The Birth of Spirituality, the First Sages

Before doctrines, temples and sacred books, there were human beings who saw what others lived without seeing it. Deep in prehistoric caves, around the fire, in silence or in the rhythm of a breath, the first sages discovered that breath and attention could transform consciousness. A return to the sources of spirituality, long before yoga, the Upanishads or the Tao: to where experience came before words.

Home / The Satsang blog/ The Revelation

Before doctrines, temples and sacred books, there were human beings who saw what others lived without seeing it. Deep in prehistoric caves, around the fire, in silence or in the rhythm of a breath, the first sages discovered that breath and attention could transform consciousness. A return to the sources of spirituality, long before yoga, the Upanishads or the Tao: to where experience came before words.

Before Words

There was a time when spirituality had no name yet, or at least no word known to us. There were no established doctrines, no learned commentaries, no schools set against one another, no temples in the sense we understand today, even if some caves, such as Lascaux, can be seen, from a certain point of view, as the first places of the sacred.

There were human beings, families, clans, fires lit in the night, deep caves, forests, rivers, animals, the dead to accompany, children to protect, seasons to await and endure.

In this harsh, fragile, exposed life, some saw, beyond the obvious, something profound. They were not the founders of mysticisms, spiritualities or religions, and they did not know that one day, long after them, humankind would speak of the sacred, of mysticism, of yoga in its original sense, of wisdom, of revelation or tradition: those words they most likely did not yet have.

They lived before systems, but they were very probably the first to notice that existence was not limited to surviving, eating, sleeping, hunting, reproducing and dying. Then something within them may have opened: a more sustained attention, a deeper relationship with the living world, a different perception of death, of breath, of fire, of night, of animals, of the stars.

They would later be called shamans, visionaries, sages, rishis or awakened ones. These names belong to different eras, languages and traditions. They must not be confused. Yet behind their diversity, a single figure emerges: that of a human being who sees what others live without seeing.

The sage is not first of all the one who holds a doctrine, but the one who sees. He sees the agitation of human beings: the fear that constricts them, the desire that sweeps them along, the image they form of themselves, the thoughts that follow one another until they are taken for the whole of consciousness. Beneath this confusion, he nevertheless perceives something else: a silence, a breath, the presence of a deep self.

The Breath Observed

The first sages may have been observers before they were masters. They paid attention to the rhythms of life, those of nature, of the sky, of birth and of death.

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

We live in a world saturated with explanations. Every phenomenon must have a cause, be analyzed, be defined. But the first human beings who experienced these states lived them first in their bodies, in their breathing, in their relationship with life and the living, long before turning them into ideas.

Deep in a cave, a man sprays colored earth onto a wall. He does not paint in the clear light of a studio, nor under the open sky. He moves forward in darkness, lit by the trembling flame of a torch. The walls shift with the flame. The contours of the rock become backs, shoulders, flanks of animals.

He blows; the pigment leaves his mouth, spreads over the stone, takes the shape of his hand and of the surface. The exhalation repeats, short, staccato, intent. The whole body takes part. Breath is no longer only what keeps him alive: it becomes gesture, rhythm, a passage between the inside of the body and the appearance of a form. In such a place, in such circumstances, perception changes.

Darkness, silence, fatigue, isolation, flickering light and altered breathing can transform consciousness. The animal depicted is not merely an image: it is a living form, a spirit.

It is reasonable to suppose that humankind discovered very early the psychoactive effects of mushrooms, resins, and the saps of trees and flowers, regarded as magical, as bridges to the sacred.

We cannot know exactly what this man experienced. But we can recognize the coherence of a hypothesis: very early on, human beings may have discovered in breath, far beyond its biological function, a way of transforming their relationship to the world, to their bodies and to what they perceived.

What Connects

Breath connects outside to inside, body to consciousness, individual life to the vaster movement of the living.

It was first lived, felt as that which animates, that which passes through, that which gives life, long before it was named prâna, pneuma, spiritus or chi, and longer still before it became prânâyâma.

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

What would later become a technique may have begun as a simple observation; what would become a doctrine, as a discovery; what would become a tradition, in a body that breathes differently and discovers that its perception changes. This intuition is not limited to caves.

Elsewhere, other human beings must have noticed that silence alters attention and that stillness changes the way one looks. The rhythm of walking transforms one’s inner state; the repetition of a gesture calms the mind.

Words spoken slowly, certain chants, certain sounds, certain vigils by the fire or under the stars also opened another perception, a door. Spirituality may have been born there, in the attention paid to these transformations rather than in a theory about the world.

Whoever, in a group, noticed these things became different, less through power in the crude sense of the word than because he knew something the others sensed without understanding it or putting it into form. He knew how to calm, accompany, listen, interpret a dream, recognize a sign, prepare a ritual, guide a passage, soothe a fear, just as he knew how to remain alone, remain silent, and return with words 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 recognizes them, returns to them, observes what makes them possible, what obscures them, what stabilizes or destroys them. He is not content to live a moment of depth; he understands that this moment points in a direction. Then experience becomes a spiritual path.

One day, someone sees that human beings can live differently. Another day, someone asks him how. At that very moment, spirituality begins to exist, to become teaching, transmission.

This scene must be imagined in all its simplicity. A man suffers, is restless, is afraid, loses himself in his thoughts or his desires. Another, steadier, quieter, more attentive, tells him something. Perhaps very little... Breathe. Look. Listen. Be silent. Do not follow all your thoughts. Come back.

These words seem poor: they do not yet contain any metaphysics, they do not describe the universe, do not explain the origin of the world, do not divide humanity into believers and unbelievers. They simply point in a direction.

This direction is immense, fundamental, for it implies that one human being can help another to find again what he could not see. He can show him a spring he used to walk past without stopping, remind him of the importance of breathing, of silence, and that within him there is a gaze that sees what is seen without the filter of the thoughts passing through it.

From then on, a new kind of speech becomes possible: words that point rather than speculate, that invite one to go and see rather than first asking for belief.

From Word to Tradition

Later, these words will be kept, repeated, passed on. Disciples will appear, gestures will remain, faithfully reproduced. Stories will arise, magnified, and places will become sacred; lineages will form around chants, hymns, rules, images, symbols and rites, gradually organizing what was, at the outset, a shared experience.

In the Indus Valley, much later, a refined civilization will leave such traces. Excavations at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have brought to light seals and figures in postures that offer a glimpse of a relationship with the living world, with water, animals, fertility and the order of the world: a universe in which body, breath, presence and the sacred were not yet separated as they would sometimes become in later systems.

The point is not to project onto it too hastily the yoga of the Upanishads or the Bhagavad-Gîtâ. But it is not impossible that ancient forms of inner experience passed through these cultures, then nourished, under other names and in other languages, the great intuitions of India and, with the Tao, those of China.

The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and later Hindu developments then no longer appear as absolute beginnings. They can also be read as moments of interpretation, formulation and reorganization of an older experience: an experience the text seeks to express, more than it brings it into being.

This perspective takes nothing away from the greatness of the traditions. It makes them more human, and therefore deeper. The book comes afterward. What comes first is the one who sees, the one who breathes, the one who falls silent and discovers, in silence, in breath, in attention and in that which looks, another way of living.

The first sages were the guardians of this discovery before they were founders of doctrines. Their role was less to invent spirituality than to recognize what others lived without understanding it, and to pass it on. Someone saw. Someone spoke. Someone listened, and what had been lived in silence began to become words offered to others.

This text is an excerpt from the book: "The Fundamental Experience",

link to download the free PDF of the book

If you have any questions, please write here:

madhyama.marga@gmail.com