The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

ON HUMILITY
whole with impartiality I see that it is comparable with the bursting of a
fireworks-rocket. The shooting upwards of the rocket corresponds with the
intra-uterine life during which everything is prepared without yet being
manifested; the moment at which the rocket bursts is the birth; the spreadingout
of the luminous shower represents that ascending period of my life in
which my organism develops all its powers; the falling back of the shower in
a rain of sparks which expire represents my old age and death. It appears to
me at first that the life of this rocket is an increase, then a decrease. But in
thinking about it more carefully I see that it is, throughout its duration, a
disintegration of energy; it is a decrease from one end to the other of its
manifestation. So is it with me as an individual; from the moment of my
conception my psycho-somatic organism is the manifestation of a
disintegration, of a continual descent. From the moment at which I am
conceived I begin to die, exhausting in manifestations more or less
spectacular an original energy which does nothing but decrease. Cosmic
reality radically contradicts my pretension towards the 'on high'; as a personal
being I have in front of me only the 'beneath'.
The whole problem of human distress is resumed in the problem of
humiliation. To cure distress is to be freed from all possibility of humiliation.
Whence comes my humiliation? From seeing myself powerless? No, that is
not enough. It comes from the fact that I try in vain not to see my real
powerlessness. It is not powerlessness itself that causes humiliation, but the
shock experienced by my pretension to omnipotence when it comes up against
the reality of things. I am not humiliated because the outer world denies me,
but because I fail to annul this negation. The veritable cause of my distress is
never in the outside world, it is only in the claim that I throw out and which is
broken against the wall of reality. I deceive myself when I complain that the
wall has hurled itself against me and has wounded me; it is I that have injured
myself against it, my own action which has caused my suffering. When I no
longer pretend, nothing will injure me ever again.
I can say also that my distress-humiliation reveals the laceration of an
inner conflict between my tendency to see myself all-powerful and my
tendency to recognise concrete reality in which my omnipotence is denied. I
am distressed and humiliated when I am torn between my subjective
pretension and my objective observation, between my lie and my truth,
between my partial and impartial representations of my situation in the
Universe. I shall only be saved from the permanent threat of distress when
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