Approaches to the Inner Life
Lanza del Vasto
1962

On the Original Error

It is no small matter to know the sciences, neither one science, nor a quarter of one.
If we had to learn all of them to understand something about this world, we would spend our lives studying and not understanding anything.
But not this seems to be in vain and that relieves us a lot!
It seems that, to have the last truth, it is enough to know oneself. I am very happy about this, because it is a subject for which I have always had a weakness. You see, me and I get along well, since the time that we go arm in arm. So here we are on a good path and we have omniscience in sight or little is needed.

I, me… Almost all of our sentences begin this way. And we think we know what we’re talking about.
But if someone asked us: “Me? What is this?” it might occur that we don’t know how to answer.
So give me a definition of the word me. Look for it in the dictionary or rather don’t, because there is none.
Above all, don’t tell me that this is “the first person singular” because this person is not first enough or singular enough to be me!
In the dictionary, there is another definition missing: that of the verb to be. Could it be for the same reason?
I’m me, it’s me. There is no other way to put it. And to be is to be. There is no other word to explain what that is. I can’t give you a definition of the smell of lilacs… It’s the smell of lilacs. Go smell the lilac and wou will know the smell of lilacs.
There are three things that have no definition: me, being, and the smell of lilacs. Could it be for the same reason?
Even if we had an exact definition, and we will try to make it as exact as possible later, this would not yet mean that we have self-knowledge or consciousness. No mental or verbal acrobatics will teach us this. No amount of studies either.
And yet we deeply feel that we know the answer, because we are the answer.

So let’s take ourselves raw, as we are. And let’s take our knowledge of ourselves, raw, as it is. And let’s try to see what we mean when we say “I”. I eat, I sleep, I walk, I’m doing well. Who? Easy! A body. I will point out right away that there are people who never talk about themselves in any other way, for the reason that it has never occurred to them to conceive of themselves in any other way.
And these people say, “When I’m gone.” And when they die indeed, it will be said of them: “He has given up his soul.”
Ah! Oh! Really? So who gave up the soul?
I know that’s not your case. You, you have a body, you are not your body. You have received a good religious and even philosophical education. Me, this knot of guts? Do you think I’m an animal? There! Calm down! This outrage is in good faith and you are right.
And now prove it.
I am not asking you to prove that this is so, but to prove that you know it.
And the proof will soon be made.
We test the money by tinkling it. With a sudden gesture I will crush your little toe with my foot and I will have proven you by sound!
Then we’ll hear something like: “That’s quite unfortunate, because it’s one of the best feet I have, but all in all this is none of my business.” Now, if I see you distraught and screaming, it is because all your religious and philosophical education has collapsed and that you have suddenly fallen back into the common error.
O you who listen to me, remember this story of the feet well. It will teach us the meaning that we give to the word know.
To know is not to find correct sentences on exact and sublime things. The essential things, you have to know them with all of your intellect, with all of your heart, with your insides and even with your feet! This is the meaning that this word has in the traditional language. And if you know what it means to know, you’ll also hear what the Hindus call Ignorance, and what the Bible calls Foolishness.
You can ignore the name of the servant-mistress of Carneas and the dates of the reign of the Emperor Tetricus, and you can even ignore how many are seven times eight. This is not Ignorance. Such a “Yoga of Knowledge” knows neither A nor B.
And the Fool is not the village idiot, it may also be the famous philosophy teacher.
To come out of Ignorance and Error is to know the difference between what is Me and what is Other, that’s all.

“I am not my body,” I told you earlier with sufficient force, but few know this profound and wholesome science!
Who are those who possess this rare science and prove it?
Those, for example, who know how to make “good use of diseases”, as Pascal said. Those who look at death as a deliverance, not because they suffer and are disgusted with life, but because they love life, because they know life and do not confuse it with its envelope hiding its skeleton and being more than half-way corrupted. Those who are called the Blessed Ones because they have passed through martyrdom. But the evaluation between supreme delight and extreme suffering are measured by this truth: I am not my body.
This rare science, is there a method to acquire it? Yes. And what is this method called?
Its name is Ascesis.
The ascetic is not a penitent consumed by remorse, nor a maniac who enjoys torturing himself. He is a master of the experimental science of the living body: of the relationship between my body and me. From each fasting, each waking, each desire or fear overcome, he concludes: what afflicts my body does not afflict me, because I keep myself joyful, what pleases my body does not please me. So what will kill my body will not be able to reach me.

