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The Eternal Present · Words of Life · 22 min
To read the great spiritual words as living sources.

2,800 years ago, in Judea, a smallstock breeder named Amos spoke out against the mighty of his time. This text explores why his words have not aged a single day. The Book of Amos appears in the Hebrew Bible among the Twelve Minor Prophets — read the full text in Hebrew and English.

Hearing or pretending to sleep

Before the text, there is the cry.

Before the word, there is the animal — the lion in the steppe of Teqoa, whose roar crosses the night and silences the crickets. Amos begins there: not in the palaces of thought, not in the corridors of the Temple, but in the body of a man who hears something that others pretend not to hear.

Aryéh sha’ag mi lo yira — “the lion has roared, who would not tremble?” (Amos 3:8). The verb yaré conveys both dread and reverence. To tremble before the lion is to acknowledge a reality that exceeds our will to believe in it or not. The lion does not ask for our consent.

This is the first hermeneutic gesture of the book of Amos: there is a reality that roars, and we must choose between hearing it and pretending to sleep.

Our civilisation is pretending to sleep.

It sleeps on its ivory divans, as in the eighth century before the common era, in Samaria and Jerusalem, whilst the lion circles the camp. It produces alarming reports which it publishes and ignores in the same breath. It holds summits where commitments are made not to exceed thresholds that are then exceeded. It passes laws that legitimise the very exploitation they claim to forbid. It celebrates its democratic, economic, religious, intellectual liturgies with a fervour inversely proportional to their actual efficacy.

This is what Amos teaches us to read. Not as an ancient text with a few contemporary applications, but as a hermeneutic lens, a way of seeing, which deciphers our world with an almost unbearable precision.

Note on transcription: Hebrew terms follow a simplified phonetic transcription, close to that used in prayer books, rather than the academic SBL transliteration.

The man who had not asked to speak

‘The words of Amos, among the nokedim of Teqoa, which he received in vision concerning Israel, in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash king of Israel — two years before the earthquake’ (Amos 1:1).

The opening of the book is already a programme. The word noked, often translated as ‘shepherd’, refers more precisely to a smallstock breeder, perhaps also a dresser of sycamores (7:14: bolés shiqmim), one who incises wild figs to hasten their ripening. A man of manual labour, of dry earth, of the Judaean steppe. Teqoa lies 16 kilometres south of Jerusalem, at the edge of the desert, a frontier between the cultivated world and the void.

And then the stunning formula, unique in the entire prophetic corpus: lo-navi anokhi vélo-ben-navi anokhi — ‘I am not a prophet, and I am not a son of a prophet’ (Amos 7:14). He repudiates the function, the title, the membership of any prophetic school. Amos is not a professional prophet. He is someone whom that Word has seized despite himself.

The verb he uses to describe his vocation is laqakh, ‘to take, to seize’: vayyiqakhéni YHWH mé’akhar hatsso’n — ‘YHWH (the unpronounceable Name of God) took me from behind the flock’ (Amos 7:15). Not a mystical calling in the sanctuary, not a theophany in the Temple. A hand that shoves you from behind, in the midst of the animals, on an ordinary morning. And yet Amos will stand up and speak loud and clear.

But who speaks today about the state of the world? Who dares, in the wake of Amos, to name the collapse for what it truly is?

We live within a paradox that the sociologist Ulrich Beck had called Risikogesellschaft, the risk society, in which dangers are known, measured, published, and yet politically inassimilable. IPCC reports accumulate. Studies on inequality multiply. Demographers, epidemiologists, collapse theorists, humanist thinkers — all the nokedim of our time — cry out in the wilderness. And the wilderness responds: interesting, thank you, let us move on to the next item on the agenda.

For the legitimacy of speech, in our world, belongs to institutional experts, to mandated experts, to experts accredited by the very institutions that are themselves stakeholders in the system it is their task to critique. The man from Teqoa would not have had access to the microphone. He would not have had a doctorate. He would not have had an affiliation. His word would have been disqualified before it could be heard.

And yet, and this is the paradox the book of Amos poses with a quiet rigour, it is precisely the one who does not belong to the system who can see it whole. The noked of Teqoa has no interest to protect. He has no career to manage. He has no partners to avoid offending. His word is freely given because it was given to him despite himself.

This is the first hermeneutic lesson: in a world where every critical word is immediately absorbed, recycled, neutralised by the institution, the prophetic question is that of the provenance of the voice. From where does one speak? For whom? At what risk?

Amaziah, the priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, says to Amos: lékh bérakha-lékha él-érets Yéhouda vé’ékhol-sham lékhem outsham titnavé — ‘go, flee to the land of Judah, eat your bread there and prophesy there’ (Amos 7:12). The proposal seems reasonable: go and speak elsewhere. But it means in reality: render your word harmless by removing it to a place where it will not trouble those who hold power.

Amos refuses. He stays. He speaks where it hurts, before those who have an interest in not listening. Prophetic speech is always localised. It does not address humanity in general from a view from nowhere. It addresses these people, in this sanctuary, in the name of these specific victims, in such circumstances. It is dangerous precisely because it names reality, conferring upon it a truth that no one can any longer deny.

Law without justice — mishpat and tsedaqah

Véyigal kamayim mishpat outsdaqa kénahal étan — ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).

This verse is probably the most cited in the book. But its force is often flattened in translation. Two Hebrew terms carry here the full weight of a civilisation:

Mishpat — law, the juridical order, the verdict rendered according to established rules. This is what we call today the rule of law, the legal framework — formal legality in all its cold precision.

Tsédaqah — justice, but in the sense of a relational rectitude, a rightness in the bonds between beings. Tsédaqah is not abstract; it is measured in the concrete quality of relations between the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the landowners and the day labourers.

The image is that of the nahal étan — the ‘perennial stream’, as opposed to the wadis that flow in winter and dry up in summer. What Amos asks for is a justice that is not seasonal, a justice that is embodied each day and for each person.

We live in societies endowed with extensive rights on paper and structural injustices in practice. Our constitutions guarantee equality. Our legal codes protect workers. Our charters proclaim dignity. And meanwhile, tax havens legally shelter fortunes built illegally. Multinationals observe the letter of tax law whilst circumventing its spirit. Trade agreements protect investors and expose populations. The instruments of formal democracy — the vote, the parliament, procedure — are scrupulously observed so as to produce policies that serve the interests of those who finance the parties.

This is the distinction Amos drew three millennia before contemporary jurists: mishpat without tsédaqah — law without justice — is a refined form of barbarism. It is barbarism with good manners. It is violence with a legal signature.

The current triumph of what one might call mishpat without tsédaqah is the true face of the civilisational regression we are living through. It does not resemble barbarism as our imagination represents it — hordes invading cities, flames and destruction. It resembles a properly conducted tribunal, a properly adopted law, a properly signed contract, at the conclusion of which a human being is ground down with all due process.

This barbarism wears a suit. It has judges and lawyers.

What the prophet Amos opposes to this legal barbarism is not a reform of mishpat, but the nahal étan of tsédaqah, that ‘ever-flowing stream’, that force which overflows the channels of formal law because it springs from a deeper source.

Tsédaqah in Hebrew thought is not an abstract value inscribed in a founding text that one contemplates from a respectful distance. It is an embodied practice, oriented towards the la’anayim shé’érit Yosséf — literally ‘the afflicted humble ones, the remnant of Joseph’ (cf. Amos 2:7; 5:15), a permanent attentiveness to the lot of the voiceless. The term shé’érit designates a remnant, what remains after a destructive passage — the grains forgotten after the harvest, the survivors after a catastrophe. Those who matter in the eyes of the prophet are precisely those whom history has left behind: the human debris of the system.

The stream that never runs dry is the attention that never grows weary. Justice is not a state to be attained; it is a practice to be sustained, a current to be kept flowing against the natural tendency of water to stagnate in the fertile valleys.

The ivory divans — an anatomy of indifference

Hoy hashaanannim beTsiyon véhabotkhim béhar Shomron — ‘Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, secure on the mountain of Samaria’ (Amos 6:1). The central word is sha’anan — variously translated as ‘insouciance’, ‘quietude’, ‘tranquillity’. But this Hebrew term carries a darker dimension: it is the security of the replete, the indifference of the satiated, the peace of one whose full stomach prevents him from hearing the cry of his neighbour’s empty one.

The portrait that follows is of clinical precision: they lie on mitot shén — ‘beds of ivory’ — stretched upon their couches, they eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall (agalim mitok marbéq), they improvise on their musical instruments, they drink wine by the bowlful (bemizreqé yayin), they anoint themselves with the finest oils (réshit shemanim yimshakhou).

And the verdict falls like an axe: vélo nekhalou al-shévèr Yosséf — ‘and they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph’ (Amos 6:6).

It is not wealth that is condemned. It is the anaesthesia and indifference of the privileged towards the shé’érit — the left-behind, those whom the system has rendered invisible.

There is something hallucinatory in the precision with which this text describes our age.

We live in societies where the upper and upper-middle classes of wealthy nations have reached a level of comfort, leisure, aesthetic and gastronomic consumption without precedent in human history — at the very moment when the indicators of the world’s condition (biodiversity, climatic stability, social cohesion, democratic health, international justice, the return of wars) are collapsing collectively.

It is not that these social classes are unaware of it. They know. They read serious newspapers. They watch documentaries. They express outrage on social media with the appropriate hashtags. And then they have their organic meal delivered in plastic packaging by a courier on a zero-hours contract, whilst the algorithm selects for them the next series to watch on their screens costing several thousand pounds.

The contemporary sha’anan, this comfortable indifference, is not ignorance — it is something more subtle and graver: it is the capacity to hold together the knowledge of disaster and the impermeability to that knowledge. To know that the world is burning and to continue booking one’s holidays. To know the figures on extreme poverty and to find it normal that financial markets set new records every day.

The British-born philosopher Timothy Morton coined the concept of hyperobject to designate those realities so massive and so diffuse — world poverty, the biodiversity crisis, all the modern crises — that the human brain can grasp them only fragmentarily, and therefore tends to treat them as if they did not quite exist. This is the neuroscientific version of sha’anan.

But Amos does not allow us this excuse. He says that the problem is not cognitive — it is ethical. It is not that the elites of Samaria fail to see the ruin of Joseph. It is that they prefer not to see it because seeing would cost them something.

Amos’s diatribe against the ivory divans is structured as a gesture of interruption. He enters the bubble of comfort, he names precisely each element of the décor — the beds, the meat, the music, the wine, the oil — and then he turns the gaze towards what is absent: shévèr Yosséf — ‘the ruin of Joseph’.

The shévèr — a term used elsewhere in the Bible for the fracture of a bone or the breaking of a ship — here designates the social rupture, the collapse of the structures that had held a community together. The ruin of Joseph: the small peasants dispossessed of their lands (Amos 2:6–7: sold for a pair of sandals), the exploited day labourers, the widows who have no one to plead their case at the city gate — the list is too long to name them all. Prophecy brings no programmatic solution. It does something more radical: it unites within the same field of vision the ivory divans and the ruin of Joseph. It makes it impossible not to see both together. And this co-presence is unbearable.

This may be the most essential function of a prophetic hermeneutic act today: before proposing any reforms, to force a simultaneous vision — to place side by side what society organises itself to keep separate, and to let that confrontation work upon us in the depths of our being.

Piety as alibi — worship without conversion

Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem vélo ariah béatsérotékhem — ‘I hate, I despise your feasts, and I cannot bear your solemn assemblies’ (Amos 5:21).

This is one of the most scandalous texts in the entire Hebrew Bible. Sanéti — I hate — is a strong term, unqualified. And it is YHWH himself who speaks, in the first person, concerning his own feasts, his own sacrifices, the music offered in his own honour.

Ki im-yigal kamayim mishpat — ‘but let justice roll down like waters’ (5:24). The adversative conjunction Ki im is here fundamental: it opposes worship without justice to justice without worship, and decides unhesitatingly in favour of the latter.

Amos is not an iconoclast. He does not say that worship is bad in itself. He says that worship detached from the practice of justice becomes its own contrary: a way of purchasing a clear conscience for next to nothing, of settling one’s account before G-d without settling one’s account before one’s neighbour.

Two readings may be made of this passage, one intra-religious and the other secular, and they are superimposed upon one another.

The intra-religious reading is of burning relevance: to what extent do contemporary religious institutions — churches, mosques, synagogues, Buddhist temples — produce moral comfort rather than ethical conversion? To what extent is liturgical fervour inversely proportional to engagement with humanist, social, political, ecological questions? Amos’s diagnosis strikes the religious where they believe themselves most secure: in their very piety.

But the secular reading is equally pertinent. Our age has its own substitute liturgies: international summits, conferences on sustainable development, prize-giving ceremonies for philanthropists, the grand speeches of world leaders on solidarity. These gatherings have the structure of worship — the sacred venue (Davos, the UN General Assembly), the accredited officiants, the ritual formulae, the music (here: applause). And this worship produces exactly what the worship at Bethel, which Amos condemned, produced: the satisfaction of having performed the required gestures, without having changed anything in reality.

Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem — I hate your forums, your COPs, your G7 summits. Not because the questions are absent from them, but because they serve to neutralise those questions. The problem is not gathering there. The problem is leaving relieved.

What Amos asks for is not the abolition of worship but its verification — the question posed at the entrance to the sanctuary: does my life outside this place correspond to what I am about to celebrate within?

The Hebrew prophet is not a moralist who proposes rules. He is a tester of coherence — one who measures the gap between discourse and practice, between proclamation and reality, between what one claims to be and what one actually brings into being.

The prophetic question posed to our age is this: what is the gap between what we proclaim ourselves to be — democratic, equal, committed to solidarity, mindful of the environment — and what our collective practices actually do to the world?

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The illusory hope that excuses inaction

Hoy hamit’avim ét-yom YHWH lama-zé lakhem yom YHWH hou-khoshékh vélo-or — ‘Woe to those who desire the Day of YHWH! What will this Day of YHWH mean for you? It will be darkness, and not light’ (Amos 5:18).

The Yom YHWH, the Day of G-d, was in the popular imagination of Israel the great moment of national deliverance, the day when YHWH would intervene to save his people and crush their enemies. A triumphalist, eschatological imagination in the sense of a guaranteed happy ending for one’s own.

Amos overturns this expectation. Ka’ashèr yanus ish mipné ha’ari oufga’o hadov — that day will be ‘as if a man fled from a lion and met a bear’ (Amos 5:19). The catastrophe moves but does not disappear. One escapes one predator only to encounter another. On that day, the man who goes into his house and leans his hand against the wall will be bitten by a snake.

Deliverance does not come automatically to those who believe it their due.

Our age is haunted by various forms of this ill-founded expectation of a providential rescue.

There is the technological expectation: geo-engineering will save us, nuclear fusion will save us, artificial intelligence will save us, renewable energy deployed at scale will save us — without requiring any change in the foundations of a way of life that produces the disaster. One flees the lion of climate change by running towards the bear of digital hyperactivism.

There is the political expectation: a great leader, a great election night, a great reform — something from outside that comes to resolve what one lacks the will to resolve from within. This secular messianic expectation is the dominant political pathology of our time, oscillating between hope in a providential saviour and cynical despair when the saviour proves to be made of clay as well — which is always the case.

There is the properly religious expectation: the return of the Messiah, the Parousia, the redemptive Apocalypse — eschatologies which, in their degraded forms, dispense with engagement in present history since everything will in any case be transfigured by divine intervention.

In the face of all these illusions, Amos poses the same question: lama-zé lakhem — ‘what will it mean for you?’ What use is hope that does not pass through conversion, through turning, through what the Hebrew prophetic tradition calls shûv — to return, to change direction, in individual life as in collective life?

For Amos is not a prophet of despair. But he is a prophet of conditional hope — and that hope has nothing to do with an individual salvation deferred in the world to come. It concerns the world, here, now: the real transformation of relations between human beings and with the earth they inhabit. In this sense, it joins all the great hopes, secular as well as religious, that wager on the possibility of a more just world.

But the condition is demanding. It is not meritocratic — Amos does not say that the good shall be saved, nor that human efforts suffice to guarantee anything. He says something more radical and more disturbing: without real turning, without shûv — that turning which engages the body, the will and collective practices — the hope of a better world is merely an empty word, a comfortable expectation that relieves one of the need to act and ends by serving the status quo.

Dirshou oti vikhyou — ‘seek me and you shall live’ (Amos 5:4). The verb darash — to seek, to require, to consult — is not a verb of mystical contemplation. Nor is it a verb of reward. It is the verb of active movement, of investigation, of permanent questioning — an orientation, not a guarantee. Prophetic hope is a hope that rises early in the morning and begins to work towards building another world, without guaranteed results, without certainty of seeing its fruit.

The earth that remembers — an eco-prophetic dimension

In the background of the book, the adamah, the earth — whose intimate bond with the human adam drawn from it Genesis recounts — is a silent but omnipresent character. Amos 4:6–11 describes a cascade of natural catastrophes: famine (niqyon shinayim — ‘cleanness of teeth’, that is, teeth that have nothing to chew), drought (végam anokhi mana’ti mikkhem ét-haguéshem — ‘And I too have withheld the rain from you’), mildew and blight that ravage the harvests, locusts, pestilence, epidemics.

These catastrophes are presented not as arbitrary divine punishments but as responses of the earth to the violence of human relations. It suffers first from what human beings inflict upon one another. There is an ontological solidarity linking social justice among the adam to the health of the adamah.

The formula that recurs like a refrain in the enumeration of catastrophes is vélo-shavtem élay — ‘and you have not returned to Me’ (Amos 4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). Ecological catastrophe is an invitation to shûv, to turning. But the invitation is refused — five times.

The contemporary ecological crisis is irreducible to a technical question. At its foundations, it is an ethical and anthropological question.

What the earth sciences have been telling us for several decades converges, with troubling precision, with what Hebrew prophecy has been saying for three millennia: there is a deep connection between the way human beings treat one another and the way they treat the earth. Societies that reduce human beings to extractable resources treat ecosystems in the same fashion. This is not a coincidence; it is the same logic operating at different levels of reality.

The economist Jason Hickel and others have shown that the ecological crisis is structurally linked to the global economic system, which is itself structurally linked to global inequalities. What is politely called the ‘environmental crisis’ is in reality the shévèr — the fracture — of a relationship: between human beings, and between human beings and their milieu.

And as in Amos 4, the alarm signals multiply — pandemics, droughts, floods, collapses of biodiversity — and the collective response bears a terrible resemblance to vélo-shavtem élay: we have not changed direction.

What is remarkable in Amos’s thought is that the adamah is not merely an object of human solicitude. She is a subject — a reality that reacts, that responds, that bears the memory of the acts accomplished within her.

This intuition, which the indigenous thought of many cultures has maintained and which Western thought has systematically effaced, now stands at the heart of the new ecological ontologies (Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, the new materialism school) and of the theologies and spiritualities of creation (Laudato Si’, Latin American theologies of the Earth).

The hermeneutic question this text poses for today is radical: what happens when one takes seriously the idea that the earth speaks — not metaphorically but as a subject of right, as an entity to which we are answerable? To integrate this perspective would transform the whole of our legal, economic, and political frameworks.

And yet...

We have built remarkable architectures for not trembling. We have psychologists who help us manage our eco-anxiety — that is to say, to live with the anguish of catastrophe without modifying its causes. We have economists who explain to us that green growth is possible — that is to say, that we can go on consuming more whilst destroying less. We have theologians who assure us that G-d will not allow humanity to disappear — that is to say, that we can act as though someone else were going to deal with the problem.

These are our ivory divans. These are our rites of Bethel. These are our yom YHWH from which we hope for salvation without having had to change.

Sanéti ma’asti — says the Voice. I hate your solutions that resolve nothing. I despise your agreements that commit no one. I cannot bear your conferences where you congratulate one another for having pronounced the right words.

This is what I ask of you: véyigal kamayim mishpat — let justice roll down like waters.

Not a trickle of water administered by committees of experts. Not a rivulet channelled through compliance procedures. A nahal étan — a stream that never runs dry — that is to say, a demand for justice that knows no dead season, that does not suspend its course during elections, that does not pause during economic crises, that does not run dry when the lobbies have drunk their fill.

A demand for justice reborn in each individual movement towards greater consideration for the other, in each daily effort at self-betterment, in each group that begins to embody the first fruits of a new world.

For one must hear also what Amos does not say. He does not say that we are condemned.

The book of Amos ends, after all, with a promise — Véshavti ét-shévout ami Yisraél — ‘I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel’ (Amos 9:14). The vine shall be planted, the wine shall be drunk, the gardens shall be made and their fruits eaten. The final image is that of the adamah reconciled with those who dwell within her.

But between the now and that future, there is one word, just one, on which everything hinges: shûv. To return. To change direction. Not a surface reform, not an optimisation of the existing system, but a turning — what all spiritual traditions name in their own fashion: the Greek metanoia, the Hebrew teshuvah, conversion in its most radical sense — that change of life which engages the body, the will, the practices, the concrete choices of every day.

Dirshou oti vikhyou — seek me and you shall live.

Barbarism is not our destiny. It is our default choice when we relinquish the act of choosing otherwise. And prophecy, in its most precise, most faithful, most Hebraic sense, is not the prediction of the inevitable. It is the name of the Voice that says: it is still possible not to go where you are going.

The lion has roared.

To respond is to begin, here and now.

Reading to be transformed

This way of reading — beginning with the Hebrew text, turning towards today, returning to the text enriched, turning back towards the present transformed — is an existential posture as much as a method. It refuses two symmetrical temptations: fundamentalism, which maps the ancient text onto the present without mediation and crushes the complexity of the real; and complacent projection, which seeks in the prophets sympathetic forerunners of our current preoccupations without allowing the text to disturb our certainties and question us in any depth.

This is, ultimately, the wager of all serious hermeneutics: that understanding is not a neutral act, that reading transforms the reader, and that the transformed reader can transform what he reads — that is to say, the world in which he reads.

Aryéh sha’ag. The lion has roared.

The question that now remains is whether we shall prophesy.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What does this text make audible for you today? Leave a sentence, a resonance, a disagreement, or a glimpse of light in the comments, so that the word may continue to circulate.

And if you wish to share your reading of a spiritual word, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

I am
of all departures
of all wanderings
everywhere I have known cold
hunger and sorrow
but joy too
immense and full
ember of the infinite I was
beneath the stars

I am the child of trees
and mountains
birdsongs
flutter through my dreams
I know no boundary
I eat the bread of springs
the moon is my inn

I am the Hebrew
radical rupture
the wound of heaven
has bled upon me
its gold and its vertigo
I knock unceasingly
at the door of mysteries
I shall sing tomorrow
Thy Name
in Jerusalem

I am the defiant one
slave they would make me
the thieves of the earth
who beat and kill
since the dawn of time
the number of their iron cage
traced upon my arm
from my very first breath
I burned it mingled
into my ashes
and my blood
never to forget
never to forget

I belong to no law
that tears Life
into tawdry fair-day scraps
for stray dogs
I am woven of Life
the immense Life
that nothing can confine
the bread of free Life
shared in love
Thy Word alone is my viaticum
O Father
Thou who dwellest within me
as within Thine infinities!

I am the poor Sufi
all but delirious
from having turned so long
and I turn and I turn
new axis of the world
my foot in the earth
my hand hooked to heaven
and the Sap flows through me
I am a gilded reliquary
wherein the Eternal dwells

I am the brother of Yechou
I overturn the merchants
of every temple
they nailed him with their dogmas
dragged his cross like a banner
to mark their conquests
but Life is stronger
than death and falsehood

I am the man
of the new world
I glimpse it far away
over there
on the bluish horizon
the tumult and the tears have ceased
human beings are no longer
divided competing
they have laid in common
their talents of light
their possibilities of love
all the sublime of their being

Each one knows his rightful path
none diminishes the other beneath his rule
the entire universe is in jubilation
for the children of Adam speak once more to G‑d
in the cool of the evening

Adochem hou haElokim !°
Adochem hou haElokim !
Adochem hou haElokim !    

Jérôme Nathanaël - 16 mars 2019

° יְהוָה הוּא הָֽאֱלֹהִים - Adochem hou haElokim - “The Eternal is G‑d”, Deut. 4,39

Note: this poem was originally written in French. The translation is my own.

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© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 22 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 5 — Humility full of gratitude
Previous article: The victory of Constancy

The fifth step of the temple

At the end of the first four stages of this journey, something has gradually been built within us. Love was first recognised as the fundamental energy that upholds the universe and can pass through us if we consent to open a way for it. Discipline then gave it its form and its channel, transforming generous but diffuse impulses into a purposeful force, capable of acting amid the sometimes rough circumstances of daily life. From their convergence was born radiant compassion, that living fruit of inner transmutation, the warmth of the one who draws from the labyrinth he has traversed the capacity to hold another’s hand. And constancy, the fourth quality of the soul, rooted all this over time, refusing to let this fine edifice collapse at the first squall.

Yet all these qualities, precious though they are, carry within them a risk that one barely senses, and which grows in silence: that of spiritual pride, that refined form of complacency which steals into the one who is progressing and begins to revel in its own progress. It is precisely this peril that the fifth quality of the soul comes to ward off, the most discreet and perhaps the most decisive of all: humility full of gratitude. It is not one virtue among others; it is, in a sense, the guardian of all the others, that without which love turns into possession, discipline into tyranny, compassion into condescendance and constancy into obstinacy.

Humility is not self-effacement

Before anything else, it is necessary to dispel a misunderstanding deeply rooted in our culture, which confuses humility with self-deprecation, lack of self-worth, or worse still, that servile self-abnegation which inclines one to accept the unacceptable for fear of displeasing. This confusion is not insignificant: it has caused immense damage in the history of spiritual traditions, making humility a suspect virtue in the eyes of all those who, rightly, refuse the effacement of their dignity.

True humility does not demean: it places things rightly. It consists in seeing things as they are, beginning with oneself: neither greater nor smaller than one truly is. The man who knows himself with lucidity, who can face his qualities squarely without taking pride in them and his shortcomings without condemning himself for them, who honestly recognises his gifts while knowing that he did not manufacture them entirely by himself but received and developed them, that man is already practising authentic humility. He has no need to diminish himself before others, for he knows that displayed smallness is often another form of pride, more subtle and more difficult to unmask.

Humility, thus understood, is a strength and not a weakness. The man who is humble can receive criticism without collapsing, receive a compliment without becoming intoxicated by it, acknowledge his errors without losing his dignity, and advance on his path without needing the whole world to confirm at every step that he is moving in the right direction. He is no longer dependent on the gaze of others in order to stand upright: it is in this that humility is one of the most central conditions of inner sovereignty.

The empty cup and the open sky

The traditions of wisdom teach us, through a striking image, that one cannot fill a cup that is already full. So long as we are encumbered by our certainties, our prejudices about ourselves and about the world, our strategies of defence and our ambitions of the ego, there is simply no longer any room for anything new to enter us. Life, in its inexhaustible generosity, continues to knock at the door, but the room is so cluttered that it can no longer even cross the threshold. This is precisely what humility does: it clears the room, not in order to leave it empty, but so that it may be filled with what surpasses our ordinary capacity to receive.

This metaphor goes beyond simple psychological common sense: it touches the very structure of spiritual life. The great mystics of all traditions have described humility as the primary condition of union with the Infinite. One does not join what is greater than oneself by clinging to what one is, but by consenting, with trust and without fear, to be passed through and transformed. This consent, which is nothing other than deep humility, is the keystone of every real transcendence. It is not a question of denying oneself, but of surpassing oneself, not of effacing oneself but of opening so widely that one begins to glimpse the immensity of what encompasses us, and to recognise in it our true dwelling place, knowing that what one may receive from it grows with every act of authentic humility.

Humility and self-knowledge

One is not born humble: one becomes so, at the end of a patient labour upon oneself which first requires a particular quality of gaze, a gaze free from indulgent complacency and condemning severity, upon all that lives within us. The man who observes himself without bias, who accepts seeing not only his brighter qualities but also his shadowed regions, his less honourable motives, his skilful compensations, his flights disguised as commitments, begins to gain access to that inner sobriety which is the natural soil of humility.

This self-knowledge is not a melancholy complacency in one’s defects: on the contrary, it is liberating. For so long as we are ignorant of our real mechanisms, we are their prisoners without knowing it, perpetually manipulated by forces we do not see. The discipline acquired at the second stage of this journey taught us to observe our inner functioning with attentive presence, and that observation is precisely what makes humility possible: one cannot bow before the truth of oneself unless one consents to look at it.

This lucidity concerning oneself opens a second door, just as important: the capacity to see the other as he is, and not as a reflection of our own projections. The man who has not worked at this knowledge of himself constantly tends to read the behaviour of others through the prism of his own wounds and his own expectations, deforming the reality of the other for the benefit of an imaginary character whom he takes for real. Humility, by helping us to step out of ourselves, restores the other to us as he is: infinitely more complex, more surprising, more worthy of consideration than our ego, concerned only with its own survival, had led us to believe.

Humility is active, not passive

One of the most tenacious misunderstandings surrounding humility lies in the image of passivity it sometimes evokes. It is readily imagined as a disposition to efface oneself: to occupy as little space as possible, to keep silent about what one would be right to say, to bend without resisting — a virtue of the shadows, agreeable and without roughness. This is a fundamental error. True humility is one of the most dynamic strengths there is: it includes within itself all the other qualities of the soul, love, discipline, compassion and constancy, not in a latent state, but active and directed.

The man who is humble does not wait for circumstances to summon him in order to act: he initiates, he proposes, he commits himself. But he does so without the agitation of the one who seeks to prove something, without the tension of the one who watches over his own image, without the impatience of the one who wants immediate results. He acts because it is right to act, and this right action, carried by a pure intention, possesses an efficacy that agitated action never attains. Humility has a sensitivity all its own: it perceives what the other needs even before he expresses it, it discerns the right moment to intervene and the moment when silence is more eloquent than any word.

This active humility is also that which does not abdicate before injustice on the pretext that it does not wish to put itself forward. To remain silent and neutral in the face of cruelty or oppression, out of a false humility which in reality conceals the fear of exposing oneself, is not a virtue: it is a desertion. Authentic humility, because it has no pride to protect, can rise up with a freedom and a determination that an ego clenched around its reputation never knows. Let us think of Moses, to whom the Torah attributes precisely the quality of being the humblest man on earth, and who was also the liberator of a people, the one who stood against Pharaoh and the mediator of a Covenant. Humility does not extinguish the sacred fire: it gives it its true measure.

Gratitude: the other face of humility

There is a dimension of humility that is mentioned too rarely and yet is, in certain traditions, inscribed in its very etymology: gratitude. In Hebrew, the word that designates humility in its deepest sense, hoda’ah, issues from the same root as the verb “to thank” and “to acknowledge”. To be humble, in this perspective, is first of all to acknowledge, in the full sense of the term: to acknowledge that the strengths, talents and gifts we bear do not belong to us in our own right, that they have been entrusted to us for a purpose greater than ourselves, and that we are their responsible custodians far more than their absolute owners.

This acknowledgement changes everything in our relation to existence. The man who lives in gratitude takes nothing for granted: neither his health, nor his intelligence, nor his friendships, nor the beauties of the world he has been given to inhabit. He knows that every instant of clarity, every impulse of love, every fruitful encounter is a gift whose source surpasses him, and this fills him with a wonder that does not grow weary. This disposition has nothing naive or sentimental about it: it coexists perfectly with a lucid vision of the sufferings of the world and of one’s own fragilities. But it transforms the gaze, substituting for the bitterness of lack the silent richness of what is there, and for the anxiety of what might be lost, the living fullness of what is present.

Thus gratitude is a protection against one of the most corrosive forms of the ego: jealousy. The man who is truly grateful for what he receives no longer needs to compare what he has with what his neighbour possesses, for he has discovered that comparison is the declared enemy of joy. Gratitude shifts our centre of gravity from scarcity to abundance, from complaint to thanksgiving, from clinging to what is missing to an open welcome to what comes.

Humility and dignity: to walk humbly is to walk tall

We must now return to an apparent paradox, one that sometimes makes those hesitate who sense the value of humility but fear losing something of their being in it. To walk humbly is to walk tall. Dignity is not the enemy of humility: it is its natural expression. The man who has truly integrated this quality bears a quiet nobility which has no need to proclaim or defend itself. He is not on a stage playing a role: he is simply there, whole and present, available and free.

This humble dignity is the exact antithesis of two equally destructive attitudes. On the one hand, arrogance, which believes itself above others and looks down on them from its supposed height, digging chasms where bridges should be built. On the other hand, the false humility of the one who systematically diminishes himself, who refuses every responsibility or guiding role in the name of a displayed modesty, when that modesty is sometimes no more than a disguised fear of assuming the consequences of his own greatness. True humility occupies a just space between these two pitfalls: it accepts being what it is, neither more nor less, and allows that being to manifest itself freely, in the service of something greater than itself.

It is remarkable that the most luminous spiritual figures in human history share this characteristic: a humility that never prevented them from speaking with authority, acting with decision, or radiating with a force that nothing could extinguish. Their humility was precisely what made their radiance authentic and impossible to imitate by mere force of will: it bore witness to a source passing through them, greater than they were and yet intimately mingled with what they were.

The secret strength of humility

Humility has a particular relation with the constancy we explored at the previous stage: it is, if one may put it so, its invisible fuel. For human constancy, left to its own forces alone, sooner or later comes up against its natural limits. It may endure for a long time, but it becomes exhausted if it does not draw from a source deeper than itself. It is humility that makes possible this connection with a vaster source, by recognising that our endurance is not only the fruit of our own will, but is also nourished by a strength that passes through us and that we do not entirely master.

Without humility, constancy runs dry and slowly diminishes, whereas with it, a power greater than itself can nourish it and, far from fatiguing it, regenerate it. This is the experience of all those who have crossed long inner nights and who, instead of bracing themselves upon their will alone, have consented to let go of control over the result while maintaining their fidelity to the effort: they then discover that they endure with a lightness they did not expect, borne by something that does not come from them.

Humility also brings into human relations a fluidity that no other quality produces with the same efficacy. There is no truly deep bond that was not born, at one moment or another, from an admission of fragility, a gesture of mutual recognition, a consent on both sides to step down from their respective pedestals in order to meet on the common ground of their humanity. Humility is not a solitude: on the contrary, it is what makes the strongest bonds possible, because it rests on shared truth rather than on a carefully constructed façade.

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One inclination, a thousand names

In the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, humility receives different names and faces according to languages and cultures, yet its deep reality is everywhere the same: the primary condition of every authentic inner life.

In Christianity, humility is placed at the very heart of the Gospel message. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” says Jesus in the Beatitudes according to Matthew, designating not intellectual poverty but that inner availability of the man who does not cling to his certainties and remains open to what surpasses him. Paul, in the Epistle to the Philippians, speaks of kenosis, voluntary self-emptying, as a paradigm of spiritual life, evoking the way in which Christ “emptied himself” in order to take on the human condition. The monastic tradition, from Benedict of Nursia to John of the Cross, made humility both the first and the last degree of spiritual life, the one without which all the other virtues risk being corrupted by pride, and its great masters traced with precision the successive degrees of this stripping away of the self.

In Islam, humility is expressed by the word tawadu, the act of “lowering oneself”, and constitutes one of the cardinal qualities of the mu’min, the fully realised believer. The Qur’an constantly returns to the necessity of recognising that every good comes from God and that the human being is only the custodian of His gifts: “Do not walk upon the earth insolently; you can neither pierce the earth nor equal the mountains in height” (Sura 17:37). Sufism deepens this notion through the concept of fanâ, the extinction of the ego in divine contemplation, which the masters describe not as the disappearance of the person but as the dissolution of his illusory tensions so that what lies beyond the ego may shine forth. Al-Ghazali, in his Ihyâ’ ‘Ulûm al-Dîn, devotes an entire chapter to humility as the antidote to pride, which he considers the first of the spiritual vices to be fought.

In Judaism, the central notion is anavah, humility, the quality the Torah attributes to Moses in unique terms, and which does not signify weakness of character but an absolute openness to hearing the divine will. The Kabbalah designates this fifth quality of the soul by the name Hod, whose Hebrew etymology refers at once to splendour, magnificence, and acknowledgement in the sense of thanksgiving, hoda’ah. This double meaning is profoundly instructive: the true splendour of being does not manifest itself in the brilliance of the ego, but in the humility of the man who recognises the source of his gifts and becomes their conscious channel. Hod is the fifth of the emotional sefirot of the Tree of Life, corresponding to the left side in the dimension of receptivity, and the kabbalists teach that it gives Netzach, constancy, its right direction, just as fuel gives the engine its real power.

