The Secret of the Golden Flower is a book on Chinese meditation and alchemy translated by Richard Wilhelm and commented on by Carl Jung, which refers to a metaphor in which each of us is obliged to awaken, to open our consciousness to light, a primordial element. opening, symbolized by the golden flower, a center of power in which everything circulates and transcends.
To speak of this book is to refer to one of the most important texts on the Taoist religion, but also to one of the most controversial. The book The Secret of the Golden Flower is one of the “Westernized” of one of Asia’s most important spiritual legacies. As with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, many details have been simplified in a Chinese textbook on yoga that the Western world could fully understand.
- However.
- It’s much more than that.
- It is known that the first mention of this text dates back to the 7th century.
- On wooden boards.
- Was an ancient Chinese treatise on esoterianism that was transmitted orally.
- Its principles.
- Codes and wisdom were compiled by a member of the so-called Religion of Light.
- Whose leader was Lu Yan.
- It is believed that all of these methods described refer to ideas arising in Persia and rooted in the Egyptian hermetic tradition.
As we see, this is a book of great importance, however, the complexity of its religion is immense. He speaks of the alchemical process by which we would illuminate the abode of spiritual consciousness, for this we must turn our attention to a sacred inner space, to the golden flower that is both our origin and our goal. Jung, although they left some concepts behind, managed to offer us a job in which we can start with these ideas, this philosophy.
“The golden flower is the light and the light of heaven is the Tao. There is the “germumle vesicle”, in which essence and life are still a unit. Does the birth of the alchemical process occur when darkness gives way to light?. -The secret of the golden flower-
Carl Jung recounts in his memoirs that he has always been interested in Eastern philosophy. It was around 1920 that he began experimenting with the I Ching, delving into the ancestral wisdom, figurative language and Oriental traditions that so captivated him. At this time he met Richard Wilhelm, an eminent German sinologist, theologian and missionary, specializing mainly in the translation of works from Chinese into German.
The idea of translating the book arose from there, after a first encounter in the?School of Wisdom? And, later, at the psychology club. In 1923, the work was released with Jung’s prologue and commentary. In 1931, Carl Baynes translated into English. It didn’t take long for the book to go around the world and become a kind of bedside book for many people. But does the secret of the golden flower really only speak of yoga and meditation?No way.
The book’s original title was something like “Instructions for Developing the Golden Flower. “To understand the purpose of this book, we must first know what the golden flower is.
It is quite possible that, from our Western point of view, all these principles set out in The Secret of the Golden Flower may seem distant and even strange, yet let us move on to what caught carl Jung’s attention, something that, as a psychiatrist and pioneer of analytical psychology, captivated him for much of his life. The golden flower forces us to set aside our minds occupied and conditioned by society to achieve a higher, free, creative and even heavenly spirit.
The light always filters through our wormholes, our consciousness envelops us in everything that we desire, dream or surround us, we must concentrate our mind within to allow the golden flower to germinate and consciousness to awaken.
At this point, many of our readers will have asked a more than obvious question: What kind of alchemy/meditation do I need to perform to achieve this light described in The Secret of the Golden Flower?The answer is something that may apparently be simple, but requires a lot of dedication, practice, and willpower: we must learn to calm the mind to open our hearts.
The secret of the golden flower lies in regular meditation, at some point, when this meticulous work reveals one by one all the layers that our mind has trapped and conditioned, we will visualize a mandala, a figure containing this glowing chemical symbol that completely frees us: the golden flower.