by Eric Baret
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 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. 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.
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 jus
t 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.
Chapter 6
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:
Christian and Spiritual Discourses Concerning Inner Life
Isn’t the fear that stops me from surrendering the same as the fear of letting go of the too well-known exterior world?
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.
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 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.
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.
