Articles

The Alchemical Process and Meeting the Void

In the March 07 newsletter, the article on the Alchemical Process gave us an insight into the movement of transformation, the essence of the Metamorphic Technique.  At the heart of every transformation there is a death. This is the death of a pattern, so that the energy of the form released may form a new event.  There is a metamorphosis.  One of the meanings of this word is "transmutation into a subtler substance", the word 'subtler' meaning that the new form is vibrating with a faster, finer frequency.  Where there is death, there is void.  Different types of void were explored in two articles published in the Journal of the Metamorphic Association, No. 31, in 2000.¹  To name a few of these voids: the void of polarity, the mental void, the in-between or interstitial void, the void of contraction (vibration), of total un-differentiation, of the cold light, of the dark light, and the void of objective love.

We have all experienced specific types of voids, one of the most current occurring when we move from childhood to adolescence.  What had been so precious up until then, the emotions experienced as a child, now have no meaning as a new energy surges through the body.  The loss of past glories is a counterpoint to a possible future difficult to imagine, but towards which we are all pushed, by the nascent sexual exigencies. The past has died, the future is uncertain, and the adolescent stands on a bridge between two banks, which appear to be lost in fog. 

We have a good example of this ‘dark night of the soul’ (this is an 18th century expression by the mystic St John of the Cross whose 'night' lasted 45 years), in the private letters of Mother Teresa, to superiors and confessors, chronicling a belief that her prayers were spurned or empty. 

She asked one of her confessors to, "…please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself - for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.  It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work'."  And later on she wrote: "…such deep longing for God - and…repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal.  - (the saving of) Souls holds no attraction - heaven means nothing - pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."  Her dark night lasted for more than half a century but she kept on doing her compassionate work with courage, writing "I have come to love the darkness - for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus' darkness and pain on earth." ² 

I would like to summarise the March 2007 article for you. The alchemical process has two phases, solve and coagula, dissolution and reformation, or resurrection.  These two phases have got three stages each. 

The first stage of solve is connected to the dissolution of the personality.  This means that as we give attention to our patterns, these patterns lose their magnetism and their weight, that is, their gravitational pull.  We no longer have these reference points at our disposal.  For example, one reference point may be your attachment to your parents.  If we explore these roles we can understand that the mother has given the child out to the world and has nourished the child.  The father on the other hand is seen as a threat. The role of the mother toward the child finishes at puberty, and she must take a backseat to let the father take over, allowing the ogre of the earlier years, as myths would have it told, to become the saviour, who takes the teenager out into society. 

With the disintegration of the personality, defining yourself by the external activities that you do abates. Perhaps you can begin to realise the importance of this dissolution, which is like the annihilation of our ancestors and the people who made us, as well as the dissolution of all the subtle energies that came together to create us.  We can compare this phase to the caterpillar going into the cocoon and welcoming its own death.  This particular type of void is called the void of total un-differentiation.   Remember that in the cocoon the caterpillar has become just a gelatinous substance.

For us this process takes the following form. Consciousness needs to empty itself of all perception.  What makes us human is the fact that we are conscious that we are conscious and that seems to disappear.  Imagine the caterpillar having just closed the cocoon; it goes into a state of deep peace and silence.  At times you can see people when they are in that state; though they are awake they look like sleeping children.  Another sign is the disappearance of everything that has accrued in the periphery of the energy field, such as vestigial influences. 

The sensation of being also disappears.  The sensation of being comes of course from the following fact:  when people say 'I feel so alive', they mean I feel the blockages against which the power of life is banging.  They feel the power of life hitting their blockages.  Of course in this disintegration, the tool of the ego disappears.

How does this effect us?  At times we feel ourselves to be completely alone, as if in a state of indifference and seek to affirm ourselves.  To affirm that they are alive, people will use violence, self-mutilation and suicide.  In the first stage of solve when there is the realisation of the importance of the dissolution of mind and ego and that it might lead somewhere, there will be attachment to that.  Even that attachment has to be dissolved, hence the void of total disintegration. 

In the second stage of solve we have to let go of all resistance.  True intuition is a great help as it allows you to align with the one unique vibration, which is objective consciousness.  Then there is the experience of the void called the mental void.  The most important belief that must disappear is the belief that one can attain something, such as the realisation of one's being through exercises of prayers, meditation, recitation of mantras, and so on.  These are exercises that the mind creates to lull you to sleep and give you the feeling that you are going somewhere, and to give your personality the feeling that something is being accomplished.  The mental void comes about with the realisation that all the exercises that you have done to attain enlightenment; all that comes to nothing in the void.  All the attainment of the caterpillar comes to nothing once it goes into the cocoon.  And there is one very important thing that must disappear; the type of intuition that is sublimated knowledge, which always contains an element of doubt and curtails true intuition, which is a generator that pushes us to action.

However, all is not lost, there is another type of void that comes in called the interstitial void. If you think of a pendulum it goes to one extreme and then stops.  And then will go to the opposite extreme and will stop.  Extremes are poles or absences of movement and there is always one pole that is stronger than the other, which introduces a tendency for the movement to stop. This is called the principle of neutralisation within the rhythm of movement from one pole to the other.  As the poles come closer and closer together they arrive at a merging point and that is the great awakening, in which one dives into a completely different level of being, the one experienced by Gautama when he became enlightened.  There is a specific movement in the body, as if an arrow starting from the solar plexus goes through the heart into the pituitary gland and then you experience an all devouring, destructive fire.  This is like diving into the sun, and diving into the sun is diving into darkness, hence it is called the void of contraction and is one of the elements of the principle of vibration. 

