HEALING TAO

Authors: Michael Minn and Others

04/5/2007

Table of contents

Tao of Balance and Harmony Song of a New Heaven on Earth

.................................................... 1
Inner Smile, the Secret to Being Simple and True
.......................................................................... 2
Daoist Internal Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature’s Intelligence
... 3
Alchemy Formulas, Qi Field & Language Theory
................................................................... 3
On Alchemy, Iraq, and the Metal Element
..................................................................................... 4
To your inner gold and a peaceful heart,
......................................................................................... 5
On the Taoist “Pure Water Method” vs. “Water & Fire” Method of Alchemy
........................... 7
Taoist Alchemy & Breatharians
........................................................................................................ 8
Becoming the child
.......................................................................................................................... 13
On Immortality, the Body, & Wuji
................................................................................................. 13
State of the Universe Address
......................................................................................................... 14
Looking for Taoists in China, Mortal and Immortal
.................................................................... 16
Story of Mantak Chia Meeting Taoist Adept One Cloud
............................................................ 18
Mantak’s Chia’s Story
................................................................................................................ 18
Clearing the Confusion Over Fusion
..............................................................................................18
Healing Tao goes Breatharian
......................................................................................................... 21
Studies on the Fundamental Theory of Bigu (Food Abstinence)—Preliminary Experimental Observations of Cellular
Bigu
....................................................................................................................................................................... 21
What Bigu Means to Me
................................................................................................................. 21
Some background
....................................................................................................................... 21
Abstention from grain
..................................................................................................................... 21
SUMMER 1999
......................................................................................................................... 22
Bigu begins
..................................................................................................................................22
What is Bigu?
............................................................................................................................. 22
The golden rule of bigu
............................................................................................................. 23
Tea
............................................................................................................................................... 23
Having big goals towards the benefit of humanity
................................................................. 23
Dr Yan Xin
..................................................................................................................................23
I CHING on LAW (Original Shen) and Unfoldment of CHI
................................................... 24

1
Tao of Balance and Harmony
Song of a New Heaven on Earth
By Michael Winn
Tao births the One.
One births the Two.
Two births the Three.
Three births the 10,000. things.
- Verse 42, Tao Te Ching
This Healing Tao USA logo is a map of Higher Consciousness
based on Taoist cosmology. I designed it based on decades of exploring
the secrets of Taoist internal alchemy meditation, deep experience of
qigong (chi kung), and study of the ancient classic - I Ching: Book of
Unchanging Changes.
Are you ready for a quick journey deep into Taoist cosmology?
The logo maps an image of a vibrational experience: flowing
consciousness is being “sung” into physical form through a pattern of
subtle tones. A subtle tone is just a vibration moving in a particular
pattern, that can be known by the shape of what is created.
Just as Nature sings itself into existence, we each sing our human
body-mind into existence. But humans are generally not aware of how
we “sing-vibrate” the shape of our reality.
This image expresses the principle of balance in the yin-yang
pulsations of the chi field. Chi, also spelled “qi”, is the subtle breathing
of Nature. Yin-Yang is any polarity - male-female, positive-negative,
etc. - flowing dynamically in equilibrium within a matrix of neutral or
Original Chi (yuan chi).
Tao as Musical Cosmology
Each of the eight trigram tone-symbols has three lines or notes
that form a musical chord. The eight trigrams are from the Early
Heaven (formless) arrangement, in which each trigram-tone is the
mirror opposite of the trigram-tone facing it.
This creates four pairs of musical chords that represent the
primordial Tao or Nature “singing itself into creation” as the four
sacred directions/ cardinal vibrations.
The fifth direction – the Center – is symbolized by the five-
pointed star emerging from the “vesica piscis” or sexually coupled large
red (fire) and blue (water) spheres. Three forces are coiled inside this
geometric vesica piscis – the black and white spirals of primal yin-yang
chi force, and the golden glowing sphere of Original Breath, or yuan
chi.
In the center of the star is a tiny circle, representing the Original
Breath emerging from the Supreme Mystery, or Wuji. This center can
never be fully known, it is the Mystery beyond all other mysteries. Yet
this Mystery lives inside each of us. It divides itself out three times into:
1. The Fundamental Tone of Oneness (yuan or Original chi field).
2.
The chi field of Two-ness (Yin-Yang polarity). Teeters. See his photo and image art at arrowofmoonlight.com. This
3.
The Five Phase cycle (five-ness called logo will eventually be produced as a poster that can be hung in your
Fire, Earth, Gold, Water, and Wood).
1
These three core layers of tonal patterns are vibrating
simultaneously in everything in nature, creating the seasons, the flow
of chi inside our body meridians and organs, the spin of galaxies and
atoms.
Five Elements Pattern at Core of Every Human
The 5-pointed star in the center also represents a Completed
Human Being. This is any human being who has internalized the five
sacred directions/elements/tones within themselves. When this
happens, there is no boundary between their body and the body of
Nature.
This is a human being in perfect harmony and balance with its
environment, they have expanded their awareness to become one with
the universal natural flow. It is a state of consciousness that is
simultaneously transcendent (multi-dimensional) and immanent
(physically present).
The star expresses the principle of five elements/five phases,
which, along with yin-yang theory, is central to all Chinese culture.
These principles are the foundation of Chinese medicine, feng shui,
qigong, inner and outer alchemy, astrology, face and palm reading,
martial arts and war strategy, city planning, the Chinese calendar, etc.
Five Elements is also a universal pattern, found in all ancient
cultures as the sacred four directions and the Center.
Flipping Yin-Yang Poles to Rejuvenate Life
The mirroring of the eight trigram tones also suggests a timeless
equilibrium of cosmic musical forces that are all held in the Unnamed
center, as a 9th tone-force. This is also known as the Fundamental, or
Original Tone that sings out all the tones of creation.
The eight tonal-trigrams in my arrangement have been changed
from the normal Early Heaven arrangement: each pair of trigrams has
been flipped or inverted twice. Heaven (three solid lines) used to be on
top, now it is below. Earth (three broken lines) used to be on bottom,
now it is on top.
Fire (yang-yin-yang lines) and Water (yin-yang-yini) lines have
reversed their positions o the left and right.
This flipping of the eight trigram-tones naturally occurs the
“refining” process of inner alchemy meditations. When we meditate,
we dissolve our fixed sense of duality/separation by “flipping” the
energetic poles inside our body-mind.
This produces a refreshed state of consciousness, and one that is
more stable. This is similar to life and death cycles in nature
rejuvenating each other.
The flipping or inverting of any two polarities creates a new
awakening of the third force in the center, the Original Breath of
Humanity.
Paradigm Shift: A New Heaven on Earth
What does “a new Heaven on Earth” mean? The Chinese term is
“zhong tian”. It implies the sexual coupling of Early Heaven (formless
plane) and Later Heaven (physical plane). It also reveals that humanity
is in a major paradigm shift, a major birthing process, a critical point in
the turning of the great cosmic wheel.
Heaven, the formless, is below Earth, the embodiment of form.
Heaven supports Earth (vertical axis), and Fire is stabilized by Water
(horizontal axis). This represents the free flow of chi or subtle energy
between these poles – the state of wu wei manifested.
Wu-wei is the “no-resistance” state of grace natural to every being.
It was made famous by Lao Tzu in his 2500 year old classic, Tao Te
Ching (daodejing).
Qigong and Meditation as Best Tools for Personal Change
Tao inner Alchemy and qigong (chi kung) are the meditation and
movement aspects of an ancient spiritual science. Healing Tao USA
has as its mission to make these wonderful spiritual tools available to
you. They can help each of us to speed up the process of unfolding our
Natural Path.
Alchemy is the ancient term for the natural way to speed up
evolution. It allows us to more easily and quickly merge with Nature
and the formless Oneness of the Tao while preserving our individual
will and responsibility for shaping creation.
Note: This logo was created with computer assistance from Mike
meditation room or home. It can help you to alig with the paradigm
shift to a New Heaven on Earth filled with balance and harmony.
This bagua logo is currently available on a custom ordered basis.
This work of art is a beautiful hand-made eight-sided dark rose-wood
frame, size 19 inches x 19 inches. The image is printed on three
different levels to add visual depth. Each one is hand made by a
meticulous craftsman. Cost: $199. + shipping/handling.
Inner Smile, the Secret to Being Simple
and True
Published in the Immortal Child, Newsletter of the Healing Tao
Instructor’s Association, in 2000
Michael Winn
http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl
In April 1999, a dozen Senior Instructors and old time US students
from the 1980’s were waiting in Masahiro Ouchi’s New York office to
meet with Master Chia, who was delayed by half a day. This was the
core group that had launched the Healing Tao and supported it in its
uncertain early days. There was some gloom, caused by the divorce of
the Chias’ and its surrounding dark aura of rumor and lawsuits. We
decided to each share our vision of what we wanted the Healing Tao to
be, with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight.
The visions that emerged were spoken from the heart, in a circle of
old friends. Many felt the Healing Tao could be more heart centered in
its teachings, less manipulation of chi by technique. Some called for
more balance between the male and female approaches to teaching,
more “yin” practice focused on receiving and nurturing chi and
cultivating virtues of love and compassion, instead of “yang” methods
of commanding and projecting chi. Others asked for simplicity, greater
focus on the ultimate truths of the Tao, less attention to myriad ways
to energetically change yourself or the world, more attention to
cultivating “shen” and spiritual values.
Since then, I have received many letters and had many
conversations with HT instructors from around the world. I sense
there is a genuine shift occuring in the Healing Tao, a yearning for core
simplicity and truth and silence. The HT has made its fame with the
many sophisticated methods for managing the energy body, and this
has perhaps been its first necessary step to achieving acceptance in the
West. Master Chia has been a superb emissary for accomplishing this
mission, and our collective impact worldwide has been tremendous.
One of the reasons I myself supported the HT from the very start
was its practicality in everyday life, its immediate benefits, the very
tangible opening of personal chi flow. This was my prime motivation in
spending years writing & editing its many books filled with techniques,
and encouraging others to do so. I was well aware of other paths that
focused more direclty on other-worldly, transcendental approaches to
meditation. I had close connections to other highly achieved spiritual
teachers in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but chose not to
promote them because of what always seemed to me to be excess
religious baggage.
But now, 20 years later, on the brink of a new millennium, I find
my own teaching style has dramatically changed. I want the Simple
and True in my own life, and have seen too many students drop away
from the Tao because they could not keep up with the perceived
necessity of doing so many techniques. Techniques can become a way
for the Ego to hide its fear of losing control behind a mask of
accomplisihed skills.
I am concerned for the future growth of the Healing Tao, and ask
myself, if we put on a simpler face, would the teachings achieve even
more widespead acceptance, more devoted adherents? Do we need to
fear Simplicity? The key is to emulate nature, and Nature always seems
to favor the simplest way of doing things, even complicated things.
As the current President of the National Qigong/Chi Kung
AssociationoUSA, I have had the opportunity to exchange teachings
with dozens of other schools of the Tao. When I co-lead an NQA trip
to China last year with 30 sophisticated western qigong healers, I was
especially impressed by a comment made by Dr. Cai Jun, the head of
Qigong Medicine at Shi Yuan, a major Beijing hospital: “It seems you
Americans are well trained in qigong techniques. Some of you are on
the edge of being really good. Actually, I think Americans in
2
general may be more sensitive to chi than the average Chinese person.
But I perceive a general weakness in your dan tiens. If you build the
lower dan tien, then all the other channels, the orbit, healing ability,
etc. will easily follow. Taoist neidan (alchemy) is very simple this way.”
I have taken his comment to heart. In my Chi Kung Fundamentals
course, I spend a long time from the very start doing a very simple chi
kung movement I now call Ocean Breathing, a brilliant term coined by
Senior Instructor Walter Beckley, who was experimenting with similar
simple breathing methods. The secret in these methods is to get
“mindless” as quickly and directly as possible, while still focusing on the
lower dan tien. The image of water gets you out of the heady concept
of breathing air, and into the deeper watery rhythms of your blood and
jing. I link in a heart centered Inner Smile with this state of floating in
waves inside the dan tien, and being aware of a vast ocean inside the
body, an inner ocean of chi, bigger even than the outer ocean.
The dan tien is no longer a tiny, hard to find point inside a dense
little physical body -- it is immense, and from the very start the source
of all pure chi used in the Healing Sounds. I teach students to see their
bodies filling with clouds of different colored chi from this inner ocean
filling their vital organs and entire body, before they breathe it out
using the Healing Sounds. And I give them dynamic movements to
help release the chi, by integrating the Six Healing Sounds with the
oldest chi kung movement known in China, the Five Animals Play. In
between each sound & animal movement, I have them internally
breathe between the vital organ and the dan tien.
I never let the students get away from this inner ocean of chi in
succeeding practices like Fusion and Healing Love or a new course I
teach called Internal Chi Rooting and Breathing, my simplified version
of Iron Shirt (different postures learned in China) and neutral force
breathing.
To make sure spiritual values are reinforced, I begin training them
from the very start to contact not just the chi of each vital organ, but
the shen (spirit, or “natural intelligence”), as well. This opens up a
different kind of communication internally, in which you have to open
your innermost heart in order to talk with the spirit of each organ. I
introduce the Five Shen as “my inner family” or “inner children”, each
with different needs and abilities.
It also paves the way for a shen (and “te”, or virtue) based practice
of the Fusion and Kan and Li formulas. I’ve found this an effective way
to simplify the Healng Tao practices. Chi can be manipulated using
outer will or ego. Shen, as your inner voices, will only relate to your
inner will or spiritual intent. Anytime a practice starts to feel
complicated or too pushy or too heady, I tell students to drop all the
techniques, go back into the Inner Ocean, and invite one or all of their
their Five Shen/ Inner Family to take an internal vacation doing
nothing but smiling and riding the pulsing ocean waves. In short, drop
back into empty mind, but an emptiness that is grounded in one’s
inner oceanic essence and the sensuous, primal orgasmic pulsations of
the life force.
I encourage every instructor to find the Way that speaks to you
personally and feels most true, as this felt sense of truth is what
ultimately gets transmitted to students. If you cannot find the Simple
and True inside yourself, how will your students find it? The Simple and
True ultimately can only be apprehended in Silence and Stillness,
where the monkey mind cannot bring its endless techniques and
concepts/images and words. This is constantly stressed in the ancient
Tao teachings. In the Tao Canon text of the Zhonghe Ji, it puts it thus:
“Silence is the Word. Fundamentally in the place where the Word
exists there is Silence. The world is silent; that is the secret formula of
alchemy.”
We have the secret formula under our noses already in the Healing
Tao, and it is called the Inner Smile. But I rarely see it taught as a high
level shen practice, only as a beginner or warm up to a meditation, or
tied into an ever more complicated technique of manipulating chi. But
once technique has used the polarities of yin and yang to change the
balance of chi in any moment, that is the moment when our Original
Being has a new opening to come into Presence. Techniques open the
gates, then we must leap quickly to ride on the invisible back of yuan
(original) chi between the waves of dragon and tiger, of yin and yang.
So really, I think all the Healing Tao techniques should be seen as
warmups for a Simple and True Inner Smile. Control of Chi must each
time be followed by Surrender to Shen. Practically speaking,
appropriate time and emphasis must be given to allowing our inner
heart virtues of love/acceptance (fire), kindness/compassion (wood),
integrity (gold), wisdom (deep water) and trust (core earth) to merge
with this Inner Smile. In my experience, this deeply felt natural virtue
is what attracts the Tao Iimmortals. They are not faked out by the
concept of virtue, by words imitating virtue or the techniques trying to
control or force virtue. But when natural heart virtue and method
unite in focused spiritual intent, they must come to assist their human
brothers and sisters in cultivating the Elixir of immortality.
As a Healing Tao-ist, are YOU ready to embrace the Simple and
True?
Daoist Internal Alchemy: A Deep
Language for Communicating with
Nature's Intelligence
By Michael Winn
When qi returns,
Elixir spontaneously crystallizes
in the cauldron pairing water and fire.
Ying and yang arise, alternating endlessly,
the sound of thunder everywhere.
White clouds gather on the summit,
Sweet dew bathes the polar mountain.
Having drunk the wine of long life,
You wander freely; who can know you?
You sit and listen to the stringless tune,
You clearly grasp the mechanism of creation.
-Hundred Character Tablet of Ancestor Lu Dongbin (1)
Daoist internal alchemy is one of the most difficult aspects of
Daoism for westerners to penetrate. This is partly because few Chinese
themselves can grasp its essence. The alchemical literature is
fascinating but maddeningly obscure. It wears two masks
simultaneously, one promising mystical illumination and immortality,
the other promising a spiritual science, a systematic approach to bridge
the dark gulf between a fragile human mind in a mortal body and the
vast eternal life of the cosmos. My thesis will necessarily wear both of
these masks, veering between intimate accounts of my experience with
alchemy and my attempt to find an objective ground for understanding
daoist alchemy as a deep language available to anyone willing to learn
to speak its silent patterns.
May the Dao Immortals smile within the hearts of all who read
this.
Alchemy Formulas, Qi Field & Language
Theory
When I was first initiated into daoist qigong and internal alchemy
(nei dan) practice twenty years ago, I began having exciting and
profound experiences. Mysterious hidden inner worlds were suddenly
revealed to me. The interior dimensions of my body became a vast
playground that I had somehow overlooked in my previous spiritual
explorations. As I progressed through “Seven Alchemical Formulas for
Attaining Immortality”, I gradually came to recognize the nei dan
formulas themselves reveal a deep language by which Nature
communicates with the different dimensions of its own intelligence.
This universal field of intelligence in alchemical terms is the mind of
the Dao. Physical nature would be the body of the Dao.
These seven formulas were transmitted to my first daoist teacher
Mantak Chia by One Cloud, a daoist monk who searched with limited
success in various monasteries for thirty years for the secrets of
internal alchemy. An abbot finally told him to “go into the mountains
to find a teacher”. On Long White Mountain in northern China near
Manchuria One Cloud met another daoist who had left his monastery,
and who HAD found a true teacher of internal alchemy. He
transmitted to One Cloud these nei dan formulas. One Cloud
practiced these methods and entered into the breatharian state (bigu)
for some years, meaning he fed his body on qi alone. (2)
During the Japanese invasion One Cloud left his mountain,
and migrated on foot to the mountains behind Hong Kong. He healed
local people and taught neidan to a few students. He was a simple man
who constantly smiled; his only complaint was that eating some bad
food after he came down the mountain would cause his early death. He
died at age 96 in the 1970’s. His formulas resonate with writings
attributed to Lu Dongbin, one of the semi-legendary “Eight
Immortals”, around which the “Zhong-Lu” neidan tradition first
flourished in the 10 and 11th centuries. Some of his formulas also
resemble the teachings on nei dan of the Complete Perfection
(Quanzhen) tradition. Historically, it is not clear if the practice of
internal alchemy adopted by temple schools of daoism like Quanzhen
originally came from scattered “mountain dao” practitioners like One
Cloud’s teacher. One Cloud told Chia that he had “given him the best
from all his teachers”. The seven formulas by title and brief summary
of their practice are found in appendix A.
Today in China there are thousands of qigong forms and many
different neigong and nei dan systems of internal mind training. At first
this is bewildering, as if it were a spiritual labyrinth with too many
paths. But now, looking back after 20 years , it is easy to see all
methods as expression of a single common deep energetic language.
Whether the life force, qi, is moved using body language or is shaped
by the intention or imagination of a particular aspect of mind/spirit
(shen), it is still the same language of qi. Just as one can produce many
different word combinations in English, all comprehensible because of
a common grammar and vocabulary, so one can create many qigong
and neigong forms, each movement pattern having a unique effect on
the body-mind’s qi field.
Nei dan (”inner elixir”) is a special class of neigong (”inner skill”)
that trains one to “speak” the deep language that silently pulses
through the medium of a universal qi field. One of the meanings of the
chinese character for “Dao” is “to speak, to tell”. (3) Hence in the
famous first line of the Dao dejing (Tao Te Ching),”The Dao that can
be spoken is not the true Dao”, the word “spoken” is the same
character as that used for “Dao”. The line could even be translated,
“The speaking that is spoken is not the true speaking”. So the idea that
the Dao exists as an unspoken, or silent language, is emphasized in the
very first line of this classic.
Linguists generally agree there must exist a “deep language”
structure that allows every child born to speak “natural languages” such
as English or Chinese, or to create “formal languages” such as
computer programs or symbol languages such as the I Ching or
mathematics. Noam Chomsky posits a “universal grammar” that is
deeper even than the “transformational grammar” he thinks underlies
each natural spoken language. But no linguist has been able to describe
the structure of this deep language other than to say that it is what
defines intelligence itself, and all power of thinking and organized
perception. Some linguists admit this deep language may best be
explored by religion.(4)
Neurobiologists, unable to locate a deep language structure in the
brain, have theorized that memory and intelligence are held in some
kind of holographic field. Physicists like David Bohm, Erwin Lazlo and
Mae Wan Ho posit a holographic quantum field filled with self-
creating organisms that communicate via energy fields with a super-
conscious universal organism. (5) This organic quantum field theory
(not accepted by most physicists, who view space/time as mechanistic)
bears some similarity to ancient daoist alchemical ideas. One major
difference is the daoist ideas have gone through several millennia of
practical testing and application to the evolution of humans.
My thesis is that a deep language ability is stored in the qi field,
and that One Cloud’s nei dan formulas are a good example of how it is
possible to train oneself to directly perceive and communicate with
Nature’s intelligence in a mostly non-verbal and non-ordinary language.
Daoist alchemy allows us to approach closely the Mystery of our Inner
Voice. Whether we hear these voices inside our head as audible voices
or as silent thoughts, or instinctual feelings from our gut, who is
speaking to us? Alchemy answers the question: where do intuition and
inner guidance arise from? By learning the alchemical process of
commmunicating through resonance with different dimensions of the
qi field, we can systematically get in touch with the origin of those
voices.
I define qigong (”skill with energy”) as a natural body language
arising to the “surface” from neigong’s deeper grammar of qi patterns.
3
(6) Practicing qigong (in which I include taiji, bagua, and xingyi internal
arts) is like learning the strokes of the qi alphabet and their “meaning”
or expression in physical reality. By calming the mind, regulating the
breath, and moving one’s body in particular patterns, the qi field
governing the meridians and energetic centers of the physical body is
activated and “speaks back” to one initially as different feelings of
energy. Qigong and neigong are not something that one “does” in the
ordinary sense of action; rather they are methods of shaping how one
communicates. The shape of the qi patterns being communicated then
shape one’s reality.
The qi field is the field of all possible relationships. Every
relationship involves communication; communication requires a
language, and as Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated in his famed
treatise on “private language”-- every language by definition is public
and accessible. The seven neidan formulas I learned give a coherent
public structure and sequence to a human language process for
speaking with and listening to the deepest levels of Nature’s
intelligence. I believe alchemy is a process of learning to speak with
this universal intelligence using the entirety of one’s personal being --
body, qi, and spirit fused into one.
On Alchemy, Iraq, and the Metal Element
Michael Winn
Dear Lovers of Inner Peace,
Spiritual people are often at a loss as to how to respond to political
events. This essay is about looking beneath the surface, as that is where
spiritual focus can leverage itself most powerfully, not in outer struggle.
Both inner work and outer action are needed, but put inner work first
as it will determine the direction and quality of outer action.
This essay is a meditation on the transmutation of the metal
element that is currently occurring in the global psyche around the
issue of war in Iraq. At the end I offer a short sample meditation of
how the individual adept can help the global mind process this crisis. I
believe this inner alchemical work is extremely important, whether
before or after a war in Iraq.
Metal is the main element used in weaponry, and is the focal point
of all alchemical work, both eastern and western alchemy, and in both
internal and external (laboratory) alchemy. The transmutation of “lead”
into “gold” is seen as both a psychic and material process. Like
everything and everyone else, metal is considered to have both a divine
and a demonic aspect.
For the last month I have been on retreat on an undeveloped
island near South America, meditating and writing a book on internal
alchemy. This remove made it easier to examine the underlying layers
of what is really Spiritual people are often at a loss to respond to
pressing political issues. driving the current crisis over Iraq. I am not
speaking of the conflicting national greed, power, and ego (disguised as
moral superiority) that are present in any war as its surface cause.
I am speaking of the deep global psyche of humanity and its
relation to metal. Reading Mircae Eliade’s history of alchemy ( The
Forge and the Crucible), I was reminded that it was on Iraqi soil, in
ancient Babylonia, that alchemy is recorded as the first human effort
to speed up the evolution of the metal element. Metal was mined, its
ore an “embryo” pulled from the womb of the earth, and refined by
fire, to bring out its “gold”, i.e. true higher nature. (I will ignore for
simplicity’s sake the probability of much older civilizations that
practiced alchemy, like Atlantis, and the pacific civilization that
preceded Taoists in China).
Metallurgy, along with agriculture, was the turning point in human
history, as it led to the development of nearly all modern technology,
from plowshares to swords to cruise missiles. Five thousand years later,
the US is threatening to deluge Iraq with metal munitions, from
bombs to bullets, but most notably the metal uranium in the form of
depleted uranium. Uranium would be considered by alchemists to be a
volatile metal that is being “forced” open to do its dirty work. And
dirty it is; besides being toxic (to humans and tanks), it has a half life of
4.5 billion years.
Whoever wins or loses any war in Iraq will be historically irrelevant
-- the stupid politicians, proud generals, greedy bankers & oil
companies and the horribly suffering soldiers and innocent
4
civilians will all die off and be forgotten in short order. However,
Nature as a whole, and its disconsolate child Humanity, will have to
deal with the consequences of this “corruption” of the metal element,
basically forever.
Which is why this war is not ultimately about politics, but about
the spiritual evolution of humanity, and about whether we can refine
and elevate our relation to metal specifically and to technology in
general. This potential war is about the inner will of humanity, and
whether the demon of metal technology controls us or we control it.
Not a final decision, but an important marker, because of the global
focus and the completely voluntary nature of the pre-emptive war
being proposed.
To get the sobering details of the effect of depleted uranium in the
last Gulf War, read the interview (at end of this essay) with Major
Doug Rokke, the top military physicist and officer in charge of
monitoring biological, nuclear and chemical safety during that 1991
war. The most astounding fact he delivers is that the US military,
ostensibly the bloodless victor in a quick war, actually had a casualty
rate of thirty percent! After the war over 221,000. Veterans were
discharged, basically “wounded” by radiation illness from our own
weapons of mass destruction. So who really lost the war?
What is this global crisis really about? It is not about whether the
UN inspections will work to stop Saddam. It is about humanity
“inspecting” itself, all the nations and all the billions of humans now
connected through metal technology (computers, tv’s, satellites)
getting to witness their own desire for and revulsion against using
metal for violence and revenge. Essentially, it is an ancient drama about
the demonic vs. the divine in metal, enacted in the theater of ancient
Babylonia. Its about, will humanity stop itself from destroying itself
with metal technology? The layers of psychic history going back to
Babylonia are all present to the global psyche, even if we as individuals
have forgotten. This will intensify the depth of penetration of this war
into the global psyche.
What is the spiritual significance of metal in this drama? Taoist
alchemy clarifies this best: metal is ruled in the human body by the
“po” soul, the Spirit of the Lungs that represents the personal metal
element in the human psyche. The Po is the least evolved soul, the
most prone to greed and narcissism, to “me” consciousness, the most
attached to earth and body. The Po becomes a ghost after death, if not
transmuted into “gold”, i.e. Integrated into the original spirit of
ourselves and humanity. The Po is constantly at war with other
elements/souls in our body, our heart spirit, etc. It doesn’t trust
Heaven, or the celestial soul aspects of us. It is prone to use its metal
chi demonically, to “cut” or wound its enemies in an age old cycle of
revenge. If you cut the metal element in another person, it means you
have cut their lung spirit so they can no longer breathe. (Depleted
uranium particles ironically kill by being absorbed into the lining of the
lungs).
Metal also has the power to cut skin (considered part of our metal
boundary in chinese medicine) to open up the blood. Blood holds the
ancestral patterns of revenge feeding the killing impulse. If you kill
someone in battle with your sword,you must look into the eyes of your
noble brother. Killing a face-to-face human enemy soldier may allow
for some spiritual redemption. It’s possible in that moment of killing
there is a soul exchange, even though you have violated the Life Force
by killing what your species has birthed. If, by absorption in the
moment of death, you “eat” the soul of the killed person, and accept
your responsibility in killing, some soul transmutation in both soldiers
may occur. The blood sacrifice forces some soul movement. A painful
path to change, but a path.
What is truly evil or demonic about modern warfare is the spiritual
separation from the act of killing that metal technology in weapons
now allow. Modern soldiers and their pentagon guides never really kill
anybody. The metal bombs and bullets and missiles do the killing. That
is the only reason the US is even contemplating this war -- the naïve
belief one can technologically kill the enemy at a distance without
paying for it with a soul debt. That is true separation of actor from his
act. It’s also a good working definition of evil -- I didn’t do it, the Devil
pulled the trigger. Or the trigger somehow got pulled to killed the devil
enemy. The devil, of course, is just our own demonic ego, hiding
behind metal armor, separated from the rest of our soul consciousness
and thus from humanity.
 Can we escape this struggle within the two sides of our metal-
armored ego, and transmute globally our heavy lead ego into gold this
time, what we couldn’t do in Gulf War 1991? Or will it merely be
another global spectacle, “ US Military gladiators brandishing cruise
missiles over their sacrificial Iraqi victims in the coliseum”, played for
our convenience on CNN? Sanitized by the media of course, because
the public wouldn’t watch if they really saw how gruesome war is. How
evil all war is, even wars of “necessary evil”. And I can tell you my
experience, from watching the killing in African wars, the lifeless
bodies stinking in the streets, that war is the greatest sickness on this
planet.
It’s too early to say, but there are positive signs. The Germans, with
their memory of nazism, declining to support this hyped up war; the
millions demonstrating worldwide. The smaller nations at the UN
sticking together, refusing to be bullied by the big guns of the US.
Maybe the US needs to express its excess yang, its aggression, and be
witnessed by the global community, in order to see itself clearly and
feel remorse. A new stage in the evolving global personality of
humanity?
I did have a lucid dream about Saddam Hussein down on my island
retreat that was a bit shocking to me. Saddam was cornered in a valley,
fighting to the very end, and suddenly he surrenders. He walks away
unscathed, wearing spiffy casual civilian sports clothes. I am a lucky
journalist who happens to get an interview with him. He is friendly,
gregarious, buys everyone a drink and charms the house. He takes a
liking to me. He is coarse in his personality, still smells from all his
killing, but I can feel his real heart opening. I awake.
Of course, this dream could be solely about the surrender of my
own personal, or an ancestral, internal dictator. If so, it just means the
“fire” of the global conflict is transmuting my internal metal element.
But in my many years as a war correspondent in Africa and the
mideast, I never had a single dream about a political leader. That’s why
it was shocking to me. So the dream raises the possibility in my mind
that the intense global media scrutiny of Saddam Hussein, and the anti-
war protests, may be rapidly transforming him and us, the spectators.
Saddam is a human being, stuck in a centuries old role of medieval
Islamic politics. He is probably discovering that he genuinely likes the
novelty of being the global underdog championing his nation’s right to
peace. That feeling may be his ticket to feeling a different kind of
internal security. Not to suggest Saddam should escape justice for his
numerous crimes. I just want to highlight that dramatic and
unexpected shifts in global consciousness may be occurring, bigger
than all of the players involved.
Anyway, the self-appointed job of alchemists is to speed up the
transmutation of the metal element in man and in nature. The metal
element - symbolized by our breath -- within each of us offers us a
fulcrum point to change the demon of metal into divine gold.
So I hope you will all join in the alchemical process this Friday,
where ever you are. And everyday thereafter, or every breath you take
thereafter....as metal is the dense octave of air. If we transmute our
breathing, and soften it with the yin fire or “civil fire” within our
hearts, just as a smith softens the metal on his fiery forge, we
transmute our Po soul.
A simple meditation is to use the Inner Smile. Just breathe deep
into your lungs, embracing the aspects of your psyche caught up in
internal wars. Dissolve your attachment to the global drama, stirred up
by media reports. Smile to the blood consciousness of your ancestors
that breathes in your lungs, and neutrally accept and witness the
memory of the scars of their many ancient wars imprinted in your lung
spirit. Breathe out, release.
Feel the rigid “metal” structure of your beliefs and judgments of
self-righteousness dissolving as you smile inside your lungs. Rigid metal
means rigid breathing. Do the lung healing sound (Hissss...) to help
release and recycle those trapped war feelings: the cycle of killing, fear
and revenge, and grief over being trapped in it. Release our collective
grief at being stuck in this dehumanizing cycle for so many millenia.
Breathe in again, fresh chi of this moment, embracing life, then
breathe out, letting go of the past.
Contact your Yi, your creative power of intention centered in your
spleen/earth element, by smiling to it. Ask its for help in strengthening
our true metal, and to help our lungs-heavy lead consciousness
to release whatever is ready to be released. As you breathe it
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out, see it transmuted into a Gold pearl.
This gold pearl is the transmuted metal that you imagine resting in
the heart of gold of our collective humanity. Underneath the layers of
hatred and violence and fear. As you breathe, nothing is discarded,
everything - the fear, grief, hatred, the killers and their victims -- is
gathered back into the radiant fire of our collective heart, but in a
purified form. You could imagine the gold pearl as a sun inside your
belly cauldron, or floating in front of your third eye (upper cauldron).
To your inner gold and a peaceful heart,
Michael Winn
Feb. 18, 2003
Ps. While we are on the topic of cultivating inner peace, the Fusion
of the Five Elements process offers even more powerful methods for
creating peace within. The Inner Smile is basic, Fusion is intermediate,
Kan and Li is more advanced.
The fusion process helps us to quickly transform negative emotion
and transmute it back into innate human virtue. It is crucial to both
our internal growth process and to our outer peace process. Some of
you may have learned it and forgotten to practice.
It requires review to master, but it pays off in the end. If you
cannot study it live with an instructor near you, consider getting it on
audio tape. It is key to inner alchemical transmutation of our heavy
lead ego self. I use the fusion pattern at higher octaves all though the
more advanced kan and li (water and firei) alchemy formulas.
------------
THE WAR AGAINST OURSELVES
An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
FutureNet / Yes!
http://www.futurenet.org/25environmentandhealth/rokke.htm
Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained
as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to
prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical
warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a
passionate voice for peace, traveling the country to speak out. The
following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock
Peace Center, Sunny Miller, supplemented with questions from YES!
editors.
QUESTION : Any viewer who saw the war on television had the
impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers
coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?
ROKKE : At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back
to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of
760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate
now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those
stationed in the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been
awarded disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued
September 10, 2002.
Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium
munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.
We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium
dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and
anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that’s struck with
uranium munitions. That’s thousands upon thousands of individuals,
but not only US troops. You should provide medical care not only for
the enemy soldiers but for the Iraqi women and children affected, and
clean up all of the contamination in Iraq.

And it’s not just children in Iraq. It’s children born to soldiers after
they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding
uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you’ve got uranium in
the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were
conceived -- the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage
and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that
male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to
have a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times
as likely.
Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in
Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves.
Now you’re going around the country speaking about the dangers of
depleted uranium (DU). What made you decide you had to speak
publicly about DU?
ROKKE: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend
John Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he
died. John set up the medical evacuation communication system for
the entire theater. Then he got contaminated doing the work.
John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world,
the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order
that sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the
assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and make
sure soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent to
the Gulf with this instruction: Bring ‘em back alive. Clear as could be.
But when I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup
procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing happened.
More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly
fire accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and
entered tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering
souvenirs to take home. They didn’t know about the hazards.
DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10
pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium,
neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on
impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal.
When uranium munitions hit, it’s like a firestorm inside any vehicle or
structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It
was devastating.
The US military decided to blow up Saddam’s chemical, biological,
and radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination
back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The
chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all
over the place. We had all of the various nerve agents. We think there
were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor
facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole
mess.
When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in
northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours.
Respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost
immediately.
When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you
start breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx,
where the cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn’t take a lot of
time. I had a father and son working with me. The father is already
dead from lung cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.
Q: Did you suspect what was happening?
ROKKE: We didn’t know anything about DU when the Gulf War
started. As a warrior, you’re listening to your leaders, and they’re saying
there are no health effects from the DU. But, as we started to
study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our
6
engineering -- I was a professor of environmental science and
engineering -- you learn rapidly that what they’re telling you doesn’t
agree with what you know and observe.
In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick.
Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things were
starting to show up.
Q: Why didn’t you go to the VA with a medical complaint?
ROKKE: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn’t
file. You have to have the information that connects your exposure to
your service before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn’t going to
take care of me, so I went to my private physician. We had no idea
what it was, but so many good people were coming back sick.
They didn’t do tests on me or my team members. According to the
Department of Defense’s own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion
level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result
in immediate medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms
of total uranium excreted per day, you’re supposed to be under
continuous medical care.
Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay
on me in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted
Uranium Project for the Department of Defense. My excretion rate
was approximately 1500 micrograms per day. My level was 5 to 6 times
beyond the level that requires continuous medical care.
But they didn’t tell me for two and a half years.
Q: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?
ROKKE: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When
uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust
and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed
in or go into a wound. Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is
soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your
organs. The insoluble fraction stays -- in the lungs, for example. The
radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs.
Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting
called up right now -- the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what
may be the next Gulf War?
ROKKE: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I
developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been
shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that’s full
of distortions. It doesn’t deal with the reality of uranium munitions.
The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office
verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak.
Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects
can be fixed with duct tape.
Q: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment
and training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon,
DU, who can speak up?
ROKKE : Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent,
aunt and uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these official
government reports and force the military to ensure that our troops
have adequate equipment and adequate training. If we don’t take care
of our American veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War,
and now we’re about ready to send them into a war again -- we can’t do
it. We can’t do it. It’s a crime against God. It’s a crime against humanity
to use uranium munitions in a war, and it’s devastating to ignore the
consequences of war.
These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238 is
4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation
for the war in Kosovo. That’s affecting American citizens on American
territory. When I tried to activate our team from the Department of
Defense responsible for radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques,
I was told no. When I tried to activate medical care, I was told no.
The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with
the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war,
because I’m a warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the
research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody
else’s, led me to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned
from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for
everyone, not just the US or the Canadians or the British or the
Germans or the French but for the American citizens of Vieques, for
the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of Indiana, of Maryland,
and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.
Q: If your information got out widely, do you think there’s a
possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to refuse?
ROKKE: If you’re going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you
know you’re going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that
leak, and you’re not going to get any medical care after you’re exposed
to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and
nobody came. You’ve got to start peace sometime.
Q: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the
military for 35 years to be talking about when peace should begin.
ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I’m
reminded that these religions say, “And a child will lead us to peace.”
But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come
from? The children won’t be there. War has become obsolete, because
we can’t deal with the consequences on our warriors or the
environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you
reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of
war can’t be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical
care can’t be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either
side or to the civilians affected, then it’s time for peace.
For more information on DU, see:
THE WISE URANIUM PROJECT:
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/
THE NATIONAL GULF WAR RESOURCE CENTER:
http://www.ngwrc.org
VETERANS FOR COMMON SENSE:
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org
Sunny Miller’s interview was originally broadcast on WMFO
(Boston) in November 2002 and is available for re-broadcast at:
http://www.traprockpeace.org
On the Taoist "Pure Water Method" vs.
"Water & Fire" Method of Alchemy
Thoughts on the Mind as Fire
Michael Winn
I have often been asked to comment on the difference between
the “Taoist Water Method” promoted by B.K. Frantzis and the “Water
and Fire Method” (Kan and Li) of alchemy taught in the Healing Tao,
originally transmitted by Mantak Chia.
Kumar has published two books on his Taoist water meditation
method in his Relax Into Your Being series (a great title, and very
Taoist). The following comments are NOT a review of his
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books or the effectiveness of his meditation method, which I think are
fine and a valuable part of the Taoist cultivation tradition. I consider
Kumar Frantzis a good friend and colleague, and we have had deep
discussions about this subject.
But I think Kumar¹s introduction in his book is very misleading
and inaccurate in its attacks on what he calls the Fire methods of
alchemy in Taoism as being a false corruption of Lao Tzu¹s pure water
method.
Let me further preface my comments by saying I think Kumar is
an excellent chi kung teacher, and has made valuable contributions to
the American chi kung scene, especially on the use of movement as it
relates to development of the energy body. I studied his six part chi
kung system as well as his pa kua system, and edited his first book,
Opening the Energy Gates of the Body. I think the Marriage of
Heaven and Earth chi kung movement he got from his teacher Liu
Hung Chieh is the best chi kung movement for opening the
microcosmic orbit, although Kumar doesn’t use it for that since he
doesn’t believe in “forcing” open those two water and fire channels.
Here are a few of the points I’ve made to Kumar in the past about
his alleged water method.
Kumar has performed a valuable service by highlighting the water
nature of many Taoist practices. He is not alone: see Alan Watts on
Tao, The Watercourse Way. But he has performed an equal DISservice
by trying to polarize the water and fire techniques into separate paths.
This is essentially self-serving, a non-Taoist attempt to claim “my way
is the best way, the true way of Lao Tzu” so buy my book and take my
water method courses.
Kumar¹s so called water method is actually not a pure water
method, because no such thing exists. The core of his water teaching
can be summarized as: “dissolve ice into water, dissolve water into
vapor”. BUT WHAT DO YOU NEED TO MELT THE ICE, AND
CHANGE THE WATER INTO MOISTURE? YOU NEED FIRE.
Kumar just doesn’t name the fire; it is left unconscious. It is the fire
of the mind focusing itself like a magnifying glass on the frozen body-
mind tissues that dissolves the ice. There is no such thing as water
operating purely by itself. The Five Elements are all interdependent,
water cannot function without fire.
In alchemy. My position is that if you are going to encourage the
water-fire interaction, you are better off having both the fire and water
elements made conscious.
The Healing Tao practices begin with dissolving and have plenty of
dissolving thruout: the Inner Smile is the prime practice here, but the
Six healing Sounds, Fusion of the Five Elements and Kan and Li
practices are all focused on dissolving. Kumar’s claim that Dissolving is
the trademark of the Water Method is equally true of the Water and
Fire Method. Kumar is falsely separating the two. What he really is
trying to say is “I use the Yin method, I don’t force anything, I just
allow it”.
I sincerely thank Kumar for advertising this point. It is perhaps the
only virtue I find in his labeling his approach the Water Method (as
opposed to the Kan and Li label, which means the Water and Fire
Method). I think that this is a good thing to highlight, especially since
westerners have a tendency to force, they are overly aggressive and
they injure their chi this way or exhaust themselves with their own
impatience. So Kumar, like Juan li and other Healing Tao instructors,
have chosen to highlight the yin methods. Many instructors feel Chia
overemphasizes the yang methods, and they have correctly changed
their practice to suit themselves. I include myself in this category.
But Kumar is confusing “forcing” with “Fire method”. This is just a
judgement on his part, and again a self-serving one that makes water
look good by default. He is confusing Fire method by linking it with
False Yang, when pure fire element should be linked instead with True
Yang. All of the Taoist alchemical texts are unanimous is advocating
true yang be cultivated.
If I were to play Kumar’s labeling game in reverse, I would start
calling his approach the FROZEN WATER METHOD of Taoism
and go about pointing out all the evils of yin and water chi that is stuck
in the physical plane for lack of Fire. Is this not the historical condition
that women are trying to liberate themselves from? The yin energy of
the planet, frozen beneath the weight of patriarchy? But I would really
be talking about False Yin, not True Water or True Yin, which is never
stuck. But Kumar seems to ignore these important distinctions.
Classically in China, you use both the Yin and Yang methods of
regulating the Water and Fire. It depends on your body and mind type,
on the season, on what you are working on, what you just ate, your
phase of development, your age, your sex, etc. etc. This is the whole
point of the I Ching: sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow. The I
Ching never says: ONLY FOLLOW.
If you only follow in the water style, this can lead to very slow
progress at times. Sometimes you need more fire to transform your life
or a situation. Only doing water practice can lead to stagnation and
holding of water in the body. Physically, this results in overweight
condition; psychically, it can result in unnecessarily slow spiritual
progress. I emphasize this alternation between fire and water methods
in all my Kan and Li teachings, and in the basics as well: when you
don’t have the attraction to doing a yang practice of guiding and
interacting with the chi or your shen, then you simply do the inner
smile and follow whatever happens. Do I dissolve first, or create first? I
just ask before I start my meditation.
Sometimes I start with a yang, self-guided meditation that lawfully
manipulates the life force and helps to more quickly manifest my
intention to work in a certain area. Then it may change in mid-stream,
after I have connected to what I sought -- and I surrender to it. Is this
a Fire or a Water Method? Why tie your hands with the labels? When
I point this out to Kumar, he hastily defends by saying that the Water
people use fire and water, they just do it in a watery way. If so, the very
label “Water Method” starts to self-dissolve itself!
Kumar’s own teacher Liu taught another one of his Chinese
students a fire method of meditation, suggesting that different
approaches may be suitable for different folks. Was Kumar so fiery as a
killer martial artist that Liu heavily emphasized the water method to
him? I don’t know, but it appears to have some merit. But no need to
distort the entire corpus of Taoist practices to defend this choice.
Kumar’s claim that the water method has an exclusive on
effortlessness is very misleading. It is the balanced interaction of Water
and Fire that opens the gates of the Yuan Chi. When you practice
from this energy, that is the true effortless state, wu wei, and it is
neither water nor fire, yin nor yang. Again, a false advertising claim for
the so called Water Method. It doesn’t matter what approach you use
to return to the Original Spirit, so why claim one is superior?
The final point I wish to make about Kumar’s alleged Water
method is that I believe that it ignores certain aspects of refining chi
found in the Water and Fire (Kan and Li) Method. Fire has many
virtues which accelerate spiritual progress when cultivated, and these
are essential to forming the Elixir. Kumar tells me that at the very end
of his process the Fire suddenly emerges from the Water (the hidden
middle line of the water trigram). The end may mean years or decades
of water method cultivation. Fair enough. But why wait that long to
enjoy the benefits of fire?
It is like saying, “Don’t cook your food, just eat it raw and your
stomach fluids will naturally digest (cook) it”. The Pure water method
ideology, if you take it to its extreme logical end, is essentially anti-Fire
technology and against all the uses Fire has brought to mankind, both
internally (spiritually) and externally (spark plugs and combustion
engines that “force” a change in the energy state of gasoline, etc.).
Does Kumar walk everywhere to protest to use of fire
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combustion in car engines? Of course not. So why condemn use of fire
in spiritual technology?
I think it is more prudent to say, there are dangers when you play
with Fire, better to approach Fire from a place of good understanding
of the Water (=body, matter). The Kan and Li methods always place
Water first for this reason -- it is the safest way to progress in the
beginning. That is why students are better off learning through body
movement (chi kung) in the beginning of their cultivation practice. But
we still need to recognize the essential need for yang methods and true
fire. Otherwise, you may get frozen into a position on the virtues of
Water Only.
Michael Winn
ps. I invite Kumar to respond to the issue, and will post his reply
when he does so..
Taoist Alchemy & Breatharians
5 Days in a Huashan Cave
Michael Winn
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to spend 5 days in a
cold mountain cave without food or water? Short answer: Because the
cave was on Mt. Huashan, the most famous Taoist sacred mountain in
China. The long answer: I was curious to investigate the experience of
Taoists who reputedly achieved the breatharian state through years of
practicing internal alchemy meditation in these caves on little food or
water. I wanted to have a small taste of their cave lifestyle, to see what
it might evoke in me.
The idea originated with my Taoist monk friend Chen (named
changed to protect his privacy) who lives in Jade Spring Monastery at
the foot of Huashan, along with about 50 other monks and nuns. I had
already visited Huashan twice, and fallen in love with its majestic
7,000. ft. high sheer peaks and temples perched precariously on cliffs
that regularly disappeared into the clouds. There was something eerie
about the mountain - I had the feeling it was alive and watching me
constantly. Was this because so many Taoists had allegedly achieved
immortality here? Still being a mere mortal, I wasn’t sure exactly what
immortality meant, even after two decades of doing Taoist cultivation.
But when Chen said to me, “There are some secret caves here, and I
thought you might like to meditate in one”, I promptly booked a date
for the following year.
I had seen many spectacular caves on Huashan on previous trips
(see Qi Journal Spring 2000). But all of those caves had either been
turned into Taoist shrines with statues inside, with a monk or nun who
rang a bell or gave I Ching readings when hikers came in to pray, or
they had been totally desecrated by tourism. One giant cave was
turned into a mini-hotel, with coffin sized boxes for tourists to sleep in.
Others were abandoned or filled with trash, being too close to the
main path that torturously winds its way up the mountain, its
thousands of tiny stone steps faithfully delivering a stream of hardy
souls to the very highest peak. Huashan has become one of China’s
most famous national parks, even though the communist government
returned all the shrines and monasteries to the local Taoists to manage
after appropriating them during the Cultural Revolution.
When I finally settled down into my cave (one year later), and
waved goodbye to Chen as his black Taoist frock disappeared over the
edge of the cliff, I sat down in the mouth of the cave’s doorway to
meditate. I focused first on my gratitude to the mountain for being
such a powerful presence. The massive West Peak of Huashan towered
4000 feet of sheer wall above my cave. To get to my cave, I first had to
climb up a 200 foot cliff with loose rocks, grasping at the roots of
bushes, while wearing a backpack filled with camping gear. One
misstep, or leaning too far back, and I would’ve been in a grave instead
of my cave.
I silently thanked Chen and other monks who had helped arrange
my stay. They are part of a very ancient line of Taoists who are guarding
this mountain. The first reference to Huashan, which means “Flower
Mountain”, comes from the Chou Dynasty, 3000 years ago. In fact, the
Chinese character “hua” (flower) was invented to name this mountain,
which has five peaks that unfold like petals of a flower. Taoists,
attracted to this powerful Five Element feng shui, have been coming to
Huashan to meditate for at least 2200 years, according to Han dynasty
records. But how they survived on this towering hunk of granite, where
little food can grow and the only water is collected rain, is still a
mystery. So I thanked the spirits of Taoists past for sculpting this cave
space, and asked them to share with me their secrets.
Finally I thanked the cave itself, and any rock elementals who
cared to listen, for being such a grand cave - to me it felt more like a
palace carved out of solid rock. The doorway was six feet wide and ten
feet high, fit for a race of giants. The domed ceiling was 25 feet high,
with a window at what could have been a second story level. Chen had
read the inscription carved on the outside of the cave. A Taoist monk
named Can Xing had carved this cave, called “Spring Flower” (name
changed to protect its location) during the Ming dynasty, which meant
the cave was up to 600 years old. No one is quite sure how he or others
carved the extraordinarily hard granite, one of Huashan’s many
unsolved mysteries. The walls had uniform grooves a half inch apart, as
if a giant comb were used to scrape out the insides of the mountain.
After I finished saying all my thanks, an extraordinary thing
occurred. My mouth was suddenly filled with a ball of pulsating energy,
which slowly moved down my throat and esophagus into my stomach.
Remarkably, this chi ball stayed in my gut during my time in the cave,
and I am certain accounted for the fact that I never once felt even
slightly hungry for the entire five day cave fast! Since this occurred
immediately after my meditation thanking the cave, it felt like a clear
communication from the mountain. I previously did have some fear
about my decision to not eat or drink for five days, whether I would be
strong enough to stay warm or to even climb down the cliff afterwards.
So to have the mountain send me a chi ball into my spleen/
stomach, the vital organ center of earth chi in the body, was incredibly
reassuring. Equally remarkable, I did not lose weight during the five
days. I didn’t have a scale with me, but I did pinch the flesh all over my
body to measure it, and none of it disappeared or grew taut. At my
Healing Tao summer retreat program in New York’s Catskill
Mountains I had learned from a remarkable medical chi kung
specialist, Madame Wang Yan, some weight loss chi kung techniques
taken from the Taoist tradition of bigu, or “not eating”. The purpose of
these bigu techniques to to satisfy your desire for caloric food with
subtle chi (qi) that is breathed into the stomach/spleen. Overweight
people then lose weight until they stabilize at their natural weight. I
was expecting to use those techniques not to lose weight, but to fight
off hunger in the cave. Yet none of these bigu methods were necessary.
Undoubtedly, I was well disposed to having such a spontaneous
experience. I had already thoroughly investigated the “breatharian”
question (”Is it real, or just a metaphor for a spiritual state?”) and
decided it was physically possible. Several of my Taoist alchemy
students had stopped eating for months at a time while maintaining
stable body weight. Just before I made the Spring Flower Cave my
home, Chen had introduced me to an 80 year old Taoist female adept,
Ciao Xiang Zhen, who had not eaten for 20 years!
Ciao had been living on Huashan for nearly 50 years, up a different
side valley with some other Taoist recluses. She had fallen and injured
her hip, and so had moved to a more accessible location where I had
the good fortune to interview her. She still wasn’t eating; Ciao
admitted to me only to drinking 3 small tea cups of plain water daily
and for variety, a small piece of fruit a few times a month. Her
appearance was thin, but normal, and her eyes sparkled with the vigor
of youth. Chen told me she is considered by the China Taoist
Association to be one the “Eight Living Tao Immortals” in China,
three of which are women.
Skeptics of breatharianism (bigu) will remain skeptics, and
that’s fine. Because bigu is not considered to be any big
9
attainment to go for, just something that can happen spontaneously as
a result of your practice. It’s not a special requirement to get into
Taoist heaven or necessary for most to think about achieving. But it’s
still real, and for me, just knowing that its real expands the freedom of
my spiritual imagination and its power of manifestation.
Back to my first day in the cave. Although I felt I was off to a good
start, I still had to face the next big issue in Cave Life: what do you DO
all day and all night? Short answer: wrestle with your monkey mind.
How do you do that? Long answer: practice Taoist cultivation
methods, the most powerful of which is neidan gong, or internal
alchemy. Alchemy is the art of communicating with the Life Force, as
well as the science of locally shaping its universal chi field.
The primary purpose of alchemy is to accelerate the unfolding and
refining of one’s personal human essence, or jing. Jing is also translated
as “substance” and is what generates our blood, sexual energy, and our
cellular power to regrow our body. In Taoist alchemy one’s “raw” jing is
refined into an “elixir” of refined golden chi or inner light by a process
involving the internal coupling or “cooking” of water and fire. Water
and fire are Taoist alchemical code names for the sexually polarized yin
and yang forces within the body. To make a long story short, you could
say I went off to a cold cave in China in order to have hot spiritual sex
within myself. The offspring of this internal sex is the re-birthing of
one’s Original Chi (yuan qi) and its Original Spirit (yuan shen), a.k.a.
the original self or “your face before you were born”.
Did it work? Hold on, while I fish around for some juicy details
from my diary in the cave. Here’s a good place to start - the moment
when I realized that by choosing to live in a cave I had stripped away
every possible excuse to focus on something other than my core self:
“Once you take away eating and drinking, socializing and
entertainment and the myriad other distractions our monkey minds
dream up - what’s left? A simpler level of being, in which more subtle
perceptions arise. I sit in a granite cave, with its door opening out onto
the bird filled valley below, and become aware that my mind is sitting
inside its own cave, sitting inside my body cave with its sense openings,
looking out of the body cave into the outer granite cave. I am in a cave
within a cave, and I know, if I look inward, that I am also sitting inside
other caves that exist within deeper dimensions of myself.
“In Taoist cosmology, the three heavens in the Tao canon (a kind of
Taoist bible collection of 1,160 mostly alchemical texts) are described
as the “three caverns”. As I contemplate this idea of Heaven as a
cosmic cave, my outer self relaxes back into a deeper level of
awareness. I keep surrendering, and ask the spirit of Huashan to take
me deep into its core. It feels like eventually I cross some kind of void,
and relax into what I recognize as the “cavern” of Early Heaven. Here
my observing self sits as a “soul” watching the activities of itself as a
body-mind in a Later Heaven cave, the physical dimension. After this
inner -outer cave duality stabilizes, I remember that my Original
Ancestor, the Original Spirit from which all humanity has evolved - is
sitting within an even deeper cave known as Primordial Heaven. This
heaven is also known as Primordial Chaos (hun tun). This cavern is
described as the darkest and most obscure of all three caverns. Here
the Chaos-of-Oneness (with no distinctions possible) watches the
perpetual play of Creation-as-Order it has set in motion.
“So really, choosing to live for a week in a cave on Huashan is just a
way of reminding myself that every reality has its own boundaries, its
own cave walls. However, it seems our Original Spirit may effortlessly
slip between these boundaries, as if its vibration were too fast to be
caught in the net of any slower reality-cave. The other lesson I’m
learning is that the so called “necessities” of physical life are not
necessities - they are optional pleasures. Food is mostly recreational
eating, deemed a necessity only because we refuse to acknowledge the
possibility of eating directly from the infinite chi field of nature’s
abundance.
“How do we see into these deeper caverns nested within ourselves,
that lead into the original cave-womb of creation itself, the “wuji” or
Supreme Unknown of the Tao? How many people sit and watch in the
outer physical cave, and nothing much happens, except perhaps they
see their boredom and frustration at being trapped in the seemingly
solid granite walls of that cave reality? By watching the coupling of
water and fire, the inner male and female, there comes an opening
hidden from outer sight.”
Now let’s slow down, before the metaphysical story gets too far
ahead of the physical one. I should tell you that four years earlier I had
spent a week in a cave in Pagan, Burma. I was in a Buddhist cave, 75
feet deep inside a pitch black mountain, with a 25 ft. high Buddha
statue guarding the cave outside. That experience gave me a point of
comparison with this Taoist cave experience on Huashan, in a
relatively shallow 18 foot deep cave. As I settled into my life in this
cave, I appreciated how clean and dust free this granite cave was
compared to the dirt walls of my Buddhist cave. I recalled my
confusion at the initial resistance the Buddhist cave seemed to have to
my doing Taoist practices in its space. My Taoist meditation practices
simply wouldn’t work, the chi wouldn’t flow. I decided the cave’s chi
field had been deeply patterned by generations of Buddhist
practitioners. Only after I opened my heart to the spirits of those
before me did the mountain relax and only then did my alchemical
practices begin to open up channels with the inner planes.
Here it was totally different. Some invisible presence within
Huashan mountain seemed to be actively pushing me deeper into
Taoist practice at every moment. This ensured that I never got bored,
even though my outer cave life was severely limited. I soon explored
the parameters of what was possible within my palatial cave. It had
enough room for me to practice chi kung movements and even my Wu
style tai chi form and a tight circle of Pa Kua Chuan. Carved from solid
rock was a three-foot high altar table in the middle of the cave, which
was big enough for me to sleep on. Chen told me the cave had later
been used in later centuries as a shrine, evidenced by holes higher up
on the walls for holding statues. Bits of some of these statues were
piled on one side of the cave, the destructive signature of teenage red
guards from the 1960’s. This was one time I appreciated the house
cleaning by them, as I actually preferred the cave naked, in its raw
original form.
There was another elevated pedestal in the center of the back of
the cave, on which I respectfully set a single candle. I found that I
rarely lit it as there was really nothing much to see in the cave with my
outer eyes at night. I spread out my foam pad and sleeping bag on the
central stone altar, as if my body was a sacrificial offering to the Spirit
of this mountain. There was nothing else in the cave, except my pack,
in which I kept some “emergency” food bars and a water bottle I never
felt tempted to consume. The only other piece of furniture arrived
unasked the second morning, when another Taoist monk, Wen Shi,
undoubtedly sent by Chen, arrived with a wooden kneeling stool for
me to sit in meditation on. It was taken from a nearby shrine to a
Taoist female deity from the Nine Heavens.
Wen Shi, concerned that I would be cold in the cave, also took off
the black Taoist cape off his own back and gave it to me as a gift. My
protestations were useless; he considered my flimsy pile jacket
inadequate against the harsh mountain elements. I wrapped his cape
around me, the dress uniform of Complete Perfection Taoists. Chen
had told me that Taoists are becoming so rare in modern China that
when he wears his traditional Taoist clothing outside the monastery in
big cities, with his white leggings, black tai chi shoes and hair tied in a
top knot, he is sometimes mistaken for a foreigner wearing some
outlandish foreign dress!
I began to merge into the cycle of night and day of cave life. At
night I lay on my stone altar-bed in the pitch blackness and did Taoist
dream practice, a method where you put the body to sleep while the
mind stays awake and does special meditations in the twilight space
between sleep and waking states. I sat up at 4 am to meditate with the
deep violet-blue light of early dawn. From 7 to 9 am I did standing chi
kung movements. Then I sat again in meditation until the sun
entered the cave at 11:30 pm.
10
The boundaries between the two halves of the physical cycle of
night and day began to dissolve as I sank deeper into the mind of the
mountain itself. This can be a very difficult concept for westerners to
accept, that supposedly inanimate natural objects like a mountain or
the earth itself could have a “mind”. Yet this is a very fundamental
premise of Taoist philosophy - that all of nature is alive and breathing
from the universal chi field, its in-out (yin-yang) breath sustaining its
very physical form. This means every aspect of matter also has its own
intelligence. Even the rigidly fixed intelligence of the granite rock of
Huashan can be an energetic pathway into its “parent” spirit of the
mountain, whose core intelligence is the earth itself.
A few days earlier I had asked Cai, the breatharian female adept, if
she ever felt like the mountain was communicating with her. She
smiled. “ I have never felt it speak to me like some human spirit, but its
presence is always very strong for me. Everyone who comes to
Huashan to live must feel its presence, why else would they stay?”
The high piezo-electric conductivity of granite may contribute to
the yang chi I felt flowing through Huashan. Others confirmed to me
that historically Taoists from all over China considered Huashan as
having very yang chi for cultivation practice. I later visited Mt.
Qingcheng (”Azure Truth”) Shan in Sichuan Province, the birthplace of
one sect of Taoism 2000 years ago. It was a completely different
experience, and I noticed how powerfully yin its chi was. The shape of
Huashan, bursting up dramatically towards the Heavens in a five-petal
flower formation, is an expression of its yang nature.
In Taoist feng shui Huashan’s shape is considered to be a reflection
of a yang stellar constellation manifesting on earth. Not far from my
Spring Flower cave was another hidden cave used since Han dynasty
times for viewing the Pole Star, the central star or higher earth element
around which the other four stellar quadrants/elements of Heaven
rotate each night. This inspired me on some evenings to go out on the
narrow ledge in front of my cave and practice Taoist star alchemy, a
method of absorbing and balancing the chi from all the star quadrants
into the crystal palace or upper dan tien (etheric space of the pineal
gland).
Meditating in this granite cave day and night for five days
awakened memories in me of the seven trips I had made to Egypt to
meditate inside the Great Pyramid. The walls of the King’s Chamber
are made of a special red granite, and above this chamber (which
architecturally represents the pineal gland) there are five giant slabs of
granite with space between them, wrongly thought to be for
earthquake adjustments. According to esoteric lore I learned while
studying pre-Egyptian internal alchemy practices, these five slabs of
granite represent the five subtle bodies of man that are awakened by
initiation in the pyramid. Taoist internal alchemy holds a similar
pattern of unfoldment, but uses different methods to achieve the
awakening.
But the use of granite to amplify spiritual vibrations from the
mountain’s deep earth consciousness and act as a ground for Heavenly
frequencies may be similar in the Taoist and Egyptian traditions.
Mountains are just natural pyramids; their axis acts as a double vortex
between the center of the earth below and the stars above. My
experience of Huashan, a giant “earth flower” made of solid granite, is
that the mountain is a vast initiation chamber for those who can
attune to its inner frequency. When you align your human body axis to
axis of the mountain, it becomes a pathway for communicating with all
that the “mind of the mountain” is communicating with. Huashan is
thus just an individual outlet for the collective planetary consciousness,
like any ley line or sacred place. The more a place gets used for spiritual
awakening, the more powerful and skillful it becomes at using the
natural chi field to communicate with humans. For those following the
path of the Tao, this is the major reason to visit China’s sacred
mountains.
This lure of awakening to one’s spiritual truth is undoubtedly what
motivated Taoists to spend years digging these caves. Chen told me
that records reveal it took up to 30 years to dig a large cave like Spring
Flower Cave out of the cliff wall of solid granite. After digging it, they
would undergo tremendous deprivation of ordinary human pleasures
to live in the cave. There had to be a special payoff in spiritual pleasure
to keep them from abandoning their simple cave life. Meditating in
solid rock seems to cause a special resonate with the bone level of
human consciousness, where Taoists consider the jing or sexual essence
to be stored. Bone and the jing within it is spiritually the most dense
level of our human body, and thus the hardest to reach by ordinary
meditation. But it is also the secret substance needed to crystallize an
immortal Body of Light This may also explain why so many Taoist are
said to have achieved their immortality on Huashan - they were able
here to concentrate their full being on the process of gathering their
jing essence and refining it into chi, shen, and ultimately wu (non-
being).
What about harsh weather? You might ask, as I did: why didn’t the
cave adepts simply light a fire in their caves to keep warm? Chen
answered this question before he would even show me the way to the
cave. “There is one very strict condition for your staying in the cave”,
he warned me.”Absolutely no heating or cooking fires are permitted.
You will notice that none of the dozens of caves on Huashan have their
ceilings blackened by fire. This traditional Taoist rule against using fire
is not to make cave life harder than it already is. It is to protect your
internal practice. A strong external fire will disturb the delicate balance
of water and fire within your dan tien. One purpose of cave practice is
to activate more powerfully the internal fire needed for neidan
(alchemy) practice”. Of course, I readily agreed to this condition.
I soon discovered other factors that may have heloed warm Taoist
cave adepts. The cave itself is good insulation. They did do not freeze
in winter because the internal earth temperature radiates an average 57
degrees F. into the cave. They put wood doors on the cave to keep out
the worst winter wind and retard heat loss. From that minimal baseline
of external support they did internal alchemy practices to heat their
body to a sustainable and comfortable temperature. While in the cave,
I spent many hours practicing “internal chi breathing”, a formerly
secret method of empty force breathing (kong jing) that powerfully
heats the dan tien or belly cauldron. This unique method mixes the chi
from the fire (du mo) and water (ren mo) channels, and synchronizes
the rhythm of physical breathing with chi body rhythms. Once the dan
tien is warm, it feeds warm yang chi to all the deep channels of the
body, particularly the Eight Extraordinary Vessels. These control your
core body temperature and autonomic system functions, and are the
reservoirs that overflow to feed the vital organs and their meridians. I
teach this Internal Chi Breathing as part of the fundamentals of chi
kung, but it was valuable for me to see it work so effectively in the cave.
I found my cave to be quite warm at night, as if it perhaps were
still absorbing heat form the daytime sun. This may have been
amplified by movement of warm valley air masses rising after sunset. I
usually had to toss the cover of my sleeping bag off during the night. I
noticed the reverse seemed to occur in the morning: as the sun rose,
the cave went through a chilly period from 7 am to 11 am, perhaps
from cold valley air masses rising. The sun would not actually shine on
my cave until 11:35 am each day. I would watch the pyramid-like
shadow of West Peak slowly move across the valley. Then the sun
would rise above West peak and cook my cave for the afternoon. I
would do practices to directly absorb solar chi , and to circulate it
throughout my body and into the chi body of the mountain.
Of course, similar weather shifts are changing everyone’s patterns
of bodily chi flow every moment. But the cave seemed to amplify my
feeling of the mountain’s deep chi rhythmically pulsating with the
cycles of the sun and moon. One night, the moon rose just as the sun
was setting. I sat in the doorway of my cave, as if the darkness behind
me were a warm opening from the earth’s womb. The forces of the sun
and moon entered my body, and having well trained pathways from my
inner alchemy practice, flowed inside my cauldron and coupled within
my core channel. I watched in awe as these cosmic streams of energy
effortlessly made love inside me.
11
My body began to glow from within, and I noticed that even
though a cold wind came up as darkness descended, it did not disturb
my internal bliss or make me feel cold. The experience continued long
after the sun had set. After two hours, I finally moved back inside my
cave-womb, feeling both deeply peaceful and exhilarated. It felt like
the mountain had again been teaching me something about the Tao -
how nature meditates inside us if we meditate inside nature. In
alchemy, this is known as wu wei, a state where things happen
effortlessly, in the deep silence of the universal mind. Your personal
mind doesn’t need to make this happen with visualization, movement,
or mantra. Once natural forces have been alchemically accelerated
within the adept’s body, wu wei is the ensuing feeling of child’s play as
your chi flows with zero resistance between the local self and the Tao.
After two days of not eating or drinking water, I awoke on the
second night with a swollen tongue and feeling very overheated. I self-
diagnosed myself, and decided it was the lack of water flowing through
my kidneys that was causing my heart to overheat. I had brought
water, but had decided on arriving in the cave to not drink any, to more
quickly test my body response to the deprivations of cave life that
might have been experienced by earlier Taoist adepts. I recalled that
one of my western friends had a Taoist spiritual guide who taught him
how ancient adepts drank their urine and then refined it with internal
alchemy. Since this put no new water into my system, and was a well
tested method used by sailors to survive at sea, I began drinking my
urine.
No need to feel squeamish about this, if you’ve never drunk your
urine. Urine doesn’t stink until after it grows cold. It was my first time,
but I literally guzzled my yellow fluid down the next morning. I found
it to be warm, salty, and like a very mild and tasty broth - and very
satisfying to my kidneys and heart, which cooled off. I had no more
problem the rest of the time, and had the feeling I could have
continued for a very long time. There is also a homeopathic effect also
created by recycling one’s urine repeatedly through your system, as it
concentrates many subtle essences that can have healing properties.
There is a large literature on people healing serious illnesses with urine
drinking. I also noticed something unusual. Every time I urinated, I
would pee on the ground the starting and ending urine flow, to remove
toxins accumulated in the bladder. I was losing about 30% of my urine
each day, a gradual loss of body water.
Curiously, the empty water bottle I used to catch the urine always
refilled to the same level each time. This meant my body was either
producing water from thin air or it was converting blood or body fat
into water. This continued the entire five days, and since I didn’t grow
thin, it felt like my kidneys were producing new water, in the same way
my spleen chi felt like it was producing new food from the chi field. Of
course scientists would say I was deluded and just consuming myself on
a fast. But what can scientists say about others who rarely eat for
months or years on end? I recalled a conference sponsored by another
nei dan teacher, Yan Xin, attended by a number of his scientist-
students who themselves had stopped eating for long periods without
undue weight loss. Modern science does not have a paradigm for this
and many other simple things in life, like love. The facts of our reality
do not always fit the modern materialist hypothesis.
This is why I find Taoist internal alchemy so fascinating - it allows
anyone to use his body-mind as a cosmic laboratory. You don’t need big
science grants or a $6 billion dollar super-collider to run an experiment.
You can apply Tao spiritual science to explore all the deepest mysteries
of the universe in your own body, as a micro-universe. The
Microcosmic Orbit meditation, the first of seven formulas of
alchemical practice in the system I learned, was by itself a kind of
internal super-collider for the yin and yang forces flowing within the
body. I was using the cave to test for its effects on my own practice. I
found the results to be very positive.
The experimental nature of internal alchemy has led to the
development of many different systems of neidan or internal alchemy
within China. On Huashan, Chen told me that historically the Taoists
here followed a form of neidan taught by Chen Tuan, an 11th century
Taoist famous for his dream practice, even though Huashan today
formally belongs to the Complete Perfection school of Taoism that
follows Lu Dong Bing style of alchemy. Ironically, the Seven Tao
Formulas of Immortality I learned (via Mantak Chia) came from an
adept named One Cloud who renounced his Complete Perfection
monastic life to seek in the mountains the true teachings of alchemy.
One Cloud found a high level hermit teacher, and used the Seven
Formulas to become a breatharian himself. Yet these Seven formulas
are recognizably within the tradition of Lu Dong Bing, even though
they don’t teach the theory of reincarnation adopted by the Complete
Perfection school. Neither Lao Tzu nor Chuang Tzu taught
reincarnation in their writings. I believe it was because living in the Tao
dissolves all divisions of past and future into a present moment that is
incarnating ever fresh from the coupling of Heaven and Earth.
There is a beautiful simplicity to this vision: there are no endless
cycles of the same individual recycling and suffering through different
lives; every human is instead the direct, fresh, and unique child of
Heaven and Earth. There are no past lives, only a multiplicity of
parallel lives in the present moment. Each person who rfines their
essence and thus completes themself in this life completes life for all
Heaven and Earth. One’s level of completion is what defines one’s level
of immortality, as a human, earth, heaven, or celestial immortal. The
concern is not to live physically forever, just long enough to complete
one’s true destiny. Ultimately everyone has the same destiny, to return
consciously to the Tao.
The adepts on most Taoist sacred mountains in China have
adopted a different set of nei dan methods to explore the Tao. Yet all
these variations derive from the same core principles of yin-yang chi
flow, of five elements cycles on a matrix of eight primal forces
emanating from a ninth neutral force (yuan, or original chi) in the
center. The fluid and changing nature of Taoist practices makes it very
difficult for westerners to pin down, and thus to understand in their
normal analytical manner, what exactly internal alchemy is. Unlike
most religions, Taoist alchemy is not based on a fixed set of beliefs, or
on an single divine entity who saves humans, but rather is based on the
merging of human body-mind rhythms with cosmic rhythms. As the
adept learns to shape the chi field through chi kung and nei kung
practices, he or she also shapes their destiny in the world.
I arrived in the Spring Flower cave just a few weeks after the Sept.
11 bombing of the World Trade Center. It might have appeared I was
retreating from the world’s problems, rather than engaging them. Yet I
did not experience it as a withdrawal, but rather saw my cave an
observatory from which I could more clearly interact with the
convulsive rhythms pulsing through the planetary brain from the heart
of America. When you are caught up in reactive emotional patterns of
society and politics, it is difficult to directly perceive the underlying
natural forces at work in shaping society. Every event, even one
seemingly caused by evil forces, is ultimately an expression of natural
forces seeking to achieve balance.
I am not talking about the immediate or surface political reasons
for terrorism, and maybe I should have made that clearer. I am talking
about the core spiritual reasons/imbalances in the global mind that
surface from the deep unconscious and get shaped by cultural forces
into whatever they are. By the time any thought form/impulse gets to
the stage of action, be it beneovlent or violent, it has gone thorugh
many filters/layers of consciousness, some of which reflect the global
brain imbalance I was attempting to refer to. These imbalances come
from fears that are very
primordial/deep ancestral, and precede the current situation.
From my cave perspective, I saw that beneath the apparent
political issues surrounding the 9-11 terrorist attack were deeper
spiritual divisions in the collective global mind. The left-brained
western hemisphere does not comprehend and thus cannot trust the
more right brained eastern hemisphere. Its similar to the difficulty
men and women have in communicating. This is a very ancient
ancestral pattern buried deep within the planet that is
12
resurfacing in a new form. The mistrust breeds fear, which in the
current scenario has translated into western politico-military
strategists seeking to dominate with weapons the near eastern and
asian peoples and their resources. The U.S. military sees China’s huge
population and political system as its only long term potential
competitor on a global scale, and the oil rich Muslim countries as
essential to controlling and containing the China threat. What can a
simple western Taoist, while sitting in a cave in China, to do about all
this? I love both China and America, the peoples of both the near
eastern and the west. The politicians tell me I have to choose, that
only one side can be in control.
My natural response to this event as a Taoist is that there is always
a third choice. I chose to align with and alchemically balance the
natural chi field of the planetary mind with this third point, the
stillpoint between the global yin and yang forces. My hope was to
bypass the apparent political polarity on the surface of the planet and
use Huashan to help me dive deep into humanity’s collective heart. My
intent was to lessen the intensity of fear driving the two split and
competing halves of the planetary brain. As a westerner sitting in a
cave at the geographic center of China near its ancient capitol of Xian,
I felt perfectly positioned to initiate such an alignment through
meditation. To amplify the effect of my practice, I had pre-arranged
for my wife and alchemy partner Joyce Gayheart to do similar
meditations from the nearly exact opposite side of the planet back in
America, not far from Washington D.C.
Lao Tzu became famous in China because his 5,000 character
meditation manual (the Tao Te Ching) integrated politics and
spirituality. It emphasizes repeatedly the necessity for politial leaders to
harmonize with the chi field of the Tao. Following the Tao is not about
choosing one political system or leader over another, but about
choosing the balance point between all contending forces. Only from
this still point of calmness can the emotion-crazed and polarized
politicians on both sides be guided to peace and harmony. This
situation today is no different from Lao Tzu’s 2500 years ago. Unless
the innate harmony of the Tao is sought, the cycle of guerrilla
terrorism vs. state terrorism (a.k.a. war) will continue until all parties
exhaust themselves and many innocents are harmed. This is a slow and
tortuous way to achieve balance.
The meditations I did on the global situation from my cave on Mt.
Huashan were very profound. I linked my own polarized brain
hemispheres and deep energy body channels to the powerful granite
meridians of Mt. Huashan. These connected me into the core of the
planetary brain that links humanity into a single collective mind. I
called in the polarized forces from the different Tao alchemy formulas,
in equal and opposing streams of chi flow: male sexual fire vs. female
sexual water, sun vs. moon, stellar spirit vs. earthly matter, formless chi
field of Early Heaven vs. formed chi field of Later Heaven. Ultimately
all these poles are fluctuations between the eternal desire of beings to
return to the primordial chaos of Oneness vs. the impulse to create
new order as the Ten Thousand Things. Into the meeting point or
cauldron of all these octaves of my consciousness, I called in the
archetypal fear splitting the planet in half. Fear lacks its own center,
and thus cannot survive such powerful cosmic impulses to unite in the
center. I had an experience of the vast currents of fear flowing about
the planetary chi field as fuel for a powerful meltdown into a deep and
peaceful inner space.
Joyce and I, meditating on opposite sides of the planet, were only
two people out of six billlion people on the planet. But by alchemically
aligning and accelerating these natural forces, I am certain that we
were able to dissolve some deep unconscious layers of fear and shift the
mind of humanity far out of proportion to our tiny number of two. In
this way, the Spring Flower cave on Huashan became in the inner
planes a cauldron of hope and renewal for all humanity. Later, after I
left Haushan, I could still feel the chi from Huashan’s granite still
coursing through my deep channels, and the heart of humanity beating
more palpably within my own heart.
 The only book I took with me into the cave was Lao Tzu’s Tao Te
Ching. In it Lao Tzu comments that “the sage stays at home, does
nothing, and yet everything is accomplished.” Staying home is a Taoist
metaphor for staying in one’s spiritual center, in the inner heart of
hearts, at the core of one’s personal cauldron. The easiest way to “do
nothing” is to align with the natural harmonizing flow of cosmic forces.
Those forces will ultimately and effortlessly accomplish the return to
peace and harmony. Internal alchemy is one very deep and powerful
way to align with those forces.
Lao Tzu also mentions that “Humans hate to be alone, poor, and
hungry”. Yet there have been countless generations of Taoist adepts on
Mt. Huashan who have chosen to live in remote mountain caves in
lives of apparent aloneness, poverty, and hunger. Why did they do it?
Perhaps only the paradoxical thinking of Lao Tzu can define their
motive, incomprehensible to the great mass of humanity: “We we gain
by losing, we lose by gaining,”Lao Tzu advises. In their cold caves
without much food or water, lost to the gaity of outer world, I believe
these alchemy adepts fed themselves and gained everything by
embracing the Tao itself.
Michael Winn is a pioneer in bringing Tao arts to the west. He is
founder & director of Healing Tao University which offers 30 week
long summer retreats in all of the Tao arts in New York’s Catskill
Mountains. Recent President of the National Qigong Association
USA, he wrote 7 books with Mantak Chia. and offers in depth Tao
home study audio-video courses in chi kung and Taoist inner alchemy.
He is leading a China Dream Trip Oct. 6-20, 2002 with an optional
week Oct. 19-27 in Taoist monasteries and cave practice on Mt.
Huashan. Contact: Info@HealingDao.com or 888-999-0555
(973-777-4442) or www.HealingTaoUSA.com
Becoming The Immortal Child
The Egyptian Book of The Dead as Inner Alchemy Text
Translated by Normandi Ellis
Note: The link between the Egyptian concept of immortality as an
Eternal Child and the Daoist cultivation of the Immortal Child is
made very clear in the following passage. The notion that the “gods”
are a collective within this Immortal Child is also strikingly similar.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is obviously not a funerary text at all,
but about spiritual passage between heaven and earth. The adept in
both ancient Egypt and in ancient China becomes the immortal child
to make that passage WHILE STILL ALIVE. Are you willing to re-
imagine yourself?
- Michael Winn
Becoming the child
(from Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of The Dead
translated by Normandi Ellis, complied from egyptian funerary texts
and religious hymns from 3000 B.C-300 A.D)
In seafoam, in swirlings and imaginings I am fish, tadpole,
crocodile. I am an urge, an idea, a portent of impossible dreams. I lie
between heaven and earth, between goodness and evil, patience and
explosion. I am innocent and rosy as dawn. I sleep with my finger in
my mouth, the cord of life curled beside my ear. Like a child in its
mother’s belly, I am with you but not among you. I know no ending for
I have no beginning. I have always been here, a child in the silence of
things, ready to wake at any moment.
I am possibility. What I hate is ignorance, smallness of
imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things
are possible. When we speak in anger, anger will be our truth. When
we speak in love and live by love, truth in love will be our comfort.
Who you are is limited only by who you think you are. I am the
word before its utterance. I am thought and desire. I am a child in the
throat of god. Things are possible-joy and sorrow, men and women,
children. Someday I’ll imagine myself a different man, build bone and
make flesh around him. I am with you but a moment for an eternity. I
am the name of everything.
13
I’ve dreamed the nightmare a hundred times, that old revulsion of
bone and flesh, waking in sweat, in a headlong rush toward the world,
into the cool certainty of fires that burn in sudden stars, the heat in the
body. That I am precludes my never having been.
What I know was given to me to say. There is more.
There are words that exist only in the mind of heaven, a bright
knowing, a clear moment of being. When you know it, you know
yourself well enough. You will not speak. I am a child resting in love, in
the pleasure of clouds. I read the book of the river. I hold the magic of
stones and trees. I find god in my fingers and in the wings of birds. I
am my delight, creator of my destiny. It is not vanity.
There are those who live in the boundaries of guilt and fear, the
limits of imagination. They believe limitation is the world. You can not
change them. There is work of your own to do. You will never reach
the end of your own becoming, the madness of creation, the joy of
existence.
Dance in the moment. Reach down and pull up song. Spin and
chant and forget the sorrow that we are flesh on bone. I return to the
rhythm of water, to the dark song I was in my mother’s belly. We were
gods then and we knew it. We are gods now dancing in whirling
darkness, spitting flame like stars in the night.
In the womb before the world began, I was a child among other
gods and children who were, or may be, or might have been. There in
the dark when we could not see each other’s faces, we agreed with one
mind to be born, to separate, to forget the pact we made that we might
learn the secrets of our fraternity. We agreed to know sorrow in
exchange for joy, to know death in exchange for life. We were dark
seeds of possibility whispering. Then one by one we entered alone. We
walked on our legs, and as we had said, we passed in well-lit streets
without recognizing each other; yet we were gods sheathed in flesh,
the multitude of a single spirit. Gods live even in darkness, in the world
above your heads, in the crevices of rocks, in the open palms of
strangers.
I am a child, the seed in everything, the rhythm of flowers, the old
story that lingers. Among cattle and fruit sellers, I am air. I am love
hidden in a shy maiden’s gown. I am the name of things. I am the
dream changing before your eyes. I am my body, a house for blood and
breath. I am a man on earth and a god in heaven. While I travel the
deserts in frail form, while i grow old and weep and die, I live always as
a child inside the body of truth, a blue egg that rocks in the storm but
never breaks. I sleep in peace in my mother’s lap, a child mesmerized
by sunlight on the river. My soul is swallowed up by god. Out of chaos
came the light.
Out of the will came life.
On Immortality, the Body, & Wuji
Michael Winn
Question has been asked: according to Tao alchemy principles, is
the physical body immortal? The issue can be simplified. Jing , chi,
shen (body substance, energy, and intelligence/spirit) are all one, and all
disappear together into and emerge out of the Wuji, the Supreme
Unknown. Ther wuji is NOT a true void, more a womb of unknown
origin. If either spirit or substance or energy lives, they all live. If one
dies, they all die.
Spirit and substance are just two ends of the same pole, connected
by energy. The movement of their apparent life and death is not just
between body and spirit, but between wuji/ Unknown and creation/
Known. So even the infinite field of Original Spirit has to face this
Unknown. The Original Spirit (Yuan Shen) is closest to the wuji, the
other levels of spirit (in stars, planets, or human bodies) are
dimensionally (i.e. vibrationally) more distant. But all claim the wuji as
their grandmother.
Jing, chi, and shen all have equal and simultaneous reality, and need
each other to know themselves. How does spirit know that it exists
except by Body/jing’s presence? That is what ensures Body’s
Immortality. Otherwise Original Spirit would just snap it fingers in the
causal plane and disappear in a second this entire troubled physical
plane. It doesn’t do this, because it NEEDS for body/substance to
evolve itself back into its original immortal state of awareness.
 But we could speculate that Immortality itself, the Eternal Life of
Spirit integrated with Body, ceases to exist and becomes something
else in the presence of the Supreme “Black Hole” of Wuji. Perhaps we
cauld call it Non-Mortality, or Amortality? I wish I were close enough
to even pose the question to the proper Presence or Absence.
Smiling at this Headiiness,
Michael Winn
2001
State of the Universe Address
Year of the Water Horse
Michael Winn
It¹s Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the Winter
Solstice, Year of the Water Horse. It begins early Tuesday morning
(EST), Feb. 12, 2002. My physical body is only a tiny speck in the
universe, how can it grasp what is really going on within these vast
cosmic cycles of the earth, moon, sun, and stars? My energy body
reaches out into the chi field, shaped like a giant question mark, its
curved hook hoping to catch some answers. Since everyone¹s Original
Spirit is the center of the universal field of awareness, I am reminded
that each of us can deliver our own State of the Union address to
ourselves and our friends. Here is mine. The State of the Universe, as I
experience it.
First, a short look back gives a better view of the general flow. 2001
was mostly a Snake Year, and some dark snakes certainly came crawling
out last September and afterwards. People are afraid of snakes, and so a
global wave of fear enveloped the planet. While the outer events of
9-11 were horrifying to contemplate, my inner vision was elated and
bursting with excitement, even as the nightmare unfolded. Maybe it is
because I love physical snakes as well as energy snakes (dragons). In the
human body snake chi is just the kundalini dancing. It can be painful if
your energy body is not prepared, and ecstatic if it is.
I felt the planetary ego-crust was finally cracking open, and the
Dark Side could best initiate this, since it is the crust. 9-ll was a
beautiful example, I reminded myself, of how the Light Side needs the
Dark Side in order to reveal the True Side (i.e. its Side-lessness, a.k.a.
the center).
On Sept.15, I flew on one of the first United planes to cross the
Atlantic, and taught in Glastonbury, England one of the most powerful
Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) retreats I¹ve ever experienced.
I knew it would be powerful, even on the morning of 9/11, as I could
feel the chi field humming. In fact, it started six days earlier for me,
when I turned 50 on Sept. 5th. My birthday present to myself was to
do five hours of chi kung and meditation, and commit myself to living
another 100 years (before reviewing my “ soul contract”). I noticed that
my heart beat immediately made a dramatic shift, speeding up to a
stable average of 10 beats faster per minute (and maintained that rate
for the last five months). I was concerned and alarmed by this at the
time. I didn¹t understand until six days later that I had simply jumped
the gun on the quickening about to occur in the planetary heartbeat of
humanity.
Atop the Glastonbury Tor, a pyramid shaped mountain rising
mysteriously from the plain below with spirals terraced into its sides, I
had a vision. Isis, the tuned-in woman who runs the Shambala retreat
center where we were staying at the base of the Tor, had told me
exactly where to stand at the confluence of two polar ley lines (called
Michael and Mary lines, suggestive of deep yin and yang). I rooted my
energy body deep down inside the earth, where I saw a luminous green
pearl pulsing deep inside the earth¹s core. It felt like a long hidden
treasure waiting to reveal its precious, joyful, essence.
I interpreted this green pearl (through my filter of Taoist
alchemical language) to be the Hun spirit of the planet. Hun is the
celestial spirit of the body, expressed physically through the liver
function. It assists the deep ocean of jing chi (sexual essence) of the
kidneys rising up towards the solar heart chi. Later this green pearl
kept coming to me as my local guide Barry Spendlove (Healing
14
Tao instructor from Wales) and I traversed the Michael ley line across
southwestern England to St. Michael Mount (a dramatic island fortess
opposite Mont St. Michel across the channel).
We crossed to Ireland and explored Celtic sites like New Grange
and spent the night in some of these underground womb-tombs called
barrows. These sites I believe were constructed using ancient
Atlantean alchemical sciences, and they come alive when you practice
alchemy in them. The earth chi was intensely powerful, and the green
pearl kept calling to me from the deep earth. A few weeks later I went
to China and spent a week in a cave in bigu (not eating) on the Taoist
sacred mountain Mt. Huashan (Flower Mtn). I wrote a separate article
on that experience, but didn¹t have space to go into the green pearl.
On Huashan I worked extensively with the green pearl, doing
alchemical meditations to facilitate expanding its pathway by linking it
with my heart and by resonance to the heart of all humanity at this
time of crisis.
So now, the Year of the Water Horse rolls around, and what does
this green pearl mean? A Water Year means that the dominant phase of
chi flowing within the planet is watery. This chi gushes and rises up in
waves, as is Water¹s wont. The Horse is a yang symbol of fire and
expansion, linked to high noon and Summer Solstice. In 1985, when I
did a four month overland journey following Marco Polo¹s footsteps
across western China to Xanadu (north of Beijing), I visited the
crumbled palace where the famous bronze “Flying Horse” from the
Han Dynasty was discovered. The reason the Chinese emperors
expanded their empire to envelop what is today the Gobi and
Taklamakan Deserts in Chinese Turkestan was to obtain the magical
horses of Ferghana.
I gave a copy of this beautiful bronze statue to my wife Joyce, who
as a Water Horse naturally fell in love with it. It has little birds sculpted
underneath the hooves of a magnificent horse, giving the impression it
is flying. Even today in modern China the Horse represents fire.
During Fire Horse Years many Chinese traditionally abort female
babies because such yang fiery chi in a woman is considered very
difficult and unlucky.
This present cycle of Later Heaven (physical plane) time takes us
into a natural water-year & fire-horse alchemical combination
“cooking” the planet at this time of crisis. I constantly remind alchemy
adepts-in-training that Nature is the great alchemist, human
alchemists are just imitating Her art & science. So after the Dark
Snake crawled out of the hole, the Water Horse is going to speed up
the transformational cooking of the unconscious energies exposed to
the light of day. This means there could be some very dramatic shocks,
likely much stronger than 9-11, to the global psyche. But not to worry.
This is just part of a spiritual tidal wave that is cleansing the planet.
The sick chi has to surface in order to be embraced and healed.
I feel the presence of the green pearl of the planet¹s celestial Hun
is a signal to me that the birthing process of the planet is about to
enter a new phase. The human alchemical process of cultivating the
“elixir” and birthing it into an “immortal child” that lives in
simultaneous heavens or dimensions has been well described in
classical Taoist literature and in my other articles. In my Sun-Moon
Alchemy (Greater Kan & Li) retreats I talk about a parallel alchemical
birthing process that is happening within the planetary being. It is
known popularly as “earth changes”, which many view with
apocalyptic dread.
To me, accelerating earth changes are just planetary birthing labor
pains, and the adept of internal alchemy is a midwife. It is perhaps no
coincidence that I find myself teaching the Sun-Moon alchemy retreat
three times this year ­ in May in Tuscany, Italy (in a natural earth
amphitheatre formed from an old stone quarry), in July at Dao
Mountain, N.Y., and in September at Glastonbury, England. There we
will again rent Stonehenge for a Taoist Fall Equinox ceremony (it was
truly amazing to feel it come alive last year) and hopefully physically
descend into the Chalice Well (Glastonbury¹s most powerful yin
vortex) as part of our deep earth journey.

