PART ONE

PHILOSOPHY AND AWAKENING: DIFFERENCES AND OVERLAPPING MOTIFS


FIRST MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You say that you are an awakened one, that an alternative vision has manifested itself to you and that you perceive things differently. I don't know how to situate your vision with regard to philosophy.
ANSWER: When I was young, I was interested in philosophy and I have recently reread some syntheses. If there had been just one form of philosophy, it would not have been worth endlessly inventing forms. I even realized that the aim of philosophy could change from one era to another, or from one culture to another. Some philosophers say that philosophy is the pursuit of truth, and others say that philosophy must not fall into the trap of searching for something so hidden which, at the end of the day, they seem to think depends on a preconceived notion.
By contrast, awakened ones quote each other not in order to tear each other to pieces, but to show that they are indeed sharing the same experience. Although they prefer to refer to teachers belonging to their own tradition, it is not unusual, particularly among modern awakened ones, for them to intersperse their views with aphorisms drawn from different traditions, thus acknowledging that their authors have pierced the same mystery from different starting points. Although the most original of them sometimes appear to reject any kind of connection with the past (a paradox which is too lengthy to explain), most of them draw examples from the past to suit them. What is being transmitted is experience, not just a representation of a particular world, which might dictate special forms of behaviour.
However, there are also philosophers of Awakening, or at least there were in ancient Greece (Parmenides, Democritus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Plato and, in one sense, just a few stoics and the true Epicurus, who was nothing like the image which has been created of him). Even in this century, a French philosopher, who does not incidentally have a French name, seems to have gone far beyond words. On account of his training, however, he retained a jargon and a substantial frame of reference which hide his consciousness. He is not at all well known, considering the quality of his works, whereas others...

QUESTION: Do you see Awakening as the Truth?
ANSWER: In my case, it was the search for the truth which led me to awakening, as it was the only goal which I started to pursue at the age of four or five. But if Awakening brings the feeling of being in the truth, it nevertheless prevents us from making a big deal of it. Consciousness has plunged into a world where everything is present. There is, therefore, no longer any contrast between the truth and what is not the truth. Right and wrong can still easily be distinguished, but truth - that fascinating, mythical word, which brings with it all sorts of mental forms - has no more meaning.
Therefore, an awakened one can no longer philosophize. Conversely, a philosopher is generally someone who would really like to go as far as awakening, but goes about it in the wrong way. He pretends to love Reality, but does not yield to it like a woman. He therefore fails.

QUESTION: Could a philosopher ever stumble upon awakening inadvertently, as it were, one day when he can't think any more, or else changes his perspective?
ANSWER: This is bound to have happened. One day a philosopher calls into question everything which he has built up because there is still something missing from his system, and on that day, instead of looking for corrections or additions, or changing method for the umpteenth time, he breaks down. He is coming close to the point when consciousness rebels and says: "I can't understand all the words which I am using, I can't understand what I am referring to - everything, anything is better than carrying on confusing perceiving and thinking". Yes, awakening can take somebody by surprise in a case like this. But in general, a philosopher ends up becoming attached to his rather tiresome work. The philosopher is constantly tidying up, without asking himself what the point is. He planes and polishes words until their meaning is rounded, so that all words slot into the same descriptive category, because one cannot mix observations with concepts. They must be subordinated by building whole universes of meaning, destroying in the process angular, heterogeneous meanings, unwelcome inconveniences which add nothing and pointless reflections which destroy the path of Ideas instead of reinforcing it.

One such individual, who wanted to do exactly the opposite in order to escape all forms of geometry and take off beyond reason, was not successful. It is unbelievable the degree of enthusiasm which Nietzsche, who died insane (or as a result of organic disease, according to his eulogists), has been able to generate, when everything he says represents a colossal form of escape from reality. He tries to pretend that the spirit can break down all walls, but he did not have the patience to define what they were before hurling himself at them. He states the obvious, but with so much panache that he manages to make us believe that he is shattering what confines us, when in fact he is reinforcing it with puerile, paranoid subjectivity.

If Nietzsche were to have forgotten that he was Nietzsche for just three weeks and simply said to himself : "something peculiar is happening to me which is making me invent all these stories and lies" - i.e. if he had referred to something beyond man, or merely discovered that his intellect was not his own, then the Divine would have looked down on him and said: "You poor fool, there is nothing to shatter, because there is no wall between the wind and vastness".

Nietzsche would have understood and attained awakening. However, he believed himself to be the author of his own works and this killed him. Sri Aurobindo said of him that he "broke moulds". Perhaps he did sacrifice himself after all, by performing feats off the beaten track in order to demonstrate a path which did not rely either on the past, on conventions, or on philosophical fashions, but his path relied on nothing more than dissent, going against the grain and contrariness. Experiencing unity must be the starting point for demonstrating what is in line with reality, because reality is oneness. Subversion pairs up with Reality, because it consists of predicting that the path of Reality cannot be traced. It is divine subversion. It is not a path, but a unique, non-transmissible experience, which can occur anywhere and at any time, through any kind of abandonment of structural values.

Nietzsche would have found awakening if he had rebelled against his own rebellion, but I am not sure that he could have got rid of the latter. He was too attached to his own sense of difference to blur the demarcation line between himself and the universe which, when erased, forms the basis of satori through the identity of the self and the non-self. He's a fascinating character, whom academics consider to be dangerous. The fear of going mad when we already admit to being disorientated is a defect which has always amazed me in human beings. The West has not trained anybody to recognize mystery, which we want to conquer before having assessed it. The East is simpler and less stupid. The Eastern spiritual approach is based on the admission that we are lost and can, therefore, only find. The West is too proud to start from this same basis and has always cheated. It tries to find something better, without cancelling out its starting point and everybody misses out on awakening because of this. The reappraisal process is incomplete. We imagine solutions to something which presents itself in the form of problems, and the solutions just slot into false questions. The East is a hundred times more intelligent. There is no answer, because there are no questions. While ever your life is not connected to the Whole in the pure obvious fact of absolute participation, all your questions and answers are futile. The mind is attacked head-on from the outset, whereas in the West, the mind structures the spiritual approach for ten, twenty, thirty years and this is pointless. Some people cheat by invoking genetic differences because it suits them and this is naturally one of the considerations which Awakened ones scorn. The Western world is based on two monumental illusions which paradoxically shore each other up – Judeo-Christian superiority on the one hand, which is just a distinguished form of jingoism, and our Greek heritage on the other, which can easily be traced, through Aristotle, to the eighteenth-century's enthusiasm for classification, which gave rise to the industrial revolution and the religion of science.

If Nietzsche and Aristotle belong in the same category, then we must define philosophy as the art of saying any old thing, whilst appearing to be profound. Aristotle, like Buddha moreover, was a misogynist, but was it ever really proven? The art of manufacturing Ideas, organizing concepts and suggesting alternative "visions of the world" does not entail a transformation of the mechanisms governing our reactions. Nietzsche was apparently a devoted or at least a habitual onanist, and one could cite many more examples. Descriptive philosophy and operative philosophy, which transforms man in depth, are two distinct things. For me, philosophies which stem from spiritual experience are the true philosophies, and the fact that these philosophers do not fully agree with each other is of secondary importance: they all have a similar experience as their starting point. Lao-Tzu, Sankara, Nagarjuna and even the founder of Buddhism did not abandon structuring a "vision of the world", but it was merely a tool for them. By contrast, descriptive philosophy has no chance of leading to operative philosophy and, in the case of certain authors, it is impossible to know what their actual experience was. Spinoza is the most representative of a combination of these two aspects, but since I cannot read German, I wouldn't like to pronounce on even more contentious and dangerous cases such as Kant and Hegel. You would need to be very shrewd to know whether these men simply conceived a perfect universe with the mind, or if they really experienced unity. One can spend one's whole life on Ideas and decant this to obtain something which resembles awakening, but only on a mental plane – i.e. great, abstract intellectual lucidity. People continue to think and to be absolutely convinced by ideas, when it is clear to me and other awakened ones that ideas are nothing more than minute tools for communication.

However, all philosophy is lovable, in the old-fashioned sense of being worthy of being loved. Philosophy also includes a third family in the form of inspiration, which has revealed itself every two hundred years on average ever since the beginning of the Middle Ages. Those who denied that philosophy could have an aim are also philosophers. The latter have shown that language was a screen and therefore set off in the right direction, but did not necessarily find awakening either, and since they were less smug, you have to look very closely for them because History was reluctant to preserve them. There are no famous names among these killjoys who undermined the idea that real discourse existed and was capable of connecting the world of signs to the real world. They claimed brilliantly that the two things were superimposed and trusted neither definitions, postulates nor paradigms as a means of representing anything at all.

