by Eric Baret
Is the belief that meeting people like you can help me see myself more clearly an illusion? Is it my imagination telling me that you can bring me a little light?
Of course, it is only imagination. What is not an illusion though, is to realize that, when you listen, you find a little peace and light. So, listen to the chair or to a swallow in flight. When you listen to something without expectation, without demand, you find peace. When we understand that, we listen to that which naturally occurs.
What is yoga? It is the art to deepen within ourselves the discovery of our lack of listening, the discovery that I always say no.
There is nothing wrong with practicing yoga or with going here or there. But we have to have perspective; I’m not going there to get something, but to realize how much I am in defense. Life brings the elements I need to free myself from saying no.
It is not what you listen to that makes you quiet; it is your listening. Joy is to listen. The most beautiful thing you can listen to is yourself, your fear, your greed, your sadness. There you can find beauty. It’s a thousand times deeper than listening to anybody else.
As long as a form of agitation makes you forget, why not read texts or listen to someone? It can bring you back to the listening, but it’s not something you want to spend your life doing.
Our mind would love to remove the clouds, as if it could change the sun. It’s impossible. Clouds appear spontaneously and leave the same way. The role of a human being is to welcome the clouds and their departure.
So, in the end, exercising willpower is like fighting the clouds?
It is a form of pretense. You do not decide about your birth or your death, your maturity or your lack thereof. A human being must observe; that is the ultimate stage. Presence without a doer. Only madmen believe they act. To understand that is the result of a lifetime of inquiry.
When we are young it is inevitable to believe that we are the doer, to want the true and to fight the false. At some point, a sort of vision happens, a form of respect.
Until a certain age, you want to be in good health; when you get older, you learn to accept health and disease, strength and weakness. Accept. No request, no demand. What is given to me is what is essential. There is no chance and there is no fight. The supreme stage is to stop fighting. I am constantly trying to get away, to cleanse myself of all my demons. That is the madness, that is the demon.
Let's live in respect. Respect for my arrogance, for my immaturity, for my fears, for my pretension, for what naturally occurs at each moment. In this respect, transformation happens, clouds dissipate. This respect is a reflection of the sun, of reality, of the essential.
What is the use of all that we learn, our education, the way we were brought up by our parents? If that is not us, why spend all this time showing or teaching others?
The notion of usefulness is mental. Things aren’t useful. Your parents cannot help projecting onto you their expectations, their misery, their worries, their needs. You cannot help acquiring the tools which seem useful to you to defend yourself and to victoriously attack the environment. There is no choice there. All species go through the same learning process. Psychologically, nothing is useful; functionally, everything is useful.
This question is a little mental!
Beauty doesn't have a reason, nor does sadness. The purpose of the world is to bring me to this obvious fact. Everything is here to compel me to let go of my pretension to need anything, to be anything, to become Superman, to liberate myself, to clarify myself, to succeed. Society is perfect, for it pushes me towards this inquiry. If it were supposed to be different, it would be. This is not a political judgment, this does not justify anything; this opens to everything.
I let go of the need to find a justification for the event, which is to say to link the event to my memory, to my knowledge, to integrate it in my comfortable prejudices. I set it free from my limited projections. There, the event can reveal a non-personal meaning, like a vision. At that stage, when you encounter a pigeon walking around, when you see a branch of a tree, straight or broken, when you notice the garments your neighbor is wearing, the position of the books on the table at a friend's house—all has meaning, no longer conceptual meaning but resonance, for nothing is separate.
When you stop wanting to understand, then a non-conceptual understanding imposes itself. You see how far animals, nature, objects are beyond meaning. It’s so much more than meaning; it is a resonance, a fragrance of truth. When you watch the sunrise, the movement of the moon or of a cloud, a duck sliding on a lake, that destroys any desire for ideas. The whole world is happening in front of you. All the beauty, the violence and the peace of the world are expressed right there.
When you look without looking for a meaning, without understanding, emotion comes up. Sometimes, as you catch a glimpse of an old rag, a rock or an ant, a tear rolls down your cheek, emotion takes hold of you; it surprises people around you. It isn’t the rock or the ant that brings up emotion—for emotion is in you—but every perception lives in this emotion. There is nothing else than this emotion.
For that to happen, personal emotion and knowledge need to quieten down. They become quiet when they are respected, loved, when you live with them without violence, without expectation, without the slightest movement to free yourself from them.
Presence liberates. Movement cannot liberate, movement changes, moves things around. The more you respect your conflict, your problems and the heaviness that lives in you, the more a form of emotional freedom appears. In this emotional freedom, you will see how much every thing, every object, every word, music or caress of the wind has a meaning beyond what philosophers could imagine. It is no longer a conceptual meaning.
For that you must listen, respect, be present.
At some point, I return to the urge to free myself from a conflict, and again I create positive and negative, darkness and light. It is an endless fight, for one brings the other.
