…when the work is so far advanced that secret confirmations are experienced, it does not matter if, at the same time, one’s ordinary affairs are put in order, so that one can fulfil one’s karma. This means the living manner of the circulation of the light. Long ago, the True Man of the Purple Polar Light (Tzu-yang chen-jen) 1)↓ said a word: ‘If one cultivates one’s action while mingling with the world and is still in harmony with the light, then the round is round and the angular has angles; then he lives among men, mysterious yet visible, different and yet the same, and none can compass it; then no one notices our secret actions‘ The living manner of the circulation of the light has just this meaning: to live mingling with the world and yet in harmony with the light.
The Secret of the Golden Flower
Meditation, Stage 4: The centre in the midst of the conditions.
When one is so far advanced that every shadow and every echo has disappeared, so that one is entirely quiet and firm, this is refuge within the cave of energy, where all that is miraculous returns to its roots. One does not alter the place, but the place divides itself. This is incorporeal space where a thousand and ten thousand places are one place. One does not alter the time, but the time divides itself. This is immeasurable time when all the aeons are like a moment.
The Secret of the Golden Flower
| 1. | ↑ | There are several Taoist adepts bearing this name. The one referred to here is probably Chang Po-tuan, who lived in the eleventh century A.D. [H. W.] |
One of the illustrations accompanying the book shows a sage sunk in contemplation, his head surrounded by tongues of fire, out of which five human figures emerge; these five split up again into twenty-five smaller figures. This would be a schizophrenic process if it were to become a permanent state. Therefore the instructions, as though warning the adept, say: ‘The shapes formed by the spirit-fire are only empty colours and forms. The light of human nature (hsing) shines back on the primordial, the true.’
[…] The Chinese concept points a way towards lessening the disintegrating effect of the unconscious; it describes the ‘thought-figures’ or ‘separate thoughts’ as ‘empty colours and shapes’, and thus depotentiates them as much as possible. This idea runs through the whole of Buddhism (especially the Mahayana form), and, in the instructions to the dead in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is even pushed to the point of explaining favourable as well as unfavourable gods as illusions still to be overcome. […]
The instructions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in particular enable us to see how greatly the conscious is threatened with disintegration through these figures. Again and again, the dead are instructed not to take these shapes for truth, and not to confuse their murky appearance with the pure white light of Dharmakaya (‘the divine body of truth’). The meaning is that they are not to project the one light of highest consciousness into concretized figures, and in such a way dissolve it into a plurality of autonomous fragmentary systems. If there were no danger of this, and if these systems did not represent menacingly autonomous and divergent tendencies, such urgent instructions would not be necessary. If we consider the simpler, polytheis-tically oriented attitude of the Eastern mind, these instructions would almost be the equivalent of warnings to a Christian not to let himself be blinded by the illusion of a personal God, not to mention a Trinity and innumerable angels and saints.
C. G. Jung form Commentary to “The Secret of the Golden Flower”