MYSTIC FORCES AND THE CONDUCT 0F LIFE - SDIR

translated from the French by Juliette MAXWELL

PREFACE
With this re-edition, I have brought a few clarifications to the
original text. In fact, Mystic Forces is one thing and Conduct
of Life another. There is a twofold task for the man who wants to
gain Heaven : on the one hand, to make use of the absolute forces like
loving one's neighbour, faith, prayer, sacrifice, death, the example
of Christ; and on the other, not to make use of other forces, certain
methods which seemingly resemble the first ones, like the will,
esotericism, illuminism, practices of clairvoyance, of the miraculous,
of the impassive. In other words, I wished to show in all possible
ways what should be done and what not to do, what should be believed
and what not to believe, what should be desired or repulsed, so as
to make oneself as worthy as possible to receive God's bounty.
To eliminate any ambiguity in the reader's mind, I have set out the
titles of these twelve lectures, too concise perhaps, and I have,
here and there, in the text outlined definitions and reinforced
affirmations. If my faithful readers find this new edition to their
liking, I beg them to be so good as to pass it around as much as they
can. We work not for ourselves do we, but for Him in whose
remembrance these pages have been written. From Him alone they will
receive the power of persuasion and light.
I
MYSTIC FORCES AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE
Where two or three are joined together in my Name, I am in the
midst of them.
(matthew xviii. 20)
The subject on which I wish to talk to you is very old but ever new
; anyway, in the years to come it will become a passionate reality.
It is our eternal Friend, Christ, whom we will try to remember
together, even though our remembrances can never be but stammerings.
Christ, no one knows Him, but He himself, the Father who sent Him and
the Spirit that serves Him. No being, understand, none, I say, has
caught more than a glimpse of Him. The searching gaze of master
theologians, the burning hearts of the saints, the meditations of
philosophers have never caught but one of the thousand glitterings
that edge his cosmic halo. Angelico prepared himself by fasting to
paint his celestial faces and sketched them while crying from love
and compassion. By what burning penances, by what adoring tears
should he not, he who claims to tell the intimate of the Word,
introduce his speech ?
Surely, I will fall short of my task. So you must help me. For that
matter even though without comparison Jesus performed few
miracles in Nazareth because His countrymen were incredulous.
You understand that it is your faith I am claiming. Your faith, not
in myself but in what I am saying ; not in what I am doing but in Him
about whom I wish to speak to you. If, as soon as I present myself to
you, 1assume towards you certain responsibilities and above all that
to be useful to you, you too, by the mere fact that you have come,
you assume duties or, rather, obligations towards the ideal which is
our common concern.
There is a mutual give and take as between collaborators.
If I am so bold as to talk to you about eternal realities, I give
you the tacit promise to render them tangible and alive to you, to
give them body, to make you feel their immanent presence under the
veils of everyday banalities. I must make it possible for you to
discover new ways of thinking, loving and acting. New landscapes must
unfold before you. I must lift you above the down-to-earth ; I
must exalt you with the intoxication of Heaven ; you must be set
aflame like everlasting torches ; the thirst for Heaven must dry you
up ; the sudden pangs of sacrifice must consume you ; and finally,
something must rise in the hearts of everyone of you and cry : to
serve, to serve, that is my vow.
Will it be given to me to arouse this enthusiasm ? And if such a
power responds to my unworthy prayer, will it still last when you
have passed this threshold ?
It does not matter ; the effort must be attempted even if it is

known that it will be short-lived.

The task of the speaker is so heavy, as you can well see, that he
needs the help of his audience.
There are two schools of thought on this.
I could, first of all, flatter the innate propensity of men for what
is wonderful and, very gently, step by step, convert it into a
liking for things eternal.
Or I could, openly, fight magic, ritual, esoteric wisdom, and show
their precarious bases and their, on the whole, narrow horizons ;
then, on these ruins, I could build a new temple or a chapel.
But the first method seems a little too diplomatic ; as to the
second one, I know that Heaven likes demolition no more than the
animation of corpses. When a creature or an institution become
obsolete, they fall down by themselves. And what I should do if your
wishes did not correspond with mine ? What I propose to you is an
effort. Here it is : What I have to tell you is even simpler than
what religion teaches us. Expect from me only commonly known ideas,
but which are forgotten as they are buried beneath numerous layers of
silt within you. Some of these ideas will seem incredible, perhaps;
but, because your soul has heard them before, on the threshold of a
previous eternity, you will believe me, no matter how rude my blows
against your present mental state.
I ask first of all for your attention.
If you listen to me as you would a teacher or an artiste who is only
a man with talent, your willingness to remember and understand will
be sufficient. But, if you wish the inner sanctuary to open to the
sounds of divine harmonies, then more than a mental attitude is
required. It is your heart that you must give. Come to him who is
speaking, no matter how unworthy he is, as to the voice of your own
conscience. You and he are coupled forces ; let your ascendant wishes
and his descending effort join, let them reunite, let them fuse
together so that, from their union, a spiritual child be born.
Anyhow, if I am here at all, it is because you have called me here.
The present minute is always the result of countless unknown
yearnings. Although your mind may not remember it, your heart has
cried out on a night of intellectual or moral distress ; and the
reflection of that cry remains printed on the faces of many amongst you.
You were anxious ; the ideal inside you has been looking for the
ideal outside you ; and, as any wish acts by itself and finally
creates its own satisfaction, your wish, after many voyages into the
invisible, many hardships, many disappointments, has finally brought
us together, you and me.
Often you have been overwhelmed with fatigue, disheartened without
reason. It was the anxious search of your mind among those seething
worlds spreading beyond imagination into the hidden yonder, where we
are only dust.
Well ! the common wish of Heaven, which has brought us together,
will make me intelligible to you if it is really about Heaven that I
am talking. But if you yearn for God and I try to steer you towards
the Eden of occultism or esotericism, then we will not understand each
other. Also and this is the stumbling block on which our mutual
emotions may clash if I talk to you about the Father, the Son, the
Spirit, as the deep Light within yourselves very well knows They are,
whereas your ego, your intelligence, your will hunger only for the
wonderful and not the divine , then my wish and yours, running
along different paths, will not meet, neither will they bear fruit.
What I ask from you then is to be simple. For one hour every week,
one short hour, become simple again. When returning to this room, the
atmosphere of which is still alive with the fluttering of angels'
wings, let your hearts recover the artlessness of childhood. Forget
what you are and what you have been. Scientists, forget your sciences
; philosophers, forget your many wisdoms ; all of you, forget your
vices, for all of us, we are, we may have been or we may become
criminals.
Try not to say while you are listening to me : this is from
Plotinus; this is Hinduism . To learn is an art; to forget is an art
also. Thus, forget : you, women, your sufferings and your passions;
you, men, your ambitions ; you, young people, your fanaticism ; you,
old people, your weariness. Tell yourselves, for one hour, that once
again you have become untaught, candid, small children; for, although

I am nothing, I know nothing, I can do nothing, perhaps why not

Certainty, Peace, Beatitude may descend on you, under the cover of my
dull and clumsy sentences.
Tell yourselves : twice, a hundred times in my life, I have searched
for God; perhaps this hour is the hour for the meeting ?
Make room in yourselves for that blessed moment. Let the Angel find
the house empty; let the spark descend on to dry kindling; let the
seed fall on to a seedless soil. If we could look, we would see
miracles any time.
Nevertheless, do not expect revelations from me. The great,
fundamental ideas of inner life are the least known today.
Everywhere, man is fond of mystery; but, in civilized man, this
inclination easily becomes a mania. This is one of the great
obstacles which prevent us from acceding to Truth. Only what is
simple is true. This axiom should guide our intellectual search; our
psychic state is narrowly linked to its observance.
Only what is simple is true. This axiom should guide our intellectual
search; our psychic state is narrowly linked to its observance. In
fact, the complications of the self evoke a similar complication of
the non- self ; or, in order to speak more clearly, our
consciousness sees Nature through the prism of personality. A
homogeneous prism will transmit an exact and clear picture, a dull
crystal will give an indistinct one. Even more so as our mind is not
an inert substance; it possesses a magnetic attraction which
sometimes reaches very far into the invisible for the corresponding
forms of the non-self.
The more the self is one, the more it is capable of perceiving
objective unity; and its unification depends on its simplification.
How can we simplify ourselves you will ask. By forgetting ourselves,
by denying ourselves personal acquisitions and satisfactions. Thus,
the rare men who reached the summit of mystic asceticism are in no
way distinguishable from the crowd; their inner splendour remains
hidden, even from the psychologists who watch them live.
This self-abnegation is one of the characteristics of these poor
in spirit whom Christ beatifies ; it needs simplicity of the soul,
a child's spontaneity, a candour which only the dawns of veritable
regeneration see bloom. That is the meaning of that maxim of Saint
Anthony the Hermit : there is no perfect prayer if the worshipper
is aware he is praying .
Any enrichment of our being first requires an impoverishment; any
acquisition requires a renunciation. In stating these paradoxes, I am
not trying to lead you to the Oriental schools which, in order to
orientate Knowledge, kill the wish to know. This procedure is
excellent for those who do not know the way to absolute life; we,
disciples of Christ, know that, to become one with our Master, in and
part of Him, we need three things :
self-renunciation, but not to kill desire,
bear our cross, but not to evade duty,
follow Christ, but no other god.
For what we are concerned with, you and I, at the moment, only the
first effort is necessary. If we wish to understand each other, if we
wish that our gathering be fruitful and bring forth a Light, selfrenunciation is necessary and sufficient, that is to say that we
must be one.
As to me, I must forget whatever I know about you, your opinions and
your hearts ; I must see in you only the Flame, straight and pure, of
divine search. As to you, not only should you stop your external
disagreements with one another but also your inner disagreements with
your temperament, your character, your mentality, your education and
the immortal desire for the Ideal which has brought you here.
***
But the most drastic and shortest method to obtain this simplicity,
this enthusiasm, which I do not fear asking from you, consists of
acquiring the very mysterious and very powerful force of faith and
then setting it in action. Let us examine this with the utmost care.
For the Catholic theologian, who in this case is of a rather similar
opinion to that of the Brahminical theologian, faith is the
substantial representation of what we hope, the assertion of what is

not apparent, supernatural Knowledge, i. e. impossible to attain for

man and gods in spite of the glorious abilities which may be theirs.
An astronomer talks to me of the rivers of Mars. I believe him ; that
has nothing to do with faith because I can repeat his experiments ; I
can, with the means granted to the adepts, go and check the
information on the spot. An angel says : Jesus is the only son of
God. If I believe him, that is faith, because it is impossible by our
reason as well as by our senses physical or transcendental to
check this fact. Esoteric, alchemical, magical,
astrological interpretations, which are subjective to religious
mysteries do not belong to faith ; they are natural, human, relative
concepts. The formula of the act of faith is not precisely that
dictum : I believe because it is absurd , but : I believe,
although it seems absurd to me .
Faith aims at God, and God only. In this, faith is unique and truly
universal, for it acts above forms, rites, laws, religions. Faith
saves any man ; it
transmutes into good any act evil in itself when carried out in the
pure intention of the Absolute.
This Absolute, God, whose essence is universal, plenary, physical
if I dare say so for lack of a more expressive term we do not see,
neither do we feel ; however, we are certain that It is there,
because our inner principle of eternity knows and acknowledges the
external principle of eternity from which it proceeds ; but the
organs of this divine soul : mind, intelligence, awareness, are not
sufficiently refined to record those sublime lights.
Whatever man may finally be able to perceive by his own means is not
eternal.
Faith, in spite of lack of understanding, non-perception,
non-intuition even, is a complete acquiescence, an unshakable
agreement of the will to the word of God. Alone, amongst all
religions, that of Christ demands this effort from us. To speak the
truth, we do not accomplish this alone ; it is Christ, deep in our
hearts, who makes us aware of the pre- secular words or eternal
Wisdom. And thus, faith unites us with the Word Jesus, makes us one
with Him, brings about our regeneration in God and saves us.
An immutable faith keeps danger at bay because it throws us into the
abyss of the Almighty. It performs all the miracles because it
asserts the
supernatural. It cures the incurable and purifies the criminal,
since it upsets everything in us and re-organizes us fundamentally.
Nothing is impossible to whosoever possesses even the smallest
portion of faith, and the promises of God in this respect are no
mere metaphors. One in its essence, all-powerful in its effects,
faith requires only one condition : to be brought to life by acts
even more than by words. Material work only supplies nutrition to
spiritual plants. By the same token, vice versa, the main intention
of the heart, sublimated by faith dynamizes the work of our hands.
Everything sacrificed to an idea reinforces it, if action is the
test of faith, doubt is its enemy ; it disperses our forces, faith
concentrates them. Let us drill ourselves not to doubt. So, a sick
person prays to be cured ; if he is not, he must retain the same
certainty of hope, in spite of all logic. So once again, you have
come expecting something new and you are going to be disappointed.
Come back anyway, come back until the end for, certainly, one day
you will see the Light.
The most beautiful fruit which ripens on the tree of faith is not the
gift of performing miracles, it is patience. Patience, a wonderful
and mysterious force by which, Christ guarantees to us, we manage to
possess our souls. To possess our souls means that all that, which
constitutes this very complex whole that we are, really becomes our
property, that we master ourselves, that we know ourselves perfectly
triple initiation to the baptism of the Spirit.
Here we can see the reason why the Apostle Paul makes this
apparently superfluous comment : Faith comes from our sense of
hearing. There exists, in fact, a secret relationship between the
mysteries of Heaven and the acoustic fluids, between the sense of
hearing and the sense of God. Music, in its efforts to express what
is inexpressible, provides the same teaching. But let us not get
involved in the fascinating labyrinth of mystic sciences ; and now
that we have finished outlining the state of mind in which one who
listens to a religious discourse must be, little remains to be said
for our conclusion.
***

The most important of these states of mind, which I ask from you,
transforms your life into a ceaseless battle. Start this battle with
the certainty of victory, and you will vanquish. For here the
battlefield is the moral world. This struggle is balanced by a culture
: brotherly love. Notice those two mystic types : the soldier of
God, the gardener of God ; we will often have to come back to them in
the course of these talks.
Work is the body of faith. The most excellent work, charity, will be
its most beautiful part. In the present conjuncture, you have a
certain kind of charity to spread for your faith to live and act. You
have something special to realize before in your hearts can rise the
emotions, the exaltations, the prostration in which the enraptured
sight of uncreated Light throws us. Behold : When man considers with
proper gravity the vast complications of life, at once he sees the
necessity for help. He finds it in the invisible sphere where the
mind has chosen to reside ; and, according to his character, he uses
those auxiliary forces, he urges them or he tries to master them.
If the self lives in the dwelling of matter, he will turn to the
material forces ; if the self lives in the dwelling of fluids, he will
turn to the various magnetisms ; if the self lives in the dwelling
of intelligence, he will turn to the mental forces, and so on. If
that self knows the supernatural Light, he will turn to the mystic
forces.
What these forces are, at least the main ones, we will study in later
talks. For today, it is sufficient for us to know that they exist
within easy reach, that they surround us, that we are impregnated
with them and that it depends on our willingness to embody them in
ourselves.
The whole atmosphere is full of spirits. Not only angels and demons,
but creatures of all grades, in which good and evil are mingled in
infinitely varied proportions. If common religious teaching mentions
only beings good or evil forever, it is no doubt to prevent the
majority from falling into that dangerous inquisitiveness which tries
to satisfy itself by the practice of magic.
Patristic literature, although it mentions the Spirits of Nature,
does not dwell on them. To speak the truth, there are no beings who
are forever fixed in Darkness, and there are very few they can be
counted who are for ever fixed in Light. We were angels ; we face
the alternative of becoming demons or rising again, higher than the
angels. But what we are interested in at the moment is to know that
we have a great host of invisible listeners and onlookers. You have
brought with you, every one of you, a cohort of spirits : ghosts of
your ancestors, spirits of your descendants, spirits of your present
parents, auxiliary, hostile, enlightening, corruptive spirits. You
have not a hatred, a friendship, a wish, an enthusiasm, a care, a joy,
a tear which does not exist individualized in the inner spaces of
your personality before becoming an apparent and tangible reality.
The very objective of our gathering calls and brings around us a
number of entities proportional to the volitive energy, to the
fervour we have brought with us to reach this objective, to the room
we have allocated it in our hearts.
To perceive these entities, to classify them, to accept some and
reject others, that is what we should not do ; that is not within our
province. We have, you and I, to consider one thing only, the one
necessary thing . Let all these presences, all these energies, good,
evil or wavering, return just now to their respective abodes with a
joy, a comfort, a refreshment.
What should we do Reconcile ourselves, make peace with all these
beings? This is not a banal maxim ; it is a formula of spiritual
dynamics, simple, efficient, precise in its use, general in its
effects ; it is a strict law, it is a battery of immeasurable energies.
To remain at peace with men, animals, plants, stones, objects,
ideas, events, time, passions, angels, demons and the dead, we take
nothing more from them than what the Law has ordered them to give us
; it means to welcome them all with a smile ; to offer them
spontaneously what they are longing for. It is an immense, tireless,
very secret charity ; it is the most constant, the most immutable,
the most serene self-control ; it is the return to the fold of the
scattered flock. It is an episode of the cosmic battle in the chaos
from which surges, here and there, like lightning, the ineffable
presence of the incomprehensible Being, the angel of Peace who,
however, came to bring war and light a certain fire in this world :
our Jesus.

If we offend nobody, all these creatures will come to us, because

they hunger for Light and it is only through the heart of man that
they can see the glory of God. That glory is harmony, it is peace ;
we can assimilate it only if we live in His kingdom. Let us pacify,
gentlemen ; let us pacify our bodies, our senses, our minds and the
places where we toil most conscientiously. Do not be anxious about
the invisible, the mysteries, the secret things ; nothing is secret
before God ; and we have gathered here to learn again how to live in
God.
To live in God ; A wish unheard-of in its audacity, a simple wish
for simple hearts. I have asked you for many things before offering
you anything in it is not I who am presenting you with the diamonds
exchange. I have nothing to offer you, or rather, and pearls of the
heavenly Treasure ; it is that God, that Father, towards whom I would
like to sway you with an irresistible impulse.
The Father, He is all things to each of his Children. He has
overturned his creation to make Himself accessible to all. Lift up
your eyes and you will see Him ; turn to Him and He will open his
merciful arms to you.
It is to this supreme Great Work that I invite you. No one is
incapable of it ; and the existence of every man of good will,
whatever it may be, offers him a design for his work and
opportunities for progress which are specially suited for him and
which are proportional to his strength.
Let us start this ascetic movement together. Let us, you and I,
right at this moment, start to work on the wonderful statue of the
angel we will one day be. Did I say the angel ? No ; let us more
simply wish to become worthy of the name of man which is ours ; no
creature has a more beautiful name since our Jesus agreed to bear it.
THEORETICAL MYSTICISM
He that receives me, receives Him that sent me
(matthew x, 40)
If you take the trouble of meditating on these words of our Jesus
no, not of meditating, but of loving them from the bottom of your
heart you will know immediately all that I wish to tell you and
even much more. Try it when you are lonely.
The definitions that have been given of mysticism all vary because
each author has considered it from a different angle. According to
the official philosophy, it is a sort of contemplation in which the
human being unites with God through an incomprehensible process.
According to theology, it is an intuitive knowledge arrived at in the
silence of the rational operations of comprehension. According to
its etymology (*), any system, the methods and results of which are
secret, is mysticism.
(*) Mysticism, from the Greek muein : to close one's mouth.
In that case, all those who think or act in the extraordinary regions
of consciousness are mystics. These definitions are too broad ; the
philosophical vocabulary of the French language is lacking in
precision. Religiousness, idealism, spiritualism, esotericism,
transcendentalism, occultism, magism, hermeticism, psychism, theosophy,
cabbala, gnosis, Sufism are not synonymous expressions and, over
all, the terms do not equate with mysticism.
We may consider as a mystic any man who, no matter what his religion
is, links himself only with God, setting aside all living creatures
and devoting all his forces to accomplishing the will of the Father.
Mysticism is not only a method of contemplation and ecstasy ; neither
is it only the physiology of the soul; it is also many other things
(*). Once a being entrust himself, from the bottom of his heart, to
the hands of the Father, his path is changed ; his works, which vary
according to his abilities and the needs of the general evolution,
are led, step by step, by special spiritual agents which replace the
ordinary guidance each man is provided with according to his
profession or his aptitudes.
(*) Modern philosophers define mystic union as an extremely narrow
focusing of the attention which exalts the intellect, uses it former
knowledge and realizes unity of consciousness. William James adds
that he then is in communication with a superior world through the
subliminal consciousness. According to St. Augustinus and St.

Bernardus, there is no link between mystic knowledge and previous

knowledge, for in true ecstasy communication with the Absolute is
established. This last opinion is the correct one.
Psycho-physiology has discovered again Patanjali's old assertion
which he himself had copied from the lost works of the Rishis : any
sensation is, in the final analysis, a hyperphysical contact. Modern
theologians infer from this that psychical sensations are psychical
contacts. That is to say that a world, or worlds, invisible and
objective exist. Superb conclusion for us, the civilized, to find
ourselves in agreement with the lowest of the Papuans ! The Old
Testament, the New Testament, the Fathers, all, however, say the
same thing !
The mystical path leads directly to the divine level, to the Realm
of Mercy and Love ; and the air that one breathes while following it
comes directly from the same eternal horizons.
To some souls, thirsting only after the Absolute, science is not
sufficient, religion is too cautious, esotericism too complicated. They
have a presentiment of a science of all sciences, a religion of all
religions, an initiation of which all the secret schools give only
the corrupted debris. There is a way of knowing by which knowledge
is instantaneous, a rite less religion by which man is in direct
communication with the Father, an initiation that cannot be gained,
but may be freely granted, which gives us the supreme power : of
bringing ourselves within God's hearing somewhere, in that vast
world, is the master of all masters. He never fails anyone's
confidence who submits himself to His august hands. A Light, silent,
invisible but inextinguishable, beyond evaluation, is there for
whosoever wishes to take it and use it to lighten the dark places in
his own heart, in the profundities and in the firmaments. This
remarkable Light is Love ; and mysticism is the science of Love.
It is the geometry of the soul, someone has said. Yes, for
Pythagoreans ; but, for Christians, it is the very life of the soul,
rolling out the waves of its occult and very ancient splendour to its
outermost organs : our conscious faculties.
As to the mystic forces, all of these are the means by which God
helps us, sending them to us directly, immediately, expressly,
because it is beyond us, to carry out this task alone. The one and
only Bestower is He who was known as Jesus of Nazareth.
The procedures for summoning these forces are all given in the
Gospel and can be found only there.
You will forgive me for the dogmatic aspect of these statements. The
rarer the object of a study, the more its outline must be precisely
defined.
We will now investigate the characteristic traits of mysticism.
**
The beliefs of the mystic are a perpetual challenge against reason ;
according to common reasoning, his wisdom is madness. Today,
Catholicism is chided for not taking into account the developments of
science and of contemporary thought ; I am a paltry theologian and a
very poor devotee ; but I am astounded by the lack of understanding
of so many modernistic priests of what are the essentials of the
religion they pretend to teach. The original character of
Christianity is, in fact, this notion of the supernatural which no
other religion mentions. For the philosopher, for the scientist, for
the esotericist, the supernatural does not exist, because they believe
they know everything and they claim to explain everything ; for the
mystic, the supernatural does exist, because he knows nothing ; that
is the essence of Christianity.
This concept is that of constant participation of the Absolute in
the province of the Relative ; that of faith in the solicitude of the
Father ; that certainty that, as He is almighty, there is always a
miracle ready to meet our urgent needs ; all these are the
corollaries of intuitive evidence with which the mystic is illuminated
: that Jesus is the Father's only Son, and God Himself.
Exegesis, criticism, manuscripts, interpolations, misinterpretations,
variations in dogma and discipline, arguments within a School, all
are immaterial to the disciple ; they are the sound of foreign words,
the cries of children on the public square. He has in himself an
indisputable certainty, an unassailable evidence, like the splendour
of the sun. Whilst it is in the womb, does a child need
identification papers to know that its mother actually is its mother ?

Mysticism is a homogeneous whole ; all its molecules are fixed,

necessary and in mutual harmony, like the inhabitants of the eternal
Kingdom of whom this doctrine represents the common badge. Because
the Absolute looms over everyone, comes close to everyone in the form
of the Word, this solicitude is perfect and these cares embrace our
whole being. Thus God can directly, without symbols, without
mediator, be made one with the substance of any soul capable of
receiving such an extraordinary visitation.
Do you realize, Gentlemen, how wonderful and extravagant this idea
is ? No, all imagination fades and all intelligence falls before such
a sight. The Absolute actually descending into the Relative, without
the intervention of an angel, a priest, a rite, a formula; into the
super-intellectual, the beyond imagination nakedness, into the
terrifying abyss of faith, into the sevenfold darkness of the senses,
reason, will, spiritual loneliness, psychical night, the annihilation
of the self ?
Thus, the gymnosophist meditations, the fasting of Oriental
ascetics, we know that they do not lead to the Absolute as theses
wise men do not want to follow the lonely Traveller who broke the
trail. But our theologians themselves admit that God can bestow the
virtues of His Grace on the soul by a means other than the
sacraments. Some elite beings, as a result of their extraordinary
observance of Heaven's laws, receive its gifts directly. The Word
sends these gifts to them by special messenger. Just as during Mass,
the character of the bread and of the wine are transubstantiated,
the Word performs an identical miracle in the hearts capable of
receiving Him. He who, knowing that his enemy is deadly, invites him
to his table, serves him, kisses and forgives him, in the mind of
such a disciple Christ Himself creates new organs, transforms into
His own flesh the dying cells and into His own blood the cells that
love the murderer (*).
(*) The organic, biological, living effect of this transforming union
must be insisted upon ; only those who have experienced it are
capable of recounting it. That is why theoreticians speak about it in
such a dull and clumsy manner. Thus, for example, they say : The
mystic state is a special state of consciousness, ineffable,
transitory, passive, modifying knowledge and love . (W. james)
Ecstasy is an invasion of the consciousness by a pure, affective
state. At the extreme, all thought having disappeared, feeling only
occupies consciousness, in the shape of an intense affective state ;
it is the direct perception of the non-self . ... It is the
absorption of the consciousness in the non-self by boundless love .
(godfernaux) It is a return to the affective state, almost
undifferentiated, not known, only felt . (Risox). Cf, also Recejac,
Pacheu, Ribet, Goerres, Boutroux, Seraphim, etc., etc. All this is
like the Bhakti Yoga of India rather than like the Gospel of Christ;
these definition givers lack practical experience of the divine Life.
Let us stand off a little to look at the mystic organon as a whole.
** *
The myriad shapes that make up the Universe are the refracted images
of a certain number of light sources scattered amongst it. These
sources are the limbs, the organs, the faculties, the powers of the
Word. And each religion, with its theology, its liturgy and its
hierarchy, is the living image of one of the aspects of this central
Word. Religions thus are not at all of equal value ; but although
all of them can lead man to eternal salvation, some of them are more
complete, more active, more true than others.
However, a common feature links them, a fanatical character without
which they would not longer be religions : this is formalism. It is
to formalism that they owe the solidity of their existence, but it
is also formalism which limits their spiritual developments. Through
rites, religions receive the strength to resist the onrush of the
centuries and the social changes ; through rites, the immense
majority of the faithful strengthen the weakness of their will ;
through rites, the invisible and mediatory hierarchies between the
devotees and their god receive extra sustenance.
But also, through rites, ecclesiastical leaders sometimes veer
towards illusory, temporal objectives, the faithful often forget God
for the mediators, and the latter may also fail in their strict
obedience. Thus, in everything there is evil and there is good.
We can thus say that all religions originate from true mysticism and
that it is re-established at their end ; but in the course of
history, it undergoes, because of misunderstandings or human
betrayals, fairly long and profound eclipses. To recover it, we must

step back and after having freed ourselves from acquired opinions and
prejudices, we must examine with a simple and free mind the words of
the founder himself of the religion we study.
This is, Gentlemen, the task that I, with a certain audacity, urge
you to undertake. You are all capable of undertaking it. In effect,
to go backwards is to return to a source, to delve into the depths.
Thus, return to the very deep and hidden source, at the bottom of
your heart, from which falls, drop by drop, the water of eternal
springs. Formalism also exists in you ; rid yourselves of it ; become
simple again ; but do not start until you feel strong enough to hold
on until the end. If not, keep to the common path. Because rites are
living beings which have gathered colonies of living beings in your
personal unseen just as in the collective unseen of your religion ;
they are sentries ; they obey their instructions ; they serve he who
practices them and ignore he who denies them.
The inhabitants of this occult world provide the faithful with
support in return for some offering, I mean some tangible effort,
which the desire of the devotee transmutes into fluid ; and the same
with abstinence, vigils, indulgences, pilgrimages.
Besides these agents, there are, in the religious host, the spirits
of the departed, all sorts of beings, infra-human and supra-human,
different from the angels and demons per se. They are the ones who
transmit prayers, litanies, ceremonies, disciplines, fasting, songs,
lights, scientific and philosophical works of art, in a word all the
things which constitute the physical body of religion. They bring us
in return granting of prayers, blessings, cures, illuminations.
All these auras, all these fluid currents are created substances,
natural although unknown ; faith, sanctity divine substances
fanaticism, tyranny infernal substances direct them.
In this orb of ambient or mediating fluids reigns the law of the
shock of recoil. This is a reaction equal and opposite to the action.
There is always a hell sunk into the antipodes of a paradise.
But the paternal Goodness definitely does not close His arms to
those who cannot resolve themselves to the ways of the Church,
levelled, surrounded with barriers, studded with guards. Libertarians
can still escape ; the lowest of savages may reach eternal life as
salvation is accomplishment of the Father's will and this consists of
loving one's neighbour.
However, impatience of any kind is so strong in us that here we must
stress the imperative need for him, who rejects external religion, to
submit all the more strictly to the literal observance of the Gospel.
On the pretext of advancing faster by sidestepping the accessory
forms, the burden of the essential commandments cannot be thrown to
the ground.
The path of the free mystic is direct ; he takes a direct short-cut
along the cliff-side of the mountain. The ground there is rugged, the
slopes are steep and the storms terrible, the air there is purer, the
smells are wilder and more pungent, the horizons more beautiful and
the light brighter. Very few people are met there, very poor people,
shepherds, ploughmen, the old soldier on reconnaissance. Anyway, I
would never dare to advise taking this narrow path ; those who feel
strong enough to take it decide by themselves. There are giddiness,
nightly terrors, landslides, thieves sometimes, wild animals also.
That is your way, you the violent ones, by which you will storm the
divine citadel. The unknown way, the glorious way, the way of
solitude and of the lonely, the way of the messengers of Light, of
the bearers of eternity, of the martyrs of the Ideal ; may we one day
make our climb in this welcome distress, in this physical and mental
agony where, in solitude, shines the great torch of Love !
Without doubt, only those who have long and patiently obeyed strict
and detailed disciplines brave its cliffs, its storms and its
adventures. Man can only free himself by carrying his chains and not
by rejecting them, by paying his debts and not by repudiating them.
In general, we follow the path on which the gods have placed us ; we
must be very wise in the first place to be able to choose.
Nevertheless the purifying of the motivation of our acts, however
modest they be, can increase tenfold their range ; so that with the
smallest portion of free will we can still achieve a good job.
Everything comes in its own time, although we can delay or hasten
this time. An earthly life is brief, it is a few minutes of the long
day of our journey, you will think. Oh ! you do not love God, it is
because you are not eaten up with longing for His coming, it is

because the sufferings around you do not move you, it is because you
are not thirsting after Light, hungering after universal Beatitude.
What do not earthly lovers suffer because of a meeting they have
missed ? How to describe then the desolation that devastated the heart
of the disciple deprived of his Master's presence ?
We are all linked together, you will say again ; we will not reach
our goal without the others ; hence, it is not worth giving ourselves
the trouble. On the contrary ; because the least effort of any one
of us benefits all, because solidarity unites all human beings, from
Earth to Neptune and from Aldebaran to Antares, we are obligated to
make the greatest efforts. To feel that my tiny work profits
thousands of beings, does that not increase my enthusiasm tenfold,
does that not give me the sweetness of the sacrifice cheerfully
embraced ?
The first characteristic of the mystic, and note this, Gentlemen,
for future diagnostics, is a zest for life, eagerness for work,
serenity in times of want, deep peace in the anguish of physical and
moral sufferings, all things which are, after all, still external.
Because the soul does not suffer.
Thus observance or non-observance of the rites are not mystical
signs, but the recourse to God alone and the strength to act.
Is extraordinary knowledge is a third mark of mysticism ?
No, I shall answer at once. These are not indispensable things, but
little indulgences by which our Friend incites us to progress. The
mystic is not a lover of occult sciences. For him, Science, conceived
as a whole of set notions, does not exist. Science, according to
him, is infinitely varied ; it varies with each second because, with
each second, things change, the centres of perception change, the
state of the environment changes.
For example, the hypothesis of re-incarnations. It is very seldom
that knowledge of anterior lives is useful. The pseudo-revelations
which can be obtained on this subject by mediums, by somnambulists,
by intuition, by transcendental meditation, hamper our progress more
than they help it. Those who sincerely observe themselves can well
see it ; the privileged few for whose benefit the Past lifts its
veil, all say that this knowledge is for them an ordeal rather than a
help. If you think about the mixture of pride, of laziness and
anxiety which constitutes the basis of our nature, you will have no
difficulty in admitting that this opinion is right.
The doctrine of-re-incarnations is a comforting one, you say. You do
not, therefore, believe in God if you look for consolation elsewhere
than in His Word which He repeats unceasingly in your hearts ! Since
you sorrow over someone dead, thinking it unfair, your god is a
cruel tyrant ! Otherwise you are being inconsistent with yourselves.
Neither is the power of looking into the future a characteristic of
mysticism. Not only since the Xlth century, but since the coenobites
of the Thebaid, since St. Paul himself, all the mystics thought that
Doomsday was imminent. The Catholics like St. Vincent Ferrier, the
Gnostics, the Albigenses, the Vaudois, the laity, the Lutherans, the
Calvinists, the Jansenists themselves have prophesied immediate,
final and utter catastrophes. The positivists laughed at this. In a
way, all of them were right.
The Master has said : I shall come like a thief . Nobody will
thus be able to forecast the moment of His manifestation in the role
of Universal Judge or of Regenerator of our minds. Moreover, the
earth is not a homogeneous block, like a crystal; it is a mass in
operation ; it is a cross-roads. It contains everything as far as
substances and beings are concerned ; it has diseases ; it is given
remedies, it undergoes surgical operations. These are all partial
judgements ; they take place on the living, interior plane. We are
not aware of them, but some clairvoyants can see them. There will be a
great reckoning, that is certain, but the due date is not known ; no
adept can calculate it.
Here is still another reason why prophesy is not a definite
characteristic of mysticism. When a heart follows the way of Christ,
it beats more quickly than the others ; but also, it enjoys, much
earlier than the mass of the herd, the beauty of the horizons it has
discovered. It is thus entirely natural that the mystic sees the
future, lives certain scenes in advance, which are still in the
invisible, in which his spiritual family will participate only in a
century or more. The judgement is one of these scenes ; and as the
consciousness of the clairvoyant has the use only of pictures of the
physical world for comparison, the dimmest of the lights from the

