Carlo Suarès : La fin du grand mythe III |
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The end of the great myth III
(Extract from Carnet No 3. March 1931) Origins Just as a dream is determined by a root cause which is expressed in a symbolic form, so is History determined by the Myth which is expressed by its symbols. The unfolding of History is the simple projection of the mythical unfolding, the historical determinism is the projection of the mythical determinism. We have seen that Myth and Time have the same origin. Both begin when man, having broken with the unity of Nature, realizes that he is exiled in a duality which he cannot resolve. When his individual "I" opposes the outside world and realizes that it is not of the same nature as him, the dream begins, the dream of the fragments of consciousness that are human individuals. In a collective dream the collective unconscious projects immutable or dramatic symbols, which are more true than the dream, and around which the dream is built. Immediately, the human plots of consciousness, immersed in the dream and identified with it, begin to play, to represent these symbols. In short, they lend themselves to the game of Myth in the most unconscious and natural way, just as dream characters naturally accept to be in the most incredible conditions and to make the most absurd gestures, without being in any way. likely to be surprised. Throughout history, men have identified themselves with their roles to the point of being nothing but puppets oblivious to a drama whose reality has replaced their own reality. By saying "I" each man designates not his essence, but the role he plays. "I", the role, replaced the primordial truth of being to the point of appearing to it as the only truth, the only reality, the essential condition for it to feel alive. Human puppets prefer torture, agony, to the loss of their role and they are right as long as the role lasts But today the drama is over, the Myth is dead, the Truth is beyond all roles: the Myth presents itself to us in its entirety, from the beginning to the end, and it is not that apart from him we can be born. He started separation, he ends today in reconciliation, after the fulfillment of the Scriptures, after all the traditions have been played, after "the end of the world", of this world which has been dreamed for dozens of thousands of years. Each Myth has its unit of Time The Great Myth we are talking about is the one that has been played both in the East and in the West since the beginning of time. We will study his character "Occident" much more than his character "Orient" because of his many adventures, and also because according to the rules of the game it was he who had to bring the end of the game. It was in his role , but this end which it brings is necessarily common. It is indeed impossible that one of the myths ends without the other also ending. The reasons for this necessity will appear gradually in the course of this talk, which will be as brief as a universal subject will allow, and which can never be anything other than an introduction to the Truth. We have said that the starting point of the Great Myth is in the fragmentation of the Consciousness - one into fragmented (consequently sleeping) and isolated consciousnesses . This fragmentation first exists in the form of gigantic collective Entities, which are born, develop, and die in the form of races and civilizations (or cycles of civilizations). Each of these Entities has its own biological development, and its own time. Each has its origin at the beginning of time, since its birth gave birth to time. If we consider some of these Entities, like for example the Hindu Entity, the Chinese Entity or the Mediterranean Entity, (become the West with the Germanic and Slavic contribution and its American branches) we note that time is not at all the same value. A Chinese century, a European century, do not have the same context: in arbitrary terms of clocks they have the same duration, but in true terms of consciousness they are very different, and this is natural, since each of these entities makes its own time (like the characters in a dream make the time of that dream). And not only are these times different, but within one of these Entities the meaning of time varies according to the necessities of the Myth. It is obvious, for example, that in the Mediterranean cycle, ten centuries of ancient Egypt did not bring about the upheavals of consciousness that the 1830-1930 century alone brought. For each of us it is necessary to find balance, not on this side of this life, in going back in time to the dead values of the Judeo-Christian myth, but beyond the breakup, where it ends. To be freed from Time means to be freed from the collective unconscious, which makes collective time, and from the individual unconscious, which makes individual time. Individual time is always linked to collective time, because the individual finds it very difficult to free himself from the grip of the unconscious. It is to loosen this deadly embrace that we will endeavor to describe it. It is obvious that the Judeo-Christian Myth, which had an individual life, its own expression, a particular time, had contacts with all these other characters of the globe: the other Myths. They have spoken to each other, they have had extremely numerous exchanges throughout history. But these innumerable contacts, these exchanges, were identical to those which characters in a dream can talk to each other, who speak to each other, although they are only fragments of one and the same individual. These fragments each have a role to play in