Alice Asks the Big Questions

by Laurent Gounelle

  Sitting in one of the armchairs was the famous Raphaël Duvernet, hair unkempt and white beard badly trimmed, holding a glass of red wine. In silence, he looked her up and down with his dark eyes.

  She had seen him dozens of times on television a few years ago, so it was strange to see him in the flesh. His wrinkles had deepened, carving out furrows in his rather reddish, puffy face. She found him very stern, but behind his harshness she sensed a kind of distress.

  Alice cleared her throat as she walked toward him, all smiles.

  “I’m Al—”

  “And I’m Raph,” he grumbled, looking away.

  Alice tried to keep smiling. “You must have been told I was coming and that I needed some clarification about—”

  “Tasting the Burgundy marc brandy…” He had said it in a grim voice.

  “No, Eastern religions.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “I’d like to understand certain Taoist concepts…”

  He shrugged his shoulders, staring at the glass he slowly turned in his hand. After a long pause, he let out an almost inaudible sigh. “Why the hell would you give a damn about that?”

  Alice felt the anger rising within her and tried to remain calm despite her raging desire to punch him in the face.

  Flatter him to soften him up.

  “Listen. I know that you’re an expert on spirituality.”

  He scowled slightly. It looked like a tortured smile. “I’ve gone from the spiritual to the spirits.”

  Alice bit her lip. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Well, then, offer me a glass of wine.”

  He seemed surprised. He turned toward her and stared at her for a long time in silence.

  Then he made the effort to get up and lean over the table, inspecting the numerous glasses. Alice realized they were all dirty.

  “Nadine!” he shouted. “A glass for Mademoiselle.”

  “Madame.”

  “Madame,” he hissed after a moment.

  There was little chance that Nadine had heard him call, so a few seconds later, Alice was surprised to hear footsteps coming down the stairs and along the passageway. She recognized the woman who had greeted her. Nadine put a glass down on the table and slipped out again.

  Meanwhile, Duvernet had taken a bottle of sparkling wine and uncorked it. The sharp popping noise echoed throughout the wine cellar. After filling two glasses, he took one and held it up to see it, then sniffed it.

  “A Tripoz,” he said. “Brut. Pure. The perfect balance of aromas. Beautiful!”

  He spoke in a husky voice, in a tone that was both depressed and somewhat aggressive. He handed her the second glass.

  Be patient.

  Tame the beast.

  “The aroma is very fine,” she said.

  “The bubbles are unbelievably delicate!” His gruff tone of voice contrasted with the finesse he was describing.

  She took a sip. She lacked the imagination to continue a discussion about wine. “I admit it is exceptional.”

  “You see?”

  “Yes, very good. You’re right.”

  “Ah…”

  “Have you been drinking this wine for a long time?”

  “Only discovered it recently.”

  They fell silent.

  Don’t allow the silence to continue. Keep going.

  “An excellent discovery,” she said.

  “Oh yes, an amazing find.”

  “Definitely.”

  “It takes years of work,” he said, “decades, to succeed at making a wine like this!”

  “Yes, and great intelligence as well, I imagine. It would take someone who wasn’t simple of spirit.”

  “Definitely.”

  Alice took a deep breath and launched in. “Simple of spirit…I always wondered why Lao Tzu said ‘My heart is the heart of someone simple of spirit.’ That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  She waited, on edge, for his reply. For a long time.

  “In my opinion, tea wasn’t the only thing he ever drank.”

  Alice repressed her desire to shake Duvernet like a plum tree.

  “Rice wine, perhaps?” she said, trying to laugh.

  “That’s disgusting stuff.”

  She chuckled out of politeness, then waited a moment. “What do you think he meant?”

  “That he probably had the goodness of a village idiot. Sweet and stupid.”

  Alice felt her frustration growing. Her strategy wasn’t working. She was wasting time with this guy. She tried to breathe to stay calm.

  In vain.

  “And when are you going to stop taking me for a moron?” she asked.

  “When you stop taking me for one.”

  They locked eyes for the first time and stared at each other intensely.

  “So from one moron to another, we can finally clink glasses.”

  He seemed to appreciate what she said, and their glasses banged together so hard that she thought they might break.

  She took a sip. The Tripoz was truly delicious.

  “Now you’re going to answer my questions. This is important to me.”

  He let out a heavy sigh. “What exactly do you want to know?”

  His tone of voice had changed. It had gone from aggressive to hollow.

  “There are a few expressions and concepts that escape me, and I want to understand. Like the idea of ‘simple of spirit.’”

  He took a long drink of wine, admired its golden color, then began speaking slowly. His statements were precise, but talking seemed to take an enormous amount out of him, and he frequently paused between sentences.

  “When Lao Tzu speaks of the spirit, he means the mind. On this question, Taoism is akin to Hinduism and Buddhism. They all call for a liberation from the mind, the cerebral. The cerebral is the incessant thinking that takes ascendency over the heart and body, to the detriment of intuition, instinct, and the awareness of being.”

