Let the Moon Be Free- Conversations on Kashmiri Tantra

by Eric Baret

  There is no language, you explore without a map. That is why there cannot be any serious book on yoga, or on any other deep subject. No book can tell you what is love, dance, music, painting or wine.

  To taste, you must taste. To love, you must love. To dance, you must dance. Words are powerless.

  So, poetry does not exist?

  You can write poems, but you cannot write about poetry. You can experience your body, you can experience energy, but nothing you can write about it will bring about any understanding.

  Out of a thousand people who study poetry in the same way, only one poet will emerge. Out of a thousand students of the piano, there will be only one true musician. Yet they all had access to the same technique.

  Art is possible—actually there is only art—but analysis, explanations, the understanding of art are impossible. You cannot understand music; you can only live it. You cannot create poetry; you can learn to listen, and from that availability poetic capacity will spring.

  Exceptionally, some poets have been able to formulate what is beyond expression. That is only possible in moments of true stillness. This availability opens areas of the brain that are usually inaccessible—whence poetic inspiration. Some writings by the phenomenal Stephen Jourdain[1] have these ingredients.

  I get what you're saying: we need to feel; to feel the emotion, the sadness, the fear. But I realize that, if I get swept up in it, comments disappear and…

  There isn't much to risk.

  If I get swept away, I tell myself: “If emotion is here, you can let yourself be swept away by fear…”

  You don't get swept away, the emotion gets swept away. You don't leave, it leaves you. It is like fainting: you let go of the body, but you do not drown. Of course, in some situations, fainting is necessary for survival. You will feel your body pass out, just like at night when it falls asleep. Let the body fall asleep.

  Let's come back to the example of being hit. You experienced this when you were competing in karate. Remember what it felt like to get hit in the belly. You feel the shock and you let the shock destroy everything in its path. You remain completely still. All of this takes place inside you. The proof is, you can talk about it. You feel detached from what you are talking about. You perceive the pain radiating through your whole body; you are beyond the pain, otherwise you would not feel it. You feel the body that hurts and, gradually, the breath that comes back, the diaphragm that struggles to work again. Little by little, things calm down. Everything happens within you. You are not relieved, it's only the body that relaxes little by little. You only witness what is here.

  Similarly, you do not let yourself be swept away by emotion, you let your body be swept away. It is very different.

  Is it like a letting go? You open the gate?

  Exactly. You do not let combat take hold of you, but the body is taken and reacts. Madness swings into action, and you are present. All of this takes place within you, you observe. If you become involved in combat, you lose your peripheral vision. If you stare at your opponent, you lose your attention. The body is centered and you keep your peripheral vision, not only visually but as a felt sense too.

  You should never get lost in feelings. That was the first piece of advice that my teacher gave me. As I was young at the time, we talked about sexuality a lot whenever we met. The first thing he asked me, even before accepting to teach me yoga, was to never let myself go during sexual intercourse—to let go of everything but not of myself. This completely changed my perspective.

  When you let yourself be stunned or taken away, you lose your vision. Somebody could come into the room, knock you out, and you wouldn't even notice it. On the other hand, if the body relaxes, you remain aware and if something happens in the room, you are present. It is important to feel the difference. I generally do not resonate much with the way the word witness is used in certain traditions, but perhaps it has its place here.

  There can be madness but stillness is present, is that it?

  Madness deploys itself within stillness. Thus, the body discovers a new function. No longer being directed, no longer being a slave, it finds new ways to act, new potential. That is true for combat, love, touch, feeling, and every capacity for survival and for life. Action happens, no one is acting.

  In my own experience, that stillness has always existed. It is just accumulated beliefs that caused me to lose sight of this obvious fact. No matter what the intensity of the event—it is difficult to express—it is as if I was perceiving or being this stillness.

  Of course, that is why there is nothing to do. The only mistake is to try to perceive stillness. That is not possible because we are perceived. That which perceives is not an object of perception. Stillness cannot be perceived.

  But it is felt?

  Stillness is aware of biochemistry.

  I understand, but if emotion allows us to become aware of stillness, as you said before, then it makes sense that people will try to live their emotions because, in the end, these emotions allow us to access this background. It is a quest for love, a quest for…

  Yes, it makes sense to think that the third swimming pool will fulfill you and also, at some point, to have the intuition to realize that what is sought is not outside of you. The desire for a third swimming pool is the same as the desire to sit down and meditate. It is a misperception of the intuition of stillness.

  Stillness is not present. It is presence, availability. There is only emotion—what else could there be? Perception is emotion. A smell, a color, a taste, a touch, all are pure emotion.

  What about ideas?

  Ideas as well because ideas always rest on senses. Certain ideas such as clarity, lightness, freedom, carry great emotion, but they have lost their original dynamic, their purity. Others, such as color, taste and touch are closer to this stillness.

  The word is emotion. A sermon by Meister Eckhart is only emotion. Words are similar to musical notes. Listen to music, you do not hear the notes, you perceive the breath, you feel the caress. When you read Meister Eckhart, words flow, you feel the rhythm, the sweetness. At the end of the text, the last note dies, the last word fades away. Emotion, joy remains. A tear, a feeling of utmost aloneness, in the noble sense of the term, can arise. This complete unity where everything dies in you is pure emotion.

