Donner du sens à l'existence - Dialogue avec Thierry Janssen

In our brain, we have a small area called the anterior cingular cortex. And this small area is like a sense detector. If there is meaning in our existence, if there is meaning to what we live and direction, the anterior cingular cortex is at peace. It does not produce anxiety. On the other hand, if there is no attributable meaning to what we live, or if there is no direction that can justify what we are living, the anterior cingular cortex generates anxiety. And so we understand that, as rituals bring meaning, allow us to give meaning, to direct projects in one direction, it is not surprising that we are eminently ritualistic animals. While the question of ritual seemed, a few years ago, completely pastoral and forgotten, we see more and more people turning to the power of rituals to transform themselves, to evoke the passages of different moments of their lives, to create a link with others. What is it? How to make a ritual not a source of confinement, but a source of celebration, of change, of transformation, and as a power of relationship, of recreating the link? To answer all these questions, I welcome Thierry Janssen. Hello Thierry. Hello Fabrice. I am really very happy to be able to share with you this exploration on the question of rites, which is the subject of your new book, but then it is not at all the preconceptions we have about rites. You really started an investigation, asking people what their particular difficulties were, and how, perhaps, the solution to transform our difficulties, is to invent rites. Maybe you could tell us what people told you about your investigation. Yes, because, indeed, I did not necessarily have the idea of writing on this subject, and then afterwards, when I let myself be convinced, I did a little bit of research on the subject in the literature. Already, rites and rituals were not so clear, and I said to myself, let's go out there, try to understand what is going on, and then from there I will see what definition to give to this word of rites, to this word of rituals, and see if it corresponds to my own experience. And indeed, I interviewed about 250 people, it's not a big sample, but still, and I was surprised, first of all, to see that many people have concerns, which are almost grouped into categories, like that. So I'm not saying that my investigation is exhaustive, and that it is representative of the population, but large categories, to have a need to take care of oneself, a need to take care of the relationship with others, a need to take care of the environment, a need to create a better atmosphere at work, a need to sacralize the events of existence, to give them a value. And all that, I said to myself, wow, it looks like it defines rites, as if the rite was born from a need, as if it was the momentum that comes from a need, in a personal life or in a collective life. And then, by asking all these people how it all lived in their lives, I realized that each of these rites had rituals, and a way of manifesting how to respond to this need in everyday life, but in a conscious way. And that's what made me understand right away that rituals are not habits. It is beyond habit, since it is experienced in consciousness. Maybe we could, to explain how you were interested in the healing power of rituals, maybe you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey, for those who don't know you. Yes, yes. Well, my name is Thierry Janssen, I am 61 years old, I was born in Brussels, and when I was very young, I was a very mystical child, but I think a lot of children are mystical. That is, I had a kind of wonder of the world, a feeling of love for this world, for people, and then also a sense of the sacred that was immediately tamed by ancient Egypt. So, as a child, I was ritualizing like a great Egyptian priest, my room was decorated with hieroglyphs, the garage of my parents was furnished to make it an Egyptian tomb, and then I had the chance to meet an archaeologist who taught me Egyptology until I was 16, every week at the university, I had been going since I was 7 or 8 years old. And in fact, all this inhabited me, I even thought of becoming a priest, at some point, and then, at the same time... A Christian priest or an Egyptian priest? Well, Egyptian, because that's what inhabited me, but in form, it would have taken the form of a Christian priest. And I saw the affiliations there were between the rites and the ways of proceeding in Christianity and those that came from ancient Egypt. But at the same time, at the same time, my mother had a surgery, a fairly serious intervention, and she showed me the surgeon who had operated on her in the hospital, and I hear myself say to myself, I'm going to do this. And so I spent my childhood between, am I going to become an Egyptologist or am I going to become a surgeon? And at 18, I chose surgery, clearly, consciously, in the sense that I said to myself, Egyptology, well, it may interest only me, but surgery, it will serve more than me. So I decided to do medical studies to become a surgeon. But, at first, there was a desire to transmit, because that's what I did since I was very young, given that, as