“there is no way to deliverance, since we have never been enslaved…there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to do. Man has nothing to “do” directly to experience his total and infinitely happy freedom. What he has to do is indirect and negative. What he has to understand is the disappointing illusion of all the paths he can propose to himself When he has devalued the very notion of all imaginable paths, then “satori” will break out, the real vision that there is no path, because there is no need to go anywhere, because from all eternity we were at the unique and principled center of everything.”
Dr. Hubert Benoit
Moving from our periphery to our center is the path to liberation, it always has been. But on the periphery stands the personality: it seems strong, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. Religions and teachings often come from founders, visionaries. But when the founder becomes more important than his teaching, when the messenger eclipses the message, all the possibilities of distortions and perversions appear.
Because the master becomes the unique principle of elevation and liberation, and no longer his teaching. This is then the appearance of the messianic symptom. The movement becomes an institution, the teachings dogmas, the founder a savior. The personality of the founder of a spiritual movement or religion is important for its appearance and development, the personality around which the movement is built. But as teaching becomes an institution, it becomes detached from its founding principle. It becomes fixed, because it is immobilized by temporal and personal interests. The teaching becomes literal and historical: the founder, instead of being a model to imitate, becomes a star to admire. Admiration replaces teaching, idolatry erases our depths, literal interpretation obscures any resonance with interiority. Everything becomes externalized.
We ourselves are our jailer and our liberator, we are both the architects of our enslavement and our liberation, the actors of our slavery and our emancipation. The bars of our prison were forged by us alone, it is up to us to open them. The teachings of realized beings, founders of spiritual movements, show us through their examples the path to liberation. They serve as examples, as mirrors to our own individual realization. But the latter cannot be achieved only by ourselves, through our experiences, our joys and our sufferings. We are our only savior.
Seeking only external help distances us from ourselves, deprives us of our unique potential for liberation. It’s all there, within us. From the depths of our soul, to our psychic structures and our material body. Nothing is missing. We just need to dive in and communicate between the different levels of our being. Self-knowledge is the key to opening this path. And the teachings are there to help us in this process, if we approach them in their correct dimensions.
The path of liberation is not outward, but inward. Making contact with reality from our center, and no longer from our surface, is to put the personality in its rightful place. All hope, expectation, worship are dead ends distancing us from ourselves. It is then no longer necessary to look outside oneself, the individual and unique inner path becomes evident. But it is about leaving a state of infantilism and passivity, and taking one’s celestial destiny in hand. It is also about freeing oneself from one’s own personality, as well as from external personalities. It’s about becoming impersonal, about dying to ourselves.
External saviors then become resonances of our own depths, simple beacons of our own darkness. They are not our path, but show it.