Returning to the Source, 8

Chapter seven closed on a question: how does a silent experience become a word, then a transmission, then a tradition? In other words, how does what we call spirituality come to be? This chapter goes back to the first people who saw beyond the evident, well before doctrines and even before words themselves, and who knew how to pass on what they had recognized.

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2. The Birth of Spirituality

There was a time when spirituality had no name yet.

There were no established doctrines yet, no learned commentaries, no schools set against one another, no temples in the sense we understand today ; even if certain caves, like Lascaux, can be seen, in a certain light, as the first places of the sacred. There were human beings, groups, clans, fires lit against the night, deep caves, forests, rivers, animals, the dead to be accompanied, children to protect, seasons to wait out and pass through.

In the midst of this harsh, fragile, exposed life, some saw something beyond the obvious, something profound.

They were not, at first, the founders of mystical paths, spiritualities, or religions. They did not know that one day, long after them, people would speak of the sacred, of mysticism, of yoga in its original sense, of wisdom, of revelation, or of tradition. They did not yet have these words.

They lived before any systems, but they were probably the first to notice that human existence was not limited to surviving, eating, sleeping, hunting, reproducing, and dying.

Then something in them may have opened ; a sharper attention, a deeper relationship with the living world, a different perception of death, of breath, of fire, of the night, of animals, of the stars.

They would later be called shamans, visionaries, sages, rishis, prophets, or awakened ones. These names belong to different eras, languages, and traditions. They should not be confused with one another. And yet, behind their diversity, a single figure seems to emerge: someone who sees what others live through without seeing it, without even giving it a name or always noticing it.

The sage is not first and foremost someone who holds a doctrine. The sage is someone who sees. They see human restlessness. They see the fear that tightens a person, the desire that pulls them along, the image they hold of themselves, the thoughts that follow one another until they are mistaken for the whole of consciousness. They also see that, beneath this restlessness, there is something else: a silence, a breath, and a presence that watches.

The first sages were probably observers of existence before they were teachers. They observed the rhythms of life, of the body, of nature, of the sky, of birth and death.

They noticed that the breath changed with fear, fatigue, effort, joy, waiting, concentration. They saw that attention shifts when the body becomes still, when noise recedes, when the gaze settles, when breathing grows slower and fuller, or, conversely, more rhythmic and intense. It is hard today to imagine what such a discovery might have been.

We live in a world saturated with explanations. Every phenomenon must have a cause, must receive an analysis, a definition. But the first people who lived through these states did not experience them first as ideas, but in their bodies, their emotions, their waiting, their breathing, their relationship to life and to the living world.

Deep inside a cave, a man blows colored earth onto a wall. He is not painting under the clear light of a studio. He moves forward in darkness, guided by the trembling fire of a torch. The walls shift with the flame. The contours of the rock become backs, shoulders, the flanks of animals. A crack becomes a line. A bulge becomes a presence.

He blows. The pigment leaves his mouth, spreads across the stone, follows the shape of the rock. The exhale repeats, short, rhythmic, deliberate. His whole body takes part. The breath is no longer only what keeps him alive. It becomes gesture. It becomes rhythm. It becomes a passage between what is inside the body and the appearance of a form.

In such a place, perception changes.

The darkness, the silence, the fatigue, the isolation, the flickering light, the altered breathing can transform one’s inner state. The animal that appears is not only an image. It seems to rise out of the rock. It seems to be there.

It is very likely that people discovered, very early on, the effects of psychoactive substances ; mushrooms, resins, the sap of trees and flowers ; which had effects on them that they took to be magical, as passageways to the sacred.

We cannot know exactly what that person lived through. Any certainty here would overreach. But we can recognize the coherence of a hypothesis: very early on, human beings may have discovered that breath was not only a biological function, but a means of transforming their relationship to the world, to their own body, and to what they perceived.

Breathing connects. Breath connects. It connects the inside and the outside. It connects the body and consciousness. It connects individual life to the wider movement of the living.

Long before being named prana, pneuma, spiritus, or qi, it was first lived. It was felt as that which animates, that which passes through, that which brings to life. It was not yet a doctrine of the breath. It was an experience of the breath.