In Hinduism, humility appears under the term vinaya, which designates at once modesty and voluntary self-discipline, or again namrata, the gracious gentleness of the one who does not believe himself superior to others. The Bhagavad Gita cites humility among the divine qualities of the accomplished being, alongside purity and courage, and the tradition of Vedanta makes the surpassing of ahamkâra, the feeling of being a separate ego, the primary condition of realisation of the Self. Ramanuja and Shankaracharya, though diverging on the ultimate nature of the relation between the individual soul and universal Brahman, agree on one essential point: the ego clenched around itself is the primary obstacle to every spiritual breakthrough, and its voluntary abandonment is the gate of liberation.

Buddhism, in its different branches, approaches humility through the central notion of anâttâ, the non-permanence of the self, and through the practice that follows from it: the gradual loosening of attachment to a fixed and defensive identity. Theravada Buddhism sees in humility the necessary condition for entering upon the Noble Eightfold Path — the eight-fold way the Buddha designated as the path towards the cessation of suffering: so long as one believes oneself already awakened or spiritually superior, every real progress is blocked. Mahayana Buddhism enriches this perspective through the figure of the Bodhisattva, who renounces the glory of his own liberation by an act of radical humility in the service of all beings. In Zen Buddhism, the tradition of shoshin, the beginner’s mind, expressed with force by Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, admirably sums up this quality: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.” It is humility that keeps alive the availability to learn and to be transformed.

Taoism approaches humility by way of its most characteristic images: water, the valley, the fertile void. Water, says Lao Tzu in chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, “nourishes all beings without intending to, and is content with the low places others disdain: thus it resembles the Tao”. The valley, in chapter 6, is called “the spirit of the valley” (gushen), that void which is not absence but infinite receptivity, capable of receiving all waters because it claims no height for itself. This Taoist humility is not a moral posture but an alignment with the deep nature of reality: water does not choose to be humble, it is humble because that is how it expresses its own nature. The Taoist sage, likewise, does not practise humility as a painful discipline: he simply lets the ego dissolve into the natural flow of the Tao, discovering that what he thought he had to defend in himself was only an obstacle to his own freedom.

All these traditions converge towards one and the same deep conviction: humility is not the enemy of greatness but its condition. It does not diminish the one who cultivates it: it reveals to him that what he had believed to be his own greatness was only a sketch, and that his true measure is infinitely vaster than anything his ego could imagine.

A few markers for the path

These reflections on humility and gratitude are not meant to transform us into effaced and resigned figures. They are meant to help us recognise and cultivate that form of inner clarity which allows life to pass through us more freely, by lessening the resistances we oppose to it without even knowing it. If the love of the first stage was the sap, the discipline of the second the form, the compassion of the third the fruit, and the constancy of the fourth the root that holds the whole tree, humility is the soil: that dark and nourishing depth without which no root can sink far enough to hold firm in the storm.

As a complement, you may wish to reread the articles in the Abecedary: H for Humility and G for Gratitude, each of which approaches one of these two notions in its own right.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Take a moment of calm and inwardness. Let each of these questions descend within you without seeking any immediate answer. What rises with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the reality of my humility
Is my humility sincere, or is it another form of ego, a secret pride in being humble? Do I sometimes flatter myself inwardly for my modesty, or do I display it in a way that seeks to be recognised? Does my humility bring me joy and lightness, or does it weigh upon me and make me sad? A joyful humility is living and true; a sad humility deserves to be re-examined.

On humility in my relationships
Does my humility lead me to be more loving and more generous, or does it inhibit me and close me in upon myself? Do I know how to receive a compliment with grace, without evading it through excess of modesty or becoming proud of it? Do I know how to acknowledge my errors towards someone without my request for forgiveness carrying an expectation of recognition? And when I exercise authority or offer counsel, does my manner of doing so leave the other person standing in his dignity?

On humility before adversity
Does my humility withstand trials, or is it carried away by the first disappointment? In the face of criticism, do I know how to discern what it is right to receive, without either defending myself out of pride or collapsing through lack of self-worth? When I encounter an obstacle, is my first reflex to seek what this obstacle has come to teach me, or is my first reaction to look for an external culprit?

On my gratitude
Am I in a state of natural gratitude towards existence, or do I take for granted what I receive from it? Am I aware, in moments of clarity or joy, that these moments are gifts and not dues? In difficult moments, can I still find, without forcing myself, at least one thing for which to give thanks? Is the gratitude I express to others sincere, or is it a formula of politeness that I no longer truly inhabit?

On the source of my strengths
Do I attribute to my will alone and to my merit alone the qualities I manifest and the successes I attain in existence, or do I honestly recognise that they also come from what I have received, from those who have formed me, and from something greater than myself? Does this acknowledgement weaken me or, on the contrary, free me from a burden too heavy to carry alone?

2. A few gestures for the week

Practise generosity before recollection
Before each moment of meditation, prayer or inner silence during this week, perform an act of generosity towards someone, however modest it may be: an attention offered, a service rendered, an encouraging word. Observe how this gesture prepares and deepens your inner state in the moments that follow.

Observe the origin of my hesitations
Choose a situation in your present life in which you feel a resistance, a refusal to commit yourself, or a reluctance to acknowledge something. Take the time to examine its root honestly: does this hesitation come from a real and just discernment, or from a disguised fear, from an unavowed pride? This simple distinction, practised regularly, is one of the most powerful exercises there is.

Express humility in an act of compassion
Identify someone around you who is going through a difficulty. Not in order to place yourself in the position of the one who helps and knows, but in order truly to put yourself in his place, with the awareness that you could, in other circumstances, go through exactly the same trial. Let this silent identification guide your gesture. Observe how it changes the quality of your presence.

Build something lasting with someone
Humility should not be a solitary experience: it finds its full measure in the bonds it strengthens and deepens. Choose this week to create something with someone — a project, a substantial conversation, a shared commitment — while deliberately placing yourself in a position of listening and co-construction rather than direction. Humility that unites is stronger than any solitary eloquence.

Teach the dignity of humility
Find an opportunity, this week, to show by your example, not by your speeches, that humility and dignity are not opposed. This may take the form of receiving criticism without defending yourself, publicly acknowledging an error or a limit, or expressing precise gratitude to someone who has helped you grow. The most powerful lesson is always the one that is seen rather than the one that is heard.

Be humble, simply
On one day this week, choose to practise humility for its own sake, without any expectation of recognition, result, or even spiritual progress. Not in order to prove to yourself that you know how to be humble, but simply in order to do it. This form of humility, freed from all self-regarding purpose, is the rarest and perhaps the closest to what the traditions call purity of intention.

3. Celebration of this stage

At the end of these seven days, or of whatever time you devote to this stage, take a moment to identify one precise thing that your practice of humility or gratitude has made possible during this week: a strengthened bond, a defused tension, an instant of lightness where there had been heaviness, a beauty noticed where your ordinary gaze would not have rested. Write it in a notebook, or say it aloud.

For humility that is not celebrated risks being confused with self-effacement, and gratitude that is not named dissolves into habit. What we welcome and acknowledge with joyful attention, we invite to continue growing and unfolding further in our life.

Next week, we shall discover how this humility full of gratitude, once integrated into our way of being, naturally opens the way to the sixth quality of the soul: inner stability, that deep and living centre from which the spiritual sovereignty we came together to seek on this path may at last begin to rise.

A good journey to all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Night has almost fallen. The arid, grey plain seems devastated by fire. I do not know how I came to be here. I walk slowly, hesitantly, among the shadows — vague human shapes I sometimes feel brushing past me. Yet no face calls out to me, I who am among the living, in this place foreign to all memory.

Only a muffled murmur fills the space, telling me that I am moving through a multitude. I begin to make out a few words, like whispers around me: “Killed in Gaza,” “killed at Kibbutz Nir Oz,” “at the Nova festival,” and again: “Killed in Jabalia,” “at Kfar Aza!” then further off, slightly louder: “At Kibbutz Be’eri!” “killed in Khan Yunis…” Other voices draw closer and grow more distinct: “Killed in Mariupol,” “Mosul…,” “Aleppo…,” “Srebrenica,” “killed in Kigali.” All at once I understand: these fragments of sentences are addressed to me. This ageless crowd, in order to exist still, is calling out to me! The terrible litany continues to swell all around: “Killed in Vietnam,” “killed in Hiroshima,” “Stalingrad!” “Dresden!” until it has engulfed me entirely. “Killed at Auschwitz,” “Verdun!” “Waterloo!” — each supplication weighs heavier on my step. I stagger, overwhelmed, more and more moved. Suddenly a brief silence, full and heavy, followed by a harrowing cry: “Killed by the madness of the living!”

I wake abruptly, drenched in sweat, seized by tears, shaken to the core. I look at the time: three o’clock. Outside, the darkness is absolute, black as the history of the world. Tomorrow morning, the living will rise to slaughter one another. Some will have the glory of defending their own against murderous hatred. Others will obey resentment or indoctrination. And yet all those who have fallen, like all those who will fall, will be gathered into a single people in that other world I have glimpsed. They will swell those multitudes who weep over their lost lives, their blood mingled with the earth, crying out towards an implacable sky.

Faced with this irreversible misfortune, all certainties — those good or bad reasons to kill or to be killed — appear to me so provisional and so tragic. That terrible cry, “Killed by the madness of the living!”, still echoes in my head and obliges me, like a summons from my dead brothers, to try to reduce the customary violence of this world.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

It is truly time that human beings chose love, as Martin Luther King proclaimed, he who said that “hatred is too great a burden to bear.” We may observe this each day, both in the wars and massacres that punctuate our history and in the countless conflicts of our societies: terrible are the consequences of these hatreds with their many faces, from which none of us is entirely exempt. Some conceal themselves beneath the veil of propriety or diplomacy. Their ferocity is no less for it, as they await only a fitting occasion to set the world alight or to gnaw at the daily lives of our fellow human beings, burdening them with fears or illusions. These hatreds drape themselves in so many tawdry trappings, in arguments of common sense or vengeance; they vary in intensity, erupting explosively or living secret lives — yet all share a common matrix: they are all daughters of Cain, that first murderer in history who, when questioned by G-d about the fate of the brother he had just killed, replied with this founding abdication:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9)

Many hotbeds of war

When I look at the world today, civil wars and wars between nations are spread across the entire planet, though the media most often highlight only those pitting Ukraine against Russia, or Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

To measure the true extent of this disaster, one must accept looking squarely at figures that well-protected consciences prefer to leave in the abstraction of organisational reports. The ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) estimated in a report of July 2024 that 50 countries are in the grip of violence: one person in seven worldwide is said to have been exposed to its consequences.

The map below, taken from their Conflict Index, shows the scale of it.

The AOAV (Action on Armed Violence) recorded approximately 34,000 civilian deaths worldwide in 2023: an increase of 130 per cent compared with 2022, with victims in Gaza accounting for 39 per cent of that total. On the military side, Media Zona estimated in November 2024 that Russian losses in the war in Ukraine exceeded 77,000.

Thus, a few hours’ flight from Paris, we watch helplessly as barbarism makes its tragic return. Yet this return is hardly surprising: cyclically, the violence of war recurs upon the earth. Is each period of peace merely the provisional rest of a humanity exhausted from having shed too much blood? It sometimes takes only a few months, at best a few decades, before human beings succumb once again to their morbid addiction to carnage and destruction.

The lucrative industry of war

The twentieth century was that of mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Increasingly lethal weapons, from the great guns of Verdun to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produced human losses at a level never before reached in history: approximately 8.5 to 10 million soldiers killed in the First World War, to which must be added 6 to 7 million civilian victims; then, in the Second World War, 21 to 25 million soldiers and 50 to 55 million civilians, swept away by combat, bombardment, massacres, the Shoah and famines.

And yet the industry of war continues to thrive. It is here that the ledger of reality reveals its most unbearable truth. In 2023, when 200 million children were suffering from malnutrition and UNICEF was devoting 3.63 billion dollars to them, global military expenditure stood at 3,000 billion dollars, nearly 827 times more. This budgetary balance of power is not a misallocation of priorities that better policies might one day correct. It is a civilisational choice, repeated consciously or unconsciously, generation after generation, that reveals the essence of what our societies truly value, far removed from declarations of principle and charters of human rights. In this bleak picture, France accounts for 11 per cent of global arms exports, third behind Russia (16 per cent) and the United States (40 per cent).

Let us pause for a moment on this arithmetic of shame. Three thousand billion to organise death; three point six billion to try to spare children from it. If one wished to summarise in a single figure what our so-called contemporary civilisation truly offers for the future of its children, that figure would suffice.

Are we truly civilised?

Can a globalised world that allows millions of children to die of hunger while others grow rich by the billion from the commerce of death be called civilised? Personally, I do not believe it can.

The dissonance is vertiginous: on one side, surgeons transplant hearts, biologists decode living matter down to its most infinitesimal sequences; on the other, armies pound residential buildings with those same derived technologies, and financial markets flourish on this commerce of destruction. Behind the cultural and technological veneer that makes our societies appear advanced, barbarism holds sway today as it did in the Neolithic, but with a capacity for destruction our forebears could not have imagined.

What Auschwitz revealed with unmistakable clarity — and I return to it here briefly, having treated this question in its full depth on the occasion of Yom haShoah — is that technical rationality, bureaucracy and scientific thought, when severed from all ethical and spiritual compass, can become the most efficient instruments ever devised for the extermination of human beings. That danger is not past. It accompanies every technical advance we make without having simultaneously accomplished the corresponding inner work. We have manifestly still not undertaken, as a collective, to plumb our inner depths in order to eradicate there whatever carries the seed of violence and war.

Cain: an interior anatomy of violence

This tenacious incapacity to plumb our depths, precisely where violence takes root before rising to the surface as wars, hatreds or organised indifferences, has a name, a face and a history. To understand its mechanics, let us return to the oldest account humanity has transmitted on this subject, not as a religious curiosity, but as a mirror of redoubtable precision on human nature. The historical genealogy of this primal murder, from the Neolithic mass graves to the genocides of the twentieth century, I have traced elsewhere. What concerns me here is different: not the map of the massacres Cain has produced across the centuries, but the interior anatomy of Cain himself — the psychological, philosophical and spiritual mechanism that drives him to act, and that continues to act within us.

Genesis, in its fourth chapter, tells the story of Adam and Eve’s two sons in sixteen verses of quite stupefying anthropological density. Cain, the elder, is a tiller of the soil: a man of settled earth, of property, boundary and accumulation. Abel, his younger brother, is a nomadic shepherd: a man of the flock, of movement and shared space. Both make an offering to G-d. He accepts Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. The Bible, in what constitutes one of its most vertiginous silences, offers no explanation for this preference. No declared fault on Cain’s part precedes the divine refusal, as though the text wished to make us grasp that the injustice Cain then feels is an original condition of human existence, an irreducible given with which every living being must learn to contend.

Cain burns with rage and shame. His face turns away. And G-d addresses him with words of troubling gravity: “If you act well, will you not hold your head high? But if you do not act well, sin is crouching at the door: it desires you, yet you must master it.” This formulation is striking in its psychological modernity: G-d does not condemn Cain a priori; he describes an interior dynamic — something waits, crouching in the shadow of his soul, ready to spring if the guardian relaxes his vigilance. Were Cain to consent to look his anger in the face, he might then learn to transform it; but Cain does not hear. He invites his brother into the fields and kills him.

When G-d then asks, “Where is your brother Abel?”, Cain utters what is perhaps the most revealing response in all of human history: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In a few words, he enunciates the prototype of all moral abdications, all retreats into self-interest, all organised indifferences to the fate of the other. This response traverses the millennia without ageing a single day: one hears it resonate behind every politician who refuses to look at world hunger statistics, behind every investor who signs arms contracts without questioning their destination, behind every citizen who averts his eyes from the misery of his neighbour.

We are Cain’s heirs

This truth deserves to be faced without evasion or mitigation: we do not descend from Abel. Abel died without issue, he was cut off too soon, erased from the chain of generations. It is Cain who fathered the nations, who built the first cities, who developed the arts, crafts and trades. The mark that G-d set upon his brow we all bear, invisible and indelible, inscribed not only in our cultural memories but in the most archaic structures of our psyche.

Freud, in his essay Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), named it the death drive,Thanatos, that inner force impelling us towards the destruction of self and other, in permanent tension with Eros, the drive towards life, union and creation. War, on this reading, is not an aberration external to the human being, an accident of history arising from institutional malfunction: it is the collective expression, organised and amplified by states, of what each individual carries in seed form in the least illuminated regions of himself.

René Girard deepened this intuition decisively with his theory of mimetic desire, which is worth dwelling upon, for it illuminates an aspect that neither Freud nor political scientists are quite able to grasp. Cain does not simply suffer from being refused by G-d: he suffers from seeing that Abel is desired where he is not. It is not the object of the offering that matters, but the preference — that gaze of the other that falls elsewhere than upon him. From that moment, what Cain wants is no longer merely to be accepted; it is to be Abel, to occupy his place in the divine gaze. This desire to occupy the other’s place, to possess his recognition, his status, his territory, is according to Girard the engine of all human rivalries, from marital conflict to wars between nations, by way of economic competition and identity struggles.

The brother becomes a rival precisely because he is close, because resemblance renders the difference in destiny unbearable. Fraternal mimesis then turns inexorably into sacrificial violence whenever no spiritual or symbolic authority intervenes to interrupt its fatal spiral. The scapegoat — Abel — provisionally absorbs collective violence, but does not suppress it: he merely defers it until the next explosion. The universal history of wars, persecutions and genocides is, on this reading, nothing but a long succession of scapegoats who have never sufficed to slake the mimetic thirst of their murderers.

Saint Augustine, fifteen hundred years before René Girard, had intuited something similar in seeing in Cain the figure of the Earthly City — that human organisation founded on self-love pushed to the point of contempt for G-d and for the other — and in Abel the figure of the City of G-d, whose tragic vocation is to be ceaselessly sacrificed by the logics of the world yet never to disappear entirely. These two cities coexist not only in the course of collective history but simultaneously within each human soul. What each individual carries, each society amplifies; and what each society amplifies, history inscribes in letters of fire and blood upon the dark plains I traversed in my dream.

The contemporary faces of Cain

It would be convenient — and profoundly false — to confine Cain to the trenches, the airstrikes or the gas chambers. The Cainite impulse invests all spaces of collective life with equal destructive efficacy, often without a single drop of blood being shed. The managerial violence that methodically grinds individuals down beneath the imperatives of profitability, the organised public humiliation on social networks where anonymous crowds set upon designated victims, the predatory economic competition that impoverishes entire nations to enrich a handful of shareholders, the institutionalised indifference to the slow death of millions of migrants, malnourished children or abandoned elderly people: all of this bears the same signature as the first murder in the fields.

And everywhere, the same response from Cain: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Behind the figure of 3,000 billion devoted to armaments, there is no accounting error: there is the result of thousands of individual decisions taken by educated men and women, often cultivated, often fathers and mothers, often capable of generosity in their private lives. The financial analyst who structures an investment fund in the arms industry, the engineer who optimises the flight path of a combat drone, the lobbyist who secures the release of an export contract to an authoritarian regime: none of them thinks he is performing a murderous act. They have simply, each at his own level, answered as Cain did — their brother is not their concern, their expertise is their concern, their career is their concern, their shareholders are their concern. The growing sophistication of our technologies changes nothing in this fundamental equation: it merely increases the efficiency of destruction and the distance between killer and victim, rendering the act cleaner, more abstract, easier to delegate and therefore easier to bear without undue guilt.

Cain decides, time and again, that his brother’s blood is of no consequence to him, and that his own immediate interest or his own fear outweighs every other consideration.

The only remedy: transformation from within

Faced with this diagnosis, the usual responses very quickly show their limits. Diplomatic solutions, disarmament treaties, Security Council resolutions, economic sanctions: all these responses are necessary given humanity’s present condition, yet none is sufficient, for they operate solely upon symptoms without ever reaching the source. The wound that has been bleeding since Abel is not institutional — it is interior, and it is there that the transformation must occur, at a level that neither politics nor technology can reach.

Three great spiritual traditions, among many others that converge upon the same reality, allow us to take its exact measure and to sketch its concrete paths.

Christian mysticism speaks of metanoia — the complete turning of one’s interior orientation, the passage from self-love to the love of G-d and of one’s neighbour — as a radical rupture accomplished not through the accumulation of knowledge nor through good intention, but through a decision of the whole being, sustained by a daily practice. What the Desert Fathers called nepsis — interior spiritual vigilance — is precisely the antidote to what G-d describes to Cain: something crouching at the door. One cannot afford to leave one’s door unguarded.

Sufism names the jihad al-akbar the great combat of the soul — not the outward war against the enemy, but the inward war against the disordered passions of the soul: jealousy, wounded pride, the resentment that settles in and festers. This combat is called great precisely because it is the most difficult, the most protracted and the most decisive: to win every outward battle without having waged it is to have won nothing at all, as the history of empires that vanquished their enemies before collapsing under the weight of their own inner contradictions bears witness.

Theravāda Buddhism proposes mettā — loving-kindness — not as a feeling, but as a deliberate and progressive practice: one begins by cultivating benevolence towards oneself, then extends it to those one loves, then to those who are indifferent, then to difficult relationships, then to enemies. This progressive, concentric deployment is not an exercise in naivety but a rigorous training of the will, comparable in its discipline to that of an athlete or a musician. Mettā does not suppress the reality of conflict; it transforms the gaze of its practitioner upon the adversary — no longer an enemy to be destroyed, but a suffering being carrying, in his own way, his share of Cain.

Martin Luther King had understood this in exemplary fashion: before taking to the streets, before mounting a platform, before facing the batons of the segregationist South, he worked each day upon his own interior Cain — the fear, the anger, the resentment, the temptation to answer violence with violence. Gandhi through his long campaigns of resistance, Mandela through his years of captivity, Etty Hillesum writing her diary in the Westerbork transit camp before boarding the train to Auschwitz: all bear witness to the same reality. Profound spiritual transformation does not anaesthetise pain nor suppress reality in its brutality; but it prevents brutality from triumphing definitively. It keeps alive, even in the most desperate circumstances, an irreducible space of inner freedom from which love may spring as act rather than as sentiment.

It is this space of love that we must develop within ourselves, then learn collectively to inhabit, to expand and to pass on.

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Learning to love — truly

“Learning to love”: the phrase may seem derisory measured against the scale of the evil described, almost naïve in the face of bulldozers, cruise missiles and armed drones. It is not, provided one understands which love is meant. Not romantic and sentimental love, as fragile as wet paper in the first contrary wind; nor the superficial benevolence that smiles at everyone without ever risking or giving anything. The love of which the mystics speak, the Stoic philosophers, the therapists of reconciliation and the builders of peace, is an active, demanding, disciplined force — a permanent labour upon one’s own structures of fear, competition and closure.

This love begins each morning, long before the bombs have had time to sound: in the way one listens or does not listen to one’s neighbour, in whether one responds or not to the distress of a stranger, in the refusal to take part in the destructive rumour, in the choice to see in the adversary not an enemy to be destroyed but a lost brother bearing, in his turn, the mark of Cain upon his brow — the same mark as our own.

This choice, repeated billions of times by billions of people in their daily lives, is the only revolution that could at last change our human condition: not by suppressing Cain, which is doubtless impossible, but by teaching him to hear the voice that has spoken to him since the dawn of time: “Sin is crouching at the door — but it is for you to master it.”

That night, in my dream, those dead asked nothing impossible of me. They simply reminded me that I am alive, and that the living still have a choice.

For Abel continues to cry out towards the sky. And the sky continues to wait for us to answer.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 20 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 4 — The victory of Constancy Previous article: The radiance of Compassion

No fruit without roots

By the end of the first three stages of this journey, something has been gradually consolidating. Love was first recognised as an infinite energy that sustains the universe and can flow through us if we consent to open a passage for it. Discipline then gave it form, a riverbed and a bank, transforming a generous but diffuse impulse into a focused and productive force. And from their slow convergence was born radiant compassion — that living fruit of inner transmutation, that warmth of one who has himself trembled and who, from that trembling, draws the strength to hold another’s hand.

But a single fruit is not enough to nourish an entire life. The tree must hold; its roots must sink deep enough to withstand the long droughts and the squalls of winter. This is precisely what a fourth quality of the soul brings: constancy — that perseverance which makes possible the victory over oneself, not the kind wrested in the blazing moment of a decisive test, but the kind built silently and stubbornly in the patient repetition of ordinary days.

A forgotten strength of our times

The human being, who struggles to see beyond his immediate needs, has little sense of the value of constancy, except as a guarantee of material security. He can barely glimpse its usefulness for his inner development, and still less for his spiritual progress. It takes a measure of maturity already acquired — having been confronted with the difficulty of changing oneself or bringing a demanding project to fruition — to accept that constancy alone will bring victory.

Our mercantile societies, driven by unbridled consumption and the planned obsolescence of products as much as desires, ceaselessly urge us to leap from one novelty to the next in a desperate pursuit of stimulation, as though it could fill our inner void. In this permanent agitation, sustaining a patient effort or remaining faithful to a commitment so often seems disappointing in comparison with the brilliance of the new, which fills us for a moment and wearies us immediately afterwards.

A strength for building and becoming

And yet anyone who undertakes a project that takes him out of the routine of ordinary life will inevitably confront the need to leave his comfort zone. Reaching that objective will demand that he surpass his habitual limits and sustain his effort over a greater or lesser period of time, depending on the nature of the goal. There then arises the difficulty of remaining constant, of continuing to advance whatever obstacles are encountered or whatever adaptations become necessary. For without constancy, the human being can obtain nothing lasting — whether in material achievement, inner development, or spiritual fulfilment. Yet we persist involuntarily in our most limiting habits whilst rarely finding the same perseverance for the efforts that might truly benefit us.

When we do manage to sustain effort over time, it is most often out of constraining necessity — working to ensure our livelihood, or studying to gain a qualification — rather than from a taste for accomplishing something that calls upon our potential for creativity and renewal. But if we come to understand the hold that a society has over us — one which urges us to chase after artificial needs — and if we gradually grow aware of the wealth of our inner resources, we shall find the motivation needed to commit to a patient effort and a solid constancy, so as to fulfil our true nature and unfold our personal path in the world.

Patience, perseverance, courage

Constancy is a subtle compound of three mutually sustaining forces: patience, perseverance and courage. It is patient because it is clear-sighted, knowing that every effort must be inscribed in time to yield the desired result — even for the most gifted of individuals. It is perseverance in the face of obstacles, always attentive to adjusting its pace in order to overcome unforeseen setbacks without exhausting its strength upon them. And it has the courage to rise again after a moment of weakness, drawing from the fall the lessons needed to resume its advance more wisely.

He who practises constancy must have the humility to accept putting himself into question — observing with sincerity his difficulties, and the distance still separating him from his goal — so as to deploy intelligently the talents and resources at his disposal and to compensate for his shortcomings without losing heart. In this way he is continually enriched by his confrontation with the real, seeking to adapt himself subtly to it rather than forcing his way towards his goal through excess of enthusiasm, which would quickly lead him to exhaustion.

A wisdom of rhythm

There is in constancy a wisdom of rhythm that our age has largely lost. An effective constancy must be loving, disciplined, compassionate, humble and dignified all at once. A constancy without love becomes aggressive rigidity that drives away those who accompany us. A constancy without humility becomes stubborn obstinacy that refuses to acknowledge its errors and presses on with decisions that can no longer be revised. A constancy without compassion is a cold mechanism, turned inward upon itself, incapable of taking into account the living world around it. What we seek is not the voluntarist contraction of one who clenches his teeth, but the dynamic openness of one who holds firm because he loves what he does and believes in what he is moving towards. True constancy does not smother the impulse: it extends it, nourishes it and gives it the duration without which it would be no more than a blaze of straw.

Just as the climber takes time to study the safest route and steady his breathing before tackling a difficult section, the spiritual seeker will try to embrace the roughnesses of daily life rather than impose his demands upon them. It is by finding within himself that space of quiet presence, to which he can remain subtly connected even in the heart of agitation, that he will discover the right and confident attitude to adopt before the obstacles that arise on the path, and will know how to recognise with gratitude the unexpected help that fortunate concurrences of circumstance sometimes provide.

Traversing the inner nights

In our spiritual evolution, to develop our qualities and transcend our fears, we must demonstrate a constancy that is at once optimistic and clear-sighted, one that will be strengthened by each small breakthrough towards greater light, and replenished through meditation or the prayer of the heart in moments of fatigue or doubt. It is important to keep our consciousness awake, in a benevolent attitude towards ourselves, so as not to be swept away by disappointment at our slowness or our setbacks, and thus to accept as serenely as possible the impermanence of our inner states, so readily influenced by outward circumstances.

For there inevitably come dark hours — not as signs of failure, but as those passages necessary to every authentic spiritual journey. These inner nights, which John of the Cross described with striking precision, do not mean that the path is false: they mean that something profound is in the process of transforming itself, at a depth our waking consciousness cannot yet grasp. Constancy is precisely this capacity to traverse our regions of shadow without fleeing them or dramatising them, trusting in that larger movement of life which carries us even when we no longer feel it.

Let us never forget that the path is long before we can begin to unify in a single direction of progress the multiplicity of figures that, within us, take turns holding the centre of our inner stage. We are like a theatre director watching his actors constantly steal the best role from one another, without yet having found the means to reconcile them and make them perform the play as he wishes. This is why on one day we feel we are advancing, whilst on another we suddenly feel weighted down and hesitant, without quite understanding why. What matters above all is to keep faith and to place one foot before the other, at our own pace.

The humility of the reed

Just as our body needs nourishment and rest to traverse the years in good health, our inner life needs to replenish itself and to breathe deeply so as not to become exhausted. Our constancy, for all that it must be sincere and determined, must not therefore harden into a proud and blind rigidity that would destroy the very inner strength we need to sustain it.

The task is to find, through a refined attention to our inner states and our real capacities, the right degree of self-demand — one that genuinely marks our will and our commitment, that obtains results little by little, whilst preserving that suppleness which prevents us from breaking. The reed that bends in the squall holds its ground without difficulty, whilst the mighty oaks sometimes end up uprooted. Let us have the humility of the reed: firm in its resolve to hold, yet with that lightness of yielding to the wind and playing with it.

The ardour of our constancy is ultimately but another gift of the Living, making it possible to exercise our human talents in order to evolve and transform the givens of our reality. This is why it is so important that it be directed towards noble aims that honour the best of our human condition. Let our constancy be that of the creator who is conscious of holding in trust that human genius which opens so many possibilities, and who gives thanks for it to the Infinite. May we use the forces and talents that come to us from the overwhelming mystery of Life to nourish an ever greater commitment to awakening our spiritual consciousness and spreading joy throughout the world.

The synergy of heaven and earth

When our constancy is thus placed at the service of a noble and spiritual aim, we gradually discover that it nourishes itself through a synergy between our inner determination and living forces that flow through us and exceed us, arising from that infinite vitality which sustains the universe. It is as though what seek to unite within us are, on the one hand, an openness, a kind of surrender and trust, and on the other, a keen will, the driving force of a measured discipline. Something difficult to define in words, since it is at once a releasing and a holding, which only a watchful alertness, a demanding presence to oneself, can keep in balance.

He who has this experience understands that his inner strength grows in proportion to the degree of his surrender, his emptying of what he believed he must defend in himself and what his habitual egotistic contraction has always protected. This contraction, as it releases, can allow other dimensions of being to awaken. The inner disorder of the acquired personality then gradually reorients itself in a single direction, in order at last to fulfil its role as vessel and mouthpiece of our spiritual essence. And this essence, in awakening, begins to perceive — as the Rig Veda teaches us: O Fire, thou art the son of Heaven through the body of the Earth — that it is at once the subject and the object of this circulation of forces between earth and heaven, between its infinitely small earthly presence, a speck of dust bounded in space and time, and the infinity of the universe.

The fidelity that sustains the living

In our relationship with others, constancy is a testimony of commitment that strengthens bonds, a harbinger of reliability and responsibility that inspires trust. It is always easy to show our neighbour our interest or our compassion in a punctual manner, on the occasion of some significant event. But persevering in support and love for the other over time, whatever the vicissitudes of his existence — whether he be in joy or distress, in abundance or poverty, acclaimed or held in contempt by others — or extending to him our compassion and the benefit of our forgiveness even when he goes astray in ways that harm us: this is a sign of the nobility we can attain when we elevate our spiritual consciousness and look upon our neighbour with the eyes of the heart. It is this unfailing fidelity, composed of patience and understanding, which can sometimes save a friend worn down by life from despair, and help him regain his human dignity by taking back the reins of his destiny.

Deprived of this capacity for attachment to the other that endures beyond every immediate consideration, delivered back to the inconstancy of relationships woven solely from interest, tribal reflex or self-centred love, the human being empties himself of the very substance of life — that infinite circulation of shared and transformed energies of which our life in common should, upon this earth, be the most sublime realisation.

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One perseverance, a thousand faces

In the constellation of the world’s spiritual traditions, this victorious perseverance has received different names in different languages and cultures, but its reality is everywhere the same: the sine qua non condition of all lasting transformation.

The Hebrew Kabbalah names this quality Netzach, victory, the fourth of the emotional sefirot of the Tree of Life. The Hebrew word netzach carries two inseparable meanings: victory and eternity, as though the tradition wished to convey that only constancy can inscribe human effort within a dimension that transcends time. Netzach is the force that refuses to capitulate, the vital energy that renews itself at each dawn after the night, and of which the kabbalists say it is the foundation of all genuine spiritual aspiration. Without it, Chesed, love, and Gevurah, discipline, remain fine intuitions without a tomorrow, and Tiferet, compassion, withers for want of being nourished over time. The Sefirat HaOmer, that counting of forty-nine days from Passover to the Giving of the Torah, is itself a school of constancy: each evening, one day alone is counted, one step alone is taken, and it is this accumulation of small faithful gestures that builds our capacity to receive the Revelation.

In Islam, spiritual constancy is expressed as sabr, patient endurance, and istiqāma, rectitude in the continuity of the path. Sabr is one of the most celebrated virtues of the Quran, mentioned in more than ninety places in various forms: not the resigned patience of one who merely endures, but the active composure of one who chooses to remain upright in the trial, grounded in his trust in G-d. Istiqāma denotes persevering uprightness, that effort to remain on the just path without being led astray by temptations or discouragements. The Prophet, when asked to sum up the whole of religion, is said to have replied: “Say: I have faith in God, then be upright” — thumma astaqim — placing constancy in rectitude at the very heart of the spiritual life. The Sufi masters deepen this notion through the figure of the maqāmāt, the stations of the heart on the path towards G-d: each station is acquired only through long residency, a repeated and patient practice, until it becomes the natural tonality of one’s being.

The Christian tradition has developed two complementary notions to describe this quality. The Greek hypomonē, often rendered as patience or endurance, literally denotes the capacity to hold firm under the weight, to remain standing under the burden without breaking or fleeing. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, traces a striking chain of transmutation: “tribulation produces patience, patience produces experience, experience produces hope”, as though the trial traversed with constancy were the only alembic capable of distilling pure hope. The Latin monastic tradition adds perseverantia, perseverance in the lectio divina and the daily rule, which Benedict of Nursia made the foundation of his Rule: “Ora et labora” — pray and work — each day, at the same hour, not seeking the extraordinary but deepening the ordinary. John of the Cross, finally, whose dark night of the soul is perhaps the most lucid description of what all spiritual seekers traverse in their passage through doubt and aridity, teaches that it is precisely constancy within that darkness which is the touchstone of true love.

In the Hindu tradition, constancy bears the name dhṛiti, resolute firmness, which the Bhagavad Gita places among the divine qualities of the accomplished being, alongside courage and purity. It is distinguished from mere obstinacy by its inner nature: it is not the rigidity of one who clings, but the stability of one who is rooted. The practice of tapas, the voluntary ascesis already evoked in the stage of discipline, yields its fruits only over time: the inner fire purifies the metal only when it is maintained patiently, without sudden force or slackening. The yoga tradition insists on the fact that samskaras, the psychic imprints that condition our behaviour, are transformed only through conscious and prolonged repetition of new attitudes: constancy is not a spiritual luxury, it is the very condition of all inner reprogramming.

