Q : I think that love destroys the soul and through this kind of love I feel the other person is hurting me.

E : What is the question ?

Q : If love can hurt the soul or not.

E : What soul ?

Q : Does the one who loves this way destroy his soul ?

E : There is nothing there to be destroyed, but nothing to be loved either. There is nobody to love. There is no need to live in a world of concepts. One comes to live in a very functional way. We feel the emotion, we feel the pain and the suffering of the body, attraction, repulsion. We don't need metaphysical concepts to live. To feel hurt is a concept. The only thing that hurts us is our beliefs.

(Long pause)

Q : When we are connected with the feeling on the body level could we say that we are connected with ultimate reality, with the truth ?

E : What do you gain by saying that ?

Q : When the mind is absent are you then in contact with the truth ?

E : The concept of truth belongs to the mind. If there is no mind there is no truth. We don't need to justify life with a metaphysical concept. When I get hurt, I get hurt. I live with the feeling. There is no point in trying to make it spiritual. If it is reality or not we just live with the pain. Any dynamism to qualify it, to justify it, to explain it, will take us away from the facts. One must learn to live in mediocrity, free from all spiritual or metaphysical concepts. Otherwise there is a waste of energy.

Q : Yes I am talking about this mediocrity.

E : This mediocrity is when the mind has no role to play. It is the mind that creates high and low, which separates. But living with the facts, living in mediocrity is oneness. One feels at ease with whatever is there. There is no need to name it, but otherwise mediocrity is a nice name.

Q : Has the word “balance” any connection with mediocrity ?

E : Balance is to have no support. If you have a support you can be unbalanced. So real balance is to have no contact. If you have a contact with the floor you can be unbalanced. It's only when you are free of contact that balance can be achieved. So mediocrity for me is balance. Yes it is a lack of separation. You are not supported by something, you are supported by the whole situation. But as long as there is a center — even if it is a very deep center — that center can be unbalanced. So mediocrity is like wind. If you push it you cannot push anything. So psychologically, anything we know, anything we take, anything we grasp creates localization and localization can be unbalanced. In fact in yoga as long as you feel the floor you can never be straight. You must totally invade the floor with the body feeling, then let the floor invade the body feeling then the two meet each other and then there is no more floor, no more body feeling. Then the absence of floor and body brings about a state of balance. But as long as we sit and we feel the floor we cannot feel free. The contact with the floor is the feeling of weight. It's only when I dissolve the contact with the floor that I can feel weightless. That is the basis of all martial arts.

Q : And how do you do that Eric ? You just decide and you go into the floor ? I mean it has to go through your mind first and then you do it  ?

E : No. What comes to you is the feeling of the floor. What comes to you is a pretension. I suffer because of this, because of that. That is concrete for us. So it is the awareness of this movement within us, which is the beginning of our inquiry. To feel the weight of the body is where my questioning begins. I move an arm and I feel the arm has some weight. That's the beginning of my questioning. That is enough. Through my love of life, my love of the body feeling I come to see that there is no weight in the arm and that the natural feeling of the arm and the body is weightlessness. There is no reason. It comes from life. It is the humility to live with the facts, to accept the weight, to accept the tension, the problems, which allows me to explore it. But if I want to solve the problem, I am living in the future. I am not present now. Then I can only create strategy and as strategy comes from limitation, it always brings me back to limitation. Again, like in martial arts, if somebody strangles you, you may know five or six ways to get free — and of course sometimes it may work —, but when you become more sensitive you know that when someone tries to strangle you, you must never try to get free. You feel the other body. You feel your body. You become totally one with the pressure. By not escaping this fact, your body may find a way to move so that you cannot be strangled anymore. There is no strategy. It is interesting when one is working in martial arts, to sometimes play without strategy. One can become very creative. Because you do not think your way out, your partner cannot anticipate it either.

Q : How can you maintain balance between male and female ?

