A Portrait of an Extraordinary Woman : Dominique Aubier

A Portrait of an Extraordinary Woman

Traduction: Sarah Kins-Thomas

ROLL 1

GENERAL OPENING

(French weather report: Marie-Pierre Planchon)

For the Atlantic and North Sea regions, for all of the regions, a strong wind storm in progress. The general situation and its movement. A very deep depression of 940 HPA on the North of the North Sea moving forward slowly to the North-East and gathering force. The forecasts by region for Saturday, December 25, 1999 at 6PM.
For the Forties, Cromarty, Forth; Tyne, Dogger, Fisher and German regions: Gale 9 winds coming from the South-West giving way to gale 7 or 8 winds during the night, then gale 5 to 7 tomorrow morning, then gale 4 to 6. The tide will be very high. To the East rain and heavy showers.

For Humber and Thames regions: Gale 8 to 9 winds from the South-West, giving way to gale 7 or 8 winds during the night. Strong gusts of wind. The sea will be very high. Storms and showers.

For the Pas de Calais and East Channel regions: Gale 7 to 9 winds from the west, gale 9 some time in the evening, then cooling off for awhile with a gale 9 wind tomorrow morning, and locally a gale 10 wind in the surrounding areas. Strong gusts of wind, the sea will be very high, storms and showers.

For the West Channel region: Gale 7 to 9 winds from the West to South-West with various low pressure zones in the night cooling off for awhile. South-West district: gale 9 to 10 winds in the South of the region, and turning towards to the West South-West area with gale 8 to 9 winds tomorrow morning. Strong gusts of wind. The tide will be very high. Rain following the storms.

For West Brittany and North Gascony: gale 8 to 9 winds from the West to South-West giving way very shortly to gale 7 or 8 in the evening and cooling off again temporarily with gale 9 to 10 winds, sometimes rising to 11 in following night. Strong gusts of wind. The sea will be very high. Storms and showers.

INT HOUSE/SOFA

Dominique Aubier
As a mater of fact, I was just thinking if there was a history of storms, because if there was a history of storms, we could figure out what just occurred in France, and what seems to me to be pretty exceptional, and we'd have to be a finie bit superstitious, in the traditional sense of the term, to feel the effects of it. How can I say, not the weight of it, but I mean the emotion. Because this storm was an extravagant event. First of ail its size, the fact that it covered all of France two times, and that all of the forests was literally flattened by this kind of incredible bulldozer.
Because when you see and you visit these forests, in just our surroundings here, you are struck by the feeling of something savage...

EXT FOREST

Dominique Aubier
...as if the wind hadn't been made of air but was a rampart that crushed things. And, it seems to me that the first notion that was important for me was the unyielding character of the wind striking the forests. It beat them as if it had the intention of doing it.

I'm extremely fascinated by the meaning of the Hebrew word for tree. Tree in Hebrew is AYIN TZADE, and that means "I see the end here, I see the stop here." And look, a stop has been put to this world. We have a stop, it's not death that we have there, it's a stop. They were all stopped in the middle of their life as if they'd gone one step too far. They went one step too far. And something said to them "stop." Now, that is exactly the meaning of the word "tree" in Hebrew. That struck me because I find this coincidence, between language and reality, to be the language of timing in its pure state. We are really in an extraordinary situation. That reminds me of a story. One day, we were driving with Roberto Rosselini and his wife on the large road that crosses Italy from Milan to Rome. All of a sudden and in the middle of the night, Roberto Rosselini who drove a convertible Ferrari, said:
"We are going to stop, I'm not going any farther."
So we were surprised, and we said:
"But, what's going on?"
"Oh," he said "no, I'm not continuing. For quite awhile, I've seen cars with their lights on coming in our direction in a distance, but there hasn't been one of them that has passed us on the road. So, if these cars aren't passing us, if they're not coming towards us, it's because there's something wrong. And when there's something wrong, I don't do anything until I've figured out why. So, everybody, we'll rest here all night and when dawn cornes we'll go see what is happening."
And so we spent the night waiting. In the early morning, after having walked 16 miles, we came to a collapsed bridge. From the other side of the bridge and at the bottom of the ravine, were all of the cars that hadn't passed us. They hadn't foreseen and observed like Rosselini, that if no one passed them it wasn't normal. Now, this lesson of knowing when to stop is very important. And that is a lesson that I've never forgotten. Because Roberto was an observer, it's no coincidence that he was the founder to neorealism. He observed a situation, and with one detail that had escaped me - I hadn't remarked that no one passed us, he noticed it. He took the lesson from that and from this lesson he took action: We are stopping.
But we live in a society now that does not know when to stop.
We don't know how to stop technology, we don't know how to stop the virtual, we don't know how to stop what we consider to be progress in the name of the famous proverb: "You can't stop progress." But what is progress? What progress are we talking about? If it's a child's progress in school, I'd prefer that we don't stop it. But if it's inventions that must be stopped so that there is a revival then it's necessary to stop them. And so, Rosselini's stop seemed mythological to me. It had an exemplary mythological value because it showed that by observing reality and discovering signs, the expressions made by reality, you can know when you must stop.

INT HOUSE/AT TABLE/SOFA

Dominique Aubier
"Careful, Careful!"
When the wind gets worked up, when the madness of the wind swells, it's our breathing that is stifled. It seems to me that breathing is thinking and that, by all evidence, in this crisis of the wind, there was a crisis of thought. And it expressed itself ...I see it in the relationship between breathing, air, thought, etc...But it is also seen in the tree! Because we culturally used to thinking of trees almost as organic manifestations of things. Descartes said: "Philosophy is a tree." When the naturalists categorize species of animals, what do they make? A tree! What do they call it? The Tree of Life!
God created Earth and put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, what does He give them? He gives them two trees, one of which they must not touch, the tree of good and evil. Wherever we look at human creations, we find the notion of the tree expressing a specific situation that is evolving, that goes from its root to its foliage.

