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The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life |
List Price: $12.00
Your Price: $9.00 |
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Product Info |
Reviews |
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Rating: Summary: Penetrating Text and Commentary by Jung Review: A very interesting and meaningful book to say the least. And like Jung, gratitude must be given Richard Wilhelm for his insight in the East and translation of the text.
A manual written symbolically for the practice of meditation, where thoughts are reduced to the square inch between the eyes, the eye lids half closed, eyes centered near the tip of the nose, the heart rate next to nothing in quietude, controlled breath of a circular motion that becomes quiet. The "white light" so spoken in Buddhist terms and various states of consciousness are related. However, this is far more than a mere meditation manual, but symbols which convey non-intellectual ideas, that is, non-Western rationalism, and yet significant and advanced in both it's teaching and applications.
Ultimately for myself, it is Jung's commentary that my Western mind needed to interpret the text itself and the subsequent interpretations. I am moved in profundity on Jung's analysis that man's consciousness advances non-rationally, but psychically. Where the advancement cannot be spoken or written of in intellectual terms but rather can be done so in symbols. In this, Jung expounds on the idea that symbols convey advanced images that relate to the psyche and can never be proved intellectually or rationally. This is where images, as in Mandalas, come in. Images and symbols speak what words cannot. They are of a higher conscious level awareness, a psychical advancement. None of this is rationally or mathematically equated, none, nor can it be languistically conveyed. Humans can only point, using symbols and images, they can not expound, explain and reason on such.
Jung's acknowledges the law of opposites and how the Chinese contain a higher culture or mind than the West, one that can contain contradictions or opposites without one-sided fundamentalism. And this is no doubt far ahead of most Western thinking in terms of black and white thinking, or what Jung calls barbarism. This reminds me of Walt Whitman's self poem of containing all contradictions and Keats "negative capabilities" and Shakespeare's comments on having all thoughts together without becoming irritable over such, and that including the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, who spoke of the same.
In Jung's memorial words dedicated to Richard Wilhelm, he relates to his thoughts on Synchronistic principle, which confirm his validity on the practices of Chinese wisdom found in I-Ching and Astrology, both sciences based not on Newtonian, or causality principles but rather through a remarkable phenomena of the unconscious, psychic parallelisms based which cannot be related to each other causally. The Tao will never be created with words and concepts, a teaching that is absent from the history of philosophy since the time of the pre-socratic, Heraclitus, and only reappears as a faint echo in Lebinitz.
Rating: Summary: 100 days to the Spiritual Child... Review: If what you seek is a meditation method that will develop in you the basis for illumination [ the Spiritual Child as described in the book ], you will find that by following the methods prescribed therein, in 90 to 100 days you will have it. The book tells it like it is, if only you can read it without intellectual wrangling..... i succeeded in 90 days exactly following the intructions.
Rating: Summary: The "Big Secret" has been revealed! Review: The "Secret of the Golden Flower" is the best book i have ever read. I have read hundreds of nonfiction books searching for hidden knowledge - none of them (with an exception of Sri Swami Sivananda's Yogic Texts) speek so clearly and openly of the divine secret which has eluded mankind for so long. I cannot posibly put into words the extreme importance of the contents of this book. The ancient Taoist translations are priceless. Read it and then read it again. I have read the two Chinese texts, with Wilhelms excellent translations, over ten times - and haven't even glanced and Jung's commentary. For the spiritual aspirant contemplating the deep secrets of the alchemical sciences, ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Biblical texts - look no further - this book is worth it's weight in "gold."
Rating: Summary: The "Big Secret" has been revealed! Review: The "Secret of the Golden Flower" is the best book i have ever read. I have read hundreds of nonfiction books searching for hidden knowledge - none of them (with an exception of Sri Swami Sivananda's Yogic Texts) speek so clearly and openly of the divine secret which has eluded mankind for so long. I cannot posibly put into words the extreme importance of the contents of this book. The ancient Taoist translations are priceless. Read it and then read it again. I have read the two Chinese texts, with Wilhelms excellent translations, over ten times - and haven't even glanced and Jung's commentary. For the spiritual aspirant contemplating the deep secrets of the alchemical sciences, ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Biblical texts - look no further - this book is worth it's weight in "gold."
Rating: Summary: A DIFFICULT AND OBSCURE EASTERN BOOK Review: The English translation is of a German translation of sections of ancient Chinese texts that earlier existed as an oral tradition. The terminology of the book is let us say obscure to a Western reader and I found Jungs commentary difficult even though Jung explicitly treats the texts as psychological rather than metaphysical.
Jung says in an Appendix tribute to Wilhelm that Wilhelm made a greater impact on him than any other man. In his commentary Jung also says that one of the reasons he was so impressed by "The Secret" is that the symbolism is the same as that Jung encountered in his clinical practice ie both originate, he argues, in the structure of the collective unconscious.
The good news is that if you can struggle through the strange wording and references of the Chinese texts, there are real signs of wisdom throughout the texts. For example at one point in "The Secret" it is said that man creates his body through his thoughts. Again on several occasions it is clear that the text is assuming that man survives death, and that after death there are alternative possible scenarios including re-incarnation (many many times) and movement to non-physical realms.
"The Secret" talks about meditation techniques including control of breathing to achieve altered states. I did not find those sections persuasive, perhaps because they were too brief for my taste.
Rating: Summary: Not a page is wasted Review: This book is absolutely worth reading, from cover to cover, including all of the commentaries and introductions and what have you. The text itself is, of course, incredible, with a surprising clarity that is rare among aged religious and philosophical texts, especially those pertaining to meditative practice, and Richard Wilhelm's somewhat outdated translation doesn't inhibit it much. Carl Jung's commentary is equally worth reading, and could easily stand as a book of its own. It also thankfully puts this book at arm's length from watery New Age "spirituality." Get this book and don't skip anything.
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