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the practice

The circulation of the light

A practice card distilled from The Secret of the Golden Flower, with a mandala that shows what a hundred days of sitting does to the mind, in Jung's terms.

One technique in three layers: eyes, then mind, then breath. Everything else is either a fault to notice or a sign to trust.

1Setup

  • Quiet room; morning is best. Put entanglements aside before sitting, not in the midst of frivolous affairs.
  • Upright, cross-legged, comfortable. Lips closed, teeth lightly together, tongue to the roof of the mouth.
  • Body like dry wood, heart like cooled ashes: settled, not rigid.

2Eyes, the plumb-line

  • Lower the lids halfway so the tip of the nose sits at the edge of vision.
  • Too open and the gaze goes outward into distraction. Too closed and you drift into reverie.
  • It is only an alignment reference. Set it, then forget it: the mason works on the wall, not the plumb-line.

3Mind, fixation

  • Rest attention at the point between the eyes. Don't push; with the lids lowered the light streams in of itself.
  • Let that sense of light settle into the lower centre, the solar plexus. Stopping between the eyes is entering the hall but not the inner chamber.
  • Hold gently: purposelessness through purpose.

4Breath, the handle for the heart

  • Breathe through the nose so softly you cannot hear it. Audible means rough, and rough brings drowsiness.
  • Beginners: silently count breaths. Losing the count means the mind has run outside; bring it back.
  • Listen inward, as the hen hatches her eggs by always listening. Attend to breath as felt, not heard.
  • Once the rhythm holds on its own, drop the counting.

5When thoughts arise, contemplation

  • Don't sit rigid against them. Look: where is the thought, where did it begin, where does it fade? Don't follow past the point of origin.
  • Then return to fixation. Alternate the two.
  • Fixation without contemplation is circulation without light; contemplation without fixation is light without circulation.

6The two faults

  • Distraction, the mind wandering: noticing it is the remedy. Re-fix the eyes on the nose, close the mouth, return to the count.
  • Indolence, dull and sleepy: the serious one. Only breath overcomes it. If sleepy, stand and walk until clear, then sit again.
  • If thoughts swarm and cannot be stopped, end the sit, walk, resume only when settled.

7Don't

  • Force, strain, or demand too much of the heart.
  • Chase lights, colours, figures, gods, or visions: the cave of fantasy.
  • Sink into cold deadness, only dry wood and dead ashes with no bright spring on the great earth.
  • Seek success. Success will then come of itself.

8Dose

  • Daily, without interruption. Continuity outranks length: the beginning and the end of the practice must be one.
  • Fifteen minutes is already meaningful. One incense stick, thirty to forty-five minutes, in the morning is ideal.
  • A hundred days of consistent work before the light is genuine.

9Signs you're on track

  • A warm stirring below the navel where breath and energy meet.
  • Sustained quiet joy, as if intoxicated or freshly bathed.
  • Outer sounds like echoes in a distant valley, clear but far.
  • Brightness with the lids lowered; the body hard to locate; a feeling of being drawn upward.
  • Test them like water: one can tell for oneself whether it is warm or cold.

10Off the cushion

  • Meet affairs by direct reflex, without any admixture of a thought of others or of oneself. The circulation continues by its own law.
  • Beginners protect a quiet block from daily life. Once confirmations appear, ordinary life is no hindrance.
Jung's reading show

The core claim

The text describes a psychic process, not a metaphysics. Jung read it after arriving at the same phenomena in patients. The vocabulary maps: the light is consciousness; hsing and ming are consciousness and life, logos and eros; the backward-flowing method is reunion with the unconscious laws of being.

Wu wei

The people who outgrew their conflicts did nothing but let things happen. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating. Fixation holds the vessel; contemplation watches what arises without following it out. Criticism may come afterwards, never during.

The circulation is a circumambulatio

The Golden Flower is a mandala. Circulation means both marking off a sacred precinct and fixation within it. All sides of the personality rotate, light and dark. The seed-pearl after a hundred days is the growth of a new centre.

Why the warnings matter

Activated contents appear first as autonomous figures. Taken literally, they possess. The cave of fantasy is inflation; dry wood and dead ashes is the opposite, a cold consciousness cut off from life. A strong undissolved consciousness is the conditio sine qua non.

The fruit: detachment of consciousness

The diamond body is an attitude out of reach of intense emotional involvement. The centre of gravity shifts from the ego to a point between conscious and unconscious, the self. One then suffers only in the lower stories while the upper stories stay free.

Source: Richard Wilhelm's translation of the Lü-tsu text with C. G. Jung's commentary. Quotations follow the English edition.