Experience and Authority
There is, in alchemy, a very pronounced tension between the need for and value of authority —whether embodied in texts or in the person of a guide— and the need for and value of first-hand experience and discernment. Either one without the other creates imbalance.
Count Michael Maier provides the balancing perspective:
If anyone will not acknowledge the force of reason, he must needs have recourse to authority.
The phrase ‘force of reason’, as Maier is using it, refers to the power of the rational soul to ‘remember’ (in the Platonic sense of anamnesis) true reality when exposed to it. The purpose of authority should be to awaken the ‘memory’ and ‘taste’ for the experience of reality in the soul of the disciple so that his/her practice is founded upon accurate theory, in order that theory may then be confirmed and further informed by accurate practice.
This, then, is another quality that a student must have: to be able to discern qualified authority, and be open to guidance from that authority, while not devolving responsibility for one’s own progress to that authority.
As it actually happens, the guide will often find the student. In fact, one with a mandate to teach will often (and entirely unknown to the student) already be in contact with that student. Observing, testing … assaying their gold. Then it is a matter of the student having basic trust, not necessarily well-refined discernment.
Post-modern society places too much emphasis on ‘conscious’ discriminative ability. Often times what is more important are those ‘feelings’ and ‘intuitions’ we often discount. However, such feeling and intuitions should not be confused with fantasy. And here again sincerity leads the way.
What you say regarding “not devolving responsibility for one’s own progress to that authority” is very important. One should never lose ones autonomy, or personal responsibility, through improper reliance upon ‘authority’.