relation to the others. So not only is each one a cycle in itself, a drama in itself, but the whole of all these cycles (or characters) is a collective drama in which each particular drama participates. East-West We are led to say a few words on the opposition of the East and the West, and on the possibility of reducing this opposition. Everyone agrees on the need to reconcile these two branches of humanity, but each would like to do so by taking sides for one of them, against the other. In reality it is impossible to resolve a conflict in this way. It can only be resolved by understanding the two antagonists, that is to say by liking them both equally. The East-West problem can in no way be solved by giving superiority to one of the two terms, but we can overcome it if we understand the role that each term plays in relation to the other. Before studying the unfolding of the Mediterranean-Western Myth, it is essential for us to situate it in relation to this other Myth, the Orient, without which we would risk not giving it its true meaning. Let us repeat that we do not take the word Myth in the sense of fable. The Myth, according to the meaning we give it, is the set of real facts, but unconscious, of which the whole history of men is only the projection. The "East" Myth is so completely different from the "West" Myth that if we do not take great care to locate them in relation to each other, we could go so far as to think that the same word cannot be apply to both, and that the conclusions to which we will be led by the examination of the Western Myth, for example, do not concern the East. But that would be a big mistake. These lines are for everyone, because beyond all separations is the universal man, to whom each of us must reach. Our true entity is therefore never below separations, but beyond. If we take sides, within human separations, for one of the sides or the other, it is because we carry this separation in us as a seed carries in it the germ of the species. This germ of separation and conflict, we carry within us, but transposed into an internal conflict, which, if we do not end by reconciliation and internal synthesis, can never be resolved from the outside. Thus, we are going to try to show that the East-West conflict is only the multiplication and the historical projection, on the scene of the world, of an interior conflict in which all men struggle, almost without exception, whose aspects are innumerable, and which we can call for the moment the conflict of intellect and love. The mythical representation of this debate of consciousness is multiplied by all human beings, and these without knowing it, play, since the origin of time, their roles with astonishing precision. The East-West conflict being mythical, it will not be resolved politically, but everyone can resolve it by tearing away their own unconscious: the germ of Myth. And when this conflict ceases within a single individual consciousness, it is that in truth the conflict is ended, because the individual consciousness which resolved the primordial conflict has become universal. This notion is very simple, therefore difficult to realize, but it can already exist virtually for those who want to understand it. The objection that we always make to the one who has completely solved his human problem is this: "you only solved the problem for yourself"; while he affirms, from the supra individual point of view (which no longer distinguishes between "me" and "the others") that the problem is not solved but exceeded, and not for "him" (because "he "No longer exists as a separate entity) but for everyone. It is this point of view there that made us write at the beginning of these pages that the Great Myth is finished, and we understand that it is really finished, even if it still takes hundreds or thousands of years on the world stage, for this end to be projected historically. This end once arrived in the human conscience will propagate its indelible and inescapable presence, its presence more powerful than all. It will destroy civilizations and build others despite the formidable resistance of institutions based on Myth, which proudly claim to be indestructible. Where are the East and the West We call Western the civilization which is today that of Europe, the Americas, Australia, etc. It has a mentality which is specific to it. Its culture is of Mediterranean origin (Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Rome) with Germanic contributions whose significance we will examine below, its religions are variations on the Judeo-Christian theme. We call (the) Eastern Asian civilizations. Our goal being to expose the primordial Myth we can only quickly locate on the one hand Russia, on the other hand Islam (branches detached from the Judeo-Christian branch) straddling the East and the West properly said, and this despite their importance. We will return later to Russia and its particular role. Many Easterners regard the West as a branch which has detached itself from the Asian and traditional tree and which is struck with sterility unless it submits to the primitive tradition. This seems completely false to us. It seems more accurate to say that in their relationships the East is Adam and the West Eve. By recognizing this feminine role in the West, we will better understand her adventures, the adventures in which she trained her companion, and also her essential role for the final synthesis, where the two Characters must recognize that they were not, one and the other, that half the human truth. The West, this madwoman, had to fatally gather the fruit of the "science of good and evil" and lead