  Hence, sometimes words sometimes bring about this pure emotion, but only inspired words, such as Rumi's or Linji's. Studies, analyses, treatises on Tantra only create a form of thinking, a form of security.

  What about the situations that awaken old trauma? When the body is purified, does it get to a point where these situations are dealt with for good and will not arise again; a point where only intensity will remain?

  It doesn't matter. When you have the intuition of this space of stillness, whether agitation, sadness or desire comes up or not, the emotion does not upset your availability, you don't get carried away by emotion.

  My teacher used to talk about total cleansing, but I do not believe, as long as the body and the psyche are here, that they can be without a memory. Of course, what used to be traumatic before no longer disturbs you. Still, depending on your life, you keep dragging around some old forms of conflict, of preferences—they simply stop being a problem.

  My teacher had a weak constitution. During the years he spent in the Foreign Legion, he suffered greatly. Later, thanks to the practice of yoga, he became as a lion; but before that, it hurt him. Toward the end of his life, his brain became affected and, on several occasions, I witnessed him thinking he was still in the Legion; he asked me to fold the blanket the way they did in the Legion, or he talked to me in German. Then he became clear again and said: “Here we are, in an hour I will get agitated again, but life is beautiful, life is wonderful.” Thus, he was free from his lapses; but some aspects of the past that had been wiped out during his whole yogic phase came back in the last two years of his life.

  There is no need to be afraid of emotion. Sadness, jealousy, and desire are also part of
life. As soon as we are no longer destroyed by our emotions, we no longer have to satisfy our desires. They can come up, but they become a form of beauty, of resonance, of complicity. Whether they are fulfilled by life or not, we feel free. There is no problem. We sleep just as soundly. We do not manufacture anything to fulfill our desires. On the contrary, we find a form of extreme pleasure in doing nothing.

  To meet a man, a woman, a dog; to feel a form of extreme resonance in your heart and to do nothing about it. What happens is on another level. A form of non-mental caress is present. Little by little, a sort of confirmation will take place on a purely energetic level. One day, if the situation presents itself, if your girlfriend is traveling, if your husband is dead and if time and space match, then something might materialize. But there isn't the slightest thought, the slightest intention to achieve any goal, no reflection, no comment, just pure availability.

  Emotion and resonance are still present, as beauty. No frustration is possible because there is nothing you want. You are simply available to what is here, to what comes up, without any preference. Free from intention, desire bursts out with extraordinary power. A desire inconceivable for anyone wanting for something. This something which, precisely, looks so childish and bland now.

  Not hoping for anything allows your desire to become really powerful, magical. It is difficult for the mind to formulate, as this desire is impersonal, it is cosmic. It's not even a desire, it's an obvious fact. Something is present, you let it happen; life will take care of the manifestation.

  Expectation, pleasure, dissatisfaction, all that clutters life, all that creates needs… I'd like to see the end of it!

  Look at it the other way around. Your life is not miserable, far from it. It has brought you to ask yourself these questions, to be honest enough to look at your mechanisms. All the events in your life helped you to question yourself. If you are not busy acquiring another husband, conceiving a child or becoming wealthy, it is thanks to that life.

  That is the first thing to establish. Successful lives are miserable lives. When you understand that, you realize how perfect yours is, since it brought you to question your functioning.

  Then you need to go further and notice that you always look in front of yourself, you always try to get to this stillness. It isn't a question of modern times, it was the same ten thousand years ago

  You can't get to this stillness. This stillness is constantly here, but you are looking for it in front of yourself, in the perception, in what you are going to do—instead of living consciously with the perception of sadness, of emotion or of joy which is here now.

  Simply feel what is here in the moment. The goal isn’t to get rid of the emotion and to free the body—which would be a useless pursuit—but to become familiar with the action of listening.

  At this moment, you can listen to the crickets. Then listen to your emotions in the same way. You have no prior history with crickets, which allows you to listen to them freely, without any comment. When you listen in that way, stillness happens. The crickets do not make you quiet, the listening does. Become familiar with listening to your body, with no intention, as if you were listening to a cricket. That is what we learn here. You will notice that everything that comes up through the senses comes up in that silence. That silence is not in front of you, but behind you. It is the background which allows every noise, every emotion to appear.

  Sometimes, I get very painful cramps in my belly. When I am in good shape, I am able to wait and it ends up relaxing. At least, that's what it feels like. But sometimes I am tired and I lack the energy to wait.

  You should use a hot water bottle.

  I take hot baths, but I was wondering if that was hurtful?

  It isn't hurtful, but it doesn't solve the problem. Better than a hot bath is a hot wrap. Keep it on the belly for ten minutes. If you are traveling, a hot water bottle does the job. Do it every day for a week. You will appreciate the change.

  This technique was practiced in South India, in ayurvedic medicine, in nineteen-century Germany by Kneipp, and also by Kuhne and Carton. All these methods are very closely connected to each other.

