection of her gestures, but you miss
something. When you close your eyes, sound takes over and takes you much further. Then
there comes a moment when you no longer even listen. When you don't look at the dance,
when you don't listen to the music, a vibration remains.
Everything is here, I'm not interested in the dancer over there. In listening, I don't look and I
don't listen. The concert takes place in the heart. From that emotion, we can then look over
there and everything looks different.
Beyond what is seen and what is heard, the felt sense remains. You approach beauty with
closed eyes. To open your eyes is a compromise.
English Intro
Chapter 5
English Intro
Let fear devour you

The more he believes himself lost, the happier he is; the more desperate, the stronger. And
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if he could know anything, it would be to never have any certainty, to constantly live in the
unknown…
Madame Guyon:
Christian and Spiritual Discourses Concerning Inner Life
How can I put an end to violence?
You put an end to violence when you are no longer afraid—because violence comes from
fear.
The dog attacks you out of fear. When you train fighting dogs, you don’t train them to attack,
but to be afraid. When they see a certain form, a certain color, body type or gesture, no
need to tell them what to do, they are scared and they attack.
When fear leaves you, violence stops. For this to happen, you’ll have to stop pretending to
be a personal entity, an image which you need to defend because it is attacked by a world
that doesn’t acknowledge it.
Fear generates violence. You are intolerant with those who understand life differently than
you do, because their way of being challenges yours. Those who like violence disturb you,
you are scared of them and, in turn, you become aggressive. When somebody beats a
child in front of you, you are revolted and you want to beat up the abuser: that is violence.
This doesn’t mean that you have to stay passive, but you no longer react as a function of
your fears. You respond to a situation directly without reference to the past.
As long as there’s fear, there is violence. You are going to be brutal with the adult that
beats the child and, as soon as you leave, he will probably be even more brutal. Wars have
never put an end to violence.
Certain situations can justify a fight. If a mob enters your country and starts massacres, you
may have no emotional resistance to intervening, according to your competence, and
participating in a defense. This is not an action emanating from an ideology, but from a
functional place. You defend your neighborhood, your village, your country in a practical
way.
If a dog jumps up at my daughter’s throat, what I will do to the dog might seem cruel to
some, but this is not the case; it is a functional action, with no psychological ramifications. I
am not angry at the dog.
Upholding a fantasy about family, race, nation or the world is just entertaining concepts.
Protecting our vegetation, our animal or human environment is a natural extension of our
embodiment. When you hurt yourself or when you catch the flu, if your cells did not react
aggressively, your body would disappear. You do not die because your cells resist
powerfully. This apparent functional brutality does not need any intellectual justification.
Pretending to know what is right is violence. If a dog attacks, he is not wrong. He is not a
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bad dog. I am not offended by the fact that a dog wants to attack my daughter. Given his
past, his training, I understand very well that sensing someone like my daughter, he
attacks. He doesn’t have any other choice than to attack―and suffer the consequences.
Violence is the fear of your fears, of your emotions. Fear that you project onto the
environment.
How to set ourselves free if we fall into the trap?
Through humility. See your fear clearly, with respect, without wanting to change it. Can I
exist without fear? No, if it were possible we would know that. I carry this disturbance in
myself, I make myself available to it. It is freedom, it is listening. Within this felt sense, a form
of intelligence will reveal itself.
What frightens you reveals the fear that you carry. To realize that is extraordinary. What
triggered your fear when you were four isn’t what triggers your fear today, but it’s still the
same fear.
If a dog attacks you, you become terrified; if it attacks someone on his way back from the
battlefield, you don’t care as much. Why? The situation doesn’t create fear, it only reveals it.
Your husband leaves you, you don’t know how to pay the rent, you feel yourself getting
older, your country is at war, you fear for your child, for your mother… Everyone has
something that triggers their fear, but it’s still the same fear.
When I realize that the situation, whatever it may be, awakens a fear that has always been
present in me, I have taken the first step, I have become available. My attention focuses on
the felt sense of fear, no longer on its apparent cause. I am going to let this feeling of fear
live in me. I am not afraid, I feel the fear, and then clarification takes place.
As long as you are afraid of something, you are locked in a concept. You can try all you
want to set yourself free, to train yourself, to control your fear of something, but something
else will trigger it. Some people are scared to get mugged on the street. To get over this
phobia, they practice martial arts intensively for twenty years. Then they no longer are
afraid of being attacked, but they may be terrified at the thought that their wife might cheat
on them.
To prepare for fear is futile, you need to feel it.
After I have been attacked by a dog or distraught by the possibility that my wife might leave
me, when I find myself at home or in the hospital that evening, the echo of fear is still very
present. Clearly, without doing anything, I let this aftertaste of fear live in me. In this passive
state, fear becomes active. It talks, I listen. In my availability, it will reveal itself somatically;
there is nothing to think about.
When you are at that stage, a whole sensory world opens up to you. Sooner or later you
reach a stage of listening which harmonizes everything. This requires a certain maturity.
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Usually, when we are scared, we run away from fear, we try to think of something else, we
get married, we divorce, we bring a child into the world or we meditate…and fear comes
back!
Sooner or later, when you are afraid of something, you thank the situation for showing you
that fear is still present in you. As long as you haven’t faced it, whether you know it or not,
your actions and your thoughts will be blocked, crystallized by fear.
We’re no longer afraid of what scared us ten years ago. Some fifty-year-olds are afraid of
becoming sixty; when they are sixty, they fear being seventy, and so on, but fundamentally,
no one is afraid of how old they are in the present. Their fear is only of the future, and when
that future becomes present, they’re no longer afraid.
We are only afraid of the future. It is what comes later that scares us, it is tomorrow.
Observe the mechanism. In your presence, the word fear will evaporate. Fear is a thought;
the future does not exist.
You are saying that fear is something which is inside of us, something which reveals itself
through triggers and ghosts. This fear, which is present, is real; the objects of fear aren’t.
They are real but they are only triggers, that’s all.
But fear is really here?
Of course. And it’s a profound emotion, like all emotions. When you face fear and set it free
from its environment of images, the fundamental fear, the causeless fear reveals itself and
you are available to it. In your somatic availability, a new clarity blossoms.
The description stops here. What comes next is awe.
We need to allow the mystery to be. We can’t say how far we can go. The experience is
indescribable. We can’t describe what it means to “let the fear live inside of us.” It doesn’t
belong to the realm of expression.
When fear has left its imaginary cause, it is no longer fear. We can say the same for
sadness, anxiety, loneliness; they are doorways to space.
The body, the psyche are crystallized emotions. When we set them free of images, they
resonate with primordial emotions. Feel this: “I am not afraid; the fear is in me.” Have the
experience.
If I cannot name it, it could be, instead of fear, just a sensation. It is as if I needed to cease
to exist for the experience to happen. When I identify it as fear, it stops being pure. When I
superimpose an image, when I paint it with this word “fear,” the sensation isn’t what it was
when it first appeared. Is that it?
Yes. When you are really afraid, the word fear isn’t there. When you say, “I am scared,” “I
am terrified,” “I am suffering,” you are thinking. The moment you feel the intensity of the
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experience, it doesn’t leave any space for the concept of fear, of suffering, of terror. The
experience is much too strong to allow any verbal expression. The need to name and to
own things is intense, but in action, there is no concept of experience.
Then suffering cannot be suffering if it stays pure?
Exactly, suffering is an image without substance.
Words are simply pointers. The word water does not quench your thirst; the word water
evokes the perception of it. The words fear, sadness are all symbols. Since we agreed to
play with language, we use certain representations, but symbols have their limits. You feel
the image, it resonates in you; you forget the image, and the resonance stays. At that
moment, the emotion no longer has a name.
But isn’t that true only for certain experiences, such as in an emergency? In day-to-day life,
it seems that the intensity is not strong enough for me to be carried away by emotion, and
thus identification comes right away.
Do not let existence become trivial. Become aware of the power of the moment.
There is nothing ordinary in life. When you touch a woman or a man, when you listen to the
wind or to the car horns on the highway, everything is possible.
Life is nothing but intensity.
All our actions are rituals. What is a ritual? It is the awareness that there is no gratuitous
act—that everything is gratuitous. Every conscious act celebrates the gratuitous quality of
life. A bubbly, intense sensation of life reveals itself little by little. Even in an apparently
banal and limited situation, deep life resonates and reveals itself.
The more the need to know, to own things, fades in you, the more you become aware that
every instant of life is its climax. Going to India is not more alive than being in a
neighborhood of Brooklyn or Montréal. The instant you pick up an apple, tie your
shoelaces or brush your teeth, it is as beautiful, deep, and right as when you sit down to
meditate. Every moment is the totality.
Some people meditate at a fixed hour, gather in a spiritual center. This is pathological.
What is the best moment? Is it only at 3:30 AM? Which location could be more auspicious
than my immediate environment?
Meditation is right here, now. What is sacred and profound is the present moment. Come
back to this clarity; that’s what ritual is.
In India, life is very ritualized in order to clearly live the obvious quality of the ultimate that is
present in every moment. With every meal, successive bites are offered to the five inner
breaths, and so on.
No activity is tasteless. Eating, moving, thinking are cosmic actions. Every movement, every
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spark of our life is a climax. There is no ordinary life, profound life or spiritual life. It’s only
fear that creates differences—the inferior, the superior, the spiritual, the material.
Come back to the obvious; each emotion is the essential.
In art, when you reach a certain creative level, you no longer furnish it with names. You no
longer evoke notions of representation. Only proportions, gradations, movements remain,
but there is no subject. The storyline of a painting showing a tree, a cathedral or an apple,
completely disappears. What remains are masses of green, blue, red, forceful lines and
spaces.
When we are afraid of someone, is it only because they disturb us?
What disturbs you in the presence of someone else is something you carry in yourself. You
come into a room where thirty people are gathered. Twenty-nine of them do not bother you
too much, but there is one whom you cannot stand. Why do you target this one person
more than any other? Because they mirror something that you cannot abide in yourself and
that you’re not aware of. Seeing that in the other is triggering.
We are always challenged by the pathology which is the closest to home. When you
decide that a situation is unacceptable, it is because you don’t listen and you don’t
understand.
There is nothing intolerable that you do not carry within yourself. This does not mean that
you should stop yourself from reacting if it goes beyond your capacity to welcome it.
What is truly unbearable? The conviction that you know what is right. If you hear words that
point to a different world vision than yours, you get offended. What’s offensive is the
pretense of knowing. If you let go of all pretense, nothing is revolting, there is
understanding. At the level of the body, it’s a different story, but to be psychologically
disturbed by someone or something is a fantasy.
What is said here is not about creating a new attitude, but rather about being available to
what’s here. That’s the only possibility. What is intolerable to you is something that, for the
moment, you cannot acknowledge in yourself; so, you project it onto somebody else.
Sooner or later you will see the mechanism.
Do not force yourself to accept things that exceed your capacity but rather, take advantage
of the “intolerable” situation; go home and give life to that residue, that intimate echo. Little
by little, you will see that less and less things will be unpleasant, until nothing is unpleasant
anymore.
Intolerable means that something disturbs your pretense system and challenges the world
that you have created in defense of yourself and of your existence. If you meet a very rich
man and say to him, “In reality, you have nothing,” he could be shocked by your remark
because he has spent his life building the image of himself as a wealthy man. If you meet a
homeless person and you tell him, “In reality, you have everything,” he could be hurt
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because he lives with this deep certainty that he has nothing, that he is unhappy.
We must live with reality. Acceptance replaces intolerance. When you no longer picture
yourself as rich or poor, nothing is psychologically intolerable.
You think that a rapist or a murderer are abominable, and then one day you look, and you
understand the inner functioning of the one who needs to rape, to kill and to create
suffering in order to find a few moments of happiness. When you become aware of the
distress, of the sadness, of the despair that is there, you no longer find it intolerable, you
just understand what the right action is.
The intolerable is the defense of one’s world. It is the origin of fascism. Our most common
attitude is to forbid what is intolerable to us.
Can you speak about victims?
To feel that you are a victim is a concept; it is still pretending. Some people indulge in this
role. They are victims of society, of their parents, their body, their education, their poor
pronunciation... It is a demand just like any other. To be proud is the other side of the same
coin. Some are proud of their past, some are victims of it—to each their fantasies.
We do not have a past, except the one that we create in the moment when we hand out our
business card. The past does not exist. We only invent it when we are afraid.
There is no victim. In a boxing ring, people don’t feel like a victim every time they get struck.
They do not say: “I am a victim, I am a victim, I am a victim…”
Why? Blows do not hurt psychologically when you accept them.
Some feel they are victims of society when they cannot go on vacation, others because
they cannot afford to buy their kids a dessert, a car, or because they only have a small
house. Everyone has their fantasy. This feeling of being a victim is only justified in the
imaginary world where we live; it is profoundly grotesque. We are the puppet of our own
conditioning.
Here we are talking about the feeling of being a victim. The blows you receive are what
they are and their consequences on the body are very real. But mental tensions prevent us
from living. When they leave us, all our energy becomes available to be present to the
body, available to help, as the case may be, with rehabilitation after a traumatic event.
Last week, someone was attacked with a saber while sleeping on a bus. What I mean by
“victim” is the one who suffers; blood was flowing.
What is the difference between someone who has cervical cancer and someone who was
wounded by a saber? In both cases it is painful. They both face their problem. They don’t
have to feel like a victim. Would they have preferred someone else’s pain? No.
There is no such thing as a victim. You get struck; if the blow is too hard, you die; if it is less
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hard, you faint; and when it is still less, you take it. Physical pain can be terrible, but to be a
victim in the sense we use here is psychological. All these justifications— “I have cancer, I
deserved it,” “I have cancer because of my mother-in-law,” “my parents didn't love me
enough, I have cancer, and it makes sense” or “my wife told me to take the bus, and
because of her I was attacked with a saber”—are all of no help whatsoever. If you do not
enter the imaginary, there is no victim. We keep all our energy to help the body, as much as
we are capable of.
To feel like a victim weakens your resistance. This is no criticism, and when people feel like
victims, they need help. By showing them the possibility of beauty in the moment, we help
them set their fabrications aside. It can be hard work, but it is the only way.
To feel like a victim comes from the notion that life could have been different. That is a
disease.
We must live with reality. As much as I can, I face the present moment. If I live in the
interpretation— “I shouldn’t have been there, taken the bus, listened to my wife”—then I am
not available to fight for my body.
All that we feel is inevitable. To heal, you must understand that.
What’s important is to live all life events with awareness. There isn’t such a thing as
spirituality, leave that to the New Age magazines. Each situation is an opening to the
intuition of the essential, to what cannot be named. Become more and more familiar with
being available to what presents itself in the moment—and not to what you imagine as the
essential.
I didn’t choose anything, not my body, nor my mental, affective or intellectual capacities. We
all have the same faculty, in the sense that we all have enough competence to realize that
no talent is necessary to touch the intuition of fullness. One day, you will leave behind any
urge to use your capacities to find yourself. The body, the mind, the emotions follow their
trajectory, but that, the great hidden that, is always present, without ever being perceived.
You realize that all life movements are a kind of coloring of this essential element that
cannot be colored. The mystery reveals itself in you. There is no longer the slightest urge to
understand, to grab, to arrive, to prove. There is no more running away from the instant,
from the essential.
Getting up to meditate at 4:30 in the morning or following a spiritual path is often running
away from the truth, from the essential that can only be now. Wanting to accomplish
anything is a way to escape the moment. Wanting to be wealthy, beautiful, intelligent,
young or healthy is all the same.
It is inevitable to go through these forms of escape; some of us will be lucky enough to

become aware of the mechanism. At that moment, all situations will reveal what we were
looking for, this place that you can’t get to, this being that you cannot become, this non-
state that you cannot own. That luminous space, which cannot be seen, lights up all things.
You cannot find it in front of them, but rather behind them. A feeling that cannot be felt.
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Intellectual understanding has no place here.
Become available to the moment. I don’t need to change anything in myself; my fears, my
arrogance, my pretensions and my limits, I need all of that to become the intuition of the
limitless.
Everything changes, but the only change that is needed is the one that appears in the
moment. All the energy that was consumed to fabricate or to own will now be available.
Then, there will be true creation. That creation is a celebration, since it expresses gratitude
rather than assertion.
If I understand you, spirituality is an illusion?
It’s a concept. What people project on so-called spirituality is what they used to project on
their Boys Scout club when they were six, on the football team when they were ten, on
politics at twenty and on marriage at thirty. This void that we try to fill with a doll, an electric
train, a good grade at school, a career, a child, we then try to project onto spirituality. When
that is the case, we must respect it; but it is only fear.
True spirituality is gratitude.
Master Eckhart makes a difference between true prayer, heart prayer, a celebration of
divine accomplishment, and prayer that comes from lack, that asks for a correction. The
latter is not prayer, but a kind of abscess.
True prayer is gratitude. True spirituality is an absence of urges, which translates to being
available to every moment. When cancer, disease, birth, violence or emotion strike, be
available, for there is the depth.
Boy Scouts, football, politics, spirituality, the child all have their place, otherwise they
wouldn’t exist. Wanting to set ourselves free from all our problems to become spiritual, to
become “awakened” has its place too. These rules, these references, this knowledge all
come from fear. There comes a time when you no longer feel the need to look for yourself
in the different currents of life. You shine light onto spirituality, not the other way around. It is
your clarity that allows you to deeply understand politics, fatherhood, violence, disease,
Buddhism, Islam etc. Your clarity shines light on all of that.
That clarity, isn’t it spirituality?
Of course. But in that space, there isn’t any word, any direction, any knowledge, any
school, any lineage, any teaching, and above all any spiritual person. What remains is
non-separateness.
Understand that there is nothing to understand, nothing to acquire. I do not need to invent
tools in order to face life; I do not need to create mechanisms of defense or ownership in
order to face situations.
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Look honestly at what is here, at what triggers fear, anxiety, pretension or defense in me.
Clearly accept my pretensions, my limits. These limits will reflect the limitless.
We need to live our mediocrity; it reveals the ultimate in ourselves.
When I refuse mediocrity, when I project a superior or an inferior, when I imagine spiritual
notions that should set me free from ordinary life, then I find myself in my imagination. It is a
form of psychosis. The life which my concepts call mediocrity, that is precisely the essential.
Function in day to day life: eat, sleep, love, see, feel, look. Let all the emotions live inside
yourself, with nothing to defend, to assert or to know. I do not need anything to find the
intuition of the primordial. No need to change anything in myself.
Some discoveries need to be made and then forgotten, in the moment. For the person
experiencing this, it is terrifying, because the ego needs qualifications: being spiritual,
meditating, liberating oneself.
We need to leave our meeting like a dog who has seen a bone which was taken away just
as he was about to close its mouth around it. It is that feeling, just before frustration arises,
that we must retain. The feeling of an empty mouth is a non-conclusion, a space which
resonates with our freedom.
Thank you for coming.
English Intro
Chapter 6
English Intro
Let the moon be free

Surrender, let go of sight and reason and walk the pathless path.
Stay in your own loss without wanting, without knowing,
without desiring anything.
Live like a child without a care in the world, not even the care to do God’s work.
Madame Guyon:
Isn’t the fear that stops me from surrendering the same as the fear of letting go of the too
well-known exterior world?
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Whatever I feel is always the doorway to the essential. If I am mature enough to feel fear or
rage in its immediacy and not in the story, that feeling will lead me back to availability. But
as long as I attach the emotion to a cause, I cut myself off from any possibility of resolution.
The situation that disturbs me is a gift that I give myself in order to discover deep emotion
anew. There is nothing outside. Sooner or later, you understand that.
If you are lucky enough to be afraid or to be disturbed, come back to the felt sense. You are
going to find the causeless fear, the true fear. It inhabits your whole body-mind: your hair,
your nails, all your systems. You feel that fear, you are not afraid. All of that appears in you,
in your own spaciousness.
When you say, “I am afraid,” you block the process; you express a thought, which stops you
from feeling. Fear is in your chest, your jaw, your belly, your thighs, your eyes. Let the felt
sense take charge of itself. You don’t have to do anything to digest—similarly with feeling.
Just let digestion and feeling happen in you. But as long as you link fear and emotion to a
situation, you will miss it. Tomorrow something else will create fear or will provoke anger.
The ego always wants to find the reason: “It makes sense that I’m afraid, that I am angry.”
Depending on my psyche, I constantly either justify or condemn my feeling. You can’t have
one without the other. One day you justify, the next you criticize, it’s the same process. At
one point you stop justifying and criticizing—you listen. There, that felt sense that we are
talking about takes over. There is no longer anything to think about.
The felt sense remains, which is life itself.
To think is to be afraid of feeling, it is a compensation. I tell myself a story, a happy or

unhappy story. I'd rather do anything than just feel.
In happiness or unhappiness, the personality can taste itself. In the felt sense, there is
space. There is neither happiness nor unhappiness, there is no place for the ego. We
cannot own the felt sense. As soon as we say, “I am peaceful,” it becomes a thought, not a
feeling.
Fear constantly triggers thoughts and agitation. When I feel, I can't be agitated. When I
listen to the sound, if I am feeling, I am peaceful. All the noise appears within that peace. If I
am agitated, I criticize this noise, I tell myself that if there weren't any noise I would be less
agitated. I react in that way because I am agitated; the noise only triggers my agitation. In
peace, noise is only noise. Yelling, loud music or a heartbeat are the same noise. They
only disturb agitated psyches.
When I am lucky enough to be challenged or agitated by noise, I come back to myself

instead of dealing with the noise. My agitation comes from my pretending that there
shouldn't be any noise, that it would be better that way.
I will be eternally unhappy if I think that things could or ought to be any different from what
they are in the moment.
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Like all emotions, fear is a feeling. Let go of the story, do not be concerned with what you
are afraid of, do not become intelligent, do not build a deep philosophical theory to justify
your fear, rather give yourself over to the felt sense. In that felt sense there is no fear. Fear
is in you; you are no longer scared and you feel the sensation called fear. It is the most
direct way.
When you talk about availability, my interpretation is to welcome life as it shows up and that
gives me the feeling of openness, of freedom; but when you say that freedom is
sacrilegious, I don't understand.
The idea of being free is a lack of clarity. The felt sense of availability is a deep experience.
The idea I am free, as well as the idea I am peaceful, are a form of agitation.
Does spirituality include an element of the sacred or is it only functional?
To refer to an absence of knowledge is sacred. Spirituality that is taught or learned has

nothing sacred whatsoever. It is a miserable disguise for people who are afraid to live.
Sacred spirituality is not thought, not organized, not elaborated, not utilized. That spirituality
is the sacred.
Spirituality is not a refuge, a means, a crutch. It is not here to compensate for life failures. It
is a dynamism, it is an intuition that life events have a meaning beyond thought. Spirituality
is that feeling of humility, of total absence of knowledge. When I awaken to this non-
understanding of life, when I stop pretending that I can explain what happens to me, that I
need something or that something else should not have happened, there lies humility. I am
done with pretending that I know what is right for me and for the world. Listening begins.
That listening is sacred, it is spirituality itself.
Any spiritual knowledge is a miserable caricature. Any spiritual teaching, any codification is
carried out by the blind leading the blind. Knowledge comes from thought, from memory.
What could be sacred in that?
What is sacred is the felt sense, the availability to beauty, to life. It manifests at every level
but can never be manifested objectively.
When you fall in love you don't know it. There is excitement. The moment you say, “I am in
love,” it's over—you are no longer authentic, you have created a situation. When you really
are in love, when you really deeply love somebody, you don't know it. When you tell
yourself, “I love somebody,” you are telling yourself a story. You can't conceptualize beauty.
You can't taste joy.
At the opera, you get moments of not knowing, of pure joy. But if you try to taste the
emotion, it triggers a form of conflict.
There is nothing to taste.
The only value of the spirituality that brings security is at a psychiatric level. The spirituality
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that knows what you need to do, what you shouldn't do, what is just or unjust, moral or not,
is a part of the fences erected by society. It might have some value from a legal viewpoint
but it holds nothing sacred. It's an ideology.
Ideologies come from fear. Without fear, I don't need to be anything, to identify with this or
that. It is fear which invents me. To believe oneself French, white, black, Jewish, rich, poor,
Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, atheist, all this comes from fear. When I am not moved by fear, I
do not claim to be anything. This makes me available. All that happens becomes easy,
intimate, it shows up deeply as myself. I meet only myself. Nothing is foreign.
If anything looks foreign, it is because I am in the story, because I pretend to be somebody.

