by Ma Muktananda | Jun 10, 2025
“Institutionalized religions, considered from their historical formation, are founded on a misunderstanding that not only runs through them, but constitutes them from their very foundations. When confronted with mystery, the disciples were unable to sustain the tension of a quest that demanded solitude, silence, surrender, and radical exposure. Unable to inhabit that wilderness, they sought in the proximity of others the illusion of a certainty they could not yet find in their own experience. They confused closeness with clarity, group cohesion with a lucidity that can only be achieved individually. They clung to each other like blind people who, holding hands, imagine that contact can replace vision, clarity. From there, from that impulse to alleviate vertigo, arose the institutional machinery of the sacred: temples, doctrines, theologies, superstitions, beliefs, hierarchies, and authority. Not as the natural unfolding of a shared truth, but as protection against the impossible to define.
However, truth does not circulate through accumulation or contagion. It is not inherited, transferred, or sustained by numbers. Its appearance is always singular, unrepeatable, and belongs to the non-transferable realm of the inner self. It is not born of the relationship between disciples, but of the fire that each one, in the solitude of their presence before the master, decides to light—or not. For this reason, it is imprecise to speak of community or collectivity in this context. There is no established brotherhood among disciples, but merely a convergence. They are not linked horizontally, but share a direction. They advance separately, without proclamation, guided by a common light that is not shared, even though they all walk toward it. And if they cross paths on that journey, they do not hold back: they recognize each other, perhaps smile, and continue on their way. There is no bond that ties them together, no form that organizes them. What remains is a discreet, real resonance that does not fix identities or raise emblems. Only that deserves the name sacred. Everything else—systems, creeds, institutions, doctrines, hierarchies—is administration wrapped in fervor. It is only domination and control disguised as spirituality or religious enthusiasm.
The true disciple does not found organizations. He does not build structures, institute traditions, or leave schools or organizations. His last gesture is simply to disappear.”
by Ma Muktananda | Jun 8, 2025
“The crowd is rarely interested in the truth. The masses eagerly seek a stable form of tranquility. The public does not want reality to intrude on their lives; they want their routine to remain intact. There is no impulse toward the unknown, only a need for confirmation. That is why, when a figure who has crossed the threshold of collective slumber emerges—a Master like Buddha, Rumi, Rabbi Akiva, Mahavira, Shankara, or any individual whose very presence disrupts the consensus—they are not welcomed as a blessing. They are perceived as a crack. It is not what they say that disturbs, but what they represent. Their mere presence, without preaching or convincing, embodies a living alternative. That is why they make people uncomfortable and why they hurt. A true Master is a mirror without mercy or distortion, and few can tolerate seeing themselves without the relief of justifications.
The reaction to such a presence is not uniform. It responds to the degree of cultural elaboration of the context in which it appears. In societies where latent violence predominates, it is suppressed, eliminated. The elimination of the body seems to offer, illusorily, the relief of having dispelled the threat. In more refined environments, a seemingly opposite but functionally analogous gesture is resorted to: religious worship. Turning the other into a sacred object based on tradition is not homage, but displacement. They are venerated so as not to have to listen to them. They are turned into myths so as not to confront the possibility that their example might challenge our lives. The altar thus fulfills a function of closure: it creates a distance that guarantees immunity. The candles do not illuminate, they obscure. The chants, instead of accompanying, cover up.
Both the crucifixion of Christ and the sanctification of Buddha are not contradictory gestures. They are modulations of the same negation. Both operations preserve the continuity of the common order. Because if Jesus does not pretend, then the rest of us do. And if Buddha is right, our usual structure of thought—time, identity, suffering—is shaken. The mere possibility that his word is valid destabilizes more than any external threat. That is why the functional option is chosen: to suppress or to consecrate. Both options allow the persistence of the identical.
