Returning to the Source, 9

Chapter eight ended on a precise moment: when a man, having seen what he could not show, begins to speak in spite of everything, and what had been only silence becomes, for the first time, a shared word. Chapter nine follows this passage from experience to language, showing how two men who lived through the same thing, without ever knowing each other, can speak of it with different images, without their experiences ever having diverged.

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Chapter 9. From Experience to Language

A man returns from a state he cannot show. He saw something, or rather he ceased, for a time, to be separate from what he was watching. He knew a boundless silence, a peace that depended on nothing, a presence that needed no proof to impose itself as the most certain thing he had ever known. Then that state withdrew, the way a tide withdraws, and he found himself sitting by the fire again, among his own people, carrying within him something that resembled nothing he could name.

What does he do then? He could stay silent. Many, no doubt, did. How many experiences of this kind passed through humanity leaving no trace beyond a slightly different way of looking at things, a slightly calmer way of living one's life, before fading away with the person who had lived them? We will never know. Silence leaves no monument, no record.

But sometimes, a man speaks. And it is this precise moment, even more than the experience itself, that begins to give rise to what we will later call spirituality.

To speak of something formless forces us to give it a form. Silence has no outline. The watching presence has no color, no weight, no boundary. And yet, as soon as it must be passed on, it has to be dressed in words, in sounds that already belong to a world, to a language, to a way of describing reality inherited from generations before.

The experience was formless. The word used to speak it necessarily has one. This is where something strange begins: translating the untranslatable.

The man who has known this state has only the images of his own world to draw on. If he lives near a river, he may say that something flowed within him. If he lives in the desert, he may say that a space opened up, vast and empty. If he has spent his life watching the sky, he will speak of a light. If he grew up among shepherds, he may speak of a path, a shepherd, a flock. These are not idle myths; they are bridges. A person uses what they have to say what they cannot say any other way.

Thus is born the first of the great laws of spiritual transmission: what is said is never the experience itself, but the closest image that the language of a given time and place could offer, like a signpost pointing a direction. But the signpost must not be mistaken for the road.

Two men who, in places separated by oceans and centuries, lived a similar inner experience may speak of it in radically different ways, not because their experiences differed, but because the words they had inherited were not the same.

One will say he dissolved into the great Whole. Another will say he stood before an immanent presence. A third will say he saw through the veil of appearances.

A hurried reader will conclude that these three men are not speaking of the same thing. A more patient reader will wonder whether it isn't the same thing which, passing through three languages and three different worlds, comes out with three different colors.

This distinction is essential, and it will guide the rest of this book: the disagreement of doctrines must not be confused with the disagreement of experiences. Doctrines can diverge without the experiences at their root diverging.

Words do not merely translate. They also transform whoever receives them. As long as an experience remains unspoken, it belongs only to the one who lived it. As soon as it is spoken, it becomes something others can examine, question, hold onto, or reject. It enters a shared space.

A child listening to their father tell of a night spent alone in the mountains does not live that night; they receive an account of it. That account can awaken something real in them, an intuition, a desire to live the same thing themselves; but it can also become, over time, a baseless belief.

This is where a danger lies, one that traditions themselves have often recognized, each in its own way. A word, once spoken, can go on circulating long after the living person who gave rise to it has vanished from the memory of those who repeat it.

One generation lives the experience and forges the word to name it. The next hears the word and imagines the experience. A more distant generation still merely repeats the word, without even remembering that it once pointed to something real, and often, as it passes from one bearer to the next, the stories shift, diverge, each person adding their own grain of salt. Remembering and passing something on faithfully calls for humility and rigor.

The previous chapter showed this with the example of the map and the landscape. Now a further point must be added: it is not the map itself that misleads. A good map, drawn by someone who truly walked the territory, will be a valuable aid to anyone wishing to venture there in turn. What misleads is forgetting that it is a map, and treating it as though it were the landscape itself.

A cookbook will never satisfy hunger.

The very first words of spirituality most likely made no such claim. They must have resembled a hand pointing in a direction more than a statement. Look over there. That, I saw over there. It was in this place that something happened to me. Words of this kind assert nothing; they invite. They do not say: here is what is true forever and for everyone. They say: here is what happened to me, see if something similar can happen to you too.

But words that repeat, passed from one fire to the next, from one generation to the next, cannot stay this bare forever. To survive time, they need something sturdier than a sentence murmured one evening.

They need a rhythm that makes them easy to remember, as with the Buddha's suttas, an image that makes them easy to picture, a gesture that accompanies them and fixes them in the body as much as in memory. This is how, long before writing, what we will later call myth, song, and rite came to be.

Myth is not, first of all, an invention, nor a naive explanation of the world that science would later come along to correct. It is, first of all, a living memory, a way of preserving, through a story that can be told and passed on, the account of an experience and the intuition of what it opens up in a person.

An experience settles more easily into a story than it does into a definition. An entire people can carry the memory of an inner truth for centuries simply because it took the form of a tale they love telling their children.

Song obeys the same necessity. Words repeated to a rhythm, carried on the breath, borne by a melody, settle into the body in a way no explanation can match. Long before people knew how to write, they already knew how to sing what they did not want to forget.

Rite, finally, does what words alone could not do: it brings back to life, at least in part, the conditions that had allowed the experience to occur the first time. Sitting in a circle around a fire, at nightfall, in silence, is not the same as hearing that others, long ago, once sat in a circle around a fire.

Rite does not recount the experience: it seeks to make it possible again. Torches are lit, oil lamps swung before oneself while chanting. Stories are heard, gathered around a fire. Marks are drawn on cave walls, carved, engraved into stone.

Myths, songs, and rites are therefore not, at their origin, stages of drift away from some original truth that they would gradually betray. They are techniques of memory, invented out of necessity, so that a fragile, silent experience could cross time without being lost.

The danger appears only later, when these forms begin to be lived for their own sake, detached from what they were meant to carry. A song can go on being sung long after no one among those singing it has ever known what it speaks of.

A rite can go on being performed long after its gesture has stopped opening anything in the person performing it. At that point, it is no longer the map that misleads: it is the forgetting of the territory that the map's only function was to recall. The rite becomes the goal instead of remaining a means.

Here we touch on something that will matter for the rest of this book. Spirituality, in its oldest movement, was probably not born from a need to explain the world, nor from a need to master the fear of death, though it may later have come to serve that purpose too.

It was born, more likely, from a simpler and more urgent need: to keep alive, across time and across generations, the memory of a fundamental experience that a few had lived, and that all could live.

A man saw. He looked for words to say it, and words were never enough. He looked for a story to tell it, a song, a gesture to fix it. And so, little by little, without any of them intending it, the account became religion.

The first sages did not found religions. They simply wove, with the means of their time, nets strong enough for an ungraspable experience to be passed on without tearing apart entirely.

It is this weaving that we will now follow, tradition after tradition, in the chapters to come; not to compare doctrines against one another, but to try to see, each time, what original experience each net sought to hold onto.

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