But let’s go back to the mistake in which we are and from which we came, not without difficulty. It takes not less to get out of the Mistake. There even needs to be more, there needs to be Grace and that Grace makes the pain a bonfire.
We carry this error within us. It is the gravity that makes us fall into the dark. From this error, it is impossible that we come out before the time, before the hour of the awakening of the Spirit. The child from the udder on cannot conceive of himself otherwise than as a body.
It is therefore not without reason that we will call the original error “original”, being common to all, from birth.
But how can we say, “We are in error,” and yet be? It is the characteristic of the man who is mistaken not to know that he is mistaken, because as soon as he knows it he is no longer mistaken.
This is true of any other mistake, but this one is too deeply rooted in my nature. Of course, if, like the common people, I ignore the common error, I can neither find nor seek the way out of it. Knowing it does not make me get out of it, but allows me to open the door. If I know it, my head emerges, and that’s already a lot, because now I can breath, but the rest of the body is still swimming in error.
Ignorance of the Law is not an excuse in any court of law. Likewise, no one has the right to ignore the truth and no one ignores it with impunity. It is an ignorance without innocence. It is not an excuse for sin, but is sin itself. And if we have called it Original Error, then because it can be linked to the Sin of the same name, the abuse of the Tree of Knowledge.

But let us see how, for the man sunk into his flesh up to above the eyes, error becomes sin.
And let’s note first that his error does not come from a lack of instruction, nor from a lack of reasoning.
He reasons very well with the animal, the reasonable animal. If he thinks he is his body, how do you want him to behave? Logically, he must behave like a beast.
But no matter how hard he tries, he will not succeed, because his intelligence prevents him from doing so.
For there is an almost divine power in intelligence that remains whole even when it is twisted and turned downwards. It means to twist and overthrow to attach it to the service of the beast; what makes the beast a beast is taking itself for the center of the world and to pull everything to himself.
So does the man armed with intelligence. I say armed, because the wolf has his fangs, the snake his venom and man has his intelligence to make his beast prevail against other beasts and, of course, against other men.
The beast armed with intelligence is a hole, a burn in the harmony of things. Rather than a beast, it is a bestial spirit, it is a demon.
But he is not alone, he meets millions of others, each of whom strives to surpass the other, hence the rivalries, wars, oppression and mutual exploitation, and then the accommodations caused by fatigue, fear and trickery, which are called laws and morals, in order to ensure coexistence, so that it is allowed to continue to collide at ease and yet to subsist; and this is how what is called this world is constituted.

“Yes, but,” said God, “I will see what their end will be!”
What is the purpose of all this? To win, to triumph, to conquer, to accumulate, to become rich, to become powerful - that is the goal. And the end? The end is that you will die and that whatever you have accumulated you will not take with you.
God’s punishment… What is God’s punishment? And how do we know that a misfortune is a punishment, and not an unfortunate accident or an ordeal to overcome?
God’s punishment is that which the sinner applies to himself with zeal, with eagerness, with perseverance. God puts you on the right or on the left depending on whether you have put yourself there - up or down depending on whether you have put yourself there.
The punishment for this error-sin which consists in mistaking oneself for one’s body, is that this error becomes a reality, so simple. That suffices. You deem yourself to be your body… well! you are!… You are a body and you will go where the bodies go, under the earth!…
And the soul? Don’t I have an immortal soul? Yes, you have an immortal soul. You have a soul. Just you aren’t a soul. Ecclesiastes says: “What is dust returns to dust, what is spirit returns to spirit.” But beware! You, you! Will you return? In order to return, you must get into the vehicle before departure. Do not miss the check mark!

