Secret_History

Chapter 2: The Chemistry of Alchemy 99
careful consideration of this point ought to be undertaken before one attaches
belief to any such claims or any such teacher.
Nevertheless, to establish contact with the higher self, for lack of a better term,
this very small seed of the soul connection that exists within us is the object of
esoteric science. It seems that the only people who have a real hope of
accomplishing this process are those who are “bankrupted”. In other words, all the
beliefs, all the programs, all the lies that have been part of the self from childhood,
must collapse or be stripped away.
We are all corrupted by the exterior world of matter - the domain of Non-being
and its gravitational lures. Even when experience contradicts what a person
believes about him or herself, they are seldom able to make the cause and effect
connection because of the serious deficiencies that are programmed into us from
birth.
We generally explain our failures as “lack of will”. What people do not realize is
that failure is not generally due to a lack of will or desire, but to a lack of BEING.
It is only with the development of BEING that we begin to understand the
knowledge we have acquired. Only then, with understanding combined with
BEING, do we have the ability to Do.
Our personality is the interface between our body and spirit. Because of the
nature of our reality, the personality is mostly “programs” of the flesh, or genetic
body so to say. The Machine runs on the “do it again principle”. Most
contemporary human beings are far more concerned about “appearances” or
“experiences” that give them a buzz than they are about their Being.
The intimate relationship of the personality to the physical body and its
interactive programs is little understood, yet it is crucial to development of the “I”
that is more than a “ghost in the machine”. We can note that when the average
person experiences serious pain, all of their noble instincts fly out the window.
Some people, of course, have the ability to master pain and to work on no matter
what. They are considered to be heroic, and it is certainly a similar nature that
succeeds in esoteric work. It is not a path for the weak.
The interdependence of the personality and the body - the machine which we
have to operate with in this reality - leads us to the logical conclusion that it is this
very machine and its programs that are most important for us to study in order to
learn perspicacity, to learn to distinguish between the real and the false.
It is at this point that we begin to learn about the “tolerances” of our machine.
We begin to discover that we spend most of our time swinging between action and
reaction with no real input of the true “I”. We discover that we have an ideal
image of ourselves that has very little foundation in actual fact or “results”.
However, we cover all of this up by “faith” in our ideal image and our lies that we
ARE that illusory self.
We come back to the fact that we attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not
possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of
ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to
“patch up” our egos with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal
from us the fact that we cannot really DO anything because we have no Being.
Generally, to avoid facing the pain of this realization, people will take drugs of
both the chemical and spiritual variety. It is only a matter of type and degree.