The third stage of solve is marked by an identification with the essence of being, which brings about the death of all patterns, and is why detachment is so important, detachment being the tool to meet that death. Detachment allows us to shift in consciousness so that consciousness gets in touch with the source of life.  The void that is experienced here is the void of the cold light where one goes into consciousness of total absence. What is this like? It is no time, and it is no memory.  It's as if the natural individuality that is established during the post-conception period of gestation dissolves like the river that loses itself in the ocean.  At times some people also feel physically that their bones have become icy cold and this can even affect the whole room where they are sitting. 

We come now to coagula.  Let's look at the first stage of coagula.  It is now the essence of our being that is acting to reform or to create a new form.  We can compare this to a resurrection. There has been transformation. Life then acquires a new form using an inheritance that has been there from the beginning of the universe. This inheritance is the movement of ascension.  Life is also using the descending energies that have gone through all the spheres of subtle beings to shape matter into a human form. You will then go into a particular void called the void of the dark light.  This is the light of awakening.  Imagine the butterfly emerging from the cocoon.  It perceives the light for the first time.  This stage is beyond un-differentiation and is the start of a new differentiation.  In this condition you are in total darkness, there is no path.  You can't perceive a new way for this new way of being and the light of this being is so strong that there is somehow the feeling of being stripped of your own light, as if you were completely naked.  Then there comes a kind of rapture as if you are being ravished by the light, but there is nothing. After this nothingness comes the activation of the creative impulse.  It is then that the principle of mentalism/creative impulse comes into its own. The new being is in form. 

The second stage of coagula consists in a completely new form arising. Here, the personality doesn't establish itself.  It's the being that does so with all the potential of the new person at its disposal.  In life we feel that we can do absolutely anything because of the feeling that we are nothing.  This is a stage where the expression of autonomy and authority is so important.  Autonomy is the power to exercise self-governance and is based on law.  Authority is the affirmation of being, the affirmation of the essence of the true self.  However, this expression of autonomy and authority triggers a backlash from your environment, which will then apply tremendous pressure on you to return to the status quo, to what others know of you, to what they are comfortable with when they are with you.  This pushes us to really come into our own power. 

It is now that we may enter at times into the void of total suspension.  This is where drawing the figure of eight comes into its own.  We could say that the two folds of duality and unity come together but that wouldn’t be quite accurate because there is still duality within you.  Through embracing duality there is integration in unity.  This is why we consider poles.  If you think of the pendulum again, it goes out to extreme limits and it stops.  If that stop is attended to, there is a brief experience of a feeling of expansion or suspension and then from that the realisation comes to you that time is elastic.  We know that the principle of polarity belongs to the same family as the principle of insight/illumination/revelation and it is when this principle is activated that you will go into a state of total suspension, of total absence.  When you come out of this state, you are left with a feeling of intense jubilation and tremendous joy,

As we come to the third stage of coagula, we can recognise together that the body of humanity has worked with the two movements I mentioned earlier on: ascent and descent. The ascent from matter to spirit has been explored for example in spiritual terms by the Buddhist and Taoist oriental wisdom, a spirituality without belief in God or in transcendence.  A Buddhist might say: ‘attend to the details and discover the patterns behind the patterns.’  Is it this approach that fostered the pantheon of gods, to give individuality to different levels of beings?  The other, descending movement has been the descent from Spirit to matter exemplified in the three monotheist traditions, Judaic, Christian and Islamic. This is a transcendental moralistic approach, which asks for some kind of submission to God. 

Where are these two movements found in the Metamorphic Technique? MT is grounded in the principle of correspondence. When I introduce correspondence in my workshops, I present two approaches, the immanent and the transcendent view of correspondence. The immanent approach proposes the ascent from matter to spirit, starting with hard tissues (bones), soft tissues and fluids. Hard tissues correspond to the energy aspect, power and life, soft tissues correspond to the mental aspect, consciousness and intelligence, and fluids correspond to the emotional aspect, feeling or communication (in unity) and creation. The transcendent approach proposes the descent from spirit to matter, starting with life, intelligence and creation. Both approaches stress the importance of understanding that there is no separation, only different expressions of Life operating at different levels of frequency.

We also touch on these two movements with the afferent and the efferent patterns, the efferent the ability to respond, the immanent approach from the relative to the absolute, from duality to unity and beyond; afference the ability to be aware, and the transcendent approach, from the absolute to the relative, from life, intelligence and creation through unity to duality.  We are now at a point in the history of the consciousness of humanity when we can embrace in consciousness these two movements.  This embrace elicits a specific type of void, the void of objective love with the realisation that the love of life and the love of the light must disappear because objective love doesn't tolerate any object. 

This is the Love beyond love, that allows love to be, and is at the basis of all manifestations of life.  We then enter the fulcrum in which universes can be created.  At a less exalted level this is where your creativity can be expressed, the creativity in which we create ourselves in the revelation of what we are through who we are, accompanied by a state of grace; a condition found with the universal principle of communication/communion/harmony. 

Gaston Saint-Pierre
Copyright Gaston Saint-Pierre 2007

¹There are a few copies available at 67 Ritherdon Road, London SW17 8QE.  If you wish to order please send a cheque made payable to Metatech Innovations for £4.25 (incl. p&p).

²The secret life of Mother Teresa - Her Agony. Time Vol. 170, No.9 September 3, 2007Pages 14-21