E : By seeing that they are both concepts. When I stop pretending, what resonates in my silence is neither male nor female. Acting like a woman or like a man depends on the situation. One must be open to all possibilities. But on the male-female level you cannot find balance because the need to feel male or female comes from fear. You are looking for an identity. It's like wanting to be rich or wanting to be this or that. There is only conflict. When you feel very intensely that you are neither male nor female, relationships with male or female are very easy because you don't want anything any more. And because you don't want anything you listen and when you listen conflict is no longer possible. But if you want something as a male or as a female you are always dissatisfied. To want something is a lack of sensitivity. If you have an identity of course this identity needs to be approved. So a man wants to be taken for a man, and a woman wants to be taken for a woman. Rich people want to be treated as rich people and sick people want to be treated as sick people. And if you deny them this identity they become crazy. If you say to a rich man  : “You have nothing” he becomes crazy. If you say to a sick person  : “You are in perfect health” he becomes crazy. If you say to a woman who thinks she is beautiful that you are not taken by her looks she becomes crazy. But there is no such thing as a rich man, a sick man or a beautiful woman. These are concepts. You think this woman is beautiful, but the husband who just divorced her sees her differently. It's just the fantasy we project. 

Q : Should somebody try to transform his sexual energy ?

E : Anything we seek comes from our past, from memory. It's an idea we have picked up somewhere. To think I must change something in myself does not come from clarity. To free oneself from all cultural comments about sexuality, to really feel what I feel and not what I should feel is a more direct way to clearing something. If you try by some exercises to change your sexuality into something different, your problem would be different but you will find another area of your life which will become a mystery for you and heavy.

Sexuality is a very wide field of investigation. It is very interesting to explore sexuality without commenting on it. To strip it of all the romantic limitations of society, of all the pretence as to how one should be. Instead inquire what is my feeling. By denying the fact that something stimulates me, excites me, it binds me to it. To do it or not is another question. But to really feel it is the first step. As long as I want to sleep with this or that person and I deny it, then I am bound, because wanting is memory, not feeling. Sexuality is everything. To look at someone is sexual. To smell somebody is sexual, to feel somebody in a room even a few metres away from me is sexual. To let the feeling of somebody come back to me even if this person died ten years ago is sexual. I don't need to put my hand on somebody to be sexual. So one comes to deeply see how we work, how we function. You see something and your whole body comes alive. You see something else and your whole body completely freezes.  You hear this comment and your whole body is excited, you hear another comment and your whole body goes dead. So one at some point inquires into this field. That's called yoga. We stay with the feeling and do not invest in thinking. Pleasure, pain, all these concepts become very subtle.

It may be very sensual to play at strangling or biting someone. Softness and hardness are very elastic in a body free from fear. When somebody strangles you, before you collapse, it is very sensual. So if your girlfriend strangles you, it may be a highly elevated form of sensuality, if it is encountered in the right way. One must learn to be open.

Q : Is it the same thing whatever the intensity of the feeling ?

E : Yes. It is feeling. There are many ways to touch somebody. But if one denies the deep feeling of the body, if I feel like raping someone or I feel like assaulting somebody and I deny the feeling and I want to transform it, I will carry the feeling with me for the rest of my life. Transforming sexuality is just creating a huge frustration. I've seen people in India who for many years tried to transform sexuality but if I send them one of my prostitute friends in a few minutes, all those years of yoga training will go away. It's a joke. But if somebody really lives his sensitivity this burns up the imagination and then nothing can make you create a story. What excites the mind is a story. Only that excites you. You may look at a woman now and feel excited, but if we tell that you your mother just died, you may look at the same woman and she will not excite you any more. She is the same woman but you don't project any more because your energy goes in another direction. You pay for the dream not the reality. So when you come to live in the feeling there is no more imagination. A touch is a touch ; a look is a look. You make nothing out of it and because you make nothing out of it, it is totally fulfilling. What's happening is fulfilling. We miss nothing. We don't need anything to go in this direction or that direction. So when you come to approach the body in that way there is a new sexuality. It's sexuality with no goals, no expectations. It's really meditation. It contains all the softness and all the hardness necessary, but no psychological involvement. That is transformation. But it comes about by coming back to our feeling not by allowing desire to change things. And as you know in Tai Chi it is the same thing. When you want to achieve something then the other person can feel you but when you work with somebody and you are in the present — you don't try, you don't want, you don't fear — nobody can read you and that's the beauty of the art of push-hand. You come with no intention, no heaviness, you just play, this is oneness. You can have this in a sexual relationship too. No grasping, no trying, no escaping. Just be present, the whole body is alive. There are not two bodies, only one body and the whole game of life can express itself. But first it comes from wanting nothing. Then in a way for me, there is beauty. But when somebody wants to work with an issue and he wants something, he prepares something, it is heavy. But when you meet somebody who tries nothing on you, it's beautiful because it's a kind of mystery. But it could be free of the mind. If there is no mind play there is no direction. Chen Man Chin was known to teach like that in New York. He taught without giving any direction  : “Never try, never try.” When you don't try, you are open. When you are open things happen. You can integrate sexuality in the same way. But we have so many concepts of what is right or what is not right. I should feel this, I should not feel that. It is difficult to get away from it. But for most people sexuality is too complex to be approached that way because they live with all the structures imposed by religion, by the society we are living in. So of course they think in terms of lover or husband or wife or children or old and young, or good and bad and so of course they cannot resonate with sexuality because they are bound up in fantasy. And you cannot have both at the same time. When you are free of concepts, when you touch somebody and you don't know what is there, there is no comment. It's not your wife, it's not your lover, it's not your daughter, it's not your dog — it's nothing. It is pure feeling. Transformation begins. And there is no pathology possible because there is no restriction. Pathology comes from restriction.

