The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

ON HUMILITY
true well-being is to be found, paradoxically, where until now I have situated
my pain. As long as I have not understood, I am turned towards 'on high';
when I have understood I am not turned towards 'beneath'—for, once again, it
is impossible for me to be turned towards 'beneath' and every effort in that
direction would transform the 'beneath' into an 'on high'—but my aspiration
stretched towards 'on high' decreases in intensity and, in this measure, I
benefit from my humiliations. When I have understood, I resist less and, on
account of that, I see more and more often that I am humiliated; I see that all
my negative states are at bottom humiliations, and that I have taken steps up
to the present to give them other names. I am capable then of feeling myself
humiliated, vexed, without any other image in me than the image of this state,
and of remaining there motionless, my understanding having wiped out my
reflex attempts at flight. From the moment at which I succeed in no longer
moving in my humiliated state, I discover with surprise that there is the
'asylum of rest', the unique harbour of safety, the only place in the world in
which I can find perfect security. My adhesion to this state, placed face to
face with my natural refusal, obtains the intervention of the Conciliating
Principle; the opposites neutralise one another; my suffering fades away and
one part of my fundamental pretension fades away at the same time. I feel
myself nearer to the ground, to the 'beneath', to real humility (humility which
is not acceptance of inferiority, but abandonment of the vertical conception in
which I saw myself always above or below). These inner phenomena are
accompanied by a sentiment of sadness, of 'night'; and this sentiment is very
different from distress because a great calm reigns therein. In this moment of
nightly calm and of relaxation are elaborated the processes of what we have
called the inner alchemy. The 'old' man breaks up for the benefit of the
gestation of the 'new' man. The individual dies for the sake of the birth of the
universal.
The conquest of humility, impossible directly, supposes then the use of
humiliation. All suffering, by humiliating us, modifies us. But this
modification can be of two sorts that are radically opposed. If I struggle
against humiliation, it destroys me and it increases my inner disharmony; if I
let it alone without opposing it, it builds up my inner harmony. To let
humiliation alone simply consists in recognising to oneself that one is
humiliated.
The Being, in our actual perspective, appears to us the unconciliated
couple of zero and the infinite. Our nature urges us at first to identify it with
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