As life had taken him for a symbol, his sisters, the only beings with whom he might have been united, showed on the occasion of a petty heritage a savage cupidity. They fought, although there was not even a bed included in the division.
An important man, having gone to see him, was afflicted by his worn, holed and dirty dressing-gown. He offered him a new one. Spinoza refused it. He liked his old dressing-gown, Solitary men are affectionately fond of certain familiar objects.
Apart from that of hermits, there was no solitude greater than Spinoza’s, face to face with his thoughts. He exercised a métier in order to live, polishing long-range telescope lenses. Permitting others to see further than ordinary sight in the physical world, he succeeded in distinguishing another life himself, behind the veil of the one that was before him and which he scrutinized so intensely.
In his perfect solitude, he had no hope of an afterlife—nothing but that of dissolving into the universal order. “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union that the soul realizes with nature entire.” Can that knowledge suffice to fill life when one is confronted by a poor rented room with telescope lenses, the faces of landladies and sometimes another philosopher who comes to talk about lofty problems?
Who can ever say what the thoughts of that solitary man were on the Sunday afternoon when he died? The family with whom he was lodging left him in order to go to Vespers. When they came back, he was dead. There must have been the sound of bells. It was the twentieth of February, and perhaps afternoon sunlight, already oblique, traversed the window panes of his bedroom. Can having written the Ethics suffice to fill a soul, even one as vast as Spinoza’s?
Did he remember the young woman about whom he had thought at the beginning of his life and from whom he remained separated by timidity? My God, what if it appeared to him that the Ethics and all human philosophy were of no importance? What if the columns of his temple, made of the substance of his books, had silently crumbled around his death-bed?
He had sacrificed his entire life to informing humans that God and nature are only one. I say an ardent prayer that he did not abruptly glimpse the vanity of that notion. For there are such traps. Some things are of formidable importance to us and then, one evening, for no reason, they appear to have the weight and extent of a soap bubble. One can tell oneself that one only has to blow more bubbles in order to enjoy a new mirage, but it is necessary that it is not at that precise moment that one loses one’s breath.
THE REVELATION OF INVISIBLE WORLDS
THE PRESENCE OF DESPAIR
There is a despair of the morning and a despair of the evening, and those two sisters willingly clasp hands during the day.
One sometimes wakes up with a desire precipitately to reenter the empire of darkness from which one has just emerged so imprudently. There are shutters clicking and milk bottles colliding on a stairway somewhere. An automobile horn evokes a traveler who is cold, in a taxi, with his trunk alongside the driver, heading for some desolate railway station. One is afraid of being cold, of rediscovering objects and beings...
One closes one’s eyes again...
The despair of the evening is like an aging queen with inflexible features. She has a black stick and she hits you with it. Every blow evokes a memory, but not good ones—never the good ones.
Forgotten bad deeds revive abruptly and bite your soul without letting go, rather like certain insects that hold on to you with their jaws even when they have been cut in two with scissors. And the black stick also causes regrets to revive that one had thought completely dead, but regrets of a special, inferior, miserable nature, especially those related to missed opportunities. At some moment in life one might have been able to satisfy some desire, and one did not, out of stupidity—especially those relating to women. One believed oneself to be sheltered from that quality of bitterness, but no. It is like the odors that penetrate so thoroughly the jar that contained them that no disinfectant or corrosive can succeed in extracting it from the pores into which it has penetrated.
And then, no book, no known wisdom can serve. They cannot bring anything more. There is a savant conspiracy between the external world and oneself. One cannot receive anything and nothing is sent. One is imprisoned in walls of ash with no possible deliverance. One can fill the room with blinding light by switching on all the lamps or remain in darkness, huddled like a hunted beast; it is the same thing. One is tracked by non-existent forces, by a presence of annihilation.
How can the enemy be vanquished? How can one be surrounded by luminous perspectives at all hours? Is there a secret of eternal joy?
THE MOUNTAIN OF SERENITY
Perhaps awake, perhaps asleep, I followed a road that had just presented itself to my sight. It descended with an extreme rapidity between melancholy trees. On raising my head I perceived that there was no sky above me and that the road was subterranean.
No signposts! No lanterns hanging on poles! I went down, pushed by a force of descent, wondering where the light might be coming from that permitted me to distinguish, to the right and the left, images, faces and scenes of life.
Nothing but things already seen! Sometimes, it was an individual that I recognized as a long dead friend who was fixed in an attitude of eternity. He made me a sign to go further, and I continued to descend.
The landscape was increasingly desolate. The vegetation was sparse and singular, as if struck by petrifaction. I distinguished the silhouettes of women. They made me signs from afar: signs that gave the impression of saying: The opportunity was missed! What’s the point? That which has been will be no longer.
And I was still descending, endowed with a strange speed, and I thought about that astonishing hero named Arne Saknussemm who, perhaps by the same road, had reached the center of the Earth. But I knew that I, personally, was marching toward the center of dolor, and I wondered what relationship could unite those two astonishing centers.