the East on a common adventure. The East in the stability and the fixity of the knowledge of the eternal had already let itself fatally led from the start, and despite itself. Adam and Eve each represent one of the poles of the Myth, and are therefore both imperfect. Speaking of the East, we will especially have in mind the Hindu tradition, because it has a great unity, while the Chinese tradition, probably not less ancient, is twofold because it includes a social tradition which has separated from the metaphysical tradition and which is independent of it. Thus China already offers by itself a duality while the Hindu Myth is an exact application of the fundamental principle of non-duality. Tradition and revolution Asia is based on an impersonal traditional knowledge, the West operates by successive revolutions a research based on the reality of individuals. We will analyze these two methods in more detail below. The first drives the individual out of himself into an extra-personal reality, the second brings the outside world within the individual. The first does not attach primordial importance to the individual, the second on the contrary makes the individual the central motif of his drama. The Hindu tradition is based entirely on the claim that the intellect has to know for itself the whole truth. By this we do not mean to say that India ignores devotion. It would be wrong. Huge crowds in India get carried away by devotion. But the original tradition, because it considers the individual as unreal instead of exalting it, colors everything with a color complementary to that of the West, even devotion. These are really like two complementary colors, which we find in all areas of life. Thus in art the Asian "decorates" a traditional and impersonal background, while the Western artist, in a personal work, seeks much more his own reason for being than he cares about making beautiful. You don't "decorate" a revolution. The Oriental is in advance subject to a metaphysical tradition, the Western is in advance rebellious, he wants to experiment. In the eastern tradition the metaphysical absolute replaces the personal experience it despises, while the personal, individual, Western experience despises everything it calls "theories." To provisionally designate this fundamental distinction, we say that the essence of the Hindu tradition is metaphysical and intellectual, while the essence of the Western motive is revolutionary, experimental, religious, personal. Take care: we do not make generalizations about the characters of Hindus or Europeans. Let us not be told that we find intellectual Hindus and Europeans passionate. It would be absurd. By saying that the Hindu tradition is solely based on the intellect, we are talking about a particular formation, within which exists the greatest wealth of varieties, and whose unconscious data have determined the history during the millennia that lasted the Myth. Besides, this point of view will become clearer in the rest of this talk. Hindu tradition The total knowledge of the pure intellect is by definition immutable and exists beyond all individual research. It exists by itself, it does not need any authority or any religious institution to support it. It is tradition itself, purely intellectual and metaphysical, and does not include the slightest sentimental and moral element. It is, beyond nature, beyond all that varies, beyond unity itself (unity is an affirmation) the primordial principle of non-duality, Brahma. It is, it therefore exists outside all evolution and all progress, it does not participate in the relative, it is the absolute certainty which goes beyond symbols and words, and which consequently can never be exposed. Its object is beyond the subject-object distinction. The means of this knowledge is one with knowledge itself. The intellect being supra-individual considers discursive reasoning only as an instrument of secondary importance. The intellect is truer than science: it is universal, while science only reaches the general. The metaphysical point of view is essentially and by definition unlimited since it rejects all that is not unlimited as not being it. He uses symbols because not only the rites but the words themselves are symbols, but through symbols metaphysical truth only wants to suggest, it does not express itself. It is beyond religions, beyond philosophy, it has no relation to anything based on the individual, psychology, etc. because it is independent of it. Metaphysics does not consider any duality as irreducible, it does not stop at the spirit-matter duality, it is stopped by nothing. It is not even the knowledge of being, because being is "something", therefore a determined expression. Metaphysics is indeterminate. So most of the philosophical problems which concern the West are regarded with regard to it as child's play, like hollow discussions on artificial data with individual and hypothetical starting points which have nothing in common with the truth "Pure intellectual knowledge is knowledge par excellence, which penetrates into the nature of things" [ 1 ]. Knowing and being are one and the same thing. There is therefore no theory of knowledge that philosophy can substitute for knowledge, but the theory of the Hindu tradition is only a preparation for the corresponding realization. The rites like theory aim to transform virtual knowledge into effective knowledge. This intellectual absolute is so formidable that the whole Hindu tradition leans on it without any help of any kind. Only the Hindu is found within the tradition. This doctrine which is purely timeless automatically rejects outside