Carlo Suarés : The Maturation of the Self : Creative education

(Extract from The Psychological Comedy . Corti Edition 1932) Reverse paths: conformism We have seen that the natural development of an ego would be an increasingly clear perception of its antinomy, to the point where it would feel irreducible. So it is not the self (the antinomy) that can develop, but the feeling that one has of being this antinomy. The ego suffers from its isolation, and because of this suffering, it is pushed to compose itself a breastplate of permanent associations, which moreover society strives to impose on it; but this breastplate encloses him in yet more deep suffering Indeed, he soothed his loneliness in a faith, in conformisms and congregations. He believed, in doing so, to work to "annihilate" the self [1] . He didn't think so well. Obedience, suppression of desires, piety, etc ... have indeed destroyed the self. They destroyed the living germ which was to burst by breaking the shell of the self . So the man was sterilized. For what benefit? From a shell, which he called his soul. Far from having lost his "soul" forever, in order to find knowledge, he stifled life in him, which would have led him to lose the feeling of his loneliness, not by "uniting" the subject who was felt isolated (said soul), to an abstraction (said God), but by removing the cause and the subject of the isolation, the self. He thought he realized himself by getting rid of the feeling of self, finding fullness by annihilating himself. He thus destroyed his only possibility of achieving his accomplishment. One does not reach the culmination of the ego by getting rid of the ego, but by exposing it. To expose it is to seek the direction which is unique to it, according to which the antinomy, which is its own bursting force, will reach its point of explosion. It is non-obedience, non-belief, non-piety, etc. which will destroy the shell of the self, called "soul" or "spirit", and which will release the dynamism of Reality. (It is obvious that any conformism, intellectual or emotional, even if it is completely atheistic, acts exactly in the same direction - established morals, traditions, national feelings, etc ..., etc ... indefinitely, as we will see in the Moral Comedy) . Ways that reach their opposite The ego does not seem to have any other alternative: to try to get out of its isolation by losing itself, that is to say to sterilize itself in "unions", or to let itself be led, by the feeling that he has to be himself, in the path of solitude, which will set him free because it will make him explode. In the first case, the ego can crystallize, until its death, in its character, or lose balance and collapse without being able to recompose. In the second case, it is at each step tempted to recompose the character by exploiting what we have called its crack. If the character, extremely reduced, manages, at its last extremity, to gather its forces to hang on like a parasite with the living breath which would like to carry it, it finds what it calls the union (mystical or metaphysical). This trap is fatal . There is no possible union between the self and the truth. Self-awareness, which in developing destroys itself, has given up, at the last moment, to consume the latter remains of the self. When all that remains of this ego is the size of a pinhead, victory is his. So, like gangrene, its static equilibrium develops and settles among men, irresistibly insidious and powerful, in a religious form. Because he has seen eternity, because he knows it, because he has learned to use it, he knows the words of truth, and knows how to present them in a sublime way . He also says that the ego must disappear and die in the good soil. But he thinks of the fruits that this self will bear. If he accepts to die, it is because of a future, however subtle it may be. Its essence will disappear in the great All, but this All is aware of being itself, therefore a character. He, attribute, will disappear in the universal substance, but this substance has an infinity of attributes, therefore of characters. The ego will no longer be there, but it will have joined the great Self, therefore a character. Naturally, he does not accept these criticisms. He knows them, and has already answered them. He invented divine "People" who are nobody, "Self" who are not "me", Infinite, infinitely infinite. It is unbeatable. The simplest thing then is to examine the way in which this self lives. He lives in his character, selfish, cruel, locked in his prejudices, in his class, his caste, his race, in the whole unconscious universe of his fellows gathered in herds, he has countless desires, all the more dirty that they dare not appear. He is the partner of all the exploiters. He is on trial. The indignity of a single priest is the condemnation of the whole religion. There is only one way There is nothing in common between all this clutter - be it idealist, spiritualist, metaphysical, philosophical, magical, theological, mystical, etc. - and the truth. There is no point in a self really wanting to find the truth losing a single day of its life in these barren