But what happens when a planet births its own Immortal Child?
The same thing that happens when a human child is birthed: it
separates into a parallel physical reality similar to its parents, yet
slightly different. That¹s why kids see the same world as their parents,
but through slightly different (parallel) eyes. That is the job of each
generation of souls waving through Later Heaven. Their destiiny is to
allow the life force to manifest its cyclic changes through them. But
occasionally a generation hits a special point in the cycle, and that
seems to be the case with humans alive right now.
The chi field of Early Heaven (formless) and the chi field of Later
Heaven (physical form) are coupling and penetrating each other more
deeply than they have for milleniua. The extremely subtle experience
of this Cosmic Love-making is cultivated in the sixth of One Cloud¹s
Seven Formulas of Immortality, called the Congress of Heaven and
Earth. It will be interesting to see what new experience unfolds in the
group cauldron of my Heaven and Earth Alchemy retreat in late
August at Dao Mountain. This is the level of practice where you work
with the expansionary shift in space itself. It is an opportunity to
ground the virtues (te) or unconditional spiritual qualities (love, truth,
acceptance, trust, etc) of Early Heaven into the physical plane. This is
what will nourish the new born immortal child of planet earth as it
separates into a parallel astral reality from its parent.
What does this mean for humans living on the old parent earth?
You have a free ride if you willing to hitch yourself to Nature¹s
alchemical process of accelerated transformation. That is why an ounce
of focused internal alchemy practice now will be worth a ton of blissful
embodiment later. The planetary immortal earth child is just a
collective space where we can all continue cultivating ourselves on a
slightly less dense version of earth. The dark side will still be present, as
you can¹t have bodies without it. But it won¹t be so stuck and evil-
appearing, but a planet where the life force flows creatively and freely,
without obstruction. A place where souls can shape the chi field to
complete themselves, where long life will be the norm.
What will be most confusing is the transition period to this greater
collective reality, where we will literally be in both worlds at once. You
may be programmed by materialist science to disbelieve my conjecture
about this, as some new age fantasy. But think again. You are already
experiencing yourself in multiple dimensions: your body and your mind
are the closest example. Body is solid and “proveably” exists in the
physical, the mind is formless and cannot be proven to exist, yet we
know it does. We are all already looking through a formless Mind
window into a world of Body forms. That makes the most ordinary
moment in life a multi-dimensional experience.
When we all “look” or envision together, in sync with deeper
elemental forces of the planets, sun, moon, and stars, this collective
fusion of the five elemental forces can create another solid-appearing
reality.
This re-birthing process is in accordance with both spiritual law
and the laws of physics that flow from the chi field (quantum field and
parallel universe theory if you prefer scientific lingo). We already
function in multiple dimensions each moment, but we don¹t notice it
because the perceptual shifts between dimensions usually occurs in
nanosecond time frames and our senses are operating much more
slowly.
What is confusing is the dimensional overlap between an old
reality and an emerging new reality. It is sort of like projecting two
movies at once on the same screen. This was apparent to me even as
the world trade center was collapsing: my inner reality was expanding
with compassion, love and joy at the release of stuck planetary energy,
my outer reality was filled with death, suffering, war-hysteria and
paranoia from political manipulation and lies. I chose to give the inner
reality more weight, as being my unfolding reality, and the latter as the
dying gasps of a reality whose negativity and self-contracting nature
dooms it to eventual death.
15
The fact is, multiple realties can co-exist. Good-bad, right-wrong,
male-female, and Me-Other occupy the same yin-yang energetic space
simultaneously, even if we have separate physical bodies. All of these
polarized energetic patterns are living in a single spectrum of
consciousness. I expect that during the Year of the Water Horse to see
the apparent disparity between these polarities intensified. The Devil-
Angel faces of humanity will be out in full force, moving the drama
along. Something like a nuclear suitcase bomb exploded in a major city,
or some other apocalyptic event that the military will use to expand
their global domination. Maybe an earthwquake or volcano near some
major city that throws the global economy into confusion.
Most people will get sucked into the drama, and feel compelled to
choose between the Light and the Dark. A minority of spiritually
mature folks will find in it an opportunity to slip through the widening
crack in the middle to find our Original Face, between the pendulum
swings of the global theatre. That is where the new reality will be
gradually crystallizing, comprised of beings who no longer want to
create the old, dog-eat-god, fear-controlled reality.
How long will this process take? Impossible to predict. How long
does it take you to shift between the dreaming and the awake state? In
astral time, it has already occurred, the earth has already birthed its
immortal child-new parallel reality. How long it takes for each of us to
pkhysically shift into it, and thereby add to its ever growing density,
will depend on our need to serve in the old reality or play out our
attachment to its many thrills, some not so healthy.
Normally, I only go into these more difficult to accept spiritual
ideas with students at the Greater kan and li level who are having some
clearer experience of their ability to cultivate original chi and create a
new internal reality. Or to perceive at least the seed of their original
self, if not a fully birthed immortal child. But things are speeding up
here. I am sharing my experience of the current earth-field shift with
you so you may be inspired to explore it and verify for yourself the
presence of the expanding Green Pearl of the Earth¹s celestial hun
soul. I find it usually appearing in the middle dantien (heart center).
(The Green Pearl may also be linked to the Atlantean legend of a
Green Emerald Tablet that recorded the earth¹s history in it. If true, I
believe it is the job of the alchemist to find, decode, and then merge
with this green crystal or pearl.)
This type of “earth re-birthing itself” information has been
proclaimed by many teachers/prophets/psychics over the last twenty
years. The information is in the collective intelligence field of
humanity, for anyone choosing to access it. But I never found these
prophets to offer much practical training to actually communicate
with these changing earth forces the way the Taoist tradition of
neidangong (inner alchemy) does.
The most important thing is to stay grounded, so that ALL of your
shen (vital organ spirits that comprise the ling, or soul) can shift
together in a harmonious and integrated fashion. Otherwise you get
conflicts, and your multiple shen want to split into different realities.
This means staying a very calm, centered, neutral observer through the
wildest of times, even when the Horse seems to be galloping over a cliff.
I hope this information may motivate some to take their chi kung
and inner alchemy path a little more seriously. This year, by the way, is
not only the beginning of a new Chinese year, but the beginning of a
new century, as this calendar (based on 60 year cosmic energy cycles)
dates back 4700 years to when the Yellow Emperor created it. I
consider “Yellow Emperor” to be code for “Great Spirit of Planet
Earth”. Next year will be the Year 4701. Time to hop on your flowing
Water Horse and throw an even bigger party!
Wishing you a joyous and chi-filled year,
Michael Winn
Looking for Taoists in China, Mortal and the Shaanxi Taoists.
I had found the perfect guide and companion to climb Mt. Hua
Immortal Shan with me. Wu Zhongxian, at age 32 was already a lineage holder in
taoist neigong (internal mind cultivation) and a superb qigong healer.
Like me, he was not really interested in becoming a religious Taoist,
Michael Winn but he was friends with many monks, as many had similar internal
Had I discovered a favorite meditation spot of the Immortals practices apart from their use of religious deities and mantras.
(”shien”) said to inhabit Ht. Hua Shan, or “Flower Mountain”, the most Wu pointed out “it’s important to remember that the Eight
famous sacred Taoist mountain in China? I was sitting on the gnarled Immortals are real historical figures, and that seven of the eight came
branches of a centuries old pine tree. This tree, for some strange from Shaanxi province. Chun li Chuan received the formulas of inner
reason, grew sideways about forty feet out from the face of a sheer cliff, alchemy here from the Tao, and taught them to Lu Dong Bin.
like a tiny dart stuck on the side of the mountain. It was a 3500 foot “Ancestor Lu” taught them to five others, who left Shaanxi to spread
drop off to the ground, measured only by a handsome white Yosimite- the inner alchemy (nei dan) teachings across China and to found
like granite cliff face. To look down into the dizzying abyss below was different schools of Taoism. But Shaanxi province still remains the
to openly stare death in the face. most important center of Taoism.”
I rooted my spinal qi into the tree trunk, so I wouldn’t think about Back on Mt. Hua Shan, I finished meditating in my pine tree. I
falling or being blown off the tree. As I got centered, I allowed my asked Wu, what did he think the adept He Zhi Zheng ate while
mind to explore the bottomless void below. I slowly expanded my perched in his bird-nest cave? “Maybe he was a breatharian, the qi up
energy body until I could feel the empty space of the natural bowl here is quite pure and nourishing”, Wu replied. He pointed up high
formed by the mountains merge into the center of my now giant sized above the cave, at some Chinese characters carved into the sheer cliff
dan tien. Suddenly, a surge of qi shot through my physical body, flowed wall. “Nobody can figure out he got up there to write that poem. Even
through me into the tree, then climbers say with modern equipment they can’t reach that spot
penetrated deep inside the mountain. because of an overhang. How did he chisel that poem 700 years ago
I experienced being in an even from solid rock? The government has a 10,000 yuan reward for anyone
more vast empty space inside the who can solve this mystery. I don’t know, maybe he was a Tao
mountain. This space felt very Immortal, and flew up there.”
primordial, the qi very formless. Iit Zheng did have had one problem. His heart was too big. He dug 72
was deeply calming and blissful. It felt caves on Mt. Hua Shan, named “Flower Mountain” for its five petalled
like the heart space of the Spirit of peaks spreading up to heaven like a giant stone lotus. But Zheng would
Flower Mountain. Was it showing me give away each cave he dug to his neigong students. His last cave was
me where to root my center of gravity the one facing me, chosen for its excellent feng shui: facing southwest
and awareness if I really wanted to for warming sun, the pine tree indicating strong nourishing qi. Today
meet with the Immortals who had inside the cave there is a shrine to Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy.
achieved themselves on Hua Shan? Chinese tourists and pilgrims still brave the cliff walk to make prayers
Facing me was a cave that He Zhi there, bowing and lighting incense in a timeless ritual.
Zheng, a Taoist adept from the 13th I remembered the words of Chen Yu Ming, the young vice abbot
century, had dug by hand out of the of Jade Spring monastery at the base of the mountain: “There are still a
vertical mountain wall. The only way lot of Tao Immortals said to reside around Hua Shan”, he said, and
to get to the cave, with my tree serving pointed out a surprising fact. “Of all the sacred mountains occupied by
as its front porch, was to walk along a narrow board one foot wide for Taoists in China, Hua Shan is the only one dedicated to the Goddess.
200 feet across the sheer wall of the bare granite cliff, clinging to a Most of its many temples and shrines are to different female deities.
chain. It’s both scary and exhilarating, like mountain climbing with no This is a bit odd, since historically mostly only male adepts were
safety rope. This guy Zheng was serious about wanting his privacy. I allowed to live here. Perhaps it was considered too steep and difficult
asked a monk if anyone ever fell down off the cliff. His answer was a for women. So the few lady Taoists who were permitted to come here
typical taoist aphorism. “No”, he said. “The more dangerous it is, the were of exceptionally high caliber. Some practiced to a higher level
more careful everyone is.” than the monks and became Immortals. They were in perfect health,
but one day suddenly their body could not be found. But their spirits
He Zhi Zheng is just one of would make themselves known.”
the colorful Taoists that made Wu and I inched our way back along the cliffwalk to visit the much
Shaanxi province renowned larger Jade Emperor’s Cave. Inside were life-size statues of Taoist
as the stronghold of Taoism. religious deities, and a young monk wearing the traditional Taoist
Some 55 miles from Hua outfit, dark blue cotton with white leggings and his hair tied in a top
Shan China’s ancient capitol, knot. He finished giving an I Ching reading to one of the thousands of
Xian, where I had visited the Chinese who flock to Hua Shan every year, making it one of China’s
Tang Dynasty 8 Immortals most crowded national parks.
Temple. Sixty miles beyond Hsueh Yu Chang, the monk, is 36 years old, and has been living on
Xian I had also visited Huashan for ten years. “I plan to live here for the rest of my life”, he
Luoguantai, a famous Taoist exclaimed, and his sincerity was apparent. It is the same story I have
Monastery built on the spot heard from all of the forty monks and and ten nuns who reside here.
where Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching. The surrounding plains of Even those who rotate to work in the monastery at the base of the
Shaanxi is virtually the largest outdoor museum in China, with temples mountain eventually long to go back up. “Life is very magical here”,
and relics from nearly every dynasty that ever ruled China, including Chang says. “In the winter it is quiet and blanketed with snow, so I do a
the famous terra cotta underground army of Emperor Qin. lot of meditation, study old tao texts, and visit with my friends on
My quest was to discover how Taoism was faring in modern China, other parts of the mountain. In summer I serve as spiritual counselor
and to energetically observe if (or how) the quality of contemporary to the public”.
Taoists would reflect the ongoing presence of the ancient Immortals. In another temple on Huashan I had a long talk with a Taoist nun,
My own passion for twenty years was to practice deeply the Taoist Liang Gui Zhi. Like the monks, she wore pants, and her face had the
internal alchemy formulas that cultivate the “Golden Elixir”, the inner same happy warm glow that comes from living a simple life and
light of eternal life grasped while one is still in mortal body. I had just cultivating a radiant inner smile. She was shy at first, but after we
finished two weeks with the National Qigong Association studying shared a couple of cups of tea together she began to talk. “The oldest
with medical qigong masters in Beijing hospitals (see Qi winter living Taoist on Hua Shan today is a woman, the 70 year old Chao
‘99 issue). Now I wanted to peek underneath the religious life of Xiang Chen”, she said. “She has lived here continuously for 50 years,
16
except for during the cultural revolution when the communists forced
her to leave. Now she lives in seclusion, in a remote valley that takes 4
hours to walk to. She is a great and wise teacher to all the young
taoists.”
I asked Liang if female adepts were trained to cultivate their
middle dan tien (heart) first, as suggested by some ancient texts. “The
lower dan tien first, later the middle”, she replied. She assured me the
women received equal treatment with the men. She herself grew up
helping around Wu Dang mountain taoist temple, which is close to
Shaanzi, and later moved to Hua Shan, where she was gradually
adopted as a nun about ten years ago.. “Taoists like to wander from
mountain to mountain”, she noted. “We are free to leave anytime we
wish. I love Hua Shan because I can meditate under the quiet sky at
night, and climb mountains by day.”
She politely declined to give her age, but did allow me to
photograph her. Most taoist monks and nuns will not allow tourists to
photograph, but I had a letter of introduction from the vice abbot, and
was considered an exception. I found out later Liang was sixty; she
looked much younger. I noticed she wore lipstick, her one concession
to the modern idea of beauty.
In the summertime, up to 10,000 visitors, mostly Chinese, swarm
like ants up the stone stairs carved out of the steep mountain rising
7,150 feet from the plains of Shaanxi. There is a spectacular cable car
ride ($7.) that will take you up halfway the mountain, the highest lift in
all Asia. Riding it, I felt like an eagle. Off season there are only a few
hundred people on any given day. The monks and tourists stay in
former monasteries converted into hostels that are fairly primitive.
Many chinese cannot afford the
cable car and hike the six hours
from the bottom, starting at
midnight in order to catch the
magnificent sunrise at the top.
This is a better way to get to
know the whole mountain. This
midnight trail is lined with little
tents lit by bare light bulbs selling
food and water to the hikers:
prices rise with the altitude. I see
many people carrying heavy provisions up coolie style, a stick with two
heavy bundles at each end. A man, carrying 50 pounds of cement bags
to build a new hotel, told me he earned only $7 for the 12 hour
roundtrip, but he was desperate for the money.
How did Hua Shan come to be a taoist holy mountain, and the
source of so many famous qigong and neigong teachings? The
mountain is home today to about 50 Taoist monks and nuns, much
reduced from the past, but still holding the thread of an ancient taoist
presence. Records suggests that taoists have lived on the mountain for
over 2200 years, since at least the Han Dynasty (200 B.C.). Taoist
hermits may have been attracted to its special spiritual energy, but they
could not scale the higher peaks. Each peak is named after the four
directions, with South Peak being the highest, and East Peak having
the most hair raising cliff climbs.
It was not until the Sung Dynasty, a thousand years ago, that a way
was found to reach the upper peaks by a carved “stairway to heaven”
that is so steep that you must hold onto a chain to keep from falling
over backward! There is a boulder called “Back Rock”, because so
many would turn back, diismayed at the vertical stairs in a section
called “Thousand Foot High Precipice”.
Legend has it that one of the most famous Taoists, Chen Tuan,
won the mountain at a chess game. Chen Tuan, beat Zhao Kuangyin,
who later made good on his promise to deliver the mountain if he
became Tang Dynasty Emperor, which he did (960-976 AD). Chen
Tuan presided over a revival of Taoist neigong practices, and is
especially famous for his Taoist Dream Practice. There is a cave at the
Jade Clear Spring Monastery where he lived his later years, and today it
is a shrine with a statue of him in the classical dream practice pose
(lying on right side, right hand supporting the head, like a Sleeping
Tiger). Records note he would meditate in this position for months
without eating while he flew about in his dream or energy body.
Hua Shan was taken away from the Taoists for ten years during the
cultural revolution. Later the temples (but not the mountain
itelf) were returned to the Taoists. Perhaps the government
17
realized nobody else could really take care of it. Chen Yu Ming is a
slender 30 year old monk who in addition to being Vice Abbot is Jade
Spring librarian and musician. He gave me a private concert on the
classical gu ching, a seven stringed hammered dulcimer-like
instrument. The music was quite elegant. He is the resident
intellectual at the monastery, and is the new breed of young Taoists
who have chosen to turn their backs on commerce crazed modern
China for communal life in a mouintain monastery. He is not isolated,
as I noticed a TV in his room, otherwise simply furnished with
calligraphy.
“The cultural revolution was terrible for the monks and nuns. They
were given three options: return to their home, become a farmer in
Shaanxi, or do hard (slave) labor. Most chose the hard labor, because
they did not want to marry and return to society. They wanted to keep
open their hope of returning to Hua Shan. Many of them died of
starvation and brutal labor conditions. But the ones who survived are
our teachers today. They tell me, “Trust the Tao, and accept whatever it
delivers to you. The immortals will help at the right moment”. Their
hearts are pure and forgiving. Amazingly, they hold no anger against
their former tormentors.”
I ask Tsong Fa Ching, a young 26 year old monk who studies
Wudang style tai chi chuan in his spare time, why he joined the
monastery. “When I was eighteen, I saw a TV cartoon drama about
the Eight Taoist Immortals, using their powers to help the common
people,” he said. “ I knew immediately I wanted to be a Taoist. My
parents lived in the south of China, and were opposed bitterly, because
monks do not bear grandchildren. At twenty I ran away and this was
the first Taoist monastery I could find..They accepted me, and I have
been happy ever since.”
At the Eight Immortals Temple in Xian, a fabulously well
preserved Tang Dynasty complex that has been continuously operating
for 1400 years, I found similar stories, and another 50 monks and nuns.
Huang Shizen (”He who walks on Air”) is only 26 years old, another of
the breed of young Taoist leader. He is well educated, speaks English,
and travels to other Taoist temples to attend ceremonies and keep
harmony between temples in different provinces. He had also just
opened his own small taoist temple in another part of Xian.
I ask Huang if he has strict dietary and sexual rules to follow as a
monk. He winces, and says with a sigh, “I get tired of people asking me
if I eat meat or have sex. In fact, most of the monks are vegetarian and
celibate. But that is irrelevant to spiritual attainment. The Tao is about
spiritual freedom. More important to remember that, not religious
rules of behavior.”
Together we leave the bustling capitol city of Xian to drive to
Luoguantai, famous for its location at the mountain pass where Lao
Tzu was stopped by the gate keeper and asked to write down his
wisdom. The 5000 chacracter masterpiece, the Tao Te Ching was
alledgedly written on this spot. The monastery is nicely kept up by the
42 monks and 8 nuns. By a large statue of Lao Tzu I take a photo of
Huang and another young taoist leader, the 30 year old Liu Si Chuan.
One is dressed in black, the other in white, like a designer yin-yang
outfit. What’s the difference? “The summer outfit is white, the winter
is black”. Of course. Harmonize with the seasons.
Huang introduced me to the abbot, Ren Fa Rong, who is also his
meditation teacher. Rong is famous as a scholar of Lao Tzu and vice
president of the All China Taoist Association. At age 70, Ren Fa Rong
is friendly but inscrutable. Of all the Taoists I met in China, his shen,
or spirit, felt the most powerful. We had tea and discussed Lao Tzu.
“There are over a thousand commentaries on the Tao Te Ching”, he
noted. “It’s good to have a lot of interpretations. Lao Tzu was not just
writing about the politics of his time, he was also guiding us about nei
dan (inner alchemy). Ultimately Lao Tzu is writing about the Natural
Tao, which embraces everything.”
I promised Ren Fa Rong I would return for a longer study, and
bring some western students of the Tao with me. He seemed happy to
deepen that connection, gave me his commentary on Lao Tzu, and
asked if I would help translate and publish it in America. I heard
myself saying yes. (Any Chinese translators out there?)
The words of one young monk captured the essence of what I
encountered in Shaanxi. “We are religious Taoists, but the original
Taoists had no religion. Our uniforms and temples are merely a
reflection of the local culture. None of it matters. Only, can you grasp
the essence?”
Michael Winn is leading a
joint NQA-Healing Tao trip to
China Sept 23 - Oct. 7, 2000. It
includes a week studying with
Taoists in Luoguantai & Hua
Shan, a week training in medical
qigong in Beijing. Winn lives in
Asheville, NC, has 20 years
teaching experience. He is Past
President of the National Qigong
Association USA, writer of 6
books on neigong with Mantak Chia, is founder and Dean of Healing
Tao University in Big Indian, N.Y., the largest offering of low cost Tao
Arts in the west with 33 summer retreats (academic credit available) in
qigong, feng shui, healing, herbology, pa gua, taoist alchemy, etc. For
free newsletter & catalog of neigong home study courses, call
888-432-5826 (or 201-656-2346). Email info@healingtaousa.com or visit
www.HealingTaoUSA.com/retreats
Story of Mantak Chia Meeting Taoist
Adept One Cloud
Introduction and interview with Mantak Chia by Michael Winn,
written for PBS book by Francesco Garripolli accompanying his PBS
film Qigong: Healing Art of the 21st Century
Michael Winn
Taoist Master Mantak Chia is a major pioneer in awakening the
West into the Way of the Tao over the last 20 years. He is co-author of
over ten books on qigong and its inner meditative aspect, neigong. He
is the first to openly initiate westerners into the secret methods of
Taoist inner alchemy, the ancient methods for healing the split
between body/mind and sexuality/soul. It’s a path that leads to long life
and a deep blissful, spirtual rebirth.
His books include Awaken Healing Energy of the Tao, the first
book in English on opening the Microcosmic Orbit, a kind of unifying
“chakra” or wheel that connects all the meridians and energy centers of
the body. I co-authored with him a revolutionary approach to
connecting sexual energy to physical and spiritual health: Taoist Secrets
of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, followed by Healing Love:
Cultivating Female Sexual Energy.
Other books focused on different types of qigong: Iron Shirt Chi
Kung, Bone Marrow Nei Kung, Transform Stress into Vitality (Six
Healing Sounds), Fusion of the Five Elements (mind training of the
vital organ qi and emotional qi), Chi Nei Tsang (Deep Organ Massage)
and Tai Chi Chi Kung. His specialty is in teaching people how their
“energy body” -- the collective meridians and deep qi channels that
connects the body-mind -- can be activated to function as one
smoothly functioning whole.
I was one of a small group of western students who helped him
found the Healing Tao Center in 1982. We were tucked into a tiny
cubbyhole in New York’s Chinatown -- a little place with a big vision.
Today, the International Healing Tao has over 1000 instructors
worldwide on every continent teaching the classical Taoist approach of
harmonizing “water and fire” -- male and female, yang and yin.
It has given me and hundreds of thousands of others a practical
way to manage our health, our emotions, our sexuality, and our minds.
It led to my spiritual experience of nature (body nature and worldly
nature) as an energy doorway that connects me with “God” in every
moment. This is the humble simplicity and beauty of the Tao, the
Natural Way. Here is Mantak Chia’s account of how he came to the
Way:
Mantak's Chia's Story
I am Chinese, and grew up in Thailand. My mother was a
Christian chaplain, but I was surrounded by Buddhist monks who
taught me meditation at age six. I watched other Chinese do chi kung
in the parks, but didn’t get deeply into it until I went to Hong Kong to
attend high school. One of my classmates took me up into nearby
mountains where a Taoist adept lived in a simple hut. His name
18
was One Cloud, and he was 90 years old though he looked thirty years
younger.
I was impressed by his kind smile and gentle strength. He lived
simply, ate simply, a diet with no salt. He taught me about taoist
alchemical salt, which is heated in bamboo, and used as a solvent to aid
meditative practice. I visited White Cloud once or twice a week for
almost four years.
He took a liking to me, seemed to think I had the patience to learn
something deeper from him than other students. He taught me the
classical seven Inner Alchemy formulas of Immortality that he himself
had used to stop eating food . He said he had existed solely on chi (qi)
for many years when he lived in the mountains of north China. He
started eating again when the Japanese started bombing and he came
down out of the hills. He believes that his liver was contaminated by
bad food at that time, which may have been a cause of his eventual
death at age 96.
I had returned to Thailand, and opened my own Natural Healing
Center in the mid 70’s in which I taught qigong, tai chi, and the
beginning levels of inner alchemy -- the Inner Smile and Microcosmic
Orbit. I was amazed at how many people got healed. I thought of One
Cloud often, of his beautiful smile and his teaching me to smile into
the body’s vital organs and the dan tiens (energy centers). I preferred
his light-hearted Tao teachings to the local Buddhist monks, who were
stern and took themselves too seriously.
I also appreciated my mother’s Christian teachings, but the Tao
teachings were always practical and wise and gradually became my
main focus. I think the qigong principles of harmony and balance are
very similar to the Christian teachings on love, they are just expressed
in a more concrete energetic form. I don’t see any difference between
the idea of universal qi and Holy Spirit.
I also noticed many monks would go see a Chinese doctor when
they got sick, suggesting they knew that chinese medicine, based on
principles taken from qigong, had a deep understanding of the body.
When I was 21, a western style doctor told me I would die from an
inherited kidney problem. So I found another Taoist teacher who
showed me how to rejuvenate my kidneys by recycling my sexual
energy. I believe it saved my life, and I have taught it to thousands of
other people and seen how it helped them also.
For me, this is the real joy of teaching qigong and neigong. I get to
watch so many people heal and blossom like a flower when they
experience their connection to the flow of qi.
Clearing the Confusion Over Fusion
Article for Immortal Child Newsletter, Healing Tao Instructor’s
Association, 2001-2002
Michael Winn
Since Mantak Chia¹s book on Fusion of the Five Elements was
published 15 years ago, there has been a lot of confusion over the
Healing Tao practice of Fusion.. There were a lot of practices in the
book that were NOT part of the original fusion practice, but bits of
higher Kan & Li alchemy practices (five animals, five planets, taking
pearl out of the body, etc.). As the editor of that book, I objected at the
time and edited these higher practices out on the grounds that people
should master the emotional level of alchemy before playing in cosmic
fields beyond the body.
Master Chia put these Kan and Li practices back in and published
it, as was his prerogative. He admitted to me some years later that it
was a mistake, as the Fusion practice, which we hoped would
revolutionize the western psychological community, was largely
disregarded by them as being too esoteric or too Chinese in its
imagination and not suitable for general western use. The problem has
been compounded over time as these and many other higher practices
have been downloaded even into the first weekend Basic orbit courses.
This tendency to compress the entire Healing Tao system into a
single powerful technique I call the “Tao Big Whopper”. It looks like a
delicious, super juicy bargain, but how many people can actually get
their mouth around it? Or if they do manage to sink their teeth in, can
they really digest the cosmic chi from stars and planets in their first
weekend? Can they go home and successfully recreate that practice?
After studying and teaching Taoist alchemy for 20 years, my
conclusion is that most people cannot. Their heads get excited with a
lot of information, they feel high energy at the workshop, but it is
difficult to ground these cosmic chi frequencies. Admittedly, these
frequencies are bombarding us every moment, and I believe Master
Chia¹s intent is admirable in wanting to share as much as he possibly
can as quickly as he can. But after years of experimenting with the
progression of “information feed” into students of alchemy, and visiting
China and studying with other Taoist teachers, I appreciate the
importance placed on gradual development in Taoism.
There simply is no rush. If you hurry, you might rush past what is
sitting right under your nose. What is right under your nose is your
Original Chi, the energy of your original self known as yuan chi. The
Inner Smile is the core method for radiating this original chi to every
level of your being. But because of the many layers of tension ­
ancestral, karmic, or acquired ­ original chi is not easily grasped. Thus
the ancients, over thousands of years of testing, evolved seven formulas
for releasing the obscurations that cloud our Original Spirit, whose
light shines on a functional level as yuan chi.
The formulas follow Taoist cosmology, and the adept must
progress through each level before progressing to the next. Without
this foundation, the original chi never crystallizes into the Immortal
Embryo, the original spirit made manifest here in the physical plane.
So people practice for years, but they hit a plateau and nothing further
seems to be happening. Eventually they give up ­ too much work and
time, too little fruit.
The major obstacles for practitioners are emotional and sexual.
The Healing Tao is a leader in teaching methods for moving sexual chi,
but I have found most Healing Tao practitioners to have largely
bypassed their emotional energy body development. The Fusion
practices don¹t seem to be working well enough, and this ultimately
retards transformation of sexual chi into higher spiritual awareness. It
is one of several reasons why so few practitioners are really successful
in their Kan and Li practice. This failure may be due partly to
differences between Chinese and western practitioners ­ we have very
different emotional bodies, the Chinese are more collective-minded,
we demand more emotional expression and individual development.
But more fundamentally I think it is because of confusion over the
Fusion practice.
When I was at Tao Garden four years ago, I ran into many people
who were overwhelmed by negative feelings because they were fusing
all their negative emotions at once into a single pearl. But their
negative emotions were not transforming, they were just jammed into
a single point of very “stuck” consciousness. This can be shifted easily
by first charging up one¹s pearls with “te”, the virtuous qualities of the
Tao that are flowing into our physical body-minds (Later Heaven) from
our pre-natal self (Early Heaven).
By first absorbing our POTENTIAL power for love & acceptance
into the heart pearl, kindness into the liver pearl, gentle wisdom into
the kidney pearl, integrity/strength into the metal pearl, and trust/
openness into the spleen pearl, we build a reservoir of yuan chi in our
emotional body that then allows us to more easily dissolve our negative
emotional patterns back into yuan chi. The pearl is a just post natal
accumulation of yuan chi.
The practical implication of this is that for westerners I believe it
is important to practice the Creation Cycle BEFORE the Control
Cycle. This effectively means REVERSING THE FUSION
FORMULA SEQUENCE: nurture the five shen (vital organ “spirits or
body intelligences” with the Fusion II formula before you attempt to
dissolve negative emotions with the Fusion I formula.
As a teacher, I have found this reversal to be the most effective
sequence for emotional transformation. It is even more effective if the
students understand the difference between shen, qi, and jing, the
three core component of Taoist alchemy. I now teach this difference in
the Basics, because it is the secret to effortless practice beginning with
the Inner Smile and Six Healing Sounds and going through all the Kan
and Li practice.
If you don¹t understand the difference between jing-chi-shen, you
end up using unconscious ego fragments (shen/body spirits not yet
integrated) to manipulate your emotional chi field. This is like asking a
drunk person to drive you home ­ the likelihood of making a wrong
turn or having an accident is greatly increased. Why ask a
dysfunctional aspect of your psyche to be in control? It merely
19
ends up seizing more control, and amplifying your emotional
dysfunction. The net result is the Healing Tao is filled with people who
have become a kind of “control freak” to the extent their ego-head is
trying to control the chi of their emotional body, rather than actually
engaging their true feelings.
This attempt to avoid one¹s true feelings is accomplished by
focusing on cosmic chi from planets and stars before you have a clue as
to what your emotional body is and how it functions. By absorbing
higher cosmic chi frequencies too soon you can actually amplify your
emotional imbalance. I know of students who followed the fusion
formulas in the book (of the nine formulas in the book, the last 4 are
actually kan and li) and whose pearl shot out of their heads and left
them feeling numb, empty or stuck for years. By going out of the body
prematurely, it becomes very difficult to actually feel what is going on
inside your body emotionally.
This is one of several reasons I am STRONGLY opposed to the
technique of “shooting the pearl” out of the crown at any level of
practice. It is NOT a Taoist practice, and cannot be found in any
alchemical text. Master Chia borrowed it from the Tibetan “powa”
practice of exiting the body at the moment of untimely death, i.e. the
method is designed to be used for emergency exit only. The Tibetan
masters warn to NOT practice it regularly because it is considered to
SHORTEN YOUR LIFE. How could it not? It resembles a kind of
spiritual ejaculation of your essence out the crown. I heard a first hand
story about a young westerner who did powa practice every day up in a
monastery in Nepal. One morning, they found him sitting up dead ­ at
age 25. I guess the practice worked.
A powerful practitioner like Master Chia might be able to pull the
ejaculated essence back into the body (which he fortunately is now
instructing students to do), but my observation is that most students
are unable to entirely draw it back in. This is because the spiritual
gravity of the planets and stars and other unconscious levels of ourself
is greater than our body¹s spiritual center of gravity in the dan tien.
This is especially true in head centered westerners, directing their chi
practice from their head brain rather than their belly brain.. How
many men can ejaculate sexually and then pull their seed essence back
into their body by “thinking” it back? The result of ejaculating one¹s
pearl essence is to send your chi orbiting in the low astral plane, where
your essence floats unconsciously. In the low astral your essence is even
more difficult to manage as it pulls on your emotions and can be
manipulated by other entities that want to feed on it. This is especially
true if the pearl is sexually charged, as it magnetizes (attracts) negative
entities that match your negative emotional makeup.
In my understanding of Taoist alchemy, your essence is best
directed in the opposite direction, i.e. take it deeper INSIDE the
body, deeper into the pre-natal field within the dan tien, so it can fuse
into a pearl and be present WITHIN the body. The cosmic planet and
star frequencies can be simply absorbed into the pearl and one¹s inner
space, without needing to ejaculate the pearl out in order to magnetize
or attract those chi frequencies. You can expand your AWARENESS
(shen) out to the planets at that stage without ejaculating your essence
(jing) into outer space. Again, the adept needs to understand how the
jing, chi, and shen function differently, and GRADUALLY train them
to reintegrate into their original self.
When the pearl/immortal child is sufficiently developed, it will
spontaneously leave the body if appropriate. The process of building
up the immortal child/pearl by absorbing cosmic chi cannot easily
happen if the emotional body is stuck. So we are back to square one,
how to first relax and then transform the emotional body using the
Fusion practice. This requires just feeling the emotions and their
relation to the body without masking them or blasting them with
intense downloads of cosmic chi or other manipulations and
visualizations by the head/mental body.
I have found the Inner Smile to be more useful here, but the smile
cannot reach the emotional patterns if they remain unconscious or as
one¹s “ideas ABOUT feelings” rather than the feelings themselves.
Ultimately, I believe the primary purpose of the Fusion practice is to
allow one to get in touch with one¹s Original Feeling, i.e., the first
unconditioned feelings of yuan chi that arise in Early Heaven
BEFORE we convert this chi into Later Heaven negative emotions. would never float away...
This is why I have found it so effective to do Fusion II creation cycle
first, but with the twist of using it to circulate the unconditioned ...while deep in space
feelings or original virtues of each of the five vital organ shen ­ the burning sun
unconditional love, unconditional kindness, unconditional trust. Once sent up
we have a foundation and relation to our unconditioned or original towering flames,
nature, it is simple to release or transform our acquired negative lighting your sky
emotional patterns. To assist in this process, I have also developed chi from dawn until dusk.
kung movement forms to help students embody these patterns
without getting into excessive mental manipulation.