Can I make a movement without pretending to be anything? Can I look at the tree without
knowing, without trying to find myself in my knowledge of the tree? This observation, this
questioning is spiritual. Can I expect nothing for a moment? Be totally present? Here, no
recipe is possible; I cannot appropriate this availability and pretend “I am available.”
But trying to find oneself in Christianity, Buddhism, dualism or Islam, by needing to own a
husband, children, a mistress, a lover, needing to identify with a country, a nationality, a
color, a race, a football team, literary or movie tastes or anything else—that kind of
spirituality is pathological. If people do not defend these images, they think they have
nothing. They are ready to fight to keep them. That is completely legitimate, but it isn't what
we're here for.
Our meetings are designed for those who have a hunch that when they stop inventing
something, belonging is no longer possible, that all knowledge, religions, races, ethnicities
and nationalities are mere inventions of fear, that we invent culture, the world and society
to avoid looking in deeply.
As long as we haven't reached this understanding, it is justified to believe oneself French,

Buddhist or married—and without those beliefs we would need even more psychiatric
hospitals. At one point, you no longer need to own anything; you keep functioning, but you
don't subscribe to these defense systems. Life's beauty is in the moment. It cannot be
limited to a given framework. In the moment, I am free from all frameworks. It looks as if I
continue to be this or that but, deep down, I no longer feel limited. That spirituality has
neither shape nor name.
Earlier you said: “When I love somebody, I don't know that I love her; as soon as I tell
myself that I love her, then I probably no longer love her.” I don't know if those were the
exact words but it was something similar. I can see how far I am from that, because I am
used to knowing whom I love and saying it. Could you clarify?
When you are with your children, you don't think constantly: “I love my child, I love my child,
I love my child.” When you are with your wife you don't say at every moment: “I love my
wife, I love my wife, I love my wife.” When you are with your dog you don't assert all the
time: “I love my dog, I love my dog, I love my dog.” You do not need to articulate the
inevitable.
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Of course, you love your dog, but in fact, there is nothing that you can refrain from loving.
You love what shows up. You love your child; but when you take your neighbor's child in
your arms, do you love her less? You do not need to pretend that your love is localized.
You love what is here, in front of you, because there is nothing else.
At one point, you give up the habit of living your life as a story. When you eat tasty
asparagus, you no longer need to think, “I am eating very tasty asparagus.” The taste of the
asparagus is pervasive enough to prevent the comment. If you think, “I am eating
asparagus,” it means that the asparagus is not good enough or that you are not sensitive
enough to its taste.
We may formulate things. Dogs love to hear loving words. When you are with your dog, you
can often tell him how much you love him; it is like stroking him with your hand. You can
meet somebody and confess your love for them—but it is a figure of speech. You can
admire your hand and express your tenderness for it. You can look at your desk, your car, a
rock in your garden, the moon. Proclaiming your love for the moon is very beautiful. You
can say it aloud, it is not a problem. But at one point, when you look at the moon, there is
such emotion that only a tear in your eye expresses it. You are no longer caught in the
need for expression. That is love without demand. You let the moon be free. You just
admire her.
In some circumstances, for theatrical joy, you may ask your mistress if she still loves you.
You can also ask your dog or your five-year-old child. But it is just for the fun of it. The word
is light. Since the word means nothing, you can play with it. There is nothing deep there.
Only the emotion is deep.
Telling someone that you love her or that you don't love her is the same thing. It is the
emotion that counts. If you have a mistress, sometimes when she has been a bitch you tell
her you no longer love her, and on other occasions you tell her you love her like mad; it's
the same thing, it is for the joy of the moment. You tell her that you no longer want to see
her, or that you want to see her more, it's the same thing. It is a game, nothing else. Life is
light.
When you do not pretend that you have a story about yourself, you totally love the person
you are with. You don't love your wife or your child more than the wife or the child of the
neighbor. Loving your child more becomes unthinkable. You totally love the child who is in
your arms.
In the moment, love doesn't require any justification, any reference. It is wholesome love
that consumes itself immediately. The next second the world has changed but, in that
moment, that love is all there is. There is nothing personal to it. It isn't your doing, it’s the
nature of the world to love.
Saying yes is not an action, it is our natural state. Yes comes from availability, no comes
from thoughts, from fear. Of course, I'm talking about a psychological no; if you put your
hand on the candle, your hand says no, but it is not a psychological state.
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Thinking that you do not love that which is not your immediate environment is pretending.
The fear of loving is very strong in us. We have learned that love is a form of weakness. But
there is no one who loves. The personality cannot love; it wants, it requires and it demands,
and those conditions are its love. But that is not love, it's business.
Love is the strongest emotion; all others derive from it.
Love heals. But as long as I deny love and myself, wounds cannot heal.
Children who have suffered long-term abuse from a parent that they naturally love develop
an apparent form of hatred towards the rapist. Many cannot go beyond their resentment
and their whole life will be colored by this wound. But when maturity settles—twenty years,
thirty years, a hundred years later—some of them will discover that they still carry this
feeling of love for the one who abused them. If they let this love live again, they may
understand that during all those years, their suffering was due to the fact that they didn't let
themselves love the one who had abused them rather than to the abuse itself. It is a freeing
experience that serious therapists know well. Of course, it can only be touched in very few
cases but when it can be reached, it brings an extraordinary transformation.
Love liberates. Every time I believe that I do not love someone, I pretend. Just because he
is of a different race, from a different country, with a different attitude, because he is like this,
because he shouldn't be like that, I deny my primordial emotion, which is love. That is what
makes me suffer.
Love does not prevent action. When somebody attacks you on the street, or attacks your
child, feeling this deep love towards the aggressor does not prevent you from acting. It isn't
an action against something, but through something. You might dislocate a shoulder, but
without any resentment for the person. There are situations where we must fight, but we
can fight without judgment. If an animal tries to bite you or your loved ones, sometimes you
need to kill it; but you do not carry any hatred for the animal and when you have killed it,
you remain present—for the situation does not end with the physical death of the
aggressor. In this way, you do not hold any psychological residual effect. It isn't a judgment,
it isn't a decision; it is a spontaneous act.
In Meccan Revelations, Ibn Arabi tells that after several circumambulations around the
Black Stone, a very strong rain arrived. Hearing the drops of rain flow into a gutter, he said
he experienced the extraordinary love of the world. The love water had for the gutter in
order to stroke it in such a way, the love and the beauty of the gutter, which was there for
the water. What was seen there, in a non-mental vision, was the love of the world.
This can be perceived in water that flows into a gutter as in anything else, except when you
pretend to love, because then you are in a story. You cannot love as a person. Love is
contemplation. This emotion only lives in the absence of a person. When we pretend to
love, we lower the other to the level of our imagination, to the level of our fantasy. It is a
form of abuse. We utilize the other, the image we have of the other, to satisfy our vanity, our
fantasy of the moment. When the other no longer fits that fantasy, we replace him or her.
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Love is without any doer, without any knowledge. There is only emotion.
When you speak about pretense, the words you use could suggest that you condemn
pretense, which doesn't make any sense because when this pretense is unveiled, we
realize that it was the way chosen by our deep being to find itself. This form of
condemnation that I feel when I listen to you is something I have suspected for a long time;
a sort of close link between perpetrator and victim that exists in each of us. That is the story
I tell myself, but it is also, among other things, what brings me close to you. It is as if there
were still something left over from that story of the perpetrator which is the truly
fundamental story.
Non-separation is to witness what is false, meaning what creates separateness. But I must
see it clearly. To be available is to become aware of entering into a story, to see that it's only
a story.
Clear vision does not include any condemnation, it does away with the story of the snake.
Since there is only a rope, it is a condemnation without an object. The word condemnation
is a word like any other. It is clear vision and when I see that there is only a rope, I
condemn the snake; when I realize that I have no reason to suffer, I condemn the suffering;
when I discover that I only suffer because of my story, the story is condemned and it is a
liberation.
You can certainly find words that will be more precise, more eloquent or more appropriate
to express this idea. I did not study and my vocabulary is very limited.
What I was talking about isn't at all a judgment, it is an inquiry. I do not question the
formulation but my felt sense of it.
I can only talk about the emotion that imposes itself on me in the moment. I do not know
anything else.
I need to become aware that the suffering that I pretend to feel is egotistical, that I only
suffer from myself. When I see clearly that my pretending to suffer is a story, that I am
dishonest because I no longer listen, that I listen only to my story, then this clear vision
condemns my story, it is a liberation. I instantly condemn both my pretending to suffer and
my suffering. What remains is a tear of joy, untouched and untouchable by the situation.
I have known what you are talking about for a long time. When I was next to someone who
was suffering, I used to have the fantasy to want to lessen his sorrow. Then, in the
presence of someone who was sad, depressed, suicidal, I was gifted with a space in which
I didn't want anything for him, in which I didn't want him to change, to move even a fraction
of an inch, in which I was totally present, should he live or should he die, should he love or
should he hate, should he be like this or like that. At that moment, I found myself a lot closer
to him than to all the people I had wanted to help, the people on whom I had projected my
imagination of what is good.
If at some point, when with someone who suffers, the thought that the crisis should lighten
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up arises, then a presence devoid of any comment returns right away. It isn't my job to
decide whether someone should live or die, whether they should be sad or happy. There is
this presence, this emotion, this love of what is there, and at the same time I cannot do
anything for the other. I cannot do anything for anybody. There isn't anybody. Life is what it
is.
This urge to change something comes back, and again the resonance shows me the extent
to which I am pretending, I am in my story and I know better than God what should be. At
that moment, I come back to my natural stupidity, to my total ignorance. I do not know what
is essential for the person who weeps, suffers or dies next to me.
I don't know anything. I am present.
What is the urge that leads to teaching?
The urge that would lead to teaching could be called megalomania: believing I know a
thing or two. All the teachers who transmit their teachings are only there to spare the
psychiatrists—a healthy social justification!
If I am honest, no teaching is possible. What could I teach? My own vacuity? That, you have
already. That is what we all share. It is that absence of ownership which allows us to love,
that absence of a pretense to be this or that, to know anything whatsoever.
We can transmit techniques. To use a bow and arrow or to dance tango, we can learn
those things. If you want to master an art such as yoga, you need to learn it as well. But
here we don't go into these things; there is no teaching. We meet each other for the joy of
deepening the premonition of our autonomy, of our absence of need. We meet for the joy of
deepening together this conviction that when I pretend to need something, I am being
dishonest with myself, this conviction that I suffer because of my dishonesty and not
because of my so-called need. I become aware of this obvious fact and I come back to
integrity, with no one needing to have integrity. This is an exploration that we carry out
together, but there is no teaching.
Let's stop focusing on what separates us. Opinions, imagination, knowledge— “I know this,
you know that.” All that is nothing but a hodgepodge of fears codified and named
spirituality, culture, civilization, morality and so on. It is so thin that it can't really separate
us. What unites us, on the other hand, is the heart emotion, which cannot be taught.
What we do here is of interest to very few people. Most people need teachings, a guru and
a tradition to follow. Here there is no such thing. There is no guru, no teaching, and nothing
is asked of you. We go home without gaining any competence whatsoever. Very few
people have the capacity, the maturity or the madness to spend so much time on nothing.
But this nothing, at one point, will stay with you forever. You will forget all the teachings you
have learned. Later on, you won't be in a condition to apply all the techniques that you
practice. All that has been elaborated through a thought process, all that seemed so
important before will be inaccessible to you because your brain, your body will no longer
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allow it. But this essential emotion will stay. It will be with you on your deathbed when all
the other senses will have stopped functioning. It is the heart of everything. All else is a
distraction. All that you can learn, know, understand, depends on the functioning of your
brain; it is superficial.
Nevertheless, we are under the impression that if we come to listen to you, it is because
you have understood or perceived something… More than we have, in any case!
It is a prejudice that we may have in the beginning. Very soon, we become aware that we
haven't understood anything and that we don't need to understand anything. That is what
needs to be understood, the fact that I do not need any intellectual clarity, I only need to
stop pretending to find myself in a thought, in a story. Free from all understanding, from all
evaluation, I come back to the felt sense, at the heart of everything.
You have experienced that; therefore, you know more than we do.
Everyone has had that experience, at night when falling asleep or when a thought ends,
before another one appears.
What brings one to experiment with more fervor is dissatisfaction. The belief that a situation
could make me happy is the limit which prevents dedication to deep inquiry.
We need to awaken to the awareness of this total incapacity to be fulfilled by anything. As

long as a smile, a look, a love, a caress, a situation can bring contentment, I am not
deserving of deep inquiry, of deep listening. Why not? Because it is not true. Nothing can
satisfy the human heart except its own collapse. At one point comes the grace of not being
able to be satisfied by an object. This non-satisfaction is the reservoir of energy which
allows this constant questioning; in each moment I contemplate my pretense, my
arrogance, my suffering. I contemplate all of this with a total letting go of any intention to
change.
As long as we carry within ourselves the capacity to be appeased by a car, a house, a

woman, a dog, a profession, a future, a past, a body of knowledge, spirituality or some
teaching, we don't yet have that fervor which is necessary to blow up what needs to be
blown up. The complete madness of dissatisfaction is the energy needed to explode what
is superficial in us.
Often, I have hunches that what I'm looking for is not this or that; and then, again,
something seduces me, and I tell myself that it’s so wonderful to live it. I then betray my
quest. It isn't a moral betrayal, but an energetic betrayal. The energy is no longer available
for this constant madness. What we are talking about here depends on the intensity of that
madness.
Is that energy available only in a state of permanent dissatisfaction?
In permanent dissatisfaction which isn't dissatisfaction anymore, because there comes a

time when the dynamics inherent to unsatisfying situations disappear.
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I can be grateful to situations, because life is wonderful and, in every moment, I meet
something new. When I lay my hand on it, it becomes like sugar in water; I can no longer
own anything. It is a very sensitive moment and a little like being on a razor's edge; I only
get to witness.
This can look strange to the environment around me, which wants to create security by
inventing me in a certain manner.
At one point, we can no longer belong to a situation. That doesn't prevent us from doing
what we need to do. If we have children, we feed the children; if we have friends, we live
with the friends; and if we have a bed, we make the bed, but without any urge to try to find
ourselves. It may seem a little cold on a certain level, but that is deceptive. It is a discrete
madness. Only very intimate friends get to see it. We can no longer belong to anything, and
we can no longer comprehend what belonging to could even mean.
How can we be certain of not belonging to anything?
The need to be someone comes from the notion of belonging. There is no certainty here.
Certainty is knowledge and here we talk about the absence of knowledge. It's very
uncomfortable for oneself and for one's environment. When you tell those around you,
“There is nothing I can help you with, absolutely nothing,” for many it's a shock. They can
no longer pretend. That brings either their maturation, or more work for psychologists.
We can't aim at non-security and want to stay safe at the same time.
Am I ready to leave all my references behind? Am I ready to leave behind my race, my

name, my country, my family, my children, my car, my house, my body, everything that could
be called mine? To no longer own anything, not my past, not my future, not my emotions?
Am I ready to witness life without any expectation? Everything is available in the moment.
There is no need for sadhana, for spiritual quest. Nothing is needed. Just in this moment,
sacrifice the pretense to be something.
Who is ready to have nothing?
I certainly can't be the one to decide this. If this is not ready inside of me, if it isn't leaving
me yet, I am not in a position to decide that it should leave.
I can’t do anything about it. That is the good news. There is nothing I can do to bring about
maturity. I can only observe my immaturity. At every moment, I can witness how much I try to
find myself, how I hope for myself and how I invent myself in a given situation: “I am rich, I
am richer, I am less rich, I am poor, I am poorer, I am less poor, I love myself, he loves me,
we love each other, we don't love each other, we no longer love each other.” I am only
talking to myself. I need to see the mechanism.
When I face my dissatisfaction and my own discomfort, am I also talking to myself?
If I find the cause for them, then yes. If it is only a felt sense, then no, there is peace.
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Discomfort in my throat, fear in my belly, there is no agitation, no story.
It just happens?
Not even that. What could be more intense than the sensation of the moment? I need to
see to what extent I look down on it, thinking that something is greater.
If it is not intense, is it that I'm not able to feel enough?
No, it is that you qualify the experience—because it is always intense. I call the intensity
non-intense. It's like saying: “I do not feel my hand.” It is the verbal codification that I use to
describe the sensation I have of my hand.
There is always intensity. You are too much of a good boy to know that experience but
when you take LSD, you swallow a pill, you keep doing what you were doing and, after a
half-hour, you say to yourself: “That's strange, I don't feel anything.” After forty-five minutes,
you say again: “That is strange, I still don't feel anything.” And all of a sudden you realize
that you've been on a full journey for over an hour. It’s the same thing here. It was so strong
that you didn't realize it. Since you don't do LSD, it's not a good example for you, but I can't
think of any other. If it isn't clear, perhaps we can find a pill!
What took us away from the ability to recognize this sensation?
Our arrogance, our knowledge, our imagination: “I understand, I am right, I know what is
correct.” It isn't a condemnation, it is an observation.
It is like the little child who gets thirty presents for Christmas and who says: “I didn't get
anything.” It’s the same thing: a lack of clear vision. And this lack of clear vision is the
doorway. Thus, it isn't something to get rid of. Fear and emotion will help me find clarity.
The lack of clear vision is clear vision. When I become aware of my lack of clear vision, this
non-vision is vision. You can't see light, you can only see darkness. And when you see it, it
disappears. When you shine light on darkness, there is no more darkness.
You can't ever see light. That is why Islam doesn't depict the Ultimate and why the direct
approach is called the negative way.
The act of seeing my limits opens to the limitless. When I become aware of the arrogance
which lives in me, this realization is humility itself. The pretense of humility is only
arrogance.
I can only see my arrogance. That vision absorbs what is seen. Arrogance is my doorway
to a humility where there is no one to be humble.
We can't own anything, become anything, be anything. Only a poet could speak of this.
We don't own these words. The poem invents the poet, not the other way around.
The poem dreams the poet.
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English Intro
Chapter 7
English Intro
Tomorrow doesn't exist

