Let the Moon Be Free- Conversations on Kashmiri Tantra

by Eric Baret

  A look does not attack. You can look at me any way you want to. All the looks, all the words are welcome. Find this autonomy, perhaps not right away but at least understand it, and, little by little, integration will take place.

  This happens to everyone according to their limitations. For some, there is such pathology that it takes a long time. In some cases, it's money, in others food, sex, love or politics. A word, a look is enough and they explode. A few notes of a political anthem, the colors of a flag, and the person becomes crazy; for her it's justified. Everyone needs to understand their own mechanism.

  There comes a day when I do not feel attacked when I hear The Internationale or the Soviet, Israeli, American or French anthem. I understand that some people weep with emotion or become enraged. I understand, and I no longer feel attacked. Nor can I feel attacked by the woman who leaves me, by the sickness of my child, by the condition of my body, of my country, by the look of my neighbor, by his judgments, whether he sees me as an admirable, wonderful, ignominious, perverse or miserable man. I love his look. He is right, he cannot see me otherwise.

  I live with reality. With people who hate me as well as with those who love me, life becomes easier. I feel as close to the former as to the latter. A little bit closer to those who hate me; the one who hates lives in such misery, such agony, that he needs more attention—all the affection I can spare. Then, naturally, a form of love arises. The one who loves, I do not have much time for him. He has already won, for to love is to live a balanced life.

  At some point, the desire to live with what is comfortable—psychologically comfortable—disappears. You can sleep on a comfortable bed for your back; that is something else. But psychological comfort, the attempt to avoid the one who wants to put me down, the one who hates me, who thinks I am wrong—and who suffers from it―that becomes impossible. You understand that the one who hates you doesn't have a choice, and a sort of natural sympathy is born. As for the one who loves you, let him live his love. Either it is a projection, and he needs to be honest enough to notice it, or it is true love, a love that gives without asking for anything in return—and if this is the case he has won and he lives life in balance. I do not have much time for happy people.

  It is interesting to observe this transition. I feel attacked by a situation and then I realize the extent to which the situation needs help. The one who attacks me is calling for help.

  It's like a child having a tantrum; he is calling for help. Attacked by the child's tantrum, I react, or I listen to the tantrum. When I listen, I can act in different ways, I can no longer act against. It is the difficult child who needs help. The happy child doesn't require much attention.

  So, when someone behaves aggressively with you, develop this intimacy. The attack isn't gratuitous. The neighbor that I disturb is the one who needs me. If need be, I will leave anyway, but I am aware that it is a call for help.

  Every suffering is a call for help. The physician does not run away from disease. Violence is a disease; attack is a disease. If the neighbor hates my political opinion, he is sick. Do I need to run away because he is sick?

  From there on, it's all functional. We need to be flexible. In some areas of my life I will be able to act that way; in other areas I won't. If it's about my money, or my wife—that I can't accept. Each has their threshold.

  In California I worked for a long time with a friend who taught me martial arts. One day I asked him: “You have been practicing Taekwondo, street fighting, for twenty years; what have you accomplished?” He replied: “It used to be that if someone insulted me in a bar he ended up in the hospital. Now, if someone insults me, I say nothing. Of course, if he touches me, he ends up in the hospital.” He had passed a threshold. Perhaps he didn't get to the end, perhaps he was still feeling attacked by caresses, but his maturity allowed him to not feel attacked by insults anymore.

  Therefore, live with your threshold, which becomes more elastic. If the aggression is too strong, if a crisis is triggered, you can move, get a new wife or become a Buddhist in order to forget the drama, but you are aware. Nothing is lost, for the crisis is not over. One hundred years later, it is still there. When I realize that I ran away from this wife or from that situation, in that very moment the crisis is present—perhaps less virulent, but still present. Then I come back to reality and I listen, with my body. I can now undo the crisis that came upon me five or twenty years ago. That's important. I will undo all my crises.

  I don't have to delve into the past to find a crisis to undo; I would only encounter my memory, my selection. But when the crisis returns, and when I realize how much I was hurt by this or that situation, the defense is still in me and I let it live fully. In this welcoming, my past gets purified of all that seemed to be against me.

  At some point, you will keep company, on purpose, with all that was intolerable to you in life. All that made you white, red, green, all that insulted you, all the situations which gave you the impression of being soiled, violated, everything that used to look disgusting to you, you will attend to, with love. You will empty out all these echoes.

  From then on, you will never feel insulted again.

  This does not prevent you from moving, from acting, but there are no more psychological residues. I understand in a single instant that the dog that wants to bite me isn't a mean dog. It doesn't have a choice and I don't either; but now I am able to see that. I can then take this vision and offer it to the dog.

