By Michael Winn
Introductory Talks 2001, Glastonbury, England
Seven Dao Alchemy Immortality Formulas
In my assumed human persona as Michael Winn, for more than twenty years I have tried to figure out what the elusive inner alchemist-Daoists from ancient times were really doing. In 1980, I was already rather firmly on a path doing kundalini, and other forms of tantric and kriya yoga. I’ve always been eclectic and have never really trusted any one teacher or tradition to know it all, and I thought I had better keep checking out people who I was attracted to, to see what else was inside these mysteries. The point was not to become a cosmic know-it-all, but to deepen my spiritual experience.
I originally started doing Daoist alchemical practices thinking I will just test them out. Testing a new car out for a spin, to make sure it went smoothly or something. What I found out was that they began to grow on me, and my other practices began to drop away. Why? These practices embodied what I was most looking for. They qre not really about transcendence, but more about “descendence”, descending the spirit into matter, into body. Growing the spirit into the body, awaken it within the body. Find out how to allow spirit to fully live right here. How to strengthen the body, the mind, and the spirit simultaneously, yet not sacrifice one for the other.
It has been a long journey, and along the way I took some pauses, and checked out some other things as well. Various forms of Fire & Water alchemy taught in western traditions. But I kept returning to the Daoist path of Water & Fire alchemy – note the sequence is reversed between east and west – because I feel that at this time in planetary history, it is what is most needed, and most effective.
I think all the paths are wonderful, and they all have something very precious to offer. Daoist alchemy has something that is very rare and difficult to find. It has taken me quite a while to understand it, because it is very deep and profound. What it is ultimately about is the spirit, or the consciousness trapped within matter, within the body. It’s about raising our awareness from the personal self and connecting to the universal process. At the same time, not leaving the personal, and not abandoning it, but in fact gathering some universal essence within ourselves, and finding that, using that to guide the process of living both in the physical plane and in the continuum of other planes that most people identify with death.
This path is not for everybody. It requires more discipline and longer training than some other paths that I’ve investigated. It is requires that you reverse the flow of chi that your personality wants, which is to flow out through the senses into the physical plane. We begin to reverse that flow with fusion practice, but the reversal in Kan & Li requires far more inner will. It is not enough to merely look inside, to turn the senses inward. We must now will ourselves into a deeper dimension, shift from the post-natal into the pre-natal, and then function from that level.
The other reason why inner alchemy is so difficult is that is involves extensive development of the physical body, and the spiritual nature. It is very easy in some ways to tune in to spirit, and allow yourself to simply dissolve into that. The problem is when you come back, and find out what you are living in, and then realize that there is a split between this body you are living in, and your idea of that perfect spiritual realm. There shouldn’t be any split. Dissolving that body-soul or matter-spirit split and growing the integration of the two into something marvelous yet functional is my idea of spiritual development.
The title of this retreat is taken from one of seven Daoist alchemical formulas for achieving immortality. These formulas have a very specific method of development, and take you through different stages of consciousness. They start off with the energy patterns within the body, and then gradually take you into other dimensions within this body, and then from there to inner dimensions of planet, cosmos, sun, moon and stars, constellations, and into the universal body of nature.
The Daoists developed a language that allows this to be talked about and discussed, which I find quite useful. Even though at the same time the alchemical language that you are learning here is silent: learning how to open up energetic pathways, learning how to communicate with different aspects and levels of your own consciousness.
One of the things that is so powerful about this work is what we can call a Daoist depth psychology that is buried inside it, which is very different than western religious and psychological ideas. This Daoist depth psychology involves getting to know and recognize that there is not a single human soul, and the human being is in fact a collective. That collective reflects the fact that we are in a microcosm; we embody all the different forces and patterns of the universe.
The universe is a collective, the same way society is a collective of many individuals, the planet is a collective of species, solar system is a collective of planets, the galaxy is a collective of many stars. An individual human being is also a collective, and this is why we are so confused. It is confusing to be a collective, especially when all those parts of the collective don’t agree with one another.
The ingenuity, the spiritual depth of the ancient Daoists was to understand that there is a way that this collective could be harmonized and brought to peace within ourself individually. The alchemical wisdom is to know that by resonance that personal inner peace would begin to extend out to the family, to the society, to the planet, to the cosmos. Many people try and skip that step, because that is the most difficult step, finding peace within your self.
They work very hard for peace outside, they project perfect peace into another dimension, a spiritual dimension that they don’t live in fully. At the end of the day they are still left with this conflict within themselves. It is a little bit like deciding that if you are going to build a house, are you going to build it from the roof down, or from the floor up? Daoists start from the floor, and cultivate the physical body first as the foundation and later the vessel for cultivating spirit. Some other paths worship sky gods and tend to build their spiritual dwelling from the top down.
SEVEN ALCHEMICAL FORMULAS OF HERMIT ONE CLOUD
These seven formulas are about how to build the house from the floor up. The first formula is about learning the rudiments of managing your energy body. This involves the microcosmic orbit, learning the Yin-Yang basic polarities in your body, the spine and the front channel. It involves the healing sounds, how to connect to the different organs and their intelligences. First formula also involves the fusion of the five elements, and how to dissolve emotional patterns of reactivity that imprison people. Also opening up the eight extraordinary channels, or macro-cosmic orbit. We will go much deeper into the five shen this week, and take them to their next level of depth as a trinity relationship.
The microcosmic orbit is the first two channels, the spinal channel and the front channel. The other six channels: the thrusting channels, in the core of the body, the belt channels spiraling around the body, and the positive and negative arm and leg channels. These allow us to extend our spiritual being out into the world, both to project ourselves, through the arms and legs, and to draw in. The legs are drawing in energy from the Earth, the arms from society, the crown of our head from heaven.
This matrix of these eight deep channels, and the rhythm of the five elements or five intelligences that govern their cycle would allow us to begin to perform a different level of alchemy. The first formula is about learning to manage your energy field, how it is connected to your body, and getting to a certain level of comfort with the fact that there is continuity between your physical body and your energy field. We are also open and smiling to higher spiritual levels, to our spirit body.
TRUE INNER ALCHEMY: ENLIGHTENMENT VS. IMMORTALITY
The second formula is what we are studying this week, the lesser enlightenment of water and fire. So you have to ask the question, what is this about lesser enlightenment? The Daoists draw a distinction between enlightenment and immortality. In these seven formulas, there are three levels of water & fire enlightenment – lesser, greater, and greatest. Those three kinds of enlightenment are just prerequisites laying the ground work before you can begin to contemplate achieving what they call heavenly levels of immortality. The last three formulas are about immortality – Star alchemy/sealing the shen, heaven & earth alchemy, and union of human with Dao/Tao.
What is the difference between immortality and enlightenment? Many paths teach enlightenment. Most of them start with trying to open the third eye, or the upper chakras, and become aware of the universal levels of spirit. It is possible to do that, actually fairly easy to open it. To keep it open is a little more difficult. Many of you may have had powerful experiences, some vision or expanded feeling, and then found the next morning when you woke up that it had gone away. Why? What is working against you invisibly? What is stopping you from staying in that space, or if you haven’t been in that space, what is stopping you from getting there?
It involves dealing with the rest of your being, the rest of our inner collective. The Daoist practices start with the so-called lower centers. They focus on building a very solid foundation in the lower cauldron, and actually having the experience of them being high spiritual centers from which you can function. Then you have a good foundation to connect to high levels of consciousness, and it becomes very easy to advance to higher levels.
The problem is when growing the upper levels first, they become like a sunflower, this huge flower that is a little top heavy, with a weak stem, maybe weak roots. The roots go down into our body, and down into our sexual energy, and if they are not connected, we don’t understand how they work, and we can continue to harbor aspects of your consciousness that will sabotage your spiritual development. So if you deal with them first, then they are not there to sabotage you later.
The other thing to understand about the difference between enlightenment and immortality, is where these practices lead. Immortality does not mean that you are going to live in your physical body forever; it just means that you achieve free will in your relationship to matter and body. Most human beings would not choose to live forever in the physical body, as it has limitations. But having the freedom to shift dimensions or states of consciousness is something that most people want consciously or unconsciously, when they talk about achieving greater freedom.
Of course the big thing you run up against in terms of what is limiting your freedom is death. Immortality is about unmasking death, to see it for what it really is. So these practices are ultimately about spiritual immortality, not physical immortality. The intermediate level between these two is soul immortality, that involves keeping the soul integrated enough to keep recycling through, but still not completely integrated with its original spirit.
The early Daoists like Lao Tzu did NOT have a theory of reincarnation, because they didn’t need one. I’ll explain more about that later. Basically death is an illusion. Nothing can die because the consciousness and spirit that is animating things cannot die. You cannot accept this however unless you actually have the experience of it, it will remain an abstract idea. Basically, everything is resolved in the present moment, not in some past life.
What alchemy does is take you through that experience. It begins dissolving what was the structure of your outer habitual self, your personality self. You give birth to a self that is immortal. At this level of the second formula, it is just the seed of that, but it is enough. It’s called the “immortal embryo”. If you can hold that vibration in your inner space, it will grow of its own accord.
I reckon it to learning a new language. You are actually learning to communicate with what is here, the pre-natal essence that is buried unconsciously within you. In learning how to communicate with this, like gradually learning any new language, you are a little uncomfortable or uncertain of yourself in the beginning. You gradually start to get more comfortable talking to the aspects of yourself that are not going to die, and are not afraid of death.
RESOLVE SEXUAL IDENITY TO EVOLVE THE SPIRIT
You begin to center yourself in those aspects, and give them more form and substance. This is where the importance of your sexual energy comes in; your sexual energy is what gives substance to spirit. This second formula, the lesser enlightenment of water and fire, the water and fire is the sexual coupling of the body and soul, the male and female aspects of your consciousness. This is your inner male and the inner female. That is just the first step towards getting pregnant.
It is hard to have a rebirth without first getting pregnant. I believe that is the normal sequence. You get pregnant and then you give birth. A lot of the people want to skip some of the steps, and jump to some other transcendental level where they can’t sustain it; they don’t understand the process of it, what exactly it takes to nourish their own rebirth. Without first resolving your polarized sexual identity, how can you hope to resolve or complete the tension between Heaven and Earth, formless and form?
My method involves a combination of movement and meditation. I’ve found that westerners in particular need movement to awaken the sleeping levels of their consciousness in their body. It is also a simple way to get out of their heads, since most westerners are stuck in their heads. There is no faking your movement, and it gives you a way for the body to practice and stay healthy.
We will be learning a six-movement Qigong form; I call it The Gods Playing in the Cauldron of Original Qi. We will be doing some other Qigong forms along the way as well that are useful in getting out of your head, getting into the energetic movement of your body. This qigong form is more accurately described as neigong, we are internally directing the energy to alchemically couple the inner male and inner female currents of energy. That will be accompanied by a series of meditations that will gradually take us in step by step deeper and deeper into the practice.
Why does it takes a week? The technique of Lesser Kan & Li is actually very simple, the principles of Daoist practices are really very simple, but because we are dealing with the body and its complexities, it may appear complicated. The body in fact is very complicated. It has taken eons to design and evolve it, so that it can sustain itself here in this physical environment. During that process of evolution, aspects of our collective consciousness started to feel very attached to this form of the body, and so got vibrationally separated from aspects of their original Qi. The original Qi is just the breath of our original self before we divided ourselves into this physical body.
We will go deeper into this Daoist cosmology, and into how they understood evolution to happen. We’ll explore what happened to the Qi, what happened with the Jing, the sexual essence, and what happened with the Shen, the spirit or self-awareness, at each level. Those three levels, understand those three components at every level of yourself, every dimension of yourself, then you will have a very good map of how you got here, and where you might possibly be interested in evolving yourself.
Those are the things I found valuable about Daoist alchemy. You get a really good map, you get a really good language that has been developed over the last several thousand years, and you have a body-centered meditation practice that is coming to us live, that a continuous group of practitioners has passed down. Daoist alchemy is the origin of the fundamental principles that lie behind most of the Chinese arts: Chinese medicine, martial arts, Feng Shui, astronomy, astrology, and many other arts in china that are based on the idea of Qi, and how to manage it through different aspects of manifest life.
Internal Alchemy, or nei dangong as it is called in China, is the original science. If you get a good foundation in this, and go very deep into any other branch, whether it is healing, astrology, martial arts, it doesn’t really matter, inner alchemy will give you a foundation for understanding them on a much deeper level. It is not the purpose of internal alchemy to be proficient at any of those levels; those are just really side benefits and practical applications.
INDIVIDUAL SELF, COLLECTIVE SELF, ORIGINAL SELF
The purpose of these alchemy practices is to develop the original self, to grow it back here again. You have all of the ingredients present inside of your individual self, and you just need a cooking class: what is the recipe, how do you get it together and how do you cook it up? Presto, you find yourself impregnated with this seed of your original self and it begins to expand, as you have created the proper conditions for it. I think that is enough on that. What you do with your embodied original spirit is your business, your personal destiny unfolding within the collective self of humanity, not mine.
One important question is, what is the inner collective of the individual human being composed of? It is composed of a spirit that has stepped itself down into this plane, and divided itself out into different streams of consciousness. This is what you find in almost every ancient culture, a theory of the five elements, sometimes it is called the four elements and there is a hidden fifth element, but it is always the five elements. That is always managed by five streams of consciousness. That is what allows the rearrangement of consciousness into matter. If you understand how it is divided out, and is all present in you, you can begin to reassemble it at an even more core level of three-ness.
The best metaphor here is probably humpty-dumpty sat on a wall, and humpty-dumpty had a great fall, and all the kings horses, and all the kings men could not put humpty-dumpty back together again. But – the alchemist can, and that is the great mystery. You have to know what the fragments are, and how they manifest as different aspects of your personality, how they control your thoughts and feelings, and how they control your spiritual development. It is a deep subject, and we will go into it. Any other questions?
Where you do the retreat is important in the sense that your own practice is never separate from what is going on in the land. We like to think that we are independent, but the microcosm that we are is wholly interdependent with the macrocosm. The macrocosm includes the environment; the aspect of the environment that we resonate most closely with is the Earth, because it is physical just like us. Planets, stars, we resonate with also but the aspect of ourselves that we will say is the most condensed is resonating mostly with the Earth.
So where you are on the Earth, and the movement of Qi in the Earth near you can greatly facilitate the Alchemical process. I try and teach these retreats in places where I feel the earth is going to be supportive. I teach up in the Alps, in the Greek Islands, in a number of different places but in the United States a place I call Dao Mountain. The fact of the matter is that you can train the elements in any environment to support you, they actually are very excited by the possibility of change, changing themselves in a way that they can not do themselves.
They don’t have the same level of free will that we have. When we do this work and begin exercising our higher levels of free will, all the elementals get to participate in that, they have to. We can’t do it without them.
I was going around Glastonbury today, the Tor and the Abbey, and other places. The Tor has it’s own natural energy, very powerful; you can feel it at the Shambhala guest house where we are staying. There has been a lot of energetic work done at the abbey, the alleged grave of King Arthur, and at the High Altar, now outdoors as the Cathedral is in ruins. I think it has been a magnet for a long time for people to do spiritual work here. So as I said, we are not starting anything new here – the Michael and Mary ley lines, holding male and female earth energies, cross at the High Altar. You can feel the buzz when you stand there.
LEMURIAN AND ATLANTEAN INFLUENCES ON ALCHEMY
The work that has been done here has mostly been done through the western tradition, which I believe is essentially Atlantean in origin. I have studied the Atlantean tradition extensively myself, it is very powerful, and a worthwhile tradition. The Daoist tradition is what is known esoterically as coming from the Lemurian tradition. The main difference is that the Atlantean tradition is more of a fire path: the fire starts from above and descends down.
The Daoist tradition, the Lemurian tradition is starting from below and within, coming from the water side, and raising up. From my understanding, the reason Atlantis collapsed was from the abuse of fire, and the power they brought with it. This is the danger facing Western society today, as they replay this Atlantean catastrophe. This is the danger of blowing ourselves up with nuclear bombs; it is the danger of excess technology destroying us.
We are beginning to see this drama played out, with the bombing of the world trade center exactly one week ago. You should not get emotionally caught up in this drama, because it is a drama that started eons ago, and you have to understand it at its core if you want to do anything about it. The only thing you can do is change it at its core. It is not the political drama that the TV and news media would have you believe it is.
It is much more of an ancient deeper spiritual drama being played out between the forces of light and dark. Daoist alchemy is not about choosing sides, between the light side and the dark side, it is about developing the third side, that is your original self, that birthed out the light side and the dark side. If you choose sides, you become a soldier in a war, and you may win temporarily or you may lose. If you want to win permanently, choose the third column. The reason I am teaching the Daoist practices is that column currently needs to arise from below and within, from within matter.
The Atlantean experiment in a sense failed. The Daoist path uses essentially the same tools, it just uses them a little differently. I believe it is maybe a more grounded and more necessary work at this time; that is why I am teaching it. So yes, the Earth matters, and I think it is great to be doing this work here in Glastonbury. I think from my experience being here 24 hours that the energy is going to be very supportive; it will be a good marriage. Any other questions?