Therefore if you want a definition of philosophy, I would say that, in my opinion, it is the art of knowing how to ask questions which have no answer, in order to find answers which have no questions.

This is why it takes a whole lifetime and that if you give up everything half-way through, you have a chance of realizing that understanding can only grasp what is actually happening at that moment. There is no target any more, actions are free and the mind rejoices. But this transition is difficult for those who hoard their knowledge like treasure. They are afraid of a light which they did not switch on themselves.

QUESTION: We are accustomed to pointing out changes of direction in philosophy (pre-Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, followed by Kant, Hegel and Marx in our own culture) and since Marx there has been nothing. In your opinion, will there be a revival of philosophy?
ANSWER: The sedimentary layers of philosophy are deceptive, because, at the end of the day, philosophy cannot evolve because it is subjugated to the Mind. Things reformulate themselves in every century and attempts at new formulations are bound to be philosophical, because in the final analysis, philosophy is something that has no framework. You define Reality in it, appropriate different layers of it and make it virtual, i.e. you wonder what you will be able to do with new annexes to infinite Reality. History, anthropology, psychology and literature, into which an element of entertainment creeps, have a much narrower framework. All philosophers enjoy classifying things and finding hierarchical tree structures of values or concepts, or they even believe that they spot forms of order which are subordinate to each other and they draw certain conclusions from their arrangement. Utopians arrange potentialities, sceptics organize doubts, materialists stick to what is useful, which varies somewhat from century to century, scholastics create smokescreens, which hard-line dogmatic philosophers always denounce in an excess of abstraction. All these great men entertain themselves and indeed sometimes do battle with words, but it is a world awash with vanity. Nearly all philosophers are caught in the trap of the eroticism of discourse. However the awakened one, even if he is capable of playing at being Socrates and holding his own against Hegel, or putting Schopenhauer back in his place on the shelf, is totally detached from his words.

What the future awakened one rebels against is the fact of "being thought" by a mixture of nature and intellect, which is a condition peculiar to man. He has gone beyond the illusion that he thought HIMSELF and realizes that he is being thought, at least in his desires, fears, unspoken obsessions and fantasies. At the risk of showing off and inspiring a school of thought, I would say that we think what suits us and that we are thought of by everything which disturbs us, because we do not want to accept non-gratifying thoughts. However, they occur anyway. Either we think of what is gratifying, or we are thought of by what is non-gratifying, i.e. all those thoughts which impose themselves on us, but which we do not want because they are humiliating and which we do not know how to curb. Resentment, hatred, jealousy, lust and fear are things which think of us, but we only think of what suits us - nice tidy rationality, the bright imaginary world drawn from the infancy of the universe, virtual beauty, the solar plan or pastel-tinted feelings. The rest, which manifests itself anyway and offends us, thinks of us by passing over and above what we think of ourselves. This is why I like Freud and go even further than him and Buddha, whom I l mention because I feel close to him. Self-righteous spiritualists are sometimes shocked that I like Freud. He realized that we were thought of by something else, something which could not care less about what we want to think, even if he expressed it differently. Well, done Sigmund and I forgive you for all the rest.

Let's be quite frank – a future awakened one is someone who finds thought a pain. The philosopher has a more perverted relationship with thought, because he manipulates language brutally, in what is often a sadomasochistic relationship. I will twist a formula for you so that it joins two different concepts and oh no, what's going on, the chain of signifiers is affected and damn it, I need to go back to the signified and change it a bit for fear the sentence strays from its central purpose by forgetting to refer back to it, and so on.

Sometimes a philosopher sees real things, but he joins them up with patches. This is absolutely hilarious and reminds me of dear old Michaux's experiments with hashish. Thanks to the secondary perception conferred by the narcotic and his prodigious intellectual honesty, Michaux realized that Bossuet was a fraud. He passed beyond the discourse and saw the man. Rimbaud also had this type of experience – uncovering deceit in the very forms of discourse. However, this form of experience cannot be reproduced or summoned up and therefore we cannot rely on any drug to reach awakening, despite the stubborn insistence of Shivaists on "getting high" morning, noon and night. I recall Michaux, of whom I am very fond, to illustrate what is most important. False, artificial ideas connect correct ones, which are more than just ideas - visions, obvious facts and pure perceptions.

It is funny how honest authors are viewed as crooks when a whole clique of verbose people, who spout a lot of hot air, manages to fool a generation or two. In short, the philosopher is caught in the trap of a mosaic made up of approximate pieces inserted between homogeneous, whole pieces. There are grout stains in the middle of lozenges of coloured glass. Pointless effort connects flashes of genius.

Only awakening can put an end to the mixture of large projections and real visions. The philosopher suffers on account of the patches which he is forced to construct between his most beautiful intuitions in order to build bridges between them.

QUESTION: We often get the impression that philosophers evade the problem of suffering with the major dualities of action/knowledge and existence/being and that they are playing with building blocks together, indifferent to those who are suffering too much to share their concerns.
ANSWER: It is true that philosophers are often thought of as navel gazers, as intellectuals protected in their ivory towers, approaching Reality without ever really being brought face to face with it. Since time immemorial, philosophers have nearly all pursued a lofty path through society – an academy, royal court or university – which renders more incisive the discourse of wise fools like Diogenes, Socrates, Heraclitus and Empedocles, who cock a snook at wordsmiths who bask smugly in the approval of the great and are comfortably settled in their lives. I am returning to the subject of eroticism because it is truly a field which fills nearly everything - not merely sex, which is the only legitimate place for it.

Philosophers tend to seek self-esteem by polishing their sentences, tearing their opponents to pieces, finding new propositions and casting doubt on themselves, which represents the ultimate in refinement. They convince themselves that they are capable of thinking better than others and that consequently what they have to say is important. They eroticize their relationship with reality by working on discourse (and in this respect Lacan is the grand master of the twentieth century), and there is nothing wrong with that. Artists do the same thing. However, an artist seeks to express himself, whereas the philosopher aspires to a more general, collective, objective and rigorous status, otherwise he would just write literature.

He is too pretentious to be a writer and lacks sufficient simplicity of feeling to be a painter or musician. In short, we should forgive them. Philosophers are people who are trying to find their place in a universe which they are not content to endure or to sublimate. We have to give them credit for one thing: they decipher values, and there is a shortage of them. We are painfully short of philosophers. There are only chroniclers. The world has become so ugly and oppressive that philosophers have had to take to the streets and fight. The only French people among the philosophers who think about anything today are committed to a real ecological, broadly political, or humanist struggle. This shows that things are stirring and that those who are not supposed to get involved on account of their eagle-like spirit are forced to swoop on the prey of scandal to preserve their integrity and dignity. Bravo!

QUESTION: In fact, you seem to miss those eras in which we still believed in something, in the power to organize the world through language, either in order to grasp it better or to transform its real, harmful aspects.
ANSWER: What is strange is that all these men, who were truly passionate about what lies beyond pure sensation, were able to say such different things. Their experience is praiseworthy. It is their life. It does not matter that they wrote any old thing, or that they seemed, like Hegel, to resolve all the contradictions inherent in philosophy and Becoming at the same time. We might suspect some of them of skilfully plugging the gaps and therefore dismiss the content proper. We give up trying to discover whether a kilo of Hegel is worth more than a kilo of Aristotle and abandon attempting to construct scales for the purpose of philosophical judgement. So what does that leave?

This is what interests me - their vanity or their detachment. For example I nearly died of laughter when I read Descartes admitting sanctimoniously in words I can't exactly remember, but whose gist was "that what had eluded by no means the least of his predecessors had finally appeared to him". His thought is so universally true that those who have not thought the same thing are missing the point. In a word, the whole of Greek philosophy is reduced to nothing. I should mention in passing that for me Descartes represents the epitome of a normalized schizophrenic - an ordinary little man who truly believes that he sees reality because he covers his perceptions with mental projections. Cogito ergo sum! Any awakened one must say exactly the opposite.