itself all the variations which do not belong to it, and accepts only orthodox variations whose expressions aim at adapting the tradition to particular mental and social conditions to the course of history. Orthodoxy is by definition true knowledge. All that is not it is false by definition. We therefore understand very well that Buddhism could never have taken root in India, because the Orthodox tradition considers it, as Mr. Rene Guinon says, as a doctrine degenerated from a sentimental point of view. Intellect and emotions Before going further let us say right away that, from our point of view, the non-duality to which the intellect claims to arrive by dominating over love, although total, although infinite, although indefinite, already resides within a mythical brain-heart duality. In this duality, the one of the two terms who believes that he is victorious at the expense of the other is in truth overcome by his own illusion. But beyond this duality, the intellect and love both pushed to their extreme limit, both victors also, realize that they were only different and equally necessary expressions of the same life. A very serious mistake made by metaphysicians is to oppose the changing world of emotions to total intellectual knowledge. The register of emotions and feelings intellectually corresponds to the lower register of individual reasoning, which also has nothing to do with truth. But intellectual infinity also corresponds to infinity of love, to identification by the intellect an identification by love. Just as there is a fusion by the intellect of the subject and the object, so there is a fusion of the subject and the object by love. Synthesis plus Analysis Thus clarifies our point of view, because we affirm that Truth is the synthesis of the two poles, but not the affirmation of one at the expense of the other. The metaphysical East is in the same illusion as the scientific West. As we said quite at the beginning of this talk, the equation can only be solved in a positive sense which includes the two elements: positive = positive + negative. Or: synthesis = synthesis + analysis. The synthesis which opposes "analytical error" the knowledge which opposes love, are trapped in their own myth. The East-West opposition can only be resolved by a complete transformation of the two poles by one another. In truth, intellect = intellect + love; and in Truth, love = love + intellect. This result is the pure act of which we spoke at the beginning, which is the Truth, and the culmination of our total being. Total liberation is in no way a total metaphysical liberation with in addition a total liberation through love. It is not about becoming a full-fledged yogi and then moving on to another kind of exercise. It is not a question of developing one aspect thoroughly and then the other, identifying yourself first with one of the poles and then with the other. The liberation we are talking about which is both intellect and love is completely foreign to the particular ways of the two aspects taken separately. It does not lend itself to their game, it does not accept their initial separation, and is therefore not obliged to go through all their respective complications. The intellect and love fertilize each other, Truth is their perfect harmony, it is not a question of quantity. To discover Brahma through Ishwara and throughout the manifestation it is essential, since we only use the intellect, to have unlimited theoretical knowledge which has no connection with the Truth. Likewise, to discover God through mystical love, it is essential to die of love for an object, through which one seeks, which has nothing to do with Truth. In one case it is necessary to have an enormous amount of intellectuality without which one is sure in advance not to find Brahma, in the other one must be capable of an enormous devotion without which one does not find God. Let us be forgiven for a somewhat simple comparison: these enormous amounts of intellect and devotion are of the same order as what the frog aspires to make itself as enormous as the ox. When it explodes it seems to him that it is eternity ... And even if it became as big as the ox, yes even if it found its Brahma or its God, what would it have accomplished there? Truth is by no means a question of quantity, but of balance, and for equilibrium to be perfect it is necessary that both intellect and love have exceeded quantity. Thus the total metaphysical deliverance, the total knowledge of Brahma, far from being even a step towards the Truth, is opposed to the Truth of all the steps which it has placed between it and the one who seeks it. Truth is much simpler than anything one can understand or imagine, it belongs neither to the East nor to the West, and neither condemns either, but it belongs to the "Integral man." Two mythical domains To those who would not like to believe that, to give an example, Western colonization, or Islam, in Asia came to bring love there, remember that to designate the two mythically separated functions, we also used the symbolic terms brain and heart. In speaking of love, or of the heart, we include in these terms love and all its opposites; whatever desire, envy, greed, thirst for possessions, like the most generous disinterestedness, cruelty, hatred, passion, the spirit of revolt, like peace of heart, in short all heroic or cowardly expressions, beautiful or ugly, selfish or altruistic, which do not belong to the intellect. And what we call intellect or brain is also the intellect with all its opposites in its own domain, such as ignorance, reasoning, classification, organization etc. In these two vast