I hope this short description is enough to help you try this revised On the day you were born
version of the Fusion practice for yourself. If not, I have recently made the quiet Moon glowed
my Fusion teachings and other Healing Tao practices available on 10 and offered to bring
audio homestudy courses and 8 video tapes. This series ties all the a full, bright face
Healing Tao practices using the Taoist cosmology of the higher each month,
practices, without prematurely imposing the higher practices onto the to your windowsill...
beginning practices. I focus on what happens to the jing-chi-shen
relationship in each of the seven formulas of immortality. This Taoist ...while high above the North Pole,
cosmology of three Heavens (Primordial, Early, and Later Heaven) and Polaris, the glittering North Star,
the cultivation of Original Chi is explained in a longer article (30 pages) stood still, shining silver light
posted on my HealingTaoUSA.com website. The article is titled into your night sky.
“Daoist Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature¹s
Intelligence”.
On the day you were born
To get a more indepth understanding of this subject, I share all the Moon pulled on the ocean below,
that I have disocovered about these practices in my home study audio- and, wave by wave,
video coures: Chi Kung Fundamentals 1 & 2, Internal Chi Breathing 3 a rising tide washed the beaches clean
& 4, Fusion 1, Fusion 2 & 3, Healing Love and Taoist Dream practice. for your footprints...
On The Day YOU Were Born
...while far out at sea
Deborah Frasier clouds swelled with water drops,
This poem captures beautifully the Taoist vision of our inner sailed to shore on a wind,
spiritual child birthing itself into a manificently interconnected planet. and rained you a welcome
Enjoy a lovely poem well worth reading every time you celebrate a re- across the Earth’s green lands.
Birthday.
Michael Winn On the day you were born
a forest of tall trees
On the eve of your birth collected the sun’s light
word of your coming in their leaves,
passed from animal to animal. where, in silent mystery,
they made oxygen
The reindeer told the arctic terns, for you to breathe...
who told the humpback whales,
who told the Pacific salmon, ...while closer to your skin
and as high as the sky,
who told the monarch butterflies, air rushed in and blew about,
who told the green turtles, invisibly protecting you
who told the european eel, and all living things on Earth.
who told the busy garden warblers,
On the day you were born
and the marvelous news migrated worldwide. The Earth turned, the Moon pulled,
the sun flared, and then, with a push,
While you waited in darkness,
tiny knees curled to chin, you slipped out of the dark quiet
The Earth and her creatures where suddenly you could hear...
with the Sun and the Moon
all moved in their places, ...a circle of people singing
each ready to greet you with voices familiar and clear.
the very first moment
of the very first day you arrived. “Welcome to the spinning world,” the people sang,
as they washed your new, tiny hands.
On the day you were born
the round planet Earth “Welcome to the green Earth,” the people sang,
turned toward your morning sky, as they wrapped your wet, slippery body.
whirling past darkness,
spining the night into light. And as they held you close
they whispered into your open, curving ear,
On the day you were born “We are so glad you’ve come!”
gravity’s strong pull
held you to the Earth
with a promise that you From the book On the Day You Were Born by Deborah Frasier
20
Healing Tao goes Breatharian
Eve Adesso
Note by Michael Winn:
I was not totally surprised when Eve called me shortly after taking
the Greatest Kan and Li 1999 summer retreat at Big Indian to tell me
she had stopped eating and was a little concerned. That retreat had
been a virtual meltdown experience for everyone present. I felt I was
witnessing in the group deep genetic and karmic mutation within the
space of that week, in which we go beyond being earth centered to
living from the True Heart/Solar Logos/Stellar Mind/Great Shen.
Teaching the “Water and Fire”alchemy retreats has initiated short
periods of stopping eating for me in the past. After one retreat, just as
I was about to put a fork full of food in my mouth, a voice suddenly
commanded me: “Don’t put that food in your mouth!”. I obeyed, and
never got hungry for three days. Currently I am eating because I enjoy
it, but I am more actively considering the phase of giving equal
enjoyment to not eating.
I also shared with Eve the experience of Barbara Peter, a Swiss
Healing Tao Senior Instructor, who stopped eating for four months as
a result of her Kan and Li practice. Barbara finally started eating only
because her family was too freaked out by it. Other people’s fear of
death by starvation seems to be the main obstacle to shifting the
thought form from eating solid food to eating chi.
Bernie Bayard, another Healing Tao Instructor from Portland,
Ore., also stopped eating for a period of some months. He was
inititated into a process taught in Australia whereby you simply stayed
in a room for 21 days without food or water, but held the strong
intention that your genetic/biological system would shift over into
living off divine lifeforce. He says many other people had used this
method in a remote village in Australia to jump start this shift, even
without having developed a high level spiritual practice. He also noted
that becoming breatharian didn’t cure their ego issues, so you still need
the spiritual practice!
If anyone in the Healing Tao community have other experiences or
information about “bigu”, Chinese for breatharianism, please send it to
me for future issues of the Immortal Child Instructor’s Newsletter or
for posting on the website.
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 22, No. 5, 392-396 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/027046702236892
© 2002 SAGE Publications
Studies on the Fundamental Theory of Bigu
(Food Abstinence)—Preliminary
Experimental Observations of Cellular
Bigu
Xin Yan
Chongqing Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine/New
Medicine Science Research Institute
Alexis Traynor-Kaplan
School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego
Hongmei Li
UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
Jun Wang
New Medicine Science Research Institute
Hua Shen
New Medicine Science Research Institute
Zhen-Qin Xia
School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego
Clinical studies as well as hundreds of case reports have
21
indicated that Yan Xin Life Science Technology has enabled human
participants to live a normal lifewith little or no food intake for
prolonged periods—a state referred to as bigu. Bigu is described in
historical records as “taking in qi to avoid food,” and is regardedas a
special technique to achieve along and healthy life. In this study,
experiments were designed to study whether cells in vitro can survive
without commonly acknowledged essential nutrients after receiving
external qi treatments from Dr.Yan Xin, a chief physicianand a
renowned life scientist. Results reported here indicate that mouse
hybridoma cells can survive inDulbeco’s modified Eagles medium
without serum orin phosphate-buffered saline buffer without other
nutrientingredients after qi treatment. These results are the first
evidence that a cellular equivalent of the human bigu phenomenon or
cellular bigu phenomenon may occur.
Key Words: bigu • Yan Xin • Yan Xin life science technology • qi •
cellular bigu
What Bigu Means to Me
by Eve Adesso (formerly Eve 2000)
drlovesong@mindspring.com
HUANG T’ING CHING (The Yellow Court Canon) states: “The
grains of hundreds of cereals are the spirits of the earth. Though the
five flavours are beautiful on the outside, they (actually) are an evil foul-
smelling demon. The foul smell corrupts the soul and the Embryonic
breath is annililated. How can you attain the return of infancy? Why
not eat breath which is the supreme harmonious essence, so as to be
able not to die and enter the HUANG NING (The Yellow Repose). (1)
I had always thought of breatharianism as something esoteric and
attainable only by mountain dwelling hermits, and most certainly
highly unlikely for a New York City resident like myself. I was wrong!
It’s been over three months now that I’ve been in the bigu, loosely
translated as the breatharian state. Michael Winn asked me to share
my experience with you through the newsletter. I want to emphasize
that this is about my personal journey, yours may be very different.
Some background
In 1996, despite my active Tao practice, my immune system
crashed and I became so tired I could barely walk up the stairs to my
loft. This put me on a path of learning about nutrition, and I began
exploring many new things. I went to the Ann Wigmore Institute in
Puerto Rico to teach and participate in their program. I arrived in an
open minded yet skeptical state about the “Living Foods Lifestyle” that
they teach there. The only thing I was sure of was that 2 weeks in the
Caribbean in the winter would do me a lot of good. Little did I know
that this would lead to my first bigu-like experience.
I was teaching qigong in the morning on the beach and the
Healing Tao in the evening and following their program of eating
100% Living Foods (raw fruits and vegetables, prepared in special ways
to make them more easily digestible) while participating in their classes
about relaxation, meal preparation, the digestive system, colon care,
etc. I learned that cooking food kills it’s enzymes, that are equivalent
to the chi or life force of the food. The first few days of the diet I
experienced detoxification. I felt generally sleepy, with aching joints,
then hyper in other moments.
As the detoxing subsided I began to feel a light, indescribable state
of consciousness that I had never achieved while eating cooked foods.
At times I felt blissful and caught glimpses of eternal vision. I had not
yet felt this level of clarity and harmony so, in spite of the fact that
Chinese medicine often discourages the eating of raw foods, upon my
return home I made a concerted effort to change my eating habits. I
grew sprouts and greens in my loft, soaked nuts and seeds and
prepared these new foods. I was by no means a living foods poster
child but I did my best and my health improved.
Abstention from grain
By Sun Bu-er
 Once you can feed on the living energy,
Your lungs will be in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.
Forget the spirit, and there are no appearances to cling to;
Merge with the ultimate, and the existent emptiness is gone.
For breakfast look for wild taro roots;
When hungry at night, pick wetland mushrooms.
If you mix in smoke and fire,
Your body will not walk on the jewel pond.
This poem by Taoist Immortal Sun Bu-er, one of the most beloved
figures of Chinese folklore, speaks of the practice of abstention from
cooked food. It is possible to do this because the living energy, the
spiritual breath fills our bodies, so that we naturally do not think of
eating. It does not mean starving oneself or enduring hunger.
“If you mix in smoke and fire, your body will not walk on the
Jewel Pond.” The immortal body should be pure clear spirit. If you do
not abstain from cooked food, then ordinary murky energy will mix
into the body, so you cannot hope to transcend it.
The Jewel Pond is the abode of the female Immortals. Legends of
the Immortals say that the palace of the Immortal Queen Mother of
the West has a jewel pond on it’s left. (2)
SUMMER 1999
Years passed and I regained my health and vitality. Even so, in
recent years I began to feel like my qigong practice was stalled and I
didn’t know why. It seemed like I was spinning my wheels and going
nowhere. I study astrology and was very intrigued at the prospective of
the dramatic Aug 11th total eclipse of the sun that was to be coupled
with a powerful grand cross astrological lineup. Many astrologers were
predicting that August 11, 1999 would be a crucial turning point where
the material would lose importance and the spiritual would come to
the forefront. I was searching for a place where I could be receptive to
the shifting energy with a good group of people.
The Greatest Kan and Li Retreat in Big Indian taught by Michael
Winn seemed like the best choice. In retrospect I see that, for me, it
was ideal. I feel that his teaching and being open to the energy around
the eclipse were instrumental in strengthening my chi field and
nudging me into bigu. Big Indian is located in a protected park area of
upstate New York where nature is still wild and powerful. The grounds
and buildings are filled with statues and art from India and China. The
marriage of nature, sacred art and meditation create a beautiful and
highly charged environment that nourishes deep transformation.
Michael Winn taught the internal alchemical practice of Greatest
Kan and Li in a clear way and I was able to get it. I felt myself making a
deep alchemical connection between the incandescent sun and lush,
fertile earth. I was able to internalize the essence of each and hold
them within my energy body. Hang-ups and blockages that had
stymied me, some since childhood, were being cremated from within
and dissolving into blissful, chi-filled insights as they transformed.
Bigu begins
I had no clue as to what was about to happen. I had been back
from Big Indian for about two weeks. One Friday night, after a relaxing
day of saunas at the local Russian baths, I went with my significant
other and a friend out to eat at a Ukrainian restaurant that featured
dancing and live music. Carried away by the moment, I ate a much
heavier meal than I was used to. The next day I felt awful and decided
that my system was due for a cleanse and I would begin a two week
regime of eating strictly Living Foods.
I went out and bought a large supply of sprouts, organic fresh
fruits and vegetables, bagged wheat grass, etc. The next day I began my
familiar routine of preparing the mainstay of Ann Wigmore’s approach
to Living Foods; “Energy Soup”, made of sprouts, greens, seaweed and
avocado. Later I ate fruit or salad. On the second day, I knew from
past experience that I would experience symptoms of detoxification
such as fatigue, achy joints, and sluggishness and sure enough, I felt
tired.
On the third day, though, to my surprise I felt fine and I was
beginning to notice that I wasn’t hungry. What I was feeling was very
different from past cleansing diets and fasts. Usually the detox
symptoms would last for days and I would be plagued by hunger,
dizziness and weakness. I was puzzled because none of this was
22
happening. This is when the thought, “Could I be in bigu?” first
crossed my mind. The forth day was when the truth started to reveal
itself.
I was finishing up work on my CD and had a recording session
scheduled for the afternoon. In the morning I was busy vocalizing and
preparing and didn’t have time to eat. It was a beautiful September
afternoon when I emerged from the subway and began my eight block
walk across Manhattan to the recording studio. As I walked through
the busy streets and into the Gramercy Park area my attention was
drawn by the scattered trees and autumn leaves. I was feeling a calm
centeredness that bordered on ecstatic. Even so, I felt grounded and
was experiencing no hunger, dizziness, or any of the things I normally
would have felt if I hadn’t eaten all day.
Feeling this level of blissful serenity, in the midst of the frenetic
energy of Manhattan was a new experience for me. At this point I
realized that something was up since I felt significantly better after
NOT eating. Right then a sign advertizing fresh papaya juice caught
my eye, I went into the cafe and ordered one. It tasted great, but after
drinking it I noticed that my energy and blissful state went down a few
notches. This was the beginning. I realized I might be in bigu and
declared that, from that point on, that my eating or not eating would
be an experiment.
Subsequently I noticed that the less I ate, the better I felt. So, I
stopped eating.
The first week was disorienting to say the least. The lifelong habit
of eating is a strange thing to revolutionize. Anxiety about being
different would alternate with the feeling that something miraculous
was happening. I recieved insight after insight on the priorities of my
life. I couldn’t treat myself like a “feed me and I work” machine
anymore. I figured out how to cut back on working and still have what
I need. My qigong practice became my daily bread, my food, my life. I
took the subway to the beach a couple of times a week and did a long
practice session, drinking in the sea air. Eventually I began doing a long
practice session starting at midnight. The chi at this time of night feels
tremendously nourishing. The Tao Canon and many masters
recommend practicing at this hour.
In addition to practicing I began buying many books on qigong
and reading something every day. I’ve been finding the translations
from the Tao Canon, the ancient texts to be especially helpful and
inspiring. A lot of the metaphorical language is becoming clearer to me.
I also have become very sensitive, feeling my own and other peoples
emotions more clearly and powerfully than ever.
When fears would arise I would meditate and consult my inner
guidance on whether to continue. During the first few weeks at times I
felt tired and weak, but in my quiet state I realized that it was due to
detoxing. As time passes and more and more toxins are eliminated I
feel stronger and stronger and and at the same time more vulnerable,
due to the heightened sensitivity. I do a weight lifting workout 2-3
times a week and have maintained a normal work schedule.
I have decided that, if my hunger reasserts itself or I notice any
decline in health or eccessive weight loss I will return to eating, but so
far the opposite is taking place. In the first month and a half I lost 18
pounds. Now my weight has stabilized and I am at my ideal weight. I
visited a doctor that has knowledge of qigong to monitor my physical
condition. I continue to take blue green algae and tonic herb teas such
as reishi mushroom and ginseng.
What is Bigu?
The term bigu denotes an advanced qigong state during which the
practitioner is able to maintain his or her normal activities without
eating or drinking (and sometimes sleeping) for long periods, in some
cases for several months and years at a time. A characteristic of the
bigu state is that one’s overall condition improves rather than weakens,
contrary to ordinary techniques of prolonged fasting. In addition , bigu
encompasses other elements which exceed or transcend the beneficial
effects of therapeutic fasting. These extraordinary aspects of the bigu
state have been occasionally observed by medical and scientific
practitioners; for example, archeological evidence includes an oracle -
bone scripture found in a 1000 year old tomb in Hunan, China, which
contains a detailed written account with pictures denoting the bigu
phenomenon.
 Yan Xin stresses that bigu should be seen as a “signpost” or an
adjunct to one’s practice, but not as an ultimate goal. He once said
“The bigu state should not be advocated or overemphasized.” The
potential of qi gong far surpasses these phenomena. (3)
My first real exposure to the bigu concept was while studying with
Dr. Yan Xin and his organization. In some of his books (see footnotes),
bigu is mentioned and scientific studies done in China are cited. In one
of his speeches he talks about a Chinese woman in bigu, living in the
US that gave birth to a healthy baby subsisting on just water.
What I am doing would be called “non-standard bigu” i.e. drinking
liquids and occasionally eating small amounts of fruit or vegetables as
opposed to “standard bigu” which involves no eating or drinking,
except for water. It’s hard for me to know for sure what is happening
physiologically. It feels as though most of my nourishment is being
absorbed directly from the surrounding chi through the breath with
more intense absorption taking place during practice.
Scientific research studies in China have shown that practicing
qigong can improve absorption of nutrients from food. I believe that
the small amount of food and liquids I am ingesting is being utilized to
the maximum. I have no doubt that the mystery of bigu is something
that will eventually be understood through scientific research and
monitoring.
The golden rule of bigu
This is a good place to emphasize some things I’ve learned from
my friends at Yan Xin Qigong. Bigu is an effect or gift of advanced and/
or prolonged qi gong practice. IF YOU’RE HUNGRY YOU’RE
NOT IN BIGU. As we all know, if you’re not in bigu, going without
food can be hazardous to your health.
If you want to become breatharian I believe that it’s essential to
develop a very close rapport with your body and be able to distinguish
between physical hunger and mental cravings. Eating disorders are
rampant in our culture. Be careful. If you’re hungry, eat, in a healthy
and balanced way. Keep practicing. Do good deeds. This will bring you
closer.
My understanding of bigu is that it is not “not eating”. It is
practicing to a level where all your meridians merge and you and feel
the chi continuously buoying you up. Your hunger dissapears. You feel
full, bright and mildly ecstatic.
Tea
Lu T’ung, a Tang poet, wrote of tea: “The first cup moistens my
lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup
searches my barren entrails but to find therein some five thousand
volumes of odd ideographs. The forth cup raises a slight perspiration,-
all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I
am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The
seventh cup, - ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of
cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Horaisan? (mythical islands
in the Eastern sea, commonly associated with immortality). Let me
ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.” (4)
The Zen idea of stopping everthing to be in the moment while
drinking tea has helped me. It gives me something to focus on when
everyone else is eating. If I feel comfortable enough with the people
I’m with I sometimes sit at or away from the table and practice while
they are eating......we are all taking in nourishment, just in different
ways.
Initially, when my partner would make his dinner I would feel
afraid that the connection we had around food would dissapear and
put distance between us. Sometimes I make tea, or we make a soup,
then we sit down at the table together and I drink tea or some of the
broth of the soup.We may have lost some of our food connection but
we practice together much more often. He’s much more interested in
qigong now and I’ve come home several times to find him re-reading
Mantak Chia’s and other books about the Tao. He’s been in the martial
arts since he was a teenager and has been hearing stories about of
breatharians for a long time. He’s excited for me and has been quite
encouraging. At times he has felt a transference of energy and his
appetite has lessened or dissappeared and he has become extremely
sensitive.
Having big goals towards the benefit of
23
humanity
In addition to broadening my knowledge on the subject of bigu, I
feel I have benefited from Dr. Yan Xin’s emphasis on having a big goal
towards the benefit of humanity. Big contributions are sustained on a
foundation of smaller contributions and having “put one’s house in
order”.
“We should extend our view of life as ordinary work and
contribution to include great contributions. Body and soul should be
directed towards making great contributions to the entire human race,
society and the universe. We should always view our life as part of the
the whole-part of the life of the entire universe.” (5)
Dr Yan Xin
Dr Yan Xin often says that cultivation; i.e. aligning yourself with
and accumulating virtue in your everyday life should constitute 70%,
and is by far the most important element in qigong while physical and
meditation practices should constitute 30%. Virtue can be seen as the
predominant benevolent force that is omnipresent in the universe.
This aspect cannot be underestimated. Food and eating are
powerful, hypnotic, gratifying and satisfying. Meals are social, ritualistic
and imbued with love and creativity. What can take their place? What
can feed us more than physical food? A breatharian goes straight to the
source, cuts out the middleman, so to speak and absorbs the nutrient
of all nutrients, the supreme substance complete with everything
nessessary to sustain life, directly.
Technically that energy may be accessed through the breath and
the saliva but spiritually it rides on virtue. In my case, it felt as though
my excitement and commitment to my music and working on the
book I am writing “launched” me into bigu. And, although my art
benefits me, personally, my overriding drive and enthusiasm are with
the impact I believe it can have towards freeing the human race.
Bigu often feels like a precious gift. It’s great to finally have enough
time in my life for the things I consider most important. Eliminating
cooking, eating and shopping frees up 2-5 hours per day. Much money
is saved and can be reallocated. My mind feels clear and unclouded by
the burdensome digestive process.
At some point this may run it’s course but I know that I will never
go back to the excessive and unconscious eating that I used to consider
normal. I am so grateful to have made the Healing Tao and qigong a
part of my life. I feel I am deeply changed forever.
In respect for yin and yang, I want to mention some of the dark,
fearful moments I’ve encountered in my “bigu beginning”.
Over the past ten years I had, one by one, eliminated addictive
behaviors and substances from my life. The only one left was food. At
times I ate heavy foods to supress unpleasant feelings. It’s much harder
now to run from bad feelings whether induced by present day events
or arising from within. I have to sit down and deal with things. I know
that in the long run this is the best option, but in the short run...... it
hurts!
In these painful moments sometimes I break down and eat
something but mainly I deal with it by stopping to practice Fusion and
explore and transform the cause of my anguish. I’m also working on
slowing down my life and pulling myself further away from that version
of modern day existence that is nothing more than a whirlwind of
earning and spending, held in place by various addictions.
The practice of breatharianism is far from being known or
accepted. Apart from my qigong and spiritually minded friends, I don’t
always tell people that I’m in bigu and not eating. If I’m around at meal
times I often say that I’ve already eaten or that I’m fasting. If the
subject of food comes up I talk as if I were eating. Otherwise it can
sometimes become an exasperating conversation that results in
incomprehension and possible condemnation (of me!).
Some can’t fathom what I’m doing and have not been supportive.
The world is crawling with experts who are certain of one thing: to live
you must eat. Some of them have medical degrees. At times the feeling
of being at odds with a large part of society has been formidable.
Specters of starvation loomed and many fears arose;
In my meditation I asked for insight and was answered........... with
a cosmic symphony of blooming harmonics. The sound entered every
pore and massaged every cell, whispering, singing, shouting “You are
loved, you are loved, you are loved”. It took my hand and led me into
the infinite void, into an emptyness that is so full, so vibrant and so
teeming with life as to satisfy all hunger for eternity. There I bathed in
a mystic dew charged with serene passion and sublime sexuality. O
paradise! How can I do you justice? Your splendor eludes capture even
by the otherworldly art of poetry.
I’d also like to mention another important issue; finding a way to
maintain a bigu state and yet not be totally out of kilter with society.
Many intimate and beneficial social moments are centered around
eating with other people. Eating small amounts of food in these
situations often feels balanced to me now. Not eating and getting into a
converstion about me being in bigu can create disharmony. At parties
I’m finding it enjoyable to sample vegetarian delicacies, dance and
make merry with everyone else. After a joyful social event the food
passes out my body easily, with no ill effects. The trick is not exceeding
a certain amount of solid food. Tales of the 8 Taoist immortals
emphazise the parties and good times that punctuate their lives lived
in service of the poor and sick.
My experiment continues. I will keep you posted. I would also love
to read about the experiences of others. Best wishes and abundant chi
to all of you who are reading this and to all my fellow Healing Tao
instructors, students and friends. Thank you for being a source of
support and inspiration to me over the years.
In closing I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to Mantak and
Maneewan Chia for their pioneering spirit and their teachings that
enabled me to lay down a solid foundation.
Another pioneer that I’d like to thank is the late Ann Wigmore
and everyone at the Ann Wigmore Institute in Puerto Rico for their
practical and valuble teachings on Living Foods..........
I’d also like to thank Dr. Yan Xin and his New York students for
introducing me to Yan Xin Qigong and the idea of bigu.
And many thanks to Michael Winn for his committment and clear
alchemical teachings and for asking me to write this article.
If you’d like to order “Journey to Eden” a CD of Eve’s original
songs please call (718) 333-1116. Eve will be teaching at the Ann
Wigmore Institute, call her for dates.
1) excerpted from
THE PRIMORDIAL BREATH Volume II
Original Books, Inc
PO Box 2948
Torrance, Ca. 90509
2)excerped from
IMMORTAL SISTERS Secret teachings of Taoist Women,
Translated and edited by Thomas Cleary
3) excerpted from
Volume 9 Chapter 7,
“Bigu - An Advanced Qigong State for Healing and Self
Developement”
YAN XIN QIGONG COLLECTION
1997 International Yan Xin Qigong Association
order from: Ms. Lihe Zhang
82 Cameo Dr.
Willimantic, CT. 06226
Tel & Fax: (860) 456-0732
E-Mail: zhanglihe@hotmail.com
4) The BOOK of TEA by Kakuzo Okakura
5) excerpted from Chapter 6, Cultivation of Virtue.
“SECRETS and BENEFITS of INTERNAL QIGONG
CULTIVATION” by Dr. Yan Xin,
Amber Leaf Press
2 Pennsylvania Ave.
Malvern, Pennsylvania 19355
E-mail; alp@op.net
Yan Xin Qigong website: www.qigong.net
I CHING on LAW (Original Shen) and
Unfoldment of CHI
Michael Winn
There is an old Chinese text written by Wang Fu-chih that
24
neatly summarizes the Shen-Chi-Jing principles of Taoist alchemy, only
using the language of the I Ching on Law-Energy-Number:
“Between Heaven and Earth there exists nothing but law and
energy. The energy carries the law and the law regulates the energy.
Law does not manifest itself (has no form); it is only through
energy that the image is formed, and the image yields the number. If
this law becomes blurred the image is not right and the number is not
clear. This reveals itself in great things and expresses itself in small
things.
Thus only a man of the highest integrity can understand this law;
basing himself on its revelation he can grasp the symbols, and
observing its small expressions, he can understand the auguries.”
The Dream of Life
from Readings from World Scriptures - by Prof Andrew Wilson
Chuang Tzu
How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? How do I
know that he who is afraid of death is not like a man who left his home
as a youth and forgot to return? Lady Li was the daughter of the border
warden of Ai. When she was first taken captive and brought to the
state of Chin, she wept until the bosom of her robe was drenched with
tears. But later, when she went to live in the royal palace, shared with
the king his luxurious couch and sumptuous food, she regretted that
she had wept. How do I know that the dead do not repent of their
former craving for life? Those who dream of a merry drinking party
may the next morning wail and weep. Those who dream of wailing and
weeping may in the morning go off gaily to hunt. While they dream
they do not know that they are dreaming, In their dream, they may
even try to interpret their dream. Only when they have awakened do
they begin to know that it was a dream. By and by comes the great
awakening, and then we shall know that it has all been a great dream.
Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, a
butterfly fluttering about, enjoying itself. It did not know that it was
Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he awoke with a start and he was Chuang Tzu
again. But he did not know whether he was Chuang Tzu who had
dreamed that he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly
dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu. Between Chuang Tzu and the
butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is called the
transformation of things.
from Readings from World Scriptures - by Prof Andrew Wilson
The Tao of Cultivating Sexual Energy
Element Books (Nov. 2000)
Michael Winn
Sexuality is a universal way for people to quickly access their chi
flow. The ancient Taoists developed many different methods to tap the
enormous power of sexual energy in order to direct it towards creating
better physical health, a greater sense of vitaliity and zest for life, and
to refine the sexual impulse into a steady state of spiritual bliss. Sexual
chi kung can heal sexual dysfunction and impotence, improve sexual
relationships, relieve PMS and menstrual difficulty.
At the core of all chi kung is the cosmic yin-yang pulsation of
polarized energy around a neutral pole. Think of creation as a
continuous cosmic orgasm, and the human orgasm as an exquisite
echo of that pulsation. When you get them in rhythm and harmony,
your personal “energy gates” open to the cosmic flow of light and love.
There are two major paths: Single Cultivation, in which you
harmonize your male-female pulsation as “ internal love-making”,
which is possible only because every person has both yin (female) and
yang (male) chi within their own body, regardless of their sex. The
other is Dual Cultivation, in which you exchange yin & yang chi with a
lover/partner.
Taoist Theory:
Sexual chi is said to originate in the kidneys and bone marrow,
which includes in the Chinese view the penis and vagina/uterus,
prostate & ovary glands, the bladder and kidney organs and their
meridians, and in women their mammary glands/breasts. All are part of
the “water element” that regulates the body’s “jing”, or sexual body-
essence.
How is sexual chi different from other kinds of chi?
Sexual chi is 1) very “sticky”, acting as the stabilizing or bonding
energy between opposing male-female or yin-yang forces. Think of it as
super-glue; 2) it has the power to amplifiy or multiply whatever it
bonds to. It intensifies emotions, it multiplies cell and glandular
reproduction rates, either in your body or by birthing children. It can
also multiply your creative energy in the world of play or career.
The major ways that sexual chi is lost or exhausted.
Men: by excessive sex and ejaculation. “Excessive” varies by body
type, age and climate, but be especially careful during the winter, when
chi is normally going in deep, not out. There are methods of slowing
down ejaculation during sex so that men can “draw” out the essence
from their spern and recycle it around the body and nourish other
centers. It is not necessary to become celibate. These practices include
“Testicle Breathing” and “Drawing Up the Golden Nectar”.
The goal is to shift from a limited “genital orgasm” to a “whole
body orgasm”. Slowing or stopping “ejaculation” doesn’t prevent a man
from having “orgasm” or being “multi-orgasmic”. Ejaculation is
physical, orgasm is your chi pulsating. But don’t get obsesssed with
“stopping” ejaculation, focus rather on opening up your chi channels
and recycling sexual/orgasmic chi until you finally ejaculate. Then this
physical ejaculation does not cause major loss of chi. It also slows the
man down to stay in closer harmony with the woman’s slower cycle of
arousal.
Women: Excessive bleeding during the menstrual cycle causes loss
of “jing”. By energetically detoxifying the body with sexual chi kung
before the cycle begins, the need for bleeding as a means of detoxing is
vastly reduced. The menstrual cycle can even be voluntarily stopped at
a higher level of practice. This practice is called, “Slaying the Red
Dragon”. Women also train to re-direct their orgasmic chi flow up to
the higher energy centers in the heart and brain.
Both sexes: poor diet, shallow breathing, and negative emotions or
mental attitudes will exhaust your sexual vitality. Improving these plus
a regular moving chi kung practice of at least 20 minutes daily are the
mainstay of preventing low sexual energy and many associated
dysfunctions.
Another key in sexual kung-fu is understanding the relation
between the fire element in the heart and the water element in the
kidneys. These fire and water essences stimulate each other and keep
the other in check. So you need to keep proper exchange between
them, so they get into a steady state. This can be done by gently
breathing between the middle and lower dan tiens, through
visualization, and by guiding chi in the right channels. By simply
keeping a very open heart you protect against blind lust, which
ultimately injures the kidneys because it can never be satisfied by
physical sex alone. The kidney shen (”spirit, or intelligence”) needs
touch and sexual stimulation, but it is also always seeking the love of
the heart shen.
A word of Caution: Sexual chi is much more powerful than most
people realize. Note how long it takes people to recover from broken
love or divorce. Thus it is essential that you prepare your energy field
properly with chi kung practice for several months before attempting
“ovarian or seminal kung-fu”. If sexual chi is mis-directed into the
wrong energy channels, the result may range from mild discomfort to
severe impairment of physical health. Any method that is powerful can
be mis-used.
What is the proper way to prepare for sexual chi kung?
1. Learn the Six Healing Sounds and Five Animals Chi Kung to
release trapped negative emotional chi. These are simple, and can be
learned from books or tapes. They release the chi trapped in each of
the five vital organs. You don’t want to unconsciously amplify these old
trapped feelings with supercharged sex chi. So don’t practice while in
any extreme emotional state.
2. Practice the Inner Smile. This insures a calm and balanced mind
when you do the sexual practice.
3. Learn the Microcosmic Orbit. This gives the sexual chi a safe
pathway up the spine and down the front of the body, with automatic
“safety overflow” valves into other major meridians. If you don’t learn
this, there is a danger of some people getting “kundalini psychosis”, too
much chi in the brain leading to delusional states. Any chi practice that
opens the lower dantien will also prepare you and ground you.
Once the Microcosmic Orbit is open, it is much easier to balance
the chi flow to the endocrine glands along its path: adrenals, pineal and
pituitary, thymus, heart and spleen, and gonads. These glands regulate
the body metabolism during sexual arousal, and their healthy
functioning is essential to get the benefits of the sexual
25
practice.
4. Get a live teacher to help you train. Sexual kung-fu is not an end
in itself, it is merely a vital step in the larger process of cultivating and
refining your chi. You should simultaneously train in standing/rooting
chi kung to ground the volatile sexual chi. The higher level of sexual chi
kung practice is known as “inner sexual alchemy”, in which you
become aware of the role of “shen”, the vital organ spirits, in regulating
your inner yin-yang balance.
Michael Winn co-authored with Mantak Chia the classic Taoist
Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy and wrote six other
books with Chia.
If you cannot get a teacher, Tao Home Study Audio courses on
Taoist Sexual Cultivation are available from Michael Winn on
HealingTaoUSA.com/bookstore or email
bookstore@healingtaousa.com. Note: before ordering the Taoist
Sexual Course, the prerequisite course is Chi Kung Fundamentals
covering the Inner Smile, Six Healing Sounds, Microcosmic Orbit.
The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm
Daoist and Tantric Sexual Cultivation in the West
Michael Winn
By abstaining from intercourse, the spirit has no opportunity for
expansiveness,
yin and yang are blocked and cut off from one another.
- Classic of Su Nu (Wile,1992, 7)
Sexual love can be one of the most powerful human experiences.
Over the past two thousand years, certain Daoist and Tantric cultures
sought to tap the power of sexuality to cultivate elevated spiritual
states of awareness and achieve immortality. These practices appear to
have originated in China and India and later spread to Tibet and
elsewhere in Asia. Daoism and Tantrism are both experiential
approaches to life, and share similar microcosmic-macrocosmic
theories of the human body as an inner mirror of outer Nature. The
body-centered cosmology of each has led to a spectrum of sexual
practices that range from ritualized physical sexual intercourse to
celibacy accompanied by conscious subtle-body love making.
(Bokemkamp, 1997, 43; Wile 1992, 25, White, 2000, 15).
Both posit a multi-dimensional universe governed by divine, all
pervading polar energies identified in Tantra as Shakti-Shiva deities or
in Daoism as the yin-yang forces of Heaven and Earth. These polar
forces arise from a mysterious non-dual unity, whose dance within the
physical plane follows a five-fold pattern of harmony governed by five
families of deities or five phase principles. Both offer alchemical maps,
often hidden within mandalas interiorized within the body - yantras in
Tantra and I Ching (Yijing) patterns in Daoism - that can be fully
understood only by the initiated adept. These subtle body maps allow
the adept to navigate the apparent chaos of conflicting physical and
sexual desires to find the way to the true self at the still center of the
drama of creation. Despite these underlying similarities in their
cosmology, the Tantric and Daoist methods of sexual cultivation, both
physical and subtle body, are radically different.
Since the late 1970’s Daoist-Tantric sexual practices have been
widely publicized and taught in the West. As a student, teacher, and
private scholar of these practices during this period, I took it upon
myself to “test” the methods of different Tantric and Daoist schools
that washed up on Western shores. I was driven by an intense curiosity
about the nature my own sexuality, which I intuitively felt to be central
to my spiritual evolution. This journey led me to travel widely in China
and India to investigate the cultural context of these practices and
discern their differences as paths emphasizing Fire (Tantric) or Water
and Fire (Daoist).
My goal is to show how Western sexual needs have shaped the teachers
and teachings of Daoist and Tantric sexual practices in the West. I will
examine the sexual behavior, attitudes, lineage, and methods of
different teachers, and if their practices were largely re-invented or
presented in radically different ways from traditional Asian lineages. I
hope to clarify the relation between physical sex, subtle body sex, the
issue of celibacy, and the traditional distinction between medical-
therapeutic sexual practices and mystical approaches to sexuality. I’ll
explore why sexuality is so crucial to spiritual transformation, and
describe the different kinds of subtle body orgasm one might evoke
using Daoist and Tantric methods.
The broad framework of my study is that (1) there is a deep tension in
every human being between a non-sexual, non-dual core Being and a
sexually polarized male-female Body. This tension is alleviated by
development of an intermediate Energy Body that is androgynous
(both male and female) in nature, and which is the deepest drive
behind all forces of spiritual evolution. (2) This tension between Being
and Body is so powerful that most “Enlightenment” states cannot
bridge it, despite claims to the contrary. It is only bridged by what are
called Immortality practices in both Tantra and Daoism.
In general, I found more detailed medical and internal sexual practices
available in the Daoist tradition, described in a concluding overview.
This paper is titled The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm because in the
course of teaching sexual practices to Westerners, I have polled
thousands of students to find out why they are learning a sexual
practice. Asked to select between understanding their sexuality,
improved sexual performance, better love relationships, and having a
spiritual orgasm, about eighty percent choose spiritual orgasm.
Because the river of Daoist and Tantric history is so vast, with so many
tributaries, generalizations are inevitable in my thumbnail sketches of a
wide array of teachers and teachings I encountered. The obstacle to all
research on sexuality is widespread lying and concealment. Subtle body
sex complicates this problem, since by definition the Daoist-Tantric
experience of the body-as-divine-cosmos-copulating-within-itself is
personal in nature. In the spirit of creating a new openness about
delicate sexual-spiritual issues, and to vivify the reader’s senses, I often
shift to a first person narrative. I accept (on behalf of my unnamed
informants) full responsibility for any inaccuracies in my brief footnote
to this chapter of Western religious history.
Sexual Revolution as Cultural Context
Tantrics and Daoists have often assumed the role of rebelling against
the prevailing social and sexual values, which were dominated by a
strict caste system in India and overtly anti-female values of
Confucianism in China. Tantrics and Daoists were also early
experimenters with “external alchemy”, the use of mind-altering
natural substances to quicken one’s spiritual evolution. It is not
surprising that their ideas came into widespread popularity in the West
during a period of widespread cultural rebellion in the 1960’s with
mind expanding drugs, pelvic-undulating rock music, and a pill-
provoked Free Love movement, all designed to topple Establishment
values. The Western sexual revolution occurred without any Eastern
stimulus; but once it was happening, it needed somewhere to go, and
Tantric and Daoist teachings offered a new and more spiritual
direction into which the sexual revolution could mature. If we imagine
that planet earth has a single global libido, I suspect these ancient
teachings would have surfaced any place where sexual freedom was
exploding.
It is important to first remove a naivete common to Westerners about
oriental sexual practices. Teachers of traditional sexology, whether
medical or spiritual, are difficult to find today in either China or India.
On seven trips to China, despite an extensive network of Daoist
contacts, no one knew of a single teacher of Daoist sexual cultivation,
even though all were well aware of its historical and textual presence.
There are two reasons. One, Daoist sexology has a bad historical
reputation for being abused and used to promote sexual vampirism,
making it risky to teach in Communist culture. Two, as Fang Ru Ruan’s
Sex in China study notes, ancient China produced the world’s oldest
and most detailed sexology texts, but modern China is one of the most
sexually repressed countries in the world - sale of pornography is
punishable by death. The neo-Reichian Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan
Makaveich showed in his 1972 film Mysteries of the Organism that as
political repression increases, sexual freedom decreases. This political
repression may be a factor in recent medical reports in mainland China
of increasingly widespread sexual dysfunction. Most current Daoist
books on sexology are coming from Taiwan and Hong Kong, often
centered around trained courtesans (Lai 2001, McNeil 1999), or from
Chinese living in Thailand (Chia/Winn 1984, Chia 1986, 1996,
2000).
26
Three trips to India, numerous contacts and books on Tantra
convinced me the situation there is not much different. Mainstream
educated Hindus are puritanical in their sexual mores, and Tantrism is
seen as low caste and morally suspect excuse for black magic, especially
seduction spells (vashikarana), suitable for entertaining stories but not
serious pursuit. It is an underground subculture, with a invisible subset
of adepts skilled in the esoteric sexual rites described in classical
Tantric scriptures, erotic paintings and sculpture. Tantric practices are
kept alive by secrecy: “publicly Vedic, secretly Tantric” is the Indian
aphorism that summarizes the situation. My thesis is that amongst the
Tantric male teachers who brought their sexual wares to the West, few
had any actual training in physical sexual practices. I believe most
recreated them from ancient texts or invented them out of their own
needs or the expectations of their Western students.
Asian sexual practices would likely not have taken root in the West
except for the ground being prepared by Sigmund Freud (d. 1939), his
students Carl Jung (d.1961)and Wilhelm Reich (d.1957), and the early
sex researcher Havelock Ellis (d.1939). The widespread acceptance of
the theory of sexual impulse being a fundamental shaping force of the
personality opened Westerners to the Daoist-Tantric metaphysic that
went one step further, giving sexuality a key role in spiritual evolution.
Jung expanded this greatly with his explorations into eastern
mysticism, writing introductions to both Tantric and Daoist esoteric
texts. In his essay on the Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung tried
(without success, in my opinion) to impose his anima-animus
psychological archetypes on yin-yang theory. Jung lacked the practical
energetic methodologies (beyond “talk” therapy) for directly
experiencing and guiding these subconscious male-female forces in the
body into superconscious states.
Reich tried to fill this gap, and died in prison in the U.S. for spreading
his teachings and devices promoting a universe - and human body -
centered around orgasm, through the medium of “orgone”, similar to
prana in India and qi in China. The ideas of these psychologists later
became increasingly mainstream, and set the stage in 1972 for
bestselling self-improvement books like The Joy of Sex, by Alex
Comfort, a scholar of Tantric erotic art and philosophy. The
appearance of crazy wisdom teachings from Tibetan Buddhist Tantrics
like Chogyam Trungpa (d.19 89) inspired beatniks and poets like Allen
Ginsberg, who as a homosexual in a homophobic society was attracted
to a teaching claiming enlightenment could be achieved by following
and completing your ordinary desires.
Two early major stimuli to the growth of Asian sexual practices in the
West were 1) publication of From Sex to Super Consciousness (1974) by
Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh and his growing popularity as a “sex guru” of
Tantric and new age mysticism, and (2) publication of the bestselling
Sexual Secrets (1979) by Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger , with classical
texts and six hundred illustrations of Tantric and Daoist sexual
iconography. Unlike previous erotic art books, it offered a living
spiritual path. These events put images and a vision of sexual-spiritual
liberation into popular media with a psychology accessible to
Westerners.
Nik Douglas was an English rock music producer who went to India
for eight years in the 60’s, several of them wandering about as a Tantric
sadhu, stirring the ashes of his guru’s sacred dhouni fire. Douglas made
the first film on Tantra in English, financed by Mick Jagger -- a clear
statement of alignment between Tantra and rock music subcultures.
Douglas published Chakra magazine in India and had an indirect but
pivotal role in introducing the Beatles to their guru, Maharishi
Mahesh. This subsequently gave other Indian gurus instant rock star
status, promoting their teachings to the rebel youth culture in the
West. Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation movement passes itself
off as Vedic, and completely avoids sexual issues and practices. But as
Douglas points out in his history of Tantra, Spiritual Sex (1997), the
TM power mantras given to initiates, chosen by birthdate, are Tantric.
The Vedas themselves are hymns to be sung, but do not offer mantras,
which Douglas traces to the older Dravidian vegetative fertility cults in
India.
Traditionally, in Hindu Tantra a lineage tranmission is essential, a
personal initiation by a guru. Rajneesh (1931-90) was an Indian
professor of philosophy who basically had no guru - he got his
initiation from books. From his wide readings and direct
experimentation, Rajneesh “self-invented” a Tantric path for
Westerners to explore themselves. He forbade his Indian followers
from using the techniques devised for Westerners, as he felt that
Western minds worked differently. He had a genius for translating
obscure mystical concepts into a workable Western psychology. He
offered Westerners exactly what they wanted: freedom from guilt
about sex, the promise of enlightenment, and a smorgasboard of
workshops led by followers that allowed them to explore and integrate
their eclectic mix of Eastern and Western methods. Having no lineage,
he invented a feeling of lineage for Westerners by requiring them to
wear swami-like robes.
Rajneesh set the stage for his Western followers to appropriate the five
element Tantric chakra system and psychologize it to fit their own
spiritual needs and Western archetypes. This trend towards a “self-
invented” spirituality became a hallmark of the New Age movement in
the West. Tantra and Daoism both have a long history of
experimenting with and absorbing new spiritual technologies, so I do
not use the term “self-invented” pejoratively, but only to distinguish it
from teachings adopted from traditional lineages in India or China.
Nik Douglas, who met Rajneesh in India before he was famous, told
me his main recollection him was of a “nice professor type who wanted
me to set him up with intellectual Jewish girls who would fuck”. This
suggests an early stage of trying to reconcile his sexual and intellectual
identities. Rajneesh was later touted as the “sex guru” by the media
because he told his followers to have as much sex as they could
possibly tolerate until they no longer desired it. This was his novel
application of a traditional Tantric principle of using ordinary desire to
obtain enlightenment. At seminars he would begin by requiring
everyone to strip off their clothes and sniff the armpits and genitals of
a member of the opposite sex. Rajneesh reportedly entered a phase of
natural celibacy between the ages of forty-two and fifty-five, so he was
not having sex at the height of his fame as a sex guru. This highlights
the paradox, found in many traditional Tantric and Daoist lineages, of
an approach that advocates celibacy yet employs sexual energy as the
main force in their meditation.
Personal Account: Kundalini Rising in the West
My own first spiritual initiation experience offers a snapshot of how
Tantric methods leapt across cultural lines without a lineage to define
it, and how the Tantric-induced experience of kundalini, the female
Shakti force rising within the body, itself blurred the boundary
between the sexual and the spiritual. I was working as a free lance war
correspondent in Africa in 1978. Enroute to the airport leaving the U.S.
I grabbed Rajneesh’s Book of Secrets, his compilation of a hundred
different Tantric methods. I had never heard of Rajneesh. Later, stuck
waiting for a visa in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, I had time to browse the
book.
I had never had a guru or any meditation training. Rajneesh’s Book of
Secrets overwhelmed me with the number of techniques in it. So I
picked the simplest one I could find, a breathing method. It instructed
me to follow my inhalation and exhalation, while gradually increasing
the length of the pause between breaths. I got deep into the process,
lying on a straw mattress in a sweltering $3. per night flea bag hotel,
shared with a black South African refugee whose epileptic seizures
were my only distraction. I practiced for three to five hours at a time,
and found I could slow my breath down until the pauses seem to last
interminably.
One day, after two weeks practice, I felt my breath stop completely.
During a long pause between breaths, I entered a deep, peaceful state,
and felt I no longer needed to breathe air. Suddenly my whole body
shook, then exploded in an intense orgasm and I watched myself
catapulted into the space around me, with a clear vision of my body
expanding rapidly through the walls of the room. After this
initial explosion, I felt like a mushroom cloud above a nuclear
27
blast, with the debris of my former consciousness blown to bits and
slowly raining back down on my transparent body in blissful droplets. I
was shocked, scared, and excited.
I realized I had entered some other dimension of myself, and decided I
had to make it a priority in life to find a way to stay connected to it. I
decided to give up meat, drugs, and sex, the latter decision particularly
shocking to me as at that time I was prone to having three girlfriends
at once. Since my beyond-the-body experience was a thousand times
more orgasmic than the best sexual orgasm I had previously
experienced, being celibate didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t know it
then, but I had entered the realm of my subtle bodies and their
spontaneously orgasmic properties. I had no guru or formal initiation,
my only teacher was a book, yet I found myself celibate, on the Tantric
path, and questing for a repeat spiritual orgasm.
When I returned to New York, I hunted down the nearest Rajneesh
ashram, a dingy cellar in Tribeca. I did Rajneesh’s Dynamic Meditation
to arouse the kundalini, but it didn’t work for me, and I didn’t like the
“group grope” feeling of the people there. I didn’t want strangers
grappling with my newly delicate energy field, and the methods
seemed to lack sufficient internal focus. The only book in print that
seemed to confirm the reality of my experience was Gopi Krishna’s
Kundalini:The Serpent Power, an account of his twelve year ordeal
with his kundalini current run wild, finally cured by simply eating
meat. Krishna published many later books claiming the kundalini - the
dance of the ida (solar), pingala (lunar), and sushumna (central) currents
of prana up the spine -- was the evolutionary force behind all genius
and all genetic evolution. When I interviewed Gopi Krishna shortly
before his death in 1984, I was not impressed by his spiritual presence.
He seemed very intellectual, an Indian pundit with thick black glasses
whose energy was mostly in his head.
I began practicing White Tantric Yoga, taught by Yogi Bhajan and his
3HO organization, and found that it systematically stimulated and
sustained the blissful experience I had in Africa. I practiced this system
of kundalini yoga daily for four years, which employed a rigorous
combination of yogic asanas (postures), “breath of fire” (rapid belly
breathing), yogic locks (squeezing different body parts tightly), mudras
(hand positions) and mantras. I took ice cold showers at 4 am, and
found my sleep needs reduced to four hours. I also began experiencing
different siddhis or spiritual powers, ranging from bursts of telepathy
and foreknowledge of the future (useful in planning my free lance
writing career) and, more dramatically, having repeated experiences of
the entire universe collapsing into a single point. I would be
immobilized for up to an hour, as if my being were condensed into a
heavy steel ball at the center of the universe, with a contracting
pressure so intense not even my mind could escape its gravitational
power.
Being a self-employed writer, I was able to practice four to eight hours
a day. The link between kundalini and sexuality was self-evident. My
testicles pulsed day and night, I could feel and internally hear my
sexual energy rushing up my spine and throbbing in my third eye. At
other times I experienced fiery sexual-like currents of electricity
flowing throughout my body. I felt like I had discovered organic LSD,
and walked about in an ecstatic state, feeling ten foot tall and looking
down from above my head into the mundane reality below. I was still
celibate, but had so much sexual energy I masturbated daily to release
the pressure. My conversion of sexual energy into blissful subtle energy
must have been unbalanced, as it eventually led to a weakening of my
physical body. This subsequently led to my shift to Daoist inner sexual
alchemy practices.
I was told that I was practicing the traditional ancient science of
Tantra, but later investigations by myself and others into Yogi Bhajan
raised serious questions as to whether his methods were “self-invented”
from a hodgepodge he had collected while formerly a customs official
in Delhi. Bhajan had no identifiable guru, no specific Tantric lineage or
school, and had mixed his yogic methods with a curious blend of
religious worship of Sikhism. I went to the Punjab state in India, and
widespread inquiries produced no one who had ever heard of any Sikh
Tantrics there. This is not to judge Bhajan’s methods as ineffective, but
simply to note the pattern of self-invented Tantrics coming to the
West to seek a following. One of his innovations was to line up male
yogis and female yoginis facing each other in long rows, up to a
hundred people in length. They would stare into their opposite sexed
partner’s eyes while doing rapid breath of fire in different asanas,
building up a tremendous sexual energy field that would shift into a
higher octave of shared collective bliss.
Bhajan offered little real training on sexual energy management, other
than the advice to limit sex to once a month with a married partner.
The only specific technique for men was to sit with their perineum
over the heel (mulabanda), to block the upward flow of sexual feeling
from going out the penis. Yet his ashrams, with serene white-turbaned
and long-bearded Western yogis, were filled behind the scenes with
frequent sexual affairs between adepts who could not follow their
guru’s admonitions. One of Bhajan’s inner circle at the time revealed to
me the existence of lawsuits against Bhajan (who was married) by
female followers for sexual abuse, and told of a coterie of sexual
favorites and “deviant” sexual practices in his inner Tantric circle.
A different yogi, also a leader in 3HO, later left to become a Daoist
student of Mantak Chia, from whom he learned the Microcosmic
Orbit meditation, a method of circulating energy up the spine and
down the front channels of the body. This radically differed from
kundalini yoga in suggesting the subtle energy circulated in endless
loops that ultimately spiraled into the center of one’s core
consciousness, instead of a linear flow from lower chakra to upper
chakra to union with an absolute self somewhere above the head. The
Orbit is also the key Daoist channel for circulating sexual energy.
Before he left Bhajan’s organization, Bhajan’s lieutenant introduced the
Microcosmic Orbit meditation into the White Tantric practice. It
later became standard practice to help ground the many spacy yogis,
who, like myself, were literally floating out of their bodies. America had
become an accelerated microcosm of the Orient, where different
Tantric and Daoist schools traded methods over the centuries along
the Silk Road trade routes.
Bhajan’s pattern of appearing sexually conservative in public while
engaging in sexual practices in private was common in other Tantric
gurus in the 1980’s, most famously Swami Rama of the Himalayan
Institute in Honesdale, Pennsylvania and Swami Muktananda at his
Siddhi Yogi ashram in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Both were
discovered to be giving “Tantric initiations” to dozens of young female
devotees in the guru’s private boudoir. There is a tradition in Indian
Tantra of gurus initiating with a drop of semen or saliva, or performing
ceremonial sexual rites where sexual union with a low caste or
untouchable virgin female is used by male adepts to enter a divine state
of union (White, 1996).
But the Tantric sex scene in America more closely resembled the
groupie music and movie star scene. The young girls who were “gifted”
with the guru’s initiating lingam (penis) reported that it was quick sex,
and felt like a man masturbating inside them, with no deep ceremonial,
emotional, or spiritual connection made. There was no body-specific
training in the Siddha Yoga program at that time in transmuting sexual
energy into spiritual energy, other than what occurred naturally
through devotional chanting. All the acharyas (novitiates) and Western
swamis had to take strict vows of celibacy. Swami Rama’s followers
were particularly galled by his insistence that male and female yoga
students were not allowed to hold hands, under penalty of being
expelled from the ashram.
Was this seemingly compulsive sexual behavior by enlightened masters
a kind of crazy wisdom, an intentionally paradoxical Tantric behavior
that we morality-bound Westerners could not understand, or was there
something else going on here? Thousands of followers would testify to
the spiritual powers of these men. For me, it raised a new question: is it
possible to be spiritually enlightened, and at the same time be an
emotional and sexual midget? Over time, my later study of Daoist
subtle body development suggested this was likely the case.
Muktananda and Rama were trained by Tantrics that
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emphasized austerities, including abstention from sex, while driving all
energy into the head to nourish the spiritual body. They likely had no
previous sexual experience in India.
These head centered (third eye and crown) practices are typical of
“fire” school methods for achieving rapid enlightenment, which often
suppress physical body urges to achieve this expanded head-
enlightened state. These repressed sexual urges can later suddenly
emerge powerfully, amplified by the active fire energy of the adept’s
spiritual body seeking to ground itself in the sexual waters of the earth
plane/physical body. The trigger activating this release could have been
the shift from the sexually repressive culture of India to the free-sex
culture of New York. The unconscious desire of the young female
devotees to have sex with their guru may also have been a factor; to
Rama and Muktananda’s opened subtle vision these sexual desires may
have been perceived consciously, and they may have been simply
unable to resist an opportunity to seek balance for their excess spiritual
fire.
A Tantric might argue these events were simply life offering a new
opportunity for exploration by all concerned, to be viewed without any
moral judgement. But was there a patriarchal blindness and excess
male-fire insensitivity to the very goddess Shakti force which Tantrics
universally claim to worship? Swami Rama escaped to India for two
years at the height of his scandal to let things cool off. When he
returned, I had the opportunity to personally ask him, what is the
purpose of sexuality in spiritual evolution? His answer was evasive,
mentioning that some cultures allowed multiple wives, implying sexual-
spiritual development was completely culture-determined rather than
obeying some cosmic law.
Muktananda was brought to the West in 1971 by his student Albert
Rudolph, a Brooklyn Jew, former nightclub bouncer and later an art
dealer. Muktananda inducted Rudi into his religious order, and so
Swami Rudrananda (”Rudi” to his followers) donned traditional swami
saffron robes. But Rudi didn’t follow traditional swami rules. Rudi was
open about his Tantric self-inventedness, and was open about his
sleeping with both male and female followers to intensify their spiritual
awakening. His honesty about this was refreshing and shocking,
exemplified by his book titlle, Spiritual Cannibalism. I saw from a
video of Rudi that he had excess kundalini, causing his head to whip
back and forth ferociously. Rudi’s creative re-invention of an American
Tantra was cut short by a 1973 plane crash. He trained a new
generation of American Tantrics who spread his experimental
approach to Tantrism, often blending it with Tibetan Tantric and later
Daoist alchemical teachings.
Two of Rudi’s top students, John Mann and Lar Short, exchanged
teachings with me and my first Daoist teacher Mantak Chia in the mid
80’s when Chia rented Rudi’s Big Indian ashram in the New York
Catskills. Some of that ended up in The Body of Light (1988), Mann
and Short’s comparison of the subtle bodies in the Hindu, Buddhist,
and Daoist traditions. Chia learned from them the Tibetan Powa
technique of shooting one’s essence (bindu) out of the physical body
before death, which he borrowed and integrated into his Daoist
teachings. This ejected essence is, in my view, the sexual-spiritual
substance that allows one to create a new incarnation, a specialty in the
Tibetan tradition. While editing the Daoist chapter in The Body of
Light I took of number of their Tantric initiations, and tried Rudi’s
experimental method of making sexual love with any astral beings met
while travelling in the subtle planes. I later rejected this (and the powa
practice) as unnecessary and potentially distracting to the process of
Daoist inner sexual alchemy. The low astral plane is filled with half-
beings of low vibration and hidden agendas. In Daoist alchemy one is
kept busy sexually coupling sun, moon, planet and star energies of
higher frequencies.
One discovery that emerged from our sharing of Daoist, Tantric, and
Bon Dzogchen teachings that had been absorbed into Tibetan
Buddhism was the clear similarity of Daoist alchemy subtle body
coupling using pearls and channels to the completion stage
annutarayoga Tantric practices with its colored male and female drops
and winds. Detailed in Geshe Gyatso’s Clear Light of Bliss (1982), these
vajrayoga practices emphasize the value of having a physical sexual
consort to speed the opening of the heart needed for highest
attainment and interpenetrating mind awareness.
John Mann later developed an innovative two person Tantric
meditation method called Divine Androgyny, which I consider a
quintessential Tantric sexual coupling of higher subtle bodies. A male
and female adept sit on chairs facing one another and do nothing
except stare in each other’s eyes and surrender to whatever flows
through. This creates a build up in the sexually polarized subtle energy
field between them which eventually begins to pulsate. If the adepts
are highly skilled and attuned, the pulsating field becomes quite
intense, tangible to anyone sitting in between, and can result in deep
healing for all involved in the process. (Mann, 2000)
In the late 70’s and early 80’s I also took a series of Tibetan Tantric
initiations from two lineage heads, the Karmapa and Dalai Lama. I
never pursued these practices in depth, as I did not feel drawn to their
complex mandalas of visualized deities and their guru worship. But
friends who studied Tibetan Buddhist Tantrism reported they kept
their sexual practices very secret from Westerners.
A Western female acquaintance went on a three-year Buddhist retreat,
believing she would practice various austerities. She afterwards
reported the retreat was a “veritable Peyton Place,” with lusty Lamas
besieging her to become a consort and thus speed their path to
enlightenment. I heard reliable reports of another lama who insisted all
the western women on retreat become his consort. Two of the four
major Tibetan sects require celibacy, but all four teach methods for
sublimating sexual energy into subtle bodies, projected as various
deities. Skill in this kind of astral projection creates the possibility of
“astral sex affairs” that occur mostly in dream time or meditative states.
A different female friend, involved in helping Tibetan teachers,
confided to me she was under “astral rape” attack for months by a
Tibetan Tantric practitioner who became obsessed with her as his
consort after she terminated a brief sexual affair. I shared with her
some Daoist methods for defining the boundaries of one’s subtle
bodies, which seemed to help. Sexual intercourse opens subtle body
connections that can be extremely difficult to dissolve. Men become
obsessed with pornography for the same reason: they are having astral
sex with their own projected fantasy in the low astral plane, the subtle
body closest to the physical.
Any divorced or separated couple also knows too well how difficult it is
to cut the bonds of sexual attachment, especially in cases of first true
love. This is often because their sexual energy bodies have been “glued”
together in the low astral plane. My own experience is that this can go
beyond a strong subtle body sexual relationship. It may involve the
exchange of what the Daoists call the jingshen, the vital organ spirits
that animate the personal body. It is difficult to separate from someone
else because a part of their consciousness is actually living inside your
body, and vice versa. Similar situation may be found in certain deep
child-parent relationships, which may be intensified by an unspoken
sexual polarity. This is a vast topic, beyond the scope of this paper, but
it does imply a spontaneous and high level of subtle body sex that is
usually unconsciously willed.
California Tantra
One of Rudi’s New York students was Franklin Jones (b. 1939), who left
Rudi to try Scientology for a year before starting his own movement.
Jones moved to California and became the self-proclaimed God-man
and World Teacher Da Free John (later changed to numerous other
names). It appeared Da Free John had such an extreme case of rising
kundalini heat that it permanently burned off his hair. Jones-Free John
is clearly a case of second generation Western self-invented Tantrism, a
showman who created a Wizard of Oz mystique by teaching from
behind panels, too sacred to be viewed by his followers. He later added
a modern twist. He lived for a long time on an island in Fiji,
surrounded by multiple wives and “gopis” (female devotees-
lovers), and daily instructs his followers in a California ashram
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in the most minute aspects of their lives by computer email. Jones may
be another Tantric case of excess fire seeking female sexual water to
cool and ground itself.
The California Tantra scene in the 1980’s and 90’s was blossoming with
its own flavor, and students (mostly of Rajneesh) sprang up teaching
Tantric workshops. These typically were taught in the nude, and often
encouraged participants to sexually partner with a stranger, with
instructions to first tune into them by breathing together and holding
one’s hand over their partner’s heart. This extremely simplified and re-
invented Tantric sex ritual for Westerners may have cemented the
media definition of Tantra as being primarily a practice of spiritualized
sexual intercourse, which of course it never was in India. Even the
famed Tantric ritual of the “Five M’s” (pancha makara) that culminated
with coitus (maithuna) was proceeded by mantric initiation and
ordinarily required lengthy prior subtle body training (Tigunait, 1999).
But Californians wanted both quick sex and quick enlightenment, the
latter being one promise of Tantra, and so market demand attracted
the teacher supply to satisfy it.
This public sexual intercourse in a group workshop setting seems to be
an enduring part of the Western reinvention of Tantra. It fits a general
Tantric pattern of defying public mores for the purpose of shocking
someone into enlightenment, but I put it more into the category of
psycho-therapeutic or medical sexual therapy than subtle body
practice. Participants are usually guided to take the sexual energy up
the chakras in the spine, but may have little or no prior training in
meditation or in stabilizing internal states of consciousness with
mantra, yantra, internally created alchemical symbols or visualizations,
or mudras, the hallmarks of traditional Hindu Tantrism. This may be
because Rajneesh, the self-invented Tantric guru of many of them, did
not himself have lineage training in these methods. Rajneesh also did
not believe mantra was suitable for Westerners, as he felt it produced a
soporific state of self-hypnosis in which it was difficult to be fully
present in the body.
In 1997 I met Jwala, a women who had been one of the first teachers
on the California Tantra scene in 1980. Her practice of Tantric
initiation involved gently masturbating men while guiding them to
move their sexual energy up the chakras to their heart and head, and
counseling them on sexual issues. She confirmed my perception of
California Tantrism being more focused on physical sexuality as
therapy, exemplified by her own professed challenge to spiritual
progress in terms of building a stable subtle body awareness. I knew by
then that if there is excessive focus on physical sexuality, the subtle
body energy is pulled down and eventually dispersed.
This limitation of focusing excessively on physical sex may prove to be
the force that moves California style Tantrism towards subtle body
sexual cultivation practices. In 2000 I taught the Daoist inner sexual
alchemy practices of Lesser Water and Fire in Switzerland. One of my
students was the director of a Tantric Institute in Germany that was
using Rajneesh inspired methods taught by Margo Anand, whose
teachings and first book The Art of Ecstasy, was also influential
amongst California Tantrics. (This book borrowed the Inner Smile
technique from the books I had written with Chia, as well as material
from Nik Douglas’ Sexual Secrets, both without acknowledgement,
which we both gracefully accepted at the time as her hidden fear of not
having a tradition behind her). At the end of the retreat, this student, a
male, broke down in tears. “I have been teaching and helping so many
people with their sexuality”, he said. “But I have been personally at a
dead end, I could not get beyond the boundary of my physical
maleness and the limitations of physical sex. I was feeling very
frustrated. But now I have a very great gift from you and from the
Dao, the subtle love-making between my inner male and female souls.
Now I have a way to move forward!”
Kriya Yoga: Tantra and Celibacy
In 1983, two years after I had shifted my main practice from White
Tantric Yoga to Daoist internal alchemy, I stumbled onto Kriya Yoga, a
Tantric method taught by Swami Paramhamsa Hariharananda Giri
(”Baba” to his followers). His Kriya Yoga was definitely not self-
invented, but strictly followed the initiations he had received in India
from Sri Yukteswar and from his student, Paramhamsa Yogananda,
who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in the USA the
1920’s. Baba was later made President of Sri Yukteswar’s ashram in
Puri, India, and took higher level kriya initiations from other yogis in a
lineage extending back to its founder Lahiri Mahasay. Lahiri, a railroad
engineer with five children, claims an immortal being named Babaji
appeared to him in 1862 and taught him six kriyas (Sanskrit root kri, to
act, ya, divine soul). These kriyas offered a structured internal map of
subtle body development, through six stages of samadhi. To objectively
explore these practices, I eventually discontinued my Daoist internal
alchemy practices for a few years.
Kriya Yoga is Tantric in its divinization of the body. In the first kriya,
prana is circulated up and down the spine. In the second kriyas,
internal seed (bij) mantras are silently chanted to infuse the spinal
pathway and the multi-petalled lotuses visualized in the chakras and
fifty body parts. Then the 50 letter-sounds of the sanskrit alphabet are
spiralled around the cranium, activating the primordial sound which is
gradually captured into the center of the cranial void space in higher
kriyas. The higher kriyas drop all use of mantra as one enters the
higher void spaces. Like Rajneesh, Hariharananda completely eschews
all use of chanted mantra, which he considers an intermediate level of
practice: “if you are busy shouting to your Mother, how can you hear
God speak to you?” he would ask. In Kriya Yoga there is a typically
Tantric progressive internalization of the cosmos within the body,
which evolves into the experience of one’s inner soul focusing on the
subtle current of sound, light, and vibration/heat in the central channel
(sushumna). Baba’s private deity is Kali, the paramount Tantric
goddess, who he claims has intervened to allow him an extremely long
life (age 96 at this writing in 2002). He was 75 when I first met him, a
few years after he arrived in the West.
Kriya Yoga is a interesting case. It was originally designed for
householders, who could have sex and children, eat meat, and meditate
at home to achieve enlightenment. The original technique was very
Tantric in allowing one to indulge these worldly pleasures, but one had
to watch from the soul level as one indulged. Lahiri insisted his
students get married, and his subtle body teachings were quite sexually
explicit: “I beheld the Red Lingam (”penis”) of Shiva inside of me; it
contained the energy of the Sun. Then I came up to the third eye, and
entered the Maha Yoni (”Great Vagina”). (Satyeswarananda, 1988) But
the lineage was virtually captured and shifted into the monastic Giri
(”mountain”) order of swamis who were forbidden from having sex,
watching theatre, eating meat or any food cooked by a non-initiate. An
American student of Baba’s visiting Benares, India ran into the
grandson of Lahiri Mahasay, who complained bitterly that Kriya Yoga
had been hijacked by Hindu monks.
Yogananda did not think Westerners were prepared for Kriya’s shakti
power, and so only taught the first kriya to his followers, a method of
circulating prana up and down the spine without mantras.
Nonetheless, the SRF-simplified Kriya Yoga has spawned many
splinter schools of American swamis claiming lineage and has achieved
widespread acceptance in the West. Meanwhile, the SRF-promoted
facade of Yogananda’s yogic purity as a celibate is beginning to crumble
under various challenges. I had a student whose father claimed to have
been in Yogananda’s inner circle, which he reported included sexual
affairs. A man closely resembling Yogananda in appearance filed a
lawsuit to examine genetic tests by SRF to determine if Yogananda was
his father. SRF devotees and relatives claim the test results were
negative. Hariharananda may eventually prove to be one of the few
cases of complete sexual abstinence amongst Tantrics who have come
to the West. He claims it was only when he gave up all sexual desire
that he achieved enlightenment.
I found Hariharananda to be a fountain of illumination and wisdom, a
Brahman with a tiger’s mind who could recite the Bhagavad Gita and
the Upanisads, yet who also radiated a heart that was lovingly pure and
had a child-like innocence. It was impossible not to love him.
After meditating for decades, at the age fifty Baba attained
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nirvakalpa samadhi , the sixth kriya and highest level of enlightenment
possible. He is famous for his yogic power to stop both his breath and
heartbeat for extended periods while in samadhi. Since then, for the
last forty-five years, he has been revered as a fully realized “God man”
in India. It is not my place to judge anyone’s level of spiritual
attainment, but I did have the expectation was that such an evolved
being would at least be sex-neutral, if not sex-positive in his attitude.
I instead discovered he was both female-negative and sex-negative,
raising the same question again: was sex and subtle body training
incompatible? Or was cultural conditioning at work? Working for some
years in close personal contact with Baba while editing his Bhagavad
Gita in the Light of Kriya Yoga (I989), I noticed how his aversion to
women also manifested itself as subtle attraction to and need for
women to be around him. Privately he expressed anti-body sentiments
(”from the senses down, the body is the domain of the devil”), and
made anti-female comments (”if you marry a woman, they will
constantly lure you to bed and weaken your power to meditate”). He
often publicly recounted a favorite story of how once a foreign woman
at his ashram in India had tried to seduce him. She crawled on top of
him naked, but his steely control was such that neither his mind nor
his penis was aroused.
Hariharananda’s top-heavy, male-fire crown chakra consciousness
seemed to regularly attract yogic successors-to-be who would act out
his suppressed lower desires, involving themselves in money scandals
and love affairs that invariably resulted in their dismissal. When I last
saw him in 1999, he was having severe back pain. I read his pulses using
Chinese diagnostic methods, and observed a kidney deficiency, a
weakness in his water element. This was likely due to his practicing
Fire methods his entire life. The thing that seemed to help his back
pain was having teams of young female devotees massage his body,
reminding me of the celibate Mahatma Gandhi sleeping beside two
young teen girls to rejuvenate himself. The sexual energy Baba denied
himself directly his entire life he could only allow himself to receive
indirectly through female touch.
There may be other systems of Kriya Yoga with different attitudes
about sex. The editors of Tantra Magazine in the 1980’s were Kriya
Yoga practitioners of a different Babaji lineage (Herakan Baba, an
immortal whose followers claim he materialized in a body in India in
the 1970’s) and the magazine was definitely sex-positive. But it
appeared their mix of Kriya and Tantra was not by lineage training but
rather an integration of their own choice, a part of the trend amongst
Westerners to reshape Tantric methods to fit their own sexual and
spiritual needs.
recount the details of my experience with Hariharananda to highlight a
recurring split amongst some Tantrics (and historically, Daoists)
between sexual and subtle body development. It is ok for their lay
followers to have sex or get married, but the elite cadre of acharyas and
swamis who attain subtle body enlightenment need to be celibate. The
equation of celibacy and anti-sexual attitudes with enlightenment led
me to question whether Hariharananda’s Fire path paradigm of
nirvikalpa samadhi as enlightenment was complete. Despite his
worshipping Kali and using Tantric meditation methods to divinize the
body, underneath he seemed to reflect a widespread patriarchal based
Indian spirituality that feared the sexual power of women, and perhaps
deep beneath that, feared an earth centered consciousness. My desire
to integrate my sexual and earth nature fully was a key factor in my
resuming my Daoist Water and Fire inner alchemy practices.
Daoist Sexual Cultivation in the West
In 1981 I became one of the first Westerners to study with Mantak
Chia. He was a thirty-six year old Chinese married man working as a
healer in New York’s Chinatown. He left Thailand in 1976, chased out
by Thai Western style medical doctors threatened by his Bangkok
center offering low-cost healing. For a few pennies people sat on a large
platform, charged with a negative ion current strong enough to
detoxify chronic ailments. Chia’s unorthodox approach to life served
him well in the West, where he wore multiple hats as healer, martial
artist, and inner alchemist. He was eager to bridge the gap between
modern science and ancient Daoist methods. He was equally
comfortable with medical and bedroom sexual practices (fangzhong)
and the subtle body coupling employed in internal alchemy
(neidangong). Most important, he was willing to openly share his
knowledge with Westerners. Other books have been published in the
West on Daoist medical sexology (J. Chang 1977, S. Chang 1986, Heng
1997), but they lack deep understanding of Daoist alchemy or subtle
body development.
Chia had studied in the mountains behind Hong Kong with One
Cloud, a Daoist hermit, who transmitted to him Seven Formulas for
Immortality. These alchemical meditations offered a subtle body map
of spiritual development: one stage of clearing physical blockages and
opening the channels of the energy body, followed by three stages of
enlightenment and three stages of immortality. It embraced a
paradigm of Water and Fire (kan and li), a continuous yin-yang, female-
male, earth-heaven exchange of energies through a well-defined
network of physical and subtle energy body channels. But it required
first harnessing one’s sexual energy as the raw fuel to be refined by
spiritual practice. Sexual attraction was a very powerful aspect of one’s
worldly destiny (ming). It had to be cultivated and refined before one
could restore one’s original nature (xing). Sexual practice with a partner
strengthened the yin-yang flow of qi, and thus rejuvenated the physical
body. But as I explored deeper into One Cloud’s alchemy formulas, I
found that the higher sexual practice was dual cultivation of xing and
ming, essentially the sexual coupling of the spiritual and earthly
dimensions of oneself.
Apart from his difficulty translating obscure alchemy terms, Chia’s
teachings on Daoist alchemy and sexual energy cultivation had no
complex layers of Chinese religious deities to peel off, no mantras in a
foreign language, and did not require long waits by students humbly
prostrated at the foot of a master. Chia broke with Chinese traditions
of personal initiation and secrecy, and presented instead the beginnings
of a spiritual science, accessible to Westerners, based on principles of
resonance between cosmic forces of Nature and the human body,
mapped and refined by generations of Daoists. The alchemy formulas
appear to date back one thousand years to the tenth century teachings
of the semi-legendary Daoist Immortal Lu Dong Bin.
Rather than employing mantra to vibrate the subtle bodies as in
Tantra, Chia used a combination of physical qigong movement, natural
healing sounds, and transformation obtained by alchemical coupling of
polarized energies inside three subtle bodies defined by jing-qi-shen
(sexual essence-subtle breath-spirit). These fire and water couplings
occur within five-fold colored psychic spheres and eight deep
“extraordinary” channels that form the infrastructure of one’s energy
body. This energy body is mapped out within an internal mandala of
spinning bagua (eight -sided shapes), most likely derived from the
Yijing (I Ching).
Daoist alchemy presents classical yin-yang theory as the cosmic
pulsation of polarized positive-negative energy around a pole
(chungmai) of neutral or Original Energy (yuanqi) that extends
between Early Heaven (xiantian) and Later Heaven(houtian), or earth.
The “ten thousand things” were procreated by the copulation of
Heaven and Earth, and yin-yang is their eternal multi-orgasmic
movement. The human sexual orgasm is an exquisite echo of that
pulsation, and internal alchemy is the process of interiorizing within
the physical body the cosmic subtle body love-making. By getting one’s
human qi - especially sexual energy (jingqi) - to flow in rhythm and
harmony with the hidden cycles of Nature, one’s personal energy gates
open to the cosmic flow of inner light and spiritual powers (de) of the
Way (Dao).
Nurturing healthy, non-depleting physical sexual orgasm is just the
beginning level of Daoist cultivation practice. One Cloud’s internal
alchemy formulas created increasingly powerful subtle body orgasm.
The sexual nature of these subtle body processes was quite explicit.
The key practice in the second alchemy formula (Lesser
Enlightenment of Water and Fire) is entitled “Self-intercourse”. It
requires the adept to revert to the androgynous state of his
Early Heaven self. The adept gathers the five jingshen (deep
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body intelligences/spirits, or vital organ “gods”) into two primal yin
(inner female) and yang (inner male) forces that copulate in the lower
dantian. This fire-water copulation births an immortal embryo, made
of androgynous Early Heaven yuan qi that coagulates within the
adept’s physical body. This embryo is slowly birthed up the core
channel, nourished by the copulation of natural sexually polarized
geomantic forces within the earth below, planetary and stellar forces in
heaven above. In the sixth formula this reaches a crescendo as the full-
out sexual Congress of Heaven and Earth, a kind of multii-dimensional
sexual coupling of their virtues. All of these copulations gradually
restore the yuanjing, the pre-natal and pre-sexual substance of the
adept’s original nature (xing).
Chia told me he originally sought out Daoist medical and bedroom
sexual practices because a Chinese doctor read his pulses and told him
at age 21 that his kidneys were weak and that he would die very young.
This motivated Chia to hunt down various Chinese teachers of Daoist
sexology, and pay them large sums of money to get their secrets. In
Chinese medicine, “the kidneys” is a broad energetic sphere that
includes the sexual organs, kidneys, bladder and their meridians, and
the breasts in women. The kidney spirit or intelligence is said to
regulate the endocrine glands, blood, bone marrow, and sexual essence
(jing), all essential to long life.
Jing, the subtle substance holding the form of one’s body, is the key
ingredient to apprehending the function of sexuality in this Daoist
cosmology. Jing is perhaps best understood in Western terms as prime
matter. Jing is the raw fuel that drives the pulsating rhythm of the
body’s moment-to-moment cellular division and reproduction of itself.
In modern terms, it generates stem cells, genes, and the sexual energy
of the glands, but is not sexual energy itself.
The jing is governed in humans by the kidney water spirit, called the
zhi, literally the “will” to be in bodily form, to survive, to seek pleasure,
and to fulfil a specific destiny while in a body. It is the jing that in the
human animal is radiating polarized waves of male or female sexed
energy we label charisma or magnetic power. In short, jing is the source
of sexual desire and the feeling substance of earthiness. Without jing,
spirit (shen) would not be able to embody its virtues or have direct
sensory experience of physicality. If one is feeling “spiritual bliss”, the
bliss part is vibrating jing. Jing is also the main source of vexation for
spiritual seekers who ignore it or run from their sexual impulses in
order to chase after the other end of the spectrum of consciousness,
the shen or spirit body, which spreads out as an infinite sea of pure
awareness. This also defines the key difference between centering a
meditation in the Fire-head-shen or Water-belly-jing cauldrons within
the body.
One of the main ways Chia rebuilt his kidney jing was a method of
semen retention and recirculation of sexual energy (jingqi) in the
Microcosmic Orbit (xiao zhoutian). Recent scholarship suggests the
Orbit began as a sexual practice to rejuvenate the brain (huanjing
bunaeo) two thousand years ago and evolved to become a spiritual
practice as the qi was observed to spiral inside the body. (Pregadio,
2000, 427). Skill in semen retention is essential to the successful male
practice of One Cloud’s internal alchemy. Other systems of neidangong
may require celibacy in the hope that it will result in the indirect or
spontaneous redirection of sexual energy to the subtle bodies. But this
is a hit or miss proposition, and can result instead in sexual repression.
Non-celibacy requires a deliberate method of guaranteeing the sexual
energy is recycled in the Orbit, which is later refined and taken up the
central subtle body channel.
How does it work? At a moment prior to ejaculation (whether in coitus
with a woman or self-pleasuring), the orgasmically vibrating seminal qi
is introjected by the man up his spinal yang fire channel (dumai,
Governor Vessel) to refresh the brain and its master glands, the
pituitary and pineal. If in coitus, the male draws up his partner’s female
sexual essence (jingqi) as well, and offers his to her. When the brain is
full of the rejuvenating sexual essence, it overflows down the yin front
water channel (renmo, Conception Vessel) which clears and purifies qi
flowing into yin meridians, heart, navel and sexual organs. The physical
method can be done with a partner (dual cultivation) or without a
partner (single cultivation), and is practiced using varying levels of non-
aroused (cool) or aroused (hot) sexual energy.
Ejaculation is Physical, Orgasm is Pulsing Chi
One goal of the medical sexual practice is to shift from a limited
“genital orgasm” to a pleasurable and healing “whole body orgasm”.
Slowing or stopping “ejaculation” doesn’t prevent a man from having
“orgasm” or being “multi-orgasmic”. Ejaculation is physical, orgasm is
chi pulsating. One should not get obsessed with “stopping” ejaculation,
but focus rather on opening up the chi channels and recycling sexual
energy to one’s partner until you finally ejaculate. Then this physical
ejaculation does not cause major loss of jing, as the essence is already
extracted. Semen retention also slows down the man’s fiery nature to
stay in closer harmony with the woman’s slower cycle of arousal.
Another key in “sexual kung-fu” is understanding the relation between
the fire element in the heart and the water element in the kidneys.
These fire and water essences stimulate each other and keep the other
in check. By keeping proper exchange between them, one enters a
steady state that opens the door to subtle body love-making. By simply
keeping an open heart you protect against blind lust, which ultimately
injures the kidneys because it can never be satisfied by physical sex
alone. All aloneness at core is the heart spirit (shen) seeking the love,
sensual touch and sexual stimulation of the kidney shen, and the
deeply embodied kidney spirit seeking the heart’s virtue of
unconditional acceptance and love.
This kind of internal biological psycho-dynamics is currently opening
for Western students the field of Daoist depth psychology. It promises
to deepen the Freudian and Jungian approaches with a clearly defined
network of energy channels and psychic spheres linking the physical
and the spiritual realms.
Changing the Western Sexual Paradigm
I had read of semen retention being practiced by Tantric yogis, but had
assumed that I would have to sit in a Himalayan cave for twenty-five
years and attain enlightenment before mastering it. Chia presented the
reverse paradigm: one had to gain some mastery of semen retention (or
the equivalent female practice, menstrual blood-ovary retention)
before one could master the subtle body practices. Equally important,
semen retention - an inner celibacy of one’s spirit (shen) attaining unity
with one’s seed essence (jing) - freed the male adept from enforced
outer celibacy. Practitioners could have their cake (physical sexual
pleasure) and eat it too, as long as they maintained this inner unity of
body essence and spirit.
The accessibility of this Daoist sexual practice to the average Western
male offered them a radical and totally new approach to sexuality. It
also offered a revolutionary and healthy way to alleviate male
horniness. The learning context presented by Mantak Chia and his
trained
Western instructors made it easy for Western students to accept. The
practices were taught in an open and accepting atmosphere, with men
and women studying each other’s “esoteric biology” in a shared and fun
space. After the sexual repression I had witnessed in so many Indian
teachers, I was shocked and pleased by Mantak Chia’s innocent
directness about sexual matters.
Would these sexual teachings promote a culture of promiscuity
amongst the Westerners who learned them? Chia and I delayed
publication of our co-authored book on Daoist sex for nearly a year
while pondering this question and its ethical ramifications. Looking
back over the twenty one years that I have known Mantak Chia, I
never heard a single accusation of his sexual involvement with
students. Certainly there was a degree of open experimentation
between male and female students attracted to one another. But there
was a strong caution placed against promiscuous and indiscriminate
absorption of another’s sexual energy (sexual vampirism), as sexual
exchange was a double edged sword in which you also absorbed your
partner’s “psychic garbage”. This meant sexual relations
demanded deep transformational effort and great selectivity in
32
choosing partners. It was the opposite approach of the Rajneesh
inspired California Tantra of having sex with a stranger at a weekend
workshop.
Shortly after meeting Chia, I described my White Tantric Kundalini
Yoga practice to him. He diagnosed it as “heating the room” - I was
driving all my sexual fire up the spine and out the crown, where it
dispersed into the room. As soon as I learned to recirculate my rising
kundalini energy down my chest through the front Orbit channel and
began practicing semen retention, I quickly grew physically stronger
and more grounded spiritually. Most Tantrics work only with the spinal
fire path and not the water path in the front.
I gradually dropped my intense Kundalini Yoga sadhana as the Daoist
methods grew on me. The lure of a more effortless practice (wu wei)
attuned to nature, the grounding embrace of the feminine through
qigong and in the Water and Fire subtle body practices, and a poetic
yet scientific approach to spiritual development were the attractions. I
was also learning new practices focused on circulating sexual energy in
ways I never dreamed possible - through the bone marrow, or using it
to give substance to an inner “pearl”, which was circulated through the
core channels and eventually into subtle body dimensions. Using the
sexual essence as the catalyst to crystallize my subtle bodies in the
lower dantian solved the problem I’d observed with most head-
centered practices, that the “fire” - the clarity of meditative bliss -
would gradually disperse in the chaos of modern life.
Later I would end up using the Orbit and other Daoist methods to
heal many cases of “kundalini psychosis” - generally energy running up
the wrong channel or stuck in the head. The condition is usually easy
to correct if the person has not been heavily drugged by psychiatrists
who do not understand the energy body. These cases were often
Western Tantrics who believed, as I once did, that their energy flow
was supposed to move only up the spine in a linear, one-way direction
from lower to upper chakra. The Daoist model was that the energy
was always moving in spirals, cycles, and orbits; the Orbit was a kind of
unified chakra. Any energy movement up had to be balanced by a
movement down, until one finally arrived at the still point of no
movement at the intersecting center of the physical and subtle body,
called the lower dantian (”field of the elixir”). This is the doorway to
pre-natal jing, from which all embodiment effortlessly emanates. But
to shift my spiritual focus from the third eye to my navel was
extremely challenging, as my Tantric Fire teachers had always
considered this a lower energy center to be swiftly left behind. It took
me a while to understand that chakras are centers of post-natal energy,
and are not operating at the pre-natal and inner dimensional depth as
the dantian.
This shift in my practice led to my writing collaboration with Chia,
which over time produced seven books on qigong and neigong (”inner
skill”). Chia taught me the techniques he knew, and I would test them
out on myself before writing about them, often under his name. Our
second book, Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy
(Aurora Press, 1984) catapulted him to fame, and sold hundreds of
thousands of copies. The book became a key force in a larger paradigm
shift in Western culture, begun earlier by an influx of Tantric ideas, that
sexual and spiritual development were inseparable.
Why was a book on semen retention, radically antithetical to Western
sexual values and even to Rajneesh-New Age Tantra style, so
successful? One, it linked biological sex-as-natural-science to a kind of
spiritual science, a comfortable fit for Western minds. This helped
remove guilt promoted by Judeo-Christian religious beliefs separating
sex and spirit and labeling sex as sinful. Two, the book was written in
my sophisticated Western literary voice, infused with insights from my
years of Tantric practice, posing as Mantak Chia’s voice, the Daoist
transmitting his oral tradition. (This was such an effective literary
device for entraining readers that it created confusion among readers
who met Chia. Hearing his “Chinese English” created difficulty
believing he was the author). Three, there was no missionary pressure
on the reader to leave one’s chosen path and join a Daoist religion. The
sexual and energetic teachings were put out as the “energetic open
architecture” of the Dao, from which one could take what one needed,
whether for sexual health or spiritual health.
Chia and I were frankly surprised at the time by the diversity of
response, and in retrospect, at the book’s contribution to the
globalization of emerging new spiritual attitudes towards sexuality. We
received hundreds of letters from men following many other spiritual
paths -Sufi, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish - thanking us for giving them a
way to stay on their chosen path and embrace their sexuality instead of
repressing it. For example, the well known Catholic mystic David
Stendl-Rast wrote to say the book had been of immense practical help
to him and he was recommending it widely to other Catholic priests to
help them deal with their celibacy.
It was just as typical that a man with no spiritual background would
show up at a “Healing Love” workshop because “I just met a girl and
thought this might help.” The sexual teachings became the hook that
converted many such seekers with superficial external desires into
serious students of Daoist internal cultivation. This book,Taoist
Secrets of Love and its later sequels - Healing Love: Cultivating Female
Sexual Energy (1986), The Multi-Orgasmic Man (1996), and The Multi-
Orgasmic Couple (2000) - combined with a global network that grew
to one thousand Healing Tao teachers in thirty countries certified to
teach Daoist sexual and subtle body practices, became a major
doorway for tens of thousands of Western spiritual seekers to enter on
a path of the previously obscure Daoist alchemy formulas passed on by
the hermit One Cloud. (Winn, 2001)
Daoist Female Sexual Practices in the West
Teaching Daoist female sexual practices to Western women who
expected equality of the sexes and wanted to use these practices to
improve their personal relationships presented a special challenge.
Douglas Wile in his definitive Art of the Bedchamber (1992) surveyed
the last twenty five hundred years of Chinese texts on sexuality, and
noted a progressive decline in the treatment of women and a
proportional increase in patriarchal type of sex manuals in which the
yin essence of women was used by male adepts for their own spiritual
progress. The Chinese women who use these practices today are
mostly Daoist nuns stopping their menstrual cycle because they’ve
made a lifetime commitment to childless, monastic meditation - not a
motivating factor for most women in the West.
In 1983 at a Daoist retreat I met a potential female consort, Joyce
Gayheart, shortly after I had conveniently decided to drop my four
year experiment with celibacy, in order to test the practices I was
writing about in Taoist Secrets of Love . She later became my wife and
has remained my partner for the last nineteen years, offering us the
opportunity to explore the full range of Daoist physical and subtle
body sexual practices that require time and maturity to master. Joyce
taught me directly about my own hidden yin nature. I now recognize
every relationship as a transmission to one’s partner that the essence
they are seeking is already hidden inside them as an inner male or inner
female. In the early years we used Daoist methods to prolong physical
love-making for many hours, interspersed with periods of meditation.
Our most powerful early experience together is interesting because it
reversed my expectation that physical sex’s main spiritual use was to
jump start our subtle body meditations. The opposite proved to be
true - our subtle bodies jumped in and made love first. We had sat
naked for a few minutes, facing each other in a cross legged meditation
position to tune in. We were both suddenly overtaken by a powerful
energy field with extremely intense and unusual vibrations. Not a word
was spoken, as our mental, emotional, and speech faculties were
completely suspended, but we later confirmed having an identical
experience. One aspect of our consciousness began experiencing a very
yang orgasm, expanding out of the bedroom faster than the speed of
light, whizzing through galaxies, exploding supernovas, and then
beyond. Another part of us was orgasmically imploding inward with
opposite and equal force, grounding and concentrating inward this
great intensity in our physical bodies. After a half hour in this
wonderful sacred trance, the vibrational field subsided in
intensity. We afterward made physical love as planned. It was
33
pleasurable, but seemed anti-climactic, mostly a way to digest and
ground the subtle body orgasm that had spontaneously enveloped us.
This permanently shifted the nature of our sexual relationship. Our
subtle bodies would quickly attune and we found we could exchange
deep sexual energy for hours, lying beside each other, naked or clothed,
without any physical stimulation or intercourse. It was a direct
exchange of sexually polarized subtle bodies. As our energy bodies
mingled and coupled, we were infused with loving spiritual qualities.
This led us to long periods of spontaneous abstention from physical
intercourse that could last for many months, but with exquisitely
sublime daily subtle body coitus. As our subtle bodies crystallized and
became more “real”, it eventually graduated to astral sex - the ability to
intentionally exchange orgasmic subtle energy at great distances. I
attribute the longevity of our relationship to this subtle body love
making, and it created a very solid foundation for making advances in
our individual inner alchemy practices.
Joyce’s early experiences with the female sexual practices I
anonymously appended to my third editing project, Healing Love:
Cultivating Female Sexual Energy (1986), written under the name of
Mantak and his wife Maneewan Chia. Maneewan in fact did not
contribute any content to the book and appeared to me to be a non-
practitioner. I was forced to resort to interviewing Joyce and dozens of
Chia’s Western female students to evaluate the effectiveness of the
Daoist female sexual practices because there was no pool of qualified
Chinese Daoist female practitioners available.
The female sexual practices (Ovarian Breathing, Slaying the Red
Dragon, and others) focus on initially reducing or later completely
stopping loss of eggs and blood through menstruation, said to be the
main source of women’s loss of jing. They progress to cultivation of
ovarian essence, absorbing male sexual essence and redirection of the
genital orgasm up the spine and or into the lower dantian and other
vital organs until full body orgasm is achieved. Its medical applications
include relief of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome and menopausal hot flashes,
healing of infertility (”cold womb syndrome”) and a variety of glandular
and sexual dysfunction including frigidity. But application of these
practices to Western women was largely experimental, due to the lack
of role models. Study groups were formed to compare results, resulting
in deeper levels of female sexual practice. (Piontek, 2001) Several
women did completely stop their menstrual cycle through voluntary
internal practice. Most used it to simply lighten the amount and color
of blood flow as they learned how to detoxify their blood. But most
important was the paradigm shift of women gaining control of inner
sexual forces and liberation of qi trapped in the uterus using Daoist
subtle body methods.
Westernizing of Daoist Sexual Practices
Editorial collaboration by myself and other senior students with
Mantak Chia resulted in the conversion of what had been a one-to-one
“ear-whispered” transmission in China into an open and detailed
curriculum of progressive courses that Westerners could pay for and
take when they were ready. Transmission was given according to the
level of the teacher and received according to the openness of the
students in the course. Those who didn’t get the transmission simply
took the course again. The integration of sexual energy, whether
physical-sexual or subtle body sexual polarities, remained central to
this curriculum.
This process meant the information on Daoist sexual practices
presented to the public was filtered through Western editors and
teachers. Daoist principles were honored as the cornerstone of every
practice. But the content of the books and courses was inevitably re-
shaped to suit modern Western psychological and sexual needs. This
included acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual practitioners; the
need to enhance the sexual and emotional quality of personal
relationships, the relationship of sex to sports performance and artistic
or career creativity. Supportive Western sexological research was
marshaled showing the difference between the prostate spasm that
causes ejaculation and the whole body physiology of orgasm. We
presented Western scientific biological studies relevant to semen
retention and longevity, showing how nematode worms, when
genetically altered to stop sperm production, lived twice as long.
The Healing Tao organization was an educational structure created so
Westerners would feel comfortable learning some times strange sexual
practices that did not fit into the ordinary context of their culture. A
good example is the Bone Marrow neigong practice of hanging weights
of up to fifty pounds by a silk cord tied around the testicles and penis
to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles and increase capacity to absorb
sexual energy into the bone marrow. Or for women to exercise their
vaginal muscles by inserting a jade egg into their vagina and move it
about as an internal exercise. This evolved into an innovation for
women drilling holes in their jade eggs in order to also hang two or
three pound weights for greater isometric effect in strengthening the
internal fascia. There was “tongue kung-fu” for strengthening that
versatile sexual muscle, and methods for absorbing qi directly into the
genitals from the sun. Sexual energy was cultivated (often by mixing it
with qi drawn up the earth) to magnify one’s power of healing oneself
and others, or to add power to martial arts skills like tai chi chuan.
Unlike Rajneesh’s promotion of Tantra in the West, there was a
deliberate attempt to de-sensationalize these Daoist sexual practices.
No nudity was allowed in workshops and teachers focused on them as
primarily internal sexual-spiritual practices that could be practiced fully
clothed, but also had optional application to the bedroom arts.
California Tantrics criticized Healing Tao practitioners for their focus
on semen retention, claiming it made men uptight and selfish about
holding onto the seed instead of sharing it with women. This was
sometimes true for men who did not integrate semen retention with
other Daoist subtle body practices. I know of men who transferred old
sexual patterns of guilt onto their inability to quickly master semen
retention, instead of treating it as a gradual subtle body training
process. In other cases, emotional struggle was created in their love
relationships if men became too technique oriented. The transmission
of these Daoist sexual practices to Westerners was complex, involving
subtle body experiences, and not always successful.
Over the past two decades tens of thousands of Westerners learned
these sexual practices with virtually no negative side effects. The few
cases with side effects usually already had an extreme imbalance, they
did not have a teacher, did not learn the other methods to open energy
channels first, or used too much force. This is the problem inherent in
people learning a powerful practice from a book. Yet periodically I was
challenged by Chinese students who would repeat warnings from some
mainland China qigong master that all sexual practices were very
dangerous and should be avoided, as they can cause craziness and deep
psychological disturbances.
Investigation led me to conclude that these warnings were valid - but
mostly for mainland Chinese, whose culture of collective “face”
suppresses individual emotional and sexual impulses in order to not
disrupt the larger social harmony. The emphasis in China is on fitting
in, not making trouble, but certainly not on personal self-
improvement. Sexual kung-fu could unleash suppressed feelings in
people that had no model for integrating them, and hence they “went
crazy” from what are called “qi deviations” by qigong professionals.
Western students occasionally reported similar problems, but these
were almost always people who had bypassed all preliminary practices
such as the Six Healing Sounds and Inner Smile.
Westerners are generally encouraged to explore their individual
impulses. In my experience they are sexually and emotionally better
equipped to practice Daoist sexual cultivation than the average
Chinese person. This curious conclusion was confirmed by a top
qigong teacher in Beijing, Dr. Cai Jun, one of the few Chinese with a
Ph.D. in qigongology. Cai Jun told me it was easier for Western
students to open their qi flow than for his Chinese students. He
thought it was because the Chinese had fixed ideas about qi.
The addition of sexual force to any energetic practice is the equivalent
of throwing gasoline on an open fire. The expansive force and
multiplying nature of sexual energy needs a safe and clear energy
34
channel to flow in, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This
integration must occur both internally and in one’s outer relationships.
This defined the Healing Tao’s multi-level Daoist training as a far more
complicated and ambitious transformational process than other
meditation traditions which did not consciously engage sexual energy
and its accompanying emotional and mental challenges.
Modern awareness of psychoanalytic processes and growing public
acceptance of sexual equality, combined with the Daoist energy body
training of the Inner Smile, Six Healing Sounds, Microcosmic Orbit,
and Fusion of the Five Elements from White Cloud’s first alchemy
formula, allowed most Westerners the possibility of safely integrating
the self-released sexual forces in a way suitable for their relationships
and spiritual development. The methods taught by Chia have since
been further developed by myself and others to deepen and simplify
their psychological accessibility to westerners. In China this
integration could also occur traditionally through close personal
supervision by a qualified teacher. But since the cultural milieu is still
largely Confucian, patriarchal, and sexually repressive, finding a
suitable teacher and achieving a Daoist model of male-female harmony
within oneself is difficult.
One very visible stage in the process of Westernizing Daoist practices
was my founding in 1995 of Healing Tao University. This has a faculty
of twenty Western and Chinese specialists teaching the full spectrum
of Daoist Arts and Sciences, with the sexual cultivation and alchemy as
the core curriculum. No similar institution exists today in China.
Ironically, it is only in the West that Daoist sexual practices are being
publicly taught. This sexual freedom is apparently irresistible to some
young Chinese Daoists who migrate to the United States. I know of
two Chinese priests, ordained in celibate Complete Perfection
monasteries, who married here and are openly teaching practices of
internal alchemy. In China they would be told that sex would spoil
their practice, and asked to leave the order. In America, nobody cares
or knows better. A New Yorker cartoon circa1995 sums up public
perception: a fashionably dressed young lady walking down the street
exclaims to her friend, “Wow! You’ve just got to try Taoist sex!”
Sex, Enlightenment, and Immortality
What is the functional relationship between ordinary human sexual
desire and the more abstract realm of subtle bodies? The short answer
is that physical sex nourishes post-natal qi, and subtle body sex
nourishes pre-natal qi. Sexual intercourse can “cook” the male-female
post-natal qi and speed its transformation back into the yuan qi from
which they originated. The long answer is more complicated. Most
people are stuck in deep struggle, paralyzed by the wide gap between
their sexed animal body and their core non-polar original being. The
experience of one’s androgynous (bi-sexed) subtle body offers a
transitional stage in both Daoist and Tantric esoteric traditions.
Nature lures humans to pursue subtle body refinement by tantalizing
them with the sublime experience of spiritual orgasm.
The sexual identity issues are complicated by celibacy issues. When
learning a new subtle body practice, it is often best to avoid sex as a
distraction, but it may be resumed once the subtle body practice is
stable. Or the reverse: many who learn Daoist alchemy “self-
intercourse” find themselves spontaneously losing outer sexual desire,
and needlessly panic. It returns, just like a woman regains her sexual
appetite after being occupied by pregnancy. But subtle body sex may
trigger deep fears around changing one’s physical sexual identity.
When one begins the Daoist subtle body practices of neidangong, the
vertical axis of heaven-earth communication is activated. The coupling
of yang jingshen (heart and liver spirits) with yin jingshen (kidney and
lung spirits) causes one’s parental and ancestral jing to begin resonating
with its “true earth”. This is the infinite pool of prenatal yuanqi flowing
into the lower dantian through the Door of Life (mingmen), the point
of moving qi between the kidneys. The attraction between inner male-
inner female, water-fire, kidneys-heart, jing-shen, outer body passion -
inner loving acceptance - all are polar forces of Destiny (ming) and
Original Nature (xing) played out in a very dynamic theatre of
meditative alchemy. But the bottom line is that the subtle body heaven-
earth axis cannot fully open if the horizontal male-female axis has not
first been made conscious and its impulses harmonized. Sexual balance
precedes and is a prerequisite to stable experience of heaven-earth
harmony. The opposite is also true; some practitioners rush this
transition, and try to use the sexual force prematurely to open up the
Heaven Earth axis without first balancing the male-female axis.
In the sexual cultivation process the human adept leads a double life.
One life is physical, where the adept appears quite ordinary, and may
have sexual relations as the desire to complete one’s essence
spontaneously arises. Physical sex may benefit health and add longevity,
but not make one physically immortal. The other life is inner, where
parallel relationships are played out between one’s own polarized
subtle bodies, and possibly with others. There are periods of intense
subtle energy copulation and active love-making that birth new
spiritual virtues and powers. These alternate with phases of deep
stillness, gestation, and observation. The adept’s inner life follows
invisible currents flowing between heaven and earth. The inner and
outer sexual couplings intersect and nourish each other. The human
heart holding the balance point between the inner and outer lives is
what defines humans as one of the three treasures of the Dao, along
with heaven and earth. This is the human path of spiritual immortality.
West as Cauldron for Dao and Tantra
The growth of Tantric and Daoist sexual cultivation practices in the
West since 1974 initiated a period of remarkable experimentation,
adaptation or outright re-invention inspired by ancient methods from
Asia. Westerners radically reshaped these sexual practices to suit their
own needs, a process likely to continue as they mature and study more
deeply the subtle body maps of the Daoist and Tantric traditions. Since
my explorations into Tantra in the 1980’s, new writers on its theory and
practice have published (Svoboda 1993, Frawley 1994, Tigunait 1999,
White (2000). Whether they fuel a new wave of Westerners exploring
lineage Tantric subtle body and sexual cultivation remains to be seen.
Sales of Rajneesh’s Tantra tapes and books, claimed to be in the
millions sold, have reportedly increased every year since his death. Nik
Douglas predicts Westerners will evolve virtual Tantric initiations, with
mantras delivered over the internet.
On my journey seeking out Tantric and Daoist practices in the West, I
observed three general approaches to sexual cultivation: physical sex
only, celibate subtle body cultivation only, and physical and subtle body
sex together. I noted a pattern among some highly achieved male
teachers of a strong, possibly excessive kundalini fire in the head being
a possible cause for seeking female energy and/or sex. My observation
about these teachers is not meant as a criticism of their methods, as I
personally used many of them for years to great benefit. Simple
modifications to most methods can easily ensure energetic balance,
and this has already happened as part of the globalizing process of
Westerners exposed to both Tantric and Daoist practices. I found the
Fire-solar culture of Tantra and the more Water-Lunar culture of
Daoism (Torchinov, 1997) to balance each other. Because I feel the
current cosmic cycle is favoring the rebirth of the feminine, I
eventually settled into Daoist practice.
The difficulty some highly achieved adepts had in balancing their
sexual energy highlights the possibility that the cosmological splitting
of our original non-dual being, first into an etheric androgyne and then
into physical male and female sexed bodies has created a spiritual
trauma so deep that it cannot be fully resolved by what are considered
states of enlightenment in the Daoist and Tantric traditions. Individual
self-realization may be insufficient to heal the vastness of this
collective wound, which may be the core issue driving the human
incarnational process. Sexual issues may continue to arise as long as
one is still in a physically sexed form, perhaps a bleed over from the
collective field of human sexual consciousness into the highly purified
(non-polar) vessel of an individual adept. The resolution of this cosmic
sexual tension may occur only by achieving what is called immortality,
the alchemical re-fusion of spirit and body-matter into its original
essence, requiring an adept to merge not only into the mind of
Nature (enlightenment) but to merge fully into its body. This is
35
the ultimate focus of subtle body sexual cultivation.
A major force attracting Western spiritual seekers to Daoism and
Tantra is the drive to integrate their sexual desire into a subtle body
experience that I term the quest for spiritual orgasm. This quest has
put Daoist and Tantric sexual cultivation practices into a Western
cultural cauldron and created positive evolutionary pressure on their
traditional methods. I believe this process will ultimately birth a new
spiritual science in the West with recognizable Daoist and Tantric
principles as its foundation.
This article will be posted on www.HealingDao.com, articles.
Permission granted to share it digitally as long as entire article is intact.
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Plenum Press, NY 1991
Rudrananda, Swami. Spiritual Cannibalism, Overlook Press, NY 1978
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Satyeswaranada, Swami. Original Lahiri Mahasay: Father of Kriya
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Svoboda, Robert. Aghora II, Kundalini, Brotherhood of Life, 1993.
Tigunait, Pandit. Tantra Unveiled:Seducing the Forces of Matter &
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Everything Is According to the Way (Bolda-Lok, Australia 1997 )
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www.healingdao.com, Articles
Happiness, Sexuality and Love
Tao & Tantra: A leap into the Inner Heart
Marco Bizzozero
Interview with Marco Bizzozero,, former Director National
Theatre of Italy. Famous in Europe as a clown, actor, mime artist, and
the first high wire artist ever to perform at La Scalia (Milan Opera),
Marco is currently Director, Flower of the Tao Center in Milan, Italy,
where he teaches Taoist internal alchemy, tai chi, and chi kung.
Question: Marco, how would you describe Tao-Tantra?
Tantra is a path to inner fullness through sexuality and pleasure,
through happiness and a total coming-together of human beings; it
puts men and woman in contact with Tao, with the universe, the
absolute, the natural whole. Tao and Tantra are essentally similar
spiritual paths, that evolved different methods for achieving the same
ecstatic unity. I have simply combined some of their methods back
together, taken the best of each to make their common essence more
accessible to westerners.
When Taoist or Tantric ecstasy extends through the erotic
experiences of a man and a woman, a new state of consciousness is
generated, a state which in a flash illuminates and reveals the
fundamental essence of being and of the cosmos. Such a deep
abandonment to love leads to a sense of wholeness and togetherness:
sweetly and subconsciously, the energy of the two lovers extends. The
beating of time is irrelevant, subjectivity is ignored, joy merges and
submerges their hearts, and their hearts open up to an oceanic
sensation of love. Wrapped in this supreme grace, lost in a divine
sincerity, for a few moments the lovers discover the total essence of
existence.
Happiness, deep abandonment, an extended awareness, a full and
total coming-together of two human beings in one - these are the
provisions for achieving Tao, supreme reality.
Q: Are such experiences within anyone’s grasp?
Unfortunately they are not common experiences, since sexuality
nowadays in not a free and joyous experience, and therefore it is
difficult and rare to achieve a total abandonment to our senses, and to
our lovers. Love is without a doubt a great path that can lead to a
Tantric experience, but a relationship must be cultivated, it must be
nourished every day, to make it blossom like a flower, with a great deal
of care and attention.
Q: Can an erotic relationship between a man and woman who are
not a regular couple be fruitful? Can it help to achieve Tao-Tantra?
Most certainly! But here again there are hurdles.
We have not been educated to seek pleasure, and we don’t even
know how to experience intimacy outside an amorous relationship,
outside a regular relationship of a couple. When such a situation arises,
and when that magic encounter takes place, there is an immediate
desire for an amorous relationship. If intimacy is not created, before
too long a veil of alienation will come down between the two lovers,
estranging them from one another.
The path we follow is a difficult one. Even in the situation of sex
without love, sex for pure pleasure, pure biological satisfaction, there
can be no true joy -- or at least very rarely is it achieved. Casual sex, or
a sexual adventure often appears to lead to a devastating series of lost
pleasures, a whole round of frustrations. But those fleeting encounters
are just missed opportunities. Such situations are often just a cavorting
of mutual friction, a body-to-body battle to release pent-up anger, role-
plays based on mirrors and masks, subtle games of domination.
Anxieties to be part of such games, anxieties about how we are
36
judged or not judged all come into play. And in the end, numb, after a
climax that lasts no longer than a sneeze, we are wrapped up in our
escapes from solitude.
But pleasure, affections and intimacy are essential sources of
nourishment for personal growth, for achieving happiness -- and so
sooner or later we all return to that spiral of amorous relationships. Off
we go again in that seductive, fateful roundabout of thinking with our
hearts. Until perhaps one day we will meet our knight in shining
armour or our princess, or perhaps we will pretend that we have found
a suitable kingdom, or perhaps we will just lose interest.
But in this spiral of broken relationships, so much of men’s and
women’s happiness is lost forever. The time has come to change all of
this, and action must be taken at the very root of life, where our
sexuality lies, where our primary and fundamental life-giving force is
averted. This essential energy (Jing), like the thick sap that travels
through the stem of the rose, becomes physical pleasure in the body;
later, when it is red like the petals of the rose, in our hearts it becomes
beauty and love (Chi); eventually, like a scent that spreads all around, it
becomes creation and awareness (Shen) in our thoughts. We cannot go
on cutting off the stem of the rose because this reveals the thorns: the
petals will die, and with them our love and their very scent.
Q: Does real happiness exist? Can we really live in happiness?
Happiness is what brings human beings closer to the universe, the
absolute. Unfortunately it is something that is hard to grasp, like a
breath of air that just brushes past us and disappears, leaving just a
vague memory. Living in happiness means being in love with life, in
love with our existence. Because happiness is in itself a love of life.
Happiness is the very essence of life.
Sometimes, for example, when we fall in love with someone, we
are full of love, we are happy. Everything whirls around us, everything is
alive, bright and shiny, everything is a discovery. We see the divine all
around us. Once again we realise that life is a matter of interpretation ñ
it is a projection of what we feel inside. A light is lit inside us, and it is a
warm, joyous light fuelled by love; outside of our bodies life is lit up.
The rose of love is blossoming inside us, its perfume is spreading
beyond our skin, touching the objects that we touch, touching the
faces of the people we love: and everything becomes love. This is life
becoming happiness, life returning to a state of happiness. Hence, if we
discover a flower in a field, if we look into the eyes of our loved one, or
glance into the eyes of a child who is watching us, then we can enter
this enchantment and through it make out the splendour of the
universe.
Q: Why does this experience of happiness in relationships always
come to an end?
Our relationships fail because they stem from need, not from
abundance. They do not derive from a heart brimming with love; they
are experiences that are born with the other person and depend on the
other person. But no other person can fill our hearts for ever. Someone
else can give us love and affection, but not happiness.
Q: But we were told that love could last for ever, in eternal
happiness, and we fell for it!
Instead love, true love, creative, earnest love, love that has the
courage not to give up in the face of changing states of awareness in
both lovers, very often, with just a few exceptions, sooner or later will
die. And when this happens, when love abandons us, we feel betrayed
by life. And evil appears dark inside us: we see the emptiness from
which our love arises, life itself seems empty.
Q: But how can we be happy, just because we are alive; how can we
fall in love with life itself?
Tao and Tantra teach us how. Firstly we need to nourish our
authenticity, and with this the image we have of ourselves. The coming-
together of a man and a woman can prove to be a fountain of unique
discoveries and changes.
In Taoist-Tantric ecstasy (as in love-making), the state of being
from which everything stems is abandonment, and abandonment
derives from listening. Tantra teaches us that an ability to listen is the
highest personal quality. A man who knows how to listen can discover
divine femininity in a woman, and likewise a woman who listens can
discover divine masculinity in a man. The most profound
abandonment stems from the heart, from reciprocal adoration. It
implies seeing Buddha in the body and in the eyes of another, sensing
the mystery, knowing how to adore the other person. This is the
wonderful path that ñ whether it is part of an amorous relationship or
not ñ makes us perceive the marvels of existence, that makes us fall in
love with life.
Men and women cannot go on waging war on one another. A war
that we wage on someone is a war that we fight in ourselves. There is
only one male archetype, for men and for women: two interpretative
approaches, but only one archetype. And this is likewise true for the
female archetype.
By diminishing the value of the male side of a man, a woman
reduces the value of the male side to her own character. And the
reverse is true for men, who for centuries have not cultivated the
female side to their characters, at the same time subtracting value from
the feminine side of women’s characters.
This closing of the chakra of the heart, this juggling for power
upsets the balance with gravity itself, the balance between yin and yang
that give a unity of being to both men and women. Today we need to
give meaning and value to the male and the female sides of our
characters, treating them as divine principles. We need to make them
blossom in our social conscience, loving them and taking pleasure from
them, inside man and inside woman. Through meditation ñ through
cultivating the energy behind the female and male sexual values, and
the exchange of energy ñ Tao and the Tantra teach us to create the
wealth that is within us, and to share it in loving play.
Only someone who has inner wealth can find the freedom of need:
“Only those who come to the fountain will quench their thirst.” Inner
wealth means identity of gender, autonomy, independence, a capacity
to listen, the opportunity to share. Only when our thirst is truly
quenched can we become a source of freedom for our partner. And
man and woman can become reciprocal sources of nourishment and
growth.
The symbol of yin and yang reveal to us the great power that our
relations have. When we nourish the image that our partner has of him
or herself with love, we cultivate the life inside our partner, just like
water and the sun. “Just as the top is, so is the base; just as the inside is,
so is the outside”: accepting the shadow of our partner and reflecting
the light of his or her image, we clean the mirror of our own awareness,
and we fuel our very fountainheads of love. In other words, by
nourishing the image our partner has of him or herself, we create inner
light and inner wealth in ourselves. This is what being a couple means,
this is an opportunity for existential happiness.
Loving ourselves, loving others, loving life -- these are all part of a
single, inseparable and divine experience.
Q: Is there a great deal of interest in Tao-Tantra in Italy?
Last year a hundred or so people attended our Tao-Tantra
seminars. This is an important sign, a courageous sign of a desire to get
to know the intimate side of our relationships and to make them
blossom.
For many of us it was a fantastic experience of opening up, of trust
and abandonment, of coming together, both on an individual level and
with others. At the end of each group session, alongside this
true, re-discovered joie de vivre, this seeing the light of the
37
world, there was a great awareness of what we were seeking, and what
we could expect from human relationships: a feeling of togetherness,
uniquely and humbly in the face of the mystery of life.
Q: What are the main approaches and techniques used during your
group sessions?
All approaches are part of an alchemy-like process that hinges on
two poles of energy during love-making: that of the heart (fire, passion,
listening, thoughtfulness, abandonment, accepting without judging,
celebrating the expectation, the event itself, the awareness of our
divine nature), and that of sexuality (water, sweetness, the expression of
our desires, the extension into cuddles, kisses and hugs, the “touching
of the soul”, “the wheel of love”, the cultivation of sexual energy and
multiplying it).
Many approaches (linked to the pole of water) are Tantric and
Taoist meditations, techniques to expand our awareness so that we can
become conscious of our sexual energy and propel it into our body and
into our partner’s body. These are techniques to expand physical
pleasure and energy, allowing the man to decide the right moment for
ejaculation, separating this moment from orgasm, exchanging his own
vital yang principles with the yin principles of the woman. Such
practices allow the woman to re-discover her Tantric nature and her
vast erotic power. In this manner, when this exchange of energy and
pleasure goes beyond the genital organs, there results an “alchemy-like
union”, in other words an extension of the orgasm to the organs and to
the brain: at this point the coming-together of the partners becomes
Tantric ecstasy.
Q: What level of intimacy is needed?
Usually these approaches are not experimented in full within the
group, time and total intimacy being required. However, we work on
preparing the techniques and the energy needed. At no time have any
participants been forced to take any of the experiments further than
they wished. Many of the exercises involve various opportunities for
experiences: the level of intimacy is free, and the levels of intimacy
chosen by all participants are carried out in full and complete respect
of the other participants.
Q: And as for the heart, what do you mean by “a leap into the
inner heart”?
Of great importance, indispensable for this alchemy-like process
are the experiences that activate the centre of the heart, that allow
participants to take a true “leap” into their hearts, and into that of the
group. And this leap comes about through games, dances and rites; we
abandon our masks, our defenses, our fears and our prejudices. For a
few days and in certain moments, we go back to living like children,
experiencing all the authenticity of our experiences.
The Tao-Tantra group is a place for sacred encounters, providing
trust, friendship and support. It is a great opportunity for
development, enwrapped in a collective field of spiritual energy, where
the light of love and awareness pervades and transforms all those
taking part. Here, everything becomes a game of enchantment. The
sensation of feeling at home, protected and loved, leads to a
incantation in the eyes of our companion, where we discover the
qualities of our own hearts.
This is the magic that allows us to see the Eternal Tao in others
and in ourselves the combined forces of Shiva and Shakti, Great Yin
and Great Yang.. And bewildered, we continually ask ourselves why we
are so far from such an awareness in our daily lives, so far from such
happiness.
This is the happiness of being here, playing this Sacred Game of
Life, where laughing together is a grace, and where silence is a
presence: together with our partner, heart to heart, skin against skin,
here, together, on the threshold of mystery.
My Spirisexual Self

