The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE INNER ALCHEMY
perfect humility, and in another towards the non-manifested infinite of my
absolute dignity.
The distress which is associated with the egotistical claim is subjected
to the same gradual modification. It is a serious mistake to believe that
understanding can increase the anxiety of man. False information, by
implanting in our mind constraining 'beliefs', can increase our distress. But
the intuition of truth on the contrary subtilises distress, reducing its
manifested aspect and increasing its non-manifested aspect. Profound
distress, from which derives all manifested personal distress, is not reduced
by an atom before satori; but it remains more and more non-manifested, so
that the adept of Zen, in the measure in which he evolves (without
progressing) feels distress less and less. When distress has become almost
entirely non-manifested, satori is near.
The inner agitation of man reveals the conflict which exists between the
vital movement on the one hand, and on the other the refusal of the temporal
limitation which conditions this movement. Placed face to face with his life
such as it is, man wants it and at the same time does not want it. This
agitation purifies itself in the measure in which understanding entails a
decrease of the refusal of the temporal limitation. The vital movement is not
touched, whereas that which was opposed to it is reduced; and so this
movement is purified, agitation disappears, our machine ticks over ever more
smoothly.
The evolution that we are studying comprises before everything, as we
have said, the subtilisation of our image-material. Our images lose little by
little their apparent density, their illusory objectivity; they become more
subtle, vaster, more general, more abstract. Their power of causing our vital
energy to well up in emotive spasm decreases. The whole imaginativeemotive
process loses its intensity, its violence. Our imaginative film presents
less contrast; our inner dream is lightened.
One can consider satori as an awakening, our actual condition in
relation to this awakening being a kind of sleep in which our conscious
thought is the dream. There is truth in this way of looking at it but it contains
a trap into which our understanding risks falling. I always have a tendency to
wish to represent things to myself and to forget that satori, an unimaginable
inner occurrence, cannot be assimilated by analogy with anything that I
know. Thus I have a tendency to assume an analogy between satori, ultimate
awakening, and that which I experience every day when I pass from the state
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