Q : Should we live our lives with a goal and if so what could that be like, a mission ?

E : I have no idea what would be the goal of life. I don't see any, I don't need a goal to love. I don't need a goal to strangle a friend, I don't need a goal to make my bed or to eat. Life resonates within me. To comb my hair or to put on some make-up, I don't need a goal for that. The goal implies that I am not interested in life now. To have a goal it means my present life is shit now and may be tomorrow it will be beautiful once I reach my goal. But if you love life there is no need for a goal. No goal is needed. The beauty of life is now. There is nothing else other than being here together now. There is nothing else. Happiness is being present. I don't want happiness for tomorrow when such and such will happen. Happiness is now. We are bound to this very moment, we are nothing other than this very moment. That is what I want. I want what is now. That's happiness. But if I have a goal I deny the beauty of now. I cannot serve the surroundings. Your friends need some help but you cannot help them because you have a goal to fulfill. For me the goal is to be present to whatever comes to me. If there was a goal it could be that one. But that one is not a goal because it is what it is..... What goal could I have ?

Q : And what about a mission ? A goal or mission ?

E : Missions are for very important people. When one lives in mediocrity, one could not have a mission. Very simply there is no room for a mission. But if you become a holy man you may have a mission. But here we don't entertain holiness, we talk about simplicity. If you wear a black robe and you wear a cross, may be you could have a mission. You are different from people who don't have a robe. You are proud of your robe. You are proud of your mission. It is beautiful but it doesn't concern what we are talking about. To have a mission would imply “I know what is best”. What can I know ? Every thing I can know comes from my memory. If I am born Christian or if I am born Buddhist, I will know something very different. But when you come to see there is nothing, you see all you can know is ideas, you realize there is nothing you can really know. When you see there is nothing you can know, it is freedom because you stop pretending you know things. That means you are open. When you are open the idea of a mission, of knowing, of teaching can never come into the picture. Life is a game  : you do it for the joy of it. There is nothing serious in life. You may think this is very serious now but later on you see it in a very different way. Change comes about without intention. When you live with a child and you need to teach him something you don't need a mission to teach him what he needs. It is a game. I am not trying to convince anybody. There are many ways of approaching life. I respect people who have a mission and spiritual people but this is not my resonance.

Q : You just said  : “If there are things you want to teach a child”.... What ?

E : It's a way of speaking. It's not teaching but it's playing with the child.

Q : Eric what I feel is that all this spirituality that we live nowadays all over the world has brought tremendous confusion. And my feeling, my experience is that for many, many years in my life, I was trying to feel this spiritual thing because I was afraid to feel what was in front of me. And now I realize at this period in my life that there is nothing that is not spiritual. Spiritual is only a word but I cannot find another one. I don't know how to express it. There is nothing to deny. Although I feel fear for many things that appear before me, I feel also simultaneously that there is nothing to deny. There is a denial on the body level because there is this fear. But it is not like it was before. There is nothing to deny and this feeling I have now comes from a terrible tension on the body level, from a great suffering on the body level which.... which....

E : Which comes from an idea.

Q : Which comes from an idea ?