interior world seems to him so magnificent, so high, so pure, that

he believes pictures of very local phenomena to be universal.
The transcendental faculties and the powers are no proofs either of
the mystical way. We, watching from outside, we can well see the
puppets, but not the hands that put them in motion ; we see miracles,
ecstasies ; we are ignorant of the force which produces them ; a man
may have become a cripple as a result of a crime or self-sacrifice.
Let us not impulsively give our confidence to those who do admirable
things. If they belong to the Light, they will not hold our reserve
against us.
** *
By what then can we recognize the true mystic, beside his passion
for charity ?
By his belief in the divinity of Jesus, a unique divinity, a divinity
that stems from nature and not from evolution ; by his active
charity, by his inner humility.
Much has been said about Jesus over recent years; but the
misunderstandings multiply ; each innovator monopolizes Him.
Nevertheless, He is at the same time farther and nearer than we think
He is ; He is the greatest and the smallest, the farthest and the
nearest, the Alpha and the Omega. It is towards Him that the mystic
strives, towards His unknown work ; it is in the new roads He has
opened between Heaven and Earth that I would like you to walk ; I
would like you to benefit from His outpourings. To see Him, you will
have to get out of this immense creation, to break the chains of
Time, to leap beyond the limits of Space, to contemplate calmly the
inconceivable abyss of original nothingness. But no man can
accomplish these works ; the Buddhas themselves have not been able to
do it. They produce however in the most grandiose way the archetype
of the superman; they have risen to the supreme peaks of knowledge
and willpower ; but the last step they have not been able to make,
because only God can take a living being, radically alter its way of
life, change its conditioned life to eternal life, in a word,
recreate it.
No matter how vast an intelligence may be, no matter how forcible a
willpower may be, it is impossible for them to make themselves vaster
than nature or stronger than the Demiurge of whom both are
offsprings. Those to whom the word reveals itself, those whom His
shining face lights up without dazzling them, those He chooses, in
all fairness and in all goodness, admire Him, love Him, see Him ; but
they cannot understand Him. This illumination is always a favour;
what I mean is that it is too precious for any effort to oblige it to
happen like a simple and fatal chemical reaction for example. But our
Friend is moved by our small works, and He gives us, through
kindness, what the rigid laws of Destiny were denying us.
Amongst us, men of the XXth century, those who adhere unshakeably to
Jesus' existence, to His divinity, to His omnipotence, to His triumph
over death, are the same as those to whom He made Himself known two
thousand years ago, in the familiar form of a very gentle, very good
and very mysterious traveller. That is why He used to say : This
generation will not pass before such events have taken place ,
These are the privileged of the present day. Before, when they met
the Friend, they were not privileged; it was a trial, proportioned to
their strength, a trial in which some of them did not succeed. To the
latter, a second trial was offered a few years ago.
All those who have not seen the Light, whom Mammon or a false science
or pride have blinded, they are not lost forever ; some
possibilities of seeing the Living truth are still offered to them
before the next judgement. They too will return to the fold, but
much later, and after many setbacks and misfortunes. But their time
will come ; that is sure. The Father has not given life to any
creature to allow it to be lost utterly. It is only that there are
various ways between the earth and Heaven; it takes a century
following some; these are the shortest ; for others, it takes
hundreds of centuries.
The authentic disciple of Jesus no longer is a servant but a friend.
He is lucky to have perceived something of the Word by means other
than books, metaphysics and abstractions. Fortunate in having seen
the poignant beauty of this Word shining on the perpetual sufferings
to which the love that devours Him has reduced Him ; a beauty which
permeates like a luminous dew, an exalted and glowing beauty when
Jesus offers Himself, with no resistance to the cruel forces of evil
and ugliness. The admirable stature of the universal Lord then

distils the eternal Light like a breath of gold and insubstantial

diamonds. The august forms of His appearance which, when calm,
radiate a holy awe, take on an ineffable pathos in the tremendous
anguish in which His tenderness for humanity, the minds and the
worlds throws Him. Then He radiates, our Christ with the gentle eyes
; He radiates with an unbearable brightness, vibrating in his entire
body with the shimmering halo of red flames of Love. The cosmic
auroras drift around Him, like dark fringes on His coat ; His bare
feet shine like snow on high peaks and His divine hands, hardened by
work, are strong and warm like the sun which gilds the vines on the
hills.
His breath is like the surge of the great waves in the zodiacal
storms. Motionless, eternally, He is still to be found everywhere at
the same time ; one and multiple, every one of the seeds He sows in
the vast fields of the Father holds Him completely ; and,
indefatigable, He bestows the superabundant emanations of His own
life to the abysses, the atoms, the gods and the infusoria.
He, Love, maintains worlds from ever and forever ; He is the one
that, with His own hands, launches the streamer comets from the
upper Abyss to the lower Abyss ; He speaks and a world is born ; He
looks, and here come running, the Death that frees and the Renewal
that beatifies. With Him, everything is Heaven, without Him, Edens
are dull and frozen hells.
Invincible athlete, living pillar of the world, tireless pilgrim
amongst the nebulae and the galaxies, magnificence of all the
glories, virtue of all the sanctities, silent healer, triumpher over
death, such is He in front of whom the mystic prostrates himself and
on whose tracks he endeavours to walk.
If he works, he knows it well, it is because Jesus has built this
universe with His own hands ; if he writes, it is because the author
of the Book of Life has imparted to Him His Art ; if he gathers
together harmonies, it is because the deep voice of the Word
creates, animates, unifies and tunes to the voices of beings, from
the howling of the demon to the melodious whisper of the seraph. For
this unfathomable abyss of perfections, no walls, no mountains, no
valleys, no precipices exist ; through Him the disciple can see,
through Him he understands the mysteries and controls the spirits.
His gentleness is all powerful ; inexhaustible source of the
Impossible, the Uncreated, the New, the Unheard-of, the Ineffable,
the Unrevealed, in His left hand lie the ashes of vanished worlds, in
His right hand shine the seeds of future worlds. Master of the
universes, benefactor of men, conqueror of hell, Jesus accepts from
the disciple his clumsy and touching weakness ; in the heart which
rises so painfully towards Him, He sees only its sincerity. How then
not to love that God who makes himself our brother and who retains
of His greatness only what is necessary to give us confidence and
leave us the merit of our effort ?
Such is, Gentlemen, the general aspect of mysticism, of my
mysticism. We still have to study its discipline, its prerogatives
and its aim.
PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Father, that the Love wherewith you have loved me may be in them
(john XVII, 26)
I propose today to examine with you the practical part of mysticism :
its methods, the prerogatives it confers, the goal it pursues. The
landscape is immense. I shall none the less endeavour to forget none
of the sites whose contemplation may help to taste the savoury,
pacifying magnificence of the whole.
And firstly, who is called to mysticism ?
The advice : Be perfect like your heavenly Father is perfect was
given to all the people as an irresistible conclusion to the Sermon
on the Mount. Thus, in spite of what Origen, Clement of Alexandria,
St. Jerome amongst others say, there are not two Christianities, one
for the masses and one for the elite ; or, rather, there should not
be, where the conduct of life and discipline are concerned, if the
Christian community truly wanted to reduce itself to its original
simplicity.
According to the formal doctrine of the Gospel, the disciple works
and waits ; he holds back from his reward; he accepts the wage which
his Master offers him. The Spirit alone distributes knowledge of the

mysteries and the power of the miracles ; the ministers of the cult
are initiators and operators only as far as that Spirit gives them
the faculty for this.
The striving towards perfection is thus the normal task of any
Christian. And if I place myself beyond the ecclesiastical viewpoint
which after all is only one viewpoint amongst hundreds I can see
no reason for allowing any pre-eminence to the contemplative life.
The word of Jesus about Mary sitting at His feet : She has chosen
the good portion did not apply to the way the two sisters behaved
but to their intentions.
The way of the contemplative crosses the highlands ; that of the man
of action is in the canyons ; but both join at the peaks, there where
the immutable re-descendSun of unitive Love perpetually magnifies any
creature and any object.
And, however hard to measure these two things are, I can still see
as many sufferings in the wear and tear of secular life as in the
vigils of the life of austerity.
Thus everybody can become a mystic, but only at a certain time. When
the moral fibres have been stretched to breaking point, when the
reactions brought about by our indiscretions become too violent, the
hard granite of our hearts starts to crumble. We mistrust our
strength; until then we have been climbing the lush foot-hills of the
mountain of the Self, we will redescend amongst the boulders and
start again from pride towards humility, from great joys towards
bitter sufferings, from glory towards anonymity, from wealth to
poverty. The Precursor has risen in us ; his rough voice lashes ;
remorse comes, then repentance. God has just conquered'; his narrow
royal road can be seen afar off; we enter the deserts of penitence
where lie in wait for us the purifying agonies, the desolating
solitudes, and finally that blessed death which immediately precedes
the rebirth into the Light and beatitude in the Spirit.
I hear some complaining that Heaven is so slow in coming. Who are
they ? The lukewarm; in a myriad of thoughts, they have hardly one
that goes towards God; whereas, indefatigable, the Friend looks after
them to receive their faintest good intentions. Souls have taken
thousands of centuries to come down to here ; why should they rise
again in just an instant ? Should they not rebuild in Light the
faculties they had in Darkness ? Should they not restore, at least a
part of, the depredations they have committed, return the unlawful
booty ?
Delicate work, difficult negotiations. Thus the masters of spiritual
life brim over with advice. The great psychic task consists of
transmutating natural man into divine man.
Contrary to the adepts who perfect that natural man, the mystics
think that, by exalting the faculties of the self, the self is exalted
towards, transcendental egoism, a very inner pride, a very mental
avarice. Time cannot become eternity; finite dimensions cannot
practically pass to the infinite. So, the living gods whose
intelligence, power, sensitivity are millions of times stronger,
greater, more exquisite than ours, some of these resplendent beings
once were men ; they have progressed. But only Jesus can take a
creature and give it rebirth in the
absolute Spirit.
Manou, Krishna, Fo-Hi, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Socrates,
Mohammed sublimate and refine ; Jesus only regenerates and creates
anew. The simple conversion of man's will is sufficient.
That conversion is repentance. A cherub has pierced the sick heart
with an arrow. Then man knows with despair that he has prostituted,
disfigured, tortured that so beautiful image of which he should have
been the faithful guardian ; he sees in himself an ignorant heart
that he would so much have wished to keep pure. He thus accuses
himself with the heartfelt sincerity of the guilty one bewailing his
sin ; he gives himself over to the reprisals of the ministers of
immanent Justice.
From now on, his existence will be expiation ; from the lowest works
of his flesh to the rarest palpitations of his mind, he will convert
everything into a perpetual holocaust. Behold the face of pain and
violence of mysticism; it is its tears and its ravages that I wish to
show you today. Nowadays there is much void talk sensitivity has
turned into oversensitivity, and tolerance into scepticism.
Gentleness is active only when it is poured by the hands of work and
energy. We will have many meetings with it later ; for the time
being, let us study the face of effort.

This multiple effort is summarized in renunciation. It is the birth

of divine offspring ; it is our soul giving birth to our mind.
Certainly, the human personality is great and vast; but he only
glorifies himself by where he touches Nothingness : by its self; and
it knows nought of the winged essences which one day will take it to
the Absolute. Now, in the history of any soul comes an hour when the
Promethean vulture alights on it; but it prefers a proud agony on the
lonely rock to an insipid life in the populous plains.
However, pride is a powerful explosive. The harder the rock, the
greater the effect of dynamite on it; the stronger the soul, the
fiercer the fight, the more its vitality increases. If the great
leaders of men want their disciples to suppress their joys, pains
and desires, it is to invigorate the fibre of the character and to
give more strength to the relaxation of the will. Is strength not
imperturbable ?
However, if we are gods, in a certain sense, we are also and how
much so thoughtless little children. The great, pompous words by
which we build ourselves up to be heroes are like the wooden sword
and the tin-plated armour thanks to which any little boy imagines
himself to be a general. Which man, amongst the most notorious ones,
does not cavort around with a broom handle between his legs ?
On the other hand, to judge the emptiness of a thing, it is
necessary to have tried it out; this is what hardships,
disappointments, anguish, triumphs, intoxication and despair are for.
What Life asks from us is that we live. And the mystic, as he wants
to live with the most intense and deepest plenitude, accomplishes
all acts with all his heart, with all his strength, with all his
soul and with all his thought , but he offers the fruits of it to
his brothers around him.
Universalize this attitude and you will see the great, compassionate
face of Renunciation. Let me, to define its outline, reproduce the
vigorous and pathetic image which an extraordinary painter has drawn.
Amongst the types of superior humanity that XVIth century Spain
offered the world, there is one which by the fire of his enthusiasm
surpasses by far all the conquistadors of the Ideal. This is the
reformer of the Carmelites, John of the Cross. This little monk,
wretched, puny, sickly, ragged, feeding on garbage, to his superiors
a disgrace, is one of those geniuses ahead of the rest of humanity by
many centuries. He did not go ahead carefully by successive stages;
he did not purify himself by measured disciplines ; he did not light,
one by one, the lamps of the inner sanctuary. No : everything in him
was sudden, welling up, final; he saw the Absolute and instantly
plunged therein ; he is about to leave and, behold, with a single
beat of his wings he arrives ; he probed the terrible bareness of the
primordial Abyss and he shed everything at once; he had the
presentiment of eternal Light and, seizing it all at once, he darted
it to us.
A burning torch made of all the torches that burned in that land of
passion, this monk summarizes the tenacity of the prehistoric Reds,
the stern eagerness of the old rabbis, the pride of the Arabs. He
goes beyond his homeland, he even goes beyond his religion. That is
why I can talk freely of the catholic saint before an audience
composed of mixed religions. Let us follow in our thoughts that
carmelite who speaks in a quiet voice the most burning words. The road
is not long ; but the landscape is fearsome.
Two ways, he says, are open to the common run of mankind. The first
one leads to happiness on earth ; the second one to paradise.
Give up rest, the pleasure of life, honours, the somewhat material
pleasures offered by civilization : all the moralists, even the
heathens, teach that herein lies wisdom.
But our monk pushes us further ; he jolts us ; he wants us to drink
the same wine that intoxicates him.
Renounce knowledge of the occult ; renounce, even where the results
are demonstrably good, the acquisition of any power whatsoever;
renounce the caressing sweetness of the angels' breath which
refreshed your pious brow ; do not try to see messengers in the
soothing dreams of the night, to detect their intervention in the
weft of your life ; give up the joys of intelligence, art and love ;
give up holy ecstasy ; give up even the harmonious ma- magnificence of
paradise... Nothing, nothing, nothing and nothing ;
Renounce knowing anything by your intellect'-;

Renounce all comfort;

Renounce all society;
Renounce all certitude;
And finally,
Renounce even the hope of any reward.
And, from within his thatched cell, the carmelite with the burning
eyes sheds on this fivefold darkness the faint lights of hope :
You will be all the more as you would be less.
What a knowledge of man ! What a mastery of the springs of the will
! What a sharp tang of the ashes which are the magnificent summits of
the Universe facing the eternal hills ! Let us try to direct the
dazzling sparks shaken by Brother John's torch in the caverns of the
soul.
Here is the principle-making unity of perception, intelligence and
action. Here is the intermingling of purifying, illuminating and
unitive life which the theologians try to analyse. These are the
subtle demons which people the cloisters with delusions. This is,
finally, the only plant which, in the cracks of the inner rock, bears
fruit; it is the attack on the self down to the most secret refuges.
One must break off from the attraction of thinking, from the
sweetness of feeling, even from unpleasant objects. One must drive
the will when one is tired ; and to hold back the will when one is
full of strength. We must live as we imagine that Jesus would live
were he in our place ; not to perceive or allow ourselves that which
would not tend to God ; in any case, adopt the most unpleasant, the
most belittling, the most tiring way.
This is the school of real patience : inglorious virtue which
however allows us to resume control of ourselves. Usually, one is too
strong in thought and too weak in action. To accept what Heaven sends
us every day is half of the task. This requires trust in God and it
is, after all, a very reasonable sentiment : What do we know of our
wishes, even the most familiar or the most noble ones ? What do we
know of our acts, even of the most heroic ones ? What do we know of
our supremacy ? Nothing. It is written : if you wish salvation,
take up your cross and not : Have visions, perform miracles or
become scientists.
The mystic studies or rather experiments with the nothingness of
himself by means of a triple purification which St. John of the Cross
calls a threefold night. If your knowledge of symbolism enables you
here to establish a curious set of analogies, simply take care that
these will be similar and not identical.
The first night is the most painful because it surprises. The
disciple had called for Love and it is Death, its gloomy consort which
arrives. Misfortune, sadness, mockery, discouragement, sickness,
indifference to incurable despairs, these are painful visitations,
much more so than the mere end of this body. But these sufferings
bring salvation; they clothe our interior with splendour. Not only
are they short-lived but they descend on us as a grace. Understand it
well, the mystic does not remain in that darkness ; it is like the
embassy of Light and Happiness.
When we have lost all taste for Nature, men, ideas and ourselves, in
the depth of that night which seems to be infinite, the imperceptible
glimmer of dawn can be detected.
Here our merciless guide goads us on again. Go on, he says ; on
foreseeing the ineffable visit, sacrifice it; beg your Master that He
reserves the blessing of His presence for those who do not yet
suspect its possibility; since you, yourself, know, through the
certainty of faith, the reality of this ecstasy. If the marvellous
occurs, accept it and be thankful in the most abject humility; if it
goes away, be thankful still, in the most plenary and smiling
abnegation.
Oh ! Gentlemen, one must have experienced the wonder of the sensible
presence of Heaven to appreciate the heroism of such a sacrifice.
***
Thus, will you in your minds, that is, in reality, look at God ?
First of all, forget books. Immerse yourselves in life, maternal,

superabundant, fruitful. Listen with your heart to the beating to

the universal heart. Leave alone analyses and calculations ; your
algebra must be the lightning that lights the fire of Love; your
microscopes will be the anxieties of an ever watchful charity.
The most beautiful books of the saints seem removed from reality and
specious so much they sometimes complicate the Gospel. I dare almost
say that mystic theology is an invention of men. For God is simple ;
He goes to the simple people; and the way to Heaven is simple.
However, to assume the right to scorn books one must have read a lot.
What is forbidden is not knowledge, it is deification of the
intelligence. The first of the intellectuals is Lucifer. True he
bears a light; but it is frozen by pride ; it dies in the sensuality
of being alone, and it resurges endlessly through a tenacious will to
dominate. The fallen archangel is the ideal of those who are
intoxicated by the strength of their thought'; he was created for
life but he preferred its inverted image because he reigns therein,
whereas in the other he would have to serve.
We will all, at some time, undergo the fearsome test of the tree of
science. Let us prepare for it by understanding that God is not tied
to any form. Here is the dusk of the third night, the longest, the
most devastating. To bear it, tell yourselves that it concerns a
heart consumed by the wish for the Absolute.
Withstand that desire, says John of the Cross ; if your heart dries
up in the deserts, bear it; suffer despair and paralysis of the will;
it is your inner? most depths which are going to be ploughed up,
turned upside down, torn asunder. All the temptations are rushing
up, the most disgusting, the most seductive, the coarsest, the most
subtle. Suffer them. Do not move. Accept the gusts. Look within
yourself without blinking. You believe that you are rejected by the
Father because at this moment you see yourself as you are; your mind
swoons in ever- recurring agonies of dismemberment, denudation,
powerlessness ; it falls alive into hell. No man, no reading can
help you ; remorse, inability to pray, to think, to act, overwhelm you.
This darkness is unimaginable to whomsoever has not experienced it.
However, its ever-increasing horror reaches an extreme. The Master
watches the disciple. And the latter, with all his failing strength,
keeps his heart towards the Being to whom he has given himself.
In that moment of total silence gushes, like a smouldering fire, the
vehement, inextinguishable Love. It burns everything in the poor,
broken heart, in this precious heart on to which come down the
merciful hands of the Friend, who has finally appeared.
Everything lights up in the inner sky, from the marrow of the bones
to the summit of the spirit. That Friend washes away any blemish and
even the memory of the blemish in this heart, carried before the
divine throne, where it will receive the supreme initiation : the
baptism of the Spirit.
Sometimes, and then it is a rare blessing, the Friend shows Himself
in person. Under the rags of the poor, under the uniform of the
prince, beautiful as a seraph, disfigured by fatigue and martyrdom,
it does not matter. His servant recognizes Him with certainty. No
known joy can then attain the ecstasy of that meeting ; the spirit of
the disciple shakes the bars of the corporeal prison ; he rushes into
the Master's arms ; he falters, he is reborn, he is transfigured.
Overwhelming joy, immutable peace, limitless love. What can be said
of these mysteries, whose ceremonies take place where the gaze of the
gods themselves cannot reach ?
But how many despairing vigils before the purple of that dawn ! The
persevering searcher will know that dawn for it is written :
Towards mid-night, behold the bridegroom comes , and further : I
shall come as a thief .
I squander repetitions, I know it. But there are thoughts against
which everything in ourselves rebels ; we must force ourselves to
allow them in ; and those thoughts are the most fruitful ones in us.
Some repetitions seem indispensable to me, and I have reasons to
impose them on you.
All the strange pictures before which we have just passed are only
the veils of the real mystic drama. The prudent Church watches, even
when it seems to set her children free. Thus what is real mysticism ?
Here I cannot answer clearly, because of certain proprieties, because
of the incapacity to which the human language is reduced before the
scenes of the everlasting Kingdom.

The effort demanded by the Gospel is an uprooting, a transplantation.

Amongst the myriad of angels serving Christ, there are some who are
sent to each disciple to change the weft of his destiny, to bring
him spiritual nourishment, to teach him, to care for him, to
encourage him, in a word to remake all the cells of his physical,
mental and psychic being. But the collaboration of the man they serve
is indispensable to them. To sow in us the seeds Jesus entrusted to
them we must, by our will for asceticism, break the soil of our hearts.
The effects of these mysterious cares are not distinctly recorded in
our conscience, especially at the beginning. They blend in with the
hard-to-analyse feeling of the divine presence. A philosopher will
find proof of this presence; a devout man, through an ardent
meditation will build up an animated image (*). All these efforts
attract the real Presence and make us able to bear it; but it cannot
be forced; it always remains independent, gratuitous. The best
formula for bringing about this wonderful sweetness is an abundant
practice of charity. A true disciple is already on the way to freedom
; he sees God everywhere ; he does not believe Him to be governed by
conditions of time or place. God, the carmelite of Avila used to
say, God is in the kitchen as well as in the cells or in the Oratory
. Some recluses in Islam, India and China also believe this. This
omnipresence is not abstract; it is real, biological, alive. To
experience it, calls for constant courage ; but everyone can reach it.
The mystic is fed with special nourishment. Any creature sustains
itself in the environment to which it belongs ; Look at the plants,
the animals, our fluidic body, our mental body. And it is the same
external environment by which it is formed and by which it repairs
itself that each of our bodies perceives.
Thus, to feel God, even in a most tenuous way, our self must feed on
divine nourishment. Simple- mindedness is that manna, and renunciation
procures it; we have seen it just now. The disciple will thus pursue
what society shuns : lack of success, scorn, difficulties. To
miracles, mysteries, magnificence, he is indifferent; sacrifice
constitutes his life itself and love is its flame.
(*) Thus the commentaries on the Exercises by Saint Ignatius of
Loyola.
The mystic is the antithesis of the adept. He wants to conquer
nothing ; his freedom, his most intimate feelings, he forsakes them;
he tries to become the most ignorant, weak and enslaved of all
creatures. Just as the Word immolates itself always and everywhere,
just as the blood cells die to give back life to the dying cells of
the muscles, the mystic, in his sphere, gives without respite. He
finishes by not noticing that he is giving. Strength, time, money,
tastes, affections, opinions, reputation : he offers them to anybody
who believes he can find some comfort or some profit in them; even
his wish for eternal Beauty he would give to save any of his
brothers from Darkness.
From where can man take such vigour ? It is his Friend who gives it
to him. Remember that the servant of God lives, in an extraordinary
world ; the world of Faith. He feels loved by God. Logically,
practically, he adopts the series of assertions which faith
promulgates ; his God is a living, loving, tangible god who gives
Life. He gives us the sense by which we can see Him. For if His light
does not penetrate, fill our souls, like the star of Bethlehem in the
eyes of the shepherds, we will not believe. It is because God makes
us see that the truth of faith remains invisible to the eyes of the
intelligence.
Faith is also the sole instrument for mystic work. The disciple has
invisible friends who become the more numerous as his visible friends
become rare. They are his old slaves ; they are all those extrahuman creatures whom, during the centuries of his selfish evolution,
he had submitted to his tyranny.
He has set them free and he makes it his duty to compensate them
progressively for the services they rendered him of old. He
understands that today he is only the result of his past; that his
present personality is only an aggregate without any consistency,
since it is built in the mirages of the black light and in the
ghosts of the self. On the contrary, according to how much the
disciple tries from now on to want nothing but the will of the Father,
his acts become real, living, definitive, fruitful; his prayers become
real, active, victorious.
Little by little, he enters a world of glory where the feelings
which are here called charity, faith, humility, resignation, goodness
are tangible, real nourishing substances, organized forms, living

beings, complete societies of unknown individualities. His mind

becomes a favourite residence for certain of these lofty creatures
and, little by little, his whole person, including his body, changes
the quality of his life, moves away from the obscure attractions and
settles in the realm of light, purity, peace.
I wanted to tell you in more detail about the prerogatives of the
mystic. I lack the time. Besides, the next talks will provide all the
opportunities for bridging this gap. We must summarize.
We have only described the general characteristics of the mystic
path. Every pilgrim there retains his original physiognomy ; every
disciple is a world apart. But the clear feeling of the divine links
them all. Something in them goes beyond human nature and makes them
out of place amongst the geniuses by whom our race is honoured and
enlightened. Their viewpoint is inaccessible, their gaze is special,
their motive is beyond common aims. They are unaware of what
everybody knows or claims to know ; but they know what everybody else
does not know : that the Father sends His son wherever He is asked.
And their existence is a continuing request.
The privileges of the disciple are not a morbid inequality, but
natural bloomings helped by moral discipline and engendered by the
direct intervention of the Word. The extraordinary phenomena appear
only as fleeting accidents ; so Saint Theresa, having reached the
summit of divine union, no longer experiences ecstasy; Ignatius of
Loyola retains the clear feeling of the divine presence while talking
with a cardinal over administrative business. Those I have known in
possession of the keys to the Treasure of Light were good family men
whom nothing set apart from their neighbours.
This robust psychic health, this constant mastery of the self, this
admirable common sense, this true goodness, always sink their roots
into a passionate soul. The mediocre and the meek never produce
anything. Francis of Assisi dreamed of glory ; Loyola, who should not
be judged on his work altered by secret interests, was quick-tempered
; Francesco di Borgia was an ambitious man ; I could give you similar
examples by the dozen. Physiological temperament predisposes to
visions, to ecstasies ; but essential union remains independent of the
nature of the person and possible to all mentalities.
So, mysticism is reached only by practising charity, resignation,
trust in God, humility. Such a method is too simple in the eyes of
the crowd; honestly, it is a very hard method. Eyes that can gaze
into the sun are rare. The mass can understand and use only outward
and ritual religion. Some, who believe they are more intelligent,
try to conquer esoterism. The Father considers with the same smile
the efforts of all His children. To all, even to those who turn their
backs to Him, He dispenses a light proportional to the weakness of
their organs, an assimilable food, a task that is within their powers.
It is this uninterrupted adaptation of the essential Truth to our
intelligence, this answer endlessly replied to our questions, which
constitute the silent and very occult descent of the Holy Spirit to
earth. The interpreters of this supreme Initiator are many ; but
they are often not up to their task. His most active agents are not
those whose names impose themselves on the memory of men, even in the
elite phalanx of the mystic writers. He, who is praised by everyone,
is only great according to Nature; he, who is persecuted by everyone,
is probably great in the eyes of God.
The water of divine Truth flows on to the earth from two sources :
the Gospel and the Conscience. If they do not quench our thirst, as
we would hope, it is because the darkness within us, drinking long
draughts from them, corrupts them by its sole contact. Our
conscience thus needs comfort, and Heaven wanted nothing to be
falsified in the only evidence which remains to us of his Angel Jesus
: in the Gospel.
When I say that the Gospel contains all initiations, written and
oral; that it encloses the wisdom of the Chings, the Vedas, the
Avestas, the Pyramids and the Torah, the scientists will smile
incredulously. And in effect, the assertion seems rash on my part, I
who have no pretension as to science or esoterism, I am sure of what
I claim; and perhaps you will contemplate with surprise, in the
course of these talks, the perspectives opened up by such a simple
and benign word from the Friend of creation.
Here are the last strokes of the outline I had promised you. Take
into consideration all of these frescos, no matter how imaginary they
may seem. Think not only about your own culture, but about the needs
of the time we live in.

When an epoch is populated with clairvoyants, prophets and

miracle-workers, you must not despise it a priori. Many diverse causes
are involved. The powers from Below may project a light, as bright
to our ignorant eyes as the powers from Above. The earth is not
isolated ; it is in ceaseless communication with other stars ; it is
a caravanserai ; what is there to be amazed at if, from time to
time, the souls who come to work down here, come from the realms of
magic, of occult science, of spiritual vices ?
Lost amongst the crowd of the curious, lovers of the occult,
ambitious of secret societies, those proud of being followers, there
are nobler souls who, after a detour into the material sciences or
into esoterism, finally return to the bracing air and the healthy
sun of God's Kingdom. In this confusion of seekers, the sign by which
the genuine one can be recognized, is faith in Jesus-Christ. Whatever
the mistakes of those who have gathered in the shadow of the cross,
they always come to repentance ; they are never irrevocably wrong;
they never take the left-hand path for more than a few centuries ;
they may be dazzled by prestige for they are not safe from seduction;
but they retain true concepts on the capital points.
Heaven always takes care of sincere hearts. Let us look for truth
with all our physical strength, with all our cerebral power, with all
our love; soon it will show itself to us as identical with the Word,
it will grow within us and will lead us to the Father.
I have shown you heights, Gentlemen. Nobody can reach them at the
first attempt. Even if our heart is set ablaze in a second, it takes
a certain time for the fire to spread to the rest of our being. Thus,
let not these heroisms I have talked about dishearten you. It is the
quality of the effort that is worthwhile and not its quantity.
I am telling you, the Father does not let the least sacrifice go
without an immediate reward. The most fleeting impulse brings the
angels closer to us. The least costly charity, if it is forgetful of
itself, shines a brightness within us. Let us live henceforward in
the eternal; every one can rise to it; and we will receive all the
confirmations and all the consolations.
CHRISTIC INITIATION
No man puts a piece of new cloth unto an old garment ...
(matthew ix, 16)
It is rather rash for someone who has only one hour to attempt the
study of such a vast subject. But are all subjects not beyond our
limitations ? And can they not, all of them, lead us to an unknown
panorama of the dazzling summits of Truth ? Furthermore, the subject
of this talk will allow me to give my opinion on several subjects
that I consider essential. More and more, as the years go by, the
struggle, in the occult worlds, becomes more tumultuous ; subtle
traps are placed and tempting baits are offered to the seeker at all
the bends in the path. To be able to judge, decide, and choose your
way, you must know all the opinions. Naturally, I believe I know the
truth ; the theories of eclecticism, which are the fashion nowadays,
have no sense. For why should anyone speak if he believes he is
propagating errors ? If the most absolute conviction does not drive
us, our voice is dead ; it is a useless and vain noise.
But I do not want, nor should I, to sweep anyone along by myself. If
it is really about Truth that I am speaking, it is not I who shall
make you recognize it, Truth itself will speak, in the very depth of
your hearts, the invincible, definitive and certain words. In the
realm of spiritualism, the roads are so many, the road forks so
frequent they have barely been covered over the last decades that
weariness overcomes us, that the desperate wish to see a light, to
hear at last the comforting voice of a helping Friend consumes us !
And the deeper one goes into spiritualism, the more swiftly come this
languor ant this thirst.
Do not be shocked if I come to you as possessing this Certainty, as
seeing that Light and as knowing that Friend. If I considered them as
temporary, I would not have the right to later on assert certain
axioms. Thus, you will be good enough not to see scornful attacks in
what I am about to tell you ; I just believe that nowadays the
respectable name of tolerance is wrongly attributed to eclecticism and
dilettantism. All opinions are respectable, all opinions contain a
part of truth; but those which go beyond the level of intelligence
are no longer a mixture of false and true ; they are, because of
their stature, either completely false or completely true.
Where can the infallible criterion be found ? In Knowledge, answers

ancient Wisdom ; in Love, answers Christie Wisdom. We are going to

confront the teachings of our Jesus with those of His human
predecessors, from the four viewpoints of Initiation, Knowledge,
Morality and utter Perfection ; and we will try, if God wills, to
conclude in a few words on the definitive choice of the spiritual path.
First of all, what is Initiation ? It is the entirety of works that
render man conscious of a way of universal life other than that on
the physical, earthly level. Hence the neophyte of Hellenism and
Christianity, hence the dwidja of Brahmanism. Therefore, it is
necessary to die on the material level and to be born again to an
invisible life which nevertheless is real, objective, substantial.
As the invisible levels are countless, so initiations are countless
also. Some are vain, just phraseology ; others are speculative, others
still are practical. In our era, only the frameworks of the ancient
mystic disciplines remain. So freemasonry shows a rather complete
picture of the initiation of the Pyramids ; Catholicism is a
rejuvenation of Brahmanism, especially as far as the liturgy is
concerned. The somewhat exclusive European brotherhoods do not keep
their promises ; the contemporary self-styled Rosicrucians know
nothing of Helias Artista. He who has read all the books and who
wants to go further believes he must go to those faraway countries
where, so tradition asserts, the last adepts live in silence.
However, Truth dwells in the depth of our being, in a silent
expectation which is infinitely more beautiful and more complete,
immutable, eternal, beatifying. But let us leave all that.
The secret science of matter is alchemy; the science of power is
magic ; that of man is psychurgy; and that of the extra-earthly
essences is the Ancients' Theurgy. These four degrees of Knowledge
existed always ; even today they are being disseminated in certain
centres in China, India, Persia, Arabia and northern Africa. They
must be wanted and overcome; they are not given; the road is shown
and the candidate progresses at his own risk and according to his
strength. How many tales I could tell you on this subject; how many
saddening stories of marred lives given up to some mania because of
tackling guardians who were too strong. Read Zanoni by Bulwer
Lytton and especially the magnificent Axel by the genial
Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam ; you will see exactly how little
compassionate are those possessors of the secret of science towards
the failures of the candidates.
On the contrary, Christ says : Break not the bruised bough; snuff
out not the candle. This is because men, no matter how wise they
are, have no forbearance, because they always feel themselves to be
slaves of Time. Even those admirable adepts, whose little known
names have a halo of superhuman prestige, whose heroic persistence
and deep abnegation know how to persevere for lifetimes in the same
research, whose personal ambition is dead and whose being, by sheer
willpower, is no more than the incarnation of a metaphysical
principle, those gods in fact, they know the fear of failure.
But the Father, His Angel, the Son, and their mutual Glory, the
Spirit, possess the quiet patience of the all-mighty and of eternity.
Creatures can only teach from the outside to the inside ; the
instructor must impress one of the pupil's senses ; an adept or a
genius teaches us by talking to the double, to the astral body, or to
the mental body; it is always through a cover of the self that the
human initiator will reach this self. Only the Father and those He
assigns can speak directly to the self. So Christie initiation is
essential, one, internal, supreme; that is why it cannot be overcome
but only received.
Each religion contains an esoterism, but it is not esoterism which
exteriorises a religion ; it is religion, or rather some of its
representatives who draw a secret doctrine from the general doctrine.
Religions, in a certain sense, represent the highway, easy, yes, but
longer; initiations are the shortcuts, the smuggler's paths, painful,
dangerous, but which lead faster to the summits of immaculate snow
where the soul can soar towards the Infinite.
Or rather, the same applies to all religions, except to the
Christian religion. In effect, as the keys of the Gospel mysteries
are, not in hieroglyphs, but in the student's heart, so the word of
Christ is the highway or the messenger according to the pilgrim's
strength, according to whether he is moderate or violent. Violence
here is not at all the intentional effort of the adept ; it is
something so beyond the reasonable mental categories, it is such a
superhuman effort, an abnegation so absolute that I fear to shock you
by giving you an example of it; I fear to not be able to make you
understand this bewildering intoxication which throws toward death

