Quotes from Daniel Odier

D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: "Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!

The quest for this simple bliss, free from dogmas and religious beliefs, from submission to a priesthood, and from the hope of being sanctified by others, is the object of each person's search.

All that is proscribed, all that is upheld, the yogas based on such limbs as the control of breath or other things, all that is false.

In an era where the word communication reigns, where an unlimited mass of information can be accessed within a few seconds, we complain about having lost contact with our body and with other human beings. We suffer from extreme solitude, we suffer from no longer touching each other, we suffer from the "virtualization" of our feelings, the expression of our emotions, and our sensorality.

Everything that we abandon in the false dream of conforming to a system is precisely what will subsequently come along and block our path.

it is no longer a question of cutting off the senses, desires, and passions; on the contrary, it is a question of mounting these high-spirited, steedlike messengers in full consciousness so that they may carry us rapidly to a continuous presence to the world.

Belonging to groups often generates a kind of narcosis that gives us the illusion of sharing something missing from all the members of the group as individuals: completeness. Our main fear—fear of dissolution, of being nothing—keeps us from realizing that when we think we are one particular thing, and therefore isolated, we indeed become only that thing and lose the rest.

a single instant of total presence was worth the reading of all the texts, all the poets, all the philosophers.

There is neither transcendence nor purification.

With disillusioned smiles, we allow our young people to tempt or try out their passion, desire, and sensorality, knowing that one day they will be like us, weary and well behaved out of obligation.

What would be the worth of a body whose marvelous functionings were not operating? How would consciousness spherically unfold itself within a frozen form not tending toward natural fluidity?

This is the battle of impulsiveness against spontaneity. Impulsiveness is brutal and destructive, because it is unconscious of the other and of the world. Spontaneity is full of grace, for it is granted immediately through consciousness to the reality of the environment.

The body immediately confers perfection, that is, certainty with regard to the true nature of things . . . thanks to the contact with the power of the Self," says Abhinavagupta.

Why do almost all the spiritual paths prohibit sensorality, desire, and passion? Why cut off a part of human potential in order to find plenitude? What kind of plenitude would it be if it did not include the totality of the human?

Desire exists in you as in everything. Realize that it also resides in objects and in all that the mind can grasp. Then, in discovering the universality of desire, enter its radiant space.

What if desire were to desire something other than objects?" the Tantric masters then wondered. If desire were simply the incandescence that gives us the feeling of being alive, were intensity, were the tremoring vibration that carries us, then it would be absurd to allow it to be consumed by objects and to lose it once we possess the object or realize we cannot attain it.

the yogi sees the world as desire. Everything—a leaf falling from a tree, the sky, the snow, the water he drinks, his food—desires him.

Can that be called perfect knowledge . . . If one is not released while enjoying the pleasures of sense? 2 sings Saraha, one of the Buddhist masters who lived sometime between the second and seventh centuries.

We do not touch in the same way a teacup that desires us, we do not look in the same way at a tree that desires us, because each contact with reality becomes a celebration of the universality of desire. Fixation on a single object thus ceases to exist.

When a single object takes an exclusive place in our mind, when our being reaches toward this object in a sort of contracted tension, movement ceases within us and suffering finds its home in us.

when our desire occupies all of space the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others.

Oh Devi, some people claim, "The body is made up of impurities such as germs, worms, faeces, urine, phlegm, blood, flesh, skin, and so on. How can we offer such a body to the Guru?" With thoughts like these, they don't make an offering.

Chinul, the twelfth-century Korean Ch'an master, expresses this freedom magnificently in his treatise Secrets of Cultivating the Mind:

A peaceful mind realizes that it has the ability to grasp everything instantaneously. It no longer has to "stockpile" the materials of reality in order to deal with them later. It sees things directly, without projection and without judgment, in all their evidence and obviousness, in their naked reality.