Raven Cohan
Perhaps it would be helpful if such a word existed as Spirisexual.
That way, perhaps we would be less likely to separate sexuality and
spirituality. Our culture and even our spiritual pathways can lead us to
believe they are separate. Deep within me from a young age, I felt very
strongly that they were one. When I became an active seeker of
spirituality, (at fifteen,) I waited to find a pathway with which I could
identify, that would support me in growing even further toward
merging body and spirit. Meanwhile I practiced varied meditations and
learned to live my life.
Bliss is a state that can be obtained by sitting and meditating, and
also it can be obtained in physical ways. Some people take drugs or
drink to hope to obtain bliss. In this lifetime I haven’t wanted to ever
do that. But I have been blessed with being highly orgasmic naturally.
Back in 1964, I discovered such an exulted state when I became
sexually active at eighteen years of age! It seemed like a miraculously,
joyful place one could easily find, just by connecting with a partner and
letting go. Without going into lengthy details, the inhibitions that I
might have run into, were not a factor. I happened to be at the right
place in time, as there was a sexual revolution going on, and I was in
the right career, (show business) and very importantly I seemed to be
mentally, emotionally and physically more independent than the
average female.
As I write this, I am in bliss. I have learned to be able to produce
rapture when I want, with or without a sexual encounter. It so happens
that about two hours ago, I did make love to my husband.
Let me describe my bliss from head to toe. My scalp is breathing,
my third eye area feels as if a tongue is moving on it in a sensual way.
My brain is pulsing, and when I look into it, rays of light shoot in all
directions. My ears are buzzing out orgasmic Morse Code. My nasal
cavities are throbbing with space. My gums, lips and roof of my mouth
are feeling as piquant as with a favorite hot sauce. Ah, the neck...It
feels buffed, or polished to a high gleam. My heart spreads through my
chest. It openly spills out into my breast and runs loving feelings down
toward my belly which is as contentedly full as after a perfect meal of
kisses.
The sexual organs are the place from which many people believe
orgasm originates. That is a learned, and limiting belief, but the sexual
organs do indeed in bliss, feel like a kitten purring image that must be
iterated by a goodly amount for the reader to get the true picture.
These are not simply aroused, or horny feelings I’m describing. They
are dream-time orgasm at their best. I’ve trained my mind to
encourage the feeling in any part of my body and to replicate orgasm.
Legs and arms too, vibrate with a chi-filled feeling. And the most
important part is my spine which contain icy tingles just like from a
song lyric. Continuous messages are delivered to the brain to keep up
this roller-coaster ride of beyond-orgasmic feeling for long time periods.
I am in a similar blissful state after beginning my meditation,
(sometimes as intense, sometimes less so.) Years ago, before I trained
to be able to do this, I did have spontaneous multi-orgasm a few times
in my life, but now with practice, it is becoming more and more a way
of life. The best part is that I can be doing other things, and not always
lose the intensity of the ecstasy.
The point of this description is that some people don’t know what
orgasm feels like, and some don’t know what bliss feels like. Some will
say they are separate feelings because they lose their body in bliss. In
my opinion, it is a choice to separate or not. Typing an article takes a
certain part of the brain, and being in bliss can take a certain part of
the brain. How can I be performing in both states at once? Perhaps I
can illuminate with the following information.
My teacher, Master Mantak Chia, was measured on Oct. 25, 1996
for his ULP, (ultraslow brain potentials,) in the laboratory of the
Institute for Applied Biocybernetics Feedback Research in
Vienna, Austria. To quote literature reproduced by the Intl.
38
Healing Tao, “The level of ULP closely correlates the flow of energy in
the body: clarity, efficiency, health, the ability to concentrate, the
ability to react, the sexual experience and other mental activities. The
measuring instrument was a biofeedback device developed in the IBF:
the PCE-Scanner. The measured figures were diagrammed...” To
obtain this entire document on the web, find it at www.healing-
tao.com . It helps people to understand that with practice, one can
complete the techniques of Inner Smile, Microcosmic Orbit and
Orgasmic Upward Draw, and energy continues to increase for the next
many minutes and can stay at a high level for over half a day, (as was
recorded on Chia,) and one can continue doing other things and
maintain this highly rapturous state. The results, as reported by the
Institute in Vienna, are different than from using mantras or chanting,
but everyone’s individual experience is unique, and I wouldn’t
personally declare that any other practice couldn’t put one toward
being able to keep the energy inside the mind and body like those
practices that I’ve learned from Master Chia over the last eighteen
years.
Teaching my Tai Chi-Chi Kung classes always puts me into bliss
and I am thrilled when sometimes out of a clear blue sky, bliss pops up,
like a sun shower. I often have a Utopian dream that if the world was
trained to do this we wouldn’t have people needing to relieve their
frustrated sexual feelings in violent or other out-of-control ways. The
understanding that spirituality and sexuality are one, could have as a
timely example, saved President Clinton, and our entire nation from
embarrassment due to his inability to keep his sexual needs within the
control of his own mind and heart. The less we separate spirituality and
sexuality, the more easily will these controls be learned. Yet, this
practice of mine also teaches me patience. We must all come to our
varied evolution as we are ready.
BIO:
Raven Cohan has been a certified Healing Tao instructor since
1983, and lives in Hollywood, FL.
SUGGESTED READING:
THE MULTI-ORGASMIC MAN
by Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams Arava
Harper Collins, San Francisco
The Forces of Love, Eros and Sex
Eva Broch Pierrakos
Note: Here is an interesting lecture on the relationship between
the three forces of Love, Eros, and Sex. If you substitute the Taoist
concepts of Shen (Spirit) for Love, Chi for Eros (the flowing yin-yang
pulsation of the chi field is inherently orgasmic), and Jing (sexual
essence) for Sex Force, the talk becomes relevant to Taoist
practitioners.
The Taoist sexual practices, when cultivated to a higher level
through Taoist internal alchemy meditation, take one far beyond the
scope of what is suggested by this lecture. The transformations
between jing, chi, shen and back again are the main focus of alchemy,
and the jing (sexual essence) is the primordial force fueling the process
in the physical plane. The higher level Taoist adept also transcends the
limitations inherent in monogamous relationships by learning to
absorb needed jing, chi, or shen qualities needed for personal
completion from other people at a distance (without sexual
relationship) or from the earth, planets, and stars.
But this lecture puts these three terms into popular western
concepts and may help them come more alive, particularly the
emphasis on married relationships being a vessel for soul (shen)
exploration. Many Taoist sexual practitioners get stuck at the level of
cultivating chi only, without exploring the spiritual presence of shen
(spirit/intelligence) underlying the chi field. After nearly 19 years with
my partner Joyce Gayheart, my own experience is that the deeper one’s
alchemy practice takes you into the Tao, the deeper the soul
experience of one’s partner. The lecture was channeled over 40 years
ago from “Spirit” by Eva Pierrakos, but survives the test of time. Her
Pathwork center in the New York Catskills was used for Healing Tao
summer retreats by Mantak Chia from 1989 to 1992. Many Pathwork
students went on to become well known channels -- Pat Rodegast
(Emmanuel books), Barbara Ann Brennan, and Michael Morgan.
Published by The Pathwork © Foundation (1996 Edition) Pathwork
Guide Lecture No. 44, January 16, 1959.
- Michael Winn
Greetings in the Name of the Lord. I bring you blessings, my
dearest friends. Blessed is this hour.
Tonight I would like to discuss three particular forces in the
universe: the love force as it manifests between the sexes, the erotic
force, and the sex force. These are three distinctly different principles
or forces that manifest differently on every plane, from the highest to
the lowest. Humanity has always confused these three principles. In
fact, it is little known that three separate forces exist and what the
differences between them are. There is so much confusion about this
that it will be quite useful for my friends to hear what the reality is.
The erotic force is one of the most potent forces in existence and
has tremendous momentum and impact. It is supposed to serve as the
bridge between sex and love, yet it rarely does. In a spiritually highly
developed person, the erotic force carries the entity from the erotic
experience, which in itself is of short duration, into the permanent
state of pure love. However, even the strong momentum of the erotic
force carries the soul just so far and no farther. It is bound to dissolve if
the personality does not learn to love, by cultivating all the qualities
and requirements necessary for true love. Only when love has been
learned does the spark of the erotic force remain alive. By itself,
without love, the erotic force burns itself out. This of course is the
trouble with marriage. Since most people are incapable of pure love,
they are also incapable of attaining ideal marriage. Eros seems in many
ways similar to love. It brings forth impulses a human being would not
have otherwise: impulses of unselfishness and affection he or she
might have been incapable of before. This is why eros is so very often
confused with love. But eros is just as often confused with the sex
instinct which, like eros, also manifests as a great urge.
Now, my friends, I would like to show you what the spiritual
meaning and purpose of the erotic force is, particularly as far as
humanity is concerned. Without eros, many people would never
experience the great feeling and beauty that is contained in real love.
They would never get the taste of it and the yearning for love would
remain deeply submerged in their souls. Their fear of love would
remain stronger than their desire.
Eros is the nearest thing to love the undeveloped spirit can
experience. It lifts the soul out of sluggishness, out of mere
contentment and vegetation. It causes the soul to surge, to go out of
itself. When this force comes upon even the most undeveloped people
they become able to surpass themselves. Even a criminal will
temporarily feel, at least toward one person, a goodness he has never
known. The utterly selfish person will, while this feeling lasts, have
unselfish impulses. Lazy people will get out of their inertia. The
routine-bound person will naturally and without effort get rid of static
habits. The erotic force will lift a person out of separateness, be it only
for a short time.
Eros gives the soul a foretaste of unity and teaches the fearful
psyche the longing for it. The more strongly one has experienced eros,
the less contentment will the soul find in the pseudo-security of
separateness. Even an otherwise thoroughly self-centered person may
be able to make a sacrifice during the experience of eros. So you see,
my friends, eros enables people to do things they are disinclined to do
otherwise; things that are closely linked with love. It is easy to see why
eros is so often confused with love.
How then is eros different from love? Love is a permanent state in
the soul. Love can only exist if the foundation for it is prepared
through development and purification. Love does not come and go at
random; eros does. Eros hits with sudden force, often taking a person
unaware and even unwilling to go through the experience. Only if the
soul is prepared to love and has built the foundation for it will
eros be the bridge to the love that is manifest between a man
39
and a woman.
Thus you can see how important the erotic force is. Without the
erotic force hitting them and getting them out of their rut, many
human beings would never be ready for a more conscious search for
the breaking down of their own walls of separation. The erotic
experience puts the seed into the soul and makes it long for unity,
which is the great aim in the Plan of Salvation. As long as the soul is
separate, loneliness and unhappiness must be its lot. The erotic
experience enables the personality to long for union with at least one
other being. In the heights of the spirit world, union exists among all
beings -- and thus with God. In the earth sphere, the erotic force is a
propelling power regardless of whether or not its real meaning is
understood. This is so even though it is often misused and enjoyed for
its own sake, while it lasts. It is not utilized to cultivate love in the soul,
so it peters out. Nevertheless, its effect will inevitably remain in the
soul.
Eros comes to people suddenly in certain stages of their lives, even
to those who are afraid of the apparent risk of adventuring away from
separateness. People who are afraid of their emotions and afraid of life
as such will often do anything in their power to avoid -- subconsciously
and ignorantly -- the great experience of unity. Although this fear exists
in many human beings, there are few indeed who have not experienced
some opening in the soul where eros could touch them. For the fear-
ridden soul that resists the experience, this is good medicine regardless
of the fact that sorrow and loss may follow due to other psychological
factors. However, there are also those who are over-emotional, and
although they may know other fears of life, they are not afraid of this
particular experience. In fact, the beauty of it is a great temptation to
them and therefore they hunt greedily for it. They look for one subject
after another, emotionally too ignorant to understand the deep
meaning of Eros. They are unwilling to learn pure love, and simply use
the erotic force for their pleasure and when it is worn out they hunt
elsewhere.
This is an abuse and cannot continue without ill effects. Such a
personality will have to make amends for the abuse -- even if it was
done in ignorance. In the same vein, the over-fearful coward will have
to make up for trying to cheat life by hiding from eros and thus
withholding from the soul a medicine, valuable if used properly. Most
people in this category have a vulnerable point somewhere in their soul
through which eros can enter. There are also a few who have built such
a tight wall of fear and pride around their souls that they avoid this
part of life experience entirely and so shortchange their own
development. This fear might exist because in a former life they had an
unhappy experience with eros, or perhaps because the soul has greedily
abused the beauty of the erotic force without building it into love. In
either case, the personality may have chosen to be more careful. If this
decision is too rigid and stringent, the opposite extreme will follow. In
the next incarnation circumstances will be chosen in such a way that a
balance is established until the soul reaches a harmonious state
wherein there are no more extremes. This balancing in future
incarnations always applies to all aspects of the personality. In order to
approach this harmony to some extent at least, the proper balance
between reason, emotion, and will has to be achieved.
The erotic experience often mingles with the sexual urge, but it
does not always have to be that way. These three forces -- love, eros,
and sex -- often appear completely separately, while sometimes two
mingle, such as eros and sex, or eros and love to the extent the soul is
capable of love, or sex and a semblance of love. Only in the ideal case
do all three forces mingle harmoniously. The sex force is the creative
force on any level of existence. In the highest spheres, the same sex
force creates spiritual life, spiritual ideas, and spiritual concepts and
principles. On the lower planes, the pure and unspiritualized sex force
creates life as it manifests in that particular sphere; it creates the outer
shell or vehicle of the entity destined to live in that sphere.
The pure sex force is utterly selfish. Sex without eros and without
love is referred to as animalistic. Pure sex exists in all living creatures:
animals, plants, and minerals. Eros begins with the stage of
development where the soul is incarnated as a human being. And pure
love is to be found in the higher spiritual realms. This does not mean
that eros and sex no longer exist in beings of higher development, but
rather that all three blend in harmoniously, are refined, and become
less and less selfish. Nor do I mean that a human being should not try
to achieve a harmonious blend of all three forces.
In rare cases, eros alone, without sex and love, exists for a limited
time. This is usually referred to as platonic love. But sooner or later
with the somewhat healthy person, eros and sex will mingle. The sex
force, instead of being suppressed, is taken up by the erotic force and
both flow in one current. The more the three forces remain separate,
the unhealthier the personality is. Another frequent combination,
particularly in relationships of long standing, is the coexistence of
genuine love with sex, but without eros. Although love cannot be
perfect unless all three forces blend together, there is a certain amount
of affection, companionship, fondness, mutual respect, and a sex-
relationship that is crudely sexual without the erotic spark which
evaporated some time ago.
When eros is missing, the sexual relationship must eventually
suffer. Now this is the problem with most marriages, my friends. There
is hardly a human being who is not puzzled by the question of what to
do to maintain the spark in the relationship which seems to evaporate
the more habit and familiarity with one another sets in. You may not
have posed the question in terms of three distinct forces, yet you know
and sense that something goes out of a marriage that was present at
the beginning; that spark is actually eros. You find yourself in a vicious
circle and think that marriage is a hopeless proposition. No, my
friends, it is not, even if you cannot as yet attain the ideal.
In the ideal partnership of love between two people all three forces
have to be represented. With love you do not seem to have much
difficulty, for in most cases one would not marry if there did not exist
at least the willingness to love. I will not discuss at this point the
extreme cases where this is not so. I am focusing on a relationship
where the choice is a mature one and yet the partners cannot get
around the pitfall of becoming bound by time and habit, because
elusive eros has disappeared. With sex it is very much the same. The
sex force is present in most healthy human beings and may only begin
to fade -- particularly with women -- when eros has left. Men may then
seek eros else-where. For the sexual relationship must eventually suffer
unless eros is maintained.
How can you keep eros? That is the big question, my dear ones.
Eros can be maintained only if it is used as a bridge to true partnership
in love in the highest sense. How is this done? Let us first look for the
main element in the erotic force. When you analyze it, you will find
that it is the adventure, the search for the knowledge of the other soul.
This desire lives in every created spirit. The inherent life-force must
finally bring the entity out of its separation. Eros strengthens the
curiosity to know the other being. As long as there is something new
to find in the other soul and as long as you reveal yourself, eros will live.
The moment you believe you have found all there is to find, and have
revealed all there is to reveal, eros will leave. It is as simple as that with
eros. But where your great error comes in is that you believe there is a
limit to the revealing of any soul, yours or another’s. When a certain
point of usually quite superficial revelation is reached, you are under
the impression that this is all there is, and you settle down to a placid
life without further searching.
Eros has carried you this far with its strong impact. But after this
point, your will to further search the unlimited depths of the other
person and voluntarily reveal and share your own inward search
determines whether you have used eros as a bridge to love. This, in
turn, is always determined by your will to learn how to love. Only in
this way will you maintain the spark of eros in your love. Only in this
way will you continue to find the other and let yourself be found.
There is no limit, for the soul is endless and eternal: a whole lifetime
would not suffice to know it. There can never be a point when you
know the other soul entirely, nor when you are known entirely.
40
The soul is alive, and nothing that is alive remains static. It has the
capacity to reveal even deeper layers that already exist. The soul is also
in constant change and movement as anything spiritual is by its very
nature. Spirit means life and life means change. Since soul is spirit, the
soul can never be known utterly. If people had the wisdom, they would
realize that and make of marriage the marvelous journey of adventure
it is supposed to be, forever finding new vistas, instead of simply being
carried as far as you are taken by the first momentum of eros. You
should use this potent momentum of eros as the initial thrust it is, and
then find through it the urge to go on further under your own steam.
Then you will have brought eros into true love in marriage.
Marriage is intended by God for human beings and its divine
purpose is not merely procreation. That is only one detail. The
spiritual idea of marriage is to enable the soul to reveal itself and to be
constantly on the search for the other to discover forever new vistas of
the other being. The more this happens, the happier the marriage will
be, the more firmly and safely it will be rooted, and the less it will be in
danger of an unhappy ending. Then it will fulfill its spiritual purpose.
In practice, however, marriage hardly ever works that way. You
reach a certain state of familiarity and habit and you think you know
the other. It does not even occur to you that the other does not know
you by any means. He or she may know certain facets of your being,
but that is all. This search for the other being, as well as for self-
revelation, requires inner activity and alertness. But since people are
often tempted into inner inactivity, while outer activity may be all the
stronger as an overcompensation, they are being lured to sink into a
state of restfulness, cherishing the delusion of already knowing each
other fully. This is the pitfall. It is the beginning of the end at worst, or
at best a compromise leaving you with a gnawing, unfulfilled longing.
At this point the relationship turns static. It is no longer alive even
though it may have some very pleasant features.
Habit is a great temptress, pulling one toward sluggishness and
inertia, so that one does not have to try and work or be alert any more.
Two people may arrange an apparently satisfactory relationship,
and as the years go by they face two possibilities. The first is that either
one or both partners become openly and consciously dissatisfied. For
the soul needs to surge ahead, to find and to be found, so as to dissolve
separateness, regardless of how much the other side of the personality
fears union and is tempted by inertia. This dissatisfaction is either
conscious -- although in most instances the real reason for it is ignored
-- or it is unconscious. In either case, the dissatisfaction is stronger
than the temptation of the comfort of inertia and sluggishness. Then
the marriage will be disrupted and one or both partners will delude
themselves into thinking that with a new partner it will be different,
particularly after eros has perhaps struck again. As long as this
principle is not understood, a person may go from one partnership to
another, sustaining feelings only as long as eros is at work.
The second possibility is that the temptation of a semblance of
peace is stronger. Then the partners may remain together and may
certainly fulfill something together, but a great unfulfilled need will
always lurk in their souls. Since men are by nature more active and
adventurous, they tend to be polygamous and are therefore more
tempted by infidelity than women. Thus you can also understand what
the underlying motive for men’s inclination to be unfaithful is. Women
tend much more to be sluggish and are therefore better prepared to
compromise. This is why they tend to be monogamous. Of course,
there are exceptions, in both sexes. Such infidelity is often as puzzling
to the active partner as to the “victim.” They do not understand
themselves. The unfaithful one may suffer just as much as the one
whose trust has been betrayed.
In the situation where compromise is chosen, both people
stagnate, at least in one very important aspect of their soul
development. They find refuge in the steady comfort of their
relationship. They may even believe that they are happy in it, and this
may be true to some degree. The advantages of friendship,
companionship, mutual respect, and a pleasant life together with a well-
established routine outweigh the unrest of the soul, and the partners
may have enough discipline to remain faithful to one another. Yet an
important element of their relationship is missing: the revealing of soul
to soul as much as possible.
Only when two people do this can they be purified together and
thus help each other. Two developed souls, who have a knowledge of
purification in their subconscious, though they may ignore the various
steps of these teachings, can yet fulfill one another by revealing
themselves, by searching the depths of the other’s soul. Thus what is in
each soul will emerge into their conscious minds, and purification will
take place. Then the life-spark is maintained so that the relationship
can never stagnate and degenerate into a dead end. For you who are on
this path, and follow the various steps of these teachings, it will be
easier to overcome the pitfalls and dangers of the marital relationship
and to repair damage that has occurred unwittingly.
In this way, my dear friends, you not only maintain eros, that
vibrating life-force, but you also transform it into true love. Only in a
true partnership of love and eros can you discover in your partner new
levels of being you have not heretofore perceived. And you yourself will
be purified also by putting away your pride and revealing yourself as
you really are. Your relationship will always be new, regardless of how
well you think you know each other already. All masks must fall, not
only the superficial but the real, which you may not even have been
aware of. Then your love will remain alive. It will never be static; it will
never stagnate. You will never have to search elsewhere.
There is so much to see and discover in this land of the other soul
you have chosen, whom you continue to respect, but in whom you
seem to miss the life-spark that once brought you together. You will
never have to be afraid of losing the love of your beloved; this fear will
be justified only if you refrain from risking the journey of self-
revelation together. This, my friends, is marriage in its true sense and
the only way it can be the glory it is supposed to be.
Each of you should think deeply about whether you are afraid to
leave the four walls of your own separateness. Some of my friends are
unaware that to stay separate is almost a conscious wish. With many of
you it is this way: you desire marriage because one part of you yearns
for it -- and also because you do not want to be alone. Quite superficial
and vain reasons may be added to explain the deep yearning within
your soul. But aside from this yearning and aside from the superficial
and selfish motives of your unfulfilled desire for partnership, there
must also be an unwillingness to risk the journey and adventure of
revealing yourself. An integral part of life remains to be fulfilled by you
-- if not in this life, then in future lives.
Should you find yourself alone, you may, with this knowledge and
this truth, repair the damage that you have done to your own soul by
harboring wrong concepts in your unconscious. You may discover your
fear of the great adventurous journey with another, which will explain
why you are alone. This understanding should prove helpful and may
even enable your emotions to change sufficiently so that your outer life
may change too. This depends on you. Whoever is unwilling to take
the risk of this great adventure cannot succeed in the greatest venture
humanity knows -- marriage.
In this way, my dear friends, you not only maintain eros, that
vibrating life force, but you also transform it into true love. Only in a
true partnership of love and eros can you discover in your partner new
levels of being you have not heretofore perceived. And you yourself will
be purified also by putting away your pride and revealing yourself as
you really are. In this way, your relationship will always be new,
regardless of how well you think you know each other already. All
masks must fall, not only the superficial but the real, which you may
not even have been aware of. Then your love will remain alive. It will
never be static; it will never stagnate. You will never have to search
elsewhere. There is so much to see and discover in this land of the
other soul you have chosen, whom you continue to respect but in
whom you seem to miss the life spark that once brought you
together. You will never have to be afraid of losing the love of
41
your beloved; this fear will have justification only if you refrain from
risking the journey of self-revelation together.
This, my friends, is marriage in its true sense and the only way it
can be the glory it is supposed to be. Each of you should think deeply
about whether you are afraid to leave the four walls of your own
separateness. Some of my friends are unaware that to stay separate is
almost a conscious wish. With many of you it is this way: you desire
marriage because one part of you yearns for it -- and also because you
do not want to be alone. Quite superficial and vain reasons may be
added to explain the deep yearning within your soul. But aside from
this yearning and aside from the superficial and selfish motives of your
unfulfilled desire for partnership, there must also be an unwillingness
to risk the journey and adventure of revealing yourself. An integral part
of life remains to be fulfilled by you -- if not in this life, then in future
lives.
Only when you meet love, life, and the other being in such
readiness will you be able to bestow the greatest gift on your beloved,
namely your true self. And then you must inevitably receive the same
gift from your beloved. But to do that, a certain emotional and
spiritual maturity has to exist. If this maturity is present, you will
intuitively choose the right partner, one who has, in essence, the same
maturity and readiness to embark on this journey. The choice of a
partner who is unwilling comes out of the hidden fear of undertaking
the journey yourself. You magnetically draw people and situations
toward you which correspond to your subconscious desires and fears.
You know that.
Humanity, on the whole, is very far away from this ideal, but that
does not change the idea or the ideal. In the meantime you have to
learn to make the best of it. And you who are fortunate enough to be
on this path can learn much wherever you stand, be it only in
understanding why you cannot realize the happiness that a part of your
soul yearns for. To discover that is already a great deal and will enable
you in this life or in future lives to get nearer to the realization of this
idea. Whatever your situation is, whether you have a partner or are
alone, search your heart and it will furnish you the answer to your
conflict. The answer must come from within yourself, and in all
probability it will relate to your own fear, unwillingness, and your
ignorance of the facts. Search and you will know. Understand that
God’s purpose in the partnership of love is the complete mutual
revelation of one soul to another -- not just a partial revelation.
Physical revelation is easy for many. Emotionally you share to a
certain degree -- usually as far as eros carries you. But then you lock the
door, and that is the moment when your troubles begin. There are
many who are not willing to reveal anything. They want to remain
alone and aloof. They will not touch the experience of revealing
themselves and of finding the soul of the other person. They avoid this
in every way they can.
My dear ones, once again: understand how important the erotic
principle is in your sphere. It helps many who may be unwilling and
unprepared for the love experience. It is what you call “falling in love,”
or “romance.” Through eros the personality gets a taste of what the
ideal love could be. As I said before, many use this feeling of happiness
carelessly and greedily, never passing the threshold into true love. True
love demands much more of people in a spiritual sense. If they do not
meet this demand, they forfeit the goal for which their soul strives.
This extreme of hunting for romance is as wrong as the other, where
not even the potent force of eros can enter the tightly locked door. But
in most cases, when the door is not too tightly bolted, eros does come
to you at certain stages of your life. Whether you can then use eros as a
bridge to love depends on you. It depends on your development, your
willingness, your courage, your humility, and your ability to reveal
yourself.
Are there any questions in connection with this subject, my dear
friends?
 QUESTION: Yes. It is so difficult for a woman to talk to a man.
Men don’t answer when one tries to get into a conversation touching
the emotional understanding. That makes it very, very difficult for the
woman.
ANSWER: Here is a great error, my dear. But let us first establish
one fact that should be well understood. Woman is by nature more
emotionally inclined. Man is by nature more spiritually, or on a lower
level, more intellectually inclined. By that I do not mean that he has to
be what you call an intellectual. It is simply that usually the reasoning
faculty is stronger in men. Because of this the revealing of his emotions
is a very difficult step for a man. In this a woman can help him. The
man will help the woman in other ways. The mistake you make is in
thinking that revelation and the meeting of souls is brought about by
talking. Oh, it may be a temporary crutch, it may be one detail; or
rather it may be simply a tool, a means of expressing certain facets. But
this is all. It is not in the talking that you find the other soul or that you
reveal yourself, though this may be a part of it. It is in the being that
this whole and basic attitude is determined.
It is the woman who is stronger emotionally. For her it is usually
easier to muster the courage to meet soul to soul and touch the
deepest core of longing that is also in man. If she can use her intuition
and reach that part of her partner, he will respond provided he has the
maturity. He must respond. Whether this response comes occasionally
through a conversation or not, is not so important. It is not a question
of whether a verbal discussion serves in reaching the other soul.
Certainly, speaking is a part of it, together with all the other faculties.
But the ability to speak about things is not the determining factor.
First the inner basis has to be established. Then you will be flexible
enough to use all the faculties God has given you. To find and meet the
other soul means going into the state of inner being; the doing is only
an incidental result, a mere detail which is part of the outer
manifestation. Is that clear?
QUESTION: Yes, it is clear. And I think it is wonderful. In other
words it is the task of the woman to find the other soul?
ANSWER: It may often be that it is easier for the woman to take
the first necessary steps after eros is no longer capable of maintaining
its own momentum. But both need to have the basic willingness to go
on the journey together. As stated before, the woman often finds it
easier to reveal herself, to let the emotions come out. The mature
woman who is earnestly willing to undertake the adventure of true
marriage will have the mature and healthy instinct to find the right
partner. The same applies to the man, of course.
Once this willingness exists in both, either one may lead the way. It
does not make any difference who starts. It may often be the woman,
but it may also be the man at times. Whoever starts it, a time will
come when the other one will also lead and help. In a relationship that
is alive, healthy, and flexible, it must alternate and change constantly. At
any given time, whoever is the stronger, the leader, will help in the
liberation of the other. For this soul-revelation is a liberation --
liberating the other soul from the prison of loneliness, and liberating
the self. This prison may even appear comfortable if you live and
stagnate in it long enough. One should not wait for the other to start.
Whoever is more mature and courageous at a particular instant will
start, and will thus raise the maturity of the other which may then
surpass his or her own. Thus the helper becomes the helped; the
liberator becomes the liberated.
QUESTION: When you talk about the revelation of a soul to
another, do you mean that, on a higher level, this is the way the soul
reveals itself to God?
ANSWER: It is the same thing. But before you can truly reveal
yourself to God, you have to learn to reveal yourself to another beloved
human being. And when you do that, you reveal yourself to God too.
Many people want to start with revealing themselves to the personal
God. But actually, deep in their hearts, such revelation to God is
only a subterfuge because it is abstract and remote. No other
42
human being can see or hear what they reveal. They are still alone. One
does not have to do the one thing that seems so risky, requires so much
humility and thus threatens to be humiliating. By revealing yourself to
another human being, you accomplish so much that cannot be
accomplished by revelation to God who knows you anyway, and who
really does not need your revelation.
When you find the other soul and meet it, you fulfill your destiny.
When you find another soul, you also find another particle of God,
and if you reveal your own soul, you reveal a particle of God and give
something divine to another person. When eros comes to you, it will
lift you up far enough so that you will sense and know what it is in you
that longs for this experience and what is your true self, which is
longing to reveal itself. Without eros, you are merely aware of the lazy
outer layers.
Do not avoid eros when it wants to come to you. If you understand
the spiritual idea behind it, you will use it wisely. God will then be able
to lead you and enable you to make the best of helping another being
and yourself on the way to true love, of which purification must be an
integral part. Although your purification work through a deeply
committed relationship manifests differently than it does in the work
on this path, it will help you toward a purification of the same order.
QUESTION: Is it possible for a soul to be so rich that it can
reveal itself to more than one soul?
ANSWER: My dear friend, do you say that facetiously?
QUESTION: No, I do not. I am asking whether polygamy is
within the scheme of spiritual law.
ANSWER: No, it certainly is not. And when someone thinks it
may be within the scheme of spiritual development, that is a
subterfuge. The personality is looking for the right partner. Either the
person is too immature to have found the right partner, or the right
partner is there and the polygamous person is simply carried away by
eros’ momentum, never lifting this force up into the volitional love
that demands overcoming and working in order to pass the threshold I
mentioned before.
In cases like this, the one with an adventurous personality is
looking and looking, always finding another part of a being, always
revealing himself or herself only so far and no further, or perhaps each
time revealing another facet of his or her personality. However, when it
comes to the inner nucleus, the door is shut. Eros then departs and a
new search is started. Each time it is a disappointment that can only be
understood when you grasp these truths.
Raw sexual instinct also enters into the longing for this great
journey, but sexual satisfaction begins to suffer if the relationship is not
kept on the level I show you here. It is, in fact, inevitably of short
duration. There is no richness in revealing oneself to many. In such
cases, one either reveals the same wares all over again to new partners,
or, as I said before, one displays different facets of one’s personality.
The more partners you try to share yourself with, the less you give to
each. That is inevitably so. It cannot be different.
QUESTION: Certain people believe that they can cut out sex and
eros and the desire for a partner and live completely for love of
humanity. Do you think it is possible that man or woman can swear off
this part of life?
ANSWER: It is possible, but it is certainly not healthy or honest. I
might say that there is perhaps one person in ten million who may
have such a task. That may be possible. It may be in the karma for a
particular soul who is already developed this far, has gone through the
true partnership experience, and comes for a specific mission. There
may also be certain karmic debts which have to be paid off. In most
cases -- and here I can safely generalize -- avoidance of partnership is
unhealthy. It is an escape. The real reason is fear of love, fear of the life
experience, but the fearful renunciation is rationalized as a sacrifice. To
anyone who would come to me with such a problem, I would say:
Examine yourself. Go below the surface layers of your conscious
reasoning and explanations for your attitude in this respect. Try to find
out whether you fear love and disappointment. Isn’t it more
comfortable to just live for yourself and have no difficulties? Isn’t really
this what you feel deep inside and what you want to cover up with
other reasons? The great humanitarian work you want to do may be for
a worthy cause, indeed, but do you really think one excludes the other?
Wouldn’t it be much more likely that the great task you have taken
upon yourself would be better fulfilled if you learned personal love too?
If all these questions were truthfully answered, the person would
be bound to see that he or she is escaping. Personal love and fulfillment
is man’s and woman’s destiny in most cases, for so much can be learned
in personal love that cannot be attained in any other way. And to form
a durable and solid relationship in a marriage is the greatest victory a
human being can achieve, for it is one of the most difficult things there
are, as you can well see in your world. This life experience will bring the
soul closer to God than lukewarm good deeds.
QUESTION: I was going to ask a question in connection with my
previous one: Celibacy is supposed to be a highly spiritualized form of
development in certain religious sects. On the other hand, polygamy is
also recognized in some religions -- the Mormons, for instance. I
understand what you said, but how do you justify these attitudes on
the part of people who are supposed to look for unity with God?
ANSWER: There is human error in every religion. In one religion
it may be one kind of error, in other religions another. Here you simply
have two extremes. When such dogmas or rules come into existence in
the various religions, whether at one extreme or another, it is always a
rationalization and subterfuge to which the individual soul constantly
resorts. This is an attempt to explain away the counter-currents of the
fearful or greedy soul with good motives. There is a common belief
that anything pertaining to sex is sinful. The sex instinct arises in the
infant. The more immature the creature, the more sexuality is
separated from love, and therefore the more selfish it is. Anything
without love is “sinful,” if you want to use this word. Nothing that is
coupled with love is wrong -- or sinful.
There is no such thing as a force, a principle, or an idea that is in
itself sinful -- whether sex or anything else.
In the growing child who is naturally immature, the sex drive will
first manifest selfishly. Only if and when the whole personality grows
and matures harmoniously will sex become integrated with love. Out
of ignorance, humanity has long believed that sex as such is sinful. It
was kept hidden, and therefore this part of the personality could not
grow up. Nothing that remains in hiding can grow; you know that.
Therefore, even in many grownups, sex remains childish and separate
from love. And this, in turn, led humanity to believe more and more
that sex is a sin and that the truly spiritual person must abstain from it.
Thus one of those oft-mentioned vicious circles came into existence.
Because of the belief that sex was sinful, the instinct could not
grow and meld with the love force. Consequently, sex in fact often is
selfish and loveless, raw and animalistic. If people would realize -- and
they are beginning to do so increasingly -- that the sex instinct is as
natural and God-given as any other universal force and in itself not
more sinful than any other existing force, they would then break this
vicious circle and more human beings would let their sex drives mature
and mingle with love -- and with eros, for that matter.
How many people exist for whom sex is completely separate from
love! They not only suffer from bad conscience when the sex urge
manifests, but they also find themselves in the position of being unable
to handle sexual feelings with the person they really love. This occurs
quite often in some measure, although it does seem extreme. Because
of these distorted conditions and this vicious circle, humanity came to
believe that you cannot find God when you respond to your sex urges.
This is all wrong; you cannot kill off something that is alive. You
can only hide it so that it will come out in other ways which
43
may be much more harmful. Only in the very rarest cases does the sex
force really become sublimated so as to make this creative force
manifest in other realms. Sublimation in its real sense can never occur
when there is fear and escape involved, as is the case with most human
beings. Does that answer your question?
QUESTION: Perfectly, thank you.
QUESTION: If two young people fall in love and marry and they
are not well matched and they don’t understand each other, is it
possible that these two people could go on this journey together and
have a good marriage?
ANSWER: If both are willing to learn love for one another and
gain maturity together. Even where an immature choice was made, it
could still become a successful marriage, but only if both are willing
and are clearly aware of what marriage is supposed to be. If both lack
the will and sense of responsibility for that, they will not have the
desire to make such a journey together.
QUESTION: How does friendship between two people fit into
this picture?
ANSWER: Friendship is brotherly love. Such friendship can also
exist between man and woman. Eros may want to sneak in, but reason
and will can still direct the way in which the feelings take their course.
Discretion, and a healthy balance between reason, emotion, and will
are necessary to prevent the feelings from going into an improper
channel.
QUESTION: Is divorce against spiritual law?
ANSWER: Not necessarily. We do not have fixed rules like that.
There are cases when divorce is an easy way out, a mere escape. There
are other cases when divorce is reasonable because the choice to marry
was made in immaturity and both partners lack the desire to fulfill the
responsibility of marriage in its true sense. If only one is willing -- or
neither -- divorce is better than staying together and making a farce
out of marriage. Unless both are willing to take this journey together, it
is better to break clean than to let one prevent the growth of the other.
That, of course, happens. It is better to terminate a mistake than to
remain indefinitely in it without finding an effective remedy.
One should not, however, leave a marriage lightly. Even though it
was a mistake and does not work, one should try to find the reasons
and do one’s very best to search out and perhaps get over the hurdles
that are in the way. Since they are due to inner mistakes, the partners
could try to make the best of it, if both are in any way willing. One can
learn a lot from one’s past and present mistakes. To generalize that
divorce is wrong in any case is just as incorrect as to say that it is always
right. One should certainly do one’s best, even if the marriage is not
the ideal experience that I discussed tonight. Few people are ready and
mature enough for it. You can make yourself ready by trying to make
the best of your past mistakes and learn from them.
My dearest friends, think carefully about what I have said. There is
much food for thought in what I told you, for each of you here, and for
all those who will read my words. There is not a single person who
cannot learn something from them.
I want to close this lecture with the assurance to all of you that we
in the spirit world are deeply grateful to God for your good efforts, for
your growth. It is our greatest joy and our greatest happiness. And so,
my dear ones, receive the blessings of the Lord again; may your hearts
be filled by this wonderful strength coming to you from the world of
light and truth. Go in peace and in happiness, my dear ones, each one
of you. Be in God!
Edited by Judith and John Salyo, Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 44
(1996 Edition)
 For information to find and participate in Pathwork activities
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contact the Foundation.
Spirituality, Sex Energy, and Relating
Lar Short
Star Wars made popular the phrase “May the Force be with you!”
as a futuristic mythic blessing that was easily accepted as having some
universal truth today. What does it mean to have the Force be with
you? What would it mean if the Force was against you? Other than the
All-Pervading Energy substitute for God, Tao, or Buddha-Nature; what
is the Force in terms of embodied individual beings? How and where
does it arise in each of us? Rather than hoping that the Force is
operating in our favor, as if It is an outside agent; what can we do to
make sure It is with us?
The Force arising within us as individuals is metaformically
connected with our genitals. The knot of confusion that seems to drive
everyone crazy is actually a fearful contraction at the root of our life
force. When our root energy is knotted up, the angst of separation, the
compounding of ignorance, and the closing of the Heart occurs.
Fearful contracting at our root energy is what keeps us reactively self-
destructive and programmable to the layers of learned helplessness
that make up the cultural trance.
Every death-oriented guilt cult has used our contracted condition
politically and coercively to make sure the Force is not with us, but
against us. Often the Force is presented as dual, as if it were two forces
constantly at war in a good versus evil struggle into eternity. As learned
helplessness takes hold, our internal dialogue betrays us. We learn to
accept the invalidating messages that have been conditioned into
internal verbiage over the natural innocence and wisdom of our living
body.
Closed spiritual systems have become part of the sad history of the
enslavement of humanity by beliefs rather than the means to
Awakening and Freedom. The maps that have become “dogmatic
truth” are outdated and often dangerous, no matter how sacred their
ancient associations may be. Even if their content was once conscious
and alive, it is now lost in the worship of the containers.
Our root energy is the individual expression of the Creative Force
in our body-speech-mind. How we use our root energy determines the
orientation of our life force; whether we orient towards the creative or
towards the destructive. Our root energy brings us into this life,
determines our vitality and aliveness, and reproduces other bodies both
physical and spiritual. Misusing this root energy is the primary factor
in our aging and death.
The cycles of charge and discharge of this Force make for the
sense of excitement and/or fear. These cycles of charge and
44
discharge in our organism are the basis of our spiritual growth,
sexuality, and relating to others. When it is used creatively it is the
energy of re-creation that produces fun, enthusiasm, inspiration,
enjoyment, and spiritual rebirth. When used destructively it becomes
the destructive emotions, upset, struggle, fighting, quitting, dis-ease,
the drama of relationships, aging and death.
By gaining clarity at the root of our embodied experience, one
regains one’s birth-right of direct connection with the evolutionary
engine. Unnecessary struggle and dualism evaporate in the wisdom of
innate clarity.
Contact address for Lar Short: paulp@laplaza.org, His website
soon to be up. Lar Short, along with John Mann, were two teachers
who had a significant influence on Mantak Chia’s teachings. Lar
integrates many different spiritual traditions and offers retreats near
Taois, NM.
Multifaceted Health Benefits of Medical Qigong
Kenneth M. Sancier, Ph.D. and Devatara Holman MS,
Ed. Note: These two surveys of medical qigong (chi kung) research
by Kenneth M. Sancier, Ph.D., et al. provide an excellent glimpse of
the powerful effects of qigong practice in healing a wide variety of
chronic illnesses and dramatically extending lifespan. In Dr. Sancier’s
second article, Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong, he cites three separate
long-term studies in China, ranging from 20 to 30 years, and involving
nearly 1000 patients suffering from high blood pressure. The practice
of qigong was found to cut the mortality rate of fatal strokes by 50% !
They also found that qigong allowed patients to take smaller doses of
medicine.
Prof. Sancier is a former research scientist at Stanford Research
Institute. His curiosity and scientific background inspired him to
collect a database of 3500 scientific studies on qigong and similar kinds
of “energy medicine”. His impressive scientific background is given in
the full biography at the end of the article.
From the conclusion to his Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong article:
“This review deals with a small fraction of the large collection of
clinical research on medical applications of qigong. The information
presented is intended to illustrate the potential of qigong exercise for
restoring normal body functions in people with chronic conditions,
many of which accelerate the aging process. The main conclusion from
many studies is that qigong exercise helps the body to heal itself. In
this sense, qigong is a natural anti-aging medicine. Two studies indicate
that qigong exercise is superior to some physical exercises.
Qigong can complement Western medicine in many ways to
provide better healthcare. For example, qigong has special value for
treating chronic conditions and as a preventive medicine, whereas
Western medicine has special value for treating acute conditions.
There are many medical applications of qigong that can complement
Western medicine to improve health care. Some examples include
chronic problems such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, aging,
asthma, allergies, menstrual and sexual function, neuromuscular
problems, and cancer.”
The Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong article is posted below,
following the first article. Both are posted on http://
www.qigonginstitute.org/html/papers. (those are pdf version with
graphs). Qigong Institute is non-profit and is sustained by donations
and low-cost user fees for their Qigong & Energy Medicine Database.
www.QigongInstitute.org is the best place for deep research into
scientific study of medical qigong benefits. But please note that the
Qigong Institute does NOT take on the job of recommending which
type of qigong is best for which disease.
For advice on the best qigong (chi kung) form for your medical
condition you should contact info@healingdao.com. All of the qigong
video/DVD’s offered on www.healingtaousa.com could be classified as
medical qigong. With the exception of people with terminal illness,
almost everyone will benefit most by starting with Qigong (Chi Kung)
Fundamentals 1 & 2. They work on healing simultaneously all organ
and meridian systems using the Inner Smile, Six Healing Sounds, and
Microcosmic Orbit.
 Qigong (Chi Kung) Fundamentals 3 & 4 work on tendons and deep
bone marrow (and thus blood) issues. Deep Healing Chi Kung and
Primordial Qigong are both longer (20-45 minute practice time)
medical qigong forms that may be invaluable for people to both
prevent and heal serious conditions, including terminal conditions such
as cancer.
- Michael Winn
Multifaceted Health Benefits of Medical Qigong
By Kenneth M. Sancier, Ph.D. and Devatara Holman MS, MA, Lac
Introduction
It is a challenge for the Western mind to understand the function
of Qi (“chi”) in the context of bodily functions as defined by science.
According to Chinese medicine and Qigong theory, Qi has an infinite
number of functions in the body. The foundation of Qigong and TCM
theory dictates that intention (Yi) directs the movement of Qi, which
in turn directs the flow of blood in the body.
Increased or decreased electrical activity in specific areas of the
body determines blood flow and fluid balance, accumulation and
dispersal of substances. The practice of Qigong is the act of bringing
awareness and skill to direct the function and movement of Qi. The
correct movement of Qi is a force that engages the body’s natural
tendency toward homeostasis.
Continued practice provides reinforcement of the body’s
inclination toward homeostasis and therefore toward optimal use of all
its functions and potential. What are called ‘special abilities’ or ‘psychic
powers’ that sometimes develop in Qigong practice are simply the
product of our natural capacity in the refined human state.
For health maintenance, the Qigong practitioners do not have to
be an expert. Almost anyone can learn to practice Qigong to maintain
and improve his or her own health. The objective of the exercises is to
strengthen the Qi in the body and remove obstructions to Qi flow that
may have developed due to injury, emotional states, diet, disease or
other factors. Conversely, obstruction of Qi flow can also produce
disease.
Qigong Most Developed Form of Energy Medicine
Of all the energy medical practices, Qigong has the most
developed theoretical basis and has been subjected to the most
extensive research. In China, the collected knowledge about the
therapeutic benefits of Qigong was developed over thousands of years.
Medical Qigong is now practiced in clinics and some hospitals that
integrate traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and conventional
Western medicine. In Western hospitals Qigong is among several
complementary practices used including Therapeutic Touch, Mindful
Meditation and Reiki.
Clinical Research Demonstrates Multifaceted Effects of Qigong
In the early 1980’s Chinese scientists initiated research on the
health and healing claims of Qigong. Of the hundreds of research
studies that were performed, few were published because suitable
journals were unavailable. However, about 1400 reports were published
as abstracts in the proceedings of conferences.
English abstracts of these reports as well as those from scientific
journals are collected in the Qigong Database™ that presently
contains more than 2000 records of Qigong studies (Ed.: now contains
3500 studies including all types of energy medicine) and is available
from the Qigong Institute. (Sancier KM 2000)
One of the authors has discussed the medical benefits of Qigong.
(Sancier KM 1994; Sancier KM 1996a; Sancier KM 1996b; Sancier KM
1999; Sancier KM Weintraub 2000) Wang and Xu, two western-
trained doctors in China explored some of the multiple health benefits
of self-practice as summarized in the table (Wang CX 1991; Wang CX
1993; Wang CX 1995):
Qigong Biological Benefits
Activities of two messenger cyclic nucleotides
Anti-aging
Antithrombin III
Asthma
Blood flow to the brain for subjects with cerebral arteriosclerosis
Blood pressure
Blood viscosity
45
Bone density
Cerebral functions impaired by senility
Endocrine gland functions
Erythrocyte deformation index
Factor VIII-related antigen
Hypertension
Immune system
Longevity, 50% greater; after Qigong 30 min/twice daily, 20 years
Plasminogen activator inhibitor
Serum estradiol levels in hypertensive men and women
Serum lipid levels
Sexual function
Strokes, 50% fewer after Qigong 30 min/twice daily, 20 years
One of the prime benefits of Qigong is stress reduction, and a
main ingredient of practice is intention (i.e., Yi) that uses the mind to
guide the Qi. While Qi itself has not been measured, multiple types of
measurements demonstrate the effects of Qi on the body. For
example, simultaneous measurements of the interaction between a
Qigong master and receiver included respiration, EEG, vibrations,
blood pressure, skin conductivity, and heart rate variability. (Yamamoto
M 1997)
Different physiological measurements have sought information
about the effects of Qigong on the brain and emotions. These include
measurements by high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG),
functional MRI (fMRI), neurometer measurements, and applied
kinesiology. Neuroimaging methods were used to study regional brain
functions, emotions and disorders of emotions. Differences were
found on the effects on the brain during meditation by Qigong and by
Zen meditation.(Kawano K 1996)
The effects of emitted Qi (waiqi) has also been extended to cell
cultures, growth of plants, seed germination, and reduction of tumor
size in animals. (Sancier KM 1991) Spiritual healing, which involves the
mind, has been the subject of two volumes by Benor.(Benor DJ 2001;
Benor DJ 2002) His discussions also include scientific studies
describing the beneficial effects of prayer on subjects’ health.
The work of Richard Davidson and Paul Ekman, researchers of
the Mind and Life Institute, may go along way to illustrate the role of
intention alone on the brain and body.(Davidson JD 1999) In current
studies underway at University of California at San Francisco Medical
School and University of Wisconsin, they are observing the electrical
mechanisms in the brains of highly trained Buddhist lamas during
various states of focused intention. Using functional, fMRI, high-
resolution EEG and state-of-the-art reflex monitoring, their early
results illustrate that electrical activity and blood flow in the brain can
be directed by conscious intention.
Through systematic and repeated practice of intention, well-
practiced lamas have succeeded in training the brain to direct electrical
activity away from areas associated with the biochemistry of stress,
tension and disturbing emotional or physical states (i.e., the amygdala
and right prefrontal cortex) and increase activity in the area associated
with the biochemistry of healthful emotional and physical states (i.e.,
the left prefrontal cortex).
Moreover, they have observed that the state of conscious intention
on compassion engages a state of relaxation and well being which
surpasses even that achieved during a state of rest. The early results of
this research suggests that parts of the brain thought previously to be
fixed in function, such as the stress reflexes of the reptilian brain, may
in fact be plastic in nature, able to be changed, shaped and developed
through ongoing practice of conscious intention.(Lama Dalai 2003)
Cost containment of healthcare is a subject of vital contemporary
interest. For example, in the treatment of asthma self-applied Qigong
led to significant cost decreases, such as reduction in days unfit for
work, hospitalization days, emergency consultation, respiratory tract
infections, and number of drugs and drug costs. (Reuther I 1998)
Recommendations
• The vast research of medical benefits of Qigong offers a rich
source of information for benefiting mankind. Medical cost
containment is an attractive benefit of Qigong practice and should be
further explored to provide healing potential without side effects.
• The science and art of Qigong may open a window into new
thinking about health, medicine, psychology and spirituality. It is a
physical, mental and spiritual practice that continuously supports our
natural tendency toward homeostasis.
• If that tendency is supported with regularity, allowing one to
hover more closely to that point of balance, then the entire being can
experience a tremendous evolutionary advantage.
• Innate abilities have an opportunity to develop; the senses more
keen, organ function more consistent and strong, the sympathetic
nervous system relaxed, parasympathetic nervous system efficient, the
mind relaxed, alert, clear, freely channeling messages in a multitude of
new and diverse directions.
• From a scientific point of view, the promise of Qigong practices
provides new avenues for understanding some of the subtle aspects of
human life and its natural inclination to strive for balance.
• For clinicians it shifts our focus from a battle with disease to a
cultivation of health.
• For practitioners of Qigong, it gives us an experiential
understanding of greater balance within ourselves and of the
cultivation our individual physical, mental and spiritual potential.
- Kenneth Sancier, PhD.
(reference list to the article follows the biography of Dr. Sancier)
Second article Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong, follows the references.
It has more detailed examinations of studies on the different kinds of
disease benefiting from chi kung/qigong.
Biography
Dr Sancier is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors
of the Qigong Institute. He is a professor at the American College of
Traditional Medicine in San Francisco. He received a Ph.D. from Johns
Hopkins University and has carried out basic and applied chemistry
research. As a research chemist he published 70 articles in scientific
journals and holds 12 patents.
He is an editor of the Journal of the International Society of Life
Information Science (JISLIS), Director of the California Information
Center of ISLIS, on the Advisory Board of the Journal Of Alternative
Therapies, and is on the Council of the World Academic Society
Medical Qigong.
Since 1986, he applied his scientific background to study and
evaluate reports on Qigong that claimed health and healing benefits.
This evaluation depended on a series of activities including
participating in international Qigong conferences in China, Japan,
Canada and USA and sponsoring the First World Congress of Qigong
in San Francisco.
To summarize the information on Qigong that he had collected,
he led the development of the Computerized Qigong Database.™ The
Database is a compellation of over 3500 citations on qigong and energy
medicine. With English abstracts of almost all research on Qigong
since 1986, it provides means to search the entire collection using any
search word(s). The Database, which is available on a CD from the
Qigong Institute, has been used as a source for six books, 7
dissertations, and numerous research projects.
He has carried out and published experimental studies of mind/
body interactions. Including experimental studies and reviews, he has
published about 25 papers in peer reviewed journals.
Reference List
Benor DJ. Spiritual healing-scientific validation of a healing
revolution. Vol. 1. Visions Publications,Southfield, MI 48034, 2001.
Benor DJ. Spiritual healing-scientific validation of a healing
revolution, Prof. supplement. Vol. 2.Vision Publications, Southfield,
MI 48034, 2002.
Davidson JD, Abercrombie H, Nitschke JB, Putnam K. Regional
brain function, emotion anddisorders of emotion. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 1999; 9:228-34.
Kawano Kimiko 1, Kushita Kouhei N 2. The Function of the Brain
using EEGs during InducedMeditation. J Intl Soc Life Info Science
1996; 14(1):91-3.
Lama Dalai, Goleman Daniel. Destructive Emotions, how can we
overcome them? New York, NY:Bantam Books, 2003.
Reuther I, Aldridge D. Treatment of bronchial asthma with qigong
Yangsheng–A pilot study. JAltern Complement Med 1998; 4(2):173-83.
Sancier KM. The effect of qigong on therapeutic balancing
measured by electroacupunctureaccording to Voll (EAV): A
preliminary study. Acupunct Electrother Res 1994; 19(2/3):119-27.
Sancier KM. Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong. J Intl Soc Life
46
Info Science 1996a; 14(1):12-21.
Sancier KM . Medical applications of qigong. Altern Ther Health
Med 1996b; 1(4).
Sancier KM. Therapeutic Benefits of Qigong Exercises in
Combination with Drugs. J AlternComplement Med 1999; 5(4):383-9.
Sancier KM. Qigong and neurologic illness. Weintraub M.
Complementary and alternativemedicine for neurologic illness. St.
Louis, Missouri: Harcourt Health Sciences, 2000.
Sancier KM. Qigong database. Adv Mind Body Med 2000; 16(3):
159.
Sancier KM, Hu B. Medical applications of qigong and emitted qi
on humans, animals, cell cultures & plants: review of selected scientific
research. Am J. Acupuncture 1991; 19(4):36777.
Wang CX, Xu DH. [The beneficial effect of qigong on the
ventricular function andmicrocirculation in deficiency of heart-energy
hypertensive patients]. Chung Hsi I Chieh Ho
Tsa Chih 1991; 11(11):659-60.
Wang CX, Xu DH. [Effect of qigong on plasma coagulation
fibrinolysis indices of hypertensivepatients with blood stasis]. Chung
Kuo Chung Hsi I Chieh Ho Tsa Chih 1993; 13(7):415-6.
Wang CX, Xu DH, Qian YC . Effect of qigong on heart-qi
deficiency and blood stasis type ofhypertension and its mechanism.
Chung Kuo Chung Hsi I Chieh Ho Tsa Chih 1995;15(8):454-8.
Yamamoto M 1, Hirasawa M 1, Kokubo H 1, Sakaida H 1, Kimiko
Kawano K 2 1. Study on Analyzing Methods of Human Body
Functions Using Various SimultaneousMeasurements(VSM) -The
Second Year Report of the 5-Year-Project Supported byScience and
Technology Agency(STA), Japan-. J Intl Soc Life Info Science 1997; 15
(2):2.
Anti-Aging Benefits of Qigong
by Kenneth Sancier Ph. D.
History of Qigong Research in China
In the early 1980’s, scientists in China began to study the medical
benefits claimed for qigong. Since then, research on hundreds of
medical applications of qigong have been reported in the Chinese
literature. Of special interest for the present article are clinical reports
of the medical benefits of qigong that claim to retard or reverse some
diseases associated with aging.
Most of the original research was reported in Chinese, but access
in English to most of this material is possible by reference to the
proceedings of international conferences of qigong. Since 1986, ten
such proceedings contain about 840 abstracts of talks given at the
conferences, more than half of which are in English.
These abstracts, along with about 160 abstracts of articles in the
scientific literature, have been organized as a computerized database.
The database enables searches and development of bibliographies
across this entire body of information by using any key word. The
clinical outcomes reported in this article are partly based on material in
the database and partly on the author’s person contacts with
researchers.
The word qigong is a combination of two ideas: qi the vital energy
of the body, and gong the skill of working of the qi. Medical qigong for
health and healing consists primarily of meditation, physical
movements, and breathing exercises. Qigong practitioners develop an
awareness of qi sensations in their bodies and use their mind, i.e.,
intention, to guide the qi in the body. The benefits of qigong are said to
extend beyond health and healing to enhance spiritual life and even
special abilities, such as psychic powers.
Internal Self-Practice & External Transmission of Medical Qigong
Medical qigong is divided into two parts: internal and external.
Internal qi is developed by individual practice of qigong exercises.
When qigong practitioners have sufficiently mastered the skill, they
can “emit” qi (external qi or waiqi in Chinese) for the purpose of
healing another person. There are many scientific reports of the
medical existence and efficacy of emitted qi. The present article
focuses mainly on internal qi because almost everyone can learn qigong
exercises for maintaining health and for self-healing, whereas, there are
a limited number of skilled qigong masters available for healing.
Range of Biological Benefits of Qigong
 There are numerous reports of the effects of emitted qi on living
systems and the functions and organs of the human body. The present
author reviewed some examples of medical applications of qigong and
emitted qi on humans, animals, cell cultures, and plants, and he also
published some of his experimental research on physiological effects of
qigong. He discussed some clinical and experimental evidence showing
that qigong exercise and external qi affects various functions and
organs of the body.
A short list of some of the functions and organs affected by qigong,
and the measurement techniques employed (in parentheses), include:
the brain (EEG and magnetometer); blood flow (thermography,
sphygmography, and rheoencephalography); heart functions (blood
pressure, EKG, and UCG); kidney (urinary albumin assay); biophysical
(enzyme activity, immune function, sex hormone levels (laboratory
analysis); eyesight (clinical); and tumor size in mice.
Clinical studies on anti-aging benefits of qigong
Several clinical studies will be described to illustrate the scope of
research on medical applications of qigong to treat chronic medical
conditions that may affect the aging process. Some details may be
omitted because of space limitations. The critical evaluation of the
research studies will be left to medical specialists.
1) Therapeutic balancing of the meridians and functions of the
body
The profound effect that internal qigong practice may have on
balancing the energies of the organs and functions of the body is
illustrated by measurements using Electroacupuncture According to
Voll (EAV). In EAV the electrical conductance of the skin above
individual acupuncture points is measured using low voltage and low
current. Diagnosis depends on measuring the relative electrical
conductance and its time dependence. An important diagnostic
criterion of degeneration of an organ is an “indicator drop” that may
occur during the measurement when the conductance reaches an
apparent maximum value but then decreases before leveling off.
Measurements were made at 24 acupuncture points at the ends of
the 12 meridians in the fingers and toes of subjects and were made by
the same operator and equipment. The subjects were asked to perform
a qigong exercise of their choosing for 10 to 15 minutes, for example,
sitting or standing meditation or moving qigong. Two series of EAV
measurements were made before and after healthy subjects practiced
qigong.
In the first series, four subjects were examined by EAV before and
after they practiced qigong. Qigong exercise decreased the average of
the EAV measured values of the four subjects in the range of -19 to
-31% (p<0.004). Qigong eliminated almost all the indicator drops.
In the second series, each of seven subjects was examined by EAV
three times in a blind protocol so that the operator did not know
whether a subject had practiced qigong before the second or third
examination. The results showed that qigong exercise changed the
average EAV measured values in the range of -17 to -35% for four
subjects and in the range of 4 to 15% for three subjects. Indicator drops
again were markedly decreased.
These preliminary results show that internal qigong practice can
make significant changes in the therapeutic balancing of the meridian
and organ systems.
In a similar type of study, the electric current at acupuncture
points on 14 meridians was measured using a single square wave
voltage pulse technique. Both a qigong master, who emitted qi, and a
qi-receiver were measured simultaneously and continuously. The
results show that internal and external qigong produce different values
in some measurement parameters, and also some synchronous
behavior was observed between the sender and receiver.
2) Clinical studies of effects of qigong on hypertensive patients
Several groups in China have investigated the effects of qigong on
hypertension (i.e., high blood pressure). The research of Wang, Xu and
coworkers of the Shanghai Institute of Hypertension was selected for
discussion because it serves as a model for the many different effects
that qigong may have on organs and functions of the body. For these
studies, the patients practiced “Yan Jing Yi Shen Gong” for 30 minutes
twice a day. This qigong is claimed to be especially valuable for
therapeutic purposes and delaying senility. The qigong exercise consists
of a combination of sitting meditation and gentle physical
movements that emphasizes a calm mind, relaxed body, and
47
regular respiration.
In 1991, the Shanghai group reported a 20-year controlled study of
the anti-aging effects of qigong on 204 hypertensive patients.
Subsequently, they reported a 30-year follow-up on 242 hypertensive
patients, and more recently, the researchers reported an 18-22 year
study of 536 patients. The patients were randomly assigned to the two
groups. To control blood pressure, the patients were given the same
hypotensive drug and in the same hospital. None of the patients
smoked.
Blood Pressure
The effect of qigong exercise on blood pressure is shown graphically in
Fig. 1. The blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) in millimeters
mercury is plotted as a function of time over 20 years for the group
consisting of 242 patients, 122 in the qigong group and 120 in the
control group. During the first two months, the blood pressure of all
patients dropped in response to the hypotensive drug. Subsequently,
and over the period of 20 years, the blood pressures of the qigong
group stabilized while that of the control group increased. Remarkably,
during this period the drug dosage for the qigong group could be
decreased, while the dosage for the control group had to be increased.
Fig. 1. Effect of qigong on blood pressure of hypertensive patients
over 20 years. Qigong group (n=104) practiced 30 min/day twice/day,
control group (n=100).
Mortality and Stroke
The incidences of mortality and stroke for the 30-year study are shown
in Fig. 2. These results show that qigong exercise decreased by about
50 percent the incidence of total mortality, mortality due to stroke, and
morbidity due to stroke. At the end of 30 years, 86 patients survived in
the qigong group and 68 in the control group. These results clearly
show that qigong has significant potential for preventing strokes and
extending life.
Improvements in heart function and microcirculation
Aged hypertensive patients usually are found to have a deficiency of
Heart-energy, which often leads to a weakened function of the left
ventricle and a disturbance of microcirculation. The researchers
evaluated the effects of qigong for120 aged patients by using ultrasonic
cardiography (UCG) and indices of microcirculation.
Experiments showed that the left ventricular function (LVF) in the
hypertensive aged group (80 cases) was lower than that in the aged
normal blood pressure group (40 cases), while the LVF in the
deficiency of Heart-energy hypertensive patients (46 cases) was lower
than in the non-deficiency Heart-energy hypertensive patients (34
cases).
After practicing qigong for one year, cardiac output was increased,
the total peripheral resistance decreased, and the ejection fraction
mitral valve diastolic closing velocity and the mean velocity of
circumferential fiber shortening tended to be increased. Significant
changes did not occur in the group without Heart-energy deficiency.
Quantitative evaluation of nailfold disturbances in
microcirculation was made on the above groups by observing 10
indices of abnormal conditions: configuration of micrangium,
micrangium tension, condition of blood flow, slowdown of blood flow,
thinner afferent limb, efferent limb and afferent limb ratio, color of
blood, hemorrhage, and petechia. The results showed that
hypertension had an accelerating effect on the disturbance of
microcirculation. The incidence of disturbance of microcirculation
disturbance was 73.9% in the deficiency of Heart-energy hypertensive
patients. After a year of qigong practice, the incident of disturbance
was 39.1% (p<0.01).
The results suggest that qigong exercise has beneficial effects on
Heart-energy and regulation of the blood channel, and qigong seems to
have improved abnormal conditions of blood circulation.
Improvement in sex hormone levels
One consequence of aging is that the levels of sex hormones change in
unfavorable directions. For example, female sex hormone (estrogen)
levels tend to increase in men and decrease in women. Three studies
indicate that qigong exercise can reverse this trend. The effect of
qigong exercise on plasma sex hormone levels was determine for
hypertensive men and women. The sex hormones levels were
measured before and after qigong practice for one year.
Seventy male patients with essential hypertension (ages 40 to 69;
disease stage II) were divided into two groups. For the qigong group
(n=42), which practice qigong for one year, the estradiol level (E2)
decreased from 70.1 to 47.7 pg/ml, a decrease of 32% (p<0.01), while no
significant changes occurred in the control group (n=20). The
testosterone levels (T) of both groups decreased about 7%. The value
of E2 for the qigong group (47.7 pg/ml) approached that of healthy men
(42.2±5.8 pg/ml) of the same age but without hypertension or
cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic, renal, or endocrine diseases
(p<0.05).
For women (ages 51 to 67, the number in the group is not available),
the aging process was associated with failure of ovarian function
manifested by decreased E2 and increased T levels. Qigong practiced
one year resulted in an increase of E2 from 40.9±.3.5 to 51.6±3.5 pg/ml, a
value about equal to that of normal menopausal controls without
hypertension or cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic, renal, or endocrine
diseases. The value of T was also increased by qigong from 25.5±2.2 to
37.2±2.2 ng/dl.
The favorable changes in estradiol levels, E2, brought about by
qigong are summarized in Fig. 3 for both men and women.
In an auxiliary study, the 24-hour urinary estradiol levels were
determined in 30 men ages 50 to 69. Qigong for one year resulted in a
decrease of 31% in E2 and a decrease of 54% in the estradiol/
testosterone ratio (E2/T). These changes were accompanied by
improvements in symptoms associated with Kidney deficiency
hypertension, such as soreness, dizziness, insomnia, hair loss,
impotence, and incontinence. The average score for these symptoms
was changed favorably by qigong from 5.5±2.3 to 2.8±1.3 (p<0.001).
Ye Ming and co-workers reported similar favorable changes in
plasma sex hormone levels E2 in 77 male and female qigong exercisers
after 2 months qigong compared with 27 controls. They did not
observe significant changes in testosterone.
The three studies above show that qigong exercise can help restore
the sex hormone levels that had deteriorated because of aging.
Changes in blood chemistry in hypertensive patients
Wang, Xu and co-workers made a series of determinations indicating
the profound effects that qigong exercise may have on blood
chemistry of hypertensive subjects. Improvements were noted in
plasma coagulation firbrinolysis indices, blood viscosity, erythrocyte
deformation index, levels of plasma tissue-type plasminogen activator
(tPA), plasminogen activator inhibitor (PAI), VIII factor related
antigen (VIII R:AG), and anti-thrombin (AT-III). In another study,
they reported that qigong exercise beneficially changed the activities
of two messenger cyclic nucleotides (cAMP and cGMP).
Reversing symptoms of senility
To study the mechanism of keeping fit by qigong, a controlled study
was made of 100 subjects classified either as presenile or with senile
impaired cerebral function. The subjects were divided into two groups
of 50 people each with a mean age of 63 years and with a similar
distribution of age and sex. The qigong group practiced a combination
of static and moving qigong. The control group exercised by walking,
walking fast, or running slow. According to TCM method of classifying
the vital energy, more than 80% of the patients in each group were
classified as deficient in vital function and vital essence of the Kidney.
Criteria for judging outcome were based on measuring clinical signs
and symptoms including cerebral function, sexual function, serum lipid
levels, and function of endocrine glands.
After six months, 8 of the 14 main clinical signs and symptoms in
the qigong group were improved above 80%, whereas none of the
symptoms in the control group were improved above 45%. These
results suggest that qigong can reverse some symptoms of aging and
senility. In this regard, qigong exercise is superior to walking or running
exercises.
Enhanced activity of anti-aging enzyme SOD
Superoxide dismutase (SOD) is produced naturally by the body but its
activity declines with age. SOD is often called an anti-aging enzyme
because it is believed to destroy free radicals that may cause aging. The
effects of qigong exercise to treat disorders of retired workers were
studied by Xu Hefen and coworkers and included determinations of
plasma SOD.
For their study, 200 retired workers,100 males and 100 females,
ranging in age from 52 to 76 were divided into 2 groups: the qigong
exercise group and the control group, and each group consisted of
50 males and 50 females. The main qigong exercise was Emei
48
Nei Gong (one kind of qigong exercises of the Emei School), and was
practiced at least 30 minutes a day.
The result showed that the mean level of SOD was increased by
qigong exercise. For example, the SOD level was larger in the qigong
group (about 2700 µ/g Hb) and than in the control group (1700 µ/g
Hb), and this difference was significant (p<0.001). This study shows
that qigong exercise can stimulate physical metabolism, promote the
circulation of meridians and regulate the flowing of qi and blood, thus
preventing and treating disorders of aging and promoting longevity.
Cardiovascular function
Several studies reveal the potential benefits that qigong may have for
improving the cardiovascular function of those with heart disease as
well as old people. This conclusion is based on three studies reporting
that qigong exercise can protect healthy pilots from altitude stress
when they flew rapidly from a low altitude to the high altitude of the
Tibetan highlands.
Before entering the Tibetan highland, 66 healthy young men were
divided into two groups: a qigong group of 32 men who did Qiyuan
Qigong exercise for 4 weeks, and a control group of 34 men who
exercised to radio music. The two groups of men rapidly entered the
highlands from a lower altitude. Before and after entering the highland,
measurements were made of symptoms of altitude sickness and
physiological changes. The qigong group suffered less altitude stress
than the control group as measured by blood pressure, heart rate,
oxygen consumption, microcirculation on the epex of tongue and the
nail fold, and the temperature at the Laogong point of the left hand
(p<0.01). The researchers suggest that qigong can prevent stress from
altitude changes.
In another study of changes in altitude, healthy young men were
divided into three groups. Forty males were in the qigong group and
practiced Qiyuan qigong for 4 weeks prior to entering the highlands;
40 men were in the control group and exercised to radio music for 4
weeks prior to entering the highlands; and 40 males were residents
living at high altitudes. The results show that the integral value of
symptoms of acute mountain sickness was lower in the qigong than in
control group (p<0.01 to 0.05). Pulmonary ventilation of the qigong
group was significantly improved compared with the control group
(p<0.01 to 0.05), and nearly equal to the resident group.
In another study, air force pilots were randomly divided into two
groups: a qigong group of 22 men who had practiced Qiyuan Qigong
exercise for eight weeks, and a control group of 18 men who did
physical exercise for eight weeks before entering the Tibetan
highlands. Microcirculation was measured at tongue apex and the nail
fold, and also from the temperature at the Laogong point in palm of
the left hand. When the men entered the high altitude, abnormal
blood pressure and microcirculation of tongue apex and nail fold
occurred in both groups. The abnormalities were statistically less in the
qigong group than in the control group (p<0.01). The temperature at
Laogong kept steady in the qigong group, but was reduced in the
control group (p<0.05).
The results of these three studies with healthy subjects lead to the
conclusion that qigong also should be effective in improving the health
of people with cardiovascular conditions including the aged. In fact
several research studies have reported such beneficial effects of qigong
on cardiovascular diseases. The three studies also provide evidence that
qigong exercise is superior to physical exercise such as calisthenics.
Blood flow to the brain
Qigong exercise has been shown by rheoencephalography to increase
blood flow to the brain. For 158 subjects with cerebral arteriosclerosis
who practiced qigong for 1 to 6 months, improvements were noted in
symptoms such as memory, dizziness, insomnia, tinnitus, numbness of
limbs, and vertigo headache. During these studies, a decrease in plasma
cholesterol was also noted. These results may offer hope to people
with cerebral arteriosclerosis.
Cancer
Feng Lida pioneered in research showing that emitted qi from qigong
masters produced marked changes in cell cultures of cancer cells from
mice. Several studies reported the effects of emitted qi on tumors in
animals. For example, emitted qi was reported to inhibit the growth of
implanted malignant tumors in mice but did not destroy the tumors.
Encouraged by the results with animals, researchers carried out clinical
research on the effects of qigong on human subjects with cancer.
 In a clinical study of qigong as a therapeutic aid for patients with
advanced cancer, 127 patients with medically diagnosed malignant
cancer were divided into a qigong group of 97 patients and a control
group of 30 patients. All patients received drugs, and the qigong group
practiced qigong for more than 2 hours a day over a period from 3 to 6
months.
The results summarized in Fig. 4 show that both groups improved,
but the qigong group showed improvements four to nine times greater
than the control group in strength, appetite, diarrhea free, and weight
gain of 3 kg. The phagocytic rate, which is a measure of the immune
function, increased in the qigong group but decreased in the control
group. There are claims that qigong can cure cancer. Researchers, who
seem to be more conservative, generally express the opinion to the
author that qigong can at least slow the growth of cancerous tumors
and reduce their size.
Combination therapy of qigong & drugs is superior to drug
therapy alone. There is ample evidence in the literature that therapy by
a combination of qigong exercise and drugs is superior to that of drugs
alone. The advantages of a combination therapy of qigong and drugs
over drugs alone were discussed earlier in this paper for hypertension
and cancer.
The mechanism of this apparent synergism is not entirely
understood, but undoubtedly relates to the fundamental mechanism of
qigong. Qigong is believed to remove blocks to the ready flow of the qi
(energy), blood, oxygen and nutrients to all cells of the body as well as
to promote removal of waste products from cells of the body. Blocks to
energy (qi) flow may result from injury, disease or stress.
Increases in qi flow and blood circulation help nourish diseased or
stressed tissue, providing a means for the body to heal itself. This
mechanism suggests that qigong also could promote drug uptake to
tissue and cells via increased blood circulation. Omura’s research shows
that drug uptake was increased by using qigongized paper (i.e., paper to
which emitted qi was sent) applied to afflicted area of the body.
Conclusions
This review deals with a small fraction of the large collection of clinical
research on medical applications of qigong. The information presented
is intended to illustrate the potential of qigong exercise for restoring
normal body functions in people with chronic conditions, many of
which accelerate the aging process. The main conclusion from many
studies is that qigong exercise helps the body to heal itself. In this
sense, qigong is a natural anti-aging medicine. Two studies indicate that
qigong exercise is superior to some physical exercises.
Qigong can complement Western medicine in many ways to
provide better healthcare. For example, qigong has special value for
treating chronic conditions and as a preventive medicine, whereas
Western medicine has special value for treating acute conditions.
There are many medical applications of qigong that can complement
Western medicine to improve health care. Some examples include
chronic problems such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, aging,
asthma, allergies, neuromuscular problems, and cancer. These areas of
public health deserve consideration by the Western medical
establishment.
References
  Footnotes
1.Kenneth M SANCIER, Ph.D., Copresident & Director of
Research, 561 Berkeley Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA. Phone/
Fax +1-415-323-1221.
2. Some of the material in this article was adapted from the article,
“Medical Applications of Qigong,” by K.M. Sancier, Ph.D., and
published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 1996;2 (1):
40-46.
3. Qigong Databaseª is available from the Qigong Institute, East
West Academy of Healing Arts, 450 Sutter Street, Suite 2104, San
Francisco, CA 94108, USA.
4. The p-value is the probability that two quantities are not the
same: the smaller the p-value smaller the probability and the more
significant the result.
5. Wang C, Xu D. Private communication, May 1995.
6. Duration of the study is not available. Endnotes
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Healing Cancer with Chi Kung Therapy
Michael Winn
Medicine in the west is undergoing a millennial sea change.
Millions of people are exploring energetic healing. Doctors dismiss
most of these New Age therapies as placebo effect or unscientific. I
believe the most effective method of healing chronic disease to emerge
will not be New Age, but rather an 5,000 year old method from China
known today as Chi Kung therapy. Also spelled “qigong”, this ancient
art and science means literally “skill in managing your energy flow”.
One of its greatest uses may prove to be in healing cancer, which has
defied western medical approaches despite billions of dollars in
research for a “magic bullet”.
The ancient Chinese found the magic bullet. It is hidden in the
flow of the life force within our body. They called it “chi”. Chi is also
the energetic matrix of our mind and of all existence. Chi is what links
our body, our mind, and our spirit and the natural world into a unified
whole. Once you learn how to mange your chi, or go to a chi kung
master who helps your chi to heal you, you can literally dissolve
cancerous tumors and areas of blockage.
While chi kung’s medical effectiveness has been well documented
in China by scientists for a wide variety of chronic illnesses, the stories
of recovery from cancer are among the most frequent and most
dramatic. Many patients have been told to go home and die, that not
even chemo or radiation (widely used in China today) can help. They
go home, and out of final desperation begin doing chi kung
movements and meditations. Twenty years later, they are leading
classes and writing books on how chi kung saved their life.
I have been working with chi kung for twenty years and seen many
so called “miraculous” healings. According to chi kung theory, these are
not miracles, they are fully understandable scientific effects. Most
disease is caused by emotional trauma and lack of sexual energy flow.
This constricts the free flow of chi in the body. The type of emotion
will usually determine where the tumor will appear. In the weakened
areas, tissue begins to form around the stagnant chi, and then a virus,
seeing an area of unconsciousness with nobody “living” in that part of
the body, decides to take up residence and grow itself.
This process is occuring in everybody, including healthy people not
diagnosed with cancer, but it usually dissolves itself before a tumor
grows. So according to Chinese medicine, nearly everybody has cancer,
but it simply is not fatal or noticeable. If you understand that your
“energy body”, the sum total of your energy channels (used in
acupuncture) and the quality of your overall “field” of awareness is
constantly in flux, then it is easier to accept that you can dissolve your
tumor without drugs or surgery. The physical body is not a “thing”, it is
a living process, only more dense than your emotions or thoughts. But
the matrix of all three of these is the same -- the life force, or chi.
Last year I co-led a National Qigong/Chi Kung Association
delegation to China to view first hand the qigong doctors working in
the main hospitals in Beijing, which all have qigong departments. The
qigong doctors have studied both western medicine and Traditional
Chinese medicine (TCM), but have chosen instead to practice a
different branch of this medicine, qigong therapy. They took a four
year course in it at Medical school instead of acupuncture or herbology.
They wear white coats, just like all the other doctors, and they get
sent the most difficult cases that nobody else can heal. They have a
very high success rate, although not everyone responds to chi healing.
Cancer is considered to be one of the toughest blockages to dissolve,
so it requires specialists and best results come with patients who truly
want to live -- enough to practice at least 3-4 hours of chi kung a day.
I met with Feng Lida, a 74 year old woman scientist who has
devoted the last 20 years to the scientific study of qigong. She showed
me slides of cancer cells, taken with an electron microscope, before
and after chi emission by a chi kung therapist. “The cells get zapped by
chi, and they dramatically slow down their rate of reproduction and
become more susceptible to immune cells gobbling them up’, she told
me. She points at a disintegrating cancer cell with jagged edges. “The
best thing is not to try to kill the cancer cells, because we have
observed experimentally that they fight back even harder. The chi
kung therapist simply focuses on weakening the cancer cells, and on
strengthening the healthy cells.” Numerous scientific studies in China
have shown that cancer patients who have undergone chemo or
radiation and afterwards practice chi kung live twice as long on average
as those who don’t. They require less medication, experience less
nausea, and recover the health more quickly after the debilitating
treatment. Patients often get up early and practice in the parks daily
with others who have the same type of cancer. The support group
seems to increase their statisical improvement even more, an effect
seen in western cancer support groups also. The Chinese say the group
sharing opens the heart, and thus improves chi flow. Western medicine
has no clear model for the connections between psychology and
physical healing, but in Chinese medicine this is clearly mapped out.
How realistic is chi kung therapy for the average western cancer
patient?
This depends on how advanced the cancer is, how strong the
willpower and constitution of the cancer patient is, and whether they
are willing to practice chi kung daily. Chi kung does not rely on belief
to work, but is more effective if you are not resisting it. Many cancer
patients do not really want to live, they are tired of life or don’t
understand the alternative healing solutions available to them. So in
my own sessions, that is the first question I ask: Do you really want to
live? If I don’t sense an authentic committment to the healing process
I refuse to proceed on the spot. My own chi is too precious to waste
fighting someone else’s inner death wish.
This is not being cold-hearted; it is simply accepting each person’s
free will, and going with their flow. Besides, there is nothing wrong
with “dying”, since no one really dies -- they just shift to a different
energy state. The ancient Taoists understood this clearly. There is no
struggle between Life and Death, only an apparent struggle between
yin and yang, life in form (body) and life in the formless (spirit).
Death doesn’t really exist, it merely defines a transitional state
between two experiences of life. But the cancer industry apparently
thrives on the Fear of Death, so much so that the thought form
“Cancer “ has nearly become synonymous with the thought form of
“Death”. Buying into this is actually what kills most people, not the
cancer itself. I’m sure many of you have heard stories of people who
were first diagnosed with a cancer that they may have had for years,
and die shortly afterward.
I have developed a special chi kung form that I call Medical Chi
Kung. It is based on a movement chi kung method used in chinese
hospitals successfully for healing tens of thousands of patients suffering
from chronic illness, including cancer. I have recently made the form
more powerful by adding more”internal” chi kung methods which
include special healing sounds and colors, facing in certain directions
to get greater balance, and connecting your inner being to the Sun and
the Earth as powerful centers of cosmic healing chi. It can be done
even by the wheelchair bound or the bedridden, but is most powerful
standing.
The secret is to purify the clogged up energy channels in the body
and embrace your love of life. The energy channels used in this chi
kung form are deeper than the ones used in acupuncture, altho
that is certainly an important support for many people. I
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consider the ultimate test of successful chi kung practice to be whether
the person is now feeling in harmony with themself, not whether their
tumor has disappeared.
One of my clients, a 69 year old women named Molly from
Asheville, came to me several years ago for chronic depression. I was
not surprised when she was diagnosed shortly afterwards with lung
cancer, because she was literally afraid to breathe. Molly intensified her
chi kung practice, even though she had trouble practicing or holding
concentration. Today the tumor is not gone, but Molly is now a happy
person. “I am blissfully sick”, Molly exclaimed. “Now I always feel
happy, because I have connected with my chi flow. I’ve had to give up
kayaking and bicycling, but I’ve got something much more profound.
Sometimes I feel a glowing chi ball moving around inside me. What a
delight! I couldn’t have gotten through my cancer without chi kung. I
can breathe better, I can get to sleep at night. My soul is healing, and
I’ve lost my fear of death. My body is still trying to catch up, and
nothing makes it feel better than chi kung.”
Michael Winn is President of the National Qigong (Chi Kung)
Association of USA, Professor of Tao Arts/Sciences and the founder of
Healing Tao University in Big Indian, N.Y., the largest chi kung
program in the USA with a faculty of 24 teachers. He also lead a
Medical Qigong Training in China trip that gave healers clinical
experience in major Beijing hospitals in September 2000.
Winn has co-authored or written with Tao Master Mantak Chia
seven books on chi kung over the last 20 years. For a free copy of his 12
page Chi Newsletter and summer course curriculum: call 888-432-5826,
or visit www.HealingTaoUSA.com/retreats.
In the spring and fall Winn lives in Asheville, NC. Email is
winn.tao@att.net. For local Asheville chi kung workshops and classes,
call 828-236-2200.
The Gentle, Easy Way to Pack Your Iron Shirt
Secret of Relaxing into Your Root
by Michael Winn
“Can you maintain undivided concentration until your chi is as
supple as a baby’s?” - Tao Te Ching
Of all the chi cultivation methods taught in the Healing Tao, the
Iron Shirt packing technique is the one most often abused -- with
potentially dangerous side effects. At summer retreats, nothing pains
me more than to watch students packing their breath in Embrace the
Tree posture. Their faces turn beet red from holding their breath too
long. Their mouths are clenched in a grimace, as their brains overheat
from excess warm chi rising up from a pounding heart. The air finally
burst from their stressed lungs in a huge sight of relief. A student,
gasping to recover, feels a vague pride at having suffered through his
daily dose of bitter medicine.
If this describes you, read on. You are not properly practicing chi
kung (”energy mastering exercise”) - you are butchering a very gentle
internal art designed to build power over time. Iron Shirt chi kung can
and should be a pleasurable way to cultivate your chi without strain on
your lungs or heart. The worst types are those who pack and squeeze
as many extra breaths into their body as possible. I know this
personality type well, as it once described me.
For the first two years after I learned Iron Shirt 1, I took great
pride in swallowing an extra twenty breaths and forcing them from my
lungs into my organs and fascia. My whole chest and face glowed red
hot. The more intense it felt, the stronger I thought my chi was
getting. More likely I was a case of my over inflated energy causing my
ego to balloon as well. Then one day after practice, I noticed a mass of
little red dots spread all over my chest. The blood vessels were
beginning to pop. That shook me up. I stopped all packing
immediately. But the red dots didn’t disappear, and six years later many
of the blood spots remain, grim reminders of youthful excess.

