Carlo Suarés : De Quelques Apprentis-Sorciers : Some Apprentice Sorcerers : Introduction + Gandhi

CARLO SUARÉS SOME APPRENTICE-SORCIERS Gandhi   *   John XXIII   *   Teilhard de Chardin Lecomte du No|y   *   CG Jung 1965 Editions + ETRE LIBRE + 20, rue Phre De Deken Bruxelles

Evil is living with fear, because it breeds hatred, distorts thinking and perverts all existence ... It is therefore absolutely necessary that a person religious be completely freed from the fear ... ... In fear are darkness where neither exists affection, understanding and love. KRISHNAMURTI

Man's psychological structure, developed over millennia, is inadequate in the world current. It has run out. Correcting it is useless: it must be broken. This work is an attempt to show that it is possible to break this inner shell, and by therefore to be able to approach our human problems in a new way. But the thought is so made that she can be in error believing herself in the truth and can only find the truth by perceiving her errors. We propose in this work to examine: a politician who wanted, in politics, to apply one's religious convictions (Gandhi); a religious leader who, starting from his religious convictions, wanted to express political ideas (John XXIII); a religious (Teilhard de Chardin) who was a man of science; a scientist (Lecomte du Nouy) who led to religion; and, finally, the prince of apprentices sorcerers (CG Jung) who, by dint of exploring the unconscious, revived the dragons who transported him in prehistory. During our presentations, we think readers will be able to ask themselves a lot of questions.

I Gandhi or the fear of emptiness. 1. - Our world escapes the measurable, therefore thought. The abrupt historical turn of our time raises, on all planes of consciousness, rots that arise as problems whose statements do not exist. The planetary body, is perceiving sensitive in all its points, far from drawing unity, is overturned in a frightening process of multiplication. How many men are there? And how many states? How many nations, peoples, aspirations, frustrations, empty bellies, bellies? How many trees on the planet and how many leaves on each tree? How many grains of dust? How many living cells? How much resurrected dead? How many millionths of a millimeter in a hundred million light years? And how does this crazy multiplication keep dividing? The irruption of the immeasurable in the world of measure destroyed the utterances. Without statements, no problems: abstractions, projections. Practical research and its applications, theoretical research and its consequences, feed daily our admiration. Transistors, the laser, as soon as discovered - or invented - become major sciences with innumerable and unforeseen branches. There is the operations specialist in the brains of spiders. So the solution of each problem that arises is an opening on endless openings. But it is impossible to venture through one of them without establishing contacts with more and more numerous and varied worlds. There have been a dozen sciences combined with during a geographic study. In opposition to these wonders, the thought from these same lobes, so ingenious, so inventive, is in a state bankruptcy in what concerns the essential: the solemn interrogation of consciousness, facing the World and herself. In depth as in depth, in human relationships according to needs material as in the caves of what is called the unconscious, "rotting without data" routs the fallacious projections of the mind which, for millennia, believed to rule. As long as they are objects - mechanical or living, chemical or physical - of structure physiological elements of which lend themselves to a measure of a kind, thought triumphs in terms of nomenclatures. But in what escapes the representation: the magna teeming with three billion beings human (it is the social and the economic) like the bottomless abyss of the inner being (is not the individual the duration), there is no longer thought, there is confusion. 2. - Confusion in the human expanse. A single example will suffice, borrowed from Mr. Alfred Sauvy ("Le Monde", September 8, 9 and 10, 1964). No let this chapter be important. It is primarily so. The most exalted thought will be despicable so much that she will give herself reasons for not knowing how to find a way to feed, house, clothe. Observe first, explain then, plan if possible, writes M Alfred Sauvy, under the title "Myths and Realities on the Job, such should be the golden rule of all those which, for some reason, risk a judgment on the economy. But this order is almost never followed. The experience, this embarrassing, this destructive, is condemnable and condemned, or at best ignored. Since the war events have inflicted the most sensational denials that have ever been provided to current doctrines a collective thought The chronicle of these denials would be instructive, although it is not necessary to be a cleric to see subject matter experts are running out of steam behind events they are supposed to lead. In in this case, Mr. Alfred Sauvy deals effectively with the relationship between technical automation and employment. Unemployment, he says, has been denounced as the fatal result of technical progress, accepted thesis for a long time by all socialist schools. (Let's add, for our account, that this theory, confirmed in detail each time workers are evicted by machines, but invalidated in the whole, tends to make the proletariat one of the most reactionary elements of society, which many Marxists would be surprised if they agreed to "observe first".) In 1938, it was still seriously claimed in France that it was impossible to find more jobs, lack of outlets. And since then, there has been the threat of a return to the crisis everywhere, devastating plague. In a different form, socialists and conservatives unite in the same apprehension. The force of the myth is such that when, against all forecasts, without exception, the Germans have integrated their seven million refugees, the most extravagant reasons have been given ... speaks of "German miracle". When we talk about a miracle, it's because we don't understand, but when we does not understand, it must be recognized. After examining the situation in other countries, we see a bouquet already sufficient, adds the author, to justify a revision of doctrines. Only, in fact, it is not so much doctrine as feelings, or, if you prefer, the doctrine is inspired by a feeling: fear, fear of emptiness. This is why, in economic thought, nothing has changed. 