The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE INNER ALCHEMY
exterior operation of my machine is modified when I cease to believe in a
personal God, an object of love and of dread, and when I arrive at conceiving
abstractly my Buddha-nature as being above all thought and all sentiment.
This process of distillation, due to the work of intellectual intuition,
corresponds to the idea, often expressed in this work, that our correct inner
evolution destroys nothing but fulfills everything. The apparent death of the
'old' man is not in reality a destruction. When I extract alcohol from fruit I do
not destroy the essence of the fruit, but rather purify it, concentrate it, and
fulfill it. In the same way I fulfill my conception of Reality when I evolve
from the image of the Child-Jesus to the image of the Void. There is apparent
death because there is a diminution of the visible, of that which is perceptible
by the senses and the mind; but nothing has been destroyed just because the
belief in the Reality of a perception ceases to exist. The fulfillment of the
human-being carries with it the disappearance of the illusory Reality of
images perceived by the senses and the mind.
The condition of man, at his birth, is to feel himself fundamentally
unsatisfied; he believes that he lacks something. What he is and what he has
does not suit him; he expects something else, a 'true life'; he seeks a solution
of his pretended problem, claiming such and such situations in existence.
This revendicative attitude, which engenders all our sufferings, is not to be
destroyed, but to be fulfilled. We have seen, in studying the compensations,
how our claim and attachment are subtilised. All our personal attachments
derive from our central attachment to the image of our Ego, to the image of
ourselves-as-distinct, by means of identifying association between a personal
image and this general image. The more my understanding deepens, the more
these associations are abolished; my attachment is thus purified, subtilised,
and concentrated; it becomes less and less apparent, more and more nonmanifested.
The attached revendication is not reduced by an atom before
satori, but it purifies itself, and fulfills itself according as the instant
approaches of the sudden transformation when attachment and detachment
are conciliated.
My amour-propre is an aspect of my revendicatory attention. It also is
purified in the extent to which I understand. To the people who observe me
from outside, I appear to be more modest. But I feel clearly that it is not so.
My amour-propre becomes more and more subtle and concentrated, so that
one sees it less; it fulfills itself, tending in one sense towards the zero of
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