Descartes represents a form of pure counter-initiation and is the emblem of France, the most superficial country on the planet, although it has rivals in England, which is redeemed by its host of mystical poets, and Japan, which gives the appearance of being serious, but is a nation in which vanity has the highest credentials. Moving on, however, and even assuming that judgement is arbitrary and dictated by karmic traces, the fact remains that I learned to think in French on this occasion. In short, France preferred Descartes to more profound thinkers who were left in the shade – La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, La Fontaine, who was taken for a fabulist, and Montaigne, of course. Descartes mesmerized generations of people who were forced to convince themselves at school that he was a great thinker. This is false. He committed huge blunders and made serious errors in his scientific experiments, which did not tally with his vision, thus demonstrating that he was hypnotized by his own approach and refused to acknowledge what could not fit into it. There are a lot of Descartes around – intelligent intellectuals who redefine the shape of the world before having absorbed it. For me, philosophy is the history of the defeat of thought, because just beside it there lies awakening. In fact, it is philosophy, rather than religion, which rubs shoulders with awakening without seeing it, because there are constraints in philosophy, but they remains in the mental realm. In the path of awakening this mental constraint is in solidarity with other constraints. You cannot just do anything with your body, desires and relationships. The ordinary philosopher is a great guy in front of his desk, who becomes an ordinary man when he is not thinking. Althusser strangled his wife. In fact, that makes sense as he was the last interpreter of Marx before the cause died out. Nietzsche had his onanism, which seemed to pursue him and the ancient Greeks rather too often let themselves go and seduced their disciples after pronouncing fine speeches. This is not a judgement, just an observation, as everybody can do absolutely whatever they like. The spirit can produce wonderful things, but the body and personality lag behind. Sartre ate like a pig and had an amazingly rich sex life for a man disguised as a toad.

Philosophy is all well and good, therefore - there is something stirring -,but if the rest does not follow then it is pathetic. Generally speaking, the rest does not follow. Rousseau lived in a state of blatant self-contradiction, on education, the scholastic philosophers were wholly lacking in sincerity out of guilt and brainwashing. Saint Augustine seems to have spent his life trying to seduce himself by advertising Christ. Pascal went too far with his hair shirt. I can't help it if the musclemen of representation had so many problems with their bodies, their desires and their "incarnation", as we say these days. Half of philosophy is devoted exclusively to what aspires upward - acknowledgement of the Mystery, the Good, broadly speaking, of Plato in which one can flog a whole army of virtues and qualities, a cavalcade of higher intense wishes - and to the resistance from below, from the cycle, remanence, desire, contingency, the body, what is perishable, concrete, material, the flesh - feelings and notions which are all tangled together, with the need to annoy us as their common denominator.

At the end of the day, being a philosopher is to pronounce in one's own way on this duality, whether one opposes it, bypasses it or is reconciled with it. At some point or other every philosopher will stumble across the enigma of fragmentation and draw his material from it – the subtle and the thick, the bodily (or tangible) and the intelligible, the spontaneous and the restrained, the new and the repetitive and anything else which one might establish by way of fundamental pairs of opposites: the generic and the individual, the actual and the potential – the list is endless. Then one just needs to draw on these and establish the proportions. Philosophy, therefore, refers back to whatever each individual wants to do with it. But once the words have been spun together, what has really changed for their author? What purpose does the approach he has taken serve?

In general, we do not go this far, because the work has the reputation of being real and of counting for more than its author. An awakened one says the opposite. He blithely forgives these fanatical writers and stubborn advocates of representation for missing the point of Reality by dint of having tried to capture it. He can be indifferent to it or sympathetic. He sees Descartes by his woodstove boasting "I know everything", feels Pascal torturing himself, sees Voltaire showing off quite magnificently without really believing in it, and Rousseau getting into a tangle trying to justify what he is not doing by stating the principles behind what he ought to be doing. He sees Nietzsche, who thinks he is God Almighty, and these wonderful attempts at Being, in which contradictions jostle flashes of genius like sheep dogs rounding up a large flock, appeal to him. The awakened one dispenses with the nonsense and writings, or uses then to induce sleep when required, although Montaigne and some other sincere, unadorned ones are far from uninteresting. Remarkable attempts to live and be appear behind the repellent speeches. Schopenhauer established that philosophers spend their time changing the name of suffering to absolve themselves of responsibility for being powerless to curb it. This simple vision redeems all his writings, even the most bitter ones, because it is a true vision.

Which philosopher's life could be exemplary? This could be the criterion, at the risk of drifting towards the mythical word wisdom. However, we become attached to different ways of thinking and not to what these ways of thinking produce inside the self. Representations change and Reality becomes elusive as soon as it is named (The Tao which is described is not the TAO), but the job of classifying orders brings new virtualities, leads to new potential and renews itself. Even morality evolves (lurking in philosophy like a poacher, surreptitiously corrupting it with its recipes). Beliefs change, but illusions remain.

Awakening is often unexpected fulfilment when we have lost everything, even hope, like that little sweet we suck when our shoes hurt while we are walking along. For the awakened one, hope is absolute faith in Reality, whatever it may be, even if it still vague or unknown. It is absolute faith in the present moment, whether it brings suffering or joy is immaterial, and not in that golden slug of a future in which things would sort themselves out and which forces promises to emerge on the path which we challenge. This is wrong, totally wrong. All feelings must be accepted so that awakening can occur. While ever we evade ourselves, with or without the collusion of "God", then awakening is impossible.

SECOND MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Do you think that you can define the conditions whereby a philosopher might become an awakened one?
ANSWER: An awakened one is first and foremost a philosopher who has made a mess of his representation of the world or of his overall vision (I can never remember the technical German term for this, which demonstrates that Germans have a real gift for abstraction which we lack). It is a concept which is absent in France. In short, he has realized that the final picture was impossible or had become impossible. Whereas Aristotle draws up an inventory of knowledge - and why not in those days - and puts everything on little shelves (while also continuing to pass strange judgements on women himself), the awakened one abandons the inventory, which strikes him as bureaucratic and only worries about his breathing, thought and presence. He does not decide conclusively to do anything about it. He does not mechanically declare his own usefulness by setting off to conquer the ocean of Reality by "philosophizing".

The AWAKENED ONE is a failed painter, who admits to himself that he will never be able to paint the landscape and who becomes the landscape. Hey presto! From that moment on, there is no point in painting it any more.

That said, a few awakened ones pass themselves off as philosophers and this is a function of civilization (Greek ataraxia is indeed reminiscent of Zen, Buddhist emptiness and samadhi), or culture, but it is always a disaster. For example, they mention being, and for them it is an experience which they translate into a notion. However, the uninitiated cannot manage to see beyond the notion and a whole load of fools latch onto it as usual, cloud the issue and poison transparent, revealing discourse. They might even peddle the description of being, which becomes gibberish, a soup, a salade niçoise or Russian salad and being becomes a heterogeneous entity bounded by its own qualities and opposed to everything which is not itself – i.e. a maze. The East is alone in never having got caught up in all of this, because it is not interested in representations. It has no intellectual eros. Educated Hindus aside, all the others – the Chinese, true Brahmans, Buddhists and especially Taoists - only attribute a pragmatic value to representation. What are we supposed to do with it? The West has always revelled in it, reflects itself smugly in it and is satisfied with it, because we are all focused on the mental here. Whites, Arabs, Jews and southern Europeans, who are more sentimental, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples are fundamentally focused on the mental and there is nothing to be done about that. They have abandoned natural feeling in favour of subjective or even national dramatization, because Westerners are projected forward. I have never seen this in Asia, except in Japan, which has always imitated what is bigger than it, since time immemorial. I have never seen this with Africans and Hindus. It has been like this since ancient Greek times – reality is cloaked in a bag of representation, sealed in and pushed in front of one to blaze a trail. This is a distinctive trait which has imposed itself everywhere, sometimes with staggering upsurges and now it is unstoppable and is contaminating the whole world... until it will have exterminated the last remaining cyclical tribes. Our civilization is being devoured by representation. Direct contact with nature, with the self and oneself is being cruelly lost. Everything is expressed in formulas. It is the hypnotic power of language, and these days of calculations, as has been expressed by Sollers and Baudrillard. I maintain that the Chinese, Hindus and even Persians are already close enough to their feelings to use what comes out of their spirit in a different way – to religious ends, i.e. participation, or with the aim of finding harmony and a natural entente with life, without the bias of submitting reality to its law, which has allowed us to exterminate non-mental, receptive and intuitive people for several centuries with a clear conscience. Whites want to appropriate and control and even the products of the intellect are used to this end. Thankfully, the whole world is not like this.