3. - The origin of the problems of the extent is in the depth. The United States seems to contradict the brilliant series of European "miracles", writes M. Sauvy. It is affirmed everywhere, and in very high places, that not only unemployment is tenacious, but that it increases from year to year, or from cycle to cycle, under the effect, we add, of automation. From then, a theory would be plausible: European countries are still in secondary school, where the number of jobs are increasing, but more advanced, the United States has already reached the threshold at which the number of jobs is decreasing under the influence of technical progress and the saturation of needs. This thesis, according to Mr. Sauvy, is inaccurate, because the needs are not saturated. Unemployment is due to a insufficient pace of productivity in the United States. The defenders of this thesis recognize that the needs are not saturated. How then can they support it? To name just one of the experts in cybernetics and automation, Robert Theobald, Harvard University: a class struck by permanent poverty emerges in the midst of potential abundance [1] . To absorb unemployment, it estimates the United States should absorb an annual production increase of 40 billion dollars before 1970, 60 billion before 1980 and 150 billion before the end of the century. He's referring to Mr. Richard Bellman, one of the best experts in the field, he adds that the two percent more qualified people could, in the near future, produce all consumer goods and the services necessary for society. The American economy knows very well that it must accelerate its rate of productivity. Mr. Robert Theobald rightly notes on this subject that commercial advertising in the USA is part of national education. Its budget is about to exceed that of schools and universities. The parents that allow their children to gut themselves in front of chopped TV commercials, their give the civic education of the good citizen, whose first duty is to be a buyer. The problem is not not yet resolved and, according to Mr. Theobald, will never be resolved on this basis. Indeed, if it were, the United [1] See "Main currents in modern thought", September-October 1964. According to the author, 38 million people, one fifth of the population, live in poverty in the United States. States, which, producing only a fraction of their potential capacity, already consume and destroy more 40 pc of world products, would soon devour the total production of the globe. Humanity would be in front of an insatiable Moloch, who would not be long in dying. So we are not faced with an economic problem to be solved, but on the threshold of an unimaginable social revolution, which will force us to rethink from scratch everything that makes up our way of life. We are at a turning point where no problem that arises can be resolved in its compartment. We must therefore broaden Mr. Sauvy's observation on all levels: the doctrine is inspired by a feeling of fear, fear of emptiness. This is why in economic thought, nothing has not moved, and see clearly that all doctrines, whatever their nature: economic, social, moral or religious, emanate from the fear of emptiness, this emptiness of the mind which alone allows direct observation of phenomena. This fear paralyzes the thought, makes it sick in front of the forces immense that it unleashes irreversibly. Only one remedy: make yourself new. It's obvious: any doctrine is based on a past that is no more. Approach the present in terms of acquired knowledge is not to see it. Mr. Sauvy would like the observation to be based on "I don't understand". It's indeed the only chance we can give ourselves to continue and understand the movement - psychological, social, historical - which one strives to observe. This double movement, inside and outside, in depth and in extent, is so fast in our time that the observer does not have time to stop at doctrines, at conclusions: he must run. And there is not just problems to solve. Something new is needed in all areas: in art, in politics and, above all, in religion. But what is new? How to define it? How to perceive it? How, first, the create? Can we tighten this notion up to bring out the new? Can it arise collectively or is it not on the contrary, does it not have a profound modification within the consciousness of being? 4. - Anything new in art? The new is never new. Hence its success. The new declares itself by comparison, that it modifies the old by taking advantage of it, that is to say that it opposes it, by putting (Marx against Hegel) the feet at the head place. The first case consoles itself by inventing "progress", the second freezes the mind in formulas which, being "overturned", only resist better (the dogma, denied by all events, of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis"). It is hardly worth mentioning "the search" for new art. The "Art Nouveau" of the beginning of the century, although it sometimes provokes a smile, maintains the dignity of a job well done. With the current proliferation of everything, everywhere, "fear of emptiness" interior (unleashing of ambitions) and exterior (outraged advertising) secretes its psycho-drug: novelty. It is necessary, more and more scandalous, smeared, terrifying, badly made, monstrous, enormous. And it