1. Breath Packing Does Not have to Strain Your Body
It took me those two years of practicing the wrong way before I
finally gave up and realized that the breath packing process should be
done without any strain to your body. If you are straining your self, you
are probably creating subtle injury to your lungs, diaphragm, heart, or
blood vessels. If you have any heart weakness or irregularity, there is a
danger of aggravating it with breath packing and you should do the
postures with NO packing.
What is it about packing that makes it so powerful? There are
three simultaneous processes that deliver a triple whammy:
a. Squeezing muscles compresses the fascia, draws blood to a local area.
b. Inhaling air injects oxygen, which is converted into available energy
by the body. Holding the breath causes you to burn reserve chi stored
in body cells.
c. Mental concentration directs the chi from the organs, blood, and
oxygen to the local point being squeezed.
At what point does holding your breath strain your body? If you
feel any dizziness, or your lungs are straining for oxygen, or your heart
is pounding, your blood pressure is rising to your head, you are
probably stressing yourself. If you find your self obsessed by the
thought, “Can I breathe now?”, you should be breathing air.
2. Single Biggest Danger of Packing is Failure to “UNPACK”
Packing is an intense contraction of your physical and energy body.
It needs a counterbalance of relaxation and expansion. Failure to relax
the muscles squeezing the chi into the bones and fascia sends a
negative message to your body. Most people are unaware they’ve left
instructions for the body to remain “uptight”. Excess packing tension
is also imprinting psychic stress on your energy body. This may show
up later as a blockage in your meditation if it goes uncorrected.
Master Chia had warned me years ago that I was packing too hard,
but I ignored his warning. The same warning is issued at workshops
today, but with the number of students multiplied a hundred fold, it
simply is not possible for many students to get the repeated feedback
they need. Other students are so out of touch with their bodies that
they actually don’t know when they are stressing it. The net effect is
the same -- Master Chia’s warning not to hold the packed breath if
strain is felt goes unheeded.
3. Packing is Historically an Advanced Method
In China, the Iron Shirt methods were historically used by more
advanced martial artists seeking to make their bodies invulnerable to
blows. There was a lot of secrecy, so that your potential opponents
wouldn’t get the benefit of this powerful internal technology. It
probably originated in the Shaolin Temple schools, which make it a
Buddhist chi kung practice, as they often used more force on the body
than the Taoist methods, which stress effortlessness.
There are hundreds of schools and thousands of different chi kung
forms in China, so many of the Buddhist and Taoist methods have
been borrowed and mixed together in endless combinations over the
centuries. Master Chia has taken this training method for fighters and
adapted it for purposes of fighting off illness and accelerating
development of the energy body.
According to one friend who studied in China, oriental martial
artists do not try any powerful packing of the breath until they have
undergone preliminary warm-up exercises and supervised body
training for at least two years. This is to ensure their body will be able
to handle the additional chi pressure that is created in all the organs
without negative side effects - high blood pressure, heart stress,
chi imbalances, etc. This body training also insures that they will
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be able to relax and “unpack” the effects of doing the Iron Shirt chi
kung.
So what is the lesson for those Americans, who are in lousy shape
physically, if they want to learn Iron Shirt chi kung? You might start by
attending a Healing Tao summer retreat, where you could receive more
intensive instruction. Unfortunately, due to the nature of weekend
teachings and lack of follow-up correction by a qualified instructor,
many students do not properly learn Iron Shirt chi kung.
Master Chia has often said you cannot hope to learn the Iron Shirt
chi kung in a weekend workshop. The basic principles of chi kung are
taught there, but its difficult to absorb them on a body level. Individual
feedback is essential from a qualified instructor after you have practice
a bit. The summer retreats offer a better chance to practice daily, get
your structure and rooting tested, and take the time to learn to pack
your breath gently, without strain.
4. Gentle “Pulsation Packing” is Easier
Today I often do Embrace the Tree, but I rarely use any physical
packing of the breath. I stand in the posture, and I go deep within the
energy channels of my body and the earth, and pack the chi using my
mind only. This is the true goal of Iron Shirt chi kung -- to increase
your ability to breathe internally. I’m completely relaxed, and enjoy it
immensely. Not only is there no feeling of strain or forcing my body,
but I use the process of pulsing the breath to gently release stress from
my body into the earth.
I call this pulsing of the breath “pulsation packing”. It is the same
as regular Iron Shirt packing, only more gentle. You frequently release
the breath before any strain can build up. I inhale, gently squeeze a
point for 2 to 5 seconds, exhale and completely relax. This is repeated
at the same point 5 to 15 times. After pulsation packing at the
perineum, I would then move to the sacrum, kidneys, chi ball, and chi
belt, repeating the same process at each point.
This warms and opens each point without straining the body. I
never pack above the waist, for the simple reason that so much chi is
generated by the pulsation packing in the lower tan tien that the chi
naturally overflows and fills the upper body. The idea is to pulse your
breaths and squeeze the muscles as delicately as you would do a tai chi
movement. Or pretend you are a young baby doing Iron Shirt -- can
you squeeze your muscles with the same soft delicacy, letting only your
chi be firm and strong inside?
5. Gentle Packing of Lower Body: A Simplified Sequence
I advise most of my students to develop the lower half of their
body first -- feet, legs, perineum, kidneys, naval -- before even trying to
build up chi into the upper body. I personally never physically pack
breath into my upper body -- if the spring below is gushing forth, it will
naturally pulse above into a full fountain.
The only packing I do in my upper body is with my mind. It is too
easy for stress to accumulate in the chest and shoulders without
further squeezing and packing them physically. If you are already
carrying a lot of stiffness and tension in your upper body, you should
especially avoid tightening those muscles. If you lead an extremely
active physical life and your upper body is very loose, your body may
tell you its o.k. If you listen carefully inside to what your body says, it
usually includes the message: “Be Gentle, Don’t Hurt Me!”
This lower body approach helps keep your mind calm and brain
cool, but warms up your lower tan tien, which is the key to good
rooting. I tell students to follow this sequence for the first six months,
with heavy emphasis on bone breathing, long, slow breaths, keeping
the brain cool, and extremely gentle squeezes in the lower body
followed by total release of all muscle tension:
 a. Set your structure for standing. Begin with arms hanging relaxed
at the side in standing position. Focus on standing with proper
structural alignment: weight on the center of the foot, sacrum sinking,
jade pillow rising, spine, bones and joints clearly aligned.
b. Begin bone breathing, earth to navel. Put your hands over your
navel. Slowly inhale as with your mind you draw chi from the earth
through your bones and meridians up to your lower tan tien. Slowly
exhale from your navel back down to the feet into the earth. After a
few minutes, your mind will get very cool and calm, and the navel will
start to tingle.
c. Visualize all the channels and points you wish to strengthen. As
you bone breathe, see the key energy points of Iron Shirt and just
mentally spiral energy at those points. Emphasize the lower half of the
body. When the lower half of your body fills up, the chi will naturally
flow up the spine and down the front of the chest.
d. Gently begin to pack. Hold breath for 5 seconds max. Hands
may remain over navel or raised into Embrace the Tree position. Ever
so gently as you inhale from the earth to the navel, pause at one point
per breath. Delicately squeeze on the inhale and then release the
muscles completely on the exhale back down to the feet. With a slow,
cool, breathing rhythm, repeat 10 or 15 times squeezing only one point
per inhalation: perineum, or kidney / ming men, or chi ball, or chi belt.
e. Repeat above, but spiral and squeeze at each point. Combine
the pulsation of gentle squeezing-packing at each point as you inhale
with mental spiraling. This will help train your mind to open the points
later without any inhaling or squeezing the point. As your mind gets
more steady, you will be able to do a double spiral at each point, one
clockwise and one counter-clockwise spiral, without any strain on your
lungs. If you start to feel any strain, do a quicker spiral - and release the
breath sooner. Then inhale to the next point, and repeat.
f. Stand quietly, and breathe internally. (See following description of
internal breathing.)
6. What Kind of Chi are You Storing in Your Body?
One goal of Iron Shirt chi kung packing is to increase your
capacity to store chi in your body. It will then be available whenever
you need it - to live creatively, or to survive any crisis. But if you want
to become an internal alchemist, the higher process leading to
complete realization of the Tao, you need to understand some fine
distinctions about the type of chi you intend to store in your body.
The major distinction is between “wei chi” -- the external or post-
natal chi, and the “nei chi” -- the internal, or prenatal chi. Food,
sunlight, water, and air energies are all post-natal, or acquired after
birth. They strengthen the body, but only temporarily.
Ching, or vital essence, and the original chi bubbling forth from
your tan tien are examples of pre-natal chi. It would also include your
DNA and inherited physical and mental abilities, which are innate to
you. These prenatal energies are much more concentrated and potent.
Both wei chi and nei chi are necessary to life, and humans must
constantly regulate and balance these inner and outer energy sources.
I draw these distinctions in reference to Iron Shirt packing,
because many students forget that packing a lot of air into their fascia
is giving only a temporary boost of energy. That packed air is post-natal
chi that is destined to be shortly consumed or spent. However, the
purpose of all chi kung is long term. In the case of Iron Shirt packing,
the short term purpose is to open up the energy channels in our vital
organs and fascia with the external chi so that the body is proteced
from illness or blows.
The long term goal of Iron Shirt packing is to create more room in
our energy body for internal chi to circulate during meditation.
This is why I urge students not to get overly focused on the
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external aspect of the packing, and cultivate the internal chi as they
stand in postures. In this high sense, Iron Shirt chi kung becomes a
standing meditation that increases our capacity for internal breathing.
7. Internal Breathing Requires Deep Relaxation
After you do this systematic contract-release breath for a few
minutes, your whole body begins to rhythmically pulsate. If you
surrender your mind to this pulsing process, your body begins to
breathe and pulsate itself automatically. But your mind must be very
calm and 100% focused internally. This pulsing is the first stirring of
internal breathing.
I focus my breath in my lower tan tien with very light packing, and
then exhale and release it into the earth. I begin pulsing between the
earth and my navel. Then I just stand quietly, and spiral the Fusion belt
routes to clear my body’s energy field and connect it with Heaven and
Earth. If I am calm and my mind is clear, the Tao fills me with fresh chi
that pours in through my feet, my bones, and my three tan tiens -
navel, heart, and crown. This is quite blissful, and the chi circulates
spontaneously through the channels I have opened through more
formulaic meditation.
One of the goals of all Taoist chi cultivation practice is to increase
your ability to breath internally. Taoist adepts and yogis from other
traditions have long claimed this marvelous state is attainable with
proper training. Some students misinterpret this and think that by
forcibly holding their breath, they can stop physical breathing and
begin internal breathing.
You cannot force your breath into stopping, and thereby gain
instant enlightenment. This confused belief leads to abuse of training
methods like Iron Shirt packing. You have to “charm” your autonomic
nervous system and vital organs into a deep state of relaxation. If you
convince your vital organs that your body has a surplus of internal chi,
then they don’t need to bother working so hard to gather extra post-
natal chi from the air, sunlight, sex, etc. Instead you begin breathing at
the lower tan tien, which connects you to your primordial, or original
breath (also called pre-natal chi).
8. Internal Breathing is Spontaneous Pulsation
The few times I have experience true internal breathing have
occurred spontaneously and unexpectedly - not because I willed it. But
I had created the right conditions: my mind was very calm and focused
inward, my physical breathing so deeply relaxed as to be negligible. The
air was moving imperceptibly between my two nostrils. Suddenly, my
physical breathing stopped completely. My breath was literally
snatched away by the explosion of inner energy and light.
When this kind of total internal breathing occurs, you have
activated your internal atomic power, sometimes called the kundalini.
You realize that your soul is always breathing the “Original Chi”, the
primordial breath of God, which arises from within. That is why the
Taoists often refer to it as “embryonic breathing” -- you feel like you
are back in the primal womb, breathing through an umbilical cord
connected directly to the purest source, the wu chi, the un-nameable
& unknowable Tao.
But what would internal breathing be like in a more ordinary, less
mystical state of consciousness, i.e. when you’re standing in posture?
This primordial breath is experienced in your subtle body as an
extreme fin yin/yang pulsation. On the physical level, it stimulates
inhalation - exhalation. But this is not just a mechanical sucking in and
out of air.
It is your soul body - your higher mind - drawing the chi from the
oxygen and feeding it to the vital organs, glands, blood, etc. With this
chi, your body can function and your soul can operate your five senses
to enjoy life on this plane. So while standing in Embrace the Tree,
simply be aware that it is your soul body/spirit that is breathing in the
oxygen that sustains your physical pulsation. This will sharpen your
awareness of the internal breathing that is happening unconsciously in
you every moment.
9. Safe & Pleasurable Packing Power: Five-Point Plan
I believe a safe practice for Americans seeking the powerful
benefits of Iron Shirt chi kung would include the following:
a. Always do 10-15 minutes of warm-up to increase your chi
circulation before doing any packing practice. These are taught at the
summer retreats, and are as important as the practice itself. This is not
a muscle warm-up like joggers do. This is a chi warm-up. Stretches
must be done slowly, with full awareness of chi flowing in your blood
and meridians. Develop a warm-up routine that is a gentle movement
chi kung, and do it every day.
b. Exhale frequently to prevent tension buildup. Follow a long
term program that begins with very gentle breathing exercises. Give
your self a spacious time frame of months or even years. Inhale to the
energy point you are working on, i.e. perineum or kidneys, and then
exhale. Inhale to the next point, and then exhale. After a few weeks or
months, you may be able to comfortably hold your breath for two or
three points before exhaling. In this way you will gradually build up the
capacity of your body without straining it.
c. Holding the breath is not important -- opening the energy
channels is what counts. In Embrace the Tree and other postures, keep
the emphasis on training your mind to open up energy channels. These
channels can be opened in many different ways -- with movement,
with meditation, with sounds, with dozens of different types of
breathing techniques. The Iron Shirt breath packing techniques can be
used to quickly stimulate the energy channels, but you don’t want to
develop a dependency on them, or it will slow your progress later. They
are crutches meant to be thrown away as soon as you can walk (breath
internally).
d. Listen to your own body, and do what it tells you is safest. If an
instructor is leading you in the Iron Shirt practice, and he/she is
holding the breath longer than you can comfortably do it, don’t be
afraid to exhale and resume normal breathing. Just follow along by
spiraling the chi at each point instead of packing it. It’s o.k. to pack the
chi mentally, without squeezing your muscles and holding your breath.
And don’t copy nearby students who are straining their bodies.
e. Keep your chi kung practice simple and fun. If you start with
gentle breathing methods and keep your mental focus simple and calm
while in each posture, you will love the fresh vitality you’ll feel daily and
get addicted to your practice!
But if you feel stress from doing the packing, this will create
mental resistance and you will eventually stop practicing. Remember,
packing is only a small part of iron shirt chi kung -- your structure,
rooting, keeping a calm mind and internal circulation of chi are all
equally important.
10. Rooting and Packing: Two Different Processes
There is a tendency among the beginners to try to root themselves
by packing their breath and squeezing their abdominal and neck
muscles tightly. This actually makes it easier for someone testing your
structure to uproot you, because the body is being held rigid as one
piece by muscular effort. Genuine rooting develops only after you relax
both your mind and your body. When these are both as soft as a baby’s,
your internal chi easily mixes and absorbs the earth’s chi.
So what does genuine rooting feel like? In Embrace the Tree
posture your body is rooted when it literally feels solid as a mountain.
Your feet and legs connect with the Earth chi below and they
merge into one piece. You feel “packed” -- but it’s not a feeling of
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high internal pressure. It’s cooler, more still. Yet you still feel
movement inside your body/earth. There are underground rivers and
lakes hidden inside the body/mountain -- your chi meridians and tan
tiens which serve as the transportation and storage system of your
energy body.
There are two points worth noting about the effect of packing on
rooting:
a. Breath packing can help to partially open energy channels, but if
your mind cannot control the chi, it will probably rise up to your head
and actually uproot you rather than sink down and root you to the
earth. There is no benefit in indiscriminately opening up energy
channels or creating strong internal chi pressure -- it is the balance and
harmonious flow and high quality of your chi that is important.
b. Breath packing is a method of taking the chi from oxygen in the
air and converting it into body energy. Rooting occurs when your
body’s chi is mixed with the earth chi. Do not confuse the chi
absorbed from air and the chi absorbed form earth, as they serve
different functions.
The air is the fire element, which has a tendency to rise up. The
earth holds the water element, which is heavy and flows deeper into
the earth. Thus water is far superior as guide for rooting into the
earth’s gravitational field. It is also much cooler for packing and
condensing chi in the body.
In my own case, my tendency to over-pack had over-stimulated by
heart and lung fire, so my mind was jumping about wildly and it was
impossible to really root. After I stopped excessive packing of breath,
my rooting improved dramatically. This was because I was able to
relax, and let my mind sink down into the cool earth and contact it’s
chi. We are all naturally rooted -- it is only our own mental resistance
that uproots us. If we put on our Iron Shirt gently, and pack it slowly
and safely for a few minutes each day, our bodies will begin to glow
with good health.
Qigong Therapy as Alternative/Complementary Medicine
Michael Winn and Don Lonsdorf, MD
Introduction (Origins and History)
Qigong (or “chi kung”, pronounced chee kung) literally means “skill
in managing the Breath of Life”. It’s an ancient healing art utilizing
meditation, movement exercises, self-massage, and special healing
techniques to regulate internal functions of the human body. Qigong is
a Branche of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) along with
acupuncture & moxibustion, herbology, and tuina (massage). Its
practice can promote, preserve, circulate, balance and store Qi
(or”chi”, vital energy) within the body to achieve health and longevity.
Archeological finds in China depict Qigong movements at least
three thousand years ago, and some believe it goes back 8,000. years.
The 3500 year old Internal Medicine Classic refers to “ancient ones”
who understood Qi thousands of years earlier. Other old texts suggest
Qigong is the “grandfather” of basic theories of Chinese medicine and
other healing modalities in Asia that employ the concepts of Qi and its
circular pulsation of Yin and Yang in the body’s meridians. (Examples:
ki is the Japanese word for Qi, Do is the word for Tao: Ai-ki-do, Rei-ki,
Jin Shin-do are all derivative schools.)
The major schools of Qigong are Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian.
The three major types are martial, medical, and spiritual, with Taoism
being famous for its medical styles. Although there are literally
hundreds, if not thousands, of different styles of Qigong, most have
the common purpose of relaxing and strengthening the body,
improving mental capacity, nurturing innate potential, promoting
longevity, and preventing or treating disease.
For these reasons, Qigong is called the “Chinese Miracle Exercise.”
The better known Tai Chi Chuan is actually a series of short qigong
movements strung together to create a longer “form”. An estimated
100 million people around the world today practice Qigong on a daily
basis for its many benefits, making it possibly the world’s most popular
health exercise.
Mechanism of Action According To Its Own Theory

What is Qi? It is the Life Force (bio-force, or matrix of primal
energy) that underlies all existence, from subatomic particles to
galaxies to empty space itself. Within humans it is the very substance
of our aliveness that pulsates at varying rates within our vital organs
and cells. Different qualities of qi define and regulate different
biological functions, just as a stem cell differentiates into specialized
functions.
Qi is NOT mechanical energy, it is the intelligent mind substance
that crystallizes into our thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and
cells. It’s the motive force of DNA replication and immune system
function. Qi is the functional level of the body’s innate intelligence.
Qigong shares the same philosophical foundation as Traditional
Chinese Medicine (which is actually modern) with its theories of Qi
and Blood, Yin/Yang, Meridians & Zang-Fu Organs, Five Elements,
and the pathogenesis of disease. It also embodies the older Classical
Chinese Medicine which focuses on the alchemical transformations
between Shen (mind), Qi (energy), and Jing (body essence) and the
shamanic concept of the Five Jing Shen (”vital organ souls”) that govern
one’s health. Beyond the overlap of theory, the methods of Qigong
differ from those of acupuncture, herbology, and massage.
When Qi becomes deficient or excessive, stagnant or blocked in
different parts of the body, or unable to ward off pathogenic factors, a
pattern of imbalance is set up that can lead to disease. Imbalances in
Qi can occur as a result of improper diet, over strain, stress, lack of
physical exercise, traumatic injury, toxins, environmental factors (wind,
cold, summer heat, dampness, dryness), or the seven emotions (anger,
worry, sadness, grief, fear, fright, joy). When the bodyÕs natural
equilibrium is overcome by any of these factors, disease can occur.
One type of qigong therapy employs “external qi emission”.
The qigong healer may tap into either his personal or universal energy
which is then focused and radiated into the patient’s body lying on a
table or while sitting. This alters the energetic matrix of the patient’s
meridians, and causes their physical body to be regenerated. The
patient may feel a gentle warmth or tingling begin to flow in different
parts of the body. Depending on the skill of the healer, it can be used
with great success on anything from mild headache to broken bones to
sexual dysfunction as well as chronic illnesses such as cancer and aids.
Some healers can work at a distance, even hundreds of miles away.
The second type is for a patient to self-practice qigong. The
patient is taught how to do qigong movements and meditations that
will benefit their particular condition. Some are specifically designed
for different illnesses, i.e. asthma, a special anti-cancer walk or for joint
disease, and others are meant to balance the qi of summer, winter, or
the heart or lung meridian, etc. All are easily performed even by the
elderly or by people in a weak condition. The patient usually feels
improvement immediately and a general sense of well-being.
The powerful Qi meditation methods known as “neigong” create
“internal qi movements” using the mind to flow qi in the meridians.
Most famous is the “microcosmic orbit”, which circulates qi up the
spine and down the front of the body. Others might use sub-vocal
sound frequencies focused on the vital organs (the “six healing
sounds”), or by evoking postive feeling states (the “inner smile”). There
is even a sexual qigong for redirecting sexual qi to alleviate impotence,
PMS, and stimulate the production of hormonal pre-cursors in the
bone marrow.
The self-practice approach requires self-discipline on the part of
the patient, but because the patient is taught how to take
responsibility for their own healing it generally produces the most
effective and lasting results. Once the patient learns to generate “qi”
within themselves, the results are not limited to self-healing. You may
continue to practice the qigong to achieve ever higher levels of
wellness and spiritual awareness. Qigong is so simple yet powerful that
many healers use qigong to repair themselves from “healer burnout”.
Biologic Mechanism of Action
The physiological effects of Qigong have been extensively
scientifically studied in the past twenty years. The Computerized
Qigong Database (Qigong Institute) has over 1300 studies. Qigong has
been shown to decrease blood pressure, decrease oxygen consumption,
increase respiratory efficiency, improve cardiovacular
functioning, alter and integrate brain wave patterns, decrease
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stress hormone levels, and improve cellular and humoral immunity .
These changes are characteristic of effects on central and
autonomic nervous systems, hormones, and neurotransmitters. The
overall relaxation response is believed to play a significant role in the
mitigation of the devastating effects of stress, and the prevention and
treatment of illness.
There are seven aspects of emitted qi that have been quantified
scientifically. Qi emission resulted in significant changes in infrasound,
electromagnetic, static electricity, infrared radiation, gamma rays,
particle and wave flows , organic ion flows, and light. Most dramatic
were human infrasonic frequencies that leaped from 60 MHz to
400,000. MHz during qi emission.
In experiments on externally emitted qi from Qigong masters on
various biological substrates and chemical compounds, emitted Qi was
found to affect DNA
synthesis and structure, protein synthesis, artificial cell membranes,
chemical reactions, and polarized light beams. In similar experiments
involving long-distance Qi emission and its effects on molecular
structures, evidence was found to suggest the existence of such a
phenomenon.
Research into emitted Qi is still in its infancy, but it is rapidly
expanding our knowledge of human biomagnetic energy. Study of
emitted Qi on biological systems has the potential to unsettle the
foundation of modern science and thinking. Qigong does not appear
to behave entirely according to the laws of linear physics, but rather to
the advanced concepts of quantum and chaos theories.
Demographics
Qigong exercises and meditations are practiced on a daily basis by
an estimated 100 million people in China and in growing numbers
throughtout the world. The profile of those utilizing Qi healing ouside
of China is not well known. In the authors’ experience, the typical
profile of a client seeking Qi healing is: woman, professional, higher
education, between age of 30 and 50.
Qigong teachers and self-practitioners are now relatively easy to
find in North America, especially in large cities with Asian
communities. Contact national Qigong associations, Qigong (Chi
Kung) or Tai Chi Schools, acupuncture schools, Chinese associations,
herbal pharmacies, health food and martial arts stores, alternative
health publications.
Forms of Therapy
internal (self-practice) and external (qi emission) qigong are the
two broad divisions. Internal Qigong consists of meditation and
movement exercises which are practiced by individuals to regulate
their own Qi. External Qigong is performed by a trained Qigong
practitioner to detect and correct imbalances in the circulation of Qi
in another person.
Indications and Reasons for Referral
Most older children and adults can learn to practice simple Qigong
to increase their sense of well being, decrease stress, improve health,
prevent illness, and especially to treat chronic and difficult conditions.
Qigong is a valuable adjunct to Western medicine in that it supports a
pro-active, preventative approach to health.
Qigong therapy alone is not appropriate for acute or emergency
situations unless the Qigong therapist is
highly skilled and experienced.
Common reasons for referring someone to Qigong instruction or
therapy:
Management of chronic illness
Wellness promotion/preventative medicine
Stress management
Inability of Western medicine to clearly diagnose an illness or
condition i.e. strange or bizarre symptoms that donÕt conform to any
known Western pattern of disease.
Patient requests Òholistic or naturalÓ treatment options
Unacceptable risk (to patient or physician) of proposed medical
interventions
Terminal illness: palliative or therapeutic stages
Research Base:

Most of the research on Qigong in the past 30 years are in abstracts in
proceedings from international scientific
meetings or published in Chinese. Many are now available through the
Qigong Institute research database.
Evidence Based
Several studies suggest Qigong can reduce both systolic and diastolic
high blood pressure, decrease the amount of medication required to
stabilize hypertension. It reduces excessive responses to stress and
improves the function of the
hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
In an impressive twenty-two year controlled study of 244
hypertensive patients, Qigong practice was shown to decrease overall
mortality (19.3% Qigong vs. 41.7% controls), decrease the incidence (18
% Qigong vs. 41 % control) and mortality for stroke (13.9 % Qigong vs.
24.7 % controls), improve control of systolic and diastolic blood
pressure, and help reduce antihypertensive medication dosages (47.7 %
of the Qigong group in contrast with an increased dosage requirement
in 30.85 % of the control group). Qigong also helps offset
cardiovascular lesions such as progressive retinopathy and abnormal
ECG findings.
Studies suggest Qigong affects hormonal balance, decreasing
estradiol levels in hypertensive men and increasing estradiol and
testosterone levels in post-menopausal women. It improves left
ventricular function, increases cardiac output, and decreases peripheral
vascular resistance in patients with essential hypertension and
coronary heart disease.
Hemodialysis patients reported subjective improvements in
appetite, increased frequency of bowel movements, increase in general
well-being and physical strength, improved sexual activity, and sleep
quality.
Basic Science
The existence and measurement of Qi has been the object of many
studies. Seto et al. measured an extraordinarily large magnetic field
(10-3 gauss) emanating from the palms of three individuals emitting Qi.
This is one thousand times stronger than the known, naturally
occurring human bio-magnetic field (10-6 gauss). The frequency of this
unusual magnetic wave was 4 to 10 Hz (29).
Chien et al. documented the effects of emitted Qi on human
fibroblast cell growth, DNA synthesis, protein synthesis and boar
sperm respiration.
Studies suggest several possible mechanisms for the physiological
effects of Qigong. Emitted Qi is able to affect RNA and DNA UV
absorption , change artificial phospholipid membranes , and alter
molecular compositions of non-living substances similar to those found
in the body. Similar results at long distances defy our current
understanding of physical laws.
The effects of Qigong on the nervous system have been well
studied. The Qigong state is different from the waking state, resting
with eyes closed, drowsiness, sleep, or any state in between. EEG
studies show slowing of alpha peak frequency and increase in alpha-1
(8-10 Hz) components in the anterior-frontal regions (7, 12) .
Qigong meditation with active abdominal breathing is a method
common to many schools. In one study, this was found to improve
ventilatory efficiency for O2 and CO2 by about 20%.
Risk and Safety
Qigong enjoys an enviable and remarkable safety profile, but is not
without possible side effects. Side effects are infrequent and are usually
not due to the techniques themselves, but rather to incorrect practice.
Patients with acute infections should avoid vigorous types of qigong
which may circulate the infected blood. Some White Crane styles with
rapid fluttering of limbs have been reported to overstimulate frail
individuals, causing nervous breakdown.
Qigong “deviation syndrome” -- dizziness, headache, nausea,
palpitation, feeling hot or cold, dissociative feeling -- is easily corrected
by the practitioner with relaxation and correct mind set, body posture,
or breathing. Qigong induced psychosis has been described in rare
cases with auditory hallucinations and delusions. This is usually
56
self-limited and resolves soon after stopping Qigong. When this fails,
an experienced Qigong practitioner or master can help.
Efficacy
The percentage of patients who respond to Qigong vary according to
the level of experience and skill of the practitioner. Common estimates
of benefits run from 80 to 90 %. With greater length of practice and
experience, the benefits appear to increase.
Efficacy is enhanced if people fully commit to practice on a daily
basis. In a study of hypertensive patients, the overall mortality rate of
people who practiced>3/4 of the timewas 11.2 % compared with 29.3 %
in the inconsistent group.
Future Research Opportunities and Priorities
Further research will likely be directed toward demonstrating
effectiveness rather than
understanding why and how Qigong works.
Office Applications
Qigong can infuse Qi into everything that acupuncture needles can,
and reach even deeper into the mind-body relationship. This makes it
a premier treatment choice for most chronic conditions:
Hypertension: benefits include improved blood pressure control
(systolic and diastolic), decreased medication use, decreased mortality,
decreased incidence and mortality of stroke, offset of the progression
of cardiovascular lesions and retinopathy .
Asthma: disorders which are affected by emotional components or
stress are very amenable to Qigong,which improves respiratory
efficiency.
Allergies: Studies show Qigong can affect the immune system and
stabilize the effects of stress and emotions.
Stress and stress-related disorders: (e.g. fatigue, tension headaches,
poor concentration, difficulty sleeping, problems with appetite, vague
aches and pains, etc.) Sitting and moving Qigong are excellent tools to
mitigate the devastating effects of stress on the mind, body and spirit.
Cancer: with experimental data about the effects of Qi on DNA,
protein synthesis , chemical reactions, cell growth, the immune system,
emotional well-being, and improved
quality of life, Qigong should be an integral part of all
programs dealing with cancer. Many studies have been presented at
scientific meetings about the beneficial effects of Qigong on cancer
cells and tumors.
AIDS: Same reasons as for cancer.
Gastro-intestinal: Irritable bowel, peptic ulcer disease, poor
appetite, constipation, hemorrhoids, etc.
The effects of Qigong on the functional aspects of digestion are well
recognized by research.
Chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia: These syndromes can be frustrating
to treat with Western medicine. Qigong can help these patients
rebuild their stores of Qi and balance their energy circulation.
Diabetes: There is evidence that Qigong can alter hormonal levels
in the body. Specific Qigong techniques exist for diabetes mellitus.
Arthritis: Qigong is often used for arthritis. It appears to benefit
rheumatoid as well as osteoarthritis. The exercises are gentle and
generally easy to learn.
Musculoskeletal pains and sports injuries: Acute or chronic
musculoskeletal injuries. Best used under the guidance of a trained
Qigong practitioner to avoid further injury.
Low energy states: If Western medical investigations reveal no
clear cause for fatigue or low energy states, it is likely due to Qi
deficiency.
Hepatitis: Anecdotal reports of benefits. Some schools have
specific Qigong techniques for hepatitis/liver problems.
Practical Applications
Most Qigong schools or instructors in the United States teach Qigong
self-practice, which include meditation and/or gentle, movement
exercises. For patients who practical methods to promote well being,
deal with stress, Òrecharge their batteriesÓ, balance their mind-body-
spirit, or handle functional complaints or disorders, Qigong is a great
tool.
 As for Qigong therapy (external Qi emission), most physician
initiated referrals (authorÕs personal practice) tend to be for
conditions that do not respond to standard medical treatment, for
strange symptoms that do
not fit into the Western model, or because of requests from patients
for more Ònatural or holisticÓ approaches. A Qigong practitioner
should be used as any other consultant when a physician needs a fresh
look from a different theoretical healing model, and his/her patient is
open to it.
Drug-Like Information
Qigong works very well with Western medicine and does not interfere
with medications. Numerous studies in China show patients on
chemotherapy and radiation recover faster and survive longer when
qigong is practiced.
Self-Help vs. Professional
Basic Qigong meditation or movement exercises can be learned
through books or videos, but it is preferrable to learn from a trained
instructor. External Qi healing requires a therapist with experience.
Visiting a Professiona
l practitioners go through long apprenticeship periods with masters to
If a patient is passively receiving “qi” from the therapist, the key
requirement is that they simply relax, keep an open receptive attitude,
and do not interfere with the process. Qigong therapists will ask the
client some questions to determine what is going on and then go on to
their form of assessment and treatment. This varies significantly from
tradition to tradition. Clients remain clothed during the session, and
may be sitting or lying down.
The healer may read the pulses on the wrist or neck, to diagnose
the condition of all the meridians and internal organs. They will look at
the appearance and demeanor of the patient. The healer may be able
to feel inside their own body the exact problem in the patient’s body.
The healer can do this by resonating the qi in his body like a tuning
fork that is ringing at the same frequency as the patient. The healer
often scans for Qi imbalances by passing their hands over different
meridians, points, or vital organs at a distance of 3 to 12 inches from
the body. They may or may not touch the body during treatment.
Some healers may utter certain sounds to vibrate the internal
organs or expel the “sick” or “perverse” qi that is causing the illness or
psychosomatic symptoms. Some may stamp their foot to activate earth
chi or move their hands over the client’s body to stimulate or sedate
the flow of qi.
Other healers utilize “spontaneous” qigong. They emit a certain
frequency of qi that helps activate the qi of the patient to begin
moving. The patient’s body, usually in a relaxed standing position with
eyes closed, may begin to undulate or begin to dance or sing,
rhythmically releasing physical, mental, or emotional tension that has
been locked in the body for years. This is not hypnotic suggestion, as
the client may choose to stop the releasing movement at any time.
Group lessons may be given in an office, school, home, or e park,
or customized for a specific condition privately. Some Qigong
movements use the walking, sitting, or lying positions, but most are
performed standing. All share the same underlying principles. The
visible physical movements of the arms and waist are usually very
gentle and circular in nature, and are often accompanied by rhythmic
breathing methods and subtle shifts in body weight between the left
and right foot or between the toe and heel.
Most clients report a wonderful sense of relaxation, warmth, and
lightness after a session. Chronic onditions, severe or life threatening
illness require more work. The interval between visits is usually
lengthened as Qi imbalances improve and the system remains balanced.
Many people experience significant changes after one session.
Clients with significant challenges may feel some kind of shift in their
symptoms or improvement in their quality of life within 10 visits.
Others may take months or years to heal. It may depend on whether
they practice at home or make lifestyle changes to support their Qi
cultivation process.
As with any other healing modality, Qigong may not work all the
time. It is not meant as a Òquick fixÓ. However, it can lead to long-
term healing, greater insight, self-discovery, and improvement in
quality of life.
57
Credentialing and Training
Currently there is no official credentialing or licensing of Qigong
instructors in the USA, or guideline for what is required to be called a
Master or Qigong therapist. There is a National Qigong (Chi Kung)
Association ¥ USA working to establish reccommended minimum
curriculum, hours of training and ethical guidelines for both general
qigong and medical qigong therapy.
Curriculum is difficult because schools have different roots and the
mastery of Qigong is a lifetime process. Currently each school has its
own internal regulations and credentials. Some people train in Qigong
schools in China and receive official credentials. So it’s not always easy
to determine the quality, level, and experience of a Qigong practitioner.
Many qigong teachers in the west are only skilled in martial arts
and not as Qi therapists. They often use Qigong as warmups for Tai
Chi, and many of the same health benefits will accrue. But if Qi
training is done mostly with the intention to fight, the health results
may not be the same if the Qi is tied up in anger or defensive boundary
setting.
One difficulty of credentialing Qigong is that in
many schools there is a spiritual aspect to learning Qigong. Many
learn advanced techniques and well-guarded secrets. The degree of
spiritual development of a student or practitioner is difficult to
measure using written and laboratory-like practical tests. To study only
the intellectual theory of Qigong would be to separate mind, body, and
spirit, and miss the essence of this art.
What to Look For in a Provider
Look for someone who practices and teaches full-time, and who has
many years of experience. Ask for references, the names and phone
numbers of their teacher(s), or check their school to confirm their
training. How good is their personal health?
Beware of those who make exaggerated claims of vast experience,
incredible ability to cure everything, being
the only lineage holder, or tries to impress you with circus tricks, etc.
Look for someone with a strong, moral character who appears calm,
caring, warm, and compassionate. Healing Qigong is practiced from
the heart for the benefit of all beings.
Barriers and Key Issues
There is a wide theoretical gap between the healing models of Qigong
and Western medicine. The apparently contradictory paradigms may
be reaon for integrating them. Some problems are best addressed with
Western
medicine, some with Chinese medicine, and others with both. In
China, many hospitals have qigong departments working along side
western trained doctors.
The concept of Qi, vital energy, appears to be a large stumbling
block. Energy medicine incorporates the concepts of mind, body and
spirit into a whole inseparable from the Universe we live in. It
incorporates the meaning of life and death, and champions quality of
life through natural connectedness. Its healing power is experiential
rather than purely intellectual or mechanical. To overcome this barrier,
we need to accept the importance of personal experience in our daily
lives. This requires openness, suspension of judgment, and expansion
of our field of vision to include different systems of science. Qigong
must be experienced first before it can be understood.
To further scientific and mainstream acceptance, the
meticulousness of the experimental designs and statistical analyses
must increase. Future research will have to be clearer about which
Qigong techniques and styles are used in studies, and the level of
experience/training of the
Master or practitioner. It is easy to discount the results of experiments
that defy conventional theories, especially when we do not understand
or believe a phenomenon. Science must remain objective and examine
all phenomena, believable or not.
Associations
Healing Tao University