ON TREES GARDEN SHOT

Dominique Aubier
So, if we relate these meanings, this infinite poetry of representation, to the tree, and if we associate this idea to the forests that were flattened, what we find is terrifying. Very simply, we find that the winds beat our thoughts, our beliefs, our ideas our habits and we have to rebuild everything. And that's very serious, because the sign was in the wind.

INT HOUSE/SOFA

D. Aubier
I don't know if people look into details enough, but it's my specialty.
This wind came from Newfoundland. What newly found Earth, what does Newfoundland mean? It left Newfoundland, it should have gone to Scotland. I would've preferred that.. It should've just crossed the ocean, minding it's business. But no, it had its own idea. From Newfoundland straight to France, and then it stops on France's border. It doesn't disturb Germany, it doesn't disturb our neighboring countries, it is confined there, and it finds its area of activity, its intention. So, it's here that we must found the new land. It was an explanation that was contained within this crisis. I'm not speaking as an Initiated person, I'm just speaking as a perceptive person.
But if I speak as an Initiate about the winds, I'd add a rather important idea, it is that this wind "wheezed", if I may say that, two times. It came a first time in one direction, and then a second time in the same direction but on other territories, sparing no one.
And with Knowledge, everything that is repeated is proven. That holds true for science too. This reduplication perfectly demonstrated the intention of the wind.

STORMY SKY + CROSSING FOREST

(French weather announcement: Marie Pierre Planchon)
A depression of 958 HPA on Iceland, moving forward towards the South-East. Atlantic depression of 985 HPA, moving very quickly to the East with an atmospheric disturbance with it, and it is forecasted to be at 965 HPA by 51 North and 09 East by the 26 at noon. A new disturbance will arrive on the coasts of Brittany at about noon, and will quickly cross France during the day.
The forecasts by region for these 24 hours.
For Viking and Utsire: Gale 4 to 6 winds from the West to South-West , with various low pressure zones Gale 2 to 4 during the day.
For the East Channel region: low pressure gale 8 to 9 winds, sometimes gale 10 or 11, moving quickly west to South-West during the course of the morning, and giving way Gale 5 or 6 winds in the West to North-West region tomorrow morning. Strong gusts of wind. Storms and showers.

INT HOUSE/DRAWING OF THE WINDS

Dominique Aubier
Look at this image. It's very old, century. In the le century, it was already known that winds supplied the atmosphere. That's very important because we breathe in the atmosphere and the winds come from elsewhere, from much farther away. This representation is very intelligent in its na vety, and the atmosphere cornes from the four directions. Now, what's interesting from an initiatory point of view is, first, the shape that the Earth is given. It's obviously a cranium, you could almost say that this is the bone structure, the framework of the cranium that has been drawn. It faces one direction, and the four directions breathe on it from all corners, from all sides. In the north there are these strokes, while we don't see them in another place, and its very interesting, because they allude to the left and right. Left gives the information and right characterizes it, does something with it. There's the famous koan: "You hit the shelf and the bowl goes flying." We see this idea is contained there. It's extraordinary. And the idea that the planet is a cranium is also there, a cranium that contains a living organ that is the cortex, and the winds influence this organ specifically. That is, the winds make us think, and that's a notion of time. Next, you have the remarkable principle of the four winds in groups of three which is a very old sacred notion. It is three levels of organization that become four when they are complete, and here they are. So, action always happens in three. Scientists know it too, you know. Many biologists say: "Everything comes in threes. Three nucleotides are necessary to make a protein...everything comes in threes."

But when these three are formed there is always a resolution that appears that makes the fourth point. And this fourth point is very obviously represented by the whole drawing.

"BERESHEET BARA ELOHEEM VE-ET HA SHAMAYEEM VE-ET HA-ARETS VEHA-ARETS HAYTAH TOHOO VA-V0H00."

Think about the terminology used to name the earth in the Hebrew language, that's what appears in the first verse of the Bible. ARETS is the name for the Earth, but ARETS is from the verb ARETS ROOTS, the runner runs. When I say ARETS ROOTS, I say the runner runs; thus, the Earth is a runner. They knew it well before Galileo by studying the sacred language. You can find many values that were already known, but needed Science to show them. And it's really something to have demonstrated them! Because if I didn't know that the Earth runs because Galileo said it, I could never really appreciate the information contained in the word ARETS. So, we must keep the sacred information and the scientific confirmation, and we must see the correlation and harmony between the two. And, as a matter of fact, the whole problem is about harmonizing. I think it was the philosopher Whitehead who said: "Science always moves, theology never moves." I'd get rid of "theology" which bores me, and I'd say: "The study of things always moves." Science shows it moving constantly, but the sacred notion is immutable because it's always the same thing. always the same absolute principle that guides reality. There are always the same rules of this absolute model that govern the movements in reality. When you really want to know about reality, you ask the Sacred without forgetting about what Science says because reality makes you look at both. Do you know what an old Kabbalist said an Initiate was? "An Initiate is someone who knows his texts very well, and knows to open the window and look outside." So, we must know both how to read the givens of the absolute model and to have the capacity to look outside at what reality has proposed for us and what science has described for us. That's why I get irritated with the imperialism of science, because the Sacred isn't imperialist. The Sacred says yes to science as long as they can have a dialogue.

