The purpose of Alchemy is the trasmutation of one state to another. And where I feel the literature fails us, and what perhaps can prevent a person really embracing a spiritual path, is that it never truly elaborates on the fact that the things we can experience during that transition is so much more exciting and fulfilling than anything our minds can pursuade our attention with. Now part of this is because of the difficulty in relating experiences which I have addressed here. However it’s important to know that walking a path geared towards tranformation is not just going to change the parts of you that you want changed. It can potentially completely change who you are.
When you engage with alchemical processes you ignite something which can be called The Process. The Process is at one time descriptive of the practices done in order to promote change in ourselves, but it also describes a much more mysterious function that occurs behind the scenes. When you start perfoming acts whose purpose is to alter and unearth who we are you start churning the entire system. In a soup, if you remove the carrots you change the flavour of the entire pot. So while at the onset it might seem that your efforts are singularly directed at the thing about yourself you want to change the most, you are in actual fact changing your entire being. It is important to realise that it is impossible to change one thing in your energetic system without it having an effect on anything else. We are an energetic ecology; everything is related. And this is The Process: the behind the scenes churning and cooking of your entire being.
The beauty of the Process is that as long as you are engaged in practices geared towards a deep exploration or transformation of the self, the Process will continue. If you want the Process to speed up, do more practices, engage more Will, do more and see more. The Process is a self regulating activity pertaining to the abilities of the individual. This transformation is something that occurs in everyone, regardless of whether they are engaged in self transformation or not. It’s a part of nature. Alchemy is just the speeding up of that transformation, the acceleration of the natural process of evolution.
So what does it do? It changes you. And I mean that literally. And perhaps not in the ways you might initally assume. And because the Process is individual, the changes that occur can appear differently dependant on the person because we all have totally unique energetic make-ups. But beyond the surface level the Process is in actual fact enacting the very same change in everybody: it is crystalling out the parts of you which have a greater amount of integrity. The parts of you which have a greater capacity to hold and cognise a further unfoldment of consciousness. And then as that level of consciousness unfolds, and begins churning our being, we crystallise out levels of even greater integrity. And so on and so forth.
This journey of self-realising can take on amazing proportions. And not just in the shaping of the energetic structure but by the standpoint that comes from awareness being exposed to realms of greater subtley and higher integrity. The world becomes different because the lens through which you are seeing it has changed. Things that may have seemed mundane to you before can become alive with new meaning. You start seeing patterns in life that engross your attention, start seeing the whispers of times past in the relations between seemingly distant things.
You start seeing the interconnectedness of everything.
And in that realisation you can find your place in creation.
Emotional life is so dull by comparison. When your awareness starts aligning to the higher parts of yourself, there is a whole new body of experiences just waiting for you to identify with. And I mean vastly more than what our minds can offer us.