The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE PRIMORDIAL ERROR
disappearance of personal disciplines thus results not in the absence of all
discipline, but in the general, primordial discipline which obliges me, without
protecting trickery, to face up to the antagonism of the Not-Self, to the
spectacle of my personal non-divinity. And this ultimate discipline cannot be
exceeded as easily as have been the personal disciplines; the ideal form
which it comprises is no longer a conscious form, valorised by my
consciousness, and which my consciousness can easily revoke. It is a
subconscious, subterranean form, which I cannot seize and devalorise
directly, but whose slow devalorisation I am obliged to await with an ardent
patience, in a vigilant impartiality, by really living the idea of Zen: 'Let go;
leave things as they may be.'
Let us examine attentively in what consists this primordial discipline
and the subconscious ideal image on which it is founded. Let us remember
what we said just now. In the universal, original Unconscious I know that I
am Buddha; on my subconscious, or primary personal plane, I pretend to be
Buddha as a distinct being, in so far as I am face to face with the Not-Self, I
then pretend that I never ought to be denied by the Not-Self, that I should
triumph always and completely over the outer world; then, in my
consciousness, I doubt the legitimacy of my subconscious pretention and I
experience distress in face of the redoubtable Not-Self (one understands why
the feeling of guilt is attached to every defeat). As long as I had a personal
ideal I escaped from the subconscious obligation of succeeding always and
absolutely; a personal domain was chosen to represent the whole, and my
success in this chosen domain kept me immune from all negation experienced
elsewhere. But here my understanding has devalorised all conscious ideal
form; then there falls on my shoulders the primordial obligation of
triumphing always and completely over the Not-Self. But this primordial
obligation is subconscious. At the same time my judgment of myself
withdraws into the shadow; my conscious observation is no longer on myself
to evaluate myself; but fixed on the outer world, on the episodes of my
struggle to live and to succeed, insisting on being affirmed and refusing to be
denied. My 'states of mind', positive or negative, affirmed or denied, no
longer depend on the form of my mechanisms (beautiful or ugly according to
whether it resembles or does not resemble a particular ideal form), they
depend on my psycho-somatic fluctuations, my successes or my failures in
the outside world, and on my coenaesthetic states of well-being or of
discomfort. According to the circumstances affecting my psycho-somatic
167