The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

OBEDIENCE TO THE NATURE OF THINGS
Principle is always ready to bring about. Perfect Felicity does not await me
above, but below; it does not await me in that which I see actually as a
triumph, but in that which appears to me actually as a disaster. My perfect joy
awaits me in the total annihilation of my hopes.
One must thoroughly understand that the total disaster in the middle of
which satori awaits us does not necessarily coincide with a practical exterior
disaster. The realising disaster, the satori-disaster, consists in an
understanding, an intellectual intuition of the radical absurdity of our natural
ascending current, in the clear vision of the nullity which is at the end of all
our hopes. The realising despair does not consist in the practical ruin of hopes
which would continue to exist in us (this would lead to suicide, not to satori),
but in the annihilation of the hopes themselves. The man that one habitually
calls 'desperate' is definitely not desperate; he is filled with hopes to which
the world opposes a flat refusal; therefore he is very unhappy. The man who
has become really desperate, who no longer expects anything from the world
of phenomena, is flooded by the perfect joy which at last he ceases to oppose.
Here is the way in which I can, in practice, make progress in the
annihilation of my absurd and deplorable 'hopes'. I am not going to set myself
to organise the failure of my enterprises; to hope to succeed in ruining myself
instead of hoping to succeed in enriching myself would not change anything
in any way. No, I let my instinctive and emotive life go on as usual. But my
understanding, initiated into the reality of things, works in parallel. At the
moment when I suffer because my hopes come up against the resistance of
the world I remind myself that my old successes have never brought me that
absolute accomplishment in which I had placed my hopes; all my surface
satisfactions, sometimes so intense, were in the last instance deceptions in
depth, that is to say in truth. Profiting by this experience, correctly
interpreted, of my fallacious successes I think now of the new successes
which I am in process of coveting; I imagine their concrete realisation, and
feel afresh their vanity. The bad moments, the moments of anguish, are the
best for this work; the suffering felt by the organism-as-a-totality curbs the
illusions which show us satori in the opposite direction from that in which it
awaits us. On the condition that all our essential hopes have been more or less
fulfilled in the past our actual hope, recidivist, is the more readily annihilated
as it is thwarted by the world. It is easier for me to let go when my muscles
are very tired. Zen affirms: 'Satori comes to us unexpectedly when we have
exhausted all the resources of our being.'
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