Leo

Barriers

The first initiative of a man seeking the Way must be to reject the habitual image that he has of himself. He will be able to begin to say “I” only when the magical word corresponds to the inner imagination of self-awareness unconstrained by limitations of space, time, or power.

Human beings must retrieve the sense of the reality of themselves. At present, they only limit and diminish themselves, feeling different and smaller than they really are; every thought they conceive and every deed they perform adds one more bar to their prison cell, one more veil to their vision, one more denial of their power. They lock themselves inside the limits of their bodies and attach themselves to the earth that carries them: it is as if an eagle fancied to be a snake and crawled on the ground, ignoring its wings.

It is not only that man ignores, deforms, and denies himself, but that he also reenacts the myth of Medusa, turning everything around him into stone. He observes and sizes nature with weights and measures. He limits the life surrounding him to petty laws, and overcomes the mysteries with petty hypotheses. He freezes the universe into a static unity, and puts himself at the periphery of the world, shyly, humbly, as if he were an accidental secretion, without power or hope.

Man is the center of the universe. All of the cold or incandescent material masses of the myriad worlds out there do not weigh on the scale of values as much as the simplest change in his consciousness. The limits of his body are just an illusion; man does not merely rest on the earth, but he continues through the earth and into cosmic space. Whether he moves his thought or his arms, an entire world moves with him; thousands of mysterious forces hasten toward him in a creative gesture, and all of his daily actions are just the caricature of what really flows divinely toward him.

Thus he should look around himself and free everything that surrounds him from its petrification. Before knowing it, he must imagine that there are conscious energies in the earth, in the waters, in the air, and in fire, and that the so-called natural forces are just modalities of our own substance projected outward. It is not the earth that makes the plant live, but the forces in the plant that draw from the earth the elements necessary for its own life. Something else needs to be grafted onto the sense of the beauty of things, namely the sense of the mystery of things as an obscure and yet intuited reality. Not only must what we can see and know act in us, but the unknown must also be bravely affirmed and felt in all its power.

We must emphasize the need for a special attitude to this point of view, as to any other esoteric one. What matters is to inaugurate something that will often help along the way of spiritual development, namely a way of possessing a concept that amounts to more than merely understanding or remembering it. It is necessary to establish a rhythm: in other words, to present a concept periodically and rhythmically¹ to one’s consciousness, which then grasps it willingly, and not only as a thought but also as a feeling. The contemplation of one’s being and of the world in the manner that I have described generates a sense of greatness and power. We must retain this sense within us, in order to be intensely penetrated by it.

In this way we will be able to establish a relationship of realization with this new vision, which at first will flow into the subconscious, then after some time will be incorporated increasingly into the feeling, in the manner I have described. A new condition will then arise: what was first a mere concept will eventually become the presence of a force, and a state of liberation will be reached, on which the new life may be built.

All the exercises of inner development will be paralyzed unless one breaks the shell of limitation that daily life forms around one, and that still remains in the human subconscious even after a change of perspectives.