ABSTRACT
Speaking of those who do not know where the true springs of secret power lie, an ancient adept says, 'Worldly people lose their roots and cling to the treetops'. The spirit of the East has grown out of the yellow earth, and our spirit can, and should, grow only out of our own earth. In the Pauline Christ symbol the supreme religious experiences of West and East confront one another: Christ the sorrow-laden hero, and the Golden Flower that blooms in the purple hall of the city of jade. The breath-body is not something 'spiritual'. It is characteristic of Western man that he has split apart the physical and the spiritual for epistemological purposes. But these opposites exist together in the psyche and psychology must recognize this fact. In the states which the instructions seek to induce the physical body plays an increasingly unimportant part anyway, since it is replaced by the breath-body.