  “The awareness of being?”

  A few seconds of silence.

  “When you are in your mind, it’s a little as if you are no longer inhabiting your body, no longer listening to your heart, no longer feeling your existence. You are interpreting reality, and most often distorting it. You assign intentions to others that are not theirs; you project your fears, your problems, your doubts and expectations. You think about events instead of living them. Eastern religions invite us to free ourselves from the hold of the mind so we can feel things as they are, in the present moment, whereas the cerebral knows only the past and the future.”

  Only the past and the future…

  “I don’t understand the link you’re making between the mind and time.”

  He looked at her for a moment and took another deep breath. Dealing with these subjects was difficult for him.

  “Your mind interprets the event that is happening, or the words that someone is saying, depending on your knowledge, your personal history, and your beliefs and convictions about yourself, other people, and the rest of the world. All those things come from the past. And if the present makes you feel afraid, it’s because you are mentally projecting your interpretations from the past onto an imaginary future. That is how the mind cuts you off from the present.”

  “And Lao Tzu compared himself to someone simple of spirit because he had freed himself of his mind, is that it?”

  Silence.

  “Apparently,” said Duvernet.

  Jesus had said, “Happy are the poor in spirit.” He was talking about the same thing, undeniably. And not about the spirit of poverty, as the Parisian priest had told her.

  Duvernet took the bottle of sparkling wine and poured them both another glass. She didn’t stop him.

  “Is there…Is there a link, somewhere, between the mind and…the ego?”

  “The ego is fundamentally the fruit of fear: fear of not being enough, of not having value, especially in the eyes of others. And unfounded fears are typically the product of a mental process. It is also our thoughts that le
ad us to take ourselves for what we are not: the mind pushes the ego to take on different roles. The mind feeds the ego.”

  He took a drink of wine before adding, “Buddhism asks us to detach ourselves from those damned roles.” He had said the word “damned” with anger in his voice.

  Buddhist detachment. “I’ve heard people talk about that, but it always seemed problematic to me. It gives the impression that you have to live in a state of detachment, without feeling anything about what is happening. But as for me, I have no desire whatsoever to live detached from my husband, my little boy, the people I love. I have no desire whatsoever to be indifferent to them, or insensitive. Obviously, if I were detached from them, I would suffer less if something bad happened to them. But if everything happens normally, then I don’t see how I would be happier—quite the opposite!”

  A new silence.

  “You shouldn’t take everything so literally,” he continued in his slow, serious tone of voice. “In Buddhist detachment, it is especially important to understand that we manage to free ourselves from the hold the ego has on us. Your ego clings on to everything that gives you value but which is not you: the roles you play, the beautiful things you own, your most flattering attributes. And, of course…”—he paused for a moment, then lowered his voice to mutter under his breath—“your fucking successes.”

  Don’t take everything so literally…

  Alice recalled Jesus’s response to the rich young man who came to see him for advice. Jesus told him, “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” Alice had found that advice strange: how would getting rid of all his possessions bring anything at all to that man? Don’t the majority of people work their entire lives to manage to buy a house and a few other things? But, in fact, Jesus’s advice might be in keeping with Buddhist detachment. Perhaps he had felt that the man was attached to his worldly goods, and it was that attachment that caused the problem. Maybe Jesus’s message meant not that it was necessary to own nothing to be happy but that one shouldn’t be attached to material possessions.

  “The other day,” Duvernet continued, “in Mâcon, I saw someone jump the light at an intersection in his BMW while another person, coming from the right, ran his red light. They didn’t hit each other hard; the BMW just had a dent in its bumper. They both stopped and the guy got out, he was in his forties, and when he saw his BMW dented, he started to cry. No one was hurt, not even the slightest scratch, just a bit of bent metal, and the guy started bawling like a kid. Truly. I walked over to him and asked, ‘Are you hurt?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Do you have insurance?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Will your premium go up?’

  “‘No, it will be okay.’ His chin was quivering as he spoke.

  “Well, in fact, it was his ego that was bawling, because his car was like an extension of himself. It contributed to his personal worth, and he must have felt he lived through it. In the end, it was a little bit of himself that had been damaged, so he was crying.”

  “Attachment to material possessions leads me to another question I wanted to ask you—”

  “How long is this going to take?”

  “We’ll be done soon!”

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “I’d like to know how you feel about sin, about giving in to temptation.”

  As she spoke, he had been pouring himself another glass of wine. Now he gave her a dark look, the bottle in his hand.

  “Are you screwing around with me?”

  “Not at all! Lao Tzu talks about desire several times, and I wondered if there was a parallel between that and the notion of sin in Christianity.”

  He continued to stare at her in a very mistrustful way for a few seconds, then calmly picked up his glass and slowly raised it, seeming to admire the color of the wine. He breathed in its aroma once more.

