The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE MECHANISM OF ANXIETY
participate in it by his own nature (for one cannot lack something without any
knowledge of that thing).
Anguish is then an illusion since its causes are illusory. Besides this
theoretical demonstration we can obtain a practical demonstration of it; we
can prove directly, intuitively, the illusory character of anguish. If in fact at a
moment at which I suffer morally, resting in a quiet spot, I shift my attention
from my thinking to my feeling, if, leaving aside all my mental images, I
apply myself to perceiving in myself the famous moral suffering in order to
savour it and to find out at last what it is—I do not succeed. All that I succeed
in feeling is a certain general fatigue which represents, in my body, the trace
of the anxiety-phenomenon and of the wastage of vital energy which has
taken place through the fear of death. But of suffering itself I do not find a
scrap. The more I pay attention to the act of feeling, withdrawing thereby my
attention from my imaginative film, the less I feel. And I prove then the
unreality of anguish.
One will understand this still better by comparison with physical pain.
If I have a painful gumboil, the more I imagine the less I suffer physically;
the less I imagine, on the contrary, shifting my attention from thinking to
feeling, the more keenly I am aware of my pain. This is because the pain is
real, not imaginary.
We do not mean to say that there is no perception in the course of
moral suffering; we say that it has an illusory suffering, which is not the same
thing. If a man sees a mirage in the desert one cannot say that he does not see
it; he sees, indeed, but that which he sees does not exist. In the same way,
when I suffer morally I perceive, but I perceive nothing that really exists.
What then happens in me when I suffer morally? There is, as we have
seen, in my feeling, the fear of death; this fear uses up my vitality and so
impoverishes my reserve of organic energy; there is in that then an injury
inflicted on my organism, on my body. This injury is not the same as that of
physical pain; the injury of physical pain affects a part of the body, it affects
the body-as-an-aggregate-of-parts. The injury of the moral suffering, loss of
energy at its source, affects the body-as-a-whole; which is not indicated in the
sensibility of the organism by any precise pain, but by a general discomfort,
by fatigue, depression, a lowering of vitality. In the course of the moral
suffering there is therefore at the body level, a general depressive discomfort.
During this time, at the psychic level, there are unpleasant, menacing images.
The moral suffering results from the association of menacing mental images
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