E : It would be enough to investigate the body as we did this weekend. If we approach the body feeling that way, it clears us of all spiritual concepts. What remains is a feeling of vastness, a feeling of emptiness, silence, which contains all possibilities. We each are given our share of suffering and problems, but sooner or later they resonate as our way. We must come to want our life. I want the mind I have now, I want the body I have now, I want the emotion I have now. There is nothing else. As long as I feel the slightest restriction in my body-mind and emotions I live in fear and I'll try to overcome my fear. Sooner or later I must want what is in front of me. And this is constantly changing. The mind I have now, because I don't pretend it is my mind, is constantly changing. All the emotions are constantly new. With the body feeling it is the same thing. When I feel my body heavy, I want the heaviness. When I feel my body light I want the lightness. This is what I really resonate with, with this constant change. If I deny myself something or as long there is one inch of my past that I don't want then I live in restriction. But it is very hard because the mind has always been trained to want something for tomorrow. And if I live like that, then I will find tomorrow just as boring as today. It is only when I take a stand for openness, that I am ready to go in any direction, that I feel the beauty of life. But as long as one entertains the question  : “What can I do to change my life  ?” sadness and separation and isolation are always there. The question is  : “What can I do not to change my life  ?” And it is a very nice question because you ask yourself  : “What can I do to stop wanting to change my life constantly  ?” You realize there is nothing you can do. You stop asking something from life and when you don't ask for anything, you receive everything. But you don't ask for this gift. It requires some maturity to feel that. As long as one is carried by the need to do things, achieve things you act on it. One must live at one's level.

Q : This is not just a way of speaking ?

E : What is not just a way of speaking ?

Q : To live at the level of your understanding of things  ?

E : No it's the deepest way. Really one can only resonate with things when one doesn't expect anything from them.

Q : So you want something and you move towards it. You do things without expecting anything  ?

E : There is resonance. There is no separation. The smell of strawberries stimulates the movement that takes you to the strawberries. In boxing, there is no decision to punch. It comes from the open space ahead of you.

Q : This wanting. Where does it come from ? From resonance again ?

E : Yes, because life is movement. You don't need a reason to do things. You don't need a reason to go to the opera.

Q : Sometimes you may think that there is a resonance and may be there is not, in fact you just follow the mind's desire. Is that so ?

E : It seems like that sometimes. But there is nothing personal. What we call personal desire is not personal. What seems to be a personal action is not personal. There is no separate entity. But it seems that way.

Q : Eric you are making me very confused because sometimes the way you say things I realize I am following a story and then you say  : "No everything is unity, the story is included."

E : Yes.

Q : What I mean is sometimes you make me feel so up in the air, like I should stop the thinking mechanism.

E : Yes

Q : And I don't know why but I feel angry now.

E : Yes, because you try to understand. The mind cannot understand. The only thing we can do together is to come to see what is not. Yes, is not. The mind wants to choose, but then you come to see very clearly at some point that something is stopping you. There is no freedom, there is nothing pre-determined either, they are both concepts of the mind. You cannot have one concept without the other. So yes, you say  : “see that you have a story”, and yes you can say  : “there is no such thing as a story”, because there is no one there to “have any story”. So what do you do with that  ? If you follow the two lines of feeling very deeply you come to a blank state and in this blank state there is dissolution. And you see it is not the one, nor the other. They are both concepts. But these concepts have been recalled from memory. In time it becomes evident that life is not a concept. That life cannot be thought.

That's why you can never say  : “I understand something.” This realization will knowingly remain as a constant background present before any upsurge of understanding. All knowing is included in not knowing. The moment you say "I know this" you exclude the opposite. So of course you challenge the knowledge later on and it is very upsetting to the mind. We realize that wanting to understand was a need to grasp what cannot be grasped. It goes against what we have said that there is no sense in anything. You may hear that and feel very happy. To make sense out of the idea that there is no sense in anything gives you a feeling of security. Then someone tells you  : "Look you are making sense out of it" and then the mind becomes crazy because it sees that it cannot not make sense out of it. Because when you understand that there is no sense in anything, you are saying to yourself  : "that makes sense". You are falling into the trap. So you have to constantly observe yourself because you constantly want to grasp what you cannot grasp and for the mind of course it is very upsetting. But it works. You must see the mechanism of understanding there is nothing to understand. There is nothing to understand, — you hear that and say  : “Yes, now I understand that” and again you fall into the trap. So you must stop knowingly before understanding. Jean talked of it as a double absence. That there is an absence within the absence that is contained in the presence. But that's on Jean Klein's level. (We could approach it in a more simple way.)

