The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Sixteen
ON AFFECTIVITY
WE can enlarge more thoroughly the preceding studies by envisaging
the whole of conscious affectivity, that is the whole of the inner
phenomena by means of which we experience pleasure or pain in
contact with the outer world. Since these two poles, pleasure and pain,
correspond with the qualitative variations of a single thing, my consciousness
of being-distinct, it will simplify our exposition to speak for the most part of
the painful variations. What will be valid for the painful will be valid also for
the pleasurable.
First of all it appears that there are two sorts of sensibility, physical
(physical pain) and psychic ('moral' suffering). I cannot confuse the pain
which an abscess gives me with that given me by the death of someone I
love. These two sensibilities seem to correspond with the gross part of me
(the somatic), and with my subtle part (or psychic). The physical sensibility
comprises sensations, agreeable or disagreeable; the psychic sensibility
comprises sentiments, also agreeable or disagreeable. In practical psychology
I necessarily make a clear-cut difference between these two domains of
sensibility.
But this duality of soma and psyche only indicates two aspects of a
single thing, my psycho-somatic organism; there are therein merely two
aspects (distinct only to the outside observer) of this creature which I call
'Self', of this microcosm, synthetic and single, which is a particular
manifestation of the Absolute Principle. If I hold, on edge, a sheet of
cardboard in front of my left eye, my left eye sees this sheet as a straight line
while my right sees it as a surface; but the sheet of cardboard is the same; in
one sense it is both a line and a surface; in another it is neither line nor
surface; in any case it is only a single sheet of cardboard.
If soma and psyche are thus two aspects of a single thing, the physical
and psychic sensibilities are also necessarily two aspects of a single
sensibility. Under two aspects there is in reality only one organism; in the
same way under two aspects there is in reality only one sensibility.
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