He is that which appears in the concealment itself and that which is concealed in every
appearance.
People of the heart have even said that the inability to know Him is the pinnacle of
knowledge...
Words fail, the speaker is mute and the audience deaf.
Ruhollah Khomeini: Mishah
Can you speak of death, of its meaning, of the way it can be approached?
There is no choice. You live exactly how you die and you die how you live. If you live in
fear, you die in fear; if you live openly and are available, you will die open and available.
Forget about death and give yourself fully to life. When you are lucky enough to experience
fear, be thankful. For if you truly taste it now, you won't have to endure it later, on your
deathbed. Let it speak to you somatically. See that you are not afraid, but rather that you
sense your fear. Little by little, it will empty itself. But if you try to minimize fear through
some technique, you will reinforce it a little more each time—and it will catch up with you at
the time of death.
Live openly and be available. Death becomes a non-event and you no longer think about
it. No knowledge of it is necessary.
Avoid reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Do not postpone life by preparing for death.
You do not need priests or esoteric knowledge or any such fantasy if you can help it.
Let your expectations, your anxiety, your worries die in yourself; that is the real death. If
such a death becomes embodied in you, you will notice that you no longer think about the
death of the body.
For many of us, as death approaches, the brain deteriorates. All the knowledge that you
will have accumulated, what you will have read, techniques and romantic ideas that you
will have entertained will no longer be accessible. Thus, any preparation is useless.
There is nothing to know. Availability and openness to the moment are your sole
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companions.
All the reflections that you may have had on the subject of death are only a memory, a
ragbag of information you collected on TV or when sitting with dying friends. It is on this
heap of erroneous notions that you base your idea of death.
Forget the great master, the lama, all those who would want to assist you. All alone, on the
sidewalk or on a hospital bed, die in peace. No priests, no assistance or weeping family,
and no need to be surrounded. Die simply, as you have lived: free.
If your loved ones are devastated at your death bed, you must accept that too. If his bad
karma pushes a Tibetan lama to want to help you, or if a Catholic priest insists on giving
you his blessing, let them do as they need to for their psychological survival. Their
ritualized agitation allows them to postpone their own fears, but these psychopathic actions
have nothing to do with you.
Nothing can help you—that is the wonder—for nothing is necessary! It is just like at night;
the body dies into sleep, thinking vanishes, perception disappears.
Those around you who are happy to see you go should stay and those who are sad should
be banned, for to be afflicted by someone’s death is a lack of respect, a lack of love. Your
true friends will rejoice when they learn about your death. Not everyone can hear this!
Yoga is the art of dying. By working with your body, you learn to die. I am not only talking on
a symbolic level, but practically too. You learn to die, you learn to live, it is the same thing.
If I understand correctly, it isn't necessary to be conscious at the time of death?
Can you choose whether you will be hit over the head with a baseball bat, have a car
accident, or have to take drugs to lessen unbearable pain—all of which would inevitably
decrease your level of conscious sensitivity?
There is no choice. You don't prepare for life, you simply live it. You don't have to know
anything about yourself or what you will have to face tomorrow. You will know soon
enough. Why be interested in what happens tomorrow? The present moment is too rich.
When you completely give yourself to sensitivity, tomorrow doesn't exist. The present life is
too beautiful, too intense, too full to be able to mix in a tomorrow, a future, a preparation.
You don’t anticipate anything. The only true preparation is availability.
An ideal death only exists in novels. To die cross-legged, erect, aware… I am not saying it
never happens, of course, and it is wonderful when it does. But it is our storytelling that
judges, comments, and says, “It was a beautiful death,” or “It was a terrible death.” In truth
what do we know? What do we know of the person who dies in pain, in torture, screaming
in agony? How do we know that in the moments after her body has gone, she won’t find
everything she wanted? And what do we know of the one who dies calmly, who goes off in
a dreamlike state, thinking himself a Buddhist? Is he really going to meet all those entities
that will help him improve himself in his next life, then a little bit more in the next one, and in
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every life a little more, until, after 950 lives, he finally becomes a Bodhisattva? All this
phantasmagoria comes from the fear of dying. How can we pretend to know what is best?
What is right is what happens.
Conscious death is very beautiful. Martial arts practitioners are familiar with Tesshu
Yamoaka, a great nineteenth century kendo master who died sitting, fan in hand. Tanaka
Seiji, his disciple, made a lithograph of it, which is published in some books on martial arts.
A few moments before his death, he summoned his students and asked them: “Why is your
training less noisy, why do I hear less yelling?” His students answered that it was out of
respect for his last moments. He scolded them and explained that if they really wanted to
show respect, they needed to fight harder and tougher. Then, after having given this last bit
of advice and upon hearing the shouting of the attacks, he drew his last breath. Some
people die this way, it is a wonderful symbol, but it isn't something to try to achieve.
If life allows you to die in peace, it is very well; but if you die in violence, you need to face it.
You aren't going to stop fighting and say: “Now I am going to die in peace!” No, you fight
until your last breath. To die fighting or to die sitting makes no difference.
On another level, when you become available to your fears, to your anxieties, you prepare
for death. You prepare to say yes, to accept. But don't do it for that reason, do it for the
sheer joy of it.
What about this attachment to the other, to life, to the body, to being somebody, or nothing?
There is nothing to try for, life is happening inside of you.
For a time, you need to feel young, beautiful, strong, intelligent, wealthy, educated,
spiritual, Buddhist or whatever. The same way that you needed, at some point, to belong to
a football team, to collect stamps, to shine in school, to have this or that friend. One day you
will no longer identify with a football player, you will no longer perceive yourself as a
member of this or that group. In time, you will notice that all identifications, all demands
fade away.
What made you so happy at one point leaves you indifferent later. But don't anticipate this
shift. As long as you're happy to own a red car, a blonde woman, a healthy body, a future, a
past, a race, a country, you need to live that. One day these things will no longer mean
anything to you.
Above all, do not try to be nothing or it will become a concept like any other. Do not
become one of those infamous enlightened beings from California or elsewhere who are
so deeply blinded that they believe they live in clarity.
To be nothing is not a quality, it is a noticing. A bit like my friend Virgil used to say: “I cannot
pretend to be somebody.” The pretense is to be somebody. Thus, it is not about deciding to
be nothing. One day, you will stop taking yourself for Napoleon, you will no longer need to
feel you exist in order to live. It will come to you naturally. Above all do not adopt another
idea such as: “I am nothing!” That would be a new fantasy.
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Can you speak more about renouncing? This week is suicide prevention week and I
wonder when I hear you say—or when I understand: “We need to go to war and not give
up.” In the end, however, when we accept death, we give up. If I no longer want to live, I
renounce life.
We need to accept that too. If someone can no longer deal with life, he doesn't have a
choice in the matter. Some people simply do not have the capacity to face life. You can't
keep somebody alive at all cost. That is therapeutic harassment. If a suicidal person is
open to your support, obviously you help them. But suicide isn't a failure of healing. We do
what we can. Some people need to have a complex life experience.
Suicide prevention week is a perfect symbol of the hypocrisy of our modern society, just
like women's week, mothers' week, children's week, dogs' week, week of the handicapped
or violence prevention week. These media events are presented as a politically correct
philosophy and only help to appease the conscience of a society which, out of greed,
refuses to shed light on its internal mechanisms.
Isn't suicide a sort of giving up? When you say: “I don't want to live anymore?”
Being happy to live is no more a choice than the act of renouncing life. A person who can
lift 250 pounds isn't superior to one who can't. The one who is not able to accomplish this
feat does not give up, he clearly lives his limitations.
Some people no longer have the strength to face life, to face pain. In more or less
clearheaded moments, they take the direction of suicide. We can only be present with
them. If the person is available, we help them as much as possible. Some people are
beyond rescuing, inaccessible to any form of help. We can still ease their pain by carrying
them with us, in our hearts. Just because someone committed suicide does not mean that
it's over, that we must think of something else, go to the movies. We keep being with them.
There is no need to fight against what is happening. If there is war, we face the war. If
necessary, we fight, without any ideological comment. When somebody dies, when
someone commits suicide, we do not reject it: we support them.
I know someone who is about to die. A member of his family really wants to take his place,
she does not want to live anymore. What can I do?
There is nothing you can do. This person has a fantasy. Be present, love her, listen to her. If
you feel the space to say something, to do something, to touch, to help, do it! If not, don't be
hard on yourself, this shouldn't keep you from sleeping. You are not in charge of every
suicidal person.
You must accept your limits. Everywhere, at every moment, people are dying in terrible
conditions. Will they be better off if you suffer? No! If you run into this situation, if life, in its
complexity, places you there, you try what you can. Sometimes what you can do isn't
enough to stop someone from dying or committing suicide.
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If you ask an astrologer to make the chart of a person who committed suicide, he will
confirm the inevitable. If it is the chart of someone who died in a car accident he will also
confirm that. We do not witness any freedom of choice in these facts. The one who kills
himself does not have more choice than the one who gets run over by a truck. It isn't choice
on one side and accident on the other. There is neither accident nor choice. What happens
is the inevitable. You can't call one situation normal and the other abnormal; everything is
normal.
When you don't build a story around the situation, you realize that what happens isn't
haphazard. Suicide is not an anomaly, an exceptional event separate from the rest of the
universe. People who commit suicide believe that everything will stop, and this may be a
misconception. Sometimes people cannot understand that. They commit suicide, and then
they must take responsibility.
Facing someone who wants to kill himself, the only thing to do is to be happy—for
happiness is contagious. The more someone in your environment is desperate, the more it
is your duty to find the space to be available. If somebody’s distress or depression makes
you sad, leave the room, otherwise you will poison him even more.
You can only meet somebody else's sadness in a good way if you yourself are happy. If
one of your loved ones is dying and you are afflicted, go to their bedside only when you are
ready to accept the game of life and death. Then you will truly help them.
Your civic duty, in a deep sense, is to stop contaminating the world with your psychological
suffering. That is why yoga is the quintessential civic art. When you practice yoga, you can
no longer be unhappy. You make yourself available to sorrow when it comes up. You are
not sad, you sense your sadness. It vibrates, it moves, it lives and it dies.
When you talk about accepting the game of life and death, I find this easy in Quebec or
other industrialized countries, even if a tremendous number of people suffer there too.
However, I am surprised that you say there are no accidents, when so many people live in
poverty or in pain. Are you saying that there is no meaning to all of that?
There is the meaning you give it. That's the only one possible. The way you think depends
on your memory, on your culture. Depending on whether you are a Marxist-Leninist, a
Trotskyist, a Maoist, a capitalist, a psychoanalyst, a Yogi, a Muslim or a Hindu, the meaning
of the world is completely different. So, what is the real meaning? Is it the viewpoint of the
Trotskyist, the analyst or the Islamist? These are all projections. When you realize that
every opinion which you proffer comes from your culture, you no longer attempt to find a
reason.
You can only understand the world through the meaning you give it. For a frog, the world
has frog meaning; for someone who suffers, the world is suffering; for a happy person, it is
joy. The shark understands the world from the point of view of a shark; orcas have a very
different opinion; so do rats, Muslims, atheists, sad people, happy people, wealthy people,
poor people or young people. Any identification to a given category gives us its specific
vision. Ask a ten-year-old child, a twenty-year-old, an eighty-year-old, a homeless person
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or a wealthy CEO what the meaning of life is. You will notice that the answer is always
different. What are they all talking about? They're talking about their own perception.
This discovery sets us free from the need to project our narrow vision onto something
which is boundless.
Life has no abstract significance. Something else is present, a non-conceptual current. The
explanation that you can find changes with age. When you tell a small child a fairytale, he
understands. When he is fifteen, he has read Freud or Jung and has a different viewpoint.
At forty, another still. At fifty-five, he has a deep sense of intuition and understands what a
symbol can be. Finally, when he reaches seventy other intuitions come to him and his
interpretation is more subtle. So, which is the true understanding? None of them, for there
is no such thing. Each level of development entails more and more refined perceptions, but
all of them are relative.
If you think that there isn't enough suffering in Quebec, then go to an emergency room or a
hospice on a Sunday night and you will find that human distress is exactly the same
whether you are here, in Zaire or in Chechnya.
The need to know comes from fear, fear of being nothing.
Why? We ask the question all the time, looking for explanations that could reassure us.
There is no why. Why seasons, why the moon? Why was I born? Why do we die? Why is
this one in pain and not that one? Asking these questions as a child is legitimate. But one
day the sense of awe burns all the questions away.
When you are entranced by a falling leaf, there is no longer room for questioning. You feel
the leaf fall inside of you—why is no longer possible. The thought why can no longer take
off. Conceptual energy can no longer reach the brain. There is availability, felt sense,
clarity. It isn't a clarity that knows anything, it is an absence of psychological urge.
A leaf falls and you see the beauty of the whole universe in it; at the same time, you feel
that nothing is happening. It is the same for every perception… It all takes place in an open
field. There is no space for concept, for understanding, for anything at all. True meaning is
non-meaning.
So, the reality of life is absolutely out of reach for the mind?
Absolutely. Reasoning can only manipulate information that has been acquired, it cannot
be creative. You learn certain things and then, depending on your intelligence, your culture
and your emotional state, you infer certain flavors, certain proportions, certain
conclusions—and you label it all. You say: “There, I have understood, I am like this, the
neighbor is like that, the word is that way.” In six months, you will have a different opinion,
and six months later another still. When you realize that, there is no way back.
Every human organism has its limits. Bodily, mentally and intellectually we always have
limits. We need to discover that these limits are not limiting, but that they will always be
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here. My political opinions will always derive from my experience, from the experience of
my loved ones, from what I have read, lived, inferred.
Objective thought does not exist. When you realize that, you stop referring to your opinions.
You still have some, but you are not attached to them. When somebody expresses an
opinion different from yours, you do not get offended. You understand that this person
cannot have any other viewpoint than she does. You have yours, she has hers, you feel
completely free with that. Affection, love is still there. You do not seek to convince.
You can also take in new information which will soften your judgment, but this will not take
you very far.
Your appreciation depends on your situation. For a Frenchman, Waterloo will always be a
defeat; for an Englishman it will always be a victory. There is no use asking if, profoundly, it
is one or the other; it depends from which point of view you are looking. When you
comprehend this, you no longer identify with your ideas, you no longer look for yourself
through them. A space has been created. Freed from the fantasy of being right, your
opinions do not stop you. They are still limited, but they no longer rigidly define you.
Go to a museum, examine the Chinese or Korean porcelain from a certain era and
perhaps, you will notice that you do not see it. You know that a whole world exists here, that
somebody else could appreciate, but that is not accessible to you. You acknowledge your
artistic, intellectual, or sensitive incompetence.
In yoga or dance practice, we also notice that certain movements do not fit us. That's the
way it is, we do not feel diminished by that. I am not upset by the limits of my body or of my
intelligence. I do not need my mind to be receptive to Chinese porcelain or my body to be
able to perform this or that posture. I accept my incapacities and, since I respect them, they
become very elastic.
If I have the opportunity to contemplate Chinese porcelain with a lover of that art, I will
begin to appreciate, at my level, its extraordinary character. Only love can transmit, it
makes me look through the eyes of the one who admires. Depending on my capacities, a
resonance is created in me, and the discovery begins. But if I view the art with somebody
who has learned things, with an intellectual, my feeling will remain superficial. We need to
approach an art with someone who is passionate about it. We appreciate music better in
the company of a musician.
But it is not essential to listen to music or to rave in front of porcelain in order to be fulfilled.
Being available to one’s own intellectual, emotional or artistic capacities is a form of
balance. The mind has its limits, but they need not constrain me. I can be free from them. I
simply notice that my capacity for analysis is conditioned by my emotional, intellectual or
professional life. Depending on whether I have a raging toothache or I am in vibrant health,
my capacity for reasoning will be different. I approach things differently if I’m in love or if I
have just been rejected, etc.
My reasoning will always be restricted; that is its beauty, its character. There will come a
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day when I no longer feel bound to it, limited by it.
When you refer to what we are by “I,” are you talking about what we are, that is to say the
Being that perceives all of that? Is that what we deeply are?
When you were eight, you dreamt of owning a red car; at twenty, you desire to be free of
yourself. Those are two symbols. To be free of oneself is a symbol that is more aligned with
what we are talking about than the red car, but as long as this stays a symbol, it is still a car.
Notice that the deep yearning is to stop pretending and, in the same instant, let go of that
understanding.
It is important to detect in ourselves this greed to want to receive, to take, to be. Always
begging like a dog who needs a bone: “I want that, if I had that, give me that.” Notice the
mechanism. We need affection, acknowledgment, respect, teachings, we need to own this
or that. We are always begging, in all directions.
Become familiar with this way of functioning without making any comments. Can I be any
other way? No! Then I face reality, in the moment. It is not about feeling guilty, but about
noticing how I act.
When I ask, I cannot receive. The more I become aware of my greed, the more I am free
from it. As long as I want to acquire, as long as I expect something, this inner demand
prevents me from receiving. We can’t demand a gift, demand grace or joy. We can only
receive when we open.
Become available to your unavailability.
It reminds me of what Meister Eckhart says in instruction three of the Book of Spiritual
Instructions. That is a very beautiful text, very short, to be read every day. The last sentence
is the essence of any teaching: “Take a good look at yourself and, whenever you find
yourself, deny yourself.”
The highest realization is to become aware of our insatiability.
We cannot see truth, beauty, joy, for they are our essence. The only part of ourselves which
is visible is the one which wants to grasp.
I feel the tension; this awareness happens in relaxation. I can only detect tension in the
letting go. When I am really tense, I cannot be aware of it. When I perceive my eyes, my
tongue, my nose in continual tension, I am relaxed; otherwise I wouldn’t notice them.
If I say, “I am available,” instantly I am back in knowledge, information, grasping. I am trying

to become Superman again, to become an awakened being, to become available.
There is nothing to become. I notice my greed and that is the ultimate step. I embody
freedom when I notice my lack of freedom. That is why in the East, this approach is called
the negative way. We point toward what is non-objective. When I become aware of what is
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objective in me, this objectivity refers to its own space, to its origin which is non-objective.
Then it no longer is an experience, it is a non-experience. That is real knowledge. There is
nothing to know and nobody who knows. Detecting this grasping is the highest state. We
need to understand that, to let it go around in our minds in every direction until it becomes
a lived experience. That is yoga.
Recognize envy, observe the demand: I need. At one point, an immense laughter invades
my heart when I feel the rise of the I need in me. That laughter is freedom. In that space,
nothing is needed. What’s left? The gift, with no action of giving or anybody who gives.
Giving makes one happy, receiving doesn’t. Receiving burdens, weighs down, restricts.
I don’t want to get anything. I do not wish for an initiation, a transmission, a teaching, all of
this burdens me, bores me, locks me up. No, I do not desire anything. I vibrate in that
space, that resonance.
Giving without anyone who gives. When I give, I let go of the giver. Offering brings freedom.
Life is only giving, there is no separation.
As long as I want to take, to receive, to follow a teaching, I can only refuse this teaching
which I pretend to desire. It’s a bit like someone who asks for an initiation, someone who
demands a gift. You don’t demand a gift. You are receptive. The initiation, the teaching, the
gift will arrive in the moment of opening, never when it is demanded, when it is hoped for.
There is nothing to wish for. In the non-demand, everything is received. As long as I expect,
I say no.
Even though you had Jean Klein as a teacher, you do not refer to him constantly. That is
not always the case in the different groups I have been part of. Why do we often feel the
need to refer to somebody else? How does one get to speak from their own authority?
Become aware that you cannot know anything. What we call knowledge is a projection.
What is said only has value in the moment.
If you invite friends for dinner, you evaluate your availability, your bank account, you go out
and you spend ten, twenty or one hundred dollars. You look at the fruit, the vegetables, the
grains, and a sort of resonance appears. Depending on your budget, on the style of your
friends, on whether it’s summer or winter, you buy some foods or others. You go home and
you still haven’t decided on the menu. You start to peel, to chop, to dice and, little by little, a
meal takes form. You do not need any recipe. The recipe happens in the moment. You
discover the color, the smell of the fruit, of the vegetable, which stimulates your creativity.
There is no need to know. Life does not demand any formal education. What do you want
to know? You can only pretend. You cannot know anything.
Basically, yoga is the art of not owning. You do not know anything and, when you don’t
pretend anything, you are open to knowing everything. The competencies needed for
functional life will present themselves without anything to learn, to understand, to own. The
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talent you need, you will discover through love. If you fall in love with martial arts, this
truthfulness will bring you some forms of resonance, of understanding. If you fall in love
with yoga, with dance or with music, your enthusiasm for these arts will give you the
intuitive capacity for discovery. What is more beautiful than the unprecedented?
But it is discovery for the joy of discovery. Before you reach your deathbed, you will not
have explored everything; life is infinite. You do not discover to accumulate, to know more,
to write a book on the subject, to become an expert on spirituality, on art. There is no
specialist, only tendencies. You will feel more and more in symbiosis with this resonance.
But it is not knowledge. You can never know anything, you can just be sensitive to
something.
When you live with a woman, you cannot know her. You can be in love, available, but you
can never know anything. If you imagine that you know a woman, you will undoubtedly run
into problems. Not knowing resonates in you and will become really alive, concrete. Any
interpretation is in the moment.
It is possible, in the moment, to embody knowledge. When someone asks you something,
there comes a resonance, and from there, an intuition. It flows through you like a piece of
music flowed through the life of Bach or Mozart. The next moment, you no longer know
anything on that subject.
I remember the former curator of the Indian collections of the largest museum in Los
Angeles, one of the greatest specialists of Himalayan art of that time. He was asked to write
a book on Rajput painting—a romantic subject that is not of real interest to the true lovers of
the arts of the roof of the world. He wrote the book called Rajput Paintings, considered by
many one of the best popular writings on the subject. I met him soon after and he told me: “I
didn’t know anything about painting before I wrote the book and I still don’t know anything
about it.” He became available to this form of art for the time he needed to write the book.
The book was written. Then he no longer needed all that knowledge.
Knowledge can appear, but only in the moment. And no one knows anything.
To want something is to live in fear. It’s the same as wanting a red car or a blonde woman.
Some people feel the need to know something and they become specialists of yoga, of
nonduality or of India.
There is nothing to read, nothing to study—except out of passion. It is the love of Truth that
takes you to Tantra, to car mechanics or to equestrian sport. You do it for the taste, you
don’t look for yourself in your exploration, you do not expect anything for yourself in it, you
are just a perfect tool.
When you are available, the man-woman relationship becomes less pathological. Since
you do not demand anything, a profound relationship can be born. You know you don’t
need anything. When you don’t demand anything, everything is there; all creativity,
spontaneity, elasticity, all of life is present. When you demand, you are miserable, locked in
the past, agitated.
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There is nothing to know, nothing to ask for; that is true science, that is freedom.
To become aware of the fact that we do not need anything is extraordinary. We have lived
all our life convinced that it was compulsory to know, to learn, to be—and suddenly we
realize how absurd that was. When I don’t know anything, everything is possible, every
piece of knowledge can live in me. When I assert something, I shut myself off from any
other knowledge. My little knowing isolates me, freezes me, cuts me off from the world.
When I do not pretend anything, all knowledge is accessible, all of it can incarnate.
Following what you just said, I conclude that the day when I no longer feel the need to be
interesting, to be safe, because I no longer feel afraid, I will no longer need to quote
anybody or to refer to anything external.
No need to make an agenda out of it. Just see, in a flash, that all knowledge is misery,
memory, a prison. See it now, in the moment. Why chain yourself, limit yourself to this or
that? Isn’t the rest interesting? Why be a specialist? No! Everything captivates me,
everything is beautiful. I do not want to settle for one piece of knowledge, I am open to
everything that presents itself.
How do I go about it? I listen.
In a foreign country, when I do not speak the language, what do I do? I listen, I look, I feel, I
observe facial expressions, movements, gestures, resonance. Using all of that, I can
communicate, I can love without prejudice. There is nothing to know. Of course, we are
more or less gifted for assimilation—that’s another issue. But the joy of not knowing is
always here.
I am particularly sensitive to your remark: “Don’t make an agenda out of it.” Every time, it is
as if I have just realized something and then the mind takes ownership and says: “From
now on this is how it will be.”
Yes. As soon as you understand something, you must let go of it.
You cannot understand anything; understanding happens. Clarity is only present when no
one is here. As soon as I say, “I understand,” I fall into the soup. It’s like thinking: “I am
realized.” It might be good for business as a guru, but that’s all.
Understanding does not bring anything. Nothing is understood. Nothing needs analysis.
Interpretation is a fantasy. It is enough to stop projecting non-understanding.
The sight of a tree does not need any explanation. When you stop thinking, when you stop
imagining the tree, you no longer stand in the way of unity. This non-separation can be
called understanding, but nothing is understood and no one understands—there is nothing
outside.
Wanting to “understand someone” is violence, racism. I do not understand anyone; I listen

to this flow of emotion, the sadness, the joy of those I meet. I do not have the arrogance to
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want to understand those around me. From my listening comes a resonance. In that
resonance there is affection, beauty and love. There is no separation.
Wanting to be free or wanting to understand are forms of sacrilege. Wanting to be humble

too. “I’d like to be humble.” You become aware of the mechanism; you realize; you smile at
so much arrogance.
When you say that is a sacrilege, isn’t that a judgment? Earlier you said that we don’t have
a choice. Thus, someone who needs to die, to own a red car or to become realized does
not have a choice. But when you say that is sacrilege or when you evoke violence…
People who commit sacrilege do not have a choice either.
But the word “sacrilege” implies right and wrong.
When you clearly see resonance as non-separation, it becomes silence; if you feel it as
separate, it becomes an object of reflection. Reflection is a sacrilege.
Of course, from a metaphysical standpoint, sacrilege isn’t outside of us. Don’t take what is
said here too literally.
All sounds are carried by silence, but we still can speak of musical harmony or disharmony.
All colors are brought by silence, but we can speak of pure colors. All forms are born in
silence, yet certain forms and proportions are more clearly pervaded by silence than
others.
A mantra chanted by somebody who has mastered its science will have a different effect
than the mere repetition of common language formulas. But at a higher level, you are right,
there is no difference. Deeply, every sound is the articulation of silence. But whether
chanted in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew or Sanskrit, a mantra is a sound more distinctly bathed
in silence than common language.
When you chant a mantra, the science of sound brings it to resonate in you, then it dies in
the heart. When you recite a profane text, it can’t really disappear, it will remain in the form
of thought.
Sacrilege is that which doesn’t emphasize unity but increases separation. Trying or
wanting something separates. Conversely, being free of all process brings welcoming,
availability and non-separation.
Every time we want, we commit sacrilege. This sacrilege dies in the silence of the heart as
soon as we become aware of it. Awareness of sacrilege is its extinction.
It would be better to avoid thinking about this meeting. Too many elements were formulated
and this could be hard to digest.
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Forget everything that was said. There is nothing to understand, to know. If you respect
that, the essential can come to life. All attempts to think things over, to analyze, to
remember, to argue would only be agitation. You will need some time to assimilate
everything that was said tonight. Let digestion happen, like a boa who digests his zebra for
days on end. For that process to take place, you need to be quiet and not think about what
you swallowed. In this serenity, all this data will migrate to the different regions of the mind
and will finally collapse in the heart. Those are not items for reflection.
Thank you for listening.
English Intro
Chapter 8
English Intro
Searching is postponing
Those who gloat at what they have done, have done nothing that deserves praise or
blame, since the real agent in them and through them is none other than God, and they are
but the placeholder for the manifestation of His actions.
You say that sensitivity is the doorway to silence. It is true that when I concentrate on my
body, I feel peaceful and happy. I am curious if perhaps this is only my imagination, my
hope… Did you experience, with Mr. Jean Klein, this sort of enthusiasm, this feeling that I
have, that I have found something extraordinary?
Jean Klein did not ask for anything. That was his most striking feature. He did not ask you
to change. He harbored no violence whatsoever towards your behaviors.
Jean Klein saw you as you were, with your conflicts, your problems, and never did he want
to change you, even a fraction of an inch. That is extraordinary respect! Think of all the
gurus, of all the teachers who transform their students and supposedly clarify them. Does
this create anything besides egos infatuated with themselves, feeling more and more
separate from their environment and from the whole universe?
He did not ask for any transformation and never pointed out anything negative in his
friends. You came into his room and he marveled at your beauty; he did not see anything
else. Of course, the beauty he was seeing was his own, but the wonderment he had at his
own beauty reflected in you. In turn you were amazed by his beauty. This beauty then
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became yours. You felt invited to keep listening to what was there, deeply, without ever
pushing. No violence, no demands; you felt completely free. You could become anything.
There were no comments. For him, no matter what you became was right.
This atmosphere of non-demand created a form of resonance. People who spent their life
wanting to change, to become purified, woke up to a sort of respect for themselves. In the
absence of demand, the process of listening to their own problems got under way. In this
listening, problems spontaneously dissolved.
Jean Klein did not have the slightest demand. That is why people from all walks of life
came to see him. He saw gangsters with heavy criminal records, a state secretary, pot
growers, high finance bankers, exuberant artists, and petit-bourgeois people allergic to any
form of creativity. To all, he gave the same teaching: “Stay where you are, do not change
your environment or your way of being but become available to your emotional, intellectual
and somatic functioning. The silence you are seeking does not reside anywhere out there
but in your presence to what arises.” Everyone came away more available to their own
uniqueness.
Such welcoming of the whole person fostered changes. It was almost imperceptible: Jean
Klein did not want people to change outwardly, he did not want any psychic events around
him. Any mental experience was considered a lack of vision, a compensation. For him, the
experience of samadhi in any form, the experience of absorption cut off from objective life
was a lack of perspective and would inevitably create larger and larger difficulties in facing
everyday life. It wasn’t about moving away from the world of objects to find peace, but
about getting a foretaste of that peace in which the world appears and disappears.
Around him was a vibration which swept away any fear of the objective world and imposed
itself as the ever-present background of all perceptions. Little by little, this vibration became
less and less perceptible as such and turned into the light that shines over every
perception. At some point it became impossible to perceive the vibration as an object.
On some level he was in control of this phenomenon and transmitted this form of sensitivity.
He said that his master, whom he considered to be far more powerful than himself, had to
constantly watch himself lest those who approached him start living uncommon
experiences. Otherwise, they would have focused on objective situations, on external
changes, on the psyche.
This did not prevent him from giving, in individual and specific cases, extremely
opinionated advice, from yoga to nutrition—where tomato skin and tomato seed could
become dramatic enemies—to love or sex—where he might dispense much technical
advice. His opinions would extend to political life, investments, music or any other subject
relevant to society. But this expert advice would only take its full meaning when the student
had truly grasped no-direction, the uselessness of taking ownership of any characteristics
whatsoever. It did not aim at purifying before awakening. It was the manifestation in space-
time, the translation into everyday life, of the feeling of what is essential. Once again, it was
about allowing the resonance of an inner emotional, intellectual and physical availability in
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which life without intention could take form without too much resistance.
With Jean Klein, there was no becoming, no direction, only respect for what was there. This
created an extraordinary relaxation around him. We felt appeased because we didn’t have
to change anything. We were pointed to our most intimate listening: presence. In this
presence to life, nature could change, but the need to transform, to clarify was
progressively leaving us.
Everything was right. There was no longer any need to free ourselves from anything. To
free oneself was seen as a form of violence and it meant that the condition wasn’t ripe.
When the trauma is ripe, it leaves us and there is no need to reject it, to eliminate it. The
trauma was respectable, it was needed—the proof was, it was there. Jean Klein was
teaching us to live with it, to listen without expectation. In that receptivity, peacefully, little by
little, trauma would come to the surface. When it found enough space within us, it emptied
itself. Of course, this approach ran contrary to all the yogic schools who want to cut out
trauma. But when you use willpower to let go of a crutch giving you a sense of safety,
without fail your organism will look for another. The radiance of his teachings came from
that respect. That was the most precious: to know that I do not need anything. That is true
nonviolence.
Concerning the somatic approach, I felt, like you, that I had found something extraordinary
when it became clear and easy to bathe in a tactile bath, to fully surrender the body into
silence. To have the capacity, at every moment, to collapse the body into a vibration is a
wonderful gift. It is, however, a lot less extraordinary than to find yourself in the presence of
somebody who listens, who marvels at all the facets of your being, who doesn’t find
anything wrong with you. His vision of perfection would bring you to listen to life without the
smallest criticism.
Gratitude for such a gift can only be eternal.
What is the role of the teacher in the transmission of yoga?
The teacher is a space of resonance. When he meets you or when he senses your
fragrance, he feels rhythms, movements, feelings. In this resonance, this vibration, he is
inspired to show you attitudes that belong to the same family of vibration.
When you practice the techniques that he has transmitted to you, this technical resonance
manifests differently every day, because he focuses on your felt sense rather than on any
formal learning.
If a student just tries to remember the technique that was transmitted to him, he cuts himself
off from this resonance and can only reproduce a mental memory. This may bring a feeling
of psychological safety, but the postponement of all clarity—for looking for anything
whatsoever in an activity can only bring us back to our morass.
On the contrary, the one who is free from any intention lets the atmosphere, more than the
technique, resonate in him. Every time he makes himself available, he comes into a deep
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connection with life currents where teacher and student are forever united, where
technique is but a framework to allow this discovery, as well as the direct expression of this
resonance.
You become aware that there is nothing personal in life. That is why, in ancient times,
artwork was not signed; no one took themselves to be the creator. Only life, or God, was the
acknowledged creator, who created through hands, through the mind and through the
word. No ownership.
That theme is very clear in Master Eckhart’s sermons; he never says he knows the truth, he
says that the truth that comes through him comes directly from the heart of God. Since he
doesn’t think of himself as special, he is the perfect tool. Coming directly from perfection,
his discourse can be considered revealed. Because he has totally lost himself, God is able
to speak through him.
The only purpose of yoga and all other exercises is to transpose this attitude to the somatic
level. This feeling, this opening to life makes you available. In this availability, it is possible
to follow a movement of inquiry, and true yoga might eventually reveal itself.
What you need is always available, right next to you. The techniques only resonate for the
one who lives this intimacy with the present moment.
To be able to receive this help, the student must be free of expectation, of demand. The one
who wants to be taught does not have the capacity to receive. Little by little, the demand
dissolves and is replaced by a listening without any orientation, supported by the teacher.
A unique relationship, impersonal but more intimate than any other, is created. The student
is present, without any demand. This waiting without expectation is the space in which
transmission happens. Nothing objective is transmitted, but transmission takes place, the
student enters the way. These moments of intimacy, often in full silence, are the yeast of the
revelation.
Is that all there is in transmission?
When you go to a museum with somebody who knows how to look, you see better. All he
can do to help you see is to look without knowing. It is a very powerful inner gesture. It
strikes you and, on some level, it helps you see. But that’s all.
People who met Jean Klein and felt his peace eventually became aware that, deep down,
the calm that they were feeling with him was really theirs. That is what transmission is. This
listening is transmission. If you listen to a concert with a musician, you hear better.
To listen and to look are the deepest actions, there is nothing more powerful. When you
stand next to a being who sees, his non-personal vision changes your whole world.
When you witness the awakening of somebody who imagined his whole life that he was
unhappy for any number of reasons and who, in one instant, realizes that he only imagined
his life, this dazzling vision doesn’t only shake up the body of that person, but yours too.
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Vision is contagious. If you are next to someone who is sad, and if you do not embody
availability, their sadness is contagious. If, on the other hand, you are available, you can no
longer be dragged down by sadness; you feel the sadness or the agitation of your
environment, but you are neither sad nor agitated. In the same way, you can feel the vision.
I don’t need anybody to feel that which is peaceful in myself; that is given to me at every
moment. I need only to see how I constantly turn it down. I do not need a peaceful guru; I
need only to witness my own agitation. As soon as I clearly become aware of it, without the
pride to want to be without agitation, as soon as I simply become present to my life,
transmission happens. It is my own stillness that calls upon itself.
Stories of transmission are often a form of romanticism. Looking for a guru instead of
looking for yourself is postponement.
Regardless of any guru, I need to always be aware of my pretension, my agitation, my fear.