Awakening flourished in civilizations in which the desire for power was weak, because trust was placed in life itself and through life itself. It was observed at length before claims were made to attribute a meaning to it. The West has been trained by Judeo-Christian guilt to be suspicious of everything which cannot be contained or controlled. Philosophies often reflect this bias - thinking about the world to create something which might suit us, before knowing what it is. The East thinks that we are stupid and mocks us. It is right to do so.

QUESTION: Why does it take the truth from the East so long to reach us? Although certain trends are appearing i.e. yoga and India, then Buddhism and meditation...
ANSWER: If you use words to pierce words, then other people will follow in your footsteps and give your words a meaning which they prefer – i.e. the exact opposite. You can make any philosopher say the opposite of what he actually said. The signified, in the true sense of the term, is not contained in the series of signifiers. You might say: the weather is fine. No two people will understand this in the same way. A person who has to stay at home might think the opposite, i.e. that it is not fine for him because he cannot take advantage of it. The words do not have any meaning. It is the reader or listener who gives it to them. The words we read are just the mirror of who we are. A murderer and a young middle-class girl do not read the same detective story in the same way. The girl will identify with the victim and experience a cheap thrill of fear and the murderer will identify with the killer. I apologize for repeating myself, but as I say in my seminars - everything is infinitely flexible. All matter can be pulled or twisted in one direction or another. You simply have to melt metal to create a new shape out of something which seemed rigid, fixed and immutable.

Philosophy is like this – you throw the old shapes away and crystallize new ones. We believe each time that everything has been said. Plato shut his predecessors up. Aristotle invented political correctness and definitiveness and closer to home, it is the same thing. Schopenhauer dethrones Nietzsche, who circumvented Hegel, who in turn had got rid of all those others who had knocked scholasticism on the head. Thereafter, Marx executed his predecessors. Could it really be anyone apart from the Divine entertaining himself by doing anything at all to make this meaninglessness meaningful? When everything crumbles, we become infatuated with the East, but with its form and not its spirit, since many people practise yoga to make themselves look good, or become Buddhists to free themselves from their Judeo-Christian guilt. Everything is promising at the outset, but what I would question is the "ceiling effect" – i.e. shutting oneself up in something which initially seemed superior, but which eventually creates paralysing structures. The Divine did not create me in this way, and I am grateful to Him for that. I have stopped at nothing, not even Awakening, but that is a difficult issue to deal with in an unfocused way.

We fill ourselves with new illusions all the time. A philosophical treatise on a library shelf does not represent anything – just neatly formulated approximations, perishable goods with a long expiry date, but which have been frozen in the perfect structure of a method. They last for a hundred or a thousand years, or even two thousand years. Behind them lies the life of a man and this life is bound to be exemplary. We applaud fashion designers who create clothes for women. We think that they are "creators of genius". This is natural since they work in the realm of the tangible and the visual. But the philosopher is also a designer and he is concerned with much more fundamental things than the shape of an article of clothing. He creates mental clothing which we can wear as values in order to change our contingency, see further ahead, gain a better understanding of the overall Manifestation, use the intellect differently, or even spot new archaisms, which all philosophers do instinctively. Their lives are fine and who cares if their works are lousy. They have rejected repetition. They hunt down terrorist conformity and I love them. However, the Awakened one is not satisfied with being a designer. He wears his own designs for a long time before offering his styles to others. He achieves integrity and in order to do that he withdraws to the extremity of the human condition. He does not use solitude in the same way as a philosopher. That is where the difference lies. A philosopher does not abandon the notion of tinkering with the future. His vanity takes refuge in improving the world. He believes that he can see what others have not seen. He dips into knowledge, method and intellect and congratulates himself on it. Nine times out of ten it is pure vanity – (you would have had to tweak Hegel's ear to see where he placed this gesture in his absolute concordance...). Behind this vanity of the thinking self, there is something perfect which seeks a way through without finding it, because the human subject resists the intellect which animates it. It wants to circumvent it in its own project.

QUESTION: Doesn't Buddhist philosophy offer Western philosophy exactly the answers required?
ANSWER: I would reiterate that there has not been any philosophy since a philosopher demonstrated a long time ago that this term could not contain anything other than signs. Do we mean by philosophy the overall collection of knowledge from intellectual thought, the mental category which assembles homogeneous collections of expanded presuppositions, or is it any meaningful action in relation to the senses?

What you find is what you bring to it yourself. Imagine a succession of individuals one after the other, each more attached to discrediting their rivals than establishing their own legitimacy, with the exception of the very great ones. Imagine the mixture of candour and vanity, of idealism and rationalism. Imagine this subjective vanity connecting with universal Intelligence, which shows itself in this great work which the self appropriates, trying to be right and thereby losing the pure impulse of Consciousness which has nothing to justify because it is just being.

Who is humble enough today to analyse Buddhism and to admit that this renunciation of "knowledge" goes a very long way and this is precisely what paves the way to meditation which calms the mind that generates the dross of words? Buddhism does indeed blaze the trail, but we must quickly be wary of it. It can also imprison. It is a sort of system of dues, a functional trap. I will free you from this, that and the other, but in exchange, you belong to me... The whole of life becomes a transaction.

It is already a remarkable thing to attack the mind and locate answers somewhere other than in reason or intellect. Unless one plays on words, Buddhism is metaphysical. Its essence lies beyond the tangible – it is emptiness, freedom.. However, this emptiness must be felt and not imagined or stimulated by some artifice or other. Freedom is evoked as potential, but we refuse to give it the status of finality. Making freedom into a finality would be the same as looking for it in a place where it does not exist: the mental space.

That is just too subtle for Western man.

That said, Buddhist philosophy contains traps. There is too much in it – complications, a hypnotic arsenal, something which wants to draw speed towards slowness, a bias for slowing down movements of whatever kind to make them vertical and tone them down. It is an endless washing process and we can forget the purpose of being clean by dint of too much washing. The Chinese Chan and Zen, which is derived from it, have tried to restore order. Letting oneself go and seeing that things have their own movement – that is the Chinese way. We must really see the movement before channelling it. Otherwise we will remain caught in the trap of substituting some movements for others, but this is not radical. Movement is based in immobility.

We should not try to forge ahead. Let's leave that heresy for those who are "addicted" to what is better – i.e. those who are experiencing the worst. Let's first of all seek to legitimize the universe, before claiming to change the world. The East is intelligent and we are not, but we are forging ahead and, with a great deal of skill, the two might join up.

THIRD MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You seem to have given up trying to find the essence of philosophy, because its forms are so varied and in the end you warn me about something quite simple: each philosopher tries to convince the reader of his vision with a battery of arguments, skill and particular know-how - all of which manoeuvres are purely and simply a reflection of the author's mind.
ANSWER: There are only two possible sources for philosophy: dissatisfaction or satisfaction. The philosopher is either jubilant because he has found something and shared it, or he is groping towards an order which he lacks and draws up reports of what is wrong, in the illusory hope of finding procedures for change. Finders and seekers use the same tricks - deduction, induction, logical development, the removal of sufficient presuppositions – i.e. rules exist. However, there is one major snag: seekers try to pass themselves off as finders. They have not discovered anything at all, but they develop areas of logical representation in which words replace things. As for finders, they are difficult to understand because their accounts do not replace a spiritual method – i.e. they transmit very little of their experience. Perhaps philosophy is a particularly Western trait. What is termed philosophy in the East bears no resemblance to it and the mind does not practise a form of onanism there. No other civilization gives a damn about Reason because they have never suffered such violent contrasts between the basic categories - imagination, sensitivity, intuition, desire, will and logical ordering. Although all traditions say that we must arrange all these orders, they form clusters within the same space, overlap and interpenetrate each other. They must be perceived interdependently. Here in the West, they are arranged in hierarchies and separated, favoured or scorned in an a priori manner. They are contrasted with each other, i.e. the order of reason with that of faith, and the order of what can be observed with what cannot be verified, etc. Our culture is wallowing around in antagonisms and they are venerated in universities. Intuitive types and mystics are fed up! They pass through dualities and nobody wants to acknowledge this; they reveal to others that they are in a cage, but the ignorant stick their heads between the bars to bite and to defend their prisons. This is a serious mistake. This cult of Reason of ours comes from a terrible fear of intuition and sensitivity, a fear which has been transmitted for centuries by Catholicism in particular. Catholicism has inculcated a fear of life in us for generations and a fear of desire; it has established guilt as the driving force behind moral consciousness. It has hardened our natural feelings of spontaneous acknowledgement of existence with the serpent and sin. It has brainwashed us for centuries. This is appalling. It has subordinated existence to the huge fantasy of intimacy with God after death, in exchange for a few sacrifices to which we consent without understanding them. The awakened one appears proud to the Western world because he no longer has a childish need to submit to God, whereas in fact he has submitted for a long time, lifetimes even, to pure reality.

