The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE HORSEMAN AND THE HORSE
actual state my life is necessarily egotistical, partial, natural, affective; when
my thought functions independently of my affectivity it is independent of my
personal life, of my life itself. In other words the horse represents my life,
accompanied by partial thought; the rider represents my thought, pure, nonacting.
I am the horse when my attention is seized by my life, I am the rider
when my attention, escaping from this domination, arouses my Independent
Intelligence.
My conscious attention, which is a unity, could never be focussed at
once on my life and on my pure thought that is above my life; it is necessarily
focussed on one or the other of these two aspects of my being. The moments
alternate during which, by means of my attention, I identify myself with the
horse (when I feel and act), or again with the rider (when I think impartially).
And it is because my surface consciousness alone is actually awakened in
me—and that thus I can only be alternatively horse and rider—that I believe
in the existence of a hiatus between these two parts although this hiatus does
not exist in reality. The illusory hiatus between horse and rider is not a hiatus
between two parts operating at the same time, but a false interpretation of the
fact that I cannot be conscious at the same time of my partial life and of my
impartial reason. If I had no memory this interpretation would not exist; it
exists because I have a memory and because, thanks to this faculty, my
imagination can evoke at once the two ways of being of which I am never
conscious at one and the same time. In memory I picture myself
imaginatively at once as horse and as rider, and thus I can see simultaneously
the image of these two aspects of myself which never operate simultaneously
for my surface consciousness; but because these two aspects never operate
simultaneously for my surface consciousness the image which brings them
together does not succeed in uniting them. It cannot be the image of a
centaur; it is necessarily the image of a horseman mounted on a horse, with a
hiatus between the two of them.
Since the horse and the rider, defined thus as two ways of being, never
operate consciously at the same time, the horse is never guided. We mean by
that that the rider never guides the movement of the horse while this
movement is taking place. Nevertheless the play of the rider has a directive
action on the movements of the horse; but it is an indirect action and
displaced in time. At the moment at which the rider is awakened (and at
which the attention which animates him cannot be upon the horse), he sees,
thanks to memory, how the horse has functioned the moment before and
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