The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Four
THE EXISTENTIALISM OF ZEN
A
MAN declares: 'My life is insipid and monotonous; I do not call that
living; at most it is existing.' Everyone understands what this man
means to say, which proves that everyone carries in himself the idea
of this distinction. At the same time, everyone feels that 'living' is superior to
'existing'; and this opinion is so clear, so categoric, in the mind of man, that
he comes to regard to 'exist' as nothing, and to 'live' as everything. The
distinction between the two terms is such that often it demolishes itself; one
ends by saying 'existence' for 'life' and vice versa. 'Life' appears so uniquely
important to man that it annexes the word 'existence' stripped of all its own
meaning.
Among the complex mass of phenomena which make up a humanbeing,
which are those that proceed from living and which from existing? We
find there the distinction between the animal kingdom and the vegetable
kingdom. Animal and vegetable are not two creatures entirely different; the
animal has everything that the vegetable has (vegetative life) and something
more (life of communication). Inside the vegetable and the animal, within the
limit constituted by their form, phenomena occur, intimate movements
(circulation of sap or of blood, breathing, birth and death of cells, anabolism
and catabolism). But, whereas the vegetable is fixed to the soil and has no
movement of its whole self in relation to the soil, the animal is mobile in
relation to the soil and can make all sorts of movements that one describes by
the word 'action'.
However, when man places living so much above existing the frontier
of this preferential distinction does not lie between their vegetative
phenomena and their actions; it lies within the domain of action, and in the
following manner: among my actions some have for object the service of my
vegetative life (to eat, to repose, to perform the sexual act by pure animal
desire); these actions affirm me (that is to say maintain my creation) in so far
as I am an organism in all respects similar to all the other animals, in so far as
I live from the point of view of the universe, as a cosmic cog-wheel, in so far
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