Like many Western interpreters of his time, Jung had the idea that yoga
involves or produces abnormal psychic states and is aimed at total
detachment from the external world, or at transcendental unity without
differentiation.
In the real Golden Flower teaching there is no suggestion of obliterating
the conscious mind (which in this context means the mind that thinks,
imagines, dreams, and emotes, including what Jung called the
unconscious).
The faculties of thinking, imagining, dreaming, and emotion are not
destroyed in the earthly immortal of Taoism; rather they are brought
under the dominion of their source of power and made into channels of
its expression. The taming of unruly consciousness is far from the
introverted, quietistic cult that Wilhelm, Jung, and others of their time
imagined from their fragmentary observations of Eastern lore.
7. Wilhelm translates "the water of vitality" as "seed-water" and equates it
with Eros; he translates "the fire of spirit" as "spirit-fire" and equates it
with Logos; and he translates "the earth of attention" as "thought-earth"
and equates it with intuition. Of these three, Eros is closest to certain
Taoist meanings of vitality, in the sense of creative energy and erotic
feeling. In this context, however, Eros is inappropriate in that the
meaning of vitality here does not include erotic feeling. Even the
connection with creative energy is actually remote in this text, because
