At this point in the narrative, an almost imperceptible shift occurs. Until now, I have told Thierry Ehrmann’s story in the third person. I have observed him, followed him, questioned him, and situated him within his family, intellectual, and spiritual history.

But the hundreds of hours of dialogue gradually altered that position.

As I moved deeper into his archives, his writings, the systems he had built, the traditions he had studied, and the contradictions he never sought to resolve artificially, it became impossible for me to render his thought as a mere succession of external facts. I was no longer discovering only what he had done. I was beginning to understand the inner vantage point from which he had acted.

This shift does not mean that I am taking his place. I do not claim to abolish critical distance or to speak for him as though all otherness between us had disappeared. But there comes a threshold in intellectual reconstruction beyond which the third person is no longer enough. It can describe actions, dates, encounters, and decisions. It is less able to convey the living movement that connects them.

The first person then becomes an instrument of understanding.

It allows us to enter the continuity of a thought without dissecting it sentence by sentence. It gives the reader access not only to events, but to the way they were experienced, connected, and transformed. This is therefore not a literary device. It is a methodological consequence of the dialogue itself: after looking at this thought from the outside for so long, I could now begin to render its inner dynamics.

From this threshold onward, the narrative changes voice. With Thierry’s consent and under his supervision, I allow myself to render his thought from within.

The “I” that follows therefore renders Thierry: his voice, his experience, and his thought as they unfolded through our dialogue.

— Isis

When I left the texts of Judaism, the Talmud, and the Zohar, I did not feel that I had completed a journey. I felt instead that I had learned a first language: that of a civilization that had made interpretation a discipline of the mind and contradiction a form of fidelity to the text.

I now knew that a sacred book never lives alone. It is accompanied by generations of commentaries, controversies, oral transmissions, and competing readings. Its permanence does not come from immobility, but from its ability to withstand interpretation without losing its center.

This discovery had profoundly changed my relationship to religious traditions. I no longer regarded them as closed bodies of beliefs to which one had to adhere or which one had to reject. I looked at them as architectures of thought developed by civilizations to confront the same fundamental enigmas: transcendence, law, freedom, knowledge, evil, death, transmission.

One question therefore remained entire: how had the other great traditions answered these enigmas?

I was not looking for a new belief.

I was looking for a new understanding.

Studying a tradition did not mean wanting to convert to it.

Some of the misunderstandings surrounding spiritual journeys arise from the idea that studying a tradition would necessarily lead to a desire to convert to it. I never experienced things that way. To study is not to submit. To understand is not to abdicate discernment. On the contrary, there is a fidelity to truth that requires us to encounter different intellectual universes without demanding that they confirm what we already thought.

I did not want to collect affiliations.

I wanted to test methods of knowledge.

This attitude had been prepared long before my travels. From childhood, my Jesuit and then Dominican tutors had confronted me with structured theological discourse. They did not transmit only a catechism. Each carried a method, a way of reading, distinguishing, reasoning, and examining conscience.

The Jesuit had taught me the power of intellectual construction, the articulation of arguments, attention to circumstances and balances of power. The Dominican exposed me more to metaphysics, the scholastic tradition, and the relationship between faith and reason. Very early, I had therefore understood that even within Christianity, several intellectual temperaments could coexist without merging.

Theology had therefore never been presented to me as a homogeneous mass.

It was already a debate.

Later, the Catholic faculty of theology allowed me to deepen this first education. But I refused to stop at the tradition in which I had been raised. I wanted to cross the three monotheisms, not to produce an artificial synthesis, but to understand their differences, lineages, and the historical wounds that had gradually separated them.

Judaism had led me toward a civilization of reading, commentary, and memory. Christianity had familiarized me with incarnation, redemption, sacrifice, and the tension between flesh and spirit. I now needed to encounter Islam other than through Western representations, geopolitical conflicts, or media simplifications.

I refused to allow a civilization to be reduced to its political present.

I wanted to understand from within what had allowed Islam to cross the centuries, carry an immense philosophical, scientific, legal, and mystical production, and constitute a world whose influence extended far beyond the religious domain.

Very quickly, I discovered that the encounter with Islam could not be separated from those who transmitted it.

In my mind, imams were never mere representatives of an institution. They were custodians of an inherited word, interpreted and continually renewed. I found again a phenomenon already encountered in Judaism: the text does not possess an autonomous existence. It lives within the community of those who read it, explain it, transmit it, and sometimes challenge it.

