Seen from outside, the actions of beings who are not enlightened, even though they obey ritual order, are entirely indistinguishable from those of enlightened beings. They eat, fight, sacrifice, make love—with just the same gestures. The only, invisible, difference is the detachment of enlightened beings from the fruit of their action. According to the Bhagavad Gītā, the action must be performed by everyone, enlightened or not: first, because the action is nevertheless carried out within us at every moment (“Never in fact can anyone remain, even for a single instant, without performing some action; since, even without willing it, each is compelled to act by reason of the qualities [guṇas] that constitute nature”).²⁶⁶ Even when we are totally still, our breathing continues: in breath there is sacrifice, in sacrifice there is the world. Second, the action must be performed because obedience to ṛta, to order (as sacrificial action), helps to turn the wheel of cosmic articulation (“And so the wheel turns”).²⁶⁷ Those who act without being conscious of the action will also turn the wheel, but in the direction that leads to the undifferentiated: “The worlds would collapse if I do not perform my action.²⁶⁸ I myself would be the cause of universal confusion and I made these creatures perish.” With lucid terror, the Hindu seer could see the threat of a return to the undifferentiated, into which every other threat flows—and at the same time he knew that the necessary action, even if conscious, cannot lead to release, unless that mysterious element of detachment is acting in it. The ṛṣi gave the highest meaning to action: he stated that without its perpetual support the world could disintegrate in an instant, but at the same time he stated that action is a thing from which one has to separate oneself: through detachment.

There is a path of action and a path of consciousness of action. The latter, which is the Esoteric, presupposes the path of action—which is the Exoteric—as its figurative casing. All gnosis is an emphasis on the path of consciousness of action: the path of thought, of knowledge. The formula that points to this path is that found repeatedly in the Upaniṣads: “He who knows thus.” A vast, indiscernible distance is then established between someone who acts thus and someone who acts in the same way but is “he who knows thus.” Today we are in a situation of forced esotericism, since the way of action has been canceled out, since there is no longer a required action for each moment: all actions can be performed at any moment, there is no longer any awareness of their articulation except insofar as they accumulate in simultaneousness or in an indefinite juxtaposition. Here the esoteric comes up against its greatest risk: the only way of knowing is esoterically, and many people think esoterically without being conscious of it: this is the supreme evil, the challenge and the parody of Inversion, the parody within which all gnosis is obliged to move, sometimes even disguising itself as unconsciousness in order to pass unobserved and thus avoid being caught. But at the same time the Esoteric is now tempted by its remotest, ever latent, experience, which finally surfaces: to take everything as support (figurative casing) for knowledge, and no longer just those actions that belonged to the order of the sacrifice, the calendar, the cycle. To take all dispersion, all fragmentation as support. This delicate, vertiginous transition recalls what had happened in the Forest Doctrine, the boldest part of the Vedic texts, where it was suggested that, since everything is a sacrifice, one need not even perform it within the community, but could go into the forest and observe it there as an act that is performed all the same, in every moment, in our physiology, in our breathing, in the same way that everything today could be described as a moment in the cycle of production and consumption.