I have always loved reading. Even when I was much younger, I would read books (mostly Dharma books) almost on a daily basis. My interest in reading stayed with me for the last 40 over years, as it is one of the ways I learn about the world’s history and current times without having to be out there on the field. One of my favorite magazines is called Atlantis Rising, which I have subscribe to for many years. This magazine contains high quality articles, written by  world renowned  authors in various fields… from unexplained mysteries of the past, cryptic occurrences and even modern technologies; most of which are topics rarely covered by regular mainstream magazines.

In one of the latest issues of Atlantis Rising, I came across this article about the famous philosopher Simone Weil. She was an incredibly intelligent woman which made her one of the greatest thinkers of the 21st Century. Simone’s brief story which is covered in this article is extremely inspiring. It tells of the great journey she had to go through in her life to discover her faith, and at the same time it reveals how much strength, dedication and devotion she has put into what she truly believed in, regardless of the difficulties she had to encounter. She is someone we should read about. Her compassion, determination and kindness will shine forever in the hearts of many. People who sacrifice their own comforts, attachments and self centered pleasures for the sake of many really touch my heart the deepest. These are the people who improve our minds, bodies and souls for the space we share on this earth.

I thought I’d share this article here so that everyone can read about this incredible human being, who stood up for what she believed in until the end. I wish to do the same in promoting the path of spirituality and peace to many.

Tsem Rinpoche 

[Note: Read the typed out article below]

The article on Simone Weil was featured in this issue of Atlantis Rising

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Simone Weil

The Last Cathar?
Suffering for one’s conscience is not a new phenomenon
by John Chambers

[Extracted from Atlantis Rising #108]

In the summer of 1940, as war swept across Europe, there could be seen in the vineyards near Saint-Marcel d’Ardeche in southeast France a tiny, frail 31 year old woman painfully gathering grapes. Her face was emaciated; her eyes were huge, black, and luminous. Wearing a luminous, tattered, black cloak, moving slowly and awkwardly through the vines, she often seemed ill. Sometimes she collapsed to the ground, but always she rose again; and each time she did, she chanted in rich melodious tones – and in ancient Greek (the language in which it was originally written)! – the Our Father, or Lord’s Prayers.

The woman was Simone Weil (1909-1943), a mystic, thinker, and social activist who would become one of the twentieth century’s foremost philosophers. The vineyards in which she worked that summer lie in the Languedoc, a region that was once home to the Cathers, or Albigensians. This was a medieval heretical Gnostic sect that was virtually wiped out early in the fourteenth century by Pope Innocent III and the kings of France in a brutal Christian ‘holy’ war that surpassed anything seen in the twenty-first century. The heresies of the Cathars consisted of a belief in reincarnation and in the essential evil of the physical universe due to the fact that the god of the Gnostics withdrew his essence; i.e., his goodness, in order to create that universe, in the process leaving no goodness whatsoever.

Catharism originated in ancient Far Eastern dualist beliefs going back to Pythogoras. It ended in blood and horror. In Christianity, Dr. Diarmaid McCulloch declares: “In its genocidal atrocity, this ‘Albigensian Crusade’ (the city of Albi was a Cathar center, with its own Cathar bishop) ranks as one of the most discreditable episodes in Christian history; mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the crusaders’ retribution.”

Only in that summer of 1940 had Simone Weil, a French Jew who loved the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church even though she reused to be baptized, encountered the amazing beauty of the Lord’s Prayer. She would later write: “The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days [early in 1940] I could not stop myself from repeating it to myself constantly. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport them to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view… filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not absence of sound but which is the object of positive sensation, more positive than that of sound.”

Perhaps that outstanding characteristics of this great twentieth century philosopher was an empathy for the pain, suffering, and deprivation of humanity that was an unforgettable as it was startling. Weil was soon to leave France for the U.S., then recross the ocean to London, England, in hopes of joining the Resistance movement in France. Her hopes were dashed; and, partly as an act of solidarity with her suffering countrymen in France, she starved herself to death in a sanatorium in England in 1943. Not long before, she had completed one of her masterpieces, The Need for Roots. Though it was little known at that time, Simone’s mode of dying emulated that of the vanquished Cathars, who believed self induced starvation was the holiest path to death.

Simone displayed from an early age her powers of empathy and an equal generosity. Her father, a noted physician, was an army doctor during World War 1. The family moved from town to town, Simone, aged five, witnessing the suffering of “the poor soldiers at the front,” sent them her sugar rations and socks when she could obtain them. The tiny Simone even corresponded with the soldiers. But at age nine she was furious at the humiliating treatment afforded the German nation by the Treaty of Versailles. Simone’s empathy and generosity stayed with her all her life; at age 28 she burst into tears when she heard of a famine in China and sent the victims all the money she could.

Simone threw herself passionately into school. She was a student of genius and of immense application. In 1931 she graduated seventh among the eleven students who passed the exams; the standards of the elite Parisian Ecole Normale she attended were such that the rest of the 107 students taking the exam failed.