Buddhism names this quality adhiṭṭhāna in the Theravāda tradition, unwavering resolve, one of the ten pāramitā or perfections that the Bodhisattva must cultivate on the path to awakening. It is distinguished from stubbornness by its grounding in wisdom (prajñā): one does not persevere out of pride or fear of failure, but because one has clearly discerned the right direction and remains faithful to it with suppleness. Tibetan Buddhism insists upon virya, the joyous and ardent energy of perseverance, that force which advances without wearying, not under compulsion but through love of what it moves towards. Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogi of the eleventh century, became one of the most venerated figures of the tradition precisely because his constancy in practice, despite years of trials and humiliations, illustrates that the door of awakening opens not to the most gifted but to the most persevering.

Taoism approaches constancy by what seems a paradoxical route. Whereas most traditions insist upon voluntary effort, Lao Tzu teaches jiān, perseverance as fidelity to one’s own deep nature rather than the imposition of will upon reality. Water returns often in the Tao Te Ching as the image of this perfect constancy: it never forces, it goes around, it seeps through, it always takes the most humble path, and it is precisely for this reason that it ends by wearing away stone. “Nothing under heaven is as supple and yielding as water, yet nothing is its equal for overcoming that which is hard and rigid”, says Lao Tzu in chapter 78. Taoist constancy is therefore less a taut will than a quality of attention, a fidelity to the natural movement of the Tao within oneself, which allows one to act rightly at the right moment with the minimum of effort, in what the tradition calls wu wei: action without unnecessary resistance, effort attuned to the rhythm of the real.

All these traditions converge upon a single deep conviction: constancy is not the quality of the strong, but that of the wise. It is not measured by the intensity of the effort expended but by the quality of the presence maintained. And everywhere it is recognised as what allows all the other qualities of the soul to bear fruit over time, to inscribe themselves not as fleeting sparks but as a real and irreversible transformation of being.

A few signposts for the path

These reflections on constancy are not intended to turn you into an indefatigable and indestructible walker. They are intended to help you recognise within yourself this capacity to hold firm, supple and determined at once, and to trust it, for it is there, even when you do not always feel it. If the love of the first stage was the sap, the discipline of the second the form, and the compassion of the third the fruit, constancy is the root: invisible, silent, yet alone capable of inscribing all the rest within duration.

To go further, you may wish to re-read the article Abecedary: H for Humility, which explores in depth this quality towards which our constancy naturally leads us.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Sit down in a moment of calm. Allow each of these questions to descend within you without seeking an immediate answer. What rises with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the reality of my constancy
Am I truly constant in the commitments that matter to me, or do I scatter my energies and abandon things the moment novelty fades? Does my constancy come from deep conviction, or from fear of failure, from habit rather than genuine will? Do I persevere out of love for what I am doing, or merely from inertia? And when I abandon a path, is it a wise decision or a capitulation before difficulty?

On the quality of my constancy
Is my constancy loving and supple, or so hard and demanding as to become crushing — for myself as much as for those around me? Do I know how to distinguish healthy tenacity from sterile obstinacy — that obstinacy which refuses to acknowledge its errors and invests itself in decisions that can no longer be revised? When I face an obstacle, do I try to force my way through or to find, like water, the most fitting path?

On my constancy in relationships
Am I reliable and present for those who matter to me — not only in happy moments but in times of trial or tedium? Is there someone in my life to whom I have promised a presence I have not sustained? What form of constancy in relationships do I wish to cultivate more?

On the source of my constancy
Do I attribute my capacity to hold firm solely to my own will, or do I recognise that it is also nourished by something that exceeds me? Am I capable of relinquishing control of the outcome whilst maintaining fidelity to the effort? Have I ever had the experience of that synergy between my own determination and vaster forces that were carrying me?

2. A few gestures for the week

Sustain a commitment for seven days
Choose a simple and concrete commitment — a brief daily practice, a few minutes of silence, a page of writing, a moment of attention to someone close to you — and keep to it each day for the full duration of this stage, without exception. Not to prove anything to yourself, but to feel from within what repeated fidelity to an intention builds.

Break a limiting habit
Identify a habit that holds you back or scatters you: a reflex of avoidance, a recurring distraction, a negative automatic thought. Choose just one. Observe it this week each time it arises, without judging it, but without yielding to it either. Constancy begins with this simple refusal, peaceful and decided.

Be patient with someone who tests you
Choose a person whose pace or manner of being usually makes you impatient. This week, offer them an entire and tranquil listening, without seeking to accelerate, to conclude or to correct. Constancy in relationship begins first with this quality of presence that does not grow discouraged by another’s slowness.

Enact a resolution immediately
If you make a decision to change in the course of this week, do not leave it sleeping in your mind: translate it into a concrete gesture as soon as possible, however modest. A resolution not immediately anchored in a real act risks evaporating before it has had time to take root.

Act for a cause that transcends you
Devote a moment this week to an action that does not directly serve your immediate interests: an act of support for someone, a contribution to a just cause, a gesture for something you believe the world needs. The highest constancy is that which takes root in something greater than oneself.

3. Celebrating this stage

At the close of these seven days, or however long you devote to this stage, take a moment to identify one small victory of constancy you have won over yourself. Not an exploit, but a faithful gesture repeated, a commitment held despite fatigue, a moment in which you chose to hold firm where you might have given up. Note it in a journal, or speak it aloud, with the quiet sobriety of one who knows that the great transformations are built of exactly these bricks, one by one, day after day.

For unacknowledged constancy discourages itself. What we receive with gratitude, we invite to grow. And it is upon these small, silent, accumulated victories that this spiritual sovereignty, solid and luminous, will gradually rise — the sovereignty we have come to seek together on this path.

Next week we shall discover how this constancy, once established, naturally opens the way to a fifth quality of the soul: humility full of gratitude, which does not weaken him who cultivates it but frees him from his last enclosures.

Good travelling to all.

© 2026 — Dialogues du Nouveau Monde — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Poems · 3 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Today I knew jubilation, and I danced in the infinity of praise!
O You, the Eternal, spread out over the universe,
You who are Life and Love and Presence poured forth in abundance,
I who am but an infinitesimal speck of dust in Your world below,
once more I entered this vessel of stone, a beggar in Your house,
built in Your Name by those men of faith to seek You and sing You,

I the wandering Jew, brother to all men,
the hassid° inhabited by all memories, all tongues, all signs invented by those who seek You from generation to generation,
I inhabited by Your Fire, companion to all those who desire You here below, descended from Heaven, invited by us to inaugurate the great Feast of joy,
a little Franciscan, a little Sufi, a little Buddhist, a little anarchist — but anarchist of love and peace,

and I sang, I sang, I sang…

“Hoïdou l’Adoïnoï ki toïv, ki le’oïlom ‘hasdoï! ( Give thanks to the Eternal, for He is good, for His Love endures for ever! )
Give thanks to the G-d of the heavenly powers, for His Love endures for ever!
Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for His Love endures for ever!
He alone has wrought great wonders, for His Love endures for ever! ...”

I sang this psalm of praise of King David, drunk with that Hebrew which is the language of my soul,
the tongue that healed me like a purifying unguent, the one that alone can open me to the most intimate part of myself…

"Hoïdou l'Adoïnoï ki toïv", and my voice carries my body to one side, as though swept by the exhalation of the song…
"ki le'oïlom 'hasdoï", the voice answers me like an echo and there I am leaning the other way,
the frail skiff of my body ebbs and flows upon the wave,
and the movement amplifies little by little with the phrases
that turn without end and resound through the nave…

I am weightless, perhaps as angels are, all heaviness dissolved,
I am a pure smoke rising in praise,
a dust of infinity within His Infinite Love…

“Halleluya, halleluya, halleluya!”

° hassid: a pious Jew, in reference to Hasidic Judaism, a mystical movement founded in eighteenth-century Poland by the Baal Shem Tov. Centred on the direct and fervent relationship of the individual with the divine, it stood in opposition to the rigid tradition of rabbinic Judaism and constituted a spiritual response to the misery of the persecuted Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. The Hasidim express their communion with G-d above all through song and dance.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 16 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Toward spiritual sovereignty | Step 3 – The radiance of Compassion
Previous article: The effort of Discipline

The fruit of effort

At the end of the first two steps of this journey, something has begun to be transformed. Love, first recognised as an infinite energy that sustains the universe and can pass through us, has gradually found within us a more attuned form thanks to that ardent discipline which has given it its riverbed and its banks. Whoever has truly worked on these first two qualities of the soul, abundant love and rigorous discipline, now discovers that he begins to see them converge towards a third reality, higher and more luminous: active and radiant compassion.

For compassion is not simply a mixture of love and discipline, it is the fruit of a deeper inner transmutation. It is by sincerely trying to embody love, by coming up against his own limitations, by supplying the effort that discipline requires in order to come closer to it, that the spiritual seeker naturally develops this widened empathy for the difficulties of others. He has groped his way through his own inner labyrinth, he has measured the weight of his heaviness, and this experience makes him open to the path of every human being.

Knowing oneself in order truly to see

It is by moving beyond our ego and its visceral fear of lack, born of our mortality, as well as our representations and behaviours acquired under the influence of education, imitation and culture, that we can gain access to a right vision of ourselves and of others. This lucidity allows us to discern more clearly our real personal needs as well as the expectations of those around us, and to find a just balance between the two, so that we behave in a way that is attuned and conscious rather than impulsive and reactive.

So long as we remain conditioned by the distortions of our acquired personality, which dominates our essential being, we are deprived of that spiritual gaze which would assess situations and people truthfully. Our compassion remains at best random and subject to our moods of the moment, now overflowing, now absent, depending on the emotional state in which we find ourselves rather than on the reality of the other. As we gradually gain a clear vision of our own functioning, through self‑observation and that sincerity which allows us to look at everything without flattering or condemning ourselves, we shall in the end decipher the deep springs of our attitudes and feelings, and we shall begin to be able to find lasting harmony between our inner demands and our capacity to love.

True compassion or illusion?

The more we learn to know ourselves and to understand the driving forces behind our motivations and our behaviours, the more capable we become of discerning whether our impulse of compassion is borne by a truly disinterested intention of dedication towards another, and whether we are really ready to put ourselves in his place in order to understand his point of view or his needs and to welcome these as they are. This distinction is essential, because compassion can very easily become one of the subtlest guises of the ego.

Is our compassion nothing more than a passing emotional reaction that soothes our conscience without our being in any way ready to embody it in concrete terms? Is it a ruse of the ego turned back upon itself, content to tell itself that it is sensitive and empathetic, without wishing to leave its habits in order to take the risk of truly caring for the one who is in distress? Or is it perhaps the result of a sense of guilt created by the imbalance between two human conditions, a selective compassion that we would not feel with the same intensity, for example, towards a wealthy person struck by great misfortune? These questions deserve to be asked honestly, for they reveal to what extent true compassion is a demanding fruit.

True compassion, which springs from a real opening of the heart to love, is that capacity to feel and to sense by empathy the sorrows and difficulties of every human being we meet, even if he is a stranger, and to be ready to support and accompany him without any form of judgement or condescension. It does not judge, does not compare, does not rank sufferings. It simply stands there, available, with the quiet nobility of one who has learnt to stand upright through his own trials.

The maternal face of compassion

To picture this quality of soul that is compassion in all its depth, let us think of a mother’s love, attentive to the needs of her children, ready to comfort them when they face difficulties, naturally finding extenuating circumstances if they have acted badly. She watches to ensure that they may grow up surrounded by affection and safety, and she passes on everything she can to awaken them to life. This maternal love expects nothing in return, does not keep count, is not discouraged by setbacks: it holds fast.

Thus compassion bears this feminine aspect of tenderness and attentiveness to the other, and whoever develops it in himself gradually softens his character: he expects less from others for himself, and becomes towards them more generous and serene. Little by little he acquires a benevolent attitude towards everyone, which prompts him to lay aside any kind of prejudice as to another’s origin, social status or culture. He distrusts rumours and hasty judgements, and should he happen to hear some damaging information about someone, he suspends his opinion and takes the time to enquire from other sources. By practising active and concrete compassion, he becomes close to everyone and seeks to bring human beings closer to one another rather than to cultivate what separates them. Indeed, he feels intensely that common humanity which we share, that universal confrontation with the vicissitudes of an existence in which suffering and death constantly rub shoulders with the joys of everyday life.

All brothers and sisters in fragility

Thus compassion always goes to what is essential: recognising the other as my fellow man, my brother in humanity, without lingering over clothing, reputation, origin or social condition. For compassion, every being deserves consideration and love. Indeed, all alike, the poor vagrant as much as the illustrious figure, the cleaning lady as much as the head of state, share the same ontological reality, our human destiny, and the same metaphysical vocation: to bring their spiritual potentials to fulfilment, that is, to realise wisdom and love in concrete form and thus ennoble the world.

Compassion is therefore welcoming towards the stranger who comes to meet it, ready to share with him the best that is possible, disposed to learn from all in humility. It is concerned to lessen the suffering of humanity, not by becoming drunk on with fine ideas, but with the courage to act as far as possible in this direction, being first of all demanding with itself. In the midst of a world of injustice and violence, compassion resolutely traces the path of peace and reconciliation, and replaces condemnation and revenge with understanding and forgiveness. Since the one who develops active compassion has himself confronted the harmful tendencies that dwell in all human beings, he knows the real effort it takes to transmute our negative energies into forces of light and love.

Opening one’s inner frontiers

Establishing active compassion within oneself is the fruit of an effort to go beyond our limitations, by gradually escaping our atavistic reflexes of withdrawal and self‑protection. It is a matter of discovering that it is possible to love oneself differently and therefore to love the other in a totally new way, not by cultivating our fears and our guarded reserve, barricaded within our very limited field of life experience, but by giving ourselves the chance of an opening to the world that allows us to be enriched by every situation in existence and by every human encounter.

As we thus emerge from our inner confinement and open ourselves to the possibility of a bond of love with all living things, we also become more sensitive to the consubstantiality of all human beings. We enter a space in which reality, which we formerly perceived as fragmented and sometimes hostile, now appears to us as integrated and unified: an uninterrupted flow of energy and consciousness, of which every human being is a unique instance of freedom and individuality, not separated, however, from this shared abundance. The very idea of individuality becomes thinkable in a different way, since true compassion makes us feel that there is in us something of the other, just as there is in him something of ourselves. We then understand why both the Talmud and the Qur’an affirm that whoever saves a human being saves all humanity, and that whoever loves another with this true active compassion already loves all humankind.

Radiant compassion

My compassion becomes beautiful and radiant when it is spontaneous, humble and sincere. It is that gentle and tranquil energy which warms or consoles, that small delicate intention which underlines the happiness one hopes for the other, that attitude of non‑judgement and peace which allows the other to escape the disguise of falsehood or the urgency of flight. It is the friend who walks with you through dangers as through joys and helps you to journey in complete freedom.

It regards the other in his essential reality, beyond the contingencies of his condition, and welcomes him with all the respect due to his human dignity. It has the constancy of one who keeps his awareness and presence to himself awake, in order to stand with full nobility upon this passing earth, where the greatest riches are those of the heart. It is enduring in its love, because it knows how hard a man must toil in his inner labyrinth, cluttered with traps and distorting mirrors, before finding the exit and emerging again into daylight. This towpath, compassion has worn it away with its own laborious, obstinate steps, and how many times it has had to turn back in order to find again, back there at the last crossroads, the barely visible footpath. How could it do otherwise than blaze up in love for its unhappy human brothers and sisters, when it has needed, for itself, so much clemency, effort and patience in order to approach, slowly, the shores of freedom and light?

It is precisely this path travelled, this intimate experience of human fragility and of the grace that enables one to rise again, that gives compassion its particular beauty: it is lit from within. It is not the condescending pity of someone who watches suffering from some safe height, but the warmth of one who has himself trembled and who, from that trembling, has drawn the strength to hold another’s hand.

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One heart, a thousand faces

Within the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, active compassion has been given different names according to languages and cultures. Yet its face is everywhere the same: the living junction between goodness and truth, between expansive love and the rigour that gives it form.

Hebrew Kabbalah situates this quality at the very heart of the Tree of Life, in the sefirah Tiferet, whose name means beauty and splendour. Tiferet is the central sefirah, the one that harmonises and transcends the two opposing pillars of Chesed, the expansive love of the first step, and Gevurah, the ardent discipline of the second. It introduces between them a third dimension, the truth of being, which is neither one nor the other and can therefore integrate them, giving them a shared and radiant countenance. The Zohar designates it as Rachamim, compassion, derived from the root rechem, the womb, underlining that compassion is not a feeling but an original warmth, a love that engenders and protects.

In the Christian tradition, the Gospels use, to describe the feeling of Jesus in the face of suffering, the Greek verb splanknizomai, to be moved in one’s very entrails, a physical and visceral compassion impossible to feign, which we find in the parable of the Prodigal Son to describe the father who runs towards his child as soon as he sees him in the distance. Meister Eckhart, in the Rhenish mystical tradition, speaks of Mitleid, co‑suffering, as the most immediate spiritual quality, that by which the divine itself is present in human suffering.

In Islam, the first two names of God that open each sura are Al Rahmân and Al Rahîm, the All‑Merciful and the Most‑Merciful, both derived from the same Arabic root rahma which, like rechem in Hebrew, evokes the womb. This convergence between the two Semitic traditions around a shared image is profoundly eloquent. Sufism prolongs this intuition with the notion of ithar, the preference granted to the other over oneself, which the masters regard as the highest degree of spiritual love.

In Hinduism, compassion is called Karunâ, a cardinal quality that the Bhagavad Gîtâ sees as an indispensable condition of Dharma, the realisation of the sacred duty of the incarnate being. It finds concrete expression in the principle of Ahimsâ, active non‑violence, not a mere abstention from harming but a vigilant attention to causing no avoidable suffering to any living being.

Buddhism makes Karunâ the second of the four Brahmavihâras, the sublime abodes of the awakened being, complementing Metta, loving‑kindness already evoked in the first step, but distinct from it through its specific orientation towards suffering. The figure of the Bodhisattva embodies this compassion at its highest degree: he renounces definitive nirvana in order to remain present to the world so long as a single being still suffers. In the Tibetan tradition, Avalokiteçvara, known as Chenrezig, is the Bodhisattva of universal compassion, whose mantra Om mani padme hum is regarded as the very vibration of this quality diffused throughout the cosmos.

Taoism places compassion among the three fundamental treasures of the sage. In chapter 67 of the Tao Te King, Laozi declares: “I have three treasures which I hold and cherish: the first is tenderness (ci)…”. Ci, tenderness‑compassion, is therefore the first of the founding virtues of the Taoist sage, the one that makes all the others possible. It is not an effort of will, but the natural course of the Tao in human existence, the gentleness of water which flows around obstacles without ever losing either its direction or its power.

All these traditions converge on a single conviction: compassion is not a feeling that one happens to experience or not according to circumstances, it is a quality of being that one develops, a dimension of consciousness one cultivates until it becomes the permanent tonality of our presence in the world. And everywhere it springs from the same source: the inner experience of one’s own fragility, traversed with honesty and sustained with dignity.

A few markers for the path

These reflections on compassion are not meant to turn you into some heroic figure with an infallible heart, but to help you recognise within yourself the seed of this quality and give it a little more space and light. If the love of the first step was the sap, and the discipline of the second the form that allows it to rise straight, compassion is the fruit: living, fleshy, offered.

As a complement, you may wish to reread the two previous steps of this journey, “The abundance of love” and “The effort of discipline”.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Sit down for a moment of quiet. Let each of these questions sink gently, without seeking an immediate answer. What rises up with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the nature of my compassion
Is my compassion tender and warm, or does it, without my noticing, take the form of pity, with all that pity can contain of condescension? Even if my intention is sincere, do those whom I help perceive it as an act from equal to equal, or as the gesture of one who bends down from above to below? Do I assess the real needs of the one whom I help, or do I give what relieves me of the pain of seeing him suffer?

On the truth of my compassion
Am I capable of truly placing myself in the other’s situation, of suspending my prejudices and projections in order to see him as he is? Does my compassion come from a guilt I am trying to dissolve, or from an authentic empathy? Am I more easily compassionate towards strangers than towards those close to me, because distance makes compassion less costly? Conversely, does my compassion for those close to me blind me to the needs of others?

On the constancy and humility of my compassion
Is my compassion reliable and enduring, or does it vanish as soon as I am caught up in my own concerns? Does my capacity to be compassionate give me, however slightly, a feeling of superiority over the one who receives? Am I aware that this ability to give of myself is itself a gift received, and not a distinction that places me above others?

On the dignity created by my compassion
Does my compassion strengthen the dignity of the one who receives it, or does it risk installing him in a dependence that ends by diminishing him? Do I help the other to stand up again and to find his own resources, or do I keep him in the position of one who receives? The highest compassion is that which renders itself unnecessary, by helping the other to reach the point of no longer needing it.

2. A few gestures for the week

Listening to the very end
Choose someone around you who is currently going through a difficulty. Offer him a moment of wholehearted listening, without interrupting, without trying to advise him, without bringing the conversation back to yourself. Simply listen with your whole being. Notice what is happening within him, and within you.

Helping according to real needs
Before you offer your help to someone, take a moment to ask yourself what he truly needs, not what you think would be useful to him. If you do not know, ask him. Then align your gesture with his answer, even if it takes you out of your usual ways of doing things.

An anonymous act
Perform, this week, an act of compassion which no one will know about, and from which you expect no recognition. Compassion that does not need to be seen is the purest of all.

Helping to rise, not to depend
Identify someone to whom you are in the habit of directly giving what he needs. Ask yourself whether you might help him differently: by strengthening his own resources, by showing him how to do something rather than doing it in his place, by encouraging him towards autonomy. The highest compassion is that which makes the one who receives it grow.

3. A celebration of this step

At the end of these seven days, or of whatever time you devote to this step, take a moment to identify a real act of compassion that you have carried out, however modest it may be. Not a fine intention left in your heart, but a concrete gesture that has touched someone else, strengthened his dignity, or created a truer bond between you. Note it down in a notebook, or say it out loud, with gratitude.

For compassion that is not acknowledged risks closing in on itself like a flower that finds no light. What we welcome with gratitude, we invite to grow. Through these accumulated acts of compassion, small and patient, the beauty of our being in the world is gradually built.

Next week, we shall explore how this radiant compassion, consolidated over time, becomes the constancy that holds, the silent victory of the one who does not let go.

A good journey to each and every one of you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : Toward spiritual sovereingty | Step 4 - The victory of Constancy

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 4 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

14 April 2026

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day on which the Jewish people remembers, once again, the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Europe between 1933 and 1945, and of the six million of their brothers and sisters who perished in the Nazi extermination camps. Without forgetting the millions more mown down by the Einsatzgruppen, as the historians revealed in the decades that followed, and, more than anyone, through the tireless, courageous, and meticulous work of Father Patrick Desbois — blessed be he.

As every year, my heart weeps first for the Jewish dead, then for the incalculable number of victims of the massacres and genocides perpetrated since the dawn of humanity. The bloods of Abel have not ceased to cry out from the earth, and humanity has still not learned: destruction and killing continue their cruel work a few hours by air from the desk at which I write these lines.

And so I remembered this poem, written during a silent retreat some years ago. It seemed to me that, alongside the more discursive text published today on this same subject, “The bloods of Abel cry out from the ground“, it might bear witness in another way — more intimate, more inward — to what passes through me on this day; and so I share it with you below.

May we each contribute, with our talents and our means, to the day when this seemingly endless chain of hatred is transformed into a thread of blazing light opening onto the Day — the Day of the Return to Eden.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, a journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Kaddish

I heard rushing towards me,
like enormous tireless waves,
— how long still?
the rumour of battles in Africa or elsewhere,
for an acre of land and an illusory power,
so much blood spilt,
the weeping of the poor who have nowhere left to go
while others, poorer still,
pay dearly for their instant
of spinning through the sky.

I saw the vacant, stricken eyes of those
swollen with drugs,
with bad medicine or with alcohol,
who stagger like angry shadows,
somnambulists upon a land
they no longer recognise.

O my Father, make of me a consoler,
that I might take this world in my arms and cherish it,
as Your Second Son did in the land of Palestine!

Kaddish° for Your World in flames!
eviscerated by the voracity and madness of men!
Kaddish for the hungry children, kaddish for the beaten children,
kaddish for the enslaved children, violated, murdered!
Kaddish! kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for the mothers who weep,
kaddish for the mothers who cry out, for the mothers in mourning!
Kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for Your daughters and Your sons who have lost hope,
kaddish for those who no longer see Your path — may they return to You!
Kaddish! Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

August 2021

° kaddish, in Hebrew קדיש qaddish, sanctification, is one of the central pieces of Jewish liturgy whose theme is the glorification and sanctification of the Divine Name, with reference to one of the eschatological visions of Ezekiel. Several versions exist, the best known being that of the mourners, though the kaddish contains no allusion to the dead or to their resurrection.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

The siren that fractures time

Every year, at the same hour, a siren crosses Israel from one end to the other. Cars stop in the middle of the roads. Pedestrians freeze on the pavements. Conversations die away. For two minutes, the entire country stands, not in a silence that is the absence of sound, but in its exact opposite: an absolute presence, a listening stretched towards what can no longer speak. I experience this from within a particular inheritance, which I do not need to name in full for it to be heard. Yet the singularity of such a transmitted wound finds its full meaning, I deeply believe, only when it becomes a beacon raised above the other darknesses of the world. That is why this ritual does not seem to me to belong to the Jewish people alone. It concerns humanity as a whole — or rather, it should concern it, if it finally consented to hear what the siren says to each of us, wherever we live and whatever memory we have inherited.

Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and of Heroism, commemorates the extermination of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945. This reality is irreducible, named, quantified, documented with a bureaucratic precision that the executioners themselves supplied, doubtless without realising that they were compiling their own indictment file for eternity. Yet this day carries, beyond its national and religious dimension, an appeal addressed to every human conscience: why does man kill man because he is the Other? And how far can he go in that direction? The Shoah has inscribed the answer to these two questions in concrete and ash, to such an extent that the whole history of collective violence, both before and after it, must now be read in its terrifying light.

Auschwitz, or modernity turned against itself

It would be convenient, and profoundly false, to classify the Shoah among eruptions of primitive barbarity, as though the SS had been cavemen armed with clubs. The truth is exactly the reverse, and it is precisely this truth that makes the Shoah unbearable to contemplate in its full dimension: it is the most sophisticated product of modern Western civilisation. The trains that carried the deportees to the camps ran according to timetables optimised by engineers; the gas chambers were designed by qualified architects; the lists of names were kept by scrupulous civil servants; the racial ideology that legitimised the extermination was formulated by doctors of philosophy and university professors. What the Shoah revealed with inescapable clarity is that technical rationality, the bureaucracy of the modern State and scientific thought can, when severed from any ethical and spiritual compass, become the most effective instruments ever produced for the extermination of human beings.

Auschwitz is therefore not a regression to the animal. It is a perversion of the human by itself, at the most advanced stage of its organisational capacities. This distinction is not academic. It means that the danger does not come from a humanity that is insufficiently developed, but on the contrary from a highly developed humanity that has dissociated intelligence from conscience. And every age carries within itself the seeds of this dissociation, including our own, with its targeting algorithms, its real-time rhetorics of dehumanisation on social networks, and its States increasingly tempted, in their governance, by fear of the foreigner and surveillance of the average citizen.

From Cain to Auschwitz: a genealogy of massacre

Yet the story does not begin in 1933. It begins in the very first days, where the Torah itself placed the first act of violence: in a field, between two brothers, under the gaze of a God who asks Cain, the murderer of Abel: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground.” (Genesis 4, 10). The Hebrew text is striking in its precision: dəmê, the bloods, in the plural – as though Abel’s body contained not a single blood, but all the future bloods of all the victims that Cain and his descendants would spill over the centuries. Rashi, one of the greatest commentators on the Torah, notes that the text indeed says “the bloods” in order to teach that whoever kills a single human being is as though he had destroyed an entire world, and conversely, that every life saved is worth an entire world. In this sense, Abel is not one victim among others. He is the name borne, in sacred memory, by every victim of collective violence from prehistory to the present day.

The list of these bloods is long. Cain is older than all our civilisations, and the question that the Torah raises is not a pious metaphor, it is an anthropology. We must find the courage to go through a brief enumeration without turning away our eyes. From the Neolithic period, the mass graves of Talheim, Asparn-Schletz or Schöneck-Kilianstädten, dated between 5000 and 7000 years before our era, bear witness that the collective and methodical massacre of an entire community is not a modern invention. The Assyrians exterminated the populations of Mesopotamia with an implacable method that already stunned their contemporaries. The Mongol conquests annihilated entire civilisations from Central Asia to Persia. The colonisation of the Americas was accompanied by a demographic collapse that some historians estimate at eighty per cent of the indigenous Amerindian populations, a proportion that exceeds anything the twentieth century produced. The transatlantic slave trade deported twelve million human beings, torn from their African lands, from their names, from their languages, from their humanity.

In the twentieth century, the Shoah was itself preceded by two tragedies. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia were exterminated by the German colonial army with a method and an ideology that made it the first laboratory of modern genocide and a direct foreshadowing of what was to come. Then, in 1915, during the genocide of the Armenians, Turkey pushed this logic of extermination a step further, with a troubling administrative precision: the designation of a population, dispossession, deportation, extermination — a protocol that the Nazis then had only to industrialise. After 1945, the list continued, as though humanity had stubbornly refused to learn anything. Let us name the Cambodian people massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the Bengalis of East Pakistan in 1971, the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days, under the indifferent gaze of a world that the survivors have never been able to forgive, then the Yezidis in 2014… The list is not closed and it is still lengthening today.

Each of these massacres has followed the same fundamental architecture: someone first decided that the Other was not fully human. That his life was worth less, that his blood flowed for a reason, that his disappearance was necessary or at least tolerable. And once this decision had been taken inwardly, in the heart of an individual, in the ideology of a group, in the law of a State, the mechanism set itself in motion, with the terrifying docility that mechanisms always display. The Shoah is the moment when that mechanism reached its maximum speed and power, when the process of dehumanisation encountered industrial machinery and total political will. It is the climax, not because the other massacres matter less, but because it is the one that rendered the question absolutely impossible to evade: how far can humanity go in the destruction of its own flesh?

We are all Cain in potential

This is the disturbing claim, the one that neither moral comfort nor clear conscience can easily accept, and it is precisely for that reason that it must be voiced without trembling: there is no race, no nation, no religion, no civilisation that has demonstrated a definitive immunity against collective violence. Nazi Germany is not a monstrous exception that appeared from nowhere in the concert of nations. It is the result of an accumulation of political choices, complicit silences, stoked resentments, instrumentalised fears, and the designation of a scapegoat deemed responsible for every ill, a process that any society can undergo if it lets its spiritual and ethical guard drop sufficiently. Hannah Arendt, with her now famous phrase about the “banality of evil”, was saying nothing else: ordinary executioners are not monsters different from us in nature; they are ordinary men who consented, step by step, to monstrous acts because social, ideological and institutional pressure had rendered those acts normal.

This does not mean that we are all guilty of the Shoah, nor that all moral positions are equivalent. It means something far more demanding. We all carry, somewhere in our psychic structures and in our collective inheritances, the seeds of what Cain accomplished in the first field in history. The jealousy of what belongs to the Other. The resentment before difference. The fear of the foreigner erected into a principle of government. The contempt for the weak, dressed up in discourse about natural selection or meritocratic competition. Indifference to the suffering of a group we have not chosen to recognise as our neighbour. It is these seeds that Yom HaShoah invites us to look at directly, not in order to lash ourselves in vain, but to accomplish the work that the Jewish tradition calls teshuvah — the return, the conversion, the turning back of oneself towards what one knows to be right.

Cutting the inner roots before the violence ripens

Teshuvah does not mean regret. Regret, on its own, is a comfortable emotion that can be experienced without changing anything. Teshuvah means to return, to return to what one is at the deepest level, before the layers of fear, ideology and tribal conditioning that have covered over the original conscience. In Jewish thought, human beings are capable of teshuvah at any moment, because the divine image within them, the tselem Elokim, can never be utterly destroyed, only obscured. Yet authentic teshuvah demands an honest inventory. What have I done with the Other in my own life? Which Other have I dehumanised, even in the silence of my thoughts? To which rhetoric of rejection have I applauded because it seemed legitimate to me, because it targeted those I did not like, because it protected what I wanted to protect?

This question is not abstract. In our contemporary societies, crossed by migratory crises, surges of identitarian nationalisms, and algorithms that confine each group within its own reality facing its own enemy, it is burning in its relevance. To remember the Shoah without carrying out this inner inventory is to honour the dead with our lips while reconstituting in our hearts the conditions of their murder. It is spiritual complacency in its most dangerous form: the form that wraps itself in the cloak of commemoration in order to avoid transformation.

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Reciting names: a liturgy for all the Abels

That is why, on this day, I would like to suggest a symbolic gesture that goes beyond the sole framework of Yom HaShoah, without in any way denying it. Imagine a silent liturgy in which, after the six torches lit for the six million murdered Jews, other flames would be kindled: one for the one and a half million Armenians of 1915, one for the eight hundred thousand Tutsis of 1994, one for the two million Cambodians under Pol Pot, one for the millions of enslaved people drowned in the Atlantic whose names are engraved on no memorial, one for the indigenous peoples of the Americas whose civilisations have been reduced to legends in their own lands, one for the Yezidis, for the Uyghurs, for all those whose collective suffering has not yet found an official name in the calendar of world memory.

This gesture is not a dilution. It is an amplification, the recognition that the bloods of Abel cry out from all lands, in all languages, that God hears all these cries with the same shattering attention, and that our responsibility as living human beings is to become the bearers of these names that no one else can any longer pronounce. To recite the names in full awareness is the most radical act of resistance against forgetfulness, which is itself the second death of the victims. And it is at the same time an act of collective teshuvah: in naming our victims, those of our nation, our civilisation, our group, we acknowledge the share of Cain that produced them, we choose to remain silent no longer and truly to change.

What all these martyrs of inhumanity still demand of us

In a few moments, the siren will fall silent. The cars will start up again. Conversations will resume. And if nothing has been transformed within us during those two minutes, if we have simply endured the ritual as one endures a shower before coming back into the dry, then we will have betrayed both the dead and the living. For the dead of the Shoah, like all the Abels of history, are not asking us for tears. They ask something more difficult and more costly: they ask us to become men and women who refuse, in their daily lives and in their collective choices, to allow the roots of rejection, contempt and dehumanisation to germinate within and around them, whose outcome, carried through to its extreme conclusion, always bears, in the end, the same name: Auschwitz.

Zakhor — remember. But remember in order to change.

— On the occasion of Yom HaShoah 5786 / 2026.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 6 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Step 2 – The effort of Discipline
Previous article: The abundance of Love

Awakening and its demands

One who seeks to free himself from the sole grip of his ego, which confines him to surviving and keeping up appearances, begins to feel his spiritual essence awakening, that dimension of his being which belongs to the Infinite. He opens himself to that living energy of Love that nourishes the universe and begins to discover that it can move through him.

By choosing to make it the driving force of his existence, letting this energy spread within him and radiate through him into the world, he quickly runs up against the limits of his capacity for transcendence, as well as the diversity of situations and people.

He then discovers the necessity of channelling his will to love into a discipline that allows him to refine its concrete embodiment and give it a form suited to the constraints of reality. Through this effort, he experiences genuine inner transmutation and a profound transformation of his relationship with others.

When our essence claims its sovereignty

By developing a conscious presence to ourselves, we gradually learn to decentre from our habitual mode of functioning in order to begin observing it. This newfound inner freedom allows us to glimpse dimensions of our being that exceed the limits of our ego, that personality shaped since childhood by the necessities of social existence.

Our spiritual essence, long deprived of space and attention in favour of this instrument of embodiment, can then reawaken and seek to reclaim its rightful sovereignty over our existence. In trying to give concrete expression to this openness in our lives, through a renewed form of love for ourselves and for others, we collide with our inner agitation, our scattered attention, our fragilities, as well as the constraints of circumstance and the complexity of people.

It is therefore through an effort of discipline and personal rigour that we shall gradually learn to love ourselves better and to finely calibrate the way we express love within the ever-changing circumstances of daily life.