ways. There are no approximations regarding the truth. A path that does not lead to it directly and for sure, is simply wrong. The only real way is that which links the character who says "I am I" to the capacity that the individual must re-acquire to resonate in the present moment, when the ego has disappeared. This path is similar to the bed that a torrent widens to flow towards the sea. This path is its own goal . The character with all of his past must flow into it. In it, the subjective time imagined to travel through the character, that is to say the way in which he accumulates his past, breaks and melts like ice in the sun, and is reabsorbed by himself until he catches up with the present [2] . The destruction of subjective time After the ego and subjective time have thus melted, consciousness is freed from the very association which had individualized it: the association of consciousness and time. The ego is made of the material of which time is made, as a dream character is made of the very material of the dream. Subjective time is what the ego is . The ego is the accumulation of all the desires of permanence, linked to each other by a chain, which is duration. The cause that creates individual time is not the existence of objective time, but the desire felt by the associations of which the ego is made to re-evoke itself at each instant, in order to perceive itself. When a madman thinks he is a horse, Napoleon or a teapot, it is not these objects that are responsible for these associations but the desire he has to associate with them. The sub-consciousness is an association of the sub-man and time, which becomes a dream: the notion of duration. The notion of duration has no more relation to real time than the feeling that a madman has of being Napoleon has nothing to do with Napoleon. To find oneself outside of time means to find oneself outside of the spell time-me. Destroying time does not mean stopping the sun, but breaking the association of consciousness and time, which is the sub-consciousness. The ego very often tries to dissociate itself from time-duration, because it wants to dominate duration, in order to ensure permanence. His metaphysics, his religions, his monisms have no other goal. What the self cannot do, man can do, not by freeing the self from duration, but by freeing itself from the self which is duration. This state is not a return to a pre-individual consciousness, which would not yet know duration, but the outcome of consciousness and duration. In this state are found intact both the desire for permanence and the desire to know permanence. This permanence is the permanence of a destruction of duration. And indeed, duration has destroyed itself. Eternity This state, which, once again, is indescribable, is what we call the presence of the present, or eternity. If this last word has been used in an absurd manner by all the maniacs of the ego, it is not his fault. Freeing oneself from subjective time is not an intellectual affair, but the affair of the whole human being. Only can still imagine that we are talking here about metaphysics, spiritualists or materialists who have not uprooted from themselves - from their substance - subjective time, the self. It is only by arriving at this state that one can seize all the old spiritual values, overturn them in conscious reality, bring them back into the flesh, into objects, and rebuild the world. Everything that is done over time belongs to me, not to permanence. The sub-man can only become a true revolutionary if he detaches himself from the desire to perceive duration . This detachment is eternity, the creative source of everything that man builds on the ruins of the subhuman, generated by matter, which acts on matter. Eternity is a process that has no duration, the action of the real in the real, the universal "plus" that has broken individual consciousness. Three phases of the life of the self These remarks lead us to specify three phases of the life of the ego, such as they should exist in a natural and human development, but which, needless to say, almost never exist in our sub-humanity immersed in his myths. The first is the period of childhood, when the self is formed, when it accumulates the Time of which it is made, and when it learns to become more and more responsible for itself. The second is the period when the self, having formed, develops until its full development. The third is the period when the ego finally gives in to the mature individual (maturity is precisely nothing other than the possibility for the individual to break his ego). This period is the end of the pupa state. The first phase is that in which Time is constructed, the second is that in which Time is destroyed, the third is that in which man has found the Present. We will quickly describe this evolution of the ego that the reader already knows, but which, in this aspect, will offer us new details. The child and the construction of the past The child begins by having no idea of its duration over time. This notion could only emanate from a self that has already taken shape around permanent associations, and delimited