The question is, is this similar to a Buddhist path, and the development of emptiness, the answer is no. That is a longer discussion. It depends which Buddhists you are talking about, some of the Tibetan Buddhists in the Dzogchen tradition, yes, it has some similarity to the Dzogchen tradition, but that is not Buddhist. The Buddhists adopted some of the teachings of the Dzogchen tradition, which existed long before Buddha, as did the Daoist traditions, which I believe go back about 70,000 years.
What generally the Chan Buddhists in China understand as emptiness runs in a different vein from the Daoist inner alchemy training because of their concept of essence, or jing. Is there is an essence that defines the “self”? The Daoist hermit tradition of this path of Internal Alchemy posits that our “ling” or soul is a vessel containing our personal essence(s). So when a Buddhist says that the self doesn’t exist, from the Daoist point of view you are just saying that the body’s apparent fixity is a temporary illusion.
Your collective of personal essences are not permanent, like the more fixed Christian notion of the soul, but are always in process. Dao is about process. “Hsu” or “xu”, the Daoist term for emptiness, is just an open space that this process uses in the transformation process, in the “opening and closing” of the Dao as described in Lao Tzu. From the Daoist point of view, the self is based upon some sort of essence, you cannot create the illusion of this body unless you had some essence.
What we are really concerned with is our original essence (yuan jing), that has divided itself out into the five elements. That is a more positive (meaning more substantive) approach as opposed to the negative Buddhist approach saying that nothing exists, that if you erase your illusion fully then your suffering and your karma as a human being will go away.
One of the reason I think that the Daoist approach is very suited to westerners is that westerners have a great deal of resistance to the term emptiness, and to what that might actually mean. Our body naturally seeks fullness. It’s the reason Buddhism failed in India originally, bodies kept appearing and disproving the notion of an illusory self. I think that the term “emptiness” is very misleading, it really means just empty of objects.. It doesn’t mean it is empty of energy or consciousness, so it is a little bit mislabeled I think. It really means openness, or implies a shift to a different kind of time and space than this physical one right here.
The Daoist approach is to work with the “self” a little more proactively, to just say look, you have an essence and can cultivate it. That is the purpose of alchemy. If you didn’t have an essence, what would you be cultivating? I think the Dzogchen approach is a much closer to the Daoists than some of the other Buddhist teachings. The Tibetan Buddhists have appropriated the original Dzogchen teachings (as well as the Buddhist teachings from India, which were larged borrowed from Hindu tantrism), so they are very similar in philosophy to Daoism.
NATURE OF QI AND TYPES OF QIGONG
We need to deal with some practical issues. I am going to teach you this Qigong form this morning. The Gods Playing in the Cauldron of Original Qi. We will just learn the basic mechanics, the movements and some of the energy directions that are activated by it. Throughout the week we will cultivate a deeper awareness energetically of what is going on inside of it. This is what distinguishes various types of Qigong from Neigong. Neigong means internal skill in managing your Qi. Qigong just means your general skill using breath, posture, movement and intention to manage your Qi. Manage is a modern word, the original term is to cultivate.
Before we do that, I would just like to speak a little bit about the very idea of Qi so that we don’t get caught up in any idea that Qi is something that we are chasing after, that it is something remote or difficult or mystical, that only a few people have it, these are all erroneous ideas about Qi. Qi only exists as a field, and it is everywhere, you can see it is a matrix of everything. If you exist, you have Qi, you are some pattern of Qi. There is no need to go out and look for it, you have more than you know what to do with. There is no shortage of it.
I think this is an idea that has been perpetrated, at least in the states, largely by martial artists who initially learned from other martial artists who didn’t necessarily have a spiritual understanding. Some fighter along the way thought that you had to build up the Qi in order to kick someone else’s butt. This idea that I have the Qi and you don’t, this is a myth. Everybody has infinite access to the Qi field, you are in fact a portal for the Qi field to manifest here, that is your nature as a human being. You can close down the valve, you can shut it down so that it doesn’t flow because you have free will. Or you can open the valve and let it flow, that is just a free will choice. It is not a question of whether you do or do not have Qi, it is a question of deciding whether you are open enough to let it flow.
So just release the idea that there is a limited amount of Qi or that you have limited access to it. That is the number one thing. A lot of people think I can’t meditate, or I can’t get Qi, or I have to do this for a million years before it is going to happen, or a zillion lifetimes, those are all just acquired ideas about it, they are not true. The only thing that is true is that as you begin to open up the valve, and begin to let this energy flow inside you, you want to make sure that it is flowing in a balanced manner. This is an idea in the west, that bigger is better, it is particularly true in America: more Qi is better.
Not necessarily, it is the quality of the Qi, and this gets into the idea of what the Daoists call Shen. Shen is spirit, or the intelligence that shapes the Qi. So if you just have Qi, it could be very coarse Qi, it could be very strong Qi but it may not necessarily have a high spiritual quality to it. So there is a relationship between the Shen, the spirit, and the Qi, they are not the same thing. A lot of New Ager’s confuse the two, thinking that if I have a lot of energy, it must be very spiritual. You can have a lot of energy and be very evil.
Energy, Qi is essentially neutral in it’s original state, and as it manifests, it gets polarized, it has to get polarized in order to separate out into form and bodies and planets, and matter from a formless field. Your polarity is necessary to stay in form. The polarity which is defined by Yin Qi and Yang Qi, expanding and contracting Qi, by nature is harmonious. We will go later into the whole cosmology, what happens in different dimensions as the Qi field shifts into matter, and how do problems arise, where does suffering come from? If it is so harmonious, why is god allowing evil? I will go into that cosmology a little bit later, so you have a clear map of how the energy steps itself down. it is very important to understand that, because we are stepping it back up.
It is like Hansel and Gretel, you leave the little breadcrumbs along the way, then have to find the way back. When you came into a body, you left little breadcrumbs along the way, called subtle bodies, and you have to find your way back using them. You have to learn to recognize those markers and cultivate them so they become clear.
The main thing to understand here is that there is no limitation, either in the quality or in the amount of Qi. Most of the limitation is arising in this third thing that the Daoists call Jing. Jing means your essence, it is your sexual essence, and it is your genetic essencel
Speaking about Jing, sometimes spelled Ching. This is the key to understanding the Jing that holds the body in shape, and what holds anything in form. Planets have Jing, stars have Jing, anything that has physical form has Jing, it has something that is giving it a shape and essence. Its essence is giving it a form. This is something that yoriting from your parents, and that is why we are all shaped slightly differently. You get some Jing from your mother, and you get some Jing from your father, from each one of them. But you are not limited to them, their Jing is can be tracked all the way back to the source in the origins of where all Jing comes from, from the Dao.
Daoist alchemy is a process of cultivating a relationship between your Jing, your Qi, and the Shen. The essence, the energy and the spirit or the intelligence. What is important to understand is that while all three of those that might appear to function very differently, they are all at heart the same thing. It express a continuum of vibration, from spirit, to energy to body essence. And vice versa. They are constantly transforming between different states of density: spirit turns itself into energy, it shapes itself, and the energy crystallizes itself down into form, into matter, and it goes back again.
There is a fourth element here; after Jing Qi, Shen there is Wu. Wu means not-being in some translations. Being, the Shen, the intelligence arises out of not being. In fact wu is not exactly not being, it really means the unknown, all of creation is coming out of the unknown. We can’t know that the unknown is non-being, we just know it is not the same thing as spirit, which is the knower within us. This is the first mystery. It cannot be penetrated from here. Wuji is what I call the Supreme Mystery; if it was knowable, then we could control it or change it from here, but apparently we cannot.
It is quite possible to get into illusory ideas that you have achieved the supreme unknown, just because you stopped thinking or breathing during meditation. The main thing to focus on right now is what is knowable, and develop some skill in transmuting between the Jing, the Qi and the Shen, the essence, the energy and the intelligence, or the spirit. If you are able to become fluid in making those transformations, or become conscious in making those transformations, then you gain a whole new level of freedom.
The real truth is that you are doing this every moment, you are going through these transmutations between spirit, energy and matter, or body, only it is unconscious for you. If you weren’t doing that, then you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be able to function, to think or feel. Those are stepped down qualities or properties of that process. Every one is already an unconscious master of this process, and all we are trying to do is make it conscious.
That’s why it is often referred to simply as remembering. But before you can remember, you have to forget who you think you have become, because that is blocking and occupying the space of your mind. It seems a little tricky that you have to forget yourself in order to remember yourself, but that just seems to be the way it goes.
TALK ON “GODS PLAY IN CAULDRON” NEIGONG
When you learn this Qigong form, in the beginning, it looks like you are just waving your arms around. But if you relax into the movements, you start to become aware that you are actually giving instructions to the Qi field, to the life force. So if you make a movement that is scooping upward, it is not about exercising your muscles or your ligaments, or anything like that, although those are side benefits of the physical movement of this. It is the signal to the Qi field saying, I want the energy to start moving up my body, and then you do it the other way, and it says I want you to go down now.
It is just like you are training your pet, a little dog, saying sit, run, walk, eat, beg. So you are training the Qi field. As I have said, it is essentially neutral, and it will never violate your will. It is an intelligent field, remember the Shen has merged in with the Qi field, the spirit. So when you have a clear intention, and communicate it clearly, it will respond, if you are relaxed enough to notice it. If you are uptight, you may not notice it even if the Qi starts to move.
There is one other thing – please release the expectation of what the Qi moving is supposed to be like: there is no supposed to. You can do different forms of Qigong, and it will have different effects. You can do Tai Chi, a long martial form, which I consider to be a form of Qigong, and it will have a certain effect. You can do another Qigong form, and it is telling the Qi to do something different, you get a different effect. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Qigong forms. There is no limit to the number of forms that could be invented. There is no limit to the human imagination or the different combinations that you could put a human body and human energy field through.
The important thing to understand is that this Gods Playing in the Cauldron Neigong is just a Qigong method that involves the body-mind in directing the Qi to flow back towards its own source in the pre-natal field of Qi. The reason it is so powerful is that by involving the body, not just giving mental directions, by involving the body, you begin to activate your Jing, the movement of your body essence. Your body essence is essentially your sexual energy. We’ll talk more about that later.
When you are getting that to move, it doesn’t mean you are sexually aroused, in the western idea of what sex is. Westerners generally have a very limited idea of what sexuality is. The purpose of the movement is also to include the densest levels of yourself, to get them moving in a particular pattern, and this neigong form is a way to encode and embody the meditative practice.
Sometimes you may find yourself in a state where you don’t feel like sitting still and meditating. So then you do neigong movement, you do moving meditation. You may just feel stuck, too anxious, and can’t meditate so you do a movement meditation, and the signals to the life force will be essentially another octave of the same messages you would give in a sitting meditation.
We will learn to use this Gods neigong form to do an alchemical operation, or meditative transmutation of the elements. The movement stimulates the spontaneous process of the meditation afterwards, they work beautifully together. I think it is important to do both sitting and moving practice. Because the signals in each are working at a little different frequency, it increases the chances that you will cover all the bases.
Maybe that’s an American metaphor, do you English play baseball? No. do you use that metaphor in English? You have rounders, cover all the rounders? Do you have bases in rounders? Okay, same metaphor, we’re in the same culture.
Let go of any fixed ideas you have about Qi. When you are doing the Neigong form, just relax, that is the key thing. Less effort, I guess you should make this point: if you try too hard, that means you are trying to use force, in Chinese that means Li, you are trying to push the Qi, that creates contraction, contraction slows down the Qi field. If you use too much muscle, if the muscles are tensing, that draws more blood, the blood needs Qi to circulate, that uses up your Qi and also slows down the Qi flow. So it seems paradoxical to westerners, but if you use less effort, more Qi flows, it is the opposite of “no pain, no gain” and all these things.
You want a clear intention, clear instructions to the Qi field, and minimal effort, just enough to move the body, and then keep it floating, and relaxing, because then the Qi starts to move. It is not being asked to do anything else, move blood, tighten muscles, hold your emotions, all these other things take Qi. So if you don’t give it any of those instructions, I need to be angry right now. That is an instruction to the Qi field, the Qi comes up and it shapes itself into anger. I need to be strong right now; then the Qi comes up into the muscles. Whatever you think is an instruction to the Qi field.
It is this very omnipresent, very sensitive field of energy, and most of us are giving unconscious instructions to it all the time, and most of those instructions are usually contradictory. Yes I want to go forward, and am no longer afraid to. Have you ever tried driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas? What happens? The car didn’t go anywhere, but you burned a lot of energy.
This is the normal state for most people, to some degree or another, one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas, and you are playing them back and forth, and you are burning up your energy, and you wonder why you are tired. These are just unconscious habits you have acquired, and you will be letting go of them on a much deeper level this week. It is important to realize they are there.
When you are moving, you are just going to be letting yourself go without resistance. We don’t want to give any double messages. This means letting go of your fear. What is your fear really about? It is usually about changing yourself, your Jing is fixed in a certain pattern and you have gotten used to it, here is my form, here is my body, and that creates a certain energetic pattern you could say, you could call it your personality.
Personality is just your Qi functioning expressed, it comes out as thoughts, it comes out as feelings, it comes out as sensations. Those are all the ways in which you shape the Qi field. That is all Qi, it just has a particular shape to it. Different subtle bodies are shaping the Qi in different ways, so most ordinary things require Qi to happen, all ordinary reality is part of the Qi field.
There is nothing really mystical about it, it just seems mystical when you get into what is behind it, and the subtle ways that you can shape it. You are not going over with a hammer and a nail and banging on it, or sawing on it or something else.
Dantian, Ming (Destiny), and Xing (Essence)
The questioner has asked, is there a difference between the navel, Dantian, and belly cauldron? No, I’m really using them in the same way, sometimes I’m giving you a biological reference. Thank you for asking the question, it is important that things go to the Dantian. A lot of people have different ideas abut what that is. The ancient term “Dantian”, has the meaning of “the space where the Qi completes itself”.
Some translations today call it the “field of the elixir”. The elixir field? In most cases, it is just a field, there is no elixir stored there, because you haven’t cultivated it. The Qi has not completed itself yet. Everybody’s Qi is different, so everyone has to find their own unique combinations of energy that will complete themselves, their own unique way of living and expressing themselves. All that is part of completing yourself.
The Daoists talk about two different phases of this. One is cultivating your Ming, your bodily destiny, and the other is cultivating your Xing (pronounced Shing), your spiritual essence. Your destiny is how you live out in the world, your job, your career, your relationships. These are all your choices, you are completing your destiny in the world. Moving from the origin out towards creation. Cultivating your Xing, your essence, you are gathering it back into its original source. Internal alchemy is focused largely on the process of cultivating inwardly. You need both. The Dantian is simply a portal, a doorway where this essence is cultivated.
The Dantian is sometimes described as a storage unit or a battery for your Qi. I don’t think this is a very useful description of it, and the reason why I don’t think it is a very good description of it is that it is too limiting, it makes it as if it was a physical container that stores your Qi, and that puts a limitation on the sense of your Qi, that you have to gather it, hold on to it, and store it.
Again, this is an idea of limitation on the Qi field, this is an infinite field of energy. I think it is better to look at it as a doorway to an infinite energy field, and that doorway can be wide open or it can be open a crack, but if the universe has infinite energy, why do you need to store it, it’s like carrying coal to Newcastle. There is no need to store it. The energy field itself is storing all the energy you would ever need.
What I think this generally is confused with, is that the kidney spirit is considered to be connected with the lower Dantian because of it’s proximity, and the kidney function which is regulating the water, the water acts as a storage medium. It is holding in a manifest form some of your essence, and it functions more like a battery, your sexual energy. But it is not to be confused with the Dantian, the field of the elixir. This elixir has infinite energy, doesn’t need to store anything, it is the universal storage of all possibilities.
There are three Dantians that are traditionally worked with, in the belly, the heart and the head. They all go to the same infinite Qi field, you can think of them as different doorways leading to the same room. As the energy moves from this infinite Qi field into manifestation, different functions come through. Your heart cauldron has more of your emotional and mental body functions coming through, and the head cauldron has more of the spiritual functions coming through.
You need all of the functions, your feet are just as important as your legs, and your hands are just as important as your arms, they are all connected and are all together. As I mentioned last night though, unless you get a foundation in opening up the densest portal, the one that is controlling your dense physical body, the other ones are not very stable, the thoughts come and go, the spiritual perceptions come and go. So the lower cauldron, if you can get your essence to crystallize there, it acts as a vehicle for all your higher bodies, so they can download here, and stay present here, other wise they come in and they go out, they come in and go out.
This is what is unique about Daoist alchemy, is that the method has evolved for stabilizing your original spirit here, it won’t happen unless you cultivate this doorway and open it up. In that space, you begin completing your Qi, and returning it back to it’s origin. In that space, which is the space where you are generating form, and you are generating your physical body, if you hold your spiritual energy there, you will start to generate the seed that will become the light body.
What the Daoists call the light body is the same thing that new agers call the light body, the only problem is that visualizing it doesn’t make it happen. It is not something that you can just imagine, and then you have it, that is called a Yin body. That is just like TV, you have a good show, you see it, and after the show is over, click, it is gone. We are cultivating what is called a Yang body, we have to give it some substance, and some vitality, and then it stays, it becomes a vehicle for your continued spiritual development, it becomes a body you can take into any dimension. So that is the long answer to your short question.
