Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

To explain what Western culture has given me—and not given me—and what the practice of yoga and its tradition have given me—and not given me—is not a simple task to carry out. In the development of a life it is not always easy, in effect, to distinguish what comes from one source and what comes from another. However, I am going to try to formulate—at the request of François Lorin to whom I owe much knowledge acquired thanks to yoga—some contributions and deficiencies of this tradition that seem to me rather clearly identifiable at this time, at the level of experiences and of knowledge that are mine.

What I have learned from yoga—beyond or on this side of my Western culture—are things about existence that are both very simple and very subtle.

First, I learned to breathe. Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one’s own life. Only the mother, during pregnancy, breathes in place of the child. After birth, whoever does not breathe, does not respect his or her own life and takes air from the other, from others. Breathing is thus a duty toward my life, that of others, and that of the entire living world. Because the majority of people in our age do not treat with care the time of breathing, it is necessary—in any case, it is necessary for me, but I think that this necessity is general—to go for walks or to remain a moment each day in the vegetal world in order to continue to breathe and to live outside of the surrounding social exploitation.

It is also necessary to understand the relations between respiration and other acts, in particular the act of speaking. Breathing and speaking use breath in an almost inverse manner, in any case for the majority of people. From this point of view it is interesting to note that people who do not breathe, or who breathe poorly, cannot stop speaking. It is their way of breathing, and notably of exhaling in order to draw another breath. Frequently, they also paralyze the breathing of whoever takes corporeal and spiritual care of his or her breath, of the breath of others. To remain silently attentive to the breath comes down to respecting that which, or who, exists and maintaining for oneself the possibility to be born and to create.

On this subject it is important to meditate on the fact that a spirituality or a religion centered on speech, without insistence on breathing and the silence that makes it possible, risks supporting a nonrespect for life. In such traditions the act of using breath to define more or less definitive words, of using nature and living bodies to develop a social worship becomes destructive because of a lack of recognition and regeneration of this contribution of life. Such spiritual and religious practices or theories quickly become authoritarian through the immobilization of breathing. They become dogmatic by forgetting the gift that comes from the living world—in particular the vegetal world—and from human bodies—in particular female bodies. Unfortunately most patriarchal philosophical and religious traditions act in this way: they have substituted words for life without carrying out the necessary links between the two. Now it is these links that would allow reciprocally conserving, regenerating, and enriching life and speech.

There is an example of this that people of the Christian tradition know well. The Annunciation, which precedes the birth of Jesus, can be interpreted in at least two different ways: as the substitution of the word of the celestial Father for corporeal relations, notably of breathing, between two lovers or as the fact that, in order to engender a spiritual child—a possible savior of the world—the conception of this savior must be preceded by an announcement through speech and by a response from Mary. It is not a question then of miraculous birth by a woman who is supposed to have kept her hymen, but of an engendering preceded by an exchange of breath and of words between the future lovers and parents. The angel, the bird, the ray of the sun, and speech represent the mediations between the body of Mary and that of the Lord. All these mediations indicate relations between the body and speech without substituting the one for the other, as a certain type of teaching would like to make us “believe.” They signify that a spiritual engendering cannot take place without the coming into play of breathing and the controlled expression of this breathing between the lovers. The current account of the “angelic greeting” would appear, from this point of view, partially erroneous in the sense that the words do not respect the question of the messenger to Mary: “Do you want to be the mother of the/a savior?” Without this question the Annunciation risks evoking the imposition of a patriarchal order on a virgin adolescent bound to another man: “Mary, the Lord informs you that you will be the mother of his child.” There are no longer, in this case, two persons: Mary becomes the simple vehicle at the service of giving birth to the son of a God-the-Father. But, if there are no longer two persons, there is no longer respect for the breath between them, nor respect for Mary’s spiritual virginity. The first interpretation, close to feminine aboriginal traditions (including by virtue of the necessarily oral character of the announcement), seems to me more capable of translating a spiritual message, which would then be forgotten and subjected to the authoritarian power of a word that supposedly has to supplant the body and not make it divine as such.