  It's my job to become free; the other doesn't have to. If I live this liberation, up to a point I'm going to help the other. But to think that the other must change, that the dog must not bite me, that the neighbor must understand that I am right—there, I am in my imagination.

  I can spend my life thinking I know how the other should see me. But the other sees me according to his own viewpoint, and he is right!

  When you stop trying to fix the world, when you leave your neighbor alone, you take care of yourself because you realize there is no yourself. The neighbor and the world disappear as problems.

  That is the homework.

  Chapter 13

  The art of dying

  Outside of this game of death, there is no answer.

  We watch, and that's all.

  Usama ibn Munqidh: The Book of Contemplation

  W hat takes us further away? What creates agitation, confusion? Fear. The fear of being nothing. Religions and spiritual teachings are born out of this fear; they carry it, they transmit it. All knowledge, all certainty, all directions are nothing but this fear in motion.

  When I ask a question, I take myself further away. When I look for myself in a teaching, I betray my autonomy and I run away from intimacy. True spirituality is not a demand, it is availability to what arises in the moment. As long as I want to follow a teaching, a direction, a guru, I remain in extreme confusion. At times, I may imagine some form of appeasement, but sooner or later I am brought back to my fear of being nothing. This space, the heart of things, only reveals itself in a moment of humility, when I renounce every possibility for any form of knowledge, any form of accumulation, that I let myself be completely devoured by the moment. This is non-appropriation.

  Are there any questions in this resonance?

  Isn't this too passive?

  What is passive is knowledge. Unless you are talking about this other way of being “passive,” which means abandoning all pretension to understand or to achieve anything whatsoever. You need to discover that way of being “passive”—the way that allows for the right gesture, the right action, without a reference. Of course, compared to a constant agitation—the attempt to become, to try or to get—it can look passive. But the greatest intellectual passivity is to follow a spiritual teaching like a sheep.

  Asking… why ask? I need to have my own experience. I'm not interested in what someone else has experienced. The fear that I'm confronting is mine, there is none other. That is the one that I must face. What can a spiritual teaching give me? It is a form o
f cowardice, a way to avoid confronting my own non-existence.

  On the contrary, the “passivity” we are talking about here, free from all knowledge, is true action. Non-doing is action in a deep sense, whereas what is commonly called action is a form of agitation.

  It is the same “passivity” that draws me toward deep sleep every night. It is what makes me renounce the best lover, the largest bank account, the deepest spiritual tradition, in order to be nothing, every night. It is not passivity.

  Can you say a few words about death?

  What is your real question?

  It has to do with anxiety, fear.

  Fear of death, that is what is real. Death is a concept. Fear of death is your experience. As in every experience, you have to make yourself available to the felt sense with humility. Welcome this emotion when it arises in you. You are not afraid; you feel the fear. This fear of death will spread through your whole body.

  Death is a fear. Intelligence has no grip, understanding doesn't play any role, except to feed the Tibetan, Hindu or Christian nonsense on the subject, or the pseudo-scientific musings of scientists lost at sea. There is nothing to know. All these pieces of information are psychopathic notions that do nothing except express the fear of their authors. You can guess the condition of those who write about death!

  So, you let go of secondhand information and stay with the humility of knowing nothing. A feeling, a fear remains: in your throat, your chest, your belly. Little by little, you let this experience of fear talk to you. But in order for the fear to talk to you, you must be silent, free from knowledge. In your humility, in your felt sense, fear will visit you and, at some point, you will notice that there is no longer any fear.

  Wanting to know something about death is as absurd as wanting to know something about life. You can only paint it all with the colors or your emotional fantasies. It's all imagination, and all imaginations are equal.

  Felt sense, on the other hand, is intimate and it brings you to a space without imagination which is the resolution of the question. Felt sense is not a thought, not an “understanding.” You cannot write a book about it, only be silent and present.

  There is the fear of being nothing. But why do we give so much importance to earthly life and to the experiences we live, as if it was very important?

  It is fear.

  These experiences we live, are they so important? When we reach the other side…

  Less important, more important, those are concepts that you do not need to own. They don’t make any sense. Is winter important? Is summer important? It makes no sense! Is your life important? This doesn't make any sense either; they are only concepts.

  But perhaps human beings are here to accomplish something?

  The tiger projects a tiger destiny, the Muslim a Muslim destiny. The unfortunate soul who practices positive thinking projects his unhappiness, the Christian his fear. Depending on how your parents died, what you saw on TV, you will project such a life, such a death, for yourself. These are mere projections. Everything you can think about your life is imaginary. A French communist sees life in a certain way, someone who was born in Vietnam and followed a Buddhist tradition will see it differently. Those are two imaginary worlds and there is no need to swap one for the other.