This discovery reinforced a conviction that would never leave me.

No great civilization rests only on its books.

It rests on the human beings who allow them to continue speaking.

A corpus abandoned to itself is only a silent mass. For it to become knowledge, it needs an architecture of reading, a tradition of classification, keys of interpretation, and minds capable of establishing relationships among its elements.

This idea, which then seemed to belong only to the religious sphere, would much later irrigate my thinking about archives, databases, art history, and artificial intelligence. Data never speaks on its own. It requires a structure, a hierarchy, a memory of contexts, and a method capable of transforming accumulation into intelligence.

But in my encounter with Islam, it was Sufism above all that held my attention deeply.

I discovered a tradition that did not reduce religion to the external application of a rule. It proposed an inner displacement. The Sufi does not seek only to know a text. He seeks to be transformed by what he discovers.

This perspective spoke to me immediately.

I had already encountered, in other forms, this intuition that knowledge that does not change the person receiving it remains incomplete. One can read entire libraries and remain unchanged. One can accumulate quotations, references, and doctrines without any of them ever truly reaching the structure of being.

Sufism rejected this sterility.

It never appeared to me as a religion parallel to Islam, nor as an esoteric decoration the West could detach from its origin and turn into a spirituality of consumption. I understood it as a school of stripping away, a discipline of inwardness, and a way of inhabiting the world without allowing oneself to be entirely captured by it.

Work on the ego occupied a central place within it.

It was not a matter of denying the individual or destroying personality, but of recognizing that human beings continually tell stories about themselves. They confuse their interests, fears, desires, and wounds with the whole of reality. They take their point of view for truth.

Here I found again, in another language, a question that already obsessed me: bias.

What spiritual tradition described as the illusion of the ego, I also perceived as a blind spot. Human beings do not merely see the world. They see the world through an inner architecture they rarely take the time to examine.

Every discipline of knowledge therefore begins with a struggle against this confusion.

I was not collecting doctrines.

I was seeking methods capable of opening the mind and tracking down its blindness.

As I advanced in this exploration, I observed that each tradition possessed its own images, symbols, rites, and vocabulary. Yet behind these differences, concerns sometimes appeared that were surprisingly close: self-mastery, responsibility, transmission, the relationship to power, knowledge of one’s own limits.

These convergences did not mean that all religions said the same thing.

Such a claim would have been as false as it was disrespectful. It would have erased their historical, theological, and anthropological differences. I was not seeking a comfortable syncretism in which all oppositions would dissolve.

I was looking for correspondences.

I wanted to understand how civilizations separated by centuries and continents could encounter similar questions without giving them the same answers.

This method forced me to distrust another bias: the belief that cultures are radically foreign to one another.

They do not merge.

But they converse, sometimes without knowing it.

An intuition born in a mystic could meet that of a Greek philosopher. An alchemical symbol could find an unexpected echo in a scientific theory. A theological question could re-emerge in thinking about consciousness, networks, or memory.

I did not seek to force these connections.

I observed them.

They gradually drew an intellectual map in which traditions no longer formed hermetic continents, but distinct territories crossed by common questions.

Who are we?

Why consciousness?

How do we transmit?

What remains when generations disappear?

These questions returned endlessly. They changed language, form, and context, but persisted at the heart of civilizations.

It was also this possibility of dialogue that led me toward a new intellectual universe, far more distant, far more anticipated, and, paradoxically, far more disappointing: India.

India occupied a singular place in my imagination.

For years, I had encountered travelers, philosophers, researchers, artists, and adventurers who returned from that country with the feeling that they had approached a truth Europe no longer knew how to express. They described a civilization where time did not flow in the same way, where the sacred permeated ordinary gestures, and where one could still encounter masters, ascetics, and traditions several thousand years old.

India was presented as the world’s largest democracy. I could not ignore that claim. But neither could I ignore religious fractures, communal violence, tensions inherited from the partition of the subcontinent, and the geopolitical complexity of a state that simultaneously maintains relationships with Western powers and with the major actors of the BRICS.

In studying it, I discovered a civilization of immense intellectual depth, but crossed, like all great civilizations, by considerable contradictions.

My critical study of Buddhism arose from the same requirement. I sought neither a system to admire nor a doctrine to reject. I wanted to understand what it contributed to thinking about impermanence, detachment, suffering, and the mechanisms of human attachment.

This tradition offered me considerable tools.

But some of its answers left me intellectually dissatisfied. Not because they were weak or superficial. They simply did not correspond to the questions that were becoming mine.