Discipline and self-love

In our modern societies, we are constantly at risk of being swept away by the prevailing current of ambient agitation and stress. Without a sustained effort of discipline and constant self-recollection, it is impossible to remain connected to our innermost being and to progress in our spiritual realisation. Every change in our life, in how we function as well as in the details of our daily routine, first requires a quality of self-presence that allows us to step back and preserve a space of inner calm.

It is there that we can find the resources needed to activate the best within ourselves: all those talents and qualities tied to our spiritual essence, which forms the foundation of our deepest human nature, our acquired personality being merely an instrument of embodiment called to serve its active expression in the world. And the driving force that enables this nature to flourish and find concrete expression in existence is none other than love, whose development is the primary intention of any authentic discipline of wisdom.

Thus, learning to love ourselves rightly means, first of all, accepting to make choices that restore our spiritual dimension to first place in our lives, sometimes renouncing common habits in favour of our inner awakening and our transformation. It also means loving others as they are, with the humility of one who knows his own limits, avoids judging the weaknesses of his neighbour, and stands ready to welcome them with an open heart, to share with them all that is possible.

From good intentions to small victories

How difficult it is to move beyond the good intentions that pass through all of us, and to become truly more open to others, more empathetic towards their concerns, more tolerant towards their ways of being, sometimes so different from our own. And what can be said of our capacity to truly love them as they are, with that compassion that dissolves obstacles and distances, and demonstrates that love is not an empty word but an active force capable of transforming situations?

How do we become ourselves the example that hints that love might, in the end, be the only solution left to try, to step back from the ferocity that threatens whenever human beings are crushed by injustice, fear, and frustration? Through discipline, always discipline, rigour and self-abnegation, but in the joy of feeling within oneself a larger, broader life growing, rich with so many precious discoveries to share!

Human beings have an incredible capacity to transform their existence in depth, to become the creators of themselves and to escape the limits that their visible condition seems to impose upon them. After every stumbling block, after every moment of weakness, it is enough to renew the effort, to better gauge one’s step, and to keep moving forward, gaining a little something here, a little something there. Those brief moments when we sense that a fragment of our frightened ego releases its grip and once again lets the loving life of the Infinite flow through us. Upon these small victories, slowly won over our inner heaviness and coarseness, the radiance of our spiritual sovereignty will ultimately rise.

Standing still in the maelstrom

The more we aspire to transform ourselves inwardly, once freed from the artificial models that drive consumerism and the performance of appearances, and the more we become aware that activating our potentials of wisdom and love will draw us closer to our true nature, the more we also run up against our inner weights and roughness, because they become more visible to us.

To these inner burdens are added the heaviness and fatigue generated by city life, for in our modern societies, crushed under noise and agitation, we often lack the time and space to catch our breath and find some relief. This is why it is so important to gradually cultivate great patience and to accept that the only guarantee of our success lies in the steadiness of one who moves forward resolutely, step by step.

The more we succeed in stepping back and remaining present to ourselves, attentive to our inner workings whatever the circumstances, the more we can hold ourselves like still points within the surrounding maelstrom and consciously choose what we integrate into our inner life. We shall also discover that we can consciously measure the concrete energy we invest in the present moment, according to the inner attitude we adopt. In a sense, it is like learning to optimise the settings of our being, the relationship between our body, our emotions, and our thoughts, so as to promote, as much as possible, our progress towards our goal: to become ourselves.

The craftsman and the Great Work

Just as the apprentice craftsman must practise for a long time, with modest materials and imperfect tools, before acquiring the skill and concentration needed to create the masterpiece that marks the completion of his apprenticeship, so the spiritual seeker engaged in the Great Work of his inner transmutation must accept working with both his strengths and his weaknesses, his blind spots as much as his moments of light, without seeking refuge in easy illusions about his condition.

But if he keeps his initial intention clearly in mind, to realise his true nature and to access wisdom and love, if he maintains an active discipline made of self-attentiveness (to see his real functioning) and measured effort (to change step by step), then his inner strength will grow and amplify; something of another state of consciousness will begin to crystallise within him.

The inner practice of sincerity and humility will gradually reveal dimensions of his being that had remained hidden, and potentialities he had been wholly unaware of. He will discover what self-love truly is, not the love of a false friend who leads one to doubt one’s possibilities and justify one’s retreats, but the demanding love of one who leads him towards the full light of his human dignity. It is upon this foundation of truth that genuine inner stability can develop, one that enables steady progress and the beginning of mastery over the tools of spiritual development.

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Ardent discipline

This inner discipline, this art of containing and directing vital energy rather than dissipating it, is what the Hebrew tradition calls Gevurah, ardent discipline, the second quality of the soul, whose cultivation begins in the second week of the counting of the Omer. Paradoxically, Gevurah does not oppose Chesed: it is the condition of its fruitfulness, for love without form or banks spreads thin and evaporates, whilst discipline gives it a riverbed and transforms it into a river capable of carrying ships. The Indian tradition of yoga calls this effort tapas, the inner heat generated by voluntary ascesis, which burns away the impurities of character as fire refines raw metal to liberate the gold. Sufism speaks of mujahada, the spiritual combat against the ego’s dispersing tendencies, which Ibn Arabi teaches is the ‘great jihad,’ far more demanding than any external battle, since it confronts the forces that resist within ourselves. In the tradition of the Desert Fathers, nepsis, sober watchfulness, that alert and tranquil attention that lets no distraction pass unrecognised, is the keystone of all authentic spiritual life. As for Taoism, which is sometimes mistakenly seen as a mere invitation to passivity, it in fact teaches wu wei not as the abandonment of all effort, but as right and economical action that does not oppose its force to that of things but joins it with precision, the supreme discipline of one who acts in perfect accord with the deep nature of reality. From all these paths emanates the same conviction: inner freedom is not received as a gift; it is built, patiently, through consented effort and benevolent rigour.

The inner temple

Having freed ourselves from our fears, which had tended to push us towards external models rather than daring to follow the call of our innermost being, we had found ourselves facing the difficulty of overcoming our inner burdens and the fear that it might be nearly impossible to move forward. But through the practice of intelligent and measured discipline, maintained with constancy, we shall gradually succeed in developing sufficient stability to no longer make our entire inner life dependent on the slightest unforeseen circumstance.

We then become capable of preserving within ourselves a deep space of serenity, one whose path we can find again without difficulty, from which we can observe the world and ourselves with benevolence and without judgement. We begin to catch a glimpse of what our spiritual sovereignty might be, of which this inner space is a kind of prefiguration.

It is in this secret hermitage that the spiritual energies circulate which can awaken our intuition; and it is in this inner temple that we can engage intelligently with humanity’s great sacred texts and find within them nourishment and guidance free from all dogmatism. It is from this still and tranquil place, that of genuine self-presence, that we can begin to think, feel, and act differently, and to express the very best of ourselves.

All the effort now consists in dwelling there as often as possible, even amid the surrounding agitation, so as to let wisdom and love grow within us.

A few guideposts for the path

These reflections on inner discipline are not meant to turn you into an unyielding ascetic, but to make you a more lucid craftsman of yourself. If the expansive love of the previous week is the sap that nourishes the tree, discipline is the form that allows it to grow straight and direct its growth towards the light. A ray of sunlight illuminates; a laser beam, concentrated at a single point, can pierce steel. Discipline is that beam. It does not punish: it orients, concentrates, and gives love its rightful measure and its full effectiveness in the real world.

As a complement, you may wish to reread the article Glossary: D for Discipline.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Sit in a moment of quiet. Let each of these questions descend gently, without seeking an immediate answer. What surfaces with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On my relationship to discipline
Do I truly have discipline in my life, or do I often surrender to improvisation and distraction? Do I use my energies intelligently, concentrating them on what truly matters, or do I scatter them in all directions? Are there areas where I lack structure, and others where I am excessively rigid?

On the quality of my self-discipline
Is my discipline itself measured and respectful of my limits, or is it sometimes tyrannical, demanding the impossible and punishing imperfection? Do I regularly take a moment to take stock of my commitments and shortcomings, with clarity but without unnecessary harshness? Is my discipline driven by the desire to become, or by the fear of not being enough?

On discipline in my relationships
When I correct or criticise someone, a child, a loved one, a colleague, is it truly out of concern for them, or is there in my impulse a hint of concealed satisfaction or irritation? Does the way I set a boundary or make a remark leave the other person standing in their dignity, or does it diminish them?

On constancy and connection
Is my commitment to my inner practices regular, or does it only survive in good times? Do my demands on those I accompany help them to discover themselves and grow, or do they freeze them in fear? Does my discipline nourish in me and in others a growing sense of dignity and sovereignty?

2. A few practices for the week

Making a plan and observing it
Before beginning your day tomorrow, take ten minutes to write down three or four real priorities, not an endless list. At the end of the day, review them honestly: neither excessive satisfaction nor harshness, just the lucid eye of a craftsman on his work. Extend this practice over several days, gradually adding a longer-term horizon.

Before criticising, run it through the filter
Each time you feel a criticism rising towards someone, ask yourself one simple question before speaking: am I doing this out of love for this person, or to satisfy something within myself? If the honest answer is the second, wait for a more fitting moment. If it is the first, find the gentlest way to say it.

Repairing a past act of discipline
Think of someone you recently corrected, perhaps with too much harshness. Go to that person this week with a gesture of gentleness and recognition. Discipline is stronger when it also knows how to make amends.

Building a space of constancy
Choose one modest practice you wish to maintain regularly between now and the end of this journey: five minutes of silence in the morning, a few lines in a notebook, a mindful walk. Place it in your daily life not as an additional obligation, but as a space you offer yourself to return to yourself.

3. Celebrating this stage

At the end of these seven days, or the time you devote to this stage, take a moment to name one quality of discipline that you have strengthened or discovered within yourself this week. Not an achievement, but a small real movement: a priority held, a criticism held back at the right moment, a practice resumed after abandonment. Write it in a notebook, or say it out loud.

For discipline left unacknowledged withers like a plant without water. What we welcome with gratitude — even in its imperfection — takes root and grows. It is from these accumulated constancies that the solid ground of our inner sovereignty is built.

Next week, we shall explore how active compassion transforms discipline into radiance and love into concrete presence in the world.

May your journey be fruitful — to all of you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : Toward spiritual sovereingty | Step 3 - The radiance of Compassion

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 6 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Discipline: the word discipline comes from the Latin disciplina, born of discipulus, the student — one who receives — itself derived from discere, to learn, and from an Indo-European root dek-, which carries the idea of grasping with consent, of welcoming what is offered. Before it was ever a constraint, discipline was a posture: that of one who accepts being taught — not by an external master, but by the very reality of what one is. In this original and often forgotten sense, to discipline oneself is to become one’s own disciple.

I. The confusion worth untangling

It is old and stubborn. For a long time, discipline was draped in the rags of mortification, punitive rigor, and aggressive self-control. Contemporary performance culture has only deepened this misunderstanding by converting discipline into an optimization tool: timed morning routines, productivity journals, thirty-day challenges posted on social media as so many proofs of a willpower worth displaying. What we call discipline in this sense is often nothing more than tyranny exercised upon oneself, whose only measure is efficiency and whose only horizon is the visible result.

II. Seeing oneself in order to change

Spiritual discipline rests on an entirely different inner economy. It does not arise from the desire to achieve a result aligned with external demands, but from a will to develop one’s essential nature. To do so, it first requires learning to see oneself as one truly is, without distorting that vision through positive or negative self-judgment. Just an honest and patient observation of one’s own inner movements and behaviors, like a researcher recording data before drawing conclusions. Only then can deliberate work begin — a purposeful transformation aimed at accessing the fullness of one’s spiritual dimension, made of adjustments and flexibility, slowly moving toward the goal.

We observe in order to change; and this path of change inevitably includes advances and setbacks, periods of clarity and others of opacity — all of which are integral to the process, and not signs of failure. Discipline asks not for heroism, but for faithfulness: returning, again and again, to that lucid gaze upon oneself and upon the course one has chosen, and resuming one’s walk with courage after having fallen. Thus the meditator ceaselessly brings his attention back to his breath after the mind has wandered.

III. What the traditions say

The great wisdom traditions have formalized this intuition in a remarkably convergent way. In the Hindu tradition, the term abhyāsa — regular practice, constancy in effort — is inseparable from vairāgya, detachment from the practical and social fruits of action. The Bhagavad Gītā offers one of the most luminous images imaginable on this subject: that of a chariot driven by a coachman, pulled by spirited horses, carrying an archer who knows where he is going. The body is the chariot, the senses and passions are the horses, the mind is the reins, the discriminating intellect is the coachman — and the conscious passenger, the archer, is the Self who observes and chooses.

Discipline consists precisely in this: that the coachman holds the reins with quiet firmness, not to immobilize the horses, but so that they may move together toward a destination freely chosen by the archer. The Christian contemplative traditions, Sufi or Buddhist, speak of the same reality under different names — askesis, mujāhada, bhāvanā — but all insist on the same sequence: observe, assess honestly, correct without self-flagellation, and resume.

What distinguishes this discipline from mere performance discipline is also the celebration of small victories — a word to be understood in its sober, almost silent sense: acknowledging that an inner space has slightly expanded, that a reaction was delayed by a second, that an old fear was faced without fleeing. This recognition is not complacency; it is the fuel of constancy.

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IV. The paradoxical freedom

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman named our era liquid modernity: a society in which forms dissolve before they can solidify, where commitments evaporate, where identity itself becomes a flux endlessly reconfigured under the pressure of algorithms and contradictory demands. In this context, spiritual discipline is not a reactionary resistance to change — it is precisely the opposite: it is the capacity to choose one’s change rather than be subject to it, to remain in contact with oneself through movement, to distinguish authentic evolution from mere adaptation to the ambient noise.

Paradoxically, it is within the society of immediacy and dispersion that discipline reveals its deepest nature: a form of freedom. The musician who runs their scales every morning is not a slave to his instrument: he is freeing himself from awkwardness so that something greater can speak through him. Discipline as a return to oneself is not a withdrawal; it is the founding act of all authentic presence in the world.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 6 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Serie: Toward spiritual sovereingty | Step 1 - The abundance of Love
Previous article: Toward spiritual sovereignty - Introduction

Traversed by the Infinite

In my meditations and sometimes in my dreams, I feel what seems like an infinite Life, an eternal vitality, nourishing the universe in a constant movement of forces that balance and transform one another. And I myself, a tiny point lost somewhere in the immensity of this cosmos, am traversed and permeated by it. In this boundless Life, I breathe, I desire, I create, and I can grow. I can even, escaping the madness of men, learn to love and keep alive within me the hope of contributing to a more just world. And for that alone I give thanks, for being able, here and now, to be committed to this path of peace and beauty, and to walk it in fraternity with all those whose roads cross mine.

For this infinite Life, I always perceive it as an energy of Love that, behind appearances and the tumult of surfaces, patiently waits for us to become its hands, its voice, and its living word, to fullfill in the flesh of the world all the potentials for happiness, freedom, and splendor of which It has been, since the dawn of time, the promise tirelessly renewed at every dawn.

To become the conscious channel of this abundance of Love, to welcome it within oneself and radiate it outward, thereby participating in the slow and patient repair of the world, the tikkun olam, as the Hebrew sages say, this, to me, is the most sublime achievement to which a human being can aspire.

Presence to oneself, openness to the other

As we gradually awaken to this spiritual dimension, we discover that beyond the familial, social, and cultural determinisms that have shaped us, we can develop a quality of presence to ourselves that allows us to welcome our essential dimensions and thus understand ourselves more fully. By cultivating a mode of knowing that balances intuition and reason, we access to a psychospiritual understanding of ourselves that truly opens the path to our inner freedom — that path which will allow us at last to escape the shackles of our fears and our dependencies.

A more open state of consciousness then begins to transform how we see others: we cease to perceive human beings as separate and competing, and come to recognize them as co-responsible for their respective destinies, and as complementary in their differences. “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” both the Talmud and the Quran tell us. “Love your neighbor as yourself”, says Leviticus, “for he is you”, adds Rashi, the great medieval commentator. The living energy of Love that holds the universe together and makes spring bloom again is that same force which can, in the human dimension, nourish the most beautiful relationships, reconcile differences, enrich complementarities, and soothe conflicts.

If we open ourselves to this dynamic and consent to clearing within us the obstacles that lock us into our false identities and immediate self-interests, if we dare to let ourselves be traversed by this breath of the Infinite, we quickly discover how profoundly it can carry us toward an infinitely wider, more expansive way of breathing in our lives.

Am I in the abundance of love?

For authentic love, the kind that unfolds in spiritual life, is the most essential and most powerful dimension of all human existence. It is at once the origin and the foundation of every true relationship. Loving elevates us beyond ourselves: we escape the limits of our ego to genuinely welcome the life of the other, becoming aware that we can establish with them bonds of trust, complementarity, and mutual giving, and together build those spaces of sharing that make both of us grow.

Love allows us to apprehend the universe in its most sublime dimension: non-separation, the unity of the Living, Life with a capital L, in a word, it opens us to transcendence. But this breakthrough toward the Infinite plays out nonetheless in the most ordinary aspects of daily life, and depends entirely on our willingness to extend to the widest possible number this capacity to love that we all carry in the depths of our hearts. Let us ask ourselves plainly: am I in the abundance of love? Am I capable of loving others and giving freely, or do I love only those who are close to me and give back in return? Am I capable of reaching out to someone I don’t know?

In sincerely evaluating our capacity to love, we may discover that the desire to love is indeed alive within us, but that obstacles, accumulated disappointments, fears left unexamined, old wounds, limit its expression and narrow its radiance. If we consent to look at them lucidly and without judgment, to cross through them and move beyond, we will make a decisive discovery: the more our love grows, the more a deep sense of freedom, fullness, and peace settles within us.

Loving rightly

Love, like music, has several tonalities and several intensities. Depending on whether my capacity to love is directed toward my partner, my family, my friends, or my social connections, it will have neither the same face nor the same modes of expression. It will also vary according to the concrete possibility of expressing it toward any given person, something that depends both on the respective roles, the temperaments at play, and the singular history of each relationship.

But whatever its form, true love is first nourished by care for the other, without which it is nothing but self-love. It is fulfilled in our acceptance of loving the other as they are, without demanding that they become someone else, more aligned with our desires or expectations. Even if you perceive which choice or which change would allow the beloved to live more fully, never forget that the most beautiful love remains the one that shows without imposing, that inspires through example rather than pressuring through insistence.

Discipline your love: learn to sense what the other can receive, and hold to that limit with kindness. Do not read their behaviors or their words through your own lens, but genuinely put yourself in their place, welcome their way of being, different from your own, and become attentive to it. For by learning to measure your love according to the other’s capacity to receive it, you will discover that this discipline also protects you: it allows you not to lose yourself in the relationship and to live it in a balance that is both healthy and lasting.

If you develop toward those close to you this faculty of loving rightly, attentive to the other’s possibilities as much as to your own needs, respectful of their freedom to be themselves, it will naturally become easier to open yourself to strangers and to love them. Not with the love of a partner or a close friend, whose intensity and intimacy require time and shared history, but with that same quality of presence you have just cultivated: the care to understand, the readiness to give what the other can receive, the respect for their difference and their freedom.

The seed of Infinity we all share

Is it not already love, the kind whose Source surpasses us, to replace the habitual wariness that feeds all forms of violence with a willingness to experience the best with a stranger, according to the possibilities the encounter will offer? If we could, in all circumstances, transform our self-enclosure into a face radiating goodness and simplicity, and into that precious skill of exchanging a few generous or joyful words, we could then enrich one another by sharing, even for a brief moment, a little of our humanity, our dreams, or our sorrows.

For when we move beyond our ego, preoccupied with its own survival, to let speak within us what can connect us to the other, that seed of Infinity they too carry as a shared inheritance, something of a mysterious common vibration becomes possible between two beings who did not previously know each other.

Yet this capacity to love, more sentimental and intimate toward those close to us, yet generous and expansive enough to reach out to strangers in the hope of a genuine connection, can be thwarted at many turns by the vicissitudes of existence: moments of fatigue or weariness, setbacks and disappointments that come to dull our momentum.

Indeed, we cannot always be fully available to others. We live in cycles of expansion, contraction, and rest that affect every dimension of our being, and it is precisely by developing self-knowledge through conscious observation that we can gradually refine our way of being in relationship, aligning our availability with our actual state rather than with an ideal standard we cannot always sustain.

It is sometimes also legitimate to question whether it is even appropriate to express this love, when it runs up against relational difficulties with those close to us, or against the prejudices and rigidity of people we encounter. But if we manage to examine the situation without being trapped by our emotions, we will most often find that what is at issue is not the energy of love we carry, but the way in which we express it toward a particular person, ill-suited to what they can understand or receive in that moment.

The languages of love are as diverse as human beings are. If the other is waiting for a particular expression of affection or a particular form of welcome, because these correspond to what they practice naturally themselves, we find ourselves in misunderstanding and confusion, not for lack of love, but due to a lack of adjustment. In love as in chess, the quality of the relationship depends less on the force of our momentum than on our capacity to anticipate what the other can receive, and to adapt to it with flexibility.

Love is a work to be built

It is ultimately humility that makes the decisive difference, the kind that transforms love that waits and demands into love that understands and welcomes. In the face of the difficulties of human relationships which, even when carried by sincere feelings, run up against differences of temperament, outlook, and destiny, it is humility that frees us from rigidity and blockage, and opens within us the possibility of patience and constancy, those two qualities without which no lasting love can be built.

Humility strengthens the bonds between those who integrate it into their relationship and makes mutual forgiveness more accessible to them in moments of tension or disappointment. It allows the substitution of emotional outburst with the intelligence of the heart, that slow and attentive intelligence that takes the time to reflect before reacting, and to adapt to the other before asserting itself. For those who are humble have consented to see everything within themselves: their limits and their fragilities, their shortcomings as well as their qualities and their achievements, without flattering themselves for the former or condemning themselves for the latter. They strive therefore to act according to the best of themselves in daily life and to improve step by step. They have learned to love themselves as they are, a being on the way toward their spiritual fulfillment, neither perfect nor resigned.

This lucidity and this benevolent realism allow them to put themselves in the place of whoever stands before them. By stepping aside from their own personality, they can intuitively sense what is moving through the other and recognize in them their true alter ego. If they then persevere in love despite the obstacles, it is because they have understood that love is a work to be built , a shared work which, nourished by feeling but also shaped by time and skill, can attain, for those who devote themselves to it with constancy, the beauty and the fullness of a masterpiece.

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One face, a thousand names

In the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, this primordial force of generous love has received different names according to languages and cultures, but its face is everywhere the same.

Hebrew Kabbalah names it Chesed, expansive love, the unconditional goodness that gives itself without calculation or measure, the first of the seven qualities of the soul that the spiritual seeker is called to cultivate at the heart of spring, as if nature itself were showing the way by making sap burst through the trees after the rigors of winter. The Sufis call it mahabba, that divine love of which Rumi says it is the hidden key to all existence, the living water that secretly traverses the most arid stones to make a spring surge forth at the most unexpected moment. Buddhism designates it as metta, the loving-kindness that knows neither borders nor conditions, which expands from the beloved to the stranger, then from the stranger to the adversary, until every living being is enveloped in the same radiance of benevolent attention. The Christian tradition names it agape, that gratuitous love of which John of the Cross says that “where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love”, a formula that alone summarizes an entire life of practice. Confucianism recognizes in it ren, the humanistic benevolence at the foundation of every civilization worthy of the name, and Vedanta celebrates it under the name of prema, designating unconditional love as the very nature of the deep Self.

All these traditions converge on one conviction: love is not first a feeling that arises, but a capacity that one develops, a quality of presence that one cultivates day after day, until it becomes the permanent tonality of our way of being in the world.

A few guidelines for the journey

These few paragraphs are not meant to say everything about love, they are meant to reopen a door. For those who wish to linger a little longer, I offer below a few questions to meditate on and a few concrete gestures: to help us assess where we stand, with kindness and without judgment, and perhaps to make a first living move in the direction of this abundance of love we have just explored together.

As a complement, you may also want to revisit the article : Alphabet: H for Humility.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Take a quiet moment to sit with these questions, without trying to answer them too quickly. Let them resonate within you as you would let herbal tea steep, what surfaces spontaneously is often more revealing than what we seek to formulate.

On my capacity to love

What is my actual capacity to love others? Am I in the abundance of love or in a state of withholding? Do I give freely, or only when I’m sure of receiving something in return? Do I truly make room for the other in my life, or do I love from the comfortable distance of my own needs? Am I afraid to open up, to show vulnerability, to be hurt if I give too much?

On the way I express my love

Do I actually express what I feel, or do I hold it back out of fear of the other’s reaction? Do I speak the other’s love language, or only my own? Is my love adapted to what the other can receive, or do I sometimes overwhelm them to the point of flooding them? As Hasidic wisdom says: rain is a blessing because it falls in drops that do not flood the fields.

On the reach of my love

Do I love only those who resemble me or who give back to me? Am I capable of loving a stranger, of reaching out to someone I don’t know, without expecting recognition? Do I express my love only when it is comfortable, or also when it costs me something?

On the quality of my love

Is my love sufficiently disciplined, or do I sometimes become the support that someone takes advantage of, in the name of love? Do I truly respect the freedom and limits of those I love? Do I see them as they are, or as an extension of my own needs and projections? Does my love make me humble, or does it sometimes feed the pride as the giver?

On the constancy of my love

Does my love hold up through trials, through the highs and lows of existence? Am I prepared to fight to preserve a bond that matters? Does my love have endurance, or does it evaporate at the first disappointment?

2. A few gestures for the week

Helping according to the other’s needs

Identify a person in your circle who needs help right now. Offer your support not according to what you think would be useful to them, but according to what they tell you they need. If they don’t say, ask them. Then do it, even if it takes you outside your usual habits.

Reaching out to a stranger

Choose a moment during the week to spontaneously offer a gesture of love to a stranger, a warm word, a practical helping hand, a genuine smile. Observe what it produces in you, and in them.

Swallowing pride

Is there a person with whom you are on cold or tense terms, a close one, a friend, a colleague? Take the first step toward reconciliation, without waiting for the other to move. Not out of weakness, but out of nobility: those who truly love know that pride costs more than forgiveness.

Building together

Propose to someone you love to create something together, a project, a meal, a walk, a deep conversation. Love is not content merely to be felt: it is built, it is cultivated, it demands hands and time.

3. Celebrating this step

At the end of these seven days, or however long you devote to this step, take a moment to identify one concrete thing that your capacity to love has brought into your life, a strengthened bond, a reconciliation, an unexpected encounter, a shared joy. Write it in a notebook, or say it out loud. For love that is not recognized and celebrated risks going unnoticed, and what we celebrate, we invite to return.

And there it is, this first oasis on the journey. Next week, we will explore a second quality of the soul: how inner discipline, far from extinguishing love, gives it its true power.

Happy journeying to all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : Toward spiritual sovereingty | Step 2 - The effort of Discipline

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 6 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Toward spiritual sovereingty | Introduction

A demanding and luminous crossing toward authentic renewal

Spring offers us the chance to deeply experience the universal archetype of renewal. The Passover celebrations honor spiritual freedom and the victory of Life over the forces of death and confinement. In resonance with this twofold invitation, I propose a seven-week or seven-step journey dedicated to our inner and spiritual flourishing.

Together, we will chart the course of a demanding and luminous crossing, one that moves through progressive awakenings and patient work transforming our emotional life and our behaviors, toward an inner liberation sufficiently embodied to allow us to become truly ourselves in the truth of everyday life. This journey unfolds in seven stages, each to be claimed in one’s own way and at one’s own pace: yet we will have here a clear and concrete direction that allows us to move gradually from an intention of realization to its living enactment, not as an abstract promise, but as a transformation verified in the very flesh of existence.

This path begins first with a shift in perspective: learning to view the world and ourselves through the eyes of the soul, open enough to perceive the abundance of love-forces that nourish the universe and to become their conscious channel. We will then discover how a demanding yet benevolent inner discipline can transform this momentum into active compassion, calibrated to the constraints and harshness of ordinary existence. Then come patient constancy, lucid humility, and living gratitude, qualities less dazzling than love, yet equally decisive in the work of transformation, for they are what allows a sufficiently solid inner stability to take root within us , solid enough for that spiritual sovereignty to be built upon it, sovereignty that each of us senses as our highest calling, and that we will together dare to claim and embody.

The Exodus, the archetype of all liberation

This invitation to renewal takes on particular resonance when we recall that the festival of Pessa’h, which falls at the threshold of spring — the Hebrew Passover, of which the Christian Passover is the spiritual daughter — is not merely the memory of a political liberation. The Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitsraïm, derives from the root metsar, the narrow throat, the mountain pass, the stranglehold, and its dual suffix -ayim opens, in the spiritual and symbolic reading of this name, onto two simultaneous constrictings: the social and political enslavement that crushes bodies and strips beings of all dignity, and the spiritual stranglehold that imprisons consciousness within the limits of an identity reduced to survival, severed from its own depth. Yetsiat Mitsraïm, the Exodus from Egypt as told in the biblical text, is thus far more than a historical event: it can be read as the universal archetype of the twofold liberation that every human being is called to accomplish, first by defying the social conditions that crush them, then by breaking the inner chains that keep them enslaved to their fears, their automatisms, and their illusions about themselves.

For escaping one's inner Egypt, even through a decisive and courageous effort, is never more than the beginning of the journey. The newly liberated slave who desires to reclaim his deeper life soon finds himself crossing a vast and disorienting desert. And he is sometimes tempted to turn back toward the deceptive comfort of his illusions and his former confinements: at least he knew them, at least they belonged to him. Yet it is precisely in this desert, in this destabilizing void left behind by all true liberation, that the most decisive work begins: the work of patient interiority, of transformation quality by quality, until the day when, the traveler having reached the summit of his own secret mountain, Life speaks once again with clarity and directness.

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In Jerusalem as in Benares : the degrees of an inner temple

The Hebrew tradition has established a forty-nine-day count, the Sefirat HaOmer, beginning the day after Pessa’h and lasting for seven weeks, leading up to Shavuot, the festival commemorating the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This counting is not a mere liturgical calendar: it is a symbolic illustration of that discipline of inner transformation which allows one to traverse the desert and reach its heights. It is organized around the seven great qualities of the soul, the midot, which Kabbalistic wisdom names the emotional sefirot, seven structuring forces of the human psyche: generous love (Chesed), creative rigor (Gevurah), harmonious compassion (Tiferet), victorious perseverance (Netzach), humility and gratitude (Hod), foundational stability (Yesod), and embodied sovereignty (Malkhut). Each week of the journey proposed here intuitively follows this movement, not as a pedagogical device, but because these seven dimensions are, at their core, the natural stages of any authentic inner transformation, in Jerusalem as in Benares, in Baghdad as in Kyoto.

It is indeed remarkable that most of the world’s great wisdom traditions have organized their path of spiritual transformation around comparable sequences, as if the human soul universally recognized this inner rhythm. Sufism unfolds the maqâmât, the stations of the heart on the road toward G-d; Tibetan Buddhism traces the path of the pāramitās, the perfections to be cultivated until awakening; the Vedanta tradition articulates its yamas and niyamas in a similar progression; and Christian mysticism, from the Desert Fathers to John of the Cross, has described the stages of the soul’s ascent toward divine union in closely parallel terms. All bear witness that inner freedom is not obtained all at once, but is conquered patiently, quality by quality, as one would climb the steps of an inner temple, each step revealing a wider horizon.

The caravan may now set out toward the first oasis !

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article: Step 1 - The abundance of Love

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Waymakers · A word that circulates · 19 min
When your voices and your exchanges become articles and enrich the Dialogues.

When I opened these Dialogues to your contributions, I didn’t yet know what form this shared discourse would take — nor how deep it might go. I only knew that a true dialogue calls for more than marginal comments, however precious they may be: it calls for voices that engage freely with one another, respond patiently, and accept that they cannot conclude where honest thought forbids a conclusion.

The exchange you are about to read originated in the Comments section of the french version of my article The Wound of Duality—and the Return (1/3), the first text in a three-part series devoted to mapping non-dual paths within spiritual traditions. The series traverses six millennia-old traditions—from Sufism to Kabbalah, from Advaita Vedanta to Buddhism, from Taoism to Christian mysticism—before giving voice to two contemporary voices: the Revelation of Arès and the Dialogues with the Angel. It was precisely this last choice—treating these contemporary Words as fully-fledged paths in this mapping, on par with the millennia-old traditions—that lit the fuse!

Alexander Djis, an attentive and philosophically discerning reader, then pointed out in a comment what he calls “the subtle flaw” in this series of articles: I had not explicitly raised the question of the epistemic status of a Word that presents itself as received, transmitted, revealed. By granting it a structuring place in my comparisons, I was implicitly taking a position on its admissibility—without ever setting forth the criteria underlying that position. This is a fair observation, and it deserves more than a simple acknowledgment. It will be the subject of a future article.

But it was Patrick Thazard, a reader of the Dialogues and a pilgrim of Arès, who first took up the gauntlet—not to answer in my place, but because the question touched him in his own life. A conversation then unfolded between them, spanning four days of exchanges in the Comments section of the article. With uncommon rigor and fraternity, it perfectly illustrates what I hoped for when I opened the Dialogues to your participation: letting the diversity of your approaches and the richness of their encounters run freely.

Patrick and Alexander do not reach an agreement. The central question Alexander poses with disarming clarity — do there exist shareable criteria of discernment between contradictory revealed claims, or does spiritual truth remain irreducibly personal? — remains open at the end of their exchange, as it should when thought is honest. What develops between them is not a consensus, but something more precious: a space of mutual understanding, patiently achieved, sentence after sentence, without reduction or evasion — a genuine dialogue that advances reflection rather than closing it off with slogans and postures, which is unfortunately so common today.

I thank them both for agreeing to let me move and republish their comments here as they are, in the form of a full-fledged article—preserving their living dynamic, with its advances, its corrected misunderstandings, its rephrasings, and that beautiful final moment where fraternity takes over without erasing any of the differences that remain.

It falls to me, once this exchange has been read, to respond to the direct question Alexander addresses to me. I have begun to do so in response to his initial comment — but this will be the subject of the article announced above.

For now, I leave you with them. Feel free to continue the dialogue if you wish — here are their Substack profiles: Alexander Djis · Patrick Thazard.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Note: this dialogue was originally written in French. The translation is my own.

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The article and comment that sparked the exchange

And here is Alexander Djis’s initial comment, which serves as the starting point for this exchange:

“Dear Jérôme, your work on non-dual approaches in spiritual traditions has the merit of naming the fractures that persist between them rather than dissolving them, and in that it is precious. But since the first article, a tension persists in the reading, linked to a subtle flaw that perhaps deserves to be exposed in turn for this last article: that of the very status of contemporary revealed word.

The two texts you highlight as “contemporary paths” are not merely modern spiritual meditations. They carry a specific claim: that of a word received, transmitted, and given. By granting them such a place in your comparison, you are not merely making a documentary choice; you are engaging, even implicitly, a position on the admissibility of this type of source.

Yet this position, in your text, remains in the background.

This is a decisive point. For what authorizes us today to take a contemporary revealed claim seriously? The depth of the text? Its coherence? Its existential fruitfulness? Its transformative effect? Or the explicit recognition of an always-living possibility of revelation?

Without clarification, an ambiguity remains: these texts seem to play a more structuring role than mere modern testimony, without the position that renders this use fully coherent being laid out.”

Spiritual discernment and revealed word: dialogue between Patrick and Alexander

Patrick Thazard: It is of course not my place to answer on behalf of Jérôme Nathanaël, but I thank you for this pertinent question.

To your question “what authorizes us today to take a contemporary revealed claim seriously?”, it seems to me that nothing conceptually clear authorizes it... no more, for that matter, than the contemporaries of the Buddha or Jesus had a conceptually clear criterion for deciding on their personal relationship with them... Some contemporaries were “touched” back then, and many others were not, and this does not seem different to me today regarding contemporary revelations.

Of course, false prophets have existed in every age, just as they do today, and the more or less clear answer lies within the intimacy of each individual’s consciousness.

Personally, I am not at all bothered by someone telling me that my faith in “The Sign, or the Revelation of Arès” is a complete illusion, and for me it is not a matter of convincing them but of seeking what we can do together in peace. Every human relationship founded on unconditional love can only respect each person’s freedom.