a child, I had, first of all, a lot of sensitivity, I had a slightly deformed body, and so the others made fun of me quite easily. We talk about harassment at school, I think I really experienced violent harassment, but at the same time, I had found my place. I had this passion for Egypt, and I took my place by transmitting this to the students, the small number of students who did not play football. I was called Thierry Janssen, and in fact, when I had all that, I was not happy, I was tense. Yes, we talked about it, so tell me, you became a surgeon, you really had notoriety, the position, an important position, and the day you have all that, you say to yourself, I had my position at the university because my goal was to teach, so I wanted an academic position. And the day I had all that, but really, the day I had it, on January 5, 1998, I heard a voice that said to me, if you stay here, you will die. And so, I listened to the voice, I could not resist that. And I left, in half an hour, the time to write my letter to the dean of the Faculty of Medicine saying, don't blame me, but I can't stay. And in fact, I never regretted that, but it had to be assumed. And as I was an employee of the hospitals in Brussels, I had no fortune in front of me, and I had the idea to find a job quite quickly, but I had not done a job on myself. And so, I found a job that I approached in the same way as when I was in the function of surgeon at the hospital. That is to say, with a lot of tendency to push, to control, with a very determined will. But again, I got tired of this job. It was a management position for a house of Italian-born priests called Giorgio Armani. Here in Paris. I did that for a little year, and fortunately, they asked me to leave. Because I might have held on a little longer, but I was exhausted, and I was really not in my environment. But I learned a lot. I learned to disidentify from what I was doing. I understood that I could do a lot of things. In the end, what mattered was who was doing it, and that's when an inner work began, a more psychological work, and a return to what had inhabited my childhood. A return to mysticism, to spirituality. And so, that's it. It all led me to finally write a first book in the year 2000, The Work of a Life. I think it announced La Couleur, then there was Vivre en Paix, and then there was La Solution Intérieure, which was the book of reconciliation between the doctor and the poet, the most inspired man. La Solution Intérieure was a book that marked a lot, which was about reconciling the scientific rigor of medicine and everything we can know about what makes sense for each of us, and how to make sense of the trials we are going through. Yes. And that's La Solution Intérieure, which still remains a great classic. I think it's a book that was very well documented, and it was very calm, which meant that people from conventional medicine, people from alternative or complementary medicine, from unconventional or less conventional medicine, could find themselves in a place where things were integrated for a better understanding of the nature of life and of the human being. And I'm very happy to have written this book, but what a job! It was 15 months of writing, every day, 8 hours a day, there were 700 scientific references to read, to sort, to try to digest. But for me, it made me grow. And above all, it gave me a form of contact with a wider audience. And then, after that, I wrote La Maladie a tel un sens, and I fell ill. And in 2009, and that was the gift, namely that I had regained my bad habits, to direct, to control, to absolutely want, to put a lot of will, a lot of work into what I was doing. I was exhausted, and that's what happened, and I was paralyzed due to a flu. It degenerated, and I was actually exhausted, my immune system. I was telling others to take care of themselves, I wasn't taking enough care of myself. I had given 200 lectures in 8 different countries, in one year. Around this theme, La Maladie a tel un sens, so the question was asked to me, and I was here, at La Pitié et Salle Pétrière, in the Neurology department, and I remember very well, I took my notebook, in which I regularly write, and I said to myself, who brought you into this delirium? And the answer was immediately, your ego, Thierry, your personality a little agitated. So I asked myself another question, if it wasn't this personality that took power in your life, what would happen? If it was rather the meaning of being that inspired you? And the answer came right away, I'm going to live in Egypt. And so I went to live in Egypt, because when you hear this kind of answer, you can't cheat. I saw the danger I was in, I was paralyzed, I almost recovered everything, I can't even whistle anymore, but it's the only one, it's a lot of luck. And I said to myself, well, go to Egypt, and I left, I had already spotted a small house there that I rented in the fields near the Valais des Rois, I wrote there, and then, I calmed down, and then, there was Confidence, a man in search of coherence, where I told this story, this readjustment. And then, just at the publication of Confidence, a man in search of coherence, so in 2012, I was 50 years old, it