The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Seventeen
THE HORSEMAN AND THE HORSE
THE dualism of the Yin and the Yang, which rules the cosmos under the
conciliation of the Tao, exists in man as in all created things. Man is
conscious of this dualism, which reveals itself in him by the belief that
he is composed of two autonomous parts which he either calls 'body' and
'soul', 'matter and spirit', 'instinct and reason', or otherwise. The belief in this
bipartite composition expresses itself in all sorts of common sayings: 'I am
master of "myself"', 'I cannot prevent myself from...', 'I am pleased with
myself', 'I am annoyed with myself', etc....
But we know that the belief in the autonomy of these two parts is an
illusion; there are not in man two distinct parts, but only two distinct aspects
of a single being; man is in reality an individual artificially divided by an
erroneous interpretation of his analytic observation. The error of our dualistic
conception does not lie in the discrimination between two aspects in us—for
there are indeed two aspects—but in concluding that these two aspects are
two different entities, of whom one, for example, may be perishable while the
other is eternal. To tell the truth, our observation does not show us that there
are two parts in us; it only shows us that everything happens in us as though
there were two parts separated by a hiatus. It is our ignorant intellect that
takes an illusory leap from the statement 'everything happens as though' to
the erroneous affirmation that there are in us two parts separated by a hiatus.
In reality it all happens in us thus because we believe that it is thus or, more
precisely, because the universal consciousness which alone can reveal to us
our real inner unity is asleep in us. An illustration will help us to understand
this problem. What man interprets as his two parts he conceives, the one as
inferior, instinctive, affective, motor, irrational, the other as superior, rational,
directing, capable of deciding what the inferior part should carry out. He
conceives himself as a horseman riding a horse.
In reality, as Zen reminds us, we are not horseman and horse, with a
hiatus between the two. The true symbolic representation of man, in this
connexion, should be the centaur, a single creature comprising two aspects
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