One can now better grasp the expression “believing in one’s thoughts”. It does not, of course, mean asserting that people ordinarily believe the first thought that happens to pass through their mind; reflection, meditation, the concatenation between hypothesis and proof, syllogizing, inferring and deducing are thoughts, just as intuition, anguish, and suffering are thoughts. The Buddha often repeated to his monks that they were not to believe what he said, but—stated in Western terms—were to make themselves available to recognize that what he said was already within them (and it is precisely to this that his other saying refers, according to which what authentic reality is cannot be explained to one who does not already be and live it).
It is not that one must not believe thoughts a priori: the problem is the “having faith” that they are a truthful expression of one’s own mind, and it is precisely this that Socrates denounces when he says that the error in itself is the “believing that one knows”; judging individual thoughts as logical or illogical, good or bad, true or false is already only a subsequent moment—and then what?, one might ask; but one is speaking here of the intermediate level of Tantra, which presupposes the activation of the ātman by the effect of Kuṇḍalī; if this does not occur, one is the thrall of thoughts, and the revealed texts illustrate precisely this.
The masters and the yogīn have affirmed for millennia that faith and reason (in the Western world they are called thus) are structurally identical: they are both a “believing”; only the nature of the object of belief changes—what one chooses to hope for in faith, what one chooses to think through reason. If one wishes, the world is truly will and representation, but such is the world of those who do not know the nature of their own mind. “Believing” in itself is the product of representation: you see the world, you think yourself, you want to know, you cannot understand, because what you take for evidence—the world and the I—are also illusory, that is, they are true as phenomena but do not have intrinsic existence; and you see these phantoms in the mist and you “necessarily” believe the phantoms you see because only those you see, and that is, you believe what the thoughts around the phantoms tell you, and they tell you precisely that the I and the world exist intrinsically, but these thoughts are already generated only from the I and the world (here lies the vicious circle of representation: it is also neurobiological, certainly, but it is “induced”).
On the other hand, twenty-four centuries of philosophies should at least give rise to the suspicion that anyone can say as truth whatever happens to pass through their mind, as already Protagoras, a great sage, warned. Sacred Science does not affirm that thoughts are erroneous in themselves, or that reason is erroneous in itself; indeed, yogīn and adepts very often indicate as a valid instrument for attempting to provoke the finding oneself outside representation precisely the right use of reason, that is, the recognizing of its self-referentiality (if one wishes, the anthropomorphism of which Giametta speaks with regard to Nietzsche, except that it leaves the ground unexpressed). But what the yogīn say is not what Westerners can believe they know: scepticism, epoché, and critique are rationalistic “beliefs” even when one doubts them, just as singularities and falsifiability are the masks behind which science hides.
To bring reason to the recognition of its self-referentiality means “to sacrifice” the I; this is the god that must finally be struck down, except that the I is a god more than jealous—truly obsessively psychotic, because it believes itself to be the individual in its essentiality; as indeed each person, even the most depressed or defeatist, sits enthroned upon intrinsically deeming himself the center of the universe: this is representation—seeing from one’s own point of view, thinking one’s own thoughts.
This is the discriminating mark that signals the entrance into the yoga: the I cannot self-negate, obviously; it can reach the limit, then it may happen that Śaktipāta occurs, grace (that is, the opus nigrum may prelude to the opus album), but this grace, if it occurs, occurs unexpected, and begins from prior; and from another angle many have danced on the edge of the volcano—some falling into it, like Nietzsche, some describing their own Inferno only to emerge from it without anything having happened, like Strindberg. But it is only one who believes himself the I who can think that there is a break between reason and grace, because in fact both are the ātman—the difference is its unveiling.
From the comparative reading of the most diverse esoteric doctrines, the punctual confirmation emerges of what Kṛṣṇa affirms in the Bhagavad-gītā: every path is the best one; if anything, the preliminary condition that must be added for Westerners is the becoming aware that one lives in a bubble. The error, which Heidegger denounced in every way, is precisely the belief that thoughts and reason are sources of truthful knowledge, whereas their only foundation is the fact that they pass through the mind (regardless of considering that this sometimes leads to benefits and sometimes to crimes, evil being an a posteriori idol created to justify crimes, not their cause). Platonic dialectic, for example, is not only synopsis and diairesis, but these are the rational instruments that Plato indicates as means with respect to the end of raising the eye of the psyche from the barbaric mud in which it lies—the eye of the psyche that sees the Ideas and feeds on that knowledge “which is not communicable like the other kinds of knowledge”.
