René Daumal: You've always been wrong (1908 -1944)

        Spiritual Death

You have always been wrong. Like me, like everyone, you have let yourself glide on easy slopes which lead nowhere. Only in dreams has your mind traveled toward the truth. Set your thought today alongside the things that are holding out against you: your most beautiful theories fade away before the wall of appearances. This veil of colored forms, of sights, of sounds, of touch, so easily called illusory, is solid nevertheless. It is from here that you set out, but you took the wrong door. Or rather, you thought that you had set out, you fell asleep on the threshold, and dreamed your beliefs about the world and about the mind. Today I am waiting for you on the threshold. We will try to take our first steps together. I ask you first to look at what surrounds you at this moment, as simply as possible. See what presents itself to you. Above all, do not begin by questioning the reality of this world: in the name of what would you judge it? Do you know what absolute reality is?

Anyone who undertakes a voyage must set off from the place where he finds himself; he should not believe the voyage has been accomplished because he has an exact and detailed itinerary in his hand; the line he has traced on a map only makes sense if he can determine the point where he actually is. So, you, in the same way, seek yourself. I mean: awaken yourself, find yourself. The place where you find yourself is the true state of your consciousness, taken together with all that it contains. It is from here that you must set out. And all our speculations will never be more than the itinerary of a merely possible voyage.

All self-contained metaphysical systems resemble the fruitless pleasure of a man who spends his time reading guidebooks and itineraries, putting together routes on a map and believing he is traveling. Up to now, philosophers have seemed to do hardly anything else, or, if some of them have made actual voyages, none has known how to reveal them to us; and so, any philosophy, even if it was lived by its creator as an actual experience, remains a sterile game, of no use to men.

The attempt I am suggesting you make with me can be summed up in two words: stay awake. I have asked you first to awaken, to see what you are aware of now. You are aware of continual change. Besides, you have felt, in one way or another, a need to become something which you are not yet: but it is even possible that, not understanding me well, you say that you feel nothing of the sort. Even so, you can experience, if you accept passively the conditions being imposed on your consciousness, that you are asleep. Awakening is not a state; it is an act. And people are much more rarely awake than their words would have us believe.

The only immediate action which you can accomplish is to wake up, to become aware of yourself. Just take a look at what you believe you have done since this day began: it is perhaps the first time that you have really woken up, and it is only at that moment that you are aware of all that you have done like an automaton, without thought. For the most part, men never wake up except to the point of realizing that they have been asleep. Now, accept, if you wish, this existence of a sleepwalker. You can live the life of an idler, a laborer, a peasant, a merchant, a diplomat, an artist, a philosopher, without ever waking up, except from time to time, just enough to enjoy or to suffer the manner in which you sleep. It would perhaps even be more convenient not to wake up at all.

And since the reality of the spirit is action, in this sleep, in the absence of real action and lack of real thought, there is nothing. Truly, it is spiritual death.

But if you have chosen to be, then you have committed yourself to a rough road, climbing ceaselessly and demanding an effort at every moment. You wake up, and, at once, you must wake up again. You awake from your awakening, your first awakening appears like sleep to your deeper awakening. On this way of self-inquiry, consciousness is forever going into action. Where most other men only wake up, fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep, climb one step in consciousness only to fall back immediately, never rising above this zig-zagging line, you find yourself.

You find yourself again and again launched on an undefined route of always new awakenings, and as there is nothing better for a discerning consciousness, your pondering on this perpetual awakening towards the highest possible consciousness will constitute the science of sciences. I call it metaphysics, but, though it is the science of sciences, don’t forget that it will never be more than the itinerary planned beforehand — and only in outline — of a real journey. If you forget that, if you believe you have achieved awakening because you have established the conditions of your perpetual awakening beforehand, then, at that moment you fall asleep, you fall asleep into spiritual death.