The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

THE FIVE MODES OF THOUGHT
the form. In order to do that he ought to make his formal mind function in a
persevering attempt to perceive, beyond its limits, the in-formal; an attempt
that is absurd in itself but which brings about the release one day of the
miracle of satori, not as crowning the success of the ridiculous efforts
accomplished, but as the defeat, definite at last, and triumphant, of those
efforts. It is like a man separated from the light by a wall and who cannot
touch this wall without making it higher and higher; but a day comes when
all these absurd efforts have built up the wall to such a height that it becomes
unsteady and collapses suddenly, a catastrophe that is final and triumphant,
and which leaves the man bathed in the light.
It is this absurd but necessary effort that we accomplish when we
oblige ourselves to perceive our in-formal sensation of existing more-or-less
in the course of all the episodes of our daily life. This effort towards an informal
perception of existence is not similar to the reflex mental efforts that
we make habitually and which are mental contractions that form images. It is
even quite the contrary; it is an effort of de-contraction made in order to
escape from the habitual contractive reflexes, an effort towards perfect
simplicity in order to escape from the complexities that we habitually
introduce, by way of reflex, into the question of our existence. We learn, by
this effort, not to do something new, but no longer to do the inward actions,
useless and agitating, which are usual with us. We learn to obtain from our
mind not the most ingeniously clever gestures, but the pure gesture which is
the essence of all the others and which rejoins immobility. This simple
mental functioning represents the highest accomplishment of our thought as
natural man; it breaks through the ceiling of the fifth mode of our thought.
Starting from the in-formality of sleep without dreams it finds again the informal
by closing a complete circle—or more exactly, since the final point of
the circle dominates its point of departure, a complete spiral turn.
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