For the next few years Weil taught in a number of schools across France. Her empathy, generosity, and learning made her the best of teachers. The young Parisian’s students adored her despite her awkwardness and eccentricities; she returned assignments overnight, spent endless ours with each student, and inspired all with her passionate exposition of the classics. A colleague later wrote that Weil, “knew how to place herself on the level of any pupil whatsoever… She brought to the task… that quality of extreme attention which, in her doctrine, is closely associated with prayer.”

Simone was already devoting more and more time to political action. She helped consolidate unions, taught factory workers literature and philosophy after hours, and became a militant far-left Communist organizing workers’ strikes. When she learned of Stalin’s mass murders, she denounced the Soviet leader as a tyrant and became violently anti-communist even while she remained rabidly socialist. In a quarrel in her mother’s apartment in Paris, she stood up to the brutal, if brilliant, Communist lieutenant Leon Trotsky, who had been exiled from Russia by Stalin. Her sympathy for te sufferings of others took over; she castigated Trotsky for killing striking sailors. The young philosopher and social activist was beginning to display the qualities which are often ascribed to saints: she could be difficult, stubborn, and vicious, making many enemies even as she made more friends.

To share, and to truly understand and feel, the impact of heavy industrial labor on the modern-day factory worker, Weil became an anonymous, menial, full-time, factory laborer, first in a huge Parisian automobile parts factory, then in a slightly smaller refrigerator parts factory. This experience, wrenching and agonizing for Weil, resulted in a masterpiece on modern-day factory lice, The Need for Roots. Weil later wrote in Waiting for God that, “As I worked int he factory, the affliction of others branded my flesh and my soul… There I received forever the mark of slavery.” The Need for Roots would contain many bold suggestions as to how to alleviate the lot of the worker.

Appalled by the atrocities committed by Franco against the Spanish people, Weil went off intrepidly in 1937 to fight in the Spanish Civil War. On arrival she managed to attach herself to a contingent of 20 volunteers; the troupe made it to the front, but before Simone could see much action she fell into a pot of boiling cooking fat and grievously burned her leg. She had to make her way painfully back to the staging area; two months later, back in France and still on crutches because of her injury, she learned that every member of her contingent had been slaughtered by Franco’s fascists. If Simone hadn’t badly burned her leg, her life would have been snuffed out in the Spanish Civil War.

Weil’s factory experience was almost a religious one; it bonded her forever to the life of the factory worker. Her experience in Spain was equally revelatory and disquieting: she learned that if the situation required it, all men and women, including those apparently “in the right,” were capable of murder. Both experiences gave her a shocking sense of the absence of God. Both were reasons why, as the 1930s advanced, Weil, while still intensely involved in political action, put together the basics of a profound and enigmatic religious/philosophical system.

Central to Weil’s system was her belief in kenosis (she rarely used the word). Called Tzimzum in the (Lurianic) Kabbala, and The Clear Light in Buddhism, kenosis is the process of the “emptying out” of God; the Creator negates himself to provide space for the universe so that his creatures may have free will (in negating himself, he loses much of his power, so that he can no longer control individuals).

The above is perhaps best taken as metaphor, since Weil believed God was so entirely unknowable (in act as well as in essence) that he was effectively non existent. Perhaps it was better to think of him as non existent; God was actually beyond believing in God or not believing in God. If we felt we had to believe in one of those, it’s preferable to not believe in God; in not believing we were at least not placing false and obscuring and misleading notions between ourselves and the true nature of God – if, in fact, God exists.

God’s primordial act of creation was a renunciation, a sacrifice, says Weil. He is utterly hidden because he has had to efface himself, to “finitize” himself – to withdraw to make room for the physical universe which at his withdrawal came into being. “God could create only by hiding himself,” she writes in Gravity and Grace, “otherwise there would be nothing but himself.” God has diminished himself; he has limited his powers; and therefore he cannot “fight evil,” whatever may be the transcendent meaning behind that commonplace phrase.

This doctrine of the utter hiddenness and unknowability of God was such that, du Plessix Gray writes, “The possibility of contact with a personal God still seemed very remote to her [Weil] and in her view the existence of God could neither be affirmed nor denied.” Nonetheless her kenotic beliefs prompted Weil, operating at full mysticism throttle, to make statements about God that are as as tantalizingly enigmatic as any Zen koan. She wrote, variously, that

“God is proven in some ways by the extreme difficulty of believing in him…”

“The good is… the motion by which we break away from ourselves as individuals… to affirm ourselves as true men, that is, as sharers in God…”

“God is proven and posited by right action, and in no other way… One must deserve to believe in God.”

Weil believed that God had limited, or “finitized,” himself a second time, intervening directly n the earthly affairs of men. In stating this, Weil is not only speaking about the Incarnation of God as Christ. She had striven to discover the root factors shared by all religions and spiritual traditions; and she had discovered that this intervention of the transcendent into the space-time of humanity characterized each and every one of these traditions.