Of course, this listening may take the form of a magical location or being. But that is only
one possible form amongst so many others. There is no need to look for a teaching or a
master. A worldly encounter isn’t what it’s about.
Meeting a great guru is of no use. We all know people who sat next to Jean Klein or
Nisargadatta Maharaj and who remained miserable.
Listening to life will also allow listening to these meetings. In non-expectation, these
meetings can blossom, life can thrive. But as long as I am looking for something, I don’t
listen. I can collect extraordinary encounters, but it remains a collection.
Spiritual quest is an escape.
I often get the feeling that discovery, realization of what is initially intuited, of what is deep
and essential, comes progressively, in steps, as if a veil was getting thinner and thinner. It
may be an illusion. It is as if I was always searching for the direction to take the next time,
as if a strong urge was pushing.
Life leads to the next step and you do not get to decide. When you let yourself be carried by
the current, the current leads you around the rock; you cannot decide. The more you
understand that your life is unavoidable, in its greatness as in its smallness, in joy as in
sorrow, the more you listen to the unavoidable. The step gets taken, you do not take the
step. No more worry, no more hesitation, you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain.
Then you discover that there is no wisdom either. Those who have spiritual experiences
are respectable, but you don’t care. That which can be experienced isn’t your business.
Your business is the light behind the experience. There comes a time when you almost feel
repulsed by that which can be experienced.
Every experience is mental and that which is beyond mind cannot be experienced.
Listening cannot become an object. The urge leaves you.
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On another level, you can tell when defense mechanisms are being defeated. You notice
that today you were insulted in this or that way, and that you fully understood how much
this person couldn’t do otherwise, how much, from her own viewpoint, she was right. You
notice that ten years ago you would have strangled her for that, five years later you would
have been depressed, and today… you just listened.
In this way, yes, you can see a form of progression—a progression of your letting go of the
imaginary world. You no longer feel attacked, challenged, assaulted by the event. The
event has become neutral for you, whereas before it would have started a drama.
You can notice this type of change. Before, when you heard about a wise man, you had to
go see him. Today, you are told about a wise man and you peacefully keep fishing. You no
longer have the urge to go and listen to anyone. You have understood that all you have to
listen to is yourself. There is nothing else.
When I hear about a spiritual teacher, I can feel a form of joy—it is wonderful that people
stop complaining—but there is no longer the slightest urge to go meet something or
someone. What for? Who can give me my silence? Who can give me my vision? Nothing.
Nobody.
This change that I witness in myself isn’t the result of a new insight, it is an absence of the
imaginary. You expect less and less. You are more and more present, with no agenda. But
it is not a progression of accumulation. There was a time when you imagined that every
woman that you met was perhaps the woman of your life. Today, a woman passes and she
is a woman who passes; there is no more imagination. You do not add anything to the
event. The event is what it is.
When you set it free, the event is magical because there is nothing that isn’t extraordinary.
And there is nothing magical, because everything is magical. The rich essence of all things
is found in the simplest, so-called trivial situations, objects, gestures. But because it is
schmaltzy, repetitive, complex or vulgar, my imagination prevents me from seeing its
beauty. I always repeat the same patterns. I always project on women the same references,
the same expectations, the same needs. On cars or on spiritual masters, I always project
the same childish demand: to find myself.
Imagination is miserable. When it fades, you discover that the slightest thing is ultimate,
that it is wonderful. Everything is like a flower that opens up and radiates its fragrance.
Imagination dries up the flower, takes away the smell.
Beauty blossoms when the impetus toward beauty stops, when any expectation, hope for
beauty drops away.
The seeker is that which is sought.
How to distinguish between what is true and what comes from imagination?
They are the same thing. On a functional level, everything comes from our imagination, but
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at a deeper level, everything is true; the mask you are wearing isn’t given to you by chance.
When you imitate someone else’s signature, the way you sign still gives away your
personality. The mask reveals what is behind the mask. Therefore, imagination isn’t
haphazard. There is no imagination. Everything is true. For pedagogical reasons, as if
talking to children, we speak about personal or impersonal, spontaneous or intentional,
imaginary or real.
What could there be other than the essential? There is nothing imaginary. As energy,
everything is life. As a story, everything is imaginary, of course. We do not have to separate
milk from water like the famous swan of the Upanishads. We do not separate anything
here. We listen.
It doesn’t matter if the conflict is imaginary or not; it is felt. I am available, I am humble

towards this feeling. I don’t have the arrogance to want to free myself from it. I do not want
anything. There is respect. In this listening, the story of what is felt goes through certain
stages, the images that reveal this feeling get fleshed out. At some point, I stop pretending
that I am sad because I separated from a man or because I lost my leg; I leave the stories
behind. I realize that sadness is here, in my body; nobody can create it in me if it isn’t
already there. Thus, the stories fade away… But it is still the same sadness. Nothing is
illusory.
But can’t sadness be imaginary too?
This starts to become philosophy.
I feel the sadness, it is my object of contemplation. I humbly face sadness without the
arrogance to want to free myself from it. Listened to and loved, sadness is the doorway. No
intervention, or you will remain in a compensation.
Techniques used to become free from a conflict bring up another conflict, because I am the
conflict. I can flush out all the conflicts from my body and from my psyche but as long as I
stay here, as soon as I open my eyes and see the world, a new conflict appears. Attraction,
repulsion, I want, I don’t want, I’m scared, I need, etc. To want to get rid of conflict is a lack
of vision. We cannot delete anything. I need the conflict that I have. Why run away from it
and create a new one when I already have one? All is very well as it is. It’s fine to be lazy. I
keep my conflicts and there is no need to invent new ones. I listen to them. In that space,
that which existed prior to the conflict may reveal itself.
Krishna Menon compared yogis who want to get rid of conflicts to people who want to
cover the world with leather. He used to say: “I wear a pair of shoes.” There is no need to
correct everything. If you bring a tray back to balance, all the objects on it come back to
balance together. There is no need to worry about local corrections. If need be, we can
create a temporary lull, but always within this global vision.
God didn’t make any mistakes that I have to fix. I need all the conflicts. I claim the scars that
I wear. No one has a right to take them away from me. They will leave when they are ready.
This respect allows a deep transformation. Wanting to fix the problem with my parents, my
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wife, my body, my past, etc.—that has no end!
In progressive paths, you can remove the conflicts. It’s easy, and it can momentarily bring a
huge opening to the person. You get to own new qualities, you free yourself from what is
uncomfortable, but this is a form of postponement.
The direct path, without transformation, appears to be longer. It will seem, twenty years
later, that the person has changed very little, but it’s only an appearance. At the time of
death, the real change is revealed. If we have the capacity to live that space, at that time,
integration will happen. A correction takes place—and I don’t have to know whether it’s
illusory or deep—but what I feel becomes the object of my contemplation, my most
precious treasure. The conflict that I feel is my gift, I discover it and I listen to it. I don’t need
to set myself free from it. Listening to it is being free.
Is the belief that meeting people like you can help me see myself more clearly an illusion?
Is it my imagination telling me that you can bring me a little light?
Of course, it is only imagination. What is not an illusion though, is to realize that, when you
listen, you find a little peace and light. So, listen to the chair or to a swallow in flight. When
you listen to something without expectation, without demand, you find peace. When we
understand that, we listen to that which naturally occurs.
What is yoga? It is the art to deepen within ourselves the discovery of our lack of listening,
the discovery that I always say no.
There is nothing wrong with practicing yoga or with going here or there. But we have to
have perspective; I’m not going there to get something, but to realize how much I am in
defense. Life brings the elements I need to free myself from saying no.
It is not what you listen to that makes you quiet; it is your listening. Joy is to listen. The most
beautiful thing you can listen to is yourself, your fear, your greed, your sadness. There you
can find beauty. It’s a thousand times deeper than listening to anybody else.
As long as a form of agitation makes you forget, why not read texts or listen to someone? It
can bring you back to the listening, but it’s not something you want to spend your life doing.
Our mind would love to remove the clouds, as if it could change the sun. It’s impossible.
Clouds appear spontaneously and leave the same way. The role of a human being is to
welcome the clouds and their departure.
So, in the end, exercising willpower is like fighting the clouds?
It is a form of pretense. You do not decide about your birth or your death, your maturity or
your lack thereof. A human being must observe; that is the ultimate stage. Presence without
a doer. Only madmen believe they act. To understand that is the result of a lifetime of
inquiry.
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When we are young it is inevitable to believe that we are the doer, to want the true and to
fight the false. At some point, a sort of vision happens, a form of respect.
Until a certain age, you want to be in good health; when you get older, you learn to accept
health and disease, strength and weakness. Accept. No request, no demand. What is given
to me is what is essential. There is no chance and there is no fight. The supreme stage is to
stop fighting. I am constantly trying to get away, to cleanse myself of all my demons. That is
the madness, that is the demon.
Let's live in respect. Respect for my arrogance, for my immaturity, for my fears, for my
pretension, for what naturally occurs at each moment. In this respect, transformation
happens, clouds dissipate. This respect is a reflection of the sun, of reality, of the essential.
What is the use of all that we learn, our education, the way we were brought up by our
parents? If that is not us, why spend all this time showing or teaching others?
The notion of usefulness is mental. Things aren’t useful. Your parents cannot help
projecting onto you their expectations, their misery, their worries, their needs. You cannot
help acquiring the tools which seem useful to you to defend yourself and to victoriously
attack the environment. There is no choice there. All species go through the same learning
process. Psychologically, nothing is useful; functionally, everything is useful.
This question is a little mental!
Beauty doesn't have a reason, nor does sadness. The purpose of the world is to bring me
to this obvious fact. Everything is here to compel me to let go of my pretension to need
anything, to be anything, to become Superman, to liberate myself, to clarify myself, to
succeed. Society is perfect, for it pushes me towards this inquiry. If it were supposed to be
different, it would be. This is not a political judgment, this does not justify anything; this
opens to everything.
I let go of the need to find a justification for the event, which is to say to link the event to my
memory, to my knowledge, to integrate it in my comfortable prejudices. I set it free from my
limited projections. There, the event can reveal a non-personal meaning, like a vision. At
that stage, when you encounter a pigeon walking around, when you see a branch of a tree,
straight or broken, when you notice the garments your neighbor is wearing, the position of
the books on the table at a friend's house—all has meaning, no longer conceptual
meaning but resonance, for nothing is separate.
When you stop wanting to understand, then a non-conceptual understanding imposes

itself. You see how far animals, nature, objects are beyond meaning. It’s so much more
than meaning; it is a resonance, a fragrance of truth. When you watch the sunrise, the
movement of the moon or of a cloud, a duck sliding on a lake, that destroys any desire for
ideas. The whole world is happening in front of you. All the beauty, the violence and the
peace of the world are expressed right there.
When you look without looking for a meaning, without understanding, emotion comes up.
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Sometimes, as you catch a glimpse of an old rag, a rock or an ant, a tear rolls down your
cheek, emotion takes hold of you; it surprises people around you. It isn’t the rock or the ant
that brings up emotion—for emotion is in you—but every perception lives in this emotion.
There is nothing else than this emotion.
For that to happen, personal emotion and knowledge need to quieten down. They become
quiet when they are respected, loved, when you live with them without violence, without
expectation, without the slightest movement to free yourself from them.
Presence liberates. Movement cannot liberate, movement changes, moves things around.
The more you respect your conflict, your problems and the heaviness that lives in you, the
more a form of emotional freedom appears. In this emotional freedom, you will see how
much every thing, every object, every word, music or caress of the wind has a meaning
beyond what philosophers could imagine. It is no longer a conceptual meaning.
For that you must listen, respect, be present.
At some point, I return to the urge to free myself from a conflict, and again I create positive
and negative, darkness and light. It is an endless fight, for one brings the other.
There is no fight, only listening. I accept pain, problems, sadness, loneliness, anxiety. I live
with them, humbly. This is what I have been given for the moment, it is not a divine
sentence to all of eternity. I give myself to that. Change comes from a complete letting go.
There is no need to make any effort, to force myself or to try anything. There is nothing to
see, nothing to understand—only to listen, love, feel. It is non-struggle.
In this peace, the secret of things presents itself. It isn’t a conceptual secret. Joy is inscribed
in all perceptions.
At that moment, all my youth, my education, my excesses begin to have a meaning. I

understand, in a non-mental way, why I drank so many beers, read so many novels,
pretended so often to be abandoned or sad; why I needed so much of this or that, of love,
understanding. All my mechanisms come to the surface, and I claim them. I wouldn’t want
for a single moment to be different in any way, for it wouldn’t be real.
This total acceptance of my characteristics is a revelation beyond any characteristics. The

light that shines on them is revealed through them. When I look, everything makes sense,
unspeakable sense, beyond any sense.
The real meaning is to die. There is none other.
English Intro
Chapter 9
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English Intro
No one ever talked to you

My find is my loss and my loss is my find.
Hallaj: Diwan
I would like to hear you speak about anger. Now, after a yoga session, we are very
peaceful, but in my usual work environment, there can be forms of verbal violence. I
observed that, facing an attack, there comes an urge to either counterattack or to roll with
the punch.
There is no choice.
No choice, I don’t know? True, there is a reaction. But I wonder, with respect to anger or to
aggressiveness, if I remain in a receptive state for too long and I do not counterattack, don’t
I run the danger of becoming a scapegoat? For me, the place of anger as a reaction is
confusing. Whether I strike back or just take it, it’s exhausting to always be on the
defensive. Now, I realize that what I’m suffering from isn’t the attack itself, but the idea that
the other should not attack me. It’s as if I’m susceptible. Perhaps I am too vulnerable, too
sensitive to other people’s words? I feel a huge gap between the moment when I calmly
practice yoga here and then when I find myself back at work enduring attacks. I would like
to be able to take the peace that I am feeling here with me.
You cannot shift immediately from the habit of reacting to being available in a nonreactive
way. Of course, I’m talking about psychological non-reaction; it may include an elbow jab, a
slap in the face, an insult or any gesture, but you act for practical reasons, not because you
feel hurt.
In certain circumstances you will need to knock someone out, but you don’t need to feel
humiliated. When someone is in a psychotic crisis, you may need to put him in a
stranglehold to prevent him from endangering himself or his environment. This does not
imply any psychological involvement; you intervene if you are competent, otherwise you
call for help.
Action doesn’t necessarily come from reaction, it can be purely functional.
Nobody ever attacked you and no one will ever attack you. The neighbor who is talking to
you is talking to himself. He’s not talking to you, but to his projection. He cannot
communicate, he doesn’t know you and will never be able to know you.
No one ever talked to you, it’s impossible. People address the image they have of you,
which is constantly changing. Do not imagine that you can be talked to; realize that
everyone is in a monologue. Observe how it works: the person’s past, the perception she
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has of you, all sorts of more or less subconscious details bring her to a form of
aggressiveness—or affection—toward you. But she doesn’t see you, she only sees her
lack of love, the terror she carries within herself, and then she thinks, “This is really a
horrible man” or “I like this guy a lot.” You are not involved; you merely serve as a mirror;
she only meets her own problems. When you realize that nobody ever talks to you, you
become aware that nobody ever loved you nor attacked you either. People have projected
love or hate on you but they only communicated with themselves. At that stage, you no
longer feel involved in the monologues of your environment.
For functional reasons, certain situations bring you to act. If you’re a teacher, you need your
students’ attention. If one of them disturbs the listening capacity of the whole group, you
can assert your authority. It isn’t a judgment; you understand very well that, given his
personality, his family and other circumstances, he cannot do otherwise. Maybe you did the
same at his age! Still, to be able to function correctly, you use whatever tools are available.
If you are in an establishment that doesn’t tolerate physical contact, you administer a formal
punishment.
You need to use what is functional. You can slap somebody out of love, you can strangle
him to prevent him from jumping through the window. The action is simply here; you are not
challenged by a student who is trying to disturb the class; you understand him very well,
but this does not mean you have to let him interrupt. Perhaps he is the most brilliant or the
most gifted in the class but, for practical reasons, at some point you just can’t let it go.
To feel challenged by a student or by a remark is a fantasy. At some point, you stop feeling
challenged. If somebody says you are stupid, there are two possibilities: either he is more
intelligent than you are, therefore he is right and there is no reason to resent him; or he is
wrong because he is more stupid than you are, and you need to respect that too. In either
case, it is not worth getting depressed over.
To be affected by an insult is childish. As you mature, it becomes impossible. Identification,

whether it be with a cast, a skin color, a race or a social function is a frequent but childish
attitude.
You say, don't identify with your functioning. But when I get attacked, I observe my reaction,
and either I feel hurt or…
There is no attack. The other doesn't attack you. When someone falls in love with you, you
don't say he attacks you, do you? When someone hates you, it is as if he were in love with
you. He looks at you, he feels you, he listens to you and it makes him want to caress you or
to hit you. Both drives come from an emotional image. In some, you trigger love and in
others, hate.
To feel attacked comes from a lack of sensitivity. You receive an elbow jab and it hits your
chin, or your ribs, but it isn't aggression. When you deeply understand that it isn’t, you no
longer feel psychologically involved. But as long as you feel attacked, whether you react or
not, you are stuck in emotion.
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It's enough to realize that an action that used to disturb you now leaves you indifferent. For
instance, at fifteen, when your girlfriend said she was leaving you, you were upset. If she
said it now, it wouldn't affect you. It wasn't any more aggressive then than now, but you took
it as such because you lived in ideas.
If you take yourself for a Frenchman and you are told, “The French are idiots,” you feel
insulted. But if you don't identify as French, you don't feel involved; you understand that
someone can have that opinion. Feeling attacked is only a consequence of your
pretension to be French. If you are told that the Belgians are idiots and you imagine that
you are French, you don't feel targeted. So where is the attack? There is no attack! Only an
identification with a certain self-image which produces this hostile feeling.
Understand that being French, Belgian, short, tall, rich or poor is a functional reality which
only exists in the moment and you will no longer feel attacked.
In exceptional circumstances, and without feeing attacked, you can comment or help set
the record straight. In times of war or conflict, if someone insults a cause, a nation or a race,
perhaps, in order to teach others, you will risk your life to express a deep emotion. But this
doesn't mean that you felt challenged. It resonated in the moment. Nor were you identified.
You could have done it for any reason.
Since you don't identify with any cause, you are available to all of them. Some heroic
French people got involved in the war in Afghanistan. If you really feel the urge and if you
have medical, humanitarian or military competence, you too can do so and Commander
Massoud would welcome you with open arms. But watch out that you don't flee to a
dangerous land because you have not adapted to your life in Quebec. Real commitment is
non-ideological. It is completely obvious. That is what led great Sufis such as Sheikh
Arslan of Damascus or, more recently, the great Abd-El-Kader, to external jihad.
Actually, the real question would be: how to not identify? Is the only useful consequence of
an attack the fact that it allows me to become aware that I identify?
Absolutely. So, when you feel attacked, you should thank your attacker, whose purpose is
to reveal your limits. Every situation that challenges you, that makes you suffer, is a gift
which allows you to realize that you are still pretending—until the day where nothing can
disturb you, because there isn't anyone to be disturbed. If you can still get upset, thank the
situation as it shows you the side of you that is not free.
Can't we do anything about this?
Being fully aware of an identification allows you to free yourself from it.
To see clearly, you must feel somatically, without justification or criticism. Saying to yourself
“I am French” or “I am not French” doesn't change anything. At some point, you will feel
where the fantasy to want to be somebody, to be recognized, to exist, comes from.
All groups come from this fear of being nothing. We need to identify with a social cell,
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Freemasons or Lions Club, to be French or to be rich, tall, masculine, intelligent, Buddhist,

