MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Alchemy of the Name
So now, as I pass through this symbolical Gate of Purgatory, my basic animal passions and their unresolved problems break out with renewed violence from imprisonment at levels below the rational. 'The mystical transmutation by calling the Name', writes Titus Burckhardt, 'goes through the same phases as are determined by the alchemical work, for the soul initially becomes congealed on turning away from the outward world, then dissolves as a result of inner warmth, and finally, having become a changing volatile stream of impressions, becomes a motionless crystal filled with light.' I feel myself trapped in a claustrophobic furnace of hot humid air. I am enclosed and 'cooked', as though hermetically sealed in the athanor, or alchemical oven, so as to melt my mental attachments and refine my emotional crudities by fire. Their fixation by habit has resulted in an isolating split between thinking and feeling, so that the mind in its false stony detachment is reluctant to make any whole-hearted commitment to the Shinshu Faith but walls in my rebellious turmoil of emotions. The Sun of Life is felt only in its angry inimical aspect, persecuting the pilgrim with the burning heat of existential anguish.