The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

FOREWORD
P
HILOSOPHY in the Orient is never pure speculation, but always some
form of transcendental pragmatism. Its truths, like those of modern
physics, are to be tested operationally. Consider, for example, the basic
doctrine of Vedânta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Taoism, of Zen. 'Tat tvam
asi—thou art That.' 'Tao is the root to which we may return, and so become
again That which, in fact, we have always been.' 'Samsara and Nirvana, Mind
and individual minds, sentient beings and the Buddha, are one.' Nothing
could be more enormously metaphysical than such affirmations; but, at the
same time, nothing could be less theoretical, idealistic, Pickwickian. They are
known to be true because, in a super-Jamesian way, they work, because there
is something that can be done with them. The doing of this something
modifies the doer's relations with reality as a whole. But knowledge is in the
knower according to the mode of the knower. When transcendental
pragmatists apply the operational test to their metaphysical hypotheses, the
mode of their existence changes, and they know everything, including the
proposition, 'thou art That', in an entirely new and illuminating way.
The author of this book is a psychiatrist, and his thoughts about the
Philosophia Perennis in general and about Zen in particular are those of a
man professionally concerned with the treatment of troubled minds. The
difference between Eastern philosophy, in its therapeutic aspects, and most of
the systems of psychotherapy current in the modern West may be
summarised in a few sentences.
The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to
adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals—individuals who
are observed to be well adjusted to one another and the local institutions, but
about whose adjustment to the fundamental Order of Things no enquiry is
made. Counselling, analysis, and other methods of therapy are used to bring
these troubled and maladjusted persons back to a normality, which is defined,
for lack of any better criterion, in statistical terms. To be normal is to be a
member of the majority party—or in totalitarian societies, such as Calvinist
Geneva, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, of the party which happens to be
in power. For the exponents of the transcendental pragmatisms of the Orient,
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