etc. To each his club, but it's all the same: a club of misery and fear. In it, you claim the right
to be afraid.
Notice that everything we build in order to feel secure, increases the opposite: fear. We
identify to feel safe, and that destabilizes us. When we discover the mechanism, change
will take place, but it may take time. Depending on biology and on conditioning, some
identifications might be easier to drop than others. It may be easy to stop thinking that you
are from Quebec, but it might be harder to not take yourself to be the father of your
children—or the owner of your car. To each his imaginary world, but it's exactly the same:
you project on your children what another man projects on his car. Neither one is better.
The sense of being invulnerable when you step into your powerful and elegant car, the
superiority you feel when you become a Freemason master, or when a beautiful woman
praises your virility and your intelligence—it's all the same; only the fantasy changes.
When you are continuously immersed in these stories, it's not easy to get rid of them!
There is nothing to get rid of. Observe the way you function with utmost honesty and at
some point, as if by magic, you will understand how your environment perceives you. Your
parents still see the child in you; they give you advice as if you were still five. Your children
imagine you in a different way. Your mistress, your wife, your dog, your friends, your boss,
your employees… each perceives you from their own viewpoint. For some, you are the
most hateful character imaginable, for others, the most wonderful. When you get to see
how it works, you no longer need to identify with one or the other.
For your dog, you are the most extraordinary man. For a dog that was trained to kill, if you
enter his territory, you are the most terrible monster. The dog that loves you isn't a nicer dog
than the one that wants to rip your throat: they are exactly the same. When you discover
this obvious fact, it changes your reference system, this automatic response to love or to
hate.
For a long time, we only love people who approve of us or look like us. People of the same
race, the same height, the same social environment, those who think like us, who have the
same political opinions, the same activities. Those people, yes, we love them, we find them
intelligent! When you grow up you find that you can have a human connection with people
of all sorts: with rich people, poor people, teenagers, people of all colors, with all sorts of
opinions. You recognize yourself in all ideologies, in all pretensions. You understand these
characteristics, but you no longer identify with them. You see clearly that they are only
fragments. You feel that it is fear that drives someone to think they are Jewish, Christian,
Muslim, French, white or black. You notice how deeply that is anchored in all of us, so
deeply that we all need to prove and defend this identification, even if it means going way
back in history to look for proof. It's a necessary step. Eventually you won't need to walk
around with any other skin color than the one you have at the moment.
The way I see it, what you describe sounds like an ideal. I have tried to live with ideals and
it ruined many moments. In my daily life, that ideal doesn't stand up to an attack on my
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personality.
You don't have a choice. If somebody attacks you, you respond according to your capacity.
One day, you simply notice that that which used to hurt you no longer disturbs you. It’s a
natural process but it takes time.
When you are fifteen, your parents' remarks touch you deeply, at twenty they move you a
little less, at forty they barely stir you. You don't have to do anything to achieve this; you just
need to be aware of it.
The more you notice how the criticisms of your parents or of your wife hurt you, the more a
new breath flows through. But the more you justify, explain or comment, “my wife is right,
my wife is wrong” the more that same criticism obstinately creates the same reaction in you.
At some point, the game stops. When you stop justifying or criticizing what was said to
you—what you call the aggression—and instead, you begin to listen to what is triggered in
you, when you learn to live the somatic experience with awareness, what used to disturb
you looks less and less aggressive.
Someone insults you and you react. That night, you still carry that vibration, that pulse of
what someone dared to say to you. You sit down in silence and you let the vibration of what
seems unacceptable live inside. For just a moment, you let go of the idea that they
shouldn't have said what they said, that you shouldn't have reacted the way you did, etc.
You feel the tension in your throat, in your belly. This sensation which, until now, always got
squashed, denied and replaced with a commentary, will become essential to you. It will
amplify, spread through your body and then leave you. You will sleep deeply. Do this on a
regular basis.
Later on, when you are insulted, you will have a reaction. After a few moments, you will
notice that you still got hurt, but you won't need to go home and sit; you will be able to
somatically absorb the shock almost immediately.
Later still, when you are attacked, you will feel the shock in your body but there will be no
comment. That will not stop you from acting—action is free—but you won't react.
Eventually, when you are attacked, you will notice with a smile that a few years before you
would have strangled anyone who would have said that to you. In the end, if you are
attacked, you understand why the person sees things the way they do and you have no
trace of a reaction.
One day, even that reference to the past disappears and you never feel insulted anymore.
You need to go through these different stages.
What you describe still belongs to the progressive path. It involves time. Can anyone
experience this maturation during his lifetime, without doing anything spiritual or
psychological?
Yes, and anyway there's nothing spiritual or psychological to do.
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That has nothing to do with awakening…
Joy is inherent to life. You are sentenced to it at birth; there is nothing you have to do. Just
realize that you constantly turn down happiness because you pretend to be something or
somebody.
From birth to adolescence, we learn to identify, and then we realize it makes us unhappy
and we'd like to let go of this identity to come back to a state of innocence and extend our
childhood.
Since you imagined that you suffered, you have to imagine that you aren't suffering any
more, but those are two imaginary worlds.
In a moment of clarity, all the suffering that you were pretending to experience appears in a
different light. When you imagine being in prison, you can only want freedom. You can't
have one without the other.
What I imagined to be the worst is exactly what I need in order to realize that everything is
OK. Disease, old age, poverty, abandonment, loneliness: what I believe is the most difficult,
what I feel I'll never be able to cope with is my salvation. As long as I don't live it, I carry it in
myself; and this fear prevents me from living. As long as I dread old age, disease, poverty,
abandonment, all of it constantly haunts me. This anxiety is a background to everything I
do. As soon as it wakes up a little too much, I throw myself into another activity to forget
about it. But there comes a time when we're tired of running away from what seems terrible,
and we open up to a world of possibility.
What is offered to me is my own maturation. It's my own joy looking for itself. Everything we
try to avoid, we will encounter. For some that is difficult to hear. But it is guaranteed,
everything you dread will happen! At some point we don't wait any more, we face it in the
now.
Isn't it dangerous to give such power to thought, when you say: “Everything you dread will
happen?”
No, it is an intuition. To be afraid of something means to sense it. It's important to become
aware of what you are most afraid of, because it is the treatment prescribed to yourself by
yourself in order to realize that there is no fear, and that you are free. Your imagination may
make it very poetic or dramatic, but in every case what you are scared of is what you need
to meet.
It doesn't mean that thought creates situations. Don't get involved in those pipe dreams.
The only fantasy is the fear of something. When you are available, you become more
concrete and you no longer project yourself into a future; you are present to your fiction.
Imagination doesn't survive—it never survives presence.
Give yourself to the fantasy. Disease, for instance. I have the fantasy, I give in to the idea, I
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feel it in my body. No effort is needed to trigger it, it's always here. People who are scared
of being sick constantly carry this fear in them.
You're not suggesting I inject myself with a virus to face this fear, are you?
If the fear exists, the virus is already in place.
I'm not talking about creating a fear, but about consciously feeling what is already here. If
you are afraid, the virus is already active. Instead of pretending it doesn't exist, realize that
traces of it are always present in your life. Feel that which is here once and for all, instead
of unconsciously letting it linger in all your activities.
This doesn't mean imagining being sick. It means feeling this fear of old age, disease,
abandonment, feeling it in the body, no longer doing yoga to assuage the fear, or get
married, divorced, have another child or buy a new red car just to run away from the
discomfort—but on the contrary to consciously feel what is here.
Life is action. You act for the joy of doing. It's in the nature of life to get married, to divorce,
to buy cars, etc. At some point though, you simply act without motivation. Joy is doing
something without a reason. Action for no reason is true action. Love is for no reason.
Are you saying that life is sending us, as gifts, situations that confront us and that we can't
avoid, or is life's purpose to create?
When I say, “Face what's here,” it doesn't mean that if a bulldozer runs you over you don't
get squashed. Certain situations will be a threat to your physical, psychic or financial
integrity, of course. Here we only talk about the psychological aspect.
Stillness doesn't guarantee physical integrity. Some events are greater than our capacity to
integrate them. A bulldozer runs you over and that's the end. A noise is louder than your
hearing capacity, your eardrums stop working. A light explosion which is brighter than your
visual capacity can make you blind. An emotional drama to which you are too identified
can damage you permanently. You could be sad for your whole life if, in certain
circumstances, you identify as French; after Waterloo, some couldn't shake off their
sadness for decades. Any identification creates its lot of drama.
What do you mean by “sensory experience?”
In his wonderful book And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran shares that after becoming
blind, he kept suffering as long as he longed to see. As soon as he realized that there was
nothing to see, he gave up his psychological identification and remained with the sensory
experience, simply present to the fact of not seeing. He had been suffering, not because he
could not see, but because he wanted to see. After that desire left him, he was able to be
happy.
You say we can't help it in certain situations, perhaps because of our grandmother, our
family history or some other thing. So, there is a past?
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It is now that we carry within us our grandmother's advice that influences the way we react.
The past isn't in the past.
When you observe one of your boyfriends, you see that he carries his soft, difficult or
abused childhood in the area of his nose, his eyes, forehead or cheeks. All that we
commonly call past can be seen in the moment. A physician who examines a body can
instantly see all of its past. Does this mean he sees the past? No, he sees the present. The
past is present.
When you observe someone and you notice his trauma, you don't see the past—there is no
past. You see the present.
Is the present what it is because there was a past?
Those are images… past, present, future, let the image slide. We use these symbols to
convey a certain inner dynamic, but they are meaningless if you take them literally.
Of course, the present is always past. The past and the future can only be present. Words
mean so little. We have a sort of agreement on the meaning of words, but it’s very limited.
What we are talking about here can only be accessed beyond formulation.
The intensity of the present contains the whole past and the whole future. At some level,
you could say that we have a precognition of what is to come, that we feel how our different
fields of vibration are going to actualize in life.
All this is so present. For the mind, it seems to involve time, but it doesn't. It's all one instant.
This intensity of the present can only be experienced in the total absence of a plan for a so-
called future. In moments of complete freedom from plans, from future, we perceive that the
present, past and future are only words. A global vision, beyond time, appears. The whole
art of oriental sculpture expresses, in space and time, this intensity of the present.
English Intro
Chapter 10
English Intro
Wake up happy, fall asleep happy

Who knows God knows that he isn't the one who knows.
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Dreams of the future are linked to emotions. We are aware that they can only cause us to
suffer, but how to stop the process?
Come back to the source, notice that the dream always comes from our presumption that
we know what is better. All suffering comes from this belief. We cannot change that. The
work is to be frequently available to this observation.
To linger on the origin of the dream is to desire something other than reality. With some
degree of maturity, we look inside and realize that we cannot know what is better, either for
ourselves or for others.
The notion of better belongs to the idea of success, as in life is better than death. Deep
down, we cannot know that. When this becomes obvious, dreams, which always stem from
this fantasy, stop haunting us. When the body is available, we remain on the somatic level.
Then the dream is like a whip lash: we live with the burn, that sensation subdues in silence,
there is no psychological residue.
You say, “this presumption to know.” But these notions go way back, when we were one or
two years old. How can a child pretend to know?
That is true, the child doesn't know. The child feels a physiological pain, which will later
turn into psychological suffering, and that is what will stop his development. Later on, when
someone points out to him that he constantly abuses himself with the idea that he shouldn't
have been raped, psychological suffering gets wiped out, and what remains is only the
physiological trauma. Certain body parts may have been shaken for life, but you can live in
harmony with somatic trauma, whereas you can't live happily with the idea that you
shouldn't have been abused.
It’s the same for a child; sooner or later he will need to evaluate the importance of his
commentary on the situation versus that of the situation itself.
I worked with a man who was tortured at length in Lebanon. He was able to free himself.
Now he only has to deal with physiological consequences: he limps a little and he has
hearing loss in one ear. He is able to be happy because he no longer has the slightest
comment on these events, the slightest psychological suffering. He can go back and work
in Beirut and he is no longer afraid. To get to this point he had to dismantle his
psychological commentary, this conviction that he shouldn't have been tortured. He no
longer tortures himself with that idea. He has accepted the functional discomfort left by
torture.
Are all psychotherapies wrong then, to want to treat through the mind?
They are not wrong, because very few people are available to listen to their body. If
somebody asks you to help solve their problem and you say to them: “Start by feeling the
palm of your hand,” they won't come back. Conceptual therapies are limited but inevitable.
They exist because our senses are asleep.
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What form of work did you practice with your friend who was tortured? Somatic only?
When I met him, he already understood a great deal. After two weeks of abuse, he realized
that the worst was the fear of the blows, not the blows themselves. This apprehension is
what made him panic. He was terrified when they came to get him, when he heard the door
open, when they took him, tied him up. He realized that when the first blow came, he was
scared of the second, and when the second struck he was scared of the third… He became
aware that he was always afraid of the future, never of what was here.
This awareness enabled him to consciously remain with the blows. When the pain was too
strong, he passed out. He knew that he needed to remain in the present moment. If he
allowed the slightest expectation, fear took over.
Through talking about these events, we were able to unify his understanding. His body
kept some residual damage, which lessened in time.
Can there also be some attachment to suffering?
In a psychological sense, yes. We get attached to what gives us a feeling of security. When
somebody has been sick for a long time and he gets better, he feels a sort of discomfort. On
an unconscious level, he often tries to get sick again.
When you have fully lived a moment of sadness without naming or justifying it, something
leaves you forever. You become aware that this sadness is an echo of a universal sadness,
which itself is an expression of joy. After that, when a situation makes you sad, you feel a
sort of wonderment. You immediately connect to the beauty. To fully feel an emotion—be it
fear, sadness, pain, or anxiety—is to discover the beauty concealed within it.
When you haven't eaten for days and you are given food, it isn't the ideal moment to
appreciate the subtle flavors, you are too hungry for that. To taste fine wine or food you
need to not be thirsty or hungry.
To fully appreciate your situation, to taste its flavor, you need to be free from it.
As long as you demand, you cannot touch a body. You think you are touching the other's
body but you really only feel yourself, you meet your own problems. When you no longer
feel the need to touch and to be touched, you caress differently, something else happens.
That is true on all levels. As long as we need something, this limits us. We are limited until
we act freely, without need.
When you remain sad after a yoga session, that is good. It shows that you have worked
with sensitivity, without using your large muscles, without too much intention. Let it happen,
feel an absolute love for this emotion, as it is your most intimate treasure; it will reveal your
freedom. You need to carry it in your heart like a precious belonging. Little by little, the
treasure will reveal itself, but it is not for you to make it appear; it will come in its own time.
The only use of the practice of Kashmiri yoga is to let these treasures, these emotions rise
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in us. Then they will actualize in our stillness and reveal the deepest aspects of our being.
Emotion doesn't disrupt stillness. On the contrary, it leads to stillness. Body tension allows
us to become aware of true relaxation. When tension appears, it reveals relaxation. It
allows us to notice what is free in ourselves.
That is the Tantric approach.
In the classic yoga approach, emotion and tension are rejected. Here it is the opposite:
everything that is felt is welcomed and brings us back to stillness. This path requires a
higher degree of subtlety, which most human beings lack.
Can the naming of the emotion at the time when I live it become an obstacle to the felt
sense? If I'm trying to figure out if it's really sadness I am feeling or if it's something else?
No. The felt sense becomes so powerful that you can no longer name. An elbow hits you
on your chin and the blow is so strong that you can no longer name it.
Of course, when you're told: “Feel your hand,” you can say: “It is warm, it is cold…” But that
is only a beginning. When a deep emotion takes hold of you, when sadness engulfs you,
your throat is tight, your chest feels as if it’s going to explode, there is a knot in your belly,
there is no place for words. The words sadness, anxiety, fear, tension, are images that we
use to communicate, but what we are talking about is beyond all that. That which descends
upon you is beyond any verbal expression.
Language is poor. How would you describe the pleasure you feel when you caress a dog,
a tree or a knee? How would you tell the subtlety of a wine when it vibrates on your palate,
on your tongue? Fireworks, life, beauty are beyond any verbal expression. Language is too
vulgar to be able to manifest the infinitely rich. Speech is only an image that shows a
direction. At some point, it vanishes.
When you sit with a friend, what you say is only an excuse, what happens is like a dance.
Sometimes we talk, sometimes we touch, but those are superficial aspects. The true
relationship is located elsewhere; there is little space for language. If your intuition feeds
you words, then why not? But they are like poetic phrases bursting in your brain.
There is no language, you explore without a map. That is why there cannot be any serious
book on yoga, or on any other deep subject. No book can tell you what is love, dance,
music, painting or wine.
To taste, you must taste. To love, you must love. To dance, you must dance. Words are
powerless.
So, poetry does not exist?
You can write poems, but you cannot write about poetry. You can experience your body,
you can experience energy, but nothing you can write about it will bring about any
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understanding.
Out of a thousand people who study poetry in the same way, only one poet will emerge.
Out of a thousand students of the piano, there will be only one true musician. Yet they all
had access to the same technique.
Art is possible—actually there is only art—but analysis, explanations, the understanding of

art are impossible. You cannot understand music; you can only live it. You cannot create
poetry; you can learn to listen, and from that availability poetic capacity will spring.
Exceptionally, some poets have been able to formulate what is beyond expression. That is
only possible in moments of true stillness. This availability opens areas of the brain that are
usually inaccessible—whence poetic inspiration. Some writings by the phenomenal
Stephen Jourdain[1] have these ingredients.
I get what you're saying: we need to feel; to feel the emotion, the sadness, the fear. But I
realize that, if I get swept up in it, comments disappear and…
There isn't much to risk.
If I get swept away, I tell myself: “If emotion is here, you can let yourself be swept away by
fear…”
You don't get swept away, the emotion gets swept away. You don't leave, it leaves you. It is
like fainting: you let go of the body, but you do not drown. Of course, in some situations,
fainting is necessary for survival. You will feel your body pass out, just like at night when it
falls asleep. Let the body fall asleep.
Let's come back to the example of being hit. You experienced this when you were
competing in karate. Remember what it felt like to get hit in the belly. You feel the shock
and you let the shock destroy everything in its path. You remain completely still. All of this
takes place inside you. The proof is, you can talk about it. You feel detached from what you
are talking about. You perceive the pain radiating through your whole body; you are
beyond the pain, otherwise you would not feel it. You feel the body that hurts and,
gradually, the breath that comes back, the diaphragm that struggles to work again. Little by
little, things calm down. Everything happens within you. You are not relieved, it's only the
body that relaxes little by little. You only witness what is here.
Similarly, you do not let yourself be swept away by emotion, you let your body be swept
away. It is very different.
Is it like a letting go? You open the gate?
Exactly. You do not let combat take hold of you, but the body is taken and reacts. Madness
swings into action, and you are present. All of this takes place within you, you observe. If
you become involved in combat, you lose your peripheral vision. If you stare at your
opponent, you lose your attention. The body is centered and you keep your peripheral
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vision, not only visually but as a felt sense too.
You should never get lost in feelings. That was the first piece of advice that my teacher
gave me. As I was young at the time, we talked about sexuality a lot whenever we met. The
first thing he asked me, even before accepting to teach me yoga, was to never let myself go
during sexual intercourse—to let go of everything but not of myself. This completely
changed my perspective.
When you let yourself be stunned or taken away, you lose your vision. Somebody could
come into the room, knock you out, and you wouldn't even notice it. On the other hand, if
the body relaxes, you remain aware and if something happens in the room, you are
present. It is important to feel the difference. I generally do not resonate much with the way
the word witness is used in certain traditions, but perhaps it has its place here.
There can be madness but stillness is present, is that it?
Madness deploys itself within stillness. Thus, the body discovers a new function. No longer
being directed, no longer being a slave, it finds new ways to act, new potential. That is true
for combat, love, touch, feeling, and every capacity for survival and for life. Action happens,
no one is acting.
In my own experience, that stillness has always existed. It is just accumulated beliefs that
caused me to lose sight of this obvious fact. No matter what the intensity of the event—it is
difficult to express—it is as if I was perceiving or being this stillness.
Of course, that is why there is nothing to do. The only mistake is to try to perceive stillness.
That is not possible because we are perceived. That which perceives is not an object of
perception. Stillness cannot be perceived.
But it is felt?
Stillness is aware of biochemistry.
I understand, but if emotion allows us to become aware of stillness, as you said before,
then it makes sense that people will try to live their emotions because, in the end, these
emotions allow us to access this background. It is a quest for love, a quest for…
Yes, it makes sense to think that the third swimming pool will fulfill you and also, at some
point, to have the intuition to realize that what is sought is not outside of you. The desire for
a third swimming pool is the same as the desire to sit down and meditate. It is a
misperception of the intuition of stillness.
Stillness is not present. It is presence, availability. There is only emotion—what else could
there be? Perception is emotion. A smell, a color, a taste, a touch, all are pure emotion.
What about ideas?
Ideas as well because ideas always rest on senses. Certain ideas such as clarity,
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lightness, freedom, carry great emotion, but they have lost their original dynamic, their
purity. Others, such as color, taste and touch are closer to this stillness.
The word is emotion. A sermon by Meister Eckhart is only emotion. Words are similar to
musical notes. Listen to music, you do not hear the notes, you perceive the breath, you feel
the caress. When you read Meister Eckhart, words flow, you feel the rhythm, the sweetness.
At the end of the text, the last note dies, the last word fades away. Emotion, joy remains. A
tear, a feeling of utmost aloneness, in the noble sense of the term, can arise. This complete
unity where everything dies in you is pure emotion.
Hence, sometimes words sometimes bring about this pure emotion, but only inspired
words, such as Rumi's or Linji's. Studies, analyses, treatises on Tantra only create a form of
thinking, a form of security.
What about the situations that awaken old trauma? When the body is purified, does it get to
a point where these situations are dealt with for good and will not arise again; a point
where only intensity will remain?
It doesn't matter. When you have the intuition of this space of stillness, whether agitation,
sadness or desire comes up or not, the emotion does not upset your availability, you don't
get carried away by emotion.
My teacher used to talk about total cleansing, but I do not believe, as long as the body and
the psyche are here, that they can be without a memory. Of course, what used to be
traumatic before no longer disturbs you. Still, depending on your life, you keep dragging
around some old forms of conflict, of preferences—they simply stop being a problem.
My teacher had a weak constitution. During the years he spent in the Foreign Legion, he
suffered greatly. Later, thanks to the practice of yoga, he became as a lion; but before that,
it hurt him. Toward the end of his life, his brain became affected and, on several occasions,
I witnessed him thinking he was still in the Legion; he asked me to fold the blanket the way
they did in the Legion, or he talked to me in German. Then he became clear again and
said: “Here we are, in an hour I will get agitated again, but life is beautiful, life is wonderful.”
Thus, he was free from his lapses; but some aspects of the past that had been wiped out
during his whole yogic phase came back in the last two years of his life.
There is no need to be afraid of emotion. Sadness, jealousy, and desire are also part of life.
As soon as we are no longer destroyed by our emotions, we no longer have to satisfy our
desires. They can come up, but they become a form of beauty, of resonance, of complicity.
Whether they are fulfilled by life or not, we feel free. There is no problem. We sleep just as
soundly. We do not manufacture anything to fulfill our desires. On the contrary, we find a
form of extreme pleasure in doing nothing.
To meet a man, a woman, a dog; to feel a form of extreme resonance in your heart and to
do nothing about it. What happens is on another level. A form of non-mental caress is
present. Little by little, a sort of confirmation will take place on a purely energetic level. One
day, if the situation presents itself, if your girlfriend is traveling, if your husband is dead and
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if time and space match, then something might materialize. But there isn't the slightest
thought, the slightest intention to achieve any goal, no reflection, no comment, just pure
availability.
Emotion and resonance are still present, as beauty. No frustration is possible because
there is nothing you want. You are simply available to what is here, to what comes up,
without any preference. Free from intention, desire bursts out with extraordinary power. A
desire inconceivable for anyone wanting for something. This something which, precisely,
looks so childish and bland now.
Not hoping for anything allows your desire to become really powerful, magical. It is difficult
for the mind to formulate, as this desire is impersonal, it is cosmic. It's not even a desire, it's
an obvious fact. Something is present, you let it happen; life will take care of the
manifestation.
Expectation, pleasure, dissatisfaction, all that clutters life, all that creates needs… I'd like to
see the end of it!
Look at it the other way around. Your life is not miserable, far from it. It has brought you to
ask yourself these questions, to be honest enough to look at your mechanisms. All the
events in your life helped you to question yourself. If you are not busy acquiring another
husband, conceiving a child or becoming wealthy, it is thanks to that life.
That is the first thing to establish. Successful lives are miserable lives. When you
understand that, you realize how perfect yours is, since it brought you to question your
functioning.
Then you need to go further and notice that you always look in front of yourself, you always
try to get to this stillness. It isn't a question of modern times, it was the same ten thousand
years ago
You can't get to this stillness. This stillness is constantly here, but you are looking for it in
front of yourself, in the perception, in what you are going to do—instead of living
consciously with the perception of sadness, of emotion or of joy which is here now.
Simply feel what is here in the moment. The goal isn’t to get rid of the emotion and to free
the body—which would be a useless pursuit—but to become familiar with the action of
listening.
At this moment, you can listen to the crickets. Then listen to your emotions in the same way.
You have no prior history with crickets, which allows you to listen to them freely, without any
comment. When you listen in that way, stillness happens. The crickets do not make you
quiet, the listening does. Become familiar with listening to your body, with no intention, as if
you were listening to a cricket. That is what we learn here. You will notice that everything
that comes up through the senses comes up in that silence. That silence is not in front of
you, but behind you. It is the background which allows every noise, every emotion to
appear.
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Sometimes, I get very painful cramps in my belly. When I am in good shape, I am able to
wait and it ends up relaxing. At least, that's what it feels like. But sometimes I am tired and I
lack the energy to wait.
You should use a hot water bottle.
I take hot baths, but I was wondering if that was hurtful?
It isn't hurtful, but it doesn't solve the problem. Better than a hot bath is a hot wrap. Keep it
on the belly for ten minutes. If you are traveling, a hot water bottle does the job. Do it every
day for a week. You will appreciate the change.
This technique was practiced in South India, in ayurvedic medicine, in nineteen-century

