The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

ON THE GENERAL SENSE OF ZEN THOUGHT
speaks is unreal and because an illusory belief, for that reason unreal, could
not be the cause of anything whatever. Besides, if I look carefully, I do not
find positively in myself this belief that I lack something (how could there be
positively present the illusory belief in an absence?); what I can state is that
my inward phenomena behave as if this belief were there; but, if my
phenomena behave in this manner, it is not on account of the presence of this
belief, it is because the direct intellectual intuition that nothing is lacking
sleeps in the depths of my consciousness, that this has not yet been awakened
therein; it is there, for I lack nothing and certainly not that, but it is asleep and
cannot manifest itself. All my apparent 'trouble' derives from the sleep of my
faith in the perfect Reality; I have, awakened in me, nothing but 'beliefs' in
what is communicated to me by my senses and my mind working on the
dualistic plane (beliefs in the non-existence of a Perfect Reality that is One);
and these beliefs are illusory formations, without reality, consequences of the
sleep of my faith. I am a 'man of little faith', more exactly without any faith,
or, still better, of sleeping faith, who does not believe in anything he does not
see on the formal plane. (This idea of faith, present but asleep, enables us to
understand the need that we experience, for our deliverance, of a Master to
awaken us, of a teaching, of a revelation; for sleep connotes precisely the
deprivation of that which can awaken.)
In short everything appears to be wrong in me because the fundamental
idea that everything is perfectly, eternally and totally positive, is asleep in the
centre of my being, because it is not awakened, living and active therein.
There at last we touch upon the first painful phenomenon, that from which all
the rest of our painful phenomena derive. The sleep of our faith in the Perfect
Reality that is One (outside which nothing 'is') is the primary phenomenon
from which the whole of the entangled chain depends; it is the causal
phenomenon; and no therapy of illusory human suffering can be effective if it
be applied anywhere but there.
To the question 'What must I do to free myself?' Zen replies: 'There is
nothing you need do since you have never been enslaved and since there is
nothing in reality from which you can free yourself.' This reply can be
misunderstood and may seem discouraging because it contains an ambiguity
inherent in the word 'do'. Where the natural man is concerned the action
required resolves itself dualistically, into conception and action, and it is to
the action, to the execution of his conception that the man applies the word
'do'. In this sense Zen is right, there is nothing for us to 'do'; everything will
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