The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

EPILOGUE
led necessarily to envisage the author of the text as an entity whose individual
value intrigues us: does he deserve our respect or our disdain? This way of
reading, sound if a documentary text is in question, is no longer suitable
when we wish to form our thought and discover our truth (that is, our own
intellectual view of Reality). When I seek for my truth I know that I shall not
find it outside myself; what is outside me—which I am going to use in order
to find the truth in myself—can appear as a coherent whole; but I must not let
myself be impressed by this appearance, otherwise I shall never succeed in
effecting the analytical process which thereafter conditions my personal
synthesis, my intellectual assimilation.
If I regard my book as a whole, I believe that the ancient Zen masters
would have given me their imprimatur. But that matters little; above all they
would have approved the detachment whereby I struggle to maintain my
thought in the face of all other personal thought. One remembers that Zen
master who, seeing one of his pupils poring over a Sutra, said to him: 'Do not
let yourself be upset by the Sutra, upset the Sutra yourself instead.' For only
thus can there be established between the pupil and the Sutra a real
understanding.
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