takes a lot. More and more, because the senses are dull, and you only have twenty hundredths of a second to make a painting of twenty square meters, we only have twenty hundredths of a second to declare it a masterpiece. Failing to face the void, we devour nothing. The admirable achievements of the photo and the film in color raise the question: is painting dead? In response we kill her. Everyone has been doing it since the age of two. Painting is so easy: just with anything, to put, any way, colors on any surface. In France, a thousand-five hundred galleries, fifty "salons" with the reinforcement of prefectures, sub-prefectures, town halls and schools - since kindergarten - show more kilometers of picture rails each year than there are highways in the whole territory. For childhood, "painting" is first of all a projective test. Applied to adults - painters, merchants and customers - in most cases, the same psychological deterioration and mental which appears in the abuse of discs, radios, televisions, songs, films, spectacles. Here, as elsewhere, the data of the problem are swallowed up. The architecture and its extensions in sculpture and painting, being functional, is out of the question. Here, a spirit empty of doctrines, theories and these hypocritical conventions which overflowed, until a recent times, in allegorical women, in angels playing the trumpet, in acanthus leaves, in columns, in capitals, in pediments, an empty mind, therefore free to observe and objectively define the terrain, the landscape, the material, the necessities of town planning and the program to be carried out, can, on these solid foundations, to design a work in the service of human freedom. It can encourage men to decondition themselves. By the judicious use of masses and colors, it can be psychically beneficial. But on what bases do they claim to base a painting and a sculpture that claim to be arts major - like symphonic music - when they are only the projection of minds infants, sick of self-inflation? ("The princes dream is to be artists, the artists dream is to be gods "..." The artist has a temperament, a sensitivity, which the vulgar does not know "..." The artist is a being apart in society "..." Where is Charlemagne? Michelangelo remains "..., etc.) In the" compartment ;tables, the Stock Exchange is that of signatures. Cult of personalities? same not. It is the craze of "manners". And commercial speculation. The crash of this fair forbids emptiness, the emptiness in silence of which one would wonder if it exists, if it can exist a point of contact between the deep consciousness of a "something" that transcends Reason and Art as an expression of this non-mythified reality. Is there, can there be a common point between the unthinkable and the image; between the timeless and the work of the hands; between the modified continuity of the past (that are the tools and the techniques) and the creation which, in the true sense of this word, abolishes the past, being new? Such would be the meditations of the void, of the spirit which would say "I don't know" and which, therefore, would have maybe a chance to be an artist. 5. - Anything new in politics? In politics, new men are less new than old men. The task of these is to make lively events they did not foresee or the unforeseeable consequences of their ministry. They learn every day that we have entered the era of excess, therefore of the unpredictable, because we can only predict what can be measured. A makeshift pragmatism, day by day, harnesses them to tasks always priority, whose necessity reached the scandal, and whose devices - which waited - are already out of date. They know that in no case will the facilities meet needs and that any rational solution of a problem on its plan, in its compartment, will always be absurd, even insane, depending on the whole. They can do nothing about it. Nobody can do anything about it. A revolution fundamental, completely new, will it burst into consciousness? Will she ever do it? However "life" (as they say) or rather the confusion of existences continues. It is made of each passing day. "A day in the past: it's always that," think the old folks. New men are vocation or second-hand doctrinaires. By necessity: they must justify their ambitions. They can only declare themselves by putting themselves into formulas and putting into formulas reverse what they oppose. So they don't criticize what they think they are criticizing but the image they do, and do not show themselves but the image they want to present themselves. In doing so, they attribute a doctrine with pragmatism in progress and their doctrine being the opposite of that which they come to imagine, very exactly defines their reaction, that is to say their conditioning. This projection emotional, mentally structured, that surface revolutionaries (in the social and economic and not in the knowledge of being) call antithesis, never, in human memory, ever produced any synthesis. As for the new men from these numerous territories cut out at random from colonial conquests, patriots in search of homelands, nationalists in advance, who proclaim states without governments, governments without administrations, revolutions without revolutionaries or socialisms regional denominations, private, very personal socialisms, the best of those who take the power in all pseudo-independence and freedom (conceded or conquered) have only one goal: the maintenance of this power. Goodbye exaltation, euphoria, fraternity, hugs. And the comrade-in-chief is surprised to suddenly discover the inevitable abyss of Robespierre and understand it so well. None of the new men from these new countries in dramatic transformation towards who knows what destiny, none of the new men who have kneaded the Eurasian colossi asleep for centuries (the Tsar Stalin, Emperor Mao-Tse-Tung, passing by Gandhi and Nehru) saw - see only - internal changes (emotional and mental) of men subject to external changes (economic, political, social) are, can only be, wrinkles on the surface of standing water. The progressive gentrification of the most revolutionary regimes at the outset demonstrates this. Nature psychologically "structuring" of any social order is obvious. This structure is kept inert by everything that maintains order: doctrine and armed force. The coercion that a power can do without stale, lively by the week, neither too certain nor too eager to last, is for a so-called diet revolutionary question of life and death. So the new regimes of new men are the most retrograde which are, because the new can only arise in freedom. 