domains, love and intellect proper differ from their opposites only because they have rediscovered their essence, and because they have freed themselves from both the subject and the object, and of all other dualities. But already their own initial duality is mythical, and is in no way different from other mythical dualities whatever the claims that the intellect or the love may have of finding non-duality on their own. Each domain has an infinity which is specific to it but which it is wrong to believe to be universal. Without their knowledge, and from the start, intellect and love play roles by associating themselves with all other dualities. Thus the intellect is the expression of the immutable non-manifested, which dominates creation, love is the expression of what is created. For thousands of years, the Orient has been waiting for the West to finish playing its passion through all the dramatic anxieties of the Great Illusion. But today the Maya is over, the phenomenon can be real, the act can be Truth, the two poles meet. What the Orient has been waiting for has arrived, the roles are played, the Myth is finished. And if we propose to follow the Myth of the West in its unfolding both symbolic and historical, it is in order to mark its accomplishment, and to finally call to life outside of the bewitchments which have become useless, of all the bewitchments, those of the West and those of the East. The Hindu spell The main object of our presentation will be to highlight the Mediterranean and Western enchantment, which to a certain extent will be facilitated by its extraordinarily dramatic aspect. It was a real theatrical performance that took place, with successive acts, and heartbreaking "passions". Whole peoples have set off, have spoken to God, have mimicked their enthusiasms and their delusions, have cut their throats by carrying everywhere with them, in them, their original curse and their invincible tenacity, through a whole similar History to a stormy black night, streaked with lightning. During all this time, the unchanging Orient waited in an absolute which also was only a role. And here is that at the time of all the Apocalypses, without knowing why or how the East in its turn is caught in revolutions. It is indisputable, for example, that Hindu unity is broken by Islam, which comes from the Judeo-Christian tree. There, Islam acts as a solvent, a revolutionary ferment, an ally of the West, against which the Hindu tradition is unable to defend itself. But to study the transformations of the oriental spell, if only with a few details, would be an inordinate task which, moreover, would make us lose sight of our essential goal. Far from being the curve of a dramatic development, these transformations are infinite variations on the same theme. The West has traveled an immense trajectory on its own, while the East has barely moved around a single center, which is a metaphysical absolute, a non-duality apprehended by being, after being the whole is identified with the intellect. From this initial theme was born the initial spell, because the intellect after having enslaved love began to build a universe complete in itself, and mythical. Indeed, being being entirely located within one of its faculties, the intellect, it was forced to attribute to the single intellect a character of reality, and to attribute to its other faculty, love, an illusory character. Recognizing only within a part of oneself (as does the character "I" in a dream) he took the part for the whole. Hence the relationships which unite Brahma metaphysical (intellectual) non-duality to the universe: the manifested universe is distinguished from it only in an illusory manner, because nothing, by definition, is outside of it , but he, Brahma, is absolutely distinguished from the universe, declaring it illusory. It is a question of piercing the illusion, of freeing oneself from the great Maya, therefore also from the faculty of love and all that it entails, that is to say experience in all its forms. shapes. Such a starting point can only give a total doctrine, perfectly coherent, perfectly exclusive of everything else, with all its innumerable ramifications in all areas of life. It exists by itself, it is much more than an atmosphere, it is a real spell. We can be outside of this spell, and therefore not understand it and do not accept it, but if we are inside it, we are forced to accept it whole we are no longer free to leave it because its grip is total. Let us say in passing that if this spell had not this absolute character it could not have been maintained. The Western spell, on the other hand, having an essentially passionate, experimental and changing character, gives the sense of freedom it needs to evolve. Christ, like the French Revolution, insisted on freedom. As to what men do with it is another matter. Be that as it may, the Hindu spell has endeavored to fully maintain over the centuries the definitive intellectual knowledge of which it was the depositary. Speaking of this spell, we are obliged to consider it as an entity existing in itself, independently of all the individuals who have identified with it. These individuals have not escaped the general law that, as long as a particular myth has not ended, the individuals who constitute like the cells of this myth, can truly liberate themselves, but by performing the gestures and taking the attitudes that correspond to the essence of the myth. We will see how in the West gestures have varied as the Myth unfolded. In the East on the contrary, the Myth having been immutable, liberations have always been made according to the same