To witness the dissolving of the I in order to rediscover oneself as ātman, to which—with the words of the later Heidegger—one can refer according to the cadence “the ātman is the ātman plus an I”.
This, and nothing else, is the chidākāśa-dhāraṇā of Tantra (at least for some operative yogīn, while for others this figure constitutes a simple modality of concentration).
That is, it frescoes “the ātman is the ātman plus an I” as the entrance into the realm thus introduced in the Ṛgveda of the thirty-three resplendent gods: “two birds, eternal friends, stand together upon the same tree; one of them eats the sweet berry, while the other, without eating, looks upon his companion”.
I have just laid out what the Sanātana dharma is, as far as I believe I have legitimately understood it in miniature; these three propositions, the summa of Vedānta, Tantra, and Ṛgveda, are sufficient to illustrate it, in the sense that the thousands of texts which refract the Sanātana dharma are precisely modes of clarifying this enigmatic nucleus (Vedānta and Tantra seem to be “systems” that differ only on a very superficial level: the ātman, key word of Vedānta, is reached, on the short path, thanks to Kuṇḍalī, which is the key word of Tantra; in the Upaniṣad, which constitute Vedānta, the most recurring expression after Brahman is prāṇa, and to say prāṇa is to say Kuṇḍalī—for instance Swami Śivānanda Sarasvatī very often repeats that Vedānta indicates the “final aim” and kuṇḍalinī-yoga the “means”—; and in turn the Upaniṣad are the commentary, reserved for the adepts as their very name indicates, of the Ṛgveda).
This nucleus, synthesized in the saying “the ātman is the ātman plus an I”, is the decisive turning-point in progressing in every yoga, beyond the images and names assigned to it by the individual doctrines; it is an intermediate hinge, a phase whose realization is as instantaneous as it is infinitely laborious to truly accomplish, paradisiacal as its final state, infernal as the exasperating spectacle of watching the I crack and then turn to dust. This phase, in the terms of Alchemy, is the stable abiding in the completed albedo (the work of white), preceded by the nigredo (the work of black), which is the killing of the I, and naturally followed by the rubedo (the work of red), the ultimate tincture.
The albedo of Alchemy is properly the expansion of a certain inner light of the mind, just as the expansion of an inner light of the mind is the crucial moment of Tantra and of every effective esoteric doctrine and of every non-representational experience, as effectively described in all sacred and revealed texts and even outside the realms of Sacred Science, in the most diverse forms. The light illuminates the cavern’s chamber, which for the secret doctrines is anything but a metaphor; this light is the go, the cows-of-light that the ṛṣi of the Ṛgveda pray that Agni may cause them to find in the heart of the black mountain, and it is the light that Kuṇḍalī makes erupt in Ājñā-cakra like millions of milky suns, it is the clear light of Tantric Buddhism and the celestial light of Qabbalah.
It is not a matter of clarifying that this — and what follows — is a logical and comparative elaboration on the portions of the Tantra that academics and Western readers relegate as autosuggestion or tribal residue; these mystical portions are what the Tantra themselves define, to put it in Aristotelian terms, as substance, whereas the professors concern themselves with analyzing the remaining portions that the yogīn consider accidental.
Nor is it at all a matter of posing the question whether all this may be true or not, but of ascertaining that the various mystical experiences of the “other side” describe not only this irradiation of inner light but also the abiding in the quieted radiance of the light in terms inexorably identical, which is certainly a coincidence most curious and rarely grasped in its essentiality by scholars or by enthusiasts of the individual esoteric doctrines.
Well then, these terms all resolve into a single and identical mental condition—because indeed one thing are the means and another the aims—which, even if spoken in different accents, can be stripped down to a single word, a word which has been and remains one of the crucial joints of Western thought, all philosophers, saints, and scientists having long questioned themselves upon it in vain: the time.
Perhaps the loftiest summit of poetry is the locution that Akhenaten so many times addresses to his Nefertiti, “young forever”.
This expression, although it cannot properly be said to be recurrent in the revealed texts, appears at times, a hapax legomenon, until one realizes that the “a-structural structure” of authentic reality beyond the veil of representation, as spoken by the revealed texts, is the “being outside time”, that is precisely the being “young forever”.
Vajrayāna, the vehicle of the diamond or of the lightning, that is, the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, monastic or ngakpa, has as its decisive intermediate moment the attaining of the state of “Buddha of the three times,” that is, as it is explained, the finding oneself outside the braid constituted by past, present, and future. From everywhere — from the Śaiva currents to the devotees of the goddess Kālī (“the destroyer of time”), from the Qabbalah to Alchemy — this is said, so much so that Wagner has Gurnemanz answer Parsifal, who asks what the Grail is: “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”, here time becomes space. Frequent indeed in the Eastern and Western esoteric texts is the mention of “rejuvenation” or of immortality in life: this is not a contradiction in terms, but is said to be reality; death certainly exists, but it is a theoretical-causal construction, pertaining to the I.
How may being outside time be understood in Western terms? And indeed, can this be conceived according to rational categories?
In the first place, being outside time has nothing to do with quantum theory and its properties, with relativity, string theory, or future concepts attainable by the calculating mind; they are opposed worlds: physics, however understood, is as such the opposite of emptiness.
In the second place, the disparate philosophical notions, from Plato to Kant to Bergson, must evidently be ignored entirely, because even if one had ever succeeded in expressing in meaningful words what one had grasped of authentic reality, such expression would already have been irreparably corrupted in the sequencing of pre-theoretical images or fragments thereof into concepts.
In the third place, one must likewise ignore whatever is said by way of empathy, whether by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, patients, or persons under psychotropic effects, as well as by pseudo-esotericists or by the possessed — the Sanātana dharma is vidyā, knowledge (pre-conceptual, that is to say, non-abstract, effective), and must be considered as such and, if anything, afterward criticized, naturally according to its own logos.