I traversed with a light celerity carboniferous terrains in which there were imprints of dead ichthyosaurs and antediluvian cicadas, the design of whose wings was visible. I glimpsed the tombs of giants, phantom dolmens. I saw to my right masses of coal and schist that plutonian forces had disturbed, and to my left volcanic corridors between frozen lava and basalts covered with crystals, like tears wept by mountains saddened by being buried far from the light.
And I finally reached, or thought I reached—which is the same thing—a lake with metallic waters, the fluidity of which must have been less than that of terrestrial waters. It was a viscous lake, and yet confusedly reflective. It was surrounded by a beach composed of an infinity of tiny gray seashells, and on leaning over I saw that they were fossil and mortuary seashells representing the deformed heads of animals or humans who were all sad—a sadness all the greater because it must go back thousands of centuries.
I was tempted to sit down and wait, immobile, until the moment of my death—but no; next to that lake of despair there is neither peace nor repose and one cannot say: “Finally!” It is necessary to get up and go on, to walk around its interminable waters on the beach of dead seashells, where footfalls make no sound, in a light coming from below, the mere perception of which is painful.
I saw several roads and discerned certain indications that made me think that there was perhaps a different advertisement for every man. On one of those roads there was the trace of a foot, the nails of whose shoe were in the form of a cross. Above another rose a white bird from which a feather was detached. I saw it fall with a spiral motion because of its lightness. On the third road there was no perceptible manifestation. I recalled how many times symbols had lied, how many signs had turned out to be empty of meaning, and I took the third road, which, according to my weary mind, had every chance of leading toward oblivion.
It was a perfectly sinister road where one lost the notion of space, with the result that I no longer knew whether it was rising or descending. And I followed it for a time variable between one second and eternity.
Sudde
nly, it turned, and an extraordinarily fresh and aromatized wind blew toward me. Was it by virtue of a mysterious game of nature, a bizarre illusion of subterranean worlds that, in the region of the solitary lake, caused one to lose the sentiment of proportions? But I took three or four steps and I found myself on the summit of a high mountain bathed by celestial air.
I saw horizons unrolling harmoniously and valleys succeeded by mountains with a regularity that I had never remarked before, the observation of which was an unexpected blessing for me. The clouds were rising and falling. In the distance, a sea was in its immemorial place and making the movements appropriate to seas, which have been commanded by a general order. At the moment foreseen by my destiny, I appeared on that mountain in order to enjoy relationships with the earth, the light and the expanse.
I was penetrated silently. I occupied the exact point of the world that was necessary. I felt tranquil and joyful, with a certain perfection coming from the experience of my journey. I knew henceforth that the lake of despair is not far from the mountain of serenity.
THE ROOT OF DESPAIR
The root of despair plunges into egotism. Anyone who loves all beings will be bathed in an inexhaustible mildness. But the most difficult thing of all is to love one’s neighbor. One can easily love a dog, a cricket or a woman, but all beings! And if one succeeds in loving all beings, how can one avoid being torn by the sight of their suffering? The ugliness of faces is an obstacle to love, the permanence of evil in souls is a more powerful obstacle, and divine silence causes an anguishing uncertainty to float overhead.
And why has the law, to which it is necessary to conform no matter what, wanted the annihilation of egotism, since it has made the gift of oneself accompanied by an unalloyed bliss. Every time that nature tries to attain her goals, she offers the creatures who are her instruments an intense pleasure as compensation. Physical creation by means of a sexual act is recompensed by a brief joy. That joy is not devoid of analogy with pain. Mental creation is followed by a more durable joy, but which is accompanied by torment. Whereas any manifestation of affection produces naturally a delight whose purity becomes greater as the disinterest becomes greater and the gift of oneself more complete.
The world manifests a prodigious design of unity, and whoever collaborates with that design is recompensed by a blissful delight. But the world manifests in parallel an equally prodigious appetite for division. And from that is born the temptation to go against the law, because in division there is an illusion of joy in which human pride takes pleasure.
It is necessary to obey the law. We are prevented from doing so by certain vertigos that blow over us like tempests. Those tempests are unpredictable. There is no meteorology of the soul. From the depths of the horizon blasts of nothingness suddenly hasten. Then, all the best-established certainties are overturned, like the tents of a camp of travelers by a tornado. One finds oneself naked on sterile sand. One says to oneself: What if everything is a lie? What if there is no perfection, no afterlife, no state of nirvana? Has not the tempest that has destroyed everything, in sum, an origin as divine as the faculty of construction that had permitted me to establish solid shelters, or what I believed to be such?
It is necessary to tear out the root of despair. For that, it is necessary to have the certainty that a more beautiful life is hidden behind the miserable life that unfurls before us. Now everyone can find by means of his own perspicacity, his own attention, by listening to the silence and examining the shadow, the proofs that ignorance demands, the proofs of the reality of an invisible world.
