Let the Moon Be Free- Conversations on Kashmiri Tantra

by Eric Baret

  The way I see it, what you describe sounds like an ideal. I have tried to live with ideals and it ruined many moments. In my daily life, that ideal doesn't stand up to an attack on my personality.

  You don't have a choice. If somebody attacks you, you respond according to your capacity. One day, you simply notice that that which used to hurt you no longer disturbs you. It’s a natural process but it takes time.

  When you are fifteen, your parents' remarks touch you deeply, at twenty they move you a little less, at forty they barely stir you. You don't have to do anything to achieve this; you just need to be aware of it.

  The more you notice how the criticisms of your parents or of your wife hurt you, the more a new breath flows through. But the more you justify, explain or comment, “my wife is right, my wife is wrong” the more that same criticism obstinately creates the same reaction in you. At some point, the game stops. When you stop justifying or criticizing what was said to you—what you call the aggression—and instead, you begin to listen to what is triggered in you, when you learn to live the somatic experience with awareness, what used to disturb you looks less and less aggressive.

  Someone insults you and you react. That night, you still carry that vibration, that pulse of what someone dared to say to you. You sit down in silence and you let the vibration of what seems unacceptable live inside. For just a moment, you let go of the idea that they shouldn't have said what they said, that you shouldn't have reacted the way you did, etc. You feel the tension in your throat, in your belly. This sensation which, until now, always got squashed, denied and replaced with a commentary, will become essential to you. It will amplify, spread through your body and then leave you. You will sleep deeply. Do this on a regular basis.

  Later on, when you are insulted, you will have a reaction. After a few moments, you will notice that you still got hurt, but you won't need to go home and sit; you will be able to somatically absorb the shock almost immediately.

  Later still, when you are attacked, you will feel the shock in your body but there will be no comment. That will not stop you from acting—action is free—but you won't react. Eventually, when you are attacked, you will notice with a smile that a few years before you would have strangled anyone who would have said that to you. In the end, if you are attacked, you understand why the person sees things the way they do and you have no trace of a reaction.

  One day, even that reference to the past disappears and you never feel insulted anymore. You need to go through these different stages.

  What you describe still belongs to the progressive path. It involves time. Can anyone experience this maturation during his lifetime, without doing anything spiritual or psychological?

  Yes, and anyway there's nothing spiritual or psychological to do.

  That has nothing to do with awakening…

  Joy is inherent to life. You are sentenced to it at birth; there is nothing you have to do. Just realize that you constantly turn down happiness because you pretend to be something or somebody.

  From birth to adolescence, we learn to identify, and then we realize it makes us unhappy and we'd like to let go of this identity to come back to a state of innocence and extend our childhood.

  Since you imagined that you suffered, you have to imagine that you aren't suffering any more, but those are two imaginary worlds.

  In a moment of clarity, all the suffering that you were pretending to experience appears in a different light. When you imagine being in prison, you can only want freedom. You can't have one without the other.

  What I imagined to be the worst is exactly what I need in order to realize that everything is OK. Disease, old age, poverty, abandonment, loneliness: what I believe is the most difficult, what I feel I'll never be able to cope with is my salvation. As long as I don't live it, I carry it in myself; and this fear prevents me from living. As long as I dread old age, disease, poverty, abandonment, all of it constantly haunts me. This anxiety is a background to everything I do. As soon as it wakes up a little too much, I throw myself into another activity to forget about it. But there comes a time when we're tired of running away from what seems terrible, and we open up to a world of possibility.

  What is offered to me is my own maturation. It's my own joy looking for itself. Everything we try to avoid, we will encounter. For some that is difficult to hear. But it is guaranteed, everything you dread will happen! At some point we don't wait any more, we face it in the now.

  Isn't it dangerous to give such power to thought, when you say: “Everything you dread will happen?”

  No, it is an intuition. To be afraid of something means to sense it. It's important to become aware of what you are most afraid of, because it is the treatment prescribed to yourself by yourself in order to realize that there is no fear, and that you are free. Your imagination may make it very poetic or dramatic, but in every case what you are scared of is what you need to meet.

  It doesn't mean that thought creates situations. Don't get involved in those pipe dreams.

  The only fantasy is the fear of something. When you are available, you become more concrete and you no longer project yourself into a future; you are present to your fiction. Imagination doesn't survive—it never survives presence.

  Give yourself to the fantasy. Disease, for instance. I have the fantasy, I give in to the idea, I feel it in my body. No effort is needed to trigger it, it's always here. People who are scared of being sick constantly carry this fear in them.

  You're not suggesting I inject myself with a virus to face this fear, are you?

  If the fear exists, the virus is already in place.