POB 20028, NYC, 10014
888-432-5826
www.HealingTaoUSA.com
A large western Qigong organization with focus on healing.
Largest Qigong & neigong training program in west -
up to 36 week long events or training trips to China.
750 instructors worldwide, over 100 in USA,
qigong retreats with academic credits, how-to books/videos.
National Qigong (Chi Kung) Association ¥ USA
POB 20218, Boulder, CO 80308 Fax: (415) 389-9465
(888) 218-7788 www.nqa.org
Annual National Qigong Conference, maintains National Qigong
Directory of teachers,
healers, organizations and practitioners, setting national standards.
Qigong Institute
561 Berkeley Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025
www.healthy.net/qigonginstitute
Maintains Computerized Qigong Database with over 1300 studies,
supports & monitors qigong research.
World Academic Society of Medical Qigong
No. 11, Bei San Huan Dong Lu, Beijing, 100029, China.
Fax: 0086 10 6421 1591.
Qigong training courses, international conferences.
Suggested Reading
The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy
Healing.
Kenneth S. Cohen. Ballantine Books, NY. 1997.
Scholarly, yet readable book on Qigong.
Great overview of the subject and introduces basic theories,
meditations, and exercises.
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2. Qi Gong Therapy: The Chinese Art of Healing with Energy. Tzu
Kuo Shih. Station Hill Press, Barrytown , NY. 1994.
3. The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy
58
Healing. Kenneth S. Cohen. Ballantine Books, NY. 1997. Page 7.
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17. Chien CH, Tsuei JJ, Lee SC, et al. Effects of emitted bioenergy on
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18. Yan X, Zheng C, Zhou G, Lu Z. Observations of the effects of
external Qi of Qigong on the ultraviolet absorption of nucleic acids
[translated]. Http://www.interlog.com/~yuan/yanuv.html originally
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19. Yan X, Zhao N, Ying C, Lu Z. The effect of external Qi of Qigong
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[Chinese]. Vol.11, 653- 655, 1988.
21. Yan X, Lu Z, Zhang T, et al. The influence of the external Qi of
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22. Yan X, Li S, Liu C, et al. The observation of effect of the external
Qi of Qigong on synthetic gas system. [translated] http://
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Zazhi (Nature Journal) [Chinese]. Vol.11, 650- 652, 1988.
23. Yan X, Lu Z, Yan S, Li S. Measurement of the effects of the external
Qi on the polarization plane of a linearly polarized laser beam.
[translated] http://www.interlog.com/~yuan/yanbro.html originally
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24. Li S, Meng G, Sun MY, et al. An experimental study on ultra-long
distance (2,000 km) effects of the external Qi of Qigong on the
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[Chinese]. Vol.11, 770- 775, 1988.
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United States to Beijing, China. [translated]. http://www.interlog.com/
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26. Pearl WS, Leo P, Tsang WO. Use of Chinese therapies among
Chinese Patients seeking emergency department care. Annals of
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28. Tsai TJ, Lai JS, Lee SH, et al. Breathing-coordinated exercise
improves the quality of life in hemodialysis patients. Journal of the
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29. Seto A, Kusaka C, Nakazato S, et al. Detection of extraordinary
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30. Yan X, Li S, Yu J, LI B, Lu Z. Laser Raman observation on tap
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[Chinese]. Vol.11, 567- 571, 1988.
31. Takeshige C, Sato M. Comparison of pain relief mechanisms
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32. 300 Questions on Qigong Exercises. Lin Housheng, Luo Peiyu.
Guangdong Science and technology Press, Guangzhou, China. P.392.
33. Lim R, Lin KM. Cultural formulation of psychiatric diagnosis- Case
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Qigong Therapy and TCM
Oriental Medicine of the 21st Century
Michael Winn, Past President, NQA
Medicine in the west is undergoing a sea change, as millions
of people begin to explore energetic based approaches to
59
healing. Acupuncture has been in the vanguard of this revolution, but
acupuncture itself is about to undergo “a second revolution” of its own
as it begins to integrate the wave of powerful qigong healing
technologies that are rapidly becoming understood and used in the
west.
The practice of qigong is essentially oriental medicine without
needles. The qigong craze is spreading like wildfire in the west because
it is easy to learn, easy to do, and produces fast results, whether you
need healing or are just a bliss junkie. It may be the greatest blessing
ever for Oriental Medicine. If tens of millions of Americans graduate
from jogging and muscle-building to the more subtle practice of
qigong, they will become educated about qi flow. That means millions
of more people who will feel comfortable seeing an acupuncturist /
herbalist to diagnose and help balance their qi. This is the real
grassroots foundation of the revolution in energy medicine occuring in
the west today.
1. What is Qigong/Chi Kung therapy?
Qigong, or “chi kung”, is the ancient Chinese art that means
“mastering subtle energy”. When applied to healing, there are two
basic modalities. One is called “qi emission”, in which a medical qigong
therapist often employs TCM style diagnosis to assess the energetic
patterns in the patient. Qigong diagnosis may use pulses or off the
body methods of scanning the patient’s qi field. Then the qigong healer
may tap into either his personal or a universal energy field, which is
then focused and radiated into the patient’s body lying on a table or
while sitting. This alters the energetic matrix of the patient’s
meridians, and causes their physical body to be reorganized or
regenerated to be free of the original injury or illness.
The patient may feel a gentle warmth or tingling begin to flow in
different parts of the body. Depending on the skill of the healer, it can
be used with great success on anything from mild headache to broken
bones to sexual dysfunction as well as chronic illnesses such as cancer
and aids. Some healers can work at a distance, even hundreds of miles
away. When combined with acupuncture, qi is sent thru the needles to
regulate meridian flow, allowing for much faster and deeper healing
than using needles without qi emission.
This type of qigong therapy is already part of standard TCM
curriculum in mainland China. You simply have to choose: which 3 or 4
year program do you want, qigong, tui-na/moxa, or acupuncture? TCM
theory overlaps neatly, the techniques and training are different for
each. In China, you might be tested for your qi emission skill before
getting a license. All the major hospitals in Beijing have separate
Qigong departments that often take on and heal the most difficult
cases that have not been cured by either drugs (western) or
acupuncture/herbs (TCM) protocols. (For a description of a National
Qigong Associagtion trip I helped lead o these hospitals, see Winter
2000 issue of Qi Journal, article by Damaris Jarboux).
A second approach is called “qigong prescriptions” or “self-practice
qigong”. The patient is taught how to do certain qigong movements
that will benefit their particular condition. There are many hundreds
of different qigong systems of movement. Some are specifically
designed for different illnesses, i.e. a special anti-cancer walk or for
joint disease, and others are meant for summer, winter, or the heart or
lung meridian, etc. All are easily performed even by the elderly or by
people in a weak condition. The patient usually feels improvement
immediately and a general sense of well-being.
The more powerful methods known as “nei kung” create “internal
movements” of subtle energy by training the patient to use
visualization of meridians (i.e. the “microcosmic orbit”), sub-vocal
sound frequencies focused on the vital organs (the “six healing
sounds”), or by evoking emotional states (the “inner smile”) or even by
redirecting sexual energy from the genital area to stimulate the
endocrine gland system, kidneys and the production of blood in the
bone marrow.
This second approach using qigong prescriptions requires some
self-discipline on the part of the patient, but because the patient is
taught how to take responsibility for their own healing it generally
produces the most effective and lasting results. Once the patient learns
to generate “chi” or “qi” within themselves, the results are not limited
to self-healing. You may continue to practice the qigong to achieve ever
higher levels of wellness and spiritual awareness.
The Taoists are famous in China for their medical qigong. They
claim to use neigong to tap into the universal pool of pre-natal jing.
Medically, this means you can replace the “acquired jing’ from your
parents that is gradually spent, the depletion of which causes one to
age. A high level practitioner of neigong is considered an “immortal”,
since death now becomes a voluntary event, not an unconscious
process that forces us out of our body. There are many cases of people
claiming to regrow hair, teeth, repair diseased organs, or recover from
near death conditions.
This focus on tapping into the universal pool of pre-natal jing
defines one of the differences between “classical qigong” (largely
suppressed by the Communists as being too spiritual) and “modern
TCM qigong”. Classical qigong might also focus more heavily on the
Eight Extra Meridians and the role of the five vital organ shen (zhang
fu spirits, or intelligences) that regulate the flow of qi in the five
elements cycle. In Taoist neigong,these practices include the famous
“Microcosmic Orbit” and the more secret “Fusion of the Five
Elements” . The five types of qi are fused into a “pearl” of concentrated
or purified consciousness that has the power to dissolve deep physical
or emotional trauma.
This type of healing method is known as “nei dan”. Dr. Cai Jung,
the head of the qigong dept. at Shi Yuan (western and TCM) Hospital
in Beijing told me that “out of the 50 or so systems of qigong I have
studied, Taoist nei dan is the best foundation for qigong healing I have
yet found”. The higher steps in nei dan training are often referred to as
“Kan and Li” (Water and Fire) practices, a kind of internal sexual
coupling of the body’s yin-yang elements. This alchemical process,
formerly kept very secret, was described allegorically in many of he
1160 volumes of the Tao Canon, the bible of collected writings on
qigong and neigong. The Kan and Li practices open the Sea of Qi in
the dan tien to a deeper dimension of pre-natal qi and jing and thus
vastly speed up healing.
On a more basic level, all qigong is so simple yet powerful that
many energy healers use qigong to repair themselves from “healer
burnout”.
2. What a typical qigong healing session is like.
If a patient is passively receiving “qi” from the healer, the key
requirement is that they simply sit or lie down and relax , keep an open
receptive attitude, and do not interfere with the process. Often the
healer will first read the pulses on the wrist or neck, which reveal the
condition of all the meridians and internal organs, not just the heart.
Some healers may utter certain sounds to vibrate the internal organs or
expel the “sick” or “perverse” qi that is causing the illness or
psychosomatic symptoms. The healer will typically be able to feel
inside their own body the exact problem in the patient’s body. The
healer can do this by resonating the qi in his body like a tuning fork
that is ringing at the same frequency as the patient.
The healer usually passes their hands over different meridians,
points, or vital organs and may or may not touch the body. Some may
stamp their foot to activate earth chi or move their hands over the
client’s body to stimulate or sedate the flow of qi. Some healers utilize
“wu si gong”, or spontaneous qigong. They emit a certain frequency of
qi that activates the qi of the patient to begin moving. The patient’s
body, usually in a relaxed standing position with eyes closed, may
begin to undulate or seem to involuntarily dance or sing,
60
rhythmically releasing physical, mental, or emotional tension that has
been locked in the body for years (or from past lives). This is not
hypnotic suggestion, as the client may choose to stop the releasing
movement at any time.
If the client is learning to heal themselves with qigong exercises,
they may learn the movements either in a class or have them
customized for their specific condition privately. Some Qigong
movements use the walking, sitting, or lying positions, but most are
performed standing. All share the same underlying principles. The
visible physical movements of the arms and waist are usually very
gentle and circular in nature, and are often accompanied by rhythmic
breathing methods and subtle shifts in body weight between the left
and right foot or between the toe and heel. These rhythmical
movements cause qi to flow thru different movements and in western
terms, stimulate the lymphatic and immune system.
Many qigong teachers in the west are only skilled in martial arts
and are not trained in the therapeutic uses of qigong. They use them as
a warm up or training for tai chi or other arts, and many of the some
health benefits will accrue. But if your intention is to use the qi for
fighting, it will not have the same benefits as doing the qigong for
healing. Qigong private healing sessions range from $40 to $100.,
depending on a variety of factors. Classes may range from $7 to $15. per
hour class.
3. History
Drawings depicting qigong movements have been found in
Chinese tombs at least 3500 years old, with other references going
back 5000 years or more. This makes it the grandparent of many
eastern energy-based healing modalities such as acupuncture and
acupressure, tui-na (meridian) massage, chi nei tsang (deep organ
massage). It probably guided the development of the internal martial
arts such as Tai Chi Chuan and Ba Gua Chuan, and the many
derivative Japanese/Korean healing arts such as shiatsu, Do-in, as well
as the numerous martial spinoffs of Aikido, Judo, etc. Some historians
speculate that qigong even travelled into India where it became part of
the repetoire of yoga and sacred temple dance training.
There are hundreds of different styles of qigong, which can seem
overwhelming to the beginner.
4. Qigong Theory
The basic premise of qigong is that everything is made out of qi, or
life force, and that we can influence the movement of this qi in
ourselves or in others in a myriad of ways. Modern visualization
techniques for healing (”I see white tigers eating up my diseased cancer
cells”) only partially tap into the qi at the core of the mind-body
interaction. Properly taught qigong gives the practitioner an internal
map of the energy pathways inside the body. These are activated to
aligns the physical, emotional, mental, sexual, and spiritual aspects of qi
so that all levels move together to create an entirely new alignment of
energy flow in the body that can alter even the genetic unfoldment of a
person.
“Nei Gong”, the more internal aspect of qigong, may be the
original and most powerful method of internal visualization and energy
manipulation ever invented to cure illness. It is closely linked with the
development of internal alchemy methods in China for achieving
longevity and immortality, which involve setting up an internal
laboratory inside the body. The most advanced method uses the “fire”
or heat and emotional energy of the heart and the “water” or sexual
energy of the kidneys to interact and thereby “cook” the physical body
into a blissful state of harmony.
Nei Gong differs radically from most eastern systems of
meditation, which are focusing on emptiness or transcendental states
of awareness. Nei Gong brings the subtle qi of the universe down into
the physical body to transform it into radiant health. There is no desire
to escape the physical plane as a kind of hell realm of suffering; our
body is seen as the “Later Heaven” physical manifestation of the Tao.
This philosophy makes Earth (our physical body) as potentially equally
divine as Heaven (our formless spirit) within the all embracing Tao --
once we allow our qi to circulate freely beteween the two.
5. Benefits & Limitations of Qigong
In China, patients are often divided into two categories: acute and
chronic diseases. The acute are sent for western treatment, the chronic
for qigong therapy. There have been thousands of studies done in
China that verify the efficacy of using qigong for virtually every type of
chornic illness, from arthritis to cancer. 20 year studies in China show
definitive reductions in mortality of 50% for hi blood pressure, stroke,
and related coronary diseases that are epidemic in the west. Qigong
can also be used for treatment of pain therapy, often with faster results
than acupuncture. This suggests that there are certain types of acute
conditions that can be treated with qigong, depending on the skill level
of the practitioner.
The main limitation of qigong is the skill of the healer or the
willingness of the patient to practice. Acupuncturists are in the best
position to introduce this healing modality into the west, and they can
gradually increase their qi skills to complement their needle/herbal
practice and TCM diagnostic knowledge. Learning to do so is both fun
and rewarding for the acupuncturist.
The current educational pattern in most acupuncture schools is
much as it was in Tai Chi Schools 20 years ago: a little qigong warmup
or elective course, and you’re covered. But now qigong/neigong is
unfolding its wings as
both the Mother/Father of the later branches of oriental medicine
and as a pillar of TCM. Several acupuncture schools are offering
Qigong degree training programs.
We are just now waking up to the fact that qigong science is a vast
network of arts and sciences that we’ve barely begun to understand
and apply. Classical medical qigong therapy is neat, rigorous, elegant,
has well defined terminology. If you blend Classical and modern TCM
styles, you can have the experience of perfect mirroring between your
inner spiritual practice and your outer healing practice.
Michael Winn is President of the National Qigong (Chi Kung)
Association, Professor of Tao Arts/Sciences and the founding Dean of
Healing Tao University in Big Indian, N.Y., the largest qigong program
in the USA with a faculty of 20 teachers and offering academic credits
for B.A. completion or graduate degrees. Courses may be eligible for
CEU’s. Winn has co-authored or written with Tao Master Mantak
Chia seven books on neigong and qigong over the last 20 years. He
lives in Asheville, NC. Email is winn.tao@att.net. He is leading a
Medical Qigong Training in China trip that offers clinical experience in
major Beijing hospitals, Sept. 23 - Oct. 7, 2000.
DNA Tricked By Inactivity Causes Major Health Problems
Obesity Sleuths find chronic diseases are linked to a breakdown
response to what our human DNA is expecting
Frank W. Booth and Espen E. Spangenburg
Dear Lovers of Chi Flow:
Scientists are finally waking up to the fact that physical movement
affects the unfolding of the genetic code, and thus can prevent a wide
range of chronic illness. More significant is the evidence on how
INACTIVITY triggers a DNA reaction that causes the chronic
diseases and obesity in the first place. The modern “drug” approach to
manipulating the gene code and creating expensive gene therapies/
drugs is misguided and unnecessarily complex.
The ancient Chinese figured this out thousands of years ago, and
have been developing “yang sheng” (long life) exercises ever since,
known as chi kung (qigong) in modern times. In my opinion they are
far superior to aerobic and high impact western exercise systems like
jogging. The science on this will eventually unfold --- but DON’T
WAIT for the science, deepen your chi kung practice today and get
the health and spiritual benefits immediately!
These scientific findings are also consistent with the approach of
Taoist mediation in the internal alchemy (neidan gong)
tradition. This approach emphasizes internal circulation of
61
energy that is captured and focused in key energy centers (dan tien) or
circulated through the entire meridian sysem (micro-cosmic orbit). I
find that this internally dynamic style of meditation is better suited to
westerners than some types of meditation that cultivate extreme
passivity. My experience is that it is impacting on the genetic level as
well, which is why these practices are considered “immortality”
practices.
Since most westerners have been brainwashed to believe their
genes control their destiny, rather than your movements control your
genes, reading this article may help you wake up to your own power
hidden within!
Michael Winn
“Obesity Sleuths” find chronic diseases are linked to a breakdown
response to what our human DNA is expecting.
The American Psychological Society
July 10, 2002
http://www.the-aps.org/press_room/journal/release7-10-02.htm
The need for physical activity is hotwired into the body’s expectations;
When that activity does not occur, nutritional “thrifty genes” react,
causing a steep rise in common chronic conditions.
BETHESDA, MD ­ (July 10, 2002) ­ The results of the most
extensive research investigation into the relationship between chronic
health conditions and physical inactivity have been released by a team
of “obesity sleuths.” They conclude that today’s skyrocketing levels of
chronic diseases are due to the collision between the body’s total gene
complement of a set of chromosomes -- programmed 10,000 years ago
to anticipate physical exertion, and the inactivity endemic to 21st
century sedentary societies. Nutritional “thrifty genes” may further
exacerbate the deterioration of the human body, which takes the form
of common, chronic disorders, once thought to be rare.
The Study
The study entitled “Waging War on Physical Inactivity: Using
Modern Molecular Ammunition Against an Ancient Enemy,” is the
latest report from the obesity research team of Frank W. Booth and
Espen E. Spangenburg, both of the Departments of Biomedical
Sciences and Physiology and the Dalton Cardiovascular Institute at the
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Manu V. Chakravarthy, of the
Department of Internal Medicine, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA; and Scott E. Gordon, of the Departments of
Exercise and Sports Sciences and of Physiology and the Human
Performance Laboratory, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC.
Their study appears in the current edition of the Journal of Applied
Physiology, a publication of the American Physiological Society.
The team set out to identify the underlying genetic and cellular/
biochemical bases of why a sedentary lifestyle produces chronic health
disorders. They support the hypothesis that humans have inherited a
genome programmed for physical activity by selective forces from the
Late Paleolithic era (10,000 years ago), when physical activity was
necessary for survival. Another associated hypothesis that was
examined in this research effort is that a lack of physical activity leads
to failure of the maintenance of normal signaling by cellular networks
that activate that genome. Since the normal orchestration of protein
expression in cells in humans was selected during evolution, when
physical activity was higher than today, an altered protein expression of
cells from sedentary individuals is associated with a higher incidence of
chronic conditions.
As part of their efforts, new conclusions have been reached on
how physical inactivity affects at least 20 of the most chronic and
deadly medical disorders. They suggest that all these conditions share
common genetic inheritances that were supported by physical activity.
When physical activity diminished, chronic health conditions occurred.
Needs for the Paleolithic Age
 Daily physical activity was an integral, obligatory aspect of our

•

Obesity: Sedentary individuals can lower their
ancestor’s existence. The weekly activity pattern of hunter-gatherers of risk of many disorders by increasing their physical activity, regardless of
the Paleolithic Stone Age period (c. 8,000 B.C.) required several days whether they are normal or overweight.
of fairly intensive physical activity followed by days of rest and light
activity. Men commonly hunted from one to four consecutive days
each week while women gathered every two to three days. The Musculoskeletal Disorders
physical labors involved in tool making, butchering, food preparation,

•


carrying firewood and water, and moving to new campsites were

•

Osteoarthritis: Appropriate exercise, both
supplemented by dances, often lasting hours, as a major recreational therapeutic and recreational, is an effective therapy in the successful
activity in many cultures. management of this disorder. The benefits are flexibility, muscular
conditioning, and cardiovascular and general health.
(Lack of) Needs for 21st Century Americans

•

Rheumatoid Arthritis: Exercise for patients
Twenty-first century Americans still possess late Paleolithic, pre- with this disorder minimizes loss in muscle strength but not in bone
agricultural hunter-gatherer genes, and, perhaps nutritional “thrifty loss.
genes.” Since our food abundant society makes physical activity no
longer obligatory for survival, the sedentary lifestyle has emerged,
disrupting the normal homeostatic mechanisms that have been Conclusions
programmed for the proper metabolic fluctuations necessary to
maintain health. Physical inactivity interferes with the genome thus This effort clearly points out that a sedentary lifestyle leads to a
becoming an initiating factor in the molecular mechanisms of disease. breakdown in the body’s biomedical system and a failure of genes
leading to chronic disease. Now, the American public has a baseline of
This assessment of chronic disorders addressed a wide range of information of how to develop an optimum design for living that will
maladies that affect a considerable number of Americans. Disorders contribute to a healthy lifestyle and to the avoidance of disorders
were considered and conclusions were reached. caused by inactivity.

Highlights include: This research also suggests that the publicized searches for genes
causing chronic illnesses are too limited. In addition, scientists should
Cancer explore how selected “activity” genes are misexpressed as a result of a


•

sedentary lifestyle. These findings challenge those engaged in using the


•

Breast cancer: Sedentary females, compared human genome sequence to fight disease to recognize the “activity
with physically active women, are less likely to have primary and genes” that produce diseases when inactivity occurs. They repeat their
secondary anenorrhea, delayed menarche, and irregular cycles, all call for Americans to participate in more physical activity to prevent
associated with a reduced development of breast cancer. the advent of a wide range of chronic disorders.


•

Colon cancer: Physical inactivity was the risk
factor most consistently shown to be associated with the increased risk Source: Journal of Applied Physiology, July 2002.
of colon cancer. A 50 percent reduction in the incidence of this disease
was found in those with the highest level of physical activity. The American Physiological Society (APS) was founded in 1887 to


•

Pancreatic cancer: Walking or hiking less than foster basic and applied science, much of it relating to human health.
20 minutes a week was associated with twice the risk of pancreatic The Bethesda, MD-based Society has more than 10,000 members and
cancer when compared with those who performed the exercise for publishes 3,800 articles in its 14 peer-reviewed journals every year.
more than four hours a week. Medicine in Crisis


•

Melanoma: Sedentary men and women had a Science, Politics and the Making of TCM
56 and 72 percent, respectively, higher incidence of melanoma than Heiner Fruehauf, Ph.D., L.Ac
those exercising five to seven days a week. This is a seminal piece that reveals shocking news to most
Americans: that Traditional Chinese Medicine is NOT traditional, but
a Maoist creation of the 1950’s. TCM is today distinguished from
Cardiovascular Diseases Classical Chinese Medicine, which would include the type of chi kung


•

and alchemical healing taught by the Healing Tao community. TCM


•

Heart disease, coronary artery disease, angina, was carefully disemboweled of anything Taoist and spiritual, in order to
and myocardial infarction: Undertaking a moderate-intensity physical put a modern scientific face on old China. This is a 1984 George
activity would prevent 250,000 deaths each year, 12 percent attributed Orwell scenario in which history books are suddenly re-written by the
to these medical government. Most acupuncture schools don’t want this information
conditions. disseminated, as it undercuts their raison d’etre. This is not to say that


•

Heart disease: congestive heart failure: Exercise TCM has no value; it has simply lost its highest level of spiritual
may improve the condition of people afflicted with this disorder; healing theory and practice. Not to worry, they are all still alive and
physical inactivity may be a determinate factor to their time of death. well in the Healing Tao.


•

Hypertension: Tests found that inactivity led to Michael Winn
blood pressures in sedentary individuals being substantially higher than
in those who were This article is based on the conviction that the traditional art of
active. Oriental medicine is dying--both in mainland China, home to the


•

Stroke: Physical activity lowers blood pressure, mother trunk of the field, and consequently overseas where branches
facilitates weight loss, and decreases the chance for Type 2 diabetes, a of the tree are trying to grow. It may be an anachronistic piece, written
major cause of strokes. at a time when TCM administrators around the world are celebrating
major advances in the field, such as increasing numbers of students,
practitioners, patients, colleges, universities, and hospitals, which all
Metabolic Diseases appear to reflect a booming state of Oriental medicine. But if we truly


•

respect our tradition as a living organism and listen intently to the


•

Type 2 diabetes: Most of the prevalence of deeper layers of its pulse, it becomes evident that the original vitality of
Type 2 diabetes in the United States can be attributed to a change in the system is expiring, although its true condition may be obscured by
lifestyle that involves a genome evolved from a Paleolithic lifestyle. a steroidal glow on the surface.
Cultures that still have hunter-gatherers have low incidence of this
disease.
62
 The following is primarily an epitomized narrative of the
development of TCM, the medical system that has monopolized the
practice of Oriental medicine in mainland China, and that has come to
serve as the main mold for the budding profession of Oriental
medicine around the globe. It exposes a system that has been
conditioned by a distinctly political agenda, and reveals its logo TCM
(Traditional Chinese Medicine) as a grave misnomer--designating a
medicine that is not at all aiming to preserve the traditional
characteristics of Chinese medicine, but, on the contrary, to expurgate,
reform, and control the classical and folkloric texture of the traditional
record in the name of progress. Between the lines of this argument
resides the warning that the progressive removal of the unique
foundations of Chinese medicine is far more than just a philosophical
issue. It affects the heart of our medicine itself, namely the nature of
the clinical encounter and the quality and the results of therapy. It
greatly diminishes, moreover, the unique edge that the traditional
science of Chinese medicine has over allopathic medicine and its
various offshoots.
Mine is thus an urgent call for a reevaluation of the direction and
the fundamental convictions that we set for ourselves as individual
Oriental medicine practitioners. Otherwise we may become
thoroughly entrapped in the spiritless mechanisms of state agencies,
insurance companies, and most of all, our modern mind that has been
conditioned to fancy the unambiguous, standardized, packaged
approach. It is admittedly an opinionated warning, but a sincere and, I
believe, reasonably informed one. From both my own perspective and
that of my most respected teachers in China (including high ranking
administrators within the TCM system), modern TCM in East and
West is about to reach the fall height of the classical tragedy--featuring
the vainglorious protagonist luxuriating at lofty heights (i.e.
mainstream acceptance and doctoral level ratification), while blindly
cutting into the life supply line without having a clue of the
consequences. All of these concerns, however, are accompanied by the
sincere hope that my findings on TCM politics in mainland China do
not necessarily reflect the true state of Oriental medicine in the West,
and that thus directed concerns are due to the limited quality of my
own personal experience.
First Impact: The Modernization of China During the Late 19th
and Early 20th Century
The end of dynastic China marked a peak season for Chinese
medicine. Although nearly every other aspect of society was in a state
of collapse and disarray by the middle of the 19th century, the culture
of traditional medicine was alive with the multihued color and texture
of a 2,500 year-old art. There was the stimulating discourse between
the newly founded fever school and the school of the neo-classicists,
there were numerous scholar physicians publishing influential
discourses, and there was the arcane realm of esoteric discipleship,
alchemical experimentation, and the kaleidoscopic facets of folk
wisdom that have always characterized the sensuous heart of the
profession.
The advent of Western medicine presented the traditional healing
tradition with its first major challenge from which it never completely
recovered. It lost its rank as the one and only medicine (yixue) and
became Chinese medicine (zhongyi), defined in contrast to Western
medicine (xiyi). Immediately, however, there developed an early brand
of progressive physicians who did not lament this situation, but
attempted to integrate some of the paraphernalia of modern medicine
into the traditional system. These pioneers are now collectively
referred to as the Chinese-Western Integration School (zhong xi
huitong pai). Main representatives are Wang Qingren (1768-1831), Tang
Zonghai (1851-1908), Zhang Xichun (1860-1933), and Zhang Shouyi
(1873-1934). It is important to note that these intial integrators, often
cited by TCM administrators as early visionaries of their own system
of integrated medicine, were not proponents of the hierarchical
superiority of Western medicine, but rather tried to embody the
traditional ideal of the broadly educated master physician.
63
It was their erudite skill level in the art, philosophy, and science of
the traditional thought process that allowed them to break new
ground by, for instance, categorizing Western drugs in energetic terms,
or by relating the Triple Warmer to certain anatomical tissues
described by Western medicine. Although it was their declared goal to
incorporate some of the useful mechanics (yong) of Western medicine
into the traditional mother body (ti) of Chinese medicine, their
parameters remained clearly traditional at the core--as the
programmatic title of Zhang Xichunís collected writings announces,
Chinese at Heart But Western Where Appropriate: Essays
Investigating An Integrated Form of Medicine (Yixue Zhong Zhong
Can Xi Lu, 1933).
This day in which curious Chinese physicians could explore the
phenomenon of Western medicine from an equal footing was soon
eclipsed by a period characterized by the through-and through
hierarchically structured relationship which still defines the
relationship between modern medicine and any traditional system of
life science today. During the first half of the 20th century, a variety of
events politicized Chinese medicine as the despicable symbol of
everything old and backward. It became a pawn that reformers from
all political camps sought to abolish. When this endeavor failed due to
vehement public protest, the new stewards of state settled for
banishing the unruly gargoyle of Chinese medicine into a controlled
existence that was subject to not only a rigorous purge of diagnostic
methods and therapeutic modalities, but--most damaging to its
integrity as a system in its own right--the creeping replacement of its
essential standards with the correct parameters of modern science.
The political voice of Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Republican
revolution that toppled the dynastic system in 1911, had been shaped
before the backdrop of his Western science education, and always
rumbled with the deep suspicion that its master harbored against the
old system of medicine. Sunís successor, Jiang Kai-shek, took this
personal bias into the legislative arena and presented the radical
proposal, A Case for the Abolishment of Old Medicine (feizhi jiuyi an).
1 Although Jiangís proposition was not implemented due to thousands
of protesting doctors and patients who took their passionate
disapproval to the streets, the production of anti-traditional sentiment
in an official document had a tremendous impact on the general mood
of Chinese medicine practice during the 1930s and 1940s.
Around the same time, the outlawed communist bandit Mao
Zedong promulgated thoughts that were very similar to those of his
nationalist adversary. In his Yanían hideout, he wrote that old doctors,
entertainers, snake oil salesmen, and street hawkers are all of the same
sort.2 This brief line should have a truly devastating impact twenty-five
years later when Maoís works became the one and only source for the
country’s definition of political truth. It served as the Red Guardís
main license for the uncompromising persecution of the rich culture of
traditional medicine and its unique modes of practice, education, and
theoretical discourse.
In Servitude at Mao¹s Court: Chinese Communism and the
Conception of TCM, 1953-1976
The years 1953-59 witnessed what appears like a remarkable
reversal of Maoís earlier views on Chinese medicine. Having graduated
from the task of creating national respect for the hinterland thug who
now donned the emperorís robes, he began to gradually advance his
private ambition of asserting leadership over the legion of budding
communist countries around the world. This objective required the
conception of a socialist model that distinguished itself from the
Russian paradigm of Marxist-Leninism by incorporating the regional
attributes of third world countries. Chinese medicine fit well into this
general scheme, since it embodied a medicine that was self-reliant,
among the people, native, and patriotic slogans that had been used to
promote Mao’s unique brand of communism. Mao sensed,
furthermore, that China was beginning to become overly dependent
on the influx of Soviet goods and expertise, especially in the areas of
Western medicine equipment and pharmaceutics. The catastrophic
famines and the far-reaching collapse of infrastructure that followed
the Russian walkout in 1961 were to dramatically confirm his
premonitions.
It was for primarily political reasons, therefore, that Mao began to
publicly embrace Chinese medicine during the mid-1950s. This was the
time when he issued the famous calligraphy that graces the front pages
of so many TCM publications: zhongguo yiyao xue shi yige weida
baoku, yingdang nuli fajue jiayi tigao (Chinese medicine is a grand
cache of knowledge that we should actively bring to light and further
evolve). In the wake of this apparently new direction, two ministers of
health, Wang Bing and He Cheng, had to resign due to their exclusive
loyalty to the Western medical system that had made them
trustworthy candidates for the position in the first place. In 1956,
premier Zhou Enlai signed papers that authorized the immediate
establishment of the first four colleges of Chinese medicine, namely
Chengdu College of TCM, Beijing College of TCM, Shanghai College
of TCM, and Guangzhou College of TCM, followed by Nanjing
College of TCM the following year. At the same time, a group that was
to become the influential voice of the first generation of institutional
TCM teachers--all of them still trained under the pre-institutional
model of discipleship education --formed in Beijing. They are generally
referred to as the five elders (wu lao), including Qin Bowei from
Shanghai, Cheng Shenwu from Beijing, and Ren Yingqiu, Li Chongren,
and Yu Daoji from Sichuan.
As if to set a good example for the new course that he had
outlined, Mao publicly ingested the traditional remedy Yin Qiao San
(Lonicera and Forsythia Powder) when he fell ill during the historic
announcement of the Great Leap Forward at the Chengdu
Conference in 1957. He restrained his onetime prejudice against snake
oil salesmen and allowed Li Shizhi and Peng Luxiang, both first
generation elders of Chengdu College of TCM, to be present at his
bedside for an entire night. In 1959, the political motives of Maoís
actions fully revealed themselves when he published his decreeing
vision about the concept of Chinese-Western medicine integration
(zhong xi yi jiehe). This edict, in essence, mandated the establishment
of TCM--a medical system which restrains the wildness and the feudal
elements of the traditional art by taking it out of the hands of its
lineage holders and assigning it to the control of modern science, one
of the most trusted tools of marxist-materialist ideology. Mao
announced a nationwide search for 2,000 first rate Western medicine
physicians who are to assist in the evolvement of Chinese medicine.3
Special Seminars for the Study of Chinese Medicine by Western
Medicine Physicians On Leave (xiyi lizhi xuexi zhongyi ban) were
established, administering bite-size pieces of a highly standardized
extract of traditional knowledge over a period of 1-2 years.
Qualifying participants were required to hold or exceed the
physician in chief rank within the Western medical system. Of 2,000
doctors who initially entered into the program, only about 10%
graduated. This low success rate may in part be due to the fact that the
study of Chinese medicine, even in abridged form, involves the
memorization of scientific detail which all participants, including the
successful graduates, had previously been conditioned to condemn as
the nefarious byproduct of a social system riddled with feudalist
superstition. Nevertheless, these Western doctors who participated in
the traditional medicine reform efforts of the years 1959-62 came to
provide the main pool for TCM administrative positions in later years.
Most top level TCM administrators of the 1980s and 1990s are, in
fact, Western medicine graduates of the reform/integration seminars.
This situation is the primary reason for the woeful plight of Chinese
medicine under the TCM systemótraditional medicine in mainland
China is managed by individuals who for the most part, and often
openly, entertain deep-seated suspicions against the field that they are
supposed to represent. In a radical sense, the history of TCM can be
described as the history of implementing anti-traditional sentiments
into the general atmosphere of Chinese medicine education and
practice. I personally know of very few TCM administrators
64
who resort to traditional modalities when they become sick. TCM
students and faculty, moreover, regularly take antibiotics when
contracting a coldóbecause it is more convenient and works faster and
better. One of the shocking personal memories that I associate with
this topic is a conversation with the grandson of Li Shizhi (the
founding elder of Chengdu College of TCM who once prescribed
Yinqiao San to Mao Zedong)--himself a TCM doctor, scholar, and
administrator at the College which is generally regarded as the most
traditional among TCM institutions in China--in which he expressed
concern about my enthusiasm for traditional herbology.
He flatly admonished me to curb my faith in the efficacy of
Chinese medicine. Many of my more classically oriented teachers,
therefore, cautiously asserted that Mao may have had good intentions
at the time, but that the integration project marked the beginning of a
process that ruined the true nature of traditional medicine. On the
surface, however, this course of events gave a boost to the status of
Chinese medicine. The government had encouraged individuals with
scientific expert status to immerse themselves in the subject of
indigenous medicine and foster the betterment of the field.
Furthermore, for the first time TCM departments were established in
many city hospitals. The actual result, still and all, was the genesis of a
situation in which the old, clinically experienced Chinese medicine
practitioners were barred from participating in major league TCM.
All of the doctors in charge were Western doctors with Chinese
knowledge (xi xue zhong)óexperts who styled their diagnosis entirely
in Western terms, but sporadically included some cookbook-style
Chinese medicine modalities in their approach. Distinguished folk
physicians, unable to practice privately under the communist system,
were accessible only in outpatient departments, or occasionally
summoned for a second opinion. Many observers of this practice
bitterly remark that if a remedy prescribed by one of these elders
resulted in a cure, it was most likely that all the credit was given to the
Western modalitiesóeven though it was their ineffectiveness that had
initiated the traditional consultation. Chinese medicine, after all, was
not recognized anymore as a clinical science in its own right, and the
traditional diagnostic approach of bianzheng (diagnosis by synthesis of
pulse, tongue, and symptom profile) was progressively becoming
eclipsed by the standardized procedure of bianbing (diagnosis by
Western disease name).
In the aftermath of these events, the status of Western medicine
became dramatically elevated with regard to institutionalized TCM
education. Planned in 1961 and executed in 1962, all TCM colleges
adopted a curriculum according to which incoming students first
studied Western medicine for 2 ý years, then Chinese medicine for 2 ý
years, and finally entered into an integrated clinical internship for one
year. The five elders immediately realized that this educational setup
was responsible for an increasing loss of respect for the fundamental
principles of Chinese medicine, and composed a letter to the central
government that summarized their concerns. Although their protest
led to an abolishment of the new curriculum and ushered in a brief
revival of classical valuesóspawning a college program that started out
with three years of exclusive Chinese medicine training, including the
reading and memorization of all major classics in their entirety, as well
as palpation of 10,000 pulses and inspection of 2,000 tonguesóthe
exigencies of the political sphere were soon to interfere in a most
severe manner again.
In 1966, Mao found himself locked in an internal power struggle
and unleashed the Great Cultural Revolution to neutralize his
antagonists. For ten years, all forms of higher education came to a
screeching halt. In the field of Chinese medicine, only the entering
class of 1963 was able to complete a TCM curriculum that for the first
time truly deserved the label traditional. Since it was the main rallying
cry of the Cultural Revolution to eradicate every trace of feudalist
influence, all of the old master practitioners of Chinese medicine,
including the five elders, became subject to criticism, ridicule, and in
some instances, public thrashing. As many physicians frantically
burned their stitch-bound volumes and other old-fashioned belongings
to avoid persecution, and as others died from grief or physical abuse,
much of the physical legacy of Chinese medicine perished irretrievably.
In this vacuum, Western medicine reasserted its defining influence
on TCM, while itself having to adapt to a political environment that
despised erudite learning of any kind. Already during the previous year,
in a speech given to health care professionals in Beijing on June 26,
1965, Mao had set the stage for the anti-intellectual direction of the
new medicine to come. In paraphrased terms, he said that medicine
needs to be changed, it is unnecessary for any doctor to read so many
books. Hua Tuo, Li Shizhen, and other traditional doctors did not
spend much time studying, but learned their trade in a clinical
environment. Most of our hospitals are in the city, while the heart of
China is in the countryside. The focal point of medicine practice and
medicine education thus needs to be directed toward rural areas.4
During the years 1966-1971, therefore, no new students were
admitted by any educational institution, including schools of Chinese
medicine. In 1972, so called Colleges for Workers, Peasants, and
Soldiers (gong nong bing xueyuan) were established, offering three year
vocational programs under the maxime of open door schooling. This
meant that there were no entry exams; the admission of students was
entirely based on their political status as well as the social background
of their parents. Textbooks were filled with quotes from Mao Zedongís
Collected Works. The doctors produced by this system received a very
rudimentary training in both Chinese and Western modalities, and
provided the human resource for the well-known Barefoot Doctor
Movement (chijiao yisheng yundong). The barefoot doctors, naturally,
were never introduced to the essential concept of differential
diagnostics. Meanwhile, the generation of Chinese medicine elders
was either dead or locked up as bovine demons and snake-like goblins
(niugui sheshen) in so called ox stalls (niupeng). Of the five elders, only
Ren Yingqiu was still alive. He was banished to Qinghai Province,
Chinaís equivalent to Siberia--allowed to bring only one cherished
book, Li Shizhenís Outline of the Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu).
In the Name of Progress: The Introduction of Superior
Methodology, Scientific Standards, and Research Axioms During the
1980s and 1990s
Another blow to the integrity of the traditional system, or what
was left of it, occurred during the period of 1980-85. At this time, the
concept of Chinese medicine improvement by methodology research
(zhongyi fangfa lun yanjiu) was introduced. The political leaders of
TCM colleges, i.e. the communist party secretaries who are generally
more influential than the president, selected several fashionable
theories of Western science and applied them to the domain of
Chinese medicineñonce again motivated by the habituated resolve to
further evolve the field. These endeavors were generally characterized
by the attempt to sanctify the scientific character of selected aspects of
Chinese medicine, and consequently, by denying scientific validity (and
the ensuing right to be preserved and transmitted) to others. During
the period in question, the theories elected for this purpose were
cybernetics (kongzhi lun), system science (xitong lun), and information
theory (xinxi lun).
The result of this assistance was the affirmation of the TCM
system on theoretical grounds. The methodologists concluded that
Chinese medicine classics such as the Yellow Emperorís Classic of
Medicine (Huangdi Neijing) already contain evidence of these
progressive theories in embryonic form, apparently recommending an
affirmative stance toward the tradition of Chinese medicine. On the
other hand, this position always implied that the classics were like
dinosaurs--interesting to look at in a museum, but, in terms of their
pragmatic value in a contemporary environment, vastly inferior to the
eloquent treatises of informatics, cybernetics, and other domains of
modern science. As a result, many TCM colleges actually established
museums, and many publishers dared again to issue reprint editions of
classical texts. The original regard for the classics as the primary
source of clinical information, however, dwindled as the
65
presence of original texts in the curriculum became minimized. Again,
it was a situation where a group of individuals with no traditional
medical background attempted to reform Chinese
medicineómotivated by ideological rather than clinical considerations.
The 1990s, in the opinion of many of my more classically oriented
teachers and myself, have seen the most severe erosion of traditional
core values. I will cite the following reasons for this assessment:
Due to market driven priorities, none of the numerous TCM
journals make an effort anymore to cover the philosophical
foundations of Chinese medicine. The government, furthermore,
provides no money for the traditional category of textual research
(which had been a possible area of specialization for graduate students
until 1988), and no graduate research projects are permissible that
involve only Chinese medicine theory.
The new market economy obliges TCM hospitals to be profitable.
The subject of profitability is intimately tied to a standardized fee
structure that is based on an official ranking system--which, in turn, is
defined by Western medicine values, such as the quantity of modern
diagnostic equipment and the amount of available beds. The hospitals
thus devote a tremendous amount of effort to the acquisition and
application of paraphernalia that will boost both their quality ranking
and their diagnostic income. As one TCM physician put it, little
money is to be made by just feeling the pulse. This tendency is echoed
in private street clinics, where doctors are encouraged, even required,
by the herbal pharmacies that employ them to prescribe large amounts
of preferably expensive herbs to maximize profits.
In 1994-95, the ministry of health published a host of official
guidelines aimed at standardizing the mandatory process of
researching the effect of new patent remedies.5 Along with the
establishment of a Chinese FDA, it was decreed that the research of
Chinese medicine patents must be conducted according to the
standards of Western pharmaceutical research. Most consequentially,
this meant that the traditional system of differential diagnosis
(bianzheng) had to be completely replaced by allopathic diagnostics
(bianbing). According to these guidelines, research on the
constitutional multi-purpose remedy Four Frigid Extremities Powder
(Sini San), for instance, must be conducted and marketed in the
context of only one diagnostic category, i.e. cholecystitis. Theoretical
background research into the traditional rationale of a remedy is
confined to 10% of the proposal, while disease oriented research has to
account for 70%. Another point that mirrors the research protocol of
Western medicine is the obligatory focus on laboratory animal
research.
This development hasstarted to turn the broadly defined clinical
science of Chinese medicine into a discipline that is dominated by the
narrowly defined and, most importantly, completely disparate
parameters of modern pharmacology. It finalizes the process of
evolution by integration that Mao had originally prescribed for
Chinese medicine 40 years agoóa process that involves gutting the
indigenous art, spirit and all, and subsequently appropriating its
material hull (i.e. herbs and techniques) into the realm of a medicine
that declares itself scientifically superior.
A new class of graduate students is developing who cannot
diagnose in differential terms at all anymore, but are completely
steeped in the allopathic system of medical terminology and diagnosis.
Virtually all of the doctoral theses presently produced in China fall into
the field of Chinese-Western integration research, or laboratory animal
research related to the ratification of new patent remedies. Integrated
standards for students of Chinese and Western medicine, moreover,
have produced the grotesque situation where Chinese medicine
researchers are required to utilize unwarranted equipment such as
electron microscopes to achieve doctoral level approbation. In
addition to the conceptual crisis outlined in this paper, the bastion of
Chinese TCM is thus also facing a grave financial crisis. Most
institutions simply cannot keep up with the steeply rising cost of the
very narrowly defined type of research that the system prescribes.

Of an impressive sounding five years in the present bachelor
curriculum, much is taken up by classes in foreign language, physical
education, political studies, and computer training. By far the most
extensive classes are dedicated to Western medicine contents such as
anatomy, physiology, immunology, parasitology, and other topics that
are unrelated to the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of classical
Chinese medicine. From both a quantitative and a qualitative
perspective, therefore, it would not be entirely inappropriate to state
in slightly dramatized terms that the Chinese medicine portion in the
contemporary TCM curriculum has been reduced to the status of a
peripheral supplementóapproximately 40% or less of the total amount
of hours. This issue is compounded by the ongoing division of students
into Western-style areas of specialization, such as acupuncture or bone
disorders. None of the specialty students, including acupuncture
department graduates, are required anymore to familiarize themselves
with the realm of original teachings, not even in the radically abridged
form of classical quotations that still serve to bestow an air of
legitimacy on most official TCM textbooks.
Is “Chi” Real? Yes, Beyond Any Doubt
Michael Winn
Everyone discovers qigong in their own way. When I first began
experimenting with it twenty years ago, there wasn’t a lot of support or
explanation for the idea of “chi” (the pinyin “qi” had not yet become
popular). Chi kung was mostly taught by martial artists, who often had
a rather limited idea of chi as being something precious and hard to
get, and once you got it you had to defend yours to keep it. There was
an assumption that if you couldn’t kick somebody’s butt with your chi,
then it wasn’t really there. I later discovered chi is the most abundant
“substance” in the universe, that you literally can’t escape it no matter
where you go. Wherever you run and hide, the lifeforce is already here!
We’re literally swimming in it all the time, it’s the very “stuff” of
nature, but we simply fail to recogize its rhythmic pulsation or its
pathways.
My biggest problem as a beginner was that I had been well
brainwashed by western scientific ideas (empirical materialism), a
victim of my own ivy league education. I wanted desperately to believe
this “chi” was real, more real than my physical body, but my over-
trained intellect was constantly doubting my own experience. It wasn’t
enough to stop me from practicing every day, but it blocked me from
surrendering to a deeper level of chi flow.
Even when I had an exceptionally “high” chi experience following
my practice of chi kung, part of me would ask, “was that my
imagination, or was
it real?”. It took me a while to figure out that every experience we
have, even in our ordinary reality, is filtered through our imagination,
whether it be our conscious or unconscious imagination. I realized that
it is not so much that we “create” our subjective reality, but rather that
we “shape” the current of life force moving through us. it is silly and
presumptious to think that we create the life force itself. Qigong is just
a methodology focused on consciously shaping the chi flow for specific
benefits, either physical or spiritual.
Sometimes the effects are quite subtle, and so it takes us a while to
tune into what is actually happening. inside us. I remember after I first
learned to circulate qi in the microcosmic orbit, I noticed a strange
thing. I used to eat ice cream every day, my major vice, to counter all
the other healthy habits I had acquired. But after I opened the orbit, I
suddenly lost my appetite for my daily ice cream. What was going on?
It took me a while to figure out that the kundalini yoga I had been
doing previously had overheated my body, driving a lot of fire chi up
my spine into my head. The ice cream was my coolant. As soon as i
began circulating chi down the water channel in the front of my body, I
did’t need the outer coolant, I now had an inner coolant. I thought to
myself, How Cool this chi stuff is.
Now I realize my experience of the microcosmic orbit twenty
years ago was in kindergarden, and the depth of its flow today
within my being is multi-dimensional, dissolving levels of my jing
66
(body essence that becomes blood and sexual energy) that I didn’t even
know existed. Then later I found myself connecting it this chi flow in
my body with levels of shen (spirit/awareness) that I never dreamed
were possible. Perhaps the greatest thrill was discovering how yin and
yang chi can orbit deep inside the core channel of my body, and
generate non-polarized chi (yuan chi, or Original Energy).
Now I see and even feel the chi orbiting in nature everywhere --
electrons orbiting around the nucleus of my atoms, planets orbiting
around the sun, magma orbiting from the hot depths of the earth to
the cool surface and back, students orbiting around the energy field of
their teachers, men and women orbiting endlessly around the quest for
love and completion of themselves.
It is the same stuff that artists, psychologists, theologians and
scientists are all trying to play with and figure out what makes it tick.
But the main difference for me, after 20 years of chi kung practice, is
that now I experience this fantastic flow of chi and enjoy it, without a
doubt.
Acupuncture, Liquid Crystallinity, and Coherent Energy
Institute of Science in Society: Science, Society, Sustainability
Talk presented to British Acupuncture Society, 2 October, 1999
Mae-Wan Ho
A medical physicist in the United States, Cho Zang-Hee, who
pioneered the proton emission tomography (pet) scanner, had his
curiosity aroused 6 years ago, when he injured his back and found
almost instant relief with acupuncture treatment. So he started
carrying out experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fmri) on the usual human guinea-pigs - volunteer medical students. He
flashed a light in front of them and, as expected, the visual cortex of
the brain lit up on the fmri. Then, Cho had an acupuncturist stick a
needle into one of the acupoints at the side of the little toe, which are
supposed to be connected with the eye. In one person after another,
the visual cortex lit up, just as if they had been stimulated with a flash
of light. Inserting the needle into a non-acupoint in the big toe had no
effect (see Dold, 1998).
Cho also found that on repeated stimulation of the same
acupoints, some subjects gave increasing response in the visual cortex,
while others gave decreasing response. One of the acupuncturist said it
was due to yin and yang, and without seeing the data, correctly
identified which subjects had an increase (yang) and which had a
decrease (yin) in 11 out of 12 cases.
The only explanation for acupuncture in the west is that the
nerves underlying the muscles are stimulated by the needle, which
then sends impulses to the limbic system of the brain, the mid-brain
and the pituitary, leading to the release of endorphins and monamines,
chemicals which block pain perception. This is the accepted basis for
anaethesia induced by acupuncture. But it does not explain other
effects. It certainly does not explain what connects the acupoints in
the foot directly to the visual cortex of the brain.
The meridian theory of traditional Chinese medicine recognizes a
vital energy, qi, circulating in nature and in our body. Within the body,
qi is said to circulate through channels known as meridians. The
meridians interconnecting the viscera and limbs, the deeper and
superficial layer of the body in a branching network of increasingly fine
mesh. The meridians and their acupoints have no known relationship
with anatomical systems in western medicine, despite many attempts
to search for correlations (see Ho and Knight, 1998).
Until quite recently, I have thought little about acupuncture.
Instead, I have been involved, since 1985, in trying to understand living
organisation from the perspective of contemporary physics, especially
of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory. At the same
time, I was developing and using new experimental approaches to
investigate organisms non-destructively, as they are living and
developing. As a result, I have now come to an understanding of the
organism that is beginning to connect with the meridian theory, and, I
hope, in due course, with holistic health systems of all other cultures. I
have outlined a tentative theory of the organism in the second edition
of my book, The Rainbow and The Worm, The Physics of Organisms
(Ho, 1998). Let me briefly describe it and then show how it may link up
with the meridian theory.
Many physicists have puzzled over how organisms seem able to
resist the second law of thermodynamics which says all systems tend to
evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium - a state of maximum
disorder in which all useful energy has degraded into a random, useless
form referred to as entropy. Instead, organisms can summon energy at
will in a perfectly coordinated way, and to maintain and reproduce its
exquisite organisation. Everyone knows that because the organism is
an open system, it does not actually violate the second law, because the
environment provides raw materials and useful energy and becomes
more disordered as organisation is built up and maintained in the
system, and entropy exported out of it. But how does the organism
actually do it?
It turns out that the key to living organisation is not so much
energy flow as energy storage under energy flow. Furthermore, the
organism has somehow managed to close the loop of energy storage to
become a self-maintaining, self-reproducing life-cycle (see Figure 1).
The organism is thus a system in which energy is stored in a
coherent form, the energy remaining coherent as it is mobilized
throughout the system. Notice that I have substituted Œcoherent
energy¹ for the usual concept of Œfree energy¹. Coherent energy, as I
shall explain presently, is stored in a range of space-times in which it
remains coherent, and is tied to the characteristic space-times of
natural processes. I say Œcharacteristic space-time¹ instead of the
usual Œcharacteristic time¹ because in the new physics since Einstein’s
relativity theory, space and time are no longer separable. (Indeed,
organic space-time is very different from the linear, homogeneous,
space and time of Newtonian physics (see Ho, 1998).) ŒFree energy¹,
on the other hand, has no relationship to space or time, and is a
notoriously vague concept.
Coherent energy is energy that comes and goes together so it can
do work, as opposed to incoherent energy which cancels itself out.
Anyone ever hit by a wave on the seashore will know what coherent
energy is as opposed to the random motion of say, molecules of air in
this room. Coherent energy is mobilised within the organism with
minimum dissipation, which means it generates minimum entropy.
This depends on a symmetrical coupling of energy yielding and energy
requiring processes within the living system. Symmetrical coupling
involves a complete reciprocity, so that the effects of one process on
the other are the same, and furthermore, they can reverse roles so the
giver of energy becomes the receiver and vice versa. How is that
achieved?
Practically all living processes are organised in cycles. The organism
is thick with biological rhythms ranging from periods of split seconds
for electrical activities of brain cells to seconds such as the heart-beat
and respiration, to periods which are circadian and circannual. But no
one has ever been able to explain why that should be. The answer is
provided by thermodynamics. It turns out that symmetrically coupled
cycles are the key to both the conservation of coherent energy and
compensation (or cancelling out) of entropy within the system so that
living organisation is maintained. I have represented a miniscule
fraction of all the coupled cycles in the living system intuitively in
Figure 2, the sum total of which make up the life-cycle. The way to
think about it is that as one cycle of activity is running down, it is
charging up a second cycle, so that the role can be reversed later.
Similarly, as disorder is created in some part of the system, a kind of
superorder appears in elsewhere, which can restore order to the first
part.
Each cycle of activity has a characteristic space-time and together,
they span all space-times from the very fast to the very slow, the global
to the local. Each cycle is hence a domain in which coherent energy is
stored, as said earlier. Of course, neither the conservation of coherent
energy nor the compensation of entropy is perfect, otherwise, no one
would ever need to eat, nor would ever age. But such a dynamic
structure of the system is the key to maximising the storage of
67
coherent energy and the speed and efficiency with which coherent
energy can be mobilised (see Ho, 1995). Thermodynamically, then, the
organism is a dynamically closed system of minimally dissipative
coupled cycles feeding off the one-way energy flow, so that the
unavoidable dissipation is exported to the environment (Figure 3).
The special energy relationship in the organism, therefore, is what
enables it to mobilize energy at will, whenever and wherever required
and in a perfectly coordinated way. In the ideal, the organism can be
conceived as a quantum superposition of coherent activities, with
instantaneous (nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the
system. The flow of qi in meridian theory corresponds rather well to
the mobilisation of coherent energy. Coherent energy is vital energy,
and it is arises because the organism is especially good at capturing
energy, storing and mobilising it in a coherent form.
Let us look more closely at the mobilisation of coherent energy.
Coherent energy is stored everywhere within the system over the
entire range of space-times. Consequently any subtle influence arising
anywhere within the system will propagate over the entire system and
get amplified to global effects. In other words, the system, by virtue of
being full of coherent energy everywhere, will be ultrasensitive to very
weak signals. This may be the basis of all forms of subtle energy
medicine.
Quantum coherence in living organisms was still firmly rejected by
mainstream biologists when I proposed it in 1993 (Ho, 1993). I was in
turn inspired by the idea that organisms may store energy as ‘coherent
excitations’, which originated with solid-state physicist Herbert
Fröhlich in the 1960s (see Frohlich, 1980). Later on, quantum physicist
turned biophysicist, Fritz Popp, suggested that organisms are quantum
coherent photon fields (see Popp et al, 1970; 1992). Today, mainstream
scientists including physicist Roger Penrose (1995) have begun to
invoke quantum coherence to account for the macroscopic, phase-
correlated electrical activities observed by neurophysiologists in widely
separated parts of the brain (see Freeman, 1995; Ho, 1997).
I must emphasise that the theory of the organism just presented is
firmly based on empirical experimental findings from our own
laboratory as well as from established laboratories around the world.
Many of the findings are published in scientific journals, but there is
little or no satisfactory explanation for them within conventional
mainstream biology. I won’t have time to describe all the experimental
results which have built up a picture of coherence in the organism (see
Ho, 1998). Perhaps the most suggestive evidence is our discovery in
1992 that all organisms are liquid crystalline.
What we actually discovered was a novel noninvasive optical
imaging technique based on the polarised light microscopy (Ho and
Lawrence, 1993; Newton et al, 1995; Ross et al, 1997). It is a technique
that earth scientists and other have used for studying mineral crystals,
and more recently liquid crystals; in other words, any material with
molecular order. But crystals have static order, so how can living,
mobile organisms be crystals? Indeed, the imaging technique
demonstrates that organisms are so dynamically coherent at the
molecular level that they appear to be crystalline (Ho and Saunders,
1994; Ho et al, 1996). That is because light vibrates at 1014Hz, much
faster than the molecules can move coherently together, which is at
most 1010 Hz. So long as the motions among the molecules in the cells
and tissues are sufficiently coherent, they will appear to be statically
ordered, or crystalline, to the light passing through. This is analogous
to the ability of a very fast film to capture the image of a moving object
as a sharply focussed Œstill¹ picture. This imaging technique is telling
us that the living organism is coherent beyond our wildest dreams,
with dynamic order that extends from the molecular to the
macroscopic.
There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective
tissues and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid
crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body (see
Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998; Ho and Knight, 1998, and references therein).
Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility,
exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid,
noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as
a coherent, coordinated whole. In addition, the liquid crystalline
continuum provides subtle electrical interconnections which are
sensitive to changes in pressure, pH and other physicochemical
conditions; in other words, it is also able to register Œtissue memory¹.
Thus, the liquid crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a
Œbody consciousness¹ that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of
subtle energy medicines including acupuncture.
The connective tissues of our body include the skin, bones,
tendons, ligaments, cartilege, various membranes covering major
organs and linings of internal spaces. We tend to see them as serving
purely mechanical functions to keep the body in shape, or to act as
packing material. Actually, connective tissues may also be largely
responsible for the rapid intercommunication that enables our body to
function effectively as a coherent whole, and are therefore central to
our health and well-being.
The clue to the intercommunication function of connective tissues
lies in the properties of collagen, which makes up 70% or more of all
the proteins of the connective tissues. Connective tissues, in turn form
the bulk of the body of most multicellular animals. Collagen is
therefore the most abundant protein in the animal kingdom.
There are many kinds of collagens - all sharing a general repeating
sequence of the tripeptide, (X-Y-glycine), where X and Y are usually
proline or hydroxyproline (reviewed in Ho and Knight, 1998; Haffegee,
1999; Zhou, 1999). They also share a molecular structure in which
three polypeptide chains are wound around one another in a triple-
helix (rather like an electric flex) with the compact amino acid glycine
in the central axis of the helix, while the bulky amino-acids proline and
hydroxyproline are near the surface. In the fibrous forms, the triple-
helical molecules aggregate head to tail and side-by side into long
fibrils, and bundles of fibrils in turn assemble into thicker fibres, and
other more complex three-dimensional liquid crystalline structures.
Some collagens assemble into sheets constructed from an open, liquid
crystalline meshwork of molecules.
All these structures are formed by self-assembly, in the sense that
they need no specific ‘instructions’ other than certain conditions of
pH, ionic strength, temperature and hydration (Zhou et al, 1996;
Haffegee, 1999). The process is predominantly driven by hydrophilic
interactions due to hydrogen-bonding between water molecules and
charged amino-acid side-chains of the protein. Hydrogen bonds is a
special kind of chemical bond in which a hydrogen atom is shared
between atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen. It is the most important
and ubiquitous chemical bond in living systems. If you don’t know
anything else, you must know the hydrogen bond. A water molecule is
made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms and each of the
two hydrogen atoms can make a hydrogen bond with another the
oxygen belonging to another water molecule or a protein molecule.
And the oxygen atom of the water molecule can accept two other
hydrogen atoms in hydrogen-bonds.
But collagens are not just mechanical fibres and composites.
Instead, they have dielectric and electrical conductive properties that
make them very sensitive to mechanical pressures, pH, and ionic
composition and to electromagnetic fields (reviewed in Ho, 1998; Ho
and Knight, 1998; in particular, Zhou, 1999). The electrical properties
depend, to a large extent, on the bound water molecules in and around
the collagen triple-helix. X-ray diffraction studies reveal a cylinder of
water surrounding the triple-helix which is hydrogen-bonded to the
hydroxyproline side-chains. Nuclear magnetic resonance studies and
Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy have both provided
evidence of three populations of water molecules associated with
collagen.
These are interstitial water, very tightly bound within the triple-
helix of the collagen molecule, and strongly interacting with the
peptide bonds of the polypeptide chains; bound water,
corresponding to the more loosely structured water-cylinder on
68
the surface of the triple helix; and so called free water filling the spaces
between the fibrils and between fibres. Typically, there is a layer of
water some 4 to 5 molecules deep separating neighbouring triple-
helices. This biological water is integral to the liquid crystallinity of
collagens (Zhou et al, 1999) and other composites such as the
extracellular matrix, the cell membrane and the ‘cytoplasm’.
The existence of the ordered network of water molecules,
connected by hydrogen bonds, and interspersed within the protein
fibrillar matrix of the collagens is especially signicant, as it is expected
to support rapid jump conduction of protons, ie, hydrogen atoms
without its electron, which constitute positive electric charges. This
jump conduction is a kind of semi-conduction and is much faster than
ordinary electrical conduction or conduction through nerve fibres.
That is because it does not actually require any net movement of the
charged particle itself. It is passed rapidly down a line of relatively
static, hydrogen-bonded water molecules.
Jump conduction of protons in collagen has been confirmed by
dielectric measurements. The conductivity of collagen increases
strongly with the amount of water absorbed (from 0.1 to 0.3g/g
collagen), in accordance with the power-law relation,
s(f) = XfY
where f is the water content, andX and Y are constants. The value
of Y is found to be 5.1 to 5.4, and is a function of the collagen fibrillar
structure. These results suggest that continuous chains of ordered
water molecules join neighbouring ion-generating sites enabling proton
jumps to occur. The high value of the exponential suggests that up to 5
or 6 neighbours may be involved in the jump conduction. Based on
these findings, it is estimated that conductivity along the collagen
fibres is at least one-hundred time that across the fibre.
A major factor contributing to the efficiency of
intercommunication is the structured, oriented nature of collagen
liquid crystalline fibres. Each connective tissue has its characteristic
orientation of fibrous structures which are clearly related to the
mechanical stresses and strains to which the tissue is subject. This
same orientation may also be crucial for intercommunication.
Aligned collagen fibres in connective tissues provide oriented
channels for electrical intercommunication, and are strongly
reminiscent of acupuncture meridians in traditional Chinese medicine.
As collagen fibres are expected to conduct (positive) electricity
preferentially along the fibres due to the bound water, which are
predominantly oriented along the fibre axis, it follows that these
conduction paths may correspond to acupuncture meridians. By
contrast, acupoints typically exhibit 10 to 100-fold lower electrical
resistances compared with the surrounding skin, and may therefore
correspond to singularities or gaps between collagen fibres, or, where
collagen fibres are oriented at right angles to the dermal layer. The
actual conducting channels may bear a more subtle relationship to the
orientation of the collagen fibres, as conductivity depends
predominantly on the layer(s) of bound water on the surface of the
collagen molecules rather than the collagens themselves. So-called free
water may also take part in proton conduction as the result of induced
polarization, particularly as water molecules naturally form hydrogen-
bonded networks. This would be consistent with the observed increase
in conductivity of collagen as hydration increases to a level well beyond
the bound water fraction, around 0.15g/g; and with the fact that the
normal hydration level of tendon is about 65%.
The hydrogen-bonded water network of the connective tissues is
actually linked to ordered hydrogen-bonded water in the ion-channels
of the cell membrane that allow inorganic ions to pass in and out of the
cell. There is thus a direct electrical link between distant signals and
the intracellular matrix of every single cell in the body, leading to
physiological changes inside the cells, including all nerve cells. This
electrical channel of intercommunication is in addition to and coupled
with the mechanical tensegrity interactionsbetween the connective
tissues and the intracellular matrix of every single cell, a continuum
that always changes as a whole. Any mechanical deformations of the
protein-bound water network will automatically result in electrical
disturbances and conversely, electrical disturbances will result in
mechanical effects.
As mentioned earlier, proton jump-conduction is a form of semi-
conduction in condensed matter and much faster than conduction of
electrical signals by the nerves. Thus the Œground substance¹ of the
entire body may provide a much better intercommunication system
than the nervous system. Indeed, it is possible that one of the
functions of the nervous system is to slow down intercommunication
through the ground substance. Lower animals which do not have a
nervous system are nonetheless sensitive. At the other end of the
evolutionary scale, note the alarming speed with which a
hypersensitive response occurs in human beings, or how rapidly they
can respond to an emergency. There is no doubt that a body
consciousness exists prior to the Œbrain¹ consciousness associated
with the nervous system.
I have argued that a body consciousness possessing all the
hallmarks of consciousness - sentience, intercommunication and
memory - is distributed throughout the entire body. Brain
consciousness associated with the nervous system is embedded in body
consciousness and is coupled to it (Ho, 1997; 1998).
Under normal, healthy conditions, body and brain consciousness
mutually inform and condition each other. The unity of our conscious
experience and our state of health depends on the complete coherence
of brain and body.
Traditional Chinese medicine based on the acupuncture meridian
system places the emphasis of health on the coherence of body
functions which harmonizes brain to body. This makes perfect sense if
one recognizes the brain as part of the body. Western medicine, by
contrast, has yet no concept of the whole, and is based, at the very
outset, on a Cartesian divide between mind and brain, and brain and
body. Because there is no concept of the organism as a whole, there is,
in effect, no theory of health, only an infinite number of disease
models, each based on the supposed defect of a single molecular
species. There is an urgent need to develop a theory of health for
proper delivery of healthcare in the next millenium.
Acknowledgment
Peter Saunders, Fritz Popp, Franco Musumeci, Kenneth Denbigh,
Geoffrey Sewell, John Bolton, David Knight and Stephen Swithenby
have taught me a lot of what I did not know about mathematics,
physics and chemistry, and shared their insights with me, some of
them over many years. Stephen Ross, Julian Haffegee, Zhou Yu-Ming
and Richard Newton were my collaborators on many of the
experimental projects. Without their enthusiasm, ingenuity and
support, the work described in this paper would never have been done.
References
Dold, C. (1998). Needles & Nerves. Discover September, 58-62.
Freeman, W.J. (1995). Societies of Brains. A Study in the
Neuroscience of Love and Hate, lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove.
Fröhlich, H. (1968). Long range coherence and energy storage in
biological systems. Int. J. Quantum Chemistry 2, 641-649.
Haffegee, J. (1999). Collagen self-assembly and alignment in vitro.
M. Sc. Thesis, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University.
Ho, M.W. (1993). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of
Organisms, World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. ed. (1995b). Bioenergetics, S327 Living Processes, Open
University Press, Milton Keynes, especially Chapters 3, 5, 7, 8.
Ho, M.W. (1997a). Quantum coherence and conscious experience.
Kybernetes 26, 265-276.
Ho, M.W. (1998). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of
Organisms, 2nd. Ed. World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. and Knight, D.P. (1998). The acupuncture system and
the liquid crystalline collagen fibers of the connective tissues. Am. J.
Chinese Medicine 26, 251-263.
Ho, M.W. and Lawrence, M. (1993). Interference colour
vital imaging: A novel noninvasive microscopic technique.
69
Microscopy and Analysis September, 26.
Ho, M.W. and Saunders, P.T. (1994). Liquid crystalline mesophase
in living organisms. In Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication
(M.W. Ho, F.A. Popp and U. Warnke, eds.)World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W., Haffegee, J., Newton,R.H. Ross, S., Zhou, Y.M. and
Bolton. J.P. (1996). Organisms as polyphasic liquid crystals.
Bioelectrochemistry and Bioenergetics 41, 81-91, 1996.
Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J. and Ho, M.W. (1995). Colour-contrast
in polarized light microscopy of weakly birefringent biological
specimens. J. Microscopy 180, 127-130.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of Mind, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Popp, F.A., Li, K.H. and Gu, Q. eds. (1992). Advances in
Biophotons Research, World Scientific, Singapore.
Popp, F.A., Ruth, B., Bahr, W., Bohm. J., Grass, P., Grohlig, G.,
Rattemeyer, M., Schmidt, H.G. and Wulle, P. (1981). Emission of visible
and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems. Collective
Phenomena 3, 187-214.
Ross, S., Newton, R.H., Zhou, Y.M., Haffegee, J., Ho, M.W.,
Bolton, J. and Knight, D. (1997). Quantitative image analysis of
birefringent biological materials. J. Microscopy 187, 62-67.
Zhou, Y.-M. (1999). The optical properties of living organisms,
Ph.D. Thesis, Open University, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory.
Zhou, Y.M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J., Brown, J.Y., Ross, S.,
Bolton, J.P., Ho, M.W.: Imaging Liquid Crystalline Mesophases in vivo
and in vitro: Measuring Molecular Birefringence and Order Parameter
of Liquid Crystals. Bios Journal, 1996.
Zhou, Y,-M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J.P. Meek, K. and Ho,
M.W. (1999). Effects of different solvents on collagen birefringence
and structure. (in preparation).
The Institute of Science in Society
PO Box 32097, London NW1 OXR
Tel: 44 -020-7380 0908
Why “Hard Science” is Based on Faith
Paul Davies
note: I’m posting this piece, as it highlights what I perceive as the
need for a spiritual science to bridge the gap between religion and hard
science. I accept Davies premise that physics is based on faith when
you examine its bedrock beliefs. I believe eventually Taoist practices
will play an important part in developing that spiritual science, mostly
because it has a clean set of unity, yin-yang and five phase principles
that are personally testable thorugh qigong and meditation practice. -
Michael
TAKING SCIENCE ON FAITH by Paul Davies
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of
knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses.
Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas”
well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a
professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without
evidence is regarded as a virtue.
The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping
magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is
that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds
on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible
way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a
meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When
physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or
astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to
encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith
has been justified.
The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the
cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which
nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws
that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are
expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws
come from? And why do they have the form that they do?
When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as
completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to
discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.
The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a
maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed
forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the
universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal,
mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that
these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat
flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the
laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a
scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is
no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the
laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence
of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is
ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If
one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality —
the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes
a mockery of science.
Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world
about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature
is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity
somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.
Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside
such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood
has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing
acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the
existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the
form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of
rules, life would almost certainly not exist.
A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought
within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we
long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly
fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from
place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a
vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of
bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with
bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a
Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it
by our very existence.
The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so
much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has
to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow
bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws.
Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a
level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith —
namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe,
like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe
even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both
monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete
account of physical existence.
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of
physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes
many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute,
universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that
God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians
envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the
universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract
transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
70
And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on
God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists
declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws
(or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what
happens in the universe.
It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical
universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-
laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The
alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern
as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together
within a common explanatory scheme.
In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within
the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The
specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until
science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its
claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
[First published as an OpEd piece by The New York Times,
November 24, 2007]
PAUL C. DAVIES is the director of Beyond, a research center at
Arizona State University, and the author of “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our
Universe Is Just Right for Life.”
Evolution Depends on Memory Held in Fields of Morphic
Resonance
Rupert Sheldrake
Note: The idea of a “field” is at the root of Taoist energetic science
- the yin,yang, and yuan principles of the Life Force being the
governing field that guides all manifestation and holds all memory. I
find Sheldrake’s attempt to integrate field theory with modern genetic
discoveries and Darwinian ideas on evolution to be most convincing,
and in resonance with ancient Taoist ideas, presented in a modern
complex that stresses verifiable detail. - Michael
Evolution Depends on Memory Held in Fields of Morphic
Resonance
by Rupert Sheldrake
Biologist, London; Author of The Presence of the Past
I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature.
Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
There is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into
being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of
cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm
beyond time and space.
Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s,
eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to
be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we
now live in a radically evolutionary universe.
If we want to stick to the idea of natural laws, we could say that as
nature itself evolves, the laws of nature also evolve, just as human laws
evolve over time. But then how would natural laws be remembered or
enforced? The law metaphor is embarrassingly anthropomorphic.
Habits are less human-centred. Many kinds of organisms have habits,
but only humans have laws.
Habits are subject to natural selection; and the more often they are
repeated, the more probable they become, other things being equal.
Animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We
inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the
habits of our languages.
The habits of nature depend on non-local similarity reinforcement.
Through a kind of resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing
systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each
species and each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory.
Is this just a vague philosophical idea? I believe it can be
formulated as a testable scientific hypothesis.
My interest in evolutionary habits arose when I was engaged in
research in developmental biology, and was reinforced by reading
Charles Darwin, for whom the habits of organisms were of central
importance. As Francis Huxley has pointed out, Darwin’s most famous
book could more appropriately have been entitled The Origin of
Habits.
Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development,
I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of
plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough.
Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments
apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many
developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization
depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental
fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.
All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of
organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an
essential role. But they do not explain the organization itself. Why not?
Thanks to molecular biology, we know what genes do. They enable
organisms to make particular proteins. Other genes are involved in the
control of protein synthesis. Identifiable genes are switched on and
particular proteins made at the beginning of new developmental
processes. Some of these developmental switch genes, like the Hox
genes in fruit flies, worms, fish and mammals, are very similar. In
evolutionary terms, they are highly conserved. But switching on genes
such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies
would not look different from us.
Many organisms live as free cells, including many yeasts, bacteria
and amoebas. Some form complex mineral skeletons, as in diatoms and
radiolarians, spectacularly pictured in the nineteenth century by Ernst
Haeckel. Just making the right proteins at the right times cannot
explain such structures without many other forces coming into play,
including the organizing activity of cell membranes and microtubules.
Most developmental biologists accept the need for a holistic or
integrative conception of living organization. Otherwise biology will go
on floundering, even drowning, in oceans of data, as yet more genomes
are sequenced, genes are cloned and proteins are characterized.
I suspect that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on
the otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For
example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell
rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are
made are present throughout the cell.
Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields
of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of
their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I
believe, but cannot prove, that they are transmitted by a kind of non-
local resonance, and I have suggested the term morphic resonance for
this process.
The fields organizing the activity of the nervous system are
likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective,
instinctive memory. The resonance of a brain with its own past states
also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans.
Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools
71
of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are
transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly
communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or
myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy
Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which
the past become present through a kind of resonance with those who
have performed the same rituals before.
Others may prefer to dispense with the idea of fields and explain
the evolution of organization in some other way, perhaps using more
general terms like “emergent systems properties”. But whatever the
details of the models, I believe that the natural selection of habits will
play an essential part in any integrated theory of evolution, including
not just biological evolution, but also physical, chemical, cosmic, social,
mental and cultural evolution.
The Biology of Free Will
Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, 231-244, 1996
Mae-Wan Ho
Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, U.K.
Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, 231-244, 1996.
Abstract
I. Introduction
* The new organicism
II. The organism frees itself from the `laws’ of physics
III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism
* The polychromatic organism
* The organism is a free sentient being
and hence able to decide its own fate
IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control
as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole
* Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues
* Organism and environment -- a mutual partnership
V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
* Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals
* Quantum coherence in living organisms
* The freedom of organisms
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Abstract: According to Bergson (1916), the traditional problem of
free will is misconceived and arises from a mismatch between the
quality of authentic, subjective experience and its description in
language, in particular, the language of the mechanistic science of
psychology. Contemporary western scientific concepts of the
organism, on the other hand, are leading us beyond conventional
thermodynamics as well as quantum theory and offering rigorous
insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic, and even
romantic notions of spontaneity and free will. I shall describe some
new views of the organism arising from new findings in biology, in
order to show how, in freeing itself from the `laws’ of physics, from
mechanical determinism and mechanistic control, the organism
becomes a sentient, coherent being that is free, from moment to
moment, to explore and create its possible futures. * Based on a lecture
delievered at the 6th Mind & Brain Symposium, The Science of
Consciousness -- The Nature of Free Will, November 4, 1995, Institute
of Psychiatry, London.
I. Introduction
Distinguished neurophysiologist Walter Freeman (1995) begins his
latest book by declaring brain science “in crisis”: his personal quest to
define constant psychological states arising from given stimuli has
ended in failure after 33 years. Patterns of brain activity are simply
unrepeatable, every perception is influenced by all that has gone
before. The impasse, he adds, is conceptual, not experimental or
logical. This acknowledged breakdown of mechanical determinism in
brain science is really long overdue, but it should not be miscontrued
as the triumph of vitalism. As Freeman goes on to show, recent
developments in nonlinear mathematics can contribute to some
understanding of these non-repeatable brain activities. The traditional
opposition between mechanists and vitalists already began to dissolve
at the turn of the present century, when Newtonian physics gave way
to quantum theory at the very small scales of elementary particles and
to general relativity at the large scales of planetary motion. The static,
deterministic universe of absolute space and time is replaced by a
multitude of contingent, observer-dependent space-time frames.
Instead of mechanical objects with simple locations in space and time,
one finds delocalized, mutually entangled quantum entities that carry
their histories with them, like evolving organisms. These developments
in contemporary western science gave birth to organicist philosophy.
A key figure in organicist philosophy was the French philosopher,
Henri Bergson (1916), who showed how Newtonian concepts -- which
dominate biological sciences then and now -- negate psychology’s
claims to understand our inner experience at the very outset. In
particular, he drew attention to the inseparability of space and time,
both tied to real processes that have characteristic durations. The
other major figure in organicist philosophy was the English
mathematician-philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1925) who saw
physics itself and all of nature, as unintelligible without a thorough-
going theory of the organism that participates in knowing. Organicist
philosophy was taken very seriously by a remarkable group of people
who formed the multidisciplinary Theoretical Biology Club.[1] Its
membership included Joseph Needham, eminent embryologist/
biochemist later to be renowned for his work on the history of
Chinese science, Dorothy Needham, muscle physiologist and
biochemist, geneticist C.H. Waddington, crystallographer J.D. Bernal,
mathematician Dorothy Wrinch, philosopher, J.H. Woodger and
physicist, Neville Mott. They acknowledged the full complexity of
living organization, not as axiomatic, but as something to be explained
and understood with the help of philosophy as well as physics,
chemistry, biology and mathematics, as those sciences advance, and in
the spirit of free enquiry, leaving open whether new concepts or laws
may be discovered in the process.
A lot has happened since the project of the Theoretical Biology
Club was brought to a premature end when they failed to obtain
funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Organicism has not survived
as such, but its invisible ripples have spread and touched the hearts and
minds, and the imagination of many who remain drawn to the central
enigma that Erwin Schrödinger (1944) later posed: What is Life?
In the intervening years, the transistor radio, the computer and
lasers have been invented. Whole new disciplines have been created,
nonequilibrium thermodynamics, solid state physics and quantum
optics to name but a few. In mathematics, nonlinear dynamics and
chaos theory took off in a big way during the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps
partly on account of that, many nonlinear physical and
physicochemical phenomena are being actively investigated only
within the past ten years, as physics become more and more organic in
its outlook. In a way, the whole of science is now tinged with organicist
philosophy, as even “consciousness” and “free will” are on the scientific
agenda. Bergson ( 1916) has made a persuasive case that the traditional
problem of free will is simply misconceived and arises from a
mismatch between the quality of authentic, subjective experience and
its description in language, in particular, the language of the
mechanistic science of psychology. In a recent book, I have shown how
contemporary western scientific concepts of the organism are leading
us beyond conventional thermodynamics as well as quantum theory
(Ho, 1993), and offering rigorous insights which reaffirm and extend
our intuitive, poetic, and even romantic notions of spontaneity and
free will.
The new organicism
I am making a case for organicist science. It is not yet a conscious
movement but a Zeitgeist I personally embrace, so I really mean
to persuade you to do likewise by giving it a more tangible shape.
72
The new organicism, like the old, is dedicated to the knowledge of the
organic whole, hence, it does not recognize any discipline boundaries.
It is to be found between all disciplines. Ultimately, it is an
unfragmented knowledge system by which one lives. There is no
escape clause allowing one to plead knowledge `pure’ or `objective’,
and hence having nothing to do with life. As with the old organicism,
the knowing being participates in knowing as much as in living.
Participation implies responsibility, which is consistent with the truism
that there can be no freedom without responsibility, and conversely, no
responsiblity without freedom. There is no placing mind outside
nature as Descartes has done, the knowing being is wholeheartedly
within nature: heart and mind, intellect and feeling (Ho, 1994a). It is
non-dualist and holistic. In all those respects, its affinities are with the
participatory knowledge systems of traditional indigenous cultures all
over the world. From a thorough-going organicist perspective, one
does not ask, “What is life?” but, “What is it to be alive?”. Indeed, the
best way to know life is to live it fully. It must be said that we do not
yet have a fully fledged organicist science. But I shall describe some
new images of the organism, starting from the more familiar and
working up, perhaps to the most sublime, from which a picture of the
organism as a free, spontaneous being will begin to emerge. I shall
show how the organism succeeds in freeing itself from the `laws’ of
physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control,
thereby becoming a sentient, coherent being that, from moment to
moment, freely explores and creates its possible futures.
II. The organism frees itself from the `laws’ of physics
I put `laws’ in quotation marks in order to emphasize that they are
not laid down once and for all, and especially not to dictate what we
can or cannot think. They are tools for helping us think; and most of
all, to be transcended if necessary.
Many physicists have marvelled at how organisms seem able to
defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics, starting from Lord Kelvin,
co-inventor of the Second Law, who nevertheless excluded organisms
from its dominion:
“The animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine . . .
consciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent,
subject to the direction of his will. It appears therefore that animated
creatures have the power of immediately applying to certain moving
particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of
these particles are directed to produce derived mechanical effects.”[2]
What impresses Lord Kelvin is how organisms seem to have
energy at will, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly
coordinated way. Another equally puzzling feature is that, contrary to
the Second Law, which says all systems should decay into equilibrium
and disorder, organisms develop and evolve towards ever increasing
organization. Of course, there is no contradiction, as the Second Law
applies to isolated systems, whereas organisms are open systems. But
how do organisms manage to maintain themselves far away from
thermodynamic equilibrium and to produce increasing organization?
Schrödinger writes:
“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of
`equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic. . . . What an
organism feeds upon is negative entropy, or, to put it less paradoxically,
the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in
freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while
alive.”[3]
Schrödinger was severely reprimanded,[4] by Linus Pauling and
others, for using the term `negative entropy’, for it really does not
correspond to any rigorous thermodynamic entity. However, the idea
that open systems can “self-organize” under energy flow became more
concrete in the discovery of “dissipative structures” (Prigogine, 1967).
An example is the Bénard convection cells that arise in a pan of water
heated uniformly from below. At a critical temperature difference
between the top and the bottom, a phase transition occurs: bulk flow
begins as the lighter, warm water rises from the bottom and the denser,
cool water sinks. The whole pan eventually settles down to a regular
honeycomb array of flow cells. Before phase transition, all the
molecules move randomly with respect to one another. However, at a
critical rate of energy supply, the system self-organizes into global
dynamic order in which all the astronomical numbers of molecules are
moving in formation as though choreographed to do so.
A still more illuminating physical metaphor for the living system is
the laser (Haken, 1977), in which energy is pumped into a cavity
containing atoms capable of emitting light. At low levels of pumping,
the atoms emit randomly as in an ordinary lamp. As the pumping rate
is increased, a threshold is reached when all the atoms oscillate
together in phase, and send out a giant light track that is a million
times as long as that emitted by individual atoms. Both examples
illustrate how energy input or energy pumping and dynamic order are
intimately linked.
These and other considerations led me to identify Schrödinger’s
“negative entropy” as “stored mobilizable energy in a space-time
structured system” ( Ho, 1994b, 1995a). The key to understanding the
thermodynamics of living systems turns out not so much to be energy
flow but energy storage under energy flow (Fig. 1). Energy flow is of no
consequence unless the energy can be trapped and stored within the
system where it circulates to do work before dissipating. A reproducing
life cycle, i.e., an organism, arises when the loop of circulating energy is
closed. At that point, we have a life cycle, within which stored energy is
mobilized, remaining largely stored as it is mobilized.
The life cycle is a highly differentiated space-time structure, the
predominant modes of activity are themselves cycles spanning an
entire gamut of space-times from the local and fast (or slow) to the
global and slow (or fast), all of which are coupled together. These cycles
are most familiar to us in the form of biological rhythms extending
over 20 orders of magnitude of time, from electrical activities of
neurons and other cells to circadian and circa-annual rhythms and
beyond. An intuitive picture is given in Figure 2, where coupled cycles
of different sizes are fed by the one-way energy flow. This complex,
entangled space-time structure is strongly reminiscent of Bergson’s
“durations” of organic processes, which necessitates a different way of
conceptualizing space-time as heterogeneous, nonlinear,
multidimensional and nonlocal (see Ho, 1993).[5]
On account of the complete spectrum of coupled cycles, energy is
stored and mobilized over all space-times according to the relaxation
times (and volumes) of the processes involved. So, organisms can take
advantage of two different ways of mobilizing energy with maximum
efficiency -- nonequilbrium transfer in which stored energy is
transferred before it is thermalized, and quasi-equilibrium transfer, for
which the free energy change approaches zero according to
conventional thermodynamic considerations (McClare, 1971). Energy
input into any mode can be readily delocalized over all modes, and
conversely, energy from all modes can become concentrated into any
mode. In other words, energy coupling in the living system is
symmetrical, which is why we can have energy at will, whenever and
wherever required (see Ho, 1993, 1994b, 1995a,b). The organism is, in
effect, a closed, self-sufficient energetic domain of cyclic non-
dissipative processes coupled to the dissipative processes. In the
formalism of conventional thermodynamics, the life cycle can be
considered, to first approximation, to consist of all those cyclic
processes -- for which the net entropy change balances out to zero --
coupled to those dissipative processes necessary for keeping it going,
for which the net entropy change is greater than zero (see Figure 3).
This representation, justified in detail elsewhere (Ho, 1996a), is derived
from the thermodynamics of the steady state (see Denbigh, 1951).
Consequently, the organism has freed itself from the immediate
constraints of energy conservation -- the First Law -- as well as the
Second Law of thermodynamics. There is always energy available
within the system, which is mobilized at close to maximum efficiency
and over all space-time modes. [6]
III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism
73
It was geneticist/embryologist C.H. Waddington (1957) who first
introduced nonlinear dynamical ideas into developmental biology in
the form of the `epigenetic landscape’ -- a general metaphor for the
dynamics of the developmental process. The developmental paths of
tissues and cells are seen to be constrained or canalized to `flow’ along
certain valleys and not others due to the `force’ exerted on the
landscape by the various gene products which define the fluid
topography of the landscape.[7] This fluid topography contains
multiple potential developmental pathways that may be realized as the
result of “fluctuations”, or if the environmental conditions, the genes
or gene products change. This metaphor has been made much more
explicit recently by mathematician Peter Saunders (1992) who shows
that the properties of the epigenetic landscape are “common not just
to developing organisms but to most nonlinear dynamical systems.”
The polychromatic organism
A particular kind of nonlinearity which has made headlines
recently is `deterministic chaos’: a complex dynamical behaviour that is
locally unpredictable and irregular, which has been used to describe
many living functions including the collective behaviour of ant colonies
(see Goodwin, 1994). The unrepeatable patterns of brain activities that
persuaded Freeman ( 1995) to declare brain science in crisis are typical
of systems exhibiting deterministic chaos. Another putative example is
the heart beat, which is found to be much more irregular in healthy
people than in cardiac patients.[8] Physiologist Goldberger (1991) came
to the conclusion that healthy heartbeat has “a type of variability called
chaos”, and that loss of this “complex variability” is associated with
pathology and with aging. Similarly, the electrical activities of the
functioning brain, apart from being unrepeatable from moment to
moment, also contain many frequencies. But during epileptic fits, the
spectrum is greatly impoverished (Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell, 1991 ).
There is much current debate as to whether these complex variabilities
associated with the healthy, functional state constitute chaos in the
technical sense, so the question is by no means settled (Glass and
Mackey, 1988).
A different understanding of the complex activity spectrum of the
healthy state is that it is polychromatic (Ho, 1996c), approaching
`white’ in the ideal, in which all the modes of energy storage are equally
represented. It corresponds to the so-called f(l) = const. rule that Popp
(1986) has generalized from the spectrum of light or “biophotons”
found to be emitted from all living systems. I have proposed that this
polychromatic ideal distribution of stored energy is the state towards
which all open systems capable of energy storage naturally evolve (Ho,
1994b). It is a state of both maximum and minimum in entropy
content: maximum because energy becomes equally distributed over all
the space-time modes (hence the `white’ ideal), and minimum because
the modes are all coupled or linked together to give a coherent whole,
in other words, to a single degree of freedom (Popp, 1986; Ho, 1993). In
a system where there is no impedance to energy mobilization, all the
modes are intercommunicating and hence all the frequencies will be
represented. Instead, when coupling is imperfect, or when the
subsystem, say, the heart, or the brain, is not communicating properly,
it falls back on its own modes, leading to impoverishment of its activity
spectrum. Living systems are necessarily a polychromatic whole, they
are full of colour and variegated complexity that nevertheless cohere
into a singular being.
The organism is a free sentient being and hence able to decide its
own fate
One distinguishing feature of the living system is its exquisite
sensitivity to weak signals. For example, the eye can detect single
photons falling on the retina, and the presence of several molecules of
pheromones in the air is sufficient to attract male insects to their
appropriate mates. That extreme sensitivity of the organism applies to
all levels and is the direct consequence of its energy self-sufficiency. No
part of the system has to be pushed or pulled into action, nor be
subjected to mechanical regulation and control. Instead, coordinated
action of all the parts depends on rapid intercommunication
throughout the system. The organism is a system of “excitable
media” (see Goodwin, 1994, 1995), or excitable cells and tissues poised
to respond specifically and disproportionately (i.e., nonlinearly) to
weak signals because of the large amount of energy stored, which can
thus amplify the weak signal into macroscopic action. It is by virtue of
its energy self-sufficiency, therefore, that an organism is a sentient
being -- a system of sensitive parts all set to intercommunicate, to
respond and to act appropriately as a whole to any contingency. The
organism is indeed free from mechanical determinism, but it does not
thereby fall prey to indeterminacy. Far from surrendering its fate to the
indeterminacy of nonlinear dynamics (or quantum theory, for that
matter), the organism maximizes its opportunities inherent in the
multiplicity of futures available to it. I have argued elsewhere that
indeterminacy is really the problem of the ignorance of the external
observer, and not experienced by the being itself, who has full
knowledge of its own state, and can readily adjust, respond and act in
the most appropriate manner (Ho, 1993). In a very real sense, the
organism is free to decide its own fate because it is a sentient being
who has moment to moment, up-to-date knowledge of its own
internal milieu as well as the external environment.
IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control as an
interconnected, intercommunicating whole
This idea has become very concrete as the result of recent
advances in biochemistry, cell biology and genetics. A molecular
democracy of distributed control There are thousands of enzymes
catalyzing thousands of energy transactions and metabolic
transformations in our body. The product of one enzyme is acted on by
one or more other enzymes, resulting in a highly interconnected
metabolic network. Henrik Kacser (1987) was among the first to realize
that once we have a network, especially one as complicated as the
metabolic network, it is unrealistic to think that there could be special
enzymes controlling the flow of metabolites under all circumstances.
He and a colleague pioneered metabolic control analysis, to discover
how the network is actually regulated under different conditions. After
more than 20 years of investigation by many biochemists and cell
biologists, it is now generally recognized that so-called `control’ is
invariably distributed over many enzymes (and metabolites) in the
network, and moreover, the distribution of control differs under
different conditions. The metabolic network turns out to be a
“molecular democracy” of distributed control.
Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues
Recent studies have also revealed that energy mobilization in living
systems is achieved by protein or enzyme molecules acting as “flexible
molecular energy machines” (see Ho, 1995a), which transfer energy
directly from the point of release to the point of utilization, without
thermalization or dissipation. These direct energy transfers are carried
out in collective modes extending from the molecular to the
macroscopic domain. The flow of metabolites is channeled coherently
at the molecular level, from one enzyme to the next in sequence, in
multi-enzyme complexes (see Welch and Clegg, 1987 ). At the same
time, high voltage electron microscopy and other physical
measurement techniques reveal that the cell is more like a `solid state’
than the `bag of dissolved enzymes’ that generations of biochemists
had previously supposed (Clegg, 1984). Not only are almost all enzymes
bound to an intricate “microtrabecular lattice”, but a large proportion
of metabolites as well as water molecules are also structured on the
enormous surfaces available. Aqueous channels are now thought to be
involved in the active transport of solutes within the cell in the same
way that the blood stream transport metabolites and chemical
messengers within the organism (Wheatley and Clegg, 1991). Joseph
Needham (1936) and his colleagues were already aware of all that some
sixty years ago.
As Welch and Berry (1985) propose, the whole cell is linked up by
“long-range energy continua” of mechanical interactions, electric and
eletrochemical fluxes and in particular, proton currents that form a
“protoneural network”, whereby metabolism is regulated instantly
and down to minute detail. In addition, the possibility that cells
74
and tissues are also linked by electromagnetic phonons and photons is
increasingly entertained (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992; Ho, 1993; Ho,
Popp and Warnke, 1994). As I shall show later, the cell (as well as
organism) is not so much a “solid state” as liquid crystalline. Living
systems, therefore, possess just the conditions that favour the rapid
propagation of influences in all directions, so that local and global can
no longer be easily distinguished. Global phase transitions may often
take place, which can be initiated at any point within the system or
subsystem. Freeman and Barrie (1994) have described abrupt, phase-
transition like changes that typically occur in the eeg of whole areas of
the brain, recorded simultaneously with a large array of electrodes, for
which no definite centre(s) of origin can be identified.[9]
Organism and environment -- a mutual partnership
Biology today remains dominated by the genetic paradigm. Genes
are seen to be the repository of information that controls the
development of the organism, but are otherwise insulated from the
environment, and passed on unchanged to the next generation except
for rare random mutations. The much publicized Human Genome
Project is being promoted on that very basis.[10] Yet, the genetic
paradigm has already been fatally undermined at least ten years ago,
when a plethora of `fluid genome’ processes were first discovered, and
many more have come to light since. These processes destabilize and
alter genes and genomes in the course of development, some of the
genetic changes are so well correlated with the environment that they
are referred to as “directed mutations”. Many of the genetic changes
are then passed on to the next generation. I pointed out at the time
that heredity can no longer be seen to reside solely in the DNA passed
on from one generation to the next. Instead, the stability and
repeatability of development -- which we recognize as heredity -- is
distributed in the whole gamut of dynamic feedback interrelationships
between organism and environment, from the socioecological to the
genetic. All these may leave imprints that are passed on to subsequent
generations, in the form of cultural traditions or artefacts, maternal or
cytoplasmic effects, gene expression states, as well as genetic (DNA
sequence) changes.
The organism is highly interconnected and intercommunicating at
all levels extending from within the cell to the socioecological
environment. It is on that account that the organism has freed itself
from mechanistic controls of any kind. It is not a passive object at the
mercy of random variation and natural selection, but an active
participants in the evolutionary drama.[11] In constantly responding to
and transforming its environment, it partakes in creating the possible
futures of generations to come.
V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
The concept of coherence has emerged within the past 20 years to
describe the wholeness of the organism. The first detailed theory of
coherence of the organism was presented by Herbert Fröhlich (1968;
1980) who argued that as organisms are made up of strongly dipolar
molecules packed rather densely together (c.f. the `solid state’ cell),
electric and elastic forces will constantly interact. Metabolic pumping
will excite macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids as well as
cellular membranes (which typically have an enormous electric field of
some 107V/m across them). These will start to vibrate and eventually
build up into collective modes, or coherent excitations, of both
phonons and photons (sound and light) that extend over macroscopic
distances within the organism and perhaps also outside the organism.
The emission of electromagnetic radiation from coherent lattice
vibrations in a solid-state semi-conductor has recently been
experimentally demonstrated for the first time (Dekorsy et al, 1995).
The possibility that organisms may use electromagnetic radiations to
communicate between cells was already entertained by Soviet biologist
Gurwitsch (1925) early this century.This hypothesis was revived by
Popp and his coworkers in the late 1970s, and there is now a large and
rapidly growing literature on “biophotons” that are believed to be
emitted from a coherent photon field (or energy storage field) within
the living system (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992). We have indeed found
that a single, one minute, exposure of synchronously developing early
fruitfly embryos to white light results in the re-emission of relatively
intense and prolonged flashes of light, some tens of minutes and even
hours after the light exposure (Ho et al, 1992b). This is reminiscent of
phase-correlated collective emission, or superradiance, in physical
systems, although the timescale is orders of magnitude longer. For
phase-correlation to build up over the entire population, one must
assume that each embryo has a collective phase of all its activities, in
other words, each embryo must be considered a highly coherent
domain, despite its multiplicity of activities (Ho, Zhou and Haffegee,
1995). Actually, this is no different from the macroscopic phase
correlations that are involved in the synchronous flashing of huge
populations of fireflies (Strogatz and Mirollo, 1988), and in many
physiological functions, such as limb coordination during locomotion
(Collin and Stewart, 1992; Kelso, 1991) and coupling between heart rate
and respiratory rate (Breithaupt, 1989). Under those conditions, whole
limbs or entire circulatory and respiratory systems must be considered
coherent domains which can maintain definite phase relationships
with respect to one another.
During the same early period of development in Drosophila,
exposure of the embryos to weak static magnetic fields also cause
characteristic global transformation of the normal segmental body
pattern to helical configurations in the larvae emerging 24 hours later
(Ho et al, 1992a). As the energies involved are well below the thermal
threshold, we conclude that there can be no effect unless the external
field is acting on a coherent field where charges are moving in phase, or
where magnetically sensitive liquid crystals are undergoing phase
alignment globally (Ho, et al, 1994). Liquid crystals may indeed be the
material basis of many, if not all aspects of biological organization (Ho
et al, 1996).
Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals
Liquid crystals are phases of matter between the solid and the
liquid states, hence the term, mesophases (DeGennes, 1974). Liquid
crystalline mesophases possess long range orientational order (all the
molecules pointing in the same direction), and often also varying
degrees of translational order (the individual molecules keep to their
positions to varying extents). In contrast to solid crystals, liquid
crystals are mobile and flexible, and above all, highly responsive. They
undergo rapid changes in orientation or phase transitions when
exposed to electric or magnetic fields (Blinov, 1983) or to changes in
temperature, pressure, pH, hydration, and concentrations of inorganic
ions (Collings, 1990; Knight, 1993). These properties are ideal for
organisms (Gray, 1993; Knight, 1993). Liquid crystals in organisms
include all its major constituents; the lipids of cellular membranes, the
DNA in chromosomes, all proteins, especially cytoskeletal proteins,
muscle proteins, collagens and other macromolecules of connective
tissues. These adopt a multiplicity of different mesophases that may be
crucial for biological structure and function at all levels of organization
(Ho et al, 1996) from channeling metabolites in the cell to pattern
determination and the coordinated locomotion of whole organisms.
The importance of liquid crystals for living organization was
recognized by Joseph Needham (1936) among others. He suggested
that living systems actually are liquid crystals, and that many liquid
crystalline mesophases may exist in the cell although they cannot then
be detected. Indeed, there has been no direct evidence that extensive
liquid crystalline mesophases exist in living organisms or in the
cytoplasm until our recent discovery of a noninvasive optical technique
(Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Ho and Saunders, 1994; Newton, Haffegee
and Ho, 1995). This enables us to obtain high resolution and high
contrast coloured images of live organisms based on visualizing just the
kind of coherent liquid crystalline mesophases which Needham and
others had predicted.
The technique effectively allows us to see the whole of the living
organism at once from its macroscopic activities down to the phase
alignment of the molecules that make up its tissues. Brilliant optical
colours are generated which are specific for each tissue, dependent on
the molecular structure and the degree of coherent alignment of
all the molecules, even as the molecules are moving about
75
busily transforming energy. This is possible because visible light
vibrates much faster than the molecules can move, so the tissues will
appear indistinguishable from static crystals to the light passing
through so long as the movements of the constituent molecules are
sufficiently coherent. With this imaging technique, one can see that
the organism is thick with activities at all levels, which are coordinated
in a continuum from the macroscopic to the molecular. And that is
what the coherence of the organism entails.
These images also bring out another aspect of the wholeness of the
organism: all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without
exception, are polarized along the anteroposterior axis, so that all the
colours in the different tissues of the body are at a maximum when the
anteroposterior axis is appropriately aligned, and they change in
concert as the organism is rotated from that position. The
anteroposterior axis acts as the optical axis for the whole organism,
which behaves in effect, as a single crystal. This leaves us in little doubt
that the organism is a singular whole, despite the diverse multiplicity
and polychromatic nature of its constituent parts. The tissues not only
maintain their crystalline order when they are actively transforming
energy, the degree of order seems to depend on energy transformation,
in that the more active and energetic the organism, the more intensely
colorful it is, implying that the molecular motions are all the more
coherent (Ho and Saunders, 1994; Ho et al, 1996). The coherence of
the organism is therefore closely tied up with its energetic status, as
argued in the beginning of this essay: the coherent whole is full of
energy -- it is a vibrant coherent whole.
Quantum coherence in living organisms
The above considerations and observations show that the essence
of organic wholeness is that it is distributed throughout its constituent
parts so that local and global, part and whole are completely
indistinguishable -- the organism’s activities being always fully
coordinated in a continuum from the molecular to the macroscopic.
That convinces me (as argued in detail in Ho, 1993, also Ho, 1996a)
that there is something very special about the wholeness of organisms
that is only fully captured by quantum coherence.[12] An intuitive
appreciation of quantum coherence is to think of the `I’ that each and
every one of us experience of our own being. We know that our body is
a multiplicity of organs and tissues, composed of many billions of cells
and astronomical numbers of molecules of many different kinds, all
capable of working autonomously, and yet somehow cohering into the
singular being of our private experience. That is just the stuff of
quantum coherence. Quantum coherence does not mean that
everybody or every element of the system must be doing the same
thing all the time, it is more akin to a grand ballet, or better yet, a very
large jazz band where everyone is doing his or her own thing while
being perfectly in step and in tune with the whole. A quantum
coherent system maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom
( Ho, 1993). This property is technically referred to as factorizability,
the correlations between subsystems resolving neatly into self-
correlations so that the subsystems behave as though they are
independent of one another. It enables the body to be performing all
sorts of different but coordinated functions simultaneously (Ho,
1995b). It also enables instantaneous, as well as noiseless
intercommunication to take place throughout the system.[13] As I am
writing, my digestive system is working independently, my metabolism
busily transforming chemical energy in all my cells, putting some away
in the longer term stores of fat and glycogen, while converting most of
it into readily utilizable forms such as ATP. Similarly, my muscles are
keeping in tone and allowing me to work the keyboard, while,
hopefully, my neurons are firing in wonderfully coherent patterns in my
brain. Nevertheless, if the telephone should ring in the middle of all
this, I would turn to pick it up without hesitation.
The importance of factorizability is evoked by the movie character,
Dr. Strangelove, portrayed by Peter Sellers as a megalomaniac scientist
who wanted to rule the world. He was a wheelchair-bound paraplegiac,
who could not speak without raising his arm in the manner of a Nazi
salute. That is just the symptom of the loss of factorizability which is
the hallmark of quantum coherence.