Germany by Kneipp, and also by Kuhne and Carton. All these methods are very closely
connected to each other.
It doesn't solve the problem, but a hot wrap allows you to deepen and may even allow
some emotions to come to the surface. When your belly gets better, you can progressively
start to practice the methods we teach here.
Hot baths help too, but local treatments are more effective. The principle is the same as
using a narrow object to hit something. It will hit harder than the same blow applied with a
greater surface. That is the way the Ippon-ken hand position works in the karate tsuki.
You need to take care of this. Pain which comes from the digestive system consumes a lot
of energy. It isn't a symptom to ignore, it is something to love. You need to carry it in yourself
as if you were carrying a child that you love very much. When the pain comes up, you feel it
and you say: “Thank you, thank you, you are here again.” Let yourself be caressed fully, but
above all do not run away from it, or it will move to somewhere else.
This somatic acceptance of pain does not prevent you from getting treatment if needed, far
from it
You mentioned that your teacher was a weak man. Obviously, one does not practice yoga
to become strong, but you said: “Yoga practice made a lion out of him.”
He would not have appreciated, I believe, my comment on his weakness. I met him after his
practice. He was already in his sixties, maybe a little less. He had considerable non-
muscular strength. I saw him lift mountains—but not suitcases! He was first and foremost a
translucent man. When he touched your hand, you felt as if a ghost was caressing you. All
those who met him have this memory. His hand seemed to be completely empty.
Was it energetic strength?
Yes, but I wouldn't have fought with him! He had a force that everybody felt. In Paris, at a
meeting at L'Homme de la Connaissance, someone asked him if vegetarian food didn't
cause a form of weakness. He looked at the audience and said: “I haven't eaten meat or
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fish for forty years, and I am ready to take on anybody in the room.” It wasn't said lightly. No
one got up.
(Silence)
You need to wake up happy, fall asleep happy. This becomes natural. That is what's
important. When you wake up happy without a reason, your back can hurt, your belly can
hurt, your head can hurt, you can be broke, heartbroken, anything… everything is a spark
of joy. You wake up happy and, at night, you go to bed happy. It happens by itself. There is
nothing to learn, nothing to fabricate. You only need to let go.
English Intro
Chapter 11
English Intro
The situation is an excuse

He doesn't build a path with either one thing or another.
What does he do then? Step by step he follows Providence… and only relies on the
infallible, which is the present moment.
Madame Guyon:
Could you tell us how God's call made itself heard to you?
We don't get into this kind of formulation here. The words God, Life, etc. take us away from
availability. It's all outside.
That which happens doesn't deserve our attention. Only that which doesn't happen, that
which does not depend on any cause, is interesting to us. That which does not happen
cannot be named, doesn't have a past and cannot be part of memory.
When I realize that any direction I follow is always based on memory, and that all that could
be grasped of a God could only be projection, the urge to experience or to formulate
anything whatsoever leaves me. There remains a non-experience without any personal
element. Nothing happens, only listening. This listening, we all have it in common.
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Experience, personal history is of no concern to us—it is a fantasy. It has value for a poet, a
writer or an artist who tries to describe these events. But at the heart of what we are talking
about, there is no event. The non-event takes charge of us. It doesn't become part of my
life, rather my life is part of it.
That is the difference between a direct approach—which emphasizes availability, the

common background in which, through which, with which our lives materialize in space-
time—and the progressive approach, which tries to experience this non-event within time.
Everything that begins, that refers to a date, to history, is not our concern; it is decoration.
Knowing whether an experience happened or didn't happen belongs to history. What
happens to me takes place in the non-event. The question is very beautiful for a novelist,
but it could only have a worldly answer.
To come back to your question, it is important not to assign the intuition of stillness to a
situation itself. No matter what the situation is that seems to echo in you, come back to your
intuition. The situation is an excuse. For some, it is being hit with a stick, the fall of a leaf, an
empty movement. For others, it is a word, a text. There is nothing in the word, the text, the
stick, all this is a poetic anecdote pointing to what is essential in us.
Constantly come back to this deep resonance. It is what is highest. It doesn't depend on
anything. If it were the result of anything, I would have no interest in it. If it were transmitted
by anyone, I wouldn't want it. What can be given to me is of no interest. I'm only interested
in what no one can give me or take away from me. Everything else is imagination.
That is why there is no teaching or transmission possible. We can only transmit concepts.
As soon as it seems that the circumstance is what allows me to feel this autonomy, I
immediately turn my head away from it and I come back to this availability. As long as I say,
“This situation brings me to…,” I am excluding the rest, and creating a form of separation.
When I realize that no particular situation can bring me to this availability, I notice, little by
little, that every situation is an echo of this listening.
Do not try to mentally understand what we are talking about.
In this vision, I notice that it was my imagination which made me think that one situation
brought me closer and that another one took me further away.
Remain in that autonomy, otherwise you will step into religion or morals. Through effort or
intention, you create a world, a life that matches your fantasy. This gives birth to conflict, for
everyone creates a God according to their imagination. The so-called ultimate Gods have
multiple colors and names depending on the area of the world they are from. This is the
basis of every war.
In our intimate resonance, there is no longer any God, any religion, any spirituality. Conflict
is no longer possible. I become available to what I receive; available to those times when I
feel separate—they need to be accepted as well. Separation is one expression of non-
separation. This feeling of non-separation is given to me as a form of resonance; I must find
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the essential in it. Silence is as much in presence as it is in absence, as much in agitation

as in stillness. I do not need to be silent to be in silence. I cut short any urge toward
ownership, toward religiosity.
It is a religion without a code, with the moment as its centerpiece. That is the essence of
Kashmiri Tantric yoga.
What is Bhairava?
A concept which points to a non-concept. It made superb art pieces possible, just like the
concept of God made beautiful architecture possible. Churches do not limit God. Bhairava's
heads do not limit Bhairava. This feeling finds its expression through the proportion in
Roman churches, through the madness of Gothic churches. It expresses itself in Nepal as
sculpted masks and in Kashmir as numerous philosophical schools using the word
Bhairava to designate supreme reality.
But those are only words. The map isn't the territory. The meaning must be revealed from
the inside. It moves from the inside to the outside; then the word gets its meaning. But when
you just utter the word, there often is imagination moving from the outside to the inside.
All Sanskrit words that designate the nameless must be spit out from the inside toward the
outside, like a mantra. A mantra isn't linked to a meaning. Mantra is an explosion from the
inside which can then, sometimes, be spit out, formulated outside. In moments of silence, of
complete stillness, certain sounds are felt, and then uttered. Later perhaps, the mantra can
be conceptualized and acquires a meaning. But to want to recite an external mantra to
reach the inside is complete nonsense; it will stay on the surface.
Abhinavagupta wrote hymns praising Bhairava. He projected an internal emotion into a

poem. Meister Eckhart also shared this emotion which later brought him to write his
sermons. There, the God he talks about is a true God, a God that moved from the inside to
the outside. It is a revelation.
If you read these texts with your mind, it is very unlikely that you will grasp their origin.
When you read the word God or the word Bhairava, you immediately project a whole
imaginary world onto them. The God that soldiers invoke before going to bomb a country in
order to pay less for a barrel of oil is a different God than the one Meister Eckhart talked
about. Yet, it is the same word.
Thus, we need to come back to direct emotion. Then, depending on your culture, your
capacity, your means of expression, depending on whether you are an architect, a poet, a
writer or a musician, you will express it in different terms, sounds, gestures, in particular
atmospheres or through a certain lifestyle. It must come from the inside.
That is why the Islamic tradition refused to formulate anything that could be associated with
God. In the Islamic sense, God isn't associated with anything—that is His first quality.
Anything that you would associate with Him isn't Him. Any name, any shape, isn't Him. He
is the non-associated. For Muslims, all those who created a form are idol worshipers.
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Poorly understood, as is too often the case with monotheist religions, this vision will be
imposed from the outside. In India, this attitude was responsible for the destruction by Islam
of innumerable wonderful expressions, from the first Muslim invasions all the way to the
decadence of the Mogul period; that is religion in action.
On the level of felt sense, any image, any concept, any name is an insult. That is why in
India He is called the Nameless.
Actually, my question was motivated by the fact that I feel something, that I have visions
and that I doubt these visions. So, I asked the question wanting you to confirm my vision
and, instead, you destroyed everything. When I listen to you, I conclude that it isn't any God,
that these are only images. At the same time, I feel these images as gates. I doubt and I do
not know what to do with this doubt. I doubt all the time.
The doubt is the gate. In the beginning, the doubt will project itself onto the objective
world—you will doubt something. Then, at some point, the doubt starts to eat what it
doubts. A doubt without a direction will remain, which is a listening.
You need to remove the object of the doubt. The doubt is not-knowing. It isn't a doubt that
projects a non-doubt. The doubt must be a real doubt. The doubt mustn't doubt objects. It
must doubt itself. When it stops being a doubt, there remains an availability.
True doubt is energy which stopped being eccentric, which doesn't go away anymore.
Yours is still oriented towards something. You doubt, forget what you doubt but remain with
the doubt, and something will explode. Everything that you can doubt, you must doubt;
there are good reasons for that. We doubt the objective world, and you must doubt it. At
some point something will come which you cannot doubt. Live that.
What could it mean to be a Yogi in our times?
Non-dual Tantric yoga doesn't speak about times or Yogis. To take oneself for a Yogi or for
any other image is pure pretense. This ownership is the opposite of what non-dual living
could be like. Diametrically opposite to this identification, you find the possibility to feel
within yourself a space free from images, free from ownership; that is the Tantric yoga
approach.
In practice, all daily activities progressively integrate into this intuition of being nothing. To
not pretend anything is an opening to the all-encompassing possibility. No longer limited
by images and references, every situation—in our times or any other time—appear for what
they are: the expression of the whole in which we play our part, without any expectation,
without any demand.
Everyday life is a direct reflection of the essence of things. It is our field of investigation, in
which we notice whether, or to what degree, our understanding is intellectual, superficial,
imaginary, or real and integrated. If a life situation is psychologically difficult, it shows that
nonduality is only a concept for me. Action is my field of investigation.
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In my intimate relationships, I will discover the extent of my imagination, of my expectations,

of my pretensions and of my strategies. It is in that arena especially that I will be able, little
by little, to find in myself a space free from ownership. How? By realizing that every
demand comes from entitlement. To demand anything from my wife, my lover, my child, my
husband or my parents comes from the same illusion: I am looking for emotional security
and its materialization depends on someone else's attitude. The need to love, to belong, is
the most direct expression of my lack of clarity.
The more I listen deeply to my body through sensory awakening and yoga, the more—if I
have joined an authentic tradition—I will notice short periods of time in which there are no
demands and no requests. After a session of asanas or pranayama, I will live a few
moments really free from the need to possess.
Instead of focusing on yoga as the apparent cause of this rest, I learn to turn my gaze
inward and to free that feeling from any cause. The practices did not cause this feeling of
well-being; they wiped out the tensions that prevented me from feeling it. When I begin to
feel that the peace experienced after a session does not result from the session, but that
the session allows peace to resonate inside of me, this understanding will continue to
spread to other circumstances. Away from yoga, walking in the street, doing my job or
washing the dishes, I will also feel moments of well-being without a cause. These moments
will keep spreading, until they become almost constant.
In the Kashmiri teachings, the practice of yoga is not separate from its integration into
functional life. The well-being apparently caused by the session will allow me to integrate,
to listen to the environment and to myself, to hear the extent to which I am in demand, in
intention, in hope.
The technical essence of this teaching is nonviolence, non-demand. Since, when

practicing, I do not demand of my body that it master anything whatsoever, I can listen to it.
The more I discover this space free from judgment and expectation, the more the
superficial layers of my body are set free; tension, heaviness and compression vanish,
allowing the subtler layers of elasticity, light, stillness and vibration to appear.
This approach leads me to let go of the urge to look for myself. When I no longer look for
myself, I am present, and in this presence, the outer body collapses inward. After the
session ends, this new awareness will bring about emptiness, vibration, light, at other times
during the day. Every part of daily life is an opportunity to come back, not toward myself, but
toward listening. In that listening, these contemporary times are only an accident.
There is no such thing as traditional times versus modern times. Every era is sacred, every
civilization springs from the same essence, the same beauty. We are exactly in the times
we need to be—otherwise we wouldn't be here.
Facing everyday life is the essence of every traditional art. No running away, no hope, no
regrets or longing for another era, no fantasy of change, of transformation, of the evolution
of consciousness or other such pseudo-philosophical nonsense can remain.
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Face what is here: peace today, war tomorrow—you can't have one without the other. Face
full employment or unemployment, face fine weather or national disaster. Face your body
in youth and health or in old age and disease. Face your psyche in its fears, its
expectations, its anxiety.
To face doesn't mean to confront, judge, or try to transform; it means to listen. In this
listening, free from any expectation, little by little, the psyche lets go of its urges, its fears, its
hopes. It finds itself to be a free space in which every individual characteristic can emerge.
Every modality of our era, in this fantastic array of energy fragmentation, is now seen as
cosmic play, as the exploration of our being, and not as a distraction, or as something to
regret or to correct.
In this simple acceptance of the world, of the body and of the psyche as they are, the non-
dual tradition of Kashmiri Tantric yoga expresses itself in all its strength.
This allowing of the world in its many modalities does not prevent a clear vision of our
times. Yet, the multiple ways a human being suffers no longer appear as something
destructive which creates a desire to run away from life. On the contrary, this acceptance
invites us to face things better, to listen better. When I realize that the origin of all suffering
is imagination, I realize at the same time that it is my civic duty to end it in myself.
War and violence have fear as first cause. It is fear that triggers the need to assert, to
demand, to require. And that fear is essentially the fear of not being, of not existing. When I
am not acknowledged according to my imaginary requirements, I react and I demand to be
recognized, respected, loved. This fear of not existing can bring me to impose my views
even on a whole civilization or environment.
It is evident in the current socio-geopolitical situation. The enemy is the one who harbors
different ideas, the one who lives differently. Recently, on American TV, a senator asked his
fellow citizens to report anyone with a different lifestyle to the police—meaning different
lifestyle from the stereotypical one. That is the result of fear! All current conflicts are based
on ideology, on the need to be something.
As long as we identify with a race, a country, a history, anything special whatsoever, we

remain in fear, in war. We need to assert ourselves, to differentiate and therefore to oppose.
Noticing this allows me to find in myself a space free from identification, free from any
pretension to be anything whatsoever.
All the suffering in the world is only an opportunity to deepen my intimate life. Suffering
does not destroy; it allows maturity to develop, it presents me with what is necessary for
self-questioning. Acceptance stops being mere passivity.
Presence to what is here—in my body, in my psyche, in the world—clear seeing without

demand, without expectation… this presence is at the heart of our tradition, and at the
center of every tradition.
This tradition does not create self-centered yogis but strong, active, well-balanced people.
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To face every situation, to get involved according to one's capacities, is a natural extension
of this vision. There will be involvement, but it won't be psychological; there will be activity,
but it won't be ideological; there will be commitment, but without the pretense that other
forms of commitments are wrong.
Action springs from vision. Vision is action, and commitment doesn't take a stance against
something. Commitment happens for and through something. According to my personal
characteristics, I participate in the whole. I do not need any other capacities than those that
are mine in the moment. The body and the psyche are here to serve. To serve what is here,
not an expectation of what should be here, nor the desire to find myself.
Acting without intention is the essence of joy. The famous anonymous quote from the
martial arts of Okinawa, “Karate is not designed to be used,” is at the very heart of
traditional combat disciplines: action for the sake of action, action without a doer, the
learning of an art without ownership. This does not contradict at all Mas Oyama's sentence,
“Karate is designed to be used,” which asserts the technical orientation of this martial art
and distinguishes it from modern sports like judo, aikido or even competition karate.
According to the teaching of Kashmiri Shaivism, daily life is the ultimate stillness.
What do you think of the use of transformational medicine, of awareness techniques such
as Byron Katie's, whom you have mentioned, or other techniques, other groups, other ways
of transforming one's attitude in order to be able to see things differently?
The quality of Byron Katie's work is her presence. She brings you to realize that pretending
anything is the sole cause of suffering. As long as you stay with and in this
acknowledgment, it is The Work. If you transform this into a technique—a tool where you
constantly write down what doesn't suit you, reverse these sentences to free yourself from
them and, in the next moment, take something else that disturbs you and write again—then
it can become an escape.
To merely challenge the words that describe an emotion does not touch on its origin, which
is the pretension to be. You can calm the ego, again and again, but it is only a temporary
fix. These tools can have their use for people who do not have the maturity to listen to their
emotions on a somatic level.
All yogic tools bring about progression, control, purification, but from our viewpoint, it is
postponement. Sooner or later, we will need to abandon control, understanding and
manipulation—all that requires the mind to be involved. Freeing certain body areas
through willpower only contributes to conceptual knowledge. When I lose my memory,
when I get Alzheimer’s, I will not remember how to do The Work, I will not remember that I
need to reverse the sentence or how to free myself from this or that energy block. I will not
have access to doing anymore. What will be left then?
Any technique which is based on activity depends on the condition of the brain—which
does not have a life warranty. Here, the work is based on non-activity. No matter what the
condition of your brain is, silence and stillness go deeper than activity.
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Everyone has tried, each in their own way, at thirteen to stare at a burning candle without
blinking, at fourteen to hold it still, or to stand under an ice-cold waterfall without breathing.
To try to own tools and, later, to realize that there is nothing to own, is part of human
maturation. As long as I feel the need to find props, I must continue to do so. If I feel the
desire to buy a husband, a car, a dog, or to change my personality, I need to do it. And then
one day, the desire to change husbands, to free myself from conflict, to change my
personality or to see more clearly, all begin to look very childish. From then on, I don't want
anything, only that which is here.
What is here is what is given to me, it is the revelation. What else would I want? This
revelation changes constantly, but the idea to transform myself is a form of insult. An insult
to God. God has made a mistake, I must fix it; I need to change, I need to see things better.
But if I needed to see better, then I would see better. The vision is to be found in living my
non-vision with humility, and not in seeing more.
Wanting is a horizontal process. I only see the object itself and, no matter how pure, it is still
an object. This does not prevent me from being in a situation which seems to create a deep
resonance in me, from meeting a man, a dog, a camel, a spiritual teacher… and to act on
it—why not? But I find myself entertaining yet another hopeful thought, thinking that the
situation might be profitable for me. At some point, I will see that nothing can be favorable
or unfavorable.
When I realize that there isn't a me, then everything is good for me. The urge to try
something or not disappears; just what is here remains. This doesn't preclude anything. If
the luck of the draw brings you to meet Marigal or any other inspired teacher, that is
wonderful. But you meet them for the joy of sharing this non-ownership.
Of course, if we were to listen deeply to what Byron Katie says, we would realize that what
she says is beyond technique, that she only talks about the essential; but generally, we
hear her on the level of technique. Her undeniable quality is not at fault.
In the same way, while listening to Jean Klein, some remained at the level of technique, of
words. They learned a non-dual teaching and they repeated non-dual sentences. Jean
Klein is not to blame; their intentional listening is. Those who wanted to find themselves, to
become wise or realized, fell into the pot and have only themselves to blame. They listened
in a self-centered way and distorted what was given to them: the art of offering, of sacrifice.
The teaching wasn't designed for anyone to own. It was the art of giving thanks.
When it's listened to in a polluted way, the same teaching seems to be reduced to a
technique. In that way, one could completely take ownership of Jean Klein's or Byron
Katie's approach. It all depends on the way you listen. If you meet her and you really listen,
you will notice that her questions are not about something external, they unfold organically.
This will allow a resonance in you and, when you are tempted to assert something or to be
dissatisfied, you will notice your mechanism. Resonance shows me my limits—not what is
authentic, but to what extent I am phony. In this way her teaching gives wonderful results.
It is the same with all teachings. There is nothing to own.
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Going to listen to Byron Katie thinking it's going to help you is a form of insult. You need to
go there for the sheer joy of meeting her. You only meet yourself; in her presence, this
becomes very obvious. Leave aside her somewhat syrupy American expression without
any comment. What remains is the beauty of what she does: not to accept any narrative
and to send you back to where you were before you pretended something else than reality.
For the sake of the American mentality, perhaps it was necessary to turn her work into a
method, but it isn't a method. It is life itself. To become aware of our pretensions and
expectations, to realize that we always blame the other for what we blame ourselves. It isn't
a technique, it's an obvious fact. What disturbs us in the other is ourselves; everybody can
see that.
So, do not go see her to acquire something, but as you go to the opera: for the joy of a
moment of beauty. It is the most joyous moment in the world. If you go hoping for change,
then when you return, nothing much will have changed.
It is essential to play, in the deepest sense, because the game is to be without a goal. You
realize that there is nothing else than beauty in life. People who have a goal and who think
that life is serious cannot play, they are too busy accomplishing important things. When I
realize that the essence of everything is to play, that I have nothing to succeed at, that there
is nothing I can fail at, that my life is perfect, then playing has deep meaning and I realize
that the rules of the game were only a fairytale. The rules are that which allows for the
game.
What's important is to play.
English Intro
Chapter 12
English Intro
The fast of the heart

