His first attempts, "Free your brain!"(2016) and"The age of knowledge"(2018) propelled into full light this genius thirty-year-old, holder of three doctorates, international consultant, columnist at Le Point and president of the Bioniria foundation. Here he comes back with" i ", an unidentified literary object, which mixes poetry and theories, with "aim to produce effects that self-organize in consciousness ". A work that is both very personal and universal which, once again, arouses curiosity and questions.
"When I enter a field, I try not to see it as my peers. It has earned me admiration but also contempt. My mentor Serge Soudoplatoff, a great Internet specialist and who has a lot determined my professional identity, told me that in this world, we are stuck between the Orthodox, the good students and the heterodox, the bad students and that you have to try to be hyperdox to get past the first two categories. That's why I tagged "hyperdoctor" on my twitter account. No one knows, but that's not because I have several doctorates: my approach is to try to be hyperdox. But it sounds a bit pedantic said like this: I prefer to cite human examples, like Diogenes, who is a sacred reference for me!
Consciousness often returns over the pages. What is your definition?
And it turns out that between the time I started this collection and the time I published it, I did an ayahuasca * ceremony. And under ayahuasca, one is thrown very specifically into the answer to the question of consciousness and what happens after death. Since Ayahuasca, it is perhaps the most powerful of the dissociatives. In neuroscience, I don't think we know of a more powerful dissociative. It completely separates us from our body, makes us lose all concept of time and space and especially any notion of self and non-self.
It becomes very difficult, under Ayahuasca, to determine who is me and who is the other. It's a bit like taking a teapot and pouring two glasses of tea: you get two individuals, two egos. And if we put the two glasses back in the teapot, we can no longer define the individuals. Under Ayahuasca, it's a bit the same. The embodied consciousness, which the Sufis call Nafs-i-Ammara, the consciousness in the body, which is also called the carnal soul, or even the "monkey mind" is the cup of tea. And then, when we die, presumably and in any case this is the impression given by Ayahuasca, we go back to the teapot. It becomes very difficult to determine who is who, but the consciousness remains. Under Ayahuasca, one has this consciousness which is much less limited in time and space and in the definition of the Self. This vision of tea and teapot, I had it in 2010 while spending an evening with the Fulani in Senegal. I am an honorary citizen of several Fulani villages and representative of a Fulani movement, the movement of September 22, which seeks redress from Switzerland, and it was with these Fulani that I had the idea of the teapot.
Based on this idea, and you mention it in your book, is reincarnation possible?
Abrahamic religions and even Judaism absolutely do not deny the possibility of reincarnation. I've told a whole bunch of even conservative rabbis about it. In fact, the real debate is: "is it worth worrying about while you're alive?". So there are spiritual traditions for which the answer is yes, like Tibetan or Zen Buddhism. And there are spiritual traditions for which it is better not. As far as I am concerned, I find that transmigration has a major poetic power.
But that very often it is in people's best interests not to think too much about it. First of all because precisely, if we are a believer, it is in the will of God that we do not know and it is for our good. Then I totally agree with this famous, well-known online guru, Sadhguru, whose lectures I find quite brilliant, who says that karma ceases with ego. As soon as you return to the teapot, you have no more karma (and it doesn't have to be death, by the way).
We can die having an ego, and according to the Sufis or the Hindus or the Hasidim or the Franciscans, this is the exact definition of hell. Dying without having killed your ego is not pleasant. And this is what one is entitled to call an unpleasant place of consciousness like hell. For Buddhists anyway, this is straightforward. Nirvana is the dissolution of the ego, which the Jews call Echad (unity) Bitul (extinction). For Jewish mystics, through Bitul one arrives at Echad. Echad is Nirvana. And of course, all recommend that you achieve it during your lifetime, when you are still in the body. For Buddhists, it is not impossible to achieve it, but it is said to be much harder. The problem is that if you focus too much on reincarnations, you end up focusing too much on the "me I". If we focus too much on the "I," necessarily, we regress.
Why is your book called "i"?
This is a title my editor recommended. I thought it was great first of all because the letter looks like an aleph to Arabic people, it is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s also the first letter of my first name. But my favorite interpretation is that it's a number in math: i is the imaginary number, which is equal to the root of -1 and is a very interesting number in mathematics. Because i to the power of i gives a real number. It is fabulous ! The imaginary to the power of the imaginary, it is the real. It gives food for thought… I don't think Walt Disney and Jules Vernes would have been against that. For yogis, this "i" sound has a very precise vibration which corresponds to the solar plexus chakra, manipura. But this title is also an opportunity to dot the i's.
Who is this character from Quixote the Black with whom your book ends?
Quixote Le Noir is the antepoet. This poem comes at the end of the book because this character from the antepoetus haunts me. He haunts me because my "Patron Saint" who is called Idris Shah (a British Sufi writer whose books I recommend including his novel "Kara Kush ") said, which is terrifying when you think about it, "Human beings have an infinite capacity for self-development, but they have an equally infinite capacity for self-destruction. " And the antépoète, in this character that I invented, is the eternal ego. He's a thing that can't die, at least one that is convinced he can't die. That’s why he is resurrected. It represents something which is also described by Sadhguru in a magnificent lecture which talks about"Alexander the Great Idiot" because he used his life to kill people, which is not the right way to go. He especially says that the only right decision he will have made according to Indian tradition is not to drink from the fountain of immortality. Alexander the Great had gone to look for the fountain of immortality in India and once in front of this fountain, ready to drink it, he saw a plucked raven which said to him "Oh, wretch, don't do that! Me, I drank it and it's been millions of years that I have been, all plucked. I cannot die and that is the worst punishment ever. Don't make the same mistake I did. " Alexander the Great does not drink from the fountain of immortality, and Sadhguru says it is the best decision he has ever made. That day, he beat his antepoeta.
The antepoet is this eternal ego which goes in the path of destruction rather than in the path of development. It’s Quixote Le Noir. Aberkan means "Black" in Kabyle. This poem, "Quixote the black", is optimistic-pessimistic or the other way around. There is the pessimistic side which recognizes that the human being has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. But there is also the optimistic side which says that he cannot win "Trying to resist divine union is, in the long run, impossible. For Sufis and Jews alike, there is only one eternal. It's that simple. Monotheism" spiritual poses that there can only be one Eternal One. So, that Eternal Hell does not exist. That would make a second Eternal and for the dogma of monotheistic religions, it is not possible. result, since hell and ego are the same thing, there cannot be an eternal ego.
And that’s why Quixote Le Noir is black, that’s because it’s ego. But he's also a Quixote. He can't win. He will lose in the end. The book ends there because it is both dizzying with pessimism, recognizing that human beings have an infinite capacity for destruction, and at the same time, there is only one eternal and the ego cannot last forever so neither can hell. And hope is there. "
** Ayahuasca, or yage, is a psychotropic plant as well as a decoction of this plant and another liana, used by Native American shamans in vision and healing ceremonies. It is prohibited in France
“I”, poems & theories by Idriss Aberkane, published by VLB.
Find Idriss Aberkane in the second part of "From chaos to harmony", a very good free documentary produced by Inress, Institute for Research on Extraordinary Experiences
Read also :
⋙ Influence of the future, transhumanism… What we learned from confinement, by Philippe Guillemant
⋙ Matter does not exist: we are made of emptiness!
⋙ The water from here connects us to the beyond