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Questions: Passion, Ego, Freedom

How do I recognize the difference between real passion—an act of the senses that unfolds from a yoga point of view, spherically as you say—and one that is simply coming from an ego-tied search for pleasure?

When the ego enters into play, this is accompanied by a mental performance. We anticipate, we judge, we weigh the forthcoming pleasure by trying to know in what way this pleasure will truly satisfy us. We become strained and tense. Our mind becomes agitated. We set up a choice, we apply a strategy, we grasp onto the object of our desire, use it, and then reject it once we are satisfied. We do this with people, with objects, with our senses, emotions, and our thoughts. We feed ourselves like predators. We impoverish the world in our own interest, we cause harm, we reveal that an unhealthy love is at work.

What does a tantrika do? When a stimulation arises, it is only the expression of the tantrika’s own inner tremoring vibration. She relaxes, gets herself in tune, opens her sensitivity, allows the source of the heart to emerge freely. Through her movements and actions, plenitude expresses itself. Her mind remains peaceful, without waves. In each impassioned tremoring vibration, she recognizes the tremoring vibration of her own consciousness. She tastes the world without destroying its harmony. She does not grasp; she does not accumulate. A thing or a person comes up: She meets it with naked presence. This person or thing disappears: She stays in the flow of presence, aware of the entirely new splendor of what just appeared to her. Nothing is fixed; she gets hooked by, hooks onto, nothing. Her life perpetually renews itself, and her peaceful mind does not hinder the course of things. She keeps herself in the natural state of the mind that her master revealed to her. Stable, steady, tremoring to her inner vibration, sensitive, and present, she plays, intention-free, to the rhythm of reality and in this way, each moment, she realizes her true nature.

But is this not an egoist attitude? Where is compassion in this approach?

We cannot do a greater good to another human being than to accord him our naked awareness, devoid of all plan. This is the very space of freedom, which he will get a taste of through our presence. In this respect for the other, a mirror without any smudges of volition is presented. The other person can hence see his own freedom and see that there is no longer any separation from the world. That is love. Tantrikas hardly ever use the word compassion, because it implies a slightly condescending duality, whereas love is a non-differentiated state.

A person who feels loved in such a way feels liberated from mental elaboration and finds herself plunged into the deepest practice of yoga. If she succeeds in getting a taste of this state, the nostalgia for unity comes back to her and, naturally, she will glide toward a more and more silent, a deeper and deeper presence to the world. What more can one give to a human being?

But the ideal of the Bodhisattva, in Buddhism, isn’t it exactly to refuse to enter into nirvana as long as all human beings have not reached it?

The Bodhisattva does not differentiate between nirvana and samsara. For him, full consciousness of reality is nirvana. He therefore has no place to go to and even less to wait for, because there is no duality between worldly experience and nirvana. There also is no difference between the Bodhisattva and the person whom a Bodhisattva could help. It is this nondifferentiation between the states of nirvana and samsara, this nondifferentiation between people, this nondifferentiation between subject and object that liberates people. Everything, for the Bodhisattva, happens in the consciousness of an absolute nature. “The fact that this consciousness is neither associated, nor non-associated with attraction, aversion, confusion, or hindrances—here is the pure luminosity of consciousness,” reads one sutra.

Can it be said, then, that it is all right for a practitioner to experiment with pleasure? Certain masters say that desire and passions must be cut off to attain awakening.

If you think desire and passions must be cut off, do it. Put all your energy into this project and see after a while if the flames of desire and passions have gone out in you. Examine the situation clearly. Have you found plenitude? Are you emancipated from desires and passions? Take a little tour around the city; come out of your retreat. Walk around; watch people. Are you really emancipated from desires and passions? Then examine the state of your sensitivity of perception. Has it developed, or on the contrary has it become weakened, wilted, withered? Do certain expressions of the body, voices, emotions, desires of others bother you? Have you found a joyous stability, an enthusiasm in the face of life? Is there no coldness or hardness in your gaze, in your body, in your mind? If this is the case, if nothing disturbs you anymore, you have succeeded.

This is an extremely difficult undertaking. Man-An, the seventeenth-century Zen master, has said, drawing on a stanza from the poem by the Third Patriarch of Ch’an, Seng t’san:

The Third Patriarch of Zen said, “If you want to head for the Way of Unity, do not be averse to the objects of the six senses [the mind is the sixth sense].” This does not mean that you should indulge in the objects of the six senses; it means that you should keep right mindfulness continuous, neither grasping nor rejecting the objects of the six senses in the course of everyday life, like a duck going to water without its feathers getting wet.

If, in contrast, you despise the objects of the six senses and try to avoid them, you fall into escapist tendencies and never fulfill the Way of Buddhahood. If you clearly see the essence, then the objects of the six senses are themselves meditation, sensual desires are themselves the Way of Unity, and all things are manifestations of Reality. Entering into the great Zen stability undivided by movement and stillness, body and mind are both freed and eased.

As for people who set out to cultivate spiritual practice with aversion to the objects and desires of the senses, even if their minds and thoughts are empty and still and their contemplative visualization is perfectly clear, still when they leave quietude and get into active situations, they are like fish out of water, like monkeys out of trees.⁴⁴

But integrating the whole of the desires and the passions with the quest is also a difficult path, because this path demands total clarity about what you really are, with no reference to what you would like to be. By this patient examination you will come to know and discover yourself in reality. You will bring to the light of day all your psychological functionings, your whole sensorality, your thoughts, and your feelings.

Rather than straining toward an objective such as liberating yourself from desire, which is a desire itself, you will enter a virgin space where the fundamental freedom of your consciousness will surface little by little. By slipping into the flow of life, you will have the joyous and luminous experience that the Tantric masters talk about. You will at last be present to reality, not to your objectives, and in this shadowless, maskless reality you will little by little discover the infinite. At this point, you will no longer be anything but love and source. “Everything that flows is good,” I once heard someone say.