The largest obstacle

I do not succeed !

How many monks, how many truth researchers devoted their whole life to the absolute's pursuit, with moments of grace and moments of dryness, but for, at the end - one needs to confess it- having lived no radical modification!

These failures should make one meditate, because they are dramatic: they could be the clue that, first, there would be nothing to gain, or secondly, that the way would be really too ungrateful, or third, that finally that we go about it very badly. This last assumption is rather rarely considered.

Method of the hole

St Jean of the cross knew his greatest spiritual experiment after his brothers monks have compeled him, for punishment, to live in a hole outside, subject to weather variations, from which hole they pulled him only one time per day, to take - kneeled- a bit of bread and water. He was able to rescue himself from this experience only by escaping.

It happened thus that some borderline experiments cause the illumination, but it happened more often than they cause death or craziness, which represents a major and annoying disadvantage.

Interest of contrariety

However, it seems that beyond this caricatural example, something which upsets our usual mechanisms is constant in all the mystical traditions : it is indeed normal that something has to be modified.

 

 

Will

Gurdjieff, a strange person from the first half of this century, describes will as what is able , in us, to oppose desires, and against dispersion reigning in us. He did not recognize by " will " this part inside us able to produce efforts, but precisely the agent of the contrariety which, only, could oppose to the too well oiled mechanisms of our person.

First problem

One day, Jacob Needleman, an American researcher, surprised himself when declaring, at a conference about mysticism, that religion and all the civilization which comes along with it, begin to corrupt as soon as the work of self-knowledge becomes subjectively less interesting than sexual pleasure. And someone in the audience insisted curiously on the moment when this fact is not recognized and not accepted anymore honestly!("Lost Christianity ", Jacob Needleman, 1980)

It is not here a matter of judgment about sexuality, but rather the intuition that this " will " which is missing in us, namely that we are able to wish our realisation, like many another thing, but that we do not know how to want it, " with all our heart, all our being, all our force " (Dt 6-4).

Second problem

But indeed, what should we oppose in ourselves ?

     

 

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