To say that the ātman is the ātman plus an I is the same as saying that time does not exist as such: a mind in such perfected nature continuously shapes the past and sees from the future, because it is not vitrified in a present—this is in concrete what the Tantra and related texts promise. The matter lies here: it is not “thinking” of shaping the past or seeing oneself from the future—this is to speak in terms which precisely presuppose past, future, and present—; rather, it is “being” (being in the Tantra is only a word, empty and insignificant like the others) in a condition in which actions (Kárman) generate effects outside sequential temporal schemes.
Jung’s synchronicity has nothing to do with Tantric temporality, for Jung synchronicity means that events occur outside a rationally ascertainable causal nexus; this is the substance of what Jung actually sets forth when he says that the unconscious does not obey space and time—so that—events parallel to one another occur, that is, Jung invokes a-temporality, but the synchronistic facts always occur in the present; and it is rather what is placed as unknown to the I—which I that is always titanically there and “is”—that sees the events, whereas the yogīn abides in the nature of mind to which he has arrived through having “sacrificed” his entire *I *(conscious, unconscious, and whatever else) to Agni.
Thus the Ṛgveda says, certainly not for those who read—like the Vedic brāhmin (the priests, that is, non-seers, post-Ṛgvedic) and then everyone—that the yajña would be “the sacrifice” consisting in pouring a spoonful of solid ghee into the flames of a fire: yajña means in dictionaries also “adoration,” but it wants to say “yoga,” the pure yoga, one could say, where the I is not “sacrificed” but simply dissolves; one must sacrifice it, strictly speaking, or rather one is forced to witness its “sacrifice” in horror if it is taken as existing as the totality and essence of the individual, whereas if one knows it is fiction, one sets it aside.
Psychoanalysis supposes that the unconscious is an entity that kidnaps, deviates, distorts thoughts into the conscious I, compelling it to do this rather than that, but the thoughts distorted by the unconscious—what are they if not again thoughts? If one proceeds from the evidence that mind is the thoughts, the unconscious is a source of thoughts, at most, just as a source of thoughts is seeing a jug, or being seized by fevers, or calculating variants; if one assumes a priori that mind is the conscious, the unconscious lies outside it, or if within it is separated from it: this is also true, but only in the evidence of the titanic I; if instead one adopts the evidence of the “nature of mind”. the unconscious clearly remains but is, so to speak, an I masked among many similar garments—it is thoughts of a particular kind, but it is thoughts.
Since psychoanalysis appeared in the Western world, the yogīn have clarified that this entity called unconscious is regarded in the revealed texts for millennia, not named because it is precisely a source of thoughts among the many that exist— yogīn do not diminish the importance of the unconscious, at the pathological level and at the metaphysical level, and indeed they affirm that wading unscathed in this black sea to emerge on the further shore is the prerogative of very few (one recalls a famous saying of the Buddha: when, in order to cross a river, one uses a raft, one does not then carry it on one’s shoulder once one resumes the path, but leaves it on the shore for whoever must cross after).
They also spontaneously adopt, among other things, that modality which Freud and Jung call transference, only enacting it in an integral manner and not limited to coercive techniques and case histories.
If past, present, and future are categories of the calculating mind taken as a priori evidences, consequently one abides in them and cannot even conceive of violating them, because they are given as ultimate structures of reality; but if one finds oneself in another kind of structure of reality in which these categories do not exist, then they do not exist, and the very words past, present, and future remain only names.
What must be clarified from the outset is that buddhahood or jīvanmukti, liberation during life, does not imply the negation of time, but implies that time is lived on this side of its common sequential apprehension; it is not time in itself that is not there, but its categories of past, present, and future—whether this should mean “eternity” depends on what is meant by eternity: to speak of past, present, and future certainly has sense, because all live according to these three times, all experience them daily, but has anyone ever experienced eternity, or has eternity always and only been posited as a conceptual abstraction, as a word that is in fact not even thinkable by the rational mind?
Time is believed to be sequential because of representation, just as it is representation that sequences reality into mind and matter, into I and reality external to the I. The mechanism is exactly the same: representation creates entities, isolates portions of the whole and posits them as independent by saying that they “are,” that they exist in themselves; representation just as it creates the notions of subject and object, in the same way creates the notions of past, present, and future.
What is representation? Heidegger devotes his entire work to showing the self-referentiality and intrinsic falsity of representation, in theoretical and pre-theoretical terms; for the esoteric doctrines, representation is what must be surpassed in order to rediscover the true nature of mind (which is called, depending on the doctrines, ātman, “nature of mind,” rigpa, anātman, Śiva).
Naturally, in order to speak of representation one must see it, and one cannot see it who is immersed in it, evidently, just as a set contained within a larger set cannot comprehend the set that contains it: the pre-Aristotelian Greeks often said that the body is the tomb of the mind, and the same is said by the Tantra and the esoteric doctrines in unison; the immersion of Consciousness in matter generates in it the belief that Consciousness itself is subject to matter, that is all, therefore mind, once immaculate, lets itself be deceived and believes that objects are “entities” intrinsically independent and believes itself to be an “I” of its own, remaining obscured, forgotten, the elementary nature of Consciousness occluded.
This avidyā, the ignorance of the true nature of one’s own mind, is never said by anyone to be a fault; it is inevitable that it should be so, and spiritual masters say only that with a little fortune it is possible that certain minds rather than others may come to realize the simple reality that stands before their nose, and it is clear that adopting such a perspective is doubly difficult for Westerners who for millennia have, in perfect good faith, lived entombed in sarcophagi of mental habits.
Continue in Part II