unimpeded space containing everything without being filled. Thus it opens
up an avenue to an endless source of intuition, creativity, and inspiration.
Once this power of mental awakening has been developed, it can be
renewed and deepened without limit.
The essential practice of the golden flower requires no apparatus, no
philosophical or religious dogma, no special paraphernalia or ritual. It is
practiced in the course of daily life. It is near at hand, being in the mind
itself, yet it involves no imagery or thought. It is remote only in the sense
that it is a use of attention generally unfamiliar to the mind habituated to
imagination and thinking.
The Secret of the Golden Flower is remarkable for the sharpness of its
focus on a very direct method for self-realization accessible to ordinary lay
people. When it was written down in a crisis more than two hundred years
ago,
it was a concentrated revival of an ancient teaching; and it has been
periodically revived in crises since, due to the rapidity with which the
method can awaken awareness of hidden resources in the mind.
The Secret of the Golden Flower is the first book of its kind to have been
translated into a Western language. A German version by Richard Wilhelm
was first published in 1929, and an English translation of this German
rendition was published shortly thereafter. Both German and English
editions included an extensive commentary by the distinguished