Over time, this logic has become entrenched. It has become a cultural habit. Whenever a consciousness emerges that exceeds the margins, it is designated as an exception. It is presented as an admirable phenomenon, albeit irreproducible. This nullifies its contagious force. What could have been a call becomes an object of contemplation. The gesture that seemed like recognition is, in reality, neutralization. Because truth does not burst forth as a rarity: it does so as a demand. It does not affirm structures; it cracks them open. It does not seek disciples; it calls on those who are willing to dissolve the simulacrum.
The awakened do not ask for allegiance or followers, nor do they create doctrines, philosophies, or theologies. They do not need institutions, organizations, or altars. They do not demand adherence. Their mere presence demands a renunciation: that which has not been lived must collapse. The presence of the enlightened Master does not demand renunciation of what has been lived, but rather that we continue to sustain the unlived life, that is, the lie, the evasion, the denied potential, the illusion, the fantasies. Their presence is a call not to prevent the collapse of the fictitious structure built to prevent awakening. That is why the true Master does not console. They do not affirm or contain. They do not sustain the imagined. He breaks, dismantles, exposes, and deconstructs. And therein lies his power.
The question, therefore, is not whether one can accept this truth. The real dilemma is whether there is anyone willing to let themselves be swept away by it. Not as self-flagellation, but as the only way to access reality.”
by Ma Muktananda | May 31, 2025
“The search for truth is much more than intellectual refinement or a luxury for the idle mind. It is a rupture, a decision that, once made, breaks with conventional forms of comfort, with the inertia of habit, and with the urge to stay safe. It is not about achieving balance, inner well-being, or even feeling more lucid. It is simply about observing. But observing, in this sense, is not comforting. It disarms. It does not organize what has been experienced; it calls it into question. The truth, when it imposes itself, does so without embellishment: it presents itself as a relentless form of clarity that undoes the supports that gave shape to the previous life. Pascal put it bluntly: “Man is endlessly surpassing himself.” Living is not enough; one must understand what it means to be that which lives. And that understanding does not liberate: it destabilizes.
Those who seriously incline toward truth learn, almost instinctively, to distrust happiness when it presents itself as a horizon. They do not deny it, but they cease to expect it. It becomes, at best, an unnoticed consequence or a residue. Happiness, once erected as an end in itself, degenerates into a caricature: it becomes something that the more it is pursued, the less it is achieved. Epicurus—misunderstood for centuries—did not glorify pleasure without measure, but rather lucid detachment. He did not seek excess, but rather the serenity that comes when one stops desiring what one does not need. For him, the wise man does not accumulate stimuli: he learns to let go. And in that letting go, he finds a form of peace that does not depend on euphoria, but on freedom.
Nietzsche, from a tragic sensibility, warned that truth does not console. It does not calm. It does not save. It is an unassimilable force, a presence that does not fit into our emotional structures. Truth—when it is such—bursts in as something that cannot be dominated or instrumentalized. It has no therapeutic function. It is not there to make us feel better. Freud, in different language but with the same harshness, reminded us bluntly: “We cannot bear the truth.” Because truth deactivates the symbolic systems that sustain our identity. Seeing is not synonymous with discomfort. But sometimes it is the only way not to live with our backs turned to reality.
Eastern traditions captured this same experience from another angle. Lao Tzu, in his austere language, left a sentence that continues to resonate: “Knowing others is wisdom; knowing oneself is enlightenment.” It is not about accumulating knowledge, but about emptying the self. Stripping it of its illusions, its fixed structures, its habits of interpretation. Buddhism insists time and again: suffering is not extinguished by cultivating new gratifications, but by understanding the transience of all forms. Understanding impermanence is not comforting: it requires going through the helplessness that comes when all supports have been lost. Clarity cannot be achieved without first going through heartbreak. And at this point, the distinction becomes unavoidable. Ultimately, there are two ways of living life. There are those who seek pleasure, enjoyment, happiness. And there are those who seek truth. The former may dress themselves in spirituality, adopt lofty language, practice contemplative disciplines. But their desiring structure remains intact: they seek to achieve something, to consolidate an experience, to fix a state. They have not renounced the desire to feel good, comfortable, satisfied, to assert themselves, to remain. The latter, on the other hand, know that there is no safe place. That seeing implies exposing oneself. That knowing requires letting go of even what seemed most familiar. Kierkegaard gave this experience an exact name: “anguish.” Not as a sign of illness, but as a sign that one has ceased to inhabit the world as one strolls through a garden.