EXT GARDEN

juggler
The notion of right and the notion of left. The right...the left. An exchange from right to left. A descent, a rise. An inside...an outside. An inside...an outside. A stop. And ail that is found on the head.
There, in this one, there's really an exchange. You need to understand it first, then once that's done, and next to do it well, you need to no longer understand. You have to stop understanding, in fact. And when you no longer understand, that's when it gets pretty. It stays with us like a memory of the shape, and it's the memory that works for the movement.
This one also...very interesting...since...the two Bides work...they are each doing something. If s the same: you must understand it. Then, for it to be pretty, you need to no longer understand it. And when you don't understand it anymore, you add another movement.

BOBINE 2

INT HOUSE/SOFA
If I want to know what time is, I have to ask the Sacred. The Bible knows exactly what time is. In it, there's a wonderful word spelled " 'OT " (AYIN TZADE) and it means: "I see the end." In humanity, man learned to speak, in the true sense of the term, at the lime he developed funeral rites. And the day when he made funeral rites, he showed a knowledge for the notion of time. Whereas, animals do not. Animals don't know that they die, but at the moment of their death the idea that it's the here and now penetrates them. I've already known for 78 years that one day or another it'll happen, and that it happens forever. For science time is reversible, and that's one of the surprises of rationality. We can be born and die, die , reborn - all of that is foolishness. In fact, to know what time is, you must ask the Sacred. And what does the Sacred say? The Sacred simply says: the universe is a brain, half of a great brain, of a great cortex. Half is invisible and the other half is visible. So, where is time? It functions at night when our levels of melatonin, or the "black hormone" are highest So, time only exists in the dark half of the universe. And it is a force that comes with an energy, an energy that transports information from the left brain to the right. Because our brain only functions if a travelling energy takes information from one side and makes it come to the other. If you say chair, my left brain records the word chair and my right brain will see the chair. If you cut the links of communication between the two halves, you will say chair and I won't see the chair; I will see the chair, and I won't say the word. So, there's a transfer of information that happens. And lime is the night energy that goes with the movement of information from the invisible to the universe. So time only exists in the universe like melatonin only exists in the night, and it's our great immunity, our great preservation, because without time we wouldn't exist. But this representation, I said that it comes from the Bible, but it's also known by Hopi Native Americans, and its largely known by Buddhism and Hinduism, and by Tibetans, and is recognized by all traditions. Only science doesn't accept it, even human sciences. There is a separation between left and right that's clear: on one side, the insects that don't have melatonin, and on the other side, the brains that do. Rationality resembles insects, while knowledge resembles man. It's a question of division without judgement, you know. These are comparative analogies to make myself clear. I didn't say that rationality was an insect. I simply said that there is an analogy in the topological situation of structures.

INT HOUSE/DINING ROOM

Dominique Aubier
"The wind awakes!. I must try to live. The immense air opens and closes my book." Three fourths of the western writers don't place much importance on time. Even though Girdano Bruno, whom I'm thinking of now, said about time: "And so who tars and feathers me, if not time. It's the ages, the years, the months, the days; weapons and threads of time. And these hours against whom neither iron nor diamond are anything."

EXT GARDEN/TREES

Dominique Aubier
...I have to cross...
...This garden is like a summary of my house, I see paintings here. This morning there were ducks swimming there, it was like a Riopelle in Canada there, except that Saint Laurent was a little small. And there now, there are vibrations, and it seems more like a Zao Wou-ki. But there at the bottom, those big trees that are reflected remind me of Soulages. Really, you get the impression that the garden wanted to pretend to be a gallery to comfort us for the disaster. There is also a Hartung there behind. You could say that there was one there.
These branch designs...

EXT GARDEN/DOMINIQUE SPEAKING

Dominique Aubier
I knew Hartung very well, and Soulages too, we were good friends. He was very curious. I remember one day when he lived in Arcueil, and he had done a painting. My husband and I went there every Saturday and Sunday because at that time he wasn't well known as he became later. He was very poor and he had nothing to take care of an injury. So, my husband was a doctor, and every Saturday and Sunday he changed the dressings on his bandages. That's how we came to have many Hartungs in our life.

And one day, he had painted a yellow painting with a big black area in the middle, very immobile. And the first Saturday that I went there, I said to him: "That black doesn't move at ail." He said, "It's true. It's very still." And then, I went back the following Saturday, and I said, "But, what did you do to the black part?" He said, "I made it move." It was very touching because he really did make it move on the canvas. And one of Hartung's biggest concerns was being able to reinvent the movement on the flat and immobile canvas that he didn't have because of his disability. And, that, when one knows him, well was a stroke of genius. Because he was able to think of movement outside of the normal ways of moving. And I think that that was his real originality.

And he had a kind of inspiration. That completely reminds me of his kind of strokes, spontaneous, because he had a strong hand. His legs were amputated during the war, so he had all of his strength in his hands. And it's really in this spirit that I see there trees. They are like a Hartung painted naturally on the sky. You could cut along there, carefully, and then put it on some transparent material and put it in you living room. And write beneath it: "Hartung by proxy."

INT HOUSE/DINING ROOM/BULL WALL COVERING

Dominique Aubier
"So something spread out...something spread out will never be refolded."
This one by koan calls for a little commentary, "something spread out will never be refolded." There's a story there. There was a monk in a garden who was stretched out, his legs out blocking a path. One of his brothers comes with a wheelbarrow full of stones, and he says: "Move your legs back." The one who is laying down, applies this sacred rule and says: "Something spread out will never be refolded." And so the other goes over his legs and breaks them. Out of respect for the code.

