The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

EPILOGUE
in accordance with my structure, and in consequence useless for the
accomplishment of my being. They will be spokes in the wheels of my
machine. If, on the contrary, I wish to build up by degrees an authentic
understanding, through intellectual nourishment which I can decompose and
recompose in my own way, I shall seek everywhere without prejudice, with a
complete absence of consideration for the person to whom I am listening or
whose words I am reading. I am ready perhaps to find nothing in a certain
famous teaching and to receive veritable revelations from an obscure source.
The individual man whose thought I tackle matters little; I am only interested
in that which, in this thought, might awaken my own truth which is still
asleep. The Gospels interest me because I find there with evidence a
profound doctrine, but discussions concerning the historicity of the personage
of Jesus leave me indifferent.
If I have written Zen and the Psychology of Transformation as I have,
without references, without precise documentation, without tracing anywhere
the limit between the thoughts which took form in the brains of the Zen
masters and those which took form in my own brain, that is because I am
myself incapable of making these distinctions. After having read part of Zen
literature and received from it, with an impression of evidence, a vivid
revelation, I allowed my mind to work on its own. When we let it function
without preconceived ideas the mind only asks to be allowed to construct; it
establishes, by intuitive bursts, ever richer relations between the ideas already
understood, and assembles them like the pieces of a puzzle. This work of coordination,
of integration, results in a whole which is more and more
harmonic and in which it becomes strictly impossible for us to determine
what has been brought to us and what is created in us. And besides, once
again, this discrimination is of no interest. The adhesion given by the reader
to such and such a thought expressed in a book should not depend upon the
fact that this thought has been conceived by such and such a man or by such
and such another, but upon that inner resonance that we must learn to
recognise and to use as our only guide.
Preoccupations concerning the individual who has conceived such a
doctrinal exposition are in relation with our illusory need to find the Absolute
in an aspect of the multiple. We wish to find the Absolute incarnated in a
form. When we read a text expressing an ensemble of ideas we are tempted to
adhere to it as a whole or to reject it altogether; that should be easier and
should save us the personal trouble of reflection. From that moment we are
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