When I say bring the energy down there, we are really constantly performing various operations, various meditations and various aspects of ourselves, and we bring it back there, so it begins to crystallize and unite, and the place where your Qi will shift from Qi into Jing, your substance. Right now your substance, your Jing is very unconscious. The only time you are aware of it is when it converts itself into sexual energy, and you feel desire, or you feel pain, and you want to try and protect your body from discomfort we are just going to give it something a little bit more like that pearl there, it is clear but is has some substance. Any other questions?
The question is should you circulate the pearl after you have brought it back there? It is optional, this is a traditional Daoist practice, and the main reason for doing that is to make sure the energy is balanced. So you are giving it a Yin and a Yang movement, you are moving it clockwise and counterclockwise.
It is not that critical here, because we are going to be doing so many things, and we are constantly balancing, and changing them back and forth. If you have that habit, and that is comforting for you, and it gives you that feeling of what you have done, then do it. You are going to find that over the thousands of years of practitioners in China, people have evolved all kinds of practices, more practices than you can shake a stick at. And you can’t do them all.
You don’t need to do them all, you just need to do the ones that you feel give you the balance, energy and cultivation that you find you need. So any time a teacher tells you that you have to do it this way, and if you don’t do this, you can’t achieve yourself or whatever, I would be very cautious.
There are many ways to cultivate yourself, and there are all kinds of methods. Usually because we have a tendency to disperse our Qi, we divide ourselves and fragment ourselves, we are spending it in three or four directions at once, it will never accumulate. We wake up every morning with a fresh batch of energy, and we don’t know where it came from, and we go out and spend it all day long.
By the time we are tired and fall asleep, the next day we do it again and again, slowly running down, because we are never tapping into the source of where it is coming from. This is the process described as slowly spending down your principal. You inherit so much from your parents, you get so much from the universe when you are born, and you are just spending it everyday, and you are not recharging it, at the end of that you die.
We are reversing that process now, and there are a lot of different ways to reverse that. People have different ways of sabotaging themselves, and they are exhausting themselves, these techniques are often so that we have a definite procedure so we don’t just scatter the Qi. The real function of it is to say, make sure this is present and holds its unity, spiral it left, spiral it right. People do it physically, put their hands around the belly, some people hold the hands still and move the belly around it. Some people use their minds to send it this way and that way. They are all good. Any other questions?
FALLING ASLEEP VS. GOING UNCONSCIOUS DURING MEDITATION
This is quite normal, in the first few days of these retreats, you may find yourself going unconscious., and you should be aware that it is not necessarily sleep, in fact most of the time it is not sleep. A lot of the times people feel guilty, and they feel bad, they have paid all this money, and traveled all this way to come here, and now they are falling asleep, and they are saying why did I come here to go asleep?
What is going on is that from the group Qi field, from the energy that I am putting out, there are frequencies of energy that you are not used to encountering in your conscious state. You normally encounter them only in your dream state. So what happens when you suddenly are in a situation where these energies come in, coming from yourself, from me, the room or wherever, from Earth, from heaven. It acts like a signal and says oh, we are in the dream state, I guess we are asleep, you go out, and that is your cue.
After a while you may feel that, I’m not really asleep, this is a false signal, I’m not really supposed to be going asleep, it is just a new type of energy, I think I will stay awake, and watch what happens while that energy is present in me. Don’t be alarmed, the energy is still going in, you are still having the experience of it, it is just the recording part of your conscious mind is off for that moment.
But as they have done lots of studies on people in dream and sleep states, you record everything, it is just not in the particular play back mode that you call yourself, your little ego self, with this little tape recorder and video camera, play it back and say oh, yeah, that was what was said, or this or that. Don’t be alarmed. That will change, as the group energy starts to crystallize, in the first day or two, and then the whole thing will shift to another level. I have taught many, many of these retreats, so I can predict that pattern with great confidence. There are always exceptions, though.
You may also find disturbing patterns coming up. The energy in here gets very strong, and you can have a weakness in one organ, and suddenly it will surface. That should get better within a day or two also. The first day or two, you just have to detox. That’s why we are coming together, to speed that process up collectively, and have a strong Qi field, it will happen faster.
LETTING GO OF EGO RESISTANCE
That comes down to the question of just trusting the group, trusting the process, trusting me, and most importantly trusting yourself, saying okay, this is the moment I’m actually going to change. I actually am going to let go of these deep patterns, which your psyche is afraid to do on it’s own, because it doesn’t feel like there is any safety net, because if I let go of all these patterns what will I be? I have to be healthy, I have to be functional, I have to be successful, blah, blah, blah, my god that is really scary, I think I will just go back to this thing that I know. So here we have a kind of safety net. Let go of the Qi field, then this stuff will circulate around, and something else will come into you, and there is a process to replace it with. That’s all. That’s here. A lot of it is being really clear, and letting go of your fear, and resistance to change. That is the core fear, is change, not to become something different. That’s why death is the biggest fear, because death is the biggest change. So you learn to have a lot of little deaths, letting your old self go, and letting your old patterns die, and you will have a lot of little births and eventually that will accumulate, and start to crystallize into something of substance. Any other questions?
USING 5 PHASES TO CREATE COHERENT QI FIELD IN BODY
The important thing to understand about the five elements, and about the creation cycle is that there is only one life force. Even though it divides itself out and it moves into different directions, and becomes different qualities, it is still the same Qi, just like the seasons going through a different phase, different weather, a different color, different qualities. so you are just taking it through those changes, and you are staying present with it. You draw the water up, and expand out the wood element, spring, the liver, the rising Qi, and then you get back to the fire. We are used to thinking of fire as expanding out and away that’s what it normally does. We are doing the reverse of it. We are pulling it down in. usually we think of water as sinking. The heavy element, it flows away from us, down. We are doing the reverse of it, we are drawing it up.
When I go into the energetics of the whole form, it will become clearer. All these movements are designed very specifically, and have particular effects, you will learn more and more what these effects are, and what we are doing with these movements. We are not just waving our arms around, you are giving instructions to your own Qi field, all the elements and all the intelligences of all the spirits inside your own Qi field, you are saying hey, go through this sequence, this pattern of expansion and contraction, and it starts to organize them and turn them into a coherent whole.
Right now, most of us are what we call a chaotic whole, we have a center of gravity, we don’t just fly apart at the seams, so there is something holding us together, but often at great struggle and chaos. one side conflicting with another, one part of us wanting to go forward, one wanting to go back. One is afraid, one is courageous. One part wants to fall in love, and the other part wants to hate the person. We are a collective consciousness, we hold all of these different wills, and all these different voices inside ourselves at once. It is very exciting. Occasionally you are in the same pattern for a long time, and it gets a little boring, that’s you want to rearrange it, when it’s lost it’s excitement. I think we need to take a break.
DAOIST COSMOLOGY
We are going to discuss and have a lightweight talk about Daoist cosmology. I say lightweight because when we get into cosmology and talk about creation of the universe, it sounds kind of heavy, and huge, and things that are generally beyond our ability as humans to understand. Without some kind of cosmology, spiritually you are lost. If you could just see it as a starting structure, and you could flesh it out through you own experience in meditation, Qigong, and Neigong, as you proceed along the path, which is to have the idea and the possibilities of what the different dimensions of yourself are. It is really important, because if you have no awareness of that, then you may fall back upon relying upon your sensory evidence, and your senses are limited in what they can know.
Your mind is not limited, your mind knows many things that your senses do not know. So you can close your eyes, and your mind is still there, and you can still be perceiving, and imagining and creating whole worlds, and you open your eyes and say that’s where it is, the created world, but none of us see this world exactly the same, so there is a great mystery, there is some kind of tension between the individual and the cosmos, between the spirit and matter, the kind of dialectic that is going on, and that kind of tension is always going to be there.
However, that can be a positive creative tension, rather than a source of anxiety; a source of why am I here, who sent me down to this prison planet, I am a huge spirit and I am stuck inside this tiny little body, and the world is beating up on me, slowly eating me out with disease and struggle, lack of money, evil people, etcetera, etcetera. So you could have all kinds of interpretations of being in a limited form, a physical form, but for the moment, I’m just going to ask you to release all those interpretations, and to release all those judgements, and open yourself to just hearing the Daoist cosmology. I think it is really essential because it gives you a framework for understanding these alchemical formulas, and why you are doing this practice.
You may have many immediate motives in terms of relieving your spiritual anxiety, or healing yourself of something. Those are all fine. From the universe’s point of view, your personal motives may be more or less irrelevant. You may be part of a larger process that you are just not aware of, even though you are perceiving your personal needs and your personal process.
The Daoists have three different heavens. There is no hell. This goes all the way back to the Dao De Jing, Lao Zi (Lao Tzu), what is considered to be the classic of early Daoist texts. Written about 400 B.C., it talks about the Dao giving birth to the one. This is in verse 42, if you check any translation of it, it will have something like this:
“The Dao (or the unknown) gives birth to the one,
one gives birth to the two,
two gives birth to the three
three gives birth to the ten thousand things (or the myriad things).”
I translate this cosmologically as:
“The Dao gives birth to unity,
Unity gives birth to the polarity,
Polarity gives birth to trinity,
The trinity gives birth to the ten thousand things.”
What does this mean? This short phrase, one of eighty one verses in the Dao De Jing, has been accepted almost universally by all the different branches of Daoism, all the different sects over thousands of years, as the foundation of Daoist cosmology. Also many Buddhist and Confucian thinkers accepted it as well.
You have to understand that in china, the term Dao is an umbrella term, so even though there are many different schools of thinking, the legalists, the Confucians, the naturalists, you have various schools of Buddhism all coming in at different historical periods. Many of them, most of them accepted the Dao as the umbrella, as some sort of mysterious goal. Confucius would also talk about the Dao, but he was more concerned about, say the Dao of human society. The Daoists such as Zhuang Zi and Lao Zi, would mostly talk about the Dao of the whole, of nature. Nature of course includes human society, they are not excluding humanity from that.
It is important to understand that there is a whole developed cosmology, of what this means to go from none to one to two to three and into the madness of creation, the multiplicity of the many. This gives you a pathway to understand the progression of the one to the many. Here we are in a room, there are many of us, yet on some level we all know that there is only one humanity, that there is some sort of global psyche, or perhaps even a global soul. Somehow all of the human minds are connected.
What causes us to think that there are only the many separate human minds, instead of just one? Because we all have internally an invisible pathway inside of ourselves, which links us to the collective mind, the unity mind. But this connection is obscured by the busyness, and the distraction of all the sensory things that are happening.
Beyond the unity of the collective mind, deep inside our core, there is the unknown. This kind of inner black hole is called the Wu Ji. Sometimes spelled wu chi, but it is not Qi, as in energy, it is Wu Ji, and it means Supreme Unknown or Supreme Mystery. That is like the womb of the Dao, there is this whole, this unknowable whole, and it births itself out through the void. But it is not really a void, or a black hole, it is the profound womb space from which we continually birth ourselves and the cosmos.
Daoism is essentially feminine, the language and terminology favors the feminine. It talks about birthing, and the Dao as the mother. It is different than many of the western religions that are focused on the fire, and say that the father is first, father, father, father. This is essentially saying that something is birthing things here, something is birthing creation, and birthing is essentially an androgynous act, it is either male or female, but later on that is physically appropriated by the female side, but we are going to get to that.
So these three forces all were birthed out, and there is this single first circle here, and that is called primordial heaven, HunTun. This is the state of primordial unity, as well as primordial chaos. Why do I always say chaos? If we, just to take this room here, if everybody’s minds here merged into one, which is what perennial philosophies, and most of the major religions are saying, “we’re all one”. What would it be like? It would be chaos, it means that I couldn’t tell the difference between your thoughts and my thoughts, my body and your body. You wouldn’t know the difference.
If you are able to make distinctions between yourself and another being, you are no longer one. Merging everything into one with no distinctions means chaos. Chaos is not a bad word, it has gotten a dirty name a little bit, associated with political chaos and other things like that. Now there is a new chaos theory, it is touching on what the ancient Daoists said, is that unity, that chaos is like a primordial soup, everything is blended together, and it hasn’t distinguished itself out yet, but all the ingredients are there that could emerge.
What are the ingredients in that primordial realm that could emerge? Yuan Qi, Yuan Shen and Yuan Jing. Original energy, original intelligence (the Shen), and Yuan Jing, the original essence or substance. So think of it as a cosmic egg, and the yolk or the whites are all mixed together in there, it hasn’t separated itself out, but the possibilities are there.
The mysteries of how this egg gets created, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Well here is the egg but it has the potential already for the full chicken inside of it. In a sense, they are both born at the same time: the potential for it to manifest…(end of tape).
This egg begins to crack open. Some times the egg is described as a gourd. Maybe you have seen drawings in Chinese art of this character with a big high forehead staff, and on that staff is hanging a gourd with two compartments in it, one smaller on top, and one larger. This is considered to be the elixir, primordial Yin and Yang, the gourd also represents a hollow state of emptiness, out of which this mysterious life force begins to create itself. A human being is a miniature gourd. The energies inside of you, the primordial aspects of Yin and Yang Qi are sitting in potential space inside us, and they are not moving, it is all chaos, very dark and obscure, but it is all one.
Then there is the sound of thunder, something cracks, some energy that is released and the egg cracks open and the gourd breaks open or whatever, and begins to birth itself. The Yin and the Yang energies begin to move and turn, and to exchange. They divide themselves out into eight primordial forces. The Yin and Yang divide three times, and each time they divide, I’ll show you later a diagram of the division process. The I Ching is the map of that process. This is a lot like mitosis, the cells dividing. You have the Wu Ji that becomes one, this original (yuan) thing that holds everything inside of it, and it divides itself into two, into Yin and Yang. Positive and negative separate out and birth from the unmixed neutral. As the egg cracks open, while it is still inside the egg, it begins to move and divides itself into three. The three things inside become distinct; they really are certain things. You have the positive force, and the negative force, and the original neutral force.
This is the most important principle in alchemy to understand, that there are always three forces in the life force, the positive, the negative and the neutral. Yin, Yang and Yuan: the Yuan means the neutral Qi, it is essentially neutral Qi before it has polarized itself into positive and negative. You can see this like the original parent, it gives birth to one male and one female, and this is of course on a cosmic energetic level. Now you have a charge, an attraction between the male and the female. Then they begin coupling, the Yin and Yang begin interacting, they actually begin to have sexual intercourse.
If you can imagine the cosmic being having self intercourse. It is good if you can imagine it because you will be doing a practice later on this week called self intercourse. You are going to be imitating what nature is doing, it is birthing itself, this universe doesn’t go hunting around for a partner, and say hey, lets get laid baby, lets have some baby universes: it does it right from within itself. It gives birth right from the center, and it births itself out. All birth happens from the center, and it births itself out. All births happen from the center, and manifests outwards: it is not like a stork dropping it down. just in case some of you didn’t know that.
So what happens? The Yang divides into extreme Yang, and mixed Yin and Yang, and the Yin divides into extreme Yin, and mixed Yin and Yang. This is what gives us five elements. You have the fire and the wood on the Yang side, and you have the metal and the water on the Yin side. Can you all see this chart?
This is just a progression energetically, to understand how the Qi divides itself out, and creates different levels and forces. That gives us four forces, they are polarized, and you have a fifth force that mediates and balances the other four. This is essential to understanding five-element theory, is that the Yuan Qi, is the central axis. It steps itself down, and here it embodies both the Yin and the Yang in one element.
That is what the job of the fifth element is to be, to harmonize Yin and Yang. In terms of your own body, that is the spleen and the stomach, it takes food in, and it distributes out nourishment and essences to all the other organs. That is why Earth is considered to be the most central, the stomach and the spleen. Essentially it is holding the space for the neutral Qi, the Yuan Qi, only it is no longer neutral here, it is balanced Yin and Yang which is holding a neutral field. What happens here, is that you have the five elements, the five phases, as most modern scholars are translating it. Elements make it sound like it is a thing, where they are really dynamic, they are like five intelligences: the Shen.
This first trinity that appears, also represents Jing Qi and Shen. We will go into that. They move through, and they divide out. The various energies now divide again. The fire divides, and you get heaven and fire, the water divides, and you get Earth and water. The wood divides, and you get wind and thunder. The metal divides, and you get lake and mountain. It gives you eight forces there, that is where the Yi Jing comes from, from the division of the original one. It keeps dividing itself, and on the manifest level, it becomes four and then it becomes eight, because there are eight forces there. Normally these are put in a circle, and the center point of this circle is this invisible element, which is still the Yuan Qi, it has no form or shape, it has no name because it is neutral, it doesn’t have any form. The other eight forces all have a particular shape to them. This will tell you, and help you to understand what is inside the Yi Jing.
