Chapter 6April 1954

(A few experiences of the body consciousness6 )

With the same accuracy, one can say that all is divine or that nothing is divine. Everything depends upon the angle from which one looks at the problem.

Likewise, it can be said that the divine is a perpetual becoming and yet also, that it is immutable for all eternity.

To deny or affirm God’s existence is equally true, but each is only partially true. It is by rising above both affirmation and negation that one may draw nearer the truth.

It can further be said that whatever happens in the world is the result of divine will, but also that this will has to be expressed and manifested in a world that contradicts or deforms it; these are two attitudes having, respectively, the practical effect of either submitting with peace and joy to whatever happens or, on the contrary, ceaselessly fighting for the triumph of what should be. To live the truth one must know how to rise above both attitudes and combine them.

* * * Keep your own conviction if it helps you to build your life; but know that it is only one conviction and that the others are as good and true as yours.

* * * Tolerance is full of a sense of superiority; it should be replaced by total understanding.

* * * Because truth is not linear, but global, and not successive, but simultaneous, it can therefore not be expressed in words: it must be lived.

* * * To acquire a total and perfect awareness of the world as it is in all its details, one must first have no more personal reactions in regard to any of these details, nor even any spiritual preference as to what they ought to be. In other words, a total acceptance with a perfect neutrality and indifference is the indispensable condition for a knowledge through integral identification. If one detail, no matter how small, escapes this neutrality, this detail also escapes identification. The absence of personal reactions, whatever their end, even the most exalted, is thus a basic necessity for total knowledge.

So we could say, paradoxically, that we can only know a thing when we are not interested in it, or rather, more precisely, when we are not personally concerned with it.

* * * Whenever a god has donned a body, it was always with the intention of transforming the earth and creating a new world. Yet until now, he always had to give up his body without being able to complete his work; and it has always been said that the earth was not ready, that mankind did not fulfill the conditions necessary for the work to be accomplished.