Alexander Djis: Thank you for your response, which I understand and respect in its personal dimension. But it seems to me that it slightly shifts the initial question.

I was not asking why some people are touched and others are not, but whether there exist criteria that allow us to distinguish, beyond individual feeling, a word that is potentially true from a word that is simply lived as true.

In other words: can the fact of being inwardly touched suffice as a criterion of validity, or must it be supplemented by other forms of discernment?

For without this, all revealed claims — including those that contradict one another — become equally legitimate by the sole fact that they are sincerely lived, which makes the very question of truth difficult to formulate.

For my part, I have developed certain criteria of discernment. The question I raise here is therefore also: do others have them? And notably Jérôme, insofar as these texts occupy a structuring place in his approach?

Furthermore, regarding the idea that “the contemporaries of the Buddha or Jesus had no criterion,” it seems to me that there existed at least implicit forms of discernment: coherence of discourse, observable transformation, progressive recognition, confrontation with other schools, testing through time.

It was therefore not purely subjective, even if, over time, these criteria can dilute and be replaced by a more diffuse adherence. Looking forward to continuing the exchange.

Patrick Thazard: I think we have understood each other, my dear Alexander.

When I answer “no” to the existence of these famous objective criteria of discernment — therefore universal ones — I do not mean that faith is entirely subjective; I mean that faith has a large subjective dimension that is supported within the conscience by “objective” criteria provided by each person’s rational intelligence... As you say regarding yourself, this objectivity remains for me a personal and deeply intimate construction.

I do understand, however, your concern for objective criteria. This, of course, raises the question of truth in a strikingly obvious way—that is true... In the “spiritual” realm, the scientific approach carries no legitimacy for me — I say this as a former engineer. Nothing is provable, and this is in my view even an assumed choice of the Absolute...

Let us note that this question of truth is about to become further complicated by the imminent emergence, I believe, of false prophets conceived through AI — which I call Algorithmic Instinct, in order to leave intelligence to humans. We are not out of the woods yet.

It remains that your direct question to Jérôme Nathanaël is chiefly aimed at clarifying his approach in your eyes, and I can only leave him to respond if he so wishes.

Alexander Djis: Thank you for your response; I believe we do indeed understand each other on what is at stake. I nevertheless perceive a point of tension that remains open.

When you evoke “objective” criteria constructed inwardly by each person, it seems to me that we are shifting registers: what is then called objectivity becomes in reality a stabilized subjectivity. This is not a problem in itself, but it makes it difficult for truly shareable criteria to exist — ones that would allow us to distinguish between potentially contradictory revealed claims.

My question, therefore, is not so much about the content or sincerity of the experience, but about the conditions that make possible a discernment that transcends the individual. It is within this framework that I introduce another angle: that of the very architecture of revelations.

Regardless of their content or resonance (which will always be culturally situated), a discrepancy remains that puzzles me: a claim to universality carried by modes of emergence that are systematically localized, singular, and uncorrelated with one another.

If one supposes a supra-human source, the question then becomes less “what is said” than “how it is made manifest.”

Why an isolated revelation, inscribed in a single psyche, a single language, a single culture, rather than a simultaneous, multi-conscious emergence allowing a form of cross-validation without constraining individual freedom?

My inquiry does not aim to invalidate these texts, but to understand whether their mode of appearance is coherent with the universal claim they bear. And here the engineer certainly has an idea on this, especially if his thinking has become systemic. For if we view a revelation as a transmission system, does its architecture not already in itself carry information about its nature? In other words, regardless of the content, does the fact that it is localized, non-redundant, dependent on a single recipient, and lacking independent cross-validation not represent something worth questioning — especially if it lays claim to universal scope?

Patrick Thazard: Thank you again for this pertinent question.

To attempt an answer, I will take an example: the miracle of Fátima. I copy here the opening of the Wikipedia article:

“The Miracle of the Sun, or the dance of the sun, is a celestial phenomenon said to have been observed on October 13, 1917, in Fátima, at noon (solar time, or 1:45 PM legal time), in the context of the Marian apparitions of Fátima, by 40,000 to 50,000 people.”

Good grief, 40,000 witnesses, some of whom came specifically to mock it! How was this interpreted?

Among this crowd who witnessed the impressive “miracle,” the details of which I will skip, committed materialists estimated that this event, inexplicable by the science of their time, was of natural origin — regardless of whether there is still no clear explanation in 2026; science might find one in 3026, who knows? Other witnesses converted to the Catholic faith, and others simply decided to tuck this memory away at the back of their minds to avoid the headache... What a diversity of interpretations! Fátima is only one example I could multiply across every religion.

And I, a century later, acknowledge the likely existence of a miracle at Fátima, but the bare fact does not convert me to the Catholic faith. Like every human being, I am free to use my subjectivity and my intelligence to form an opinion or an attitude toward this “miracle” backed by solid testimonies.

I sometimes say that the human being is an incarnated god who fears his own divinity. This is subconscious of course, but this fear is respected by the Creator, by Life, in every era. Life speaks to us with Love through the means of prophets, all the while knowing that Humanity has moved away from It through a more or less conscious and gradual choice made long ago. Human freedom produces an infinity of sensibilities that Life respects infinitely.

The form of “cross-validation” you speak of is perhaps the desire to rationalize an existential choice that is, for me, far more than rational — like falling in love commits a life and is not rational. Moreover, even a pure atheist is not rational when he stakes his life on the non-existence of God, for he cannot prove it logically; his atheism is a form of faith. But nothing of course prevents you from seeking this cross-validation if that is the criterion you set for yourself in your personal journey.

Frankly, my response may be totally off base, but I did my best...

Alexander Djis: Thank you for your response; it is very insightful and I better understand your position. It seems to me, however, that we are not quite speaking on the same level.

The example of Fátima is interesting, for it shows that a phenomenon, even one shared by a large number of witnesses, can give rise to divergent interpretations. But this does not directly answer the question I was raising, which does not bear on the interpretation of an event, but on the status of a word that presents itself as universal.

When you evoke freedom of interpretation or the existential nature of choice, I partly agree with you. But this amounts to situating the question of truth at the level of the individual relationship, whereas I am questioning the possibility of a discernment that goes beyond that framework alone. In other words: does the fact that an experience is sincere, profound, or transformative suffice to consider it as potentially true beyond the one who lives it?

When you mention freedom of interpretation or the existential nature of choice, I agree with you in part. But that amounts to situating the question of truth at the level of the individual relationship, whereas I am questioning the possibility of discernment that goes beyond that framework alone. In other words: is the fact that an experience is sincere, profound, or transformative sufficient to consider it potentially true beyond the person experiencing it?

For if we answer yes, then all revealed claims — even those that contradict one another — become equivalent from the standpoint of truth, which seems to me to pose a difficulty. For example, on what grounds does one distinguish one revelation from another when they do not converge (such as the Grail Message of Abd-ru-shin)?

My question therefore remains open: do there exist, in your view, elements allowing us to conceive of a form of shareable discernment, even partial, or must we accept that this question can never leave the strictly personal register?

And if we retain this second option, another inquiry appears: what then founds the legitimacy of transmission — even of conviction — around these spiritual propositions, particularly when they are embedded in educational frameworks for children, where consciousness is not yet fully constituted (and is still oriented toward the search for recognition from others)?

These questions do not necessarily call for an immediate answer. They chiefly aim to explore the coherence between a claim to universality and the concrete conditions of its transmission.

Patrick Thazard: I do believe there exists “a form of shareable discernment, even partial,” while holding that faith belongs to a very intimate personal register.

My faith is not religious but spiritual — a fundamental difference in my view that would take too long to explain here, but Jérôme Nathanaël’s introductions offer a first glimpse. As the Source of my faith is for me the absolute Good — which is Love and Freedom — it carries no pretension to social universality, even if it does carry a pretension to have a universal impact over the long run without requering a general conversion of humanity. Acts of love are more creative than any faith.

The primary concrete condition for transmitting a spirituality is, in my eyes, to lead by example in one’s life without becoming a moralizer. The rest can become a form of domination, as is done in religions and atheist ideologies.

Transmitting one’s faith to one’s children through an intellectually solid educational framework seems to me to be a profound error. Every religious or atheist morality is an intellectual certainty that confines. I wish for everything to be under the sign of love — therefore of the child’s freedom, in keeping with their personality and their growing capacity for autonomy.

To move beyond generalities: it so happens that my daughters are in their thirties and do not share my faith, without friction or too much disappointment on my part. I believe I was more or less attentive to their intimate relationship with this question. This does not mean that there was no certain suffering for them in adolescence, for thinking autonomously is not always easy when facing a father. Silence was a practical and understandable solution for them.

Alexander Djis: Thank you for your response; it clarifies your position well, and I find it coherent in its intention.

I better understand your choice to situate faith in an intimate register, non-imposable, and to make the quality of acts the true place of expression of this orientation. On this point, I largely agree with you.

It seems to me, nonetheless, that this leaves open a fundamental question we have touched upon: if spiritual truth seeks neither to demonstrate itself, nor to transmit itself as such, nor to impose itself, then it largely escapes any framework of shareable discernment, and approaches an existential orientation rather than a truth in the strong sense.

This is not necessarily a problem in itself, but it changes the status of what we are talking about.

I therefore keep this inquiry in the background: do there exist, beyond the lived experience and the effects it produces, elements allowing us to distinguish different spiritual propositions other than by their personal resonance?

And I also ask myself, more broadly: does spirituality really need to rely on a form of revelation or message from a beyond in order to exist, or can it stand on its own, in a direct openness to what transcends the human?

In other words, from what point does recourse to a revealed word transform a spiritual approach into a form of religion?

Patrick Thazard: You write: “If spiritual truth seeks neither to demonstrate itself, nor to transmit itself as such, nor to impose itself...”

For me, absolute spiritual truth is inaccessible to human intelligence — no revealed word gives it — but relative truth seeks to transmit itself without demonstrating or imposing itself.

You write: “Does spirituality really need to rest on a form of revelation or message from a beyond in order to exist, or can it stand on its own, in a direct openness to what transcends the human?”

For me, spirituality is existential transcendence through acts of love and liberation — it is penitence. It is accessible to the most committed atheist, provided they will it. Louise Michel is for me a spiritual exemplar.

You write: “In other words, from what point does recourse to a revealed word transform a spiritual approach into a form of religion?”

It is the lack of penitence... What “The Sign, or the Revelation of Arès” says is that every dogma, every adulated clergy or theologian, every form of power over the people (even political), transforms a belief into a religion when there is not enough concrete penitence among the faithful. This is the sad trajectory of all great religions and all political hopes — and it is for this reason that the Creator, Life, chose to speak anew at Arès. One can therefore be a follower of a great religion and still be a penitent.

Of course, nothing guarantees that the followers — called Pilgrims of Arès — will succeed in maintaining over time their hope outside of religion. That depends entirely on them.

Alexander Djis: Thank you for your response; it clearly illustrates your position.

As I read your words, I seem to perceive a pattern that recurs throughout religious history: a new message comes along to reinterpret, correct, or revitalize older forms that, in its view, have become inadequate or corrupted. This process of reinterpretation and correction is understandable in itself.

But this is perhaps where, for me, a limitation lies: once this dynamic relies on a new revelation to reinterpret previous ones, we enter a realm where discernment tends to fade in favor of an act of adherence.

And at this threshold, it seems to me that two attitudes become possible: recognize the internal coherence of the proposition and explore its meaning, or to refrain from adhering to it — not out of rejection, but because the passage toward the supra-human origin cannot be crossed without a personal commitment that transcends the framework of shareable discernment.

For my part, I remain committed to the idea that human beings can attain a form of righteousness, transformation, and virtue without necessarily relying on a revealed word. Not in opposition to these paths, but independently of them.

This takes nothing away from your path, nor from the sincerity of your search, but it simply marks a difference of position on this precise point, which is no longer shareable.

Patrick Thazard: I am glad to see, my dear Alexander, that we have understood each other.

It is possible that your path of searching for virtue may bring you closer than me to the Creator, to Life, even in unbelief and in unconsciousness of this proximity. It is among other reasons why Jesus said 2,000 years ago: Do not judge.

This resonates with our theme of non-duality: everything that exists is One, is a Child of Love in infinite space.

Thank you for this spiritual exchange.

Alexander Djis: Thank you for this exchange, which will have allowed us to go to the end of a point rarely explored with such precision.

It seems to me that we have reached a structuring limit: the point where the question of truth can no longer be decided without engaging a fundamental posture.

On one side, an assumed trust in the intimate as the ultimate place of validation.

On the other, the search for a discernment that can, at least in part, be shared and confronted.

Between the two, there is not necessarily a synthesis — but a bifurcation.

Each person then advances according to what they are ready to recognize as source.

And perhaps the real issue is not to choose an answer, but to know how far one is willing to question what, within oneself, already gives an answer.

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A word of gratitude in closing

Thank you to Alexander and Patrick for the quality of their presence in this exchange — for the patience with which they listened to each other, the precision with which they responded, and the elegance with which they remained open where their paths diverge.

This dialogue was born spontaneously, in the comments, with no staging. That is precisely what gives it its value.

If something in this exchange has passed through you — a question that resonates, a nuance that catches, a perspective you would like to bring — the Comments section is there for you. Alexander and Patrick will be able to respond to you. And if you wish to contribute in turn to these Dialogues, in a more developed form, I remind you that the Waymakers section is open to your voice.

What circulates here belongs to no one — and all the better for it.

Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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If you feel drawn to the approach of the Dialogues and would like to contribute to it or to join the community of Waymakers, I invite you to read the Opening page if you have not yet done so and then, so that we may get to know one another, to book a 45-minute video conversation — at no charge.

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The Eternal Present · Heritages · 27 min
To reread the traditions in order to understand what they have shaped and what they can still transmit.

Serie: The wound of Duality — and the Return. Article 3
← Previous article: The wound of Duality — and the Return (2/3)

This third and final article concludes a comparative journey begun in the two preceding installments.

The first article had drawn a map of the wound itself: how six major spiritual traditions — Kabbalistic Judaism, Christian mysticism, Islamic Sufism, Vedantic Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism — along with two twentieth-century voices, the Revelation of Arès and the Dialogues with the Angel, each name in their own way the fundamental separation of the human being from its Source, and what vision of the Absolute grounds, for each of them, the possibility of a return.

The second installment had followed these same traditions on the terrain of concrete paths: through what disciplines of the mind, what practices of the heart, what uses of the body, and what commitments in the world can the human being make of non-duality not a beautiful idea but a lived reality? It had shed light on a convergent anthropological sequence — mind, heart, body, action — that traditions independently discovered across several continents and several millennia.

This third installment now enters the territories the first two had left open: contemporary voices in all their singularity, the irreducible fractures between traditions, and finally the question this entire work had been silently asking from the start: what does the contemporary human being spiritually need, and what can be offered to them?

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IV. The paths of access: how does one cross the veil? (continued and conclusion)

5. Contemporary Voices: Dialogues with the Angel and Revelation of Arès

After this journey through millennial traditions, it would be tempting to look at the two contemporary voices carried in this article as mere confirmations or variations of what came before. That would be a misreading. They are indeed situated within this space of convergences — as shown at each cross-reference — but they bring elements that the millennial traditions did not formulate in quite this way: a non-duality embodied in historical urgency, rooted not in withdrawal from the world but in its radical transformation from within the self.

Mind: threshold-sentences, or the Word that works from within

The Dialogues with the Angel and the Revelation of Arès propose no systematic intellectual method comparable to the jñāna-mārga or to Mādhyamika prasaṅga. But they inherit this same foundational intuition: certain verbal formulations can work consciousness from the inside with an effectiveness that no explanation can replace.

Certain phrases from the Dialogues function in their own way as mahāvākyas: threshold formulas that are not grasped conceptually but which, when diligently meditated upon, cause consciousness to open onto something else. “You are my denser equal”: this affirmation addressed by the angel to the human being contains in condensed form an entire metaphysics of non-duality — the human and the angelic are not two species separated by an ontological hierarchy, but the same being, Life, in two degrees of density. Density is not inferiority: it is the necessary condition of manifestation in the world. “From Eternal Life, Temporal Life is born, and from Temporal Life, Eternal Life is born”: this formula resists all paraphrase — it does not describe a linear causal relationship but a living circularity that shatters ordinary time from within. “Be One within Yourself”: these four words from the Revelation of Arès contain the entire path — not unity with an external God, but the realization of a unity already present, buried beneath layers of inner division.

The Revelation of Arès develops an analogous demand through a different path. It insists, recurrently, on the necessity of emptying one’s mind of the vain sciences, this “reason” that claims to have an answer for everything — not to destroy intelligence, but to create the space in which other faculties can take over, where “the Breath” of Life can come and refresh spiritual intelligence. Aresian penitence — the turning of being, the fundamental change of direction — operates on the intellect precisely by clearing it of everything that makes it an obstacle rather than a bridge: ideologies, dogmas, human systems, all forms of institutionalized conceptual separation. What remains, once the clutter is dissolved, is not emptiness: it is Life, in its original clarity.

Synthetic convergence: this stripping away, one aspect of what the Revelation of Arès calls penitence, simultaneously joins Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit, Hasidic bittul, Mādhyamika śūnyatā, and the Taoist clearing of obstacles. All aim for the same free space — which each tradition names differently but which is recognizable by its quality: consciousness freed of its constructions does not find emptiness, it finds Life.

Heart: asking and giving, or the law of freedom

The Dialogues with the Angel belong to the family of the path of the heart through a fundamental structure running through all 88 conversations: the dynamic between asking and giving. The angel does not manifest unilaterally — it waits to be invoked. Asking — it is up to the human being to take the first step, to open the space, to create the crack in the armor of self-sufficiency or despair. The angel can only give if the human being asks. A gift without asking would be a violation of freedom, an imposition that would destroy precisely what it seeks to awaken. It is the asking itself — sincere, personal, often clumsy — that is already the beginning of the answer, because it signals the turning of being back toward its source.

The formulas from the Dialogues that belong to the path of the heart carry a different intensity from the intellectual threshold-sentences. “All love is a path toward the Light.” “Touch is the highest form of knowledge.” “Love is the only indestructible reality.” These formulas do not call for intellectual meditation: they call for resonance, for a recognition in body and heart of a truth the human being carries without having words to name it.

The Revelation of Arès names this same reality with an economy and a radicality reminiscent of the great formulas of contemplative traditions: “There is no faith but love, no law but the good.” This is not an ethical program — it is the description of a state of the transformed heart. Aresian prayer as Michel Potay describes and practices it is not a liturgy — it is a personal, free opening, addressed directly to Life without institutional intermediary, three times during the day and once at night (Rev. of Arès 12/5). This rhythm recalls the continuity of Sufi dhikr, the constancy of Hasidic devekut, the uninterrupted return of the nous to the heart in hesychasm. In all these traditions, frequency is not an external discipline: it makes possible the recognition that the heart, left to itself in the flow of ordinary life, tends to forget — and that remembering without cease is the path itself.

Noted divergence: what distinguishes the two contemporary voices from all the traditions we have traversed is perhaps that they propose no path withdrawn from the world. The angel of Budapest speaks to beings who live, love, create, suffer, and die in history — the Hungary of World War II. The Revelation of Arès speaks to beings who must change the world, not withdraw from it. This double anchoring — non-duality and total engagement in the world — is not formulated with such radicality in the millennial traditions, with the possible exception of Tikkun Olam and the bodhisattva vow. The contemporary voices make it their center, not their periphery.

Body: density affirmed and breath as prayer

The Dialogues with the Angel bring to the question of the body an affirmation that has no exact equivalent in any preceding tradition: “You are my denser equal.” The human being is not less than the angel: it is the same being in a state of greater density. Thus, this density is not a punishment, a fall, or an obstacle: it is the condition of a form of manifestation in the material world that the angel alone cannot accomplish. The dense human body is irreplaceable, not provisional. The angel needs the human hand to touch the world; the human being needs the angel’s eye to see what density conceals. This is an anthropology of complementarity, not of hierarchy.

The Revelation of Arès anchors the practice of self-transformation in precise and concrete acts: prayer as an opening to the given Word, penitence not as self-mortification but as change of behavior in daily life, the good accomplished as a concrete and embodied act. The body is the place where inner transformation must be verified — not its secondary instrument but its most reliable sign. A metanoia (Greek: deep change of intelligence, perspective, and direction of life), a teshuva (Hebrew: return to the source, return to God, return to the true self), that do not descend all the way into bodily acts — into the way one speaks, treats others, works — are not yet fulfilled: they are still only beautiful thoughts.

Conclusive convergence: this affirmation of the dense body as the irreplaceable site of divine manifestation joins, from an entirely different angle, Palamas’s defense of the purified body, Dōgen’s zazen as embodied awakening, and the body as royal road in Kashmir Shaivism. All these traditions — despite their radically different metaphysics — say the same thing on this precise point: the sacred is not despite the flesh, nor through the flesh as contingent instrument, nor beyond the flesh as future promise — it is in the flesh, available here, now, to whoever consents to be fully present within it.

Action: non-duality as a civilizational program

The two contemporary voices bring their most original and most urgent contribution at the level of action. None of the millennial traditions has formulated with such clarity the idea that non-duality is not only a possible individual realization but a collective vocation, a program of civilizational transformation intended for all — not for a monastic or academic elite. The Revelation of Arès formulates this program with striking economy: change the world by changing your life — not through political revolution, not through a social program, not through institutional conversion, but through the transformation of the very foundation of the human being, one person at a time, one act of good at a time, one spark lit one by one in the night of ordinary human consciousness.

The Dialogues with the Angel, for their part, raise the question of individual responsibility in building a new world from an expanded consciousness: “The new world can only be built of beauty” — not merely of justice or social efficiency, but of beauty, because beauty is the signature of the Living in matter, the proof that Life expresses itself freely within it.

Final convergence and line of horizon: these two contemporary voices do not conclude the journey we have just accomplished — they open it onto the future. They synthesize in contemporary, accessible language, without ritual prescriptions or dogmatic enclosures, what the millennial traditions had elaborated in their own idioms: non-duality is not a philosophical curiosity nor a mystical privilege. It is the natural vocation of the human being — what it is when it ceases to oppose its own nature. And in this recognition, all traditions converge, despite their irreducible fractures on which we will now dwell.

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V. The real fractures: four irresolvable lines

We have traversed six great families of spiritual traditions and two contemporary voices. We have woven between them a dense network of convergences. It would be tempting, at this point, to conclude that these traditions all say the same thing in different languages. That would be a misreading, and a form of intellectual laziness that would ill-serve each of them. The fractures that separate them are not misunderstandings to be dissolved: they reveal real disagreements about the very nature of the Real that they all seek to reach. Examining them honestly is an act of respect for their respective integrity — and a condition of any intellectually serious synthesis.

Four fundamental lines of fracture emerge. They do not fully overlap. Each one cuts differently through the landscape of traditions — and none resolves itself simply.

Fracture 1 — Self or dissolution?

The first fracture is perhaps the most deeply existential: what becomes of the person — the singular being, with their history, their relationships, their own consciousness — when they enter into union with the Absolute?

The pole of dissolution is represented, in its most radical formulations, by Shankara’s Advaita and by certain expressions of Sufism. For Shankara, the jīva, the individual soul, never had its own ontological existence: it was an appearance on the screen of Brahman, like a wave in the ocean. Liberation (moksha) is the recognition that this individuality was from the very beginning an illusory superimposition. There is no liberated jīva that continues to exist in union — only Brahman recognizing itself, without personal remainder or residue. Sufi fanāʾ, in its most radical formulations — precisely those that al-Junayd sought to temper — can drift in the same direction.

The pole of the restored person is represented with equal force by Teresa of Ávila — more herself than ever in the seventh dwelling — by Rāmānuja, for whom the love relationship between the soul and the divine is its own fulfillment and not a provisional stage, and by the Dialogues with the Angel: the angel and the human remain distinct throughout all 88 conversations, their communion does not dissolve the difference but deepens it until it transforms into partnership.

Between these two poles, intermediate formulations are numerous and subtle. Al-Junayd proposes baqāʾ — subsistence in God after extinction — where the person is restored, not annulled. Ruysbroeck formulates the soul as “flame in the fire” — united without merging. Palamas maintains the creator-creature distinction even in theosis — the human being becomes “god by grace” without ceasing to be human. Kashmir Shaivism affirms that pratyabhijñā does not dissolve the person but finally reveals it in its true nature: not an ego-centered construction to be destroyed, but a unique expression of universal Consciousness to be recognized.

The fracture is real and is not resolved by claiming that both poles aim at the same thing from different angles. Shankara’s Advaita and Teresa’s Christian mysticism do not say the same thing on this point: one affirms that the person was an illusion, the other that it is a permanently transformed reality. The question that faces us is not which of the two positions is true, but rather what kind of human being each position produces, and which of these beings is most apt to inhabit the world with justice, beauty, and responsibility.

Fracture 2 — Is the world real?

The second fracture cuts through the traditions differently from the first, but it is equally deep in its practical consequences.

At the pole of devaluation: Shankara’s Advaita is the clearest case — the phenomenal world is māyā, an illusory superimposition on the screen of Brahman. Original Buddhism is not far removed: saṃsāra designates the cycle of suffering, and liberation, nirvāṇa, is the extinction of the fires of greed, aversion, and ignorance, the end of conditioned rebirth. Even hesychasm, despite its profound dignity accorded to the purified body, retains a tension with the visible world: theoria is vision of the Uncreated Light, thus a passage beyond the simple sensory grasp of forms.

At the pole of valorization: Ibn Arabi is the most elaborate case — the world is tajallī, a precious and irreplaceable epiphany of Divine Being in which no form is accidental. Kashmir Shaivism affirms līlā — the spontaneous and delightful play of Divine Consciousness in matter. The Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidism teaches that every ordinary act is the site of a divine spark to be freed. Taoism celebrates the natural world as a direct manifestation of the Tao. And the Dialogues with the Angel formulate this valorization with unique density: “You are my denser equal” — matter is not a fall of consciousness, it is its irreplaceable form in manifestation.

The practical consequence of this fracture is considerable. Traditions that devalue matter tend to produce spiritualities of withdrawal. Those that affirm its value tend to produce spiritualities of engagement — in beauty, in creation, in the transformation of the world.

The Revelation of Arès takes a position on this point with exceptional clarity: change the world by changing your life — not withdraw from the world but transform it from within the self. This positioning brings it structurally closer to Tikkun Olam and the bodhisattva vow, and distances it from all spirituality of withdrawal. But this position exposes it to a fundamental objection that Shankara formulated with relentless rigor: if the phenomenal world is recognized as a possible site of authentic spiritual realization, how do we prevent this recognition from degenerating into adhesion to the world as it goes — to its seductions, its illusions, its compromises? Any spirituality of engagement must here walk a particularly difficult ridge: affirming that the world is the very place where good must be embodied, without ever forgetting that it is also the place where ego, forgetfulness, and falsehood perpetually reconstitute themselves. This tension between transformative presence in the world and vigilance toward its traps is one of the most difficult to sustain durably — and no tradition has resolved it once and for all.

Fracture 3 — Do you need a master?

The third fracture bears on the question: who is qualified to accompany spiritual realization, and under what conditions?

The traditions that answer with the absolute necessity of a qualified master are numerous and solid. Shankara’s Advaita requires the realized guru: direct transmission from consciousness to consciousness is irreplaceable. Zen insists on direct transmission outside the scriptures, from master to disciple. Sufism makes the sheikh the indispensable pivot of the path. Kashmir Shaivism reserves dīkṣā (initiation transmitted by an authorized master) to lineage masters. Hesychasm insists on the starets (the experienced spiritual elder) as a condition for safe hesychast practice.

The traditions that answer with the possibility of direct access are rarer but no less convincing. Rebbe Nahman’s hitbodedut is the most explicit formulation in Judaism: speak to God in your own language, without intermediary. The Revelation of Arès radicalizes this position to one of its most coherent expressions in modernity: Michel Potay’s teaching insists on absolute freedom of conscience — no human authority can interpose itself between the human being and its Source. The Dialogues with the Angel rest on the same structure: it is the angel that speaks directly, not an initiation system to be traversed.

This fracture has immediate practical consequences for anyone seeking a spiritual path in the contemporary world. Traditions that require a qualified master are coherent in their logic: without an external gaze, projections, illusions, and self-satisfactions can crystallize into solid and dangerous spiritual certainties. But they presuppose the existence and accessibility of an authentic master — which is, in the contemporary world, a rare and difficult-to-discern resource. Traditions that affirm direct access respond to a real urgency — the opening of the spiritual path to all. But they expose themselves to the inverse risk: the confusion between an ego that self-confirms in its preferences and a consciousness that is genuinely expanding. Lucidity about this risk is one of the most demanding forms of honesty in contemporary spiritual life.

Fracture 4 — Does history matter?

The fourth fracture bears on the question of the status of time and history in the spiritual vision of the world. It is perhaps the least obvious at first glance, but it is fundamental for understanding why spiritual traditions produce such different cultures and civilizations.

Traditions that inscribe realization in a logic of exit from time — nirvāṇa Buddhism, Shankaran Advaita, certain branches of Sufism — tend to view human history as a backdrop from which one must learn to free oneself, not as the theater of a fulfillment. Awakening is not in history — it is beyond it, or more precisely in the recognition that time itself is a construction of unawakened consciousness. This position has a rigorous internal coherence — and it produces, in its purest expressions, human figures of remarkable serenity and freedom.

Traditions that inscribe realization in a logic of transforming history — Kabbalistic Tikkun Olam, the Mahāyāna bodhisattva vow, and in a decisive way the Revelation of Arès — affirm that history is the very site where the fulfillment of the divine in matter is played out. Taoism occupies a singular position here: it belongs to this pole not through program or deliberate engagement in the world, but through a symmetrical conviction — that creative non-interference, when it is right, is the most effective form of action on the course of things. It thus situates itself at the boundary of both poles, testifying that the frontier between withdrawal and engagement is not always where one looks for it.

For traditions fully committed to this logic, history is not a backdrop to cross through — it is the stage of a real drama in which every human being is an irreplaceable actor. Time has a direction: not linear, not teleological in the Hegelian sense, but oriented by the possibility of a more just, more beautiful, more loving world. Every act of good counts — not only for the individual who performs it, but for the very texture of collective reality.

The Revelation of Arès is perhaps the path we have traversed that formulates this historical orientation with the greatest urgency and precision: the world can change because the human being can change. Not within a lifetime, not within a generation, not through revolution — but through the patient accumulation, generation after generation, of consciousnesses that have made the choice of active good. This vision is at once the most demanding and the most welcoming of contemporary spiritual positions: it does not promise paradise tomorrow, it affirms that every just act today is a real stone in an edifice built across the long arc of humanity.

Two secondary silences

Beyond these four major lines of fracture, two silences noted along the way deserve mention here as secondary fractures — no less real for being less systematized.

The silence on the body in Hasidic Kabbalah and in medieval Christian mysticism, and the silence on social action in classical Sufism and in medieval Christian mysticism, are not accidental omissions: they reveal unresolved internal tensions in these traditions, zones where the coherence of the spiritual vision has not yet produced all its practical consequences. Pointing to these silences is not a criticism — it is an invitation, addressed to these traditions themselves, to continue their own internal development where the path still has ground to cover.

The Sufi silence on collective transformation deserves particular attention here: it contrasts strikingly with the intensity of Ibn Arabi’s vision on the tajallī of the world, as if the fullness of the metaphysical vision had not yet found, in the classical corpus, its translation into a coherent social ethics. It is precisely on this point that Tikkun Olam and the bodhisattva vow bring what classical Sufism has not yet formalized.

These four fractures and two silences are not obstacles to dialogue between traditions — they are its conditions of depth. A dialogue that erases divergences to celebrate convergences is a courtesy, not a dialogue. Real dialogue begins where differences are named with precision, respected in their integrity, and interrogated for what they reveal about the complexity of the Real that each tradition seeks to inhabit.

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VI. What our time spiritually needs

We have traversed eight paths — six great millennial families and two voices that emerged at the heart of the twentieth century — seeking not to harmonize them by force nor to reduce them to a lowest common denominator, but to let them speak to each other in their convergences and confront each other in their fractures. This work was not erudite curiosity. It was an attempt to answer a question that did not arise with this acuity in preceding centuries, but which imposes itself on us with an urgency we can no longer defer: what does the contemporary human being spiritually need — and what can these paths, separately or together, offer them?

The diagnosis of our time

The contemporary human being lives in a paradoxical spiritual condition. On one side, they have unprecedented access in history to the totality of humanity’s spiritual heritages: the Upanishads are online, the Tao Te Ching can be read on the subway, the teachings of Tibetan Dzogchen are available in translation, Eckhart’s sermons can be downloaded for free. Never, in any previous civilization, has an ordinary human being had within reach such an accumulated wealth of human wisdom. On the other side, this unprecedented availability is accompanied by unprecedented superficiality in assimilation: one knows more traditions than any of our ancestors, but one lives them less deeply than any medieval monk. Access has been democratized; depth has become rare.

This paradox is not accidental. It is the symptom of a crisis deeper than simple secularized modernity — what the traditions themselves had diagnosed under different names: the wound of duality that is the subject of these three articles. The contemporary human being is perhaps separated from themselves, from others, and from their source in a specifically modern way — not because they would be less intelligent or less virtuous than their ancestors, but because the social, economic, technological, and ideological structures in which they live have systematically organized this separation as the ordinary mode of functioning. Analytical thought, the market, the digital, nationalism, consumerism, bureaucracy: all these systems function through cutting — they decompose, specialize, fragment, optimize each part separately. The overall vision, inner continuity, the sense of belonging to something greater than oneself — all of this has been progressively evacuated as non-measurable, non-profitable, non-operational.

It is in this context that the question of the spiritual vocation of our time takes its full weight. Not as a nostalgia for the epochs when religious traditions organized the whole of social life — those historical forms, with all they produced of real and precious, belong to a world that no longer exists in that form, and their shadows do not deserve to be idealized. But as a recognition that human beings cannot live for long, without serious damage, in the single horizontal dimension of existence, without interiority, without verticality, without contact with what precedes and transcends them.

What each tradition offers today

Each of the traditions we have traversed has something irreplaceable to offer the contemporary human being — not despite its cultural and historical specificities, but through them.

Kabbalah and Hasidism propose a cosmology of responsibility: every just act counts in the repair of the fabric of reality. In a world where the ordinary human being feels powerless before the magnitude of collective catastrophes, this vision is a powerful antidote to cynicism — it says that the individual scale is real and that nothing done with kavvanah, right intention, is ever lost.

Christian mysticism reveals a psychology of union that does not abolish the person, and in particular the conviction, carried by Teresa and Ruysbroeck, that the human being is more themselves in union with the Divine than in their separate autonomy. In an era where the dissolution of the self in digital flows and collective identities is a real danger, this affirmation of the transformed rather than dissolved person is precious.

Sufism expresses a science of the heart: a precise and rigorous practice of transforming deep emotions into instruments of spiritual knowledge. The dhikr is not an exotic practice reserved for Anatolian Sufis but a demonstration that conscious, oriented repetition can restructure consciousness at levels that willpower alone cannot reach.

Shankara’s Advaita brings the most radical philosophical dissolution of the illusion of separation available in the history of human thought. For the contemporary human being imprisoned in their narrative identity — their personal history, social status, ideological certainties — Shankara’s question “Who is the one who suffers?” is a surgery of consciousness of formidable effectiveness.

Kashmir Shaivism enables a joyful and guilt-free reconciliation with the sensory world — beauty, creativity, the body — whose forms secular modernity has reappropriated without retaining their substance. It says that beauty is not a luxury or a distraction: it is an epiphany of the Divine in matter, and the human being who creates or receives it consciously performs a real spiritual act.

Buddhism — Mādhyamaka, Zen, Dzogchen — deploys a psychology of liberation without an Absolute: a practicable path for the contemporary human being who can no longer believe in a personal God but who acutely feels the suffering of separation and the aspiration to a freer, lighter, more just consciousness. Sati, zazen, the recognition of rigpa — these practices require no prior metaphysical affirmation: they ask only for the disposition to sit, to look, to not flee from what is.

Taoism gives us a wisdom of non-resistance to the natural movement of things — a precious antidote to the generalized will to control that is one of the most destructive traits of technocratic modernity. It says that the best intervention is often the one that accompanies rather than imposes — a lesson that neither politics, nor medicine, nor education has yet integrated into their institutional practices.