Those who seek the truth do not ask about happiness. Not because they despise that state, but because they have understood that the question no longer carries any weight. What appears in its place is not fulfillment, well-being, or enlightenment. It is a form of presence stripped bare, unadorned, without promises. It does not intoxicate or exalt. It does not anesthetize. It is more like a clear silence, a serenity without guarantees, an inner disposition in which reality is no longer the enemy. When all desire to impose meaning has ceased, something becomes still. Not because there are answers, but because the compulsion to impose them has disappeared.
The paradox is fierce but fruitful: only those who have stopped seeking happiness as a goal or pleasure as an objective seem capable of touching a more honest form of peace. Not a peace that is produced, induced, or promised. A peace that appears unexpectedly when one stops pursuing it. It is not born of a technique, method, or formula. It is the side effect of silent fidelity. Of uncompromising dedication. Of an insistence that, over time, allows one to maintain clarity even when everything around them is shaking. That clarity, fragile but firm, does not break in the face of pain, loss, or even the end.
Human beings who pursue happiness will end up, at best, anesthetized. They will find an elegant oblivion. A sophisticated way of not looking, of ignoring. Those who seek the truth, on the other hand, will eventually find it. But not as something external, nor as an object to be possessed. Because finding the truth means becoming truth or being truth… which demands a non-negotiable transformation.”
by Ma Muktananda | May 28, 2025
“Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the early thinkers associated with analytical philosophy of language did not merely delimit an area of work within contemporary thought. They modified the very coordinates that structure the relationship between thought, language, and truth. Their project, anchored in the aspiration for rigor characteristic of the formal sciences, stripped language of all psychological depth, of any expressive or emotional connotation. They reconfigured it as a system governed by rules, subject to logical decomposition, and verifiable through the exact procedures of symbolic mathematics.
This new approach was not a simple methodological refinement. It represented a transformation in the very way of conceiving philosophical discourse. Attention ceased to focus on what the speaker believes they are communicating, on their inner experience or on the existential resonance of the statement. What mattered was the logical form of the propositions, their ability to articulate themselves within a coherent conceptual structure. From this perspective, language ceased to operate as a vehicle of expression and became an instrument of formalization. It was no longer a matter of interpreting meanings, but of examining structures.
In this context, logical analysis was not limited to correcting ambiguities, but imposed normative conditions on meaning. And when this scheme is transferred to the field of metaphysics, the effects are quickly felt. Consider a proposition laden with theological weight and philosophical tradition: “God exists.” Viewed from an analytical perspective, this statement cannot be accepted without a rigorous examination of its elements. What exactly does the term ‘God’ refer to? What is being asserted by the verb “to exist”? And what logical relationship links the two terms?
Scholastic theology, especially in its Thomistic formulation, responds by affirming that in God there is no distinction between essence and existence. It is not a matter of an entity to which being is added as a property; it is a matter of a being whose essence consists in being: esse subsistens. The proposition does not express an external relationship, but an ontological identity. Within it, subject and predicate are confused. However, what was self-evident to medieval metaphysics becomes problematic in the light of modern criticism. Descartes, Hume, and Kant, each from their own perspective, dismantle the claim to uphold ontological statements without first subjecting them to the principles that regulate knowledge. In this new grammar of thinking, it is no longer enough to invoke tradition or appeal to definitions. The proposition “God exists” must prove that it makes sense within a logic that can recognize it as meaningful. Here, a distinction introduced by Frege and articulated more systematically by Bertrand Russell becomes relevant: the difference between first- and second-order predications. In the former, the subject is given as an empirical reality, and the predicate introduces an attributable property. To say “this table is white” presupposes the existence of the object and adds a perceptible quality. In this framework, to assert “this table exists” adds no relevant information. It ratifies what was already assumed. The proposition becomes tautological; its content is exhausted in a reiteration.