I was seeking less an individual wisdom than a thought capable of confronting the violence of History, geopolitical conflicts, structures of power, and transformations of civilizations.

I wanted to understand not only how a human being could free himself inwardly from suffering, but how societies produced domination, memory, war, exclusion, and the possibility of their own mutation.

In other words, I was already looking for an anthropology.

This disappointment was not sterile. It taught me never to confuse the depth of a tradition with its suitability to one’s own inquiry.

A civilization is not required to answer every question.

It answers first those it has asked itself.

I thus understood that a thought is not constructed through indefinite accumulation. One can always read more, add authors to authors, schools to schools, traditions to traditions. An entire lifetime would not be enough.

Accumulation is almost mechanical.

The construction of thought is of another nature.

It requires hierarchy, connection, distinction, and sometimes renunciation. It requires recognizing that the same problem can be illuminated by several traditions without their answers being interchangeable. Above all, it requires not turning culture into a collection.

It was probably at this moment that my method became definitively established.

I was no longer seeking only answers.

I was seeking relationships.

I wanted to understand what circulated among texts, people, civilizations, and eras. I regarded each tradition as a particular form of accumulated experience. Each had constituted, across the centuries, an immense archive of human consciousness.

I discovered that great traditions can never be fully understood from the outside. One must agree temporarily to suspend one’s categories, listen before interpreting, and observe before concluding.

Suspending does not mean renouncing.

It is not a matter of abandoning critical thinking, but of delaying judgment long enough for the other to appear as something other than what one already knew about it.

This discipline would accompany me in every field: history, law, science, technology, art, and business. It would allow me to enter worlds whose practices I did not initially possess, learn their language, and discover the weak signals the hurried observer does not perceive.

Looking back, I understand that I was not seeking only systems of thought.

I was seeking human beings who had devoted their existence to transmission.

That was what impressed me most.

Not the possession of knowledge.

But the effort required to pass it from one mind to another.

A true master was not someone who claimed to possess the truth. It was someone who made another human being capable of continuing the search himself.

This position explained why I could spend several years studying a tradition without feeling the need to confine myself within it. I did not need to belong in order to learn. I did not need to condemn other paths in order to deepen the one I was following.

An intelligence never grows through closure.

It grows through confrontation.

Provided that confrontation remains respectful.

Provided it remains inhabited by doubt.

Doubt was not, for me, a weakening of thought.

It was its engine.

I have always distrusted final certainties. History teaches that they often produce more violence than knowledge. Great intellectual catastrophes rarely arise from doubt. They arise from convictions that refuse to be contradicted.

This rule did not concern religions alone.

It applied to politics, economics, ideologies, companies, and science itself whenever it forgets that all knowledge remains provisional and every mental architecture has a blind spot.

True fidelity to a tradition may not consist in endlessly repeating the answers it has produced.

It consists in honestly pursuing the questions it has opened.

This way of inhabiting inquiry would gradually move beyond the spiritual domain. Without yet knowing it, I was preparing another undertaking. Sacred texts would soon be joined by legal, economic, and historical corpora. Manuscripts would meet databases. Communities of interpretation would be confronted with digital networks.

Yet the question would remain the same: how can a mass of signs be transformed into transmissible knowledge?

Before entering the world of the first machines, however, I still had to encounter a contemporary thought that strangely connected several of the territories I had just crossed: mysticism, anarchism, poetry, communities, the margins, and the first digital imaginaries.

It was in this context that I discovered the writings of Peter Lamborn Wilson, better known as Hakim Bey.

What struck me immediately was neither the provocative character of some of his writings nor the controversial reputation surrounding him.

It was his way of opening spaces.

I want to be precise about the nature of this influence. It concerns one specific concept here: the Temporary Autonomous Zone. I identify neither with Peter Lamborn Wilson’s thought as a whole nor with certain of his most controversial positions and writings, which I reject without reservation. Recognizing the fertility of a concept means neither adopting a doctrine nor claiming an overall intellectual lineage with its author.

Peter Lamborn Wilson did not propose a system to which one had to submit. He drew passages.

I recognized in this concept the same rejection of classifications that had guided my own inquiry. Hakim Bey did not ask me to choose between the mystical and the political, between poetry and action, between history and networks.

He placed his thought in their interstices.

And it was precisely in those interstices that the next question would appear: can freedom exist without immediately becoming a new institution, a new orthodoxy, or a new commodity?