In the passage from traditions that respect the breath to those that submit (themselves) to speech without concern for the breath, the mode of speaking has evolved from poetic saying, from the hymn of song, from the prayer of praise to already written discourses or texts, often in the imperative, addressing the individual in his relation to society more than to the cosmos, an individual whose paradigm is the adult man subject to the authority of the often absent gods of his gender. The most spiritual becoming proposed then to woman is that she also can be a man … In our egalitarian times, one can note the return, including on the part of certain feminists, to religious texts that announce nothing better to women than to be equal to men! I would compare, on this occasion, the forgetting of feminine aboriginal traditions, particularly of India, with the submission of women to patriarchal power in the horizon of which the ideal, for them, would be to become men.

In this patriarchal horizon the very use of speech and the circulation of breath have changed. Speech finds itself subjected to ritual, to repetition, to speculation. It has been uprooted from its present engendering, in relation with the rest of the energy of the body and of the world that surrounds it. The writing of a poem, the singing of praise—possibly addressed to nature, to the lover, to a divinity that we incarnate or could incarnate—use respiration in a way other than obedience to an already written word or text, expressing orders or laws, more than praises or graces. In the first case we remain closer to the divinities that guard life and cultivate it. We are these gods or goddesses who protect, engender, or deploy life, divinities always tied to nature and not simply produced or chosen by a people or a society.

In my case, the consciousness of being a woman, the desire to remain a woman and to spiritually become a woman found in the practice of yoga and the reading of certain ancient texts of this tradition an aid for interpreting my more patriarchal tradition and for reviving a repressed culture that better suits me. Such a culture is lacking today for the spiritualization of a society of men and of women and, especially, for the spiritualization of love between them: at the level of the couple or of society, a love remaining in harmony with the natural living universe that serves us as a place of existence and of regeneration.

In patriarchal traditions individual and collective life both wants to and believes it is able to organize itself outside of the surroundings of the natural world. The body—also called microcosm—is then cut off from the universe—which is called macrocosm. It is submitted to sociological rules, to rhythms foreign to its sensibility, to its living perceptions: day and night, seasons, vegetal growth … This means that acts of participation in light, sounds or music, odors, touch, or even in natural tastes are no longer cultivated as human qualities. The body is no longer educated to develop its perceptions spiritually, but to detach itself from the sensible for a more abstract, more speculative, more sociological culture.

Yoga taught me to return to the cultivation of sensible perception. In fact, I have always loved it. Since my childhood, nature has helped me and has taught me how to live. But yoga brought me back to this taste with texts that lead me from the innocence of sensations to a spiritual elaboration that permits their development, and sometimes their communication or sharing.

To be sure, Western culture has produced an art that doubles, in some fashion, the contributions of nature: painting, music, the art of cooking, etc. But it seems that art cannot be substituted for the experience of natural perceptions. It can help in enduring the absence of this contribution without claiming to replace it. For example, at night, when the birds sleep, listening to music is good. But music does not correspond to the living present of the singing of birds. It is perhaps more in one sense, but less in another. It is most often already repetition, unless it is an improvisation, in particular vocal, unique. That is rare. And, moreover, it is possible that humans have lost the capacity that birds have of singing in harmony with the state of the universe, of celebrating nature such as it is in the moment.

Another aspect: Western mysticism has cultivated perceptions that are secondary. It speaks of a touch, of a taste of the “spirit,” for example. But these spiritual discoveries, often acquired at the expense of great suffering, do not seem to me to be able to substitute themselves for the cultivation of sensible perceptions. Learning to listen to beautiful sounds, to contemplate beautiful colors, to taste good products of the earth aids spiritual development. I prefer this nonsacrificial path to another. And we do not have enough of an existence to educate our sensible faculties. Why repress them for a hypothetical beyond? That appears to me today to be not very holy or very wise. And the transformation of my body into a spiritual body seems a lot more worthwhile than access to a science, including that of God, that scorns the body and leads it onto paths of useless and sterile suffering.

In order to cultivate the body, it is necessary to remain close to cosmic rhythms. The liturgy and Christian monastic orders have been aware of this. Too often, this dimension is unfortunately forgotten. So, yet again, why speak of spiritual “night,” of spiritual “drought,” of spiritual “winter” while neglecting the impact upon us of the real “night,” of the real “drought,” of the real “winter”? All this metaphorical language leads to a lot of mortifying wanderings.

