Soul Sex: Hidden Driver behind Romantic Love? (Sent to eList)

Sent to my national elist yesterday.

Inside Chi Flows Naturally:

1. Essay on the question that few seem to be asking: is full sexual
completion achievable,  through either a sexual love relationship or
spiritual practice? Another way to ask it: is it possible to embody an
integrated male-female state (divine androgyny) while still living in a male
or female sexed physical body? Is the very desire of our soul to integrate
its male and female halves the hidden driver behind all sexual and romantic
love?

    I have been exploring variants of these questions for decades.  My
current premise: humans have a binary or split soul. This soul tension flows
into our sexed body-mind. Many spiritual practices seems to target the mind,
rather than the soul. Is there a way to energetically resolve this sexual
tension at the soul level? 

   Recently I had a breakthrough, a new alchemical meditation practice I
received as a transmission from some more profound level of my Self. You
could call it way to induce “soul sex”, the internal copulation of the split
halves of our soul.

   What I discovered was a method of circulating soul essence (a particular
quality of “jing”) in a “pre-natal orbit” pathway. This orbit flows in a
different pattern than the spiral around the spine and chest of
the standard Taoist Microcosmic Orbit – it also cycles through the core
channel. It also seems my “soul question” led me to have numerous intense
experiences of astral or beyond-the-body sex – i.e. exchange of soul essence
as a kind of macro-cosmic orbit shared with others souls. More on astral sex
in my essay.

    This new “Advanced Lesser Kan & Li: Second Refining of the Golden
Elixir” practice is given on the Glastonbury/Stonehenge UK September 2007
retreat.  The audio CD set is 17 hours, and includes other powerful new
practices:  the Wudang MACRO-cosmic Orbit, and a great new Fusion 3 practice
to concentrate the 8 cosmic forces + Self: The 9 Cosmic Spirals of the
Energy Body. The CDs also have the full confession and juicy details of my
astral plane sex life…:). The new practice is very intense if you have
done the prerequisite training.
    
 This audio course is now available – but not yet on the website. To
order call 888-999-0555 (M-Fri. 1-5 pm) or email info@healingdao.com.  Note:
it is recommended you complete the regular Lesser kan and Li course before
listening to these CDs. My money-back guarantee applies only to courses
taken in sequence. This new practice will intensify the practices of all the
other levels of Kan & Li I have taught, it integrates beautifully with
higher practices. Knowledge of the ‘Wudang orbit method taught in my Qigong
Fundamentals 2 is essential.

2. China Dream Trip 2008- ALERT! Only four spots left. Don’t delay if China
is calling you to the experience of a lifetime. Contact me if you want to go
but need an extended payment plan to make it. Exact departure date from Los
Angeles is evening of Sunday May 11, 2008. 16 day trip returns May 27,
22-day trip returns June 2. There is usually a last minute cancellation,
late signups go onto a wait list. For more info,
see: www.healingdao.com/chinatrip2008.html

3. Dec. 8-9: Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4 WORKSHOP in ASHEVILLE. $144.
This is a great time of the year to explore Internal Chi Breathing and Bone
Breathing & Rooting. We are heading into winter, and the chi is naturally
returning to its root deep in the bones of mother earth. The new moon will
intensify this workshop. Contact me (hit reply) to reserve a space. For more
information on these practices, or to get the homestudy course,
see www.healingtaousa.com/ckf3.html
   
4. Pre-Solstice Ceremony. Dec. 9, 2008 is this season’s “Power Night”. It’s
the dark new moon before the “dark sun” of Winter Solstice. This “true yin”
conjunction of the lunar and solar cycles is a great opportunity for
profound spiritual work in the Great Darkness. A great time to dissolve your
little fears into this great dark ocean, let them come back as growing light
for the rest of the year. Be sure to do a pre-Solstice ceremony on your
own. 
     The best (darkest) time for this Great Yin ritual is at midnight,
Sunday Dec. 9.  I suggest you do a Winter Solstice ceremony at that time.
Plant a seed intention, of whatever it is you wish to organically unfold
during the upcoming year (request health, wealth, spiritual progress,
anything your heart truly wants to nurture – but make your request
concrete). See my old e-letter “Tap the Great Yin Power of Winter
Solstice! History of Solstice “Holy
Night”at: www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=73