was the year of my 50th birthday, and in fact, I did, we said I had had a depression, I didn't consider it as a depression, even if I believe that all depressions could be called what I call a dark night of the soul. And really, I saw, and it still lasted a long time, because I told myself, I'm going to stop, the idea, in fact, at the end of 2012, after Confidence, was to stop for a few months to find space in myself and create the School of Right Posture, which at the beginning I called the School of Therapeutic Presence. Because following the exhaustion of 2009, I told myself, well, it would be time to stop travelling, to have my own place, and people will come if they want to. I didn't want to spread out, it didn't suit me. I'm a monk, I need my monastery, or my ashram, in fact, I need my place of anchor. And I wasn't sure I was up to such a place, because you need a lot of space in yourself to receive others and their inner chaos, and make them hear this place of peace that is in them. And I knew the school would be both a psychological but above all a spiritual school. And who am I to create a place like that? I didn't have a line of masters who would have eventually encouraged me to do that. And so, I had to go and find this conviction, this certainty, this seat in me. And I told myself, I'm taking a retreat to experience myself. Except that the retreat, I thought it was going to last six months, that I was going to write a book about the silence I had heard when I had retired to Egypt. And in fact, it lasted three years. And it lasted, it was hard, because it even ended with almost a suicide attempt. And in fact, today, I think I can say that I understand what is written in the mystical texts of the past. I understand what is written in the mystical texts of the crossing of a desert in which we meet monsters. Now, I know what it is. And above all, I know what it is not to be annihilated by these monsters, to be able to look at them in the face and then to enlighten them with love, with light, with consciousness. And it made me, it may be a new pretension to say that, but I assume it, it made me absolutely peaceful. Absolutely peaceful. And today, I am 61 years old, I can die tonight, it's good. But I am happy to live, I am not at all hoping to leave. But it's good. It's done. I think I saw, I understood. And I am happy. Deeply happy. What I could not have said five years ago, ten years ago, certainly not. There is a joy, nothing seems complicated to me. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort, but nothing is complicated. I am happy. Nothing is complicated. Nothing is serious. And so, in this book, you gather, basically, your work, your experience to rehabilitate, basically, the power of the rite as a power of transformation in everyday life compared to what we have seen, these different difficulties that everyone has and that the rites are very precious if we want to get out of the holes that we have in their words. Yes. And in fact, again, I had never thought about this topic and I did not realize that I was ritualizing a lot in the end. But I think we all ritualize quite well and that we will probably all ritualize more and more because in the title of the book, there is to invent contemporary rituals to live in an uncertain world and I think that since the crisis of COVID-19, we are all more or less aware that the world is uncertain. It is, by essence, life is uncertain. It is uncertain in the sense that the world is uncertain in the sense that life is uncertain. But here, we have become aware of it. Everything can stop for the whole world in a few days. And so, it is when Jean-Philippe de Tonnac told me do you realize that you have established a contemporary ritual by offering a meditation every night during the first lockdown. And I said, I had never thought about that in those terms but it is true. It was a ritual where I found people on Facebook every night at 7 p.m. It lasted 45 nights in a row. And I know that there are people who were sometimes 10,000, 15,000 per night. And people, it changed their lives and mine too because I had landmarks, I was peaceful, it structured my day, it gave meaning to this lockdown where I was still a little isolated like most of us. I was really living alone during the lockdown because my companion was in Egypt and was stuck in the middle of the city and stuck there. And so I said to myself, yes, it is worth thinking about it and indeed the rituals, the rites and the rituals give meaning to existence, allow accomplishments and allow us to cross the periods of chaos, of uncertainty. So what is the difference between a rite and a ritual? So, as I was saying earlier, by doing my little investigation, it really caught my eye and I did not find that in the literature that I consulted. So, I did not consult all the literature on the subject, but it often seemed confused to me. Rite, ritual, there are even authors who use both in the same sentence without really specifying what they mean in a possible difference. And the rite is really something that is born in our personal life or in the collective life in relation to a momentum that comes from a collective life. And so, I think that