6. - Anything new in religion? From distant times to the present day, from primitive tribes to our theologians, religions are explanations of the Universe and of man which satisfy thought and feeling. Fraud is both if coarse and so subtle that the more clearly you see it, at a glance, in its enormity, the more it is difficult to show because, in truth, those who do not see it are so deeply asleep that one does not know what atomic explosion in their brains could wake them up. And yet, the situation of the problem is curiously easy to perceive. We do not have, for to think, that of a thought conditioned by time and space. Not only is thought a development over time, but the elements that constitute it - memory, experience, judgments, conclusions, perceptions, certainties, hypotheses, projections, images, abstractions, symbols, etc. - are all dependent on time. They "are" the time. The psychological structure (the character) that manipulates these elements is itself a product - collective and individual - of accumulations of time. Time- character perceives himself internally to be, by means of a time-thought instrument, in a space- universe. The evolution of civilizations has allowed this process to deepen by going back in time to symbols of the not yet civilized man and to extend until capturing vibrations coming from galaxies unimaginably distant. Reached this point - and even discovered an antimatter that opens perhaps doors to an anti-universe - the dizzy mind realizes, but refuses to admit, that Since the universe cannot be absurd (since it exists) it is thought that is. Why did you go so far? We knew it at the start. We knew that thought can think a hour, day, centuries, in short measurable quantities within a graduated scale, but that it is unable to think of this scale in itself, a time that has started and will end (non-time is unthinkable) or a time that has not started and will not end (the always is unthinkable). And so it is even space. Thought is rational within the measurable. She knows that the measurable is not that an aspect of the totality, totally unthinkable, universe-consciousness. Once and for all, to know that she does not know how it is that there is anything. Intelligence, it demolishes the psychological structure of the thinker. She is the "void" which, nullifying the framework in which we define ourselves and is located, scares here more than anywhere else where its need. And yet here, more than anywhere else, it is essential. Our society is sick of thinking wrong. Thinking wrongly about the essential leads to a mental habit, a psychic automatism intellectual incapable of engaging in reality the slightest problem of super-structure. Think wrong in this which concerns God is to think false with regard to the most material needs of the human masses: to eat, to stay, to dress. The abrupt turn of our times requires, in order to solve these problems concrete "which rots without data" that one knows, by direct knowledge, or rather that one discover what is "something" that we disguise and betray under the term "God". Thought is sick with pride. She perceives her limits without perceiving them, admits them without admitting them, pretends to cross the impassable, to think the unthinkable, to conceive the inconceivable, to contain one's container, usurp the being. Does this mean that the"insurmountable barrier" of those who take themselves for researchers are, under a modern garment, only the ancient angel whose flaming sword prohibits access to the tree of Life ? Yes, certainly, if despite the evidence, these so-called researchers do not realize that the instrument with which they imagine they are looking is inadequate, and, faced with the obstacle, are incapable to emit something other than nonsense, such as "the God hypothesis makes the universe intelligible." The men that time raised to the highest heights of celebrity in the field of thought, a Freud, a Jung, a Teilhard de Chardin, a Lecomte du No|y, are those who, under the appearance of the new, plunged the spirits back into the swamps of the old, the past, the rotting. Their thought, this thought developed over the millennia, limited intelligence to the extent that it wanted to be unlimited. That if, turning against itself, this inadequate instrument had been "seen", the intelligence awakened would have understood that all thought - the most "elated", the most "transcendent" - can only dream of it temporality in words like God. Supreme, Absolute, Timeless, Atman and others, and that his quest of truth can only lead, at most, to a "belief", that is to say to an emotional acceptance of the illusion that it is possible to think the unthinkable.( in relation to God!) That if, accepting its limits as an incontestable fact, thought, by this fact, realizes that everything unable to discover the truth, she has an extraordinary ability to discover error, an incredible power of penetration into the mysteries of the forgery, an invincible power of demolition ... ... In this one vision is the miracle of "something." 