the hearts set alight by the torch of Love. The greatest poets fall
short when expressing certain ecstasies ; all the more would I be
presumptuous to want to describe them. If one of you has that
violence in himself, he will surely find alone the opportunity to
use it.
To initiate oneself is an important affair. It is not sufficient to
say or believe that one is Rosicrucian ; It is not sufficient to
break bread ceremoniously, to discourse on symbols, to be successful
in a few alchemical experiments, nor to act intentionally from a
distance. Let us be wary of literature ; nowadays, the least author
has himself called dear Master and the least amateur in occultism
just Master .
Let us react against this liking for what is complicated, strange and
mysterious ; it is so strong only because our culture makes us
artificial. We leave ordinary religion because exact science seems
more profound ; but when we have probed its emptiness, we rush into
the fantastic sciences. How naive we are ! How right the Orientals
are when they consider us barbaric, to sometimes send us absurd
systems and fallacious messages !
However, they possess the veridical mystery, as well as we do. Who
has been able to go down into the Dekkan crypts, to read the Y-King,
to talk to the dignitaries of Benares or the visionaries of Roum,
Medina or Fez, has seen that all the signs, all the diagrams and all
the symbols say the same thing; that the study of masonic thought,
the Imitation of Jesus-Christ, the rules of the contemplative
orders make known the same precept. And that fundamental, unique,
universal axiom can be called : Charity, humility, prayer. But
whether one deciphers in French, in Sanskrit, in Hebrew, in Parvi or
in any of the thousand initiating idioms, one thinks : yes, I know
that ; and one goes on to the next page. Those three words precisely
contain all the secrets, all the help, all the sciences ; alas !
without them, one gets nowhere in the great psychic work but to
sickness, madness or death.
The great fault of human initiations is that they have buried those
three illuminating words beneath heaps of rites, exercises, mysteries
and instructions. They have disfigured them by the cult of all kinds
of gods ; they have reversed them even criminally, so that certain
schools, and not the less learned ones or the less powerful ones,
make use of these pure flames to exalt spiritual pride. That is one
of the reasons why Christ so stubbornly denounces all the Pharisees.
The archetype of these three words is the Light that Jesus came to
light again. For the last two thousand years all the forces of
money, matter, selfishness and deified intelligence have formed a
coalition. The Caesars, killers of so many Christians, did less wrong
than those dignitaries of Oriental esoterism who, in the second
century, held a secret convention in Alexandria. There such measures
were taken to win the popular forces issued from the word of an
unknown Galilean ; there the legends were collected, the episodes
composed, the dates of Jesus' life falsified, on the Procrustean bed
of her? metic symbolism, with the purpose of obtaining a new type of
adept, conforming with the millenary model of the hierophants.
You might believe that I am accusing these initiates of being false
; nothing of the sort. These men were sincere, but pride blinded them
; they understood nothing about Christ, neither do their descendants
of today understand anything about Him. In the story of Jesus,
anything, not fitting in the framework of their logosophy, was simply
believed to be popular gossip, and deleted. I understand their
state of mind. An initiate progresses, or believes he progresses,
only by his own energy. In reality, he receives much help, but he is
convinced that he owes it all to his own strength; his selfconfidence is his best trump-card in this formidable game he has
started against Destiny. He must thus have beforehand a precise goal
without which his efforts would diverge, melt and fade away. But what
he does not see is this : by the fact that he sets himself a goal,
he limits his ascension, he circumscribes his action, he surrounds
his inner perspectives with a wall. His sphere is more or less vast,
according to his instinctive, animistic, intellectual or volitive
power ; but that sphere is closed. And all the infinite freedom which
spreads beyond it, for him, is as though it did not exist.
On the other hand, Christ says : You are nought, you can do nought
by yourself, you can do anything if you do as though God dwelled
within you. Your most heroic efforts are worthwhile only as the signs
of your good will : they attract grace, they make it possible for
the Spirit to come down ; without these efforts, the Spirit might
well come within you : It can do everything ; but Its presence would
reduce you to cinders. You must thus accomplish the same works as

your brothers, as the peasant, as the workman, as the citizen, as the

scientist; but with the deep conviction that you nevertheless remain
a useless servant. Then shall I come to you as my Father wills .
If, finally, we consider the technique of the mystic disciplines, we
shall notice the most important difference between them and the
evangelic path. The first address themselves to one of the principles
of the human being ; they are abstract, speculative and hopeless of
redress in case of failure. The second one is general, practical,
living, in a word human ; and for him who fails, even seventy-seven
times seven times, the goodness of Jesus never tires.
In fact, look at the Sufi ; although he may be wrong in some aspect
of his myriads of invocations, the forces he has set in motion go
back to him ; the same applies to the Mantra-Yogi as well as to the
Strotapatti. If the Taoist beginner, in his small forest pagoda,
after two or three years of solitude, lets his meditation deviate or
his volitive tension weaken, then he is defeated. If the
Parivradjaka, in his underground cave used for Brahmanic initiations,
after three weeks' fasting and darkness, comes back to daylight
without having faced the terrible gaze of the gods from below, then
he is mad for the rest of his life. It is not without reason that the
Ancients called epilepsy the holy sickness and that people in the
East respect the insane. They are often unlucky explorers of the
invisible.
And, without leaving our Europe, if you manage to put your hand on
the manuscripts that are transmitted, from superior to superior, in a
few contemplative communities, then you will see that there is an
initiation in practical theology. The best known of these rituals
are the Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. This book is available
in bookshops ; I shall thus not be indiscreet if I talk about it. It
consists of a series of meditations on the life of Jesus-Christ and
on the dogmas, but meditations in which, by imagination, scenes and
characters must be seen and heard. Very few candidates are accepted
to attend the complete series of these exercises ; a director is
imposed who speaks to the novice and guides him hour by hour. In the
end the descent of illuminating grace must occur. The test, which is
not indicated, consists of that dilemma which necessarily faces the
disciple. Either those visions are the result of autosuggestion, and
then all the theological realities are subjective and will is the
only god ; or those visions are objective and, whatever one does,
they will take place only through divine agreement. Those amongst the
novices who cannot by themselves solve the enigmas of human freedom
and divine presence become quietist fatalists or atheists. And the
directors, who can recognize them, then keep them in the lower
workings of the Company.
Pure evangelical initiation, on the contrary, is essentially
practical. It tests only the self. In case of success, it procures
intellectual knowledge and the corresponding psychic power ; in the
case of failure, it offers the neophyte, after a little rest, a new
test. Those tests are the miseries of everyday life : loss of money,
treachery, illness, sorrow ; the disciple remains the son, the
consort, the father, the citizen, the labourer, the industrial man
he was before having requested promotion. These are the usual
problems he must solve : to persevere in or to give up a lawsuit, to
create an enterprise, to grant credit or refuse it, to be friends
again or not. The effort is supplied by the heart and by the
faculties of realization. There is no need for either books, dieting
or travelling. And any one may, alone with himself, secretly ask for
the Light since Jesus, Master and Friend, is constantly at the door
of our hearts, of every one of us.
Oh ! if only we knew with what affectionate and burning solicitude
He is waiting for us to ask, how we would say at once the words
towards Life and how we would withstand the test !
***
You can see now how human initiation is circumferential and christic
regeneration central.
Esoteric methods of knowledge are many and would merit a profound
study. They have been built up by men rich with a multi-secular
treasure ; they contain an infinity of ingenious observations, genial
views, subtle and suggestive remarks ; and the Hindu schools, amongst
others, have made, since the mid XIXth century, great efforts to
impart to the white race just a few of their psychological
experiences. Those methods are not suited to Europeans. Giving to the
mind a strength and an admirable regularity, they produce internal
reactions which, in the long run, are harmful. In any case,
exclusively intellectual meditation, intentional psychic drive, no

matter how cautious one is, always create a kind of dynamic lack of
balance ; the head is only a part of the body, the intellect an organ
of reflection ; and the image of life must not be mistaken for life
itself.
The wise men of old had foreseen this disorientation and, to remedy
it, they taught a fluidic culture (dietetics, breathing,
automagnetism) and an
animistic culture artificially developing devotion, love. And those
drives were interchangeable.
Let us try to reckon up the faults of these methods. To contemplate
God is impossible ; the non- Christian devotee thus begins by
contemplating Him in His creatures, partial signs of His perfections.
It is as if saying that, in mathematics, the infinite is the sum of a
series of finite numbers. Either the devotee believes creation to be
endless ; then his God is an ungraspable concept, an abstract god ;
thence to identify this primary cause with Thought, there is only one
step ; at the next step, one falls back into the theory of universal
illusion, where the thinking being himself is not sure that he
exists. Such was primitive Buddhism : Oh monks, said Gautama, to
state that the self exists is not exact; but to claim that the self
does not exist, neither is that true .
As to the transcendental faculties, they can be developed in a
subject or in oneself. But for the knowledge that they procure to be
accurate the instrument of perception must be perfect, the object to
be perceived motionless and the refractive index of the environment
must be known. Well, none of these three conditions is realizable ;
if it were, the problem of knowledge would supposedly be solved. Many
seekers make this basic error.
You are going to say to me : Where did you discover a method better
than that whose excellence is claimed by the initiates and whose use
has produced the most magnificent monuments of genius ?
The Gospel contains this more than excellent method ; but, to
discover and to put it into practice, the supernatural force of faith
is necessary. Look first , Jesus says, for the Kingdom of God,
and the rest will be given you also . That rest , which is not
the Kingdom of God, is precisely what all men look for in Nature,
everything they hope for in the Relative. The Kingdom of God, it is
the land where pure love, brotherhood and peace reign. And, in
truth, he who loves his neighbour as himself knows everything ; I am
telling you this because I have verified it, not in myself, but in a
man, the only man I have known who really loved his neighbour :
money, time, science, goodness, he was prodigal with everything ; he
never thought of himself, he never bothered to find out how he would
live the next day; the most importunate were never sent away. Well,
that man knew everything in effect; he could solve a problem in
integral calculus as well as indicate the location of ruins in a
desert or next week's Stock market fluctuations. I have always
verified the perfect accuracy of his most minor information. Whence
comes such a miraculous faculty ?
He who lives in God, whose only nourishment is to accomplish Heaven's
will, lives in Truth. Truth lives in him : and its presence,
invisible to the eyes of flesh, is sensed by the eyes of the immortal
entities. But everything has a spirit. That is why the spirit of
this table, if asked for it, is forced to tell such a man, the name
of the labourer who has made it or of the forest whence its timber
came. Before Truth, no lie, no error can be maintained.
Such is living knowledge ; it gives us, instead of the approximate
relationship between an object and a subject, the actual essence of
that object.
***
As to Morality, its principle is universal, not only on this planet
but in all creation. It is the consequences that vary. All the
beings, visible and invisible, infernal and heavenly, have but a
single law : to live for others.
The differences between earthly moralities are external, sociology
and ethnography easily show us their causes ; or internal, and to
know these the theological principle in the name of which they have
been formulated must be analyzed.
Any initiation which places the head above the heart, Intelligence
above Love, is an inversion of the patriarchal synthesis and of the
doctrine of the Word made flesh. It puts the image in the place of
the object. Its morality will be personal, intentional, human. It

will not know saviours but elder

brothers ; they hardly offer themselves as victims ; they only
sympathize or they give some momentary help. The effort of
liberation according to these systems rises from bottom to top, passes
from outside to inside ; it needs a material basis. The physical body,
then the fluidic body, then the astral body, the mental body and so on
are cultivated in succession according to the depth of the will.
Nothing is more logical, more reasonable, more positive. So it may be
said that initiates are less spiritualists than transcendental
materialists. In any case, they come nowhere near mysticism.
Forgive me these somewhat coarse images. We have no time to study
the details ; my sketch must be outlined, light and shade must be in
sharp
contrast so that the figures may imprint themselves in your memory.
That effort which takes its root in the self, it is Marcus Aurelius,
Socrates, Pythagoras ; it is primitive Buddhism and Taoism ; it is
Ibsen and Nietzsche ; it is also, at the risk of shocking you, the
too famous Tolstoy who is christic only by his vocabulary. It is
clear that this morality can never raise us higher than ourselves ;
thus it will never take us out of the created, no matter what its
advocates say.
The Gospel ignores discipleship. The whole of asceticism, the
struggle against passions and undergoing the tests is only the
Precursor destined to fade away as the Light will grow ; no more the
glory however beautiful of some created eden, but the splendour itself
of the uncreated Realm. It is repentance, penitence ; the disciple
himself will trowel out the mould into which will descend the form of
the Word appropriate to him. This descent, it is the new birth, the
true liberation ; it is the pure Spirit and not the spirit of a god,
of a genius, or a rishi or a dragon. In a word, Christ affirms that
He replaces man in the Absolute. No adept can do more than rise to
the summit of the relative, to that metaphysical zero which is the
motionless pivot of universal liberations.
Where lies the merit, will you say ? What becomes of the value of
man, of his freewill ? I cannot take advantage of your patience by
repeating Pelagius, Saint Augustine, Boehme, Jansenius and Molinos ;
what I do assert is that antinomy of the divine prescience and of
human freedom exists only in our intellect. A day will come, I hope,
when you will verify by experience what I claim now. It is enough to
remember for the rectitude of our work that Mosaic reintegration,
Brahmanic discipleship, Buddhist deliverance are three states
completely opposed to each other and even more opposed to the
salvation mentioned in the Gospel. Unity of religions is an illusion
for many centuries to come; before it is brought about, those
religions must undergo a complete transformation.
To the ancient notion of power and freedom of man the Gospel adds
that this being, although possessing in himself a seed of eternity,
cannot reach it by his own means, since these means are relative,
limited, finite. Only this passage from the Relative to the
Absolute, however swift, constitutes true salvation. But only He who
is that Absolute, that Infinite, that Eternal, can make us cross it.
That one, he is the Word, it is the Christ Jesus.
Discipleship is initiatic perfection ; evangelic perfection is the
achievement of the divine will. For both, a new birth is necessary;
the first one is natural, the second one is supernatural.
In theory, the adept is omniscient and all powerful ; in fact, none
of the adepts I have met knew everything, although they had an answer
for
everything ; and even less were they capable of everything. Let us
plant our feet firmly. To know everything means that the Father
accepts us in His councils ; to be capable of everything means that
he puts us in command of the angels' cohorts. Well, no man, no god,
no creature has yet been endowed with such prerogatives. Let us keep
our feet on the ground ; the field of the Miraculous is still very
vast; and yet, those promises of esoterism which refer to it remain
exaggerations.
Look at alchemy. Chemically, it is true; it is possible to make a
substance which possesses all the properties of gold, without being
gold; spiritually, that matter is false, because gold, as any form of
matter, is such only by virtue or a supra-terrestrial principle
which is outside the power of human understanding. The initiate can
act on the physical, the fluidic and the astral; as to the verbal
essence of beings, he is powerless.
Seek in transcendental philosophy. The books on occultism are full

of stories about mysterious elixirs thanks to which the adepts

prolong for centuries their existence on earth. That is correct;
there are secret processes and also men sufficiently learned and
strong to use them. But what the seeker does not notice is that such
individuals are criminals. Everyone, in fact, has merited a certain
amount of intelligence, of well-being, of power and of physical life.
But, as the financier cannot accumulate millions without sowing ruin
around him, the adept, who is entitled to eighty years of life cannot
take a hundred or two hundred years without taking away that physical
life from other human beings. Let not the pretext of a superior goal
be put forward ; any good obtained by a bad procedure is no longer
good. Our life does not belong to us ; neither does our body; nothing
in ourselves is ours.
How can we stop the course of these progressive changes within and
outside of us, if not by a selfish and proud tyranny ? If it was
permitted to violate the secret of others, I would have told you the
recent story of an adept who lived on earth for close on one
thousand years and who was forced to restore the profits of all the
frauds he had committed. I have seen also, just to mention the
reverse case, a man really dead being resuscitated and an extension of
his life granted him ; but the thaumaturgist had provided all the
supplementary power that the creatures attached to the soul of that
dead man had a right to receive.
So, let us not take literally all the grandiloquence of the books on
occultism.
Many secret societies influence political events ; and most of them
refer to various esoteric fraternities. Nobody is unaware of these
occult interferences throughout the world, in Europe as well as in
China. And it is not necessary to dig deep into the bedrock of
legends to discover that all these associations depend on two or
three nuclei and these nuclei on a few unknown, sedentary or erring
individuals who, however, are able to dissimulate admirably their
actual occupations.
There are, in these conjectures, quite a number of errors on a
background of truth. Everything is actually double in the social
collective as well as in the individual; there does exist, in any
religion as in any government, a secret hierarchy alongside the
external hierarchy. Certainly from time to time, some gods send
missionaries to the political or ecclesiastical authorities ; so
were, of old, Saint Bernard, the Cosmopolitan, and Cagliostro, to
mention only these and to respect the secret of some more recent
interventions. At last, the army of God and that of Darkness, which
fight each other in the universe, also fight each other on earth; but
the army of God is one ; the army of Darkness is multiple, and its
various groups often shoot at each other. That is why it is so rare
to find an initiate who does not consider as black magic the systems
which are different from his own.
The Gospel condemns all the occult sciences and all the secret
associations because all of them involve murder or revolts. Man is
not here to command, but to submit; a hard law for pride, a sweet law
for love. All are led ; and those who believe themselves to be the
more independent are those who are led most. There are only two
beings who know what they are doing ; the Lord of the earth, the free
man delegated by the Word, and the Prince of this world, the
lieutenant of Lucifer. Both keep themselves unknown because they need
solitude and silence ; both of them are misunderstood, but the Lord
more so than the Prince, because there is less light than darkness in
the hearts of men.
Look at Christ. Who was less understood ? All the sects try to take
Him for themselves and people have killed each other in the name of
the false image they had of Him. To the philosopher, he was an
agitator; to the anarchist, an anarchist; and the men of authority
claim Him for their own ; to the spiritist, He is a medium; to the
mesmerist, He acts only through the fluids ; the hermetist holds Him
to be a magus and the Buddhist, to be a future Buddha.
And yet, Jesus is quite different; He is first of all our Jesus, He
belongs to all of us, who keep on crucifying Him by our acts, our
words, our thought;
He is not a guide who turns around to throw a rope to the traveler
in peril; nothing in common between Him and Buddha; Buddha means, in
the language of the Temples, the enlightened one ; Jesus means the
living. Jesus was never an Essene ; all that Jacolliot and Notovitch
tell about travels and initiations in India is part of their fantasy;
Jezeus Christna are impossible words in Sanskrit. Christ did not, as
claimed in the Talmud, steal the Tetra- gram from the Temple in

Jerusalem; He never needed lessons or training. In Egypt, when he was

three years old, he made what we call miracles by setting free
enchained souls. He was a man, yes ; but that man perfect
contained the whole of divine Light.
When He said : Who sees me, sees my Father , He was not indulging
in a metaphysical pun ; He expressed a fact, a substantial reality. He
was, He is, He will remain the Master of Life. He has helped us, not
from a distance by wishing, but by coming down among us, by taking on
our burden and our fatigues. He has known all the human pains and,
what is more extraordinary, He resisted all our joys. When He expired
on the Calvary, it may have been the tenth or the twelfth time that in
Persia, Rome, Spain, Egypt, India, Tibet, He suffered chains and
torture. For His whole story has been cunningly falsified, remember that.
Christ is the only Master worthy of that name, because He has
willingly suffered all the servitudes ; He is the only Friend,
because He has accepted the pain of everyone of us ; He is the only
Initiator because, He only knows the absolute, the relative and all
the infinities. He is the Path, because creatures can progress only by
following the dazzling track of His steps. He is Truth, because
nothing exists without Him. He is life because He was the first born
of the Father and He will still be present in thousands of millions
of centuries, when this immense Nature, purified, burning, blazing,
will rise towards the eternal glory.
Evangelical initiation proposes only one goal : accomplishment of the
Father's will; only one task : brotherly love; only one method :
resignation and asking. It speaks only to the heart; it uses no
allurement ; it needs no fasting. It is simple enough for a child to
understand and sometimes more terrible than the frightful austerities
of the secular Rishis. It is silent, but the voice of its disciple
can resound beyond the constellation ; it is sweet for, with a smile,
the Friend gives us the strength for a century's work ; but,
unfortunately, it is very much unknown because men are pursuing the
strange, the rare and the brilliant.
For neither science nor miracles are proof of spirituality. There is
"at present a man who has healed by the thousand ; he considers
himself as very
superior to Christ; thus you can see that the god of pride can bestow
powers to his partisans. I know, among our contemporaries, seven or
eight new messiahs who all believe that they are authentic
reincarnations of Christ; has America not had the incarnation of the
Holy Spirit ? Those who, more modestly, claim to reconcile the Pope
and the Great Lama, to divulge integral science or to establish a
universal empire, are not very rare.
You, Gentlemen, who are starting the study of these mysteries, you
also who have continued them for such a long time, be careful. First
of all, abate your curiosity; everything comes in its own time, be
wary of fascinations of any nature ; beware of those who keep to the
wings, the most admirable of them in appearance being perhaps only
puppets.
Study, compare. As Nature grows the herbs which heal bruises in the
steep places where falling is frequent, so it offers us the means of
pulling our? selves out of any difficult situation into which our
imprudence has cast us. Any creature is born into its appropriate
environment; we Europeans, we are under the word of Christ; it
contains all the spiritual food for our souls ; and only it contains it.
Let us be reasonable. Does the Gospel seem too childish ? Let us
start by reducing its so simple recommendations to actions ; we will
soon notice that there is no more absorbing work ; and we will have
no time left to argue whether Logos is threefold or sevenfold. We do
not understand trans-substantiation ? Let us first go to our enemy,
let us offer him our hand, let us invite him to our table, in
remembrance of that Jesus, whose words were so little learned ;
then, we will understand.
Such is the only method, sound and swift, the fruits of which last
beyond death. Since the origin of the world, this truth has made
itself known ; but men darkened and distorted it many times. Today,
you have experienced the emptiness of materialistic science and of
merely formal religion ; but you have built another idol for
yourselves : the secret science of esoteric religion. Remember that
the last word in knowledge is : I do not know ; that the last word of
discipleship is : I cannot. When you have, from the palpitating depth
of your being cried these two despairing words, the dawning of
eternal Light will spread over your nothingness. It will be the first
step on the mysterious road of poverty, which leads to the Father.
My wish is that this catastrophe and this dawning soon become very

near for each of you.

PRAYER
If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask what you will,
and it shall be done unto you.
(john xv, 7)
Prayer is the most difficult task that could be proposed to man ;
however, everything prays around us. The mineral, the plant, the
animal ask Nature to sustain their strength ; any act is a request;
and any living being necessarily acts. Among creatures, it is man who
more often refuses to admit that law, and yet, it is especially to
him that it applies. I hope to show you how unreasonable such an
attitude is.
Contained within its true dignity, prayer is a desire for Heaven and
a conversation with God. It is a grace and the source of all graces ;
it is a seed in the soil of eternity ; a work more precious than all
the masterpieces, greater than the world, more powerful, one might
say, than God Himself. Do not be astounded ; we are now leaving the
civilized realm of reason ; we are in the luxuriant forests of love.
Silence the intelligence ; open the windows of the heart ;
contemplate the infinite fields of the eternal life ; why can I not
render them visible to you ?
Because prayer is the supreme act, it is not worthy, it does not exist
unless it is brought forth by sincerity. Angels are ever about us.
When we think of God, they arrive in greater numbers ; some of them
are gentle; others take their station to collect what may be selfish
in our request. Others, at last, who have come because of a sincere
wish to see God through our hearts, are shocked and down? cast if
your prayer is badly put. We are responsible for all that.
In prayer, two movements occur. Desire becomes humble, exalts itself
and takes refuge in divine mercy, which is Christ; grace answers,
offers itself and lets itself be devoured by it. Both are the mystic
form of faith; and the more desire sinks into the abyss of humility,
the more the Word develops deep within us.
Prayer is the flowing of our personality towards the Absolute ; it
surrenders to the Father, it throws itself into His arms, it talks
with Him, but without words. It does not involve the intellect; it is
the heart which has at last made contact with its complementary
whole, which is amazed, faints, dies and is reborn, into an infinitely
growing beatitude.
If that is prayer, you understand that we must pray only to God. This
happens very seldom. We generally speak to the god we have chosen. A
woman who goes to church to ask that her lottery ticket (*) be drawn
when she already has a private income, it is not to God that she
prays in her heart, it is to the god of money. How many times do we
not behave like that old dear !
(*) Translator's note : the French text does not say lottery ticket
but debenture or bond In France and other countries, some
Government bonds are drawn periodically in the same way as lottery
tickets and the winner receives a substantial prize.
Now, each god hearkens to his faithful, just as a king keeps the best
positions for his court. An ambitious man who prays for his ambition,
a miser who prays for his avarice, will be easily hearkened to by
their gods ; but they will push further along the wrong path. When a
simple heart asks the Father for something which might damage his
soul, the Father does not hear him ; and that is one of the reasons
why our prayers are so often unfruitful.
Also, do not pray to a living being, even though he or she has been
declared a saint. It is being impolite towards God ; it is telling
Him : You will listen more attentively to one of your favourites
than to me ; you will not pay attention to me because I am an unknown
or wretched man . That is doubting His power and His love. I am not
criticizing the cult of the saints ; I am merely repeating the
canonical doctrine.
Here again is another reason why it is wise to talk only to God. Man's
first, most implacable foe is himself; Satan is less dangerous to us.
Both of these adversaries move in the same unfathomable ways ; to
fight them, we need a fulcrum outside the world, since they fill this
world, since they constitute the strength itself of the universe. This
fulcrum can be only God.

Pray to the Father ; pray to Christ since He is God. To pray to the

Holy Spirit is too difficult; we are still too deep in matter to be
sensitive to this infinitely subtle presence. And then, there is one
to whom we can pray without fear of contracting a debt or fail
towards the Father : it is the Virgin Mary. As she is the humblest of
all creation, we may be sure that she will pass on our whole request
; and because her Son always grants her requests, there is, by
talking to her, a better chance of being heard.
However allow me to stress this important point without the
express help of Jesus, we can do nothing. He, the Word, gives the
vital strength to all creation. He gives it to them again by
Redemption. This at the same time is universal and individual. He
waits in silence at the door of our hearts and, at the first impulse,
He opens His arms to us, allowing through only as much of the Light
that He radiates as our ailing eyes can bear.
God alone, in His aspect of the Word, possesses all the details of the
cosmic plan. The destiny of a microbe and that of a nebula are
equally present to Him. There is nothing in us which does not come
from Him ; the wish itself that takes hold of us to go towards Him,
it is He who inspires it; our free will acts only at the moment of our
decision. So the ability to pray is a reward.
Now, few know how to pray. The apparent causes of this ignorance are
education, material cares, influence of the environment. The actual
cause is older and deeper. Man can achieve nothing if his mind does
not contain the faculty appropriate to that act and if his body does
not possess the organ appropriate to that faculty. On the other hand,
psychic faculties are not abstractions ; they are real, objective
organs, the limbs and the viscera of the mind. In the physical as well
as in the hyper- physical, everything starts with a little seed that
develops slowly through work, through suffering. Just as an adolescent
who does not practice walking has weak legs, so he who does not pray
wastes away the psycho-physical organ of prayer. If we cannot pray,
it is because we have spent years, centuries perhaps, before
alighting down here, without thinking of God, with no anxiety about
Heaven. Therefore let us start immediately to make good this
stupefying negligence; not tomorrow, not tonight, now ; do we know
whether Death is not lying in wait for us behind that door ? Let us
give all our care to that enterprise; let us devote all our movements
to it, so that any circumstance becomes a pretext to pursue and
perfect it.
I have neither the wish nor the taste for prayer; I do not feel the
need for it, will you say. Then begin to follow Christ through your
acts ; make the simplest of efforts ; you will talk with your friends
in a while : stop the first piece of slander that comes to your lips
; stop it at any cost. And soon you will feel the demon of perversity
whispering : Well say that so and so is ridiculous, since it is true
; what does it matter ? . But if you wish by any means to defeat the
tempter, you will have to call for help. And that cry may well be
your first prayer.
Very often our inner Light struggles within us, cries and complains.
But our consciousness remains deaf. It has not built its spiritual
ears ; it has well educated cerebral cells in order to capture the
voices of many creatures, of geniuses, of wise men or of gods ; it has
neglected to capture the voice of the Friend. Perhaps you can see now
why our first steps towards Heaven are the heart-breakings of
remorse and repentance. The plough must tear the soil apart before
sowing.
Prayer is an ineffable act. Because it admits being nothing, it can
do everything; it transfigures the horrible, fills the abysses and
knocks over mountains. Like a refreshing dew, it relieves, washes and
delivers. It is the fire, the anvil and the hammer. It is unknown and
nothing takes place without it; knowing nothing, it teaches
everything; it is so simple that the scientists most filled with
science do not understand it; it stammers, and cohorts of angels bend
down to hear it; small wretched vibration, the prestigious hands of
ardent seraphs collect it; exhausted breath, it makes life be born
again. Colourless tears transmuted into sparkling gems, root of joy,
sapience of wisdom, sweetness of strength, perfection of the word,
achievement of the promise, universal medicine, such is prayer, such
is its forever living incarnation, Jesus-Christ.
Prayer is the weapon which fights God's justice, the twice-tempered
file which takes away wherever it finds the rust of iniquity. Through
it, the word of man, the magnificent sign of his greatness, rises
back to its principle, soars up towards God and reaches the sources
of Life. The human word recovers its original strength, becomes an
act, attracts the divine Act and incorporates itself into the Word,

its creator. The veritable prayer is the daughter of Love; it is the

salt of living science making it germinate in our hearts, its natural
ground. Impetuous, ardent, persevering, it must know interruption no
more than eternity knows change. Heaven likes to be conquered by
violence and likes one to cling to It as the roots of a tree cling
to the nourishing soil.
God keeps His promises. Ask, and you will receive , He has said.
If you, who are wicked, give your children what they ask for, how
much more will the Father give you ? If you ask my Father
something in my name, He will give it to you. Whatever you ask
my Father in my name, I shall do unto you .
God alone is good . Mighty words, the harmony of which vibrates
from one end of the world to the other ; I cannot enumerate their
infinite effects ; just accept them, accept them temporarily and
later, when you are alone, look at the mystery of your life by the
light of this torch; you will understand why the saints only speak of
God with tears in their eyes ; perhaps eternal Love will tremble in
you; perhaps will you know its unspeakable sweetness and the peace
it brings with it; and at last you will perceive, in spite of
violence, murder, deception and long martyrdoms, how much divine
Mercy surpasses Its justice since the coming of the Friend.
What conditions must true prayer fulfill ?
It is the impulse of the supernatural within us towards the
supernatural outside of us ; of the supernatural, allow me to stress
that word, of what is above Nature, Creation, Time, Space, conditions,
beyond rites, in that luminous atmosphere where alone pass the great,
free breezes and the resplendent shapes of Truth's angels.
One can pray only by means of the faculties of which one is
conscious. Thus many will pray with their nerves, their intellect,
their passionate greed, with the spirit of their flesh and their
bones. For them, observance of liturgies is excellent, indispensable
even ; and, after all, who amongst us can claim that his prayer is
pure of any trace of flesh or blood ? But it is perfection one must
want; that is why I am talking as if we were capable of a superhuman
effort.
Where can one pray? Anywhere it is possible to concentrate. According
to the advice of Christ, to shut oneself up in one's room, on the
material level as on the spiritual one. On the material level,
because this way only God and his Angels can see us. It is a great
force, that good done in secret; it is pure. Our friends, the members
of our family even, who see us retire to our room, may think that we
are going to rest; we will thus avoid, by this discretion, the
fallacious reward of their esteem. In the spiritual sense, to shut
oneself up in one's room , means to commune with oneself, to shut
the door of the senses and of memory which bring the mental in
communication with the outside world, with cares, pre-occupations,
projects, reminiscences. Already this requires serious work.
In the churches, we take advantage of the orientation of the fluidic
environment, the collective urge, impressionable artifices like
semi-darkness, the fairy- like glow of the stained-glass windows, the
enthusiasm music inspires in us, the often secular atmosphere which
previous generations have peopled with sighs and acts of grace. All
that is a great strength; It is not forbidden to take advantage of it.
If you can pray better in a church, go to church. If Nature helps
you, pray in the calm and beauty of the country. If your refusal to
go to church shocks somebody, sacrifice your comfort and do as
everybody else. However, if you wish to progress more quickly, choose
to talk with God in the place that forces you to pay most attention.
If you believe in the virtue of sanctified places, liturgical
formulae, rites, if you are fundamentally attached to a cult, do what
you believe to be good. Your prayers will arrive to Heaven only
after having crossed the spiritual, collective bodies to which you
linked yourself, but they will arrive in the end. It is difficult and
rare to receive the direct divine influence and we can come to that
immediate union only after having used for a long time all the ritual
aids. For the strict observance, the use of certain formulae, the long
psalmodies of the Brahmin, the Shakti, the Sufi, the monk, to
become useless to us, we must have used them. And, anyway, all these
auxiliary forces are only worthwhile when vitalized by ardent
sincerity of the heart; the eternal is accessible only to the
eternal. Little by little, Heaven frees us from these impediments ;
In comparison to Sivaism and Brahmanism, Catholicism is simple ; he
who has perceived spiritual poverty can simplify; but for this it is
necessary to work ten times as much as the common run of mortals.