the great needs of humanity are at the origin of the great rites of humanity. And then, the ritual is a way to put this into practice, to manifest it concretely. There is a simple example, but which certainly speaks to everyone, it is the example of the baptism. The baptism, even the non-religious baptism, the baptism in universities, all these baptisms correspond, well, respond to a need to welcome a new person in a community, a need to recall the values of this community, and a need for the one who adheres to the rite to show his commitment to the community. And just that, just this rite, there are at least three needs that are at the origin. After that, the baptism ritual will vary from one community to another, from one religion to another. We do not baptize in the mammon in the Orthodox, the Catholics or the Protestants. So, it is really an update of a rite which itself is at the service of a need. So, it is really important to understand that the rite is a bit the root. Rituals, we can invent them, they have different forms. So, when we understand that, we are much less fixed on the form of the rite. So, the rites are only forms to deploy the meaning of the rite and not to confuse the ritual with the rite. Ah yes, and you know... Because that's what creates the tension. Ah yes, and that creates a confinement. And I'm a little bit... Well, sometimes I have a franc to speak and then I assume what I say. But I'm a little annoyed sometimes to see so many works today saying what rite you will get such a thing. So, it's possible that the implementation of this kind of rite mobilizes psychic and physical forces that allow the accomplishment of certain things. But at the same time, I find that very confining. Because we put on people's lives rituals that come from the outside without even always doing the pedagogy of what the rite behaves as an intention, as a symbol, as... I think that this proposition of inventing rituals is not necessarily to throw the rituals of the past in the trash. There is a heritage of rituals in our culture, in our cultures which is very rich. But at the same time, it is to reappropriate them. Which is reinvented. And which is already reinventing them again. For example, just before our interview of the day, I was in a funeral. And, in fact, it was in a church a Catholic church. I grew up in a Catholic family. I did my communion and all the rites that this church proposed. But today, I don't have religious practices in this church. And suddenly, at the moment when everyone went to communion, I didn't feel like getting up and going there too. In a kind of conformism, belonging. And at the same time, it was a little embarrassing because I also wanted to show that I was united with the others. That I was sharing something with them. And a common value and a common tribute for the person whose funeral it was. And I stayed in my place by saying to myself, no, you are going to ritualize communion but in your own way. And so, I put myself in my little inner kitchen in meditation. I opened my heart very strongly, physically. I felt this energy and it spread throughout the church. And I felt in communion so much with the community that was there and with the transcendence that inspired this community. But I didn't want to use the same gestures because they belonged to a community that recognized themselves in these gestures. The other great misunderstanding about rituals is the idea that it's religious. And so, all those who spoke about religion say, but what does it concern us? But it's going to be a confinement. But no, rituals are not religious. Rituals are not ... Rites and rituals are not particularly religious even if religions have adopted them. But all human beings wherever they are have adopted rituals. And you underline very precisely that rites and rituals make up the structure of our political social life at the heart of secularism. Totally. By the way, the word secular for me is a word that I try to avoid because I think it becomes a religion. It almost designates a set of behaviors and beliefs sometimes very intolerant I find. And so, I prefer to talk about non-religious rituals than secular rituals. That's because you're Belgian. Yes, that's it. I know. We have this distance. Between the Belgians and the French in the sense of ... But let's say what is really important is that the ritual is not religious. Maybe you can give some examples. Yes, because in the survey I did I was surprised at first that a lot of people said, no, I don't ritualize, I don't have a religion. I know, and when I introduce rites, people tell me, no, no, you're giving us something religious. So I also, it made me laugh a lot and I tell the same anecdotes as you. That the rites are at the heart of our modern societies. Completely. And what interested me a lot in the little survey I did, not the survey with people but the literary survey, the documentation, is that the psychologists who deal with the evolution of our behavior according to history and the circumstances of history, etc., these psychologists tell us that it is highly likely that the great religions that were born in the first great cities at the beginning of the Neolithic were born