One might say that this is intrinsically false, but it is true in a certain sense. Awakening is a sort of true reward, which cures us of all our lust for immortality. This is what Buddhists teach and it is a good point.

A future awakened one draws up his inventory from everything which is not fantasized and which occurs, from everything which escapes the dictatorship of belief and from everything which manifests itself in us in all the orders of perception. The philosopher operates outside himself and does not short-circuit projection. He waxes lyrical about what his spirit grasps, but it is not a transformed spirit which is grasping reality, it is the old generic spirit which is thinking and which believes in the reality of Ideas. All ideas become real as soon as we believe in them. This is the problem. "Killing in the name of God kills God", said a contemporary philosopher fighting on the battlefields of hatred and moving around the scene of recent massacres. What can really he really prevent? It does not matter, he is fighting without being obsessed by results, unlike all those quitters and those who abandon creating a better world using realism as an excuse. This must change. The best contemporary minds are turning away from the idea of knowledge. You cannot change the world by spreading perfect representations of how it ought to be. All thought has power, whether it be true or false. True ideas are less accessible than false ones, because they do not bring with them that glue of smugness. Recognizing ourselves in false ideas is knowing that we are not quite up to scratch and that we will have to work hard, take part, create and transform ourselves. All false ideas exempt us from calling ourselves into question and therefore have a much more immediate and spontaneous power.

Fascination versus rigour.

The war goes on.

Superficial ideas which are well marshalled can lead one or two centuries into the ravine, as was the case with Communism. Real Ideas, pictures of pure visions and the testimony of awakened ones only carry along in their wake those who are prepared to pay the price for their emancipation.

In order for that to happen, we must first acknowledge that we are slaves to our addictions, conditioning, heritage, or to a temperament which can play tricks on us, and the whole of humanity is not prepared to go that far. The awakened one drags the whole of humanity behind him, but does not feel contempt for it. If the AWAKENED ONE is more significant (and there are some who think the sun shines out of their backsides, as the expression goes), then he represents the whole of humanity and no longer contrasts anything with anything else, but absorbs, covers and joins things. He can see that everything makes sense, whereas the philosopher creates abstract mosaics in which to stuff everything, and this is not the same.

Reason in Greece, then in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, right up to Marxist logic (which was as mechanical as the industrial mentality it was fighting) is nothing more than mental pride on the part of the mind which legitimizes itself. The mind allays its suspicions through argument. It is a forger. Discernment is a state of mind, not a logical technique. Reason takes hold of the World and reduces it, since it cannot do anything else. It works for its own greater glory. The unforeseen gulag which comes from the blind spots on a charter which only establishes man within his own contingency is a huge blunder, but nobody sees this! It is extraordinary. I have never been the victim of this kind of thing. When I was nineteen in 1969, all my friends at preparatory school for higher education teaching believed in something – Marxism, Communism, Leninism, Maoism. I was the black sheep of the dorm, denouncing the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia with my guitar. Some people didn't understand. I even found myself saying : you'll be for it, come the Revolution! Hatred was placed at the service of peoples' freedom – that is how it was at the time. There were inquisitors everywhere, looking at you fiercely and asking you what you did in 1968, ready to send you to the gulags if you said: I was on the beach with my first fiancée.

How could I imagine anyone other than the Divine setting such traps for Himself?

I possess awakening and have yielded body and soul to totality. I bent the knee and suffered and used to be obsessed by the knowledge which I lacked. When awakening came to me in January 1974, thought came a cropper, my consciousness was freewheeling and, whatever happened, I didn't need to change gear. There were no more ups and downs and nothing more to seek. The very idea of trying to find answers was totally stupid. Everything was there, without the need for explanations. There was absolutely nothing left to do, find or seek. It was marvellous. The self begins to show the secret connections between things, not as much as the supramental, which can be found beyond freedom itself - but it is certainly all pretty homogeneous. You are therefore out of step. You are the only one not wearing glasses in the midst of people who are all wearing them, which does not go down well at all. They feel threatened. When you are sincere and say that religion is pointless, that Freudianism is incomplete, that the West is just one civilization among many and that its supremacy is an act of usurpation, or that the Chinese and Hindus are more profound, this is disturbing. It is as if everybody wanted to convince themselves that there were good reasons, scientific reasons, for clinging to their prejudices.

QUESTION: Didn't some people listen to you anyway?
ANSWER: Very few. You have to have been blessed with being born without vanity to be able to understand me. Spiritual seekers are vain too. They are attached to their movement. Some of them are so Manichean that I feel very uncomfortable around them. They really do see evil everywhere, as if it were intentional – in medicine, politics and sects which are not their own. In fact they are all trying to convince themselves that they are doing things properly, and there's the rub. The aim is not to do perfect Zazen, perfect Buddhist meditation, or to say perfect Christian prayers. We are not trying to reassure ourselves with an apprenticeship in perfection. This is false. It is something completely different. We can see the whole universe in sublime unity and in order to do that we have to pass through the self, mental silence and awakening. There is no other way. Unity comes from the dissolution of thought and nothing else. One cannot structure the movement towards dissolution, my dear Watson, but it is true that Buddhism, Zen and other "tricks" try to do so. In my opinion, it is pointless. The need to understand, evolve and truly improve oneself, without this being the product of narcissistic ambition, is difficult, because the path of awakening constantly humiliates us. We constantly need to reassure ourselves by telling ourselves that we are on the right track when, in fact, there is no track.

The self is panoramic, the Lord is in everything and mental silence has no blind spots. When we genuinely reach the self, there is no centre or periphery. The past seems far away and the future is a mirage. The dictatorship of mythical words is over.

The spirit is permanently free.

Nothing threatens it. Error is no longer the opposite of truth. In fact it is like a drug. You can become attached to detachment in the self and refuse to take part or to suffer again. However, the supramental then transforms pure silence and fulfilment. There is no end, I'm afraid and for some people this is disheartening.

QUESTION: So awakening is the perception of unity, spontaneous, tangible and direct perception, whereas philosophy tries try to trap this unity in intellectual discourse?
ANSWER: That's it exactly. It is the Western attitude of seriousness, that incorrigible thing which confuses solemnity with depth and weight with gravity; it is that metallic layer of the mind which takes itself seriously and screws everything up. The future awakened one fights against self-importance, sadness, melancholy and even abstraction, because this group of things freezes natural perception and destroys it. At the same time, we must be able to stand back. We must stand back without imprisoning ourselves in our own discourse and its modes of representation. We must distance ourselves and also be open like a child at the same time. Water becomes gas under the influence of heat and is steam. It becomes a sort of Earth because it becomes solid in the form of ice with the cold. Air, which avoids sparks, is fire unbeknownst to itself, but is also consumes itself with the help of burning wood. It is true that the same thing can take not only different, but also opposite, forms. This is the basis of things. But the more you evolve, the more you realize that it is the same thing - the same single thing which assumes different guises. Even the four Elements are variations on the Ether, whose substance is extremely fine, a hundred times finer than that of air. There are hundreds of foregrounds, backgrounds and middle grounds, and they all fill up with countless metamorphoses at great speed. But there is only one thing, in two forms: consciousness and energy, nothing more. Matter is sleep, extreme slowing down, the periphery of seething atoms filled with infinite consciousness. I have experienced it ,just like Sri Aurobindo and Mother. Admittedly, this is even further on than awakening, but you have to pass through it to reach the supramental, or at any rate to make it descend as far as the body and begin the work so that the body becomes a sort of plasticine permeated by a microscopic movement, a fire which does not burn.

This reality is all marvellously homogeneous and it is astounding, quite astounding.

INDESCRIBABLE.

Every one can think what they like and it enters into the order of things. It is a seamless reality. The seedy shantytown sits beside hotels for millionaires. Bombay is the symbol of the Manifestation. Homogeneity explodes into multiple variations, like a Polynesian coral garden. Everything makes sense; the self begins to reveal it and the supramental confirms it. What it is appropriate to transform or throw out is the mind. It cannot tolerate the shantytown next door to the luxury hotel, or the brothel next door to the convent. Efflorescence disturbs it, because it constantly reminds it that it is impotent to change anything at all. The mind feels guilty for not transforming the world and knows that it cannot do it. It is like Sisyphus. It pushes its boulder up the hill, displays its philosophies, invents forms of Marxism that tally nice and naturally with the gulags and then starts all over again ad infinitum. It pretends to believe that it is good to roll the boulder to the summit, because that is the only thing that it knows how to do. It tells itself that if it tries once more, it might be lucky this time.