Now you have five elements here, and you have the nine forces: eight manifest forces plus the invisible one. Again, this is why when you go to some culture, like the Hindu, or the Greek, and they say there are four elements. In the Hindu culture, the fifth element is called ether. In Greek terminology, it is called the quintessence, it is just invisible. The Chinese are unique in that they make it manifest, they say the Earth, the fifth force is manifest. The whole five element system is geared to alchemy, because this Earth is your cauldron, it is your center space where all the other elements, the Qi comes to complete itself, it is your Dantian.
The Chinese are making it very conscious, even in the physical plane, and saying that fifth element actually has a name, it has substance. The other ones don’t deal with it in the physical plane, they are only dealing with it in the etheric body, that fifth element. The Chinese track it all the way through. This is a key idea, because if you can’t manifest the etheric body into the physical plane, you are never going to develop the light body. The “light body” is essentially a way of saying you are not just light, you have some substance, some Jing/body. That is what we are trying to do here, is give some substance to the etheric.
In early heaven, there are eight trigrams, there are eight forces, and this is ruled by a different arrangement of energies than the outer ring, which is later heaven. Early heaven is the same thing as your pre-natal self. If you can imagine your spirit here, your spirit, when you are in the primordial space, you are all one, and then you decide “I want to create”, but in order to get into later heaven, which is the physical plane, I have to go through a period of gestation.
The same way as when you were a spirit inside your mothers tummy, and you were forming yourself, and you were not quite yet separate from your mother. You are in a process of individuating yourself but you haven’t done it yet: it totally depends upon her, and you are still in touch with your original spirit, your primordial self. This is a middle heaven, pre-natal heaven, it is an intermediate stage, where the energy of the spirit goes through, and then finally steps itself down into later heaven, which is the physical plane.
It is important to understand that these are all heavens, that this is heaven here, that you are in heaven. Heaven means you are created from original spirit, you are created by the Dao.This is not the creation of some evil force apart from it that said I’m going to stick you in a little body, and torture you, make you run out of money, make you hunt around for a partner, and you can’t find one so that you are all frustrated.
No, this is not the creation story here, everything here is all coming from the same force, whether you like it or not, whether you call it good or bad, or fun or not fun, it is all coming from the same source. It is all designed, it is just vibrating at different speeds. So they say that the energy of early heaven is ruled by heaven and Earth, as in the arrangements of the Yi Jing, one is the early heaven arrangement, one is the later heaven arrangement. They have an axis, they have a head and a tail. The head, three solid lines is heaven, and the axis, the tail is three broken lines. Just manifest again.
Everything is fine there, so the center of early heaven, to go back to the other chart here, the first arrangement, is still Yuan Qi, original Qi. It is sitting in the middle of early heaven, and even though you are halfway into form, starting to form yourself, you have distinct qualities or forces that are happening. The five elements are there, qualities or the five phases are there, the aspects of your intelligence that are starting to move and cycle, like seasons, only now it is happening cosmically, the cosmic mind is beginning to turn.
Everything is revolving around a neutral center, so they are balanced, this is symbolized by heaven and Earth, which are an exact mirror of each other: three solid lines and three broken lines. Fire and water, all these symbols, all the images, everything neutralizes it’s opposite force, so there is no real conflict, even though you have all these opposites in perfect polarity, they are just dancing, moving easily.
So if you can just imagine that you are in the womb, in the prenatal state, and your mother is in a perfectly happy state, your mother being the Dao here, or primordial heaven. You are going to feel perfectly happy, you are not going to have any struggle, there is no fight, everything is in harmony. So when these eight forces shift, and they flip their arrangement, they go through a shift, they slow down their vibration into the physical plane what happens?
This is the key to understanding where all of our problems come from. As you shift into later heaven, you can say the center is still original Jing, Qi and Shen, the original trinity that is there in primordial heaven, that is still there inside everything here, still generating and birthing out through the early heaven phase, but now that center is a little more distant, in fact, it is unconscious. You can’t quite remember how you got here, you can’t remember the pathway in, that is very unconscious, and now the head and the tail are ruled by the trigrams fire and water.
Fire and water is symbolized by these patterns here, Yang, Yin, Yang, and Yin Yang Yin. They mirror each other also, but they are not pure, there is a hidden force inside each one of them, so there is the possibility for conflict. The other trigrams don’t mirror each other, even though the fire and water more or less hold that axis stable, fire and water are inherently volatile, and the other trigrams no longer perfectly mirror each other, so you have these cycles now happening, but you don’t have perfect harmony and balance.
NATURE OF YUAN QI (ORIGINAL BREATH)
The easiest way to understand this is the amount of Yuan Qi, or original Qi in heaven, when everything is unified. The Jing, Qi and Shen are all connected and unified, in that primordial chaos unity – it is 100% original Qi, 100% neutral force. As it births itself out, into a gestational, early heaven, a lot of the energy goes into the eight forces, and only about 50% original Qi in the middle. So the amount of neutral force is already reduced, but the polarity of the eight forces, the other 50% of the qi field is already balanced, so it is no problem. It is still functioning as a whole, everything is communicating, everything is in harmony. When it divides again, and shifts out to the physical in later heaven, you have about 90% polarity Yin and Yang force, and only 10% neutral force. These percentages I am assigning arbitrarily, but they reflect Daoist numerology.
So the neutral force has been weakened in the physical plane. It seems that in order to have physical matter, you have to have mostly polarized energy: you have to have hot and cold, hard and soft, all these things that define matter, they have to be very extreme, and slow down in vibration so you can see what is hard, and what is soft, what is male and what is female. So the energy has to be more polarized. Probably if you just had a 50/40 split on the Yang and Yin, with ten percent more Yang to keep that Yin from getting stuck, the Yin here is not a negative term, it just holds stable. The numbers 4 and 5 tend to equate with Yin and Yang: odd numbers are Yang, even numbers are Yin, together that gives you the number 9 which is considered to be the number of creation. The number 10, the other 10%, made up of original Qi is what is really causing the wheels of creation to turn here, it is dividing itself out and feeding into the Yin and Yang.
The problem comes about on the human level. If you took the humans off this planet, you would be sailing along, the animals would be eating the grass, and eating each other, but it would all be in harmony, and they would be keeping each other in balance. it went on this way for quite a long time, and there was no problem. This planet was never on the brink of extinction because of the animals, other than the human animals. They never took the earth out of balance: it’s not as if plants overgrew the place, and were going to choke the place to death, there is no planetary genocide going on because of the plants. The problem comes with the humans, and how did that problem start?
If you can imagine that in the early heaven stage, there is already some type of human consciousness that is forming there, we’ll say still in an etheric body, it hasn’t gotten to the physical stage yet. At that stage, it is androgynous, it hasn’t divided itself into male and female. Androgynous means you are actually cloning yourself, you can birth yourself again. You don’t die, you are actually immortal, you can birth yourself, if you get tired of that form or that shape, you can say I’ll just birth a new me, and you draw on that Yuan Qi, the original Qi, and you pull it through by the natural coupling of your inner male and inner female aspects. If you are androgynous, you can have sex internally, and boom, here I’ve refreshed my essence, my substance, and I’ve just birthed a new form. There is nobody to argue with you, there is nobody to fight with you, there is no hunting around for a partner, and there is no rent to pay, so it is very easy.
When you shift into the physical plane, something very different happens, there was an experiment you could say, that is still going on, you flip this androgynous prototype of a human being into a male and female physical form. In the process of splitting those two, the Yuan Qi, as you separate out the male and female aspects, the Yin and Yang aspects, the binding force of the Yuan Qi, the original Qi, the neutral force, gets dispersed.
It means that males and females are born with maybe only one percent Yuan Qi instead of ten percent, that makes it even harder to communicate with this original self which is one hundred percent Yuan Qi. Now you are stepped down so you have only one percent of your original self, and you have 99% polarity, and you are walking around saying I’m totally a man, I’m for all the men, or I’m a woman, I’m on the woman’s side: they are from Mars, I’m from Venus. Heard that one? That’s how that rumor got started, so the polarities got more extreme, and as they get more extreme, they get harder to manage.
There is no fault here, there is no blame, it is not as if you or I caused this. It is just in a process of dividing itself out, and experimenting: lets download some more of higher intelligence into the physical plane, maybe into a monkey body, to a lemur. That is the first monkey, that is where you get the Lemurian race from; injecting higher consciousness, stellar consciousness into an animal form. The first monkey couldn’t handle it and died, eventually they got it in there, but at a price, because the energies were so polarized that they started to feel separated from it’s original self.
There is still a pathway there, all the ingredients are still inside, you have this Yin Qi, the Yang Qi and the original Qi, but mostly you have this Yin and Yang Qi. You are getting very polarized, and very easy then if you evolve over the next couple hundred thousand years, or a million years, or however long it took, it is very easy to form judgments, it is very easy to hate something apart from yourself, and not recognize it as yourself, even though it is coming from the same original heaven because you are so polarized, you don’t remember. It is very easy to have conflicts internally because these energies inside you are not in harmony.
The five elements, the five phases that we talked about earlier, they are all functioning in you but at a reduced level of awareness. So everything gets stepped down: it is still there, you are still a microcosm of everything. All the ingredients of the universe, that are birthing the universe, everything is coming from the same original heaven. Some of it is going out into stars and heaven, some of it is going into plants and rocks, and some of it is going into us.
That is why animals have essentially the same genetic code as us, we are coming from the same source. I think some of you know, and have read in the papers, is that difference genetically between a mouse and human beings is 3% difference in the gene code, the difference between a monkey and a human is 1.3%: those are just the patterns of Jing. The DNA is just the printout, the intelligence, different levels of intelligence, of connection to the Shen, the spirit, we have a greater connection.
KAN & LI AS ENERGETIC EQUIVALENT OF “OPPOSABLE THUMB”
You have heard of human beings having the opposable thumb, have you heard of that? Everybody here have one? Just check it out, and see what it is. That should grasp tools right? Is that why you are so smart and so advanced, and able to build atomic bombs, and blow yourself up? No. That is only one small aspect, and that is a physical aspect. You have an opposable mind, you have the ability to grasp with the Yin and Yang aspects, the left and right brain. The Yin and Yang Shen, the spirits within you are able to grasp something else with their polarity, a third force.
That is why you are so smart. It is not just because you can manipulate tools. Monkeys have opposable thumbs, too. But we higher human monkeys are able to manipulate energies, and concepts, and feelings, and change them around again, again and again until you get tired of that toy, and then get another one. It is just like the opposable thumb, only it is happening on a psychic and spiritual level, it is highly polarized.
But even in that polarity, you can grasp what the opposing sides of your brain, what the inner male and inner female are seeking. what is it you most deeply want to grasp? Simply put, you seek a return to your original self. You are grasping other things, thinking they will complete your energy, and eventually they may. If you are a male, you grasp for the female, if you are hungry, you grasp for food if you are hot, you grasp for hot, if you are hot, you grasp for cold.
You are always trying to find something else, and you are interested in finding something in the middle. You are not trying to get too cold, or too hot, you are trying to get it just right. You don’t want too much of women or too much of men, you will get sick of them, they are different from you. You want just as much of them as you want, just enough to satisfy yourself, just enough to bring yourself to that right spot.
This is all a gifted memory of your trying to grasp your original Qi. That is your original self. So the function of alchemy is to help you speed up that process. Alchemy takes who you are, divides it out into three forces, recombines it and presto, it purifies it and you have some more Yuan Qi, Yuan Shen or Yuan Jing. There are specific stages for each of those. That is all it is.
The reason for wanting to grasp that, the reason for doing alchemy is because of this cosmology, because we have lost our connection to that original spark. It is still inside of us, but it is buried, it is like a deep unconscious witness. We know there is somebody in there watching as wee go through all these phases in our life, all these different personality changes, from a baby, a little toddler body to a young hormones on feet teenager body, to an alien elderly body, there is still one witness watching all of these things, and remembering all these things, and holding all of these things inside, and that is your original self. Just the fact that you can witness it is not enough. You want it to become actively present, and when it becomes actively present, you retain your health, you retain your choice, and you can participate in creating your reality.
DOES “SELF” CREATE OR MERELY SHAPE OUR REALITY?
This new age slogan where you can create your own reality is misinterpreted to mean that your ego self can create it’s own reality. But that is not what you want, that is the problem. The problem is that your fragmented self is creating it’s own reality, and that reality is a mess, it is not in balance, it is not embracing all the forces, it is not connected to all the heavens.
Now the other thing to understand about this cosmology is that heaven is not above your head up in the stars, it is right inside your body. There are many different sects, but starting about 2nd century AD there began a process of temple institutionalized Daoism. But there has always co-existed a daoist hermit tradition, many were just mountain Daoists sitting up there, doing their thing, which was often inner alchemy, in a hut or cave.
That is where this tradition of One Cloud (and Healing Tao) comes from, from the mountain Daoists. The temple Daoists are creating gods and deities and statues inside temples that were approved by the Emperor, and all these other more standard religious things. They are all basically mythologizing the daoist cosmology: they have the three pure ones, they give it some human and cultural forms, but it is essentially the same cosmology. These heavens are not outside of yourself in the temple or in the sky above, they are inside your body-mind micro-cosmos.
The whole function of alchemy is to start opening up the layers, and to harmonize the later heaven layer, the physical body, and the flow of Qi in the physical body. Then take that in one layer, back to your early heaven body, it is just a different kind of energy, and then from there, eventually you get back to the primordial heaven, the chaos (hundun) from which you are creating yourself. There is no where to go, there is nothing to transcend, you are not going to stop creating yourself even if you arrive back in early heaven or in primordial heaven, it doesn’t mean creation stops.
This other diagram here shows the line of creation, from origin to creation, and from creation back to origin. You are just constantly cycling back and forth. It is not that you are really creating the universe from scratch in each moment; you are just reshaping the energy field that’s here. That is pulsing back and forth, it happens so fast that you don’t see it, you are dissolving back into the source in each moment, and in each moment, you are birthing it back out, only it is slightly different.
In that moment, you scratched your nose, your blood flowed, you had a thought, a feeling: this is what allows you to change, the fact that the universe is rebirthing itself, and reorganizing itself, according to your will. I want to blow my nose, I want to scratch, I’m doing higher math, it doesn’t matter, it is just how you are reshaping the Qi field. So this way you can begin to understand that the spirit shapes the energy, and the energy becomes form, and there you got it, in that moment, that is what your body is like. That is the shape of your physical reality, the whole thing dissolves, and it goes back in, back inside you, then it comes back out again, in the next nanosecond, back out and allowing you to have a slightly different change in yourself.
This cycle of moving between creation and origin, also has a macrocosmic cycle, where it seems like you are born in one moment, and you go through so many decades of life and then you check out and you go back. But during that whole time, you are still doing the same thing, there is a vibration moving back and forth, so it not like your spirit left you when you got born, and then when you die, you go back to the spirit realm. This is just complete ignorance, to think that your spirit suddenly left when you got born, and now you are not in the spiritual realm, and now you in some physical realm. The spirit is still here, but you are distracted by the intensity of physicality, all the elements are still here.
So the purpose of this kan and li meditation is to start getting you to say hey, how do I take these things back down, from the patterns of the eight cosmic forces dancing around here, and the ninth force of the yuan qi in the center almost invisible, and unconscious. How do I start to gather those forces back down to the physical self, consciously?
This is what the eight extraordinary channels, as well as the fusion of the five elements is about. It’s about learning how to manage the eight channels: the arm and leg channels, the thrusting channels, the belt channel, the front and back channel. Who is managing it? The five Shen, the spirits of your heart, liver, lungs, spleen and kidneys. When those spirits get back together, and they are managing the Qi, and they take it back to the next level, back to the level of three, and the three divides, and it becomes five, and the five divides, and it becomes nine. That is all it is doing, alchemy is retracing that consciously. How do you gather yourself into a level of three instead of having it polarized out into five different aspects, and five elements, I want to go down into a deeper dimension, and a deeper heaven, and that is how you do it.
CROSSING THE MESH BOUNDARY BETWEEN BODY AND SPIRIT
Just think of it as if you had kind of a coarse membrane. On one side of it is the physical plane, and here is this coarse membrane, and then on the other side is early heaven, the formless self. You have form there, but you can’t see it, it is not solid right? If you had to go from this side of this membrane to that side, to get through that membrane, it is a kind of a fine mesh, but you have to get your particle size down, the consciousness to a certain vibrational speed, a certain fineness of vibration so that you can fit through the mesh, otherwise it acts as a boundary, and you get up against it and you go I can’t go there.
So we are all temporarily “stuck” in the physical plane.But if you raised your vibration, you could easily penetrate the formless inner plane, have an experience, as the other part of yourself that is there already, and maybe you can look back and say oh, that’s what my physical self looks like from this side of the mesh, isn’t that interesting, I thought I was stuck over there, but part of my consciousness is over here looking in. Then you could shift it back here, and you could play through that boundary.
To get through the boundary is the challenge. If you have a big ego, like the chunk of a rock, it just doesn’t go through. You have dissolve those energy patterns, get them back to a little finer vibrations, and then they move right through. The same thing with your body. Your body starts getting a certain imbalance. In certain elements you are weak, for whatever reason: you weren’t born with enough wood element, or you have too much fire, you had this or that, or you were in an environment that was excessive, and there was this cold, cold climate, and you had cold parents, or whatever it was, and this whacked you out, and you have weak organs as an expression of that, of your Qi field. What happens is because you can’t get your Qi field into balance, you might have certain faculties very highly developed to break through that mesh, but the other parts are stuck here.