I knew a banker, and now I found out about his suicide, from the newspaper.
They say he was going bankrupt. Here is at least one who did not take himself for his body, since he made it so cheap: for a little money, worse, for the lack of a little money, he threw his skin bag overboard!
But since he still didn’t look like an angel, we can only wonder who he thought he was, that one!
Well, I’ll tell you this: he thought he was Mr. so and so… Director of… Chairman of the Board of Directors of… Decorated with the Order of… Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.
In short, he took himself for his persona.
He mistook himself for a suit-jacket decorated with a red rosette and topped with a delicate colored tie, with a pearl.
“I am Mr. So-and-so,” he would say, without ever forgetting “Mister”.
And not only was he a persona, he also believed in it, “he believed!” as they say. But that is not the faith that saves.
What is a persona? It is what one plays as a role in the theater.
And, for there to be a theater, one needs a costume, a scenery, and a role learned by heart.
A persona is first of all a habit, a name, a social position, and then a language, manners, a culture…
And all these are things learned and made. All this has nothing to do with nature and reality. Business, politics, the world, successes, fortune, all this is just fiction, convention and comedy.
But is the role we play at least ours? The personas are ready-made, as in the Italian comedy, and the part of improvisation remains small. As soon as the persona presents himself, adorned with the distinctive signs of his social dignity, the other personas replicate. Whether I am a peasant, a janitor, a committed writer, a soldier or the President of the Republic, I just have to recite.
But really, who invented this role for me, who put it on me? Mr. Nobody, pseudonym of Mr. Everybody.
But I almost forgot an important piece of this show: the hat. The character’s hat is personal opinion. I know people who change hats according to the world and the season, and others who are surprised that they only own one and have always worn the same one. They are so attached to it that they sleep with it.
If you are tempted, my friends, to believe that your personal opinion is yours, remember that there are hatters who are called journalists, lecturers, politicians. Go bare-headed under the sky, my friends!
What animates and forms the persona, and makes him gesticulate around the world, is this emptiness which in good Latin is called vanity. And this emptiness gives empty satisfactions, swellings, which are called pride, pomp, power. And this emptiness also gives a dull anguish. The persona, the poor one! Deep down in itself, it knows very well that it is nothing. That’s why it never gets to the bottom of itself. It keeps away from it, and it is one of the great works of the persona, and of the personas among each other: to distract itself. It is a question of distracting ourselves from this serious truth that we are nothing!
The great business of our persona is to make others believe that we are different than we are: more interesting, more intelligent, more brilliant, more virtuous, braver, more enigmatic, more attractive - or much worse, more wanton, more vulgar, more modest: in any case more! In all my life, I have only met one man who said to me: “I am a man like everyone else.” All the others have strongly affirmed to me or hinted to me that they are not like the others. All of them were exceptional, except for this one. That one was Gandhi.
I knew a kind boy (and very intelligent by the way) who, one day, caught jaundice because he had heard that a guy had said that he was a… um!
The guy had said that out of the air, by the way, to try to be funny. Ten seconds later, he no longer thought about it, if at all he would have ever thought about it. But twenty years later, my clever friend was recovering with a tip to the liver with every stroke.
It’s just one… um! enough to blow a person away, since the persona depends entirely on the opinion that someone forms of it.
Anxiety can also become a stimulus to the accomplishment of great works, and the great work will aim to demonstrate to others and perhaps finally to ourselves that we are someone or even something.
There are men who have tried their best to the point of bleeding the world, in order to give importance to their persona.
He has ruined himself to found a nursery, not that he cares about babies (he knows nothing more disgusting!). But what he caresses with his dearest desires is the marble plaque where his name pops out in gold letters.

And the end of all this?
The end is that maybe, with a lot of luck, I will one day have my statue. And when I get my statue, I won’t be there to admire it anymore. Ah! the unfortunate setback!
From which I conclude that it is much less vain to fill your stomach. Because a belly is a fairly common thing and, except for exceptions, without glory or greatness, but it is a thing that offers the immense advantage of being!

What do you think about it? It seems to me that the case is spoiling and taking a worrying turn. And yet we were off to such a great start!
So then, when it is not my body that screams me! to ask, to demand, to complain or to get upset, when it is not his needs that speak, his fears, his desires, his works, his tricks (because he is smart, the big smart one!), so it’s my persona, with his glass cabochons and his tinsel, in search of spectators and applause.

And who else in us could speak up on our behalf?
Let’s think about it.
Have you thought about it enough?
Yea, I thought about it and I found it.
Here is the answer, it goes without saying:
Who speaks, if not the thought?
A great spirit said, “I think, so I am.”
Therefore I am the one who thinks.
The one who thinks, who feels, who wants, that one is called me. He is also the only one who knows how to speak and give himself a name. In short, I am my Mind. The rest may be mine, maybe in me (I don’t know about that!), but is not me.

We could not say it better: this is a well-conducted speech, well-honed arguments.
In fact, to think of yourself as your belly is the mistake in its raw state.
To construct oneself as a persona is the mistake peculiar to the civilized, the refined, the distinguished.
But to identify oneself with the Mind, that is the thing of a philosopher.
It is the rarest, the purest, the most perfect form of the same error.

Error? Hey! You’re the one who says it! Prove it! Answer me!
I answer with a question: And when do you sleep?
Yes, when you sleep really, deeply, without dreams.
Are you then or are you ceasing to be? Are you the same or another?

You see that there is no answer to this question except this one:
Awake as well as asleep, I am the same: I am the one who thinks, who feels, who wants, and I am the one who doesn’t think, who doesn’t feel, who doesn’t want!
In a word: I don’t know who I am.
“Everyone knows well the purpose he pursues”; everyone says, “I don’t know who I am,” says Lao-Tse, the greatest of the wise men of China.
Finally, to speak in the manner of the Tao-Te-King¹, we can state:

The me who says me is not the True Me

Have you followed me well so far?
This is what we call the Three Steps.
Step by step have you followed me… nowhere?
Do you have the courage, the honesty, the lucidity to recognize that you don’t know each other?
If you have advanced to this point, made it obvious, folded in half, bent over, annihilated to this point.
So, maybe you have reached a turning point in your life.
For you are already quite different from the passants whom, passing by yourselves, you met on the street on your way, who all believe they know the purpose they are pursuing and where they are going and who they are!
He who believes he knows is never just a passant who passes (misses) knowledge and faith.
The point at which you are, that of the most total darkness, it is clear, decisive, salutary, that we cannot remain there.