  It doesn't solve the problem, but a hot wrap allows you to deepen and may even allow some emotions to come to the surface. When your belly gets better, you can progressively start to practice the methods we teach here.

  Hot baths help too, but local treatments are more effective. The principle is the same as using a narrow object to hit something. It will hit harder than the same blow applied with a greater surface. That is the way the Ippon-ken hand position works in the karate tsuki.

  You need to take care of this. Pain which comes from the digestive system consumes a lot of energy. It isn't a symptom to ignore, it is something to love. You need to carry it in yourself as if you were carrying a child that you love very much. When the pain comes up, you feel it and you say: “Thank you, thank you, you are here again.” Let yourself be caressed fully, but above all do not run away from it, or it will move to somewhere else.

  This somatic acceptance of pain does not prevent you from getting treatment if needed, far from it

  You mentioned that your teacher was a weak man. Obviously, one does not practice yoga to become strong, but you said: “Yoga practice made a lion out of him.”

  He would not have appreciated, I believe, my comment on his weakness. I met him after his practice. He was already in his sixties, maybe a little less. He had considerable non-muscular strength. I saw him lift mountains—but not suitcases! He was first and foremost a translucent man. When he touched your hand, you felt as if a ghost was caressing you. All those who met him have this memory. His hand seemed to be completely empty.

  Was it energetic strength?

  Yes, but I wouldn't have fought with him! He had a force that everybody felt. In Paris, at a meeting at L'Homme de la Connaissance, someone asked him if vegetarian food didn't cause a form of weakness. He looked at the audience and said: “I haven't eaten meat or fish for forty years, and I am ready to take on anybody in the room.” It wasn't said lightly. No one got up.

  (Silence)

  You need to wake up happy, fall asleep happy. This becomes natural. That is what's important. When you wake up happy without a reason, your back can hurt, your belly can hurt, your head can hurt, you can be broke, heartbroken, anything… everything is a spark of joy. You wake up happy and, at night, you go to bed happy. It happens by itself. There is nothing to learn, nothing to fabricate. You only need to let go.

  Chapter 11

  The situation is an excuse

  He doesn't build a path with either one thing or another.

  What does he do then? Step by step he follows Providence… and only relies on the infallible, which is the present moment.

  Madame Guyon:

  Christian and Spiritual Discourses Concerning Inner Life

  Could you tell us how God's call made itself heard to you?

  We don't get into this kind of formulation here. The words God, Life, etc. take us away from availability. It's all outside.

  That which happens doesn't deserve our attention. Only that which doesn't happen, that which does not depend on any cause, is interesting to us. That which does not happen cannot be named, doesn't have a past and cannot be part of memory.

  When I realize that any direction I follow is always based on memory, and that all that could be grasped of a God could only be projection, the urge to experience or to formulate anything whatsoever leaves me. There remains a non-experience without any personal element. Nothing happens, only listening. This listening, we all have it in common.

  Experience, personal history is of no concern to us—it is a fantasy. It has value for a poet, a writer or an artist who tries to describe these events. But at the heart of what we are talking about, there is no event. The non-event takes charge of us. It doesn't become part of my life, rather my life is part of it.

  That is the difference between a direct approach—which emphasizes availabili
ty, the common background in which, through which, with which our lives materialize in space-time—and the progressive approach, which tries to experience this non-event within time. Everything that begins, that refers to a date, to history, is not our concern; it is decoration. Knowing whether an experience happened or didn't happen belongs to history. What happens to me takes place in the non-event. The question is very beautiful for a novelist, but it could only have a worldly answer.

  To come back to your question, it is important not to assign the intuition of stillness to a situation itself. No matter what the situation is that seems to echo in you, come back to your intuition. The situation is an excuse. For some, it is being hit with a stick, the fall of a leaf, an empty movement. For others, it is a word, a text. There is nothing in the word, the text, the stick, all this is a poetic anecdote pointing to what is essential in us.

  Constantly come back to this deep resonance. It is what is highest. It doesn't depend on anything. If it were the result of anything, I would have no interest in it. If it were transmitted by anyone, I wouldn't want it. What can be given to me is of no interest. I'm only interested in what no one can give me or take away from me. Everything else is imagination.

  That is why there is no teaching or transmission possible. We can only transmit concepts.

  As soon as it seems that the circumstance is what allows me to feel this autonomy, I immediately turn my head away from it and I come back to this availability. As long as I say, “This situation brings me to…,” I am excluding the rest, and creating a form of separation. When I realize that no particular situation can bring me to this availability, I notice, little by little, that every situation is an echo of this listening.

  Do not try to mentally understand what we are talking about.

  In this vision, I notice that it was my imagination which made me think that one situation brought me closer and that another one took me further away.

  Remain in that autonomy, otherwise you will step into religion or morals. Through effort or intention, you create a world, a life that matches your fantasy. This gives birth to conflict, for everyone creates a God according to their imagination. The so-called ultimate Gods have multiple colors and names depending on the area of the world they are from. This is the basis of every war.