However, the power of such a prayer compensates for quite a number

of martyrdoms.
When should one pray ? I shall answer with the whole congregation of
mystics : Always. To the believer, everything is a motive for prayer,
that is to say, to thank and to request. As soon as your eyes open,
thank God for the rest He has granted you ; if you have had a bad
night, be even more thankful for having had the opportunity of a
suffering, that is to say, a purification, a repentance.
Pray when your duties give you leisure to do so, for the most living
of prayers is the best example. But use all your free time. A second
I repeat : a second of enthusiasm or of recourse to Heaven acts
on our invisible as well as on the psycho-spiritual organ of prayer.
This organ is not formed all at once, but cell by cell; the mind's
psychology resembles that of the body : ten easy movements develop
muscles more than a great disproportionate effort.
If your daily work leaves you time at night, make use of it for
prayer. As soon as the sun goes down, many forces change : but the
struggle between the celestial and the infernal increases during the
night. Therefore, you must be twice as careful; and it is with
reason that the Church indicates special prayers for sleep and
nocturnal vigils. If we were doing a methodical course, this would be
the place to examine the reason for the canonical nocturnal hours :
matins and lauds, which monks must recite at midnight and at 3 o'clock
in the morning; and combinations of psalms, anthems, hymns,
doxologies, collects and responses which they comprise. The rule of
Saint Benedict, which dates from the VIth century, offers the most
precious mine to the searcher.
But let us remain on the secular plane ; the mysteries here are as
abundant, and so are the Lights.
**** ** * *
There is a remote preparation to prayer, which is the accomplishment
of the Law, good works, resignation. If prayer demands love, love
demands virtue. The temple needs foundations as the tree needs roots
; the soul's appetite must be sharpened ; when speaking to God, the
language of Heaven must be used and one will not learn it unless one
is living the life of Heaven, the life of sacrifice. The temporal
must be left behind before starting for the eternal; for the Father
to do our will, one must first obey Him.
The Kingdom of Heaven, towards which we hold out our hands, is the
kingdom of harmony; there, an active, fruitful, many shaped peace
unfolds limitless splendours. If man wants to rise thither, let him
first make peace around him and within himself. From the viewpoint
of the Spirit, it is better to lose money than to win a court case, to
lose friendships rather than to make someone suffer. Also, be in
peace with events ; does it matter that they are disastrous since
then they set us free ? Does it matter that they are favourable since
there is no lasting joy ? Let us be grateful for anything that
happens. At last make peace within yourselves. Still your anxieties,
listen to your conscience, so that remorse does not consume you; you
can fight without being frightened, with a magnanimous heart and
quiet confidence. In reality, this pacifying preparation requires, if
we want it perfect, an immense effort; this struggle against the
deepest instincts of our nature surpasses in intensity and in
duration all other works. To triumph, we must have broken all our
selfish attachments ; our hearts must be free, that is to say we must
love creatures only in God; at last, our intelligence must be bare,
ready to receive and to forget everything.
He who prays seriously, deeply, is like a soldier in the middle of
the battle, like a swimmer struggling amongst treacherous weeds.
Intelligence may fade; the body may collapse because of terror or
fatigue ; there is no reason to be upset; leave the center of the
mind anchored on Heaven ; with this milestone as a tie, nothing
irremediable can happen.
Right conduct, peaceful living, to be grateful, these are the three
habits which dispose the inner forces for prayer.
To focus these forces into a beam, to bend the mystic bow and make
the arrows of desire reach Heaven, it is still necessary to be
attentive, humble, confident, perseverant.
Lack of attention is a lack of fervor. To be attentive is to yearn
and it is impossible to yearn without loving. In truth, Love is the
key to all doors.

To fight distraction, pray aloud. If your heart is dry, pray and

meditate, use your logical reason to reflect on each word you
pronounce, weighing and examining it.
When we pray, many creatures, visible and invisible, watch us, hear
us and crowd at the door of that temple which is our heart; many
perceive God only by the image this heart contains. For those
retarded brothers, words must be pronounced aloud and that is a way
of giving our prayer an earthly body.
In spite of this advice of praying aloud, do not believe that the
repercussions of the voice in the imponderable are very useful. The
mantra-yogis and certain Sufis attach importance to these occult
acoustics ; but to the disciple of Christ they are useless. Anyway,
this science established for a certain epoch and certain countries,
is incorrect as far as we are concerned. The old rabbis taught that a
prayer said with cries of distress and tears could push in the doors
of the superior palaces. There is some truth in this ; but it is
feeling that gives it this strength, not the vociferations. Only
sincerity makes prayer valid.
It is possible, during the day, to take a few effective precautions
to develop the power of attention. To abstain from unnecessary words,
to resist daydreaming and, above all, to correct one's faults. To
become holy; these words contain the secret of all the moral,
spiritual and even intellectual developments; but, alas ! I fear that
the recipe is too simple; the mysterious holds such attractions for us!
It is enough to push aside distractions with the greatest calm,
without tiring ; if three hours go by before having been able to
properly say the Lord's prayer, these three hours will have been well
used ; no effort is wasted. Prayer may be painful, tasteless, boring
; its merit will be all the greater for it.
Humility is the fifth condition.
To be humble is to judge oneself as being the least of men, the least
worthy and the least deserving. It is to judge slander, insults and
the most unfair attacks as being fair; it is to receive them with
joy, it is not to run away from them, it is to go before them. This
is beyond common opinion. This lowering is difficult beyond man's
ordinary powers ; we cannot go down these steep slopes alone ; we
need the arm of an angel or to be chased by a demon ; anyway, angel
and demon never come one without the other. So be without fear. When
we have tasted the bittersweet liquor of humiliation, such a change
occurs in the principles of our being that we are brought to love the
persecutor, to thank him, to ask for the blessings of Heaven to
descend on his head ; we know with certitude that it is salutary.
That is when our prayer rises to the throne of God.
Although all this seems to be lacking in reason, remember how
incapable and crippled we are. In truth, our pride is illogical; this
self-judged strength is a weakness according to the Spirit. The last
word on our superb freewill is the word of the Virgin : Let what
is done unto me be according to Your will . And as soon as this
surrender is accepted, something unknown, obscure and very strong
rises in ourselves. This mysterious energy is faith.
At least, its chrysalis. Trust in God is necessary when we pray. If
you knew what faith is, nothing would seem difficult to you. When
Jesus claims that faith can move mountains, He does not use a
metaphor. He states a physical fact. When Philip of Neri, I believe,
orders a mason falling from a tower to stop and when that man remains
suspended midway ; when the priest of Ars sends the director of his
orphanage to visit the empty attic and finds it full with bags of
wheat, those saints had faith as big as a hemp-seed . They had not
called for spirits or pronounced mantras ; they had asked the Father
and the Father had sent angels.
So faith is definitely a divine, supernatural force in us, which
creates where there is nothing and which finds where nothing has been
created. This magnificent and complete definition is from Jacob
Boehme, the cobbler. How can anyone not certain that God will
bestow, expect to receive ? Irresolution, shyness, fear, skepticism,
do they not prevent thousands of men, everyday, from succeeding in
these temporal enterprises which are so easy com? pared with the
efforts of the spiritual struggle ?
Doubt is one of the greatest weapons of the devil. If faith
represents the present realization of one of the virtues of eternity,
doubt is the mental illusion of one of the appearances of time. When
we are worried because of an obstacle, we are preparing for a
certain fall; but if we consider it with

determination, it fades away. A skeptic never achieves anything

unless he has faith in his skepticism. What would the man who
believes in God with all his strength not be capable of if some,
having believed in another man, a woman, an idea, have accomplished
heroic deeds ? It is difficult to have faith you say. No, that seems
impossible to you only because you yourself have bound the hands of
your mind, you have locked yourself in a cell where you are moaning.
Yearn for faith, and you will have it at once ; drive away hesitation
and you will act as if you had faith ; drive away pride, and you will
see that doubt is nothing but a mirage that intercepts divine
communications. Then your faith will not be like that of superhumans,
the most deadly poison for your soul, but on the contrary its
all-powerful tonic.
It is not enough to believe in the all-mightiness of God, in
addition, you must not doubt the power He imparts to us. If a man
purifies himself, Heaven gives him the right to ask ; better, Heaven
makes it his duty. Hence, let us pray; by praying we awake joy in the
heavens.
Furthermore, we are not alone. Our Friend is there. He prays with us
; He is the wish for the request, the messenger and the reply. His
whole person is nothing but a vast symphony of requests. When, long
ago, He blessed this earth with His very sweet presence, His words,
His thoughts, his acts were all irresistible prayers.
Each cell in His body, each spark of His inner being, was a living
prayer. Understand what prays in ourselves is His spirit ; and our
sighs are only virtuous if, beforehand, we have incorporated
ourselves in Him, by the habit of our feelings, of our thought and
our acts, all offered to His service.
This trust which I ask you to create in yourselves for we can do
everything in ourselves and is indispensable to the exercise of the
mystic priesthood, is not intellectual faith, it is living faith,
that which faces every day the impossible in practical life ; that
which remains serene in the worst catastrophes ; that which stares at
death without blinking and that is not slowed down at the sight of
the blackest of demons. The greatest amongst men have taken just a
few steps on the path and, nevertheless, I urge insistently to
create it within yourselves ; it is closer to us at present than it
was during the Middle Ages ; it is lurking ; an effort and it catches
fires. Make this effort at the first opportunity.
I do not believe that genius is an infinite capacity for patience ;
but, certainly, an invincible perseverance forces genius to descend
on us. Therefore you must wish to succeed as a drowning man looks for
air ; no disappointment must cause a reaction other than a renewal
of courage. He who wishes to become a master in this divine art must
expect more inner miseries than ever ; little by little all the
personal energies he has in himself will become so many angry demons ;
no fold of his mind where they will not light their devouring fire.
Let this man persevere ; to abandon something already begun is a more
deadly suicide than that of the body. Suffering is only as important
as we make it. Furthermore, forty years of work seem endless to us ;
but when we will have been in the realm of the dead for three days
this long life will seem to have been very short.
The inner man is similar to a garden covered with dead leaves that
the autumn wind scatters constantly. The gardener endlessly sweeps and
rakes ; and if he wants the paths to be neat for the Lord to walk
therein, he must start all over again, all day long. In the same
way, we must constantly begin again to make order among the
distractions, the memories, the covetous desires which the whimsical
wind of our personal nature raises in a whirl.
*
**
These preparations, external ant internal, the> are repentance. They
plough deeply the inner spiritual soil ; they bewilder the heart;
they starve it; and, in answer to the moanings that anxiety wrestles
from it, the Word brings it the bread and the water of eternal life.
Such a prayer is effective. Like the morning dew it regenerates
everything ; it halts catastrophes, sickness, misfortunes ; or at
least it modifies them. It builds within us a haven for the Father ;
it is sovereign against sadness, for it forces us to humility ; it is
the giver of all Brightness ; it defends, harmonizes and relaxes us.
Everything around us benefits by it ; it sanctifies our clothes, our
food, our furniture, the walls of our room, the fatigues of the body,
all the acts of ourselves. It renews kindness ; it can make the
irreverent, pious ; the wrathful, gentle ; the insensitive, kind ;

the hopeless, courageous ; the sick, healthy, even bring the dead
back to life.
The trees, the flowers which we pass praying, the footway where we
walk, the hill and stream we look at, the dog that follows, the person
we pass in the street, all receive something. Our forefathers whose
ghosts rest in the home, our future children whose spirits come down
in the room where they will be born, all the invisible witnesses of
our existence, those who venerate us, the giants who sometimes
torment us, the good people who help us, the bad ones who lead us
astray, all benefit by our prayer.
Furthermore, that prayer itself, gushing forth from the center of
life within us, directed to the Master of Life, that prayer is a
living being. That room, that slab, that rock where somebody prays
today retain that light in their memory ; and their memory is more
faithful than ours. In ten years, in ten centuries even, the men who
pass by that place may unexpectedly feel some inexplicable and
salutary emotion.
But I must finish. We have noted nearly all the distinctive signs of
prayer. My fear is that my words have been too dull; I would have
liked to set your hearts ablaze with that living Fire that the
Friends of God pass on from century to century, and with the
splendour of which my eyes will always remain dazzled. At least,
supplement the gaps in my discourse by your own enthusiasm and you
will find by yourselves and within yourselves the ineffable Presence
to which I wanted to bring your attention.
CHRIST'S HEALING
Great multitudes came together to be healed ... but He withdrew
himself into the wilderness, and prayed.
(LUKE V, 15-16)
When Heaven grants us the big favor of meeting one of Its soldiers,
our most fervent wish is to see him show us the proof of his mission.
Yet, is bringing relief to suffering not the most convincing and the
most touching proof ? The Friends of God have His mercy at their
disposal. At their request, a catastrophe may be deferred, an
epidemic contained, a bankruptcy avoided, an illness halted. Today we
will consider only the latter of these powers ; more are interested
in it and it allows a more complete analysis of the occult forces of
Life.
First of all, what is illness, what is healing ?
The answers vary according to the standpoints from which man and
Nature are considered : the psycho-chemical point of view, the
fluidic, the spirits, the ideas, and so on, as many as your erudition
will supply you with.
Any illness is a breakdown in the harmony of relations which bind an
individual to his environment ; healing is restoration of that
harmony. The healing agent acts on that part of the human makeup to
which it is similar : a drug acts on the body, magnetism on the
fluids, suggestion on the mind, etc... Thus there are three great
categories of therapeutics : the materialistic one, the occultist one
and the mystic one, according to whether one believes in the
physical, the astral or the pure spirit.
This being granted, it will be easy for you, to understand the
procedures of the ordinary physician, of the magnetizer, of the
spirit healer, of the mentalist, the theurgist, since illness may make
its entry in ourselves by a physiological or an ethereal corruption,
an astral, a mental, or a moral one. Let us note, wherever it
introduces itself, it spreads gradually, and especially from top to
bottom, from the center of our being towards its circumference, from
the more subtle organisms to the more material ones.
But Christ gave no drugs ; although He laid-on hands, He did not
magnetize, note all this. Any gesture releases electricity and
magnetism, it is not healing magnetism ; Jesus did not voluntarily
emit His fluidic and mental forces, even though they were great enough
to produce almost all His miracles. He was not a medium in the
spiritist sense of the word; no spirit ever took over His mind. He
never needed magic rites ; all that has been said about His studies
in various initiatic colleges in Judea, Egypt, India, or among the
Celtic peoples, is false.
The healing He performed, as well as all His other miracles, were
accomplished by commandments. Not by painful efforts of the will,

sustained by the practice of concentration, not by sudden bursts of

energy, or extraordinary outpourings of usurped spiritual force. But
by legitimate, quiet, measured, normal orders, like the orders given
by a king to his subjects. For Christ is Master of this earth, and
the Lord is universal.
*
**
Illness is not a punishment : The Father does not punish anyone ; it
is the logical and fatal consequence of previous acts. Illness is not
caused by atavism, heredity, contagion, or by accident; rather, they
are the means used by Nature to make us pray for our faults. A child
does not become affected by tuberculosis because his parents are
alcoholics ; but he is born in a family of alcoholics because he has
deserved to suffer tuberculosis. A car does not run over us by
surprise, or by lack of attention, but the accident occurs because
the resulting injury is fair and useful to the freeing of our spirit.
This is neither to condone alcoholism in the parents, or speeding;
it is our duty to lessen by all our means the sufferings around us.
We must behave like auxiliaries of Mercy, and not like the agents of
Justice.
The cause of any suffering is a breach of the law of the world; if
no being had ever wanted to take more than its share of the feast of
life, there would be no dissensions, no restitutions. Thus, the
primary cause of illness is sin.
In the central plan of the universe, any act begets a living spirit;
thus it fatally brings back on its author the good or the evil of
which that act was a manifestation. So a miser who has welcomed a
poor man with a stick will pay in his irascible heart, in his wicked
mind and also in the arm that has struck. If, as many spiritualists
believe, that man in a future incarnation is born with a paralyzed
hand, a therapist may perhaps make it function; he will not touch the
moral cause ; he will raise a wall between that cause and that
effect, thus causing new inner disorder, driving pain away from its
right place to send it elsewhere, where it will be out of place.
Those who cast spells often make this mistake, linking a man's
illness to a tree or to an animal, that suffer from it, as if one of
us got an illness from a god.
Only he who can perceive the spiritual cause of illness and the
picture of its origin is capable of modifying its path or its
influence and of really healing through purification of the primitive
blemish, which is sin. Such a man must have obtained access to the
spring of eternal life from Christ.
It is difficult to explain in detail the way in which a moral vice
becomes a physiological corruption. Heaven does not desire for us to
search for the deep causes of illness ; knowing that such an
infirmity is sometimes caused by such a crime, we would generalize
particular cases, we would judge everyone pitilessly and would thus
condemn ourselves to everlasting labours.
In general, this is what can be said. A moral tendency always ends
in an act; during this descent, it passes from the heart to the
intellect, from the intellect to the brain, then to the nerves, to
the muscles, to the cells of every order, that will contribute to the
act. All these small, living energies, from the subtle to the
material ones, will be corrupted by the intention which sets them in
motion, if it is perverse. They will, in this way, thwart the normal
course of things, since the Law is Charity and any fault is always a
lack in a particular kind of charity.
Those small energies often go against order; the weaker they become,
the more vulnerable they become to the forces of disintegration,
struggle and division. Thus a day will come when they will no longer
want to, where they will no longer be able to accomplish their
normal function; that day, illness will begin.
Let us examine the case of a being in the course of its evolution,
one of us. His body contains the germs of all the vices. The first
ones which, on the material level, are microbes, develop only if they
come into contact with analogous germs ; so, in the invisible, the
bad spiritual germ needs the blueprint of the illness to become
active ; so, on the moral level, latent evil needs contacts with life
to become a vice.
It is enough for the will to doubt to succumb to temptation; for the

spirit of the stomach to become afraid in order for cancer to set in

; for the cell to be weak in order for the bacilli to invade it.
Thus, faith here again is the sword of any victory and the shield of
any resistance. In epidemics, see how courageous life-savers often
escape unhurt. Self-confidence certainly is a powerful safeguard;
but true confidence in God makes us unassailable.
What is the blueprint of illness ? To simplify, let us consider only
what goes on on our planet. All events first exist in the invisible,
in the soul of the earth, before passing into the body ; as a house
first exists in the mind of the architect. These living pictures, in
which the spiritual types of all future beings and objects are
represented, follow trajectories, or rather paths, which have been
fixed from the beginning of this world.
So, twenty-five thousand years ago, a certain piece of land of sad
renown was the theatre of atrocities similar to those just committed
there ; and there is a certain relationship between the men who cut
each other's throats recently and those who butchered each other
there long ago.
The life of each individual is calculated by certain gods, charged
with this duty, so that its curve meets in certain agreed points the
curves of certain other blueprints. The intersections constitute the
events of earthly, material or moral existence. Man can only change
his path slightly; because he is a coward and if he saw a way to
avoid trials, he would eagerly make a detour. That is why we know
nothing of our future ; if we knew, we would no longer work, we
would not progress.
Illness itself : fever, tumour, rheumatism, whatever it is, is a
living creature in this world of blueprints that evolves, works and
is credited with merit or demerit. It feeds on the physical life of
man, animal, plant, of stone even. It takes its food from us, then
goes. When it leaves, it is either recovery or death.
The various therapeutics have only two results : drive it away more
quickly or prevent it from coming. In the first case, we throw it
before the right time on to another being, and that is injustice; in
the second case, we succeed only in increasing its hunger and making
it angry ; and when it has pulled down the barricades of preventive
medicine, man will suffer much more.
Then, is there no need to take care of oneself ? will you say. Yes ;
we have the strict duty to try to get cured, but always saying :
Let God's will be done and not mine . In this way, the legitimate
rights of all are respected and a providential help is made possible.
Understand this well : medicine, magnetism, spirits, liturgies,
pilgrimages, relics, nothing cures radically. For the effect to
cease, the cause must cease. Eradication of sin is the only
definitive remedy.
Finally, remember that, since the coming of Christ, it is impossible
to assign precise laws to phenomena; for a special and direct
intervention from Him may always occur. When, apropos to someone
born blind, He answers that that man is not so by his own fault, nor
by that of his parents, but to reveal the works of God, He makes us
understand that we sometimes suffer for an expiation of faults not
our own, present or past, or even for someone else's faults. Any rule
has its exceptions, and the simplest things often have unknown and
unknowable motives. That is why it is prudent to judge nobody.
Shortly, we will find other motives concerning this.
This definitive wisdom resides in a free and joyful acceptance of
trials. When we know that the Father loves us, we are happy for the
sufferings, we understand the slow illnesses, those where we feel
death's approach step by step, are favours ; they bring us back to
true humility ; they are the catalysts in the flame of repentance and
prayer ; our destiny in the Beyond, our future life may therefore be
considerably improved.
Before concluding on these general considerations, I would like,
between parenthesis, to say a few words on surgery.
The surgeon is inevitably an instigator of a suffering other than the
suffering of the patient. The limb or the organ he removes see
themselves on the spiritual level put aside in those stores of
Nature where the physical shapes of beings are being wrought. They
remain there, stockpiled, inert, inactive, until their material shape
has completely been taken over by the soil. The time when the spirit
of these excised organs becomes ready to be put into circulation again
no longer coincides with that when the body to which they belonged

starts a new life afresh. There is a rupture ; the two evolutions,

that of the part and that of the whole, no longer concur; and later
on that produces a lack of balance, atrophy and sometimes more
serious troubles.
So the surgeon is caught in a dilemma, the two terms of which are
equally embarrassing ; for he is obligated by his conscience, to do
anything to cure his patient and he can only bring him relief by
harming him in the future. But, if he acknowledges his powerlessness,
let him ask Heaven to ward off all those complications ; after all, he
is, only cashing certain debts unwillingly, since illnesses are
caused only by the patient's sins.
Two remarks, to close this parenthesis. It is better not to keep the
amputated organs or limbs but to return them to the earth ; there the
living spirit of their cells will suffer least.
Anesthesia is necessary in cases where the suffering would be beyond
the limit of nervous resistance ; but if it is used to avoid bearable
sufferings, it becomes a deception : these sufferings capitalize
themselves, if I can say so, for the time when the anesthetic
influence is over. That is the cause, among others, of the really
infernal tortures of de-morphinisation.
Thus Christ healed, by a simple command, all sicknesses whatever
their origin, instantly, from a distance, by touching the sick or by
letting him touch His clothes.
He gave orders to the sick, to the sicknesses, to the organs and the
demons because, in His eyes, everything is alive, everything is an
individual spirit. He was a sun of radiating forces, supernatural
energies which He had brought from the Kingdom of His Father. Laying
hands for Him was only a sign, as the gesture we make to say : yes,
or no. Giving an order was also only a sign, because everything in
Him was simultaneous, from the summit of His being to His body. This
total, plenary, admirable unity belongs only to Christ ; nobody
possesses it in the same degree.
As far as man is one, he is powerful. To be one means that
everything in ourselves is in harmony; that the body does not want
one thing when the mind wants something else ; that the muscles, the
bones, the nerves agree ; that memory, judgment, intuition tend
towards the same goal ; that everything in ourselves loves what the
heart loves ; and that, in turn, the heart loves only what God loves.
Then man recovers the lost majesty of his stature; he grows
singularly ; the beings around him acknowledge him as their leader
and begin to obey without resistance. Jesus possessed that state to
perfection ; one with the Father, one in Himself, one with Himself,
one by His compassion with all beings, this indestructible
homogeneity dominated all the exterior antagonisms and all the
ferments of suffering and illness.
Sometimes, when an organ does not .exist, He creates it
instantaneously. In my youth, I saw something similar happen : a man
born one-armed grew an arm in three days. As a reward, the healer was
condemned some time later for illegal practice of medicine.
Almost always, Jesus asks for faith from the sick, faith in Himself,
unique and supernatural being. When our doctors speak of the faith
that heals, by that they mean simple suggestions ; but suggestion
does not heal. Faith in the almightiness of the Word is the
necessary arrow which, in the mind of the sick, opens the way to the
remission of sins. Such a faith comprises repentance and repentance
lights the wish for purification.
A single glance is sufficient for Jesus to know thoroughly the poor
creature standing in front of Him. The wretchedness of that
suppliant, his silent suffering move Him ; He offered, in His
magnificent heart, hospitality to all human feelings. He did not
satisfy Himself with a smiling, serene and distant compassion ; He
suffered with men, His friends ; He has wept with them ; He has
trembled with them ; He has been despaired with them. He probed the
suffering of mothers, the suffering of wives and that of friends. To
make the young come back from afar, it was enough for Him to call
them ; but, for His friend Lazarus, He trembled, He wept, He cried.
How ingenious is his tenderness, and how human nature in Himself has
really burdened itself with all the burdens !
For this perfect healing, which stems from forgiveness of the sins to
take place : either the sick one accepts paving his debt in some way
and commits himself to it; or somebody else pays for him. Jesus paid
for the crowds that long ago surrounded Him ; and even now, He pays

for the crowds, still more numerous, that disown Him and forget Him.
No matter how wretched our love for Him, does His love not move us
deeply and shall we not try to relieve His bruised divine shoulders ?
To relieve God ! expression of insane pride ? But no, it is the
expression of true love, of that love for which the impossible does
not exist. We cannot repeat what Jesus accomplished ; but we can
become less unworthy and less lukewarm disciples.
What shall we do for the sick ?
On Judgment Day, how many men the world has considered as disciples
of Christ will hear Him say : I have never known you . The
miracles, the sublime doctrine may co-exist with pride and result
from inverted lights. We are warned, however, that the princes of
Hell will work wonders greater than those of the Gospel. Many are
beneficent. The true disciple alone is, moreover, humble and does not
value himself. That is the first condition.
The second condition is to have received from Christ or from an
incontestable Friend the power to heal. This transmission must occur
on the physical level, from mouth to ear; allow me to not go into
detail. That gift is always free and its growth subject to the good
conduct of the recipient. But no one must be prevented from healing in
the name of Christ; everyone is responsible for his acts ; everyone's
freewill must be respected.
Whoever tries to love his neighbour as himself is a disciple of
Christ. By realizing this law in its entirety, Christ has created a
special force, a new magnetism about which even now the most
ingenious searchers know nothing ; He hands it down to His friends
and it is by this fluid that realization of their requests is
achieved. That unseizable force links all those who love their
neighbour like themselves and it makes up their lot.
The success of a cure depends neither on a diploma nor on a
superstition, but on devotion, true compassion, intimate fervor. More
than any science, more than any secret, humble and sincere recourse
to the supreme Virtue, to the infinite Charity, is the miraculous
elixir ; but it cannot be transmitted, everyone must find it by
himself. It is not the theurgy of the ancient mysteries, collaboration
with the gods, but the true theurgy, collaboration with God.
To practice it, a double life is necessary : not that entry into the
invisible plane of a religious collectivity, that a baptismal rite
confers, but an effective union between the heart of the disciple
and that central place of the spiritual universe, that heart of the
world, where the waves of cosmic life beat, the Word's own resting
place. There Jesus in person, our Healer, sits on the throne.
The more the disciple tries to realize the Father's will, the more
his mind takes root in that kingdom which is Heaven. There he lives,
he breathes, he thinks, he loves, he works ; so much so that if, for
example, he offers a glass of water, or makes up a remedy, that water
or that substance will be saturated with the divinely living force
that Jesus has created and which radiates in that place.
The theurgist lives in unity. The relief he provides to a feverish
person spreads, if he so wishes, to many other feverish persons ; if
he heals a paralyzed person, he can act on the collective essence of
paralysis and improve all paralyzed people. So, at the beginning of
this century, a Friend of God modified the invisible of one of the
most terrible diseases and, since, doctors have discovered step by
step the means of healing it completely. Shortly the same thing will
happen for tuberculosis, then for cancer. The theurgist even acts on
the future life of a sick person, and indicates knowingly how to
lessen an ordeal or how to change it.
Such men are extremely rare ; there is hardly one in every century.
However, it is possible, if the future years are to be terrible, that
several appear. But we, ordinary men, who would wish to bring relief
to our fellowmen, what shall we do for them ? Firstly, the resources
of science must be tried ; everything must be tried, at least all the
remedies permitted. We have the right to use any mineral, vegetable
or animal substance ; but, be careful, we must not trap their spirit.
It is better to die, or to let a beloved one die, than to maintain
life by an illicit process. The spirits of trees, of animals, of men
must under no circumstance be bound ; never perform paracelsic
transplantations ; never sign pacts with the spirits even though
they appear to be good ones ; never call on the spirits. Many of the
insane were taken with spiritism and magic. Psychiatry is a snare ;

any suggestion is radically wrong. If your child is gluttonous, will

you better him by tying him up or starving him ? The immediate
benefit of this forbidden process would be the origin of future, much
more bitter sufferings. Heaven does not want us to interfere with
anybody's freedom. Try to heal yourself or your neighbour, because it
is your duty, because your body is an instrument of work that must
be maintained in good condition. But be
resigned to suffering and death, and be satisfied if they come
instead of good health.
When prayer fails, then it is not justified : for example, if the
sick person can bear the sickness and would not bear an equivalent
ordeal in his fortune, or his affections, or if the intention of the
person who prays was not pure, if there were a personal interest in
his request; or if he had not fasted enough.
The pure intention is a faith which knows only God ; never ask
anything from an invisible intermediary ; that would be a mistake. We
have seen all that in our talk on prayer.
Abstinence, is to reduce with moderation the nourishment of the body
; but, above all, it is to reduce rigorously the nourishment of the
self. Learn to deprive yourself for the benefit of someone who is
suffering; but be careful not at the same time to want to force the
miracle to happen ; always watch the self scrupulously ; driven back
on one point, it surges at another point ; watch in spirit.
Let us now say that we have no right to burden ourselves with
someone else's suffering; for our body is only a loan. If God wishes
to hear our request, He is rich enough to heal by His own means all
the illnesses of the universe. By giving Him, by moral abstinence,
the proof of our goodwill, He will certainly hear our supplications.
Sometimes contemplatives, laic or religious, drag out their lives in
endless illnesses. The Church teaches that this is a substitution.
Possible ; but more often it would involve very courageous souls who
wanted to get rid of a great deal of their debt all at once.
Another reason for not judging the unfortunate.
This abstinence is the best of prophylaxis. Not to criticize the
sick, not to show contempt for them, not to despise them, not to get
impatient with them : that is the surest preventive hygiene because
it is a spiritual one. Let us say that, no matter how terrible the
disease of our neighbour is, we probably deserve it in all justice
and that probably one day we will suffer it.
If your prayer is heard, then the most difficult part begins. You
must not become vain thereby. Imitate Christ : be silent and ask
others to be discreet. Heaven will be able to make the miracle known,
if It judges it necessary. And then, so many people are watching for
the sparks of the Light ; and, it is written : Cast not pearls
before swine.
Also, do not distract your sick from their religion ; Avoid scandal.
Rather teach them to thank Heaven. We never do it enough ; we do not
know it; we do not want to realize it; but the Father loves us ; He
is happy when something joyful happens to us. He smiles when He
gives us something. He loves our clumsy acts of grace ; our small
happiness's move Him. You who are only men, do you not like it when
you bring a toy to your small child, to get a surprise treat out of
your pocket, so that his happiness is overwhelming ? You possess
this goodness only because the Father possesses it first, infinitely.
He does the same thing with us. Let us thus thank Him.
This is the first dawn of this exquisite joy that the beloved
disciple speaks about to us. It then rises when we have learned how
the smallest help
offered for Jesus' love, it is by Jesus Himself that it is received.
It is certain that we can bring relief to the innumerable martyrdoms
of our eternal Friend ; it is a fact that can be verified. Let the
greatness of this task exalt us and make the most unpleasant task easy
for us.
THE TEMPTATIONS OF CHRIST
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted of the devil.
(MATTHEW iv, 1)
As we have granted the epithet of mystic to the disciple of the Gospel
only, Christ must be the sole subject of our study. His healings

constitute the major task of His external life ; today I want to

reveal the essential task of His inner life through His temptations.
Let me warn you that the things I am going to talk to you about may
appear to the Catholics, the Protestants, the Esotericists, the
Israelites or the Orthodox, either heresies or panegyrics. Such is not
my intention. I wish to attack nothing ; I wish to drag nobody along
any particular way. In front of you, I forget anything I may have
learned; I say only what I perceive at the moment through the faint
glimmer of the Word which it has been given to me to grasp. And what I
wish from you is that, having placed yourselves in the suitable moral
conditions, you accept my assertions only after having verified them.
***
Why are Christ's temptations the key to His inner life ? Here : The
Word assumed a human form to give a universal and perfect example. His
essential mission was not to suffer ; suffering is only the
corollary of His Works. Looking at Jesus, any man, in any time, in any
material and moral situation, finds his model; Jesus is primitive Man
in the freshness of innocence, final Man in the splendour of
Knowledge, eternal Man in the immutability of union with the Father.
All the hardships, all the anguishes of the heart, all the material
anxieties, He suffered them, or rather He deliberately asked for
them. In the middle of all these things, He planted a seed of Light;
by giving them shelter, He modified all these beings. In such a way
that we, afterwards, benefit from these innumerable kindnesses.
Either that drop of heavenly purity and propitiatory gentleness laid
down twenty centuries ago in the souls of the ministers of Destiny
softens their implacable probity; or, if we give in to the suggestions
of the Low One, these same ministers excuse us because long ago the
Lord of creatures agreed to appear listening to these insidious
propositions; all of us, in the devastating despairs and the
insignificant sins, by faith we can cling to the glimmer that the
suffering of the Lamb caused to shine when those same temptations and
ravages made their entry in the immense precincts of His human being.
The sufferings of Christ started with the first word which fell from
the mouth of the Creator; they will last until the last wave of the
last creative word dies away on the indefinite shores of Nothingness.
He suffers the pain of each of our disobediences ; He is affected by
every anguish Darkness inflicts upon His friends ; each hatred, each
blasphemy, each forgetfulness of Heaven strikes His cosmic body.
Calvary was only the earthly and local crystallization of the
permanent martyrdom to which the Son of Man offers Himself in the
spiritual place where all the acts of creatures end. But each mortal
blow restores Him for another agony; each martyrdom exalts the triumph
of His Love; each drop of His very precious life is someone's
salvation; and a new star lights up in the firmament of spirits with
each tear that the anguish of our final happiness wrests from His
divine eyes. Such is the splendour of the immense, incomprehensible
Love with which He pursues us.
Temptation means ordeal. A burden is the ordeal of the muscles which
lift it. We cannot be certain of possessing any virtue until we have
fought the vice which opposes it. The Redeemer, as God, is above
temptations as it is from Him that they hold their life. As man, He
makes Himself accessible to them, to improve them, to alter their
ulterior course and to leave His younger brethren who will, later on,
bear witness in His name, a greater chance of victory, because of
His victory. Temptation is not only a psychological phenomenon ; it is
also a biological process. That the tempter has come to attack me,
or that myself I looked for him, in body or in spirit, cells have
been used in the contact, the conversation or the meeting; for every
feeling is a contact. Evil desires may rise in me, from my own depth,
by the play of my mental organisms, as my stomach is responsible for
making ferments and my muscles toxins. But temptation is the evil
desire produced in me by a foreign hand. That tempter is called the
devil, we insult him, we damn him, but the soldier of Heaven does not
fear his visit and does not ill-treat him; he knows very well that he
is only a workman doing his job, that is all.
Later we will see what conduct to adopt in this event; but first let
us study our model.
***
Christ was tempted at the beginning of His public life by Satan;
during His mission, by His adversaries, finally at His Death, by the
excess of His own exhaustion. It is the first of these three ordeals
which is the more comprehensible to us and which offers the more
immediate teachings.