That is another way that the Chinese would draw a distinction between enlightenment and immortality: with enlightenment you can look through the mesh with part of yourself, maybe part of you can go through it and look around. With immortality, you are actually integrating all of yourself so you can go through that mesh, through that boundary, but you have to give up your fear, causing a contraction in big chunks of your psyche, ego chunks, and keeping your body vibrating at a slower speed. If you want to resonate with this heaven only, and it doesn’t want to believe that it is also connected in to this other level of your self.
So that is all it really is: this is a very simple process of gathering in all the aspects of your psyche, and saying hey, I want to assert my self out into Yin and Yang aspects, that means inner male and inner female aspects, and I want the male and the female that are naturally attracted to each other to couple, I want them to make love. In the process you may give birth to more original Qi, between your core Yin and Yang coupled, that is what happens. They tend to birth Yuan Qi, and then the vibration, that expands the space between the molecules, that dissolves the rigidity of the ego, and now you are able to move through the mesh, now you are able to actually see and communicate with the subtle parts of yourself, the formless parts of your mind. They are here all along, they are inside you right now, but you are not communicating with them because you are vibrating so slowly that that part of you seems like a foreign planet.
This process, starts off with the lesser Kan and Li right inside your own body, because if you can get it right here, then you can stand out and you can start to do the same thing in the macrocosm. That is the greater Kan and Li, you start going inside all the forces out there, and you start coupling areas, and dissolving the blockages there, and opening communication. Then you go to the planets, that is the greatest Kan and Li, and you start communicating with parts of yourself that are still parts of the planetary level.
When you came in, and you birthed yourself, and you stepped yourself down, it is like you passed through all these levels, and you just left a part of you, you parked a part of your consciousness there, part of it in the sun and moon, part of it in the planets, some of it up in the stars. When you started stepping yourself down, a big hunk of it in the Earth, that is the really unconscious piece, and then you finally stepped yourself into human form, coming in at the right moment, invited by your parents. But your consciousness had to step itself all the way down.
All these formulas are doing is tracking yourself back up, stage by stage, and reunifying this individual consciousness with each level of consciousness, and seeing that the same patterns are there. The consciousness of the planets, like Earth, or any of the other planets in the sky, sun and moon, they all must follow the same laws of the life force that human beings must follow, there is only one Qi field, it has the same principles.
It is all organized around expanding and contracting, and stabilizing, Yin, Yang and Yuan: those three forces are operating on the planetary level, the galactic level, and they are operating at the human level, so you can understand what is inside yourself, if you can talk to yourself in this language of the life force, you can talk to anything anywhere, in any dimension, you can navigate anywhere. So you start with what is close to home, and if you skip this step, you can still talk on other levels, you can have some unconscious resistance; it is not going to stabilize.
You can communicate with stellar beings, you can open up and channel in the consciousness of the sun or the planets, but theis how well are you going to be able to digest it, do you have a space, a vehicle to hold their consciousness inside your human form? Again, do you want to build your house starting with the roof, or do you want to build it starting with the foundation? This is the second level, the foundation.
The first level is learning to open up the channels, balance out the Yin and the Yang with the healing sounds, release the extreme imbalances of the vital organ spirits, fusion of the five elements, we did a meditation this morning starting to see that they can actually, when I had you draw in your potential for love, the potential for kindness, where do you have those qualities coming from? Where are you drawing it from?
You are drawing it from early heaven, from another dimension of yourself, when those are in a pure state, they are not affected by what happens on the physical plane. Everybody on the planet could murder everybody else, we could blow ourselves up, and the potential is still there in early heaven for total love, total peace, and total harmony. It is likely that everybody would be there at the same time, because the life force has a self-correcting mechanism, and it always has a balance between Yin and Yang forces.
Sometimes to keep that balance, we have to go through cataclysmic change in order to balance, sometimes there will be earthquakes, there will be floods, sometimes there will be wars, which is just the human beings way of trying to balance out the global psyche, that is just a choice, you can balance it out with love, or you can balance it out with war. You are going to affect some kind of change until it finally comes into balance though. That is the law of the universe; it has to maintain an overall total equilibrium. That is the big picture in terms of the cosmology. Any questions about that cosmology?
What I said was that you are going to give substance to your spirit. The confusion I hear arising in your question, is why do I need to give birth to a spirit, if I already have a spirit? Here is where we are running up against western concepts of the soul and the identity. The here is that you have just one soul, and you have to save that soul, maybe it was the center, this is the predominant idea: I’m a little defective but I have a soul and a spirit, and I just need to save it, from itself maybe or whatever, from the devil.
The Daoist alchemical idea is that the original spirit exists, and it has divided itself out to manifest here, and that basically a human being is an experiment, you don’t own your soul: you have a team arrangement which is here provisionally, and if it integrates, then it continues evolving, if it doesn’t integrate, heaven and Earth say fine, lets take back the elements of it into the larger pool of consciousness in Heaven and Earth, and we will try a different combination.
This is where I say it was different from the Buddhist theories, and the Hindu; the Buddhists got their ideas from the Hindu, Buddhism is an offspring of Hinduism. They put out this idea that you evolve from a plant to a frog to an animal to a human, and if you are bad, you fall back to a frog. This is a childish story put out by priests to intimidate peasants, in my view; you are welcome to have it. Transmigration of our human soul through different animals forms is a total myth. That is different from the human embryo recapitulating all of its evolution in the womb.
From a Daoist cosmology, human beings don’t control the evolution of total reality; it is controlled by heaven and Earth. These are what divides out from your original being, it divides out into heaven and Earth, and then heaven and Earth copulate, and humanity is their offspring, all plant forms, all mineral forms, are the offspring of heaven and Earth. Those are our true parents: Heaven and Earth are copulating, and they are constantly producing this reality, human beings and their need to have a story about themselves, that’s what religion is, how did I get here, where am I going. They have created these stories that are basically very ego centric, anthropocentric is the term that is used, and so, they give all the power to what the human beings are doing.
So what the Daoists are saying is that you have to qualify, in order to become a creator, you have to mimic what the life force is doing universally, you have to learn how to manage that, so we will keep combining ourselves back together until you evolve yourself until you actually take responsibility for your own creation. But if you are at war with yourself, the Dao doesn’t want you out there creating again and again and again, this kind of war, so basically it says that’s a failed experiment, lets dissolve that one, you go back into the pool, lets see if we can try this again, and get this to integrate.
Different spirits in you are basically, you could say they have signed a contract, they are engaged, but they are not married yet: until they really spiritually integrate, that soul that you have that is acting as the overall container for all these different aspects of consciousness, doesn’t have permanent form, it can just dissolve at death. If it integrates, and achieves a certain level of spiritual consciousness, parts of it will stay integrated, and the parts that don’t integrate will disperse. The heavy parts go back to Earth, and the light parts go back to heaven: that is the Hun and Po soul. This is why it is so important to understand that you have these streams of consciousness inside of you: you have to couple them, and integrate them, if you don’t do it, if you don’t have the will, the different aspects of your will come together into one, who is going to do it for you?
The whole point is that you develop the inner will, if heaven and Earth have to step in and say oh, you are a bad guy, and you are good, spank you and say now you have to get together, now you act good, and you act this way, and so on, nothing has been learned or developed. This is why heaven and Earth don’t step in and control things, because they are waiting for humanity to keep growing from their experience, and start integrating. This is taking responsibility.
That means you have to take responsibility for the whole process, from primordial heaven, birthing yourself from the gestational heaven and back again, and when you have achieved the will to shift freely between those dimensions, then the universe goes oh, you can create, because you know how to do it. But if you are a thick headed human, sitting here saying I am my body, and you have no idea how you got here, how can you possibly create? Other than your thoughts or your speech, you can create something here, but you are not getting to the level of substance of creation. You are just getting to the level of some level of expression of these different forces within you.
That is the difference, it is a different point of view, try it on, try it on for a week here, it will open up some new doorways for resolving some of the deep conflicts within yourself, tension between your spirit and your body. If you are just one soul, how can you have an argument with yourself? How can you have two points of view inside yourself, how can you love life, and also want to end it, how can you hate your body, but also want to keep on living? You have all these conflicts, where are they coming from? All these voices, where are they coming from?
If you are just one person, one soul, you are just going to have one feeling, one thought. So your original spirit, your original Shen is that way, but we have lost that. That is not who we are now. We are a crowd of soul fragments, and we are trying to grow them back together, and integrate them, and let them realize where they came from, and that is a challenge. You know you don’t have to be 100%, it is not black or white, I’m successful or not successful, it is just a process, doing this as part of a universal process.
DAOIST ALCHEMICAL VIEW OF REINCARNATION
We are getting ahead now into the details of the reincarnation question. I’ll give you the short version of it. You can have future and past memories, but where are they coming from? If you are a multiplicity of souls, everyone of them has future and past memories, it doesn’t mean that you were the same single entity in a past life, or in some future life, it means that those components of you are/were there having that experience. As you move into early heaven and primordial heaven, you move beyond the linear time zone of later heaven where it all looks linear. This is the problem with the reincarnation theory, is that it all looks as if it was happening linearly, one life, the second life and then the third life, but that is not the way creation goes, creation is not linear, it is from the center out, from the eternal present moment out to the peripheral physical creation.
When you move into early heaven, you are able to shift beyond that time zone; you are able to see all your lives at the same time, and all these lives of all these fragments. They are very permeable, and co-exist and occasionally bleed over across the timelines. You can be having a memory, and it can be coming from your kidney spirit, in it’s last lifetime it was in a certain body in a certain time and space, and it can be holding fear from that. Your heart can be coming in from a completely different incarnation, say the heart spirit had a life filled with joy.
So here is a new combination, lets put this one that had extreme fear with this one that had extreme love, and lets see how they do together here, if they can create something new and exciting. It is not a fixed thing.
There are two main timelines that we want to get more clear on, there is a biological timeline, and a spiritual timeline. Obviously the biological timeline is going to follow a linear sequence, the parents, grandparents, great, great grand parents etcetera. I’m talking here about your spiritual timeline, and that is not controlled by physical space and time. It is controlled by what we call the consciousness of heaven and Earth.
Consciousness of heaven and Earth just means later heaven and early heaven, consciousness that has taken physical form, and the consciousness that is in the formless, and they are constantly copulating, and producing creation, and it is new. If it wasn’t new, the universe would be totally bored with it self. If people’s had souls that kept running around the same little mill all the time, creation would probably just dry up.
It is constantly experimenting and trying to create new combinations of itself. That is how you can have children that might have some characteristics of the mother, some characteristics of the father, and some that might be seeming to be coming out of the blue, we don’t know where it is coming from: that is the third force, the spiritual lineage coming in. Any other questions?
ALCHEMY AS PERFECTION OF SPIRIT AND BODY
The question is, are you just changing the awareness of the spirit body, or are you changing the substance of it? You are refining both. In alchemy you’re taking your later heaven substance, your later heaven spiritual qualities. And your later heaven energies. You are purifying them, you are changing them, and you are recombining them. When they recombine, there is a new level of integration and substance, and quality, in that spirit body. It is not somebody just going “I just noticed that”. Of course all of it occurs through shifts in awareness, but as I said before, the secret lies in the Jing, the Jing is the most contracted part, holding the substance.
So people get into a spiritual phase of feeling “I’m so aware, I’m in touch with the stars, I’m hearing everything, and knowing everything”, but they don’t know what is going on inside their own body. They are not aware of what is producing their own individual state of consciousness, even though they are tuning into the macrocosm, they are totally unaware of how they create their body, and they take it as a dumb given, my body is just here. But how did it get here? How is it getting here each moment? Are you aware of that, of what it is going through, of all the shapes and all the forces creating that? Most people aren’t, including many people otherwise highly spiritually evolved.
As I said, we are tackling the difficult question of alchemy, which is the problem of the body. Most religions, and many spiritual paths do not want to deal with this problem. If you hear a philosophy that says you are already perfect, you don’t need to do anything, it is all awareness, what essentially they are saying is that your original Shen is perfect, your original awareness is perfect: it is. Then why do you have pain, why is there still struggling? Because there are patterns here that are not in harmony. You can just focus on the Shen, the spirit, and say the spirit is perfect, but does it have a perfect awareness and perfect relationship with the Jing? When someone talks about spirit, are they talking about the body spirits – the vital organ intelligences – that are certainly part of the universal or original spirit?
And does the person who believes spirit is already perfect have any understanding of what is Jing? Jing is just contracted spirit, it spirit still holding form here in the physical. If your spirit is perfect, then why can’t you just shape shift right now from jing/body form into a pure spiritual state? Why won’t the spirit that is contracted into your form do that?
So the method of saying you are already perfect is just a spiritual teaching that is trying to get you to relax, and accept who you are, so you can go in and look deeper, and say I’m noticing that it is perfectly okay to be in contraction, and have fear, and to have all these other things, because that is what I have inherited, there is nothing imperfect about that, that is just part of the reality that you have been delivered when you came into a body. You are given all these ancestral and karmic things, and told hey, transform them, live them out and bring them back transformed, back to your original self.
It is a perfectly good teaching, “you are perfect already” it is just trying to get you out of self-judgment. But you can observe that there are imbalances without judging, or being judgmental. You can neutrally observe there is excess contraction here; there is fear here without judging the fear, without judging the contractions or the sexual uptightness.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JING AND SEXUAL ENERGY (JING QI)
Most religions, most teachers don’t want to get into the body because it is like a loaded gun. It is where all the deep problems are hiding, particularly in the area of the sexual energy because of the problem when you split the body into male and female, and the loss of original Qi. The sexuality is right dead center at the core of it. How many religions want to solve your sexual identity problem? I haven’t heard of very any.
Most of them want to say get married that’s it, don’t fuck around. That is the law. They have it written in the book: get married, don’t fuck around, that’s it. You don’t need to know anything else, that’s it, that’s it. That is not it: that’s all I’m saying.
The key piece is your Jing, is the polarized sexual energy. An important thing to understand is that sexual energy is not the same thing as Jing. Jing is your substance, the essence, you create, it has the desire to perpetuate itself, so it creates sexual desire, an offspring of it. An offspring of it, sexual qi is not identical to jing. Jing is what has the desire, sexual qi is one expression of that desire.
Why do you keep wanting to have children, why do you have the desire to have a lineage, why does humanity want to keep reproducing itself, some part of it wants to come back into form. There is a primordial desire, that substance wants to have more substance, it doesn’t want to have to disappear, and go back into spirit, it likes it here, it likes having a body, it likes having a mirror, it likes seeing itself. Here I am! Angels can’t feel themselves; they don’t know what they look like. We have that.
That is why there is a big line all the way around the cosmos to get in here. This is the most exotic zoo in the entire universe, and they all want to come in because for Spirit this is like going into the Wild West. Not only do you get a body, but also each one is custom made and different. You should go to some planet where there is a bunch of aliens, and they all look like insects, and they are all cloned, they are all stamped out of the same thing, so they are very harmonious societies, like insect societies.
That is why we are so afraid of aliens, because they look like insects, we are afraid of losing our individuality, so we are in fear of that. We finally have a body, and here we are, and we don’t know how to use it, we don’t know all the treasures buried in here, the capacity for individual connection with the universal mind from this very limited and contracted point in space and time
Having the body is like having a slingshot, you pull it way, way back, and the thing that is pulled back here is so contracted, your tiny little body, the universal consciousness pulled all the way back, that the further you pull yourself back into matter, the greater the tension is, the pull on the rubber band, and if you just let go, you can fly all the way back to primordial heaven, you can fly all the way back to your original self. The more contracted you get, the greater your potential for spiritual enlightenment.
That is why everyone wants a body, because you can evolve super fast in a body. That’s why it is so troubling for people who commit suicide, they lose their consciousness, and they are stuck, and they can’t evolve very fast, and they have to wait until they dissolve, or the universe takes them back up and recycles them back through. This is a different point of view than some of you may have heard before, so just try it on.
DAOIST RELATIONSHIP OF STUDENT AND TEACHER
I don’t care personally whether you believe me or not, it doesn’t matter to me. I think we should talk about our relationship. I’m not interested in having anybody follow me, or imitate me; I’m interested in having you unfold your own essence, that to me is evolving things. If you are following me around, and looking to me for the answers, that means that you haven’t started looking inside yourself, and you haven’t learned the process by which you do it.
In the beginning stages you have different teachers, and you are trying to get used to it, and you need help. It is a lot faster having a teacher. It doesn’t mean you hang on to their skirts, or their trousers in this case, because that defeats the whole purpose of your spiritual independence. It also ties up my energy, so I’m really not interested in that. I’m really just here to share my experience, and you should just take the part of it that resonates with you, and leave the rest, that’s all.
That’s what works, that’s what I’ve always done. That worked for me, and I’m just suggesting that it can work for you. It doesn’t mean you are going to do everything exactly the way I do it, you are going to change things around because you have a different nature, there are different ways to practice, we’ll get into that later this week.