Nature seems not to want that discovery. She has organized a schema very skillfully, in order that it should not be possible to pierce the enigma. She has arranged matters so that every proof of the afterlife has a counterpart in reality that makes the proof turn back against itself. But all the layouts of nature present a slight fissure through which one can pass one’s head in order to see further.
Methods have been prescribed which require more or less time to follow, and more or less vigorous purifications of the body and soul. But even without practicing any method, by presenting oneself with one’s natural impurity and hope at the edge of the invisible world, one can hear a word or see a face, a grotesque or terrible image, which gives the certainty that there is a marvelous life to discover.
THE ADVENT OF THE SIGN
Ramakrishna has said that living faith can be given and received in a more positive and more tangible fashion than any other material thing.
Thus, someone can come into your house one day and hand you faith, like a precious object! Or it can be the consequence of an encounter. And that encounter might occur at any moment.
But what is the faith in question? Ramakrishna speaks of the living faith. For here is also the dead faith. Now, the difference is essential. The word faith means ordinary faith in God, the God of a religion, and a series of complex and almost invariably absurd dogmas, for they come from verities so deformed that they are unrecognizable. That harsh and forbidding faith cannot be given like an object, in passing or in the course of a conversation, and received with ease. One cannot slip a skeleton into a hand.
The living faith of which Ramakrishna speaks is faith in the pure Spirit, in the Absolute. It is joyful, winged, deprived of punishments and recompenses. It is a communication with the original force, from which one can receive an unalloyed felicity if one can find the secret of one’s accord with it.
All saints and all visionaries, and even simply those who have meditated intensely on human destiny, have had at one moment of their life a sign or a revelation of the invisible world and of the accord that they might have with that world. How many destinies have been orientated by small supernatural events! Even Descartes had three symbolic dreams.
The moment of their life at which the sign is manifest is ordinarily marked by a violent dolor, the loss of a cherished individual or the sharp sentiment that one is not living in accordance with the law whose orientation one has secretly glimpsed. The sign is most frequently the appearance of a flame or a luminous face, sometimes a voice giving an imperative order. Some have seen a transparent individual beside them. Others have been visited by Jesus Christ or the Buddha. The revelations have sometimes come after an appeal, after an anxious wait. But at other times, they have presented themselves abruptly without any apparent reason, because the person’s hour had sounded on the invisible clock of his soul.
It has been possible to indentify that revelation with Christian grace. In that case, the person who receives it is the object of a favor originating from a capricious God who chooses certain beings and not others. But religion has nothing to do with the veritable revelation. The spiritual vase of the soul receives one more drop of spirit, a drop ordinarily mingled with a tear, and it overflows toward its source.
It is not necessary to believe in a personal God to receive the grace of the spirit. It comes from a more immense source.
Revelation can be manifest in a different manner, but the result is similar. The individual experiences a delightful joy that words have difficulty expressing. His forces of love are infinitely multiplied. He understands the insignificance of his life. His heart beats with that of all creatures. He senses passing through him the torrent of the suave delight that is the intimate essence of everything that exists, and which death must give to those who die detached.
One discovers in almost all mystical experiences the same mechanism of revelation. It is at the moment when the soul abandons itself, and recognizes internally its submission to the law, that a mysterious door opens, that the sign is made.
But the person who sees nothing arrive, the person who appeals in vain, ought not to cease to believe in the magic of his appeal. There is no appeal without response; the response is only more or less belated. It is necessary never to forget the words of Swedenborg:
“A divine law appears to exist, in accordance with which our will awakens the will of God.”
THE UTILITY OF ILLNESS
I have been forced to observe by personal experience that the state of illness, of slight illness, is more favorable to the discovery of and the access to another world near to ours, another world more beautiful, which is like an ideal counterpart.
It would be preferable, more moral and more exemplary exclusively to glorify the health of the body as the source of all marvels. In a healthy body one has clearer and nobler thoughts. Not always, in fact. All people charged with instruction have unanimously taught that it is first necessary to have a healthy body; even in the mystical domain, it is said that there is no possibility of self-improvement if one does not have lungs, muscles and a circulatory system capable of certain exercises that guide the spirit along the way.
That is an obvious verity and I adhere to it fully. The state of health is superior to the state of illness and it is necessary to seek the health of the body and that of the soul with love.
Personal experience, however, informs me that a slight state of illness pushes you gently, without your being aware of it, toward a sort of frontier, an intermediate zone in which one has the faculty of perceiving in the distance a double of our universe, of which ours might only be a physical refraction and not the true reality.
In the same way, a little moral disequilibrium, an abnormal excitement, favors intuitions. It creates resonances of new and profound emotions. What is called inspiration is nothing other than a disturbance, a temporary disorganization of the mental faculties. Ideas vibrate differently, associating with more rapidity, and of the new groups they form, one of the more audacious sometimes reached a point that the others have never attained.
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