5. Dynamic-Sit Sexy Tai Chi Ergo Chair – ALERT! Buy one now before they
disappear forever. The manufacturer in Taiwan had business problems  and
stopped making the chair, and we don’t know if/when another will be found. I
bought the entire remaining stock of this elegant and fantastic
“exercise-chair” at a premium just so I could share them with my Tao tribe.
A great GIFT to yourself or a loved one. 
   Here’s a freshly arrived testimonial: “I just wanted to let you know how
much I enjoy the Ergo Chair.  I use it in my home office. It works great to
keep me alert and focused.  I love the fact that I have to engage my core to
sit properly in the chair and I’ve notice an improvement in both my core
strength and my posture, which i don’t get when I sit in other chairs. 
Thanks for a great product.” -Steve H.  For more
info: www.healingdao.com/ballchair.html

6. WINTER SALE: Discount of 15% off ALL my (Michael Winn’s) homestudy audio
& DVD products until Jan. 4, Friday at midnight. Discount applies to all my
“Chi Flows Naturally” readers and your friends. But you must place your
order by phone or email by Jan. 4. This is the first time my Kan & Li
courses have been included in a sale. Sale is not posted on the website.
Call Wendy in my office at 888-999-0555 or email: info@healingdao.com. 

————————–

Dear Seekers of the Sexual Mysteries of the Soul,

    I have already written extensively about how, from the viewpoint of
Taoist cosmology, we humans got into these strangely wonderful if sometimes
awkward contraptions we call a physical body. Briefly, our body-minds are a
crystallization of natural cosmic yin-yang and five-phase forces. This a
basic Taoist principle – that humans are a microcosm of nature. 
    
   The original human being in the astral plane was androgynous (both male &
female), and hence immortal- it could self-reproduce. This allowed us to
continuously explore the process of creation, a.k.a Life. I received the
information that during the process of polarization into physicality, a
problem arose when we split into separate male and female bodies in the
physical plane. We unknowingly  scattered and lost much of our Original
Breath (yuan chi) – the neutral force that bound the original yin/female and
yang/male forces together. 

   This new level of sexual polarity caused a feeling of separation from
source/heaven and eventually led to the battle of the sexes on
earth. (see www.healingdao.com/healinglove.html#slt for talk on “Sexual
Qigong: Secret Tao Path to Completing our Human Identity”).
                   
      Immortality Formulas: Designed to Rebirth our Androgynous Self

    The Taoist hermit One Cloud’s “Seven Formulas for Achieving Immorality”
is basically an outline for the process of re-constructing our original
androgynous Energy Body. This isn’t easy, however. Because when you’re in a
man or a woman’s body, your perceptions are largely driven by the polarized
sexual current running your consciousness. 

   Many meditation traditions that I have studied attempt to offset this
sexual bias by focusing on “stillness” or a passive “inner witness” or
“divine self” that is described as sex-less and desire-less. These
traditions often blame some aspect of the lowly physical self – either the
“ego”, the “mind” or our bodily sexual desire – for leading us astray from
our true nature or higher self. I find these to be unnecessary judgments
against the body and its sexual nature. My view is the polarization is now
intentional, and begins BEFORE we incarnate, at the soul level. Humans are
blameless in the predicament they find themselves, only able to manifest as
a male or female, but not both. It’s the root cause of our mortality.

   Few meditators seeking transcendence seem able to release their deep
sexual tension, especially the supposedly highly enlightened male
gurus/masters who, while posing as celibate transcendents, end up screwing
hordes of their female disciples. A case of “boys will be boys”? The female
gurus seem to have a less scandalous record – but are they truly
desire-less, or perhaps just more discrete?  (for the juicy details, see my
article “The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm: Daoist and Tantric Sexual
Cultivation in the
West www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=35). The
parallel in the West is found in the Roman Catholic church, with its history
of widespread sexual abuse by priests recently exposed.