from these rituals that were necessary to live in a cohesion of the populations in these cities. Namely, in the Paleolithic there was a large population of people who lived in small groups and it was not very complicated to know what the neighbor thought. We could discern on his face his intentions and know if we were all going to go hunting for mammoths. On the other hand, in the Neolithic when the first agglomerations took place around the Nile, the Indus, the Euphrates, we found hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people who were all going to share the same values, the same visions and maybe go to battle together or repair the digs after the flood of the river. And so, there were these first great collective rituals around the monkeys, around the harvests, around the hunting and it federated, it allowed to have a cohesion in these societies around common projects and it linked, linked and it created religions. And so, without having doubt, the great rituals that answered these great needs and the first one was to appease the populations and to create cohesion in their hearts, well, they are at the origin of religions. So, the rites are more at the origin of religions than the religions at the origin of rites. And then, you also show, that's why I wanted you to tell your story and all the components of your reflection, that neuroscience needs rites. Yes, and that also excited me because, indeed, as I spent as a doctor and as a scientist, yes, I did research, I did a research thesis, so yes, I had a scientific approach at the beginning, even if today, I see that science can also lock us in representation systems that, unfortunately, are not inspired enough or not inspired enough sometimes, but in the meantime, it is always exciting to see that in the scientific culture there are justifications to understand the behaviors that are ours. And indeed, as far as rituals are concerned, there are a lot of things that we could say, but there is a very, very striking thing, it is that in our brain we have a small area that we call the anterior singular cortex and this small area is like a sense detector. If there is meaning in our existence, if there is meaning in what we live and direction, because the sense is the direction that we live and the direction is the direction that we move and the direction is the direction that we move and the direction is the direction that we move and the direction is the direction that we move and the direction is the direction that we move. So, the sense has these two acceptances and well, the anterior singular cortex is appeased, it does not produce anxiety. On the other hand, if there is no meaning attributable to what we live or if there is no direction that can justify what we are living, the anterior singular cortex generates anxiety and this anxiety prevents thinking and therefore we understand that we need landmarks, we need to bring meaning, the need for meaning is essential for the functioning of our brain and therefore we understand that, as rituals bring meaning, allow to give meaning, to direct projects in a direction, well, it is not surprising that we are animals eminently ritualistic. So, ritualized means trying to give meaning, to give order precisely when we are in an uncertain world. Totally. And it is not a fixed order, it is an order that we have to create according to what is necessary for us. Absolutely. So, this is what you invite us to do in this book, it is what are my needs, where there are things that are hurt, where there are things to rectify and from there I can find meaning, find, and therefore peace compared to a deep uncertainty. Yes, and this is in addition to the advantage of the rite, it is that it goes through the body, this is a fundamental criterion so that, let's say, the transformation is incorporated and becomes alive. That it is manifested and that it is really transformative. And, in fact, there too, when I read the importance of involving the body in the ritual and in particular compared to other components of our neurological apparatus, namely mirror neurons which are at the base of all the learnings that we do. If a child sees his parents peeling potatoes in a certain way, with these mirror neurons he will integrate this movement and then will be able to learn very easily to do it because it is already imprinted in his brain. Well, when we ritualize together, when we sing together, when we recite the same texts, etc., our mirror neurons create a feeling, a cohesion between us that makes our societies solid and that they can go through the trials. Indeed, I was surprised to see so many people when I meditated during the first confinement every night, but I think it was because many people were in great uncertainty. What happened collectively with this confinement and the COVID-19 crisis came to shake us all of a sudden in our habits, in our certainties, and as soon as we offer a ritual, obviously, people can hang on to it. So, the danger of this, and this is what made me stop for about 45 days, is that we can install, suddenly, something that becomes a buoy of rescue for people who are confronted with uncertainty, with the anxiety of this uncertainty, and we