“For Jean Gebser, all corporeal forms are ‘nothing but solidified, coagulated, thickened, materialised time’.
For Gebser, the ‘test’ or ‘task’ that faces us at this critical juncture is no less than the achievement of the Achronon: the liberation of human consciousness from time.
Alchemy and Art may be described, in the words of Baudelaire, as a process of ‘distilling the eternal from the transient’.
Henry Corbin defined the Mundus Imaginalis as a juncture between the eternal and the transient, the intelligible and the sensible: the intermonde or intermediary realm par excellence.
According to the overarching schematic of the alchemical perception, reality unfolds from a single essence that polarises itself into two natures: one that separates, and one that unites. The struggle and interplay of these two natures embody the twin processes active in the constitution of reality.
Reality, according to this ouroboric perception, consists of one nature acting upon itself, dividing itself, multiplying itself, and finally returning to itself.
Alchemy is not creating something ‘new’; rather, it is ultimately seeking to render the pristine ontology—the nondual ground of being—present to living perception.
It is a purification of temporal accretions in order to let the boundless existentiating Urgrund shine forth in an unobstructed, uninhibited manner according to its innate, diaphanous nature.” - Aaron Cheak.
