René Daumal: Letters on the Search for Awakening (1930–1944)

A letter to 
Jeanne de Salzmann

                                                     Pelvoux, August 6, 1943

We received yesterday, Thursday, the transcript  of the 22nd and read it last night—and so more than ever I felt as if I was in “Paris” (I say “Paris” as others say Mecca). Your letter helps me very much. How necessary it is to hear oneself repeating, and repeating yet again, everything one thinks one knows!

First I want to respond to your questions:

1) Has my remembering, my sensation of “I am,” changed? It’s very difficult to respond altogether properly. In my ordinary state, I see above all the negative side: I see myself more and more submerged in a sea of identifications and, the more I work, the more I’m assaulted by all the causes of distraction. My ability to remember myself does not, then, seem to me to have changed very much. But that isn’t true. If I reflect—that is to say, if I confront my ordinary state today with my memory of the best moments of work—I see a slight change. I’ve had several moments, rare and brief, when “I am” had a new taste—new, and at the same time it was like returning to something very ancient and deeply concealed, something at the same time painful and quiet—empty and null, and yet sure of itself, which separates itself from the machine for a few moments and prevails over it. At that moment, my attitude toward my body changes completely. I no longer consider it “mine,” as my property over which I have every right, but rather as something confided to me for certain uses, which can be taken from me from one moment to the next without giving me any cause for protest. And at those moments, in fact I wouldn’t protest. It may be this deep reaction in front of the thought of death that gives me the best measure of the small progress I’ve been able to make in the quality of my remembering. But not in duration. Just there, I feel, is the great work that calls for continuity of effort and patience: “to sustain the effort.”

I also see the distance already covered when I compare the meaning of the word “being” some time ago and today. Some time ago, “being” meant “to delight in oneself”: having reached a certain state, to stop to enjoy it and admire oneself (and from there, what a fall!) Now, “being” means rather to fulfill consciously one’s place and function, and that is why I know that I am not; but I know this only when I say “I am.”

2) Concerning my “concentration of thought”—here, too, if there is a change, it’s in the direction of a struggle that is larger, sharper, more frequent; but if the enemy appears to me stronger and more numerous, it may well be a sign that I have a little more force myself. The fact is that during the exercises, or when I reflect, my thought is now cleanly split in two: in those moments the active part no longer blends with the mechanical part; and the latter I sometimes feel to be quite submissive, no longer bothering me with its associations. But here again, the issue is to make it last longer. As soon as the effort is let go, the flow of associations seems to me much worse than before.

What is developing in these days is the taste and need for struggle. An answer of Mr. Gurdjieff’s about the need to go against the body in everything it likes or does not like has recently shown me this more clearly. It’s certain that in my case I can’t apply this rule to the letter (unfortunately, because in times past when I believed I could, it gave me a great deal). But if, under the word “body,” I also include everything that is most mechanical in my functions, an entire field of work opens up. With my intellectual mechanism, in particular, I can apply the rule of thwarting it in everything, of opposing myself to its tics, its manias, its clichés, etc.—in a word, its laziness. It goes without saying that this makes my work as a writer more difficult, but much more interesting and inwardly fruitful.

Yes, I do the exercises, and I shall try to do them better and better, in the spirit you ask: “as a service” and “as one learns a trade.” The work is more and more a work “on myself” rather than a work “for myself.” The greatest satisfactions I now have in my work are the moments when I observe that the “personal” element has become less strong. It’s difficult to say, but I feel very clearly today that “I am” is just the contrary of “I, me, my."

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.