by permanent dissociations. The notion of duration is the notion that these permanences have of themselves. At its formation, however, the ego is not yet strong enough to close in on itself. It is still plastic. His balance, extremely unstable, is unable to refuse the experience. The child constantly vibrates between the object and the non-object, between desire and repulsion, between the movement which projects it outside, and that which brings it back on itself, because it is in turn, entirely taken, or entirely released by the outside world. Thus the child begins by constantly living in the present, but in a present which is still only pre-temporal, and which is transformed into the past, (automatism, memories, tendencies, etc.) as the desire for balance of the subjective manages to overcome its capacity to respond to the succession of the present, which would not cease to destroy it, like waves a sandcastle. The aggregate, in search of its balance (which can no longer rely on specific hereditary constants, in rout) is forced to build its own past, as a defense against the present which continues to assail it . The construction of this barrier against the present, isolates the child, as soon as the notion of its duration develops, in the feeling that time is disproportionately long. It will not be until its maturity that it will find that time "passes quickly". The construction of this past should occur, in a normal development (as we have already seen) around the primitive reactions of the child, which were original and adherent to the present, and not around the more recent reactions, already distorted by a lack of agreement with the present. (It happens that the child, suddenly obliged to repair a balance that too violent shock has deeply upset, does not succeed without the help of the educator, whose role, as we see, would be here analytical). The greatest pitfall, the fatal pitfall, however, comes not from the fact that the child already opposes his own past to the present, but from the fact that the child, still in contact with the present, is at all times struck by a society of grown-ups built on the past . These remarks would lead us to seek a social state which does not deform the child by making weigh on him the myths of the past. But this is beyond the scope of this talk. Such a social state will only be obtained by a complete revolution. While waiting for this revolution to spread, the educator can only undertake an impossible struggle, hoping to save something despite everything. The development of responsibility Let us say in passing that if the educator has not himself reached the third stage of development, that where the ego no longer exists - which is almost never the case - his role can be harmful. But he must at least strive to be impersonal, and not to associate himself in any way with morals whose values are based on the reality of the ego, and its material or "spiritual" possessions. The educator and the analyst must act as loving technicians, like gardeners, surgeons, engineers, and not moralists, that is to say, accomplices of the established order. It is not for a moral purpose, but out of love, that the gardener prunes the plant and brings it to flowering. By constantly bringing the child back into the building under construction of its own particular equilibrium, by pruning it with all unnecessary growths, therefore harmful, which tend to disintegrate individual unity by their foreign equilibria, the educator simply allows the sap to develop naturally. This natural development is the only moral that we can accept . Socially it results in a rule, only one: do not exploit anyone . Such an education leads the child to release the uniqueness of his nature, which, socially, translates into a sense of responsibility. As soon as the individual feels fully, fully responsible, it is also that he is fully aware . Here again we see the harmful role played by hierarchies and religions, which oppose the development of individual consciousness, by limiting the responsibilities of the members of their congregations. An absolution is equivalent to a dose of narcotic; it encloses the individual in a magic circle, in the terrifying ring of the Myth against which doubt will break. Hierarchical obedience acts in the same way, except naturally in the work of a collectivist society, where obedience is only a discipline which results from the command "do not exploit anyone", and where hierarchy is only a technical arrangement deemed convenient by all, and organized by all. This technical hierarchy in the common work intended to feed everyone, is an impersonal contribution that each one, with the community, of the best technique of which he is capable. In this contribution, the "I am I", his birth, his development, his death, have nothing to do. The faster and better the collectivist societies will be organized, the more men will be freed from the preoccupation with food, (ridiculous preoccupation, when so many machines are ready to supply everything with minimal labor, that a good rationalization would quickly reduce to almost nothing ), the more space there