The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE MECHANISM OF ANXIETY
been in the depths of the being ever since its first meeting with the Not-Self,
the selfsame fear that the baby experienced when his mother seemed to
withdraw from him her alliance.
Anguish is then a phenomenon in two periods, and it is of capital
importance to examine these two periods into which it can be resolved. It is
'the head', 'the reason', 'the angel' which leads the way; the head pretends to
be ignorant of the existence of the dangerous Not-Self and escapes into its
dreams; acting thus it implicitly affirms the Not-Self in matter-of-fact reality,
it goes over in fact to the enemy's camp. Then the animal portion, 'the beast',
is distracted with fear, not with a relative fear of the relative defeat which is
impending, but a total fear of the total danger of death which the Not-Self
represents for a Self that the desertion of the head leaves powerless. In what
one calls, incorrectly, 'fear of defeat' there are then two distinct elements: an
intellectual refusal of defeat, and an affective anguish not of defeat but of
death.
The erroneous belief implied in the fear of defeat explains how the
vicious circle of anguish is closed. Our subject does not realise that he
trembles in the face of death and that he does so because his head abandons
his organism in face of the menacing general Not-Self. He believes that he
trembles before such and such a concrete negative aspect of the outside world
(which may be in fact a very little thing, the low opinion of Mr. X, for
example). Seeing this concrete aspect of the world as the spectre of death, of
total destruction (since in reality it is death which is feared) he sees this
aspect of the world as a total negative Reality, as an absolute negative, and
consequently as indestructible. And this vision of the obstacle of the world,
as indestructible and absolute, evidently reinforces in the abstract portion his
refusal to undertake the struggle. The vicious circle is thus closed.
One understands why anguish is fatally the lot of those beings who are,
in a sense, the best, the richest, in whom the impartial and abstract portion is
very strong and the partial and animal portion very strong also. On the
contrary anguish will not be the lot of beings, on the one hand, whose
abstract portion is weak and who live in a comfortable egoism ('materialists');
or, on the other hand, of beings whose animal portion is weak and who live in
a comfortable altruistic renunciation ('idealists'). Among the former the 'no'
triumphs in fact, among the latter the 'yes' triumphs in fact; in both cases the
scales have tipped to one side or the other and have come to a standstill. But
the unhappy man whose two portions are strong is torn inwardly by the
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