INT HOUSE/IN FRONT OF THE TV

Dominique Aubier
I'd like to say something very important about bullfighting that I haven't said in any of my books. Bullfighting teaches you to see. It is an art that goes so fast that when a scene has occurred, you have to replay it mentally to find the facts exactly that made it significant. I owe so much to the father of Luis Miguel Dominguin. He called me unique example, "ejemplar unico." He said: "I'm a matador of bulls, my son is a matador of the public, and Dominique Aubier is a matador of bullfighting" because I explained it.

ON TELEVISION

Commentator

Death hits. The Spanish eye judges, following the precise rules. We have just seen a cruel death, a combat unequal by authority. And if we haven't entirely gotten the deep meaning, the obscurity of the sacrifice...

Young Dominique Aubier (in TV screen)

We must speak about bullfighting, we must explain it so that we understand something here. In itself, it doesn't explain anything. But look at it as you would a museum of the world. Isn't it wonderful to see today an art that tells us about a primitive mentality, that goes back 50,000 before today? Because you must link bullfighting to the first men who saw their chins decrease in size, their foreheads grow larger, and their mouths form. These are the people who killed the bull. Now, it's from this perspective, as memory of the world, that you see an extraordinary myth and maybe one of the purest of the world. You don't watch bullfighting with a free eye. You have to watch it with a trained eye. You must first know what must be chased...

Dominique Aubier (today)

I'd like to agree with the doctors who believe that we can go back and forth in time. I feel as if I've gone forward. As for going back, help me if you can! But it's bad enough seeing yourself 34 years younger! There's not only a physical change, there's a great mental change.

When I was interested in bullfighting, I saw in this myth as, a participation with the Sacred that had a universal value, as phrase I say it often enough in this film. And now, I still think I was correct. Now that I understand in another way what the essence of the Sacred is, thanks to traditions, to the Sacred, to the Kabbalah, to Hebrew, I see that's it is true in bullfighting. For example, in evolution there is a stop that must be made and there is an elevation that must be accomplished. Well, the bull's horizontal body represents the stop that must be made, and in fact, it's going to be killed. Through his traditional clothing, the bullfighter shows the spiritual elevation that must be made after he kills the bull. I find that even on the archaic side, even though it's been made more aesthetic and become and Art, there is still a participation with the Sacred that makes it totally valid and it remains valid. As for time passing, it was a little cruel to show me myself 34 years ago - to see that young woman and then to see the old woman that I became. Time's cruel, it makes you cry, but at the same time there's no better way to show that time is what makes us. Time made that young woman, here's what it's done now, and it had nothing to do with me. Time is an invisible event, a perpetual advancement of things that makes who we become. We can never beat time. It always wins. It always conquers us. It's interesting to confront the present and the past, with the distance being more than a quarter century, because it shows us how the invisibility of time creates resolution.

PHOTOS D. AUBIER + PAN ON BOOKS

DOMINIQUE AUBIER'S DESK

D. Aubier
I think that's funny! I was just writing down something very interesting. "But all rights, not only is man the owner of his own history, but history is the private property of man." So, when I tell you my history, I'm already in the middle of the Supreme Court of Appeals. But are you the owner of your history if you didn't understand it? You're only the renter! There where the science of reality comes in and then...well, it's better to have read Don Quixote. I wanted to read Don Quixote and some hard times came along, I wasn't supposed to read it, because when I read it...
...I didn't speak Spanish very well, but I could skip back and forth between French and Spanish, which is what I did, and something terrible happened to me: I had the impression that my head became inflated. But, that it inflated like a hot air balloon. Like I was like the little Chinese statue with the big meditation sphere around his head. I had an enormous gaseous sphere around my head. I didn't dare go through any doorways, I was very sensitive. And then , one morning, bam, flat as a pancake. I had searched my whole life to understand what happened to me. Now, I know. A book is made of gas, it's words. The gas enters our nerve cells, and above all the words, and takes its place there. But, if you put too many words with an interior breath that's too powerful, your cells inflate inflate inflate, then , your cerebral energy accepts ail of that, dissolves it and wham! It's flat. But after you have to explain to yourself what happened. So, for me to explain to myself what had happened, I had to learn Hebrew, to become a Kabbalist, to become a scientist specializing in the brain. But, I did it. So now I know that what happened to me is very normal.
When you find a book like Don Quixote, you don't find just a book...you find a language, a country, an ontological genius. You find a bit of the mystery of Being, of Spain. You cannot explain all of that with just the written word. So, I went to Spain. I moved to Carboneras by following the signs that took me there because I went to the only village in Spain that was named the same as the intellectual opération that I was going to undertake. Carboneras means "The country that brings together" in Hebrew, "Carbon": bringing together, and "erets": country. So during fifteen years, I brought things together...
...And what did I bring together? No, not fiancés, but science and knowledge of the doctrine by following Cervantes' indications. And I realized that there was a profound and extraordinary harmony between the lessons of the Sacred and certain scientific discoveries.

So, the intellectual pleasure of bringing them together was limitless and this pleasure in Hebrew is called "carbon." And I was in Carboneras.

ROLL 3

INT OFFICE

D. Aubier
The biggest lesson in Cervantès that I swallowed, like you swallow your soup, was a reading on reality. This book is an exposé of phenomena and events that you have to decode if you want to understand what he's saying. What fascinated me was the extraordinary parallel between the story of Don Quixote, the adventures of the hidalgo, and my own adventures in my life. I realized that even though my life was not written by me, there must have been someone who wrote it on my back, and wrote like Cervantès did. Now, that's fascinating. You have a book that is written by someone...
...who knows how life writes and, during this time life is writing on your back in the same style. And we're not talking about the French novels...
It's not the psychology of Balzac, nor the development of Proust. It's the mysterious emergence of events in life. So, you learn to read the events. And reading events is a prodigious science that is, in my opinion, the real secret of the reading of reality. If you read events, you know what life wants, you know what time wants and does. And I learned that in Don Quixote.

