who lives in the midst of the things of the world yet is free from bondage to
them. This contrasts with the limitation of awareness represented by the
lower soul, mixed up in the objects of its perception.
Since Jung's "collective unconscious" still has form, from the point of
view of the golden flower it must therefore be classified with the
lower soul and ordinary mind; his hope was to make this conscious in
order to transcend it, but Jung himself appears to have become so
involved in the discovery and discussion of the unconscious that he
became attached to it and as a consequence was never able to
experience the higher soul and open the golden flower, His
commentary on Wilhelm's translation bears witness to this, as do his
other writings on Eastern mysticism.
19, Here life means spirit, and death means matter. Feeding on blood is
emblematic of attachment to the body as self, carried through the very
portals of physical death. According to Chan Buddhist psychology, what are
mythologically
portrayed as experiences of hell after death are in fact manifestations of
this attachment wrenching the heart as one is dying. When this text
speaks of a "coming together of kind," it means that whatever attention
is fixated on material things inevitably meets the fate of all material
things, which is to perish and decay.
20. This final passage again drives home the point that the
