Signs of Verification of Turning Around the Light
This thread is about an almost always forgotten chapter in the famous book "The Secret of The Golden Flower": chapter 6, titled Signs of Verification of Turning Around the Light.
After talking about the philosophy, the method and the common errors, the author(s) dedicate an entire chapter to the description of specific spiritual events that accompanies the practice and -most importantly- confirm the effectiveness of what has been done.
Why is that important?
In my opinion, there are essentially two reasons that gives to this chapter a tremendous value.
The first one is that the spiritual experience tends by nature to be subjective and it varies from an individual to another in most schools of practice, therefore when certain milestones are given in a method, it means that they are (or they tend to be) objective measure of spiritual progress to a large extent.
The second reason is that, when it comes to the actual method of "turning the light around", this specific book is interpreted in a variety of ways by different people who often rely on it to complement or explain a method that they already know from different sources. About this matter, it is sufficient to mention the Dan-Tien cultivation approach, the Ch'an sitting approach, the third eye meditation approach and the MCO approach which complement or explain the practice (even in the texts itself, given that there are at least 3 different versions of it available in translation, and maybe more in original language).
Nonetheless, this chapter Signs of Verification of Turning Around the Light is generally consistent in different versions and it is -at this point- evident that it could be effectively used to determine the true original method of Turning the Light around among the various interpretations given to the text.
I will refer, copy and paste from this beautiful website The Secret of The Golden Flower to extract the relevant parts present in all of the available versions of the text and I will ignore the parts which are embedded with philosophies and that are open to interpretations.
Now, can you talk a little bit about your experiences with those things while practicing the Golden Flower Method? And how do you actually cultivate the golden flower?
Taking the turning far towards its logical conclusions, it has taught me that it is a method of resolving energy-remainder-loops. When the entirety of the neural systems are ostensibly operating in a full Yin mode, there is no sensate experience related to the body whatsoever. After I was able to stabilize the light....able to reabsorb any potential that might manifest itself in a yang state...then there was no sensate input to even consider. "Sight" was paradoxically 360 degree view of dimensionless space - that one is a bit difficult to describe, as if there was simply no direction to be observed - all directions and no direction, at the same time. A sort of infinite-consciousness-space where no time or space existed as part of what was being observed. I found it curious that I remembered clearly, yet "there was no yang from the hippocampus to form the memory."
But I never finished Cleary's book, any of the times I bought it, each time I found someone who needed it more than I did. I just read enough to grok turning the light around, and holstered it into my meditative batman-belt.