There are different ways to do these practices, there are more Yin practices, and more Yang practices. Everybody has a different nature so you are going to be attracted to different aspects in these practices, and I’m going to give you a whole range of them, so you can find something that works for you. From very simple to more projected and guided, telling the life force what you want to create, to the more Yin, I’m open, this is the shape I’d like to attract these energies into me. There is a whole spectrum in there.
The whole idea is getting into a fluid relationship with the life force. I am just the finger pointing at the moon. What is the moon? The moon is the life force, I am here to introduce you to your teacher, your teacher is the Qi field. It is super intelligent, and I am just saying shake hands, here you are, shake hands with yourself, shake hands with your insides, and once you have the connection and you can communicate with the life force directly, you don’t need me. That is all I’m here for, to introduce you to your teacher, and that teacher will never leave you, will never abandon you, it is always present. I’m going to leave here after a week and say bye-bye. I might come back next year, you might see me again for a week and on the energetic planes, sure we can stay connected but basically you have to accept that this is your own process,
You have got to feel comfortable opening up communications with your teacher, your teacher is the life force. It is very reliable, it never cheats on you, never leaves you, you can’t get away from it. That’s a little annoying sometimes.
KAN & LI AND CYCLE OF EQUINOX AND SOLSTICE
What is the significance of learning Kan & Li at this time of the equinox?
The fact that the equinox is a big event, planetary alignment, means that the kan and li energies are already present here, in fact they are sometimes stronger going into it. What are the energies of the fall equinox? It is the day of the year when night and day are equal lengths. In terms of the whole annual cycle of Qi, the winter solstice is contracting and the summer solstice is expanding, the Yang forces are increasing, the day is getting longer. From summer solstice to winter solstice, the days are growing shorter, and the Yin aspect of the life force is increasing and expanding, just like the Tai Ji symbol. Spring and fall equinoxes are midpoints on the ascension and descension in this process, so these are the days of perfect balance. This is an extremely auspicious period for us to be learning these alchemical practices because they are essentially about balancing the extremes of Yin and Yang.
The most important thing to understand about all the solstices and equinoxes is that there is an abundance of cosmic Yuan Qi present during these time periods. When these forces get into balance, usually during the turnaround between yin-yang extremes of summer and winter, and the balance points of spring and fall. The overall balance of the Qi field comes into a point of equilibrium or change at the extremes of the solstices, and the Yuan Qi expands out, spontaneously available to us.
This is why in almost all cultures you will find there are various festival or cultural days laid over these events. The meaning is lost why they did it originally, the ancients who understood the cycles understood why. That Yuan Qi is a big boost towards recovering your original self, and towards your making changes in the pattern of your old self, that has become a little conditioned, a little fixed, a little stuck in the ordinary cycle of physical time.
We are here together, we are going to do a powerful ceremony, and we are doing it at a powerful site, at Stonehenge. It is important that you have an intention when you do this ceremony. The intention is what do you want to change, because this is a moment of neutrality, where if you insert your intention into the ceremony, the life force is very open, and can penetrate deeper into the Qi field, because it is mostly neutral, Yuan Qi. You will get a faster and more powerful response from the universe. You will find it easier to change. This is completely up to you, what you choose to manifest.
I will just give you some advice. It is usually helpful to flow with that season, right now is the time of autumn, of leaves dropping off, and moving into winter, basically a time of dying, dying means letting go. This is a great time to let go of some problem, of some obstacle, of something you want to get rid of in your life. It could be that you wanted to sell some property, it would be a very auspicious time to do this ceremony, and to say I want to release and sell this property for such and such a price.
It could be I have had trouble getting a raise, and I want to let go of my problem. It could be that you are letting go of your resistance to something happening in your life it could be a health issue. It could also just be a time of penetrating inward, going in deeper. There could be some aspect of your life that you want to go in deeper to, some aspect of your life. You want to understand better about yourself, it could be a spiritual aspect, or it could be completely material.
The only thing you have to know is that whatever you ask for, you have to be prepared to receive. If you ask for a big change, sometimes these changes come and you are shocked, and you have to change your life to accommodate that thing you are asking for. So just take a minute or two right now, and think about that.
What is it you want to let go? What do you want to go deeper into, what aspect of yourself do you want to die so that you can rebirth something else. Maybe you want to let go of a disease, let go of a disease patter, or an emotional pattern that has been an obstruction for you. Let go of a struggle, let go of poverty. These are all shapes, these are all energetic shapes, everything happening in your life has an energetic shape, and if you don’t like it, this is a great time to let it go of that energetic pattern.
One of your Shen is holding that pattern, so what you are really doing is giving instructions to the life force, and telling your Shen I want you align with a new pattern, I don’t want you to hold onto the pattern that is dysfunctional, struggle, poverty, disease, emotional, anger, whatever, I want you to let go of it. Then the cosmic forces come in and give it a big whack of Yuan Qi, and suddenly you are free from it. It dissolves; Yuan Qi dissolves things, and allows new things to crystallize. You can continue thinking about this, because we are not going to do this ceremony right now. I want you to have had some quiet moments to think about this.
At some point during the ceremony, I will ask you to invoke your intention, of course it will be the climax of the ceremony, where we have gathered and generated the most powerful Qi field in the already existing Qi field of Stonehenge.
Now I’m turning off the tape recorder, and we will go into the details of the ceremony. The last thing, is right when we finish the double clockwork movement, at the end of that, when I stop beating the drum, at that point, disconnect your hands, because you are now not trying to make a collective Qi field, you are now concerned with your own individual intention, and at that moment, express silently internally your intention, what you wish to let go of, what you wish to change. At that moment, the vortex will be open for deep communication between heaven and Earth, and you put your intention into that vortex, and it will manifest. It has to by the spiritual laws, if you are clear, and if the energies are clear. That is how things get created, that is all there is to it.
It really comes down to the question of how much resistance do you have, how clear are you. How much do you really want it? If you don’t really want it, if you are ambivalent about it, your ambivalence will be expressed, it’s not just the words that you say but what is in your heart. If you are ambivalent, then you will get your ambivalence back. If you are really clear about something, and if you really need it, then the life force says fine, I know what you want and now I can act on it, now I can start to arrange the wheels, the synchronicity, and manifest that. You don’t need to be concerned with how that happens; you don’t need to know the details about how that happens. That is perhaps beyond you. Any other questions?
How many times in the second phase? You keep going back and forth until I feel the energy has opened, the vortex, and the dragon is descending into the Earth. We might do it nine times; we will just keep building it. It is the friction between the Yin and the Yang forces in the ceremony that creates more and more spinning vortex, and opens up the Yuan Qi in the center. I’m just going to be monitoring that, it’s up to this group how fast we create that, what the energies are in Stonehenge, I don’t know.
STONEHENGE, ATLANTIS AND LEMURIA
Stonehenge, what is it doing there? Everybody has their own theories, I have mine. Barry was just handing out a thing here saying the idea that the Celts arrived from Western Europe, and then spread out to the coastline of England and Ireland is a crock, it is the other way around, something arrived here on the shores, and spread inwards. The Celts did not come from India. I believe they were just different tribes that arrived from Atlantis, in the Diaspora. They brought with them varying levels of technology, architectural, astronomical and other things, very advanced culture.
They more or less arrived in a big way at the same time, and resurrected various aspects of their culture. Some went to Egypt and built the pyramids, and some went to India, and invaded India, what they call the Aryans. The Hindu culture from my point of view is largely Atlantean: sun worshipping and fire worshipping. I think there was even some influence into China, there was a mixture of some elements, came into some of the aspects of the Daoist culture, which was essentially Lemurian. The Kan and Li work is fire and water, it is not just a water path, it is fire and water. It incorporates both.
I believe Stonehenge is a calendrical device, and it is also kind of a landing pad designed to welcome certain visitors from the sky, and to mark when they might come back. The Atlanteans I believe, one of the reasons their culture became so advanced, was that they borrowed some technology from some extraterrestrial sources. This allowed them to accelerate their technological development, which they were not quite equipped to handle on a psychological, emotional, mental and spiritual level. They, the beings they borrowed this technology from departed, and they built various monuments, astronomical observatories and calendrical things to mark the time when they thought they would come back.
That is my own opinion, based on extensive work with some Atlantean teachers. You can take that with a grain of salt, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever set it up, moved around some really heavy stones, and had some pretty amazing astronomical knowledge. The alignment is there; ceremonies have been done there for close to 6000 years, or more. So we need to respect the energies of those who have been there before us, and at the same time we are adding in our own, we are using the space that has been created, and are building on it. I think it will be a powerful ceremony.
KIDNEY – HEART ALCHEMICAL QIGONG
(Adapted from Alchemical Crane/Five Animals, but done sitting):
We have taken the Qi from our inner heart spirit, and we are connecting it into the inner point of the Ming men, in between the two kidneys, and are connecting it to the inner spirit of the two kidneys.
Now imagine that one of these beams coming from your palms is red, and the other one is blue. Let the left one be red, and the right one be blue, reflecting the polarization of the two kidneys into left and right, the Yin and Yang kidneys. So those two beams are fusing into a single point. At that point where they neutralize each other, just imagine a gold pearl.
Now start doing some internal healing sounds, the heart and the kidney sounds. We are going to breath up and inhale the kidney sounds. The kidney sound is the chooo sound. When you inhale it, it sounds like chooo. Make a round circle with your lips and inhale, and feel the cool air passing over your teeth. The teeth are the only exposed bones in your body. Bones are controlled by the spirit of the kidneys; the Jing essence is inside the bone. The bones are guarding your essence. When you physically die, what remains? Sometimes after millions of years, it is your bones. They hold the vibration that connects you and brings you back to the Earth.
Thee of Feng Shui was developed originally because the vibrations of the bones of the ancestors needed to be placed in a favorable environment unless they disturb the bones of the living. As you inhale, and you do the kidney sounds, you are activating this essence inside the bones. As you breathe in and inhale through the teeth, that resonates through all the bones of your entire body.
With your mind you feel like you are drawing up the entire essence from the kidneys, from the inner kidney spirit, in the Ming men point, inhaling it up the back, along the spine, into the area of your inner heart. Just try that. Chooooo, and feel cool blue liquid light, or blue mist with a lot of substance to it, you are breathing up to the heart center. Choooo, choooo, choooo. And pause for a moment
Now lets do the same thing with the heart sound, we are going to exhale it from the heart down the front, down the inner channel in the front, down into the Ming men point in between the two kidneys, and see red clouds, warm or even fiery Qi, or red liquid inner light, flowing down from the heart, down to the Ming men.
Lets do that with the fire first, inhaling, and exhaling the haaaa sound down to the kidneys. Now lets start to mix the two, inhale cool blue liquid light from the kidneys up the back, along the inside of the spine into the palace of the heart spirit, sub vocally drawing in the chooo sound, and exhaling from the palace of the heart spirit down the inside front channel, into the Ming men, the points between the two kidneys. The palace of the kidney spirit. Exhaling the haaa sound, bright red liquid light, or clouds of red mist. Do that repeatedly.
Continue distinguishing as you do this, between the cool Qi coming up from the Ming men, from the spirit of the kidneys, and the warm Qi flowing down from the inner heart spirit. END Meditation
CORE THEORY OF KAN & LI PRACTICE
The pathways we are using to connect the inner heart and inner kidney spirit, is described in ancient Chinese texts, what are usually described as medical texts, but are in fact spiritual texts. This heart-kidney link is a special channel called the Bai Mo. The heart and the kidneys have a special relationship with each other, they are essentially the inner king and inner queen that rule your consciousness, and rule and regulate your body, and personality. They are a kind of inner husband and wife, when they get along well, you feel very happy, you feel bliss.
When they are not talking to each other, you feel estranged. When they want a divorce, you feel like dying. The most common time for people to commit suicide is after a romantic relationship is broken off, they have mistaken the other persons heart connection to their own kidney spirit for their own, so when their relationship breaks off, they feel as if their own heart kidney relationship has broken off. So they want to die, life doesn’t seem like it is worth living.
The process is very simple, gathering Yin and Yang essences, inverting them and coupling them. It is really not very complicated. There are a lot of forms, and a lot of different ways to do it. Mostly there are a lot of different applications to it, for dissolving core issues, traumas, for rejuvenating various parts of your nervous system, your lymphatic, and circulatory system, and for using it to open up your inner vision, which from the Daoist point of view doesn’t come just from the third eye, but from the whole core channel you can open up many different levels of your inner eye, depending on what you want to look into.
We will go through all of these practices this week with these applications, but the core practice is very simple. You will get better at it, as you practice it more, and the life force begins to understand exactly what you want to do. Again, all of these meditations, all the Qigong are just communications with the Qi field, you are expressing exactly how you want to arrange these three core forces, the Yin, the Yang, and the Yuan, the positive, the negative, and the neutral. The arrangement of those energies is what produces the accelerated transformation. We will go through the most effective ways of doing it, the most effortless ways of doing it, and we will go through what our resistances are, to accelerating our transformation. It has to do with our inner family of spirits, and their resistances, their incompletions. That is a whole deep subject in itself, which is basically dealing with the problem of negative ego.
I think it might be useful at this point to discuss the whole problem of saying what is my intention? Whether it is in a ceremony, or when you are sitting down and you are meditating, you are having some intention. You could say that any repeated act is a ritual. Sitting down to meditate every day is a ritual, this is really an internal ritual where you are aligning some aspects, some internal forces of your own consciousness, and opening these to some type of change, or some new perception or awareness.
There is always this question of what’s my intention, or is this my ego, or an aspect of myself, or some higher part of me somewhere else that is having an intention, and it is the cause of me, and I am the effect of it? I think that is really what these alchemical practices are about, is understanding this continuity, that there is a continuum of intention, of creation, and we are not separate from any part of that continuum. There is not really a boundary between your lesser and your greater self, it is a continuum, in just the same way that the Jing, Qi and the Shen, the spirit, the Qi energy, and the substance or essence are just a continuum. We separate them out in order to understand them. I think it is useful to look at nature itself as being an alchemist.
Nature separates itself out in different dimensions of spirit, of energy and of matter. Why does it do that? Separating itself out, it is built into our language, we think of the body, mind and spirit. Why do we have this trinity? It is a reflection of what is going on in nature, we separate out, it is somehow alchemically refining itself by manifesting itself out into a physical plane, it is separating something out so that it can se it more clearly. It interacts with it, couples it, makes love with it or whatever, transforms it, and then takes back the essence, and then does it again.
In nature itself, its essences change with the seasons, and essence changes shape as it moves through all the dimensions, whether it is primordial, early heaven or later heaven. If you want to give different names to those dimensions, it doesn’t matter, but the idea is that nature is macrocosmically doing the same process that we are doing microcosmically here. It is doing it on a large scale. All we are really doing is coming into resonance with that. We are not really inventing something new here.
We could say that the Daoists refined the process, they clarified it, and they took it to extremely refined, elegant levels that have been worked over by many, many, many generations of masters. We are continuously incorporating in new elements that come up. So we are actually just in that continuum, aligned with the ancient masters, but also exploring what is happening in our time cycle. We are in this process here, in a new space, a new time, a new generation, and everything that we are doing, we are refining that process, and are bringing in elements of this culture, and the culture of the ancients who have lived here, and in our inner cauldron space, are refining all this together.
There is no such thing as a totally separate intention, but at the same time, you can be very clear that you are speaking from a particular point in space and time, a particular body and particular personality who has certain needs, but is still within the matrix of everything. You need to find that point and be clear about that point to affect the whole, because if you are not clear about where you are in the present moment, then you send confused messages to the whole; then the whole is not sure where you are, because you are a little blurry, you are not quite in focus. A lot of this is embracing both the individual and the whole, simultaneously and saying that they are a continuum, and yet they also have their own functions in the microcosm and the macrocosm.
INTERIOR GODS SCHOOL OF ALCHEMY: THE FIVE SHEN
One of the handouts, the three treasures of the Dao, it’s just to give you some familiarity with the terms, the Jing, Qi and the Shen. The Daoists do everything in trinities, they have the three treasures of man, the three treasures of heaven, the three treasures of Earth. The three treasures of man are the Jing, Qi and the Shen, the spirit, energy and the body or essence. On the right side there, it gives a little summary of what those are. On the back side, this is a handout from one of my Qigong fundamentals courses, the healing sounds.
I will draw your attention to one thing: a lot of people learn the healing sounds as just a sound, a way to let out some excess Qi, but there is a much deeper level of practice that is possible. I am just mentioning this by way of introducing you to the fact that the sounds are ultimately a way to connect with your spirit, with each organ. The Daoists sometimes call these your personal gods, the gods of the body, the body mind. It is not just the physical body, it is the individual self. They are much, much more powerful that you are aware.
Much of your ordinary consciousness is only skimming the surface of their powers: it is their will projected out through the senses so you can see, you can hear, you can talk, you can feel. Those are the powers of these vital organ gods, they are letting you talk, see, feel and think. Most of their power is completely unconscious to you, so you are just skimming along the surface of their life, and you are like the proverbial ice berg, you just think the tip sticking out of the ocean is who you are, and all the other immense parts of yourself are unconscious. The idea that the vital organ spirits, these inner gods, are basically covering all this territory that is hidden. As alchemists, we are asking how does it work, how does it function, what is going on there?
