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Nostalgia for Unity

One of the causes of our suffering comes from the presence, in the deepest part of ourselves, of a kind of nostalgia for unity that sometimes surfaces with great force not only during infancy and adolescence but also in adulthood. This powerful feeling of unity with the world is generally interpreted disfavorably. Adults speak of daydreams, of distraction, of merging states more or less suspicious and destined to disappear over time. And unfortunately this is, in general, how it happens.

We all, at times, go through what are acceptably called crises, in the course of which we once again encounter this powerful nostalgia. Anything that submerges us with force, that makes us doubt our well-regulated life, that carries us away, that touches us deeply, that makes us become conscious of our limits can revive this state of unity—or underline its absence in a disturbing manner. During these crises, we will feel vulnerable but extremely alive, and it is this feeling of drinking once again at the tremoring^*1 source that will push us to perform sometimes beneficial, sometimes neutral, sometimes catastrophic actions.

This feeling, this need for freedom, this “high” is what we call the passions, and even though we know they give life back to us, they generally trigger in us a certain guilt that goes hand in hand with social disapproval, as if to live is to become progressively used to suffocation, to slow death. No one, not even the paragons of virtue, escapes these jolts, these cataclysms, and if they are most often misinterpreted, it is simply because we all know how essentially marvelous it is to be awakened from our torpor by the passions. Those who have lost this state of grace are the first to condemn the victims of these inner earthquakes, and the misunderstanding continues, carried from generation to generation.

Moralists talk about controlling, reducing, destroying desires and passions, while fanatics take action by destroying the impassioned, but no one can go through life without feeling the devouring substance of desire and passion. Why do these jolts cause us so much suffering? Why, after living through them, do we often return to the state of hibernation? Why do we agree to pay the exorbitant price that society demands of the impassioned? Is there not a fundamental error in the way we orient our lives? Why does our ideal not correspond with our deep intuitive knowledge? Why do we accept that wonder and marvel should no longer be fundamental qualities of our lives?

This abandonment of our potential comes from our upbringing, education, and socialization; from the difficulties of life; from the need to find our place in it. But above all it comes from our universe of thought, from our mythology, from our religions, from our concepts tied to the biblical texts and to our genesis. Original sin, the fall, and redemption are powerful principles of inhibition and guilt. They condition us to our concept of separation.

It has always been true that those who have authority, in all religions, have tried to retain it by making themselves indispensable and by denying people their own free will and their possibility of being saved if they do not recognize their own inability to deal directly with the divine or, better still, to see the divine in themselves. These intercessors have taken the power and they mean to keep it. They follow the meanderings of social evolution, become more flexible, make reforms, change their image—but fundamentally nothing changes, because the heart of the matter is never broached. They are there to deny our unity with the divine and to make this territory their exclusive hunting grounds. After a few thousand years of varied attempts, it would seem that neither punishment nor heavenly reward has succeeded in giving to people the inner freedom and the plenitude they continue to long for.

If we stop delegating power, however, we liberate ourselves from the absurd expectation that we will be liberated by others. This engenders an immediate impression of space, of calm, thanks to which we become able to examine the situation and once again to take the matter of our potential for freedom into our own hands.

I have used this journey through the unity of being or existence to show to what degree not only the great absolute paths of Tibetan Buddhism, Mahamudra, and dzogchen but also that of the original Chinese Buddhism, or Ch’an—paths that saw their beginnings in close proximity to the Siddhas of Kashmir and Oddiyana—converged toward this total acceptance of the absolute nature of the human being in the exploration of a third path marked by the influence of Tantra.

Through the most profound texts of the Tantric tradition, through dialogues with those who follow this path, through questioning of those I meet at the Tantra/Chan center, and through the presentation of the exercises and practices of tantrikas of diverse schools, I propose to accompany you on a journey that will perhaps allow you to verify the intuition or hope most of us carry within: that there does exist a path integrating the totality of the human experience, without fear or taboos, with joy, pleasure, love, and plenitude.