Something else that yoga taught me or clarified for me is the necessity of a living link between the teacher and the student. The Western tradition has often wanted to dissociate the one from the other. Education in the West is then assimilated to apprenticeship or to the reading of texts, the dead authors of which are often more appreciated than living ones. It is subjected to writing with a minimal part of transmission being truly oral. It makes of the teacher an aseptic and supposedly neuter vehicle of the culture that he/she transmits.

According to me, to learn, in the best of cases, is to learn from someone’s experience. To teach is to transmit an experience. What is taught is guaranteed by the life of the one who teaches, and by that of his or her own masters. In this way a concrete and spiritual knowledge is elaborated, a knowledge useful for a cultivation of life, for which the life of the teacher himself remains the support of truth, of ethics, and even of aesthetics. This practice of teaching constitutes a genealogy that is at the same time natural and cultural. In certain families knowledge is handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, from father to daughter, from mother to son. In other cultural lineages the transmission occurs outside the natural family, from master to disciple. But, remaining linked to experience, it engenders a sort of milieu that is at once natural, sensible, and spiritual where knowledge of the past circulates and where that of the present and the future is elaborated. Indeed, a culture tied to experience cannot be reduced to the repetition of an already written corpus. Such a culture evolves, be it only according to the evolution of the universe, but also in the way of thinking the link between cosmic history and the history of living beings, particularly human beings, of this world.

For the transmission of culture to be correct, it is necessary to notice the differences between what women’s experience can teach us and what men’s experience can teach us, without privileging the teaching coming from one sex or from one gender. In fact, it is not true that knowledge is indifferent to sex or gender. The most daily experience teaches us this as does the knowledge of tradition, including that of yoga. The corporeal and spiritual experience of a woman is singular, and what she can teach of it to her daughter and to her son is not the same. To efface this contribution of the transmission of culture is to falsify its truth and value. It is also to contribute to teaching’s becoming more and more ritual, speculative, magical, tied to the worship of the father and to exclusively celestial divinities, constructed by the spirit of men as incorporeal, and even timeless, guarantees of texts and laws organizing their societies. It is then no longer a matter of living human divinities, of gods and goddesses among us such as exist in feminine aboriginal traditions and what remains of them, but of absolutes recapitulating an epoch of History in order to gather together, to organize, to rationalize its multiple dimensions. A teaching linked to earthly life, to the sensible, to the concrete, and concerned with cultivating their fecundity as well as their spiritual, divine, mystical qualities is a mode of transmission more faithful to the oldest traditions, particularly those of yoga. These traditions are feminine, which does not mean maternal. The accent put solely on the maternity of women is rather a masculine perspective in the evolution of the tradition.

This different mode of approaching life, others, teaching—that I have learned or relearned from yoga—supposes and accompanies a singular experience of the body. It has often been said to me that I should have conquered my body, that I should have subjected it to spirit. The development of spirit was presented to me in the form of philosophical or religious texts, of abstract imperatives, of (an) absent God(s), at best of politeness and of love. But why could love not come about in the respect and cultivation of my/our bodies? It seems to me that this dimension of human development is indispensable. Through scorn or forgetting of the body, what remains of it in our traditions is often reduced to elementary needs or to a sexuality worse than animal. To restrict carnal love to a reproductive duty, preceded by elementary coitus, at best by some vague caresses—when the man is not too overwhelmed with work, when one has the time—seems to me, in fact, a degeneration worse than bestial. The majority of animals have erotic displays that we no longer even have. Humiliation—especially of the woman—violence, guilt … are the lot of most couples in our supposedly evolved civilizations. This is something to be ashamed of! Because this means that love, for us and between us, has become less than human, except for some generous yet rare and often limited exceptions.