The ātman appears to the I’s also as thoughts; indeed, until it is recognized, it appears only as thoughts, perhaps at first marginal and different from ordinary ones, at least according to how the yogīn say they may be recognized afterward, after the ātman has been known. Once Śiva has installed himself through the activation of Ājñā-cakra and the consequent inner light, it is Śiva who directs (this is the juncture of Tantra described in the terms of Kashmir Śivaism; Ājñā-cakra means “the commanding centre” not “third eye”; Śiva is the ātman who, being Śiva, the Brahman, is also the I’s): one must then discriminate the visions emanating from the inner guru from ordinary thoughts, and to do so it suffices to observe the flow of thoughts (it is always understood that even ordinary thoughts, and therefore the I’s, are the ātman, but they derive, technically, from the influence of karmic seeds, that is, from the saṃsāric events in which each living being evidently lives; in the advanced stages of the yogas they are said to influence less and less).
This is what the texts say in practical terms, but at the same time it is repeated that even for the yogī this is not easy—it becomes so only if one does not think it, obviously: this would be the point, to live the ātman and therefore the I’s in the natural spontaneity of being a portion of the Brahman; if one instead calculates or analyzes “in real time,” one identifies oneself with an I even if one deliberately thinks other thoughts, whereas what is required is to let the I of the moment be, insofar as it is an apparition of the ātman, perceiving it in a para-conscious manner—all extremely convoluted, but it is a way of rendering in existential terms the integration of the higher dimension into the ordinary one, or of liberation in life, or of the divine eye in worldly things; it is said in a thousand different ways.
If only one who is a yogī can realize being a yogī, does this perhaps make Tantra self-referential? The answer is negative: it is true that it is not the case that by reading about seeing one’s true nature one can therefore see it, and it is true that for this seeing one needs a mental organ without which one can only think of not-seeing it or of seeing it, and of believing it non-existent or existent; but everyone possesses this mental organ—it is precisely the nature of the human mind as it was given, the basis of consciousness which distinguishes man from other living beings: it is something, this mental organ, that one could say is analogous to the capacity that Chomsky identified as the predisposition for language acquisition, with the difference that the latter is easily accessible because relatively superficial, whereas the “yogic” capacity is precisely the basis of the mind and is more difficult to bring into focus because it is too close.
If the Buddha himself said that authentic reality cannot be explained, I certainly shall not attempt to do so; I can, however, attempt to translate individual traits of these Tantric dimensions as presented in the revealed texts, rendering them in the terms of contemporary existential-analytic language—an hermeneutic operation which is, it is repeated, a discursive description of pre-discursive states, through expounding by definitions and schemes what tolerates neither definition nor possesses schemes.
And the intermediate term for doing so is constituted by the effect of the arising of the awareness of the dissolution of time: not the non-existence of time, but the non-existence of temporal partitions, which representation creates for its own use and consumption just as it creates subject and object. In the Tantra one does not speak very much of surpassing time, or rather—certainly—one does speak of it, but not in particularly deepened or emphatic terms, because it is obvious that the reality of time is not what the ordinary mind believes it to be; it is only Western thought that has created for itself the totem of sequential time as a basic evidence of phenomenal reality, and has churned out aphorisms each more incisive than the last (aphorisms cannot be refuted; at most one should demonstrate them).
It is not that time ceases to be, for the yogī, nor that things do not change or that they change within some golden eternity: reality is always the same; only, it ceases to be conventional and becomes authentic—it is not a different perception of reality, but rather that it unveils itself together with the unveiling of mind: both reveal themselves as they naturally are—mind is Consciousness, reality is Consciousness. The structural condition of reality, of which mind is a portion, changes; but already here discursive language is deficient: it is not that “something” changes into “something else,” nor is it that it “reveals itself” from how it appeared to how instead it is. It is the representational mode of thinking itself that precludes relating oneself to vidyā, because the representational mode of thinking is founded on “entities”, and therefore cannot but think events such as “changing” or “revealing”, because it intrinsically takes for granted that there can only be entities and that therefore this authentic reality as a whole must be an “entity”.