Romance: the Cultural Solution to Sexual Tension

    The solution to finding sexual peace on the popular level of culture is
more simple. Countless seminars (Sterling comes to mind) and new age writers
like David Deida counsel something like, “if you are male, be totally male.
If you are female, be totally female”. This is the traditional Asian
approach. This seems to make sense on one level – surrender to your bodily
destiny. 

   Men should explore their various roles as father, brother, son,
grandfather, and whatever list of male archetypes you want to choose
(warrior, priest, magician, hunter, etc.). Women should explore their roles
as mother, sister, daughter, grandmother, and various female archetypes
(virgin, priestess, whore, nurturer, etc). This raises political fights over
which archetypes belong to which sex, but essentially is saying that biology
ultimately controls destiny.

    From a Taoist point of view, this cultural solution to our deepest
biological impulse would be considered one Way of completing your worldly
destiny, or “ming”. Your “mingmen” or Door of Life, is the soul essence
flowing between your two kidneys to form your body. It carries in it a
demand that we complete some mission in the world. We each have a unique
post-birth destiny, and filling it gives us a feeling of completion. The
Taoist view i’ve met in China is that there are differences between the
sexes, but they tend to disappear if your cultivate to deep levels of soul
integration.

   This drive to complete “who you were meant to be” is the same impulse
that supports the modern industry of self-fulfillment and self-improvement
books and videos. But most of them are only working at the level of mind,
not soul, so are only partially successful. Our deep soul-sex drive also
feeds the huge “quest for romance” theme in songs and films, the default
cultural reason for existing.

    But the simplicity of the biological-cultural romance model of sexual
completion gets a bit fuzzy when you scratch the surface of it. The romance
is never wholly satisfying. You cannot permanently unite with your lover.
Lovers ultimately get sick and die on you. There are all the confused gender
issues, people claiming they were born in the wrong sexed body. The sense of
dissatisfaction with marriage and culture, the feeling there must be some
deeper fulfillment beyond working your whole life to scratch the sexual itch
and all its attendant cultural roles. 

   Modern science steps in to close the gap: you are working for the
survival of your species.  But Darwinism feels inadequate, too
one-dimensional, like chewing cardboard. It fails to fully explain the
evolution of collective cooperation and the range of consciousness embedded
in nature itself. From the Taoist viewpoint, a dissatisfaction with romantic
love might be our spiritual destiny or “xing” calling us back to re-discover
and love our original bisexed androgynous nature. 

          Can Inner Alchemy Create A Male-Female Energy Body?

    This brings us to the key question: is it possible to simultaneously
satisfy both our worldly destiny of biological romance and our spiritual
destiny of divine androgyny, aka immortality?

    The Taoist meditations of the Inner Smile and the Microcosmic Orbit seem
aimed at harmonizing this tension in our sexual-spiritual nature. The Inner
Smile cultivates the sense of our neutral inner witness. It invites our soul
force to flow in and unconditionally accept what is, thereby freeing the
stuck aspects of our outer self to move on and unfold their unique male or
female destiny. 

   The Orbit actively embraces both our conscious front and our unconscious
back, creating a circular flow of the male fire and female water channels in
the body. This circular flow harmonizes the direct expression of our
male/yang/governor and female/yin/conception energy pathways. In effect, it
begins the process of consciously mixing our male and female energies. 

  But if we analyze the sequence of the formulas, the Inner Smile and Orbit
apparently aren’t enough to heal the soul’s split. That is why there are
seven alchemy formulas to do the job – the sexually split soul runs very
deep, and must be healed or integrated on many levels, not just for our
personal selves walking the earth looking for romance. 

