The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

SENSATION AND SENTIMENT
death, movement and fixity, spasm and suppleness. The paradox is only
apparent, on the formal plane; behind this appearance there is the conciliation
of the contraries.
Our comparison between emotivity and a muscle allows us to make
clear what new kind of relaxation we obtain in ceasing to struggle against the
immobilisation of the spasm; and this comparison, as we shall see, serves us
thus at the moment at which it is no longer applicable. When my muscle goes
into a spasm it is shortened; when it is decontracted it recovers its length and
is ready for a new shortening spasm. When I do not correct inner work it
inevitably happens that my central spasm decreases; this eventuality, as with
the muscle, then throws me back into a relaxation ready for a new spasm. Up
to this point our comparison is applicable, but when I adhere consciously to
my spasm, what takes place in me is analogous to a phenomenon that is never
seen in physiology: a muscle which is relaxed without becoming longer,
which could decontract without recovering its original length, and then be at
once shortened and supple. Let us suppose that a failure puts me into a spasm
of humiliation; if I take no correct inner action my humiliation will pass more
or less rapidly and sooner or later I will come out of this state; I shall be no
longer humiliated, but then I shall have come back to my habitual pretention
and in consequence open to an eventual new humiliation. If, on the contrary,
in my state of humiliation, I consciously adhere to my spasm, my humiliation
disappears without my pretention reappearing; my central 'muscle' (as
opposed to what can be seen in the case of my material muscles) decontracts
without losing its shortening; my humiliation is transformed into humility.
The comparison with the muscle (with its states of expansion and of
diminution) is a good one. When a success exalts me I feel myself to be
aggrandised, increased tenfold in volume; physically even, I feel my chest fill
out, my nostrils open, I use large gestures. When, on the contrary, a repulse
humiliates me I feel myself small, shriveled, reduced, I have a weight on my
chest, my gestures are curtailed. The inner action of which we are speaking
consists in shutting ourselves up willingly in this reduced volume. There is
then produced a sort of condensation of the Ego; the Ego is at once denied in
its volume and affirmed in its density. This process is comparable with that
which transforms coal into diamonds; the aim of this process is not the
destruction of the Ego but its transformation, its sublimation. The conscious
acceptance results in the coal which has become denser, and so blacker and
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