There is no fight, only listening. I accept pain, problems, sadness, loneliness, anxiety. I live with them, humbly. This is what I have been given for the moment, it is not a divine sentence to all of eternity. I give myself to that. Change comes from a complete letting go. There is no need to make any effort, to force myself or to try anything. There is nothing to see, nothing to understand—only to listen, love, feel. It is non-struggle.
In this peace, the secret of things presents itself. It isn’t a conceptual secret. Joy is inscribed in all perceptions.
At that moment, all my youth, my education, my excesses begin to have a meaning. I understand, in a non-mental way, why I drank so many beers, read so many novels, pretended so often to be abandoned or sad; why I needed so much of this or that, of love, understanding. All my mechanisms come to the surface, and I claim them. I wouldn’t want for a single moment to be different in any way, for it wouldn’t be real.
This total acceptance of my characteristics is a revelation beyond any characteristics. The light that shines on them is revealed through them. When I look, everything makes sense, unspeakable sense, beyond any sense.
The real meaning is to die. There is none other.
Chapter 9
No one ever talked to you
My find is my loss and my loss is my find.
Hallaj: Diwan
I would like to hear you speak about anger. Now, after a yoga session, we are very peaceful, but in my usual work environment, there can be forms of verbal violence. I observed that, facing an attack, there comes an urge to either counterattack or to roll with the punch.
There is no choice.
No choice, I don’t know? True, there is a reaction. But I wonder, with respect to anger or to aggressiveness, if I remain in a receptive state for too long and I do not counterattack, don’t I run the danger of becoming a scapegoat? For me, the place of anger as a reaction is confusing. Whether I strike back or just take it, it’s exhausting to always be on the defensive. Now, I realize that what I’m suffering from isn’t the attack
itself, but the idea that the other should not attack me. It’s as if I’m susceptible. Perhaps I am too vulnerable, too sensitive to other people’s words? I feel a huge gap between the moment when I calmly practice yoga here and then when I find myself back at work enduring attacks. I would like to be able to take the peace that I am feeling here with me.
You cannot shift immediately from the habit of reacting to being available in a nonreactive way. Of course, I’m talking about psychological non-reaction; it may include an elbow jab, a slap in the face, an insult or any gesture, but you act for practical reasons, not because you feel hurt.
In certain circumstances you will need to knock someone out, but you don’t need to feel humiliated. When someone is in a psychotic crisis, you may need to put him in a stranglehold to prevent him from endangering himself or his environment. This does not imply any psychological involvement; you intervene if you are competent, otherwise you call for help.
Action doesn’t necessarily come from reaction, it can be purely functional.
Nobody ever attacked you and no one will ever attack you. The neighbor who is talking to you is talking to himself. He’s not talking to you, but to his projection. He cannot communicate, he doesn’t know you and will never be able to know you.
No one ever talked to you, it’s impossible. People address the image they have of you, which is constantly changing. Do not imagine that you can be talked to; realize that everyone is in a monologue. Observe how it works: the person’s past, the perception she has of you, all sorts of more or less subconscious details bring her to a form of aggressiveness—or affection—toward you. But she doesn’t see you, she only sees her lack of love, the terror she carries within herself, and then she thinks, “This is really a horrible man” or “I like this guy a lot.” You are not involved; you merely serve as a mirror; she only meets her own problems. When you realize that nobody ever talks to you, you become aware that nobody ever loved you nor attacked you either. People have projected love or hate on you but they only communicated with themselves. At that stage, you no longer feel involved in the monologues of your environment.
For functional reasons, certain situations bring you to act. If you’re a teacher, you need your students’ attention. If one of them disturbs the listening capacity of the whole group, you can assert your authority. It isn’t a judgment; you understand very well that, given his personality, his family and other circumstances, he cannot do otherwise. Maybe you did the same at his age! Still, to be able to function correctly, you use whatever tools are available. If you are in an establishment that doesn’t tolerate physical contact, you administer a formal punishment.
You need to use what is functional. You can slap somebody out of love, you can strangle him to prevent him from jumping through the window. The action is simply here; you are not challenged by a student who is trying to disturb the class; you understand him very well, but this does not mean you have to let him interrupt. Perhaps he is the most brilliant or the most gifted in the class but, for practical reasons, at some point you just can’t let it go.
To feel challenged by a student or by a remark is a fantasy. At some point, you stop feeling challenged. If somebody says you are stupid, there are two possibilities: either he is more intelligent than you are, therefore he is right and there is no reason to resent him; or he is wrong because he is more stupid than you are, and you need to respect that too. In either case, it is not worth getting depressed over.
To be affected by an insult is childish. As you mature, it becomes impossible. Identification, whether it be with a cast, a skin color, a race or a social function is a frequent but childish attitude.
You say, don't identify with your functioning. But when I get attacked, I observe my reaction, and either I feel hurt or…
There is no attack. The other doesn't attack you. When someone falls in love with you, you don't say he attacks you, do you? When someone hates you, it is as if he were in love with you. He looks at you, he feels you, he listens to you and it makes him want to caress you or to hit you. Both drives come from an emotional image. In some, you trigger love and in others, hate.