Awakened ones must clear out the dead wood and say what is really going on: the mind can only be used to order perceptions. It cannot do anything else. An ordered self deciphers the world differently and intuition stems from this, because there are no more blockages. Changing things is fine, but only by taking reality as a starting point, i.e. the naked eye of the self which does not have anything to defend. If you think that it is dreadful of me to call Catholicism dreadful, I would agree with you – there have been some good things too, but what I attack in particular is the mental Judeo-Christian legacy, not the works or the sincere men who believe in this fable. They have nothing to defend and yet they still point out the birds in the sky to those who never look up.

FOURTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: Re-reading the previous interviews, I realized that you were warning me against an artificial, intellectual vision of Oneness which, according to you, is not sufficient to initiate an approach towards a tangible perception of reality.
ANSWER: If you want this Oneness to correspond to the what is already inside your head, then of course it does not work. The Earth is not just a blue ball destined to be saved by baby Jesus in the last split second of his genesis. The Earth is not the playground of History, which can only perpetrate crimes and divide men in the name of new illusions. The Earth is not the universe of miasmas, which Buddha abhorred when he said that no object was worthy of being desired. An intellectualized form of Oneness is sometimes used as the basis for esoteric fascist visions. The intellect has accepted oneness, but the self is not prepared to understand it and a false follower is a truly vile thing. He thinks that he is truly superior, just because he has opened his mind hungrily to a hidden concept which requires initiation, and he is full of contempt for those whom this dry, sterile vision does not seduce.

Oneness is only truly perceived in the Self, even if it can be understood before, or foreseen at the outset.

It seems rather to be the case that the Earth is filled with consciousness and that this consciousness spills out everywhere - in crystals, plants and animals - and that it provisionally completes its course in the Man who appropriates his own life through the Mind. In fact, awakened ones say that the consciousness which appears when the mind is destroyed is not personal consciousness. Once the mental wall has been shattered, the consciousness which comes through sees itself with disconcerting ease in all other forms of existence. This is perhaps part of the reason why some awakened ones used to establish religions: to encourage respect for consciousness, which manifests itself everywhere, as soon as the mental veil is dissolved.

If we wax lyrical about the path of awakening, we might believe that there is a philosophy of AWAKENING, i.e. we establish presuppositions, draw circles around them and end up somewhere. Another inner state is legitimized which does not refute anything, but contains everything. Is all this worth dying for? No. The human race is stupid. All Giordano Bruno had to do was keep quiet and, in the more prosaic order of descriptive truth, Galileo could have recanted more quickly. Why risk being killed because one does not think like fools? They are still the ones who rule the world. Isn't life our most precious possession? If I were threatened with imprisonment for saying that I was an AWAKENEND ONE, or that everything was the Divine, it is obvious that I would say: "OK chaps, I was having you on. I'm an ordinary guy, I have only ever seen what you have seen yourselves. I see things just like you, so you don't have to put me in a straitjacket...".

Today, I would undoubtedly be a shameless perjurer, without the slightest trace of guilt. I have already been persecuted in previous lives for showing the way, I had to persevere and was made to pay for it. Now, if the supramental only exists for my predecessors, to whom I owe so much, and for myself, then that's already not too bad. I don't campaign anymore, and what is more, the Divine does not expect me to. Telling people what is happening to me and enjoying writing about the ultimate order of things is not forcing anybody's hand. It is just a nod to those who, like myself, are ready to make a fair number of sacrifices to see things more clearly, and there are not very many of them, even among so-called "spiritual seekers" who expect to draw some personal gain from liberation, which is idiotic and is enough to make you die laughing, or die of sorrow.

As a Zen monk once said: "a robber has stolen everything I own, but who can deprive me of the light of the moon through the window?" I have nothing to defend and I will recant whatever you want. This is the basis of my dignity. You are what you are and I am what I am. If that bothers you, then I'll be on my way and if you want to follow the same path, then you must throw everything away. We can begin to come to an agreement on the basis of what is left.

QUESTION: So philosophy cannot therefore be a collection of unshakeable certainties which are able to mark out a route?
ANSWER: Each individual has unshakeable certainties, but they are not all the same. Every Chinese person instinctively knows that nothing exists apart from their transaction with Time. He hoards up the present and is the only one to do so. He does not need distractions. He may die on his hoard of treasure without ever deriving any benefit from it and nobody will ever know what this fortune meant to him. Take Hindus, for example, they become queasy at the at the idea that God might not exist. Just asking the question constitutes blasphemy and fills them with fear. Take the Japanese – the very idea of not finding the best means to one's end makes them ill. You have to succeed (you really, really do!). You have to stop thinking in order to achieve awakening, but how should you go about it? Half of Zen is a swindle. Awakening is sometimes described in it as the fruit of skill, and you are forced down this path, without any mystery. It is reminiscent of the circus, with its wild animal trainers or a trapeze artists. Bad luck – awakening is not a circus! While ever we are content with practising Zazen together in the eroticism of seriousness, which contains even more voyeurism than other forms of eroticism, then we will always be dealing with faking awakening perfectly, i.e. miming it perfectly, playing sneaky tricks with formulas, pretending to be awakened ones because we are looking for awakening without really looking for it, etc.

Every instant is Zazen, whatever the circumstances. The notion of superimposing on the plane of real time the deliberate intention of observing it causes a rupture in the natural continuity of duration. True meditation becomes apparent of its own accord and to try to schedule it stems, once again, from the pride which the mind takes in looking at its best side in the mirror. Or else we have to do things properly, light-heartedly and in the right frame of mind, without attributing any higher value to this moment. Otherwise, when we come out of the meditation, we think that we are no longer working at full capacity and recreate the dualities which we were trying to erase during the meditation.

A lot of people know how to meditate perfectly and this pulls the wool over their eyes. But it is often the same as for philosophers. Once they come out of the dojo, temple or sanctuary, their reactions are generic. They listen to you even less because they think that they are close to the truth, with all their artificial aids. It is easy to create areas of consciousness. Fasting, for example is a sure means of getting off the ground. You can also suffer from spiritual addictions and do lots of things to enhance performance or self-image. If vanity becomes involved, then it is pointless. This is the Divine sense of humour. He makes you wear masks, until the most beautiful one, of which you are so proud, strikes you as the worst one. Then you have a chance of getting through.

FIFTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: You have spoken a lot about awakening, and it would seem that you only mention philosophy in order to come back round to your own vision of things. What proof is there that you have understood the philosophers and are not underestimating the scope of their works?
ANSWER: I like authors. I have a fractal vision of things and I do not have to read everything by each one to see what I am dealing with. This is the first point: perhaps I do not need to have models any more, or to learn how to think, because I have done all the work myself. I am not impressed by philosophers' work. I have done just as much in previous lives and even during this life and the composition of my spiritual legacy, The Principles of the Manifestation, could be considered philosophical work. I would then say that reading is different for an awakened one. Words no longer deceive. The way in which discourse is organized reveals the author's intention and the philosopher often appears to contradict himself. Being inclined towards indulgence, I would say that he is evolving, as it is more elegant. If I catch him ranting, then I tell myself that he has not resolved such and such a problem and it would suit him for things to be as he describes them, in order to stifle his personal issues and this is my second point. Finally, the third point is that I don't see myself becoming an expert on mazes. It may be a great job, but it isn't a job for me.

All philosophy (except in the case of awakened ones of course) can be summed up by the question: "How can I do without God, now that I have given up on knowing him?". Descartes remains the undisputed champion. He turned his desire for God, which he was unable to control, into a cathedral of words, a mechanism of concepts all perfectly articulated to fit into each other. However, there is no trace of anything other than ointment to salve nostalgia for an hour or even less, during which time the veil begins to tear.

This is where we have to forgive the Divine. He peeks through the window and then we never see him again, or else it is too late and we are old. The Divine caught me when I was very young. I shouldn't complain and yet sometimes I do so anyway because I cannot stand what my body is experiencing any more. I am the most blessed of men and sometimes it is still difficult nevertheless.

