by Eric Baret
But then how come we feel so good when someone loves us, understands us, gives us a feeling of security?
Because you stop requesting. In this absence of request, you realize that what loves you is yourself.
You do not need anyone to love you. It's your job to love yourself, and you don't need to do it. You don't need anything to love the moon. You don't need anything to wonder. You don't need anything to love—only to accept being nothing.
To pretend to be anything is a form of violence; war is not far off. As long as you pretend to be anything, it is useless to complain of war here or there. War is born out of this pretense. It crystallizes, thickens and becomes what is called a war. But the war arises earlier—in this pretension, this demand.
With a baby or a dog, you can really feel intimate. You do not have to pretend, as they don't judge you. A form of simplicity is there. That's why a lot of people would rather have a dog or a cat than a wife or a husband. It is a form of comfort. But you can live with a woman or a man as well as with a dog!
Demand locks up the human being. When something is demanded of you, you choke. If you are next to someone who suffers, the only thing to do is to demand nothing and just listen. Unhappy children are children who, more often than not, were bombarded with demands. When you demand, you are not present; you are in your demand. When I am present with a child, there is nothing to demand. It is this presence which gives balance. The child will resonate with this presence.
The same is true of an adult. Do not ask the other to be anything other than what he is. His question, his functioning, his assertion—that is your wonderment. It is extraordinary to see a human being, to see how he has constructed himself, how he has imagined himself: the head, the ears, the belly, the voice, the intelligence, the cowardice, the odor he has given himself. All this you have given yourself; this is the gift you gave yourself. If you meet an obstacle in your life, that is the gift you give yourself. As long as this is not clear, you experience it as a fight and you struggle. One day though, you will realize that what looks like a drama to you, is, deep down, your gift.
I am not asking you to accept it!
It is extraordinary to see! To see nature, to see a leaf, to feel the wind, to hear a cry. Nothing is more extraordinary than life. To believe that I need anything other than this extraordinary gift is a lack of respect for life's beauty. I don't need anything other than a cloud.
This doesn't prevent action! We each have our physical, intellectual and emotional capacities. We express our strength, our endurance, our intelligence, our know-how in some domain. The dancer dances, the musician plays music; each fulfills his role, but there is nothing there; life's beauty is not what you do, it's not your lifestyle.
There are prostitutes, monks, married people, single people—so what? Why would you want to know what is better? Why would you want to know what suits you? There is nothing that is better and nothing that suits you. What is best is what is here, in the moment: for a monk it is to be a monk, for a prostitute, to be a prostitute… in the moment. In the next moment, the prostitute gets married, the monk leaves the order; it's not better or worse, it is life's adventure. Judgment is no longer possible, becoming is no longer possible, awakening is no longer possible. When you can feel the touch of the wind on your cheek, how can you be so arrogant as to want to be something other than that feeling? When you are lucky enough to be with a friend who is dying, would you want to be awakened, would you want to be different rather than feel this extraordinary moment? It's an escape. There is nothing to be. That is what you must really be.
I would like to hear your comments on the mind. I was depressed for two months and I realized, at some point, that it wasn't me but my mind that was depressed.
In order to communicate, we use words, symbols. For you, the word mind has a certain meaning, for me it has very little. I can understand what some people mean by mind, but I cannot answer your question in the way that you ask it.
Indeed, as you seem to discover, when you feel depression you are not depressed. Rather than tell the story with your mind, we would suggest—as an experiment—to feel the depression. It is somewhere in your body. If it comes back, if it is here, simply listen to your body and see how this sadness, this joy, this depression resonates inside you. “I am depressed.” What does this mean? How do you know? Who told you that you were depressed?
There is no desire to do anything.
Go back before that. What took the desire away? You feel depressed; where do you feel it? That is the question you must ask. At the start it is an intellectual question, but play the game. In which part of your body do you feel depressed? You feel? Therefore, it's one of your senses, but which one?
Listen to your body. When you do that, you do not think, because these two activities call on two different areas of the brain. You let your feet, your legs, your knees, your thighs, your belly, your chest, your head, your arms all become sensually alive. You will see, you will be surprised. One day, you will really feel the depression in a certain area of your body, your belly or your chest. It is the beginning of an extraordinary exploration. Then, indeed, you can say: “I feel the depression. I feel the fear in my chest, I feel the sadness, the bitterness in my belly, in my throat. I am not sad, I am not afraid, I feel the emotion.”
If you become familiar with this attitude, you will realize that the emotion is in you and that you are not in the emotion; a new clarity will be born. Even the word mind will leave you.
The mind is an abstraction. The body as well, but a more pedagogical one. Let your body resonate with depression. Then one day, you will not be able to feel depressed. Depression always comes in moments when the body isn't inhabited, when you do not feel it. When you feel, you cannot be depressed. As long as a single sense is active—and at least one always is—what is important is the feeling. Come back to the felt sense.
What we are talking about here cannot be thought. You can debate at the level of thought, but what is said here aims at waking up this space of no-thought in us. You need to feel the silence, to feel the stillness, the absence of need. It is not a concept, it is not an idea; it is felt.
We all spend time in that space. After a desire is fulfilled, we get a moment of satisfaction, an absence of desire. It's enough to give yourself to that moment. It isn't the object that satisfies us. The situation is only an excuse, it wakes up the satisfaction that was already there in us. The same woman, the same compliment three days later no longer affects us. Why? Joy was already inside us. The situation did not create it, it stimulated the resonance that we carry buried within ourselves.
The fulfilment is in me, it isn't in the object. You need to understand that. The object refers back to me. More and more, I give myself to these moments of fulfilment without paying attention to the cause. It is fulfilment without a cause, even if it was apparently caused. The fulfilment will eliminate its cause. I will no longer need a smile, a look, a gesture or a red car to find it. I will no longer need to be awakened either. I will not need anything. This is autonomy. We all feel it, at certain times. It is only because we lack the right orientation that we place our attention on the cause of the fulfilment—the woman, the car, the dog, the husband.
Stay in the fulfilment, let go of the cause; that is the direct approach.
Is the satisfaction simply the joy of being?
The toy, the man, the boat, the dog, the affection, the compliment, all of that served the same fulfilment. There is only one: the moment when the quest stops.
As long as I am searching, I say no. In a moment of non-quest, this non-quest is the answer. What I was demanding with such violence was to stop demanding. My only demand is for that to stop. Whether it is in sexual intercourse—violent or sensitive—in extreme physical risk, in the accumulation of one thing or another, or in an intellectual reflection, what I always look for is the ending. It is to breathe out, to be nothing. I demand my own extinction and I demand it of the outside world! It isn't po
ssible.
The only deep fulfilment is to live this non-demand. This does not stop us from having lovers or cars, but it stops us from wanting the lover or the car to give us what we deeply are. We don't need anyone to give it to us because we already are that.
Then functional life can get underway. Without the dynamic toward something, there remains a real dynamic. A tremendous dynamic, because it isn't oriented. It isn't the dynamic to get this or that, but a welcoming for what arises, the dynamic to face what is here and now.
What is here is my supreme interest, my supreme awakening. I do not want any other. Just to be available, to listen to what comes up in the moment. Civic sense, moral sense, true responsibility, I fully recognize myself in that which presents itself. In that space, there is no separation. There is true communication, without anyone communicating. This all might seem serious and complicated but it is the simplest, the closest thing.
Do not resist.
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[1] French spiritual author who was awakened at age 16, 1931-2009 (translator's note)