will be in society for total responsibilities . Through collective, anonymous work , everyone would pay their debt to Nature which nourishes them. There, everyone would be fully responsible, but only in the area limited by their technique. With his debt paid, the man freed from work becomes liable in an unlimited way, towards himself and his fellow men. He can do it because he is free. He fulfilled his commitment to exploit no one, and Nature, now a good mother, provided him with the maximum, with the minimum of effort. He can therefore have his freedom, without coming into conflict with his fellow men, but on the contrary by entering into free contact with them. We have indicated here a few points which only belong to this account because they put an end to conflicts of responsibility. The subhuman chaos of particular interests unleashed against each other, poses to the individual insoluble problems about his responsibility, problems that each reader can specify as far as he is concerned, and that no morality can solve, but the revolution. By tending more and more towards consciousness, that is to say by immersing yourself first, and more and more, in the edification of your mythical self, which can only be destroyed by its development, the well-guided child learns to use this self in actions which involve an increasingly greater responsibility, and this responsibility itself in turn develops its consciousness. The sense of responsibility constantly rejects him in front of the permanent associations of which he is made, and forces him to examine them, to decide if they are him, or if they are not. Responsibility obliges, in the self, the observer and the observed to establish between them more and more intense vibrations which activate the two poles of duality, to the point of bringing them to their maturation. It forces the self to strengthen itself in contact with everyday reality. It prevents him from escaping in his dream , from closing in on himself, in a shell which would become harder and harder, because more and more subtle. The mechanism of contradictions in the construction of the ego As the ego is built, the illusion it has of its own reality develops in it. From this notion arises the intellect. We have already shown many times in which contradictory movements decompose and recompose love and intellect, fear and doubt. At the beginning of its existence, the still plastic, soft, shapeless, ill-assured self of its existence, is not able to gather around a fixed center and to emit rays towards this outside world. , who, in their intellectual journeys will become all the more adventurous as they will be sure of never detaching themselves from their central home: at the beginning, the gelatinous ego can still only be shaped by its emotional life. According to the law of contradiction which governs the ego, love and the intellect have functions which oppose their own movements. Love gives the individual the impression of a centrifugal movement: the ego has the impression of giving, of giving up; but if he lets himself be carried away by the course of his feelings and his passions, if he agrees to extinguish the feeling of self there, it is only because he hopes to find there (through union with the object of his love) a permanence of which he does not feel sufficiently assured. Love is a search for permanence, which takes place at the expense of the self's desire to perceive itself; love seeks, by all means, to use the outside world to build this inner permanence. Far from being centrifugal, it is therefore a centripetal movement, but one which gives the illusion of being centrifugal, because the notion that the ego has of its own reality is obscured there. In the reverse world that is the ego, it is therefore good by losing the feeling of its reality, therefore by going out of itself, that the ego comes into itself, and is established in its own permanence interior. The intellect, by a process exactly opposite to that of love, gives the individual the impression of a centripetal movement; the ego has the impression of grasping, of apprehending, of holding objects under its examination; but if he does take hold of observations and concepts, if he accepts to forget the feeling of his own permanence there, it is because he wants to develop self-perception there. And in effect, an isolated permanence, which is not exercised on the outside world, becomes fixed like sleep. The intellect is a search for self-perception, which is carried out to the detriment of the very permanence from which it emanates; the intellect seeks by all means to establish the ego in its individual consciousness. Far from being centripetal, its movement is therefore centrifugal, but it gives the feeling of being centripetal because the notion that the ego has of its reality develops there. Here, it is by entering into itself that the ego develops the feeling of self, which by exercising on itself, will tend to destroy it . The contradiction operates at every moment, in the functioning of love and the intellect. Love seeks permanence, but as soon as it finds it, it can no longer live for fear