The tradition of yoga, the Tantric tradition and certain meetings with spiritual women and men have taught me something different. They have begun to teach me that the body is itself a divine place—the place or temple of the divine in harmony with the universe—or rather they have taught me how to cultivate my body, and to respect that of others, as divine temples. I knew that the body is potentially divine, I knew it notably through my Christian tradition of which it is, in fact, the message, but I did not know how to develop this divinity. Through practicing breathing, through educating my perceptions, through concerning myself continually with cultivating the life of my body, through reading current and ancient texts of the yoga tradition and Tantric texts, I learned what I knew: the body is the site of the incarnation of the divine and I have to treat it as such. That is not always easy, especially in our age, but this makes possible a spiritual becoming that is a lot more stimulating and worthwhile than the perpetual falls and redemptions, inside and outside the flesh, that the majority of the religions of our age teach. The body itself, including in the carnal act, can be deified. That does not mean that it overcomes itself but that it blossoms, becomes more subtly and totally sensible. This transformation, transubstantiation of elementary corporeal matter into spiritual flesh, is achieved particularly through the passage of energy from certain chakras—or psycho-physiological centers—to others: thus from chakras of sexual energy or of elemental vitality to those of the heart, of the throat, of the head, without forgetting the return circulation all the way to the feet. All this alchemy of the becoming of the subtle body is described in certain texts such as the Upanishads of yoga and also in certain Tantric manuals as well as in the teaching of Patanjali on concentration in perception. Everything is not said there, everything is not yet said there as I have sometimes believed. But instructions about the transformations of the body in union with the totality of the universe and about its possible incarnations are given.

Often, love is presented there as a union, regressive in a way but ecstatically spiritual, of man with the universal womb that woman would incarnate, chosen as shakti. This interpretation is far from being negligible and it is certainly more worthwhile than simple bestial love, rapacious or debased. But the union of two lovers, man and woman, free with respect to genealogy, can realize something other in the incarnation of human love. Each lover, woman or man, can contribute to the rebirth of the other as both human and divine incarnation. In this case, the carnal union becomes a privileged place of individuation and not only of fusion, of regression, or of the abolition of polarities and differences. In love, women and men give back to one another their identity and the potential for life and creation that the difference of identity between them makes possible.

This double identity allows them to remain two in love, and in adult relations of reciprocity.

My wish for the future would be a reciprocal initiation. Which requires that women and men constitute a world proper to their sex or their gender, and that both can offer themselves and can exchange elements of this world other than purely biological ones: sperm and eggs, for example. Men and women have something besides children to engender. I have learned this aspect of spiritual fecundity between the sexes by my own experience and my own desire. When I have tried to explain it—perhaps badly …—to some practitioners of yoga, it has been poorly understood, even rejected. Nevertheless the practice of yoga continually brings me back to this obvious fact, as do certain texts or commentaries of the Indian tradition. In this way Mircea Eliade often presents the culture of India as a culture that has succeeded in retaining Asiatic aboriginal elements alongside later patriarchal contributions. There is therefore, in India, room for a spiritualization of the masculine and of the feminine. Moreover, it is one of the only traditions where women goddesses and divine loving couples are still venerated.

At the time of a trip to India in January 1984, I was happily surprised to see that the majority of women there, even poor ones, keep a great dignity, an attitude foreign to that of humiliated, submissive, or arrogant women that Western women often have. I am not ignoring what happens in India concerning prostitution, violent acts, and even the murders perpetrated against women. But the one does not prevent the other. There exists there a cohabitation between at least two epochs of History: the one in which women are goddesses, the other in which men exercise a blind power over them.

During this same trip, I was moved when I heard the master T. Krishnamacharya affirm the importance of sexual difference as a dimension of the culture of yoga. That was and still is for me a precious teaching. I would have liked to ask him how to translate the difference of the sexes in practice. It is a question that I still wish to ask yoga teachers, both men and women. I know that there exist practices for pregnant women. But are there practices for women and men inasmuch as they have a different body and spirit? I would like to know them in order to avoid harming my body, in order to develop my qualities as a woman, not only as a mother but also as a lover who is a woman, as a woman philosopher and writer, as a woman speaker, etc.

