Jean Klein didn't ask for anything. That's what struck me the most about him. He didn't ask you to change. There was no violence with respect to your behavior. Jean Klein met you, saw you as you were, with your conflicts, your problems and not for a single moment wanted to change you, not by a millimeter. This shows a tremendous sense of respect! Think of all the gurus, all the teachers who try to transform their students: does this create anything other than egos devoted to themselves, who feel more and more separate from themselves, and the entire universe?
He demanded no transformation of you and never indicated any bad thing among his friends. You entered his room and he was amazed at your beauty, he saw nothing else. Of course, the beauty he saw was that of his true nature, but this wonder he had of his own beauty was reflected in you. In turn, you were amazed at its beauty. This beauty was then yours. You were invited to be attentive to what was there, deeply, without ever forcing. No violence, no demands: you felt completely free. You could have become this or that, he had no opinion. To him, whatever you had become, it was right.
This atmosphere of non-demand created a form of resonance. Some people who had spent their lives wanting to change themselves, to purify themselves, were waking up to a kind of self-respect. Without prompting, listening to their problems was accomplished. In this listening, in a spontaneous way, the problems are released. Jean Klein had no demands. That’s why people from different walks of life came to see him. He received both a gangster linked to serious crime and a minister of the interior, a marijuana cultivator, high finance bankers, exuberant artists and petty bourgeois traumatized by any form of creativity. To everyone, he transmitted the same teaching: “Stay where you are, do not change your social status or way of being, but become available to your emotional, intellectual, and sensory functioning. The silence you seek is not found somewhere but in your presence to what presents itself. “Everyone was more available to their characteristics. In this welcoming, a change was occurring. He was almost callous, Jean Klein didn't want people to change on the outside, he didn't want psychological events around him. Any experience based on the mind was seen as a lack of vision, a compensation. Going into samadhi in any form, any absorption which cuts us off from objective life was for him a lack of perspective and would inevitably have created increasing difficulties in coping with daily life. It was not a question of leaving the objective world to find peace, but rather of sensing this peace in which the world appears and disappears.
In his presence, the vibration which imposed itself swept away any grasping of the objective world, enabling one to realize oneself as the backdrop that is always present in daily perceptions. This vibration gradually left its perceptible characteristic to become the light that illuminates all perception. At some point, just as light cannot be perceived, it becomes impossible to perceive vibration objectively. On a certain level, he controlled this and transmitted this form of sensitivity. He said that his master, whom he considered much more powerful than him, had to constantly monitor himself to prevent those who approached him from having particular experiences. Without this, the students would have focused on objective situations, on change, would have focused on the outside, on the psychological level. This did not prevent him from giving, individually and in specific cases, some of the most virulent advice, both on the practice of yoga and on the dietary level – where the skin and seeds of tomatoes could become dramatic enemies –, on love or sexual life – where he was very generous with technical advice. His advice could extend to political life, banking investments, musical opinions or any other social subject. But his enlightening advice did not take on its full meaning until the student truly intuited non-direction : the absence of needing to appropriate any characteristic. It was not aimed at a purification with a view to an awakening: it was the orchestration in space-time, the transposition into daily life of the foretaste of the Essence. He tended to resonate within him an emotional, intellectual, and physical availability in which life without intention could take shape without much resistance.

• Eric Baret
  art Antonio Linde