  I'm not talking about creating a fear, but about consciously feeling what is already here. If you are afraid, the virus is already active. Instead of pretending it doesn't exist, realize that traces of it are always present in your life. Feel that which is here once and for all, instead of unconsciously letting it linger in all your activities.

  This doesn't mean imagining being sick. It means feeling this fear of old age, disease, abandonment, feeling it in the body, no longer doing yoga to assuage the fear, or get married, divorced, have another child or buy a new red car just to run away from the discomfort—but on the contrary to consciously feel what is here.

  Life is action. You act for the joy of doing. It's in the nature of life to get married, to divorce, to buy cars, etc. At some point though, you simply act without motivation. Joy is doing something without a reason. Action for no reason is true action. Love is for no reason.

  Are you saying that life is sending us, as gifts, situations that confront us and that we can't avoid, or is life's purpose to create?

  When I say, “Face what's here,” it doesn't mean that if a bulldozer runs you over you don't get squashed. Certain situations will be a threat to your physical, psychic or financial integrity, of course. Here we only talk about the psychological aspect.

  Stillness doesn't guarantee physical integrity. Some events are greater than our capacity to integrate them. A bulldozer runs you over and that's the end. A noise is louder than your hearing capacity, your eardrums stop working. A light explosion which is brighter than your visual capacity can make you blind. An emotional drama to which you are too identified can damage you permanently. You could be sad for your whole life if, in certain circumstances, you identify as French; after Waterloo, some couldn't shake off their sadness for decades. Any identification creates its lot of drama.

  What do you mean by “sensory experience?”

  In his wonderful book And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran shares that after becoming blind, he kept suffering as long as he longed to see. As soon as he realized that there was nothing to see, he gave up his psychological identification and remained with the sensory experience, simply present to the fact of not seeing. He had been suffering, not because he could not see, but because he wanted to see. After that desire left him, he was able to be happy.

  You say we can't help it in certain situations, perhaps because o
f our grandmother, our family history or some other thing. So, there is a past?

  It is now that we carry within us our grandmother's advice that influences the way we react. The past isn't in the past.

  When you observe one of your boyfriends, you see that he carries his soft, difficult or abused childhood in the area of his nose, his eyes, forehead or cheeks. All that we commonly call past can be seen in the moment. A physician who examines a body can instantly see all of its past. Does this mean he sees the past? No, he sees the present. The past is present.

  When you observe someone and you notice his trauma, you don't see the past—there is no past. You see the present.

  Is the present what it is because there was a past?

  Those are images… past, present, future, let the image slide. We use these symbols to convey a certain inner dynamic, but they are meaningless if you take them literally.

  Of course, the present is always past. The past and the future can only be present. Words mean so little. We have a sort of agreement on the meaning of words, but it’s very limited. What we are talking about here can only be accessed beyond formulation.

  The intensity of the present contains the whole past and the whole future. At some level, you could say that we have a precognition of what is to come, that we feel how our different fields of vibration are going to actualize in life.

  All this is so present. For the mind, it seems to involve time, but it doesn't. It's all one instant. This intensity of the present can only be experienced in the total absence of a plan for a so-called future. In moments of complete freedom from plans, from future, we perceive that the present, past and future are only words. A global vision, beyond time, appears. The whole art of oriental sculpture expresses, in space and time, this intensity of the present.

  Chapter 10

  Wake up happy, fall asleep happy

  Who knows God knows that he isn't the one who knows.

  Abd-El-Kader: The Book of Stops

  Dreams of the future are linked to emotions. We are aware that they can only cause us to suffer, but how to stop the process?

  Come back to the source, notice that the dream always comes from our presumption that we know what is better. All suffering comes from this belief. We cannot change that. The work is to be frequently available to this observation.

  To linger on the origin of the dream is to desire something other than reality. With some degree of maturity, we look inside and realize that we cannot know what is better, either for ourselves or for others.

  The notion of better belongs to the idea of success, as in life is better than death. Deep down, we cannot know that. When this becomes obvious, dreams, which always stem from this fantasy, stop haunting us. When the body is available, we remain on the somatic level. Then the dream is like a whip lash: we live with the burn, that sensation subdues in silence, there is no psychological residue.

  You say, “this presumption to know.” But these notions go way back, when we were one or two years old. How can a child pretend to know?

  That is true, the child doesn't know. The child feels a physiological pain, which will later turn into psychological suffering, and that is what will stop his development. Later on, when someone points out to him that he constantly abuses himself with the idea that he shouldn't have been raped, psychological suffering gets wiped out, and what remains is only the physiological trauma. Certain body parts may have been shaken for life, but you can live in harmony with somatic trauma, whereas you can't live happily with the idea that you shouldn't have been abused.

  It’s the same for a child; sooner or later he will need to evaluate the importance of his commentary on the situation versus that of the situation itself.

