The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE COMPENSATIONS
middle of the multitude of other images in the ceaselessly-moving flow of
cosmic life such as it is in reality.
Passing beyond compensations, the devalorisation of idols, is a process
which takes place in my intellectual intuition. This process supposes first of
all the acquisition of a correct theoretical comprehension which demasks in
the abstract the illusory idolatrous belief. It assumes on the other hand that I
have experienced, by suffering, the unsatisfactory character of compensation.
This painful dissatisfaction is inevitable; indeed the compensation, as we
have seen, only mitigates my distress in the moment during which it
functions, but I expect in the depth of my being, that it will definitively
remedy my distress; and so I am necessarily led, more or less rapidly, to
realise the deceptive character of my compensation in comparison with what
I expected of it. It is then, in the suffering of deception, that my
understanding will manifest itself by a correct interpretation of my suffering.
Abstract comprehension and concrete suffering are both necessary; neither
one nor the other is sufficient alone. We will return later to this question of
passing beyond compensations, it is in fact impossible to deal with it without
knowing how the various compensations are constituted.
Every compensation is essentially constituted by an image involving
my Ego, by an image-centre around which is organised in a constellation, a
multitude of satellite images. The image-centre is bi-polar, like everything
that belongs to the domain of form. This explains why there are positive and
negative compensations. Man has an innate preference for the positive—the
beautiful, good, true—and tries always at first to build up a positive
compensation; but failure can release the inversion of it into antagonistic
negative compensation. For example, I begin to hate the being with whom I
have tried in vain to establish a love relationship; and this hatred can give a
sense to my life as love had. After pointing out this process of the possible
inversion of our compensations, we will limit ourselves to describing the
principle positive compensations that the observation of human-beings and
our own inner world reveal to us.
The image-centre can represent me as receiving the service of the
outside world, which is the compensation of being loved. It can represent me
as actively seizing my nourishments in the outside world, which is the
compensation of enjoyment (the affirmation of myself eating the outside
world; the love of riches, which is a potential means of eating the outside
world). The image-centre can represent me as serving the outside world, as
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