If I may, I'd like to read it because I couldn't say it better. So, "When they were entering into the village, Don Quixote observed two little boys contesting each other, "Never fret about it, for you shah]. never see her again as long as there's breath in you body.' Over hearing this, Don Quixote said to Sancho, 'Did you hear what he said, 'You shall never see her again as long as there's breath in your body. "

`So,' said Sancho, 'What's the great business though the boy did say so?.' 'What!; cried Don Quixote, 'Do you not see that by applying words to my affair, they plainly imply that never see Dulcinea again.' Sancho was about to reply, but he was hindered by a full cry of huntsmen and hounds running across the countryside chasing a poor hare. The poor terrorized animal took refuge and curl up under the foot of the donkey, Dapple. Sancho took the hare in his hand and presented her to Don Quixote who repeated: 'Malum signum, malum signum. A hare runs away, the hounds pursue her. It's finished, Dulcinea won't be seen again.' 'You are really strange,' said Sancho, 'Can't we suppose now that this hare was Dulcinea of Toboso, and that these hounds that followed her were the dogs the inchanters that changed her into a country lass. She runs away and I catch her, and I give her safe and sound to you who keeps her in his arms and caresses her calmly; What bad sign is that and what ill omen can we take from it.'" And, yes, a very simple omen, it is that there will be a Sancho Pancha like me who will get Dulcinea. That's what I did. So, Dulcinea is obviously all Sacred doctrine. And this doctrine of the Sacred wasn't discussed by Cervantès, he didn't discuss it at all. He set it to work and he says it, he says:
"It seemed fitting and necessary to him, for the brilliance of his glory as well as for the service of his country to make himself a knight-errant, to go around the world with his horse and his arms, to search adventures and practice everything that he had read that knights-errant did, righting an sorts of wrongs, and exposing so many meetings, so many perils that he'd acquire eternal fame for surmounting them."

He applied the doctrine of the Sacred as it had been taught to him by the Kabbalah, the great Jewish way, with some Sufism in it too, because Spain has been a place for the Jewish Kabbalah and Sufism as well. And, as Sufism and Kabbalah have the same criteria, if you understand one, you understand the other. The problem isn't very complicated, and by applying all of these criteria, he could write Don Quixote. And in my way of decoding Don Quixote, I only made Cervantès' intentions appear. Intentions that were perfectly encoded in his text. That's why you cannot read Don Quixote literally, linearly. Linearly, you lose. You have to stop on the event in each chapter and make a little mental film of it, to watch what just happened, and look for the meaning of the event. And when you discover that the event means this or that, see which word, which proper name, gives the secret away. And if you find the words that say exactly the same thing that the story does, you are sure to have understood what it was about. That's what I did, which took me 1000 pages as you see, seven pounds. And it's not done, there are at least another two volumes.

To understand Don Quixote, there's a notion that you must absolutely have in your mind. It's that this book was written in 1605, and that that was the time of the Inquisition's great power. Don't forget that on February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for saying that the universe was infinite. At the same time in Spain, Cervantès was saying to himself: "Burning? Not for me!, I'm not doing that, and I'm going to say what I want." So, that's what he did. He wrote a coded book. He used the model of the chivalry novels, and introduced what the Inquisition would've prevented him from saying by using his coded language. And when you read Don Quixote on the surface, you don't sense the code which is the whole point of the work. If you decode it, you see that he gave the most masterly lesson on the Sacred that one could give, and he did it in the face of the Inquisitors.

And you see it from the first line. When I started to read Don Quixote, I read it in French and in Spanish in a book that's still here, that one. I jumped between the two languages, but I could see that there were discrepancies. There are always discrepancies. You cannot accept that it is right just like that. It must be true in another way. So, I started by working with several edition, and I saw that they didn't correspond. Sometimes an edition said one thing, another edition said another. So, I bought the book from 1608 which is the corrected edition. In 1605 there were errors, but by 1608 Cervantès had corrected all of them. So, that becomes a precious document because it's the real edition. And so, you see on the first line, he says that Don Quixote is the Don Quixote de la Mancha. La Mancha, M-A-N-C-H-A, that's the province. The first line of the book...
..."En un lugar de la Macha." So, he's no longer in La Mancha. Now, it's about Machee'a! He's using a word that means messianism. That means that he's not telling me about the place La Mancha, he's telling me about a place of messianism, whose name he doesn't want to say. Certainly, we can understand him, he would be obligated to say it in Hebrew. He's not going to say "mashee'akh ben yosef."
And it's like that the whole way. So, you have 2000 pages from substituted words to...truth. Because there's what he said, and then there's what he meant. And what he meant is audible, you must simply read with an exercised ear and know how to manipulate the code. Kabbalists and Sufis had the same ....
....code, which is what I wrote in the French language in "The Hidden Face of the Brain," that is - the precepts...
...of practicalities that one must know how to recognize. And Cervantès used these practicalities. He put them on the page...
...but as he used a kind of big cloak to cover his story, that is, he tells a story of chivalry, well, the Inquisition was none the wiser. He was more clever than Giordano Bruno who was a philosopher, and so,he said things too clearly. Cervantès didn't say it clearly, he encoded it. And by coding it, he said much more than Giordano Bruno. But to decode it, you must know Spanish, you must be able to manipulate the Hebrew system of 22 letters, you must be able to manipulate the whole code underlying the 22 letters, you must know the brain fairly well, and you must know, how can I say it, spoken Spanish. Because Cervantès, for example, there are moments when I find him absolutely lyric. He takes a spoken expression, and he gives only half of it. Because it's spoken, you know it already, you'll add the other half. So, from time to time, there are these holes, like Gruyere cheese, but take a bite inside, and it's full! So, you have to add the spoken language, add the tonality, there's a tone. And in this tone, there's also his meaning. Sometimes, he becomes indignant, you can feel the indignation, and you must pay attention to what he says. But you must pay attention by listening, like the theatre. That's why the flat and shallow translation...
..ois a cartoon because it doesn't give the linguistic and living sonorousness to this prodigious book that I love.