representation. When schisms occurred, like Buddhism, the representations separated in a very clear way, each having its own life, hence the coexistence in Asia of different civilizations, while the West despite all its diversities has, at each instant, only one "dominant". Mythical representations The process by which intellectual knowledge crystallizes into doctrines and social laws is fairly simple to understand. First of all, if we take back what we said previously about time, we must note that it is impossible to trace the origin of the Great Myth, since the Myth and Time have a common origin, and are only two aspects of the same phenomenon. The Myth was therefore not created by individuals, any more than individuals were created by him, but each individual carries within himself, in his unconscious, the initial theme of the unsolved Myth. The whole purpose and raison d'etre of an individual is to solve the Myth, but he can only do it according to him, since the problem he has to solve is given by the Myth. This has always been true, for all Myths, and for all eras. It is only today that individual deliverance can reach the absolute truth of synthesis-analysis which is beyond all Myths, for it is the first time since the origin of time that times are accomplished. We must never stop keeping this accomplishment in mind because it creates possibilities that contradict all historical laws. When we speak of the necessity in which individuals have been in the course of history, it will be understood once and for all that these necessities no longer affect us. Thus the need where individuals have always been to solve the Myth is replaced by the possibility that we have of going beyond the Myth. But, to return to the Hindu Myth, on the one hand the great Liberates to whom he gave birth through the ages could only represent the man-intellect delivered from the Maya, on the other hand the enormous human masses who were born and died within this Myth could only represent, in the Maya, the projection of these deliverances. Let us not forget that the means of knowledge is one with knowledge itself. When knowledge is purely metaphysical it has absolutely nothing to do with psychology. Consequently from the beginning of his research, the individual, this isolated element of consciousness which carries in its unconscious the theme of the intellectual Myth, has already accepted the existence of a universal will, and has already submitted to it. It is even in this that the fact of belonging to this Myth resides. Therefore individual research continues according to the laws of this will, because by definition the individual desire to reach knowledge does not recognize its true amorous nature. Because desire does not have the freedom of choice it seems to be non-existent, and the will believes itself alone This is how the intellect, or Adam,which constitutes the true entity of this character that is the Hindu Myth, has its own will, which has already been expressed from its origin, and which from its origin has distributed the individuals following a hierarchy governed by its laws, just like a magnet coordinates according to its magnetic laws of iron filings. Its laws are logical and coordinated, from the simple fact that the intellectual ideal is sensed by everyone from the start (it is the initial theme of the Myth which separates the individual from the universal, the "me" from "that ", Seen from the intellectual side), and yet this ideal, with very few exceptions, is never achieved by anyone. The result is the following illusion: theory and all the paths of knowledge, methods, established orders, development laws, categories, classifications, divisions, correspondences, oppositions, huge accumulations of doctrines , of social and individual laws, and the formidable apparatus of Hindu orthodoxy, the most complete that is in the world, all this thousand-year-old apparatus which for the most orthodox spirit is an application of the truth, is on the contrary an intellectual scaffolding that the intellect has built itself to achieve its fulfillment. The organized illusion The intellect starts from the principle that the whole creation is an absolutely nonexistent illusion in front of its own infinity, but it wants to govern this illusion and this nullity by applying the truth to the Maya, without realizing that from its own point in view the truth once applied to the illusion is no longer in any way the truth, but the illusion itself. Whatever the degrees of illusion, metaphysical truth is completely absent, because truth has no degrees. The indefinitely one-eyed metaphysical absolute thus condemns itself to fabricating an indefinitely long collective time within an "illusion" in which it has forever refrained from recognizing any reality whatsoever, but which it wants to enslave for its own ends. Far from being an "application" of metaphysical perfection, all of Hindu life is its slave. And as this perfection is inhuman since it is only the absolute affirmation of only one of the human faculties which has usurped the entity Man (Manas means both intellect and man), its domination is also inhuman. We will give just one more example before tackling the Western Myth: that of the castes. The caste system is based on the Dharma of each, that is to say on the fact that according to his own nature, each individual behaves in a particular way, has certain skills, can fulfill certain functions and develop according to certain lines. Now we are made up of two elements: on the one hand atavism, on the other hand what constitutes our personal and original strength, what "characterizes" us from our