All the words in the Gospel have a bearing; and each detail is a
teaching. So, it is the Spirit that takes Jesus to the desert; and,
in effect, the servant of Heaven no longer acts by his own will; he
no longer has any will; he has made himself a slave once and for all,
and his effort only consists of realizing, day by day, the orders he
receives from His Master. Several times, Jesus asserts this complete
dependence upon His Father, and asserts holding knowledge and power
from Him. His guide, in the event we are concerned with, is the
principle of truth, of energy, of wisdom which opposes matter, as
being faces nothingness, like strength faces inertia. It is
especially and I regret not being able to dwell more on the subject
it is especially freedom, that essential attribute of the divine
plane, that splendour of beings moving in the Absolute. Thus the
Spirit, that is to say the God in Jesus, had decreed temptation, had
ordered Satan to come, had led Man to the desert. Why ? We will
know when the world of creatures will be behind us ; today, we can
only draw from the acts of the Spirit a few of the truths they contain.
Before starting His propaganda, Christ wanted, if I dare say so, to
try His strength; or rather, before fighting the visible
representatives of Evil, he had to confront and to vanquish its
invisible leaders.
Why the desert? Because of the solitude. Solitude is something
mysterious ; sister of silence, it weakens the weak, it exalts the
strong. It cleanses the wounds of the soul, that the red fire of
repentance cauterizes ; it forces us to face ourselves ; and what
terrible lessons do these long looks teach us ! We get out of it in
pieces, or hardened against all shocks. But turn your eyes towards
Jesus' solitude ; stare at it, if the dazzling, white stillness of
that overheated desert does not blind you. Jesus's solitude : rocks,
sand, a blazing sun, an implacable blue sky ; at times, the furtive
silhouette of a wild animal, a caravan on the horizon, a bird of prey
in the dazzling sky. Not even the feeling of a possible neighbour. To
sleep alone, to walk alone, to think alone, to pray alone, to forget
the sound of one's own voice, to foresee alone future tortures, to
see them, to fear the bites of the ominous hounds of Hell. Alone
without, alone within, so was our Jesus. Alone since the beginning on
the highways which link the planets to the suns and the erring tribes
of the stars to the cities of the sedentary constellations ; alone
on the lost paths where, scarcely every thousand years, a mysterious
traveler passes. We, who claim to love our Friend, shall we let him
reach the end of his tireless wanderings alone ?
For, bodily, He was alone, alone in the spaces of His thought, alone
in the enthusiasms and the dejections of His love, alone in the
progressive exaltation of His will, finally alone in His invisible
links. During those forty days, everything was taken away from
Christ, even the angels' cohorts which in the past had maintained Him
in constant communication with His Father and with the world. During
that fasting, He was as though He did not exist; leaving step by step
the inhabited regions of the Beyond, He reached in his mind the edge
of the original Abyss. Without this rigorous isolation, the aim of
that retreat would not have been reached.
Will we conceive that solitude, we who are afraid to be alone; we
who, when our business gives us some respite, rush to where the crowd
is ; we who seek the most insipid pastimes rather than to stay face
to face with our conscience ; we who, from our youth, spoil our whole
life rather than to return at night to an empty room ? Let us picture
to ourselves the overwhelming stillness of the desert, the magnificent
symphonies of the sun on the wide horizons ; the porphyry, the
marble and the distant mountains transformed in the morning and at
night in a dream architecture; the black nights, the myriads of
stars and the alarming moon ; always silence, always solitude; and
the inner storms more frightening than the wind ; not a book
not a face, not a glimmer; that for forty days and forty nights?...
Amongst the hieroglyphics of the very mysterious science of Numbers,
forty is one of the most famous It means expiation and penitence; it
has governed the deluge, the sleep of Adam, the exile of the Hebrews
; it is the cipher of matter, of the mother, of death, of all that
transforms ; it has to do with the Virgin and with Christ, since it
proceeds from another number which is not less famous, thirteen. But
let us only remember this known thesis that the Messiah, who came to
repair Adam's fault, must submit Himself to the same situations and
repeat the same acts, but in reverse. This gives the key to many of
the evangelical enigmas.
I shall not explain that hell which Jesus meets. You know that it is
the necessary shadow to splendour, the ground necessary to ether, the
individualism favorable to altruism, the obstacle indispensable to

enthusiasm, the past without which the future would not exist, as
immobility is the starting point of movement. It thus fulfills a
useful function, and we must neither hate it, nor fear it. There are
evil spirits everywhere ; some are attached to things, others live in
the atmosphere, others finally, and they are the direct assailants of
man, live in the mind. They have a universal chief : Lucifer, king of
pride, reversed image of the Word; he is, in the still, frozen and
impenetrable state of crystallization, what Jesus is in the manifold
bursting forth of eternal life. He tempts all men in a way which,
because of his natural influence, we do not even notice. Under his
command are, so tradition says, Asmodeus, the prince of material lust,
Mammon, prince of this world, the god of money, Beelzebub, the
prince of idolatry and of sinister works. Lucifer, himself,
influences by his stillness ; he is the metaphysical zero, the fixed
point of the world.
Around him, on all sides at the same time, the opponent is hovering
about, the devil, Satan, the killer, always in contradiction and,
right outside, near the physical level, the demons seethe, who
weaken, corrupt, putrefy and dissolve the vital compounds; they are
what is called Legion.
But what was the use of such a rigorous and prolonged fasting? Was
that not inducing exhaustion, hyperaesthesia, delirium, what was the
good of it ?
Christ was an exceptional being. What would have weakened an ordinary
man was only an incentive for His vital energies. The weakened state
resulting from fasting is being restored by a call upon the nervous
reserves ; but Jesus's body had not been built by the earth; its
material had been brought directly from a world much more beautiful
and pure than ours. He was stronger and more vigorous than a child of
the earth; His bones were as hard as steel; His senses exquisite; His
resistance to fatigue, implausible ; the swiftness with which He
recovered from exhaustion, extraordinary. The tenth part of His vigils
and sufferings would have killed the most vigorous man. Material food
was not necessary to Him ; His physical vitality drew nourishment from
the world it came from. Strength came unceasingly on Him; and
consciousness of His divine affiliation kept His whole being in a
supernatural tension.
The story of the contemplatives shows a thousand examples of
extraordinary abstinences. The cure d'Ars, just to take a close
example, all his life worked twenty-two hours out of twenty-four,
without more sustenance than half a potato. And did Jesus not say : &
My food consists of doing the will of Him that sent me ? Whoever
devotes himself, body and soul, to the service of Heaven, Heaven
preserves his life and supplies him with supernatural strength ;
unless the hour has come for that soldier to leave for a mission on
another planet.
We get back in the measure that we give ourselves. And Jesus had given
Himself entirely. Yourselves, Gentlemen, the exaltation of a simple
human feeling, of a love, of a task, of an ambition, has it not
rendered you capable of extraordinary efforts ? There is no question
here of a lack of nervous balance ; but, in reality, our life is
grafted on to matter ; if we can uproot it and transplant it into
the kingdom of the purest Ideal, how much miraculous food will it not
receive ?
So, Christ's fasting is not incredible. Some saints have done almost
as much, having retained, in spite of their effort, the calm and
practical common sense required for foundations, the lucidity
required to advise the crowds that came to question them. Abstinence
facilitates a steadier concentration, a deeper union if, understand
it well, the ascetic prepares and gives life to the corporeal
privations by privations of the self.
*
The first of the three temptations applies to the body; the second
one, to the lust for possession ; the last one, to spiritual pride. So
the three psychic centres are put to the proof.
Make these stones become bread , says the Insidious ; and, if we
listen, we begin to doubt the Father and the whole scaffolding of the
inner house tumbles down. Christ answers : Man lives not only on
bread, but on any word that comes from God's mouth . Notice the
peculiar turn of the sentence. At first sight, it means that
observance of the Law assures our material subsistence. For who obeys
God is God's child, and God takes special care of him ; for who
obeys God recovers his splendour as a man, and then the invisible
recognize and serve him. But, moreover, these words mean to say that

bread itself is a word, and that it possesses its nourishing property

only because it is a word of God, alive and active in the midst of a
psycho-chemical aggregate.
Here let us recognize the value of the material forms of Life. First
of all they exist to maintain our existence; but also so that we
respect Life, so that we develop it, so that we instill it with the
eternal Light that shines in us. This is one of the great forms of
charity, that charity of which so much is said and of which so little
is known. If men knew, if they were looking for the true, living face
of charity, if they opened their eyes to its ardent gaze, how they
would love it, how they would hurry to follow in its steps, how they
would everywhere become its indefatigable auxiliaries !
In refusing to transmute the stones into bread, which would have
been easy for Him, Lord of the Earth, Jesus teaches us the most
precious lesson : not to abuse our strength, to let everything follow
its normal course, not to rely on ourselves, but on the goodness of
the Father. When the priest of Ars draws about sixty bowlfuls from a
small cauldron for his orphan-girls, it is a multiplication very
similar to the multiplications of the bread related by the Gospels.
Myself, I have seen with my own eyes a decanter of fresh water
suddenly materialize itself on the table, because a soldier of Heaven
was thirsty. I have seen coins fill up a purse that its owner had
just emptied in the hands of some poor people. The disciple lives in
an atmosphere of miracles ; so, never be afraid of material
destitution ; it is the less painful of all the kinds of poverties.
Then Satan carries Jesus on to a mountain, he shows him all the
kingdoms and offers them to Him, if He agrees to worship him. All the
superhuman things which took place did so on a mountain ; the Merou,
the Potala, the Sinai, the Nebo, the Thabor, the Calvary are the
beacons of humanity. The symbol unveils itself clearly ; it is the
law of progress ; beings rise to their zenith, then Heaven comes down
to meet them. Anyhow, some tasks can be accomplished only in the
isolation of the summits, on the naked bones of our common mother,
there where the fluids flow according to different axes, where the
body of the ecstatic is freed from certain pressures. The great
voice of silence speaks only in solitude. And it is on the summits,
natural lightning rods, that certain igneous currents come down and
penetrate the earth without unsettling it.
Whether we are prostrated on the welcoming rock, or whether we have
taken refuge on the mystical mountain of our mind, let us never
forget that it is to God alone that our adoration or our
supplications must be directed. Notice how idols dwell in the lower
places : money, glory, passion, murder, external science, where is
all that if not in the city, in the plain ? There are revealing
correspondences between the two faces of the universe, and the great
book of Nature is easily deciphered by the gaze of the simple people.
Remember : any desire is an adoration which begins. Keep those
precious forces, the wishes for only Him who has put them in us and
who, alone, can fulfill them in an overabundant way.
Satan carries Jesus back to the top of the Temple : If you are the
Son of God, he says, throw yourself down, for it is written : The
angels will carry you . In effect, there is that stranger, whose
identity the Adversary doubts and who just refused the satisfactions
of the body and those of the self ; He can legitimately believe he
is God's favourite. Look at ourselves. To whom has it not happened,
after a painful and courageous sacrifice, to say : Well ! now, I
have been wise ; God certainly owes me something . We forget that we
are only useless servants. This is the infiltration of spiritual
pride; it is to tempt God.
*
Jesus triumphs over doubt, greed and pride ; over the strongest
uncertainty : material anxiety ; over the most beautiful and
intoxicating greed : glory ; over the most subtle pride : to believe
oneself a saint. What a picture ! In a few strokes, all the wheels
of psychology, all the moral struggles, all the splendours, all the
humilities. Each sentence of the Gospel is a world. And again, I have
confined myself to the moral viewpoint only. It will take you only a
few vigils for your meditations to show you a complete sociology, a
complete physiology, a complete cosmology, and so many other
mysteries if you are interested in them.
In Mark's gospel, that story takes three sentences : He was in the
desert for forty days, tempted by Satan; He was among wild beasts;
and the angels served Him . Let our gaze dwell on this scene. A
sublime pathos rises from it. Hell, Heaven, beasts ; in the midst, a
man, the Man, the Word. The scribe with the lion has put in only the
indispensable ; but the scene appears in full light. It flows beyond

its frame ; its simplicity sets free the wings of enthusiasm and
amplifies as far as the firmament the scope of our meditation. Look
at that landscape of white and yellow stones, edged by the noble,
violet lines of the Arabian mountains ; the dark patch of the Dead
Sea underlines the wave of a hill ; here and there dry bushes, cacti.
On a rock, a man ; his loose clothes are the colour of sand. One can
see a sunburnt face, a face with motionless features which move
however, as if illuminated from inside. A face of mystery on which
the most magnificent energy sparkles ; a taciturn face where each
feature speaks eloquently, where every trait radiates a deep emotion
; a face of tenderness, with pursed lips, the Love of which gives it
its complexion and lowers its gaze. That man walks as we imagine
seraphs fly ; he holds himself up to the sun, as if his athletic body
did not belong to the earth. And yet, a few years later, he will
collapse under the physical burden of the world's sins.
All day long, He is alone, except the last night when, in the
declining rays dappling the far off mists, translucid shapes descend,
which put down water at His feet a certain kind of water , bread
a certain manna. The sun goes down ; the wild beasts come out;
cautiously approaching, and the wild eyes, the sly ones and the proud
ones, those of the jackals and those of the lions, rise towards the
quiet, unfathomable eyes which speak to them without words. Then the
atmosphere grows heavier ; the tangible darkness rolls indefinite
shapes ; the animals hide; and a being suddenly appears, a man more
beautiful than a dream. He is naked, because any creature appears in
its essential nakedness before the Word ; his supple limbs, his
ambiguous face, the fire of his cutting eyes, shake every? thing
around like a coat of fear, and they stand face to face, the willing
Slave and the Rebel, the victim and the future executioner.
A few clairvoyants have seen demons ; but one can only grasp the
degree of good and evil which is at one's level. Most of the
visionaries say that devils are ugly ; not always. Their prince is
beautiful; so beautiful that no one could resist the rapture of his
charm, if one were not first incapable of enduring without a mortal
fear the deleterious emanation of his presence.
I have known a man who had told one of the soldiers of Heaven : I,
I do not believe in the devil; he does not exist, he is a symbol .
Well ! answered the soldier, look at the window of that house . And
the face that the unbeliever saw was such that he started to run away
in frightful agony and that he was not seen before the next day,
beseeching to be freed of the memory of that face.
Gentlemen, let our gaze rest on the scene of the desert; Jesus,
conqueror of hell, served by Heaven, at home with the animals, but
alone amongst men. And, in effect, for the last two thousand years,
how humanity forgets its Saviour ! From our birth, how we forsake our
Friend !
***
The Pharisees often tempted Jesus, that is to say that they tried to
find fault with His doctrine. These ordeals were the least painful;
they attacked only theory. The Pharisees were the intellectuals of
the time ; and to intellectuals everything is incomprehensible,
except metaphysics and casuistry. If Jesus came back today and
repeated His Miracles, He would certainly meet the same distrust.
I am anxious to come to the last temptations, to the spiritual
martyrdom, to these unspeakable tortures which no god could have
undergone without dying.
First of all, it is the night in the Garden of Olives.
There are, in the Provencal countryside, parts of hills which
resemble what was then that garden. Imagine a terraced slope, like
that of olive-groves ; in the Judean mountain, the peasants were
already building dry-stone walls to retain the shifting soil. A path
winds its way under the old trees and is crossed by a stream : it is
the Cedron. In the distance, the hum of Jerusalem has died away with
the lights ; the moon makes the silver foliage glitter. Here and
there, on the high grass studded all over with wild flowers, men have
gone to sleep. But one of them, the tallest, goes up the slope, to
the place where a rock provides a sort of shelter, and, making a sign
to three of his companions : Pray, he says, so that you should not
be tempted ; my soul is sick unto death ; stay here and sit up with
me . Then that man, the same that we have seen earlier giving orders
to Satan, falls prostrate on to the ground. And here : the nightly
glimmer darkens ; the stars glow ; the country smells fade away ; the
spiritual darkness reinforces the physical darkness ; fear, terror,
dejection descend on these men. Above the stretched great white shape

the imminent ignominies of Passion spread ; repudiation, abandonment,

tortures, and the terrible inner solitude. And Jesus says : Father,
if you could take away this cup. However, let not my will be done,
but yours . No matter how superhuman his nervous resistance was, His
heart stopped beating and He started to die.
But an angel came Gabriel, so tradition says and gave Him a
drink. Then His soul returned to His exhausted body.
The-frightening picture was still there, but underneath a more
terrible one unfolds : the hatred of hell, and the demoniac cohorts,
the instigators of the executioners. Jesus suffers no longer the
rods, the thorns and the nails, but, inside, the tortures that the
demons would have liked to inflict on Him, had they found the way of
materially doing so. Then Jesus, attaches Himself more closely to the
Father, throws Himself more deeply into the Father's will, plunges
with all His enthusiasm into Love and forgiveness. His effort is such
that, his heart beating irregularly under the pressure of his blood,
the capillary vessels burst and a red sweat completely soaks Him.
What wretched things are our tears in comparison !
Jesus comes back to the three favourite disciples, and He finds them
asleep. So, you were not capable of sitting up an hour with me ? .
That is all the blame of His immense Love. Then He returns under the
rock of agony and again takes up his prayer and struggle.
Now, it is all the future evil which falls on Him ; all men will do
against the Father, against their brethren, against themselves, and
against life. Jesus sees the murders, the cruelties, the countless
base actions with that dizzy quickness and that clarity that those
who have been near the doors of death know. But He accepts it all. The
clouds lift; darkness becomes less dark; it is temptation going away
; it is also the hope that Jesus conceives : the Father will let no
one be lost and a few faithful will help Him, even at the price of
their blood. He can see it, He is sure of it. Thus He rises, exhausted
but calm; and He has hardly awakened the apostles for the third time
when the traitor arrives with his troop of hirelings.
Here the inner life of Christ appears clearly. Knowing everything,
being capable of everything. His heart, personally, had neither
desires, nor anxieties; His will had, for itself, no struggle to
fight. But, as I told you to begin with, to help men, to save
others, to modify the inexorable progress of Destiny, to improve
evolution, Jesus opened His heart to all these beings, offering them
His own strength, presenting His gentleness to demons, His patience
to destiny, His kindness to the despairing, in order that they can
take from Him a pure nourishment, and thereby purify themselves.
That, no one else but the Word could achieve.
All Christ did, was done through compassion. Through compassion, He
took on a body, He healed, He spoke. If he drove the pigs into the
sea and withered the fig-tree, it was because He wished the animal
killers and the destructors of forests to be punished less severely.
Through compassion, Jesus suffered sadness so that we, who are often
sad because we forget about Heaven, should not be visited by the
doubt that our melancholy calls forth.
Through compassion, at the very last minute of His very precious
martyrdom, He uttered a complaint: My God, My God, why have you
forsaken me? so that for all of us, who always believe we are
suffering unfairly, our childish despairs have an excuse.
Is it thus not legitimate to say over and over again that Jesus loves
us, as no mother ever loved her son, nor a man his wife ? Oh ! as
soon as the most tenuous ray of that Love pierces the triple armour
of our hearts, how metaphysics will seem empty, and sciences vain, and
earthly joys sickening !
What will we do ? And if in this audience there happens to be a
single heart that grasps through my dull words, the immense ardour of
eternal Love, it is that heart that I am asking : what should we do
so that all these cares have not been lavished in vain? If I had to
interrogate crowds, and for many years, I would count myself for
satisfied if, when I reach the threshold of the Beyond, I had at
least received one answer, I had at least met a single soul ready to
realize that answer by action.
***
In this province of the positive and the practical, the disciple must
firmly understand that temptation is a grace, the danger stations are
stations of honor for soldiers, the common man having enough to do to
conquer himself. Let us not be haunted by the devil ; the evil which

is in us, the perversities of the body, the intelligence and the

heart, are enough to make us fall. Darkness fights only the trained
disciples ; and they are very few ; the Devil is too strong for us ;
there would not even be a sham fight.
The temptation one resists is the best of works, provided one does
not face it through bravado or for one's spiritual advantage ;
Fighting it under those conditions, one would fall into pride. All
temptations can be fought successfully by humility, quietness and
prayer.
Here in short is its mechanism. The demon of theft, for example,
enters my mind. At once, the molecules of any kind of order which
have, in the past, participated in larcenies are roused ; the tempter
has a hold on them. If I resist, he goes away, weakened, alarmed by
my serenity; if I succumb, he takes possession of all the cells, even
the physical ones, which have participated in the theft. When the
spirits of these cells, by the interplay of their evolution, will
reach the level of the cerebral cells, where they direct everything,
then I will be nearly incapable to resist the tendency to steal; I
shall fatally succumb.
That is why the fight must be started at once, not tomorrow, not
tonight, now. Because of Jesus' fasting, he who resists a vice for
forty days, if he remains humble, will overcome it subsequently.
It is often said at the end of the Pater : Do not lead us into
temptation ; it is a timid request. The soldier of Heaven, who does
not fear blows, says : Let us not succumb to temptation . He does
not go looking for it; he accepts the fight, with the help of Heaven.
That bravery stems from constant self-control. As you have certainly
understood, mysticism does not consist of devotional prayers only;
it is a permanent state of enthusiasm, but also a plenary serenity.
Christ says several times : Watch and pray . First, to watch, to
be awake ; no dreams, no vague aspirations, no diffused
sentimentalities ; to realize what happens in oneself and around
oneself ; to watch out for the temptations of desire; not to become
exalted for ideals which are beautiful in appearance only.
For it is not only in the ecstasies of the men in cloisters that
Satan is transfigured into an angel of light; in the same way he
deceives in events, in relationships, in doctrines, in eminent
personalities. Remember the evangelical stories. Jesus said : Be
simple as doves , but he adds at once : Be careful as snakes .
Those to whom statues are raised are sometimes public offenders. Do
not throw yourself in the wake of anybody : study your
enthusiasm. A certain thaumaturgist, who up till now has achieved
healings by the thousands, holds his power, however, from implacable
enemies of Christ. Such an esoteric system, admirably built up, will
nevertheless lead its adepts only to the frozen kingdoms of
essential Death. The more the years go by, the sweeter the fruits
that the ancient Tempter will offer us, the more seducing their
colors, the more delicious their first savour. They will be called
tolerance, altruism, universal peace, unity of religions, psychic
powers.
Be careful ! Develop in yourselves an exquisite sense of truth ; fight
firstly against mistake in your own personality; then fight against
the error that the Enemy of men will attempt to instill in you Then
the blessing I wish for you will descend, and so will the immutable
joy, perfect joy : the real presence of Divinity.
THE SPIRITS OF THIS WORLD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
Do you think that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall
presently give me more than twelve legions of angels ?
(matthew xxvi, 53)
It would seem at first that a mystic should not be interested in the
problem of the spirits ; but, after due consideration, the use of
this study be? comes evident, to obtain a clear idea and to define
the respective scopes of occultism and mysticism. As with all
corrupted people, our time is looking for the uncommon; it is
satisfied neither with the austere lessons of positive science, nor
with the more comforting advice of the Church ; and, because of its
feverish anxiety, it is led astray almost at every step. Today, we
will try to react against the craze for spiritism, magic, personal
magnetism, by rectifying our progress towards the polar star of the
invisible world, towards the Word Jesus.
The invisible is vaster than the Visible, a thousandfold. The beings
that populate it are commonly comprised under the name of spirits

; but that term is incorrect, for grammatically that word specifies

an immaterial entity and the invisible creatures are provided with a
body. The name Spirit is suitable only to the Comforter, to the
third person of the Trinity. The inhabitants of the Beyond, by the
mere fact that they are created, possess material organs. The gods
have bodies, so have the devils ; the angels when on a mission adopt
temporary bodies, just as we put on a traveling coat. To conform
with custom, I shall call spirit any being imperceptible to the
corporeal senses, unknown to ordinary consciousness, intangible to
laboratory equipment.
By that token, the people of Mars or of the Sun are for us spirits ;
and yet, they are organic beings who eat, work, multiply, whose body
is substantial on their own planet. So too, there are stars which are
formed of a matter much heavier than ours if we could measure its
density by the universal standard of weight; and yet those stars
remain invisible to the best telescopes. In the same way, there are,
on earth, little-known races of men, whose bodies, much more vigorous
than our own, much taller, capable of reaching a patriarchal
longevity, can be perceived neither by our eyes, nor by any optical
instrument. In the thickness of rocks, in the sand of certain
deserts, in the ice of the poles, other men live who are different
from us, giants, pygmies, Cyclopes, winged like angels, or monstrous.
They are real; but the light rays go through their bodies, the
molecules of which are grouped according to different planes ; thus
our eyes cannot see them, neither can those of the ordinary
somnambulist. Later, the quality of the luminous fluid will change,
and the explorers will discover those strange creatures. When, by
accident, they manifest themselves, they are taken for spirits.
Beside these aborigines of the invisible, beside the deceased, the
images, the reflections, spiritual entities exist that are connected
with all material creatures. Every blade of grass has its spirit, so
the Kabbala says, in agreement on this with the Fathers of the
Church. Myths, popular legends illustrate this idea ; the Gospel
gives it under its highest aspect : < All things have been made by the
Word, the beloved disciple says, and nothing that has been made has
been made without It . Every creature contains a spark of the Word,
of Life ; and there is no life without spontaneity, no spontaneity
without freedom, no freedom without individuality. Speaking- in the
absolute, everything is a self, an intelligence, a will; every body
is the envelope of a soul, the instrument of a spirit.
How to believe in such fairy tales ? There is only one way, to go and
see. Difficult and delicate work. He who has received the baptism of
the Holy Spirit possesses the privilege of a permanent communication
with the heart of the world, central abode of the Word. There, all
creatures show themselves in their original nakedness, in their true
form. But I cannot open your inner eyes and throw you inside the
torrents of secret cosmic Life. Your brains, would not resist that
dazzle, that tumult, the infinite seething of these crowds.
However, notice this. Amongst the searchers of the invisible, some
are theoreticians and some are practitioners. The first are poets,
philosophers, intellectual initiates; they profess subjectivism, or
else they consider the legends, the miraculous stories, the
theologies only as allegories, symbols, metaphorical descriptions of
dynamic environments. For the practitioners, on the contrary,
everything is real and objective, be it in the left-hand path, like
the country sorcerers, the fakirs, the magicians, or in the
right-hand path, like the mystics. Once more, the extremes come into
touch with each other; the ignorance of the savage, who distinguishes
a spirit in lightning, the baobab or the cayman, joins in with the
perfect knowledge of the Friend of God, whose gaze pierces veils that
hide the veritable shape of the creatures.
The Church also believes in the spirits of things ; some of its
liturgical formulas prove it. When the priest pronounces : Exorciso
te, creatura aquae , it implies that there exists in the water a
principle which hears that word, which perceives the feeling of
priesthood ; or then, liturgy would be only literature. When the
priest blesses a crop, a house, a telegraph, a medicine (*), that
means that there is life in those things, or then that appeal to
divine forces would be nonsensical, insulting to Providence. A few
thaumaturgists have perceived the world of spirits. The admirable
Francis of Assisi used to say : my brother the wolf and my
sister the lark ; and also my brother the fire, my sister the
ash, my sister poverty . And in his thought they were not poetic
images ; he knew the spirit which animated those things, as fire,
fish and swallows obeyed his kind commands.
* Rituale Romanum.

It is very hard for our intelligence to understand that fairies

dwell in fountains and goat-footed men in the Ethiopian deserts.
Those who have seen creatures of that kind were not all hallucinated
however; furthermore, hallucination always corresponds to something
real. The whole difficulty lies in changing our viewpoint. Looking at
a tide, the sailor sees waves; the engineer sees a dynamic curve
which he transcribes into equations ; the astrologer discovers
fluidic currents. They are all right; but only he who looks through
the very eyes of the Word embraces simultaneously the principle and
all the aspects. Such is the mystic.
** *
Amongst these invisibles, some are microscopic, some are immense.
So, the resplendent prostration of the angel of prayer unfurls from
one extremity to the other of the firmament sheaves of glittering
stars ; whereas we, when we pray, hardly a few of the milliard of
cells which compose our being light up. Great is the fear, in the
heart of the disciple who has seen that angel; but his joy remains
ineffable and unforgettable.
The odic effluvia rediscovered by Baron of Reichenbach are not the
spirits we are talking about; neither are the egg-shaped,
many-coloured halos perceived in the magnetic and mental planes. The
intellectual entity, the moral tendency of an association, of a
school, of a movement are only a mixture of emanations arising from
the material and spiritual vitalities of that collectivity.
On the other hand, when, during her ecstasies, Catherine Emmerich
pulls out the weeds from an immaterial vine, stating on awakening
that the vine is the Church and the parasitic plant a worthless
prelate; then, when shortly later, the prelate she has named is
dismissed, it was the spirit of the Church that she had really seen.
When a mother dreams that a snake winds itself around the neck of her
child and when, the next day, the child wakes up with a sore throat,
it is the spirit of disease that she has seen. If, after having prayed
for someone who is afflicted, in your dream you see him visited by a
soldier, for example, it is the spirit of deliverance appearing to you.
A few among the servants of the great Shepherd are in this way put
into communication with some gigantic agents who rule the forces of
Nature. That is how, one day, a friend of mine, who certainly was not
in telegraphic correspondence with the seismographs of the
observatories, said to me point- blank : Tonight, at such a time,
there will be an earthquake from such a place to such an other place ;
but it will not be felt in the village where Mr. X... lives, because
he is a good soldier ; arrangements will be made to that end with the
dragon . And, in effect, the papers related the earthquake exactly
with the direction and the inexplicable interruption which had been
forecast to me. What is strange in this anecdote is the underlying
opinion that any hill, any mountain, any river, any lake, the depths
of the earth itself are the dwellings of many spirits ; and that by
acting on the spirit the lake or the hill could be modified, just as
if, when passions change, the face changes also. That opinion is very
widespread in Arabia, in India, and where yellow people live ; but it
is very rare in Europe.
I could tell you many similar stories ; but I must keep within the
limits of my program.
In order to study a little more closely the spirit of things, we
will choose an example, which you will be able to stretch to all
sorts of analogous cases.
*
**
Here is a house. Any building is the physical body of a spirit. The
banal cases of modern buildings also have their spirits. Those spirits
take on animal shapes, and the true clairvoyant gets into
communication with them, makes them act as is useful.
In parenthesis, I must tell you that the being I call a true
clairvoyant is not the honest medium or somnambulist who do not
cheat; he is something completely different. The maniacs of psychism,
as soon as they believe that they have seen signs of mental
unbalance in somebody, rush to develop that subject; but, as they
know nothing of the real constitution of man, of the relationship
between mind and body, they go ahead blindly; and the developments
they obtain are only breakdowns. The self-conceit of those
experimenters, who believe they are doing a useful job, would be
ridiculous if it were not pitiable. The true clairvoyant is above all

a disciple of the Gospel; it is only in addition that he exercises

an exceptional faculty.
I now return to the rest of my story.
What happens in the beyond during the construction of a building ?
First of all, the future owner receives the spiritual form of that
building ; that visit happens in unconsciousness. If the mind of that
man is interested in that picture, welcomes it, feeds it, the image
is impressed on the brain and enters the field of consciousness ;
will opts for acceptance or rejection. Blueprints cannot be
materialized by themselves ; they need man's collaboration : but
neither can matter evolve by itself ; it needs a structure supplied
by the blueprint.
These, before becoming intuitions, vague desires, projects, plans,
works and physical creations, needed co-ordination in their own self
of all sorts of suitable currents to link together the being from
whom they expect materialization.
A spiritual type grows or withers according to whether the men and
places with which he is in touch supply or deny him food. Here, for
example, is the blueprint of the theft which comes to my mind.
Before, I was not thinking of stealing ; the longing comes to me
because of an opportunity. If I satisfy it, the physical and mental
forces which serve to accomplish the larceny will be absorbed by the
blueprint, which will then leave my mind a little stronger than it
entered ; if I resist, after a few trials, the blueprint will leave
weakened.
These contacts of blueprint with the physical world shape the weft of
our lives. It can be seen here how serious the decisions actually
can be which rational judgment would have thought to be of little
importance.
The place where a house is to be built is indicated from the birth
of the continent of which it is a part. Many years before the digger
seizes the pick, fluidic currents converge on that place. The longer
the building is to last, the more this preparation is distant :
Owner, architect, labourers, stones, beams, cement, metal, finally all
that which contributes to this enterprise is fixed beforehand in the
archives of the earth, according to the most impartial laws.
For nothing happens to a person, that has not been called for or
chosen beforehand. Collapse of the building, bad workmanship,
inaccurate calculations, the future fire, possible lawsuits, all that
is brought about magnetically by the original conception and by the
fair destinies of the owners, the builders and the tenants.
This is no excuse for dishonesty, for example, on the part of the
contractors. A cheating builder is brought to me and injures me only
because I have deserved to be deceived ; but he remains responsible
for his deceit. If he resists his avarice, he acts twice as well,
for himself and for me. If I acknowledge the spiritual legitimacy of
that theft, by refusing to go to court, I pay a debt myself, I
improve my future, that of my house, and that of the dishonest
builder because, unknowingly by my renunciation, I place the germ of
remorse in the mind of that man.
There are places of evil omen, houses where a certain terrible
disease seems to have elected to reside. Often, we go to live there
because of ignorance ; and that ignorance is wanted by God so that
we should not escape from our just destiny. On the other hand, we
must not confront peril with bravado : I am not afraid ; I am more
intelligent than so and so ; I am in good health . We must say : I
take this dwelling in spite of its inconveniences, because Christ
never even had this much ; I can well put up with this lack of
comfort, since one of my unknown brothers will benefit from the more
convenient place I leave him, and since I am certain to get help .
That is the language of a soldier of Christ.
Consider the singular turn of the evangelical phrase : When
entering the house, greet it, saying : Let peace be on this house ;
and if that house is worthy of it, your peace will come on to it
and, if it is not worthy of it, let your peace return unto you . In
effect, a house can, just as any creature, wish for the Light or the
Darkness ; peace escorts the former, dissonance accompanies the latter.
The spirit of a building groups around it other spirits ; every room
possesses one; each part of the room, each detail of the door or the
window, each piece of furniture, each object can subsist only by the
cohesive action of a spirit.

The tree in the forest, in its full stature, is the body of a

spirit. When the axe fells it, each one of its portions, each plank,
each log becomes the dwelling of a spirit of a different order, and
the carpenter, the cabinetmaker, who give those boards a useful
shape and a practical purpose, unconsciously evoke a new spirit,
half-sylvan, half-human, which will live in that timber which has
become a table, a chair or a cupboard and to a certain extent will
determine its life.
THE SPIRITS OF THIS WORLD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT (continued)
Each man appears in the Invisible as the centre of an important
phalanx. He has servants to make his work easier, and gods for whose
benefit he works ; the spirits of his ancestors are there, those of
his village, those of his country, of his race and of his religion;
guides accompany him in the practice of his trade, in the pursuit of
his enterprises, in the search for his ideal; travellers come to him,
attracted by his virtues, his vices or his preoccupations. Lastly,
at his side are, day and night, a representative of Light, the
guardian angel, and a representative of Darkness, the bad angel.
Moreover, the god that each one serves god of money, god of
science, god of art sends to his follower veritable cohorts of
auxiliaries and collaborators. Some of the Thousand and One Night
stories explain that very well. A conqueror, Napoleon for example,
sent on Earth as the surgeon to the sick, inspires his soldiers and
enchains Victory to his horse only because the countries he crosses
are populated with men and spirits that came directly from the world
of war and were sent by the gods of war.
A similar co-operation is granted to the philosopher, to the founder
of a religion, to any hero. However, here an essential difference
must be noted in the inner attitudes of those charged with a
mission, attitudes which lend their works a quality of Light or of
Darkness for Darkness also has its delegates. If man believes in
his own strength and relies only on himself, he will enslave those
invisible auxiliaries, who are obeying under fear but who are always
ready to revolt. If man assesses himself at his fair value, that is
to say as pure nothingness, and relies only on Heaven, of his aides
he will make spontaneous servants, friends always ready to sacrifice
themselves to his work. The quality of our wishes makes the quality
of our relations.
In the typical adept and in the typical mystic, a very clear
illustration of those inner attitudes can be seen. The former, by
training of the nervous and mental systems, by training of the will,
by the ecstasies in which he plunges by his own free will, forces a
number of all sorts of spirits to help him and, in a certain way, he
incorporates them in himself. The Friend of God, on the contrary,
does not wish to become a spiritual athlete, but only to accomplish
perfectly the Law in the small sphere in which Providence has placed
him. The servants he possesses are sent to him and, as they come from
Heaven, their devotion is spontaneous, free and total.
The story of the tree under which St. Martin of Tours used to pray
and which, having been sawn surreptitiously by a criminal, fell down
to the side opposite the cut so as not to crush the saint, is not a
legend; the spirit of that oak had recognized the spirit of the pious
bishop.
The cup of poison breaking between St- Benito's hand also shows the
intelligence of things, and their small freedom. Many similar cases
show how Heaven protects those who have a quiet and brave confidence
therein.
***
What practical lessons can be drawn from these hasty pictures ?
Wisdom orders us not to look under any pretext for a relationship
with the invisible, even to refuse these relations if spirits
manifest themselves spontaneously. But we are far from wisdom; or
else, there would not be so many seekers of psychic phenomena in the
world.
Spiritism, even when it gives experimental certitudes, is a lure.
Never has an evocation helped a dead man. Spiritualistic practices
deny the goodness of the Father, since it is always a lack of
confidence which pushes us towards them ; they open a door doors
to all sorts of imbalance, physiological and psychical; they
engender only discord in the kingdom of the dead; they make us blind
to the true Light.