can lock them in something. It seems to me more just and more alive for a society to encourage these individuals to ask themselves questions about the needs that are theirs in these periods of great transformation, of change, of chaos, and to bring answers that are sometimes personal, although we see that there are great themes in these answers, and to ritualize so that it really makes sense and that it really brings concrete answers. Somehow, it's almost a plea for the emergence of a new religion that would come organically from the base and that would not be decided by religious or political powers from the top, because without that we would fall into dictatorship. However, dictators know very well how to ritualize populations. When we parade on the Red Square in a very rigid and demilitarized way, all of this has an impact on a population. It gives meaning, it gives a national feeling, a cohesion, even the parade of July 14th. And I tell in the book that the setting in which the rituals are performed is far from being trivial. This parade of July 14th between the Arc de Triomphe and the obelisk at the Place de la Concorde is still highly symbolic, even if people no longer realize it. In the collective unconscious, it reminds us that we are the heirs of the Roman emperors, that military power can create domination over an entire empire, and that we are going to head to the Presidential Tribune, which is mounted at the foot of an obelisk coming from Egypt, symbol of the reliance between heaven and earth, ray of the sun, which was erected at the very place where Louis XVI lost his head. Louis XVI, the divine king, symbolized, and should have symbolized this reliance between heaven and earth. So we are in frames of national collective rituals which have an impact. And we must not underestimate, because we say that our leaders are sometimes a little stupid, I think that there are people in there who are not stupid at all, who are even initiated to the symbolic knowledge of things and who can make up rituals. My purpose is not to manipulate, but to say do not question. We question ourselves inside and we invent the rituals in our life that we need in our existence. You also show that sometimes rituals can become confining. When it becomes some kind of toque. Yes, yes, indeed. First, I say because I am someone who is quite rigid and in my personality I was quite mature in my childhood. And then I had parents who were also a little rigid and so I conformed to please them, to find my place or to be able to occupy the place that I wanted to occupy while still being a little perfect, perfectionist, etc. And that is very confining. Rigidity is somehow anti-life. So today I try not to be a rigid person but rather a rigorous person. This is the characteristic of a rigorous person on whom we can count, who respects his commitments and who puts things with discernment in the most just place possible. But next to that there are behaviors that go beyond the simple small rigid neurosis that could be mine. There are behaviors that are pathological and that could be attributed or attached to rituals because they are not conscious but they look like rituals and these are the TOCs, as you said, obsessive compulsive disorders and then it is also the routines of people who have a pathology in the spectrum of autism such as Asperger's syndrome. Earlier you asked me to introduce myself and I think that maybe I would have been diagnosed with Asperger's limit when I was a child. I think it reassured me to have my rigidity because when we have this kind of sensitivity the world is still very striking with the way we perceive it and sometimes it is even in English we say overwhelming we are submerged and suddenly we even see these children called autistic or in the spectrum of autism who break a box who are angry because I have a friend she has a child who is autistic and when she changes the dentistry mark it happened once she told me I won't do it anymore she changes the dentistry mark and the child gets angry because all of a sudden his universe is disturbed because he had found it to reassure himself so... We all have to do this this is an extreme case we all have to find a balance between order and chaos totally and the ritual is how to find order exactly and it is this impulse of the ritual but habits a little compulsive that come to reassure precisely this great sensitivity but they unfortunately they invade all the space of the life of the individual and suddenly they are not at all fulfilling the ritual must be fulfilling it must free us on the contrary and give us a feeling to be able to the elaboration of a world full of rituals, which is the experience of freedom. Yes, thank you. Thank you, it's really a pleasure to spend this moment with you. I always say that you are a character, a hero, a character of narration. Yes, one day he will make a film. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Dialogue. It gave you a whole new vision of the meaning of rituals. And above all, subscribe to the channel to receive notifications of the next episodes. Do not hesitate to share your comments, to put blue thumbs, yellow stars, smileys, and I kiss you. See you soon.