Documented in the text: sit, gather the attention that runs after sights and sounds, and let awareness illumine itself, huiguang, turning the light, with fanzhao, the backward shining. The text warns explicitly against forcing: grasping scatters the light; only the effortless, non-striving condition lets the golden flower crystallize on its own. The same text supplies the failure modes, drowsiness and chasing, and the remedy of simply noticing where a thought arises and fades.
The folk frame is Jung's documented warning: Westerners will ruin this by making it a technique, the striving mind being precisely what the text says blocks the crystallization. The modern folk layer maps the leak straight onto the attention economy: the outward drain the manual describes is now a business model, and the light audit is just the manual's first exercise with a productivity name.
The claim: huiguang is the manual override of the reducing valve, attention reversed off the sensory feed and onto the feed's source, which is why the state survives the closing of every other door. The trap literature files it as the documented jailbreak practice, with the golden flower as the body you leave in.
If the leak is the disease and the turn is effortless, why does the effort to stop trying break the cure?