The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE COMPENSATIONS
perceptions—from the material of images stored up by our memory—and
which we arrange as we please, in accordance with the structure of our
individual psycho-somatic organism. These constitute our inner personal
world. Evidently they could not be a pure creation; they are recreation, with
non-personal elements, of a personal representation of the world, according
to a personal order which is like a special section cut in the volume of the
Universe (for this personal order does not result, either, from a personal
creation; it is a particular aspect, chosen according to our personal structure,
from among the indefinite number of aspects of the cosmic order).
One can compare the universe personally recreated, which our
compensations constitute, to a design imagined by an artist. No designer
could create a form of which the prototype did not already exist in the
Universe and which he has not perceived himself by the intermediary of a
personal image based on outer reality. The creation of the designer only
consists in choosing a form in the outer world by neglecting all others and,
sometimes, in assembling as he wishes forms he has never seen assembled in
this way in reality. Thus the personal element in the recreation of our
imaginary universe does not reside in the elementary forms used, but first in
using such and such a form rather than any other, and second in assembling
universal forms in accordance with a personal style. The elaboration of a
compensation is an imaginary artifice.
Our compensations correspond with what one currently terms our scale
of values. Each man sees certain things as particularly real, particularly
important, and it is these which give a meaning to his life. If I wish to know
my compensations it is enough for me to ask myself: 'What gives a sense to
my life?'
Before going further let us return to the question: 'What do our
compensations compensate?' They do not compensate, as one often thinks,
the particular negating aspects of existence. If it were thus our compensations
would always be affirming, positive images; but we shall see that they can
just as well be negative. The essential character of a compensation is not that
it should be agreeable to me but that it should represent the universe to me in
a perspective such that I am the centre of it. Only that matters, and not the
fact that this universe centred on me is affirming or negating. Our
compensations compensate our illusory belief that we are separated from
Reality, that is the subjective non-appearance of our essential identity with
the Absolute Principle. In other words, the recreated imaginary personal
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