Q : But Jean Klein used to say that it is good to find the limits, to push the understanding of the mind to the very limit.

E : Jean Klein was beyond anything one can comprehend. So I cannot talk about it. For me the need to know the limits of the mind is a very beautiful limited-mind concept, because there is no such thing as a limit to the mind. The mind is unlimited. Like if you say  : “You must come to feel the limits of your body. It is unlimited. You can spend 60 million lives and still every new day — every day you can feel more deeply and every day you can think more deeply. The limit of the mind on the body level is totally horizontal. Every day you can be more certain. So what  ? You are going to die and could have been so much more certain. So the problem is not to be really certain. It will remain limited all your life. We must live with that. Our mind, our body will stay gross all our life. But you can see that and when I clearly see that whatever conclusion I reach on the mental level will always be gross, there is a space in me which resonates, in which gross feeling and subtle feeling, high mind, low mind come to be seen as exactly equal. And this space is presence. And this space is something I can never reach by making my body subtle or by thinking high thoughts. This space is always with me when I do not pretend that I need to make my body subtle or that I need to my mind to think high thoughts.

I respect what Jean said when Jean was there to say it. Coming from him, yes it was okay. But it is not something I would extract from his teaching. Jean's teaching was alive because of Jean. When Jean would say something is beautiful, his presence brought it alive. But now if one says : "Jean said that", it is like saying : "Ramana Maharishi said that". It's grotesque. Ramana Maharishi never said anything. The words we have from him are an expression but they were not his teaching. So I think it is very important we do not extract words from a spiritual teaching because spiritual teaching contains no words. We use words sometimes to convey a spiritual teaching. But the words of a teacher mean what they mean. So yes, what he said is of course true but it was to be realized at the time he said it. It was true then. At another time he would say the opposite too. So then what was happening ? He said this and he said that. He said everything is conditioned and he said everything is free. So read the two sentences, put them together and it makes no sense to you. Nothing. So hearing one at the right time will bring you to silence and then hearing the opposite at the right time will also bring you to silence. But now it remains only as a sentence, and a sentence only brings you agitation. So when you read Jean's book, if it brings you to silence you are ready but if you remain in the argument read it again, so that you come to forget the argument and only experience silence. But it is important to see how much we have this mechanism in us to want to grasp. It's enough to just see it… constantly. And there is nothing wrong with it ; we just knowingly experience this grasping process. I feel it in my shoulders, in my mouth, in my tongue, in my forehead, in the way I walk, in the way I breathe, in the way I look, in the way I listen, in the way I read, in the way I think, in the way I act and constantly, knowingly, I live my pretension without the pretension of being free from pretension.  Clearly. That's spiritual enquiry.

(Pause)

Some people find it difficult to leave after spending time together : they feel that something is missing. This is the ultimate feeling. Something is missing. What is missing could never be present. Not on this level. If we leave with the idea that “we have had a very good talk, now I understand” then it was a waste of time. We must leave with the feeling that we never touched upon what was important. It can never be touched upon, it can never be thought, it can never be understood. So we leave with a very strange feeling that of a space which we can not name, we can never really feel in any way. What is there, is there, that is all. The discussion, all the exercises were just a moving, a breathing in that space. But it's very uncomfortable. The ego needs to go to a seminar and leave and say : “Now I know something  : a new exercise and I understood something.” Here it is the opposite. We meet and we leave without understanding anything, without becoming anything, without knowing anything. It needs some kind of maturity to be able to cope with it. And if somebody does not have this maturity sometimes they get mad and go somewhere else to become spiritual or to become something. But no we did not talk about what is important. It is like when we are in love with somebody, we never say what is important. We talk about movies, we talk about dancing, we talk about beauty but there is something that we don't talk about and that is the course of our relationship. And sometimes we leave the person that we love and the mind may tell you “it's too bad, I did not really express my feelings.” But it should be that way. There is nothing to concretize. The beauty of life, the beauty of a relationship is to never touch upon what is important. It's an art, the art of not giving substance, or reference points. That is what we do in the bodywork. We come to the body feeling where there is no inside, no outside. There is no substance. This open state is the royal way to not creating an imaginary world and a self.

Thank you for coming again.