birth [ 2 ] . We have characteristics that make us belong to one typological group rather than another. These groups can be established for convenience according to very different classifications. "Primitive types and Metatypes constitute a true Human Natural Series, the genus of which is defined by the Constitution, the species by temperament, the individual by the determination of the type". All of these "characters" determine our abilities, and these should determine our social functions. "It will never occur to anyone," says Dr. Martiny, "to harness a thoroughbred to a plow, or to run a draft horse." Now, in principle, if we give the word "caste" its true meaning "social function", we see that this is a natural law which until now had been ignored by Western civilization. But the rigid and theoretical system according to which each individual from before his birth belongs to a social caste from which in practice it will be, despite the theory, absolutely impossible to leave, this doctrine which takes no account of personality, but which defines the individual by the atavism which he is supposed to have and by the social function of his parents, this tradition which declares "illusion, Maya" in front of all the psychological data, far from being an "application" of the truth, is a a real anonymous, inexorable, tyrannical mythocracy, which uses human individuals as instruments. If human categories are a natural fact, how can we establish them in advance? Contemporary typological research, the "tests" which allow the true nature of the child to be identified, and finally the institutes for vocational guidance correspond more to the truth. To subject an individual, whoever he is, to a law which claims to "correspond" to a natural law, and which claims to "apply it", is quite simply to replace this natural law with an artificial law which has nothing to do with common with the truth. The example of the castes can be extended to the whole Hindu system, to all the systems of the world, to all the rites, to all the theories, to all the theological sums that the earth saw flourish and die, to all "ways" , to all doctrines, to all Churches. Whenever men wanted to "apply" the truth they did the opposite: they built scaffolding which were to lead them to it, believing that they could build in time simulacra and images of what cannot be nor simulated or imagined, the absolute truth, the eternal. Adam's role The Great East-West Myth can also be called the metaphysical-experience myth, or the knowledge-science myth, or the synthesis-analysis myth, or the absolute-transitory myth, or the truth-illusion myth, or the impersonality-personality, myth. or the myth that-me, or the myth brain-heart, etc Speaking in an extremely general way one can say that the human groupings are distributed so as to represent, to play, these two roles. The purpose of this dramatic representation is the reconciliation of the two Characters, who are fairly well symbolized by Adam and Eve. (Each Character in turn has in him the two elements, which are the Myth itself and its historical representation; this in turn has the two elements which are men and women; each human being in turn has the two elements which are intelligence and feelings, or the soul and the body, and so on indefinitely, everywhere and always until "representing" the Myth in all the complexities of life). The roles of the two Characters of the Great Myth can be defined according to what we call these Characters, but the names, although different, will tell the same story. "Eternity" must remain unchanging, in order to fertilize the "illusion", to constantly fertilize it through historical development, until the day when, after multiple metamorphoses, the "illusion" finally gives birth to the Truth. For its part, the fertilizing element has in spite of itself undergone the transformations it has imposed. If its path is less dramatic, less painful, and less long, it nevertheless has the same duration as the other. The two movements can be compared to those of a clock hand: the hand which indicates the hours moves only from one sign to another while the analytical minute hand is obliged to go around the whole dial. At the "new hour", however, they are both displaced, and no longer overlap. They were united at midnight, they will not be united again until midday. The hour hand will never once depart from its quiet logic, while the other will have had to repeat the truth twelve times without knowing it. Because of this destiny, the Judeo-Christian adventure is essentially dramatic and symbolic. The twelve apostles, the cross at six o'clock, death at nine o'clock, and the sun which darkened until noon, then finally the sun of the great noon, these symbolic signs which immediately come to mind , among hundreds of other symbols, already indicate the opposition of the characters of the two Characters of the Great Myth. All of Judeo-Christian history represents the passion for achieving final birth, and the appalling cries of the Woman, condemned by the Myth to give birth in pain. But let the East beware, because here is childbirth, the human has just been born, and Truth also has just been born, which is universal. Let the East be as careful as the West, because we have all played enough, that is enough, the roles no longer have any meaning, and their hypnotic power will be smashed to pieces in the midst of the greatest convulsions. 1 Rene Guinon (from which our brief exposition of Hindu doctrines is inspired). 2 V. Art. by Dr. Martigny in "Notebooks of the Star" Nov-Dec. 1929. La fin du grand mythe III at a par Carlo Suarés - 3e millinaire |