Both of these must be held together: not to invent a history we cannot prove, but not to deny, either, what human experience makes plausible. No direct lineage can be claimed between the breathing gestures of a Paleolithic man and the codified practices of yoga. But nothing forbids us from thinking that, in different places and different eras, people recognized in the breath a particular power.

What would later become a technique may have begun as an observation. What would later become a doctrine may have begun as a moment of wonder. What would later become a tradition may have begun in a body breathing differently and discovering that its perception was changing.

This intuition is not limited to caves.

Elsewhere, other people must have noticed that silence changes attention, that stillness changes the way one sees, that the rhythm of walking transforms one’s inner state, that repeating a gesture calms the mind, that certain words spoken slowly, certain chants, certain sounds, certain nights kept watching by a fire or under the stars, opened another kind of perception, opened a door.

Spirituality may have been born there ; not in a theory about the world, but in the attention paid to these shifts.

Whoever, within a human group, noticed these things became different. Not because they held power in any crude sense, but because they knew something the others sensed without understanding or being able to put it into words.

They knew how to calm, to accompany, to listen, to interpret a dream, to recognize a sign, to prepare a rite, to guide a passage, to ease a fear. They also knew how to be alone. They knew how to remain silent, and to return with a word full of meaning.

The first sage may have been the one who did not leave experience unquestioned.

Many people know moments of peace, of clarity, of presence ; and then forget them. The sage, instead, recognizes them. They return to them. They observe what makes them possible, what obscures them, what steadies or destroys them. They do not simply live through a moment of depth; they understand that this moment points toward a direction. That is when experience becomes a path, a spiritual way.

One day, someone sees that people can live differently. Another day, someone asks them how. At that exact moment, spirituality begins to exist, to become teaching, transmission.

Picture this simply. A person suffers, grows restless, feels afraid, gets lost in their thoughts or their desires. Another, steadier, quieter, more attentive, says something to them. Perhaps very little. Breathe. Look. Listen. Be still. Don’t follow every thought. Come back.

These words seem poor. They contain no metaphysics yet. They do not describe the universe. They do not explain the origin of the world. They do not yet divide people into believers and unbelievers. They point only toward a direction.

That direction is immense, foundational, for it implies that one human being can help another find again what they could no longer see. They can show them a spring they had been walking past without stopping. They can remind them of the importance of breathing, of breath. They can remind them of silence. They can remind them that within them is a watching presence that sees what is seen, and that is not the thoughts passing through it.

From there, a word becomes possible. Not a word of speculation, but a word of guidance. Not a word that first asks for belief, but a word that invites verification.

Later, this word would be kept, repeated, passed on. Disciples would appear. Gestures would be preserved. Stories would be born. Places would become sacred. Lineages would form. Chants, hymns, rules, images, symbols, and rites would come to organize what had, at first, been an experience.

In the Indus Valley, much later, a refined civilization would leave such traces. The excavations at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have uncovered seals, postures, a relationship to the living world, to water, to animals, to fertility, to the order of things, that hint at a world where body, breath, presence, and the sacred were not yet separated as they would sometimes become in later systems.

There is no need to project too quickly onto this the yoga of the Upanishads or of the Bhagavad Gita. But it is not impossible that ancient forms of inner experience passed through these cultures, and later nourished, under other names and in other languages, the great intuitions of India and China ; the Tao among them.

The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the later Hindu developments do not then appear as absolute beginnings. They can also be read as moments of interpretation, of formulation, and of reorganization of a much older experience ; an experience that is not born with the text, but that the text seeks to express.

This perspective takes nothing away from the greatness of these traditions. It may, instead, make them more human, and therefore more profound.

For what comes first is not the book. It is the person who sees, who breathes, who falls silent, and who discovers, in silence, in breath, in attention, and in what watches, another way of living.

The first sages were the keepers of this discovery before they were the founders of doctrines. Their role may not have been to invent spirituality, but to recognize the importance of what others lived without understanding ; and then to pass it on.

Someone saw. Someone spoke. Someone listened, and what had been lived in silence began to become a word offered to others.

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