by Eric Baret (translated by Jeanric Meller)
I become available to the moment. I don’t need to change anything in myself: my fears, my arrogance, my pretenses, my limits. I need all of that to sense the limitless.
Everything changes, but the only change that is needed is the one that shows up in the moment. All the energies that were utilized to fabricate, to own, will now rest in this availability and become accessible for true creation. This creation is a celebration: it expresses gratitude, not affirmation.
Spirituality is a concept. What people project on so-called spirituality, they used to project on their Boy Scout team when they were six, on their football team when they were ten, on politics at twenty and on marriage at thirty…
This void that we try to fill with a doll, an electric train, a good grade at school, a career, a child, we then try to project onto spirituality. When we do that, we must respect it; but it is only fear.
True spirituality is gratitude. Meister Eckhart makes a difference between true prayer, heart prayer, the celebration of divine accomplishment, and prayer that comes from lack, that tries to ask for a correction. That last is not prayer, but a form of abscess.
True prayer is gratitude. True spirituality is a stillness that makes one available for every moment. When cancer, disease, birth, violence, emotions strike, be available: there lies the depth.
Boy Scouts, politics, spirituality, the child, the football team all have their place, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Wanting to set ourselves free from all our problems to become spiritual, to become “awakened,” has its place too. These beliefs, these references, this knowledge, all come from fear.
There comes a time when you don’t feel the need to look for yourself in the different currents of life. You are shining light onto spirituality, not the other way around. It is your clarity that allows you to deeply understand what are politics, fatherhood, violence, disease, Buddhism, Islam. Your clarity shines light on all of that.
Then there isn’t any word, any direction, any knowledge, any school, any lineage, any teaching, and, above all, any spiritual person. What remains is non-separateness.
I understand that there is nothing to understand, nothing to acquire. I do not need to invent tools to face life, to create ways to defend or affirm myself to deal with situations. I look honestly at what is there, at what triggers fear, anxiety, pretense, defense in me. I clearly accept my pretenses, my limits. These limits will reflect the limitless.
We need to live our mediocrity: it reveals the ultimate in us.
When I refuse mediocrity, when I imagine, when I project a superior or an inferior -, spiritual things that ought to set me free from ordinary life -, then I am in my imagination. It is a form of psychosis. Mediocrity – what my beliefs call mediocrity – is the essential itself.
Let’s function in day to day life: eat, sleep, love, see, feel, look. Let all the emotions live inside of us. Nothing to defend, to affirm, to know. We do not need anything to get a feeling for the primordial. No need to change anything in ourselves.
This text is an excerpt from the book De l’abandon by Eric Baret soon to be translated and published in English.
