Completing the Tao
February 10, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Soul Cluster
s37. “The unity of the two, life and consciousness, is the Tao, whose symbol would be the central white light, also mentioned in the Bardol Thodol.”
s28. “If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand, and there hidden, let thy true self always dwell.”
I believe Carl Jung does quite a good job in this chapter of summarizing the process of completing the Tao. The actual task consists of alchemically reuniting and harmonizing what is severely repressed in individual human life through an esoteric process of heating both consciousness and life. The process itself is quite complex because it requires nothing less than accessing elements of our being which are completely hidden from ourselves.
The character of this hunt isn’t like looking for Easter eggs, as anyone who’s been involved in it will vouch. Although at times it may seem like an Easter egg hunt at other times its quite brutal because it involves seeing things about ourselves that we’re very embarrassed and fearful of. These are miserable things which we’ve hidden so deep that we’ve completely forgotten about them in their original forms but which now plague us in unforeseen ways.
Why they plague us is due to the psychological mechanism of projection where attributes and qualities we can’t accept or harmonize in ourselves are unconsciously seen outside of us or invested in other people. Besides our own psychological masks we place masks on others or we look for others who are already using those particular masks. As a result, our inner conflicts are played out with others as outer conflicts which occur almost daily as endlessly repeated miscommunications and irrational reactions.
These hidden psychological forces drive us to act them out without our knowing why we’re acting as we are or why others act as they do. What is hidden seeks to express itself and come into consciousness but sensing disruption of our established identity and prerogatives we repress these forces both in ourselves and as they may appear in others.
The methods used for repression are many but it would be a sidetrack to go into them now since the current chapter isn’t concerned with them. What’s more important here is where these hidden forces are actually hidden. If we believe as we’re commonly taught that these forces exist only in our brain or only in our emotional memory then we would be very surprised to find out that they actually impact our physical bodies in a variety of places. But even more startling and hard to credit from an everyday view is that many of these hidden psychological forces also reside just outside the physical body encasing it in their proximity in a type of roughly circular enclosure.
s38. “The ‘enclosure,’ or circumambulation is expressed in our text by the idea of ‘circulation.’ The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means, on the one hand, the marking off of the sacred precinct and, on the other, fixation and concentration. The sun-wheel begins to turn; the sun is activated and begins its course.
Psychologically, this circulation would be the ‘movement in a circle around oneself,’ so that all sides of the personality become involved. ‘The poles of light and darkness are made to rotate,’ that is, there is an alternation of day and night.”
What is this inner solar system the Taoist alchemists are talking about? I’ll go into this next time.