Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower

Abstract

In the Pauline Christ symbol the supreme religious experiences of West and East confront one another: Christ the sorrowladen hero, and the Golden Flower that blooms in the purple hall of the city of jade. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. The reaction that is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, a widening of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of a tyrannical intellect. The collective unconscious is simply the psychic expression of the identity of brain structure irrespective of all racial differences. The European invasion of the East was an act of violence on a grand scale, and it has left people with the duty of understanding the mind of the East. The unconscious is then projected into the object, and the object is introjected into the subject, becoming part of his psychology.