   It is an unresolved issue for our ancestors trapped in sun-moon time
cycles, and for the collective/archetypal level of human consciousness
embodied in the planets and our astrology. It’s beginnings are found at the
celestial level – in the zodiacal stellar consciousness that we could call
the field of our oversouls.

    In One Cloud’s 1st Formula, the chi flowing in the orbit is superficial
in the sense it harmonizes our outer or post-birth chi only. It’s One
Cloud’s 2nd Formula of Inner sexual alchemy – Lesser Kan & Li –
that includes a method of “self-intercourse”. This internal sex marries our
inner male and inner female. The fire and water halves of our soul are
guided to copulate in the central channel. This moves us consciously into
the energetic domain of the pre-birth, the formless self, where our soul
first polarized itself into the male or female sexed body. 

                    The Missing Element in Lesser Kan & Li

   But I had noticed in both myself and in my students that something was
missing in the Lesser Kan and Li practice, some element of our sexuality was
not completely being resolved. It was this dissatisfaction that led to my
asking for and receiving the practice I call the” Advanced Lesser Kan and
Li: The Second Refining of the Golden Elixir”. This practice involves
coupling the male and female aspects of the soul (our pre-natal essence)
along the entire axis of our body’s core channel and in all three dantian. 

    What I perceived was that even though the male and female halves were
coupling and resolving their past “sexual split” in the original Lesser Kan
and Li, the higher levels of the soul collective  downloading energy from
the future was still being polarized by our male or female  physically sexed
vessel. This new practice, with its pre-natal Microcosmic Orbit, brings the
horizontal sexual tension of the male/female halves of our soul continuously
into the vertical crown/perineum or heaven/earth axis of our being. So its
more integrated, and refines the Elixir to a higher level. The method is an
evolution of the Wudang Orbit taught in my Qigong Fundamentals 2, which is
necessary to get this new method.

   How well does the alchemical process resolve the deep sexual tension of
the soul? Can the inner alchemy process truly shift the practitioner from
the sexually polarized state into an androgynous state? I’ve trained many
hundreds of people in the practice. The reported level of progress varies
widely, depending on the adepts’ natural aptitude and self-discipline. The
practices can bring up huge resistance that exists collectively to
re-integrating this male-female split. It requires deep courage and strong
focused practice to keep penetrating to deeper levels of integration.

   The answer for myself is both clear and ambiguous. I have vastly
expanded  the functional presence of my “inner witness”, the aspect of self
that is holding the neutral force that binds my original androgynous self
together. AND I simultaneously have as much or more male sexual energy than
I had as a younger man. My sexual drive is quite different from when i was
younger. 

   My hormones-with-winged-feet are no longer flowing wildly and
indiscriminately out of my groins as an unconscious biological urge. Rather
the sexual impulse emerges, still unpredictably, from an inner space, where
my heart-feeling and kidney-will seem to have integrated into a deeper drive
that I feel is best described as a soul impulse. In short, I only feel
sexual attraction when there is a soul attraction.

                 Subtle Body Sex is Beyond the Personality

    More interesting is that this soul impulse, flowing out of my core
channel, seems to have led me to have numerous sexual affairs. Not in the
physical plane, but in the astral plane. These affairs were not generated by
the physical desire of my body and did not originate from the sensory or
culturally shaped mind. Instead, my soul partners spontaneously arrive from
the ethers and impose themselves upon my personality involuntarily. 

   Some astral sex affairs happened with the energy bodies of people I knew
physically, but who were mostly not conscious of the process (I asked).
Other astral affairs are with the souls of complete strangers who seem to
feel the need to exchange some powerful information with me. This
macro-exchange of soul information involves what I would call a second phase
level of kundalini experience that is not experienced in the spine, but in
the core channel, which is far more intense.