of losing it; the intellect, which develops self-awareness, is immediately chased by the doubt that it arouses in it. Thus dynamic love was static since it gives rise to fear, and the static intellect was dynamic, since it arouses doubt. Each movement only tends to arouse its opposite in an infinitely varied game, which we will study in our Moral Comedy. Let us limit ourselves here to considering a self capable of carrying each of its movements far enough, until the birth of its opposite. Such a seldom exists. It is difficult for him to support this true perpetual movement of the two pendulums, love and intellect, which are both composed and destroyed, which generate contrary currents, fear and doubt, whose function is to destroy themselves. each other (fear kills doubt, doubt kills fear), in order to give birth to primitive movements, and so on. A self that can bear to be carried away by such deep currents is not long in being violently energized by the intensity of its two poles. It was not long before he found himself facing an admirable life-threatening catastrophe, as far as his hull was concerned. It does not take long to force himself to burst. The me who do not want to die, compose with a wild trick, and all the more dangerous since it is mechanical, love in fear which channels it and makes it go in circles, doubt in the intellect which channels and turns it in circles. Having castrated dynamic love and doubt, the self settles in its fear and its intellect: it is saved, it is sterilized. Instead of carrying love and doubt to terror, hatred, jealousy, crazy adventures, deadly anguish, he brings them to weary, disgusted, satisfied monotony, daily selfishness nourished. Let's leave these dead hulls there. Let us consider a self which still has within it its intact treasures of love and doubt . This adolescent ego finds itself, at the end of an education whose essential goal has been to orient it towards its own tendencies, suddenly moved by an impetuous movement. This movement is the result of the patient efforts of the educator, who has constantly brought this ego in formation back to its own equilibrium . The typological characters, the hereditary constants, the physiological development, were composed around the central focus of individual dynamism, which were the first reactions of the aggregate in contact with the Present, and provoked a natural grouping of associations, this grouping resulting ultimately in a balanced self on one center . If education and the environment have on the contrary provoked an artificial grouping of mythical associations, the pseudo-entity which results from it is only a mythical character, which can naturally destroy itself by liberating the consciousness that it imprison, but only by incredible efforts, and indescribable suffering, because first of all, it will be extremely difficult for him to understand what it is made of, that is to say to destroy his own pseudo-reality. And indeed, the associations of which this entity will be made, will be composed around innumerable centers of balance, imposed from the outside, which by pulling each one on its side, and by neutralizing each other, the will prevent it from moving. Each influence which is exerted on the child, especially if it is considered good by a social order based on the ego, only destroys life, and creates mythical puppets. Here we leave it to everyone to seek in themselves and destroy them, the balances that break it down. We cannot stop there in this talk. The ego which by an appropriate education, or by its doubt, or by a very intense desire to know itself, or by very great sufferings, has managed to be composed, for the most part, of associations which are natural to it, feels animated by a movement of which he has no doubts. This movement, this irresistible tendency, results in a temperament, a vocation, a very marked line of action, tastes, aptitudes: the self is formed. <> The adolescent, and the action Here he is at his second internship. The doubt, the anguish, the vertigo, which could have seized him at the time of his formation, where he had seen himself, have disappeared as an external phenomenon, although they remain buried in him. The present only counts as a field of action, where the ego, moved by a movement all the more impetuous as it is balanced, will be destroyed by its own conquests, and triumph over itself . Thus the movement, which is a contradiction, is all the more intense as the ego is better centered on itself. This perfectly formed young self, who can neither doubt nor love because he is too full of doubt and love, who does not know himself or see himself, because he subsists in his permanence (permanence which precisely will not subsist not) and that it destroys itself in its dynamism (dynamism which precisely will not destroy itself) this absurd and magnificent ego, seeks ecstasy in action. What should this action do for him? It must lead him to experience that he is already complete, that he is total, that he can add nothing to himself . This understanding can only be produced by the meeting, in experience, of love and intellect. By experience