The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

OBEDIENCE TO THE NATURE OF THINGS
What we have just been saying should not be understood as a
masochistic appetite for torment. The man who works according to Zen has
no love of suffering; but he likes suffering to come to him, which is not at all
the same thing, because, in helping him to 'let go', these moments will make
easier for him that inner immobility, that discretion and silence, thanks to
which the Principle works actively in him for Realisation.
One perceives how much the 'progressive' doctrines which invite man
to climb up an ascending hierarchy of states of consciousness, and which
more or less explicitly conceive the perfect man as a Superman, turn their
back on truth and limit themselves to modifying the form of our hopes. Zen
invites us on the contrary to a task which, up to satori exclusively, can only
appear to us as a descent. In a sense everything becomes worse little by little
up to the moment when the bottom is reached, when nothing can any longer
become worse, and in which everything is found because all is lost.
We can imagine nothing of the transformation of satori; therefore we
risk a new idolatry if we try to imagine anything of it whatsoever. At the
point at which we are today we are not able to see the true evolution except
as a progressive annihilation of all that we call 'success'; we are not able to
see the man who has attained realisation otherwise than as a man who has
become absolutely ordinary. Only he who has obtained satori can say: 'A
wandering cur who begs food and pity, pitilessly chased away by the street
urchins, is transformed into a lion with a golden mane, whose roar strikes
terror in the hearts of all feeble spirits.'
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