The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

METAPHYSICAL DISTRESS
that touch on his condition, that is to say he is distressed concerning
metaphysical questions; but this man is tormented by mental images, by
phenomena, by forms; he suffers on the phenomenal plane—physical not
metaphysical. Another man can be distressed at the thought of renouncing
certain illusory compensations; he can then believe that this distress at the
idea of losing his personality and merging in the universal deserves the name
of metaphysical distress. But this man has a false conception of renunciation;
he does not know that true renunciation is a passing beyond that which has
been depreciated by the understanding interpreting experience; this man is
not, as he believes, distressed by the universal but by the particular values to
which he is still attached and which are menaced by a false conception of
Realisation. No distress that is consciously felt could be called metaphysical;
there could not be distress at the level of the Principle, at the level of our
creative source.
On the other hand, we repeat there cannot exist any distress,
consciously felt, which has not at its origin unconscious metaphysical
distress, the reversed unconscious image of dormant existential Felicity. This
fallacious unconscious image is the efficient cause of all our 'moral'
suffering; the circumstances of our life, in connexion with which we suffer,
are only, despite what we habitually believe, immediate causes. A mother
who has lost her child does not suffer, as she believes, because her child is
dead; she suffers, in connexion with this death, because she believes herself
to have been abandoned by her Principle, she suffers because the occurrence
has released in her the profound impression of not 'being'.
If no distress that is consciously felt can be the primary metaphysical
distress it is important to see that our secondary distress is more or less
removed from the fallacious primordial distress. Our distress is graded in a
qualitative hierarchy according to the degree of depth of our understanding.
My distress is at its furthest from my source if my understanding of the inner
life is null, if I am fully persuaded that my concrete and particular grief is the
real cause of my suffering. In proportion as I advance in the correct
understanding of the inner life I escape from this trap; my belief in the causal
role of the particular accidental circumstance decreases; I relate my suffering
less and less to that which happens to me personally, and more and more to
my universal human state, this state which I share with all human-beings. In
the degree in which this understanding works effectively in me the lawsuit
between my personal being and my personal nullity ceases to be pleaded; that
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