I have a Taoist I Ching. It will often talk about spiritual alchemy in the commentaries of the hexagrams. Truth be told, I skipped the introduction of this I Ching, so when I get home today I will dig it out of my book box and read for myself.
I was wondering if anyone here knows a thing or two about spiritual alchemy?
The alchemists were the pioneers of modern science. Many of these were doctors and priests. Being pioneers, they did not have modern science to turn to, for their education. They had to invent and define these things from scratch. In such a situation; unknowns, the unconscious mind becomes active and projected into their science experiments. Much of their experimental techniques and tools are still used today; extraction and distillation.
Without any of the modern analytical tools that allow us to see tiny things, they would theorize how chemical materials combined to form new substances, using mythological projections from their unconscious mind. Jung would show how these were based on archetypes of DNA based firmware common to all humans. Essentially they were reverse mapping the unconscious mind, and using that to form a system for chemical explanations. They were mystical philosophers as much as chemists.
I remember when I was studying collective human symbolism through the collective works of Carl Jung. I was quite interested in learning the ways of the alchemists. I was also a Chemical Engineer at that time who was given an emergency project to extract mercury from water to a standard that did not yet exist. I had to invent new best available technology; BAT. There was nothing in the literature or off the shelf to do this. I decided to try an alchemist approach, since they knew lots about mercury but in their own unique mystical way. I used their reasoning and invented the BAT.
Mercury was called quick silver. It was also associated with the mercurial dragon which had a symbolic connection to Satan. Mercury is a poison and has mind altering properties; mad hatters. This was infer by the alchemists through the Satan projections and symbolism.
In their system like attracts like; birds of a feather will flock together. Since mercury was symbolized by Satan, I knew I needed to use things attributed to hell, since these would be birds of a feather. I used sulfur and iron, with sulfur the smelly smoke of hell, and iron symbolic of the god of war.
The final process used an anion exchange resin that I saturated with sulfide ions. This became a modified cation exchange resin to which I then attached ferric ions with Iron +3. The mercury in solution will be attracted to this reactive hellish surface; war and hell fire, exchanging itself with the reactive ferric iron, to form mercury sulfide, which is now fixed; trapped, to the resin and very insoluble. I invented it in two weeks and treated 1 million gallons of water below the standard required.
I even published how I invented this, using alchemy reasoning, in the science literature. This was greeted with mixed reviews but nobody could doubt the effectiveness of the final product. After that I was called the mercury man.
It appears the structuring of the unconscious mind reflect the physical reality that we live in and projections can be useful for understanding what is both inside and outside. I Ching is often about the synchronicity; meaningful coincidences, between the two.
