Alchemistic ethics presupposes that there is an education, an ennobling of the will. The person that wills can learn to encompass infinitely much in his ego. [Cf. Furtmüller (Psychoanalyse und Ethik, p. 15): “The individual can ... make the commands of others his own.” He quotes Goethe (Die Geheimnisse):
From the law which binds all being
The man is freed who masters himself.
The poles of shrinking and extension are the following: The magician and the pathological introversionist contract the sphere of their interest upon the narrowest egoism. The mystic expands it immensely, in that he comprises the whole world in himself. The person egotistically entering into introversion can preserve his happiness only by a firm [pg 289] self-enclosure before the ever threatening destruction; the mystic is free. The mystic's fortune consists in the union of his will with the world will or as another formula expresses it, in the union with God. [On the freeing effect of the merging of one's own will into a stronger cf. my essays Jb. ps. F., III, pp. 637 ff., and IV, p. 629.] This fortune is therefore also imperishable (gold). The reader must always bear in mind that the mystic never works on anything but on the problem of mankind in general; only he does so in a form of intensive life, and it may indeed be the case that the powers which introversion furnish him, actually make possible a more dynamic activity and a greater result. For my part I am strongly inclined to believe it.
On the extension of personality, some passages from the Discourses on Divinity in the Bhagavad-Gita:
“Who sees himself in all being and all being in himself,
Whoever exercises himself in devotion and looks at all impartially,
Whoever sees me everywhere, and also sees everything in me,
From him I can never vanish nor he from me.” VI, 29f.
“Whoever discovers in all the modes of life the very exalted lord,