For reasons beyond the scope of this article, Weil believed that Christianity was a fulfillment of the religious aspirations, not of the Jews in the Old Testament, but of the ancient Greeks. She believed the chaining of the Titan Prometheus (his name means “fore-thought”) to a rock in the Caucasus for giving man fire was a prefiguration (more than that: an event of analogous and equal power) of the Incarnation of Christ. “As Christ was crucified for love of humanity, so Prometheus was crucified (and Weil uses exactly this word) upon the rock for the same reason,” explains theologian Stephen Plant in Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Elucidating Weil’s thought, Plant explains that “[The Greet dramatist] Aeschylus also describes Prometheus as being, like Christ, the instructor of human beings who had taught them all things necessary for their salvation… In crucifying Prometheus, Zeus opened the way of wisdom to humanity, for it is only through an understanding of suffering that a true knowledge of God is possible.” Moreover, there was “a high degree of consent and cooperation between Zeus and Prometheus, and in this respect their relationship mirrors that between God the Father and Jesus Christ. In Aeschylus’ play [Prometheus Bound], Zeus and Prometheus are said to be one.”

The doctrine of the kenosis is reflected in doctrines found in the Kabbala (particularly the Zohar) and in Gnosticism. Here we begin to see the connections between Weil’s philosophical system (which is really too gnomic and non-linear to be called a system) and that of the Cathers. It bears repeating – and it is extraordinary – that Weil came by her Catharist beliefs through her own evolution as a human being and a thinker; it wasn’t until near the end of her life that she encountered Catharism for the first time and realized that her beliefs were uncannily like those of this annihilated heretical sect. If she hadn’t been so learned and hard-headed, she might have thought for a moment that she was the reincarnation of a Cathar.
What were the resemblances between Weil’s thought and Catharism?

From an early age, and all through her life, Simone Weil ate little; psychological and physiological factors (including anorexia) perhaps played a mojor part, but there came to be bound up with Simone’s asceticism, her need to suffer and share suffering, and her generosity (she increasingly gave her food to the needy). An in fact the perfecti – those who enjoyed the highest spiritual rank among the Cathars – were forbidden to eat meat, eggs, and cheese. In this Weil was, or so it seemed, alied with them.

Simone was a virgin all her life. She seemed to find the thought of sex disgusting and was made uneasy by the slightest physical contact. Thus the yearning French philosopher fell automatically in line with the prescribed perfecti mode of no sex and no physical contact whatsoever.

The Cathars were severely Gnostic. They believed God had withdrawn in order to bring into being the physical universe, but that since he had emptied the universe of his essence, including all his goodness, that matter was (this being all that was left for it) entirely evil. McCulloch notes that the Cathers then “believed in the evil of material things and the necessity to transcend the physical in order to achieve spiritual purity.”

In this instance Weil departs slightly from the overall Catharist view; though she accepts the kenostic view; i.e., that God withdrew to make space for the physical universe, she believed that physical reality, while it enchains and corrupts, must also be adored for its thrilling beauty. She believed that the physical universe, since it was the result of God’s superabundant generosity, was sacramental. Its order and harmony were intermediaries between the realm of the necessary on Earth and that of the good somehow contained in an utterly hidden God; this order and harmony, which were the underpinnings of beauty, connected humanity to the eternal. “The beauty of the world,” Weil wrote in Waiting for God, “is Christ’s tender smile for us, coming through matter.”

Weil believed, according to du Plessix Gray, that, “There are three potential objects of human love in which God is secretly present and through which we can therefore love him in an indirect or implicit manner.” These are love of neighbor, love of religious rituals, and love of the order and beauty of creation. Weil believed the practice of prayer was the greatest among these religious rituals and that the greatest prayer of all was the Lord’s Prayer. The Cathars accepted only one sacrament, the consolamentum, but this involved the candidate in saying the Lord’s Prayer. Here again is a profound link, perhaps the greatest, between Catharism and the unconsciously Catharist Simone Weil.

Weil felt intense sympathy for Cathars, seeing this lost civilization as the hope for the future. Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc, had been in her eyes the most important city in Western Europe after Rome and Venice. It had been the “cradle of those Western humanist values currently being threatened by Nazism,” writes du Plessix Gray, explicating Weil. “The Albigensians, creatures of the twelfth century troubadour culture, had created a network of small city-states whose blend of monarchy, democracy, and decentralization Simone viewed a a model of civic virtue. The Cathars had been “the only truly Christian civilization” of the Middle Ages.

Dying in a sanatorium in England in 1943, Simone must have dreamed of that only truly Christian civilization, She must have hoped that, dying of starvation as the most spiritual of the Cathars had done, she might somehow earn the right to behold somewhere in heaven – that is, if God existed – the vanished Christian cities of the Cathars.

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