But these traditions, taken in isolation in their inherited historical forms, cannot respond to the totality of what our era demands. They were born in social, linguistic, cosmological contexts that no longer exist. Their intact transmission in the contemporary world requires either a considerable effort of acculturation or a strong community of belonging — and in both cases, these conditions are the exception, not the rule. This is where the contemporary voices come in.

The specific contribution of the contemporary voices

The Dialogues with the Angel and the Revelation of Arès are not syntheses of the preceding traditions; they are not ruptures from them either. They are something rarer and more difficult to characterize: crystallization points, moments where human consciousness, brought into direct contact with something that surpasses it, can produce a new formulation that says something the existing traditions had not yet said with this clarity — or had not yet said for this era.

What the Dialogues with the Angel specifically contribute is an anthropology of partnered dignity. The human being is not the passive recipient of a descending grace, nor the laborious practitioner of an ascending path toward a distant summit: they are the partner of a Living being who needs them to manifest in the dense world. “You are my denser equal”: this affirmation is not a consoling flattery but a metaphysical statement about the very structure of reality. The human and the divine are not in a relationship of unilateral dependency; they are in a relationship of structural co-necessity. The angel cannot touch the world without the human hand. The human being cannot see their own depth without the angel’s gaze. This vision, which emerges in Hungary in 1943–1944, one of the darkest moments in human history, is an answer to a question the millennial traditions had not yet formed with this urgency: not how can the human being free themselves, but how can the human being and the Divine, together, traverse the night of history?

The Revelation of Arès proposes an ethics of collective transformation grounded in absolute individual freedom. No system, no institution, no dogma, no obligatory rite: only the conviction that every human being who changes from the very foundation of their being — and actively changes for the good — modifies collective reality in a way that surpasses what political or social strategies can produce. Change the world by changing your life: this program-formula is perhaps the most audacious and most coherent of all contemporary spiritual propositions, precisely because it offers no shortcut — no revolution, no reform, no forced collective conversion. Only the patient, discreet, irreducible work of a consciousness that transforms itself and, in doing so, liberates around it spaces of freedom and love that nothing else can produce.

Toward a spirituality of present time

What our comparative journey has rendered visible, and what we can now formulate with greater precision, is this: the spiritual vocation of our time is not a return to one of the traditions, nor a synthesis of all of them, nor their transcendence in a new religion. It is something more difficult and more demanding: learning to inhabit multiple levels of reality simultaneously — the particular and the universal, time and eternity, flesh and spirit, interiority and engagement, inherited tradition and living revelation — without reducing one to the other or sacrificing one for the other.

All the traditions we have traversed, in their convergences as in their fractures, share an affirmation about the nature of the human being: they are greater than they believe themselves to be. Greater than their personal history, greater than their fears and certainties, greater than the systems that organize them and the ideologies that name them. They carry within them — not as a potentiality to be developed but as a reality to be recognized — something that traditions call Brahman, rigpa, Uncreated Light, Tao, divine spark, Life. The names differ; the movement of recognition is the same.

This movement of recognition — the wound of duality beginning to close not through external will but through the slow, difficult, irreplaceable inner decision to see what is really there — is perhaps the only answer equal to what our era is traversing. Not because it would resolve the political, economic, or ecological crises by magic. But because it modifies the very quality of presence that the human being brings to face these crises, and it is this quality of presence, more than any strategy or program, that determines in the long run the direction that history takes.

“The new world can only be built of beauty,” say the Dialogues with the Angel. “Each free and loving soul liberates something in the world,” affirms the Revelation of Arès in other words. All the traditions we have traversed, from the depths of their irreducible differences, converge on this conviction: the transformation of the world begins where consciousness finally accepts seeing itself as it is — vast, free, luminous, responsible.

This beginning is always here, always now, always possible.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

Do you see, in our time, a spiritual or cultural heritage that remains active, for better, for worse, or in some ambiguous fashion? Share your reading in the comments to spark discussion.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 6 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Pride : Old English knew a word, prūd, to describe someone valiant, capable, excellent — someone who stood out. At its origin, there was something right about it: the desire to reach toward the best in oneself, to refuse complacency. But in forging the word pride from this root — through Old French prud and ultimately Late Latin prōde, meaning advantageous, beneficial — the language recorded a silent shift: from rightful self-regard to excessive self-estimation, from aspiration to enclosure. For it takes very little for the feeling of being excellent to turn into the certainty of being superior, and for what sought to be an elevation to become a citadel.

I. Untangling the confusion

Pride suffers from a singular paradox: it is one of the most universally recognized flaws, and yet one of those that each person most readily spots in others and most rarely in themselves. That is because it knows how to dress itself in the garments of dignity, competence, even vocation. One must therefore first distinguish what it is not: pride is neither the legitimate satisfaction of work accomplished, nor confidence in one’s own abilities, nor the healthy self-regard that refuses humiliation. These states can coexist with openness and self-questioning. Pride, by contrast, is distinguished by its fundamental impermeability — that conviction, rarely conscious, of having already reached a sufficient vantage point on oneself and on the world. The proud person has become so full of himself that no space remains to receive anything new: no lesson from experience, no sincere gaze from another, no surprise from reality. And we only learn where we do not yet know.

II. Immobility at the heart of the path

For those engaged in a process of inner transformation, pride is not an obstacle among others: it is the one that renders all the others invisible. The proud person who enters this path without having recognized or measured their pride risks building a particularly solid illusion of progress. Depending on their temperament, they will accumulate esoteric knowledge, metaphysical reflections, or mystical experiences, perfecting the surface of their practice while remaining immobile in depth — their pursuit will remain merely intellectual. For this path demands precisely what pride forbids: opening oneself to something greater than oneself, making room for what exceeds us, and beginning, concretely, by opening oneself to the other. Let us have compassion for the proud person: the citadel they inhabit was often built as an urgent response to a visceral fear — fear of not being enough, fear of powerlessness, fear of being ordinary. Their deeper self suffers from this immobility, which gradually deprives them of life and of the enrichment it offers — until the moment when a bereavement, a failure, a rupture, an accident comes to shake the entire construction, and offers them, in the very collapse, the rare opportunity to find themselves again.

III. What the traditions say

The great spiritual traditions of humanity agree on one point: pride is the primary obstacle — the one that precedes and engenders all the others. In the Christian tradition, it stands at the head of the seven deadly sins — superbia — not as a mere moral failing, but as a fundamental refusal to acknowledge one’s own condition and one’s dependence on what surpasses it. In the Islamic tradition, kibr — arrogance — is described as the veil that separates the heart from G-d and from other beings. In Greek philosophy, hubris designates that excess by which a person believes themselves the equal of the gods, inevitably calling forth nemesis, the return of reality. The Jewish tradition, for its part, has coined for the opposite movement a word of remarkable precision: bitul — literally the annulment of self, or more exactly the bracketing of one’s own sufficiency — designates that inner act by which one consents to empty oneself of certainties in order to become capable of receiving what exceeds our ordinary measure. Everywhere, the same deep intuition: pride does not merely hinder inner progress — it renders it structurally impossible, closing precisely the doors through which light enters. One begins to receive only after having first lightened oneself of one’s sufficiency, having practiced, however clumsily, something that resembles bitul — that consent to not already know everything.

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IV. A difficult lucidity in the age of the performing ego

Our era makes the recognition of one’s own pride particularly difficult. Digital platforms have transformed each individual into a personal brand to be permanently optimized, performance cultures reward displayed certainty over hesitant honesty, and the algorithm consecrates those who speak loudly rather than those who are still searching. In this context, pride no longer resembles an archaic flaw: it resembles a survival strategy, even a virtue. Self-questioning reads as weakness, the admission of ignorance as a confession of failure — and the inner citadel ends up being mistaken for solidity. This cultural inversion makes the recognition of one’s own pride both more difficult and more precious: for those who manage to observe it in themselves, without defending against it or being crushed by it, have already begun to loosen its grip — and that first movement, however discreet, may be the most courageous of all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The Eternal Present · Heritages · 56 min
To reread the traditions in order to understand what they have shaped and what they can still transmit.

Serie: The wound of Duality — and the Return. Article 2
← Previous article: The wound of Duality — and the Return (1/3)

The first part of this crossing had drawn a map: six major spiritual traditions, to which two voices that emerged at the heart of the twentieth century were added, each one naming in its own way the wound of dual separation and the return toward the deeper unity that precedes it.

But a map, however rigorous, does not cross any threshold on its own. It illuminates the landscape; it does not say, by itself, how to walk.

The decisive question now becomes more concrete: how does one actually cross the veil of duality? Through what disciplines of the mind, what practices of the heart, what uses of the body, what ways of inhabiting action and engaging with the world, can human beings make non-duality more than a metaphysical intuition or a beautiful contemplative idea — a lived, direct, continuous reality?

This second installment focuses on these pathways as they are deployed in the traditions already explored. The irreducible lines of fracture between them, the singular place of the contemporary voices, and the question of what these legacies can still say to our time will be taken up in the third and final article.

Let us now continue our exploration by entering the fourth part of this series.

IV. The pathways: how does one cross the veil?

After the mapping of visions comes the decisive question of the pathways. Spiritual traditions differ not only in what they say about Reality, but also in the practices, disciplines, and arts of living they offer to help human beings concretely cross the veil of separation.

These paths are neither arbitrary nor interchangeable. Each one responds, in its own way, to the question: how can non-duality become a lived reality?

The universal sequence: mind, heart, body, action

Before entering into the details of the pathways specific to each tradition, we must pause on something remarkable: the progression we are about to observe — from the transformation of the mind to that of the heart, from incarnation in the body to its radiance in action — is not a grid imported from outside to artificially organize resistant material. It is a sequence that the traditions themselves have articulated, each with its own priorities and emphases, as the natural order of spiritual maturation.

This is not a hierarchy of value among these dimensions of being, as if the body were worth less than the heart or action less than contemplation. It is a logic of genesis: one cannot act durably in a just manner without a gaze having first been converted; but a light that never descends all the way to gestures, breath, relationships, and works would itself remain unfinished.

Buddhism gives the most systematic formulation of this with the eight branches of the Noble Eightfold Path, which invariably begin with sammā diṭṭhi, right view. Not because this view is more precious than action, but because action without right view is blind — just as right view without right action remains barren: right view begets right intention, which begets right speech, which begets right action.

Advaita Vedānta in Shankara’s formulation describes an analogous progression with a different pedagogy: śravaṇa (hearing), receiving truth in the intelligence, precedes manana, working it in the intimacy of the thinking heart, which precedes nididhyāsana, contemplating it until it becomes incarnate in direct awareness. And the jīvanmukta, the living liberated being who crowns this journey, acts in the world not out of duty but by nature, as the sun illuminates without deliberating.

Lurianic Kabbalah articulates the same sequence through the three upper spheres of the Tree of Life: ḥokhmah, the flash of pure vision, non-dual intuition, descends into bīnah, understanding — the heart’s work of articulating and integrating — before reaching daʿat, direct knowledge, intimate union. This inner descent continues downward along the Tree, all the way to Malkut, the Kingdom — action in the world — where the Tiqqun Olam, the mending of creation’s fabric through every just act, is accomplished.

Hesychasm in Gregory Palamas’ rendering describes this movement in its own language: the noûs, the contemplative intellect — the summit of the human spirit — must first be purified and illumined by theoria, the vision of the Uncreated Light, before descending into the heart, where it finds its natural dwelling. It is from this heart, inhabited and stabilized, that the body can itself become a place of divine presence, as a subject of deification and not merely a vehicle — and that diakonia, service of the world, becomes an authentic expression of spiritual life.

Sufism names the same stages: maʿrifa, contemplative knowledge of the Divine, illumines maḥabba, the love that transforms the heart from its very foundations; this love takes flesh in the samāʿ and in bodily dhikr; and the being thus traversed becomes khalīfa, vice-regent of the Divine in the world — not out of ambition but because it has become transparent to That which seeks to manifest through it.

The Dialogues with the Angel unfold this same arc with arresting economy. The threshold phrases that work on the mind — “You are my denser equal,” “From Eternal Life, temporal Life is born” — precede the discovery of the law of the heart — “All love is a path toward the Light” — which becomes incarnate in the valorization of bodily density as an irreplaceable vocation, before radiating outward into creative calling: “The new world can only be built from beauty.”

The Revelation of Arès carries this same sequence to a prophetic and collective scale: the liberation of the mind from its systems — “Empty your head of vain sciences” — precedes the transformation of the heart through love alone — “There is no faith but love, no law but good” — which is expressed in the recovered dignity of the upright praying body, and finds its fulfillment only in repentance as a collective task: changing one person is changing the world.

What is striking about this convergence is that it is not superficial. It reflects a deep, shared spiritual anthropology that traditions have discovered independently across multiple continents and over millennia: the transformation of the human being follows a logic of propagation, from the inside outward, from the most subtle to the most dense, from vision to act.

One cannot reverse the order without betraying the movement: wanting to change the world without first having changed one’s gaze is like rearranging furniture in a house whose windows have not been opened. And contemplating the light without ever letting it pass through the body to reach the hands and the world means keeping a treasure locked away, suffocating from never being spent.

Let us now look, tradition by tradition, at how each of these paths takes on flesh — with its own methods, its particular insistences, its telling silences, and its unexpected convergences with the others.

1. The non-dualism of Being: the Abrahamic paths

The three great monotheistic traditions have each produced currents that pushed their monotheism to its most vertiginous consequence: if God is truly the One, if nothing exists outside Him, how can a human being still stand before Him without being, at bottom, in Him? In their mystical forms — kabbalistic Judaism, contemplative Christianity, and Islamic Sufism — they do not merely affirm the fundamental unity of Reality: they seek to let it traverse the intellect, the heart, the body, and action, until it ceases to be a doctrine and becomes the very fabric of Life.

A. Kabbalah and Hasidism

The mind: Hitbonenut, or the intellect that descends into the heart

In the Hasidic tradition, and more particularly in the Chabad movement elaborated by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812) — the Alter Rebbe, founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch and author of the Tanya — hitbonenut (literally “inner contemplation,” from the root binah, understanding) designates a specific form of intellectual meditation that constitutes the pivot of the entire spiritual path. The process unfolds as follows: the practitioner chooses a concept from kabbalistic thought — the infinity of the Ein Sof, the omnipresence of the divine Presence, the deep identity of all things with their source — and subjects it to prolonged, intensive contemplation. He turns this concept over in all its aspects, exploring its implications, its nuances, its paradoxes, until it ceases to be an abstraction and begins to resonate in the totality of one’s being. Rabbi Schneur Zalman was accustomed to practicing hitbonenut for hours before beginning his prayer — not to accumulate additional knowledge, but so that intellectual truth might descend (yeridat ha-mohin) into the heart (lev) and transform his emotions into resonance with the Divine.

What radically distinguishes hitbonenut from simple intellectual study is its ultimate orientation. Study (limud) aims to understand. Hitbonenut aims at bittul — the nullification of the self, the dissolution of the perceived separation between oneself and the Ein Sof. The intellect is used not as an end, but as a bridge: it concentrates consciousness on divine truth until consciousness itself is transmuted, until the emotions (midot) — love, awe, joy — are ignited in the heart from this contemplated reality, and the separation between the thinker and the object of thought begins to dissolve into a state of non-dual presence. This movement — from hokhmah (the flash of pure vision) through binah (understanding) toward daʿat (direct knowledge, intimate union) — is the internal movement of the Tree of sefirot that hitbonenut seeks to reactivate in the practitioner’s consciousness. No longer as a map, but as a living itinerary.

Convergence: this movement of the intellect toward direct knowledge through prolonged contemplation — the intellect as a bridge that, once crossed, loses its own utility — will be found almost word for word in Shankara’s nididhyāsana, the third stage of the Vedantic path of knowledge. The underlying metaphysics are radically different: where hitbonenut aims at a living, loving union with a personal God, nididhyāsana aims at the realization of absolute identity with impersonal Brahman. Yet the pedagogical structure — the intellect concentrated until it transcends itself — is remarkably analogous.

The Heart: Devekut and Hitbodedut

The Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760), founder of the Hasidic movement in Podolia, accomplished within Judaism a revolution comparable to what Sufism had accomplished within Islam: shifting the center of gravity of religious practice from scrupulous observance of the Law toward a living, direct, and joyful relationship with the Divine. Devekut — literally “adhesion,” “attachment” — designates this state of continuous contact with the divine Presence that the Baal Shem Tov considered not the privilege of scholars but the vocation of every human being, accessible in the most ordinary acts of daily life. According to his teaching, there is not a single atom of reality that does not contain a divine spark — the nitzotzot of Lurianic Kabbalah. To cleave to God therefore does not mean turning away from the world, but learning to see through the world to its divine source, in every encounter, every gesture, every moment. In this perspective, joy (simhah) is not a secondary emotion but a central spiritual practice: it is the sign of living devekut, the fruit of the awareness of being carried by a loving Presence.

Hitbodedut, as taught by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810), great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, constitutes the most personal and radically accessible expression of this path of the heart in Judaism. Where the Chabad lineage’s hitbonenut used intellectual contemplation of theological concepts, Rebbe Nachman’s hitbodedut is a free, spontaneous conversation — in each person’s native tongue, without pre-established formula, without liturgy, without intermediary. “Speak to God as you would speak to a sincere friend” — this is, in essence, Rebbe Nachman’s central teaching. He recommended practicing it daily, preferably alone in a secluded space (where every tree, he said, carries its own prayer up toward heaven), and addressing God in one’s own name, with one’s most naked suffering, most persistent questions, most simple joys.

What gives this practice its depth is precisely what makes it difficult for modern people: there is no method to follow. When one no longer knows what to say, one says that one no longer knows what to say. The truest sincerity itself becomes the highest form of devotion, because it shatters the illusion of the social mask we wear even in our relationship with the Divine.

Convergence: this formula-free, personal prayer, addressed directly to the Divine without institutional mediation or prescribed liturgy, resonates with two practices we will encounter further on: the ask/give structure of the Dialogues with the Angel — where the sincere, often clumsy request is already the beginning of the answer — and the Arèsian prayer as described by Michel Potay, addressed directly to Life three times during the day, once at night, without intermediary. Three traditions, three contexts, one shared conviction: the direct relationship between the human and the Divine is not reserved for an elite — it is the vocation of every human being who consents to present themselves there without a mask.

The body: a real presence, but poorly theorized

Kabbalah and Hasidism have not developed a distinctly formulated path of the body comparable to Zen zazen, tantric prāṇāyāma, or the Jesus Prayer in hesychasm. Yet the body is not absent: it is present in the swaying of prayer (shuklen), in dance, in sung fervor, in the physical joy of the festivals, and in a way of concretely inhabiting the relationship to the Divine in daily life.

But this presence most often remains practical, symbolic, and liturgical, rather than conceived as an autonomous spiritual path with its own pedagogy. This is not a pure absence, but a form of theoretical reserve — reflecting a broader tension within the Abrahamic traditions: on one hand, the world is a place of sanctification, human gestures can participate in Tiqqun, and the body can take part in prayer; on the other, a persistent wariness remains toward the flesh as a possible source of distraction, opacity, or dispersal.

This point deserves careful note, as it is not a secondary detail. It already anticipates one of the questions we will encounter further on: do all traditions grant the body the same spiritual dignity, or do some assign it only a supporting role where others make it a royal path of transformation?

Action: Tiqqun Olam, or repair as cosmic vocation

The doctrine of Tiqqun Olam — the mending of the world — constitutes Lurianic Kabbalah’s most original and ambitious contribution to universal spiritual ethics. For Isaac Luria (1534–1572), creation itself began with a cosmic catastrophe: the Tsimtsum (the contraction of the Infinite to create the space of manifestation), followed by the Shevirat Ha-Kelim (the shattering of the Vessels designed to contain divine Light), scattering myriads of divine sparks — the nitzotzot — into the depths of matter, covered by kelipot, the husks of opacity. The world as it is is not simply imperfect — it is fractured at the level of being itself — and the human being’s task is to free these sparks through every just act performed with kavvanah (conscious intention), every prayer carried to its depth, every gesture of love and truth. The mending of the world is therefore not an optional social improvement: it is the continuation of the creative act itself, the cooperation of the human being with God to rebuild the shattered unity of Being.

Convergence: this refusal to withdraw from the world as long as the last spark has not been freed — this vow to remain engaged until the accomplishment of total repair — is structurally analogous to the bodhisattva vow in Mahāyāna Buddhism: to remain in the cycle of existences until the last sentient being has been liberated. Two traditions separated by continents and centuries pose the same demand: inner realization is incomplete as long as it has not been translated into responsibility toward all. We will return to this in the Buddhist paths.

B. Christian Mysticism

The mind: Abgeschiedenheit and Theoria

The great Rhenish mysticism of the 13th–14th centuries — Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Ruusbroec — developed, from the Neoplatonic heritage and apophatic theology, a doctrine of the Grunt (the “ground of the soul”) that constitutes one of the most audacious non-dual formulations in Christianity. For Eckhart, the Grunt der Sele is not one region of the soul among others: it is the point where the soul and God share one single ground — Augustine’s abditus mentis. This is not a union acquired by spiritual effort — it is already there, primordial, permanent, but veiled by the agitation of discursive consciousness and the “images” (Bilder) that invade the mind until they hide the living God. Eckhart’s entire spiritual path aims at a single act: Abgeschiedenheit — detachment, stripping away — not first of exterior things, but of interior representations, the ego’s projections, even the images of God that clutter the soul to the point of hiding the living God from it. “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me: my eye and the eye of God are one single eye.” This formula, which the Inquisition deemed heretical, is nonetheless the most precise description of what all traditions call the non-dual heart: not the meeting of two gazes, but the discovery that vision was one from the very beginning.

Convergence: this dissolution of images through Neoplatonic apophatic method will find an unexpected echo in Nāgārjuna’s method — though these two apophaticisms do not aim at the same horizon. Where Eckhart deconstructs to make room for an ineffable Presence that remains, Nāgārjuna deconstructs all the way to the end, without any positive residual ground. We will specify this divergence in the lines of fracture.

Hesychasm — from the Greek hēsychia, “inner silence,” “stillness” — is the great contemplative tradition of Eastern Christianity, of which Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), monk of Mount Athos and later Archbishop of Thessaloniki, is the most fully elaborated theologian. His path of the mind bears a precise name: theoria — a state of direct knowledge of God that the hesychast tradition considers accessible to the purified human being, not as an extraordinary experience reserved for a few, but as the natural goal of human life. Palamas’ spiritual psychology distinguishes two states of the noûs, the luminous center of human consciousness: dispersed outward, fragmented by sensory representations and the logismoï (thought-passions) that ceaselessly invade it; and restored to its natural state — gathered, concentrated in itself — capable of nepsis (sober watchfulness), of pure attention, free from images and discursive thoughts, and finally of accessing theoria, the vision of the Uncreated Light. Here, the intellect is not destroyed but transfigured: the noûs is restored, not annulled, in its vocation of contemplative knowledge of divine Reality.

Internal Divergence: where Eckhart dissolves all images of God through the apophatic path — all the way to the nameless Grunt, prior to any relation — Palamas carefully distinguishes the absolutely transcendent divine essence from the uncreated divine energies through which God genuinely communicates Himself to man. These are two non-dual Christianities that are not easily reconciled: in Eckhart, the Creator-creature distinction tends to dissolve in the common Grunt; in Palamas, it is maintained, but overcome through participation. This tension between dissolution and participation runs through all of Christian mysticism and foreshadows one of the major lines of fracture.

The heart: Thérèse and Ruusbroec, or the union that does not abolish

Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), in The Interior Castle, maps the human heart as a dwelling of seven concentric mansions, at the center of which God permanently resides — not as an outside guest, but as the flame at the heart of a candelabra, whose light illumines all the mansions.

What is striking is that this progression is described not as a mystical performance but as a love relationship that deepens: access to each mansion is not an achievement, but a deepening of trust, surrender, and love. The seventh mansion, the transforming union, is not the disappearance of the person but her full realization in relationship with the Divine: Teresa says she is, in that state, more herself than ever.

Ruusbroec, in the same vein, formulates this union through the image of the soul “as a flame in the fire”: inseparable but not merged, united but not dissolved. Union is not annihilation — it is an intensification of the person in relationship with God.

Divergence: this union that does not abolish the person stands in direct contrast with the Sufi fanāʾ in its most radical formulations, where the extinction of the individual self is the explicit horizon of the path. This is not a quarrel over words: it reveals a deep metaphysical divergence on the question of what becomes of the person in union with the Absolute — one of the major lines of fracture we will examine in the next section.

The body: the Jesus Prayer and the defense of the purified body

Hesychasm developed, within Eastern Christian tradition, a doctrine of the body in spiritual practice that constitutes one of its most original contributions to universal spiritual anthropology. Gregory Palamas defends, against the attacks of the Calabrian monk Barlaam, that the purified body can participate in deification — not as a spectator or passive instrument, but as a subject of transfiguration. The Light of Tabor, says Palamas, is not perceived by the physical eyes alone, nor by the intellect alone: it is perceived by the entire being, body included, when that body has been purified through years of practice.

The hesychast method involves a precise coordination between the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — and the cardiac breath: inhalation accompanies the first part, exhalation the second. Transmitted from spiritual father to spiritual father in the monasteries of Mount Athos, this discipline aims to make the entire body — muscles, breath, posture, heart rhythm — a single instrument of presence to the divine Light. When the practice deepens, the prayer begins to recite itself on its own, from a level of being deeper than conscious will: the body itself prays, and not merely the mind.

Convergence: this fine coordination between breath and prayer that hesychasm elaborates finds a direct echo in the tantric prāṇāyāma of Kashmir Shaivism — where breath connects the physical body and the subtle bodies — and in the Mevlevi Sufi samāʿ, where the rotation of the body becomes the instrument of the ego’s extinction. Three traditions, three bodily paths, one shared intuition: breath and bodily movement are not insignificant adjuncts to spiritual life — they are among its most direct levers.

Action: an Intense interiority, but a poorly articulated social ethics

Medieval Christian mysticism — whether Rhenish or hesychast — did not develop an explicit theology of action in the world comparable to the kabbalistic Tiqqun Olam or the bodhisattva vow. This does not mean that just action is foreign to it: caritas, the service of the poor, care for the sick and excluded, remain at the heart of the Christian ethos — and many mystical figures lived a remarkably concrete heroic charity.

But this active dimension most often appears as an implicit consequence of inner union, rather than as a dimension reflected upon in itself, with its own language and an overall vision of the world’s transformation. The contemplative tradition seems to maintain an unresolved tension between withdrawal into interiority — where everything unfolds, at the level of the Grunt or theoria — and the inscription of this union in structures of justice, peace, or a reorganization of the social fabric.

This is not an accidental lacuna, but a historical and spiritual choice whose weight must be assessed. Placed alongside the total engagement proposed by Lurianic Kabbalah with the Tiqqun Olam, or — in modernity — the Revelation of Arès with its call to “change oneself for the good, to change the world,” this relative withdrawal of Christian mysticism on the question of collective action outlines one of the major gaps we will encounter in the lines of fracture: between spiritualities of interiority first, and spiritualities that make the transformation of history a constitutive element of the path.

C. Sufism

The mind: maʿrifa, or seeing through the world to its source

Sufism is not primarily a doctrine but a path of consciousness transformation, whose intellectual cornerstone is maʿrifa — direct, immediate, non-discursive knowledge of the Divine — which is not the fruit of theological study but of a purification of the inner gaze. Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), in his doctrine of Waḥdat al-Wujūd (the Unity of Being), provided the most systematic metaphysical framework: there exists only one real Being — that of Allah — and all of creation is nothing but His self-manifestation (tajallī), the epiphany of His Names and Attributes through the infinity of their combinations. Every existent is a mirror in which a divine Name is reflected, a face through which the Divine contemplates Itself from a particular angle. Maʿrifa consists in seeing through each thing to the divine Name that grounds it — not abstracting the Divine from the world, but recognizing the Divine in each detail of the world, like light in each fragment of a prism.

Divergence: this vision of the world as tajallī — a precious and irreplaceable epiphany of divine Being — directly contrasts with Shankara’s māyā, where the phenomenal world is an illusory superimposition onto the screen of the only real Brahman. One of the sharpest fractures between non-dual traditions: where Shankara says dissolve, Ibn Arabi says celebrate. Their metaphysics lead to radically different practical attitudes toward the world, which we will examine in detail in the lines of fracture.

The heart: dhikr, or the three levels of remembrance

The central practice of Sufism is dhikr — literally “remembrance,” “recollection” — the rhythmic, intensive repetition of the divine Names until consciousness is saturated by the invoked Presence, to the point where the distance between the invoker and the Invoked begins to dissolve. The Quranic foundation is explicit: “Prayer keeps away indecency, but the remembrance of God is greater” (Quran 29:45). Ibn Arabi distinguishes three successive levels in the practice of dhikr. The first — dhikr al-lisān, the remembrance of the tongue — is the vocal repetition of the Name, accompanied by rhythm, breath, and bodily swaying: the entry into practice, where the physical repetition of the Name begins to imprint a reorientation of attention in the body. The second — dhikr al-qalb, the remembrance of the heart — is the state where the heart itself begins to invoke, independently of conscious will, as naturally as breathing. The third — dhikr as-sirr, the remembrance of the secret — is total transparency: it is no longer the human being who performs the dhikr, it is God who remembers Himself in the space the practitioner has become.

The fanāʾ — extinction — sought through this progression, is not an annihilation of the person but its transparency: al-Junayd of Baghdad (830–910), master of “sober” Sufism known for his silent dhikr, clarifies that the extinction of the self is always accompanied by a baqāʾ — a “subsistence in God” — where the person is restored, not annulled. Sufi love, as Rumi sings it in the Mathnawī, is therefore less a dissolution than a transfiguration: the reed cut from its original bed weeps — not in despair, but because the very separation is the condition of music. The lament of the ney is simultaneously the pain of separation and proof of the aspiration for return.

Convergence: the third level of dhikr — that level where “it is no longer the human being who invokes; it is God who remembers Himself” — joins what Shankara calls sākṣātkāra : the instant in which the knower, the known, and the act of knowing coincide in a recognition without remainder. Two traditions, two idioms, two profoundly different metaphysics — one single movement: the dissolution of the subject-object duality in knowledge itself.

The body: the mevlevi samāʿ, or the pivot between heaven and earth

Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi (1207–1273), Persian mystical poet and founder of the Mevlevi order, made the dance of rotation one of the most sublime expressions of the path of the body in Sufism. The samāʿ — literally “listening” — designates the musical and dance ceremony that forms the heart of Mevlevi practice. The symbolic structure of the rotation is of remarkable cosmological precision: the semāzen turns counterclockwise, right arm raised toward heaven, palm open in a position to receive, and left arm lowered toward the earth, palm facing downward in a position to transmit. He is the pivot between heaven and earth, the channel of divine Presence toward creation. The rotation gradually accelerates until a state is reached where the ego, unable to maintain its narrative coherence at that speed, lets go — and it is in this freed space that fanāʾ opens. The semāzen does not fall: he is carried by something that is no longer him but belongs to him more deeply than he himself does.

Convergence: this body as a pivot between heaven and earth in Mevlevi rotation resonates with a central intuition of the Dialogues with the Angel: “You are my denser equal.” In both cases, matter is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the irreplaceable place of manifestation and mediation: the angel needs human density to manifest in the world; the Divine needs the semāzen‘s body to dance in creation.

Action: a spiritual chivalry, but little thought given to collective transformation

Like Christian mysticism in this respect, classical Sufism did not develop a detailed theology of action in the world comparable to the kabbalistic Tiqqun Olam or the Buddhist bodhisattva vow. This does not mean that ethics are foreign to it: futuwwa (spiritual chivalry), unreserved hospitality, service of the master and the companions, care for the poor and wanderers — these are constant dimensions of Sufi brotherhoods, and many Sufi figures exercised real social influence in their contexts.

But this action remains above all the natural radiance of a transformed heart, rather than an explicit project of reshaping collective structures. The Sufi thinks of himself primarily as a traveler toward God within the world, more than as a conscious agent of a history to be redirected; the priority is the transparency of the soul, not the reconfiguration of the social fabric as such.

Placed alongside Lurianic Kabbalah or the prophetic modernity of the Revelation of Arès, this restraint draws a distinctive tonality: the world is received as a place of tajallī — epiphany of Being — more than as a worksite to transform. This is one of the major gaps we will encounter in the lines of fracture: between traditions for whom spiritual fulfillment necessarily involves explicit responsibility toward history, and others for whom transformation unfolds first in the quality of presence — leaving to God the care of the world’s overall architecture.

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2. The non-dualism of Identity: the Hindu paths

If the Abrahamic traditions elaborate their non-dualism within a fundamental relationship between the human being and a God who stands before them — even in the most radical formulations of Sufism or Kabbalah — Hinduism enacts a break in register: non-duality is no longer the endpoint of a relationship; it is the very structure of reality. The human being does not rejoin Brahman — he discovers that he has never ceased to be Brahman. But Hinduism is not a monolithic tradition, and this non-dualism of identity unfolds there in two deep, contrasting tonalities: Shankara’s Advaita — austere and resolute — and Abhinavagupta’s Kashmir Shaivism — luminous and celebratory. These two voices respond to and contradict each other from within the same civilization; their tension is one of the most fertile in the entire spiritual history of humanity.

A. Shankara’s Advaita Vedānta

The mind: Jñāna-Mārga, or the intellect that devours itself to the Light

Shankara (788–820 CE) defines jñāna-mārga — the path of knowledge — as the royal road to moksha, liberation. If suffering arises from metaphysical ignorance (avidyā) — the misrecognition of one’s own nature — only direct knowledge can dissolve it at the root. Right action (karma-yoga), which purifies, and devotion (bhakti), which opens the heart, prepare the ground but do not by themselves uproot the illusion of separation.

Shankara’s pedagogy unfolds in three stages. The first, śravaṇa — “hearing” — designates the reception of truth revealed by the Upanishads and the qualified teacher: not passive listening but total attention oriented toward this single inquiry: what is Brahman, what is Ātman, and in what way are they identical? The second stage, manana — “reflecting, ruminating” — is the work of the intellect that turns this truth over in every direction, examining its implications, untying objections, eliminating misunderstandings, until it becomes a stable inner conviction. The third stage, nididhyāsana — “contemplating until deep integration” — is the uninterrupted contemplation of this truth until its incarnation in direct, immediate, non-conceptual awareness. This passage from concept to experience — this tipping from “I know Brahman,” which dissolves into “Brahman knows Itself in me” — is what the tradition calls sākṣātkāra, direct vision.

The Mahāvākyas — “Great Utterances” from the Upanishads, such as Aham Brahmāsmi (”I am Brahman”) or Tat tvam asi (”You are That”) — play here the role of tools of transformation more than doctrinal propositions. They must be actively meditated upon, confronted with every daily experience until the ego’s resistance crumbles and the subject-object duality in knowledge itself collapses. It is precisely this threshold-crossing that the entire jñāna-mārga aims at.

Convergence: Shankara’s three-stage structure presents a striking analogy with Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s hitbonenut: in both cases, the intellect is used as a bridge toward direct knowledge that surpasses it — not as a permanent dwelling. This rapprochement does not erase the deep divergence on the nature of the Absolute: it makes it more precise, and more instructive.

The heart: Shankara’s silence and Rāmānuja’s response

In Shankara’s pure Advaita, the path of the heart does not occupy a central place. Bhakti — loving devotion — is recognized as a valuable preparatory path, capable of purifying the emotions and orienting consciousness toward the Divine, but it remains structured by the duality of the devotee and the devoted-to — and therefore cannot, in this logic, accomplish the ultimate dissolution of separation.

It is precisely on this point that Rāmānuja (1017–1137), philosopher of Viśiṣṭādvaita (”qualified non-dualism”), opposes Shankara. For Rāmānuja, the love relationship between the soul and God is not a provisional stage destined to dissolve into a subjectless knowledge — it is ultimate reality itself, its crowning and its fullness. Devotion to Vishnu, total surrender (prapatti) to divine grace, are not crutches to be thrown away once knowledge is acquired: they are the highest form of spiritual life. The burning love poems of the Tamil Alvārs stand as living demonstration: the heart can reach directly what the long intellectual road seeks by other paths.

