1001 Doors - Window One

Alchemy is about combining elements to change something that is less valuable into something that is more valuable. It is descriptive of nature’s creative process, imitated by chemists, and utilized by a number of different schools of thought to actively refine and improve the human being. 

The goal is to turn lead into gold. 

From a spiritual perspective, lead refers to our acquired self and the consciousness limited by that. That self is largely a product of childhood, culture and the time in which you are born. Like lead, it has limited use and can sometimes be toxic.

Gold, on the other hand, is considered a noble metal. It can even be eaten. It is valuable because it can easily be crafted in many beautiful ways and has come to symbolize worth. Gold is like spirit, and every gold object is a unique expression of that one substance. That is what we are, in our heart of hearts. 

That reference also reveals something about the nature of alchemy. When a substance is divided up into its component parts there is a risk that its original nature will be lost and forgotten. That’s what happens to human beings. On birth everything is divided up into self and other, male and female, thoughts and feelings, earth and heaven, and so forth. Eventually, if unchecked, this division destabilizes consciousness and begins to manifest what is not its essential nature, what is not golden, but which is leaden.

Luckily gold is denser and therefore heavier than lead, although it doesn’t appear that way because most gold we encounter is somewhat ornamental in nature. The weighty, noble nature of gold symbolizes the human being’s essential nature, which will always prevail, no matter how leaden consciousness may appear.

In alchemy, the process reverses division, and so is always moving consciousness in the direction of gold, the original substance. When you perform an alchemical operation on consciousness you can witness that. At first you might experience stasis, as if two opposites have neutralized each other. But then a high order of consciousness begins to reveal itself. The two opposites have been reconciled, synthesized and evolved. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And the divisions are less polarized.

This principle was discovered in modern cognitive psychology, for instance, when NLP researchers came up with something called “collapsing anchors.” They discovered that when a person holds an unresourceful state and a resourceful state in consciousness at the same time transformation happens. Using confidence as the example,  the person doesn’t simply become more confident or less non-confident however. Confidence simply becomes less of an issue in favour of a more natural state of equipoise and dynamic self-expression.

Performing alchemy on emotional states is very revealing. If you take anger and kindness and intend to synthesize and evolve them, or include and transcend them, the consciousness that is created seems to borrow from both and invoke a state of consciousness more valuable than either. The energy of anger enlivens the normally soft energy of kindness. And the energy of kindness softens the normally harsh energy of anger. The result is a higher order emotional state in general. 

The same sort of result happens when we perform alchemy on the polarity of self and other. We feel less possessed by the self, and have more empathy for others. Or, if the polarization has been in the opposite direction as is the case in some cultures, we have a stronger sense of self and feel less possessed by others. If you look you will some variation of that kind of alchemy happening everywhere in the world, as a kind of trend, because alchemy really is the process of evolutionary change, as opposed to the opposite, which is devolutionary change.

Chinese alchemists have known about gold for thousands of years. The integration of opposites is considered the primary process for giving birth to a consciousness of the undivided or non-dual whole within the cauldron of the human form. For these alchemists, the energy of the human body, of nature and of the cosmos itself provides a graded series of polarizations which can be strategically reconciled to produce the realized or enlightened unit of consciousness that is ultimately the direction all of us want to go, whether we know it or not. 

So, whatever your interest, may it be science, history, sociology, psychology or mysticism, alchemy is an interesting and useful window to look through.