Right at the beginning you meet the "dragon," the chthonic spirit, the "devil" or, as the alchemists called it, the "blackness," the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering.... In~ the language of the alchemists, matter suffers until the nigredo disappears, When the "dawn" (aurora) will be announced by the "peacock's tail" (cauda pavonis), and a new-day will break, the leukosis or albedo. But in this state of "whiteness" one does not live in the true sense of the word, it is a sort of abstract, ideal state. In order to make it come alive it must have "blood," it must have what the alchemists call the rubedo, the "redness" of life. Only the total experience of being can transform this ideal state of the albedo into a fully human mode of existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious state of consciousness in which the last trace of blackness is dissolved
— Edward F. Edinger
The alchemists already knew what every spiritual program rediscovers and then forgets: the whiteness is not the end. Albedo — that luminous, relieved, abstract clarity after the darkness breaks — has the feel of arrival. The suffering is gone. The dawn has come. And precisely here the danger concentrates, because albedo is genuinely beautiful and genuinely insufficient. It is what a person sounds like after a breakthrough that has not yet been lived: clear, articulate, somewhat unreal. They have passed through the blackness and emerged clean, and the impulse is to stop there, to take the whiteness as the prize.
Edinger's point, following the alchemical grammar faithfully, is that the rubedo cannot be engineered or hurried — it comes when the total experience of being enters the picture, not as a technique but as what actually happens to a person who keeps living rather than resting in the achieved state. Blood is not a metaphor for intensity; it is the specific gravity of embodiment, of being returned to a body that bleeds and wants and ages. The soul that bypasses that return — that takes the whiteness as home — has exchanged one kind of unconsciousness for another, considerably more elegant kind. The nigredo at least announced itself honestly.
Edward F. Edinger·Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy·1985