Thus, let us leave the land of the certain and the scouted. Let us go forward without
hesitation and without seeing where we go.
We must move like a ship upon the waters; she has no tracks before her nor does she
leave any behind. We need not see anything before we start walking nor keep any memory
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from the place we visited to turn it into a path.
Madame Guyon:
Can you talk about fasting?
Most often, fasting is a compensation for an inappropriate diet. Why fast? Nature offers
food, the body needs food, we must eat what fits. If there is nothing to eat, we fast. If, in the
past, we ingested large quantities of medication, fasting may be appropriate to eliminate
certain chemical residues. It is personal; we cannot generalize. For fasting to be beneficial,
it needs to extend over a long period and to be supervised by someone competent. Under
regular circumstances, fasting is not necessary; it's enough to eat properly.
What you eat isn't essential. It only affects your health. Your health does not affect your
maturity. You can be in perfect health and be completely irresponsible, or your body may
be very sick and find its maturity. Your freedom isn't affected by the condition of your body.
The desire to create a body in good health comes from fear. That balance is unbalanced.
Good health and disease are two expressions of health. Being scared of disease is already
a disease.
Physical fasting is superficial. What counts is the fast of the mind, not absorbing useless
thoughts—the thoughts that we get saturated with through the media, television,
newspapers, novels etc. And, even more essential, the fast of the heart—fast from
affectivity, resentment, criticism, hatred or knowledge. To really remain still, detached. To
not intervene in the world but to let it live inside us. That fast is the only true fast. The fast of
the mind is a consequence of it. Sometimes, the fast of the body can present itself as an
auspicious extension of the fast of the mind.
To remove physical food has no value when you continue to feed on all the clichés of
society: hopes, expectations and regrets—that food is far more harmful than all the cooked
fat, the sugar and the animal proteins you are trying to avoid.
The true fast is the fast of the heart. Stop begging, demanding, requesting anything
whatsoever. Stop wanting to be considered, to be treated in a special way. Do not ask for
anything. And, above all, stop imagining that you are being attacked or assaulted by a
situation. Stop imagining that, because your environment does not love you the way you
want it to, you are attacked; attacked by a look, a gesture, a word, a presence, an idea, a
race, a lifestyle, a different religion…
A true fast is to fast from this pretense of attack, until I realize that nothing can attack me,
except my own pretension. If I fast from my pretension, I become unassailable. A dog can
bite my leg and I won’t be attacked. The neighbor can spit on me and I won’t be soiled. My
body can be raped and I will not feel molested. As long as you are soiled by spittle,
assaulted by rape or attacked by a word or a look, all dietary fasts are useless.
What is essential is the fast of the heart. The body will follow in its own way.
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Your health depends on your genes. You can't help it. You are sentenced to be weak or
strong your whole life. You must accept that. You are stiff or limber, you are easily
traumatized by being slapped or seeing blood, or not. In all those circumstances, there is
only one thousandth of a chance of apparent freedom, of which diet is a part. Observe
three-year-old children who play at recess. You can tell those who will be sickly from those
who will be healthy; whether they eat pizza or brown rice won't make much difference.
If you fall in love with an intelligent diet, why not? But it is for the joy of eating, not because
it's good for your health.
Stillness is good for your health. Hatred, resentment and fear destroy it; your whole
digestive system is upset by these emotions, and even if you take the most wonderful
nutritional supplements, you will not assimilate them. But if you free yourself from all that,
you can eat rocks and you will metabolize what you need.
As for a dietary fast, it can be very appropriate or very unbalancing. People who fast
regularly are often unknowingly setting themselves up for poor health. Fasting is a form of
physical abuse to the body; you burn your reserves.
At the turn of the century in France, many experiments took place on those who fasted
professionally. In public view, a person who fasted was locked in a cage. To make sure he
couldn't eat at night, people slept beside him. Before the fast began, his forearm was cut
with a knife, the healing time was recorded and he was asked to evaluate his pain on a
scale of one to ten, as well as other things. Then he fasted for one month, only drinking a
little water. At the end of this period, his other arm was cut open, and the healing time had
dropped substantially. From what he said, the pain had decreased by 95%! These people
enjoyed excellent health until they were around sixty or sixty-five. Those who reached
seventy started to go downhill. After the age of seventy-three, the end of their lives was very
difficult as they had exhausted their reserves.
So, if you want to die young, fasting is a very good idea, otherwise you should avoid it. If, at
some point during your life, you were stuffed with cortisone or antibiotics, you can fast to try
to eliminate the toxins, but it isn't essential. What's important to us is the fast of the heart;
that one has no side effects.
With a fast of the mind or a fast of the heart, the essence of fasting is non-action. There is
nothing to do. It is the supreme surrender, an offering to our deepest nature. Let Him act. I
live this acknowledgment of my inability to do anything whatsoever; that is the spiritual
meaning of fasting.
You say that stillness is important. When we are disturbed by certain events that take place
around us, by the neighbors or by the person we live with, what is preferable: to adapt to
that which is disturbing, to change the external conditions or to move to another place?
What's preferable is honesty; to become aware of the way we function. We all have a
tolerance threshold. You can accept this and that, and then, all of a sudden you are
saturated. This threshold is different from person to person. Everyone needs to discover
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their own boundaries. It isn't about saying, “I must accept everything”—it would become a
concept—but it is about really seeing the situation.
To humbly become aware that only my story can disturb me, that is the revelation. As long
as I believe that anything else can disturb me, this immaturity prevents all clarity. One day,
Grace incarnates, and this obvious fact frees me from all my pretending to suffer from
anything other than my imagination. As long as I haven't integrated this revelation, my
spiritual life has not begun. That awareness starts the process. Now, when a situation
disturbs me, I know, I feel, that what disturbs me is my reaction to the situation. This is the
first act of humility. I stop pretending that this or that situation can disturb me.
My body and my psyche are just as foreign to me as those of my neighbor. Thus, whether I
am disturbed by my neighbor or by my thoughts makes no difference. So, when I am
distressed by my thoughts, is it better to move away or should I stay put? I do not have a
choice. Sometimes my thoughts are so strong that I have to move, or to become a Buddhist.
Sometimes the thoughts are less extreme and I can remain present, and feel the agitation. I
do not get to choose. I tolerate the telephone ring, the noise of the jackhammer, but the
screams of a child abused by his father might be more than I can bear. If I were a
policeman, a surgeon or a psychologist, perhaps I would have a different capacity. I respect
my limits. It's no use staying here listening to the child's screams and destroying myself.
This doesn't really help the child.
My capacity can only be revealed by my honest listening to the situation. If it is unbearable

and if I can, I leave; but I leave with the maturity of knowing that I do it out of immaturity. I
cannot stand this woman, this situation, and consequently I divorce; at the moment I do not
have any other option. This is already humble. But if I divorce because my wife is awful,
because my husband or my neighbor are like this or like that, then the same situation will
come up again. If I run away because someone attacks me, then someone else or
something else will attack me. There will always be somebody or something to drive me
crazy.
The first level of honesty is to notice that this madness is here. It does not come from over
there, it is here. When I was three I already suffered from it. As long as we don't realize this,
we cannot do much. We visit psychologists, we move, or we become Buddhists. But if I am
lucky enough to receive this revelation, then listening takes place—listening to what is
here, without prejudice. I listen to my body; there is nothing else to listen to.
If tomorrow, because of the whim of a judge, I find myself in prison, what will happen when I
hear screams on the other side of the wall? I will not be able to leave. This happens sooner
or later, one way or another. One day, we can't run away anymore—at the latest, on our
deathbed. Where will I go, on my deathbed, when I get so deeply disturbed? I can't move,
call for help, speak, remember, think. Where will I go?
Face the situation. Sooner or later I will be sentenced to listening. Getting there before
death is grace. The true preparation for death is to face life in each moment, with all its
modalities.
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Then, if I leave, I leave in an open state, open to my lack of maturity, without criticism. I
cannot force myself to accept what I can't accept today, but I can become aware that many
things which were unacceptable yesterday seem easy today. What is unbearable for me
today will not be a problem tomorrow. That I must integrate.
More and more, I listen to what seems unbearable to me. I come back to myself; it is here
that I am attacked, here that I become crazy, here that I need to listen. As long as I listen
over there, as long as I think it should be different, I am not listening here.
As soon as I turn my head, there will be a new attack. There is no recipe. It is normal for a
child to want to run away from a difficult situation; it is also normal for me to be a child
sometimes. When there is aggression, I listen. That is yoga. I do not listen to the attack
—there is no attack. I listen here. Nothing can attack me.
Some people feel attacked if someone spits on them. When that happens, you wipe
yourself off if it's possible and that's it! Why believe yourself to be attacked? It's your
imagination. It doesn't mean anything. When the poor soul spits on you, he feels better
afterwards; that isn't a reason to feel attacked. It is pathological.
Aggression is an idea. Spit on your own hand, you don't feel attacked, do you? But if the
neighbor does it, it's an attack? That is completely imaginary. At some point, many attacks
will no longer reach you psychologically. This doesn't mean that you don't duck to try to
avoid the spit. But you no longer feel attacked by this sort of thing.
Somebody sees you and finds you disgusting, despicable. From his point of view, he is
right; you are that way to him. It isn't an attack. If a lion thinks I am his lunch, I do not feel
attacked. The lion is right to see me in that way. As a lion he can't help seeing me as lunch.
This does not prevent me from climbing up a tree; on the contrary, feeling attacked by the
lion would block my energy system and slow down my escape. When the situation is no
longer felt as an attack, there is still a reaction, but it isn't against the lion.
It is very important to understand that, little by little. Then, we must do our homework. Life
provides the material. We do it honestly. It isn't about pretending to accept what is
unacceptable. If something drives me crazy then that's the way it is, I respect it. If the
telephone drives you crazy then don't have one. If it’s the TV, your wife cheating on you,
your child doing drugs, the neighbor's car being cleaner than yours, the government of a
country or the war over there, whatever it is, it doesn't matter: to each his attack.
At least I leave the door open intellectually and I acknowledge that today I can't bear such
or such a thing as it drives me crazy. But I remain open to the possibility that perhaps there
is no conflict there.
Ten years ago, many situations would drive me crazy and I was ready to strangle someone
or jump through the window. Today the same situations don’t disturb me; I realize that there
was no problem there.
When I found out that my wife wanted to leave me, I was ready to do anything; today it is
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just a memory.
When I lost that job, that body part, that love or that acknowledgment, I lived it as if my life
was over. I was destroyed by what had happened. Today I realize that nothing was
missing; it was just my imagination coming in the way of clarity.
I first need to understand this intellectually.
Coming face-to-face with the situation, sometimes I feel a moment of madness, but it does
not last. I come back to myself and I realize that yet again I imagined a whole world that
does not exist. There is no situation, only my feeling. It is the same toy that made me so
happy then so upset, and for a piece of plastic I was ready to kill!
The toy can bring me neither joy nor sadness; I alone can do that. I live with this
understanding and, little by little, it will leave its mental and conceptual dimension and
become a felt sense.
Availability, sensitivity of the body… Without my reaction, the telephone is only a sound.
There only, in that sound, the attack is felt; there again, honestly, in the moment, I can face it
or not. If you are confronted with something which is beyond your physiological capacity,
you will faint, or your heart will stop and you will die. There is nothing to worry about. It is
when you are feeling that your capacity for integration is at its peak. When you say yes to a
blow, you can really receive blows; when you say no, the slightest blow breaks you.
The jackhammer noise drives you crazy; you feel like killing. Then Grace arises and you
can listen. You no longer listen with your ears; you feel the jackhammer in your chest, in
your throat. Let yourself be stroked. The rhythm of the jackhammer balances your organs.
Your capacity for integration gets multiplied. The threshold beyond which your eardrums
would burst is pushed further away. Your eardrums might still burst, but much later than if
you were to refuse the so-called sound attack. If you resist, the physiological accident
happens faster. It's the same with the heart, you can adapt.
But there is no rule. The rule is honesty. To face my immaturity without any comment. To
understand that I alone can frighten myself. I no longer give this power to anybody else, as
I have done thousands of times. In multiple situations, I pretended that some event terrified
me, until I realized that it was all a story—my fear of losing, of feeling less, of being
challenged.
What do I have to lose in life? I have nothing. To believe I have something is pure pretense.
I can't have anything, hold on to anything, own anything. When, deep down, I realize that I
have nothing, I am no longer afraid of losing anything. As long as I believe I own
something, the whole world is attacking me; at any moment, what I have may be stolen. But
what I have is nothing but misery. That is what I defend! Observe the mechanism.
That doesn't mean we need to become passive—on the contrary. Reactivity is passive; it
constantly repeats the same pattern. I imagine that something attacks me, and what
happens when I feel attacked? I attack. That is passive. I can act that way my whole life,
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constantly, at every moment. You attack me, I attack you; you don't love me, I don't love you;
you are violent, I am violent. That is the way we function.
I must integrate this vision without any comment, since I can't be any other way. To try to not
be aggressive doesn’t mean anything. I attack out of fear. But I can rid myself of fear by
realizing that I have nothing and that I have nothing to lose—just my illusion. What is going
to be taken from me, what is taken from me, is all worthless. All I have will disappear, if not
now, then in the end, on my deathbed. To lose it before that happens makes no difference.
What do I have to lose? To realize this destroys fear. Without fear, I can no longer feel
attacked and there begins true action.
To realize that I cannot be attacked allows me to take risks—because there aren’t any. I can
find myself in any situation where people are going to hate me, to despise me, to attack me,
but what do I care? It is their problem. The cat wants to scratch me, the snake wants to bite
me—that's the way it is, that's the way they are. There is no fear. When someone observes
me, he perceives the shape of my body, my smell, the way I talk, I think, with whom I live,
with whom I sleep, the color of my skin, the way I eat, my political opinions; he feels
attacked, driven crazy. I cannot be attacked by someone else's look. There is a deep
peace. When he trains, a boxer is not attacked. Some people feel attacked when nobody
even touches them. What would a boxer say?
A look does not attack. You can look at me any way you want to. All the looks, all the words
are welcome. Find this autonomy, perhaps not right away but at least understand it, and,
little by little, integration will take place.
This happens to everyone according to their limitations. For some, there is such pathology
that it takes a long time. In some cases, it's money, in others food, sex, love or politics. A
word, a look is enough and they explode. A few notes of a political anthem, the colors of a
flag, and the person becomes crazy; for her it's justified. Everyone needs to understand
their own mechanism.
There comes a day when I do not feel attacked when I hear The Internationale or the
Soviet, Israeli, American or French anthem. I understand that some people weep with
emotion or become enraged. I understand, and I no longer feel attacked. Nor can I feel
attacked by the woman who leaves me, by the sickness of my child, by the condition of my
body, of my country, by the look of my neighbor, by his judgments, whether he sees me as
an admirable, wonderful, ignominious, perverse or miserable man. I love his look. He is
right, he cannot see me otherwise.
I live with reality. With people who hate me as well as with those who love me, life becomes
easier. I feel as close to the former as to the latter. A little bit closer to those who hate me;
the one who hates lives in such misery, such agony, that he needs more attention—all the
affection I can spare. Then, naturally, a form of love arises. The one who loves, I do not
have much time for him. He has already won, for to love is to live a balanced life.
At some point, the desire to live with what is comfortable—psychologically comfortable

—disappears. You can sleep on a comfortable bed for your back; that is something else.
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But psychological comfort, the attempt to avoid the one who wants to put me down, the one
who hates me, who thinks I am wrong—and who suffers from it―that becomes impossible.
You understand that the one who hates you doesn't have a choice, and a sort of natural
sympathy is born. As for the one who loves you, let him live his love. Either it is a projection,
and he needs to be honest enough to notice it, or it is true love, a love that gives without
asking for anything in return—and if this is the case he has won and he lives life in
balance. I do not have much time for happy people.
It is interesting to observe this transition. I feel attacked by a situation and then I realize the
extent to which the situation needs help. The one who attacks me is calling for help.
It's like a child having a tantrum; he is calling for help. Attacked by the child's tantrum, I
react, or I listen to the tantrum. When I listen, I can act in different ways, I can no longer act
against. It is the difficult child who needs help. The happy child doesn't require much
attention.
So, when someone behaves aggressively with you, develop this intimacy. The attack isn't
gratuitous. The neighbor that I disturb is the one who needs me. If need be, I will leave
anyway, but I am aware that it is a call for help.
Every suffering is a call for help. The physician does not run away from disease. Violence
is a disease; attack is a disease. If the neighbor hates my political opinion, he is sick. Do I
need to run away because he is sick?
From there on, it's all functional. We need to be flexible. In some areas of my life I will be
able to act that way; in other areas I won't. If it's about my money, or my wife—that I can't
accept. Each has their threshold.
In California I worked for a long time with a friend who taught me martial arts. One day I
asked him: “You have been practicing Taekwondo, street fighting, for twenty years; what
have you accomplished?” He replied: “It used to be that if someone insulted me in a bar he
ended up in the hospital. Now, if someone insults me, I say nothing. Of course, if he
touches me, he ends up in the hospital.” He had passed a threshold. Perhaps he didn't get
to the end, perhaps he was still feeling attacked by caresses, but his maturity allowed him
to not feel attacked by insults anymore.
Therefore, live with your threshold, which becomes more elastic. If the aggression is too
strong, if a crisis is triggered, you can move, get a new wife or become a Buddhist in order
to forget the drama, but you are aware. Nothing is lost, for the crisis is not over. One
hundred years later, it is still there. When I realize that I ran away from this wife or from that
situation, in that very moment the crisis is present—perhaps less virulent, but still present.
Then I come back to reality and I listen, with my body. I can now undo the crisis that came
upon me five or twenty years ago. That's important. I will undo all my crises.
I don't have to delve into the past to find a crisis to undo; I would only encounter my
memory, my selection. But when the crisis returns, and when I realize how much I was hurt
by this or that situation, the defense is still in me and I let it live fully. In this welcoming, my
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past gets purified of all that seemed to be against me.
At some point, you will keep company, on purpose, with all that was intolerable to you in
life. All that made you white, red, green, all that insulted you, all the situations which gave
you the impression of being soiled, violated, everything that used to look disgusting to you,
you will attend to, with love. You will empty out all these echoes.
From then on, you will never feel insulted again.
This does not prevent you from moving, from acting, but there are no more psychological
residues. I understand in a single instant that the dog that wants to bite me isn't a mean
dog. It doesn't have a choice and I don't either; but now I am able to see that. I can then
take this vision and offer it to the dog.
It's my job to become free; the other doesn't have to. If I live this liberation, up to a point I'm
going to help the other. But to think that the other must change, that the dog must not bite
me, that the neighbor must understand that I am right—there, I am in my imagination.
I can spend my life thinking I know how the other should see me. But the other sees me
according to his own viewpoint, and he is right!
When you stop trying to fix the world, when you leave your neighbor alone, you take care of
yourself because you realize there is no yourself. The neighbor and the world disappear as
problems.
That is the homework.
English Intro
Chapter 13
English Intro
The art of dying

Outside of this game of death, there is no answer.
We watch, and that's all.
Usama ibn Munqidh: The Book of Contemplation
W hat takes us further away? What creates agitation, confusion? Fear. The fear of being
nothing. Religions and spiritual teachings are born out of this fear; they carry it, they
transmit it. All knowledge, all certainty, all directions are nothing but this fear in motion.
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When I ask a question, I take myself further away. When I look for myself in a teaching, I
betray my autonomy and I run away from intimacy. True spirituality is not a demand, it is
availability to what arises in the moment. As long as I want to follow a teaching, a direction,
a guru, I remain in extreme confusion. At times, I may imagine some form of appeasement,
but sooner or later I am brought back to my fear of being nothing. This space, the heart of
things, only reveals itself in a moment of humility, when I renounce every possibility for any
form of knowledge, any form of accumulation, that I let myself be completely devoured by
the moment. This is non-appropriation.
Are there any questions in this resonance?
Isn't this too passive?
What is passive is knowledge. Unless you are talking about this other way of being
“passive,” which means abandoning all pretension to understand or to achieve anything
whatsoever. You need to discover that way of being “passive”—the way that allows for the
right gesture, the right action, without a reference. Of course, compared to a constant
agitation—the attempt to become, to try or to get—it can look passive. But the greatest
intellectual passivity is to follow a spiritual teaching like a sheep.
Asking… why ask? I need to have my own experience. I'm not interested in what someone
else has experienced. The fear that I'm confronting is mine, there is none other. That is the
one that I must face. What can a spiritual teaching give me? It is a form of cowardice, a way
to avoid confronting my own non-existence.
On the contrary, the “passivity” we are talking about here, free from all knowledge, is true
action. Non-doing is action in a deep sense, whereas what is commonly called action is a
form of agitation.
It is the same “passivity” that draws me toward deep sleep every night. It is what makes me
renounce the best lover, the largest bank account, the deepest spiritual tradition, in order to
be nothing, every night. It is not passivity.
Can you say a few words about death?
What is your real question?
It has to do with anxiety, fear.
Fear of death, that is what is real. Death is a concept. Fear of death is your experience. As
in every experience, you have to make yourself available to the felt sense with humility.
Welcome this emotion when it arises in you. You are not afraid; you feel the fear. This fear
of death will spread through your whole body.
Death is a fear. Intelligence has no grip, understanding doesn't play any role, except to
feed the Tibetan, Hindu or Christian nonsense on the subject, or the pseudo-scientific
musings of scientists lost at sea. There is nothing to know. All these pieces of information
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are psychopathic notions that do nothing except express the fear of their authors. You can
guess the condition of those who write about death!
So, you let go of secondhand information and stay with the humility of knowing nothing. A
feeling, a fear remains: in your throat, your chest, your belly. Little by little, you let this
experience of fear talk to you. But in order for the fear to talk to you, you must be silent, free
from knowledge. In your humility, in your felt sense, fear will visit you and, at some point,
you will notice that there is no longer any fear.
Wanting to know something about death is as absurd as wanting to know something about
life. You can only paint it all with the colors or your emotional fantasies. It's all imagination,
and all imaginations are equal.
Felt sense, on the other hand, is intimate and it brings you to a space without imagination
which is the resolution of the question. Felt sense is not a thought, not an “understanding.”
You cannot write a book about it, only be silent and present.
There is the fear of being nothing. But why do we give so much importance to earthly life
and to the experiences we live, as if it was very important?
It is fear.
These experiences we live, are they so important? When we reach the other side…
Less important, more important, those are concepts that you do not need to own. They
don’t make any sense. Is winter important? Is summer important? It makes no sense! Is
your life important? This doesn't make any sense either; they are only concepts.
But perhaps human beings are here to accomplish something?
The tiger projects a tiger destiny, the Muslim a Muslim destiny. The unfortunate soul who
practices positive thinking projects his unhappiness, the Christian his fear. Depending on
how your parents died, what you saw on TV, you will project such a life, such a death, for
yourself. These are mere projections. Everything you can think about your life is imaginary.
A French communist sees life in a certain way, someone who was born in Vietnam and
followed a Buddhist tradition will see it differently. Those are two imaginary worlds and
there is no need to swap one for the other.
You stay in your place, you keep your useless conditioning and you realize that it doesn't
limit you. Something in you is freer than your conditioning. The more you emphasize this
space devoid of ideology, the more you will notice that ideology is of no consequence.
Whether you think that your life is extremely important and you are ready to do anything to
preserve it, or you believe that it has very little importance to the point that you could
sacrifice it for a political, a military or a historical cause, you will see that those are two
concepts. It isn't as if you had a choice.
Our presence is gratuitous then? For nothing?
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For nothing is still an explanation. Thought has no place in true understanding. Looking for
mental clarity postpones understanding and is mere manipulation of your thoughts. What is
talked about in the East is to be understanding, non-objective understanding. There is
nothing that can be understood. This obvious fact sets you free from any possible
understanding.
You do not need to understand anything—this of course you need to understand. When
you really see, you instantly forget what is seen—or else it becomes another image; like
Heidegger you have a very beautiful image, but it is still a conceptual image. Your mental
representations vanish, for there isn't a true representation. The true representation is that
which brings about the disappearance of its representation.
So, is it our fear that needs to know?
Yes. All our actions are motivated by fear. This is not a criticism, it's an observation.
If I am certain of being nothing, is it an image?
Of course.
So, what isn't an image?
That which is not an image cannot be formulated. It is what brings you to ask this question.
Without a foretaste of what is beyond the image, the question would be impossible. The
fact that you ask this question means that there is in you a non-mental foretaste of what is
beyond the image.
Why has very shallow roots. Being is a silent gazing, why is a form of agitation. Depending
on your intelligence, the answer you give today will be different from tomorrow's answer.
There is no answer. Have the humility to stop looking for yourself in an answer.
An answer is only memory. You can only find what you already know. Every day you store
new data and your answer evolves. Every day, your maturation changes your perception of
the world. Whether your answers are brilliant or stupid doesn't make any difference. At
some point, you free yourself from the search for an answer. What remains is a foretaste of
the absolute.
Spirituality is not a circus. It is utterly discrete. No personality, no guru, no assertion is

possible; only a questioning, which is our own death.
Spirituality is the art of dying! It isn't the art of living. But who can hear that? People want to
live. They want to do yoga, meditation, follow a teaching to get better. Might as well go
fishing!
Spiritual teaching is what brings you back to your lack and to your constant failure. In this
fire, maturation happens. People who come here to get better should go away to follow
liberated beings; then, of course, they will get better.
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What to do with my mind, which attacks me all the time?
It is your tool, your gift, you need it. It is no coincidence. You need to listen. See the
mechanism that wants to change, that thinks that if your mind were different, then it would
get better. Is that true? The mind you have is exactly the one you need. It needs to be
listened to, enhanced. It isn't your enemy, it is you who are screaming with impatience.
First understand that that which you are hankering after, you already have. It is not outside
of yourself. You cannot find it anywhere, nor can you discover it, become it, reach it or buy
it; you can't do anything at all. Discover your complete incapacity; that is the gate. In every
moment, feel your complete lack of knowledge, of intelligence, and you will see that an
appeasement takes place. Agitation always comes from the pretense of knowing
something, of thinking that things could or should be different. Become humble, available
to what is here—that is the first step. There is nobody being appeased, but there is
appeasement.
From a pedagogical point of view, we could say: play with your body. When you feel, you
cannot think. Choose a manual, artistic, aesthetic or athletic activity which brings you to live
in the felt sense, and not in strategy. If you choose an art which by vocation has the
capacity to bring you back to this availability, you can go very far with body sensitivity. Even
a superficial form of art can already bring about a form of appeasement.
You are not agitated, you feel the agitation. That is very important. This morning you were
agitated, then less agitated, and now you are quiet. A space within you has witnessed
these different mental degrees. If you take a tranquilizer, you will also notice that your
agitation decreases. You are that observation. Become familiar with this attitude of being
available to agitation, to the degrees of agitation, to the increase of agitation. The practice
of a traditional art stimulates this availability.
Does this imply that we are responsible for opening up to this state?
As long as you think you are, yes. As long as you think you are a personal entity, you have
a form of responsibility. When you realize your complete non-existence, no responsibility is
possible any longer.
You are not responsible from a moral standpoint. But thought is energy and if you think that
your happiness depends on the next woman, it brings about a certain dynamic. This
dynamic is not entirely contained in your body; you create the different society flaws that we
know.
Thought is creative. So as long as we think, we are responsible. It is not a moral