I owe it everything. I owe to it my understanding ot life, ot the sciences. Everything that I understand in life I owe to it because it's all there. Its code is the universal code. And we'd better learn this prodigious code. All the more so since Cervantès wrote it for a specific time in the future.
He knew that someone would explain his book right when life needed it, and he says so. So, to decode Don Quixote today, first, it's time, and then it's the moment that life really needs it, we all need Don Quixote's code to understand life, to understand politics, to understand...everything is in it. And, basically, you have to know how to decode it. I had to decode it to prove that it exists. There was a time when I benefited from it without decoding it, I just knew what it was. But I had to decode it for others. I had to put it in black and white. I had to apply this code to our cosmic reality to show the conditions of our universe. This conditioning is necessary to understand Don Quixote, beginning with the first line "in a place of messianism." You have to know everything that is evolutionary in the history of the Sacred. Because the Sacred has its own history. There's the history of religions, and that's very good, but the Sacred extends out over religions. Religions are only an era of the Sacred and messianism is a second era of the Sacred. And Cervantès is in its first region, and the exegesis of his work is in the second region. I can't do anything there, it happens that life whisked me there to understand this text. But life didn't put me there to understand it, because actually I was born understanding it. This text was given to me, and if it hadn't been given to me, I wouldn't have understood it more than someone else. I need to be very modest there.

He's a messiah, that is, A messiah...I didn't say that there were no others. I'm not saying that he rebels against Jesus, that's an absurdity. He's an explanatory messiah, Jesus was the active messiah. They must not be confused. But they belong to the same cycle of messianism and that's about...a cycle, a 2000 year cycle, and these 2000 years end today unfortunately with the Y2K of the trees, with the Erika oil spill that is vomiting on us everything that we want, with three signs of malediction. It was foreseen that at the end of messianism things would be going badly. And, here we are. But it's because the moment is here and it's a historic moment, a cultural moment, a civilizing moment. And we must take responsibility and take it into account. Now, that's exactly what rational thinking doesn't want. Rational thinking wants to continue in the delirium of its technology, its inventions. It doesn't want to realize that the reality of time is sensitive, intentional, living, and that we must keep into account the wishes of time. And time wants what Cervantès wanted, that is "We must explain, we must clear up the problems, we must realize the universal code, and we must reform the global consciousness," and that's ail possible. Ifs a question of will, a little bit of politics, and a lot of culture. And I don't think it's beyond the means of today's human intelligence, not at ail. I understood the Hebrew alphabet in Cervantès.
But, the Hebrew alphabet is a gift from God. You must know that at the root of everything Sacred, there is a divine decision, and there's a divine immanence that said "Here, I give you truth, now you'll have it." Because we never would have invented it! It was better that God gave it to us. So, He was very generous and He gave it. He is called "Oten Ya," the God who gives. When this God gives, it circulates in the cosmos, and in the evolutionary adventure, and then it passes by humans, it passes by rebels, in ail traditions...
...some of them captured the messages, captured the knowledge, that's why knowledge is everywhere. It's everywhere because there are people who were inspired. I was inspired.

A lot of people think I'm Jewish. I'm not Jewish, I learned some Hebrew. But, that bothers me because if God had asked me as He was making the world, when He was choosing a maternal language for the universe I would've said, "Listen, be nice to me so that no one calls me a lost Jew, make it Provençal." But no, what can I say? He had His idea. He had the right too to have His idea, God the Father.
He preferred to write in Hebrew. He drew the world with His 22 letters plus five, and with that, you can understand everything in the world. You can hear everything, understand everything. It's just as I told you, that makes people prejudices against me. Everybody treats me as if I was Israel in person...That is because the world is full of anti-semites, the imbeciles. They are against God, not me. They picked the wrong enemy.
It's not against Jews, it's against God. These days, everyone is denying God. They don't even want God, it's well known!

INT HOUSENEAR PLATE

D. Aubier

Oh, I told you about how I got back into Spain illegally. Now, I'll tell ou how I left Spain, very legally, because of this plate.
Imagine that one day, I was sleeping, I always slept in very late in the mornings, and I heard my son who called me:

"Mom! Mom! It's one o'clock, and you're still sleeping; There are some gypies out here who brought you a beautiful plate." Oh, a beautiful plate, and I had a collection of plates...If someone said there was a beautiful plate.... I wake up, I slip on my robe, I rush down the stairs, and I get to the terrace and what do I see? Four gypies lined up like a commando, far from one another with these serious expressions on their faces. So, I'm surprised by how they were standing, and by their expressions, and I say,
"What is it?"
And one of them named Antonio says to me:
"Senora, un plato de una vez" (Ma'am, we have a legendary plate.)
He takes it from behind his back. Then, I look and I say, "I didn't know that snakes encircled dogs." And he says to me:
"But, ma'am, it's not a dog, it's a horse."
A horse? And from the back of the terrace another gypsy named Luis cries: "Senora y ese caballo le parece a usted" (And ma'am, this horse looks like you.) My son arrives on the terrace.
He comes towards me and says:
"And, you know, the snake looks like Trignero."
Trigonero was my associate. So, all of a sudden, by this verbal revelation of the people who were there, I learned that I looked like this horse that looked like a dog. And that this horse was about to be attacked by a snake who was about to stop it from talking by biting it's tongue, and that this serpent looked like my friend and associate.
So, in a pure and simple state, I would have said, I'm in danger, I'm going to be attacked by my best friend. But, as I was already tremendously formed by Kabbalist symbolism, I thought of things much more precisely. I said to myself, the snake is Satan, the horse is the prophet. I'm not a prophet because I still look more like a dog.