  I worked with a man who was tortured at length in Lebanon. He was able to free himself. Now he only has to deal with physiological consequences: he limps a little and he has hearing loss in one ear. He is able to be happy because he no longer has the slightest comment on these events, the slightest psychological suffering. He can go back and work in Beirut and he is no longer afraid. To get to this point he had to dismantle his psychological commentary, this conviction that he shouldn't have been tortured. He no longer tortures himself with that idea. He has accepted the functional discomfort left by torture.

  Are all psychotherapies wrong then, to want to treat through the mind?

  They are not wrong, because very few people are available to listen to their body. If somebody asks you to help solve their problem and you say to them: “Start by feeling the palm of your hand,” they won't come back. Conceptual therapies are limited but inevitable. They exist because our senses are asleep.

  What form of work did you practice with your friend who was tortured? Somatic only?

  When I met him, he already understood a great deal. After two weeks of abuse, he realized that the worst was the fear of the blows, not the blows themselves. This apprehension is what made him panic. He was terrified when they came to get him, when he heard the door open, when they took him, tied him up. He realized that when the first blow came, he was scared of the second, and when the second struck he was scared of the third… He became aware that he was always afraid of the future, never of what was here.

  This awareness enabled him to consciously remain with the blows. When the pain was too strong, he passed out. He knew that he needed to remain in the present moment. If he allowed the slightest expectation, fear took over.

  Through talking about these events, we were able to unify his understanding. His body kept some residual damage, which lessened in time.

  Can there also be some attachment to suffering?

  In a psychological sense, yes. We get attached to what gives us a feeling of security. When somebody has been sick for a long time and he gets better, he feels a sort of discomfort. On an unconscious level, he often tries to get sick again.

  When you have fully lived a moment of sadness without naming or justifying it, something leaves you forever. You become aware that this sadness is an echo of a universal sadness, which itself is an expression of joy. After that, when a situation makes you sad, you feel a sort of wonderment. You immediately connect to the beauty. To fully feel an emotion—be it fear, sadness, pain, or anxiety—is to discover the beauty concealed within it.

  When you haven't eaten for days and you are given food, it isn't the ideal moment to appreciate the subtle flavors, you are too hungry for that. To taste fine wine or food you need to not be thirsty or hungry.

  To fully appreciate your situation, to taste its flavor, you need to be free from it.

  As long as you demand, you cannot touch a body. You think you are touching the other's body but you really only feel yourself, you meet your own problems. When you no longer feel the need to touch and to be touched, you caress differently, something else happens. That is true on all levels. As long as we need something, this limits us. We are limited until we act freely, without need.

  When you remain sad after a yoga session, that is good. It shows that you have worked with sensitivity, without using your large muscles, without too much intention. Let it happen, feel an absolute love for this emotion, as it is your most intimate treasure; it will reveal your freedom. You need to carry it in your heart like a precious belonging. Little by little, the treasure will reveal itself, but it is not for you to make it appear; it will come in its own time.

  The only use of the practice of Kashmiri yoga is to let these treasures, these emotions rise in us. Then they will actualize in our stillness and reveal the deepest aspects of our being.

  Emotion doesn't disrupt stillness. On the contrary, it leads to stillness. Body tension allows us to become aware of true relaxation. When tension appears, it reveals relaxation. It allows us to notice what is free in ourselves.

  That is the Tantric approach.

  In the classic yoga approach, emotion and tension are rejected. Here it is the opposite: everything that is felt is welcomed and brings us back to stillness. This path requires a hig
her degree of subtlety, which most human beings lack.

  Can the naming of the emotion at the time when I live it become an obstacle to the felt sense? If I'm trying to figure out if it's really sadness I am feeling or if it's something else?

  No. The felt sense becomes so powerful that you can no longer name. An elbow hits you on your chin and the blow is so strong that you can no longer name it.

  Of course, when you're told: “Feel your hand,” you can say: “It is warm, it is cold…” But that is only a beginning. When a deep emotion takes hold of you, when sadness engulfs you, your throat is tight, your chest feels as if it’s going to explode, there is a knot in your belly, there is no place for words. The words sadness, anxiety, fear, tension, are images that we use to communicate, but what we are talking about is beyond all that. That which descends upon you is beyond any verbal expression.

  Language is poor. How would you describe the pleasure you feel when you caress a dog, a tree or a knee? How would you tell the subtlety of a wine when it vibrates on your palate, on your tongue? Fireworks, life, beauty are beyond any verbal expression. Language is too vulgar to be able to manifest the infinitely rich. Speech is only an image that shows a direction. At some point, it vanishes.

  When you sit with a friend, what you say is only an excuse, what happens is like a dance. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we touch, but those are superficial aspects. The true relationship is located elsewhere; there is little space for language. If your intuition feeds you words, then why not? But they are like poetic phrases bursting in your brain.