Divergence: a deep fracture between Shankara and Rāmānuja — absorption into the Absolute vs. accomplished relation with the Absolute — which we will encounter again in Section V under the question of the person’s destiny in union.

The body: silence and its reasons

Shankara’s Advaita does not develop its own path of the body. This silence is consistent with his metaphysics: if the phenomenal world is māyā — an illusory superimposition onto the screen of the only real Brahman — then the body belongs entirely to this relative order. The jīvanmukta, the living liberated being, continues to inhabit a body, but knows that this body is no more real than an image in a mirror; to make it an instrument of liberation would, in Shankara’s logic, amount to confusing ontological levels.

Divergence: this silence on the body will be one of the sharpest points of contrast with Kashmir Shaivism, which follows by a century and a half in the same civilization — and for which the body becomes instead a royal road of realization.

Action: structural tension and its modern resolutions

If the world is māyā, why engage in the mending of the world? Shankara responds through the distinction between two levels of truth: at the conventional level (vyāvahārika), ethical actions remain necessary and fully valid — the law of causality, the suffering of others, the obligation of just action are not denied; at the ultimate level (pāramārthika), only the knowledge of Brahman is liberating. The response is philosophically rigorous, but it leaves ethics in the order of the provisional, as if it were not rooted in the Absolute itself.

Vivekananda (1863–1902) and Gandhi (1869–1948) then made a decisive reinterpretation to extract from Advaita a robust foundation for action in the world. Vivekananda formulated a “Practical Vedanta”: if Brahman is the reality of every human being, serving the human being in distress is serving Brahman. Gandhi extended this logic in satyāgraha — resistance through truth: if the other is Brahman and so am I, any violence against them turns back against me; non-violence (ahiṃsā) becomes a metaphysical deduction from non-duality, not a mere moral ideal.

Convergence: where Mahāyāna Buddhism had from the outset articulated non-duality and compassion with the bodhisattva ideal, Hinduism had to rework Advaita from within to express its ethical consequences. The Revelation of Arès and the Dialogues with the Angel will formulate it differently still: their non-dualism is immediately ethical, because the unity of the Living is there the first word — not the last.

B. Abhinavagupta’s Kashmir Shaivism

A century and a half after Shankara, in the tenth-century Kashmir of Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016), a non-dualism of an entirely different tonality takes shape. Where Shankara is austere, Abhinavagupta celebrates; where Shankara devalues the world as māyā to be dissolved, Abhinavagupta declares it līlā — spontaneous play — and spanda — the living pulse of Shiva’s divine Consciousness. Nothing is excluded from divine reality: passion, suffering, sensory beauty, the diversity of forms — all of it is vibration of the one Consciousness that plays at hiding itself in multiplicity for the joy of finding itself again.

The mind: Pratyabhijñā, recognizing what was never lost

The path of the mind in Kashmir Shaivism bears a revealing name: pratyabhijñā, “re-cognition.” It is not about reaching a new reality or dissolving an illusion through prolonged effort, but about recognizing what has always been there — what only the contraction of consciousness upon itself (aṇava mala) prevented us from seeing. Liberation is not an acquisition: it is a return to oneself, to what one is at one’s most primordial depth.

The philosophy elaborated by Utpaladeva and systematized by Abhinavagupta in the Tantrāloka and the Īśvarapratyabhijñā-kārikā affirms that Shiva’s Consciousness — free and joyful — is the very substance of every human being, not as a potential to develop, but as the actual and permanent reality of every instant of consciousness. Ignorance is not primarily a cognitive error to correct through the intellect — it is an existential contraction to release.

Convergence: this logic of recognition rather than acquisition connects directly to Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen: in both traditions, awakening is the primordial nature of the mind, not a state to be reached. And it resonates, even more surprisingly, with Huangbo’s formula in Chan — Chinese Zen: “The only mistake is seeking.” Three traditions separated geographically and culturally, one shared fundamental intuition: what we are seeking, we already have — and it is precisely this frantic searching that obscures it.

The heart: līlā, or the joy of being in lhis world

Kashmir Shaivism proposes a movement inverse to Shankara’s: not a break with the world, but a joyful reconciliation with it as an expression of līlā — the spontaneous play of divine Consciousness. The world is no longer a screen to cross or a problem to solve; it is the stage where Consciousness plays at losing and finding itself. Every form — beautiful or painful, sublime or trivial — is a mask of Shiva, and joy (ānanda) is not an emotion among others: it is the fundamental tonality of the Absolute.

Convergences: this joyful celebration of the world as the play of divine Consciousness stands closer to the Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidism — which teaches that joy is a central spiritual practice — and to Ibn Arabi, for whom the world is a precious and irreplaceable tajallī, than to Shankara. It also resonates with the creative vocation expressed in the Dialogues with the Angel: “The new world can only be built from beauty.” In all three cases, matter and sensory beauty are affirmed as authentic expressions of divine reality, not as its poor relations.

The body: Prāṇāyāma and Kuṇḍalinī, or the body as the royal path

It is perhaps on the question of the body that Kashmir Shaivism most clearly departs from Advaita and delivers its most original intuition. Prāṇāyāma — mastery of the breath — rests here on a principle drawn from pratyabhijñā: this recognition of our deep nature as divine consciousness. If we are already this consciousness, prāṇa is no longer merely biological breath — it is the bridge between the physical body and the subtle bodies, between ordinary consciousness and expanded consciousness. The human body thus manifests the trace of śakti, the cosmic energy that animates all of reality. To act on the breath is therefore to transform far more than a bodily rhythm: it is to intervene at the very heart of cosmic consciousness.

The Shaivite tantric tradition describes kuṇḍalinī śakti — the dormant energy at the base of the spine — as a coiled serpent that adequate practice can awaken and guide through the chakras, our energetic centers, all the way to the crown of the skull (sahasrāra). The union of Shiva — pure and motionless Consciousness — with Shakti — dynamic manifested Energy — realized at the summit, is precisely the embodied non-dual realization: the body becomes the explicit place of union. The body is no longer a prison to transcend but a condensation of divine Consciousness in matter, whose transformation is simultaneously a transformation of individual consciousness.

Convergences: this ontological valorization of the body as the place and instrument of realization finds echoes in Palamas’ hesychasm — the purified body as the subject of deification — in Dōgen’s zazen — posture as awakening in act — and in the Dialogues with the Angel: “You are my denser equal.” In all these cases, material density is not an inferiority to compensate for — it is the necessary condition for a form of divine manifestation that pure light cannot accomplish alone.

Action: joyful engagement as expression of līlā

If all is play of divine Consciousness, if nothing lies outside Shiva, then engaging in the world — through creative action, loving relationship, or artistic realization — is not to leave the spiritual path, but on the contrary to fulfill it in full recognition of our divine nature. The human being who acts from pratyabhijñā acts neither to correct a cosmic error nor to obey an external law, but because Consciousness rejoices in manifesting Itself through him. Līlā invites him to participate in the play of creation with the lightness and precision of an accomplished artist.

Conclusive convergence for this section: this joyful, engaged non-dualism draws an unexpected line of continuity with the two contemporary voices. “The new world can only be built from beauty” (Dialogues with the Angel) and “the good accomplished” as the only law (Revelation of Arès) carry the same affirmation: right and beautiful action is the natural flowering of a consciousness that has recognized the fundamental unity of the Living.

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3. Non-dualism without an absolute: the Buddhist paths

In the first installment, we had sketched the broad landscape of Buddhism: Theravāda — guardian of the Pāli canon — where the not-self of the subject does not yet open onto a non-dualism of ultimate realities; then Mahāyāna, with Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka and its doctrine of śūnyatā — the emptiness of all dharmas — and the Yogācāra vein, closer to an “original pure consciousness”; and finally three great contemplative traditions of recognition — Chan/Zen, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā — where awakening is no longer conceived as a state to construct, but as a nature to recognize.

This second installment does not seek to unfold all these schools exhaustively. It focuses on three nodes where non-duality without an Absolute condenses into very different but secretly convergent pathways: the radical deconstruction of Nāgārjuna and the Mādhyamaka — which empties the mind of all its conceptual supports; the bare sitting of Zen — where practice and awakening are identified; and the recognition of rigpa in Tibetan Dzogchen — where the natural state of the mind is held to be always already present, veiled rather than absent.

A. Nāgārjuna and the Mādhyamaka: the mind without support

The mind: the Middle Way, or deconstructing until there is nothing left to deconstruct

Nāgārjuna, the second-century Indian philosopher, is the great founding figure of the Mādhyamaka school — the “Middle Way.” His gesture consists in applying, without compromise, the Buddha’s central intuition — the absence of a substantial self — to all phenomena, including the concepts that spiritual thought tends to absolutize: existence and non-existence, being and nothingness, permanence and impermanence, nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. His method, laid out in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (”Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”), is a dialectic of deconstruction: for every conceivable metaphysical thesis, he shows that it is untenable — and the same holds true for its antithesis. The mind, deprived of every point of support, is forced to let go.

What Nāgārjuna aims at is not a new system, but liberation from the very need for a system. Emptiness (śūnyatā) is not a new absolute: it is the character of every thing — nothing existing in and of itself, everything existing only in dependence on everything else (pratītya-samutpāda). Even emptiness is empty: “Emptiness, poorly understood, destroys the ignorant — like a snake badly seized or a spell badly recited.” The goal is not to think emptiness, but to directly see that nothing is worth grasping; this seeing is already anattā — non-self.

Convergence / Divergence: the structure of the Mādhyamaka resembles, from a distance, the Christian apophaticism of the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition and of Meister Eckhart — but where Eckhart deconstructs images to make room for an ineffable Presence that remains, Nāgārjuna deconstructs all the way to the end, leaving no positive residual ground. And where Shankara dissolves the world into Brahman, Nāgārjuna also dissolves Brahman: śūnyatā is not even a reality — it is the absence of all intrinsic existence, including its own.

The heart: bodhicitta and karuṇā — compassion as the natural flowering of emptiness

In Mahāyāna Buddhism — which developed directly in Nāgārjuna’s wake — the doctrine of śūnyatā opens onto a radical ethical consequence: emptiness is never separate from compassion (karuṇā). The bodhisattva — the being who renounces “entering” nirvāṇa, final liberation from the cycle of existences, as long as a single being remains to be freed — embodies this union: to understand that all phenomena are empty of inherent nature is to simultaneously see that no being possesses a “self” to defend against others, and that the boundary between “me” and “others” reveals itself as conventional. Compassion here is not a moral supplement — it is the natural mode of existence of a consciousness that has ceased to believe itself separate.

The Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras — “Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras” — hammer home this double demand: prajñā (wisdom) that sees emptiness, compassion that embraces all beings. The iconic formula of the Heart Sūtra condenses this movement: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness.” Seeing the emptiness of all things does not lead to cold disengagement — it leads to a radical tenderness: nothing is to be possessed, everything is to be cared for.

Convergence: this intrinsic link between non-dual vision and responsibility toward all resonates with the kabbalistic Tiqqun Olam. In both cases, personal realization is considered incomplete as long as it has not been translated into effective responsibility toward all beings.

The body: seated meditation and walking, the body as a field of non-grasping

In the ancient sources, the path of the body is not theorized as in Tantrism — but the body is constantly the field of exercise for right view. The Noble Eightfold Path begins with right view (sammā-diṭṭhi), but it continues in attention to the breath, to postures, to movements, to sensations: the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (”Foundations of Mindfulness”) describes this patient work of observing the body, sensations, mental states, and phenomena as a school of non-grasping.

Seated meditation (śamatha-vipassanā) — which would later become zazen — aims less at “leaving the body” than at seeing that the body itself is nothing but a stream of sensations without an owner. To sit, to breathe, to walk with attention is not to sacralize matter — it is to see it as it is: impermanent, unseizable, without self. Satipaṭṭhāna — mindfulness founded on the body — is the first and most fundamental of the four foundations of mindfulness: before even turning attention to sensations, mental states, or phenomena, the practitioner learns to inhabit the body with total presence, to feel the breath as it is, to note each sensation without fleeing it or clinging to it. This work of the body is not a mere preliminary to spiritual life: it is already spiritual practice, because the body is the only place where one can truly meet the present moment.

Convergence: Dōgen’s zazen will develop this intuition to its most radical consequence: the correct bodily posture is itself awakening in act. We will return to this in the next section.

Action: the bodhisattva, or engagement until the last being

The ideal of the bodhisattva is without doubt one of the most radical figures of spiritual engagement humanity has ever produced. Its founding vow — not to “exit” saṃsāra, the cycle of existences, as long as the last sentient being has not been freed — immediately articulates non-duality and universal responsibility. Since there is no separate “self,” the liberation of one cannot be complete as long as others remain in ignorance.

This vow is not an external heroism — it is the logical consequence of a non-dual vision of emptiness. Where certain non-dual traditions can slide toward de facto detachment, the figure of the bodhisattva makes engagement in the world the criterion of the depth of realization.

Convergence: this grounding of ethics in the vision of interdependence — not in a divine commandment, not in natural law, but in the direct recognition that everything is connected to everything — resonates deeply with the logic of Gandhian non-violence: if the other is me in another mirror, to harm him is an act of self-mutilation. Practical conclusions converge even when metaphysical premises diverge radically.

B. Dōgen and Zen

The mind: zazen, shikantaza, and kōan — two pathways to immediate awakening

With Dōgen (1200–1253) — founder of the Sōtō school in Japan and author of the Shōbōgenzō — Buddhist Zen formulates a radical intuition: practice is not a means to awakening; it is awakening in act. The formula shūshō ichinyo — “unity of practice and realization” — breaks the mental structure by which awakening would be a distant goal toward which the practitioner gradually progresses. As long as there is a “self” that practices in order to later obtain a superior state, the fundamental separation has not yet dissolved; practice remains inhabited by the logic of acquisition. Shikantaza — “just sitting” — is the concrete translation of this revolution: sitting without aiming at anything other than the very act of sitting itself, without seeking, without any project of elevation, in the total nakedness of the instant.

Yet Zen does not exhaust its pedagogy in Dōgen’s path alone. The Rinzai tradition has developed, with the kōan, a complementary strategy: not quietly stabilizing consciousness in the simple fact of being seated, but pushing the intellect to its breaking point. Questions like “What was your face before your parents were born?” do not call for a logical answer — they aim to saturate the discursive mind until it ceases to function as the center of gravity of being. In both cases, the target is the same: to drop the illusion that one more thought could finally deliver the truth.

Convergence: by different means, shikantaza and kōan both join the Mādhyamaka’s intuition: the mind does not awaken by accumulating ever subtler formulations, but by ceasing to seek support in what can be formulated. Zen distinguishes itself from Nāgārjuna, however, by its style: where the Mādhyamaka dismantles conceptual handholds through dialectic, Zen short-circuits them through bare practice or through the shock of a lived paradox.

The heart: satori, or the compassion that follows the falling of boundaries

In Zen, the transformation of the heart is not primarily conceived as the slow cultivation of elevated feelings, but as the spontaneous consequence of kenshō or satori: the lightning flash of direct vision where the ordinary separation between oneself and reality cracks open. When a being ceases, even for a moment, to experience itself as an isolated fortress facing the world, compassion no longer needs to be commanded — it flows of itself from a perception that has become less defensive and less possessive. The tenderness that results is not sentimentality, but a sobriety of gaze: the less the self intervenes, the more the other appears in their own nakedness.

This logic explains why Zen can seem so little moralistic while being of extreme ethical rigor. It does not begin by saying “be compassionate” — it works to dissolve what makes compassion difficult: identity rigidity, cognitive grasping, and separation. Goodness is not added on top of vision; it is vision’s natural breath when nothing thick interposes itself between oneself and other beings.

Convergence: This compassion born of awakening joins the structure already underlined elsewhere: authentic realization never leads to indifference, but to a more just presence to others. It can thus be placed alongside the Sufi baqāʾ as al-Junayd conceives it: not the sterile disappearance of the person, but their return in a truer, more sober, more available quality of being.

The body: Dōgen’s zazen, or posture as incarnate awakening

It is perhaps on the question of the body that Dōgen formulates his most unforgettable contribution. With shinjin datsuraku — “shedding body and mind” — he is by no means inviting us to leave the flesh, but to discover that the body, properly held, breathed, and inhabited, becomes the very place where the opposition between body and mind ceases to be operative. Posture is not a backdrop to meditation: it is awakening taking form in matter.

Hence the almost liturgical precision of zazen: pelvis slightly tilted forward, spine elongated, chin tucked in, hands in hokkai-join resting on the thighs, supported by the lower abdomen, eyes half-closed, deep breathing rooted in the kikai tanden — the “ocean of energy” located below the navel. Nothing here amounts to gratuitous formalism; each detail aims at a balance between tension and release, vigilance and surrender, presence and non-grasping. The long, silent exhalation brings consciousness back below the mental chatter, to that more naked, almost biological layer of presence. Dōgen — and later Taisen Deshimaru in his work of transmission in Europe — insisted on this point: the correct posture does not accompany awakening, it makes it immediately operative.

Convergence and Originality: Dōgen here joins Palamas — who makes the purified body a subject of deification — and Nāgārjuna — who sees in the body a royal path of realization. But he adds a distinctly Zen radicality: the body is not merely capable of participating in awakening — it is awakening when it is fully seated in rightness.

Action: ethics beyond the law

Zen inherits from Mahāyāna the idea that ethics does not need to be grounded in a transcendent commandment in order to be absolute in its scope. If the substantial separation between self and other is illusory, harming the other is not only a moral fault: it is an error of perception. Right action then arises from ontological clarity, not from obedience.

This is why the bodhisattva ideal remains fully active in Zen, even as Zen distrusts grand discourses. Generosity, restraint, non-violence, attention to concrete reality, humble and just work — these are not virtues plastered onto awakening; they are the daily form taken by a less-separated consciousness. Where some spiritualities of the Absolute risk sliding toward withdrawal, authentic Zen makes the ordinary — sweeping, serving, walking, cooking, speaking — the very field of verification of awakening.

Conclusive convergence: this ethics without commandment joins, from another slope, the intuition that will appear further on in the Dialogues with the Angel and the Revelation of Arès: when separation dissolves, the good no longer appears as an external obligation, but as the natural form of a consciousness re-attuned to reality.

C. Tibetan Dzogchen: the recognition of primordial clarity

The mind: rigpa, or recognizing what has always been there

Tibetan Dzogchen — Atiyoga, “the Great Perfection” — pushes the Buddhist logic of recognition rather than acquisition to its extreme point. Rigpa — primordial awareness — is neither an elevated state to fabricate nor a distant summit to merit; it is the actual and permanent nature of the mind prior to any conceptual contraction. What we call the ordinary mind is nothing other than rigpa itself — but veiled, dispersed, covered by habitual mental constructs, as the sky remains present behind the clouds that conceal it. Thus, all of Dzogchen’s pedagogy aims less at building than at clearing away, less at producing a light than at letting appear a clarity already there.

It is here that the rapprochement with the pratyabhijñā of Kashmir Shaivism becomes particularly fruitful. In both cases, awakening does not consist in becoming other than oneself, but in recognizing what was never truly lost. The formula attributed to Huangbo — “The only mistake is seeking” — illuminates this logic well: not because no discipline would be necessary, but because tense searching nourishes precisely the illusion that awakening exists somewhere else.

The teachings of the Bardo Thödol extend this intuition to the threshold of death. They rest on the idea that at the moment when ordinary mental constructs dissolve, primordial consciousness can manifest in its most total nakedness; if the practitioner has recognized it during their lifetime, they can still recognize it at this decisive hour and be liberated within it. Death is therefore not conceived as an absolute rupture, but as a moment of truth where what has always been there — behind the theater of mental appearances — is revealed.

Convergence: where the Mādhyamaka empties the mind of all its supports, Dzogchen reveals what remains when no support is sought any longer. The emphases differ, but the shared aim remains the same: to let appear a space of freedom that ordinary consciousness masks from itself.

The heart: ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta

In Dzogchen, the dimension of the heart unfolds with remarkable subtlety through the distinction between ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. The first designates the direct recognition of the primordial nature of the mind; the second, active compassion in the phenomenal world — the concrete concern for beings still caught in confusion and suffering. The one does not oppose the other: the first grounds the second, and gives it its rightness.

Knowing that all beings share the same veiled rigpa does not lead to indifference — it makes their suffering all the more poignant. To see the other in their deep nature, and to simultaneously see the thickness of the veils separating them from it, engenders a compassion of a particular kind: neither sentimental pity, nor confused fusion, nor moralism. It is a clear, lucid, stable compassion that accompanies without possessing and helps without substituting itself.

Convergence: this lucid compassion can be placed alongside the Sufi baqāʾ already invoked elsewhere: after the extinction of the separate self, what remains is not insensibility, but a more just, more sober, and vaster presence to the other. Two universes without direct historical debt arrive here at a strikingly similar human structure.

The body: breath, posture, and unfabricated presence

Dzogchen does not develop the same minute postural liturgy as Dōgen’s Zen — but it by no means disparages the body. As in Buddhism at large, breathing, posture, and attention remain indispensable places of stabilization; the key difference is that they are not valid as techniques for fabricating a superior state, but as means of ceasing to interfere with the natural state. The body then becomes not the object of heroic mastery, but the place of a just release — where the mind can finally cease contracting upon itself.

We find here, in a different tonality, the same fundamental trust encountered in Taoism and in certain aspects of Dzogchen already highlighted: the original nature of the human being — body and consciousness — is right, fluid, luminous. What causes the problem is not what must be added but what must be dissolved.

Convergence: where Zen makes the correct posture awakening in act, Dzogchen tends more to make just release the revelation of a clarity already present. Both converge, however, against any spirituality of fabrication: neither one conceives of awakening as the production of an artificial state.

Action: active compassion and right presence in the world

Dzogchen by no means abolishes the demand for action — it reformulates it from clarity. If all beings already participate in the same primordial nature, then engagement on their behalf does not come from an obligation imposed from outside, but from the recognition that their wandering and suffering are not truly separate from us. Right action therefore arises neither from guilt nor from moral heroism, but from lucid compassion.

It is in this that Dzogchen deeply converges with the bodhisattva ideal: not as a spectacular sacrificial figure, but as the natural consequence of a vision freed from separation. The being who sees more clearly does not leave others in their obscurity; they remain available — because the recognition of fundamental clarity makes compassion toward those who do not yet see it more urgent, not less.

Conclusive Convergence: from Zen to Dzogchen, late Buddhism thus shows two distinct but convergent ways of thinking a non-duality without Absolute: one insists on bare sitting, the exact gesture, and awakening as practice; the other on the recognition of primordial clarity and the lucid compassion that follows from it. In both cases, right action is not added to realization — it is realization’s natural flowering in the world.

4. The non-dualism of Fluidity: Taoism

The three great families of traditions we have just traversed — Abrahamic, Hindu, Buddhist — share, despite their divergences, a common structure: they aim at a state, a realization, a summit. The Taoist path enacts another fundamental break in register: it does not aim at a state to reach, because it does not begin from the premise that there is anything to reach. The Tao — elusive, unnameable, what precedes heaven and earth — is not a reality hidden behind the visible world that one must rejoin through spiritual effort. It is the very movement of reality, its natural flux, its inexhaustible spontaneity. The question is therefore not how to rejoin the Tao — it is how to stop opposing it.

The mind: The paradox as pedagogy

Laozi, who according to Taoist tradition composed the Tao Te Ching in the 6th century BCE — though his historicity remains debated — inaugurates a pedagogy of the mind that has no direct equivalent in any other tradition. He does not build a philosophical system, does not propose intellectual meditation. He places the reader before the impotence of their own thought through the deliberate use of paradox: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” — first verse, first act of destabilization. “Non-being is useful,” “Silence is the greatest resonance,” “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know” — each formula is a small bomb placed under the foundations of discursive thought, not to destroy it but to reveal its own limits from the inside.

Zhuangzi, continuator and amplifier of Laozi, radicalizes this pedagogy still further through narrative, humor, dream, and absurdity: the cook who butchers the ox effortlessly because he follows the natural articulations of the animal; the butterfly who wonders whether it is a man dreaming or a man who is a butterfly; the King of Chaos whose emissaries pierce seven orifices to render him a service — and who dies from it. Each story is a Taoist kōan before the fact — an irruption of the unpredictable into ordinary logic.

Convergence and originality: the paradoxical pedagogy of Laozi and the narrative devices of Zhuangzi converge with the zen kōan — of which Taoism is historically one of the sources in China. Both use paradox not as a logical defect but as an instrument of transformation. But where the zen kōan aims at satori — a sudden awakening, a direct breakthrough out of discursive mind — Taoist pedagogy is more diffuse, more atmospheric: it does not seek a flash, but a progressive impregnation — like water that eventually passes through stone, not by force, but by constancy.

The heart: Wu Wei, or love without effort

Wu Wei — literally “non-action,” often translated as “acting without forcing” — is without doubt one of the most misunderstood Taoist concepts in the West, where it is readily reduced to a form of passivity. Yet it designates neither inaction nor withdrawal, but a way of acting that does not proceed from a tensed will seeking to bend reality to its own demands. It is an action attuned to the natural movement of things — like water descending to the sea with no apparent effort, finding its passage without violence. Wu Wei is therefore not resignation in the face of the world as it is, but the art of harmonizing with the Tao rather than pretending to constrain the course of things. This is why the image of water recurs ceaselessly in the Tao Te Ching: apparently soft and supple, yet capable of wearing away even the hardest stone.

Multiple convergences: Wu Wei resonates with the Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidic devekut — this adhesion to divine Presence in the most ordinary acts, without forcing or dramatizing. It resonates also with the līlā of Kashmir Shaivism, where right action is that which coincides with the spontaneous play of divine Consciousness. And it resonates finally with the structure of action in the Revelation of Arès: not political program nor social strategy, but the harvesting — that patient, repeated, humble gesture of the awakened one who does not seek to transform the world by force, but to embody a presence so just that others, by contagion, begin to move in turn. In both cases — Taoist and Arèsian — the transformation of the world passes through the transformation and radiance of the acting person, not through the imposition of a will upon reality.

The Body: Tai Chi and Qi Gong — the circulation of cosmic breath

Taoism has developed, in its practical branches — Tai Chi Chuan, Qi Gong, the internal martial arts — a culture of the body founded on a central principle: qi — vital cosmic energy, analogous to the Indian prāṇa — circulates naturally through the body when the body ceases to oppose it through rigidity, contraction, or excessive tension. Physical health, emotional balance, and spiritual realization are, in the Taoist perspective, aspects of the same phenomenon: the fluidity of qi in the body and between the body and its environment.

Taoist bodily work is not, like tantric yoga, an activation of a dormant energy to be awakened and directed toward specific centers — it is a clearing of obstacles, a progressive release of everything that prevents qi from circulating according to its own nature. Tai Chi’s movements — slow, continuous, fluid, in gentle spirals — do not seek to impose a form on the body but to discover the form the body itself wants to take when it is no longer constrained. This is Wu Wei applied to flesh.

Convergence: the Taoist principle of clearing obstacles rather than forced activation connects directly with tibetan Dzogchen’s pedagogy — where the aim is not to construct awakened consciousness but to clear away what masks it. Two very different traditions share the same fundamental trust: the original nature of the human being — body and consciousness — is right, fluid, luminous. What causes the problem is not what must be added but what must be dissolved.

Action: the sage without intention, or governing like the valley

Taoist ethics of action is one of the most radically anti-authoritarian and anti-programmatic that exist. The Tao Te Ching affirms that the best government is the one whose people do not know they are being governed; that the best teacher is the one whose student believes they learned everything by themselves; that the best warrior does not fight. This is not political passivity — it is a metaphysics of non-violent efficacy that affirms that the greatest force is the one that accompanies the natural movement of things rather than opposing it. The image of the valley returns as the Taoist metaphor of the ideal sage: low, open, receptive — and for that reason, everything flows through it and nothing ever fills it.

Divergence: this ethics of non-interference enters, however, into direct tension with the ethics of active responsibility we encountered among the Kabbalists (Tiqqun Olam), among the bodhisattvas, and in Gandhi. Taoism affirms that forcing the repair of the world can produce exactly the opposite of what is sought — that any action dictated by a preconceived idea of the good is liable to reintroduce violence under the cover of virtue. There is in this caution a real wisdom that the “repairing” traditions would do well to take more seriously. The tension remains open and fertile — and it is one of the lines of fracture we will examine in the next section.

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Provisional conclusion: the path is not yet Unity!

At this point in the crossing, a first truth emerges clearly: in the great spiritual traditions, non-duality is neither a disembodied speculation nor a luxury reserved for a few contemplatives withdrawn from the world. It always takes the form of a path, a discipline of being, a concrete transformation of the gaze, the heart, the body, and action. The languages differ, the metaphysics frequently oppose one another, the emphases range from austerity to celebration, from deconstruction to song — but all the traditions encountered so far agree at least on this: ordinary separation is not the ultimate horizon of the human being, and there are pathways for crossing through it and returning to Unity.

Yet this convergence must not deceive us. The further we advance, the clearer it becomes that these traditions are not simply saying the same thing in different words. They propose neither the same vision of the world, nor the same understanding of the person, nor the same relationship to the body, nor the same kind of engagement in history. The rapprochements we have been able to make are real; the fractures are equally so. It is perhaps in this double faithfulness — to the depth of the convergences and to the irreducibility of the divergences — that a spiritual approach worthy of the name becomes possible: one broad enough to listen, and rigorous enough not to conflate.

It now remains for us to cross a decisive threshold. The most pressing question is not only how the ancient traditions conceived the exit from duality — but what this question becomes in our late, fragmented, disenchanted world, saturated with information yet starving for Presence.

It is there that we will reconnect, in the final part, with the two contemporary voices already glimpsed — the Dialogues with the Angel and the Revelation of Arès — not as mere modern echoes of ancient wisdoms, but as singular, demanding, sometimes unsettling formulations of what a non-duality fully incarnate in historical urgency might look like today.

Next week, we will therefore resume from these two contemporary voices, before entering into the examination of the great lines of fracture that run through the whole of this inquiry: the destiny of the person in union, the value of the sensible world, the question of spiritual authority, and the status of time and history in the life of the spirit.

It is only by confronting these disagreements without artificially dissolving them that we can hope to discern, with a little more accuracy, what our era still expects from the traditions, what it can receive from the new voices of the twentieth century — and what it may perhaps need to learn to formulate by itself.

Read the third and final part: The Wound of Duality—and the Return (3/3). After exploring the paths of return, this final installment examines contemporary voices, the irreconcilable rifts between traditions, and the spiritual calling of our time.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

Do you see, in our time, a spiritual or cultural heritage that remains active, for better, for worse, or in some ambiguous fashion? Share your reading in the comments to spark discussion.

And if you wish to share more broadly your reflection on the heritages that shape us, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 8 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Anger: unlike the French word colère — which arrived late in the French language, displacing the older ire and the Greek-derived cholè (kholê), bile, the humor the Ancients held responsible for fits of fury and irritability — the English word anger carries a strikingly different physical intuition. It descends from the Old Norse angr, meaning grief and affliction, and traces back through Proto-Germanic roots to the Latin angere: to choke, to strangle, to squeeze. To be angry, in this etymological lineage, is not to overflow and burn outward, but to be gripped from within — constricted, tightened, unable to breathe freely. The same root gives us anguish, anxiety, and angina, that strangling sensation in the chest. That is no coincidence: in every one of these words, the body remembers what the mind so easily forgets — that beneath the fire of anger, there is nearly always a form of suffocation.

I. Untangling the confusion

Anger occupies a peculiar place of ambivalence in our culture: we condemn it in intimate relationships and glorify it in the political arena. We treat it as a character flaw, then summon it as proof of commitment or strength. This confusion rests on a fundamental distinction that everyday language tends to flatten: the difference between anger as a signal — an immediate response to a real injustice, a call of conscience in the face of what should not be — and anger as a settled state, a permanent residence that colors every perception with suspicion and hostility. The first can be a life force, an energy that protects what is precious and mobilizes what is right. The second is a prison: it robs us of the ability to be present to ourselves, creates a chronic inner agitation that prevents any genuine reflection, and ultimately blocks access to the very solutions it claims to be calling for.

​There is also a more subtle form of anger, less dramatic but equally insidious: that simmering irritability born of slow accumulation — frustrations, silent disappointments, the persistent feeling of not being seen, recognized, or valued for what one truly is or gives. Often, this anger does not express itself — or expresses itself sideways, directed at substitute targets, with a disproportionality that baffles those around as much as the one experiencing it. It gnaws, it hardens, it gradually shuts the door on gratitude and wonder, turning reality into a permanent adversary rather than a territory to inhabit. Recognizing it for what it is — not a shameful character flaw, but an alarm signal that deserves to be heard — is already the beginning of liberation.

​II. A signal worth decoding

For anyone sincerely engaged in a path of inner transformation, anger deserves to be looked at squarely rather than denied, suppressed, or simply discharged onto others. It functions, in reality, as an inner compass of remarkable precision: it points exactly to where an unspoken expectation has run up against the world’s resistance, where a personal boundary has been crossed without being named, where something we hold deeply dear feels threatened or violated. It reveals what has not yet found its way to peace, what still awaits acknowledgment, compassionate reception, patient accompaniment toward a renewed relationship with reality.

​Those who agree to observe anger with clear-sightedness — without rushing to judgment, without shame — often discover something unexpected. At the heart of this anger: an inner child, one who still demands that the world, other people, and circumstances respond to his desires, and who has not yet fully crossed the threshold of acceptance and limitation. This encounter is not a humiliation — it is, on the contrary, an opening. The decisive question is therefore not “How do I kill this anger?” but “What kind of fire is this, and where can I channel it?” Anger can thus become one of the most valuable tools of self-knowledge — provided one consents to moving through it from the inside rather than projecting it outward, or burying it in a silence that festers. Learning to distinguish between anger that protects something genuinely worth protecting and anger that defends an illusion we have grown attached to is one of the most delicate and most fruitful labors of the inner life.

​III. What the traditions tell us

The great spiritual traditions agree on one fundamental point: anger is one of the forces most capable of pulling human beings away from themselves — while also recognizing, in certain of its forms, a dignity of its own that would be reductive to ignore.

​In the Hebrew tradition, uncontrolled anger is associated with the momentary eclipse of tselem Elohim — the divine image nestled at the heart of the human being. The Talmud draws a radical conclusion from this: “In the eyes of one who loses his temper, even the Divine Presence loses its importance” (Nedarim 22b). Elsewhere, it states that one who is completely governed by rage should be regarded “as an idolater” (Shabbat 105b), for he has substituted the fire of his ego for the light of that which transcends him.

​In Christianity, the tradition distinguished early on between ira ordinata — righteous anger, which rises in the face of injustice and whose evangelical icon is Christ driving the merchants from the Temple — and ira inordinata, which corrodes the soul and poisons relationships. Thomas Aquinas himself, however, did not condemn all anger: that which responds to a real injustice and seeks a just remedy can be the expression of an authentic love of the good — it is its excess and its duration that corrupt it, until it crystallizes into resentment and becomes, in the moral tradition, “hatred of one’s neighbor.”

​In Sufism, mastery of anger (ghadab) is one of the central disciplines of the purification of the heart (tazkiyat al-nafs). Sufi masters distinguish between the impulsive ego (nafs ammâra, the soul that commands toward evil) and the progressively pacified soul (nafs mutma’inna, the soul at rest): working through anger is precisely one of the necessary passages in this inner ascension — not to smother the fire, for the fire of spiritual ardor is precious, but to transmute it into an impulse toward God, a force of transformation rather than destruction.

​In Vedantic thought and yoga, anger (krodha) is counted among the forces that agitate the mind and obscure deep consciousness. The Bhagavad Gītā devotes to it one of its most penetrating analyses: “From desire springs anger; from anger arises delusion; from delusion, the loss of memory; from the loss of memory, the ruin of intelligence — and from the ruin of intelligence, the loss of self” (II.62–63). This chain that Krishna describes to Arjuna on the battlefield is not a martial metaphor: it is a precise map of what happens internally, within seconds, in any human being swept away by anger.

