The alchemists called their undertaking the magnum opus, the Great Work. On the surface it was the making of the philosophers' stone. Beneath the surface, and sometimes quite openly, it was the perfecting of the worker. The phrase has since become the common name in the Western tradition for the whole enterprise of spiritual development: the transformation of an ordinary human being into a complete one.
In brief
- The Great Work is the deliberate development of the whole person toward their highest capacity.
- It begins with self knowledge and proceeds through purification, illumination and union.
- It is carried out in daily life, not apart from it.
- Its results are measured in character and conduct, not in visions.
The aim
The Hermetic texts state the aim without embarrassment. The human being is twofold, mortal and immortal, and has forgotten the immortal half. The task is to remember it and to live from it. Let the one who has mind recognize that he is immortal, says the Poimandres. The Tree of Life pictures the same thing as the ascent from the sphere of the body to the solar center, and alchemy as the turning of lead into gold.
Later writers speak of a higher self or a higher genius: the deepest and truest part of a person, of which the everyday personality is a partial and often distorted expression. The first great goal of the work is conscious relationship with that center, so that it, and not habit or impulse, directs the life. Everything in the early training is preparation for this.
Put in plainer language, the aim is integrity in the literal sense: to become one thing instead of a crowd of competing wants, and to bring that one thing into accord with what is highest in oneself.
The first step: self knowledge
The words know thyself were carved at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the whole tradition treats them as the first commandment. It is not a comfortable instruction. To know oneself is to find out how one actually behaves, as distinct from how one imagines one behaves: how long attention really lasts, how often one's word is really kept, what one really wants.
This is why the practical training begins with observation and record. The diary, the evening review and the elemental inventory are instruments of self knowledge. Until there is an accurate picture of the starting point, effort is wasted on imaginary faults while the real ones go on undisturbed.
The three phases
Writers in many traditions have divided the path into three phases, and the Western esoteric tradition adopted the scheme early. It corresponds closely to the color stages of alchemy.
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Purification / the black and the white
Clearing the ground
The first and longest phase. Attention is trained, the body is brought to stillness, habits are examined, and the disowned parts of the self are faced. The elements of the character are balanced. Much of this is undramatic and some of it is painful. The alchemists placed their blackest stage at the beginning for good reason.
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Illumination / the yellow dawn
Seeing
As the mind becomes quiet and honest, understanding begins to arrive that is not the product of reasoning. Symbols open. The tradition's teachings cease to be propositions and become descriptions of what is seen. There is a growing sense of meaning and direction, and of being guided from within.
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Union / the red
Becoming one
The division between the higher and the everyday self is healed, and what was glimpsed in the second phase becomes the stable basis of life. The tradition speaks of this in images of marriage. It insists that the result is not withdrawal from the world but return to it. The power must be turned into earth.
The phases are not passed through once and left behind. They recur at each new level, like the turns of a spiral stair, and most people will be at work on purification for as long as they live.
Why it is called work
The old writers chose the word with care. The transformation they describe is not an event that happens to a person but a labor that a person performs, daily, with materials that resist. It requires a fire kept at an even heat for a long time. They are equally clear that effort is not the whole story. At certain points something is given that could not have been made, and they call it grace, or the gift of God. The worker's part is to prepare the vessel and keep the fire.
Three qualities are named again and again as necessary: patience, since nothing can be forced; humility, since progress brings the temptation to self importance; and perseverance, since everyone meets long stretches in which nothing appears to be happening.
The place of ordinary life
It is a common mistake to think of the Great Work as something done in a special room at special times, with daily life as an interruption. The tradition teaches the opposite. The alchemists said that their first matter is found everywhere, is trodden underfoot and thought worthless. The material of the work is one's own life as it stands: this job, these relationships, this temper, this body.
Formal practice is the laboratory where capacities are developed. The test of them is the rest of the day. A person who meditates each morning and is no more truthful, patient or reliable by evening has not yet begun.
True and false signs of progress
Because the work deals with inner experience it is easy to be mistaken about how it is going. The tradition offers some markers.
| Signs worth trusting | Signs to distrust |
|---|---|
| You keep your word more reliably, to yourself and to others | A sense of being more advanced than other people |
| You notice your reactions sooner and are less driven by them | Striking experiences that leave conduct unchanged |
| You can stay with discomfort and boredom without fleeing | Contempt for ordinary life and ordinary duties |
| You see your own faults more clearly and judge others less | Certainty, and impatience with questions |
| Those who live with you find you easier to live with | A need to tell everyone about your practice |
The last of the trustworthy signs is the most reliable of all, and the tradition's fourth power, to keep silent, is the standing remedy for the last of the false ones.
Practice
A statement of aim
- Set aside half an hour. In your diary, answer in writing: what do I actually want from this work?
- Read the answer. Ask what lies behind it, and write that. Repeat until you reach something you cannot go behind.
- Reduce the result to a single sentence that you would not be embarrassed to read in ten years.
- Copy the sentence onto the first page of the diary. Read it on the first day of each month, and revise it when it no longer tells the truth.