The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Twenty-Four
ON HUMILITY
WE would like to end this book by insisting on a capital aspect of this
theoretical and practical comprehension which alone can deliver us
from our distress. It is a question of understanding the exact nature
of humility and of seeing that in it is to be found the key of our liberty and of
our greatness.
We are living from this moment in the state of satori; but we are
prevented from enjoying it by the unceasing work of our psychological
automatisms which close a vicious circle within us. Our imaginative-emotive
agitation prevents us from seeing our Buddha-nature and, believing therefore
that we lack our essential reality, we are obliged to imagine in order to
compensate this illusory defect.
I believe that I am separated from my own 'being' and I am looking for
it in order to reunite myself with it. Only knowing myself as a distinct
individual, I seek for the Absolute in an individual manner, I wish to affirm
myself-absolutely-as-a-distinct-being. This effort creates and maintains in me
my divine fiction, my fundamental pretension that I am all-powerful as an
individual, on the plane of phenomena. This task of compensating my
psychological automatisms consists, in my imaginative representation of
things, in refusing my attention to evidence of my impotence, in giving it to
evidence of my power, and in withdrawing my pretension whenever the
spectacle of my impotence cannot be eluded. I train myself never to recognise
the equality between the outside world and myself; I affirm myself to be
different from the outside world, on a different level, above whenever I can,
below when I cannot. The fiction according to which I should be individually
the Primary Cause of the Universe requires that it shall only be a question of
the conditioning of the world by me: either I see myself as conditioning the
outer world, or I see myself as not succeeding in conditioning it, but never
can I recognise myself as conditioned by it on a footing of equality. From
which arises the illusion of the Not-Self. If I condition the outside world, it is
Self; if I do not succeed in doing so, it is Not-Self; never can I bring myself
231