The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Twenty-Two
THE COMPENSATIONS
THE man who has not attained realisation, animated by the need to be
absolutely as-a-distinct-being, cannot accept his existence such as it is.
This impossibility is not due, as one might suppose at first, to the fact
that individual existence is passed under a constant menace of partial or total
destruction, for man's essential need is a need to 'be' absolutely and not to
'exist' perpetually; it is a need of infinite eternity and not of indefinite
duration. Were illness and death definitely avoided man would be not less
constrained by his need to be absolutely, to refuse his existence such as he
knows it. What is inacceptable to man in his existence is not that the outer
world menaces this existence, but that everything he perceives is not
conditioned by his individual existence while that remains unconditioned.
Man, because he is virtually capable of living his identity with the Absolute
Principle, cannot accept the sleep of this identity; he cannot allow that he is
not the First Cause of the Universe. But he cannot perceive his real and
essential unity with the First Cause of the Universe as long as he lives in the
belief that he is only his psycho-somatic organism, as long as he is identified
only with this organism.
However, man accepts his existence, in fact, since he forces himself to
maintain it. He accepts it, in fact, because, if he knows that his organism is
not the motor centre of the Universe, his imagination preserves him from
feeling it by recreating in his mind a universe centred on himself. The
imaginative film masks the intolerable vision, saves the man from this vision.
But it only saves him from it during the moments in which it functions; the
danger remains and has to be conjured incessantly by a continuous
imaginative activity. Imagination mitigates the distress without being able to
destroy it.
Our imagination, this function which creates in us an imaginative film
that is not based on the real present, is therefore our compensating function;
it is the function which fabricates our compensations. Our compensations are
systems of images which we borrow from our sensory and mental
206