we mean any conflict that causes the reality of the ego to falter, any crack that occurs in its structure, any destruction of its sub-consciousness for the benefit of consciousness. An experience can be decisive for his whole life, and yet be played in a fragment of a second, without anyone noticing. But in action, the ego, not knowing that it is complete, seeks to develop, to perfect itself, to acquire, to be powerful, or better, or more pure, or more noble, or more dexterous, or more moral, etc ..., etc ... and it is here that he must avoid all the pitfalls of all the societies that exist in the world. They appeal to him from all sides. Wherever he turns, he finds before him the lure of an ideal. If he does this, he will become that, that is, he will become something more than he is now, in the more or less distant future. Whereas he himself is, as me, only an accumulation of past, when he should break one after the other all the stratifications of the past of which he is made, in order to n ' to be nothing more than a vibration of the present, all that is offered to him is to run towards a future which does not exist, which will never exist for him, because not only does the future not exist for this past, but not even the present. The present will only exist where the ego is broken. The mythical values that society offers Depending on its nature, this active or contemplative self will find an ideal of action or an ideal of contemplation. Society at certain times may need men of action to establish heroic values, at other times men of contemplation to establish mystical values. No society has yet managed to destroy the values of these myths. On the one hand, in societies based on hierarchy, social classes, power, religion, possession, etc. the ego are condemned to reactions which depend on their social classes, and happen to be want it or not, engaged in mythical fights, from which they cannot free themselves. [] For the moment, from the point of view of the absolute truth that man finds only by abandoning the mortal remains of his ego, from the point of view of unfathomable doubt which alone leads to a true action, based not on the past and future, but on the present, society offers on the whole planet only the vast battlefield of the class struggle, where everyone can find the truth, but can also lose it without realizing it, even if he is on the side of the Revolution. The ego that we are considering here, the ego that feels ripe for action because it is complete in itself, because the edifice built on the two poles of the antinomy of which it is made is completed by having developed to his maximum the notion that he has of being an entity, this completely subconscious self because he is perfectly sure of his reality, leaves in the world for the sole purpose of developing, of maturing, of obtaining in after all, what he already has without knowing it. The me who responds to his essential desire This ego whose development has been normal can already be considered a phenomenon, among all the ego mutilated in their dynamism to the benefit of the specific constants of their species (class, race, nationality, religion, etc.). But we have already abandoned them in the sad prison where they voluntarily shut themselves up because they are afraid. If they do not wish to run the adventure of their deliverance, then the social upheavals, the death of those they love, ruin, illness, as also passions, violent emotions, will undertake against them a multiple combat, whose outcome will be unpredictable. Tossed about on all sides, bent on defending their impossible static equilibrium against the enormous waves of life, these selves will create their own fatality . What they call their desire is not a desire, but a fear. They only want to preserve the objects that make up the static balance of their pseudo-entity. They want to preserve around them all the people and things they think they love, but to which they are simply attached as with ropes; in the same way, they wish to protect all the associations of which they are made and whose disappearance would leave gaping gulfs in them. The ego of which we speak is on the contrary animated by a violent desire. He may not be able to define this desire. It may be that this desire changes from one day to the next, that it becomes attached to unforeseen objects. There is always a struggle between desire and the current state of balance in which the individual finds himself. This ego we are talking about has been trained, or trained, to follow its essential desire, to pursue it, to let itself be carried by it, to the detriment of any balance already established, however precious it may be. Between two desires, he has learned to choose the largest, and to follow it, by declaring himself responsible for his choice, that is to say, by doing without approvals and disapprovals, by imagining the possible consequences of his acts. , and finding in itself the courage to face them without rejecting themselves, repentant and submissive, in absolutions. By following this moral line, the only one that does not sterilize desire in fear (or in