  You stay in your place, you keep your useless conditioning and you realize that it doesn't limit you. Something in you is freer than your conditioning. The more you emphasize this space devoid of ideology, the more you will notice that ideology is of no consequence. Whether you think that your life is extremely important and you are ready to do anything to preserve it, or you believe that it has very little importance to the point that you could sacrifice it for a political, a military or a historical cause, you will see that those are two concepts. It isn't as if you had a choice.

  Our presence is gratuitous then? For nothing?

  For nothing is still an explanation. Thought has no place in true understanding. Looking for mental clarity postpones understanding and is mere manipulation of your thoughts. What is talked about in the East is to be understanding, non-objective understanding. There is nothing that can be understood. This obvious fact sets you free from any possible understanding.

  You do not need to understand anything—this of course you need to understand. When you really see, you instantly forget what is seen—or else it becomes another image; like Heidegger you have a very beautiful image, but it is still a conceptual image. Your mental representations vanish, for there isn't a true representation. The true representation is that which brings about the disappearance of its representation.

  So, is it our fear that needs to know?

  Yes. All our actions are motivated by fear. This is not a criticism, it's an observation.

  If I am certain of being nothing, is it an image?

  Of course.

  So, what isn't an image?

  That which is not an image cannot be formulated. It is what brings you to ask this question. Without a foretaste of what is beyond the image, the question would be impossible. The fact that you ask this question means that there is in you a non-mental foretaste of what is beyond the image.

  Why has very shallow roots. Being is a silent gazing, why is a form of agitation. Depending on your intelligence, the answer you give today will be different from tomorrow's answer. There is no answer. Have the humility to stop looking for yourself in an answer.

  An answer is only memory. You can only find what you already know. Every day you store new data and your answer evolves. Every day, your maturation changes your perception of the world. Whether your answers are brilliant or stupid doesn't make any difference. At some point, you free yourself from the search for an answer. What remains is a foretaste of the absolute.

  Spirituality is not a circus. It is utterly discrete. No personality, no guru, no assertion is possible; only a questioning, which is our own death.

  Spirituality is the art of dying! It isn't the art of living. But who can hear that? People want to live. They want to do yoga, meditation, follow a teaching to get better. Might as well go fishing!

  Spiritual teaching is what brings you back to your lack and to your constant failure. In this fire, maturation happens. People who come here to get better should go away to follow liberated beings; then, of course, they will get better.

  What to do with my mind, which attacks me all the time?

  It is your tool, your gift, you need it. It is no coincidence. You need to listen. See the mechanism that wants to change, that thinks that if your mind were different, then it would get better. Is that true? The mind you have is exactly the one you need. It needs to be listened to, enhanced. It isn't your enemy, it is you who are screaming with impatience.

  First understand that that which you are hankering after, you already have. It is not outside of yourself. You cannot find it anywhere, nor can you discover it, become it, reach it or buy it; you can't do anything at all. Discover your complete incapacity; that is the gate. In every moment, feel your complete lack of knowledge, of intelligence, and you will see that an appeasement takes place. Agitation always comes from the pretense of knowing something, of thinking that things could or should be different. Become humble, available to what is here—that is the first step. There is nobody being appeased, but there is appeasement.

  From a pedagogical point of view, we could say: play with your body. When you feel, you cannot think. Choose a manual, artistic, aesthetic or athletic activity which brings you to live in the felt sense, and not in strategy. If you choose an art which by vocation has the capacity to bring you back to this availability, you can go very far with body sensitivity. Even a superficial form of art can already bring about a form of appeasement.

  You are not agitated, you feel the agitation. That is very important. This morning you were agitated, then less agitated, and now you are quiet. A space within you has witnessed these different mental degrees. If you take a tranquilizer, you will also notice that your agitation decreases. You a
re that observation. Become familiar with this attitude of being available to agitation, to the degrees of agitation, to the increase of agitation. The practice of a traditional art stimulates this availability.

  Does this imply that we are responsible for opening up to this state?

  As long as you think you are, yes. As long as you think you are a personal entity, you have a form of responsibility. When you realize your complete non-existence, no responsibility is possible any longer.

  You are not responsible from a moral standpoint. But thought is energy and if you think that your happiness depends on the next woman, it brings about a certain dynamic. This dynamic is not entirely contained in your body; you create the different society flaws that we know.

  Thought is creative. So as long as we think, we are responsible. It is not a moral responsibility but an energetic one. When you step on an ant, you are responsible; that doesn't mean that you could have done anything else. If you push someone onto the road and the person dies, you are responsible. When you bring ownership to your life, there is a form of responsibility—functional, not moral. That is why society is right to put you in jail. When you are happy, you are responsible for the happiness of your environment. When you are unhappy, you are responsible for the unhappiness of your environment. It does not mean that you can avoid being unhappy. When sadness submerges you, you are responsible for the poison that you spread around.