7. - To seek is not to find, to find is not to understand Nothing is more fallacious than these words attributed to a divinity: "you would not seek me if you had not already found me." To seek without finding is to seek what does not exist, where not to know what one seeks, where to seek where what one seeks is not. What I want to accomplish - what I have struggled and struggled for thirty years - is my realization, seeing God face to face, reaching, wrote Gandhi in the introduction to his autobiography [2] (Moksha is the liberation from the cycle of reincarnations). I live and act and have my being at the pursuit of this goal. All my activity when I speak, when I write, as well as in my political enterprises, is directed towards this same goal, he adds, and further: I worship only God and the Truth. I haven't found Him yet, but I'm looking for Him ... During our reading, we discover, not without a certain surprise, the dimension of this God. Adolescent "bad attendance" leads Gandhi to a brothel where, intimidated, he remains seated and inert until expelled by the furious woman. I was going in the jaws of the sin, he writes, but God, in his infinite mercy protected me against myself ... and, further on: since that day I have always given thanks to God for having saved me. During his whole life, this "God" intervenes for the choice of a reading, a walk, a menu ... It is useless to highlight the childishness of this mind, but it is possible and necessary to dismantle these mechanisms and perceive their real variables. [2] Gandhi: "An Autobiography", Beacon, USA, 1962 edition. This quote is a translation free from english. 8. - The pleasure of thinking wrong The thought that imagines having jumped over the obstacle that it could not overcome feels light and happy. It evolves with ease in spaces that escape gravitation, it makes a point omega and flies there, a religious doctrine and sits there. The psychological (conditioned) structure that develops it, becomes this thought in the perception that man gives of himself (thought thinks: I perceive myself being; in doing so, the thinker put himself entirely into this thought coming from him). So the happiness of the disengaged thinking becomes the felicity of the pseudo-thinker. He no longer thinks to just think, to see facts, to solve problems, to progress in knowledge: he thinks only false, because that this false thought is the only one that gives him pleasure, that encourages him and strengthens him in his situation, prominently in a hierarchy between earth and sky, between the masses and the elite, between the ignorant and the philosophers, between the governed and the powerful. Gandhi does not find God, but in all humility, he imagines that a creator of billions of prodigious, inconceivable galaxies, bends down with a lot of care about his person. It must be precious. The great mass is more convinced of this than themselves. At such men holiness is offered, enforced without delay, and those most distant from that spirit of devotion, doctrines, institutions, beliefs that are the ground, welcome these new idols in the pantheon of their great men, religious or lay, on the right or on the left. If thinking false is a pleasure in itself, even though this false thought generates a hiatus between the individual as he is mediocre, narrow-minded on all sides, a blind extension of a duration which is unaware, greedy and fearful at the same time, lost in the labyrinth of his conflicts and the ideal, the virtues, the principles, which he learned the names (thinking that the name is the thing), how much greater is the pleasure of saying that the the highest representatives of this frozen thought (a great politician, a pope) have crossed the interval. We wants their actions to be proof. The slightest appearance of movement on the surface of this stillness is hailed as a revolution. And to demonstrate that to conquer the unlimited it is not that to anchor oneself on the spot, one delights in a diary, an autobiography, which reveals that this great political, that this great spiritual leader has the mental age of a child of seven, as regards the essential. Far from questioning honesty, sincerity, the heart, the virtues and what is called the "humanity" of such men, far from contesting their intelligence in the practical realization of certain designs, far from to downgrade, in short, these qualities and the debate that one could propose about them, it seems to us at the contrary necessary and urgent to deepen this debate to the very root of human consciousness, faced on its condition on the one hand and on the other hand on the perception of this condition. And we see that such men are dangerous factors of regression, at the moment when an abrupt historical departure makes obsolete ways of thinking developed over several millennia and urgently require a transformation of minds. 9. - Gandhi We have analyzed elsewhere (The Psychological Comedy) the virtuous man, the "principled" man, the "character" man. The real motives to which this character obeys are relatively easy to to perceive and we will only mention them here in passing, because our object in this work is not not so much the individual who expresses and acts according to a false thought as its harmful and retrograde effect in the society. If it is sometimes possible to see, at a glance, that the data of certain concrete problems (such that of employment, which we mentioned above) hide in the dark recesses of fears unconscious it is more difficult to see how the solutions of false problems consolidate the social psychological structures, built on these same fears. Hence their success. Myths that spontaneously arise from these illusory creations consolidate the shelters, between floors and ceilings, already built by the social in order to reassure the domesticated consciences inside and in the image of these limits. The reformer Gandhi comes to the rescue of an old religious myth threatened by social stagnation established by this very myth. In the name of the precepts of this religion, which he obeys more than anyone, he devotes a life of