   Most of my subtle body sex was with my wife Joyce – it has been a
hallmark of our relationship since we met at a Taoist retreat 24 years ago.
But even that could not be fully willed by our personalities or any
biological urge; it usually happened spontaneously, most powerfully BEFORE
we had physical sex. Eventually we surrendered to allowing it to be our
primary form of sexual coupling – just lie down next to each other, relax
and allow our energy bodies to copulate. Our skill with Taoist alchemical
practices obviously facilitated this subtle body sex, but did not exactly
control it. The soul controls it, not the mind.

                  Soul Sex is Kundalini in the Core Channel

    These subtle body sexual experiences are usually far more intense than
physical sex because the energy body has many more channels of exchange than
the physical body. But it was observing my many experiences over a long
period of time that led me to suspect that my soul was not in fact a
totally”neutral witness”, but a polarized pattern of force or entity within
a more neutral field of consciousness. 

   This led me to the hypothesis that all human souls are sexed
predominantly male or female, but that each human soul has a “shadow” gender
which functions exactly like the shadow side of our slower vibrating
male/female sexed body-mind. In short, the formless pre-natal plane of our
soul is similar to the physical plane, only it is difficult to grasp because
it is vibrating as such a fast level. 

   The hidden or unmanifest side of our soul is holding a lot of power and
has a different agenda than what we think or feel we are. The sexual split
at the body-mind level has us polarized “horizontally” as male-female. If we
have a male body, our shadow is female, and vice versa. This dynamic is
played out biologically and culturally in our sexual relations.

          Humanity: 3rd Force between Heaven & Earth

   At the soul level, the sexual split plays itself out “vertically”, in our
identification with the heaven-earth polarity. This plays itself out in our
spiritual seeking after earth/form or heaven/formless, and played itself out
historically within sky god/earth goddess religions and all the social
implications they promote. Groups offering a path into the ultimate Void or
Absolute Emptiness are simply repackaging the male/formless/sky ideal. 

   If we can make the shadow side of our soul conscious, we can harness its
spiritual power and greatly speed completion of our spiritual destiny as
humans mediating between heaven and earth. Otherwise, humans are simply
unconscious soldiers fighting for one or the other side of their psyche. An
awakened humanity will realize it can consciously hold a third force between
heaven and earth.  I believe our highest potential destiny is to return to
our divine androgynous male-female-state with ia restored ability to easily
breathe Original Breath (yuan chi), the raw stuff of creation. 

   This accounts for the Taoist focus on becoming immortal, which I define
as unique beings who bring continuity to creative life in other dimensions,
other heaven and earths beyond this particular physical one. Human
evolution is the process of internalizing our relationship with and
transforming the primordial field of Original Breath, not devolving and
disappearing back into it without a trace. This is how I interpret
“returning to the source” in the Tao Te Ching (daodejing) of Lao tzu.

   May our Souls Play Harmoniously in the Tao,

Michael Winn

“Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Tao as his door, and who becomes change – is a 
Sage.”
– Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters
 
“The Tao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
— Taoist Sage, 200 B.C
 
Get a free 12 page brochure on Healing Tao University, 
the largest Tao (Dao) Arts & Sciences program in the 
West with 25 week long retreats featuring “chi kung” 
(qigong) and  inner alchemy (neidangong) training. For 
more info, see www.HealingTaoRetreats.com.
 
Or visit www.HealingTaoUSA.com, www.HealingDao.com to 
order books/videos/tapes from the Tao Chi Kung Home 
Study program. Call the Healing Tao USA Fullfillment 
center at the Mystical Number 1-888-999-0555 or more 
ordinary numbers: 828-505-1444 (-1044, fax), or email 
info@HealingDao.com
 
Visit www.Taichi-Enlightenment.com for a glimpse into 
the world’s most magical form.
 
To get Michael Winn’s FREE 130 page ebook Way of the 
Inner Smile, with 25 fabulous photos of the world’s 
most spiritual smiles, go to homepage and subscribe to 
“Tao News”. You will receive his “Chi Flows Naturally” 
newsletter and be on his most updated elist. You will 
immediately receive download info.
 
If you change your email address in the future and wish 
to stay on this list, simply re-subscribe to Tao News.