But the dog is the message, and I'm the bearer of a prophetic message. And the devil is going to stop me from spreading this message. So, suddenly, this idea woke me up, and I said to myself: "Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's pretentious, maybe it's too much, but, I'm going with it."
It's obvious that I could have not listened to the message. I had the choice, I could have said, "It's foolishness like a lot of other things, a coincidence that doesn't mean anything," or really believe in the value of the augury, the warning. I preferred to bet on the value of the warning, on the value of caution. I took it very seriously, and I went to the bank and did everything necessary, so as not to be ruined. And, good thing I did. If I hadn't taken all of these violent and ferocious measures that have scandalized a lot of people, not only would I have been ruined, but I would have probably been bitten on the tongue and stopped from speaking for the rest of my life ...if not dead.

EXT HOUSE/D. AUBIER WALKS THEN ENTERS THE HOUSE

ROLL 4

D. Aubier

I think that three fourths of my life's work is looking at what events are and what they mean. Obviously, I'm very mischievous because when I watch events and comment on them, there's always someone next to me who is startled. I remember one day when we were watching the burial of François Miterrand on TV. And, the wind lifted the flag that covered his coffin, and Madame Miterrand piously tried to recover it, and POOF! The wind started again, and I said:
"The wind doesn't see your loyalty towards the flag."
So, there was someone next to me who didn't agree with me politically who said to me: "What do you mean?"
And I said: "Nothing... the wind. It's nothing."
Right then, they put the casket in a hearse. And Oh! Unbelievable! The license plate number was 666!
Just saying 666 is enough to know that it's what is called the Number of the Beast. The number of a maximum anthropic cyclic situation, but 666 is found in the Apocalypse of St. John, and it's a sacred notion. So, obviously those who aren't used to this language could wonder what it means. So 666 means: when the great cycle bearing the civilizing movement will have crossed its first steps, it will be on step 60.

This step 60 will have metabolized the last little cycle of 6 layers. So, the situation will be dramatic. It will be apocalyptic and we will say that it is of the Beast, but obviously the Beast doesn't exist physically. There is a disastrous situation and I have to tell you that this disastrous situation has been with us in the West, and particularly in France, since about 1900, 1917 some people say...

And it's not surprising that at Miterrand's funeral, this number appeared and said: "Think about me! Think about me!"
It was like a vague recollection, it was like a bit of information that said: "You're about to forget me, and that's terrible because if you forget me, you'll never stop anything and bad times are going to continue." I don't mean that Miterrand was this or tha, I'll leave it to history to judge him. Personally it's not a judgement, it's reading a sign. I observed this, exactly like another situation with Jacques Chirac, whom I don't have any grief against, nor any liking for either by the way, I'm neutral. He was officially photographed by Bettina Rheims. And what do I see on his official photo that everyone can see in any mayor's office? The flag is reversed. It's not blue, white, and red, it's red, white, and blue. I'm sorry, but they could have watched the wind. It seems to me that if someone has an attention to detail, if you watch the problems, you see that the wind is saying to Mr. Chirac: "You're the opposite of a Frenchman." Anyway, it's not me who said it, it's the wind. But I think that it's the fault of the photographer not looking at the details, and passing on an absolutely distressing message.

EXT SUNSET AND SUNRISE

EXT GARDEN JUGGLER

Dominique Aubier

...Isn't he talented...Oh! He's very good!...
He promised me that he'd handle the criteria of knowledge with as much skill as he handles the diabolo. So, I'm watching him with great interest.

ROLL 5

INT HOUSE

Dominique Aubier

"Be like a pure crystal around the precious moon."
That one deserves a comment, "be like a pure crystal around the precious moon." The precious moon is like the events that we should be around, not the sun since we do not shed light on events. Time does that, and we should be a sufficiently pure consciousness to reflect time.

INT HOUSE/LITTLE GIRLS

Dominique Aubier

We're going to do something together now. I'm going to explain something to you. Fm going to tell you that in life there are only heads, everywhere we look, there are heads, and you've got to have a good one. So, you take a nut. What's a nut?

Little Girl
It's uhm...

Dominique Aubier
A fruit.

Little Girl
A fruit.

Dominique Aubier

You open it. And you see that the nut is like a head. Oh! This one's all black, that's a burned head. The guy with that head rode a motorcycle. Let's take another, a wiser one. You see, a nut is like a brain, like we have in each of us. In the nut there are, you call them the halves, and you see a brain looks kind of like a nut. In French, they are almost the same word too... And what's that, they are bowls. But not just bowls, they are symbols for the head. So, the Tibetans made this metal bowl, and we can make the head sing. All human beings have heads and, for the Tibetans, when people lead their lives very well they become singing bowls. With their lives and their intelligence, they make a song appear, a music that resonates for a long time alter they have lived.. And that's the singing bowl. Good, and now you eat it. The sound that you make during your life lasts a long time after you're gone. And you'll see, I have a secret, a little statue. It's also a singing bowl. This little Chinese man is in meditation in his own aura that is shaped like a brain, and he took the theme of the brain from a sculpted nutshell. It's a very old, ancient, traditional object that represents knowledge. A person of knowledge is someone who meditates inside the theme of the brain and so becomes a singing bowl.