incredible sacrifices to the rectification of some material conditions, at random situations that present themselves to him, without suspecting that they are the consequence of the faith of which he makes himself the propagandist. In order to revive the Bhagavad-Gita or some other sacred writing, somewhat affected by the necessary demolition of a section of wall (Gandhi receives untouchables in his ashram) he couples with the old a new myth, swollen with emotional force: nationalism. This process (highlighted today by this nationalist Islam which is the "Arab" myth) is clearly regressive, in the sense that it contributes to the conditioning of consciousness. Proclaiming his religion, seeing the intervention of "God" at every event of his life, Gandhi is in truth as antireligious as all convinced believers (of all religions of the world), because the timeless, the unthinkable, the immeasurable, which he makes a "goal" to achieve, he confuses it with a realization personal, which in addition is supposed to be the result of character armor, painfully fabricated, hardened, by means of disciplines based on an "idea" of what this unknown goal is. Gandhi did never make a secret of the enormous difficulties that he never ceased to encounter, throughout his life, in his efforts in order to overcome itself. Of a fundamentally submissive nature (whatever you may think), his deep honesty, his candor, his love of the truth, his benevolence, his compassion, condemn him, from his adolescence, with a severely mechanical approach, from which he will never depart. The springs of this automatism are the wishes to which he does not cease to have recourse. Raised in a religion with strict rules, these rules are its truth. To apply them rigorously is to salvation. It is proves it easily: faithful, his intimate satisfaction he sees in no way as one of the cogs of his process, events light up, God saved him; unfaithful, God punishes him. Thus the means (the rule, the discipline, will, wish, character that sets itself) is the end. Married at thirteen (child marriage puts him in painful perplexity), student in London shortly after, he took three wishes to face life in the capital of the empire: chastity, vegetarianism, do not drink alcohol, which, because of the environment and the insistence of friends, sometimes put him in danger, but "God" watches each time and saves him. Vegetarianism is of great concern to him, and is the subject of a intense propaganda. Later, back in India, and "God", despite his interventions, not appearing to him doubtless not clearly enough, it is constantly increasing the dose of resources. Conjugal fidelity is not sufficient, he vows absolute chastity; vegetarianism still flatters its palate too much, it reduces it with successive wishes, while being sorry each day to take even more pleasure in the food which remain. He vows never to drink milk again. (Much later, sick, he accepts to drink milk goat, because his wish, in thought, only referred to cow's milk and buffalo milk, but remorse do not leave him any more for having obeyed the letter, not the spirit of this vow, although it is justified by his desire to "Serve", which he could only satisfy while healthy). He vows to remove spices and even salt so encourage his wife to support this diet, prescribed by a doctor. Around him, in the small community that he organizes, he imposes strict rules and disciplines. A child having disobeyed, he punishes, by vowing to fast for a few days, for having failed to impose his law. This law includes the absolute prohibition to kill any being, even poisonous snakes whose presence is a danger to children. "God" rewards him: there are never accidents. Curiously, this imprescriptible wish does not prevent him from undertaking a recruitment campaign in favor of the English during the war of 1914-18, and this at a time when with audacity and a sense of certain politics, people like Mrs Besant take advantage of British weakness to lobby for self-government. In his letter of allegiance to the viceroy, Gandhi takes care to dissociate himself from this action [3]: If I could get my compatriots back on their steps, I would make them withdraw from Congress all their resolutions and not murmur "autonomous government", "responsible government" during the period of the war. I would make India offer all her able sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at this critical time, and I know that India, by this very act, would become the partner most in favor of the Empire and that the racial distinctions would become a thing of the past. In this letter, the Mahatma develops his insistent idea: India should sacrifice itself head over heels for its masters, and these, grateful, will grant him the Home-Rule: it is an absolute certainty. Let it be understood that this autonomous government will be located within the Empire. Independence, Gandhi does not envisage it at any moment. To situate oneself within the Empire, it is first of all to do everything to consolidate it. This way is the only one that can lead to the goal to be achieved: the status of partner. Alas, some time later, it was the Punjab affair. To support claims of interest regional, Gandhi authorized Satyagraha (passive resistance), but the authorities, predicting that its presence would cause trouble there, deny him access to this province. The Mahatma does not believe in these disorders: have not the Satyagrahis vowed not to indulge in any violence? Is passive disobedience not not peaceful? He insists, comes back to the charge, does not obtain his permit ... but already the events exceed. Huge crowds unleash their uncontrolled passions, which spread to other crowds. To the riots succeed riots, and these are frightening, bloody, inhuman repression. The apprentice wizard is dismayed: I did not want that, he exclaims. The troops had already shot the crowd in Delhi, in Lahore, in Amritsar. But it