The alchemists wrote a great deal and agreed on little, but there is one instruction that almost all of them give. Solve et coagula. Dissolve and coagulate. Take the thing apart, and put it together again. They said that whoever understood these two words understood the art, and I have come to think they were not exaggerating.
In the flask
In the laboratory the meaning is plain enough. A solid substance is dissolved in a liquid, so that its fixed structure is broken and its parts move freely. Impurities can then be filtered away or left behind. The liquid is evaporated, and the substance returns to solid form: the same substance and yet not the same, since it is purer than before. The operation is then repeated. Some recipes call for it seven times, some for dozens.
Notice what the process assumes. A thing cannot be improved in its fixed state. As long as it holds its shape, its impurities are locked into it. To change it you must first reduce it to a condition in which change is possible, and that condition looks, from the outside, exactly like destruction.
In a life
I do not know of a more accurate description of how people change.
Think of any real change you have been through: leaving a profession, recovering from a loss, giving up a long held opinion, learning to do something difficult late in life. In every case there was a period when the old arrangement had come apart and nothing had yet replaced it. You no longer knew what you thought, or who you were for, or how to do what you used to do without thinking. It was unpleasant. From the inside it did not feel like progress. It felt like failure.
The alchemists gave that condition a color, black, and a list of grim emblems, and then they did something generous. They called it the first sign that the work had begun. I have found few ideas more useful in bad seasons than this one: that confusion may be the solvent doing what it is meant to do.
Those who only dissolve
The formula has two halves, and there are two ways to get it wrong. The first is to dissolve and never coagulate.
You will have met such people, and perhaps been one. They are forever taking themselves apart. They move from one teaching to the next, one method to the next, always analyzing, always uncovering a deeper layer, never arriving. Every structure is questioned as soon as it forms. They mistake the feeling of dissolution for the work itself, because it is vivid and dramatic and resembles insight.
Esoteric circles are full of this error, since so much of our literature praises the breaking of forms. But a substance left permanently in solution is not purified. It is merely liquid. The point of dissolving was to make something.
Those who only coagulate
The opposite error is to fix things too soon. Here a person seizes on the first structure that offers itself and makes it permanent. They have an experience, and at once it becomes a doctrine. They adopt a practice, and within a month it is an identity, defended against all comers. The discomfort of not knowing is so great that any firm ground is welcome.
This is the fault of the convert and the dogmatist, and it produces rigid, brittle people who cannot learn anything further, because learning would mean going back into solution. The old books describe a work spoiled in this way as one in which the matter was sealed up before it was clean. The impurities are now part of the stone.
The rhythm
The art lies in the alternation, and in knowing which phase one is in. There is a time to question and a time to commit, a time to open a matter up and a time to say that it is settled for now and build on it. Neither is higher than the other. A breath is not improved by being all inhalation.
I find it helpful to ask the question directly. Am I in a dissolving time or a fixing time? If things are coming apart, my task is to let them, to keep the vessel sound, and not to grab at premature answers. If things are coming together, my task is to give them form: to decide, to make the routine, to write it down, to keep my word about it. Much unhappiness comes from doing the right operation in the wrong season.
The vessel and the fire
Two further conditions appear in every alchemical account, and both translate exactly.
The work is done in a sealed vessel. Dissolution is safe only when something holds. For a person in the midst of change, the vessel is the ordinary structure of life: regular sleep, work, a few steady relationships, a daily practice that continues whatever one feels about it. People who dismantle their beliefs and their circumstances at the same time have broken the flask, and the contents are lost.
And the fire must be gentle. The Emerald Tablet says the separation is to be made gently, with great skill. Almost every failure the old authors describe comes from too much heat: the wish to have the thing done. A slow fire, kept up for a long time, will do what no blaze can. I know of no harder instruction in the whole tradition, and none more often confirmed.
And again
The last thing the formula teaches is that it is not done once. Each coagulation becomes, in time, the fixed thing that must be dissolved. The understanding that freed you at thirty is the cage at forty five. This is not a counsel of despair. It is the shape of a living thing, which grows by outgrowing. The stone, the alchemists said, is made by repetition, and what is repeated is this: taking apart what has become too small, and putting it together again a little more truly.