​Finally, in Buddhism, anger (dosa in Pali, dvesha in Sanskrit) is counted among the three primary poisons of the mind, alongside greed and delusion, because it veils the deep nature of reality and breaks the continuity of mindful presence. It does not only wound those at whom it is directed — it burns first the one who carries it. The Buddhist path does not advocate brutal suppression — which would only drive anger deeper underground — but its gradual transformation through mindfulness, compassion (karuṇā), and the contemplation of the interdependence of all beings: understanding that the other I am blaming is, like me, caught in the same current of suffering and ignorance, gradually disarms the mechanism of anger at its very root.

​Everywhere, the same deep intuition: the fire of anger can illuminate or consume — and that is the only real choice we are given when facing it.

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​IV. Anger in an age of noise

Our era maintains a deeply complex relationship with anger. It is saturated with it: social media amplifies it, monetizes it, makes it the primary fuel of political engagement and public discourse. Anger circulates there at the speed of light, aggregates, coalesces, and takes on proportions that those who sparked it can no longer control. It ends up forming a permanent background noise — the soundtrack of an era that confuses outrage with depth of thought. Yet this collective anger can carry genuine dignity when it is born of a sharp awareness of injustice and directed with clarity toward right action. But the moment it is no longer tempered by patience, self-examination, and discernment, it almost invariably degenerates into pure reactivity — and becomes, to borrow the Buddhist metaphor, one of the poisons that burns those who ingest it as surely as those it is aimed at.

​Recovering a just relationship with anger — neither repression nor explosion, neither glorification nor shame — is one of the most demanding and most necessary spiritual practices of our time. It requires developing the capacity to pause within the space of a single heartbeat, before the automatic reaction sweeps everything away: that space which the traditions call, each in its own vocabulary, discernment, presence, mindfulness, hishtavvut (equanimity) or sabr (active patience). Within that space, there is only one question truly worth asking: what is this anger telling me about what I care about — and what is the most honest response I can bring to it?

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The Eternal Present · Heritages · 29 min
To reread the traditions in order to understand what they have shaped and what they can still transmit.

Serie: The Wound of Duality — and the Return. Article 1

It is a question human beings have never stopped asking, across every latitude and in every language: why do I feel separate? Separate from the Divine or the Absolute, separate from others, separate from nature, separate from myself. This wound of duality — this persistent sense of being an isolated fragment in an indifferent universe — is perhaps the most fundamental pain of the human condition. To address it, humanity’s great spiritual traditions have each elaborated, in their own idiom, remarkably deep and coherent maps of reality and paths of return.

This text is a crossing in three parts. Neither an inventory nor a comparative handbook, but an invitation to descend into the depths of several age-old traditions — kabbalistic Judaism, Christian mysticism, Islamic Sufism, Vedantic Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism — before giving voice to two twentieth-century spiritual voices whose freshness and urgency yield nothing to the authority of antiquity: the Revelation of Arès and the Dialogues with the Angel.

This first installment maps the veiling and its names, the diversity of visions of the Absolute, and the deep convergences between these traditions. The second and third installments — to be published next week and the week after — will explore the concrete pathways of access: how does one cross the veil? — before examining the irreducible lines of fracture between these traditions, and what they say together to an age that has lost its sense of the Sacred. The goal is not to force an artificial consensus among them, but to seek what they share — and what their irreducible differences reveal about the very nature of the Real that each one seeks to reach.

I. The fundamental question: what is the Real?

The inadequacy of ordinary perception

All great spiritual traditions share a common starting point. Ordinary human consciousness, when left to its habits, does not perceive the world as it truly is; rather, it perceives the world as it is perceived. It slices the world into pieces — me and you, inner and outer, sacred and profane, life and death — and mistakes these slices for absolute realities. In doing so, it misses something essential: a deeper unity that precedes and sustains all these distinctions.

This veiling bears different names across traditions. In Shankara’s Vedantic Hinduism, it is avidyā, or metaphysical ignorance, which projects māyā onto the Brahman, the absolute Consciousness-Being. In Buddhism, it is the mistaken belief in the existence of a fixed, independent self, or ātman, which the Buddha denies through the doctrine of anattā. This belief generates attachment, resistance, and suffering. For Sufis, it is the veil of ghaflah (forgetfulness), which prevents the heart from perceiving that all existing things are epiphanies of the divine. For Kabbalists, these are kelipot, or shells of opacity, that cover the divine sparks scattered during the primordial breaking of the vessels. In the Revelation of Arès, it is the Adamic fault, which is not a moral transgression, but rather an event of dualization. By emancipating himself from the Father through his own misdirected freedom, Adam became “dual, at once image and likeness of the Father and a thinking animal, king of the world.” For the Dialogues with the Angel, it is heaviness—the progressive densification of human consciousness that distances it from its angelic “luminous half”—not as original sin, but as a provisional condition whose overcoming is the very vocation of human beings.

All these traditions affirm that this veiling is not a primary, necessary condition; rather, it is a secondary fracture. Whether historical, cognitive, or karmic, depending on the perspective, it is real in its effects, but not in its foundation. Because it is not a primary condition, liberation, return, awakening, and deification are possible, depending on the vocabulary used.

The Absolute has many faces

Before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge a fundamental diversity that the syncretic temptation tends to erase: the names that different traditions give to ultimate reality are not interchangeable, and their differences reveal distinct worldviews.

Shankara’s Brahman, for example, is a pure, impersonal consciousness — without attributes (nirguna), without will, and without love in the relational sense. It is rigorously solitary at its core. It is designated by the triad Sat-Chit-Ānanda —Being, Consciousness, and Bliss—not as three qualities, but as one indivisible reality. At first glance, Ibn Arabi’s divine Dhāt appears similar — beyond all Name and Attribute — but it retains a core desire to manifest and be known, as expressed in the hadith qudsī: “I was a Hidden Treasure, and I desired to be known, so I created creatures.” The Kabbalistic Ein Sof is the boundless infinity of the Divinity, prior to all manifestation, yet unfolding with architectural precision through the sefirot. The Mādhyamaka Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā is different: not a positive Absolute, Consciousness, or Being, but the emptiness of the intrinsic existence of every phenomenon, including emptiness itself. The Taoist Tao refuses even language: “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” In the two contemporary voices that close this mapping, ultimate reality is designated by a single word: Life — not as a biological metaphor, but as the name of Being itself: living, present, loving, and irreducible to any abstraction.

These are not mere terminological disputes. They signal metaphysical positions with considerable practical and ethical implications because the way one names the Absolute determines how one inhabits the world. Yet, these traditions also share something essential: ultimate reality is one, not multiple. The multiplicity we perceive daily is either derived, illusory, or a veiled expression of this fundamental unity.

II. Four major traditions of non-dualism

1. The non-dualism of Being: Abrahamic monotheisms

The three great monotheistic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have each produced mystical currents that push monotheism to its most extreme consequence. If G.od is truly the one and only, and nothing exists apart from Him, then how can a human being face him without being, in essence, in Him? The institutional orthodoxy of each tradition has often tried to suppress this question, which is the secret engine of all the great Abrahamic mysticisms.

Jewish Kabbalah

In Judaism, Kabbalah is an esoteric movement that developed from the 12th century onwards. It culminated in the 13th century with the Zohar, becoming more radical in the 16th century under Isaac Luria in Safed. Kabbalah is the most bold expression of non-duality. Its central concept is Ein Sof, which literally means “Endless.” Divinity in its absolute essence, prior to any name, relationship, or will. Ein Sof is not the personal God of the Hebrew Bible. It is divinity before all its actions, in a silence and fullness that no language can reach and that only the apophatic path can approach. The functional structure of Ein Sof is reminiscent of Shankara’s nirguna Brahman — but while Brahman remains radically impersonal, Ein Sof manifests itself in the ten sefirot. These are the attributes or spheres of divine energy that form the Tree of Life, the architectural structure through which infinite light journeys toward manifested creation.

In Lurianic Kabbalah, this process of emanation is preceded by the Tzimtzum, or the divine contraction. It is the withdrawal of the Ein Sof into itself, which frees up a space (tehiru) where creation can exist. It is a non-dualistic paradox of remarkable subtlety: the divine creates by erasing itself, and the world is only possible because the infinite consented to make itself small. According to the primordial catastrophe, or Shevirat Ha-Kelim (the Breaking of the Vessels), during creation, the vessels meant to contain the Light shattered. This projected divine sparks, or nitzotzot, into the depths of matter, which are covered by kelipot, or shells of opacity. The world, as it is, is a field of captive sparks yearning to return to their Source. The task of human beings—the teshuvah in its Kabbalistic dimension—is to free these sparks through every just act, every intentional prayer, and every gesture of love and truth. This is Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world. It is a simultaneous cosmological and human repair, mending the fracture of Being and the fabric of human relations. Divine sparks scattered throughout creation are not released in the solitude of individual consciousness; rather, they are released in the space that opens up between beings when a gesture of justice, tenderness, or truth bridges the distance that separates them.

The 18th-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, further radicalized this non-dualism by teaching acosmism. This is not pantheism, which asserts that the divine is the world. Rather, acosmism asserts that the world has no independent reality and only exists in relation to the Ein Sof. Devekut, or adhesion to the Divine, is not a state reserved for a contemplative elite; it is accessible to every human being in daily life through prayer (tefilah), joy (simha), and right intention (kavanah). The boundary between the finite and the infinite is not ontological — it is cognitive. It is our fragmented gaze that creates the illusion of separation.

Christian mysticism

In Christianity, the most rigorously non-dualist tradition is Rhenish mysticism of the 13th–14th centuries, led by the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260–1328). According to Eckhart, the soul possesses a “spark” (scintilla animae) that has always been united with the Divine. This divine entity is not the personal G.od of Trinitarian theology, but rather the Gottheit (Godhead), the abyssal ground that precedes the three persons. It is the functional equivalent of the Kabbalistic Ein Sof and the Shankarian Brahman. His central aphorism encapsulates his non-dual vision: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” There is no human gaze and divine gaze crossing each other; there is one act of vision in which the subject and object reveal themselves as identical at their core. His disciples — John Tauler, Henry Suso, and Jan van Ruysbroeck — developed this legacy with their own emphases. Ruysbroeck expressed this union in a way that no theological formula ever had: the soul is “like a flame in a fire” — it becomes inseparable without ceasing to be itself.

The Byzantine tradition of hesychasm, theorized by Gregory Palamas in the 14th century, proposes a different yet convergent path. Palamas distinguishes the divine essence, which is absolutely transcendent and inaccessible, from the uncreated divine energies through which God communicates with humans in contemplative prayer. This allows for a theosis (deification) that does not abolish the distinction between Creator and creature, but unites them in such an intimate way that the distance between subject and object disappears in the Light of Tabor — the uncreated light of Christ’s Transfiguration, which is accessible even to a body purified by the Jesus Prayer.

Islamic Sufism

In Islam, the most powerful and systematic non-dualist formulation is that of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). His doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud (Unity of Being) asserts that only Allah truly exists and that all of creation is His self-manifestation (tajallī) through His infinite Names and Attributes. Each existent is a “mirror” in which a divine name is reflected and a “face” through which the divine contemplates itself from a particular angle.

Here, one sees the distance from Shankara, who declares the world māyā, or an illusion to dissolve. Ibn Arabi, on the other hand, declares it tajallī, or a precious and irreplaceable epiphany. Before Ibn Arabi, al-Hallaj (857–922) lived this non-duality thunderously: condemned to death for declaring “Ana’l-Haqq” (”I am the Truth”), he embodied fanā’—the extinction of the individual self in the divine presence—in which Hallaj is no longer speaking, but rather God through the empty space that Hallaj has become.

2. The non-dualism of Identity: Vedantic Hinduism

Of all the spiritual traditions, Hinduism — specifically the Advaita Vedanta school — has developed the most radical, systematic, and philosophically coherent non-dualism. Its most illustrious representative, Ādi Shankarāchārya (788–820 CE), deserves an in-depth examination of his work.

Shankara: the radical nature of identity

Shankara was born in Kerala and devoted his short yet intense life to traveling throughout India. He publicly debated his philosophical positions, commented on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, and founded four monasteries (mathas) at the four cardinal points of India. His work constitutes a rigorous reinterpretation of the Vedic texts as well as an original, remarkably coherent metaphysical construct.

His central position is encapsulated in a sentence whose apparent simplicity conceals profound depth: Brahman satyam, jagat mithyā, jīvo Brahmāiva nāparaḥ — “Brahman is real, the world is illusion, and the jīva (the individual soul) is not different from Brahman.” Three propositions, one single movement: affirm the One, relativize the many, and recognize identity.

For Shankara, the Brahman is the only existing reality—pure Consciousness (Chit), pure Being (Sat), and pure Bliss (Ānanda), indivisible. “Aham Brahmāsmi” — “I am the Brahman” — drawn from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, is one of the four Mahāvākyas (literally: “Great Sayings”), revealed formulas from the Upanishads that aim to actualize the ātman-Brahman identity. Shankara places these at the heart of Vedantic teaching. Tat Tvam Asi — "Thou art That" —, from the Chandogya Upanishad, is the declaration addressed to the disciple that what you seek so ardently, you already are.

Māyā is the concept by which Shankara explains the perception of the world as being multiple, diverse, and autonomous. Māyā is neither real nor unreal in the strict sense; it is anirvacanīya, or indefinable. It is neither being nor non-being, but rather a superimposition (adhyāsa) projected onto the screen of Brahman by the power of ignorance (avidyā). The classic analogy is that of a rope mistaken for a snake in the dark. In the light of direct knowledge, the snake (the multiple world) disappears as an illusion and only the rope (Brahman) remains. This devaluation of the phenomenal world is the point at which Shankara departs most radically from all Abrahamic traditions, Kashmiri Shaivism, and, as we will see, contemporary voices. However, it has a rigorous internal logic. If Brahman is the only reality, then multiplicity cannot be real in the same way as Brahman.

From an ordinary perspective, the individual soul (jīva) is a distinct being subject to karma, the law of causality of actions, rebirth, and suffering. However, from the ultimate perspective (pāramārthika), it is always Brahman, misunderstanding itself. Just as the light of a lamp, when projected through different filters, appears multiple and colored without changing its nature, the Ātman (the deep Self) appears multiple and individualized without ever ceasing to be Brahman. Therefore, liberation (moksha) is not a transformation of the soul nor an ascension to Brahman; it is a reversal of perception (jñāna). The jīva realizes that it has never been different from Brahman. There is nothing to accomplish and nowhere to go—only the error that must be dissolved by the light of this realization.

However, the mind must be prepared to receive it. Shankara’s preparatory discipline (sādhana-catuṣṭaya) is rigorous and includes discernment (viveka) between the real and the unreal, detachment (vairāgya) from the fruits of action, the six inner virtues (control of the mind and senses, patience, concentration, faith, and aspiration for liberation), and an ardent desire for deliverance (mumukṣutva). Next is the relationship with the guru, whose role is not to impart knowledge the disciple lacks, but to reveal what has always been present: not an external transmission, but the removal of the blindness that prevented seeing. Finally, there is prolonged meditation on the Mahāvākyas until truth ceases to be an intellectual concept and becomes an immediate, continuous, lived reality.

The jīvan-mukta, or liberated being, continues to act in the phenomenal world. However, he acts like a mirror that reflects everything without retaining anything. He is not identified with the ego or ignorant of his own nature. The world continues to appear, and conventions remain fully operative at their own level (vyāvahārika). The law of cause and effect, the necessity of right action, and the reality of others’ suffering are not denied. However, they no longer hold any existential significance for him because the misconception that took them for ultimate realities has been dispelled — he knows that he is Brahman.

Kashmiri Shaivism: affirmative non-dualism

Centuries after Shankara, Abhinavagupta (950–1016) developed a radically different form of non-dualism in 10th-century Kashmir. This was far from Vedantic Kerala and in a profoundly different Tantric and Shaivite context. While Shankara devalues the world as māyā, which was to be dissolved, Abhinavagupta celebrates it as līlā (spontaneous play) and spanda (living pulsation) of the divine consciousness of Shiva, the personal Absolute of Shaivism. Nothing is excluded from divine reality. Passion, suffering, sensory beauty, and diversity of forms are all vibrations of the Single Consciousness that plays at hiding in multiplicity for the pleasure of finding Itself again. Realization (pratyabhijñā, or re-cognition) is not the dissolution of the world into the silence of the Absolute. Rather, it is the recognition at the heart of the sensible world that everything has always been Shiva playing with Himself. This position is structurally closer to Sufism, Hasidic Kabbalah, and two contemporary voices than to Shankara’s pure Advaita.

3. The non-dualism without the Absolute: Buddhism

Buddhism introduces a radically different perspective into the landscape of non-dualism than all previous traditions because it affirms no positive Absolute on which to base its non-duality, which is more disturbing to any substantialist thinking. Neither Brahman, Tao, Ein Sof, nor God—yet the non-duality is as radical as any other.

The historical Buddha taught anattā, or the absence of a permanent self. What we call “I” is a temporary aggregation of five skandhas, or aggregates: material form, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. These aggregates have no fixed substance. This is not yet non-dualism in the full sense, but it is its foundation: If I have no fixed, separate self, the boundary between myself and the rest of the world becomes porous.

Theravada buddhism

The Theravada school, a faithful guardian of the Pali Canon, stops there in its de-substantialization. Its Abhidharma philosophy maintains that, although the self is empty, the dharmas (elementary phenomena) that comprise it have a real existence, however fleeting it may be. Theravāda preserves a fundamental structural duality: saṃsāra and Nibbāna —the Pāli term for what Sanskrit calls Nirvāṇa. The former refers to the cycle of existences conditioned by karma and ignorance. The latter refers to the unconditioned state where this cycle ends without leaving any residue. Liberation is a transition from the former to the latter. This is a non-dualism of the subject, but not of ultimate realities.

Mahayana buddhism and Nagarjuna

Mahayana took a decisive step with Nagarjuna (2nd century) and his doctrine of shunyata: not only is the self empty of intrinsic existence, but all dharmas, without exception, are empty—including nirvana itself and emptiness itself. The formula is unequivocal: “Saṃsāra is no different from Nirvāṇa.” This is an unexpected point of contact with Shankara, who asserts that liberation is not in any other place than this world because the world is Brahman. Nāgārjuna asserts the same thing, but for a different reason: there is nowhere else to go. However, there is a significant difference: for Shankara, Brahman is real, and the world is an illusion; for Nāgārjuna, nothing has intrinsic existence, not even the positively named Absolute.

The great ethical contribution of Mahayana Buddhism is the bodhisattva ideal: a being who, having realized the emptiness of any distinction between the self and others, chooses to remain in the cycle of existence until all beings are liberated. While Shankara’s Advaita leads logically to an inward-facing liberation —for the jīvan-mukta, others are merely Brahman playing hide-and-seek—Mahayana asserts that if others are not inherently separate from me, my liberation without theirs would be a contradiction in terms. Universal compassion (karuṇā) is the natural extension, not an added moral component, of non-duality.

Yogācāra school

The Yogācāra school, also known as “Consciousness-Only” (vijñaptimātra), was developed by the brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth or fifth century. This school approaches non-duality from a different angle, focusing on the non-separation of subject and object in consciousness. Everything experienced as an external object is a projection of storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). Liberation consists of purifying this consciousness to reveal the nature of Buddha (tathāgatagarbha)—the primordial, awakened consciousness that is always present and never defiled. This notion of pure, original consciousness is closer to Shankara’s concept of Brahman than Nāgārjuna would have liked. The Mādhyamika masters did not fail to point this out.

This fundamental insight—that awakening is a nature to be recognized, not a state to be constructed—is present in both Tathāgatagarbha Yogācāra and Śūnyatā Mādhyamika. It finds its living expression in three major contemplative traditions of East and Central Asia.

Japanese Zen

In Japanese Zen, the heir to Chinese Chan (which itself emerged from the intersection of Mādhyamaka and Taoism), the practice of zazen is not a preparatory exercise for awakening; rather, it is awakening in action. Master Dōgen expressed this idea of the unity of practice and realization in the concept of shikan-taza: simply sitting without purpose or expectation as a direct expression of the Buddha nature already present.

Tibetan Dzogchen

Tibetan Dzogchen, literally “Great Perfection,” developed in the Nyingma and Bön traditions, takes this logic to its most radical conclusion: there is no practice toward enlightenment since enlightenment is the primordial nature of the mind prior to any practice. Its central teaching is based on rigpa, the primordial, clear, vast, and centerless awakened consciousness that constitutes the profound nature of all beings. This consciousness is not tainted by ordinary obscurations, no more than the sky is altered by passing clouds. Therefore, practice does not create rigpa; it dissolves the cognitive and emotional veils that prevent us from recognizing it directly.

Mahāmudrā and the Kagyu lineage

The Mahāmudrā of the Kagyu lineage, literally meaning “Great Seal,” is structurally analogous to Dzogchen, despite coming from a different tantric transmission. Mahāmudrā refers to the ultimate nature of mind—luminous, empty, and cognitively awakened—and to the path of gradually recognizing it. In both Tibetan and Zen traditions, the metaphor is the same: the goal is not to construct something that does not yet exist, but rather to cease obscuring what has always been there.

Chan master Huang Po formulated this convergence with disconcerting precision, and it resonates with equal force in all three traditions: “The only mistake is to seek.”

This is not because the effort is useless—all three traditions involve rigorous disciplines—but because seeking outside of oneself that which has never ceased to exist within oneself is the very structure of delusion. The paradox is complete: Practice is necessary but ultimately dissolves the seeker.

4. The non-dualism of Fluidity: Taoism

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu’s Taoism offers perhaps the most poetically honest formulation of the Absolute in religious history. This is because they begin by recognizing the radical inadequacy of language. “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” While Shankara builds an impenetrable philosophical edifice to designate Brahman, Lao Tzu immediately dismantles any system by pointing out that the Tao defies systematization.

The Tao is the void from which everything emerges and the fullness from which everything proceeds; it is both immobility and movement; it is the One of which the Two (Yin and Yang) and the ten thousand beings are expressions. Taoist non-duality does not say, “Everything is one” — that would still be too conceptual. Rather, it shows that the yin/yang duality is itself an expression of a deeper unity that can never be fixed in a formula but rather inhabited in the fluidity of existence.

The practical consequence of this vision is wu wei—non-action, effortless action, or action perfectly aligned with the natural movement of things, producing no resistance. Compared to Shankara, the contrast is striking. Advaita calls for a clean break with the world of māyā through discriminative knowledge, whereas Taoism seeks gradual harmonization, the release of resistance, and a return to natural fluidity. The non-dualistic view of evil is particularly significant here and is radically different from all Abrahamic traditions. Yin is not the enemy of Yang; rather, it is its necessary and complementary transitory phase. Darkness is not the opposite of light; it is a prerequisite for its emergence. Rest is not the opposite of movement; it is its breath. Emptiness is not the opposite of fullness; it is its receptacle.

From this perspective, what we call “evil” is not an autonomous ontological reality or an adverse power that opposes good from another principle. Rather, it is a phase of the total movement—a moment in the cycle when force withdraws in order to return stronger and darkness precedes light. The Tao Te Ching formulates this idea with disconcerting precision: “Return is the movement of the Tao.” Everything that descends rises again; everything that contracts expands—not out of naive optimism, but because polarity is the structure of manifested reality itself.

This intuition—that evil is good in gestation, that night is a necessary condition for dawn, and that trial is a disguised ascending force—will not remain confined to Taoism. It will pass through the centuries to resurface with striking vigor in occupied Hungary in 1943. “Evil is good in the making, but not yet ready,” as we shall see in Dialogues with the Angel—a phrase that could have come from the Tao Te Ching itself.

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III. Two Voices of the 20th Century: the Revelation of Arès and Dialogues with the Angel

These two texts are testimonies that emerged in the heart of the 20th century in conditions of existential urgency. They bear a spiritual message of such coherence and depth that it cannot be ignored in any honest mapping of contemporary non-dualism. A tradition implies transmission over several generations, a community of interpreters, and hermeneutic sedimentation—a duration that these two texts do not yet possess. Therefore, they do not have the authority of antiquity; they have the authority of freshness and urgency. It is precisely this freshness—the fact that they were spoken yesterday in our world, in our languages, and in the midst of our catastrophes—that gives them particular resonance for contemporary readers.

Two texts received in times of crisis.

The Revelation of Arès is a direct divine message that Michel Potay received in Arès, France, in 1974 and 1977, when the foundations of today’s crises were forming. The message unfolds in two stages: forty appearances of Christ in 1974 and five theophanies of G.od Himself in 1977. Recorded in two texts with radically different modes of expression but both strikingly original in style and theology, the Revelation of Arès is part of the full Abrahamic tradition of prophetic revelations. In this tradition, the Divine communicates directly with humans, without intermediaries, and with full authority as the Author of existence.

The Dialogues with the Angel emerged amid immediate and deadly violence in Hungary from June 1943 to November 1944. During this time, the Wehrmacht occupied the country, and mass deportations decimated the Jewish community. Four artists—Hanna Dallos, Lili Strausz, Joseph Kreutzer, and Gitta Mallasz—chose to live together in a decorative arts workshop in Budaliget to lead a more meaningful life. One day, after Gitta read a text to Hanna, Hanna simply said: “Be careful, it’s no longer me speaking!” She then began to convey words that clearly did not belong to her. Over the next seventeen months, Gitta recorded 88 interviews word for word. Hanna, Lili, and Joseph died in the camps. Gitta, the sole survivor, took the notebooks to France and published them in 1976 with Aubier.

The fact that these two texts were received during the same period, with their publications following each other almost without an interval—the Gospel given to Arès, the first part of the Revelation, in 1975; Dialogues with the Angel in 1976; then, in 1978, the beginning of the publication of the Book from the theophanies of 1977— is a coincidence that I have never ceased to meditate on. However, their respective contexts differ in nature, and this difference itself is instructive.

In Dialogues, destruction is immediate; three of the four protagonists die in the camps, and the luminous word emerges from the heart of annihilation. In the Revelation of Arès, the catastrophe has not yet occurred—it is a premonition in a world that believes itself rebuilt. Night declared on one side, night foreseen on the other: and in both cases, the same paradox that non-dualism has always been able to formulate—the Real does not depend on conditions.

What deeply unites them?

The two texts have numerous structural similarities that justify reading them together.

First, they both name the ultimate reality: Life. The Revelation of Arès states, “Life is being in the infinite, and life having spread throughout this infinite, to be human is to live among countless living beings.” The Dialogues say: “Our life is a transition to the ONE LIFE.” And again: “From eternal life comes temporal life, and from temporal life comes eternal life.” This lexical coincidence is not insignificant; it signals the same profound ontological intuition: the Absolute is not a cold abstraction—not Shankara’s impersonal Brahman, not the de-substantialized Śūnyatā, and not the unspeakable Tao—but rather, a living, dynamic presence that is personal without being personalistic.

Secondly, both reject the dissolution of the person in the Absolute. While Shankara absorbs the jiva into Brahman completely, Theravada Buddhism seeks to escape saṃsāra, and even the most radical Sufism celebrates fanā as the annihilation of the ego, these texts firmly maintain that the person is not an obstacle to union; rather, he is its condition. “One cannot skip the passage through individuality,” say the Dialogues. “The human being is free to be nothing or to reintegrate into Being beyond the Infinite,” says the Revelation of Arès. In both cases, individual freedom is not a residue to be dissolved, but rather, an absolute dignity to be fulfilled.

Michel Potay compares the Revelation of Arès to Shankara: “Shankara is non-duality, with no separation between the being that is each of us and the Whole. This is evident in the Revelation of Arès. Be One in Yourself (xxiv/1).” However, he also emphasizes the differences between the two. While pure Advaita absorbs individuality into Brahman without remainder, the Revelation of Arès preserves individual freedom as a constitutive dignity of the human being, not as a residue to be dissolved.

Thirdly, the Revelation of Arès and the Dialogues with the Angel both affirm the reality and value of the world as a place of transformation. Matter, history, relationships, beauty, and suffering are not illusions, expendable epiphanies, or mere conventions. It is here, in the density of the real world, that reunification with Life takes place. The Revelation of Arès makes collective ethical transformation—love, forgiveness, peace, and the intelligence of the heart—the royal road to this return. The Dialogues with the Angel make the creative vocation of humans their watchword: ‘Creators, not dreamy, sleepy consumers.’

Fourthly, both texts establish a non-dualistic view of suffering and evil. The Revelation of Arès does not present evil, suffering, and death as an eternal metaphysical reality but as a temporary consequence of misguided human freedom. This consequence is reversible through penance—not contrition, but a rebirth of life itself through constant improvement. The Dialogues express this idea strikingly, with a profound echo of Taoism: “Evil is good in the making, but not yet ready.” The burden, the obstacle, the trial — “they become a gift, not a punishment”, because they are the necessary resistance that allows the ascending force to exert itself.

What sets them apart?

These profound similarities should not obscure the real differences that make the two texts complementary rather than identical.

The Revelation of Arès is a direct divine word, without an angelic intermediary, in the full Abrahamic tradition. In contrast, the Dialogues are mediated by an angelic figure — “The Angel is my life-giving half, and I am his life-giving half”; “You are my denser equal” — whose relationship with humans is constitutive of non-duality. In this relationship, two halves of a single being seek each other in structural reciprocity. This reciprocity between humans and angels is nonexistent in the Revelation of Arès, where the relationship with the Creator is asymmetrical by nature. It is the unique contribution of the Dialogues to the mapping of non-dualism.

The Revelation of Arès has an explicit eschatological and communal dimension: penance as the collective transformation of all humanity over generations—the Tiqqun of an entire species. The Dialogues focus on the fulfillment of the individual in their relationship with the angel. Their scope is more personal and silent on collective and cosmological dimensions. These two differences complement each other: one reminds us that spiritual transformation is a collective task involving the destiny of all humanity, and the other reminds us that it begins in the most immediate intimacy—between a human being and the most luminous part of themselves.

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Provisional conclusion: the map is not the territory!

Here is the map—or rather, the maps. There are at least six of them, some of which overlap and some of which are irreconcilable. Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism are six ways of naming the same wound and designating the same foundation of unity. They are six architectures of the Absolute, whose differences are revelations of the nature of reality that each seeks to attain, not inaccuracies to be corrected. Emerging in the heart of the 20th century and its dangers are two voices that name this reality with a single word: Life. These voices refuse with remarkable firmness to dissolve the person into unity on the pretext of reaching it.

However, a map, no matter how detailed, is not the territory. The most urgent and concrete question that now arises is not how these traditions name what separates us. Rather, it is: How do they propose to cross the veil? What disciplines, practices, and arts of attention have they forged so that knowledge of non-duality becomes a lived reality and not just a beautiful idea? When their paths diverge—on the value of the world, the destiny of the individual in union, and spiritual authority—are these divergences obstacles or doors of their own kind?

The second part of this journey will explore these questions.

→ Next article: The wound of Duality — and the Return (2/3). How the great spiritual traditions, their maps of consciousness, and their practical methods outline paths for transcending duality and returning to unity.

Read also: A word that circulates #2 — and digs into a real question! A dialogue between two readers on spiritual discernment and the Revealed Word, a compilation of four days of comments on this article.

To go further

Kabbalah

— Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken Books
— Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, HarperOne

Christian Mysticism

— Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe, Crossroad Publishing
— Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. James A. Wiseman, Paulist Press

Sufism

— Ibn Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusūs al-Hikam), trans. R.W.J. Austin, Paulist Press
— William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, SUNY Press

Advaita Vedanta

— Adi Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani (The Crest Jewel of Discrimination), trans. Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood, Vedanta Press
— Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction, University of Hawaii Press

Buddhism

— Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā), trans. Jay L. Garfield, Oxford University Press
— Matthieu Ricard & Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus, Crown Publishers

Taoism

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell, Harper Perennial
— Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson, Columbia University Press

The two contemporary voices

— Gitta Mallasz, Talking with Angels, Daimon Verlag
— The Revelation of Arès, Éditions Adira (bilingual French-English edition)
— Michel Potay, Blog — michelpotayblog.net — open access, ongoing commentaries

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

Do you see, in our time, a spiritual or cultural heritage that remains active, for better, for worse, or in some ambiguous fashion? Share your reading in the comments to spark discussion.

And if you wish to share more broadly your reflection on the heritages that shape us, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 8 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

The word “gratitude” comes from the Latin “gratus,” meaning “pleasant,” “precious,” or “worthy of being welcomed with joy.” The same root gave us grace and gratuity. At its core, to feel gratitude is to recognize that what is given to us has value — and that this value comes from somewhere beyond ourselves.

I. Untangling the confusion

Gratitude suffers from a persistent misunderstanding. It is too often reduced to a social nicety—a well-mannered thank you or a social obligation toward someone who has done us a favor. The word “thanks” comes from a different root. The French word “merci” derives from the Latin “merces,” meaning “wages” or “reward.” This etymology reveals our ordinary relationship with gratitude. We instinctively experience gratitude as a debt to be honored, a gesture of reciprocity within the great commerce of human relations. Yet, authentic gratitude is of an entirely different nature. It is not necessarily directed toward an identifiable person, nor does it settle any account. It is an inner state, a way of inhabiting the world by recognizing that life gives us infinitely more than we could ever demand from it. As Montaigne, one of the first to introduce the word into French in the 16th century, observed, it requires a lucidity of the heart: seeing what is without taking it for granted.

II. A quality that must be cultivated

Although gratitude may arise spontaneously within us, it does not take root without effort, especially in our societies saturated with stimulation where attention is constantly captured, dispersed, and exhausted. Like any worthy inner quality, gratitude is acquired through patiently reorienting one’s gaze. This effort begins with a simple decision: to observe the world differently and rediscover what we once knew naturally as children—to marvel at what seems insignificant, to hear the song of a bird, to sense the quality of light at a particular hour, and to receive an unexpected smile as a token of love from life itself. This retraining of attention is not an escape from the difficult reality of the world. On the contrary, it is a way to avoid being overwhelmed by it while keeping an awareness of the gifts bestowed upon us alive, especially in times of hardship. Indeed, for those who sincerely work on themselves, even difficult situations can become an occasion for gratitude. They confront us with our limits, reveal our hidden resources, and help us grow in ways that ease alone would keep us asleep.

III. What the traditions tell us

The great spiritual traditions agree on this point: gratitude is not just another pleasant feeling — it is an essential attitude toward existence, inseparable from spiritual life itself. In Judaism, gratitude lies at the heart of daily prayer. The blessings, or berakhot, that believers are invited to recite a hundred times a day are moments of conscious gratitude for the gifts of creation, from the greatest to the most infinitesimal. In Christianity, the Eucharist—whose name derives from the Greek eucharistia, meaning “beautiful grace” or “beautiful thanks”—places gratitude at the center of the act of faith. Giving thanks is not a secondary gesture; it is the primary spiritual act. In Islam, the concept of shukr, thankfulness toward God, is one of the cardinal virtues. The Quran promises, “If you are grateful, I will surely increase My favors upon you” (14:7), recalling an essential aspect of gratitude: gratitude does not deplete what it receives; it amplifies it. In Buddhism, gratitude naturally flows from mindfulness. Perceiving the interdependence of all beings means recognizing that nothing we are was built alone and that this debt to life can only be repaid through loving attention to our surroundings. In Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that those who receive the gifts of creation without offering anything in return live like thieves. Thus, gratitude is a sacred duty, not a sentimental option. The same profound intuition is found everywhere: gratitude is the gesture by which human beings step out of the illusion of self-sufficiency.

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IV. A countercultural virtue in an age of lack

Our era has a paradoxical relationship with gratitude. It is spoken of at length—the word has colonized social media, personal development journals, and wellness applications—yet its genuine practice is becoming more difficult. Authentic gratitude requires satisfaction with what one has, if only momentarily. However, the entire architecture of our economy rests upon permanent dissatisfaction: wanting more, possessing more, and being more visible. In this context, to reclaim gratitude is a countercultural choice, almost radical. It means measuring the richness of one’s life not by what it lacks but by what it already contains that is precious. Lao Tzu sensed this in the Tao Te Ching: “There is no greater misfortune than never knowing contentment” (Ch. 46). When authentic gratitude truly takes hold, it does not close in on itself; it compels in the strongest sense of the word. It urges us to share this state of awakening and help those around us open to the beauty of life in turn. After all, one cannot remain grateful long without wishing to contribute to the circulation of what has been given.

In this sense, gratitude naturally extends humility, the first entry in this Abécédaire. Humility clears the inner space of self-sufficiency, and gratitude fills it with a gentle, steady light. Together, they form the foundation of any authentic spiritual life: open hands and a heart that knows how to say thank you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.