is in Punjab that the repression reaches its greatest savagery. Gandhi is amazed: it was the Punjab which had provided his best Indian contingent, the English army, were his sons, most of whom died for the British Empire. However, if he is surprised, he is not dismantled; if he finds a failure, it is because there is an error in the application of Satyagraha. [3] If I could make my countrymen retrace their steps, I would make them withdraw all the Congress resolutions, and not Home-Rule or Responsible Government whisper during the pendency of War. I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment, and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favored partner of the Empire, and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past. (Book cited, page 448 Government policy of lawless repression was manifested in Punjab in all its nudity ..., leaders were arrested, martial law, - which in other words means that there was no law - was proclaimed, special courts were established. These courts were not courts of law but instruments to apply the arbitrary will of an autocrat. Of convictions were pronounced without factual support and in flagrant violation of the justice. Innocent men and women in Amritsar were forced to crawl on their stomachs like earthworms [4]. Meanwhile, the Mahatma was examining its conscience and publicly accusing itself of having committed "a Himalayan miscalculation". The presentation of this error places us at the heart of a thought and of an action which, in order to be effective, endeavor to limit itself. Now let's see what this Himalayan miscalculation was? Before we can get to qualify to apply civil disobedience, one must have voluntarily submitted and respectfully to state laws. Most of the times we obey these laws only out of fear penalties and this is especially true when these laws do not contain moral principles. Through example, an honest and respectable man will not suddenly start flying, whether or not he has a law that prohibits it but will have no remorse for violating a regulation regarding the obligation to have a bicycle set fire at night. He probably wouldn't even accept friendly advice to this subject. But he would observe any other regulation of this order, if it was only to avoid disadvantages of the lawsuits he might face. However, such obedience is not the willed and spontaneous obedience that is required of SATYAGRAHI. A SATYAGRAHI obeys the laws of Society with intelligence and free will, because he considers it his sacred duty to do. It is only when a person has thus scrupulously obeyed the laws of the Society, that she is able to judge which laws are good and just and which are unjust and unjust. It is only then that the right is granted to him, the right of civil disobedience concerning certain laws, in well-defined circumstances. My mistake was not to observe these necessary limitations. I launched people into a civil disobedience campaign before they qualified for such an action, and this mistake seemed to me to be as huge than the Himalayas. As soon as I went to Kheda district, all the memories of struggles for the SATYAGRAHA of Kheda came to my mind and I wondered how I had missed seeing what was so obvious. I realized that before a people was able to offer civil disobedience, he must fully understand its implicit depths. That said, it would be necessary, before relaunching civil disobedience on a mass scale, to create a group of well-trained, pure-hearted volunteers who fully understand the strict 4 Translated from the cited work, page 471. SATYAGRAHA conditions. They could explain them to the people and by vigilance always in awakening, keep it straight [5]. This text may surprise those who, of the Mahatma, know only the legend. If he interests us, this is because, in its naivety, it lays bare the consequences (always the same, with some variations) false thinking common to believers of all organized religions with active faith mixed in recklessly of worldly affairs. The statesman who shows up on Sunday at mass or Friday at the mosque, but who, in the exercise of his functions is rather a disciple of Machiavelli, is not an apprentice sorcerer: he is Caesar and we know that what belongs to him belongs to him. If he is "otherwise" believing, he is like everyone else, like all people cut in half; the right hand ignores the left, the superficial religious conscience delivers the depths to the absolutions. They are right, it is the common sense even who wants this. We can, we must extend a hand to the ex-enemy who, over the centuries had acquired the bad habit of invading you, but the other hand must hold a digger. The little cries of humanitarian indignation on this subject are absurd, and, moreover, ineffective, because they invoke an ideal and, therefore express only a false thought, since the ideal does not exist, is only an idea, an idea disengaged. No one in two thousand years has engaged the Sermon on the Mount in politics. Why? Where is the error of this: To see the universal, the immanent Spirit of Truth face to face, one must to be able to love the tiniest part of creation as yourself. And the man who aspires to that does not can afford to stay out of any area of ??life. This is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics: and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do in politics, do not know what the religion means [6]. Where is the error of the man who wants to be integral and integral and deeply religious in all sectors of human activity, if not in its very conception of religion? She is certainly not in his desire for totality. It is, of course, in the instrument, (thought limited by the idea it has of a truth that she does not know) in the conditioned instrument, by means of which this man wants reach the unconditioned. It is not in the perception of the existence of a "something" which transcends the human spirit of spirits like drafts). It is in the way that we imagine we have to walk for a 5 Translated from the cited work, page 470. 