Magic is even more pernicious. It can work great wonders, sometimes

even seemingly great things ; but it is always a revolt against the
Law, since it commands, usurps and loots, and because no man, except
the free man, must do anything but serve, submit and give. White
magic, that which appears to deal only with good causes, is more
dangerous than black magic. The sorcerer, in effect, cannot do much ;
when he has killed a herd, a man, or dried of crops, this is only
physical damage. But the adept, the hierophant of occultist books,
the being who believes himself to be very learned, very pure, very
high, who says he is a free man, because he has enslaved a great
number of spirits, because even some authors have not enough praise
for such a crime he has not feared to take by secret means the
bodies of strong young men in order to prolong his own earthly life
for centuries : such a man is much more disastrous, because, by the
apparent beauty of his life, he leads others into pride, into
spiritual selfishness, towards immobility, to a second death.
Never try to act on the spirit of things ; never accept what Eliphas
Levi calls transmission of the magic wand. Can the Father not give
you everything ? And does He not give you according to whether or
not you show the strength and wisdom necessary for using His gifts ?
Do you wish to know the secret things ? Start by keeping your
neighbour's faults as an inviolable secret, and whatever he has
confided in you. Do you wish to work miracles ? Begin by being worthy
of the miracles which, twenty times a day, Providence works in your
favor and which you do not deign to notice. Do you wish events to
obey you ? Demonstrate to them, by giving up the personal advantages
of your toils, that they will never have command over you. To obey the
Father, to do what is good, to fight one's own vices : that is the
fairest, the healthiest and the most active recipe.
Without having recourse to the tricks of the occult sciences even
outside the liturgical rites, the simple quality, good or bad, of our
moral life is sufficient to influence in a positive or negative way
the whole environment in which we evolve. The dwelling will be pure
if the tenant is pure. It is possible that minds attracted to the
wonderful deem this theory too simple; however, simplicity is the
sign of truth, the attribute of power, the seal of the Light.
Knowledge of the invisible is forbidden to us, because it would
entail immediate power on matter. We would in this way miss one of
the goals of life : evolution of the material world by material
effort. Evolution of matter obtained by spiritual dynamism would be
too abrupt and, therefore, fruitless.
The theories I show you, however childish they may appear, bring you
new obligations ; as a reward, they will provide new rights only
later on. They give a new and at the same time a very old explanation
; long ago, they often restored disheartened men's men courage ; I
want them to renew the same service for you.
***
Man thus exercises a real influence over the objects amidst which he
lives. A chair thrown in anger stores anger; an avaricious
housewife's utensils will propagate avarice with their subsequent
owners. The same will apply to the acts of the good man, from the
viewpoint of the fluids and especially from the viewpoint of the
spirits. Can you see now that it is useless to entangle yourselves in
the thousand precautions written in the Laws of Moses or Manou? To
eat from a dish which has already been used, to wear garments which
have already been worn, to feed on so-called impure meats, to touch
corpses, that may defile perhaps, as the Orientals claim, the body or
the aura ; but that does not soil either the heart, or the mind. The
old hierophants purified from the outside; Jesus purifies from the
inside. A completely new table may still have been soiled, by the
labourer's laziness, by the merchant's greed, by the wickedness of the
tree from which the timber comes. In any case, the rite by itself
purifies only on the level of vibrations. On the contrary, if we use
an object served to commit the darkest of crimes, that would have to
perform an act of true charity, it will be, for its spirit, a perfect
purification.
Charity, the only duty of man towards the rest of the world, is
countless in its applications. Do not scorn anything : it would mean
offering a dwelling to the spirit of disparagement. Do not break
branches in the forest, do not kill insects, do not destroy anything
without a pressing motive. They are wise people, in their own way,
who pile up in the vast attics of provincial houses, all sorts of
objects which are no longer in use; those old servants rest together
as they have worked together; they do not suffer from human
ingratitude ; they still give services to their masters, but

spiritual instead of material ones. They link to the house which

shelters them the images of the past, the traditional chains, the
links between ancestors and descendants.
Do not burn those old witnesses ; do not disperse them, except to
help any less fortunate people; let them return gently to original dust.
It is by charity that we must keep cumbersome or ridiculous presents
; in this way, we give hospitality to what someone else does not want.
It is by charity that we must not destroy old portraits, neither by
fire nor with scissors ; they always retain a little of the life of
the person they represent, even though they may be dead. Bury those
faded photographs ; the earth is maternal. By charity, do not blow
out the lamp or the Candle; avoid causing sudden death to the small
beings which fabricate the flame; since your breath spreads life into
you, do not force it to take life away, outside. By charity, do not
mend indefinitely old linen and old clothes, if you can afford to
buy new ones ; the Law is that everything circulates and everything
renews itself.
***
Do not spare any of these humble efforts, of these obscure
sacrifices. A time will come when you will meet again in some one of
the white homes of the Father, all those humble spirits of the home,
all those modest servants; and before your moved gaze will pass
again, from the depth of centuries and space, the familiar scene when
you will have had a gesture of gentleness for the silent but living
witnesses of your short earthly life.
All the prayers you will have said in the still of the night and in
the solitude of your closed room, the objects around you will have
heard them, will have fed on them and will remember them. Things have
a memory ; psychometry proves it. Know well that your books, your
trinkets, the trees in your garden or in the country, feel your
presence, understand a little of what happens in you and expect from
you a light and a direction.
Give them that light, not by trying to give them that light by
yourself; your own light is much too unimportant. But endeavour to
retain in your heart the Light itself of the Word and you will be a
sure guide to all those beings. To retain Jesus in yourselves, you
know what to do.
Let us apply ourselves to the daily work, to the immediate duties,
to the tasks we can understand; and let us leave the distant,
abstract, too difficult tasks to those who believe themselves
capable of bringing them to a good end.
NOCTURNAL GHOSTS AND SUPERNATURAL VISIONS
All things are done in parables, so that seeing they may see, and
not perceive ; and hearing they may hear ; and not understand...
(mark iv, 12)
For approximately the third of our lives our conscious body is
condemned to rest. The disciple, who takes scrupulous care not to
upset anything in Nature and to utilize all resources that it offers
us spontaneously, transforms those hours into spiritual work. It is
the method of this transformation that I would like to explain today.
The materialists teach that the origin of dreams is either
physiological : bad digestion, bad blood circulation or mnemonic :
conscious or unconscious memories, association of ideas in unrelated
series. In effect, some dreams are produced by these causes and they
have no spiritual value; but many dreams have an objective origin, an
origin outside ourselves, and they contain a prophetic, illuminating
or thaumaturgic meaning. They are the real dreams ; the Scriptures
are crowded with examples of these.
First of all, we have to realize what is the phenomenon of sleep,
then the mechanism of dreams ; later on, we will look for the place
where the dreamed scenes take place; we will study the effects of
dreams, their meaning and finally the way in which to prepare
ourselves to receive true dreams.
There is no necessity to go into the detail of all the complex
systems worked out by the various schools of esoterism on man's
constitution. Let us keep to the simplest views.
Beside his physical body which, by itself, is only inert matter,
three principles comprise the human compound :

 vitality, the id, magnetism, the double,

the mind, partly conscious intermediary through
the sensory or mental faculties, to a great extent
unconscious through all the other organs related
with the Invisible ; it is the seat of the self, of
the will, of the free will;
the soul, eternal uncreated spark, light of the
Word at present turned low, but which acquires
all its splendour at the time of our mystic rebirth.
During the day, it is the conscious mind which rules by means of the
cerebrospinal nervous energy ; during the night, that energy being
exhausted, consciousness rests while the accumulators are being
charged afresh through the cerebellum ; the unconscious mind, if we
can call it that, leaves the body, sometimes even subdivides itself;
and the acts that it carries out during those errands, its meeting,
the scenes to which it attends, are transmitted to the conscious only
if there remains in the body, and especially in the brain, enough
nervous energy to register them. So, we dream constantly, but we
seldom remember.
That mind, intermediary between the soul and the body, is not a
halo, an aura, a fluidic egg; it is a veritable organism, much more
complex and delicate than the body of flesh, and its many properties
have their seat in various locations. It possesses nutrition,
breathing functions ; transmission and perception organs ; an
intelligence, free will; and each one of these faculties corresponds
with one of the parts of the physical body. As the muscle increases
in proportion to the amount of work it is taxed with, the mind
develops in the same way by its own exercises : ambitions, anxieties,
volitive efforts, virtues, vices. Artificial esoteric practices
develop it also, but in a hasty and abnormal way. Of all the tasks of
the mind, only the struggle against egoism refines and purifies it.
Moreover, just as molecules of various kinds enter the corporeal
body through nutrition and breathing, in the same way, all sorts of
subordinate spirits enter, settle, leave, live and die in the mind.
These visits produce in the consciousness intuition, ideas, feelings
and discoveries ; they make possible the events of life, the
illnesses, the meetings ; finally, they participate in the production
of dreams.
** *
During sleep, the spirit wanders about. When it goes to a very
strange country, it feels estranged, since neither its own elements
nor its corporeal cells have any affinity with the things in that
region. No matter how the brain looks, learns, goes or comes, it can
bring nothing of these inquiries back to the consciousness, since its
molecules are incapable of registering messages which make them vibrate.
When the trip is short, on the contrary, the objects are more
familiar and the experience is registered.
It must be said that these excursions may very well happen during the
day; but then we do not realize it because the nervous energy is
utilized almost completely by the acts of consciousness, and also,
because our brain is not robust enough to bear a double tension, our
will not calm enough to resist the new desires to which this second
life would give birth.
The dream advantageously replaces all the inventions by which
esoteric science establishes intentional relationships between man
and the Invisible. It is a normal, healthy phenomenon within anyone's
reach; it does not require a special way of life. Moreover, Nature
prepares the best conditions for it; the environment is organized
with a view to our nightly education as it is organized for our
corporeal subsistence. During the night, the magneto- telluric
circulation changes, the atmosphere is freed from certain overactive
elements ; the moon replaces the yellow sun, different orders of
spirits come close to the earth ; the ground, the sea, the trees, the
animals emanate a special aura and exert a propitious influence to
the setting free of the mind.
All that can become the cause of a dream : angels, gods, demons, the
deceased, blueprints, images of what was, fluids circulating in the
inner spaces, spirits of the things, of the living, images of what
happens, at this time, and all that will happen to the end, in a
word, Life can come to reflect itself entirely in the translucid
mirror of the imagination.

But the most frequent factors of dreams are the blueprints of

personal destiny and the visits of members of the spiritual family.
Our central self is linked, as you know, with the heart of the
Universe, on the level of the Word ; there we are grouped in families.
Each of these groups, all the members of which are similar, even
bodily, and, as a consequence have identical tasks to perform,
follows the same road. So, for example, the elder of a family to
which I belong possesses, but in a more perfect form, the same
faculties I have; he encounters various images, but earlier than I
do ; it is possible that he has received the image of tuberculosis
thirty or fifty years ago and that I, I shall meet it only in ten
years' time. Viewed from Sirius that difference is insignificant;
but, if I had already been born when the head of my line was already
suffering from phthisis, I may have, in a dream state, felt some pain
in the lungs, as a warning against the ordeal still to come.
Thus we dream only for the things which have a delegation in us, a
physical or psychical cell of the same nature. For an image to affect
me, it must find in me a point to which it can cling; dream is that
contact. It is for that reason that the mere fact of being warned of
an ordeal decreases its intensity or increases our resistance; then
the myriads of small spirits whose work makes us live arouse,
preparing themselves defensively and looking everywhere for help.
So the body of man possesses the germs of all the happinesses, of
all the misfortunes and of all the prerogatives. Its dignity is thus
very high, its mission serious and its responsibilities heavy.
Dream, considered on the physical level, has three values : one of
prophecy, another form of teaching, the third of thaumaturgy.
It is prophetic when it is produced by the blueprint of a future
event. To what we have already said about blueprints, let us add that
our mind may either receive them or simply see them. In the first
case, there will be personal foreboding; in the second case, a
fortuitous indication which will interest the sleeper only from a
distance.
A dream can teach, supply information even of positive science,
reveal natural secrets, solve a mechanical difficulty, bring an
illumination. But a dream never informs us on the morale of somebody
before we have mastered ourselves enough to retain, in spite of
everything, a sense of indulgence, fairness and kindness. In effect,
treason and deceit get a hold on us only when we have deserved it by
our former conduct. To evade an ordeal is a miscalculation ; we will
have to submit to it sooner or later.
Sleep activity is sometimes transmitted on the physical plane. By
repeatedly controlling our nervous, passionate or mental impulses, by
submitting them to the Law of Christ, in the sphere of consciousness,
the volitive power reaches their secret roots, in the sphere of the
unconscious. We acquire autonomy in the middle of the most animated
dreams ; we can think, judge, act, as on the physical plane, with all
our presence of mind. Then the inner man becomes responsible, it is
true ; but the limits of his action spread in a particular way. And
as this psychical state is accessible only if our heart has entered
the spiritual universe : the Word, the acts of dream have their
repercussions on the physical, because of the power this penetration
confers. We receive reports from the angels, we direct them, we give
orders with the permission of Heaven; we can heal, renew luck, avoid
an accident. Such is the first school of theurgy.
The brain, the whole nervous system, the physical life are
progressively refined ; matter becomes less heavy ; and the day
comes when sleep is no longer indispensable for consciousness to
register spiritual activities. One ends up by being able to perceive
simultaneously the physical world and one of the invisible ones ;
one is then, as the Brahmins call it, a Dwidja, one born twice, a man
with a double consciousness. However, note that only the perfect
disciple of the Gospel perceives the central kingdom of the
Invisible, that where the Word Jesus actually lives.
Accomplishing Christian precepts is the only door to that mysterious
dwelling ; and the most profound humility is the only nourishment
which can sustain the organism undergoing this double tension ; no
fasting, no drug, no human discipline allows the eternal Light to
enter the being of the disciple and to regenerate him down to the
marrow of his bones.
Nevertheless, when urgent advice is necessary, Heaven arranges to
send it to us, even during our waking hours, even in the whirl of

business, anywhere. Such are certain phenomena of telepathy,

clairaudience, apparitions.
NOCTURNAL GHOSTS AND SUPERNATURAL VISIONS (continued)
How to interpret dreams, the dreams which come from the pure Spirit?
They are a help ; they must be understood in order to be able to use
them, if only by deference. Why, we may ask, does Heaven not give us
this information in a more intelligible form ? To make us work ; to
teach us a lesson that we do not know and to which we would be
indifferent if we were not inspired by curiosity; to bring us back to
Life, from which we turn away because of the proud tendency of the
mental. The language of dreams is the universal language, the
language of life. The simple people understand it, because they are
closer to reality, because they content themselves with living. Of
all the simple people, it is the mystic who best deciphers this
language and who, moreover, speaks it, because he lives the deepest
and most intense inner life.
The complicated beings, on the contrary, with an artificial culture,
entangled in systems, abstractions and metaphysical games, no longer
perceive Life, but only its mental reflection.
Therefore the science of dreams is intuitive, a science of the
heart, an art to speak the truth. To practice it is an excellent task
for the intelligence, for the imagination ; it makes us progress in
the knowledge of ourselves. For, if Hippocratic medicine carefully
noted the dreams of the sick, the life of sleep also lights up the
folds of the inner being and the images of the unconscious in the
most fortunate way.
Let us say at once that the night when we believe we have not
dreamed, the dreams we do not understand almost always contain a very
active force. We assimilate well only what is very close to us ; so
divine union is difficult, because we keep ourselves far away from
God ; so the disciple of Christ has nearly always only the deep
darkness of faith to conduct him.
To have a good judgment on divine dreams, we should first of all be
accustomed to the Truth. Nothing in us is pure, neither the heart,
nor the nerves, nor the principles of thinking; thus no perception
is absolutely exact. Moreover, the evil which emanates from us poisons
the secondary atmosphere around us and distorts the objects in it.
In the great majority of cases, the sleeper does not see accurately;
he does not hear very well the words of his spiritual visitors ; the
environments which separate the minds of men from the plane of Truth
are always refringent. And our senses, corporeal or spiritual,
provide us only approximate certitudes.
As a consequence, when interpreting dreams, we should guard against
superstitious fears and remember that Christ looks after us with the
most tender and most vigilant solicitude.
Secondly, the depth of sleep should be taken into consideration.
Just as, when we work, only a few parts of our being are at work
whereas the rest is distracted, so the body is never completely
asleep. Furthermore, the mind can split; one of its organs can go down
to the bowels of the earth, another one may go to China. The mind of
the physical body is only the body of the total mind; each viscera
has its own mind; the mind of an arm may get out on one side, the
mind of the head, on the other. All the meetings which occurred in
various places impress the brain, if it happens to have a receptive
cell; and, if these impressions are simultaneous, the dreams are
superposed on each other; the sleeper dreams a scene and, in that
scene, he dreams a second dream. I have seen up to ten or twelve
dreams interlocked in such a way. If we are endowed with a great
serenity, we will remember ; otherwise, everything will become
confused in an incoherent mixture. It is not easy to explain our own
dreams ; you can see how embarrassing the dreams of others may be.
Thirdly, the biological relations of the sleeper should be known; to
discern the affinities between each of the parts of himself with the
three kingdoms, with other men, with his country, his religion, his
planet. That condition is very hard to fulfill; but the majority of
men can, without it, acquire sufficient intuition for the ordinary
requirements ; in the exceptional case of a disciple, destined for a
special mission, there is always somebody more advanced beside him to
teach him.
There are two great categories of dreams : those which come from the
temperament and those which respond to the dominant preoccupation.
The inner man, in effect, receives the influence from the elements

and from the planets, from the Spiritus mundi, as the hermetists say;
and it will impress the temperament with a direction conforming to
his ideal : pursuit of wealth, or honors, or science, or passion.
If a painter dreams the same scene as a chemist, for example, the
meaning of the vision will be different ; to see a stream means
something to a politician and another to a housewife. Furthermore,
each person, because of his own personality, because of the central
quality of the self, is in communication with a different centre of
the Invisible. Therefore, a third factor to the diversity of
symbolism. It is the Bishop of Synesius who mentions this important
peculiarity, which forces everyone to build up his own personal
dictionary. But if we follow Christ, the part of Nature will be
reduced to a minimum, in our dreams as in our activities, whereas the
part of the supernatural will increase.
This comment is capital for us, who have devoted ourselves to the
study of the evangelical Light. Because we are looking for God
through our works and our individual temperaments, we escape from the
provinces of Nature. The more ardent, sincere, disinterested our
search is, the less the chains of matter, the astral wheels, the
satellites of the gods have a hold on us. The flame of our devotion
in the service of Jesus sets all our organisms free.
Therefore, during the night, it is no longer the inhabitants of an
elemental kingdom, of a planet, who come to visit us ; they are the
particular, invisible servants of the Word. The forces we receive no
longer stem from a created order : they come straight from the
living, central world of Light, of Truth, of Life.
In consequence, the interpretation of our dreams is special. It
stems from a primitive law, namely that the life of Matter is always
opposed to that of the Mind. One is selfishness, the struggle for
life, the worldly ; the other is love, sacrifice, the heavenly. So,
in the eyes of the disciple of the Gospel, any worldly fortune is a
divine misfortune, all corporeal suffering is a spiritual joy, and
reversely ; if we weep in our dreams, if we toil, if we are wounded,
they will be pleasures, smiles and success for the external personality.
The soldier of Heaven is taught directly by Truth, let me tell you
that once more. It is the Word Jesus who comforts him and teaches
him. For no seed rises without the earth in which it has been sowed
suffering in providing it with the required nourishment. Natural man
is the earth; the spark of the Word within us is the seed. For that
glimmer to become a flame, its envelope, the personality, must let
itself be consumed.
For us who are not trying to satisfy either the lusts of the body,
or the curiosity of intelligence, but only the holy instinct of the
divine encounter ; for us who are preoccupied only with the silent
trembling of mystical regeneration ; who endeavor to renounce to the
self ; who are feeding only one wish : Jesus and His kingdom, dreams
are endowed with gravity and depth, since they are the visits of the
friends of our Friend.
For the sincere disciples we wish to be, it is thus logical that,
for example, the dreams of songs, music, dances, foreshadow moral
sufferings ; the dreams of funerals, of deaths indicate a future
inner transformation, more or less complete ; base beings, repulsive
objects indicate material success ; the school, the church, the
convent, priests, monks, mean purifying ordeal, practical initiation.
To see Christ, if only in effigy, is a great suffering ; he who in
his dream converses with Christ, or receives something from Him,
money, a glass of water, can rejoice : he is about to make a great
step towards perfection, he is going to suffer one of the sufferings
Christ has endured. Simple actions, like sowing, climbing a hill,
coming down, going by car, by train, receiving rain, refer to the
daily course of life and are self-explanatory. The motorcar indicates
a free promotion. Black animals or men are always dangerous, as well
as giants or monsters. To the true disciple, the dog is a friend, the
horse a messenger, the lion a protector.
If the disciple succeeded, as I told you earlier, in remaining in
full possession of his faculties during sleep, he could collaborate
in one of the great mystic works, that of the Gardener or that of the
Soldier. Allow me to say a few words on these two important
functions, that a few amongst you may one day be called upon to fulfill.
** *
The great battle that has gone on since the beginning of the world
between the Light and Darkness has the Father for its referee. The
commander of the second one is Satan. They both hold their
intelligence, their power, their soldiers from the Father ; their

strength is equal ; but Christ has something more than the Opponent,
something very difficult to conceive ; that advantage could be called
: wisdom, if we understand the full meaning of the word. The weapon
of Heaven is gentleness ; Its soldiers give everything they possess :
money, friendship, science, even their life. The weapon of Hell is
anger ; its soldiers wound, steal and kill.
That mystic battle is known by all traditions.
The other aspect of the cosmic drama is agriculture. Wherever the
soldiers of Darkness have finished destroying, and in all the places
that the soldiers of Heaven have watered with their tears and their
blood, the ploughmen of the great Sower come. Their work is
mysterious ; they prepare the ultimate achievement ; John the Baptist
is their commander. By their cares, the Kingdom of God grows
imperceptibly, the deserts become fertile ; the thorn- bushes become
covered with flowers and fruit ; the barely visible trails in the
jungle become straight and level roads. In such a way that, when
peace finally comes, the Peaceful will be able to show Himself in the
full sun, He who kept hidden for countless centuries when He was the
courage of all His soldiers and the perseverance of all His gardeners.
These two armies, these two peoples have commanders. We have said
who their kings are ; each one of them is represented on each planet
: Satan by the Prince of this world, Jesus by the Lord of this
world. The Prince centralizes all the evil which is being committed
down here ; the Lord reaps all the prayers and all the good that are
being done. A few men, the most deserving and the humblest, receive
the visit of that Lord, general amongst the soldiers, master amongst
the gardeners, friend of God and so united with Christ that he takes
on the likeness of Him sometimes even bodily (*).
For the Lord of this world, and also the Prince, take on, when they
deem it useful, a physical body ; then they go to and fro in life, as
one of us, and many come in contact with them without recognizing
them. Fortunate is he who discovers the identity of the Lord under
the appearance he has taken. The majority of christic disciples come
near him only in spirit : then he presents himself under a familiar
shape, but with attributes no other creature would be able to have ;
Heaven would not allow it. He takes on the face of Christ in
excessively rare cases only ; the immense majority of Christ's
appearances to people in a state of wakefulness, sleep, or ecstasy,
are not true ; it is only a servant who took the cloak of his Master.
All this will probably not be of immediate use to you. Amongst the
hundreds who will have heard me, I will maybe have made myself
understood by only one ; only one maybe will start the veritable
work, the unique necessary ; it is for that person that I give those
details and, even if I had to talk for ten years in a vacuum, I
would do it with pleasure if, the eleventh year, I encountered a
heart ready for action.
(*) Something similar can be found in Moslem mysticism.
I will finish this long incursion in the secret provinces of mysticism.
The disciple, to benefit from these heavenly collaborations, must be
simple and one ; he must dwell in the kingdom of Peace. The
phenomenon of dream does not strike him as something exceptional; in
his eyes, it is one of the modes of Life ; it is the same thing as
the previous day ; it is its counterpart, its complement, its
continuation. He interprets it as he interprets material
circumstances, because for him the whole universe is only the
expression of divine power and divine will. He does not see the
divergences, but the concordances ; not the apparent similarities,
but the profound identities. Much better than the occultist, he knows
that everything corresponds ; that each molecule of his body has
some affinity with a certain event, a certain spirit, a certain
science, a certain planet, a certain temptation, a certain virtue.
He knows that certain invisible images may enter the mental through
many doors : through the spirit of the finger, of the bones as well as
the spirit of the brain. When, during the night, he fights the dark
opponents, he is not surprised the next morning by the aches and the
pains he physically feels ; if a secret Friend comforts him with a
drink or a manna, he is not surprised not to feel hungry or thirsty,
for perhaps several days.
So you can see that there is an enormous difference between natural,
superficial visions, which cross our nights and the mystic activities
that occupy a select few. How can we acquire these prerogatives known
in theology under the name of visions, ecstasies, raptures, how can
we deserve them?

We must not try to acquire them, since the true Christian relies on
his Master for everything ; we cannot deserve them since everything
that comes from Heaven is free, and not one of our efforts can pay
for the gifts of God. All that is possible is to put ourselves in the
least unfavorable conditions to receive that help.
** *
Sleep is a phenomenon important enough to be worthy of some
preparations. It is the time of the highest level of interior
activity. The mind of the pious man can then rise to the highest
regions which it is possible to reach ; it redescends in waking up ;
but, without preparation, the spirit will not rise to the limit of
its ascensional strength.
First, how to sleep ?
It is our duty to give our body the required time of rest. Sleep
before midnight is the best. The bed must be turned with the head
towards the north or the east. The general color of the room, the
drapes, the blankets, provides more peace if blue or mauve are
dominant, or more strength if it is imperial yellow. It is
preferable that the windows be open and the curtains drawn. Not to
sleep with a light directed on to the head. A frugal supper, great
cleanliness before going to bed, that is for the material side.
As for the spiritual, there are two preparations ; one general :
good conduct according to the Gospel ; the other immediate : prayer
to God only. The Lord's Prayer is sufficient, if we wish to modify
its fourth request, by saying : Give us tonight our daily bread.
Then the Father, Lord of all beings, even those whose approach is
redoubtable, hears us.
He sends us His mercy by sparing us the spiritual contamination which
our daily sins attract. He sends us his protection by averting the
possible projects of interfering beings from the invisible. His mercy
and His help are the real angels which ensure the integrity of our
vital spirit and the contact with the Light of our psychical spirit.
The daily bread includes all possible requests, since everything
we can receive spiritually feeds one of our invisible bodies. But,
for our dreams to be the healthier, the more useful, the more
fruitful, do not ask for them to be extraordinary, or related to
mysterious things. Ask to be enlightened on your sins of the day, on
your task for the next day, to be shown the best methods to bring
them to a happy end. That is practical wisdom, since we are here only
to accomplish our daily task.
Surely, you must have noticed, if you have carried out searches
which have led you nowhere, if you have spent nights trying to find
the solution to a problem or the way to sidestep an obstacle, and if,
having found nothing, you have confessed to yourselves, or to God,
your ignorance and your powerlessness, that then the difficulty has
solved itself, in a few drays, in a few hours even. Your anxieties
were a prayer, a living prayer, thus a powerful prayer. Heaven has
answered it as soon as you put yourself in the proper calm state of
mind.
In effect, we are tyrants ; our faculties, our life must at all cost
function according to the opinions we have built up for ourselves.
It often happens that they cannot conform to these requirements ; no
more than a locomotive could run on a road. Some room must be left
to our psychic organs. Do not wish at all cost to have dreams ;
tyrannize nothing in you. Ask Heaven ; never use drugs, talismans,
magic rites to cause revealing dreams.
We are not masters of ourselves when we are awake, even less during
sleep ; therefore, we need help against the possible enemies, a
direction, a shield. Do not try, under the commendable pretext of
helping others, to go out in your astral body ; do not strain your
will towards those tasks. Tell our Friend : Take me if I can be
useful for something ; if not, leave me in my ignorance and in my
torpor.
When, during the night, some spirit appears to us, we should welcome
it with that cordiality that stems from confidence in God ; but that
assurance, already rare on the physical plane, is very hard to keep
when asleep. Make sure and tell your visitor that you did not call
him, ask him to acknowledge Jesus, incarnate Son of God ; and follow
his advice, use his information only after having carefully examined
it. For extreme care must be taken in our relations with the Beyond ;
there are even more usurpers and simulators there than there are
here. Very often the labourers of Darkness are beautiful and know how

to seduce. Christ did not fear to recommend us, with the simplicity
of the dove, the prudence of the snake. And that advice itself of
prudence forbids me to give you practical examples : it would mean to
open an issue to certain enemies lying in ambush.
If we wish to remember our dreams, the request must be made to
Heaven before going to sleep : then, as soon as the dream is over, we
will be woken up for the few seconds which are required to take note
of it in two or three words. Little by little, memory will acquire
the habit. But if we are negligent, the angel will no longer wake us
up. It is important to go to sleep in the most perfect serenity ;
that temporary oblivion of anguish, covetousness, remorse, suffering,
can only be obtained by prayer. To sleep well, to remember dreams and
to understand them, calm is necessary. For, at the moment when we
have dreams, do they not seem very natural and very logical ? That
means that we understand them.
In this way, we will gradually acquire the habit of recognizing
whether the dream is personal or allegoric, whether it is related to
science, religion or the fatherland ; whether it has a prophetic or
present value ; whether it concerns a friend, the past or the future
; whether it is clairvoyance, telepathy, a vision.
*
**
Because I have spoken at such length on a subject which does not
appear to be very serious, do not infer from it that I consider it
essential. Christ likes to encourage us ; whether He gives us hope by
means of a human affection, a success, or a dream, He is master of
His choice. To consider dreams as nonsense or to be too engrossed in
them are two mistakes. They must be received with attention and
gratefulness as welcome lessons, and at the same time we must tell
ourselves that our vices and our faults prevent us from perfectly
understanding those explanations. When we do our best to carry out
the Gospel, we may hope for one or two of our dreams each month to be
truthful, sent from the eternal Kingdom. It is only a small success,
but it is a success. We are still very weak ; Heaven cannot offer us
too rich a food, we could not assimilate it. It arranges small
experiments, proportioned to our weakness, small tasks which do not
tire our inconstancy. Everything is admirable to the gaze of the
pious disciple ; every scene is eloquent to him since it speaks of
God. Let me admire the processions of dreams ; they lead us towards a
more intelligent and deeper adoration.
THE BLESSINGS OF DEATH
Our friend Lazarus sleeps ; but I go that I may awake him out of
sleep.
(Sr. john xi, 11)
If, in fact, we are spiritualists, if our acts conform with our
beliefs, the Queen of terrors loses in our eyes her prestige of fear
and her halo of mystery. She becomes deliverance, the step forward,
the entrance in to a new world. Then we can see the arrival of the
mower with complete serenity ; we welcome with a smile its inevitable
visit; for it is from God that it holds its power and its strength
is one of the forms of the force of the Word. The fear men feel when
death draws near, if no rapture makes them forget themselves, is
entirely physical and has its origin in the inertia of matter. Old
people suffer more than the young, because the corporeal spirits,
used to this world, this light, this atmosphere, to familiar objects,
are frightened of losing this familiar environment, they fear the
unknown of which they have the foreboding, and desperately cling to
the obscure shell which is their home. But in general the self
maintains more calm, and the last contractions which painfully affect
onlookers are for the most part, completely physical automatisms.
The phenomena of death are so to speak unknown. Such an assertion
will no doubt seem excessive to seekers like you, Gentlemen, who are
familiar with the teachings of the religions and the mysteries of
initiations. This is what I mean. The place where the departure of
the souls takes place is hidden ; the air of the land of the dead is
unhealthy to the living. Some tenacious experimenters may well have
been able to get near it and perceive something through a crack in
the wall, while the guards had their backs turned ; but what they
have seen is incomplete ; they have been able to grasp only
isolated details, a silhouette in the crowd, a syllable among a
thousand words. In spite of this, the partial, incomplete and
unimportant piece of information has been adequate for them to
construct one of those admirable systems, from which so many people

have drawn the courage to die, the harder- won even courage to live,
and which we still study nowadays with respectful amazement.
I do not wish to make you contemptuous towards these old rishis,
these patriarchs, these hierophants whose great work imposes respect
; only understand that the accurate and complete description of death
is written nowhere. It has been said that the test of the ancient
mysteries consisted of the conscious passage of the neophyte through
the dark Gates ; yes, the initiate knows death as we know a city by
seeing a photograph. Only he who has entered the kingdom of shadows
through the door can speak of what happens there ; and only he, who
has received the key of life, can enter legitimately; this is the
free man.
Tonight, you will thus hear only elementary notions, although I
believe them to be accurate. On the other hand, I do not ask you to
accept them without verifying them, on the contrary ; and that is
possible, as everything can be confirmed to whoever asks Christ to
teach him directly.
** *
There are various kinds of death, as there are countless forms of
life and they succeed each other, replace each other, and they
mutually transform each other. As for men, we can distinguish between
inner, spiritual, psychic death, and outer, physiological death. The
nights of catholic mysticism are deaths ; an initiation, a baptism
involve a preliminary death, since they are rebirths. But, as for
bodily death, it consists only in the departure of the spirit.
So, some individuals come and go, exercise their trade in a word
they seem to live and their spirit has already left their body a
long time ago ; it is the intelligent life of matter which continues
to make the machine run. And when physical death occurs, when the
bodily spirit also leaves, only their parents and friends will be
affected ; their self will hardly realize it.
Other less extraordinary cases occur where the spirit of a living
man is partially exteriorised in the Invisible in search of a being
he wants to contact. This journey, which may occur years before
death, has no other effects than a physical and mental weakness more
obvious than in the preceding case, because the vegetative nervous
system has not been able to recover its autonomy as long as the
spirit is only partially absent. In effect, it is especially the
spirit which tires the envelopes, physical and other, which it uses
to act; often we see great corporeal strength in beings who have
little intelligence or who are devoid of reason.
When the time of departure comes near, the angel of death Azrael,
he used to be called by the Kabbalists, Yama, the Brahmins say
comes down to the deathbed. In fact, he does not come himself; the
taciturn messenger appears only to the rare men who are reckless
enough to face the diamond dazzle of his never closing eyes, to the
beings whose travels revolutionize the world, to the mysterious
strangers whose gaze has rested on the half-glimpsed splendors of
eternal Light. In general, it is a subordinate spirit who goes to the
bedside of a dying man. Then two other spirits present themselves,
who note the good and bad he did in thought, in speech, in action ;
finally come all the creatures to whom that man has been good or bad
; they are all there, from the pebble to the god, the blades of
grass, the animals, the living and the dead, the invisible, all
ready to give evidence or to claim justice.
That is why the agony of the wicked is so painful. The mind is
bewildered, mainly on the corporeal level it runs in panic to all the
corners of the body, looking for help ; and, unfortunately, the love
of those who remain is too personal, too futile in most cases, to
offer him the comfort he needs. The dying man can be helped only by
a less affected and higher force; in general, he finds it in the help
of religion.
One of the remarkable effects of religious ceremonies is precisely
to bridge a certain corner of the visible and a certain circle of the
invisible. All the religions prescribe funereal rites ; and, if we
had the time to analyze those numerous codes, we would soon
accumulate a pile of very curious documents. But how could we separate
the true from the false ?
Instead of studying the habits of peoples different from us by time,
distance, mentality and the nature of their evolution, used to
efforts which the dissimilarity of environments would make impossible
for us, let us look at what is within reach, at what has been
combined for us, for our countries, for our centuries and by men of