Something similar occurs with analytical judgments such as “a triangle has three angles” or “a circle is round.”
In these cases, the predicate is contained in the definition of the subject. No new content is introduced; rather, a truth that is already implicit is made explicit. Their validity is not verified through experience, but through the analysis of concepts. They do not discover or clarify. Second-level predications, on the other hand, disrupt this logic. In these cases, the subject is neither empirically given nor conceptually assured.
To assert “the unicorn exists” is not to attribute a property to the unicorn, but to declare that there is an entity corresponding to that concept. Here, the predicate ‘exists’ is not redundant. It is the point of tension. What is at issue is not the relationship between subject and predicate, but the ontological legitimacy of the subject itself. The proposition “God exists” falls into this zone of ambiguity. It has the form of an assertion, but its subject lacks empirical guarantee and its reference remains uncertain. Defining God as “the necessary being” does not solve the problem. The ontological proof, in any of its formulations, encounters the same objection already raised by Kant. In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, he denies that existence can be treated as a real predicate. He states this with absolute clarity:
“Existenz ist kein reales Prädikat, d. i. ein Begriff von etwas, was zu dem Begriffe eines Dinges hinzukommen könnte.”
“Existence is not a real predicate, that is, a concept that can be added to the concept of a thing.”
(Critique of Pure Reason, A599/B627)
With this, Kant dismantles the central premise of rationalist theology. Existence does not extend the concept of a thing; it is not added as another property. It is, instead, the act of placing an object in experience. Therefore, “God exists” cannot be presented as an analytical judgment or as an empirical statement. It is found in a liminal region, where the statement has logical form, but its subject does not have a clear ontological status. Hence, according to Kant, its acceptance is not justified theoretically, but ethically. Practical reason—not speculative reason—requires postulating the existence of God as a condition for moral coherence.
It is now appropriate to consider a third mode of predication: that in which there is no addition, but identity. The predicate does not enrich the subject: it reveals it as what it already is. Thomistic metaphysics affirms that God does not possess being as something added: He is being itself. “God is being” is neither an empirical proposition nor a conventional definition. It is an expression of ontological identity. Such a statement does not describe a property: it articulates a unity. But this structure, however solid it may seem conceptually, does not impose itself as evident to finite consciousness. There is no experience that certifies this equivalence, nor any analysis that verifies it. From our perspective, this identity appears as a hypothesis without immediate confirmation. And here the need arises for a fourth category: a form of predication where subject and predicate really coincide, even if this coincidence is not apparent as such to the subject who utters it. Identity is real, but unrecognized.
This figure finds suggestive correspondences in certain non-dualistic doctrines, such as Advaita Vedānta or Mahāyāna Buddhism. There it is affirmed that the separation between the knower and the known is illusory. In this framework, to say “God exists” is not to make a judgment about a distinct entity, but to recognize a unity that is only actualized when the split between subject and object ceases. It is not a logical statement, but a form of knowledge that emerges when consciousness is transformed and recognized as identical to reality.
From a different, though no less demanding, perspective, Martin Heidegger raises a fundamental objection to propositional logic. In Sein und Zeit, being is not a property that can be attributed, nor an object that can be represented. It is the very horizon of manifestation, that which allows something to appear without itself appearing as something. To affirm that “God exists”—from this point of view—is to subject being to the logic of the entity, to treat it as if it were just another object among others. It is, therefore, to fall into the fundamental error of Western metaphysics: to forget the ontological difference.