To feel attacked comes from a lack of sensitivity. You receive an elbow jab and it hits your chin, or your ribs, but it isn't aggression. When you deeply understand that it isn’t, you no longer feel psychologically involved. But as long as you feel attacked, whether you react or not, you are stuck in emotion.
It's enough to realize that an action that used to disturb you now leaves you indifferent. For instance, at fifteen, when your girlfriend said she was leaving you, you were upset. If she said it now, it wouldn't affect you. It wasn't any more aggressive then than now, but you took it as such because you lived in ideas.
If you take yourself for a Frenchman and you are told, “The French are idiots,” you feel insulted. But if you don't identify as French, you don't feel involved; you understand that someone can have that opinion. Feeling attacked is only a consequence of your pretension to be French. If you are told that the Belgians are idiots and you imagine that you are French, you don't feel targeted. So where is the attack? There is no attack! Only an identification with a certain self-image which produces this hostile feeling.
Understand that being French, Belgian, short, tall, rich or poor is a functional reality which only exists in the moment and you will no longer feel attacked.
In exceptional circumstances, and without feeing attacked, you can comment or help set the record straight. In times of war or conflict, if someone insults a cause, a nation or a race, perhaps, in order to teach others, you will risk your life to express a deep emotion. But this doesn't mean that you felt challenged. It resonated in the moment. Nor were you identified. You could have done it for any reason.
Since you don't identify with any cause, you are available to all of them. Some heroic French people got involved in the war in Afghanistan. If you really feel the urge and if you have medical, humanitarian or military competence, you too can do so and Commander Massoud would welcome you with open arms. But watch out that you don't flee to a dangerous land because you have not adapted to your life in Quebec. Real commitment is non-ideological. It is completely obvious. That is what led great Sufis such as Sheikh Arslan of Damascus or, more recently, the great Abd-El-Kader, to external jihad.
Actually, the real question would be: how to not identify? Is the only useful consequence of an attack the fact that it allows me to become aware that I identify?
Absolutely. So, when you feel attacked, you should thank your attacker, whose purpose is to reveal your limits. Every situation that challenges you, that makes you suffer, is a gift which allows you to realize that you are still pretending—until the day where nothing can disturb you, because there isn't anyone to be disturbed. If you can still get upset, thank the situation as it shows you the side of you that is not free.
Can't we do anything about this?
Being fully aware of an identification allows you to free yourself from it.
To see clearly, you must feel somatically, without justification or criticism. Saying to yourself “I am French” or “I am not French” doesn't change anything. At some point, you will feel where the fantasy to want to be somebody, to be recognized, to exist, comes from.
All groups come from this fear of being nothing. We need to identify with a social cell, Freemasons or Lions Club, to be French or to be rich, tall, masculine, intelligent, Buddhist, etc. To each his club, but it's all the same: a club of misery and fear. In it, you claim the right to be afraid.
Notice that everything we build in order to feel secure, increases the opposite: fear. We identify to feel safe, and that destabilizes us. When we discover the mechanism, change will take place, but it may take time. Depending on biology and on conditioning, some identifications might be easier to drop than others. It may be easy to stop thinking that you are from Quebec, but it might be harder to not take yourself to be the father of your children—or the owner of your car. To each his imagina
ry world, but it's exactly the same: you project on your children what another man projects on his car. Neither one is better.
The sense of being invulnerable when you step into your powerful and elegant car, the superiority you feel when you become a Freemason master, or when a beautiful woman praises your virility and your intelligence—it's all the same; only the fantasy changes.
When you are continuously immersed in these stories, it's not easy to get rid of them!
There is nothing to get rid of. Observe the way you function with utmost honesty and at some point, as if by magic, you will understand how your environment perceives you. Your parents still see the child in you; they give you advice as if you were still five. Your children imagine you in a different way. Your mistress, your wife, your dog, your friends, your boss, your employees… each perceives you from their own viewpoint. For some, you are the most hateful character imaginable, for others, the most wonderful. When you get to see how it works, you no longer need to identify with one or the other.
For your dog, you are the most extraordinary man. For a dog that was trained to kill, if you enter his territory, you are the most terrible monster. The dog that loves you isn't a nicer dog than the one that wants to rip your throat: they are exactly the same. When you discover this obvious fact, it changes your reference system, this automatic response to love or to hate.
For a long time, we only love people who approve of us or look like us. People of the same race, the same height, the same social environment, those who think like us, who have the same political opinions, the same activities. Those people, yes, we love them, we find them intelligent! When you grow up you find that you can have a human connection with people of all sorts: with rich people, poor people, teenagers, people of all colors, with all sorts of opinions. You recognize yourself in all ideologies, in all pretensions. You understand these characteristics, but you no longer identify with them. You see clearly that they are only fragments. You feel that it is fear that drives someone to think they are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, French, white or black. You notice how deeply that is anchored in all of us, so deeply that we all need to prove and defend this identification, even if it means going way back in history to look for proof. It's a necessary step. Eventually you won't need to walk around with any other skin color than the one you have at the moment.