  “Desire in Eastern religions leads back to the ego. It is the ego that desires an object, a promotion, more money, or whatever else, because the ego is always trying to reinforce itself, increase its worth with the object of desire. Through what we desire, we subconsciously seek to augment our identity, or rather what we feel is our identity. In fact, we tend to be confused about who we are, so we don’t know exactly how to go about being more ourselves. So we desire things in an attempt to exist a little more thanks to them. When you desire a piece of clothing, a car, or anything else, you subconsciously believe that the clothing or car will add something to who you are, will make you special, interesting, valuable. In short, it will reinforce your identity. It’s an illusion, of course, and Eastern religions like Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism ask us to free ourselves from desire.”

  “But why? What’s the problem?”

  “Desire quickly leads to slavery. Since it is based on an illusion, to reinforce your identity, the object of desire doesn’t bring what you are seeking, so it’s an endless quest: you continually desire new things, things that never bring you what you are looking for. That’s why Lao Tzu said, ‘There is no worse disaster than the desire to possess.’ And ‘The holy man has no desire other than to have no desires.’”

  Desire quickly leads to slavery…Alice recalled what Jesus had said that had made her smile: “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”

  “And in your opinion, is there a link with the concept of sin in Christianity?”

  He sighed. “These mythologies really have nothing to do with one another, so it’s very difficult to make comparisons.”

  “Mythologies?”

  “Um…I meant religions. A Freudian slip: read Campbell, the famous American expert on mythology, and you will understand that the Bible is rather similar to mythology.”

  Alice wrote down the name. “But what if we tried a comparison anyway?”

  “Christians see sin as an offense against God, as disobedience to divine law, which could lead to hell after death. Unbelievably stupid. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and years later, his apostles reported his words when writing the Gospels. Except that they wrote in ancient Greek, so they were translating Jesus’s words from Aramaic to Greek. Then the ancient Greek was translated into our modern languages. Several specialists in ancient languages today think that the word Jesus used that is translated as ‘sin’ did not mean an offense against God but an error—inappropriate behavior—which is in no way the same thing. At the end of the day, the only problem with sin is that it keeps your consciousness in an inferior condition that prevents you from improving yourself.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The more we wallow in sensory pleasures, the less we can awaken our spirituality. No one gets hurt, God has nothing to do with it, but we drag ourselves down.”

  Alice thought about that idea for a few seconds while Duvernet polished off the rest of his wine.

  “In that case, is what Christianity calls the renunciation of sin or temptation perhaps similar to freeing ourselves from desire in Eastern religions?”

  “You might say that, but Christians don’t experience it that way.”

  Alice told herself that there could be a great difference between the present-day experience and the intention behind the original message.

  “What about heaven? Lao Tzu often uses that word. What exactly does it mean in his mind?”

  “In Eastern religions, heaven signifies the world of intangible, imperceptible realities. The other reality we reach by evolving, by awakening, as the Hindus call it. In English, there are different words for the sky, or the heavens, and another for the world of intangible realities: heaven. There is no ambiguity, while in other languages the same word can mean both things, which can lead to confusion.”

  “But then when Jesus tells the young man who comes to see him that if he follows his advice he will have treasure in heaven, isn’t it a metaphor for the afterlife, for the paradise you can reach after death? And the famous ‘kingdom of heaven’ promised by Jesus, which all Christians wish to enter, isn’t it als
o after death? Could this be the other reality Lao Tzu talks about?” Alice asked.

  “Stop comparing Christianity and Taoism. They’re totally unrelated!”

  Duvernet was starting to get seriously annoyed. Change the subject.

  “So tell me, what was Lao Tzu thinking when he said, ‘He who dies without ceasing to be has attained immortality’?”

  Duvernet let out a loud sigh. “You told me we were nearly finished.”

  “Nearly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s my last question.”

  “Finally,” he grumbled.

  He took another deep breath. “In most Eastern religions, the work consists of killing the former person in ourselves so we can be reborn.”

  “Why the hell would we do that?”

  “For example, in all Vedic thought, it’s the starting point—”

  “What kind of thought?”

  “Vedic. The Veda is a group of sacred texts that is the basis of ancient Hinduism. I was saying that in all Vedic thought, death is the starting point for imagining life. Enlightenment is not just an evolution, a progression, it is a feeling of true disruption, as if your very nature were changing. You are here, in this earthly life, a slave to your desires, with your ego and all the problems it causes, and you manage to throw yourself into the other reality of life, free of the ego, free of desires, in a fullness of being. It’s as if you were dying on a certain level to be reborn on another plane.”

  “But that’s wonderful! I finally understand Jesus’s words when he said, ‘For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me…will save it’!”

  Duvernet made a gesture of impatience. “Stop comparing Christianity with Eastern religions! They have nothing to do with each other!”

  “But why wouldn’t they have anything to do with each other?”

  “Because most Eastern religions are non-dualistic, while Christianity is dualistic.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about. You’ll have to spell it out.”

  “Too late: you asked your last question.”

  “It’s not a question, it’s a request.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  Alice made a face. “Well, then, let’s say…that it’s an order.”