The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

OBEDIENCE TO THE NATURE OF THINGS
the final explosion, the irregularities are smoothed out, the personality is
blurred according to the degree in which the thought attains a universal point
of view, or, more exactly, frees itself from the narrowness, from the rigidity
of personal points of view. Man comes back to his initial spherical form, but
this time down-stream of his temporal realisation. This phase then resembles
the first although it is in a sense its opposite (one recalls the words of Jesus:
'In truth I say unto you, whoever will not receive the Kingdom of God like a
little child shall not enter therein').
Let us note that this third phase appears to us necessarily at the same
time as progress and as regression. It is progress from the point of view of the
universal, since the balloon increases its capacity and approaches an
explosion which will make it coincide with the immense sphere of the
cosmos; but it is at the same time regression from the point of view of the
particularities of shape, from the point of view of the personality. That which
distinguishes this man from all others grows less, he becomes more and more
ordinary, his reliefs disappear; the 'old' man wastes away and approaches
death in the measure that the birth of the 'new man', with the bursting of the
balloon, comes nearer. (One can thus understand the words of St. John the
Baptist: 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make smooth his paths. Every
hollow shall be filled up, every mountain and every hill shall be made flat.')
The outcome of the third phase, the bursting of the balloon, is the
explosion of satori, the instant at which every limitation disappears, and at
which the one is united with the all.
We have said that man's ignorance thwarts this normal evolution. In
fact man, before any initiation, does not recognise any reality in what his
balloon-figure contains, but he sees reality that is indisputable and unique on
its surface and in the particular shape of this surface. In this ignorance his
will to 'be' expresses itself only by the will to 'be as one distinct'. This
ignorant balloon, built up into a figure, refuses to accept the smoothing-out of
its distinctive reliefs: it stiffens itself in its particular form, it is opposed to
any stretching of its folds which would increase its capacity by tending
towards the spherical. The hypertension being unable to resolve itself in this
normal manner must resolve itself otherwise; and there comes into play the
man's imaginative-emotive activity, a kind of safety-valve by which is
released the pressure caused by the continuous inflation of the Principle. This
corresponds to the wastage, of which we have spoken, of energy which ought
to have been accumulated with a view to an explosion.
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