The Danger of “Letting Go” as an only practice

In Taoist alchemy, you relax, smile, and let go of fixed energy patterns/identity using various methods, depending on how deeply engrained they are.

This Letting Go opens up some internal space; you then play with/shape the Life Force to express your innate power/virtue or to complete your soul destiny.

But what happens if your ONLY practice is to Let Go? Can you effectively just Let Go all the way back to the Source, and make Letting Go your way of shaping the life force as well?

This is the method advocated by the Sedona Institute, inspired by Lester Levinson. He was a physicist who got inspired by Ramana maharshi (“Who Am I?” fame) to just let go of all his problems, one by one, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, physical sensation/pain by pain, etc. it bears some resemblance to SOME schools of Zen/Chan Buddhism (although most also chant and do other practices, so not strictly analogous).

I rented their Sedona center in 1995 for three retreats, the foundation for what later became Healing Tao University, the year after Mantak Chia moved to thailand. And I had one of the senior teachers of the Sedona method, Larry (don’t remember last name), share his method with a bunch of Taoists, who are usually willing to try something that sounds like a half-interesting experiment.

So what did we find out?

It’s a great “first aid” technique, when you are in a situation and need to drop reactive feelings and thoughts that come up. And then the secondary and tertiary levels of those reactions. so you can be clear, neutral, and express free will to balance out the situation or take appropriate action, whatever.

But what happens if you keep doing it, to all the levels of your self, your desires, your soul impulses, etc. etc.?

Well, one thing we did was to go over to Lester levinson’s grave and tune in to him, with totally open minds, to see if we got some communication about his progress after death.
towards the end of his life, he had allegedly given up the desire to eat, and was a kind of breatharian, although he finally wasted away and died, letting go of his desire to breathe.

Five senior tao instructors and professional “psychic” went to the grave. And interestingly, all six felt Lester’s presence. But the consensus was that the news wasn’t good; lester wasn’t happy, he wasn’t complete, and that is why he was still hanging around. Like he had set something in motion that wasn’t complete, and now felt attached to that incompletion.

I took it as a warning lesson – about the importance of not just letting go, but also concentrating the chi and creating a vessel that would sustain transformation and information flow.

And shortly thereafter, we learned that Sedona Institute had been forced to “let go” of owning their beautiful retreat center. A bunch of ex-students/lawyers sued them for it, claiming they had been brainwashed and promised extraordinary benefits in life, etc.

so the Sedona Institute itself proved the danger of being too good at letting go. Poor larry – his home was on the Insttitute land, and he lost it and everything he’d invested, his life savings.
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Flash forward to one year ago exactly, FEb. 23, 2005 if my memory serves.

Plato and I are the beginning of a lengthy and heated debate, and a friend of Plato’s called Blackhawk posts a heavy critique of the sacrilege of my challenging his and Plato’s teacher, nan huai chin.

I read the email, and feel a lot of strong negative chi. Wow, I thought, this guy is really mad.
And expected the bad feeling to pass, like any normal emotional exchange would for me.

but it didn’t. it got stronger, and stronger. It started hanging around me like a dark cloud.

I thought, maybe this guy has a team of spooks behind him, and this is a psychic attack.

And I watched for the next 24 hours as the dark cloud got thicker and angrier, definitely bothering me.

so I posted a reply to blackhawk, suggesting he was posting a kind of religious hatemail, and could he lighten up. And when he responded, I saw he was a sensitive and intelligent guy who just happened to disagree strongly with me (the way muslims get triggered over certain cartoons, perhaps). I saw he was somebody I probably like if we met.

But the cloud of black anger didn’t go away. It got stronger. I realized it was not coming from blackhawk; it had just piggy-backed a ride on him, and had nothing to do with his intention or some black magical skill of his.

so i decided to start communicating with the Black Cloud. And I found out that it wasn’t attacking me – that was just my paranoid initial interpretation. This cloud was a cloud of anger and sexual frustration that was very, very ancient. It had a long time to congeal into a very tangible form.

What I finally got was that this cloud was coming to me not as an attack, but asking, by its presence, to be transformed. It was stuck, and recognized me as someone who might get it unstuck. This of course shifted the whole dynamic.

I now took it in deeper into my field, and began dissolving it, testing which level of kan & li formula had the right polar forces that would undo its stuckness.In this case, it was the Planetary-Soul Alchemy, the Greatest Water and Fire practice.

It wasn’t pleasant; in fact, it was downright nasty, horrible yucky energy that I would never have volunteered to transform if given the choice. But in this case, I recognized that I didn’t have a choice really; either i transformed it or it was going to stay attached to me in its yucky form.

It took me four days to dissolve it completely. I was kind of pissed off, as i had a lot of other things to do. But I had to drop them and work on this, the choiceless choice. it took many many hours of meditation until it finally cleared up, changed into light clear energy. and i got my life back.

why do I share this story? Because working with this dark cloud of muck, I came to realize that it was anger and sexual feelings that had just been “released” or LET GO by an ancient religious group. Was it the group of Pali Buddhists that blackhawk identified himself with? I cannot say. Probably he would strongly deny that. But it was at least some negative thought form that resonated and linked with his posting – that the body and the five skanda (elements) were all illusory.

The experience helped me realize that not everything that gets “released” gets automatically recycled by nature.

Everything that manifests, is here to experience transformation of some kind. Just letting go of it shifts the burden onto some other part of the field to transform it.

Moral of the story: transform your own shit if you can. If you can’t, send a prayer of gratitude to whatever part of the field that is taking that on, a favor to you, because you haven’t grown up enough yet to take responsiblity for it.

michael