The Holy-Name

Ruach, pneuma, spiritus, prana: in languages far removed from one another, breath and spirit bear the same name. From this breath that animates all life, the traditions have drawn one and the same intuition: a presence that The Spiritual Path calls the Holy-Name, and that others have named the Holy Spirit, the Shekhinah or the virtue of the Tao. A presence that cannot be manufactured and cannot be understood, but can be recognized.

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A Name That Can Be Neither Written Nor Spoken

This text is inspired by a chapter from the book:

"The Fundamental Experience" PDF

Ruach, pneuma, spiritus, prana: in languages far removed from one another, breath and spirit bear the same name. From this breath that animates all life, the traditions have drawn one and the same intuition: a presence that The Spiritual Path calls the Holy-Name, and that others have named the Holy Spirit, the Shekhinah or the virtue of the Tao. A presence that cannot be manufactured and cannot be understood, but can be recognized.

In languages from very different horizons, one and the same word came to designate both the wind and the spirit, or soul. The Hebrew ruach evokes at once the wind, the breath and the spirit, or soul. The Greek pneuma carries the same double meaning.

The Latin spiritus, from which our word spirit comes, first means breath; anima, from which the word animate comes, designates that living air which animates a body. In India, prana names the vital breath, and nirvana, literally, the extinguishing of this breath, the breath of passions and attachments.

These words do not share the same history, and the traditions that forged them do not say exactly the same thing. But they converge on the same observation, prior to any doctrine: life manifests itself through an invisible breath that animates it.

Before religions, before philosophies and systems of thought, there were human beings who breathed, who saw a child draw its first breath, an old man breathe his last, or who felt their own breath quicken as the hunt drew near or in the face of danger; some, painting on the walls of a cave, used their breath to blow their pigments. These people already knew, without naming them, those moments when breathing seems more present than thoughts.

It is this presence, the one that accompanies the first breath and joins the last, as it accompanies the whole of human life, that The Spiritual Path names the Holy-Name, or Shabda-Brahman.

This word is not fully satisfying, for the Holy-Name can be neither written nor spoken; other traditions have approached it under other names, the virtue of the Tao for Lao Tzu, the Holy Spirit for certain Christian currents, or the Shekhinah in Jewish thought. The Holy-Name carries within it an indescribable peace and bliss.

Two things, however, must not be confused: there is the infinite space that contains everything, what Jesus called the Kingdom and Lao Tzu called the Tao, and there is what, within this space, manifests, acts, lets itself be recognized: its virtue, its Te, its Holy-Name.

The Kingdom is not an experience; it is what contains all experience. The Holy-Name, for its part, is that living manifestation, that active presence which alone can be recognized directly.

On a windy day, you can verify it for yourself: lie down in the grass and close your eyes. Listen to the rustling of the leaves, without trying to think of anything else. After a while, the mind regains its calm.

A sensation appears in the chest, like a caress, a simple peace, with no apparent cause. You do not manufacture it. It appears as soon as you stop thinking.

You already know this sensation. It is found in love, in certain silences, when the mind stops commenting for a moment on what it perceives. One might think it depends on a situation, a person, an event. In reality, it is always there, within us. What changes is the attention we give it, the awareness we have of it.

Abiding in this presence, rather than looking for it elsewhere, is perhaps what Jesus meant in his own way: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Still other traditions have named this same manifestation differently: Rita, the fundamental harmony, or Satnam. Words change from culture to culture. The reality they designate does not change.

This Name, precisely, is nothing like a word. It is neither pronounced nor written. It is heard, or rather, it is recognized, the way one recognizes a beloved face before even trying to describe it. A verse of the Bhaktimàrga says it in a single sentence: “The Holy-Name cannot be spoken; listening to it brings knowledge of the bliss of fundamental harmony.”

We can then understand why it is possible to speak of a fundamental harmony without always naming it. What we call a presence, a stable ground behind the agitation of the mind, here receives a name: not to confine it, but to allow a more direct return to it.

If God, the Tao, the One could speak, we may well think that his only commandment would fit into three words: “be in Me”. Not one more rule to add to all those that the history of religions has accumulated, but an invitation to remain aware of what already flows through us and dwells within us.

The word virtue, here, has nothing moral about it: it designates a property, in the sense that tea has the virtue of keeping one awake and water that of hydrating. The virtue of the Holy-Name is to open, to calm, to make one feel bliss, transcendent love.

A text attributed to Jesus, in a version of the Gospel of John compiled by Edmond Szekely, contrasts the written law with the lived law: “the law is life, the Scripture is dead”. In its own way, this sentence sums up an essential idea: the truth that matters is verified in the experience of all that lives, the grass, the tree, the breath, the body itself, rather than learned from a text, however learned that text may be.

Spiritual discussions sometimes turn into a Tower of Babel. Each person defends their concepts, their beliefs, their vocabulary, while the experience these point to disappears behind the words.

People discuss the soul without ever identifying with it, without even pausing to be aware that they are breathing; they compare doctrines without seeking to live the experience. The mind loves to comment on reality; it is far less skilled at surrendering to it.

Recognizing this presence once is not enough to abide in it. That is why The Spiritual Path offers a regular practice, a sadhana, one of whose techniques is precisely called the “Holy-Name technique”.

It asks neither for the repetition of a word nor for the production of a particular state: it consists in making oneself available to the essential, to the inner peace always present within oneself, until this availability becomes more natural than the confusion that most often hides them.

This presence does not require withdrawing from the world in order to manifest. A luthier bent over his workbench, a cabinetmaker fitting a joint, or simply someone washing the dishes in silence: their attention, the delicacy of their gestures, can already be a form of recognition of the Holy-Name, without their ever having heard the word. What The Path teaches as a technique, others practise without knowing it, simply because they love what they do.

One could multiply comparisons between traditions, debate words, look for the most accurate one. But that adds nothing to the essential. The Holy-Name is not understood. It is recognized, the way one recognizes, in the grass, on a windy day, the same peace that was waiting, all this time, for us to stop looking for it elsewhere.

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