6 Translated from the cited work, page 504 limited consciousness reaches unlimited. She is not in the refusal to be satisfied with a condition of "Creature" guided by the obscure will of an Allah (this apparent refusal to "think" the divinity thinks of reports, think anyway). It is, despite the correct appreciation of a fact (the existence of a transcendence) and the correct attitude of not accepting it (of not accepting to be only a conscience blind, ignorant of what it is), it is in the middle. By what detours does the man who, by his religion, refrain from killing the slightest mosquito, come to to offer a holocaust to its conquerors the life of all its compatriots? By what means did this spirit limited to require submission to an unjust social order, in order to protest against a detail, against a particular situation, so that this action is powerless to inflict the slightest scratch on this order? ... And what dream held him at the moment when, declaring himself lucid, he made the "Himalayan" error of to think that he had committed it? Can we, without simplifying or generalizing - that is to say without having any "opinion" (which would not have value) - to extract from the Gandhi case, examined as under a microscope, the essential and secret motives of the confusion that reigns in most minds? Can we be free enough, can we be enough direct contact with the fundamental data of a psychological structure to identify two or three simple variables, common to most religious spirits (so-called religious spirits: this restriction is capital). willingly - is a superiority over those who hold what appears to them to be true to be true [7]. In fact, these truths condense into a truth, or rather into a system, a rule, a code of ethics that " the truth experimenter "carries through life like a traveler a suitcase packed before the departure. When it happens that this pseudo love of Truth is a by-product of an obsessed with salvation personal, the psychological structure hardens in more and more strict rules, more and more invasive. The Puritan would be an inquisitor if circumstances allowed it. One day, alerted by a cook, Gandhi bursts into the room of a friend whom he lodges and finding him in company of a woman, expels her immediately. This man is no longer his friend, and if he cannot find accommodation elsewhere, too bad for him. The obsessed with salvation takes the duty to do that of others. For their well. The expulsion of the above friend is for his own good. Yes. But also because he offended the Puritan, he soiled the atmosphere of impeccable purity which surrounds the obsessed, with whom he surrounds himself for his salvation. The moral of the story is Gandhi who formulates it. Being passing through a place of pilgrimage, he notes: I had no doubt that many of them (the pilgrims) had gone there to acquire merit and to purify themselves [8]. It is difficult, if not impossible, to to say to what extent this kind of faith lifts the soul. Whatever the salvation promises of different religions, they are always carried over to a future life, in this world or another. But they impose conditions: they must be deserved in the present. (The subject on which unexpectedly falls what is called "Grace" does not escape this obligation: he repents, converts and strives to deserve the reward already received.) In which direction is the effort directed towards acquiring merits? In the direction prescribed by spiritual authority and temporal - or both spiritual and temporal. To acquire in the future is to capitalize. To capitalize is to deprive today for better, tomorrow. So this "faith that lifts the soul" consists in submitting to a religious authority and to eliminate from life more and more things - in particular all that can to give pleasure - in order to accumulate for the future enormous, psychological, say spiritual, which theoretically should end up being called God. Armed with this pitiless cerebral organization, the puritan, the ascetic, the monk, the Pharisee who wants to be [7] On the false philosophy of Descartes and a few others, see Critique de la Raison Impure. [8] ... to earn merit and for self-purification; cited work, page 390 a politician is nothing more than a rectifier of wrongs, finicky and limited. The future in which he places his illusionary reward being only the projection of the past where the doctrine which dispenses him from archaic forms lessons and information about the unthinkable, its social action is necessarily retrograde and tends to reinstate a dead past. The sacrifice imposed finds its delight in it and is actively engaged in an increasingly simple life, that is to say more and more complicated, to have less and less products. We build our house, or rather our shelter, we make our bread, we cultivate our vegetable garden, we weave hand, we exhaust ourselves at work, we no longer have a minute to ourselves and we congratulate ourselves on being virtuous. In short, good feelings don't just make bad literature. To consider them well, we must find that at best they are ineffective, at worst harmful. At best, they animate the slayers of atomic bombs or some other consequences of a thought system developed by a succession of civilizations over millennia. The targets on which these skirmishers discharge their indignation is too current, they want results too quickly that they know they cannot obtain, and in ultimately, reduced to shouting in the name of a principle, a doctrine, in short an ideal, they become the fighters of this ideal that does not exist and neglect to attack the source of the evil because they do not not see, not having given the time to see it. So good feelings prevent thinking the man whom nothing would hold back from thinking. That is why it may suffice for churches - secular or nuns - to preach them.