Éric Baret: Interview #9

[Guest guest]

INTERVIEWER: So, in a way, we could say that all these meditation

techniques, pranayama, yoga, exercises, repeating mantra, reading

scriptures, is like what Shankaracharya said about the

scriptures: " Before one is realized, one cannot understand them, and

afterwards they are not needed. "

 

It is like that in a way. Jean Klein said that he could only

understand sexual intimacy after his freedom. Before that, he was

always very interested in the subject, he had sexual relations with

women but it was a mystery to him. It is after he realized what the

body really was that he could really understand Tantra and the

relationship between two bodies. He said that before that, he had

had

a glimpse of it, because of yoga and because of his intelligence,

but

it was only afterwards when he realized that the body was nothing,

that he could understand what physical relationship was. So, all the

traditional arts can only be understood from the forefeeling of

silence. You can only listen to music or watch dance from stillness.

One cannot really do mantra, yoga or anything, as long as one

pretends to be the doer. Of course, it is clearer in the traditional

arts, because they are created for the sole purpose of bringing this

very fact to light.

 

What comes directly from purity is beauty. When somebody recites a

mantra it is beauty, joy, and it is the same with yoga, dance,

making

a temple, reciting poetry. Traditional art is done for the sake of

beauty, not as a means of reinforcing the fantasy of being

enlightened. Projections of being enlightened or being superman are

the same fantasy. So, there are no more problems with women, no more

problems with money, no more problems with the body, no one is

disturbed by the neighbour. We stop pretending to be anything other

than what we are and in this silence, all the beauty of the

traditional forms can really be appreciated for what it is and not

as

a way to becoming free. It is seeing beauty itself, in action. That

is why in the tantric tradition of Kashmirian non-dualism, the arts

have been heavily emphasized, as opposed to yoga and the classical

Vedanta tradition, where art is seen as a distraction for the

senses.

 

In the Kashmir tradition, we sense that the senses are beauty

itself.

Through the expression and feeling of the senses, one can really

forefeel the beauty beyond the senses. That is the specificity of

the

Kashmir tradition, compared to all other Indian traditions.

Generally

in India spirituality is thought of as freeing one's self from the

senses. As seen from this tradition, nothing is disturbing,

everything is welcome and the joy and beauty of feeling is silence

speaking. Nothing is separate from it. Everything brings us back to

the resonance. Abhinavagupta wrote about this feeling resonating as

beauty, but he's kind of unique in the Indian tradition.