Mystique

"To know the spiritual experience of the other" that was the vocation young Louis Massignon, when he was still an agnostic, had when he discovered Sufi Hallaj's life, who had been crucified in 922 in Baghdad. Massignon is in the middle of the colonial period, during the years 1900, and the economic and political interests were drawing the attention of everyone. Indeed, at that time, there were few western people who really tried to penetrate "the spirituality of the other": Islam. Massignon was one of them.

Unlike many of his contemporaneous who facing the gradual decay of modern world take a waiting posture, Alain Chevillat, acts, organizes. His structure, Terre du Ciel, created in 1990 suggests today many activities: edition, travels, spiritual retreats; All these activities target the same goal, a same utopia: the reestablishment of a more harmonious world, where man doesn't consider himself as omniscient and omnipotent, where the quest, the spiritual dimension, would be replaced at the center of life.

Douglas Harding is an English spiritual master (1909-2007) not well-known in France. Born in Suffolk in Christian fundamentalist sect, he decides to discover life by himself and leaves at 21 years-old his family. This will bring him to exhort his auditors to question every form of belief system and to experience by themselves what they call reality.

Are we capable to appreciate a raspberry distinguishing - without dividing - its form, its color and its taste?  Are we able to identify and to dissociate sun, air, and light? On these same distinction principles and non-separation, ternary anthropology considers that each man's life participates in three different orders of life: physical, mental and spiritual of which participate body, soul and spirit.

Rabia is considered as the greatest saint of the Sunnite world. There are many Muslim saints but Rabia is certainly the only one to have an ardor so important nowadays, it is still the object of veneration in Sufi communities and for simple believers who continue to pray her... and sometimes who see their wishes fulfilled. Yet from Rabia's life, we have no tracks of her words, her poems were transmitted to us by Sufis long after she died. 'Attâr, her official biograph, lived four centuries after her. Ibn'Arabî and El Ghazâli called her "the crown of men".

"The place where your treasure is, there will be your heart" says Jesus in Mathew's Gospel.
In spiritual traditions and particularly in mysticism, heart means the center of the being, his deep conscience and the place of transcendental knowledge. This is in the secret chamber or this mirror that divinity knows and admires. Thus heart becomes the place of revelations, sudden intuitions, visions and mystic union. That's why it opens a path for everyone: the way of the heart.

"There is a reality out of the world, that is to say out of space time, out of men's mental universe, out of all the field which human skills can reach. (...) It's from it that falls in this world all the good capable of existing, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, all subordination of human condition to obligations" writes Simone Weil in "Ecrits de Londres".

If we compare true religions under their inferior customs aspects, speculative theologies, popular beliefs, we only see differences, and, all the tentatives of syncretism (...) are naive and mistaken. But if we consider the real thought, practical thought (...), we find in them the same truths" writes René Daumal.

The Grand Jeu was both the name of a magazine and of the group of which it was the expression from 1927 to 1932.
Composed by followers such as René Daumal, Roger Vailland, Robert Meyrat, Roger Gilbert-Leconte, Joseph Sima, Pierre Audard, André Delons, Maurice Henry, Pierre Minet, the group founded on the revolt and associated to surrealism, didn't stop to continue his researches proving the existence of a knowledge based on mystic experience of all time and to fight against those who betrayed the revelation.