The notion of ἀλήθεια (aletheia), which Heidegger recovers from Greek, designates not a truth as correspondence, but as un-concealment. Being manifests itself, but does not allow itself to be thematized as content. In this framework, to say “God is being” is not a logical proposition, but an attempt to name that which whose appearance transcends all language. The fourth category of predication, understood here, does not extend logic: it suspends it. It is not a matter of classifying, but of giving space to the unappropriable without reducing it.
The distinction between levels of predication—first level, second level, identity, and limit—should not be understood as a closed system. It functions rather as a philosophical tool for questioning the possible ways of affirming existence. In Kant, it allows us to delimit what can be said meaningfully from theoretical reason. In Heidegger, it points to the very inadequacy of the proposition as a vehicle of being. In both, a shared demand is raised: to think beyond the conditions imposed by language itself.
Perhaps this demand—to say what exceeds saying—encodes the most delicate task of contemporary thought. A philosophy that does not limit itself to repeating inherited formulas, but also does not take refuge in ineffability. A philosophy capable of inhabiting the limit without closing it off.”
by Ma Muktananda | May 24, 2025
“Friendship, far from being reduced to a spontaneous affinity or mutual attraction of temperaments, constitutes a relational experience that engages fundamental structures of the psyche. From a psychoanalytic perspective, it involves not only conscious bonds, but also unconscious displacements that shape its complexity. Sigmund Freud, in Zur Einführung des Narzißmus (1914), argues that the beloved object—and by analogy, the friend—can constitute a projection of the ideal self. In this sense, friendship can be read as a form of transformed narcissism: the friend is chosen not only for their manifest qualities, but for what they embody of the unconscious desire for an idealized image of completeness. However, an exclusively narcissistic interpretation is reductive. Melanie Klein introduced a fundamental distinction between partial object relations and total object relations. While the former involve the fragmentation of the object according to partial drives, the latter imply the ability to recognize the totality of the other, including their contradictory aspects. Genuine friendship, as a total object relationship, requires accepting the ambivalence inherent in all human bonds: love and hostility, the desire for fusion and the need for separation, proximity and distance. In this context, the friend is not a mirror image, but an autonomous subject whose difference cannot always be integrated without conflict.
The authenticity of friendship is therefore measured by its capacity to sustain otherness. Jacques Lacan points out that the other is not simply what complements the self, but what introduces a point of irreducible opacity. The friend, as a symbolically constituted other, cannot be reduced to a mirror function. True friendship involves transcending narcissism, not remaining fixed in it.
Listening, in this context, takes on a structuring value. It is not a matter of interpreting or resolving, but of sustaining the other’s words without appropriation or judgment. Donald Winnicott, when speaking of “good enough presence,” describes a way of being that does not invade or demand immediate reciprocity. In mature friendship, this listening becomes a potential space where the unsaid, the uncertain, and the vulnerable can unfold. When it is not conditioned by need or utility, friendship constitutes an experience of symbolic gratuitousness. It does not seek validation or reward. It does not respond to a logic of debt, merit, or equivalence. Like love that has overcome the compulsion for completeness, it is sustained by the acceptance of imperfection, the renunciation of control, and the ability to accommodate the fragility of the other without interpreting it as a threat.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, therefore, friendship cannot be conceived as an accessory or merely affective bond. It is a relational structure that allows the subject to work through their drives, contain their aggression, and open themselves up to ways of coexisting that are not regulated by domination or strategic exchange. Being a friend, in the most rigorous sense, is not being indulgent or unconditional, but rather being capable of sustaining a bond in which the other does not appear as an extension of the self, but as a presence that destabilizes, challenges, and transforms.
Understood in this way, friendship does not numb, console, or save. Nor does it guarantee emotional stability or constant harmony. What it offers is a form of companionship that, without eliminating psychic conflict, makes it livable. In this shared journey, completeness is not achieved, but a form of presence that makes the fact of existing less inhospitable.
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