The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE HORSEMAN AND THE HORSE
separated by no hiatus. We are centaurs but everything happens in us as
though we were horse and rider because we believe in the reality of a hiatus
between our two aspects, or, more exactly, because we do not see the unity in
which the two aspects are integrated.
We will try to define, in our concrete structure, what we see as horse
and as rider, and to understand why we have this false vision of ourselves.
We are first of all tempted to trace the boundary between the horse and
the rider starting from a morphological standpoint: the horse would be our
gross manifestation, or soma, the rider our subtle or psychic manifestation.
But this morphological point of view does not suit the angle from
which we are studying man at this moment. We are studying, at this moment,
not only the modalities of the functioning of the human machine, but the
problem of the determination of this functioning. Going beyond the
consideration 'how our life works' we are studying the orientation of this
working. Looked at from this higher perspective, the two parts of man are no
longer two modalities of phenomena, some physiological the others
psychological, but two ways of being, two styles, two different rhythms of
the manifestation of our being.
The horse represents my way of being when my thought does not
function in an independent, impartial manner. It is my personal life, egotist
and partial, that which I live when my intellect works geared to my desires,
my fears, my affective reactions in general. It is my life when there operates
in me only the inferior conciliatory principle, the Demiurge who rules over
the metabolism of the temporal plane. It is Nature willing herself in me,
achieving her ends through my organism. It is I in so far as I wish to be
distinct, in so far as I wish to be Self beside, and opposed to, the Not-Self.
The rider represents my way of being when my thought, ungeared from
my affective life, works in an independent, impartial manner. It represents
my Independent Intelligence, impartial reason, or pure, objective, or universal
thought. It is I in so far as I think without wishing to be distinct, outside all
opposition between the Self and the Not-Self.
The rider, understood in this sense, is not a motive-power. It is the
principle of direction in the movement of my machine, but it is not the motor.
It is the principle of my 'acting', itself 'non-acting'. In consequence, if the
horse and the rider are two ways of being, the horse alone is a way of living;
the rider is not a way of living—since living implies movement and the rider
is 'non-acting'—it is a way of thinking that is independent of my life. In my
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