The coherent organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of
activities -- organized according to their characteristic space-times --
each itself coherent, so that it can couple coherently to the rest (Ho,
1995b; 1996a). This picture is fully consistent with the earlier proposal
that the organism stores energy over all space-time domains each
intercommunicating (or coupled) with the rest. Quantum
superposition also enables the system to maximize its potential degrees
of freedom so that the single degree of freedom required for coherent
action can be instantaneously accessed.
The freedom of organisms
The organism maximizes both local freedom and global
intercommunication. One comes to the startling discovery that the
coherent organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing is in
control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is the failure to
transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people persist in
enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions; or
whether free will exists, and who choreographs the dance of molecules.
Does “consciousness” control matter or vice versa? These questions are
meaningless when one understands what it is to be a coherent, organic
whole. An organic whole is an entangled whole, where part and whole,
global and local are so thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable,
and each part is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive.
Choreographer and dancer are one and the same. The `self’ is a
domain of coherent activities, in the ideal, a pure state that permeates
the whole of our being with no definite localizations or boundaries, as
Bergson has described. The positing of `self’ as a domain of coherent
activities implies the existence of an active whole agent who is free. I
must stress that freedom does not entail the breakdown of causality as
many commentators have mistakenly supposed. On the contrary, an
acausal world would be one where it is impossible to be free, as
nothing would be intelligible. Nevertheless, freedom does entail a new
kind of organic causality that is nonlocal, and posited with the
organism itself. It is the experience of perceptual feedback consequent
on one’s actions that is responsible for the intuition of causality
(Freeman, 1990). However, it must not be supposed that the cause or
consciousness is secreted from some definite location in the brain, it is
distributed and delocalized throughout the system (c.f. Freeman, 1990).
Freedom in the present context means being true to `self’, in other
words, being coherent. A free act is a coherent act. Of course not all
acts are free, as one is seldom fully coherent. Yet the mere possiblity of
being unfree affirms the opposite, that freedom is real, “. . . we are free
when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it,
when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one
sometimes finds between the artist and his work.”[14]
The coherent `self’ is distributed and nonlocal -- being implicated
in a community of other entities with which one is entangled
(Whitehead, 1925; see also Ho, 1993). Thus, being true to self does not
imply acting against others. On the contrary, sustaining others sustains
the self, so being true to others is also being true to self. It is only
within a mechanistic Darwinian perspective that freedom becomes
perverted into acts against others (see Ho, 1996e). The coherent `self’
can also couple coherently to the environment so that one becomes as
much in control of the environment as one is responsive. The
organism thereby participates in creating its own possible futures as
well as those of the entire community of organisms in the universe,
much as Whitehead (1925) has envisaged. I venture to suggest,
therefore, that a truly free individual is a coherent being that lives life
fully and spontaneously, without fragmentation or hesitation, who is at
peace with herself and at ease with the universe as she participates in
creating, from moment to moment, its possible futures.
Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this paper was written for the occasion of the
6th Mind & Brain Conference, and I am grateful to Brian Goodwin
and Peter Fenwick for making it happen. Afterwards, I felt so inspired
by the discussions with the participants that I decided to write it
up for publication. Thanks are also due to Geoffrey Sewell for
76
stimulating discussions on coherence and bioenergetics and for
keeping track of my physics; to Peter Saunders, Brian Goodwin,
Michael Brown and Michael Clarke for their encouragement and
support, and for drawing my attention to crucial publications and
preprints. Invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript came
from the reviewers, Walter Freeman and Joseph Goguen.
Notes
1. The Theoretical Biology Club was an informal association of
academics based in Cambridge University in the 1930s. Its
membership was probably more extensive than I have indicated (see
Mackay, 1994). Their project continued, to some extent, in a series of
meetings organized by C.H. Waddington in the 1960s and 70s. The
proceedings, published under the title,Towards a Theoretical Biology
(Edinburgh University Press) were very influential among critics of
mainstream neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, including myself. Four
recent Waddington Memorial Conferences have been organized by
Waddington’s student, Brian Goodwin, and published as collected
volumes (see Goodwin and Saunders, 1989; Stein and Varela, 1992).
These helped to keep the project of the Theoretical Biology Club alive,
and I count myself among the intellectual beneficiaries.
2. Cited in Ehrenber, 1967, p103.
3. Schrödinger, 1944, pp.70-71.
4. Schrödinger was criticized by both Pauling and Perutz over his
non-rigorous use of “negative entropy”. The exchanges are described
by Gnaiger, 1994.
5. I explore the consequences of organic space-time for
understanding some of the more paradoxical “states of consciousness”
in my book (Ho, 1993) and also in a forth-coming paper (Ho and
Marcer, 1996).
6. The present conceptualization, based on thermodynamics,
converges with the notion of autopoesis describing the living system as
a unitary, self-producing entity, which Maturana and Varela (1987)
derived from purely formal considerations.
7. Waddington’s ideas in evolutionary theory is reviewed recently
by Ho, 1996b.
8. This is comprehensively described by Goodwin (1995) in our
Open University Third Level Course and accompanying video.
9. Elsewhere, it is argued that nonlocal intercommunication based
on quantum coherence is involved in these simultaneous changes in
brain activities (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
10. I have dealt with the socioeconomic implications as well as
scientific issues of gene biotechnology and the Human Genome
Project elsewhere Ho (1995c).
11. My colleagues and I have written against the reductionist
tendencies of mainstream evolutionary theory since 1976, but see in
particular, Ho and Saunders (1984); Pollard, J.W. (1984); Ho, M.W.
(1986); Ho and Fox (1988). The issue of epigenetic, or Lamarckian
inheritance has been thoroughly reviewed and documented recently by
Jablonka and Lamb (1995). See also, Ho, M.W. (1996d).
12. Some aspects of brain activity can best be understood in terms
of quantum coherence, independently of arguments given by
Hameroff and Penrose (1995) who offer a specific mechanism for
mediating coherence. The quantum coherence described in the
present paper involves the whole system. When the system is
coherent, nonlocal correlations can be established instantaneously, i.e.,
without delay. The large-scale spatial coherence of brain activities
observed by Freeman and Barrie (1994) may be indicative of such
instantaneous intercommunication. The relationship between
quantum coherence, organic space-time and conscious experience is
the subject of another paper (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
13. The coherent pure state (which is factorizable) is the
prerequisite for instantaneous, lossless intercommunication, because
the slightest change will give rise to a `signal’ passing between the
uncorrelated factorizable parts. However, during intercommunication,
factorizability is temporarily lost.
14. Bergson, 1916, p. 172.
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Genetic Determinism and Beyond, 14 Feb 2001, and The Human
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whole (submitted).
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Books, 1995.
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1984.
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Goodwin, B.C. , Saunders, P.T. and Robertson, F. (1992a). Brief
exposure to weak static magnetic fields during early embryogenesis
cause cuticular pattern abnormalities in Drosophila larvae. Physics in
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organization, coherence and the morphogenetic field In Physics in
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Legends
Figure 1. Energy flow, energy storage and the reproducing life-cycle.
Figure 2. The many-fold cycles of life coupled to energy flow.
Figure 3. The organism frees itself from the contraints of energy
conservation and the second law of thermodynamics.
Are Science and Religion Compatible?
Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg Debate the God Factor in
Science
Werner Heisenberg
Note: This is a marvelous conversation amongst seminal physicists
of the 20th century, when religion was still a discussable topic.
Objective vs. subjective, free will, ethics vs. science are all debated in a
lively and readable manner. I post this because it gives an excellent
framework for viewing the underlying values of Harmony and Balance
in Taoism, and the importance laid on evolving change and virtue
embedded in its “religious natural science”. - Michael Winn
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
By Werner Heisenberg
From Physics and Beyond, By Werner Heisenberg, (Harper & Row,
1971). Republished in Physics And Philosophy: The Evolution Of
Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg, (Harper Perrennial, 2007).
WERNER HEISENBERG (1901–1976) was born in Würzberg,
Germany, and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the
University of Munich. He became famous for his groundbreaking
Uncertainty (or Indeterminacy) Principle and was the recipient of The
Nobel Prize in Physics 1932. After World War II he was named
director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and
78
Astrophysics.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
One evening during the Solvay Conference, some of the younger
members stayed behind in the lounge of the hotel. This group included
Wolfgang Pauli and myself, and was soon afterward joined by Paul
Dirac. One of us said: “Einstein keeps talking about God: what are we
to make of that? It is extremely difficult to imagine that a scientist like
Einstein should have such strong ties with a religious tradition.”
“Not so much Einstein as Max Planck,” someone objected. “From
some of Planck’s utterances it would seem that he sees no
contradiction between religion and science, indeed that he believes the
two are perfectly compatible.”
I was asked what I knew of Planck’s views on the subject, and what
I thought myself. I had spoken to Planck on only a few occasions,
mostly about physics and not about general questions, but I was
acquainted with some of Planck’s close friends, who had told me a
great deal about his attitude.
“I assume,” I must have replied, “that Planck considers religion and
science compatible because, in his view, they refer to quite distinct
facets of reality. Science deals with the objective, material world. It
invites us to make accurate statements about objective reality and to
grasp its interconnections. Religion, on the other hand, deals with the
world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do,
not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or
false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the
basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. In short, the conflict
between the two, which has been raging since the eighteenth century,
seems founded on a misunderstanding, or, more precisely, on a
confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific
statements.
Needless to say, the result makes no sense at all. This view, which I
know so well from my parents, associates the two realms with the
objective and subjective aspects of the world respectively. Science is, so
to speak, the manner in which we confront, in which we argue about,
the objective side of reality. Religious faith, on the other hand, is the
expression of the subjective decisions that help us choose the
standards by which we propose to act and live. Admittedly, we
generally make these decisions in accordance with the attitudes of the
group to which we belong, be it our family, nation, or culture. Our
decisions are strongly influenced by educational and environmental
factors, but in the final analysis they are subjective and hence not
governed by the ‘true or false’ criterion.
Max Planck, if I understand him rightly, has used this freedom and
come down squarely on the side of the Christian tradition. His
thoughts and actions, particularly as they affect his personal
relationships, fit perfectly into the framework of this tradition, and no
one will respect him the less for it. As far as he is concerned, therefore,
the two realms—the objective and the subjective facets of the world—
are quite separate, but I must confess that I myself do not feel
altogether happy about this separation. I doubt whether human
societies can live with so sharp a distinction between knowledge and
faith.”
Wolfgang shared my concern. “It’s all bound to end in tears,” he
said. “At the dawn of religion, all the knowledge of a particular
community fitted into a spiritual framework, based largely on religious
values and ideas. The spiritual framework itself had to be within the
grasp of the simplest member of the community, even if its parables
and images conveyed no more than the vaguest hint as to their
underlying values and ideas. But if he himself is to live by these values,
the average man has to be convinced that the spiritual framework
embraces the entire wisdom of his society. For ‘believing’ does not to
him mean ‘taking for granted,’ but rather ‘trusting in the guidance’ of
accepted values. That is why society is in such danger whenever fresh
knowledge threatens to explode the old spiritual forms.
The complete separation of knowledge and faith can at best be an
emergency measure, afford some temporary relief. In western culture,
for instance, we may well reach the point in the not too distant future
where the parables and images of the old religions will have lost their
persuasive force even for the average person; when that happens, I am
afraid that all the old ethics will collapse like a house of cards and that
unimaginable horrors will be perpetrated. In brief, I cannot really
endorse Planck’s philosophy, even if it is logically valid and even though
I respect the human attitudes to which it gives rise.
“Einstein’s conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow
involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the
central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural
laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and
directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this
is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don’t believe Einstein is tied
to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God
is entirely foreign to him. But as far as [Einstein] he is concerned there
is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the
subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a
far better starting point.
“A starting point for what?” I asked. “If you consider man’s attitude
to the central order a purely personal matter, then you may agree with
Einstein’s view, but then you must also concede that nothing at all
follows from this view.”
“Perhaps it does,” Wolfgang replied. “The development of science
during the past two centuries has certainly changed man’s thinking,
even outside the Christian West. Hence it matters quite a bit what
physicists think. And it was precisely the idea of an objective world
running its course in time and space according to strict causal laws that
produced a sharp clash between science and the spiritual formulations
of the various religions. If science goes beyond this strict view—and it
has done just that with relativity theory and is likely to go even further
with quantum theory—then the relationship between science and the
contents religions try to express must change once again. Perhaps
science, by revealing the existence of new relationships during the past
thirty years, may have lent our thought much greater depth.
The concept of complementarity, for instance, which Niels Bohr
considers so crucial to the interpretation of quantum theory, was by no
means unknown to philosophers, even if they did not express it so
succinctly. However, its very appearance in the exact sciences has
constituted a decisive change: the idea of material objects that are
completely independent of the manner in which we observe them
proved to be nothing but an abstract extrapolation, something that has
no counterpart in nature. In Asiatic philosophy and Eastern religions
we fined the complementary idea of a pure subject of knowledge, one
that confronts no object. This idea, too, will prove an abstract
extrapolation, corresponding to no spiritual or mental reality.
If we think about the wider context, we may in the future be
forced to keep a middle course between these extremes, perhaps the
one charted by Bohr’s complementarity concept. Any science that
adapts itself to this form of thinking will not only be more tolerant of
the different forms of religion, but, having a wider overall view, may
also contribute to the world of values.”
Paul Dirac had joined us in the meantime. He [Paul Dirac] had
only just turned twenty-five, and had little time for tolerance. “I don’t
know why we are talking about religion,” he objected. “If we are honest
—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of
false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a
product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why
primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the
overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have
personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays,
when we understand so many natural processes, we have no
79
need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate
of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this
assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so
much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and
all the other horrors He might have prevented.
“If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas
still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower
classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous
and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a
kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and
so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people.
Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the
State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards
—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against
injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That
is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the
human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”
“You are simply judging religion by its political abuses,” I objected,
“and since most things in this world can be abused—even the
Communist ideology which you recently propounded—all such
judgments are inadmissible. After all, there will always be human
societies, and these must find a common language in which they can
speak about life and death, and about the wider context in which their
lives are set. The spiritual forms that have developed historically out of
this search for a common language must have had a great persuasive
force—how else could so many people have lived by them for so many
centuries? Religion can’t be dismissed as simply all that. But perhaps
you are drawn to another religion, such as the old Chinese, in which
the idea of a personal God does not occur?”
“I dislike religious myths on principle,” Dirac replied, “if only
because the myths of the different religions contradict one another.
After all, it was purely by chance that I was born in Europe and not in
Asia, and that is surely no criterion for judging what is true or what I
ought to believe. And I can only believe what is true. As for right
action, I can deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I
find myself: I live in society with others, to whom, in principle, I must
grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a
fair balance; no more can be asked of me. All this talk about God’s will,
about sin and repentance, about a world beyond by which we must
direct our lives, only serves to disguise the sober truth. Belief in God
merely encourages us to think that God wills us to submit to a higher
force, and it is this idea which helps to preserve social structures that
may have been perfectly good in their day but no longer fit the modern
world. All your talk of a wider context and the like strikes me as quite
unacceptable. Life, when all is said and done, is just like science: we
come up against difficulties and have to solve them. And we can never
solve more than one difficulty at a time; your wider context is nothing
but a mental superstructure added a posteriori.”
And so the discussion continued, and we were all of us surprised to
notice that Wolfgang was keeping so silent. He would pull a long face
or smile rather maliciously from time to time, but he said nothing. In
the end, we had to ask him to tell us what he thought. He seemed a
little surprised and then said: “Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a
religion, and its guiding principle is: ‘There is no God and Dirac is His
prophet.’” We all laughed, including Dirac, and this brought our
evening in the hotel lounge to a close.
Some time later, probably in Copenhagen, I told Niels about our
conversation. He immediately jumped to the defense of the youngest
member of our circle. “I consider it marvelous,” he said, “that Paul
should be so uncompromising in his defense of all that can be
expressed in clear and logical language. He believes that what can be
said at all can be said clearly—or, as Wittgenstein put it, that ‘whereof
one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’ Whenever Dirac sends
me a manuscript, the writing is so neat and free of corrections that
merely looking at it is an aesthetic pleasure. If I suggest even minor
changes, Paul becomes terribly unhappy and generally changes nothing
at all. His work is, in any case, quite brilliant. Recently the two of us
went to an exhibition which included a glorious gray-blue seascape by
Manet. In the foreground was a boat, and beside it, in the water, a dark
gray spot, whose meaning was not quite clear. Dirac said, ‘This spot is
not admissible.’ A strange way of looking at art, but he was probably
quite right. In a good work of art, just as in a good piece of scientific
work, every detail must be laid down quite unequivocally; there can be
no room for mere accident.
“Still, religion is rather a different matter. I feel very much like
Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to
remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from
science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language
of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think
that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry
with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does
indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of
truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an
objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that
religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and
paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the
reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a
genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a
subjective side won’t get us very far.
“That is why I consider those developments in physics during the
last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as
‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are, a great liberation of thought. The whole
thing started with the theory of relativity. In the past, the statement
that two events are simultaneous was considered an objective
assertion, one that could be communicated quite simply and that was
open to verification by any observer. Today we know that ‘simultaneity’
contains a subjective element, inasmuch as two events that appear
simultaneous to an observer at rest are not necessarily simultaneous to
an observer in motion. However, the relativistic description is also
objective inasmuch as every observer can deduce by calculation what
the other observer will perceive or has perceived. For all that, we have
come a long way from the classical ideal of objective descriptions.
“In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been
even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical
physics to make statements about observable facts. For instance, we
can say that a photographic plate has been blackened, or that cloud
droplets have formed. But we can say nothing about the atoms
themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on
the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has
freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the
observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer
possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the
means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be
said to have objective and subjective features.
The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we
know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality.
Admittedly, even in our future encounters with reality we shall have to
distinguish between the objective and the subjective side, to make a
division between the two. But the location of the separation may
depend on the way things are looked at; to a certain extent it can be
chosen at will. Hence I can quite understand why we cannot speak
about the content of religion in an objectifying language. The fact that
different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual
forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these
different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they
exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing
from man’s relationship with the central order.”
“If you distinguish so sharply between the languages of religion,
science, and art,” I asked, “what meaning do you attach to such
apodictic statements as ‘There is a living God’ or ‘There is an immortal
soul’? What is the meaning of ‘there is’ in this type of language?
Science, like Dirac, objects to such formulations. Let me illustrate the
epistemological side of the problem by means of the following
analogy:
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“Mathematicians, as everyone knows, work with an imaginary unit,
the square root of –1, called i. We know that i does not figure among
the natural numbers. Nevertheless, important branches of
mathematics, for instance the theory of analytical functions, are based
on this imaginary unit, that is, on the fact that -1 exists after all. Would
you agree that the statement ‘There is a -1’ means nothing else than
‘There are important mathematical relations that are most simply
represented by the introduction of the -1 concept’? And yet these
relations would exist even without it. That is precisely why this type of
mathematics is so useful even in science and technology. What is
decisive, for instance, in the theory of functions, is the existence of
important mathematical laws governing the behavior of pairs of
continuous variables.
These relations are rendered more comprehensible by the
introduction of the abstract concept of -1, although that concept is not
basically needed for our understanding, and although it has no
counterpart among the natural numbers. An equally abstract concept
is that of infinity, which also plays a very important role in modern
mathematics. It, too, has no correlate, and moreover raises grave
problems. In short, mathematics introduces ever higher stages of
abstraction that help us attain a coherent grasp of ever wider realms.
To get back to our original question, is it correct to look upon the
religious ‘there is’ as just another, though different, attempt to reach
ever higher levels of abstraction? An attempt to facilitate our
understanding of universal connections? After all, the connections
themselves are real enough, no matter into what spiritual forms we try
to fit them.”
“With respect to the epistemological side of the problem, your
comparison may pass,” Bohr replied. “But in other respects it is quite
inadequate. In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the
content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental
game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other
hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are
meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very
existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside.
Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from
our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure
of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the
strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once
formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its
particular level of knowledge.
Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual
framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom
reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and
societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an
individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence,
he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures—consciously
or unconsciously. For he, too, must be able to speak of life and death
and the human condition to other members of the society in which
he’s chosen to live; he must educate his children according to the
norms of that society, fit into its life. Epistemological sophistries
cannot possibly help him attain these ends.
Here, too, the relationship between critical thought about the
spiritual content of a given religion and action based on the deliberate
acceptance of that content is complementary. And such acceptance, if
consciously arrived at, fills the individual with strength of purpose,
helps him to overcome doubts and, if he has to suffer, provides him
with the kind of solace that only a sense of being sheltered under an all-
embracing roof can grant. In that sense, religion helps to make social
life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the
language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within
which our life is set.”
“You keep referring to the individual’s free choice,” I said, “and you
compare it with the freedom with which the atomic physicist can
arrange his experiments in this way or that. Now the classical physicist
had no such freedom. Does that mean that the special features of
modern physics have a more direct bearing on the problem of the
freedom of the will? As you know, the fact that atomic processes
cannot be fully determined is often used as an argument in favor of
free will and divine intervention.”
“I am convinced that this whole attitude is based on a simple
misunderstanding, or rather on the confusion of questions, which, as
far as I can see, impinge on distinct though complementary ways of
looking at things. If we speak of free will, we refer to a situation in
which we have to make decisions. This situation and the one in which
we analyze the motives of our actions or even the one in which we
study physiological processes, for instance the electrochemical
processes in our brain, are mutually exclusive. In other words, they are
complementary, so that the question whether natural laws determine
events completely or only statistically has no direct bearing on the
question of free will. Naturally, our different ways of looking at things
must fit together in the long run, i.e., we must be able to recognize
them as noncontradictory parts of the same reality, though we cannot
yet tell precisely how.
When we speak of divine intervention, we quite obviously do not
refer to the scientific determination of an event, but to the meaningful
connection between this event and others or human thought. Now
this intellectual connection is as much a part of reality as scientific
causality; it would be much too crude a simplification if we ascribed it
exclusively to the subjective side of reality. Once again we can learn
from the analogous situation in natural science. There are well-known
biological relations that we do not describe causally, but rather
finalistically, that is, with respect of their ends. We have only to think
of the healing process in an injured organism. The finalistic
interpretation has a characteristically complementary relationship to
the one based on physico-chemical or atomic laws; that is, in the one
case we ask whether the process leads to the desired end, the
restoration of normal conditions in the organism; in the other case we
ask about the causal chain determining the molecular processes.
The two descriptions are mutually exclusive, but not necessarily
contradictory. We have good reason to assume that quantum-
mechanical laws can be proved valid in a living organism just as they
can in dead matter. For all that, a finalistic description is just as valid. I
believe that if the development of atomic physics has taught us
anything, it is that we must learn to think more subtly than in the past.”
“We always come back to the epistemological side of religion,” I
objected. “But Dirac’s attack on religion was aimed chiefly at its ethical
side. Dirac disapproves quite particularly of the dishonesty and self-
deception that are far too often coupled to religious thought. But in his
abhorrence he has become a fanatic defender of rationalism, and I
have the feeling that rationalism is not enough.”
“I think Dirac did well,” Niels said, “to warn you so forcefully
against the dangers of self-deception and inner contradictions; but
Wolfgang was equally right when he jokingly drew Dirac’s attention to
the extraordinary difficulty of escaping this danger entirely.” Niels
closed the conversation with one of those stories he liked to tell on
such occasions: “One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a
horseshoe over the door to his house. When a mutual acquaintance
asked him, ‘But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe
that this horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he replied, ‘Of course not; but
they say it helps even if you don’t believe it.’”
Researchers find sense of “Self” in the Right Brain
Discovery News
This study on the right brain frontal lobe as dominant in forming
our personality is curiously matched by ancient Chinese theory that
the right half of the body is the yin side, i.e. the more contracted
personal side.
It also underscores that the traditional strength of western
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ego, in the left brain language center, is a false center of self. Taoist
practice is to cultivate the meeting point between left and right brain
to activate the universal brain, the chi field.
Michael Winn
Discovery News
Wednesday, May 9, 2001
dsc.discovery.com/news/reu/20010507/brain.html
Researchers studying patients with a rare degenerative brain
malady that can trigger dramatic changes in personality said today they
have pinpointed a part of the brain that controls a person’s sense of
“self.”
An area in the front portion of the brain’s right frontal lobe
appears to harbor the sense of self -- in other words, personality, beliefs,
likes and dislikes, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University
of California-San Francisco.
Miller said he began looking into the anatomy of the self after
noticing that several of his patients with frontotemporal dementia,
commonly known as Pick’s disease, underwent a stark transformation,
changing their religious and political beliefs, and altering their
preferences in food and clothing.
Miller and several colleagues examined 72 people with Pick’s
disease, which is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers used
advanced brain imaging techniques to determine which areas of the
brain had the most severe degeneration. They also evaluated the
patients for major changes in personality, values and tastes. Seven
patients had undergone a dramatic change of self, the study found. Six
of those had their most severe abnormalities in the brain’s right frontal
lobe.
Of the 65 patients whose sense of self had been preserved, only
one had the most severe damage in the right frontal lobe. Miller said
the findings indicate that normal functioning of the right frontal lobe
is needed for people to maintain their sense of self. He also said the
findings demonstrate that a biological disorder can break down well-
established patterns of awareness and self-reflection.
“This is kind of a mysterious area in the brain,” Miller said in an
interview. “The question is why in this non-language area do we see a
loss of self concepts. And the answer is: We don’t know.”The study was
presented during a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in
Philadelphia. One patient involved in the study was a 54-year-old
woman described as a charming, dynamic real estate agent who went
from wearing expensive designer apparel to choosing cheap clothing
and gaudy beads and asking strangers the cost of their clothing. Once a
lover of French cuisine, she adopted a love of fast food, particularly
Taco Bell.
The concept of self has intrigued philosophers, writers and
scientists for centuries, but only recently has the technology been
available to study its anatomical basis, the study noted.
The Tao of Free Energy Devices
Peter Lindemann
Note: The main message of Taoist alchemy is that there is infinite
and virtuous free energy (”chi field”) available to all of creation to assist
in the unfolding of our personal essence and destiny. It is inevitable
that this free energy inherent in our own nature should be reflected in
modern technological society as free energy devices. Many people
today will not believe they have infinite energy flowing in through the
core channel of their body and manifesting first in their dantien until it
is proven to them by external science through free energy devices. In
effect, the scientists who create these free energy devices will become
their spiritual teachers.
The following is an important essay by Peter Lindemann about the
dark forces -- in society and especially within ourselves -- that have
prevented the dissemination of existing free energy devices. If you are
skeptical of the scientific validity of these claims, in a similar vein the
Disclosure Project has over 400 government officials and scientists
testifying on the same subject -- that free energy has been suppressed
in order to maintain the political power and stability of the current
system (www.disclosureproject.com). The people in government,
industry, and academia who have developed and kept these free energy
devices secret certainly don’t consider themselves evil conspirators --
they are just cooperating with forces more powerful than themselves.
But as this article suggests, those forces (helped by the internet) are
changing rapidly as global consciousness expands.
At the end are a list of web sites to help you build your own free
energy device. If you get one running, send me an email to let me
know. I’m looking forward to soon put a fuel cell unit in my house to
help its elementals shift from the power company grid back onto the
natural chi grid. But meanwhile, I am busy having fun learning to
operate the most sophisticated small-scale free energy device ever
created -- the human body. That is what the science of Taoist energy
body cultivation - chi kung and internal alchemy -- is about. No
government conspiracy can stop you from getting that free chi! We are
the main conspirators in preventing its flow. The title “The Tao of Free
Energy Devices” was added by me.
-Michael Winn
from: educate-yourself.org/worldoffreeenergy1mar01.html
[Editor’s Note: I played a role in helping to arrange for an
important lecture on September 12, 2000 in Irvine, California by Peter
Lindemann titled “The Cold Electricity Secrets of Edwin Gray” . Prior
to that, we had often talked on the phone about free energy topics and
had both agreed that the only way to get free energy “secrets” out to
the public is to simply give it away and forget about making money.
Any attempt at going the conventional route by applying for patents
and lining up money with venture capitalists, etc., was doomed to fail
(as history has repeatedly demonstrated) at the hands of the
controlling corporate elites and their pals in the military and
government. This well written essay by Peter Lindemann is a fair
accounting of the reality of free energy today and of the forces that
have conspired to keep these marvelous technologies from benefiting
the common man-for nearly a century. That time of suppression has
now passed. Thanks to the Internet, the cat is definitely out of the bag
and in more ways than one (unfortunately and fortunately) it’s a Brave
New World...
Ken Adachi
By Peter Lindemann, D.Sc.
March 1, 2001
In the late 1880’s, trade journals in the electrical sciences were
predicting “free electricity” in the near future. Incredible discoveries
about the nature of electricity were becoming common place. Nikola
Tesla was demonstrating “wireless lighting” and other wonders
associated with high frequency currents. There was an excitement
about the future like never before.
Within 20 years, there would be automobiles, airplanes, movies,
recorded music, telephones, radio, and practical cameras. The
Victorian Age was giving way to something totally new. For the first
time in history, common people were encouraged to envision a utopian
future, filled with abundant modern transportation and
communication, as well as jobs, housing and food for everyone.
Disease would be conquered, and so would poverty. Life was
getting better, and this time, everyone was going to get “a piece of the
pie.” So, what happened? In the midst of this technological explosion,
where did the energy breakthroughs go? Was all of this
excitement about “free electricity”, which happened just before
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the beginning of the last century, all just wishful thinking that “real
science” eventually disproved?
Current State of Technology
Actually, the answer to that question is NO. In fact, the opposite is
true. Spectacular energy technologies were developed right along with
the other breakthroughs. Since that time, multiple methods for
producing vast amounts of energy at extremely low cost have been
developed. None of these technologies have made it to the “open”
consumer market as an article of commerce, however. Exactly why this
is true will be discussed shortly.
But first, I would like to describe to you a short list of “free energy”
technologies that I am currently aware of, and that are proven beyond
all reasonable doubt. The common feature connecting all of these
discoveries, is that they use a small amount of one form of energy to
control or release a large amount of a different kind of energy. Many of
them tap the underlying Ether field in some way; a source of energy
conveniently ignored by “modern” science.
1) Radiant Energy. Nikola Tesla’s Magnifying Transmitter, T. Henry
Moray’s Radiant Energy Device, Edwin Gray’s EMA Motor, and Paul
Baumann’s Testatika Machine all run on Radiant Energy. This natural
energy form can be gathered directly from the environment
(mistakenly called “static” electricity) or extracted from ordinary
electricity by the method called “fractionation.” Radiant Energy can
perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity, at less than 1% of the
cost. It does not behave exactly like electricity, however, which has
contributed to the scientific community’s misunderstanding of it. The
Methernitha Community in Switzerland currently has 5 or 6 working
models of fuel less, self running devices that tap this energy.
2) Permanent Magnets. Dr. Robert Adams (NZ) has developed
astounding designs of electric motors, generators and heaters that run
on permanent magnets. One such device draws 100 watts of electricity
from the source, generates 100 watts to recharge the source, and
produces over 140 BTU’s of heat in two minutes! Dr. Tom Bearden
(USA) has two working models of a permanent magnet powered
electrical transformer. It uses a 6-watt electrical input to control the
path of a magnetic field coming out of a permanent magnet. By
channeling the magnetic field, first to one output coil and then a
second output coil, and by doing this repeatedly and rapidly in a “Ping-
Pong” fashion, the device can produce a 96-watt electrical output with
no moving parts. Bearden calls his device a Motionless
Electromagnetic Generator, or MEG. Jean-Louis Naudin has
duplicated Bearden’s device in France. The principles for this type of
device were first disclosed by Frank Richardson (USA) in 1978. Troy
Reed (USA) has working models of a special magnetized fan that heats
up as it spins. It takes exactly the same amount of energy to spin the
fan whether it is generating heat or not. Beyond these developments,
multiple inventors have identified working mechanisms that produce
motor torque from permanent magnets alone.
3) Mechanical Heaters. There are two classes of machines that
transform a small amount of mechanical energy into a large amount of
heat. The best of these purely mechanical designs are the rotating
cylinder systems designed by Frenette (USA) and Perkins (USA). In
these machines, one cylinder is rotated within another cylinder with
about an eighth of an inch of clearance between them. The space
between the cylinders is filled with a liquid such as water or oil, and it
is this “working fluid” that heats up as the inner cylinder spins.
Another method uses magnets mounted on a wheel to produce large
eddy currents in a plate of aluminum, causing the aluminum to heat up
rapidly. These magnetic heaters have been demonstrated by Muller
(Canada), Adams (NZ) and Reed (USA). All of these systems can
produce ten times more heat than standard methods using the same
energy input.
4) Super Efficient Electrolysis. Water can be broken into Hydrogen
and Oxygen using electricity. Standard chemistry books claim that this
process requires more energy than can be recovered when the gases are
recombined. This is true only under the worst case scenario. When
water is hit with its own molecular resonant frequency, using a system
developed by Stan Meyers (USA) and again recently by Xogen Power,
Inc., it collapses into Hydrogen and Oxygen gas with very little
electrical input. Also, using different electrolytes (additives that make
the water conduct electricity better) changes the efficiency of the
process dramatically. It is also known that certain geometric structures
and surface textures work better than others do. The implication is
that unlimited amounts of Hydrogen fuel can be made to drive engines
(like in your car) for the cost of water. Even more amazing is the fact
that a special metal alloy was patented by Freedman (USA) in 1957 that
spontaneously breaks water into Hydrogen and Oxygen with no
outside electrical input and without causing any chemical changes in
the metal itself. This means that this special metal alloy can make
Hydrogen from water for free, forever.
5) Implosion/Vortex. All major industrial engines use the release of
heat to cause expansion and pressure to reduce work, like in your car
engine. Nature uses the opposite process of cooling to cause suction
and vacuum to produce work, like in a tornado. Viktor Schauberger
(Austria) was the first to build working models of Implosion Engines in
the 1930’s and 1940’s. Since that time, Callum Coats has published
extensively on Schauberger’s work in his book Living Energies and
subsequently, a number of researchers have built working models of
Implosion Turbine Engines. These are fuel less engines that produce
mechanical work from energy accessed from a vacuum. There are also
much simpler designs that use vortex motions to tap a combination of
gravity and centrifugal force to produce a continuous motion in fluids.
6) Cold Fusion. In March 1989, two Chemists from Brigham
Young University in Utah (USA) announced that they had produced
atomic fusion reactions in a simple tabletop device. The claims were
“debunked” within 6 months and the public lost interest. Nevertheless,
Cold Fusion is very real. Not only has excess heat production been
repeatedly documented, but also low energy atomic element
transmutation has been catalogued, involving dozens of different
reactions! This technology definitely can produce low cost energy and
scores of other important industrial processes.
7) Solar Assisted Heat Pumps. The refrigerator in your kitchen is
the only “free energy machine” you currently own. It’s an electrically
operated heat pump. It uses one amount of energy (electricity) to
move three amounts of energy (heat). This gives it a “co-efficient of
performance” (COP) of about 3. Your refrigerator uses one amount of
electricity to pump three amounts of heat from the inside of the
refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator. This is its typical use, but
it is the worst possible way to use the technology. Here’s why. A heat
pump pumps heat from the “source” of heat to the “sink” or place that
absorbs the heat. The “source” of heat should obviously be HOT and
the “sink” for heat should obviously be COLD for this process to work
the best. In your refrigerator, it’s exactly the opposite. The “source” of
heat is inside the box, which is COLD, and the “sink” for heat is the
room temperature air of your kitchen, which is warmer than the
source. This is why the COP remains low for your kitchen refrigerator.
But this is not true for all heat pumps. COP’s of 8 to 10 are easily
attained with solar assisted heat pumps. In such a device, a heat pump
draws heat from a solar collector and dumps the heat into a large
underground absorber, which remains at 550 F, and mechanical energy
is extracted in the transfer. This process is equivalent to a steam engine
that extracts mechanical energy between the boiler and the condenser,
except that it uses a fluid that “boils” at a much lower temperature
than water. One such system that was tested in the 1970’s produced
350 hp, measured on a Dynamometer, in a specially designed engine
from just 100-sq. ft. of solar collector. (This is NOT the system
promoted by Dennis Lee.) The hp, so this system produced more than
17 times more energy than it took to keep it going! It could power a
small neighborhood from the roof of a hot tub gazebo, using exactly
the same technology that keeps the food cold in your kitchen.
Currently, there is an industrial scale heat pump system just
north of Kona, Hawaii that generates electricity from
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temperature differences in ocean water.
There are dozens of other systems that I have not mentioned,
many of them are as viable and well tested as the ones I have just
recounted. But this short list is sufficient to make my point: free
energy technology is here, now. It offers the world pollution-free,
energy abundance for everyone, everywhere. It is now possible to stop
the production of “greenhouse gases” and shut down all of the nuclear
power plants. We can now desalinate unlimited amounts of sea water
at an affordable price, and bring adequate fresh water to even the most
remote habitats. Transportation costs and the production costs for just
about everything can drop dramatically. Food can even be grown in
heated greenhouses in the winter, anywhere. All of these wonderful
benefits that can make life on this planet so much easier and better for
everyone have been postponed for decades. Why? Whose purposes are
served by this postponement?
The Invisible Enemy
There are four powerful forces that have worked together to create
this situation. To say that there is and has been a “conspiracy” to
suppress this technology only leads to a superficial understanding of
the world, and it places the blame for this completely outside of
ourselves.
The First Obstruction
The First Force that impedes the availability of free energy
technology is our willingness to remain ignorant and action less in the
face of this situation has always been interpreted by two of these forces
as “implied consent.” So, besides a “non demanding public,” what are
the other three forces that are impeding the availability of free energy
technology?
In standard economic theory, there are three classes of Industry.
These are Capital, Goods, and Services. Within the first class, Capital,
there are also three sub-classes. These are:
1) Natural Capital. This relates to raw materials (such as a gold
mine) and sources of energy (such as a hydroelectric dam or an oil well).
2) Currency. This relates to the printing of paper “money” and the
minting of coins. These functions are usually the job of Government.
And
3) Credit. This relates to the loaning of money for interest and its
extension of economic value through deposit loan accounts.
From this, it is easy to see, that energy functions in the economy in
the same way as gold, the printing of money by the Government, or
the issuing of credit by a bank.
In the United States, and in most other countries around the
world, there is a “money monopoly” in place. I am “free” to earn as
much “money” as I want, but I will only be paid in Federal Reserve
Notes. There is nothing I can do to be paid in Gold Certificates, or
some other form of “money.” This money monopoly is solely in the
hands of a small number of private stock banks, and these banks are
owned by the Wealthiest Families in the world. Their plan is to
eventually control 100% of all of the Capital resources of the world,
and thereby control everyone’s life through the availability (or non
availability) of all goods and services. An independent source of wealth
(free energy device) in the hands of each and every person in the world,
ruins their plans for world domination, permanently.
Why this is true is easy to see. Currently, a nation’s economy can
be either slowed down or sped up by the raising or lowering of interest
rates. But if an independent source of capital (energy) were present in
the economy, and any business or person could raise more capital
without borrowing it from a bank, this centralized throttling action on
interest rates would simply not have the same effect.
 Free energy technology changes the value of money. The
Wealthiest Families and the Issuers of Credit do not want any
competition. It’s that simple. They want to maintain their current
monopoly control of the money supply. For them, free energy
technology is not just something to suppress, it must be
PERMANENTLY FORBIDDEN!
So, the Wealthiest Families and their Central Banking institutions
are the First Force operating to postpone the public availability of free
energy technology. Their motivations are the imagined “divine right to
rule”, greed, and their insatiable need to control everything except
themselves.
The weapons they have used to enforce this postponement include
intimidation, “expert” debunkers, buying and shelving of technology,
murder and attempted murder of the inventors, character
assassination, arson, and a wide variety of financial incentives and
disincentives to manipulate possible supporters. They have also
promoted the general acceptance of a scientific theory that states that
free energy is impossible (Laws of Thermodynamics).
The Second Obstruction
The Second Force operating to postpone the public availability of
free energy technology is National Governments. The problem here is
not so much related to competition in the printing of currency, but in
the
maintenance of National Security. The fact is, the world out there
is a jungle, and humans can be counted
upon to be very cruel, dishonest, and sneaky. It is Government’s
job to “provide for the common defense.” For this, “police powers” are
delegated by the Executive Branch of Government to enforce “the rule
of law.”
Most of us who consent to the rule of law do so because we believe
it is the right thing to do, for our own benefit. There are always a few
individuals, however, that believe that their own benefit is best served
by behavior that does not voluntarily conform to the generally agreed
upon social order. These people choose to operate outside of “the rule
of law” and are considered outlaws, criminals, subversives, traitors,
revolutionaries, or terrorists.
Most National Governments have discovered, by trial and error,
that the only Foreign Policy that really works, over time, is a policy
called “Tit for Tat.” What this means to you and me is, that
governments treat each other the way they are being treated. There is
a constant “jockeying” for position and influence in world affairs, and
the
STRONGEST party wins! In economics, it’s the Golden Rule,
which states: “The one with the Gold makes the Rules.”
So it is with politics also, but its appearance is more Darwinian. It’s
simply “survival of the fittest.” In politics, however, the “fittest” has
come to mean the strongest party who is also willing to fight the
dirtiest.
Absolutely every means available is used to maintain an advantage
over the “adversary”, and everyone else is the “adversary” regardless of
whether they are considered friend or foe. This includes outrageous
psychological posturing, lying, cheating, spying, stealing, assassination
of world leaders, proxy wars, alliances and shifting
alliances, treaties, foreign aid, and the presence of military forces
wherever possible. Like it or not, this IS the psychological and actual
arena National Governments operate in.
No National Government will ever do anything that simply gives
an adversary an advantage for free. NEVER! It’s national suicide. Any
activity by any individual, inside or outside the country, that is
interpreted as giving an adversary an edge or advantage, in any way, will
be deemed a threat to “National Security.” ALWAYS!
Free energy technology is a National Government’s worst
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nightmare! Openly acknowledged, free energy technology sparks an
unlimited arms race by all governments in a final attempt to gain
absolute advantage
and domination. Think about it. Do you think Japan will not feel
intimidated if China gets free energy? Do you think Israel will sit by
quietly as Iraq acquires free energy? Do you think India will allow
Pakistan to develop
free energy? Do you think the USA would not try to stop Osama
bin Laden from getting free energy? Unlimited energy available to the
current state of affairs on this planet leads to an inevitable reshuffling
of the “balance of power.”
This could become an all-out war to prevent “the other” from
having the advantage of unlimited wealth and power. Everybody will
want it, and at the same time, want to prevent everyone else from
getting it. So, National Governments are the Second Force operating
to postpone the public availability of free energy technology. Their
motivations are “self-preservation.” This self-preservation operates on
three levels.
First, by not giving undue advantage to an external enemy.
Second, by preventing individualized action capable of effectively
challenging official police powers (anarchy) within the country.
And third, by preserving income streams derived from taxing
energy sources currently in use. Their weapons include the preventing
of the issuance of patents based on National Security grounds, the legal
and illegal harassment of inventors with criminal charges, tax audits,
threats, phone taps, arrest, arson, theft of property
during shipment, and a host of other intimidations which make
the business of building and marketing a free energy machine
impossible.
The Third Obstruction
The Third Force operating to postpone the public availability of
free energy technology consists of the group of deluded inventors and
out right charlatans and con men.
On the periphery of the extraordinary scientific breakthroughs
that constitute the real free energy technologies, lies a shadow world of
unexplained anomalies, marginal inventions and unscrupulous
promoters.
The second and third Forces have constantly used the media to
promote the worst examples of this group, to distract the public’s
attention and to discredit the real breakthroughs by associating them
with the obvious frauds.
Over the last hundred years, dozens of stories have surfaced about
unusual inventions. Some of these ideas have so captivated the public’s
imagination that a mythology about these systems continues to this day.
Names like Kelley, Hubbard, Coler, and Henderschott
immediately come to mind. There may be real technologies behind
these names, but there simply isn’t enough technical data available in
the public domain to make a determination.
These names remain associated with a free energy mythology,
however, and are sited by debunkers as examples of fraud. The idea of
free energy taps very deeply into the human subconscious mind. A few
inventors with marginal technologies that demonstrate useful
anomalies have mistakenly exaggerated the importance of their
inventions. Some of these inventors also have mistakenly exaggerated
the importance of THEMSELVES for having invented it. A
combination of “gold fever” and/or a “messiah complex” appears,
wholly distorting any future contribution they may make.
While the research thread they are following may hold great
promise, they begin to trade enthusiasm for facts, and the value of the
scientific work from that point on suffers greatly. There is a powerful,
yet subtle seduction that can warp a personality if they believe that
“the world restson their shoulders” or that they are the world’s “savior.”
Strange things also happen to people when they think they are
about to become extremely rich. It takes a tremendous spiritual
discipline to remain objective and humble in the presence of a working
free energy machine.
Many inventors’ psyches become unstable just BELIEVING they
have a free energy machine. As the quality of the science deteriorates,
some inventors also develop a “persecution complex” that makes them
very defensive and unapproachable. This process precludes them from
ever really developing a free energy machine, and fuels the fraud
mythologies tremendously.
Then there are the out right con men. In the last 15 years, there is
one person in the USA who has raised the free energy con to a
professional art. He has raised more than $100,000,000, has been
barred from doing business in the State of Washington, has been jailed
in California, and he’s still at it.
He always talks about a variation of one of the real free energy
systems, sells people on the idea that they will get one of these systems
soon, but ultimately sells them only promotional information which
gives no real data about the energy system itself. He has mercilessly
preyed upon the Christian Community and the Patriot Community in
the USA, and is still going strong. His current scam involves signing up
hundreds of thousands of people at locations where he will install a
free energy machine.
In exchange for letting him put the FE generator in their home,
they will get free electricity for life, and his company will sell the excess
energy back to the local utility company. After becoming convinced
that they will receive free electricity for life, with no out front
expenses, they gladly buy a video that helps draw their friends into the
scam as
well.
Once you understand the power and motivations of the first two
Forces I have discussed, its obvious that this person’s current “business
plan” cannot be implemented. This one person has probably done
more harm to
the free energy movement in the USA than any other Force, by
destroying people’s trust in the technology.
So, the Third Force postponing the public availability of free
energy technology is delusion and dishonesty within the movement
itself. The motivations are self aggrandizement, greed, want of power
over others, and a false sense of self importance.
The weapons used are lying, cheating, the “bait and switch” con,
self-delusion and arrogance combined with lousy science.
The Fourth Obstruction
The Fourth Force operating to postpone the public availability of
free energy technology is all of the rest of us. It may be easy to see how
narrow and despicable the motivations of the other Forces are, but
actually, these motivations are still very much alive in each of us as well.
Like the Wealthiest Families, don’t we each secretly harbor
illusions of false superiority, and the want to control others instead of
ourselves? Also, wouldn’t you “sell out” if the price were high enough,
say, take $1 million dollars, cash, today?
Or like the Governments, don’t we each want to ensure our own
survival? If caught in the middle of a full, burning theater, do you panic
and push all of the weaker people out of the way in a mad, scramble for
the door? Or like the deluded inventor, don’t we trade a comfortable
illusion once in a while for an uncomfortable fact? And don’t we like to
think more of ourselves than others give us credit for? Or don’t
we still fear the unknown, even if it promises a great reward?
85
You see, really, all Four Forces are just different aspects of the same
process, operating at different levels in the society. There is really only
ONE FORCE preventing the public availability of free energy
technology, and that is the unspiritual motivated behavior of the
human animals.
In the last analysis, free energy technology is an outward
manifestation of Divine Abundance. It is the engine of the economy of
an enlightened society, where people voluntarily behave in a respectful
and civil manner toward each other. Where each member of the
society has everything they need, and do not covet what their neighbor
has. here war and physical violence has become socially unacceptable
behavior and people’s differences are at least tolerated, if not enjoyed.
The appearance of free energy technology in the public domain is the
dawning of a truly civilized age. It is an epochal event in human history.
Nobody can “take credit” for it. Nobody can “get rich” on it.
Nobody can “rule the world” with it. It is simply, a Gift from God.
It forces us all to take responsibility for our own actions and for
our own self disciplined self-restraint when needed. The world as it is
currently ordered, cannot have free energy technology without being
totally transformed by it into something else.
This “civilization” has reached the pinnacle of its development,
because it has birthed the seeds of its own transformation. The
unspiritual human animals cannot be trusted with free energy. They
will only do what
they have always done, which is take merciless advantage of each
other, or kill each other and themselves in the process.
If you go back and read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or the Club of
Rome Report, it becomes obvious that the Wealthiest Families have
understood this for decades. Their plan is to live in The World of Free
Energy, but
permanently freeze the rest of us out. But this is not new. Royalty
has always considered the general population (us) to be their subjects.
What is new, is that you and I can communicate with each other
now better than at anytime in the past. The Internet offers us, the
Fourth Force, an opportunity to overcome the combined efforts of the
other Forces preventing free energy technology from spreading.
The Opportunity
What is starting to happen is that inventors are publishing their
work, instead of patenting it and keeping it secret. More and more,
people are “giving away” information on these technologies in books,
videos and web sites.
While there is still a great deal of useless information about free
energy on the Internet, the availability of good information is rising
rapidly. Check out the list of web sites and other resources at the end
of this article.
It is imperative that you begin to gather all of the information you
can on real free energy systems. The reason for this is simple. The first
two Forces will never allow an inventor or a company to build and sell a
free energy machine to you! The only way you will ever get one is if
you, or a friend, build it yourself. This is exactly what thousands of
people are already quietly starting to do. You may feel wholly
inadequate to the task, but start gathering information now.
You may be just a link in the chain of events for the benefit of
others.
Focus on what you can do now, not on how much there still is to
be done.
Small, private research groups are working out the details as you
read this. Many are committed to publishing their results on the
Internet.
 on the net!
All of us constitute the Fourth Force. If we stand up and refuse to
remain ignorant and action less, we can change the course of history. It www.free-energy.cc developed by Clear Tech, Inc. and Dr. Peter
is the aggregate of our combined action that can make a difference. Lindemann
Only the mass action that represents our consensus can create the
world we want. The other three Forces WILL NOT help us put a fuel jnaudin.free.fr developed by JLN Labs in France
less power plant in our basements.
www.1dove.com/fe/index.html Jim’s Free Energy Page in the USA
They will not help us be free from their manipulations.
Nevertheless, free energy technology is here. It is real, and it will www.keelynet.com/ developed by Jerry Decker in the USA
change everything about the way we live, work and relate to each
other. In the last analysis, free energy technology obsoletes greed and www.xogen.com site for super electrolysis technology
the fear for survival. But like all exercises of Spiritual Faith, we must
first manifest the generosity and trust in our own lives. www.rumormillnews.com excellent site for all kinds of alternative
news, with many links
The Source of Free Energy is INSIDE of us. It is that excitement
of expressing ourselves freely. It is our Spiritually guided intuition Patents: (most can be viewed at www.delphion.com )
expressing itself without distraction, intimidation or manipulation. Itis
our open-heartedness. Ideally, the free energy technologies underpin a This list is nothing more than a sample of inventions that produce
just society where everyone has enough food, clothing, shelter, self free energy.
worth, and the leisure time to contemplate the higher Spiritual
meanings of Life. Tesla USP #685,957
Freedman USP #2,796,345
Do we not owe it to each other, to face down our fears, and take Richardson USP #4,077,001
action to create this future for our children’s children? Perhaps I am Frenette USP #4,143,639
not the only one waiting for me to act on a greater Truth. Perkins USP #4,424,797
Gray USP #4,595,975
Free energy technology is here. It has been here for decades. Meyer USP #4,936,961
Communications technology and the Internet have torn the veil of Chambers USP #6,126,794
secrecy off of this remarkable fact. People all over the world are
starting to build free energy devices for their own use. The Bankers Clear Tech, Inc.
and the Governments do not want this to happen, but cannot stop it. Box 37 Metaline Falls, WA 99153
Tremendous economic instabilities and wars will be used in the near ph: (509) 446-2353 fax: (509) 446-2354
future to distract people from joining the free energy movement.
There will be essentially no major media coverage of this aspect of Jerry W. Decker - KeelyNet
what is going on. discussion list archive www.escribe.com/science/keelynet
It will simply be reported as wars and civil wars erupting
everywhere, leading to UN “Peace Keeper” occupation in more and Order Out of Chaos - main site www.keelynet.com
more countries. Reality is a Novel
Physics vs. Metaphysics in a Sequences of Possible Universes
Western Society is spiraling down toward self-destruction, due to Rudy Rucker
the accumulated effects of long-term greed and corruption. The Note: Taoists have traditionally written about alternate realities or
general availability of free energy technology cannot stop this trend. It “islands” that can only be visited by Immortals who know the secret of
can only reinforce it. If, however, you have a free energy device, you traversing space & time. Their underlying principle of causation, the
may be better positioned to survive the political/social/economic chi field/Life Force, is both physical and metaphysical. This essay gives
transition that is underway. No National Government will survive this us a modern metaphor for for understanding the possibility of multiple
process. The question is, who will ultimately control the emerging realities generated by the Life Force.
World Government, the First Force, or the Fourth Force? - Michael Winn