The healing sounds are the first step in the Daoist training to open them up, and free their flow. I have incorporated the healing sounds into the Qigong form we are learning here, so you can have a simple practice, and you can also have the sounds. One of the points I am making here, about deepening their power, is that the whole five elements theory, the five phase theory as it is now more commonly translated, it is really that the phases implies a rhythm of the life force.
The elements are not things, they are not separate, there is only one life force, and it goes through phases. Those phases have different functions, and different kinds of intelligence, different aspects to them as they divide from the original, from the Yuan Qi, the original energy of the original intelligence. This is highlighting the fact that everyone has done a color meditation, or they use sound, or they use geometric shapes, or they’ve worked with breathing or rhythm, or they have felt certain qualities.
So people do a lot of what I call partial practices, they are activating something but they only do it partially. You could do just a visualization, or you could do just an affirmation, and that would activate one aspect of yourself, and focus on doing something positive, but the other aspects may lie dormant because you are not giving them any instructions, you are not activating them at that moment. They are passively standing by, saying okay you are doing a visualization, meanwhile maybe there is some feeling aspect or some sound aspect that can speak, or some aspect that relates to vibration or sound that is not being activated.
The idea is that in order to activate your full power, which essentially means integrating the five Shen to all act in unison, and to all act at once, when you do a practice, the more levels of things that you add simultaneously, the more they are all activated. If someone said be totally present, meaning being present in the exterior world, you would look, you would listen, you might be smelling, and touching it. You would be present with all your senses, all of your spirits would go out and say here is my take, this is what it looks like, this is what it tastes like, it sounds like this, and oh, that’s the thing, now it has complete reality. It is possible to create only partial realities.
What the Daoist practices are really designed to do is that in order to embody your spirit, your original spirit, you need to engage all of your inner powers, not just some of them. That is the difference between visualization, and Qigong. Qigong, you are moving energy, you are not just imaging that it is going to move, there is a difference.
Yes visualization will move some energy, it will give instructions to the life force, and it will start to do something, but that is different than actually having contacted the movement of the energy, and merge with it, and then you are inside the energy moving it from the inside, rather than being up in your head and visualizing that something down there is moving around, and doing something. That’s why the principles are simple, but the practice is not always so simple because we are so fragmented, and we are not used to engaging all the aspects of our self at the same time: we are used to being only partially present, or using only part of our selves to do something.
That is the challenge here, you might find it interesting to work with using the color, the shape, the feeling, the sound and the rhythm all at once, and then you will find that the energy, the Qi completely responds, it has a very powerful effect. That is on the backside of that, it is not really from this course.
I CHING AND ALCHEMY: EARLY HEAVEN AND LATER HEAVEN TRIGRAMS
The other handout here, really it is a two sided handout. I really gave it to you so you could see the two arrangements of the Bagua: the Fu-Xi (“shee”), and the King Wen. One is later heaven, and one is early heaven. King Wen is considered to be the later heaven arrangement, this is the one used by all the Feng Shui people, this is the manifest, the later heaven reality, and the arrangements of the energies, the eight forces. The one on top, the Fu-Xi, is what is called the early heaven arrangement, and that is your unmanifest self, that is the matrix underlying it.
In the diagram that I drew for you yesterday, the three heavens, there is another heaven that does not have trigrams, all those energies, before they divided out, before the one has divided to the two, the two to the three, and the three has divided out into these trigrams, each one with three levels to it. This is not a course on the Yi Jing, so I will not go into it in elaborate detail but it is just important to understand the cosmology, and that this is the foundation. If you start to investigate, and read deeper into things. The Yi Jing/I Ching just offers a language to describe the process, but it is not process itself. The Yi Jing is used for divination; it is used for many different things. It is also used to describe the alchemical process.
On the other side of that handout, this is actually a mistake and I wasn’t actually planning to make copies of it but Barry made copies of it so I decided what the hell, I’ll hand it out. I find that on the path, if there is too much information, people usually don’t understand it, so I don’t give it out, but you can just have it to contemplate, and it has the progression of energies as you move through the three heavens. If you look in the right hand column, you will see how you go from a circle divided into eight potential pieces of pie, to the early heaven arrangement right below it that has heaven above, and Earth below, and fire on the left, and water on the right. That’s when it starts to take shape and form, that square, it is called the squaring of the circle in sacred geometric terms. Then you go down one level lower, and you see the same shape, the eight sided octagon, only fire is on the top, and water is on the bottom, and wood and metal on the left and right, with Earth in the center: this is the later heaven arrangement. This is the arrangement of energy that we are in now.
If you just want to turn over the chart, you will see, look at the bottom diagrams, even the fire and water on the top and bottom, they don’t mirror each other, they are not opposing images of each other. This diagram is said to go in a cycle, it rises and goes up to the top where the fire is, which represents the sun. The Chinese who invented the compass, they put south on the top, not north, because they are oriented towards the experience you are having in nature, which is the sun at the high point of it’s zenith, at the top. They have water, which is the north on the bottom. So this goes around in a cycle. It is much debated as to what the progression is in it.
If you look at the other diagram, you will see how every trigram is the mirror of the one opposite it. So this is how we are talking about the Yuan Qi being sustained in the center because the forces are balanced. The original Qi that is holding the center here, is much more powerful, because all the images hold each other in balance, all the forces, the different combinations of Yin and Yang forces. They don’t do that in the lower cycle: they are unstable, so they keep moving and have a dynamic, they have a pattern, but they are essentially trying to find their center. That is where we find our self here.
You can just have this chart to look at occasionally, it is not that important. What is really important is our practice, understanding your experience. From a Daoist point of view, we have no theology: ultimately the words are not important, you are learning in alchemy to speak a silent language, but I have found that for westerners, it is very important to have a framework, otherwise you have an old mental framework that has not shifted, and you try to do the practices, and in fact it is in conflict with your old set of beliefs, so you are now having a tension between them. So if you have a clear understanding of the theory and the cosmology, it makes it much easier I have found, for the practice to happen.
RELATION OF FIVE PHASES TO THREE PRIMAL FORCES
One of the things, I think it is probably important to understand a little bit more about the fusion, because we did some of the fusion practice the other day. That is the arrangement of the five elements, and how we are getting down to this. The progression is important to understand cosmologically: we are going from five elements down to three forces. What those numbers mean, five elements is the pattern of the intelligences controlling the process of manifestation, so when we shift down, we gather the Yin and Yang elements together to their natural affinities.
Here we gather the wood and the fire energies into the Yang pearl, the Yang essence, and we combine the metal and the water into the Yin essence. We are shifting dimensions. That is why we are doing that. It is really the same collective intelligence; only it is functioning at a different level. It is not operating quite as close to the surface, it is the surface, it is operating a little deeper in, it is closer to the core. One thing that is important to understand is that you have to get the star with the five elements in it. This is the same five pointed star that you have seen in all the western systems as well, although the elements have different names. In China that progression is fire to earth to metal to water to wood: each one supports the other, and each organ that they are connected with supports the functioning of the next, this is the whole basis of Chinese medicine, this chart right here.
It is all the five elements Creation Cycle whether you are doing herbology, or acupuncture, acupressure, or Jin shin do, all these arts, they all come out of this. All the theory, all the points, and the qualities in all the points, they are all based on this. But in alchemy what we are really going to is the core. We just want to understand what the core is. The Creation Cycles are just applications in the outer world. That arrangement is the later heaven arrangement, it is postnatal, it is how you function here.
There is also a control cycle, one element controls the other: fire controls the metal, metal controls the wood, wood controls the Earth, Earth controls the water. That is also part of keeping balance here, the control cycle. Now in the west, our control mechanisms are out of whack; we have this culture of control freaks, that is part of the whole addiction to technology, controlling nature, controlling everything. We are controlling things to death. You build a bomb to control someone else, then they build a bomb and can control you, and everyone is going to drop their bombs controlling everyone else, then there is nobody left to control. That is the problem that is going on here in the later heaven cycle. Instead of nourishing each other, everyone is doing a little bit of excess control, out of fear, out of contraction and other things.
REVERSING FLOW OF CREATION CYCLE PRODUCES PRE-NATAL CHI
Now the other cycle is pre-natal. You see these things in the fusion practice but you don’t necessarily understand them because you don’t know where you are going with the practice in the kan and li. You have five points here, there are five elements in a circular arrangement of the creation cycle. When you change those five pearls into what looks like a cross, all that happens is that one point here, the Earth element has moved into the center. It used to be on the five pointed circle, now it moves into the center, and it takes it’s position as the Earth, as the center of all the other elements. This is the pre natal arrangement.
Prenatal means that this is that intermediate state, when you came out of your original state, your unborn state, and this is the arrangement of the elements. It is not the dynamic worldly functioning one, it is more stable: it is more interior, the Earth is on the inside here, the Earth is not circulating through the outside. It is a little different than the other elemental systems in the western world, because no one uses the five elements manifest, they only use four plus Ether. When the Earth element moves into the center, it becomes the cauldron; it becomes the meeting place for all the other polarities, particularly the most volatile ones, the fire and the water.
The metal element I am going to put into parentheses as gold, the Chinese word for the metal element is Jin, and it means gold. It is really an alchemical term. The only reason they call it metal is that in it’s unrefined state, it may not be pure. So as you refine yourself, it represents the Po soul, which is considered to be the lowest, the least evolved soul. This is the lung spirit, it is responsible for the most negativity, we will discuss that more as we get into each one of these spirits and how they function so you can understand yourself better, and what kind of conflicts you have going on.
Okay, so you have learned all of this from fusion, this is the five elements; their mandala arrangement is in essentially what is a cross. What we are doing in kan and li is pairing those together, the yin phases of metal and water, and the yang phases of wood and the fire. When those fuse together and invert themselves, it is essentially shifting from five down to three. That is how the five, the three created the five, they just divided themselves out on their way in as they created themselves, we started from one to two to three, and the three divides themselves into five.
Kan & Li is just reversing that process of creating five elements, I showed you the first day that chart where the elements divide out, it starts out with the one and then the Yin and Yang divide out, then the Yin and Yang start subdividing. Just to remind you of that, we can look at it again. This diagram is about the division, we are going back to where the one divides into two, and these divide, each one divides and the center, and you have five. Now we are taking these two back to that, and these two back to there, and we are moving back in. Just to remind you, you have this diagram already.
Now, we are doing this inside our body, that is just seeing it drawn as the division chart, but now we really want to experience it, and see that we already have these patterns inside our body from doing the fusion practice, and the reason that they are there is that they are setting you up for the next stage. There is a natural affinity there of these elements. These spirits, you can think of them as intelligences. These elements are not physical things, fire and water is not just hot and cold. If you think of them that way, your practice will be very limited because if you limit the power of these different aspects of your own consciousness, and you see them as limited things, that you are manipulating like little pieces on a chessboard inside your body, that is the result that you will get. You will get a limited result because you have set up limited expectations of their power.
If in fact you contact these different aspects of your consciousness, and you ask them, you train them and say look, this is the alchemical operation that I want done, will you do it for me? Now you are challenging them. It is just like if you have a kid and you say can you tie your own shoe, can you write the alphabet, can you do anything, well now, that challenges them to do something, and do it on their own. It is the same way with contacting these intelligences inside you.
What happens is that over time, you have gotten into a very conditioned state, where they have a very humdrum existence, you say look, I just want to know enough to add up my check book, or I only want to know enough to say hello to the neighbors, or I only want to know enough to drive to work, or this or that. You start setting all these limitations and boundaries, saying this is what I need to do, that’s it, just to survive. Meanwhile you have all these other hidden talents that you could be using to explore the entirety of the internal cosmos, which is much bigger than the outer cosmos. But because you don’t ask them to do it, you don’t go there with them, you don’t go on the journey with them, they don’t do it and you start to think that they (the vital organ Shen) are stupid, or I am stupid and I can only do these things.
I have had people tell me well, I can’t meditate. It is just an acquired bad habit. Even the idea of there being a formal period of meditation: really when you awaken these aspects then they are always meditating, they are always seeing and noticing what is happening on the outside, and what is happening on the inside. You start leading a double life that other people who are in a more humdrum state of mind are not going to be able to share with you. They might think you are crazy, or you are just imagining it all. It doesn’t matter, they are just imagining in a more limited way their reality, but every reality has to be imagined and created by somebody or someone, other wise you would be dead if someone wasn’t creating it and changing or evolving it, it would just be like a dead thing.
The idea is that we are just doing another level of fusion here. In the beginning practice of fusion, you are just learning how to balance these elements for your emotional body, just so it is not an obstacle. Now we are going below the level of the emotional body, and below the level of your sexual energy. This is an important thing that took me a while to understand in these practices. In the fusion practice, and in the healing love practice, there you are dealing with the functioning of your Shen, your five element spirits in the world, you have all these dysfunctional patterns emotionally and sexually. Before you can really get to a deep level of success, you need to at least neutralize the extremes of your traumas, and your dysfunctional emotional and sexual patterns. It is not ever about something being totally perfect or totally complete, it is always a process.
You need to start finding out, what are all these patterns of my personality, I have all this anger, I have all this grief, I have all this fear, whatever it is, and you start to neutralize that. The idea is that you start to get back to the feeling quality of the original spirit, which is pure feeling; it is not attached or reactive to the object that it is feeling. Emotions by this definition are actually reactions remembered from the past, and true feelings are defined as spontaneous experiences in the present moment. You can feel reactions from the past arising to experiences you are having in the present.
So, for example, I tell Barry “you are an idiot”. He agrees with me, and that gets me angry. Lets pretend that I say he is an idiot, and Barry reacts against me and gets angry, and says “no I’m not, I’ll prove it to you, here, we’ll have a duel”. The center of his energy is coming from me, and he is shaping his reactive emotional energy around what I said. It is possible that Barry could be in a more enlightened feeling state where he has fused his emotional body, his Shen, so he can be actually feel the totality of himself and me, and he is watching me be in judgment, of accusing him of being an idiot.
Then Barry’s experience is not coming from me, it is arising out of his own being. He is saying, “Oh, I’m having the experience of Michael calling me nasty names”. That is his feeling experience that is happening, it is not originating from Michael’s center. That is the purpose of the fusion meditation, is to get you more to that state so that you are not controlled by the emotions of people around you. You also start seeing these patterns you have got and begin dissolving your storehouse of reactive patterns from the past.
INNER SEXUAL ALCHEMY VS. OUTER SEXUAL PRACTICE
Likewise, the sexual practice, we should call external sexual alchemy with a partner, dual cultivation or alone. You are learning how to manage your manifest sexual energy, which in the west is projected all over the place. That eventually exhausts us, and also complicates our emotional life; our emotional energy usually gets bonded and glued to different things by our sexual energy. So the sexual energy and the emotional energy are really just two different aspects of the emotional body but it is important to understand the difference between your manifest sexual energy and your Jing. In the lesser Kan and Li, it is called the internal sexual alchemy. Its purpose is for you to couple your inner male and your inner female.
Scientists and modern people tend to make their DNA into gods: the DNA is this, the DNA is that, have you heard what the DNA said today? These are the new gods, and the scientists, or the geneticists are the high priests, can change your DNA around. Of course they haven’t the foggiest idea of the intelligence it takes to unfold and create that whole language of the genetic code. So that you need to get into the intelligences behind the Jing, and these are all the different Shen who are shaping it, and control the timing of its unfoldment. There are other spirits as well besides these five. These are just the five deep ones that are guarding your essence.
Sometimes in teaching it in the beginning, in order to help people feel some of the energies you can have the Yin and Yang energies copulate as the inner male and female. I will remind you that this is the source of the sexual energy, and it can intensify the practice in that respect but if you bond your practice of the Kan and Li to stimulating your sexual energy, it eventually will become a dead end. Let me explain to you why.
The Jing, the subtle essence, which is the matrix, you could say is like your genetic essence, or intelligence behind the unfoldment of your genes. The problem is that is you constantly convert the Jing inive sexual energy in order to go “oh, I am alive”, I am feeling myself sexually, when you want to get to the level of the Jing, that means when you want to step back down from the level of the five elements down into three, you have to move back from the sexual energy, the manifest level, back into what it really was originally, which was this original essence.
That was what you were trying to get to. You are not trying to get your rocks off, or your ovaries off, or whatever the expression is for women. You are really trying to get into a steady state where your spirit and your Jing are in communication; this is the real spiritual bliss. This is something that is not dependent on do I stimulate myself sexually, does he like me, does she think I am attractive sexually, that is a whole external dynamic that you can take on yourself, pleasuring yourself, activating your sexual energy, arousing it, but it is much too external.
Cultivating Pre-natal Jing vs. Exchanging Post-natal Jing Qi
The reason I say this is that it may eventually dry up your practice is that if you get into the habit of continually converting your Jing into sexual energy, and using that to try and make your practice happen, eventually you deplete it, and it gets tired, you say “I’m being used here” just like you had a partner who constantly wanted you to stimulate them sexually, eventually there is a reaction against that, you get this same reaction internally.
