The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE COMPENSATIONS
anything. He no longer feels anything; it is the 'Night' in which nothing exists
any longer in connexion with what can be felt or thought. But there is still an
ultimate attachment to the Ego which links together all the powers of the
being, an ultimate and invisible compensation. It is passing-beyond this
invisible compensation which is the veritable detachment, total and
instantaneous. To the Night succeeds what St. John of the Cross calls the
theopathic state, that which Zen calls Satori.
Detachment, or passing-beyond the compensations, is often imperfectly
understood; people believe that it is a question of destroying the affective
preference that is felt for the compensating image, or that it is a question of
tearing desire out of oneself. One forgets that attachment does not lie in
desire but only in the claim to satisfaction of the desire. Desire need not
disappear, but only the claim resulting from it. And the abandonment of the
claim does not result from an inner struggle; it results from the correct
interpretation of the deception that is inherent in the claim, whether it be
satisfied or not. Distress, revendication, belief that the image claimed is
Reality—these are the pieces of faulty scaffolding which is undermined by
understanding and which that will one day bring crashing to the ground.
Detachment is not a painful inner occurrence but, on the contrary, a relief.
Sometimes our too feeble understanding does not allow us for a long
time to pass beyond such and such a compensating situation. Our inner
growth seems to bump up against this obstacle. But, let us repeat, that which
we love, to which we are attached, is never in itself an obstacle; the obstacle
is only in the false identification of the loved image with Reality, the obstacle
lies only in ignorance.
Our chances of passing beyond such and such a compensation depend
then on the power of our intellectual intuition. They depend also on the
degree of subtlety of our compensatory image. First of all, the more subtle
this image the less the chances that it will deceive us; every image loses its
value in course of time, but the more subtle the image the stronger it is and
the slower in exhausting itself. Then, if nevertheless fatigue and deception
occur the correct interpretation of this deception is as much more difficult as
the compensating image happens to be subtle. Instead of throwing doubt on
the Reality of this image I am tempted to consider myself inadequate,
maladroit, idle, or cowardly, in the dealings that I have with it. It is useful,
from this point of view, to draw special attention to a species of
compensation that is very subtle and that one ordinarily designates by the
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