The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

EMOTION AND THE EMOTIVE STATE
operate. This non-natural gesture is executed on the plane of natural
mechanisms and against the current of the automatism which unceasingly
draws my attention towards images.
We should stress this essential point, we should remember that all inner
work in whose undertaking the irrational affectivity has played a part, is by
that very fact bound to fail from the point of view of satori. These
indispensible oratory precautions having been clearly formulated we can go
on to speak of the practical inner task looked at from the angle of this study.
This task consists in making, whenever we can, an inner gesture aiming
at the perception of the emotive state. But let us see at once what there is of
paradox in this perception. My emotive state affects me, affects my psychosomatic
organism, in so far as that is a totality; it cannot then be the object of
a dualistic perception comprising subject and object. It is illusorily objective
as long as I do nothing in order to perceive it, but it does away with itself in
the measure that I seek to perceive it. The liberating inner gesture aims at the
perception of the emotive state but it could not achieve that; it achieves a
certain perception of my total organism, or perception of Self, across the
emotive state which covers and hides this Self at the same time that it points
out the way. This gesture results then in a moment of real subjective
consciousness obtained via the partial annihilation of the emotive state, by
'Looking into one's own nature'.
The natural man, apart from all inner work, believes that he can
perceive his emotive state; but, when he ends up with the observation that he
is 'irritable', he only perceives a mental image fabricated in connexion with
the illusory objectivity of his emotive state. All his reflexes, all his
mechanisms, are conditioned by his emotive state; the importance of this
state is, then, immense; but this importance is implicit, subconscious, and the
emotive state in reference to which the man considers everything is never
itself consciously considered. The natural man lives uniquely in reference to
his Ego, but he never questions himself regarding this Ego. Thus the emotive
state, in the functioning of the human-being, plays the role of a fixed point
round which everything turns; in other words, the natural man is centred
round his subconscious (centre of rotation), whereas his real or geometrical
centre is the Unconscious.
In reality the emotive state is not a fixed point; and it is its illusory
fixity which conditions all the illusions of our egotistical life. When I
deliberately direct my attention towards my emotive state (that is to say
133