INT HOUSE AT TABLE

Dominique Aubier

"I know how to play the drum. Ra-ta-plan." Three levels of organization. "Ra-taplan." Two times, reduplication. He gives two archetypes by showing that he knows how to play the drum, or the cyclic model, that is round like a drum.

INT HOUSE AT TABLE

Dominique Aubier

Voilà. "You leave to live, you enter to die." Where do you leave, and where do you enter? Into the Invisible. And I think this next one is very precious.
"Know the face that you had before you were born."

LUXEMBOURG PIXILATION SPRING

Dominique Aubier

You know, there's one thing that amazes me. It's that time cannot be measured. They say that we measure it with docks, watches that work more or less efficiently. Scientists, who are so learned and who measure everything scientifically, have they found the atomic element of time? Have they found the "chrono" for us? No. They know everything about matter, but they only "knew" one thing about time...and that was a perfect joke! Until just recently, thermodynamics specialists said that time was reversible. I wish it were! I see that time is a formal element in my life that does not recede. And that's terrible because time is invisible. It isn't translated materially for the scientists to observe it. We can say that it makes the day, it makes the night, it makes the seasons, it makes the ages, but we cannot say how it does it. That's something we don't know.

INT HOUSE/ SOFA

Dominique Aubier

We want to know where time comes from, what its structure is, what its action is, why it is so powerful though invisible, impregnable, and uncontrollable. That's where we would find the cosmic element in time that makes life, that makes man, that makes us, that makes culture, that makes cinema, that makes literature, that makes our thoughts.

LUXEMBOURG PIXILATION WINTER

Dominique Aubier

Actually, there is a measure for time. Whether it be measured by the rational and materialist culture that its devices that go "tick tock tick tock", or whether it is found in the Knowledge in sensitive literature....

INT HOUSE/ SOFA

D. Aubier

...time is measured by events. It is events that construct and describe time to us. That's why, if you want to know what time does, you have to look at the event. And the storm that was caused by the wind was a particularly impressive event that measured the passage from the year 1999 to the year 2000. If I dare say it, I'd say that the Y2K bug that didn't infest the computers, well, the cosmic computers had it, and it was the storm

TRAVELING FOREST

D. Aubier

The evolutionary order states that we shouldn't go in the forbidden area that I also call the "Verboten". For about a century, we've lived in the "Verboten," that's why everything is going badly. That doesn't mean that what we're inventing at this moment is bad, but we've invented it in the area where we shouldn't have been. We could invent it later in another cycle, and it would be different. Unfortunately, we invented the television, the Internet, and the virtual in the area of the "Verboten," so it's unwelcome. But if these same values were invented in another cycle, they'd become positive values.

INT HOUSE/ SOFA

Dominique Aubier

We spoke a lot about the storm, but if we'd been completely objective, we would have observed that at the same time, that is the end of December and beginning of the year 2000, three unhappy events occurred. We had floods in the month of November, and we had the incredible wreck of the Erika. I had a very special look at the Erika situation. First, because it happened in the ocean. Now, the sea is the symbol of knowledge. As soon as something happens at sea, it has very particular resonance from a symbolic point of view. Also, this boat that left from Dunkirk and went to Italy, why did it break in two right off of France? It could've done it in front of Portugal or lower at Gibraltar or even Italy! No, it had to choose France's coast. Since I'm a realist, I said to myself,:
"France is involved, knowledge is involved, and the Erika should pive us a solution to this problem."
As I said, I'm a nominalist. When I don't understand something, I go straight to the name. And I ask that name to tell me what I don't know. And, Erika, I'm sorry to say it because it makes me terribly sad, but it equates to "Ari-ké" in Hebrew without any change at all means:
"The divine system is vomiting you."
That means that the order of nature, the divine system that is the laws of nature, are vomiting up what man made. And it is really vomiting, because it's doing it literally, not figuratively. And what it's vomiting isn't number two fuel, now we know. It's toxic waste, probably carcinogenic. It took them three months to tell us because we needed time to digest it. Now, naturally, when you hear a message like that:
"The system of God is vomiting you."
You wonder, "But why? Why is it vomiting our creations right now and not before,"

I think that it's very important to say because it's the drama of our time, and there are no cultural elements to make us understand that it's our social and civilizing evolution that has gone beyond its limits. It went into an area that it shouldn't have gone, and that's why the laws are vomiting us.
They vomit everything we've done that shouldn't have existed. And we should have known that. It was intelligible. I often think about the Talmudist information.

A piece of Talmudist information tells us:
"You must stop when the notion of light is intelligible."
The notion of light was already intelligible in the 19 century. And what's the event that could have made the system of light intelligible, just like time makes events? With an understanding of light in physics terms, was there such an obvious event? Why yes there was my friends, and I'm happy to tell you because we're taking advantage of this event right now as we speak. The Lumière brothers invented the cinema. Now, they were called the Lumière brothers, and that's what they did. They sent us into darkened rooms. That is, they put us face to face with the problem of darkness and light, and they put us face to face with the obligation of seeing the truth. And they put us face to face to see the real with the unreal. As Paul Valery said:

"Cinema is the unreal of the real."
But in the unreal of the real relationship, there is the real of the unreal. That is, in the two cases, the relationship is from left to right, and it's correct. That is, man invented cinema, blessed though he is, he should have also had the awareness of the event. I'm not going to say more. Since, after all, we've been invited to come to this awareness from now on...

Traduction: Sarah Kins-Thomas