People go through life trying to make their lives, and the lives of those around
them, perfect. But what is perfect? Ask anyone for a definition of what
perfection would be for them right now, and they will come up with a definition.
Ask the person standing next to them, listening in, and they will come up with a
slightly different definition. The third person will come up with something
slightly different again, and this holds true even if these are people who share
the same beliefs and ideals. This is because everyone's experience is slightly
different from everyone else, and we all define our idea of perfection based on
our experience. And supposing each of these people got what they said was
perfect, would they really be completely satisfied with it? Five minutes later,
wouldn't they be wanting something slightly different?

So the pursuit of perfection is an endless task, because everyone's idea of
perfection is slightly different, which means that everybody who works towards
his idea of perfection is working against the efforts of the next person who
wants something slightly different. So everything we do towards achieving
perfection is hampering everyone else's efforts to reach perfection. Every
positive acton of ours is having a negative effect on someone else.

And when we reach it, what we want to achieve is no longer perfect, our ideal
has changed slightly. Think of the perfect situation. Imagine yourself in it,
now. Is it really perfection, or are there one or two things you'd like to
change? Imagine you're in that situation for an hour, a day, aweek, a month,
ayer. Can you see a few changes that you'd like to make to it?

We are always chasing after something that is not what we really want, and in
chasing after it, we are fighting against everyone else. And when we get there,
it is no longer completely satisfying, and we always want something else.

When we reach that understanding - and we all get there in the end - we find
ourselves having to stop and reconsider what we are doing and where we are
going.

When we really understand the futility of our actions, we start seeking for
real, unchanging perfection. What will make us happy and at the same time will
make everyone else happy at the same time? What will make everyone happy
unchangeably? We start looking for eternal perfection. We start looking for
something solid and unchanging, for the eternal, unvarying truth. And as we do
so, anything relative gradually ceases to be of value for us.

The alchemists called the thing that we look for, the philosopher's stone. It is
perfect - nothing could be better than it - and it is unchangeable - it exists
for ever; nothing is going to come along to replace it, and nor would we or
anyone else ever want it to.

How do we find it? We simply examine what we have to see if it is perfect,
unchangeably true. If it is not, we simply drop it, we let it go, it ceases to
have any value for us, we lose interest in it.

Instead of grasping at things, we find ourselves letting go of them. Instead of
amassing, we begin discarding.

Instead of a hundred thousand ever-changing deisires, we have one, a desire for
the ultimate truth that is beyond all change. And in place of our grasping
technique, we have self-surrender.

What we do is to examine what we chasing after at any given moment, hold it up
to the gold standard of unchanging truth, and if it doesn't meet that standard,
we discard it as valueless.
The alchemists called this process 'solve'.

When we discard something, when we dissolve it, we find that something else
appears in its place. The alchemists called this 'coagulo'. We apply the same
universal solvent of our critical and undivided attention to this new thing.

Solve and coagulo.

Desire for the eternal, or God, and self-surrender.

As we proceed with this process, we change. Our character, our interests, and
with them out whole life, changes. Instead of grabbing, we are letting go.
Instead of reaching for material things without thinking, we are examing our
ideas about them, to make sure that they measure up to our ideal. Instead of
looking outwards, we are looking inwards. We realise that we were looking out at
results before, rather than inwards at the causes of those results. No wonder
what we used to do never worked! We were trying to work with the results of our
actions, rather than working on the blueprint, rather than examining the source
of them. That's a fundamental reversal.

We find our thinking gets clearer. Before, we were using our consciousness to
identify matter that we would then use our energy on, to make matter into the
shape we wanted, so to speak. Now we are using our energy to dissolve matter,
and we find that in doing so, more consciousness is released. Every time we let
go of something, we wake up a little, our consciousness level, our awareness
level is a little more heightened and our understanding is greater. From the
ashes of every dissolved idea, a new and purer idea emerges. We find that, in
letting go, more is given, while before, when we grasped, we tended to lose what
little we had.

Darkness flees from it, from this univeral solvent, from this merciless
insistence on finding the real, ultimate, unchangeable truth. What we uncover is
sometimes terrible, is sometimes horrifying, is sometimes beautiful and
sometimes marvellous. It can be appalling or delightful, but it is not eternal
truth, and it dissolves in the alchemical fire of our unstoppable, our merciless
attention.

When you start seeing the results, when your understanding increases, you find
this is the only thing worth doing, everything else is pure, pointless
timewasting, and you find yourself reducing it to the minimum necessary to get
by in the world.

When you start seeing the results, you become unstoppable. When you see that it
works, and you see how you're changing, your efforts become stronger, and as
they become stronger they become more effective. The universal solvent becomes a
stronger tool in your hands, and you see more and more that needs to be
dissolved.

And you see that all the signs point to this road that you're travelling - all
religions, all philosophy, all science, all alchemical texts, all attempts at
government. All the signposts set by the enlightened people of the past are
indicating the same road. They start from different places but they all converge
on the one goal, and they all meet in the unchanging centre, the point at which
all their aims converge.

Chris
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