The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE MECHANISM OF ANXIETY
He is like a prisoner who laboriously files the bars of his window; his work is
progressive and brings him nearer, in time, to his escape; but as long as this
work is not completed this man remains entirely a prisoner; he is not free
little by little; he is not free at all for some time, then he is completely free at
the very moment the bars give way. The only progressive advantage that this
man obtains from his work is an increasing alleviation of his suffering
through being a prisoner; he is quite as much a prisoner one day as the day
before, but he suffers less on that account because his instantaneous
deliverance is getting nearer in time.
One can show the same thing again in another way, that which Jesus
used in his interview with Nicodemus. Jesus said that man must die in order
to be reborn. It is progressively that the 'old' man, by a process of special
inner work goes towards his death, but this death itself and rebirth in another
state could only be the two aspects of an inner occurrence that is unique and
instantaneous. The 'old' man can be more or less in a dying condition but not
more or less dead; as for the 'new man' he is born or he is not yet, but he
cannot be more or less born. This unique and instantaneous inner event Zen
calls 'satori' or 'opening of the third eye', and it affirms its sudden character.
'At a single stroke I have completely crushed the cave of phantoms.'
'A light contact with a taut wire, and behold, an explosion which shakes the
Earth to its foundations; everything that lies hidden in the spirit bursts forth
like a volcanic eruption or explodes like a clap of thunder.'
Zen calls that 'to return home'. 'You have found yourself now; from the
very beginning nothing has been hidden from you; it was yourself who shut
your eyes to reality.'
This radical divergence of view between that which the Orient calls the
'progressive' method and the 'sudden' method has consequences that are
capital to the conception and practice of the inner liberating task.
Let us see now in detail how one may, in accordance with the general
doctrine of Zen, understand the ordinary state of man, this lack of inner union
of which we have spoken, and all the functional consequences of this state.
We must first of all, in order to do that, sketch the state of the man who
has attained realisation, who is perfect, enjoying his divine essence. This man
is a psycho-somatic organism comprising a soma, or animal machine, and a
psyche. The psyche of this man is a pure thought, or Independent
Intelligence, functioning independently of all influence coming from the
animal machine, not determined by this machine but determined by the
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