our race. I would like to remind you of the rites of the Sacrament of
Extreme-Unction, last try to extract its sense and see its effects on
the poor, bewildered spirit rejecting the prison of that body to
which it had finally grown so accustomed.
** *
When he comes in, the priest calls for peace on the house and its
inhabitants ; then he gives the sick man the crucifix to kiss and
recites the known formula of mundification : Asperges me, Domine,
etc. If possible, he obtains his confession and addresses him a few
words of exhortation. The initiatic verse : The Lord be with you,
and with your spirit opens a long supplication to Jesus-Christ for
happiness, joy, health, help from the angels, to keep the demons at
bay, and sanctification. Then another formula ask the Father to send
protecting angels. Then the seven psalms of penitence are recited,
whose name clearly indicates their use, and the corresponding
litanies. Then, the priest crossing himself three times and by laying
his hands on the sick man drives away the diabolical forces, in the
name of the Trinity and with the help of the saints. He dips his
thumb in the holy oil and anoints in the form of the cross the eyes,
the ears, the nose, the mouth, the hands, the feet, the kidneys,
while calling for the Lord's mercy on the function of every one of
these parts of the body. Then comes the Eucharist, six responses for
divine help and three Oremus, requesting inner and outer health.
During the death agony, if the dying man cannot speak, the priest
substitutes himself for him and prays aloud in his name.
These prayers include, among other formulas, special litanies which
invoke the help of Christ by the analogous circumstances of His life
: His passion, His death, His grave, His resurrection, His ascension.
Then a commandment given to the soul of the sick man in the name of
the divine persons, of the angels and the saints, to leave this
world for the place of Peace ; a request for the clemency of the
Father, four other orations repeating this request and based on the
analogous facts of sacred History and the history of the Church ;
then chapters XVII et XVIII of John are recited ; followed by psalms
and three more objurgations to Christ by the merits of His agony.
When death comes close, the priest invokes aloud, near the ear of
the dying man, Jesus and Mary, begging them to receive that spirit,
to give it repose, to be merciful to it.
You can see that, the administration of the last sacrament involves
three phases. A preparatory one, during which the environment and the
subject are purified ; a second one which is evocatory, if I dare say
so, during which the priest calls for Jesus, the angels and the
saints ; the bridge is laid from above to below. Thirdly comes the
sacrament proper which consists of a superior magnetization. At last,
the priest turns to God, recapitulates and unites his requests, then
gives his thanks, his gratitude and his confidence.
A man needs a certain strength : this is the sick man ; another man
possesses the key to that treasure : this is the priest. The first
remains passive ; all he does is to put himself by his confession and
repentance in the moral attitude of receptivity. The second one helps
him to adopt this attitude and casts a line for the transmission of
the required force : prayer; he fastens him to the very place where
it is born, that is to say Jesus ; to stretch it he enrolls the help
of benevolent intermediaries, the angels and the saints ; he attaches
it to the same place from where it takes its beginnings to the
negative pole, the sick man : the force passes and the operator makes
the patient absorb it. Then he thanks the helpers, sends them back
and puts everything back into order, in the hands of God.
The procedure by which the Church helps those in agony is summarized
as follows : a man trained to live in the spirit, through
contemplation, in the invisible wake of Jesus that is the priest
tries by means of prayer to raise the struggling sick man and to put
his bewildered mind in this same condition. Therefore he uses the
living and luminous image that each one of Jesus' acts has left in
the secondary atmosphere ; he applies the corporeal sufferings of
the Saviour to the corporeal sufferings of the sick man, Jesus'
anxiety to the sick man's anxiety, the psychurgic power of a certain
ancient prophet to the bewilderment of the sick man ; he evokes the
triumphs of Jesus : resurrection, ascension, in order that the dying
man might experience some comfort from their invisible presence.
So the Church acknowledges the very ancient theory of a flexible,
vibrant centre where the images of all past events would be kept. In
effect, the extent to which a protagonist of a certain act incarnates
Truth in that act, Life comes down to animate it, makes his physical

existence fruitful and perpetuates his reflection in that

imagination of the earth where the clairvoyants can find it again
centuries later. When the author of that act is perfect and powerful
like Jesus, the reflections multiply and possess a particular energy.
In such a way that men who tend towards that model recover those
images more quickly and benefit from them more profoundly.
That is, in broad lines, the mystery of the virtue of the
sacraments. Their action is proportional to the depth with which the
faithful and the priest enter the occult of the Christie act which is
their root. The sacramental form always contains two forces : one
central, which comes from Jesus, entirely spiritual but assimilable
according to the practical faith of the priest and the recipient ;
the other one exterior, fluidic, which is only the sum of the
vibrations accumulated by all those who have accomplished the same
gestures and pronounced the same words. For the first of these
virtues to penetrate the substance of the soul and to heal up to and
including the body, the sanctity of the pontiff, and the humble,
ardent wish of the devout are required. But let us return to our
subject.
***
THE BLESSINGS OF DEATH (continued)
To understand what happens at the time of death, let us remember
that in man some forces come from the earth, others come from the
cosmos, others still come directly from God. Death is only the
repossession by the earth's soul of what it had lent to us at birth.
If we give back readily, we do not suffer. If we refuse, there is
inevitable anguish, wounds and regrets until the defunct understands
the wisdom of trusting resignation. Good people suffer very little;
those who, on the contrary, have idolized themselves and their
qualities, experience the void of their glory. The body, the double,
the feelings, the mental functions, the memory, the professional
skill, the particular tastes, all that is taken back by the earthly
gods for a purification, a restoration and a storage, in a special
place, with a view to later use, either for the man to whom it had
already been trusted, or for someone belonging to the same spiritual
family.
As for the physical body, inhumation is preferable to cremation.
Here is why : each human individuality, since it must one day rule a
part of Nature, receives, among other tasks, a determined portion of
terrestrial matter to develop, by making it familiar with the human
way of life. An atom of carbon, for example, works as a mineral, then
as a vegetable, then as an animal, according to the various qualities
of earthly life in each one of the three reigns. It will terminate
its cycle by entering a human individuality, either through food,
breathing or any other functional door, or by hyperphysical ways.
A complete system of canals and lines is established to bring
everyone of us, from all the corners of the world, the material
particles which are destined to us. So, when I enter the baker's
shop, that shop keeper gives me, among all his loaves of bread, that
particular loaf whose raw material was chosen for me, among all the
wheat fields and among all the ears of wheat. The same thing applies
to anything that is incorporated in my body.
At birth, every man receives a part of the total mass of earthly
substance that is attributed to him from the start and which must
return to the earth, refined by the work itself of human vitality.
The square of soil that will receive the corpse is also determined
before we are born. The motives that determine the place of death,
the cemetery and the place of the tomb are only semblances. So we see
emigrants, who have spent their entire life abroad, return to their
native county, just for their body to rest there where the occult
repartition of matter requires it to rest.
Furthermore, every man is magnetically linked with minerals, plants
and animals. They are born together and they die together ; we must
not disperse what God has joined. Thus, if we burn a corpse, besides
the fact that the liberation of the psychic elements is brutal, we
cause to suffer and panic the double, an enormous quantity of
spiritual particles receive a violent death and those of the earth,
where the inhumation should have taken place, await in vain the task
they were hoping for and are deprived of a legitimate evolution and a
reward : the light itself of human vitality, that the cells of the
corpse should give them. There is fraud, hindrance to the natural
activity and discomfort in a small corner of the physical plane.
Embalming should also be avoided for opposite reasons. It delays
evolution, it immobilizes the double ; it prevents the normal play of
the souls' return. If my time were not measured, I would have very

curious stories to tell you apropos the Egyptian mummies.

Some measures could be taken as to the inhumation itself, concerning
the making of the coffin, the building of the sepulchre. But all this
is foreseen by administrative rules ; and, as there are unfair laws
only in appearance, our first duty is to submit ourselves, even if we
have to suffer from it.
It is good to close the eyes of the deceased ; that separates him
from this world ; perhaps, at the moment of his last breath, he
perceived a scene
that no indiscreet person must intercept in the depth of his
henceforward motionless pupils.
The spirits we have talked about accompany the convoy ; other beings
also, invisible roamers and defenders ; the latter are often dogs ;
the barbarians, who killed on the tomb of the chief his familiar
animals, foresaw this ; this is what the priests of Egypt and India
had perfectly seen. More than we think, the dog is the friend of man.
The double hovers around the coffin and looks avidly for the fluidic
emanations of the incensing, the aspersions, the sacerdotal gestures
and the ritual words. It is always useful to celebrate a religious
service, at least to say some prayer over the corpse. The study of
the Catholic ritual for funerals is extremely instructive.
When inhumation is accomplished, the double remains beside the tomb
and stands watch, unless a powerful interest calls it somewhere else.
So it is that the phantoms of victims haunt the place where they
have lost their lives, where the miser keeps his treasure, and the
inventor sometimes his formulas. But such manifestations, especially
when they take on a character of fright or confusion, mostly come
from beings who have not acted well, who believed only in matter, or
who had not learned resignation. And their anxieties in the Beyond
begin their purification. If you have only skimmed through a
collection of psychic facts, you know that these phenomena are
frequent. I could tell you about a great number that I have witnessed
; I shall talk about a single one only, which will show you how the
double sometimes remains attached to matter for centuries.
It is about a searcher of treasures that I knew long ago and who
lived in La Plata. He operated through magic and with the help of a
female somnambulist. He learned of the existence of underground
tunnels beneath an abandoned religious establishment and he sent his
somnambulist to discover it. She drew him a plan of these cellars and
claimed that in one of them was a treasure that had been there since
the end of the XVIIth century. Our man prepared everything and, on a
certain night, went with his clairvoyant into those ruins. He found
the entrance to the underground, lit up his lantern and entered the
passages guided by his sleeping somnambulist. At a certain moment,
she cried out with fright ; in front of her a priest, she said,
belonging to a certain order recognizable by the particular form of
his headgear, threatened her. The magnetizer ordered her to go ahead
notwithstanding ; the poor woman took a few steps falteringly and,
suddenly, she collapsed with a great cry : He killed me . And she
had died at once. You can imagine the return of our magician, in the
dark, two leagues from the city, and with a dead body to cope with.
He never again undertook to discover a treasure.
In the great majority of deaths, the spirit leaves after a few days.
Just after the last breath, in effect, judgment takes place. As I
have told you earlier, many invisible helpers crowd around the bed.
Two of these spirits lead the spirit of the deceased for three days
into all the places where he has lived and bring him face to face with
the creatures he has been in contact with and with all those he
would have known had he always done his duty. This journey ends
before the court where the Judge, our Jesus, sits. Often He is there
alone ; sometimes he has beside Him the Lord of the earth and the
Virgin Mary. Before these very pure presences, but which veil their
brightness according to the weakness of the eyes which contemplate
them, the disincarnate spirit sees its faults as in a mirror ; it
confesses spontaneously ; all the lies come to daylight and the
hidden crimes are discovered. Often remorse and repentance are such
that the spirit asks itself for expiation.
Moreover, there are a prosecutor, the bad angel and a defender, the
guardian angel and, with him, the Virgin, who throws into the balance
her powerful intercession. In any case, the verdict is always made
lighter. Mercy impinges on Justice.
It is the whole spirit that undergoes that judgment : the
unconscious and the conscious, the fluids, the mental and psychism ;
because every one of these compounding entities possesses free will.

After the verdict, they return respectively to the earthly region

whence they have been drawn.
Memory and intelligence do not follow the self ; they remain here ;
it is thus impossible to remember previous incarnations, and
paramnesias come neither from the brain, nor from the intellect, but
from the spirit.
The latter goes to the place where resides the ideal it has adored by
its acts, its anxieties, its desires. The spirit of the painter goes
to a planet of light ; the spirit of the musician to a planet of
harmony ; that of the liar to a place where everything is deception.
Each paradise, each hell, described by the various religions,
objectively exists. The spirit of the old Scandinavian warrior rose
to a real Walhalla ; the spirit of a fervent Catholic rests in an
atmosphere of gentleness, enthusiasm and gratitude ; the spirit of
the false adept is enchained in a motionless and empty space. In a
word, everyone experiences the realization of his dearest hopes.
Therefore it is true that, if we have shown ourselves as being good
sons, good husbands, good parents, good friends, on the other side we
will meet our parents, our beloved, our friends, even those we have
lost sight of a long time ago. But, if we wish to avoid disillusions
or surprises on the other side, we should not forget that, in our
earthly sympathies and antipathies, the forces of the flesh and the
blood enter for a great deal and that, their influence ending with
death, a beloved being may soon become indifferent or a likeable
enemy. Sometimes also, when our feelings are pure, separation exalts
them, sublimates them, and takes them as far as the immortal light
of true love, that whose splendour is increased by each sacrifice.
THE BLESSINGS OF DEATH (continued)
Everything is balanced in the cosmos. The deaths and the births are
equal ; the spirit of the one who disappears from the earth finds
itself, so to say, animating another body at once on another planet.
There everything holds itself ready to receive it ; parents wait for
it, and friends, and guides, as when it was born down here.
While waiting for the final resurrection in the Kingdom of God,
death brings us an immediate resurrection. We neither have to take
care of anything nor have we anything to fear : all the details of
these journeys are foreseen and regulated with the most meticulous
solicitude. The only concern of the Father is to supply us with all
the means to live, to learn and to work.
The period of unrest ends as soon as the soul detaches itself from
its earthly idols and becomes resigned ; then it enters the peaceful
enjoyment of its Ideal. However, two categories of beings do not know
rest on the other side. They are, first of all, the wicked and those
who never wanted to work on earth. Then come the soldiers of Heaven.
These, in effect, neither work to perfect themselves nor to merit
Heaven. They are sure to see God one day. It is indifferent to them
whether they become rich, famous, powerful ; on the physical or on
the moral plane ; it is the will of the Father they are interested
in. They work only for the others, never for themselves ; what they
are looking for is to offer veritable joy to others. They forget
themselves ; they do not think of their weariness and, if they obtain
a reward, they do not keep it, giving their merits to their less
advanced brothers.
But ordinary men, they rest, although not for very long. It is very
seldom that the interval between two earthly incarnations reaches one
thousand years ; the more the race to which we belong comes near its
end and the more the individual himself is evolved, the more
frequently incarnations happen. There even exists here a man who does
nothing else but passes from a used body to a new one ; his spirit
never has the time to reach the land of the dead. The Jewish legend
of Elijah, the Christian legend of John the Evangelist, the Moslem
legend of El Khadir, come from an intuition of this fact. That man,
a veritable Ahasverus of the Invisible, is the small, imperceptible
grain which
prepares the distant future where our planet will enter the joy of
the Lord.
It is on earth that we work most fruitfully ; to reach old age thus
is a favor. In no case have we the right to kill ourselves ; suicide
is a great error. The spirit on the other side undergoes all the
sufferings from which it wished to escape and it must carry out, in
addition, supplementary tasks to repair all the disorders its
untimely act has initiated around it. However, do not blame those who
commit suicide ; nobody knows the real motives of an act ; and,
sometimes, suicide is, so to say, fatal.

What must our behaviour be towards the souls of the dead ? In a

general way, we do not have to concern ourselves with them ; we have
no obligations towards them. We are not forbidden to think of them,
to go on loving them, regretting them ; but we must not make them
return, either by magic or by the simpler means of spiritism. If we
are good, if they have been good, they will return by themselves ;
or rather they do not leave us.
In all the patriarchal families, the ancestors are present around
the hearth ; they help their descendants and pray for them, if they
knew how to pray when they were on earth. Anyway, ancestors, parents
and children are a single, compact group ; if they separate in body,
they remain together in spirit, on the condition that they all
practice virtue.
Good unites, resembles, harmonizes always. Evil, even when it is the
same kind of evil that several beings commit, always disunites and
disperses. The psychic manifestations called forth, when they are
produced neither by larvae nor by the spirits of animals, are the
doings of the double, the astral of the deceased ; almost never does
the immortal soul participate in it.
Thus, we are in the hand of God ; He disposes of us as He wishes,
but always for our betterment. He allows no god to deprive anyone.
The Father watches over all of us ; when a beloved being leaves us,
new sympathies surround him ; he has guides, he has help ; and
wherever his just destiny wakes him, it is for perfecting him.
Therefore, fight against revolt and despair. Our moanings tie our
dead to the earth. Let them go ; they will return ; often they even
return in a material way ; for, if the great grandmother smiles with
such profound affection on her great grandson, it is because their
spirits meet and remember the years that have gone, when perhaps
they were toiling together and were happy together. But let us respect
the veil that the divine Goodness has fortunately cast on the mystery
of the lives.
Spiritism, for him who trusts God, therefore is at least useless.
Anyway, the spirits do not know more than we do about the secrets of
the universe ; they may very well make themselves heard by us
spontaneously in case of emergency. Let us obey the word of Christ :
Let the dead bury the dead. They have angels to take care of them,
there where they live, just as they had when they were dwelling on
earth. As for hell, no being remains there forever ; its prince
himself one day will become repentant. And if we care to better the
destiny of our deceased, the only efficient and normal procedure is
to devote ourselves with more fervor to the practice of virtue. From
the heart of the disciple, Light shines on all the beings he is
related to. We form families, and the members of each family remain
together, in spirit, on the condition that they unite through their
love for the same Master. And that love, is the only one that nothing
soils and on which we can base our surest hopes. Very few men know
it ; but, to believe those privileged, no enchantment comes anywhere
near its supernatural happiness.
Thus, death is gentle to him who loves God above everything else. Far
from seeking, in the crypts of esoterism, elixirs and formulas to
prolong his life, he no more wishes the visit of him whom only Christ
knows how to defeat. His joy is not to live here or elsewhere, it is
to accomplish the will of his Master. If you knew what beatitude is
provided for us by the least word, the simple presence of the Friend,
all the deserts would lose their horror and all the hells their
desolation. But Jesus dwells in our heart, preferably to any other
place, unless we oppose his visit.
What splendid rewards will be ours later on ! And with what
sweetness does Heaven not reduce the tasks of Its soldiers ! For them
death casts away its terror; angels come to their bedside, they guard
them and drive away what is hostile from their bodies, they wrap
them in veils, they cover them with their wings, they carry them in
their arms, above the abysses, across whirlwinds, and they put them
down, sleeping with a light sleep, on the steps of a throne where
sits Him whom they love. No, in truth, the soldier can fear nothing
from whatever is stirring between the boundaries of creation. But I
would not like you to set yourselves to work in the hope of a reward
; it is towards the sole ineffable joy of the Spirit that I wish you
to walk.
He who masters his passions and who keeps those fiery horses in the
path of good receives as a reward to become their real master. Who
has vanquished demons, Heaven then gives them to him as servants,
when they have improved by his cares. But if we work for any
advantage, we are dealing with selfishness and not with Love.

We must become perfect through simple obedience, to give joy to the

Friend. That is when Heaven overwhelms us with goodness ; but, above
all, He makes us aware of Him. He pours us the pure liquor of eternal
life. He sets us ablaze with an ever-increasing ardour. These mystic
notions are not philosophical concepts ; they are realities, active
substances, penetrating balms. If the Word is Life, and we possess It
in us, our sole task is to make that precious seed grow, to cultivate
around it countless sparks of any order which continually flow from
the heart of the Universe. Death will appear to us for what it is : a
phantom ; and only the possibility of a decrease of the Light in us
will produce those salutary fears thanks to which we do not stop
rising towards the summit of the Immutable.
THE MASTERS OF POWER AND THE SHEPHERD'S DOG
You call me Master and Lord and you say well for so I am.
(john xiii, 13)
Man needs a guide ; the auxiliaries Nature gives him, the signpost
it puts at intervals along his road the guardian angels that Heaven
delegates to maintain that sacred Fire of which every one of us
possesses a spark, all these collaborators are not adequate to soothe
our anxieties, because they keep to the other side of the veil. Our
parents, our teachers, our superiors are not always adequate either,
because we often feel that they are men as we are ; they do not bear
on their forehead the sign of Truth ; the light of their eyes, the
power of their words, the goodness of their acts do not always stem
from an immutable certainty of the divine realities. We wish, at
least those among us who raise yearning eyes towards the house of the
Father, we wish for a more tangible presence, a strong arm that lifts
us, a voice that moves us, finally a smile that reopens in the depth
of our dry eyes the spring of holy tears, precious tears, fecund
tears of absolute Love.
No matter how unworthy we are of that grace, God grants it to us as
soon as our mind is old enough not to run the redoubtable risk of
ingratitude, as soon as we have accomplished the minimum of the
necessary efforts to justify the precious visit of a messenger of the
Spirit.
Let us place ourselves, as usual, at the viewpoint of perfection.
Then we can see, among those whom men call spiritual masters, two
categories : the false and the true. They all go beyond the general
level ; but the first ones are merely travellers on the road ; some of
them are famous heads of schools, founders of certain religious forms
a few thaumaturgists, a few theoreticians ; some of them have
beguiled the suffrages of a credulous public, as a few occultist
writers in the past centuries ; some of them are usurpers, who have
propagated evil by parodying the gestures of Light.
Others, among these athletes of intelligence and willpower, have
preferred to remain incognito. Such are the shelters, the poles
, the summits of contemplative Islam ; such are those secret
chiefs of Brahmanic esoterism who show the crowds of India, who had
come to Benares, only the spark of fabrics made of precious stones
with which they veil their venerable faces ; such are those Annamese
centenarians with their long, white beards, who pursue, hidden in
their silk robes, at the foot of altars lost in the forests,
meditations which are so abstract that they would seem vain to our
philosophers ; those descendants of Theban schools, who go across the
world in modern clothes, with a cosmopolitan gait, and who, in the
XVIIth century, called themselves Rosicrucians ; those skinny
rabbis, bending over the scrolls of the Torah, at the back of some
dark and muddy lane in Germany or in Poland ; such at last are
perhaps? that majestic cardinal who sits in the depth of a noble,
bare, palace, in the City of the Seven Hills, or that silent monk
buried alive in his white cell.
All these have lifted the veil that covers the veritable face of the
universe ; but only a small corner of that veil, which is as immense
as the scene it protects. That is why these men : anonymous laymen,
sacerdotal princes, naked vagrants in the jungle, Asekhas,
Djivanmouktis, Ghouts, Phaps, saints, mages, all admirable although
by different beauties, those elder brothers can direct us, warn us
of a trap. But they are not Masters, in the total and simple meaning
of that word ; they hold only portions of Power, fragments of
Knowledge, although they believe they possess them entirely ; their
gaze does not pierce through the eternal centre of creatures ;
therefore direct none of them.
I shall not mention here other unlucky men who have become blind

supporters of some prince of Darkness, who covet only the prerogatives

of matter, of cunning and of pride, and to whom all means seem
legitimate if power is on their side.
With many other beautiful things, our epoch, in which reign the liking
for the false and the hysteria of adulation, has prostituted that
great title of Master.
***
The Master according to the Spirit is a man who possesses freedom
fully and entirely ; he has reached that literally supernatural
state, not as the too famous false wise men, by repudiating life, by
escaping from its servitudes, by killing desires, forgers of the
chains of life, but by living with the greatest intensity, by
accepting all the servitudes, by exalting all the desires as far as
the Uncreated, by that psychic alchemy which operates the
transmutation of the material, the natural, the corruptible into the
spiritual, the divine, the perfect. Nothing is free except that
which escapes from the grip of time, that which goes beyond the limits
of space ; he whom the law of justice, the inexorable relations from
cause to effect, the ineluctable restitutions, the individual
obligations can no longer reach : that is the free man.
Now you can understand why that man is all- powerful over himself and
over those he has been called to lead.
One does not become free because one declares himself to be free by
virtue of some stendhalian or nitzschean theory; one must undergo
tests of which the well of Raguel, the underground tunnels of the
pyramids and the crypts of the pagodas never hid anything but the
benign imitations. One must triumph in many fights ; one must
vanquish all the adversaries, bear all the tyrannies, forgive all
the injustices, accomplish all the sacrifices, and lastly forget all
the sufferings. Only then we receive the baptism of the Spirit, we
re-enter the Kingdom of God, we sit at the banquet of eternal
beatitudes.
The real Master is one of these free men, one of these reintegrated
men, who consents to redescend to carry out a mission. Unknown to
the world if he remains in Heaven, he uncovers his identity, on the
planet where he becomes incarnate, only when it suits him; most of
the time, he must keep silent, otherwise he would compromise the
success of his tasks. Usually, he presides at the birth of a world,
and he is present at its end ; and, because everything in him comes
from the supernatural, because his whole being does not contain a
single particle borrowed from Nature, he remains the most unknown of
men, the most enigmatic, in truth, according to the temporal, the
smallest. Alone, he can say with accuracy : I am nothing.
Alone, he is really master of his body: he has the right to impose
all the fatigues and all the privations on it ; he can take it and
leave it, be born and die whenever it suits him ; transport himself
instantaneously from one place to another, even appear in several
places at the same time. And those apparitions are not like those told
by hagiography ; sometimes they last several days ; they are not
fluidic ; in every place where they occur, witnesses touch a
ponderable body. Facts of this nature have recently occurred in
France, Italy, Russia, America ; I have held their indisputable
proofs in my own hands.
The free man justifies all that the theologians teach us about the
glorious body, but while applying their descriptions to the purified
material organism which is that heavenly missionary's own body. A
biologist would find nothing particular in the chemical analysis of
such an organism : only a few visceral functions, a few anatomical
peculiarities distinguish him from ordinary organisms ; those are the
signatures of the exceptional faculties of the divine Spirit that
animates him. That Holy Spirit imparts its supernatural life to
everything he touches. This is how, for the body of the free man,
this infusion occurs.
When we accomplish an act of charity, for example, our body
co-operates with it ; but the cells that spend themselves in that
effort are, generally, forced by willpower or subject to a
contamination by personal interest, the ferment of which it is very
hard to rid ourselves, even when we are determined to practice
virtue. Among the few thousand cells which help me to put a coin in
the hand of a poor man, only two or three will have worked with
rectitude. These two good workers, having carried out their task,
leave the collective being of which they were a part my body and
are led by special agents to a reserve bank, in a store, where they
will wait all the other cellular vitalities, of which my body will

receive the management during its earthly incarnation, have joined

them, after having integrally fulfilled their functions. At that
moment, I, as a human spirit, will be ready to receive the veritable
and final baptism ; and, admitted to the home of the Father, I will
recover, in the case of a mission, all those thousands of purified
minute spirits, which will belong to me, whereas, during my temporal
tasks, I had only the usufruct of them.
Such is the genesis of the glorious body ; and that is how it is
beyond the reach of the laws of Nature.
Thus in reality, the free man needs neither food nor sleep. If he eats
and sleeps, it is to impart a new virtue to food; it is to improve
the world of dreams. And all the acts of his earthly life, all of
them without exception, constitute either cures, cultures or struggles.
***
THE MASTERS OF POWER AND THE SHEPHERD'S DOG (continued)
This brings us to the point of finding out which missions the Father
more specially entrusts to those of His delegates who are the object
of our present study.
A Master according to the Spirit is not only a teacher. The lessons
he gives, no matter how living and fruitful they are., are nearly
always silent. All the manifestations of life, in the sphere to which
he descends, receive his care. He keeps an eye on the organization
of geological strata; he channels such interplanetary influences by
virtue of which an unknown precious stone will slowly crystallize in
the bowels of the mine. He watches the plants; he confers on the
spirit of a certain vegetable species a new virtue ; he improves a
certain other venomous species. He keeps en eye on the animals,
following their destinies, using their faculties, striving to bring
from the depth of their spirit finer feelings, limiting the growth of
hybrid races, taking care of the repose of races which disappeared.
He watches the numerous hierarchies of the invisible, regulates the
underground fires and the atmospheric currents, regulates the dynamic
exchanges from planet to planet, and prepares, centuries in advance,
the great modifications of general biology.
Usually, he limits himself to imperceptibly rectifying the task of
all these beings, like the shepherd's dog does for the uncertain
progress of the flock. Seldom does he give orders ; but then he is
obeyed immediately. At his sign the sea calms down, the wind stops,
the rain falls or the storm breaks out. Because he possesses eternal
life, everything is born again at his contact; and, if he touches a
rotted stump in the forest with his foot, it recovers and grows new
shoots.
That Master is not a judge; he only comes to help and repair ; he
always invents the means of new delays for the lazy and for those who
disobey to find the opportunity to amend themselves. How many
disasters have I not seen deferred, by the powerful gesture of a
certain stranger ! How many justiciary dragons asleep in the oceans,
how many monsters enchained under the mountains that man maintains in
their sleep and in their chains so that ascertain city of bad faith
takes the time to repent ! But how many times, it must sadly be
reckoned, do his cares remain fruitless ! And for his patience not to
wear out, how such a man must live in the permanent and serene
goodness of which the Word alone is the inexhaustible source.
As to humankind, sickness is submissive to the voice of that Master.
He heals as we have seen that Christ healed ; he comforts the
desperate, he makes stand those who are lying on the ground, he makes
the courageous progress, he controls the descent of souls and their
ascension; for the living ideas obey him. Looking at a being, he
sees his vices, virtues, possibilities, past, present, future; with a
wink, he precipitates or delays events ; wealth, failures,
condemnations, marriages, death, births, everything passes before his
eyes and lines up at his command. The various branches of industry,
of theoretical and applied science, of art have no secrets for him;
he diminishes them, increases them, transforms them, sends them to
other planets, according to whether he deems it necessary. He supplies
to the useful discovery the inventor whose brain is capable of
perfecting it; he defers the premature discovery; he makes new
concepts descend from the bosom of eternal Wisdom ; that is how
philosophy perfects itself; he sets right, in the mental universe,
the injustices and the ravages that the soldiers of Darkness were able
to commit there. That is why he sometimes expresses a notoriously
erroneous proposition ; and, because he is a man endowed with the
Spirit which proclaims as true an idea presently false, the latter
changes and becomes true.

These things are hard to understand and impossible to admit for

whoever has installed reason on a throne and science on an altar.
Only the princes of science and philosophy have an idea of the vanity
of the teachings pronounced in their names. Nothing is fixed in the
world ; today, borage no longer has the same virtues it had in the
XVIIIth century, and do you believe that next year, on the same day,
at the same time, this room will occupy the same place in space it
occupies now ? And who says that, at the time of the Caesars, the
formula of gravity was the same as it is today ? The straight line
is the shortest way from one point to another only in a
three-dimensional geometry ; two and two are four in quantitative
arithmetic.
The free man also keeps an eye on the races, the peoples and the
civilizations ; sometimes he interferes with the political powers,
and the Spirit opens for him, when it is necessary, the best-guarded
palaces. True history, anecdotic history, shows us a few examples of
unknown laymen introduced to a pope, or an emperor, reminding them,
face to face, of their forgotten duties, or preparing them for some
great enterprise. And here I allude to personalities other than that
of a Saint Bernardus, a Barnaud, a Cosmopolitan or a Count of
Saint-Germain. Also the ministers and satellites, who anxiously see
the opinion of a stranger prevail, overburden him with all the
accusations and all the intrigues.
The Master still considers whether a certain war is indispensable, if
nothing else can replace it; he lets it occur when the salvation of
a race depends on it, in spite of all the pain he feels at seeing men
kill each other; sometimes he interferes in the battle, in the same
way that he interferes to spare surgical operations to men as much as
he can.
Finally, the field of his powers is immense ; and to examine all its
furrows, it is the complete study of planetary life that should be
undertaken.
Suppose that one of us be put in the presence of such an
extraordinary individual, he would remain incomprehensible to him.
Everything, with the Friends of God, happens in the opposite way than
with ordinary men. We believe ourselves free, but we are the slaves
of our idols, of our desires and of our vices. The word passion, does
it not mean something we submit to, under the sway of which we bend ?
The word virtue, does it not mean something active, shining,
operative ?
The Friend of God possesses truth, absolute truth; and, upon His
sending him on a mission, the Father gives him a secret, by means of
which that absolute truth adapts itself to all the particularizations
of the relative. Such a mastery of Truth is more than a mere
intellectual assent; it is rather a habit, a dwelling, an
incarnation. Truth appears only at a long distance and through all
sorts of clouds, before our eyes ; for the free man, it resides in
himself, down to the marrow of his bones ; and no particle of himself
is still capable of receiving error. The Real, it is the law of our
essential being, the principle that constitutes us ; only through it
do we reach our full development; it attaches itself only to those
who are free of all slavery. Matter, error and chains are the trinity
from Below ; it is opposed to the trinity from Above : spirit, truth,
wings.
For these reasons, the free man holds the right to command himself
and the rest of the world. If his gaze forces any creature to bare
its heart, his force confers on it a supreme authority over all. He
can know everything instantaneously : what happens in Sirius, in
which place of the desert a precious steel is buried, as well as the
most secret, most fleeting thought that palpitates under your brow.
A glance at a plant, and he knows all its virtues. A silent request
and the stone of the most ancient monument will tell him the name of
the worker who has cemented it. The material beings, in effect, all
bear an inscription, written with an ink and in a language which can
be discerned and deciphered only by those whose eyes have been opened
by Heaven ; and It communicates that mastery only when we have
become incapable of ill- judging any creature.
The free man possesses that innocence; he has received the secret
from the very mouth of the Father. Even so, he never assumes an
attitude of master in respect to others ; never does he perform a
healing or a miracle, never does he permit himself to take the least
of the ordinary initiatives of daily life without first asking God's
permission. That freedom, which comprises the spiritual results of
all his previous tasks, he has handed over, as the most beautiful
homage, into the hands of his King and he has engaged himself to no
longer have any will but His.

