The Seba library treats Spiritual Embryo in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Liu I-ming, Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, Wilhelm, Richard).
spiritual embryo, ever correct and undivided, using the natural true fire to melt away the residual mundanity of acquired conditioning, such a one is called a true human without taint
This passage defines the spiritual embryo as the properly incubated product of inner alchemical work, maintained through correctness and the natural fire that dissolves conditioned accretions.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
if one knows how to fill the belly and also empty the mind, practices nondoing and incubates the spiritual embryo, ever correct and undivided, using the natural true fire
This passage presents the incubation of the spiritual embryo as a specific praxis combining non-doing, emptied mind, and the natural inner fire within the context of gathering and stabilizing the restored elixir.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
if now an embryo can grow in manure, and shed its shells, why should not the dwelling place of our heavenly heart also be able to create a body if we concentrate the spirit upon it?
Wilhelm’s text uses the natural embryo as an analogical argument for the possibility of the heavenly heart generating a subtle spiritual body through concentrated spiritual effort.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
having the form of a body, but in the subtle state, it is, so to say, the embryonic mold of the new body, the ‘acquired’ subtle body
Corbin identifies the first subtle organ in Iranian Sufi physiology as an embryonic mold — the latifa qalabiya — that constitutes the beginning of the spiritually acquired body.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
The energy which is withdrawn into the unconscious is needed to hatch the egg, the symbol of potential wholeness and new birth. This wholeness will be the Self
Vaughan-Lee treats the egg as a functional cognate to the spiritual embryo, requiring withdrawn libidinal energy for the hatching into conscious selfhood within a Sufi-Jungian framework.
, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992supporting
the egg which contains so much unexplained mystery, is naturally an appropriate archetypal image to express the preformed totality which contains everything, the details of which are not yet manifest
Von Franz reads the egg as an archetypal image of the self in its not-yet-realized state, structurally parallel to the spiritual embryo as latent totality awaiting incubation.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The subtlest secret of the Tao is human nature and life. There is no better way of cultivating human nature and life than to bring both back to unity.
The Hui Ming Ching frames the entire project of inner cultivation — including the formation of the spiritual embryo — as the unification of human nature and life force in a single undivided ground.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
It takes forty-nine days from conception for the first signs of the human pineal to appear. Forty-nine days is also when the fetus differentiates into male or female gender.
Strassman draws a speculative parallel between the biological emergence of the pineal gland in the human embryo and Buddhist accounts of soul rebirth, touching obliquely on the theme of spiritual gestation.
, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, 2001aside
To be cured, the victim of an illness must be brought to a second birth, and the archetypal model of birth is the cosmogony.
Eliade situates initiatory rebirth within cosmogonic symbolism, providing a comparative religious context in which the spiritual embryo motif — gestation toward a new self — finds its mythological analogue.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside