The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

ON HUMILITY
my objectivity has triumphed over my subjectivity, when the reality has
triumphed in me over the dream.
In our desire to escape from distress at last, we search for doctrines of
salvation, we search for 'gurus'. But the true guru is not far away, he is
before our eyes and unceasingly offers us his teaching; he is reality as it is,
he is our daily life. The evidence of salvation is beneath our eyes, evidence of
our non-omnipotence, that our pretension is radically absurd, impossible, and
so illusory, inexistent; evidence that there is nothing to fear for hopes that
have no reality; that I am and have always been on the ground, so that no
kind of fall is possible, so that no vertigo has any reason to exist.
If I am humiliated, it is because my imaginative autonomisms succeed
in neutralising the vision of reality and keep the evidence in the dark. I do not
benefit by the salutary teaching which is constantly offered to me, because I
refuse it and set myself skillfully to elude the experience of humiliation. If a
humiliating circumstance turns up, offering me a marvellous chance of
initiation, at once my imagination strives to conjure what appears to me to be
a danger; it struggles against the illusory movement towards 'beneath'; it does
everything to restore me to that habitual state of satisfied arrogance in which
I find a transitory respite but also the certainty of further distress. In short I
constantly defend myself against that which offers to save me; I fight foot by
foot to defend the very source of my unhappiness. All my inner actions tend
to prevent satori, since they aim at the 'on high' whereas satori awaits me
'beneath'. And so Zen is right in saying that 'satori falls upon us unexpectedly
when we have exhausted all the resources of our being'.
These considerations seem to indicate humility to us as the 'way'. It is
true in a sense. Let us see, however, in what respect humility is not a 'way' if
by this word we understand a systematic discipline. In my actual condition I
cannot make any effort which, directly or indirectly, is not an effort towards
'on high'. Every effort to conquer humility can only result in a false humility
in which I again exalt myself egotistically by means of the idol that I have
created for myself. It is strictly impossible for me to abase myself, that is for
me to reduce the intensity of my claim to 'be'. All that I can and should do, if I
wish to escape definitively from distress, is less and less to resist the
instruction of concrete reality, and to let myself be abased by the evidence of
the cosmic order. Even then, there is nothing that I can do or cease to do
directly. I will cease to oppose myself to the constructive and harmonising
benefits of humiliation in the measure in which I have understood that my
234