indifference, which in its neutral aspect is violent selfishness, as we will see in the Moral Comedy) the ego of which we speak has kept his desire intact, or if he had lost it he finds it again. Looking for a free activity This desire can take any form. Let us first get rid of any false notion of good and evil: all authentic desire is good, and which is not opposed to the development in others of authentic desires; is bad any desire aroused by a balance that is not the unique balance that the individual builds on his essence, because this desire, whatever its moral appearance, always expresses a form of exploitation. But the ego impatient to act, finds so far in society only exploited and exploiters. He himself is incapable, despite the good will he can put in it, of discerning exploitation where it is found. He says "I am I", and he does not know that this statement is the primary source of all human exploitation of man. And because no society yet exists which can provide man, in order to exercise and destroy his ego, a free, free activity, purified of all exploitation (in one way or the other) the self that his desire for truth irresistibly moves, finds himself caught in an inextricable chaos of dark forces, agitations, eddies, from which he may perhaps never again emerge. The mythical rise and fall The ego will be hungry for sensations, since not knowing itself to be complete, it will seek to vibrate as much as it can between its two poles, with the illusory aim of enlarging. His feelings of pleasure or pain, power or weakness, movement or stagnation, drunkenness or lucidity, balance in adventure or imbalance in security, love or hate, doubt or certainty, wealth or poverty, elation or depression, ecstasy or despair, in short its violent sensations ((more and more violent) made of contrasts, antinomies, oscillations with each moment larger and faster at the same time, will not be able to satisfy his desire. Pushed by its own inner force, which emanates from its double essence, in contradictory terms, the self is like a demiurge struck with madness, balanced on two mountains, one foot on one and one foot on the other, which makes them rise higher and higher, each push of one causing a push of the other, until their peaks move further and further into absurd, useless heights, become impossible, until the stupor of collapse into a fully fabricated abyss. And yet, beware of the satisfied, the timid who do not dare to face this mythical ascent and fall. To be unreal, they are nonetheless authentically lived by the ego, and nonetheless involve the sacrifice of their life, of their real physical life, in the flesh . If mythically all this is only a game, however for the self who agrees to play, this game is his Great Game, his total, integral game, from which he can withdraw nothing, nothing which in a form or the someone else can provide him with a retreat, a refuge, an escape. According to his nature, he will go to the end of his pleasure, his enthusiasm or his ambition. The ego, driven by its inner strength, will want to experience its reality, even if it means seeing it destroy itself, and therefore it must at all times avoid the traps that its desire to set against itself will set against itself a static equilibrium where it would feel protected. Most of the time, the trap is called "an ideal". The ideal is only a projection of the past in an image called "future", intended to flee the present, intended to save the self by allowing it to survive. The dynamic call Like a torrent, which to trace a bed rushes wherever it can, even if it means undergoing all the detours imposed on it by the innumerable barred paths where the attraction had projected it, the ego decided to find the absolute permanence of the 'universe, will rush in each way which will open to him, and will leave there as soon as he will see that this way leads only to a stagnation apart from the great current where the self-destruction calls him. This stagnation is always a refuge built by fear. The ego rejects fear, and continues its adventures. He is perjury, disloyal, treacherous, he denies himself a thousand times, because no adhesion given in the past, no oath can bind him, he who burns everything he was at every moment. If he betrays the past, it is because of his terrible and lucid loyalty to the present, to his death. Just like the ideal which projects the past into the future, loyalty is a trap, which projects the future into the past. In a sense as in the other, the ego defends itself as it can, it plays its Moral Comedy, it puts on its fear of sublime words, admirable gestures, hypocrisy. If he manages to defeat himself, he is already struggling with his environment; he wasted no time in being alone. The worst vicissitudes can lie in wait for him, the pain of his family, abandonment, misery, madness. Truth, of course, brings the sword of peace. The terribly dynamic peace, the living, changing peace of the universe in perpetual renewal, the peace of the absolute movement, is only obtained by successively breaking with rigor and lucidity, all the balances, all the appeasements, all harmonies, all