Thus, translating the Tantra into philosophical terms means offering flashes of images that have no objectual meaning in themselves, because these flashes of images presuppose and declare that there are neither objects nor subject nor temporal partitions—this exposition is therefore analogous to that used by Renaissance alchemists who offer receipts of images, and if they are read word by word it is not their fault.
This clarified, it can well be said—computationally—that conventional reality changes and is discovered as authentic, because what changes and discovers itself as authentic are together and simultaneously the Consciousness that is reality and the Consciousness that is mind, which are the same Consciousness: the ātman is a portion of the Brahman. The structures brought by representation fall away, the various schizo-categories evaporate or collapse—subject here and objects there, palpable matter and inexistent thoughts, before and after, events that have happened and perfect ones, situations in becoming. Once the belief that there exists a past already irreparably completed, a future that will occur, and an evanescent and microscopic present—instantaneous or eternal, as one prefers—has vanished, it is precisely the three times, not time in itself, that are unmasked—one reiterates, in accordance with what has already been made explicit, that it is not that the Tantric condition reduces the three times to thoughts; rather, past, present, and future are thoughts in the ordinary mind.
And how does this occur? The revealed texts have always said so—some directly, others implying it: whoever advances in the yoga observes that reality is molded, irrespective of considering that the events and the changed facts belong to what is usually called the past, the present, and the future, simply because this is how it is. An impersonal expression has been used, “that reality is molded”, because this is not done consciously by the yogī, but by the ātman “from” the Brahman through itself and through its various I’s, without the yogī having to be conscious of it in itself. The yogī sees one of his I’s act directed by the ātman, as if watching a film: at first and sometimes from the point of view of the I, at other times from the point of view of the ātman; then the whole integrates itself outside any point of view—and this leads to the higher levels of Tantra.
Is then the yogī different from the acting I and from the ātman? The yogī “is” the ātman, and the ātman is simultaneously the ātman and the I that acts, and is the Brahman. This means, at least at an introductory level, Tat Tvam Asi, “you are That”, icon of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad: it is the (intermediate) aim of asparśa-yoga, yoga as such psycho-organic in Vedānta; it is not a motto or a concept, but indicates “what” one must recognize oneself to experience as “being”, that is, precisely the ātman. In the Upaniṣad it is repeated endlessly that thinking oneself to be the ātman serves nothing, yet at the same time thinking oneself to be the ātman is precisely the practical content of asparśa-yoga, until there is no longer any difference between thought and non-thought—or until the leap occurs from representational awareness to pre-representational awareness (a leap which Heidegger indeed calls, in the text titled Identität und Differenz, “the leap into the abyss”, though clarifying that it is not a plunge, much less a voluntary one, but a retroceding shift, the celebrated Schritt-zurück, the “step back”).
The ātman is also the Brahman, but speaking of the Brahman, even on the basis of what the revealed texts say of it, seems an undertaking that is not possible: if something of the ātman can be sketched in dissection because an individual dimension is also implicated, the Brahman is precisely the all-inclusive dimension and as such is not knowable by the individual except by participation, which makes it impossible to speak of it—and indeed the term “participation” echoes the Platonic methexis as the ultimate definition of the relationship between worldly entities and Ideas, but here it is evidently used in another sense: in the Brahman there are also the phenomena that are called worldly entities and the Ideas themselves, but they do not exist intrinsically and they are not the structure of reality (as for the Ideas, the yogīn too see them, but they scarcely allude to them; Śrī Aurobindo names them because he lived long in the West, for they are not a supposed auto kath’auto being of which worldly things participate or are copies, but it is reducing them to rational terms that makes them entities).
If anything, the Brahman in Western terms can be said thus: identity and difference in the yoga are not absent, only they are not the concepts that representational thinking has of them, for it presupposes entities and establishes identity and difference between entities—as coincidence between itself and itself, and non-coincidence between itself and the other; that is, identity and difference are abstract descriptive unfoldings implicit in thinking an “entity”. In the Brahman there are no entities, and yet identity and difference are given, but coexistent and in actuality: clearly these are empty words that sound baroque, but the Brahman spoken of by the yogīn is the living of this, and certainly not the concept of “a Whole” that philosophers and physicists may think.
Continue in Part IV