responsibility but an energetic one. When you step on an ant, you are responsible; that
doesn't mean that you could have done anything else. If you push someone onto the road
and the person dies, you are responsible. When you bring ownership to your life, there is a
form of responsibility—functional, not moral. That is why society is right to put you in jail.
When you are happy, you are responsible for the happiness of your environment. When
you are unhappy, you are responsible for the unhappiness of your environment. It does not
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mean that you can avoid being unhappy. When sadness submerges you, you are
responsible for the poison that you spread around.
If I hit you with my elbow and break your jaw, I am responsible. It doesn't mean that this is
going to create an emotional condition. If I do not take myself for my body, whether I go to
prison or not is not my problem; but my body must endure the consequences of my action.
There is a responsibility of the body. But when you realize that your body and your thinking
are clothes, you become non-responsible. If you run over a cow, you are responsible to
reimburse the farmer, but you don't need to see a psychologist.
So, as long as there is an ego that feels responsible for the happiness and unhappiness of
others, we are responsible?
As long as there is an ego that feels responsible, we are not responsible at all; the
responsibility that we assign ourselves is imaginary. It's only when you realize that you are
completely irresponsible that there is true responsibility. At that moment, you take
responsibility. You accept your legal or civil responsibility with respect to society. For you,
nothing is unfair anymore.
Nothing is unfair, even if it's unfair. The feeling of injustice is the fruit of a fragmented vision.
Your neighbor kills your other neighbor and you are accused; you say that it is unfair for
you to get hanged because he did it. But at some point, you will see that this is no injustice.
Life threads are much more complex than that.
As long as I imagine being responsible, then I am really irresponsible. It is a form of

pretense. When I see my total irresponsibility, then only do I become responsible, without
bitterness, without any criticism of society. It's in the absence of all ethics that ethics are
possible. As long as I want to behave ethically, I am in my imagination; it is always my
ethics and it will be in conflict with the ethics of others. True ethics is without conflict. There
is nothing left to defend.
Society judges me according to its laws. An Islamic society would judge me differently. I
don't get to decide which society judges me. So, I accept all the laws. All societies have
their fairness. It is a functional submission. If I need to go to prison, I go to prison. If I get my
hand cut off, I get my hand cut off. It is not a psychological problem. There is no doer, but
the body is responsible in a functional way.
I hear a lot of talk about awakening. What is the difference between an awakened being
and myself? Is it about the perceiving of life? To what do we awaken?
An awakened being is someone with a financial problem; he could not find work and he
needs to earn a living. Now, as an awakened being, he makes enough money. But if you
have a decent job and enough to eat, there is no need to become awakened.
To be awakened or not awakened are two concepts that come from fear. There are no
awakened beings, there are scared people. They are scared, they need to know, to own
concepts that they misunderstand, and to transmit their “teachings.”
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Nobody can be more awakened than Meister Eckhart and, when you read the end of one
of his sermons, you will find the words “Let us pray for this truth to actualize in ourselves.”
He is not “awakened!” So, if Meister Eckhart is not awakened, who is? Those who dare to
pretend? We need to let the poor souls—those who are retired and bored and those who
have financial problems—be awakened; but it is a degenerate form of manifestation that is
very telling of our times.
In the East, there are no awakened beings, but people who have recognized their
complete incapacity, their simplicity. They let their life be accomplished through them. That
a few of their students misinterpret this simplicity and want to see them as “different” only
testifies to their lack of understanding.
There is awakening, but there are no awakened beings.
But somebody like Nisargadatta Maharaj or Jean Klein, aren't they awakened? Those are
people who recognized that they were nothing, didn't they?
One evening in Santa Barbara with Jean Klein, a famous Buddhist master kept talking
about awakening and everybody was listening to this wonderful teacher. Jean Klein was in
his corner and several times he expressed the fact that there are no awakened beings, that
they do not exist. He was saying this in a light manner, in order not to challenge this man.
This does not mean that there cannot be, sometimes, through a man like Nisargadatta
Maharaj, a flow. But this flow does not come from him. It is because Maharaj was free from
himself that something beyond him could flow through him. That is life! Sacred music could
go through Mozart and Bach because they were free from themselves. Creation could
manifest through them because they were nothing. When you listen to certain Muslim or
Hindu musicians in India, at some point the person disappears, only the song is left.
There is an awakening: the awakening of life which deploys itself. But no one is awakened.
Isn't fear a concept as well?
As long as fear has a cause, it is a concept. But the fear we talk about here is without
cause. That fear is not a concept but a felt sense. It is the terrible fear that wakes you up
from a nightmare, when you are falling from a bridge. That fear is not a concept, but the fear
that your husband might leave you, the fear of not being loved, these fears, yes, are
concepts. At some point, fear regresses and finds its primordial madness again. Then,
there is no concept. There is no fear either.
That fear is fearless. As long as fear is fear, it still has an object. When it leaves its object, it
also leaves its quality of fear. What is left is something pure.
Because of that, in Kashmiri Tantra and in certain forms of Nepalese Tantra, consciousness
is often represented by a form which is meant to inspire fear: Bhairava, the Terrible, the
One who makes tears flow.
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Fear is a form of consciousness. It is no longer the fear of something but a manly fear. You
need to feel that fear. No one is afraid. This cannot be taught, transmitted, explained; this
must be lived in the aloneness of the heart.
Do you believe that death is a concept?
The word death is a concept. What we call death is a concept. What is death? It is the death
of the other! You do not talk of your own death, but only of the death of the other. And that
depends on your outlook; a Muslim fighter sees his death in a certain way, the American
Pentecostal who bombs him sees it differently.
All you can think or feel about death is a concept. But when you are next to somebody who
dies, when you leave behind your references, your knowledge, when you let go of this
childish desire to want to “support” the dying and all that nonsense, you are present;
sometimes there is something which is beyond thought. Then you are only love.
Life is also that way. If you feel into what life is, the word death becomes as insignificant as
the word life. What's left is availability, space without knowledge. Death is a magical word,
like the word cancer. They are scarecrows; you don't have to take yourself for a sparrow.
At some point, you are no longer scared of scarecrows. Death: c'est la vie! Words without
meaning.
Felt sense needs the physical body to express itself. When there is no longer a physical
body, there is no longer a felt sense.
The physical body is only one part of the felt sense. There is feeling independently of the
physical body. Sometimes you feel someone in another room; it is not with your physical
body, and it is a felt sense. Sometimes a friend dies and you feel it; it is not with your
physical body. Feeling through the body is one way, but there are other ways.
I am listening to you as you describe this reality which is not mine, which is not ours, and I
can't help wondering: why on earth would so many be off the mark? Why don't we have that
perception? Why are so many of us so lost?
You want to create a pretty story at all costs, but there is no story! There is nobody. You
invent a world, and then you ask why the third son of a sterile woman can't graduate from
high school! In a moment of humility, as you might have observed, there is no other,
because there is no you. There is no you, thus the question of the other is resolved once
and for all. You need to come back to the source: you.
Do you think that we can only awaken through deep suffering and self-disgust?
I think that to awaken as it is currently commercialized, indeed you need to be very

disgusted with yourself. Without this lack of maturity, you couldn't have the childish thought
of believing yourself awakened.
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Those who have self-respect cannot pretend to be awakened. Respect means humility,
listening without expectation—without demanding an awakening. In self-disgust, in
violence toward oneself, you can indeed find all the catalysts to one day believe yourself
awakened. There are many examples in the marketplace.
The answer you gave the lady, earlier, takes away my desire to make any effort.
Exactly.
But what about the consequences? I have work to do and if all this is an illusion, a fantasy,
then my desire to carry out my work correctly is also an illusion, it is based on fear.
Of course.
I am afraid of what this might entail if I no longer make any effort to do my work correctly.
But since you are afraid, it cannot happen: fear will prevent problems. It's only in a total
absence of fear that you can be ready to completely come apart.
Would I come apart?
Of course, and more than that. What is there to risk?
Losing my job?
And so? What is the problem?
This means losing face, this means being on the street. I don't want to look any further.
Fundamentally what is the problem? There are 800 million people who don't get enough
food. What difference does one more make?
The idea of having to be an admirable little girl, approved of and acknowledged by the
people she works with, that idea gets totally lost. If there is no longer an impulse to work in
order to be approved of, all the energy constantly utilized to present yourself, to sell
yourself, to justify yourself, to be loved, to ask for affection and recognition becomes
available to you to do your work according to your capacity. Someone more brilliant would
accomplish it in a more brilliant way, somebody more stupid in a more stupid way, that's all.
If your boss likes you, he keeps you; if he dislikes you, he kicks you out and you find other
opportunities for work; if there are none, you improvise.
No matter what, we will die. Whether we die of hunger or we die wealthy makes no
difference. There is nothing to be afraid of. When you leave behind all psychological needs
to sell yourself, to be acknowledged in your work, then you will carry it out twice as fast and
twice as well. Psychological waves caused by the desire to present yourself in a “good”
light disappear. Whether you like your work or not is not your problem. Everyone does what
they need to do according to their competence.
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When you give yourself fully to what you do without trying to sell yourself, your capacity for
work increases, the quality of your work does too. I really wouldn't worry about this.
But fear contributes to many human realizations, for it motivates people to perform better
and to give more of themselves.
It all depends on what you call realization.
I would like to know your perception of your mind and mine.
They are concepts.
They are not linked at all?
They are not separate at all. Mind is one. Fear causes us to imagine a separation.
I think that this is the first thing that you should say before talking about illusion and
advising us to do nothing. It would be easier to understand. But is that a concept too? We
talk about awakening but what is it?
That word is foreign to me. I leave it to brilliant people or to those who have financial
issues. Here we do not talk about awakening. We leave awakening to the poor souls who
need it to buy clothes. We meet among friends to share together the conviction of not
needing anything.
Awakening is separation. If there were awakened people, there would need to be non-
awakened ones. This is an intolerable separation, a form of racism.
Leave awakening to the awakened. In the non-awakening that we all share, everyone is
interesting. We do not need to be awakened, we do not need anything. When I think I need
to be awakened, I deny my profound beauty, my deep balance.
Aside from mental health issues, nobody needs awakening. It's an escape. If someone
wants to awaken, he can find many teachers in that market.
You have strayed from my question. I find it sad.
Here we are not trying to teach anything. I do not have any truth to convey. You certainly
know a lot more than I do. But here we share this conviction that there is nothing to know,
nothing to understand. I am not trying to explain anything, otherwise I would be transmitting
concepts and we have enough of them as it is.
The heart of our meetings vibrates with the energy of not needing and more than that, of
the resonance of silence. That is what is important.
Questions and answers are not important. You shouldn't even listen to the questions, much
less to the answers. When you do not listen to the answers, there remains a silence.
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None of my answers can help you. Here we do not give anything. In the conviction that we
need nothing to be happy, it becomes useless to understand anything whatsoever: neither
the question nor the answer. That is what unites us. We respect those who want to be
awakened, of course. But that is of no concern to us.
Isn't this dark humor about awakened beings a form of judgment, of separation?
No, because the one who believes himself to be awakened isn't separate from non-
awakening. He is a caricature of it. Even his pretension cannot separate him from reality.
This is not a criticism, but there comes a time when you stop being a little boy looking for
his daddy and you no longer need awakening. You take responsibility for yourself.
Why “there comes a time”?
Because maturation is the nature of things. Because, when you are on your deathbed, you
will be alone and there will not be an awakened being next to you. At that moment, your
own availability will be your guru.
That is what we are pointing to here. The guru that you can visit and then leave does not
interest us. The true guru is what is within you, your gathered and global availability. This is
not linked to the concepts of awakening or non-awakening.
We don't advertise our meetings. Perhaps the resonance we are talking about here does
not suit you, I completely respect that.
I am just discussing…
I am not trying to convince anyone.
Still, this type of meeting seems very intellectual, with concepts and images being
exchanged. Do we absolutely need to go through that? Do we need to go through an
intellectual process before realizing that we are nothing, that we don't need to be afraid,
that we are not individuals, that there is no free will, that we don't have a responsibility, that
we don't have a personal will?
Given your question, I would say yes, for you. For a musician, for an artist, maybe not. In
your question you show a certain intellectual quality, a certain reflection.
First you need to calm down. This will only happen when you have the humility to realize
that you will never be able to understand what is beyond understanding, that you cannot
think the unthinkable. Then this lull will transport you beyond this type of question. But as
long as the question comes, we need to respect it.
With somebody else, the question might take a different form: the death of a friend, physical
pain, financial loss, war—it doesn't matter, it's always the same question.
I respect my life. That which, in my life, appears to me as disorder or violence, that is what I
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need to listen to. If what seems profound is reasoning or questioning, then I need to respect
that too. I do not get to decide my sadhana, my path toward truth. Life manifests my path in
the moment. All that happens to me is my path.
At some point, there is no longer any mental questioning. The quest becomes shapes,
forms; no more thought. It's a little like when you watch the sunset; when the sun melts
behind the sea, behind the mountains, it takes away all your thoughts, your knowledge,
your pretension. In silence, nature, creaking sounds, animals, freshness, everything lives in
you! At some point, everything dies.
What you are transmitting to us right now, is it beyond the intellect?
I do not transmit anything. If you listen to the questions and the answers then that is on the
level of the intellect. If you really listen, then it is not. For that, you need to leave questions
and answers behind. You can hear them, of course, but more like a background noise.
Something else is there.
What is there between us? What is the only possible relationship? Love. There is no other
relationship than love—and it isn't a relationship.
When I do not pretend anything, there is this affection, which is not toward an object but
which is the essence of every situation. In it resides the joy of sharing: going to a boxing
match, listening to an opera, taking a walk, eating, dancing together. It's not about dancing
or boxing; deep down, it's about being together.
What does being together mean? It means not being—not being personal. There is only
boxing, the moon, the cool evening. The joy of being together comes from the sacrifice, the
sacrifice of one's knowledge.
To be together, we first need to not be here: that is the essence of a deep relationship
between human beings. It's not a relationship from person to person. If it were, there would
be no love; the person wants something.
The joy of taking someone to the theater or to a hockey match is not about the hockey
match. Watching together brings out the being's deep joy. There is no one who watches,
there is no longer a relationship from person to person, only watching.
Is that only possible when we are no longer scared?
Without the person, fear isn't possible. Fear is an idea. You are alone in an empty house,
you hear a creaking noise and anxiety comes up. But if an old friend is with you, or even a
three-year-old child, the furniture makes a noise and there is no fear. Why? Can the three-
year-old protect you? No! So why are you no longer afraid? Because, when you are
present to the child, you are absent to yourself. You are present, very simply. In this
presence with the environment, fear is no longer possible.
At some point, you no longer need the child to not feel alone. In true aloneness, you can
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never be alone: you are the world.
Human beings are often contracted in terror. They look for personal love relationships.
They sell themselves: “Love me… I am worth something… Don't you want to love me a little
bit?” At some point you see this functioning. “Don't you want to understand me? Don't you
want to listen to me?” Just notice.
But then how come we feel so good when someone loves us, understands us, gives us a
feeling of security?
Because you stop requesting. In this absence of request, you realize that what loves you is
yourself.
You do not need anyone to love you. It's your job to love yourself, and you don't need to do
it. You don't need anything to love the moon. You don't need anything to wonder. You don't
need anything to love—only to accept being nothing.
To pretend to be anything is a form of violence; war is not far off. As long as you pretend to
be anything, it is useless to complain of war here or there. War is born out of this pretense.
It crystallizes, thickens and becomes what is called a war. But the war arises earlier—in this
pretension, this demand.
With a baby or a dog, you can really feel intimate. You do not have to pretend, as they don't
judge you. A form of simplicity is there. That's why a lot of people would rather have a dog
or a cat than a wife or a husband. It is a form of comfort. But you can live with a woman or a
man as well as with a dog!
Demand locks up the human being. When something is demanded of you, you choke. If
you are next to someone who suffers, the only thing to do is to demand nothing and just
listen. Unhappy children are children who, more often than not, were bombarded with
demands. When you demand, you are not present; you are in your demand. When I am
present with a child, there is nothing to demand. It is this presence which gives balance.
The child will resonate with this presence.
The same is true of an adult. Do not ask the other to be anything other than what he is. His
question, his functioning, his assertion—that is your wonderment. It is extraordinary to see
a human being, to see how he has constructed himself, how he has imagined himself: the
head, the ears, the belly, the voice, the intelligence, the cowardice, the odor he has given
himself. All this you have given yourself; this is the gift you gave yourself. If you meet an
obstacle in your life, that is the gift you give yourself. As long as this is not clear, you
experience it as a fight and you struggle. One day though, you will realize that what looks
like a drama to you, is, deep down, your gift.
I am not asking you to accept it!
It is extraordinary to see! To see nature, to see a leaf, to feel the wind, to hear a cry. Nothing
is more extraordinary than life. To believe that I need anything other than this extraordinary
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gift is a lack of respect for life's beauty. I don't need anything other than a cloud.
This doesn't prevent action! We each have our physical, intellectual and emotional
capacities. We express our strength, our endurance, our intelligence, our know-how in
some domain. The dancer dances, the musician plays music; each fulfills his role, but there
is nothing there; life's beauty is not what you do, it's not your lifestyle.
There are prostitutes, monks, married people, single people—so what? Why would you
want to know what is better? Why would you want to know what suits you? There is nothing
that is better and nothing that suits you. What is best is what is here, in the moment: for a
monk it is to be a monk, for a prostitute, to be a prostitute… in the moment. In the next
moment, the prostitute gets married, the monk leaves the order; it's not better or worse, it is
life's adventure. Judgment is no longer possible, becoming is no longer possible,
awakening is no longer possible. When you can feel the touch of the wind on your cheek,
how can you be so arrogant as to want to be something other than that feeling? When you
are lucky enough to be with a friend who is dying, would you want to be awakened, would
you want to be different rather than feel this extraordinary moment? It's an escape. There is
nothing to be. That is what you must really be.
I would like to hear your comments on the mind. I was depressed for two months and I
realized, at some point, that it wasn't me but my mind that was depressed.
In order to communicate, we use words, symbols. For you, the word mind has a certain
meaning, for me it has very little. I can understand what some people mean by mind, but I
cannot answer your question in the way that you ask it.
Indeed, as you seem to discover, when you feel depression you are not depressed. Rather
than tell the story with your mind, we would suggest—as an experiment—to feel the
depression. It is somewhere in your body. If it comes back, if it is here, simply listen to your
body and see how this sadness, this joy, this depression resonates inside you. “I am
depressed.” What does this mean? How do you know? Who told you that you were
depressed?
There is no desire to do anything.
Go back before that. What took the desire away? You feel depressed; where do you feel it?
That is the question you must ask. At the start it is an intellectual question, but play the
game. In which part of your body do you feel depressed? You feel? Therefore, it's one of
your senses, but which one?
Listen to your body. When you do that, you do not think, because these two activities call
on two different areas of the brain. You let your feet, your legs, your knees, your thighs, your
belly, your chest, your head, your arms all become sensually alive. You will see, you will be
surprised. One day, you will really feel the depression in a certain area of your body, your
belly or your chest. It is the beginning of an extraordinary exploration. Then, indeed, you
can say: “I feel the depression. I feel the fear in my chest, I feel the sadness, the bitterness
in my belly, in my throat. I am not sad, I am not afraid, I feel the emotion.”
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If you become familiar with this attitude, you will realize that the emotion is in you and that
you are not in the emotion; a new clarity will be born. Even the word mind will leave you.
The mind is an abstraction. The body as well, but a more pedagogical one. Let your body
resonate with depression. Then one day, you will not be able to feel depressed.
Depression always comes in moments when the body isn't inhabited, when you do not feel
it. When you feel, you cannot be depressed. As long as a single sense is active—and at
least one always is—what is important is the feeling. Come back to the felt sense.
What we are talking about here cannot be thought. You can debate at the level of thought,
but what is said here aims at waking up this space of no-thought in us. You need to feel the
silence, to feel the stillness, the absence of need. It is not a concept, it is not an idea; it is
felt.
We all spend time in that space. After a desire is fulfilled, we get a moment of satisfaction,
an absence of desire. It's enough to give yourself to that moment. It isn't the object that
satisfies us. The situation is only an excuse, it wakes up the satisfaction that was already
there in us. The same woman, the same compliment three days later no longer affects us.
Why? Joy was already inside us. The situation did not create it, it stimulated the resonance
that we carry buried within ourselves.
The fulfilment is in me, it isn't in the object. You need to understand that. The object refers
back to me. More and more, I give myself to these moments of fulfilment without paying
attention to the cause. It is fulfilment without a cause, even if it was apparently caused. The
fulfilment will eliminate its cause. I will no longer need a smile, a look, a gesture or a red
car to find it. I will no longer need to be awakened either. I will not need anything. This is
autonomy. We all feel it, at certain times. It is only because we lack the right orientation that
we place our attention on the cause of the fulfilment—the woman, the car, the dog, the
husband.
Stay in the fulfilment, let go of the cause; that is the direct approach.
Is the satisfaction simply the joy of being?
The toy, the man, the boat, the dog, the affection, the compliment, all of that served the
same fulfilment. There is only one: the moment when the quest stops.
As long as I am searching, I say no. In a moment of non-quest, this non-quest is the

answer. What I was demanding with such violence was to stop demanding. My only
demand is for that to stop. Whether it is in sexual intercourse—violent or sensitive—in
extreme physical risk, in the accumulation of one thing or another, or in an intellectual
reflection, what I always look for is the ending. It is to breathe out, to be nothing. I demand
my own extinction and I demand it of the outside world! It isn't possible.
The only deep fulfilment is to live this non-demand. This does not stop us from having
lovers or cars, but it stops us from wanting the lover or the car to give us what we deeply
are. We don't need anyone to give it to us because we already are that.
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Then functional life can get underway. Without the dynamic toward something, there
remains a real dynamic. A tremendous dynamic, because it isn't oriented. It isn't the
dynamic to get this or that, but a welcoming for what arises, the dynamic to face what is
here and now.
What is here is my supreme interest, my supreme awakening. I do not want any other. Just
to be available, to listen to what comes up in the moment. Civic sense, moral sense, true
responsibility, I fully recognize myself in that which presents itself. In that space, there is no
separation. There is true communication, without anyone communicating. This all might
seem serious and complicated but it is the simplest, the closest thing.
Do not resist.
[1] French spiritual author who was awakened at age 16, 1931-2009 (translator's note)
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Eric Baret Éric Let The Moon Be Free

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LET THE MOON BE FREE

CONVERSATIONS ON KASHMIRI TANTRA

TRANSLATED BY JEANRIC MELLER

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Published by: Science and Nonduality, 2018, second edition

Cover layout and design: Zaya Benazzo and Melissa White

ISBN-13: 978-1727646269ISBN-10: 1727646266

Annelied Mock for your enthusiasm and your resourcefulness.

Mary Mann, for the first translation of the initial chapter.

Kathleen Knipp, for your willingness to participate.

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Zaya Benazzo, for your continual inspiration, oversight and support.

Eric Baret, for your presence.

Chapter One......................In the silence of intimacy

Chapter Two......................Living with emotion

Chapter Three...................Hope is an escape

Chapter Four.....................Free of all understanding

Chapter Five......................Let fear devour you

Chapter Six.........................Let the moon be free

Chapter Seven...................Tomorrow doesn't exist

Chapter Eight...................Searching is postponing

Chapter Nine.....................No one ever talked to you

Chapter Ten.......................Wake up happy, fall asleep happy

Chapter Eleven.................The situation is an excuse

Chapter Twelve.................The fast of the heart

Chapter Thirteen.............The art of dying

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Ibn Arabi: The Meccan Revelations

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In the silence of intimacy

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Ibn Arabi: The Book of Theophanies

O ur meetings do not happen in a context of spirituality, teaching or understanding, for all

If there is no accomplishment, is there no evolution either?

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essential, something without memory, without ownership.

If there is no accomplishment, what is the use of my consciousness?

The consciousness of something is a functional consciousness. It is like a leg to walk on.

If I manage to be aligned with Consciousness, can I reach Essence?

Try for just a moment not to be aligned with Consciousness…

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Listen to him, listen to his distress, to his joy.

All this comes from listening, from not knowing.

Is philosophy also knowledge?

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I do not need to be intelligent, to understand anything, in order to discover the space of

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The mind cannot understand; it takes me further away.

It is not in your hands, you cannot decide about it.

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child's schooling? What does responsibility become in this state?

Love excludes all responsibility, burns all appropriation.

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My lifestyle is not my business. I do not need to take after Alexandra David-Neel, to go to

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