If one practises the circulation of the light, one must forget both body and heart. The heart must die, the spirit live. When the spirit lives, the breath will begin to circulate in a wonderful way.

Children, take heed! If for a day you do not practise meditation, this light streams out, who knows whither? If you only meditate for a quarter of an hour, by it you can do away with the ten thousand aeons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness. This marvellous magic cannot be fathomed.

Meditation, Stage 1: Gathering the light

But when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine. Everything depends on there being no interruption. The beginning and the end of the practice must be one. In between there are cooler and warmer moments, that goes without saying. But the goal must be to reach the vastness of heaven and the depths of the sea, so that all methods seem quite easy and taken for granted. Only then have we mastered it.
 All holy men have bequeathed this to one another: nothing is possible without contemplation (fan-chao, reflection). When Confucius says: ‘Perceiving brings one to the goal’; or when the Buddha calls it: ‘The vision of the heart’; or Lao-tse says: ‘Inner vision’, it is all the same.
 The Secret of the Golden Flower