The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life

The Treasured Guide to Spiritual Growth and Enlightenment

The Secret of the Golden Flower is an ancient Chinese text, passed on for centuries, in which Taoist mystics reveal the path to true enlightenment. The first written version was believed to have originated with Lü Dongbin, a legendary scholar, poet, and spiritual master. This remarkable and important work, first published in the United States in 1931, is Cary F. Baynes's elegant English translation of sinologist Richard Wilhelm's 1929 German translation of the original Taoist texts. This edition includes insightful philosophical commentary by psychologist Carl Jung which helps explain the metaphysical aspects of the text, providing valuable insights for westerners.

In the text, symbols for light represented awareness, which is normally directed outward toward externals. The method of redirecting one's consciousness inward towards the self through a straightforward form of silent meditation and breathing was known as "turning the light around." Through this process of channeling energy beyond the limits of the discriminating intellect, one's psyche-indeed, one's fundamental being-can gradually open and blossom into an awakening of the mind and spirit. The result can be metaphorically pictured as a bright "golden flower" mandala, representing the rewarding end goal of a personal alchemy of inner transformation. The simple method described has been called "Zen with details."

Like a practical workbook for achieving enlightenment, this clearly written meditation manual explores foundational techniques to experience elevated states of consciousness. It is nothing less than a spiritual seeker's road map to discovering the secret to peace of mind.

This book is also available from Churchill & Dunn in paperback (ISBN 1648374085 ).

Richard Wilhelm, C.G. Jung, and Cary F. Baynes, whose collective scholarship made possible the Bollingen edition of the I Ching, also contributed to this presentation of another ancient Taoist text. "The Secret of the Golden Flower," the treatise that forms the central part of this book, was discovered by Professor Wilhelm, who recognized it as essentially a practical guide to the integration of personality. His German translation, published in the autumn of 1929 shortly before his death, was immediately hailed by Jung as a link between the insights of the East and his own psychological research, a relationship explored by the great analytical psychologist in a brilliant and significant commentary.

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded the field of analytical psychology. He developed his theories under the tutelage of Eugen Bleuler at Burgholz Hospital, and later worked with Sigmund Freud. His later break with Freud established his system of analysis as different from Freud's psychoanalysis. His development of the concepts of synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, collective unconsciousness, extraversion and introversion were milestones in the understanding of the human psyche.