refuges. Certainly, the one who pursues the truth becomes more and more human. It therefore does not injure unnecessarily, it does not break brutally, it is not cruel. However, it is all the more irresistible as it is gentler, all the more inexorable as its conduct is not dictated by reactions, but by immediate and creative action. One last temptation: sublime bankruptcy There are countless ways, since everyone has their own. However it can be said in general that the greatest pitfall to avoid, the one where most of those who get to reach him could have overcome it, is the one which consists in being hypnotized by his own shine. The ego, we said, is a lover of sensations. The one whose poles have become gigantic is not long in being requested by his own spectacle, which has become astonishing. Here he is already surrounded by thousands of onlookers, who are timid, excited by proxy. He has become a genius, a hero, he shines with extraordinary brilliance, and the crowd is happy. All the me who turn in the circuses of their stagnation are associated, from the bottom of their wells, with his adventure. If he lets himself be taken in, here is his dying self which suddenly resuscitates, which exploits eternity to make itself a circus in its own way, dazzling and gigantic, where at dizzying celestial heights, the grand spectacle of its failure takes place . This spectacle is one that, above all, the mythical sub-men have called with all their souls through the centuries. The hero of this show must be both genius, mystic, and go bankrupt. This case illustrates our Psychological Comedy in such an excellent way that, for want of being able to develop this inexhaustible Comedy, we will be led, by this example, to our conclusions. Indeed, across all the civilizations that the selves have built, the individuals most representative of the intimate contradiction that are these selves are neither among the great conquerors - these elephantic selves never doubted their reality, and they were only the products of a mythical universe (an Alexander or a Napoleon could not exist without armies, on a planet where no country would be to conquer); - neither among the sociologists, the scholars, the philosophers, who acted on the world insofar as they were assured of their own reality; nor among the artists, who insofar as they doubted themselves had faith in their works, and reconstituted by their works the magic circle of the myth, which they had partially overcome. But the me most representative of their psychological drama, are rather those who were devoured by a reality other than their own, and who, on the point of dying there, could only play the Myth, because the clock of the collective sub-conscious had not yet struck the hour of deliverance . Thus Jesus and his return shock Nietzsche, in this enormous Millennial Comedy, played the beginning and the end of the same act, the birth and the agony of a civilization; they were the actors of the same psychological drama, which was tied and then untied first in one direction, then in the other; they both died on the threshold of the Real, and with all the more splendor the closer they were to crossing it. In order to better understand this psychological drama, we will imagine a self so dynamic, so in love with eternal permanence, that the whole second stage of its life (the one that begins when it is fully formed) will consist only of being destroyed by reality. This case, being extreme by its counting, will contain all the varieties of releases, or suggest them. We will see there the struggle between two realities, that of the ego and that of the Present, then, beyond bankruptcies, all the more sublime as they occur closer to the goal , we will finally see the ultimate realization, that where the me has given way, erupted under the irresistible pressure of eternity. [1] "The self, to which I once related, must be wiped out forever" (Fenelon). "Christian piety destroys the human ego" (Pascal quoting Cousin) ... etc ..., etc ... which is exactly the opposite of the dialectic of the ego! [2] PARALLEL EXPERIENCES. - I would like to quote today, on the sidelines of this book, the following sentences from a manuscript by Joe Bousquet which testify, it seems to me, to a poetic experience perfectly parallel to our ideological development: It seemed to me that my gaze opened the doors to a life foreign to all surprises. Any appearance of a creature or a new object prevented, one of my wishes, inspired it all accomplished, it seemed to me ... By playing the game of events I had become the flesh of my will which was fulfilled in the them .. In all the places of the world, there was my gaze waiting for me, naked like a God. It seemed like my life was burning in him to belong to me. Ah! the path I was leaving knew better than I the path I was going to take And again this (extract from " Speech is silver " - Shock II): " I have searched all my life for the mirror that would not return any image to me ...". CS

Carlo Suares : Works in French : Carlo Suares Fondation + 3rd Millenaire La maturation d'un moi : L'éducation créatrice par Carlo Suarhs - 3e millinaire