The reasons by which such a sublime being makes up his mind, as

logical as they are, remain ungraspable to the narrowness of our
views ; and, if we could rise to the level of his judgment, we would
only discern them without understanding them. That is one of the
reasons why a Master usually keeps silent. He lets the exterior
aspects of his activity be perceived ; but he carefully hides all the
methods that would allow us to guess the secret sources or that would
put the curious on the way of his real identity.
The greater the man, the more he needs to keep silent; the more
learned he is, the more he is compelled to keep silent; the more
powerful he is, the more brotherhood orders him to keep silent. Not
always, but in many occasions. Greatness, loneliness and silence
blazon the exceptional hearts. To the common, truth is unspeakable,
supreme beauty is invisible, perfect goodness is impossible. They are
only, but then they are of a real and eternal presence, in the only
Being who might legitimately say of Himself : I am the Path, Truth
and Life . They reside, by immediate communication, in those
servant-friends, entirely identified with the Word by means of their
love. The other men, the philosophers, the artists, the saints,
although they belong to the same elite, die of the efforts they have
made to catch a glimpse of those radiant angels of the Absolute, that
face of the Father : Truth ; that form of the Lord : Beauty; those
hands of the Creator : Goodness.
To that point saturated with eternal forces, the Master exercises,
it is understandable, an unceasing activity. His body does not feel
the need for rest, since it is pure ; it is by accomplishing the will
of the Father that he sustains himself ; his heart craves only for
work, since it is to fight that he has forsaken a beatitude in
comparison with which the good things of any paradise have no flavor.
Why should he stop ? He lives in that supernatural place where
nothing opposes the radiance, where forces grow as they are being
spent, where beings grow without interruption and perfect themselves
without limitations. Imagine, Gentlemen, what these three words
contain : the eternal life ? Life wholly in uninterrupted progress,
where intelligence and power never meet obstacles in front of them,
where all other beings think only of helping you to grow, where you,
yourself, nourish only the hope of making the others happy. Life
whose principle, food and end are the same substance : Love. Life
whose every palpitation is a sacrifice and each sacrifice, anew
happiness. Life whose participants all rise together in a continuous
movement, with the certainty of an endless ascension, in an evermore
vivifying atmosphere.
Such is the state of mind of the free man. He keeps in the depth of
his heart, even in the most desolate hell not the memory the
distinct sensation of Heaven. Can you understand that he counts
sufferings for nothing, that his aspect disconcerts by the inner
immutability it reveals, that his gaze might revolutionize, that his
word might reach, beyond understanding, the very centre of who
receives it ? Can you understand that such a man acts outside, beyond
time, space and conditions ? He sends flames that reach beyond the
boundaries of the Created. The laws do not reach him, neither him,
nor what comes forth from his incandescent heart. What he does is not
written in the books of Destiny; his acts are not entered in the
accounts of the universe ; they are always graces and mercies;
Justice does not collaborate with them; neither is it wronged by
them. The man of God always manages, when he relieves the burden of
someone, not to load someone else with it; often he loads it on his
own shoulders.
Lastly, the Master can write in the Book of Life; he can modify
individual or collective destinies; sometimes he exerts the terrible
privilege to which these words of Christ refer : From he who has
nothing, some will still be taken . To some, in effect, Heaven
gives light, special faculties, a little more intelligence, and they
do not use it; or, if they do use it, it is to oppress their
neighbours, to make a wider place for themselves, to glorify
themselves, as if they had acquired these superiorities by their own
efforts. A day comes, in that case, where Christ, by the agency of
one of His Friends, takes away those gifts, which they had used only
for their pride and transfers them to someone else who, being humble,
will make them fructify in the Light, for the general good, and will
transfer the gratitude and the glory of them to God.
THE MASTERS OF POWER AND THE SHEPHERD'S DOG (continued)
When a Master comes here, naturally he meets only a part of
humanity. Among those who become acquainted with him, those who have
eyes not to see, see nothing special in him. They are the indifferent

; they are retarded on the spiritual level; the divine sense is

asleep in them.
Others discern something; but as they like their passions, as that
light is a blame for their conduct, they conceive hatred and try to
harm the Messenger.
Others also discern a mystery ; but they are lazy ; they do not wish
to rise or even to open their eyes. Others still see that Light
entirely different from what it is ; they consider that man as a
magician, as a hypnotizer, as an adept, according to their studies
or the trend of their mentality.
Others, finally, and they are a tiny minority, have a presentiment
of something extraordinary in that being ; they study him, follow his
path by practicing virtue and finally discover a little about his
veritable identity. Those are the disciples and they will become
soldiers.
The indifferent, the ignorant, even the adversaries are not the most
guilty; the lazy are. The latter sin essentially because they refuse
to act; the debt they contract is heavy and the payment painful.
But the Master is patient; he has eternity before him ; he knows
that at his request the Father would, if necessary, prolong the
duration of creation to give a single one of His prodigal children
the opportunity to recover himself from his errors. He would himself
go heartily to the bottom of hell, in spite of the suffering, to look
for someone who went astray. Anyway, the Word in person would
reincarnate Itself rather than let the less important creature go
astray.
If only these solicitudes could touch us ! Let us tell ourselves
that, to become less unworthy of them, we have to increase our
courage and our cares. Let us use the help which has been put on our
path so that, if all our brothers must be saved, for none of them we
should be the cause of a delay in their happiness.
If a demon appeared suddenly, we would be frightened, because the
virus distilled by his corrupted will would be perceived by our
fluidic organisms. If an angel appeared suddenly, we would equally be
taken by fear, because everything, in that innocent being, is
strange to the earth; he would really be a stranger to us ; he
himself would not understand us anyway, unless he is in charge of a
special mission, in which case the Father has given him all the
necessary information.
But when the Master appears, he is like a rising sun in the heart of
the disciple. All the clouds disappear; all the matrixes
disintegrate; a new light spreads, so it seems, on the world; we
forget bitterness, despair, anxiety; the poor, tired heart rushes
towards the radiant landscapes of which it has caught a glimpse and
on which the peaceful splendour of Eternity spreads its glory;
nothing dull darkens Nature anymore; everything finally harmonizes in
admiration, adoration and love.
No disciple enters Heaven without having seen again the man who gave
him, on earth, the foretaste of the divine; the venerable hands of
that supreme Initiator will pour for him the living water of the
baptism of the Spirit. It is the same man, the only one worthy of
that title, who will wash from him the indelible stain of evil; it
is he who will definitively wrest that heart from the transitory to
implant it in the immutable, to graft it on to the Word. It is he who
will present that purified heart to the same Word Jesus to receive
from Him the choice crown, because it was he who, at each judgment,
defended him, made excuses for him and implored the indulgence of
the just Judge in his favor. And it is to him, finally, that this
happy heart will offer that crown, as a homage for all the tasks, all
the solicitudes, all the anxieties that the ewe cost the shepherd;
and the attendance will acclaim that double triumph.
I cannot find the words to tell you about the vivifying, very pure
and very gentle rapture which carries away the heart of the disciple.
Nothing similar can be imagined. Music our music would barely
express the refreshing delight of those ineffable colloquies. Only
silence celebrates those mysteries in a dignified way, because it
favours in us the dawning of the superhuman, the unutterable, the
supernatural, because it offers naked to our heart what words dress
and hide ; because it is only in its darkness that the
inextinguishable desire for Heaven lights up.
You, Gentlemen, who have bravely begun exploring the Mystery,
contemplate these scenes in silence and through silence ; your ears

will no doubt perceive what I would be forbidden, by respect, to say

aloud, if human language would be able to translate the sparkling
words of the Word.
The most certain sign, by which the disciple recognizes his Master,
is an inner evidence stronger than all the doubts of the mind. In
addition to all
the physical signs, the most convincing of which must be kept
silent, everything, in the person of the free man and in his works,
is supraterrestial.
In appearance, he lives like everybody else, perhaps married,
perhaps an artisan, a vagrant or with a private income. It is by his
teaching that he asserts himself as a child of God; he gives evidence
not by hearsay, but because he was, because he is a witness of
supernatural realities. Jesus' divinity, His resurrection, charity,
the invisible universe are no longer for him articles of faith or
instructions, as they are for us ; they are facts. He places
brotherly love above all the initiations and all the penances.
Finally, he asserts himself as a messenger of God, because, like the
true Shepherd, always he comes in through the door . Never
something extraordinary in his behaviour, never does he require an
oath, never anything that is in contradiction with the customs, the
proprieties or the laws ; never anything premature, violent or
fanatical; never any publicity, never is he looking for approval,
never does he upset the established order; and seeing a man whose
will nothing could resist, waiting in silence that the natural
course of life offers him the most discreet opportunity to act, that
is a lesson of practical wisdom of the greatest effect as to our
impatience and our haste.
Remember that sign well : The true Shepherd comes in through the
door and never through a hole in the hedge.
The Master does not precede us ; he accompanies us ; his immense
superiority lowers itself to our level, because he loves us ; he
walks along with us, to everyone he speaks his own language, and
above all, he acts. Love your neighbour, sometimes he says ; but he
starts by giving the poor all that he humanly possesses. Work, he
also says; but he spends his days and his nights in the most
absorbing occupations. Bear your pains, he advises us; but he
undergoes without complaining all the pains of the body and the soul,
and not human pains, the pains of gods. Forgive; but he never defends
himself whenever he is attacked and he answers to his persecutors by
granting them material wealth or the life of their children.
** *
I have just given you, the most fantastic assertions ; and you are,
from a rational viewpoint, perfectly right to not believe me. I have
proofs in my hands ; I am not allowed to show them; anyway, only he
can convince himself who beforehand has in himself the germ of
conviction.
Thus all those to whom an imperceptible inner voice affirms the
extraordinary realities I am talking about, that Master knows them;
for a long time he has been following them, as he is also anxious
about the others who will not be able to open their eyes until much
later. For all men, the blessed day of the corporeal meeting with
their Master will finally dawn. Unique day, among millions of days.
And, in that moment, when these two beings will exchange their
first, but definitive, glance by which they will take possession of
each other, according to the mutual virtues of gratitude and mercy,
in that moment the universe will be silent around them and, from the
bottom of the hells up to the throne of God, all the beings will stop
living because a lost sheep will have been found.
If we could only hasten that minute, since it is written in the
books of Destiny. Yes, we can. Since Jesus, Goodness balances
Justice. Heaven will change its verdict if we only make the little
effort which is necessary. And I will always finish by repeating the
same word to you, a word which summarizes all the Law and all the Life.
Love each other, and you will hasten the divine meeting. Love each
other, and you will hasten that meeting for your brothers. Love each
other, and you will lighten a part of the burden of that unknown Man
who progresses slowly towards our hearts, from the depths of space,
from centuries ago, to set them afire, to heal and regenerate them.
APOSTOLATE
As you have sent me in the world, even so have I sent them into
the world... Neither pray I for these alone but for them also which

shall believe in me through their word, that they also may be one in
us...
(john xvii, 18-21)
We have now reached the term of our cursory examination of the main
supernatural forces. Until now, we have only inquired into the means
of receiving. Now we must examine the means of giving. And, as
mysticism our mysticism is wholly built up with the uncreated
substances of faith, as the heroic efforts it demands always remain
infinitely less than the treasures whose magnificence we receive, in
our turn we must radiate faith, and pour into hearts the water of the
eternal spring which refreshes, heals, washes and regenerates. Such
is apostolate, such is the task of the disciple, which we will
examine today.
Apostolate is a form of charity peculiar to the disciple, for the
true cult of the Word is action ; for the best action is that whose
aim is highest and whose effort is most intense. What work requires
more cares, more vigils, more tears, more fastings, more love than
to open to the Light hearts petrified under the muddy waves of
temporal desires ?
So, everybody is not able, from one day to the next, to become an
apostle. It is first of all necessary to have learned to know men, to
discern their real needs, to open a path to their hearts. Charity is
the teacher of that school. Everything has been said about our
duties ; we all know how we must behave towards our neighbours,
inferior beings, things, intelligent beings, collective beings and
ourselves ; you know what Heaven expects from you. But what I would
ardently like to make you aware of is the manner in which to undertake
this task, the sort of fire that should animate you, the
concentration in which you must keep yourselves to bear fruit.
You must modify the attitude, the habits and orientation of your
heart; let it stay where it is, however, for wherever it is, in
science, philosophy, art, manual work, in heaven as in hell, God has
put it there. Just look for the point where your transitory situation
touches the eternal world ; there you will find the Word Jesus
waiting for you. His strong and gentle hands will draw your tired,
worn, soiled heart from your chest; they will take care of it, they
will open afresh the inner paths our laziness allowed to be invaded
by brambles ; from that purified, restored, recreated heart, quick
energies will set off towards the intellect and the senses; these two
poles of the human being will resume their function as regulators and
instruments. You will possess life in you instead of running after
its changing images ; you will directly know Life outside of you ;
as tired eyes revive as they perceive fresh countrysides, your heart
will palpitate in ecstasy at the sight of the Sun of spirits and it
will radiate its incomprehensible light to other hearts, in the
shadow around it.
The arrow of divine Light will strike the centre of your will, open
it, unfold its wings, as the first sun ray strikes the still misty
countryside and wakens its inhabitants. For that, it is not necessary
that your meeting with the Master has taken place. It is sufficient
that you know that meeting to be possible, certain, infallible. Such
a conviction, because it is supra-intellectual, is already the
wonderful meeting. It cannot germinate in you without radical humility
; it is the first direct vision of Jesus, according to His veritable
form; for the first time, the soul transmits an eternal word to the
self.
***
See in the apostolate the practical initiation of Jesus. Love is its
principle, its aim and its means, because Love burns at the same time
in the centre of man and in the centre of God. Listen to this tender
exhortation of the Friend : As I have loved you, you also, love
each other . Such is the formula of the apostolate, of life, of
evolutionary terms ; such is the only great Mystery of total
knowledge and supreme power.
What can I tell you on that supernatural Love, that the enraptured
voices of Saints, Friends, Soldiers, mystic Gardeners have not
already published ? Without a love, no matter how paltry, no being
can accomplish anything. If, in the hollow of a rock, the hard
granite turns to crumbling earth, it is because it yearns, it is
because it loves the chemical ferments of the air, the rain and the
sun. If, along the roads to the Infinite, the burning seraph rides
the comet, it is because he loves, he yearns for those unknown, dark
spheres that the Lord orders him to visit.

Love is the excellent Angel among the myriads of angels ; as it came

from God, it goes back to God, in a speedy flight, carrying between
its wings bruised captives the souls , but so happy to be captive.
As the Tartarian rider, in the steppes of Turkestan, Love rushes,
devastates, sets fires and leaves in the same gallop, having
liberated the narrow huts where our hearts languished in the deep,
purifying breezes of the Spirit : the Spirit, the voice calling in
the desert.
Love is the great Treasure, the unique pearl, the diamond which will
never tarnish. It is very small, it is naked, it is invincible, it is
invulnerable. It is as strong as death, the Mage of Israel used to
say. Yes, before our Jesus came down, Love was only as strong as
death. Since then, it has surpassed its sister, its enemy, its
collaborator. Since the great victory of the Nazarene, it is no
longer a strong being, it is strength; it even overcomes the Justice
of God. Unattainable in its movements, the swift eyes of Lucifer
cannot follow it and the sharp swords of Satan the killer become
blunt against its bare chest. What brushes, dipped into the radiant
essence of eternal life and in the dazzling fluids where it flows
away, would not be necessary to render perceptible these cataracts of
light that love shines on its chosen ones ?
It is gentleness, joy, enthusiasm, the supreme, the minute ; it is
divine folly, the one that makes absurd hopes come true, the
veritable Christophore, the sleepless watchman, the captive that the
heaviest chains do not weigh down. No prison that does not open at his
prayer, no dung that does not flower as it comes near, no archangel
that does not hasten at its call.
Love sees nothing, in all the universes, other than the One it loves
; or rather, it sees all things in Him. It forgets itself, rushes,
transforms, destroys and realizes itself. At a certain degree of
union, the Word thus propagates Its ineffable gaiety from the heart to
the extreme limit of the disciple's individuality. Intellect,
judgment, sensibility then take the form that would take, in the same
circumstances, the intellect, the judgment, the sensibility of the
Son of Man. The body itself of the disciple, renounces its own life
to seize the pure essence which of old constituted the physical
vitality of the Saviour and to assimilate them. Miracles ? No ;
natural results of a supernatural cause. For those of the world, for
the wise men in the schools and temples, they are miracles, because
those idol-lovers deny the supernatural whilst worshipping the
wonderful. For those in Heaven, who know that the supernatural
exists, for Christie wisdom, which teaches the inanity of the
wonderful and the perpetuity of the miracle, illuminations and inner
alchemies are logical and familiar facts.
Now, Gentlemen, try to imagine the state of silent exaltation in
which the disciple lives. The disciple : a man who, still alive, has
embraced his ideal. Summon up in your heart the unforgettable
emotions of your adolescence; purify, sublimate, broaden those
raptures, revive the glimmer of all those gems and of all those
precious stones ; imagine on the bottomless azure of the zodiacal
perspectives the immense figure of the Word, reaching beyond the
boundaries of the world and still completely contained in the heart
of His friend. Look at the dazzling suns, the cosmic fires, the
killing lightnings of the divinities ; all that is nothing more than
a few smouldering red coals of the dazzling glory with which the Lord
is clothed. Reconcile the immense and the small, assemble in your
soul the flavor of the almightiness and that of the most defenceless
tenderness. Then perhaps your imagination, stretched to its limits,
will reflect a fleeting image of the atmosphere where the disciple
breathes. Perhaps, you will inhale those subtle smells. Then you
will understand why some men seem to be immutable ; why nothing
astounds them to the point that they appear insensitive; why their
gaze, received inadvertently, pierces you to your innermost being
and, if it meets your eyes, makes you dizzy. They are exceptional
beings, accustomed to the strange, seekers of the impossible, who,
having devoted themselves to Jesus, assume the ever-recurring
martyrdoms that the world keeps in stock for the apostles of the
divine. They are complex anti-theses. Where we laugh, they cry ; and
what disheartens us raises their enthusiasm. There is in them
congenital attraction which awakens our confidence; but there is
also around them a barrier which keeps at bay indiscretions and
familiarities. They see things from an unknown angle; and their
incommunicable contemplation gives them an uninterrupted supply of
irresistible motives for pity, indulgence and fraternity. We are of
stone, they are of fire ; they are ablaze and they set afire
everything around them with an indefatigable zeal. Allow me to recall
a word of Jesus, to wish with all the fervor of which I am capable,
that that fire reaches you, borne by the winds of the Spirit, and
that you soon burn with the vivifying and regenerating flames of Love.

APOSTOLATE (continued)
The apostle wants to convince, then to carry along. To convince, he
has words ; to carry along, he uses the example, or, in other words
action. These two methods of propaganda are resolved in the deepest
and highest inner work : in prayer. Discourse is a prayer, act is a
prayer; in its turn, the veritable prayer is words and action.
First, the disciple in his propaganda through words.
Language needs to be handled with care. There is something behind
words and writing; It must be known that the occult exists and
understood that it does not want to be prostituted under the penalty
of troubles and disorders of all kinds amongst hearers or readers,
among others as well as humans. The debt of our time will be heavy,
in which so much unhealthy prose is being printed, in which so many
inauspicious and empty words are being poured down from pulpits and
rostrums.
Speech is a gift of God, one of the highest; and this earth is one
of the corners of the world where that gift has descended most
abundantly. But I do not wish to examine the origin or the essence of
speech; it is sufficient to feel its beauty, its profound virtue, its
majesty, to know at the same time the attention that it is worthy of
receiving.
Any man who is conscious of his dignity heeds his words ; how much
more the disciple, who aspires to the most decisive influence on
souls, must he not control his tongue ? That we must account for any
word, that we must avoid any nasty, malicious and useless word, that
we must abstain from any insulting or scornful word about inferior
beings, supposedly inanimate, abstract or invisible; all this, your
studies and our talks must have told you.
Today, contemplate rather the mysterious correspondence of these two
words : speech, the word; follow up its ramifications ; better still,
bring them together, try to produce a synthesis of them. Where will
that contemplation reach ? To God. Here the nature of speech grows so
much that it escapes our gaze, becomes one with the nature of the
world, goes beyond the boundaries of the Relative. We approach the
occult city of Silence, fatherland of all the languages, of all the
signs and of all the harmonies, and in whose palaces the majestic
displays of inner life unfold.
Silence is not only not-speaking; it is a positive act, an
affirmative force, it is a spirit, it is a god, it is an occult
kingdom, and it progresses, like any being, between two counsellors,
an angel of Light and an angel of Darkness.
Everything speaks in the Universe, but also everything listens.
Usually, we try to know what beings say, but wise men are rather
concerned with what they do not say; the Brahmanic Dakshinamourthi
and the wise men of Samoa, placed at the beginning and towards the
end of the golden chain of ancient initiations, show the value of
silence in the systematic cultivation of the will.
If the world of sound contains the intellectual food of our mind,
the world of silence is the world of mystery, the storage place of
ideal reserves, the original kingdom of what is True, Beautiful and
Good. Its gates are narrow and are found only after long wanderings
in the jungle of speech. One must have experienced the justness of
the Persian pro? verb : The word that you remember is your slave ;
the one that escapes you is your master . Who can foresee the
consequences of a word ? In such a simple act, how many of the
components escape our control!
That is why the disciple does not speak much ; that is why he takes
refuge, before speaking, in the bosom of silence, and he locks
himself up in it again after having spoken. Speech is between two
silences as time between two eternities, as space between two
infinities. To speak is to sow; but mysteries are celebrated in
silence; the gods till the souls. Gentlemen, make your silence alive
and, to that end, light a torch in it : the torch of Love, so that
the Master Himself comes and steers the plough in the vast fields of
your mind.
One will verify here, in the premonitory silence of speech, the
universal law of evolution. Nothing inferior rises without the
preliminary descent of two superior forces. Religious traditions
teach it, histology demonstrates it. For the disciple's speech to
reach a further degree in the mind of the attendance, profound
energies of his being must be sacrificed and a spark of the Word must

come and dwell in him. See in this why the disciple's life is a
continual fast.
Understand also why the masters of inner life hold silence in such
high esteem. To the adept, it constitutes a tremendous saving of
forces, transmutable into higher forces. To the Christian, it is the
evocation of God, the habit of the heavenly presence, a barrier to
all sorts of bewilderments.
Prior to any cataclysm a second of silence takes place. Jesus
incarnated Himself in the anxious silence of the whole Universe;
Jesus descends into us only when all the voices of flesh and pride
have become silent; Jesus will put on our head the crown of
beatitudes in the enraptured silence of the worlds. The disciple
starts nothing without prayer; that prayer is the living and
fecundating silence, because true love, supreme love, eternal love
are beyond all expression; similar to the great eagle of the millenary
solitudes, it hovers, with its vast wings widespread, motionless,
higher than the peaks, higher than the clouds, supported by the
incandescent gaze it fixes on the sphere of unbearable splendour, on
the sun of the spirits.
The great sorrows are silent, so it is said; so are the great joys.
In the centre of the world, reputations are born and live in noise;
but glory blossoms in silence. The Being of beings, God, He who has
magnificently been defined by scholasticism : the pure Act, who has
heard His voice ? The most angelical of men have never grasped but a
few of its distant echoes. That the constant habit of physical
silence stirs within us the not yet cooled ashes where here and there
a few sparks of the Uncreated Fire still glow ; and, when that
immortal flame has risen, that it devours everything perishable in
us, that it makes us lighter, that it carries us away to that
astounding world where the created voices collapse in the infinite,
silent clamour of ecstasy and adoration.
All that we do we must do completely. If we speak, let it be with
all possible care, talent and fervor; if we keep silent, let it be
with the silence of the tomb for others' faults and secrets, for
double-edged ideas, for premature truths. Those are the lessons of
passive silence; active silence, it is not man who can teach it, but
God alone.
Very often the apostle sees himself forced to keep closed his hand
full of secrets ; swine and dogs, before whom the Gospel forbids us to
throw pearls, crowd around the inner man. Too strong a food poisons
the mind; and that is more serious than killing the body. Let us pray
before we unveil mysteries.
The mystic is certain, because of his humility itself, to receive
the visit of the Word without an intermediary. For that meeting, he
needs to be in control of all his forces, from the intuitive to the
corporeal ones, in the attitude of the most profound attention.
Attention is the waiting, the love, it is the most accessible form
of silence. Then the words of the Apostle will only be the
translation in human language of his conversations with Jesus ; but
why is there any need for conversation ? Here and there, a few men
know from experience that a word from the Word has been sufficient
to fill their whole solitude, to impregnate the vast desert of their
mind, to light an immortal fire in the heart, to confer in them the
inestimable power of propagating that fire in other hearts. What
would I wish for you, if not that you soon perceive, under the
olive-trees of Peace, on the slopes of the eternal hills, the sublime
silhouette of the Shepherd, sending by the echoes of the valley
still buried in the mists of dawn the illuminating call, the anxious
cry of Love. The disciple knows the shortcomings of speech; he has not
reached the plenitude of Life. He is still ascending ; he may slip.
That is why he will exercise the most rigorous supervision on himself
; he will constantly fear not giving auditors the living example of
the Ideal he shows them. The worry of not being a worthy herald will
haunt him day and night. And his scruples are legitimate, his fears
admirable, his efforts worthy of all our respect.
The influence of an example is different from that of books or
speech ; it reaches hearts by the avenues of real life, and not
through intelligence. The teachings it gives are clear; they cannot
deceive; they cannot be subject, as speech or writing, to the
distortions of commentators. The act, which is Life, speaks to the
life within us an indubitable language. But, above all, realization
of theories, to which the soldier compels himself by the strictest
discipline, gives his work, his understanding, his intuition, a
vigorous health; it is a rich and generous blood; it fixes his
ideas; it gives him an imperturbable mental balance ; it maintains in
his reason that precious common sense which is indispensable to

mysticism.
The apostle will thus divide his external life into two parts ; one
being the base of the other and both spreading deep roots in the
inner life, in the night rent by lightning where the unspeakable
colloquies of the Master with His Friends, and of those Friends
amongst themselves, take place.
Just as the inner life requires more time and cares than the
external life, so the realization portion of the latter requires more
effort and costs more tears than the propaganda part of it. Look into
ontology, and you will soon be convinced that everywhere that which
cannot be seen is infinitely more important and more difficult than
what appears in broad daylight.
Apostolate (continued)
For the apostle, public teaching is the beautiful, perfumed flower
which everyone is invited to notice ; what is hidden is the slow
struggle of the seed in the furrow, the painful growth of the root
and the stem, the desperate resistance to hail and storm.
That is why the disciple takes such care of his acts ; why he
chooses them with prudence, why his whole practical life is summarized
in a single word : charity.
The act is life ; life is energy ; the best act is that in which
energy is the most intense and pure. And is the most intense energy
not to fight against oneself, to deprive oneself for the benefit of
the others ? The purest energy is it not that which springs from the
highest motives ? And that motive is the service of God.
The spring of charity is as deep as the heart of God whence it
gushes; its scope is as immense as the Universe which is its object.
The disciple receives it directly and distributes its very pure waves
through his daily tasks ; he despoils no living, he forsakes what is
superfluous to him, and lastly he offers what he cannot do without.
To lead a prosaic life is indifferent to him. He knows, according to
the word of Theresa of Avila, that God lets Himself be seen in the
kitchen as well as in the chapel. He knows that the most vulgar act
can become the envelope of a heavenly germ. He attends to the most
common tasks uniting himself through Love to Jesus who, long ago, did
not scorn to accomplish those same gestures, begging Him to be
willing to illuminate by His blessing the analogous tasks of the inner
man.
Such are the bases of charity, its elementary exercises. For it is
not an energy that develops its powers wisely and carefully ; it is
universal; as an explosive, it suddenly bursts out and instantly
comprises everything, the disciple and the universe, man, gods and
demons.
When the moralists discourse on the subject, they only see the path
that leads to that fire; they do not see the plenitude, the totality,
the perfection of that form in which the absolute unity of truth,
beauty and goodness is achieved. We must approach it with respect;
the greater the vocable, the greater the angel it veils. The angel of
charity knows all the mysteries and can accomplish all the miracles.
That is why enemies rise in multitudes under his footsteps. However,
no matter how tender the solicitude that makes him lean towards the
poor, stray creatures, he always waits, before letting them feel his
compassion, until they have formulated a request and an appeal.
*
**
But if, in truth, any act accomplished with the aim of uniting with
God is a real sacrifice, the disciple strives for the similitude of
his life with the humble life of Christ. Jesus, infinitely delicate
nature, has suffered excessively. What His body has suffered is
nothing in comparison with what the callousness of men, their
cowardice, their hypocrisy, their ungratefulness have inflicted on
Him in the way of inner martyrdoms. His human soul was tortured every
day with a Passion as terrible as the bodily tortures on Golgotha.
So do not be surprised to see in His faithful the same hunger for
pain. Rather die than not suffer : that is their cry. But do not see
in them heroes like Werther or Manfred, who revel in the unhealthy
autosuggestion of their own melancholy, or in a platonic
commiseration for others' misfortunes. They are very elevated souls
whose thirst to expiate exceeds all the martyrdoms.

The apostle renews the mission of John the Baptist. He teaches us

repentance and atonement of evil; but he would not dare to lavish
them on us if he did not share these remorses and these expiations.
Although he retains an inner, immutable serenity, he scorns neither
the anxious, nor the uncaring. He does not look for suffering for the
sake of suffering; it is only the flint stone whose impact causes
Love to explode in a shower of sparks ; it is the sign that Heaven
does not forget his progress.
So the soldier looks neither for consolations nor for distractions
regarding spiritual cares ; he opens a book only to study, he
frequents friends only to encourage them. He never confides his
sorrows ; men see only his smile; God alone and the angels see his
tears. For the Master has said : You, when you fast, anoint your
head and wash your face, so that men do not notice that you fast, but
only your Father who knows what is in your heart .
The apostle weeps only because of the evil he sees being committed;
it is because his sorrows are infinite that he keeps them silent. The
more profound the darknesses within himself, the more dazzling the
Light he radiates. He is, in his environment, the expiatory victim as
the free Chief for a planet, as Christ for the whole of creation.
And, if he declines all help, it is so that more angels remain free
to help his brothers.
Gentlemen, when such a missionary grants us the grace of coming to
us, we contract serious obligations towards him. We become
responsible for his fatigues. The burden that weighs on his shoulders
is heavy. On the one hand, he hears the concern of our indiscretion ;
furthermore, to exercise his function, he needs to communicate with
the invisible Kingdom of the Word ; and those visits are only
possible if he surpasses, by a constant heroism, the normal degree of
perfection which he has reached.
Every time the conquest of a soul can be predicted, the apostle
offers his own life in a new holocaust. There are even more saints
than those enumerated by the Bollandists. I have seen some of these
unknown servants consume their days in renouncements, their nights in
beseeching tears, and accepting with gratitude the scanty necessities
that an adverse Destiny sparingly measured out to them. It is said
that the wicked have a hard heart; the Friends of God, their heart is
docile; it is liquid and as an ardent spring that overflows,
inexhaustible, and whose least drop softens the strongest
petrifaction of egoism.
These willing victims never spare their pains ; they fear, one would
say, the easy things ; they are in no hurry to succeed, they are not
upset by defeat, they have the certitude of a definitive victory. In
spite of everything, the witness of their struggles wonders whence
they draw that tenacity, that energy which is not overcome, but
increased by misfortune.
What you have done unto the least among you , Jesus says, you
have done unto me .
In truth, since all suffering is a liberation, it contains a
redeeming virtue emanated from the Word. The disciple, burdening
himself with the misfortune of his brother, forces the mercy of
Christ to descend, though the holy boldness of Love.
Nothing of what exists has been done without the Word; consequently
all that men do to man and to any creature, attains a particular form
of the Word. Moreover, Christ suffered everything, although He was
innocent, although He never had anything to learn. By looking for
similar tasks, although on a smaller scale, the apostle comes nearer
to his Master, or rather he incorporates the essential substance in
himself. Finally, as we already know, Jesus continues to suffer until
all the sheep have come back to the fold. The Calvary of Judea was
only an earthly localization of the universal Calvary. So each time
the apostle assumes someone else's sufferings, that is to say expiates
a fault he has not committed, he relieves in that proportion the
spiritual martyrdom of Jesus.
All that is imagination ! you will think perhaps ; or you will
consider these perspectives as so distant that they dishearten you ?
On the contrary, all these things are positive; they are experienced
facts. But still, to verify them, you must submit to the required
conditions. Heaven is always at our side; it is us who wrongly seek it
so far away. None of the promises of the Gospel is symbolic. They are
all real and permanent, because Jesus was speaking in the Absolute.
Our indifference, most of the time, causes them to remain buried in
the profound circumvolutions of the unconscious. But the true
disciple, the soldier, the apostle, open up paths for them right to

the corporeal level, the social level even. So the annunciation of the
Consoler received realizations other than that of the Pentecost; all
these among us who have come near and who will come near a Friend of
God receive, physically, the visit of the Holy Spirit.
A few Catholic saints found in the Manducation of the Eucharist a
nourishment sufficient for their body. But for all who give without
counting time, money, intelligence and health, the flesh of Christ is
a nourishment and His blood a beverage. Each particle of the body of
Christ was the crystallization of a suffering innocently undergone;
each drop of His blood was the effusion of an act of redeeming Love.
To the extent that we imitate that inimitable model, the faculties,
the organs that carry out those sacrifices see themselves united with
the analogous faculties and organs of Man-God, for he is the vine and
we are the shoots.
Before his birth, the apostle has already weighed his cross and
tasted his cup; the angels have shown him his responsibilities, his
failures, his attacks ; but he, contemplating the innumerable clamour
of the painful multitudes, signed the pact of the great Charity. At
once a Light descended on him, to shine later on with a royal
brightness at each accepted suffering; and if men do not shut their
eyes to it, they will see it and will receive from it a spark of
salvation.
Let us keep awake; if the pathetic voice of a Friend of God rises in
the middle of the night, if he walks, raising the torch of eternal
Light in the darkness, let us not lose that precious visit. Let us
make the difference between the call of a wanderer and that of the
Shepherd. Let us keep, under the ashes of the dying, vain yearnings,
some spark of the primordial Fire that the breath of the Spirit will
rekindle. Let us keep our eyes open, so as not to lose in the crowd
the Pilgrim of Eternity who looks for us so painstakingly. Let us
look everywhere for such men, not by their clothes or by their
discourses, but by their hearts and their works ; the Apostles
seemed to be ignorant and unrefined ; that is to say, since before
their birth, they had already forsaken to the retarded their
intellectual acquisitions and their experiences of earthly
civilization. If we looked at such a missionary without seeing
him, hundreds of centuries would go by before the event of the
wonderful meeting would occur again.
Gentlemen, we will leave each other, for months, for years perhaps,
for who can see the future plainly ? But, no matter how pale my
stories have been, no matter how unskillful I have been in moving
your hearts, I earnestly ask you to remember our talks. Could there
be one among you, in whose heart that memory rises every day ! That
one is ready for the task. But the others, I beg them still to do
their best, so that the Recruiter of Light will soon enroll them.
Today, as at the time when the Messiah was traveling across the
fertile countryside of Israel, we are short of labourers for the mystic
harvest. Ask the Father, according to the wish of His Son, to
remember to send workers ; but also, develop in yourselves the humble
and ardent fervor which will make you chosen for those pacific tasks.
If you knew how moving it is to see dawn rise over the Master's vast
fields, how dusk widely spreads its softness, what balms float in
those valleys, what perspectives enchant the gaze, from hill to hill,
to the brilliant mountains where the radiant shape of the
Well-Beloved shines.
Let us rise, Gentlemen, let us be ready for the first glitter of
morning sun ; like soldiers on the alert, let no attack surprise us
and let the ever-likely appearance of the King of supernatural glory
find us prepared ! I hope that at our next meeting a few among you
will bear on their faces the everlasting light that the invincible
and very gentle gaze of our Jesus leaves, wherever it rests.
The End