At some point it says hey, I want to guard the reserves here, you are just exhausting me, every time we make love you are using me, you are using it up, and you are not cultivating it directly or supporting my spiritual rebirth. It means the sexual relation is too external, and you want to go to a more internal stage. So the Jing, which is your principal in the bank you could say, that is the wealth that you were born with. You inherit a certain amount of Jing essence from both your parents and some from the universe, some aspect from the original Jing.
In modern Chinese medicine, they have developed the idea that once you have spent that principle and you have used up your Jing, you die. This is what’s called TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine. TCM is actually Traditional Communist Medicine, that is what it really means. It was invented in the 1950’s when the Maoists took power, and they went through these traditional Daoist theories, and said well, we’ll take this and we’ll throw out that, this is too feudal, and this is too spiritual, and we don’t want that, we want to look modern and scientific. So they threw out all kinds of stuff, and they stripped it down and made it more mechanical, and you stick the needle in here, and you get this response, and do that.
That was never the way the ancient Daoists practiced medicine. They suppressed wherever they could anybody who was doing that kind of witchcraft medicine where you actually contacted the spirits of anything and did anything with it. The TCM theories were limited, they had no concept of what came before, what is going to come after and how to rejuvenate alchemically yourself, that was all out, it doesn’t apply anymore. Instead all that mattered is can you manipulate it right now, and basically it was symptomatic, you stick the needle in and you get the results.
It is not that different from western medicine in that sense, it is a little more holistic, there are lines and meridians that connect the whole body, and the shell of the theory is there, but the heart of it is not there. Most of the medicine that is practiced in China is not really very holistic in that sense; now it has become a big business, and it has become established, and they don’t want to change it even though there are people in China who are challenging it. That is just some background to understand it.
What you are actually learning here is the original medicine, the internal medicine, and forming the elixir. Basically its premise is that you already have the medicine, everything you need inside yourself to heal yourself, and the Jing is the key. The Jing is your essence and your substance, which is what holds your body consciousness. (end of tape).
What we are going to next here is the whole question of where does the Jing come from? How do you renew the Jing, how do you renew your sexual essence, your body essence? You have to remember, when you are really talking about your sexuality here, you need a much broader definition, than the idea of foreplay or intercourse, you need to realize that your cells are having sex every moment. That is called sexual division; they are reproducing themselves every moment. Reproduction is sex. The question of immortality, the question of long life, the question of spiritual life means how long can I with my own free will continue reproducing myself. If all your cells said at this moment we are not going to reproduce, well you have just been terminated.
Scientists don’t know why cells stop reproducing, they say it normally divides fifty times, and there is this little telomere that controls that decision. So we are going to try to manipulate it. Of course they haven’t ever built one of these cells so they don’t really know how they work. Spirit is constantly building these things, so spirit understands how they work. Your internal spirits control it, so they understand it: so you really need to rely on their intelligence, which is much greater than your acquired intelligence from textbooks or from scientists or from physicists. That could be an interesting or practical way of looking at it, and understanding it, imaging it and all that stuff but it is not going to take you to the core of how to build it.
The question is if we wanted our cells to live longer, how would we do it? Its like we are running out of money in the bank, you have this original energy that you have from your parents and the idea is that once you run out of that, you run out of money in the bank and so you get taken out of this universe because you have no more money. We don’t want any poor people here, you have to have some Jing in the bank, and when you run out of that, you can’t reproduce your selves and you are out of here.
The Daoist idea is that you are all the time exchanging from the universal bank, the sea of Jing, and you are growing from it and converting it into consciousness. You are not living as a separate entity: once you have this stuff from your parents, now you are a free floating agent and you are totally self sustaining as long as you have money in the bank. But you have no connection to the whole field of everything.
This is not the Daoist theory. Their theory is that what you have from your parents is very defining in terms of your energy and your capabilities, but it is not a closed door system. It is not a confined system, it is an open architecture that is constantly interacting with the whole universe. The whole universe, scientists are now starting to discover, is mostly mysterious forms of dark energy: dark matter, and fields so immense that they can’t begin to comprehend it, background fields of energy where all the stars and all the interstellar gases, the sun and the planets are coming from. All the stuff that looks like it is the stuff of the universe is like 1% of it. Well where is the other 99% coming from? I think it is a reasonable supposition that we are, as a mirror of the universe, a microcosm of it, are basically in the same boat: what you see here is maybe one percent of it, and the other 99% is that iceberg below the surface, and we are drawing all kinds of things from it, including our Jing.
ALCHEMICAL SCIENCE SPEEDS COMPLETION OF ONE’S DESTINY
What an alchemist is doing, is opening up a portal so you can consciously go into your unborn self, this universal reservoir and say “when I was born, I was a little short on fire, or my wood element was out of whack, or I had these problems from my ancestors, and I had this and this and this, and I have this kind of illness, or I have these kinds of personality disturbances, or I need something more from the bank to replenish and balance out who I am, in short to complete your self.
It is called fulfillment, the Daoists call it completing your destiny. You may need it in order to do something in the world, or you may need it to complete something internally. The idea that you are stuck here in this dimension, and you can’t get anything from any other dimension because this is all you parents gave you from this dimension, and that’s it, this is ridiculous, and of course, it is completely materialistic, designed so that you can’t discuss anything that cannot be manipulated. That is what science wants: if you can’t manipulate it, they don’t want to talk about it. If it can’t be patented, or controlled by a scientific institution or by a government, or by the military, or if it can’t be measured, it basically doesn’t fit into their model or their paradigm. It is not what they would call science; they would say that is religious.
Thus alchemy is really cutting right between science and religion, and saying there is no boundary there, it is an artificial boundary. There is a continuum of the matter and all the formed things to all the unformed, and there has to be a way that they communicate, and that you can shape that process. That is all we are doing here. What is important is, this is just the first step, starting to align forces down to a deeper level so they are more powerful and more core. Reversing them so they couple, the idea, you look at these diagrams here on the image, the fire below the water. There are several things going on here. This is taken on a really simple level. The image of fire below water is what these trigrams are, the first initial gathering the fire from the heart, and the water from the kidneys and reversing them and coupling them, which we did this morning.
How many people here have ever heated a pot of water? Raise your hand. A couple hasn’t but that is okay. A few people still back in the Stone Age, and haven’t figured that one out yet. It is no problem. You are all welcome here. The Daoists say that the simpler you are, the better Daoist you will make. Less complications in your life. How many of you, every time you heat the power of water, you see the steam rising out of it, you think “I have to capture that steam, I have to drink that steam, and I have to get it somehow.” You are just like everybody else for thousands of years: the water has been boiling on the campfire; it has been going on for centuries, millennia.
And this fire and water relation was steaming away, and it wasn’t until in the 1800’s that we’ll have to give credit to an Englishman, James Watt, who said you know what? Look at this steam rising off this thing; I wonder if I could tap that? By golly I could create a steam engine, I could drive a piston with that. Eureka! So this has been here for thousands of years, and no one has done anything with it, and one guy does something with it, and what happens, we get an industrial revolution, it changes the whole world, just because someone decides to capture that steam, that extra energy that was rising out of there, and out of that all kinds of things, the shift in energy production shifted everything: transportation, manufacturing, everything, you name it. Used later on to generate electricity, you name it; it goes on and on and on.
The Daoists saw the same thing, but they saw it in spiritual terms, they said look: you have these forces inside your body, and they are there al the time, we are always heating our blood, and are always cooking things up in order to keep things moving, maybe we cool them off by night, and cook it by day, or however you want to look at it. They looked at this and said, “I wonder if you could capture this steam, I wonder what would happen?” Wouldn’t that be revolutionary? The light bulb went off, even though they didn’t have light bulbs then, something else went off.
So that is all we are doing you have these things happening, and when you are young, why do kids have more energy than adults? Well they have more of the ingredients, and you cook and cook and cook, and it starts spinning, and after a while what happens to the water in the pot? It evaporates, and you die. No water in the pot means no blood left in the body, and you dry out. You see old people and they are all wrinkly, there don’t seem to have much blood do they? They’ve shrunk down inside.
This is the Daoist idea, they just looked at what was happening and said you know what? The fire and the water are separating all the time in people, the heat is rising up in the heart and the brain, you are thinking all the time, having all this stuff, and the water slowly gets colder and colder down below. After a while there is no fire below that water, and there is nothing cooking, and after the Yin and the Yang separate, the fire and the water separate, you are dead, that’s all that happens.
When anybody dies, they can say it is from this disease or that disease, but from an energetic point of view, from the Daoist medicine point of view, it just means the Yin and Yang have separated and some organ, and the current was cut. No more exchange. No more completion process in the physical.
It really means that the original Shen has left the body, because now there is no more center for all the other Shen, for all the other spirits. The original Shen says this party is no more fun anymore: nothing is being generated, nothing is being evolved, lets get out of here. Lets turn it back to heaven and Earth, we have to remix this one and take it to another level, it is not happening here.
Getting back to the original subject, and what we are going to do next, it is one thing to gather these elements together, these spirits, these aspects and these intelligences that are running your biology, and running your spiritual life too. But lets not limit them to our biological life or psychological life. When you want to connect to something higher and more powerful, they are the ones that actually do it. They are the ones that actually tell you, that power is now here: you don’t think, you don’t feel you know anything except through their functioning, so how do you know that there is some greater spiritual power?
You are standing there at Stonehenge, how do you know, how do you feel the Qi? They are feeling it for you. They are recording, it is hot energy, it is cold energy, it is rising energy, it is bubbly loving energy, it is demonic energy. Who is telling the quality of that energy? There is something inside you that knows, so that is what it is. The five inner shen (wu xing) is what we are identifying the core of that consciousness., You can give your own name, I don’t care.
VESICA PISCIS IN THE CAULDRON: PORTAL TO INNER SPACE
The thing that is important here, looking at that image of the fire and the water coupled, is that space between them. This is the vesica Pisces. The fire below, the water above with blue waves there, and there is this whole space in between. Later today, we are going to go over to the Chalice Well, made famous by the later addition of the same symbol. They don’t actually have a perfect vesica Pisces in there I don’t think. According to one book that I read.
A perfect vesica Pisces means that this edge is exactly at the mid point of this circle, and this edge is exactly at the midpoint of this circle, which means that they are exactly touching to the center, the two spheres of energy, the two forces have exactly reached the midpoint of each other. In between what happens is that another sphere of energy is formed which has a center exactly at the midpoint between these other two points. This is almost universal in alchemy, it doesn’t matter whether it is western alchemy or Daoist alchemy, and it is interesting that you are going to find this image coming up.
We are getting into this three dimensionally, not on a flat plane with two flat circles, the red and the blue, I mean that is what is drawn there, and that is just a flat symbol. We are getting the full spheres of experienced self-gathered energies within our self, not just energies but actual spirits. We are asking them to create a container within these spheres within our body, and we are asking them to couple. That is revolutionary enough as we said, to have the fire below the water, the Yang will nourish the Yin, it will cultivate it and open it up, it will warm the Yin, the Yin tends to gather in to the center. The Yang wants to expand out.
So what is happening inside here is the most important, this is the whole key: if you don’t go inside here, you are condemned to be perpetually knocking on the door, that is why I say if you just try and use your activated sexual energy, you will just be knocking on the door, because this is what happens after you have coupled and had an orgasm internally, not projected the sexual energy externally. You need to direct all of the energy internally. So you may activate it to a certain degree, just the penis, but ultimately you are going to go into a completely different dimension of yourself, and this is just a portal, you are opening a doorway inside yourself. You can say you are going to have multidimensional sex, if that sounds more exciting to you.
We are going to do an exercise now without coupling. What I want to make a point here is that even though something forms in there, this is really just a space, a void space, it looks void, it is often called void but it is not. The Daoists have different names for these empty spaces, in the Daoist cosmology, there is no such thing as a perfect void, they actually don’t have that concept, because from their point of view, there is always life force, something there breathing through a void, there is always energy, always awareness, always presence there, even in a void.
So they will call and talk about different levels of emptiness: Kong, Shu (xu) and Wu, from the Wu Ji, the supreme unknown. That is there right now inside of us, we don’t have to do alchemy to produce it. The purpose of alchemy though is that it opens that door consciously and it keeps it open, then you can go to the bank and it is like legal bank robbery, you can take as much as you want. You are basically going to the universal bank and you are saying I want some more substance, I have been a bad boy or bad girl, I have been on a shopping spree, and I have been spending like there was no tomorrow. And now tomorrow arrives and I’m getting a little bit older, and I realize that I had better check in with the trust account, and make sure that the window is still open for me.
The universe opens it’s window to you no matter how bad you have been, because it loves you. That is really putting it a little bit in emotional terms, people need, that is why they are always saying the universe loves you. It is not that it loves you, it is you, you are it, and so it has no real choice! Either it kills you, or lets you die, and in the process of that, a part of it dies. It is like when you are a parent and your kids screw up, and you still love them even though it is for the twentieth time, they have done the same thing you have warned them about, what are you going to do?
It is really the same relationship here. The sun, moon and stars, the universe is your parents and your grandparents, and etcetera, etcetera, and they have no choice but to try and support you. It doesn’t mean that they are going to give you something that you are going to run off and hurt yourself with; they are a little bit smarter than that. Whoever they are, we will leave that as a question for right now. They are going to give you what you are ready for.
Most people don’t know how to go to the window, how to open the door, and how to ask, and they end up asking in their spoken language and saying god, give me this, I want that, I need this. But the universe doesn’t speak English, it doesn’t speak Chinese, it doesn’t speak any language except the language of Qi. So when you are praying and you are asking for something, it completely disregards what you are saying, and looks at your energy: what is your energy doing, that’s all.
That is why we are doing these practices, it looks at your energy and you are going I’m gathering this together, I’m balancing out this, and I’m taking them in right into this central space. Now you are vibrationally right at the same frequency, you can say you are mediating the universe halfway there at the doorway, and it can talk directly to you, not through layers of different dimensions of watered down energies where it is trying to figure out do you really want this, or do you really want that? Where all the prayers are projected out away from you, above your head to some god somewhere else, with the universe listening right here, not listening up there, it is listening right here.
From a Daoist point of view, people are often praying in the wrong direction, they should be praying inside to the inner dimensions, and that is what we are doing: we are gathering what is normally focused on our outer life, our outer world, and we are taking it in step by step, you can call that a prayer if you want, you can say it is just a form of internal communication, you can use whatever language you want.
What is important is opening up this portal right there, this portal in the Daoist terminology, if you read the Dao De Jing, is sometimes called the mysterious pass, sometimes called the mysterious female. As I have said, the Daoist framework is basically something that is birthing us all the time, there is a feminine quality to all that. We are really going into a womb, or creating a womb inside of ourselves, we are going back into a womb that birthed us. So the spirits came out of this womb, and now we are taking them back in to that same womb. Remember we weren’t born, we weren’t delivered by a stork from above, we were birthed from within and we came out. After we are finished living here, things go back in, we are just going in early, we are not waiting to run out of Qi. The original spirit is saying lets go back now that we have or full powers, so we can go in and actually do something with what we find.
We are going to take a short break, and then we are going to do an exercise where you just see that that space is already there, where you go inside the cauldron, and we are going to see what happens when you go into that apparent void space. That is more important than the fire and water, the fire and water is just a way to open the door, to unlock it. The door is locked we could say, people who are looking out within this dimension. How do you open the door, and hold it open?
TRUE SINNER SMILE DEVELOPS
Any questions on this theory? We are going to go in, and play the experience again, and again and again. You have many times to play with this water & fire relationship, to go inside. It is what is inside the cauldron; the space is a portal towards earlier heaven, another dimension of yourself. Does anyone have any questions? Do you understand the purpose of it? Why would I bother telling you if you already understood it? (laughter).
So lets just feel the effects of the divine love elixir. The number 72 in Daoist numerology is very significant, it is the number of the Earth, the wholeness of the Earth, it is the 72 flowers combined into one essence. It is also balancing our relationship to the Earth, particularly to our emotional body. And the emotional body, like the sexual energy body needs to be balanced, before we can go into deeper dimensions of our self, and they need to at least be relaxed, otherwise they would seize up and contract, thereby making it hard to get to those inner dimensional spaces. Just smile, and put your hands over your chest, and hug yourself a little bit, embrace all of your inner spirits. Your whole inner family.
In the beginning there is some part of you, or one aspect of you smiling at the other aspects, and that is not really the genuine inner smile. That is just the beginning, the training phase of it, because you are separated from these other aspects, which are a huge part of your inner self. So what all these formulas and practices are designed to do is that when you merge with them, and when we smile with them, all of them are smiling together, and feel the fullness of that made conscious.
It is important to open up communication with all of these, what the Chinese call Jing Shen, the body spirits, because it is just like if you have allies, it is so much easier to get something done. If you are trying to get something done inside yourself, if you ally all these different aspects of yourself together, it all becomes so easy, effortless. The reason spiritual development or meditation is ever difficult is because there is some part of you that is resisting it, that is not being included, that is not one of our allies, it is one of our conscious enemies, and so we get stuck in this struggle, and we can’t figure out why we can’t progress to these higher levels, or deeper level of anything.
