The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

SENSATION AND SENTIMENT
more opaque, being instantaneously transformed into a diamond that is
perfectly transparent.
It is evident that we cannot really accomplish this inner gesture of
complete adhesion to our shortening spasm the moment we try. For all our
previous automatisms push us towards gestures that are radically opposed to
this one. The inner work consists in making with perseverance partial
performances of the useful gesture; that already brings me a certain calm
which progressively increases; I thus move in the direction of the absolute
calm which may permit one day the release of satori.
I learn to feel directly in myself my spasm, my uneasiness, under the
imaginative film which more or less masks my centre; the acquisition of this
new inner sensation conditions all the rest of the work. Then my attention
brusquely abandons my film in order to focus, and remain motionless, on this
profound uneasiness which I have felt in its purity. I install myself in this
uneasiness from which I have always fled till then (the only place where this
lion ceases to be dangerous is in his very jaws); at least I make a very sincere
effort to install myself there but, as we have understood, in the degree in
which my effort succeeds my discomfort disappears and it is in my centre
(where my illusory distress seems to have its seat) that I find myself. For a
long time my success being only partial my attention does not reach my
centre with stability; it only reaches it for a moment that is without duration.
The disappearance of my discomfort removes every object from the field of
my attention and this attention finds itself again seized by images; then
everything begins once more. Our spirit of investigation has to be
persevering.
This work implies the correct 'despair' from which Hope is born. Until
now I was hoping that the convulsions of my imaginary film would one day
wipe out my spasm; when I had a worry I carried out the forced labour of
sterile ruminations (because, implicitly, I believed them to be useful); I was
in the jail in which my absurd confidence in my imagination shut me up.
Now I have seen imagination for what it is, a sterile camouflage; the hope
which I placed in its activity is transformed into Hope placed in its nonactivity;
the door of my prison opens. I have at last the right to suffer without
ruminating, that is to say without perpetuating my suffering; I have at last the
right to profit by the essential instability of my suffering, to allow myself to
be relieved by the Principle without doing anything. In exempting myself
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