Because of this lack of cultivation of sexual identity, the most irreducible site of reciprocity, reciprocity often seems absent to me in the milieus of yoga. To be sure, a noticeable kindness and a relative respect for the other prevail there. Yet the hierarchical relation often remains what dictates the rules. There also exist few truly spiritual exchanges. For the most part, these are supposed to be useless or even harmful to the practice of yoga. In order to become adept or initiated, it is supposed to be advisable not to think, or to no longer think. This slogan or this ideology, imposed or conveyed in an elementary way by students or teachers of yoga, find attentive and obliging accomplices. Women regularly attend yoga courses in greater numbers; they hear there what they are accustomed to hearing, thus they offer for the most part no resistance. If one among them dares to ask a question that is not agreeable to the teacher, it is quickly made known to her that this question is misplaced and shows a lack of knowledge of what is said or not said in such places. I have lived through this situation several times and I have found it painful and more or less unworthy of practitioners of yoga, who are willing moreover to have truths that are difficult to hear addressed to them by more or less competent masters. Without doubt, it is easier not to think than to think, but the alibi of being a good practitioner cannot prevail against the discipline and the cultivation of the mental. Is practicing without thinking even a part of the tradition of yoga? This tradition seems to me to possess a subtlety that demands, on the contrary, a real aptitude for thought. It is not a matter of thinking any way one pleases. It is necessary to learn again to think without centering on the object, for example, to think in a living and free manner, unattached, neither egological nor possessive. This does not mean not thinking but being capable of going beyond the inertias of thought in order to set its energy free. Is this not the path shown by Buddha and, in our age, in his own way, by Krishnamurti?

Both are men. Patanjali is also. Women can certainly learn something from them, while taking care to transmit their own knowledge to men. The majority of spiritual beings attest to this necessity by the need they have of a companion, notably a virgin. It would be worthwhile to make it understood that virginity does not then signify privation or abstention from the realization of the self by a woman subjected to the good will and development of a man, but rather an aptitude of the woman to conserve and cultivate her own identity in order to share its qualities with man in one way or another. This dimension of woman’s psychic virginity, kept and cultivated in love and desire with man, is without doubt one of the most extraordinary spiritual riches of humanity, a richness still to be discovered beyond the value of maternity, which is not properly human. If woman does not keep her virginity, she loses her identity and certainly cannot be reborn as a woman. Moreover, becoming simply a mother, woman is no longer a possible companion for man. She is no longer situated on the same genealogical level.

Once again, it is not a matter here of the presence or absence of a physiological hymen, another reduction of sexual difference to simple anatomy, but of maintaining the existence of two sexes, of two genders, as source of biological and cultural creation. It is possible that what paralyzes the becoming of the spirit in our age is the lack of positive tradition concerning the value of woman’s virginity. We do not or no longer recognize the value of the virginity of the girl, of the woman for herself and not as exchange money between men, as site of physical engendering of men-heros or gods, as enslavement of the innocence of the woman to the law of spiritual fathers supposedly capable of defining good and evil for all men and all women.

This deficiency of feminine identity transforms the products of masculine intelligence into authoritarian and, in part, artificial, discourses. Men become cultural fathers, and women become natural mothers. The first become the spiritual masters of their mothers. The two sexes, from then on, never communicate between themselves as adults and cannot wed as adults.

I expect yoga to help develop this horizon of the difference of the sexes through taking account of our body and our psyche as women and as men. I fear that practitioners of yoga are moving in the direction of a neutralization of the difference of the sexes, of the treatment of the two sexes “as equals,” of the admission of women into the latest and most masculine tradition of yoga while forgetting what they have contributed to it and can contribute to it that is specific to them. If this is how it is, particularly in the Western adaptation of yoga, is it not better most often to renounce such initiations, which are not founded on the reality of bodies and of “souls”?

In fact, women and men risk finding themselves in exile here from their tradition, from their body and from their spirit, without support of a culture that is appropriate to them. It is, in any case, a question that yoga asks: the solitude imposed on the practitioners who walk along this path. This solitude is no doubt increased for Westerners who abandon part of their certainties, conscious or not, in order to entrust themselves to the competence of a practitioner of another tradition. Starting from simple and true realities—the difference of the sexes—seems to me indispensable for reducing the bewilderment and distress that can result from it.