Then there is Albert Einstein and modern physics. Both talk about the atomic structure but the difference is tremendous: Democritus only talks, modern physics knows.
In the East also there has been talk about atomism. Kanad, one of the great thinkers of India, has talked about atomism – and in a very subtle, refined way – but it is all talk. In fact, because he talked so much about atoms – his whole philosophy is based on the hypothesis of atoms – that his name became Kanad. Kan means atom, Kanad means one who continuously talks about atoms. But still, it was philosophy. He had no real experimentation, it was not based on any scientific exploration – must have been a great thinker, almost three thousand years before Albert Einstein – but he stumbled, and I say stumbled, upon the truth of atomism. But it was an unproved hypothesis. There are many parallels like that.
The same is the case with Carl Gustav Jung and the process we are talking about: the process given by The Secret of the Golden Flower.
The book of The Secret of the Golden Flower is an alchemical treatise – it knows – and if you follow the method you will come to know. It is absolutely certain. And when I am saying this, I am saying because I know – because I have gone through the process. Yes, the golden flower blooms in you: you come to a point when the many disappear, the multitude disappears, the fragments of the mind disappear and you are left all alone. That is the meaning of the word alone: all alone, all one.
If you think about it, the thinking is bound to take you to a certain line. If you think about it, then you will ask how to come to the one, how to make these fragments of the mind join together, how to glue them together. But that will not be real unity. Glued or unglued, they remain separate. A crowd can be transformed into an army: that means now it is glued together, it is no more a mob. But the many are still many, maybe in a certain discipline, as if there is a pile of flowers and you make a garland out of those flowers: a thread runs through all the flowers and gives them a certain kind of unity.
That’s what Jung was trying to do. How to bring these fragments together, how to glue them together, that is his whole process of individuation.
The real experience of individuation is totally different: you don’t glue these fragments, you simply let them disappear, you drop them. And then, when all the fragments of the mind have disappeared – receded farther and farther away from you – suddenly you find the one. In the absence of the mind it is found – not by joining the mind together in a certain discipline, not by putting mind together into a certain kind of union. Union is not unity. Union is only an imposed order on a chaos.