I don't mind philosophy existing if it is a means of reviewing the difficulty of Being from scratch and evicting complacency from its homes in the mind. Grappling with God, nature, oneself, or grappling with Reality, if one does not wish to add intent to evolution, is perfectly legitimate and very honest. However, discernment has no motive. It is an end in itself, which can just as easily be applied to the most trivial emotions as to the most abstract mathematical calculations. Discernment is a state of mind which is really curious about everything and not a policy which is specifically reserved for philosophers' general ideas, female emotions, or for the business man's benefit.

I reject the notion of specialist discernment.

If that is the case, then it is just self-interested vigilance. True discernment is not something which just follows behind something else. This is how I view those troublemakers Diogenes, Socrates, Empedocles and Krishnamurti. They knock things over. Their discourse is a bowling ball which scores a strike in the ranks of the best conceived ideas. On the other side, starting from a similar experience, you have the complacent ones who establish things. This is reassuring, but the spirit soon starts to identify with notions which are deemed to represent reality, instead of identifying with reality. – i.e. with nothing which is known, but with something in which everything makes sense. While ever we still shudder when cats play with mice, then something is not right. We would like things to be different, but that is impossible. We cannot transform Reality without having felt what it really is, beyond our dislikes and preferences.

This means that I can immediately discover in a philosopher the method by which he manages to escape the realities which disturb him. I am fundamentally opposed to all those who adopt the postulates of their culture. I am anti-Christian, because I know that a man, even an avatar, cannot represent God all by himself and show us the one and only path. Firstly, this is disrespectful to all men who are not Christ and, secondly, hundreds of awakened ones have saved themselves in past millennia without identifying with any supreme father figure. I cannot accept either that a Buddhist should believe at face value that Buddha and Buddha alone defined the only supreme truth and discovered the ultimate meaning of life. Far from helping spiritual progress, this type of belief corrupts it at the outset, by creating a false background which always comes forward to meet the foreground - what we are actually experiencing without any other considerations. It is precisely these considerations which will channel perception of the moment towards preconceived dead-ends, filled with so-called meaning. This is what philosophy should do: produce new representations which disagree with beliefs. In fact, as soon as philosophy stops denouncing things, it doesn't have much left to say, because it then plugs the breach between it and the unknown, that different place, which could reveal itself to be a pure present, free of archaic finalities. It is different for an awakened one: the Self does not seek to reproduce itself. If an AWAKENED ONE has followers, it is because he cannot help it, or because the Divine has arranged things for him in this way. The annoying thing about philosophers is that they always want to be right. This is what disturbs me. I am flabbergasted by the hatred thinkers have for each other...

QUESTION: But don't you seem to hold a grudge yourself against certain philosophers?
ANSWER: Not in the least. I view them as legitimate on their own terms, but I think that what they say does not always tally with what an awakened one calls Truth. Yes, I do tear Descartes to pieces, but he is my only bête noire along with Sartre, and it all makes sense. At the time, belief in God was looking for a dogmatic message and the scientific feel of his approach in a period when observation and analysis had finally gripped the Western mind meant that Descartes was in tune with his era as a precursor, but one who lacked the timelessness which the Self reveals. As soon as we read these writers it is amazing - they shudder at the mere thought of each other. Plato hijacked all his predecessors, but here is one thing he could not come to grips with - Morality - which he never mentioned. Democritus did not exist for Plato. The mind is agile enough to bypass what cannot be hijacked – bravo! Cioran, who was as upright as he was quirky, which is indeed a record of sorts, bore a grudge against Valéry and then blamed himself for it! What's it to him? In the end, there are no philosophers. There are men who offer their opinions while pretending to follow the rules of the game which is pompously called philosophy. Furthermore, these rules are not really unchanging, so that the philosophy enthusiast has to specialize excessively in the techniques of discourse to compare these so-called great minds of our civilization with any degree of relevance. I applaud them all for expressing themselves, but I do not trust them.

QUESTION: Is an AWAKENED ONE any more trustworthy?
ANSWER: This isn't a question for an awakened one, because he would be promoting his own cause by saying yes and would be suspected of coyness for saying no.

QUESTION: You say that you have nothing to defend, but at the same time you say that you are different - you are awakened.
ANSWER: In fact, I don't shout it from the rooftops. I find it deeply interesting that humanity is evolving and the Divine Mother sometimes dictates to me what I have to do for myself. A trace remains of what I do for myself - expressing what happens to me. This might legitimately help others, in so far as nothing extraordinary happens to me, other than perceptions which are beyond the current abilities of the majority of human beings. In fact, my spirit is nearly always rejoicing. Everything is a source of wonder and discovery and I welcome every form of suffering if it manifests itself. At the same time, it pains me that man lets himself be manipulated and I present awakening as something which can bring this manipulation to an end. Neither belief, other people, or the Self can manipulate the awakened self. Desire is no longer a problem: it can be just as artificial to satisfy it as it is to sublimate it. The conflict on which philosophy is founded - the perishable flesh versus a spirit capable of rebelling, conceiving, choosing, loving, abolishing time - without which philosophy or religion would never have existed, comes to an end with awakening. The most difficult thing is how to escape from the manipulation exerted by a mixture of the spirit and nature, without inventing a new, more subjective one, a made-to-measure version, as it were. We can manage to curb a certain number of mechanisms and to infuse consciousness into a fair number of things. However, there are primary tendencies which would simply like a change of scene, instead of being transformed.

Self-image is crushed in the stage preceding awakening. Many people do not get beyond this stage. They prefer to remain in their ignorance rather then lose the false reference points which deceive them. They lack joy and an archaic feeling of security keeps them in a rut which they mistake for roots. This is why I say "do not pretend to be interested in awakening if you are not prepared to give up everything you have". Christ said the same thing in a different way. By contrast, this is why Buddhism is questionable – intensity is hidden and it rambles. There are lots of little answers to fragmented problems. Morality is based on detachment, but detachment is not moral, religious or ethical. It is not something which can be cultivated. It is physical. For example, it is refusing to seduce somebody if one likes the pleasures of the flesh and the opportunity presents itself. How many philosophers could do that? It is being indifferent to what others think of you. How many great thinkers, always ready to draw their swords to defend their system, "the truth", could do that? Detachment is knowing that one can be wrong, and being prepared to admit this immediately, as soon as the mistake appears, without feeling guilty, humiliated or demeaned.

Fine words on the ultimate meaning of things have never changed anything much, but philosophy can, nevertheless, lead to detachment through its opposite: commitment, passionate involvement in interpretation. But beware of cheating - one cannot commit half-heartedly. Buddhist philosophy has become rambling; it offers the opportunity to fulfil one's mediations, to forge a life without any vices, and encourages one to be dispassionate, etc. Exoteric Buddhism is psychoanalysis diluted to infinity, a series of microscopic little reappraisals in the main areas of the self.

Fear thinks within me, desire thinks within me, heredity thinks within me - these are the major discoveries which a Buddhist must follow to clarify his consciousness and achieve emptiness. However, others must elevate this moment in which they feel thought of by the universe and offer it to the Divine, instead of dividing up one's spirit and letting it fall back into mental ruts where the mind amuses itself by contrasting good resolutions with insurmountable disappointments. Beware of minute forms of progress, scraping the surface or polishing, which gets rid of a few disturbing rough patches, but extinguishes the flame. We must burn with a desire to change so that Buddhism is not merely a practice, like Confucianism, which ends up being triumphantly hypocritical - a facelift for an old building. The same thing obviously applies to Christianity.

QUESTION: Doesn't an awakened one have any virtues?
ANSWER: None whatsoever. He has nothing to compare with anything. He does not redeem his faults with overzealousness in the areas where good qualities appear. The awakened one is pure, not because he has conquered impurity, but because his state of mind is not adulterated. Too bad for those believe that they bear the stain of original sin, or any other stain that would make them go through life with a curse upon them. There is no curse other than refusing to see things as they are. There is no stain apart from enduring the infinite mystery of consciousness which animates us without trying to understand it. The awakened one has no more sin, or stain and can be more or less satisfied with his relationship with desire, other people and himself, but this leaves no trace, because he is constantly changing his own perceptions. Anyone who is fed up with not being whole enters the path of awakening, keeps a low profile, and eventually understands the huge manipulation process. He comes through it and cries victory. You have to be constantly hurt until you become invulnerable. Hurt by what is missing, by overly powerful appetites, by an inability to love and to forgive. We must be in direct contact with everything that is wrong, in order to find a way through. We must sometimes decide one way or the other, destroy things, and sometimes take deep breaths, before taking up arms again on the battleground of psychological knots, without the will to conquer. We must expend a colossal amount of pain in order to abolish suffering.

