Dear M.,
Some time ago, during one of our meetings, you were reading something about the reason why we ”come” into this world. You turned to me and asked me what I believed I had ”come” into the world for. I had simply taken a deep breath. But I haven’t forgotten your question and I had promised myself to answer it at some point. I will express my vision on this matter with complete honesty.
I don’t think I ”came” into the world, but that I emerged from it, like a wave that emerges from the ocean but doesn’t fall into it, or like a tree that grows from the earth but doesn’t land on it. I remember reading once these words from a Zen master: ”We all come from here, and here hasn’t moved“.
I don’t think the Creator created me outside of Him but inside Him. Since He encompasses and contains everything, there remains no space outside of Him that I could occupy… beside Him.
I am obliged, for the purposes of expression, to speak of me and Him, but I am not convinced by this duality or this separation. The wave that is born on the surface of the ocean, however high it may rise, never detaches from the ocean. It remains part of it throughout its entire lifespan. It only seems to have its own life because the mass of water that composes it takes on a particular form for a limited time. But it remains an integral part of the ocean. And its form is only temporary. When it subsides, the mass of water that composed it and that was its very substance becomes again the ocean it never ceased to be. The wave comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; it’s the form that travels on the water. We have the illusion that the water moves; in reality the surface is lifted by a thrust that creates a wave phenomenon, but the water only rises and falls as the wave passes.
Similarly, the tree is only an ”outgrowth” of the earth. It is the fact that Man amused himself by giving names to different forms, ranging from the infinitely large to the infinitely small, that fragmented the ONE and gave the illusion of multiplicity. We have been distracted and we have let ourselves be caught in the whirlwind of multiplicity to the point that we have lost sight of the fundamental Unity that underlies everything that exists, the Divine.
I cannot simultaneously believe in the existence of the Divine and in my own existence. This coexistence is impossible for me. When I am, He is not yet; when He is, I am no more.
The ONE took on the appearance of multiplicity so that this love relationship between Him and His parts would be possible, which, for me, is the only valid meaning of Existence.
I complete this with an analogy that uses the element of air, as the tree analogy used the element of earth and the wave analogy used the element of water. You know it is written in the book of Genesis that God took clay, breathed into it, and created Man in His image. The image of God in Man would therefore be only the breath that animates us, which we call the Holy Spirit, since it is the Spirit of God.
I don’t know if, as a child, you played at making soap bubbles. For the purposes of the analogy, we’ll keep the divine child and replace the clay with soapy water. The bubbles that are created, what are they composed of? — Air and a thin membrane of soapy water. The air they contain is not different from the air in which they float. What creates the illusion of separation is this thin membrane. When it bursts, where does the air it contained go? Nowhere! It simply melts into its primary element from which, in reality, it was never truly separated. This is what death means to me. The ”disappeared” person goes nowhere; they have always been in God, they continue to be… but without limits or constraints.
There is only the ONE, and ”we” are all His reflections in the mirror.
Pointing a finger at himself, a mystic had exclaimed ”under this robe, there is only God!” And to someone who asked who he was, the mystic Rumi replied ”just my name, everything else is Him.” And a third defined the Sufi as one who ”in both worlds, sees only God.” The belief in the reality of separate entities is the result of the dream of existence. As expressed in this prophetic tradition you know: ”Men are asleep, death awakens them.” The characteristic of the sleeper is to dream. He dreams that he does things, that he travels paths, including ”spiritual” ones. But when he wakes up, he realizes that he has done nothing and traveled nowhere. He is always in the place where he was when he entered sleep. Unless he had a nightmare, he will have entertained himself in his sleep. The best entertainment is that which brings us joy and love.
The world is only the playground of the Divine. For Sri Aurobindo, ”Man is too serious partner for God.” We give ourselves various objectives and goals, whereas for my part I have taken this form to live a love story with… the Source of Love. And this, through all the forms under which it manifests to me. It is true, sometimes Love wounds us, but its wounds open even wider access to Love within us.
Many people ”work on themselves to improve”; I don’t seek to improve myself but to love, Love takes care of transforming me. This is why I love this saying of St. Augustine: ”Love and do what you want!” St. John of the Cross had said that it was easier for him to love men through God than to love God through men. This is also my approach. I turn toward The Source within me, which manifests through breath, and I let this love relationship overflow, without effort or intention on my part, and spread wherever it needs to go.
When I focus my attention and feel the caress of the breath that animates and cradles me, I am necessarily in ”self remembering,” ”self observing,” and ”self sensing” that Gurdjieff speaks of, therefore fully present. And it is to live this exercise of presence that I go to our meetings. I don’t go there to learn, because it has been a while since I’ve been seeking rather to unlearn… to rediscover the innocence of childhood and live, according to Christ’s words, the kingdom of heaven here and now.
Much has been and continues to be written about Truth, but it is closer to silence than to words. In ”the letters of wisdom” of the Druze, we read that Knowledge is a point that the ignorant have multiplied. Addressing himself, the Sufi Hafez said one day ”my dear Hafez, all the clutter in your brain will one day dry up like stagnant tide under the Sun”. And, after writing his ”theological summa” of two thousand pages, St. Thomas Aquinas said, ”everything I have written is nothing but straw“.
As a microcosm, the human being contains on a smaller scale the world that surrounds him — the macrocosm. If this is the case, the Source I come from is within me and the Source I am supposed to rejoin is also within me. The journey takes place within me. And it is through feeling and not ”thinking” that one can accomplish it. For me, contentment and adherence to ”what is” is the culmination and ultimate goal of all teaching.