The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

SEEING INTO ONE’S OWN NATURE
as to perceive what is called my coenaesthesis, what I shall call here my
physical coenaesthesis. If someone asks me: 'How are you feeling at this
moment from the "moral" point of view?' I look into myself so as to perceive
that which I will call my psychic coenaesthesis (that which is called also my
state of mind or my mood). And when someone asks me: 'How are you
feeling at this moment from every point of view at once?' I look into myself
so as to perceive what I shall call my total coenaesthesis. It is this last way of
looking which constitutes the essential effort in order to obtain one day the
'sudden' release of 'vision into my own nature'.
In order to study this special inner perception which is total
coenaesthesis we will use the similarities which relate it to physical
coenaesthesis. Two points are interesting. First of all coenaesthesis is a
perception obtained by a de-contraction; the coenaesthetic sensation of my
right arm, for example, which consists in feeling the existence of my arm, or
in feeling my arm from within, cannot be felt if my arm is contracted; in this
state of contraction the sensibility of my arm is projected to the surface; I
must decontract my arm in order to feel it in its central axis, as though its
sensibility flowed back then into the marrow of its bones. Again,
coenaesthetic perception is in-formal. When my arm is contracted I feel its
form; when on the contrary it has lain as relaxed as possible for some minutes
and its sensibility has flowed back entirely into its central axis, I feel this arm
certainly, I feel it as existing (this corresponds with the painless sensation of
the missing limb that a man has, whose limb has been amputated), but I no
longer feel its form. If I think of it from the spatial point of view I feel it to be
as big as the whole universe, as though its form had burst and was dissolved
in the totality of space; I have therefore certainly an in-formal perception of
it.
These two points, de-contracted perception and in-formal perception,
are common to the three coenaestheses. But the physical coenaesthesis differs
from the two others from a point of view that is capital, the point of view of
time. The perception of my physical existence is capable of continuity in
duration; I can feel my arm, or the whole of my physical body, 'from within'
during a certain continuous period. On the contrary, when I perceive my total
coenaesthesis, that is to say when I feel myself from within in my psychosomatic
totality, it is only in an instantaneous flash, and I cannot hold it with
the least temporal continuity; this perception escapes me at the same moment
that it reaches me. It escapes me in its in-formal purity and drifts at once
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