We can dissolve suffering through pain just as we light a fire with a flame. Fire and flame are not the same thing and nor are suffering and pain. I am an awakened one who does not believe in models, who does not approve of Plato and who is convinced that suffering does not exist. I do not even like the idea of a general concept to represent the fact of pain. This sanctification of pain in the myth of suffering, along with Christian original sin, Buddhist and Hindu samsara, which believes that all reincarnations are painful, the cult of suffering which does not even spare Jews who pay for the privilege of being God's chosen people by a surfeit of tortures - frankly all this just creates a vision of life which encourages man quite legitimately to complain about what is happening to him. The roots of complacency lie not only in the emotional body, but in the entire cultivated memory of peoples who make pain into an entity by calling it Suffering.

We seek AWAKENING because it is a genuine state of consciousness and not in order to avoid suffering. Subordinating the quest for awakening to the fantasy of no longer suffering is a serious form of depravity in Buddhism.

AWAKENING and nothing else.

Awakening is for relieving life and allowing it to suffer less, as in the prajna paramita - awakening for life itself and not in order to free oneself. The only thing from which we must free ourselves is the self which hides the Self, the self which is hooked by life and hypnotised by it. Freeing oneself is just a way of giving life back to the Spirit; it is not personal, although we are necessarily present when it happens, but it is another self. This is the mystery, because it stays partly identical to the previous one. This is why quantum theory is providential for metaphysics.

It does not cure anything or provide relief from anything, it simply crowns depth, because its whole extent is suddenly accessible. We no longer feel distant from anything at all, we cannot build walls any more and we can let ourselves go. Letting ourselves go is not carelessness, but spontaneously feeling that everything that happens has a meaning and we try a lot less hard to control, avoid or obtain. A rat must not try to be an eagle. A utilitarian form of awakening in order to get off the wheel of reincarnations, or to bring suffering to an end, is really disgusting. I don't want to know about it. There is no more a Buddhist philosophy than there is a Christian or Chinese one. There are broad panoramas which reduce Reality to the dimensions of the human mind, for better or for worse. There will always be people who grab the knife by the blade, either through absent-mindedness or because they are in a hurry.

SIXTH MOVEMENT



QUESTION: I have re-read your answers and I am astounded...You say: "The awakened one has no virtues". If this is the case, then over half of all philosophy is empty, since it aims to educate mankind in the path of virtue.
ANSWER: The awakened one has simply become pure, i.e. unadulterated. He has gathered up all his motives, undercurrents of ambition, bursts of desire and his wishes - the whole collection ranging from desire to the wish to be - and brought them to the spiritual fire, where they have all become the one flame. In order to reach this point, the awakened one is bound to have suffered, but it is quite obvious that the amount varies from one individual to another and we cannot, therefore, establish that suffering is necessary for achieving liberation. Irrespective of whether this was a long process or not, he will have worked hard. He is bound to have been ground down by questions such as "Who am I?", "What must I do?" or "What can I afford to do?" and by all the desires which we, rightly or wrongly, believe constitute real obstacles on our path.

But this work in the crucible has nothing to do with what hypocrites advocate: cultivating one predominant quality which we develop and master so that we have a clear conscience and can bury all the rest. It is true that in the West, as well as in China or India, half of all philosophies offer some form of all-purpose formula. Popular religious and even atheist philosophies can be summed up as the art of having a clear conscience by a process of normalizing our relationships with family, institutions and God. The generic spirit takes a sort of subtle, abstract, opportunistic line - a global intuition that doing good is better than doing harm after all, because we reap what we sow.

This getting to grips with Reality, which stops immediately as soon as security is achieved, is deceitful.

The self does not dive inwards any more because it has "correctly" identified with those external spaces which threaten its stability. Therefore, in some respects, stability is death. We need to take things further, but at this point there is nobody to encourage us apart from awakened ones themselves, who are not satisfied with family and cultural ties and religious play-acting.

True philosophy says: "You poor fool, you are dithering between Plato and Nietzsche, Fourier and Marx, or even between Buddha and Jesus, because you are incapable of producing your own vision of the world". This endless sum of disparate visions serves no purpose in the end other than to reveal human subjectivity to us in all its glory. Descartes believes he is proving the existence of God, but lovers of God ask what the point would be. If Descartes had known God, he would not have needed to prove his existence. The Divine has never asked anyone who loves Him to prove his existence to humankind. He simply throws them into a heated battle – evolution – but that is not a mental issue. The Divine can only manifest Himself from within an individual and all the external pressures which we strive to develop in religions are only used in the end to establish moral systems. The call to awakening comes from within, in such a way that a child or adolescent can feel it, whatever their original background, be they atheist or believer. In fact, the call can be irresistible and independent of all belief, as in my case. I never "believed" in God prior to my supramental experience. It is not necessary, even in awakening. Religion is not concerned with the feeling of being connected with the Whole, the Mother, or the Supreme force, but with an imitation of this. If we truly love the Divine, we love Him before even knowing whether He exists or not. Words which were previously meaningless gradually come to mean something on the basis of experience.

I am coming back round to the idea, therefore, that philosophy can only be a personal thing and that it is above all a method for eliminating belief. If this movement grows, it is clear that we understand awakened ones a lot better. The mind will no longer offer resistance by erecting the barrier of personal beliefs between the awakened one's discourse and the act of reading it.

If the philosopher is a masked redresser of wrongs, then he is not a philosopher. It is simply a case of saying what one has to say, and even the bias of drawing others to one's own vision is already not philosophy any more. This is where we get down to the essence of this discipline, because a cunning author manages to obtain his reader's support without forcing him, by mastering logic. This is what Reason aspires to – imposing itself from the inside on every sincere individual who wants to use logic to uncover eternal truths. However, logical inner conviction, which determines whether one becomes a Cartesian, Hegelian or Marxist, does not affect the whole self. The individual will have succumbed to external factors and will have been conquered by an infallible system; he will have been recruited into it while having the impression that he took part in this recruitment process himself, by sticking closely to the discourse. It comes down to the same principle for religions, none of which can do without dogma, or for Buddhism - there are lots of unverifiable claims and nothing to believe at face value, so that we have to know where to draw the line at what we have really assimilated and to throw the rest away, or retain only the hypothesis.

However, the inner call of awakening cannot be compared to that afforded by belief in an external system. The future awakened one is, therefore, forced to smash up all the abstract modes of representation which tie him to a political, religious or even spiritual concept of reality.

This work can sometimes be initiated by philosophers, who only want to follow themselves, but the mind eventually gains the upper hand and only allows them to create a regular polygon with a variable number of faces, a complex mirror which they use to articulate their existence, a polygon for which they can at least take the credit for inventing by putting a stop to imitations. Somebody who has never rejoiced at creating a synthetic vision of Reality (including his relationship with the world) cannot understand philosophy. Philosophy, like awakening, is a state of mind. If you do not like to wonder, then you cannot become a philosopher. If you prefer answers to questions, you must develop along a different path, of which there are many. Philosophy is merciless: if you practice somebody else's, you are heading for disaster. If philosophers were not so caught up in the business of what they are creating, they would stop criticizing awakened ones for their lack of rigour, a lack which in fact constitutes a superior form of rigour, absorbing opposites and including paradoxes, to the point where it forces mental structures to become broader or else break.

QUESTION: So there could, therefore, be a philosophy of awakening, if one were careful to specify that it does not pursue anything?
RÉPONSE: ANSWER: Of course, but it is too subtle for the Western mind, which is obsessed with mastery, control and the appropriation of the future. The Eastern world can do thousands of things without being certain of achieving goals, and that does not disturb people. They are much more sensitive to duty than to goals. This is why their civilizations evolve slowly. The notion of a goal to be achieved is a Western one. Primitive peoples go hunting and it is just as normal for them to come back empty-handed as it is to catch prey and if they stop hunting after coming back empty-handed several times on the pretext that they had not achieved their goal, then they would die of hunger or be short of protein. The simplest of men and those who are the most highly developed act without any goals, which limits their personal ambition, their taste for power, wealth and prestige. They accept what eludes them and this does not make them anxious, mean or withdrawn. Most of the time, setting goals is like trying to manipulate one's life according to one's personal interests and subjective instructions.

From this perspective, I would even go so far as to say that the future awakened one does not feel ownership of his own desire for awakening. He accepts that he is pervaded by mysteries and does not fight against an imperative that is superior to all others and w