The last Great War is almost upon us. The seeds are planted. After
this will come the beginning of a real Civilization. Some of us who
refuse to fight will survive to see the dawn of the World of Free Energy. by RUDY RUCKER
I Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer;
challenge you to be among the ones who try. Novelist; Author, Infinity and the Mind
from an essay in www.edge.org
LIST OF RESOURCES: ----------

Books:
Living Energies by Callum Coats
The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity by Peter Lindemann,
D.Sc.
Applied Modern 20th Century Aether Science by Dr. Robert
Adams
Physics Without Einstein by Dr. Harold Aspden
Secrets of Cold War Technology by Gerry Vassilatos
The Coming Energy Revolution by Jeane Manning
Websites:
www2.murray.net.au/users/egel/content1.htm
developed by Geoff Egel in Australia. Best free-energy site
86
Reality Is A Novel.
I’d like to propose a modified Many Universes theory. Rather than
saying every possible universe exists, I’d say, rather, that there is a
sequence of possible universes, akin to the drafts of a novel.
We’re living in a draft version of the universe—and there is no final
version. The revisions never stop.
From time to time it’s possible to be aware of this. In particular,
when you relax and stop naming things and forming opinions, your
consciousness spreads out across several drafts of the universe. Things
don’t need to be particularly one way or the other until you pin them
down.
 Each draft, each spacetime, each sheet of reality is itself rigorously
deterministic; there really is no underlying randomness in the world.
Instead we have a great web of synchronistic entanglements, with
causes and effects flowing forward and backwards through time. The
start of a novel matches its ending; the past matches the future.
Changing one thing changes everything. If we fully know everything
about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future.
With this in mind, explaining an given draft of the universe
becomes a matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment
of that draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the
successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a particular
Now moment. As Scarlett’s climactic scene with Rhett is repeatedly
rewritten, all the rest of Gone With The Wind changes to match.
And this evolution, too, can be deterministic. We can figure we
think of there as being two distinct deterministic rules, a Physics Rule
and a Metaphysics Rule. The Physics Rule consists of time-reversible
laws that grow the Now moment upwards and downwards to fill out
the entire past and future of spacetime. And we invoke the
Metaphysics Rule to account for the contents of the Now moment.
The Metaphysics Rule is deterministic but not reversible; it grows
sideways across a dimension that we might call paratime, turning some
simple seed into the space-filling pattern found in the Now.
The Metaphysics rule is...what? One possibility is that it’s
something quite simple, perhaps as simple as an eight-bit cellular
automaton rule generating complex-looking patterns out of pure
computation. Or perhaps the Metaphysics rule is like the mind of an
author creating a novel, searching out the best word to write next,
somehow peering into alternate realities. Or, yet again, the big
Metaphysics rule in the sky could be the One cosmic mind, the Big
Aha, the eternal secret, living in the spaces between your thoughts.
The Biology of Globalization
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
Note: Elisabet Sahtouris, like Mae Wan Ho, fits my ideal of the
spiritually awakened and politically involved scientist. Sahtouris is a
biologist who spent 13 years on a small Greek Island contemplating the
connections between small cell systems to human organisms to
planetary ecosystems to human economic systems as a map of
evolution. This mirrors perfectly the Taoist alchemy approach to
energetically harmonizing the Human (vital organ system) with the
Earth’s seasons & directional energy matrix with the harmonics of
Heaven (planets, stars, black holes).
Her article could be titled “The Tao of Globalization”, as it is about
the nesting of all these different systems into a harmonious whole and
the impact of economic systems on the whole. She doesn’t talk about
the Life Force per se, but has mapped out its omnipresent signature in
creating yin (cooperative) and yang (competitive) biological systems to
maintain healthy growth and balance. A long piece, but fast reading
and well worth it. Her entire book, Earth Dance, and other brilliant
articles can be downloaded from www.ratical.org/Lifeweb.
-Michael Winn
The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary
process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and
important aspect of globalization -- its economy -- is currently being
organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental
principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it
threatens the demise of our whole civilization.
Contents:
* The Wake-up Call
* Global Community
* Lessons of Nature
* Introducing Holarchy
* Body economics
* The evolution of cooperation
* Holarchic negotiations evolve
87
* The Principles of Living Systems
* The “either/or” syndrome
* A balance of all levels
* Dynamics of Natural Democracy
* What’s to be done?
Lessons of Nature:
* All living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by the
same biological principles, which we can identify and abstract.
* Among the principles essential to the health of living systems are
empowered participation of all parts and continual negotiation of self-
interest at all levels of organization.
* Humanity constitutes a living system within the larger living
system of our Earth.
* Essential to the health of humanity is empowered participation
of all humans and negotiated self-interest among individual, local and
global economies as well as the Earth itself.
The problem is we have tried to tell the human story without
telling the Earth’s story.
--Thomas Berry
The Wake-up Call
What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself
because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new
circumstances, of an economic ideology.
--Sir James Goldsmith, London Times, Feb 1994
Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now
fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism
and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our
open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I
believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.
--George Soros, Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1997
When globalized capitalism’s leading players themselves warn us of
the dangers of the system in which they have gained their enormous
wealth, we had better pay attention. They are telling us clearly that the
current course of economic globalization cannot continue without
threatening the very survival of humanity.
Will our seriously imbalanced civilization survive? Historian
Arnold Toynbee studied twenty-three past civilizations, looking for
common factors in their demise. The two most important ones, it
seems, were the extreme concentration of wealth (George Soros’
warning) and inflexibility in the face of changing conditions within and
around them (Sir James Goldsmith’s warning).
We cannot go on playing global Monopoly when a cooperative
game is called for by our obvious global problems. In 1994, Robert
Kaplan warned that anyone who thought things were still going well
was ignoring three-fourths of the world. His cover article (”The
Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1994) was illustrated by
a burning globe. This year, same month, same weathervane magazine,
the cover featured George Soros’ article telling us that global corporate
and financial capitalism is at fault.
The central problem at present is that the “democratic” congresses
of some seventy nations including the United States, have voted away
the sovereignty of their nations by agreeing to uphold the provisions of
the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can meet in secret and
challenge any laws made at any level in member nations (including
their provinces, states, counties or cities) if they are deemed to conflict
with its interests.
How could this happen? In the United States, the story goes back
at least as far as the first few decades following World War II, a heady
time in which we still believed in “life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness” while gradually our Congresses were bought off by
corporate interests.
As Paul Hawken pointed out, “Washington D.C. has become a
town of appearances and images, where sleight of (political) hand has
largely replaced the clumsy system of payoffs, outright bribes and
backroom deals of old....One per-cent of American society owns nearly
60 percent of corporate equities and about 40 percent of the total
wealth of this nation. These are the plutocrats who wield the power
and control this pre-eminent “company town” while trying to convince
the other 99 percent of the citizenry that the system works in our best
interests, too.” (The Ecology of Commerce, Harper Collins, NY 1993,
p. 111)
In the course of the Cold War, had we been paying adequate
attention, we would have seen that both communist and capitalist
systems were subjugating local interests (individual and community) to
national and global interests, however much we in the West were
ideologically taught that our individual wellbeing was primary and our
democracy good for our communities. Practice did not bear out
theory; to wit: unemployment, poverty, crime, unsafe streets, drugs,
unsafe foods, polluted air and water, ill health, spiritual crisis, despair
and even rapidly increasing child suicide and murder. Similarly,
megacorporations, now globally legitimized by the WTO, the GATT
(General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the pending MAI
(Multilateral t Agreement on Investment), are overriding the interests
of nations, local communities and individuals. (See Appendix B for
more details.) As Ralph Nader points out, “Under WTO rules, for
example, certain *objectives* are forbidden to all domestic
legislatures... including [objectives such as] providing any significant
subsidies to promote energy conservation, sustainable farming
practices, or environment-ally sensitive technologies.” To understand
this situation and to see what we can do to alter the course of events
toward a healthy future for all humanity, we need to look at the
inherent contradictions between these current economic
developments and the democratic, ecologically sound economic
system we could develop.
As a biologist, I find that the easiest way to comprehend this
contradiction is by looking at humanity as a whole in its natural
context, thus recognizing ourselves as a living system and comparing
our current unhealthy economic situation with the economics of
healthy living systems. In doing so we will see clearly why the “Wake-
up” call is being sounded and how to respond with the biological
resilience that is our evolutionary heritage, privilege and responsibility.
Therefore, I will discuss in some detail the natural organization of
living systems, with their endlessly negotiated “political economies” as
we are only now coming to under-stand them. If you bear with me in
this discussion, a new and coherent understanding of our global crisis
and its solutions will emerge very clearly. The challenge of crisis
confronts us; our opportunity lies in responding positively and actively.
Global Community
The human being of the West has abandoned being human and
has turned himself into an individual... community has died in them.
--Nicolas Aguilar Sayritupac, Aymara Indian, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia
To think of ourselves as a living system, we must see ourselves in
community with all other people at local, national and global levels.
While this may seem superficially easy, it is actually not. Western
culture, now globally dominant, has systematically trained us, as
Sayritupac accurately observed, to think and act as though we are
separate individuals, often in competition with each other for scarce
resources of one sort or another, primarily money, which has be-come
the perceived means to all we want and need in life. From the vantage
point of an evolution biologist watching the human species, it’s
encouraging to see that community and community values are at
last coming back to life in Western culture. Not as an alternative
88
to individualism, which was an important human development, but to
complement it in a healthy balance.
The new swell of interest in, even fervor for, a global human
community with equitable and ecologically sustainable economics is
vitally important for our species survival. Words such as “community”
and “communal values” were consciously or unconsciously suppressed
in our culture during the Cold War because of their linguistic similarity
to “communism.” Happily they are back in our vocabulary now that
the Soviet stigma has been removed from them. We have, in fact,
suffered greatly from their absence. The big question is whether we
can restore community and communal values to our globalization
process before all is lost.
The globalization of our species is not a choice; it is a natural,
inevitable evolutionary process that began when humans settled on all
continents. Human empire building over the past few thousand years
continued the process by merging cultures over ever larger areas. In
modern times, this empire-building process has been shifting from
imperial nations with colonial empires to corporate cartels and other
global corporate entities with economic empires which, in some cases,
now dominate or overrule national political structures.
Yet, simultaneously, nations have joined in a United Nations effort
with remarkable success in negotiating cooperative global systems such
as telephone, postal and air travel networks, as well as the initiation of
other global agreements on electronic/ satellite communications,
oceans, etc. that are less democratic and of programs that seriously
attempt to implement global health, education and peace. Because
these efforts at the democratization of humanity conflict with the
concentration of wealth and power, the United Nations is continually
under intense pressure. Thus we see that it is not globalization per se
that is undesirable. The cause of the enormous crisis we face is the
manner in which the most central and important aspect of
globalization, its economics, is currently organized. For this reason, we
must become more conscious participants in the process of
globalization, to avoid letting a handful of powerful players lead us all
to doom.
First and foremost, we must recognize globalization as a biological
process -- something that is happening to a natural living system we call
humanity. Then we can see how an economics that violates the
fundamental principles by which living systems are organized currently
threatens the demise of human civilization.
Fortunately life is resilient, and we are witnessing a growing storm
of protest rising from calmer discussions of economic globalization.
These are healthy reactions that can help lead us to survival, for they
indicate increasing recognition and concern that communal values
have been overridden in a dangerous process that sets vast profits for a
tiny human minority above all other human interests.
Most people looking at problems of “market-driven capitalism” are
becoming aware on some level that the measure of human success
must shift from money to wellbeing for all. To do this, communal
values must be reclaimed and acted upon in a way that ensures a
balance of global interests with local interests and with the interests of
all other species.
The evolutionary process is an awesome improvisational dance
that weaves individual, communal, ecosystemic and planetary interests
into a harmonious whole.
Biological research of the past few decades, on the evolution of
nucleated cells, multicellular organisms and mature ecosystems as
cooperative enterprises, is updating our ingrained view of antagonistic
competition as the sole driving force of evolution--a Darwinian view
that was adopted as the rationale for an unjust dog-eat-dog world of
antagonistic capitalist competition and ultimately the fascist
holocaust. As Soros says, “there is something wrong with making the
survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilized society. This social
Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution.”
As the more enlightened view gains prominence -- that life is far
too intelligent and naturally cooperative to proceed simply by blind
accident and dominance struggles--it will be increasingly translated, to
our collective benefit, into a more enlightened view of our human
society in all its social, economic, political and cultural ramifications.
My purpose is to help with that translation, for we humans, no
matter how spiritual, are inescapably biological creatures, and the
solutions we seek are readily available in nature’s experience. We are a
living system embedded in a larger living system, and we could benefit
greatly from the lessons already learned in the five-billion-year dance of
our planet.
Lessons of Nature
The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the
immediate future
is one talking about the planet -- not this city, not these people, but
the
planet and everybody on it.
--Joseph Campbell
Introducing Holarchy:
We can see more clearly what is going on if we look more closely at
the individual, the community, the nation and global human society as
living systems embedded within each other like Russian nested dolls or
Chinese boxes. Arthur Koestler coined elegant terms for this concept:
holons in holarchies (Janus: A Summing Up, Pan Books, London 1978).
Each relatively self-contained system, such as a cell, an organism, a
family or an ecosystem, is a holon, while holarchy refers to their
interdependent embeddedness within each other, and was
intentionally derived but distinguished from the term hierarchy to
avoid its value implications of relative superiority. Take the living
system most intimately familiar to all of us: the human body. We’ve
long known that our bodies behave as a community of cells, which are
organized into organs and organ systems. The central nervous system
functions as the body’s government, continually monitoring all its parts
and functions, ever making intelligent decisions that serve the interest
of the whole enterprise. Its economics are organized as an equitable
system of production and distribution, with full employment of all cells
and continual attention to their wellbeing. The immune `defense’
system protects its integrity and health against unfamiliar intruders. It
can be thought of as a kind of global political economy with organs as
bioregional units, their different tissues as communities, cells as
families or clans, and the organelles within cells as individuals (which
many of them once actually were, as we will see shortly).
More recently, microbiology has revealed the relative autonomy of
cells and their organelles in ever more exquisite detail: every cell
constantly making its own decisions, for example, on what to filter in
and out through its membrane, how to adjust its local production and
distribution economics, which segments of DNA to reorganize or
copy from its nuclear gene library for use in maintaining its cellular
welfare, etc. Hardly the automatons we had thought them to be!
Physiologically we can see that the needs and interests of
individual cells, their organs and the whole body must be continually
negotiated to achieve the body’s dynamic equilibrium or healthy
balance. Cancer is an example of what happens when this balance is
lost, with the proliferation of a particular group of cells ignoring the
needs of the whole, multiplying wildly at the expense of the body
holon, ultimately defeating their own purposes by destroying it.
Body economics:
On the whole, our bodies work in remarkably harmonious health.
But imagine what would happen if our bodies tried to implement an
economic system such as we humans practice in our world at present:
How would your body fare if the raw material blood cells in bones
all over your body could be mined as resources by more powerful
“northern industrial” lung and heart organs, transported to their
production and distribution centers where blood is purified and
oxygen added to make it a useful product? Imagine it is then
announced that blood will be distributed from the heart center only to
those organs that can afford it. What is not bought is thrown out as
surplus or stored till the market demand rises. How long could your
body survive that system? Is it an economic system that could keep any
living entity healthy?
Can we turn the United Nations into a governing body as
dedicated to service as is our central nervous system? When will
human diversity be recognized to be as necessary and creative
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as the diversity of our cells and organs? When will we be as concerned
with the health of every local bioregion in our global body as our
individual body is, or practice its cellular full employment policy?
When will we implement its efficient and universally beneficial kind of
economics?
Obviously metaphors have their limits and I do not for a moment
suggest we slavishly emulate body models. But they are examples of
living systems with healthy politics and economics, and we all have
them in common, regardless of our worldviews, or of our personal,
political or spiritual persuasions. Surely body metaphors are preferable
to outdated and unrealistic mechanical metaphors of perfect societies
that were supposed to run permanently and smoothly as well-oiled
machines once we got them built correctly. The whole Cold War was
rooted in competition over which side had that perfect social
machinery!
The evolution of cooperation:
Our bodies are multicelled creatures which actually evolved from
an earlier evolutionary phase of “multicreatured” cells, whose story was
pieced together by microbiologist Lynn Margulis. (Symbiosis in Cell
Evolution, 1981; Early Life, 1982). The story of their evolution holds an
extremely important lesson for humanity today.
In brief, it goes like this: Ancient bacteria, some two billion years
ago, had blanketed the Earth by themselves, inventing all the ways of
making a living still employed today (mainly fermentation, photo-
synthesis, respiration) and devouring its “resources” with downright
human thoroughness. Finding themselves in crisis, they began to
invade each other for new resources in a phase I call bacterial
imperialism, which we humans echoed so much later in our ignorance
of their experience. This phase led to renewed crisis, because their
early attempts at “globalization” into huge colonies were based on
competitive exploitation of each other with no concern for all
participating members’ wellbeing.
Many such colonies died, until somehow they finally managed to
evolve the cooperative scheme we call the nucleated cell: a huge
bacterial community with a peaceful division of labor, which we call
the nucleated cell. All this was achieved, of course, without benefit of
brains, in time to avoid the extinction of Earthlife eons ago. In fact,
their “invention” of these huge cells is what makes you and me
possible, for each of our cells, as well as those of all organisms larger
than bacteria, is one of their descendent cooperatives. (For details of
this story, see “An Inspirational Tale of Ancient Times”, below.)
Life, as this story shows, is resilient and creative.
Some of the greatest catastrophes in our planet’s life history have
spawned the greatest creativity! And therein lies my hope for humanity.
It is worth looking at this cooperative evolutionary process up close.
What is it that prevents your cells, or your organs, from pursuing their
self-interest competitively such that relatively few “win” and most
“lose?” The superficial answer is that they are part of a cooperative
community in which the health of every level in the body’s holarchy
promotes the health of individual cell and organ holons. But what is it
that makes our individual cells and organs behave communally? If we
can answer this critical question biologically, we will gain important
insight for applying the lessons of nature to our human affairs.
Holarchic negotiations evolve:
One definition of the word evolution is the flow of interwoven
steps in an improvisational dance. Although it comes from dance
terminology, it actually fits biological evolution very well, since we can
now see it as an ongoing process of interweaving, self-organizing
holons in holarchy. The dance is not always smooth. Nature sometimes
stumbles as it improvises, making crude moves, especially on the part
of young aggressive species, such as our own, that attempt to take over
the whole dance.
In fact, one can discern in evolution a repeating pattern in which
aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then
avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances, as in the bacterial
story above. To show how this works, let me introduce a concept of
simultaneous self-interest at all levels of living systems holarchy, a
concept I have not yet encountered among other evolution biologists.
Darwin, as we well know, held the competitive individual to be the
driving force of evolution (as we have applied this theory socially, it
could be called the capitalist version of evolution), while later biologists
countered with the alternative of species self-interest, wherein
individuals within species demonstrated altruism and self-sacrifice for
the common good (the communist version) but species as wholes were
competitive with each other. Richard Dawkins, refuting both these
views, claimed they were in error because competition among selfish
genes drove evolution (micro-capitalism?). But what if all these
evolutionists are right in sum, rather than individually? That is, what if
every level of organization in nature looked out for its self-interests
simultaneously?
An Inspirational Tale of Ancient Times
In studying the Earth’s evolution, the most fascinating story I
know is that of ancient beings who created an incredibly complex
lifestyle, rife with technological successes such as electric motors,
nuclear energy, polyester, DNA recombination and worldwide
information systems. They also produced--and solved--devastating
environmental and social crises and provided a wealth of lessons we
would do well to consider.
This was not a Von Daniken scenario; the beings were not from
outer space. They were our own minute but prolific forebears: ancient
bacteria. In one of his popular science essays, Lewis Thomas,
estimating the mitochondria that are descendants of ancient bacteria
in our cells as half our dry bulk, suggested that we may be huge taxis
they invented to get around in safely ( Lives of a Cell, 1974).
From whatever perspective we choose to define our relationship
with them, it is clear we have now created the same crises they did
some two billion years ago. Further, we are struggling to find the very
solutions they arrived at--solutions that made our own evolution
possible and that could now improve the prospects of our own far
distant progeny, not to mention our more immediate future. I owe my
understanding of this remarkable tale to microbiologist Lynn Margulis,
whose painstaking scientific sleuthing traced these events back more
than two billion years.
The bacteria’s remarkable technologies (all of which still exist
among today’s free-living bacteria) include the electric motor drive,
which functioned by the attachment of a flagellum to a disk rotating
with ball bearings in a magnetic field; the stockpiling of uranium in
their colonies, probably to heat their communities with nuclear energy;
perfect polyester (biodegradable, of course), elaborate cityscapes we
can only now see under the newest microscopes and their worldwide
communications and information system, based on the ability to
exchange (recombine) DNA with each other--the first World Wide
Web!
Yet, like ourselves, with our own proud versions of such wondrous
technologies, the ancient bacteria got themselves deeper and deeper
into crisis by pursuing win/lose economics based on the reckless
exploitation of nature and each other. The amazing and inspirational
part of the story is that entirely without benefit of brains, these nigh
invisible yet highly inventive little creatures reorganized their
destructively competitive lifestyle into one of creative cooperation.
The crisis came about because respiring bacteria (breathers)
depended on ultraviolet light as a critical component in the creation of
their natural food supply of sugars and acids, while photosynthesizing
bacteria (bluegreens) emitted vast quantities of polluting oxygen which
created an atmospheric ozone layer that prevented ultra-violet light
from reaching the surface of the Earth. Cut off from their food supply,
the hi-tech breathers, with their electric motor rapid transport, began
to invade the bodies of larger more passive fermenting bacteria
(bubblers) to literally eat their insides -- a process I have called bacterial
colonialism.
The invaders multiplied within these colonies until their resources
were exhausted and all parties died. No doubt this happened countless
times before they learned cooperation. But somewhere along the line,
the bloated bags of bacteria also included some bluegreens, which
could replenish food supplies if the motoring breathers pushed the
sinking enterprises up into brighter primeval waters. Perhaps it was
this lifesaving use of solar energy that initiated the shift to
cooperation. In any case, bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers
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eventually contributed their unique capabilities to the common task of
building a workable society. In time, each donated some of their
“personal” DNA to the central resource library and information hub
that became the nucleus of their collective enterprise: the huge (by
bacterial standards) nucleated cells of which our own bodies and those
of all Earth beings other than bacteria are composed.
This process of uniting disparate and competitive entities into a
cooperative whole--a multi-creatured cell, so to speak--was repeated
when nucleated cells aggregated into multi-celled creatures, and it is
happening now for a third time as we multi-celled humans are being
driven by evolution to form a cooperative global cell in harmony with
each other and with other species. This new enterprise must be a
unified global democracy of diverse membership, organized into locally
productive and mutually cooperative “bioregions,” like the organs of
our bodies, and coordinated by a centralized government as dedicated
in its service to the wellbeing of the whole as is the nervous system of
our bodies. Anything less than such cooperation will probably bring us
quickly to the point of species extinction so that the other species
remaining may get on with the task.
adapted from E.Sahtouris’ “The Evolution of Governance” IN
CONTEXT, #36, Fall
1993; http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC36/Sahtour.htm
This would necessitate ongoing negotiations among individual
parts and levels of organization, and this is exactly what seems to be
happening. Moreover, Nature’s dance seems to be energized by the
conflicting self-interests of various parts and levels, and choreographed
by the compromises it has made in the course of evolution, and
continues to make in every day of the present. At its best, the dance
becomes elegant, harmonious, beautiful in its dynamics of non-
antagonistic counterpoint and resolution.
The repeating pattern of evolution is the sequence from unity to
diversification, which produces conflict that instigates negotiations,
resulting in resolution leading to cooperation, and thus back to unity in
the form of a higher level of organization.
The most important lesson learned in the course of its evolution,
often the hard way, is that no level of holarchy may be sacrificed
without killing the whole!
Let’s explore this driving dynamic as it plays out in our everyday
human experience. The Greek playwright Aristophanes said of
marriage partners a long time ago: Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live
without `em. Look at this familiar situation anew: A couple is a holon
in which two individual holons (the partners) are embedded. This is
thus a two-level holarchy, the levels being that of couplehood and that
of the individuals. The couple will survive in good health only if each of
the three holons’ self interest is negotiated with the other two! Once
you see this, then extrapolation to family is easy. Now try community.
My favorite creation myth from India tells that the cosmos began
as a vast sea of milk in which a tiny wavelet formed, and was torn ever
after between wanting to be itself and longing to merge back into the
sea. Is this not another metaphor for individual and community in the
endlessly creative dialog and metalog of self-expression, already re-
cognized in ancient times? What matters in this dialog is that the
contradictions do not become antagonistic.
A mature ecosystem--say a rainforest--is a complex ongoing
process of negotiations among species holons and between individual
species and other parts and levels of the self-regulating holarchy
comprised by the various micro and macro species along with air,
water, rocks, sunshine, magnetic fields, etc. As Soros pointed out in the
Atlantic Monthly, “Species and their environment are interactive, and
one species serves as part of the environment for the others. There is a
feedback mechanism...” among levels. Let us now look at a fuller
complement of the principles by which these interwoven living
systems operate, so that we may get on with analyzing our global
human crisis more effectively.
The Principles of Living Systems
Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run
the world
--Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico

Xilonem Garcia, in this statement, expresses her intuitive
knowledge that anyone who understands the principles of living
systems can apply them to any holon at any level of its holarchy.
If we think about it, we can all be aware of such principles
operating in our bodies. And we seem to intuit and practice them
reasonably well at the family level. Not many people starve three of
their children to overfeed the fourth, for example, or beautify one
corner of their garden by destroying the rest of it. At the level of our
local communities or towns, we begin to lose sight of those principles,
and when we consider our nations or the world, we seem to have
forgotten them entirely, despite the fact that these are living systems,
too.
Main Features and Principles of Living Systems
1. Self-creation (autopoiesis)
2. Complexity (diversity of parts)
3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them
(holarchy)
4. Self-reflexivity (autognosis--self-knowledge)
5. Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
6. Response ability--to internal and external stress or other change
7. Input/output exchange of matter/energy/information with other
holons
8. Transformation of matter/energy/information
9. Empowerment/employment of all component parts
10. Communications among all parts
11. Coordination of parts and functions
12. Balance of Interests negotiated among parts, whole, and
embedding
holarchy
13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
14. Conservation of what works well
15. Creative change of what does not work well
Let us look, then, at a list of the main features and principles of all
healthy living systems or holons, be they single cells, bodies, families,
communities, ecosystems, nations or the whole world (see above). By
understanding these principles, we can assess the health of any
particular living system and see where it may be dysfunctional. This in
turn will give us clues to making the system healthier.
I leave it to the reader to consider this list in detail, and to choose a
familiar living system, such as an organization or community, to analyze
for its adherence to each principle in turn. Our purpose here is to learn
to do such analyses in order to understand in what ways our living
systems are healthy and in what ways they are not. We want especially,
in this discussion, to apply there principles to the process of political,
economic and cultural globalization--of forming our new “body of
humanity.” As soon as we begin checking this list, we see that while
globalization of humanity is bringing about a complex, self-organizing
process and is embedded within our ecosystems (1,2,3), it does not
meet most of the other requirements because only a relatively small
part of humanity is involved in decisions and has the power to serve its
own interests, often at the expense of other parts.
We must question how well it knows itself (4), for the process to
date has not been fully conscious, at least among the vast majority of
humans. Most of us feel swept along by its tides with far less than real
knowledge of what the process is all about.
We have not adequately taken into account our embeddedness in
and dependence upon the Earth holon with all its various sustaining
ecosystems. As a result, our self-regulation is woefully inadequate. To
wit, the input of matter and energy from our ecosystems into our
human systems (7) has been unsustainably rapacious, transforming
them to our use as though they were simply resources put there for our
benefit. Our output back into those ecosystems has further despoiled
them rather than restored them.
While our human system certainly has the complexity and
diversity of parts common to all living systems, we have not recognized
that as an asset. Rather, we have tried to make the system’s human
components as uniform as possible by imposing a Western
consumer ethic and other Western cultural patterns of
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industrialization, education, fashion, etc. on the world as a whole.
We had better take into account that monoculture is a very strange
concept we humans have introduced into Nature and that it does not
make a lastingly workable living system. Monoculture fails in
agriculture as in social culture, in economics as in religion. Social
monoculture is rooted in an outmoded and ignorant fear of difference
and of scarcity. It is time we learned to respect and cherish our human
diversity as the creative source of harmonious complexity.
As we continue through the list it is readily apparent that our
worldwide system of humanity is not functioning well as a living
system. The system neither empowers nor employs all humans (9).
While our communications (10) are technologically impressive, we do
not use them to coordinate parts and functions (11) in ways that foster
a balance of interests at all levels (12) of the human system (individuals,
families, communities, bioregions, nations, world), nor is there yet an
intent for reciprocity in mutual contribution and assistance (13). As for
conservation (14) and creative change (15), we are entirely unused to
seeing that both are necessary parts of a single system because of our
pervasive either/or syndrome, which I would like to discuss in some
detail.
The “either/or” syndrome:
The capitalist/communist drama that played out for most if not all
of our lifetimes reveals a fundamental dramatic flaw: an odd and
ultimately impossible ideological choice: to build society on the basis
of individual interest or on the basis of communal interest.
Throughout the Cold War, our global alignment presented nations
with this either/or choice between “left-wing” communism and “right-
wing” capitalism. One simply could not be “for” both capitalism and
communism, both left and right.
Even within our political democracies we divide ourselves into
radical and conservative parties of various hues, and ask, or require,
ourselves to make the choice to vote for one or the other of their left
or right political programs. In essence, “right” is conservative, “left” is
radical (and still “tainted” by association with communism).
In nature, no living system chooses between conservation and
radical change as a way of life. Some living systems, such as squids and
sharks, cockroaches and certain lizards, have functioned so well despite
dramatic changes in their environments that they have survived
virtually unchanged over eons, rather like bicycles in the jet age.
Others, such as our own human species, have virtually leaped into
change. But they have not taken their particular directions from some
unflinching commitment to either conservation or change; they have
simply done what was called for depending on circumstances. Most
species combine conservation and change as circumstances demand.
Fifty years of laboratory evidence shows that when they change, they
do so by rearranging their DNA intelligently in response to
circumstances in the environment
(Sahtouris, E. A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, Wiley,
New York 1998).
Thus Nature interweaves conservation and change to protect what
works and change what doesn’t. And we would do well to adopt that
strategy, as Alvin Toffler suggested some time ago in urging us to stop
looking left and right, but rather to assess any idea in terms of whether
it will lead us forward or backward (Toffler, A. The Third Wave, Wm.
Collins, London, 1980).
In practice, it turns out, there was more in common between
capitalism and communism than their professed either/or ideologies
indicated. Alvin Toffler was the first author I recall talking about
parallels between the Soviet East and the Capitalist West. Both, he
pointed out, were unfairly exploiting the Third World to support their
large industrialist economies. Now David Korten goes further, telling
us “ a modern economic system based on the ideology of free market
capitalism is destined to self-destruct for many of the same reasons
that the Marxist economy collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union.” (Mander & Goldsmith, editors. The Case Against the
Global Economy and For a Return to the Local, Sierra Books 1996).
He spells out these common features as:
1. the concentration of economic power in unaccountable and
abusive centralized institutions (state or transnational corporations);
 2. the destruction of ecosystems in the name of progress;
3. the erosion of social capital by dependence on disempowering
mega institutions;
4. narrow views of human needs by which community values and
spiritual connection to the Earth are eroded.
Note that all of these illustrate systems in which the “top” level is
empowered by disempowering local and individual levels. We are
accustomed to understanding this about communist systems, but we
have ignored the erosion of our own democratic principles in the
process of capitalist globalization. A another example of the either/or
syndrome, the USA’s President Clinton’s Commission on Sustainability,
in its initial meetings, actually argued whether discussions of ecological
sustainability need involve economics. The debate occurred because
we have created yet another apparent either/or situation: economics
versus ecology--sometimes epitomized in the United States as “jobs
versus spotted owls.” In the brief time I was given to address this
Commission, I pointed out that ecology in Greek is the logos or
organization, of the oikos (society as “household”), and ecology the
“household’s” nomos or rules. Thus, they can hardly be at odds in any
healthy society. The problem is not whether they need be linked, but
that we separated them in the first place! (Recall here Xilonem Garcia’s
earlier quoted comment that “Anyone who knows how to run a
household, knows how to run a world.”)
Our latest version of the either/or syndrome seems to be in a
growing debate on globalization versus localization, as is implied, for
example, by the title just cited: “The Case Against Globalization and
Toward Local Economy.” While most authors of this recent IFG
(International Forum on Globalization) book are really only opposed
to the way in which globalization is happening, considerable numbers
of people actually are arguing this situation in classical and ultimately
unrealistic either/or fashion.
A balance of all levels:
It is of the utmost importance that we not let economic
globalization override the interests of people and their local economies
and ecosystems, for this would be a grave violation of the principles of
living systems, as we have just seen. Local economies are holons within
the global human holarchy, and must have the power to negotiate
effectively, in their own self-interest, with other levels of that holarchy.
The solution to our currently imbalanced globalization is not to
oppose globalization; it is to do globalization better.
We can easily see that balance among the interests of the global
holon and those of the regional and local holon economies it comprises
is as important as the balance between the interests of any local
economy (as a holon) and those of the individual people and non-
human species which comprise it. Thus the appropriate response to
the world corporate interests that railroaded the GATT (General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the WTO (World Trade
Organization) into existence under the rubric of “economic liberalism”
without in fact giving it a democratic vote after adequate information,
is clearly the strengthening of self-sufficient local economies, as David
Korten, Herman Daly, Edward Goldsmith and other members of the
IFG have explained. It is also to launch a sufficiently strong movement
to demand change in the GATT and /WTO themselves, and in the
United Nations which spawned them as it earlier spawned the World
Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
Taking our cues from our bodies, or from the Earth itself, with its
diverse ecosystems, we can see that bioregionalism--basic local self-
sufficiency economics which takes all species, including humans, into
account -- is as necessary and important an aspect of healthy
globalization as are equitable international trade relations. Certainly no
one part of a healthy globalized economy will be able to exploit
another. That means local economies will have to protect themselves
against unfair trade and strong economies will have to permit that
protection in their own interests of seeing a healthy global economy.
Soros points out in his Atlantic Monthly article that in nature,
“Cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition” and
again, “The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common
good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.”
But unless self-interest is “tempered by a recognition of a
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common interest,” the society, on which the market rests, “is liable to
break down.” This is an excellent example of understanding living
systems principles.
That is, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by all people
must be possible within the global economy
Dynamics of Natural Democracy
My tradition helps us learn that individual and group needs must
be met in ongoing ways for the People to survive as a People... As we
try to consciously and conscientiously fit economics and business back
into a holistic approach to life and living; there is much that can be
learned from societies and communities that have never forgotten that
wholeness;... communities that understand Life as flows of energy,... [in
which] everyone receives basic support.... everyone contributes... no
part is separate from any other part... the health of the whole enables
the health of any part thereof... sickness of the smallest part impacts
the whole.
--Paula Underwood, World Business Academy Journal, vol. 10 no 4,
1996
In historic terms, capitalism and communism are human social
systems experiments that looked good in theory but proved
problematic in practice. One has failed; the other is still being tested.
Both have imbalanced the interests of individual and community by
making one subservient to the other, rather than putting them in
balance with each other.
It is of considerable interest that both capitalism and communism
were in part inspired by the democratic political economy and social
structure of the Native American Haudenosaunee, a union of native
nations that the Europeans called Iroquois. Ben Franklin, influential
with the other founding fathers of the USA, on the one hand, and
Friedrich Engels, who influenced Karl Marx, on the other, were
inspired by this unique democracy. Unfortunately, neither the capitalist
nor the communist systems inspired by the Haudenosaunee really
understood her tradition as Paula Underwood describes it above.
It is still a lesson to be learned from many native cultures that
humankind is but one holon within the Earth holarchy. In such
awareness, we all would see clearly the advantage in negotiating (not
eliminating) our human differences, and we would also cease and desist
immediately our denial of planetary interests and our profligate
destruction of the ecosystems sustaining us with ever more difficulty.
If we were an intelligent species--and that remains to be
demonstrated, given our knowing destruction of our own life support
system and our rather juvenile antagonisms over what belongs to
whom--we would look to the planet that spawned us for guidance in
human affairs, as was the original purpose of natural and political
philosophy in ancient Greece. It would then become obvious that
human affairs have reached the danger level at which cooperation must
restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we
are to survive.
What’s to be done?
Survival means the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a
part of it.... If the South cannot survive, the North is going to crumble.
If countries of the Third World cannot pay their debts, you are going
to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of the Third World,
your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue
living in the way you have been for much longer.
--Thich Nat Han, “The Heart of Understanding”
The global wave of protests against the unfair advantage of huge
corporations and bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)
that represent their interests, as I said at the outset, is a healthy
reaction necessary to rebalancing holarchy in our species is to survive
the current crises. We have seen that globalization is the natural next
phase of evolution. We are not entirely in control of this process and it
is beyond our power to stop. We have already globalized
transportation, communications, money, industries, food, weapons,
pollution and other aspects of human culture, many of them peacefully.
 Sir James Goldsmith, one of the wealthiest men in the world at the
time, was quoted in a London Times article of 1994 (March 5). He said:
“What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself
because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new
circumstances, of an economic ideology.” That ideology is now
questioned and discussed ever more openly.
The main problem is being identified as imbalance in our global
economics. All the WTO’s member states authorize the WTO to do
their business negotiations and all are bound by its decisions. They can
be forced to change any of their own present or future laws if, as the
WTO provisions read , “the attainment of any [WTO] objective is
being impeded” by its existence. The trade dispute panels of the WTO
and NAFTA do not guarantee members’ economic disinterest.
Further, they keep all their proceedings, documents and transcripts
secret. There cannot be any media or citizen participation, and no
review or appeal is available.
This constitutes a loss of sovereignty among the member nations,
whose agreements to join were railroaded through congresses with
inadequate discussion. But it is not too late to redress these severe
imbalances as the world’s people wake up to them.
Under present WTO practices, Thailand has been told it cannot
refuse to import US cigarettes for health reasons, and Indonesia may
not keep the rattan it needs for domestic use. Neither children nor
adults are protected from exploitative and unhealthy conditions of
labor, and no member country may make any effort to protect its local
industry and employment against erosion by unfair competition in the
world market. Self-sufficient organic farming is literally outlawed, while
poisonous chemicals are forced on countries, destroying the health of
people, crops, land, air and water for the sake of short-term profits in
high places. The US, after long grassroots efforts resulting in bans on
tuna fish caught without ensuring the safety of dolphins, is now being
forced to import it again. Europe fights hard against forced imports of
genetically altered foods.
As each injustice comes to light, people become informed and
active. The good news is that we don’t have to do our economics
inequitably to globalize. It is possible, as Hazel Henderson has pointed
out for decades, to do win/win, rather than win/lose, economics.
(Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics , 1991; Building a Win/
Win World, 1996).
As Henderson points out, the UN’s most powerful nations
commandeered the World Bank and the IMF, then dominated the
GATT discussions and set up the WTO together with corporations
and financial institutions. Yet the UN’s special agencies, during the
same timespan, formed agreements and treaties on nuclear
proliferation (IAEA), air traffic rules (IATA) and postal rates (GPU),
also working doggedly on health, education and security issues, as well
as accepting a great deal of criticism and recommendations for UN
restructuring, which is now an official process. Obviously the UN can
only be as good as its member states will make it and as NGO (Non-
Government Organizations) can push it to be.
Polls show clearly that the people of the United States support the
UN overwhelmingly, while their presumably representative
government does not pay its dues and periodically threatens to quit.
Interesting global power shifts would happen if it did. Henderson
recommends a new UN funding structure by a tiny tax (.003%) on
international currency transactions, global commons use fees, “sin
taxes” on polluters, drug traffic fines and taxes on arms sales, to avoid
the problems created by non-payment of dues by its members. The
UN, whatever its problems and whatever our view of it is, remains, as
Henderson points out, “the world’s major networker, broker, and
convenor of new global negotiations.” All the new problems of
globalization are centered in its spinoffs, especially the newer GATT
and WTO. So we must also see as a sign of hope the relentless popular
pressure of NGOs that is proving itself increasingly an agent of change.
In 1995 the UN World Summit on Social Development in
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Copenhagen, covered by two thousand journalists, discussed replacing
GNP measures with a people centered and ecologically sustainable
“new development paradigm.” The 1996 UN Habitat II Summit in
Istanbul hosted a World Business Forum that set up a process for
Global Standards. Inside the World Bank, its own staff is now in the
process of creating significant progressive changes. Now, in 1999,
NGOs are sponsoring the Hague Appeal for Peace.
In addition to such NGOs, labor organizations, religious
organizations such as the United Religions Initiative and others
devoted to interfaith peace and alliances, various conscious investment
and pension funds, meetings such as the annual Gorbachev
Foundation sponsored State of the World conferences and grassroots
movements are all playing a role in global awareness and the
restructuring of human society. These are just a few of many examples
showing that we are growing wiser as a species in our self-organization
at the global level.
Some capitalist entrepreneurs are uniting with each other to work
out ways of doing alternative and responsible-to-community capitalism
in organizations such as The World Business Academy, Business for
Social Responsibility, the Social Ventures Network and the Conscious
Business Alliance. Certain corporations are moving toward stakeholder
ownership, very serious recycling, and holarchic decision making. Role
models such as the Body Shop, Interface and Ben and Jerry’s show us
the possible future of all business enterprises. The picture of
globalization and the needs and aspirations of the human community
are clarifying now and we can get on with the task of insuring our
civilization against demise. We can prove ourselves a mature species,
ready to learn from our parent planet’s four and a half billion years of
experience in evolving workable living systems.
The beloved American author Mark Twain tells the story of a
young man returning from his first forays out into the world, amazed
on hearing his father speak--surprised at all his father has learned while
he was gone. It is of course a characterization not of new learning in
the father, but in the son. The son’s budding maturity lies in his new
ability to listen to an elder’s accumulated wisdom.
When we humans, after all a very young species, drop our
adolescent arrogance of thinking we know it all and read the wisdom
in our parent planet’s accumulated experience of living systems design,
we too will mature as a species, to our own benefit and that of all other
species, as well as the planet itself.
See Also :
* “NEW POLITICAL TAGS: GLOBAL VS. NATIONAL” from
the 12/22/97 edition of The Christian Science Monitor .
* from nirvanet’s Zen Planet :
* 9/97 ZP interview: Elisabet Sahtouris
* Interview: Part Two
* E. Sahtouris: BRAZIL AND GLOBALIZATION
Organism and Psyche in a Participatory Universe
The Evolutionary Outrider. The Impact of the Human Agent on
Evolution
Mae-Wan Ho
The Evolutionary Outrider. The Impact of the Human Agent on
Evolution, Essays
in Honour of Ervin Laszlo (D. Loye, ed.), pp. 49-65, Praeger, 1998.
* Abstract
* Organism - the universal archetype
* The irrepressible tendency towards the whole
* Organic space-time versus mechanical space and time
* Organism versus mechanism
* A theory of the organism
* The thermodynamics of organized complexity
* The liquid crystalline organism
* Knowledge as intercommunication in a participatory universe
* The quantum holographic body field of the organism
* The coherence of brain and body consciousness
* Quantum coherence and brain consciousness
 * The organism’s macroscopic wave function and universal
entanglement
* Acknowledgments
* References
Abstract
The Jungian ideal of the whole person is one whose cell and
psyche, body and mind, inner and outer, are fully integrated, and hence
completely in tune with nature. Jung’s ideas on psychical development
show many parallels to those relating to the organism. Similarly,
Laszlo’s theory of the quantum holographic universe views the
universe effectively as a kind of superorganism, constantly becoming,
being created through the activities of its constituent organisms at
every level. The organism is thus the most universal archetype. I
describe a theory of the organism, based on quantum coherence,
which is, in some respects, a microcosm of Laszlo’s universe. It involves
key notions of the maximization of local autonomy and global
cohesion, of universal participation, of sensitivity and responsiveness,
which have profound implications for our global future.
* Parts of this paper was first delivered as a lecture in the Assisi
Conference,”The Confluence of Matter and Spirit: Patterning in the
Psyche and in Archetypal Fields”, Assisi, Aug. 11-17, 1996.
Organism - the universal archetype
In the Summer of 1991, I saw something in Mexico City which
haunted me for months afterwards. It was a thick round slab of
sculpted rock, about 3.25m in diameter. The official guide book says it
depicts the Aztec moon goddess, embodying the powers of night, who
was killed and gruesomely dismembered by her brother the sungod -
an act so terrible that the world itself is torn asunder. Yet, the
beautifully executed symmetries of the form evokes a sense of the
dismembered parts drawing together again to make a whole,
counteracting the violent severence of head and limbs. Mazatl
Galindo, who teaches indigenous American cultures and is himself of
Aztec Indian descent, has since explained to me that this sculpted disc,
which has the same dimensions as the much better known, and widely
reproduced calender stone, is actually also a calender: the thirteen
main joints of her dismembered body representing the thirteen
divisions of the year. The alternating disintegration and re-integration
it evokes signifies the cycles of death and rebirth that mark the passage
of time.
I came upon the sculpture while accompanying a group of
university under-graduates travelling around the world on an intensive,
year-long education programme on Global Ecology - Integrating
Nature and Culture (of which I was a founding faculty member). In the
course of the year and throughout the Third World, we had
experienced the same distressing disintegration of the environment
and indigenous communities brought on by industrial developments.
And yet there remains, everywhere, an indestructible, irrepressible
spirit to make things whole again. It was not just a survival instinct, but
a genuine lust for life - the psychic energy that created the calender
stone is at work, initiating the healing process even as disintegration is
continuing apace. The meaning of that year’s journey and the journey
of my life as symbolic of life itself came to me like an avalanche. I have
died several deaths since my encounter with that symbol. I found
myself standing at the gates of the underworld, as Orpheus must have
done, torn between the fear of impending hell and the over-riding need
to recover a lost love. Eventually, it transformed my life, in much the
way that Jung (1964) has envisaged the transforming power of symbols.
Love rules our lives on many planes. Scottish psychologist Ian Suttie
(1924), a critic of Freud, proposed that love, as distinct from sex, is the
primary drive for all social organisms. Love comes from the nurturing
ministrations of the mother or caretaker during infancy. From this
arises a feeling of tenderness that regards all people to be possible
companions, to be enjoyed and loved, and from whom approval is
sought. On another plane, the successful separation of child from
mother creates a field of attraction, a “virtual space” of love
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which we fill with our social and creative activities.
(Winnicott, 1974).
Love is a desire for wholeness. It is a desire for resonance, for
intimacy, a longing to embrace and complete a larger whole. And it is
that which motivates our social and creative acts and our knowledge of
nature on the most universal plane (Ho, 1994a). At its most personal,
love is our affection for specific human beings, it is also one’s own
process of individuation - of remaking one’s “self” out of the fabric of
experiences, transcending the well-worn archetypes to become a
unique whole person. The whole person is one whose sense of
uniqueness is premissed on her relationship with all of nature. Thus,
the personal and universal are inextricably intertwined. The most
intimate knowledge of oneself is at the same time, the most profound
knowledge of nature.
The true love of self is also inextricably the love of humanity and
of all nature. That is why we feel obliged to serve, to help, to alleviate
suffering and pain just as they were our own. Scientists like David
Bohm, Ervin Laszlo and others are indeed trying to recover that lost
love, the universal wholeness and entanglement that enables us to
emphathize and to be compassionate.
The whole is never static, it is constantly dying and reborning,
decaying and renewing, breaking down to build up again. The same
cycles of disintegration and re-integration occur whether one is
looking at the energy metabolism of our body or the stream of
consciousness out of which we individuate our psyche. During the
normal `steady state’ of our existence, the multitudes of infinitesimal
deaths and rebirths are intricately balanced so that the old changes
imperceptibly into the new. However, whenever the attracting centre
of the new is radically different from the old, a larger, and at times,
complete disintegration may be needed before the new can
individuate. It is like the caterpillar which must completely dissolve so
that the beautiful butterfly can emerge. That is our hope for the
approaching millennium. The psyche has so much in common with
the organism that many of the most perceptive biologists and
psychologists have proposed a complete continuity and identity
between the two. They were impressed with the `directiveness’ of all
vital processes, whether developmental, physiological or psychical. In
development, the fertilized egg goes through a series of
morphogenetic changes directed towards producing the adult
organism, and is remarkably resistant to disturbing influences.
Similarly, the organism is able to maintain its internal physiology in a
constant state despite large changes in the external environment. So it
is with the purposiveness of all living things. One has only to try to
stop a cat from doing what it wants to do. The mark of a living being is
that it always has its own way of doing things, its own directed purpose
in life that resists what is imposed on it. It is not at the mercy of its
surroundings. It is so even for the simplest unicellular organism. The
biologist Jennings (1933) took a lifetime to study the ciliate protozoa
Paramecium, and became convinced of its purposiveness, it autonomy
at the very least. For example, it will swim towards the light, or not,
according as to whether it is hungry or fully fed.
Geneticist Sinnott (1950) argues in his book, Cell and Psyche, that
biological organization, concerned with development and physiology,
and psychical activity, concerned with behaviour and leading to mind,
are fundamentally the same thing. “In some unexplained fashion, there
seems to reside in every living thing,...an inner subjective relation to its
bodily organization. This has finally evolved into what is called
consciousness...through this same inner relationship, the mechanisms
which guides and controls vital activities towards specific ends, the
pattern or tension set up in protoplasm, which so sensitively regulates
its growth and behaviour, can also be experienced, and this is the
genesis of desire, purpose, and all other mental activities.” (p.48)
To me, the Jungian ideal of the whole person is also one whose cell
and psyche, body and mind, inner and outer, are fully integrated, and
hence completely in tune with nature. That may be the secret of the
golden flower (see Fordham, 1966), the immortal spirit-body created
out of the resolution of opposites, the intertwining of darkness and
light (moon goddess and sungod) that is the essence of life itself. The
encounter with the Aztec calender stone is the immediate prelude to
my work towards a theory of the organism, much of which is in The
Rainbow and The Worm written almost a year later (Ho, 1993). A
recent summary of the main thesis with additional work done since is
presented elsewhere (Ho, 1997a)
Jung’s ideas on psychical development show many parallels to
those relating to living organization, and have since been borrowed
back into biology. `Individuation’, for example, has been used by the
embryologist/ geneticist Waddington (1956) to describe the process of
forming a whole, or a whole organ, such as a limb from the global
morphogenetic field. Jung himself was not unaware of these parallels
when he presented the psyche as a dynamic, self-regulating system,
motivated by psychic energy or libido, a general sense of desire or
longing, an urge that flows between opposite poles, so that the
stronger the opposition the greater the tension (Fordham, 1966). The
allusion to the living system and energy flow is unmistakable. Jung’s
theory of the psyche, drawn largely from his own experiences and
imagination, is also a theory of the organism. The organism is the most
universal archetype. Similarly, Laszlo’s (1995, 1996) theory of the
quantum holographic universe views the universe effectively as a kind
of superorganism, constantly becoming, being created through the
activities of its constituent organisms at every level. These activities
leave traces (quantum interferences) in the universal vacuum field
which feed back on the future evolution of the organisms themselves.
The universal quantum holographic field is the collective
consciousness (including the unconscious) of all organisms. My theory
of the organism is in some respects, a microcosm of Laszlo’s universe.
The irrepressible tendency towards the whole
What is it to be an organism? It is, at bottom, the irrepressible
tendency towards being whole. It is that which underlies both the
directiveness of vital activities, and the love we express on many planes.
In biological development, the most characteristic feature of the
embryo is not so much its directiveness towards producing an adult
organism or any archetype, rather it is its tendency to maintain and
develop into an organized whole, however it is disturbed. Sometimes,
this organized whole is so altered that it is no longer recognizable as
the same organism, but it is nonetheless an organism in the sense of
being an organized whole.
More significantly, there is a special relationship between part and
whole in the organism.The egg starts to develop by cell division. At a
sufficiently early stage, the cells in the embryo are typically totipotent,
in that they have the potential to develop into any part of the whole.
When they are separated, each cell can develop into a whole organism,
albeit a much smaller one than the original. Similarly, if a part of the
early embryo is removed, that part can be regenerated from the
remaining so that the whole is again recovered. Regeneration can also
occur in adult organisms of some species such as the salamander. It is
part and parcel of the healing process that enables all organisms to
recover from illnesses and injuries. Whole and part are therefore
mutually implicated in the organism. This quality of organic wholeness
has eluded mechanistic science right from the beginning, and has been
the main sticking point of the debate between the mechanists and
their opponents, the vitalists.
Organic space-time versus mechanical space and time
The mechanistic framework broke down at the turn of the present
century, giving way to quantum theory at the very small scale of
elementary particles and to general relativity at the large scales of
planetary motion. In place of the static, eternal universe of absolute
space and time, there is a multitude of contingent, observer-dependent
space-time frames. Instead of solid objects with simple locations in
space and time, one finds delocalized, mutually entangled quantum
entities evolving like organisms. The opposition between the
mechanistic and the organic worldview hinges on the fundamental
nature of space and time.
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Mechanical space and time are both linear, homogeneous, separate
and local. In other words, both are infinitely divisible, and every bit of
space or of time is the same as every other bit. A billiard ball here
cannot affect another one there, unless someone pushes the one here
to collide with the one there. Mechanical space-time also happens to
be the space and time of the commonest “common-sensible” world in
our mundane, everyday existence. It is the space-time of frozen
instantaneity abstracted from the fullness of real process, rather like a
still frame taken from a bad movie-film, which is itself a flat simulation
of life. The passage of time is an accident, having no connection with
the change in the configuration of solid matter located in space. Thus,
space and time are merely coordinates for locating objects. One can go
forwards or backwards in time to locate the precise objects at those
particular points. In reality, we know that we can as much retrace our
space-time to locate the person that was 30 or 50 years younger as we
can undo the wrongs we have committed then. There is no simple
location in space and time (Whitehead, 1925).
Psychoanalyst-artist Marion Milner (1957) describes her experience
of “not being able to paint” as the fear of losing control, of no longer
seeing the mechanical common-sensible separateness of things. It is
really a fear of being alive, of entanglement and process in the organic
reality that ever eludes mechanistic descripion. And yet, it is in
overcoming the imposed illusion of the separateness of things that the
artist/scientist enters into the realm of creativity and real
understanding - which is the realm of organic space-time. Mechanical
physics has banished organic space-time from our collective public
consciousness, though it never ceases to flourish in the subterranean
orphic universe of our collective unconscious and our subjective
aesthetic experience. In a way, all developments in western science
since Descartes and Newton may be seen as a struggle to reclaim our
intuitive, indigenous notions of organic space-time, which, deep within
our soul, we feel to be more consonant with authentic experience.
Organism versus mechanism
The mechanistic worldview indeed officially ended at the
beginning of this century. But the profound implications of this
decisive break with the intellectual tradition of previous centuries were
recognized by a mere handful of visionaries, especially by the French
philosopher Henri Bergson (1916), and the English mathematician-
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1925). Between them, they
articulated an organicist philosophy in place of the mechanistic. Let
me summarize some of what I see to be the major contrasts between
the mechanical universe and the universe of organisms.
Mechanical Universe - Organic Universe
Static, deterministic Dynamic, evolving
Separate, absolute space and absolute time for all observers space-
time
inseperable, contingent observer(process)-dependent space-time
frames
Inert objects with simple locations in space and time Delocalized
organisms
with mutually entangled space-times
Linear, homogeneous space and time Nonlinear, heterogeneous,
multi-
dimensional space-times
Local causation Non-local causation
Given, nonparticipatory and hence, impotent observer Creative,
participatory; entanglement of observer and observed
The contrasts are brought into sharper relief by considering the
differences between mechanism and organism, or, more accurately, the
opposition between a mechanical system and an organic system. First
of all, a mechanical system is an object in space and time, whereas an
organism is, in essence, of space-time. An organism creates its own
space-times by its activities, so it has control over its space-time, which
is not the same as external clock time. Secondly, a mechanical system
has a stability that belongs to a closed equilibrium, depending on
controllers, buffers and buttresses to return the system to set, or fixed
points. It works like a non-democratic institution, by a hierarchy of
control: a boss who sits in his office doing nothing (bosses are still
predominantly male) except giving out orders to line managers, who in
turn coerce the workers to do whatever needs to be done. An
organism, by contrast, has a dynamic stability, which is attained in
open systems far away from equilibrium. It has no bosses, no
controllers and no set points. It is radically democratic, everyone
participates in making decisions and in working by
intercommunication and mutual responsiveness. Finally, a mechanical
system is built of isolatable parts, each external and independent of all
the others. An organism, however, is an irreducible whole, where part
and whole, global and local are mutually implicated. An even more
significant change in worldview is the dissolution of the Cartesian
barrier separating the observer from the observed. In the quantum
universe, observer and observed are mutually entangled, each act of
observation determining the evolution of both. Knowledge, therefore,
involves the full participation of the knower in the known. As the
knower is an organism, she is also an actor who participates in
constructing and shaping the universe, andshe does so knowingly.
There is, thus, no escaping from the responsibility of a participatory
universe and the moral imperative of one’s mutual entanglement,
ultimately with all of nature. But let us begin with the central percept
of being an organism.
A theory of the organism
There are 75 trillion cells in our body, made up of astronomical
numbers of molecules of many different kinds. How can this huge
conglomerate of disparate cells and molecules function so perfectly as a
coherent whole? How can we summon energy at will to do whatever
we want? And most of all, how is it possible for there to be a singular
“I” that we all feel ourselves to be amid this diverse multiplicity?
To give an idea of the coordination of activities involved, imagine
an immensely huge superorchestra playing with instruments spanning
an incredible spectrum of sizes from a piccolo of 10-9 metre up to a
bassoon or a bass viol of a metre or more, and a musical range of
seventy-two octaves. The amazing thing about this superorchestra is
that it never ceases to play out our individual songlines, with a certain
recurring rhythm and beat, but in endless variations that never repeat
exactly. Always, there is something new, something made up as it goes
along. It can change key, change tempo, change tune perfectly, as it
feels like it, or as the situation demands, spontaneously and without
hesitation. Furthermore, each and every player, however small, can
enjoy maximum freedom of expression, improvising from moment to
moment, while maintaining in step and in tune with the whole. I have
just described a theory of the quantum coherence that underlies the
radical wholeness of the organism, which involves total participation,
maximizing both local freedom and global cohesion. It involves the
mutual implication of global and local, of part and whole, from
moment to moment. It is on that basis that we can have a sense of
ourselves as a singular being, despite the diverse multiplicity of parts.
That is also how we can perceive the unity of the here and now, in an
act of “prehensive unification”(Whitehead, 1925). Artists like scientists,
depend on the same exquisite sense of prehensive unification, to see
patterns that connect apparently disparate phenomena.
In order to add corroborative details to the theory, however, I shall
give a more scientific narrative beginning with energy relationships.
The thermodynamics of organized complexity
Textbooks tell us that living systems are open systems dependent
on energy flow. Energy flows in together with materials, and waste
products are exported as well as the spent energy that goes to make up
entropy. And that is how living systems can, in principle, escape from
the second law of thermodynamics. The second law, as you may know,
encapsulates the fact that all physical systems run down, ultimately
decaying to homogeneous disorganization when all useful energy is
spent, or converted into entropy. But how do living systems manage
their antientropic existence? I have suggested (Ho, 1996a,b; 1997a) that
the key to understanding how the organism overcomes the immediate
constraints of thermodynamics is in its capacity to store the
incoming energy, and in somehow closing the energy loop within
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to give a reproducing, regenerating life cycle. The energy, in effect,
circulates among complex cascades of coupled cyclic processes within
the system before it is allowed to dissipate to the outside. These
cascades of cycles span the entire gamut of space-times from slow to
fast, from local to global, that all together, constitutes the life-cycle.
Each cycle is a domain of coherent energy storage - coherent energy is
simply energy that can do work because it is all coming and going
together, as opposed to incoherent energy which goes in all directions
at once and cancel out, and is therefore, quite unable to do work.
Coupling between the cycles ensures that the energy is transferred
directly from where it is captured or produced, to where it is used. In
thermodynamic language, those activities going thermodynamically
down-hill, and therefore yielding energy, are coupled to those that
require energy and go thermodynamically uphill. This coupling also
ensures that positive entropy generated in some space-time elements is
compensated by negative entropy in other space-time elements. There
is, in effect, an internal energy conservation as well as an internal
entropy compensation. The whole system works by reciprocity, a
cooperative give and take which balances out over the system as a
whole, and within a sufficiently long time (Ho, 1997a). The result is
that there is always coherent energy available in the system, which can
be readily shared throughout the system, from local to global and vice
versa, from global to local. That is why, in principle, we can have energy
at will, whenever and wherever it is needed. The organism has
succeeded in gathering all the necessary vital processes into a unity of
coupled non-dissipative cycles spanning the entire gamut of space-
times up to and including the life-cycle itself, which effectively feeds
off the dissipative irreversible energy flow. In thermodynamic terms,
the living system can be represented as a superposition of cyclic non-
dissipative processes, for which entropy production balance out to
zero, SDS = 0, and dissipative, irreversible processes, for which net
entropy production is positive, SDS > 0.
But how can energy mobilization be so perfectly coordinated?
That is a direct consequence of the energy stored, which makes the
whole system excitable, or highly sensitive to specific weak signals. It
does not have to be pushed and dragged into action like a mechanical
system. Weak signals originating anywhere within or outside the
system will propagate throughout the system and become
automatically amplified by the energy stored, often into macroscopic
action. Intercommunication can proceed very rapidly, especially
because organisms are completely liquid crystalline.
The liquid crystalline organism
Several years ago, we discovered an optical technique that enables
us to see living organisms in brilliant interference colours generated by
the liquid crystallinity of their internal anatomy. We found that all live
organisms are completely liquid crystalline - in their cells as well as the
extracellular matrix, or connective tissues (see Ho et al, 1996; Ross et
al, 1997). Liquid crystals are states of matter between solid crystals and
liquids. Like solid crystals, they possess long-range orientation order,
and often, also varying degrees of translational order (or order of
motion). In contrast to solid crystals, however, they are mobile and
flexible and highly responsive. They undergo rapid changes in
orientation or phase transitions when exposed to weak electric (or
magnetic) fields, to subtle changes in pressure, temperature, hydration,
acidity or pH, concentrations of inorganic molecules or other small
molecules. These properties happen to be ideal for making organisms,
as they provide for the rapid intercommunication required for the
organism to function as a coherent whole. (Images of live organisms
taken from video-recordings may be found in Ho, 1997c)
This imaging technique enables us to literally see the whole
organism at once, from its macroscopic activities down to the long-
range order of the molecules that make up its tissues. The colours
generated depend on the structure of the particular molecules - which
differ for each tissue - and their degree of coherent order (see Ross et
al, 1997 for the mathematical derivation showing how, for weakly
birefringent material, the colour intensity is approximately linearly
related to both intrinsic birefringence and the order parameter). The
principle is exactly the same as that used in detecting mineral crystals
in geology; but with the important difference that the living liquid
crystals are dynamic through and through. The molecules are all
moving about busily transforming energy and material in the
meantime, and yet they still appear crystalline.
The reason is because visible light vibrates much faster than the
molecules can move, so the tissues will appear indistinguishable from
static crystals to the light transmitted, so long as the movements of the
constituent molecules are sufficiently coherent. In fact, the most
actively moving parts of the organism are always the brightest,
implying that their molecules are moving all the more coherently. With
our optical technique, therefore, one can see that the organism is thick
with coherent activities at all levels, which are coordinated in a
continuum from the macroscopic to the molecular. That is the essence
of the organic whole, where local and global, part and whole are
mutually implicated at any time and for all times.
Those images draw attention to the wholeness of the organism in
another respect. All organisms - from protozoa to vertebrates without
exception - are polarized along the anterior-posterior axis, or the oral-
adoral axis, such that all the colours in the different tissues of the body
are at a maximum when the axis is appropriately aligned in the optical
system, and they change in concert as the axis is rotated from that
position.
Knowledge as intercommunication in a participatory universe
The images demonstrate something profound about the nature of
knowledge. Are the colours really in the organisms? Yes and no. They
are dependent on the particular organism and its physiological state,
but no colours would be produced unless we set up the observation in
a certain way. Therefore, the observation, and hence the knowledge
gained, is always dependent on both the observer and the observed. It
is an act of intercommunication, which, in the ideal, is just like that
between different parts of the organism (see below). The authenticity
of the knowledge gained depends on this delicate balance of obtaining
information while respecting the object of one’s interrogation. That is
why one uses minimally invasive, nondestructive techniques for
investigating living organization, which allows organisms to be
organisms (Ho, 1993). Crude, destructive methods of interrogation will
invariably yield misleading information of the most mechanistic kind,
reinforcing a mechanistic view of organisms and of the universe.
In the same way, as we participate in universal wholeness, in
Laszlo’s quantum holographic field, we do so with the requisite
sensitivity and respect. Knowledge is always a gift one accepts with
responsiveness and responsibility. Let us look at how
intercommunication takes place within the organism.
The quantum holographic body field of the organism
There is no doubt that if we could look inside our bodies the same
way we have done for the small creatures, we would see our living body
as an incredibly colorful, liquid crystalline continuum, with all parts
rapidly intercommunicating and colours flashing, so that it can act as a
coherent whole. (That may be why we say we are off-colour when we
don’t feel well.) One has been led to believe that intercommunication
in large animals like ourselves depends on the nervous system
controlled by the brain. However, that may be only half the story, as
nerves do not reach all parts of the body, and animals without a
nervous system nevertheless have no problems in acting as a coherent
whole.
The clue to the other half of the story is in the connective tissues
which make up the bulk of most animals including ourselves. These are
the skin, the bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and other tissues that
fill up the spaces between the usual organs. Most people still think that
these tissues fulfill mechanical functions of protection and support,
like packing material. However, we now know they are all liquid
crystalline, and have much more exotic properties.
The connective tissues are further connected to the intracellular
matrices of all individual cells which are also liquid crystalline. There is
thus an excitable, liquid crystalline continuum for rapid
intercommunication permeating the entire organism, enabling it to
function as a coherent whole, as we have directly demonstrated with
our noninvasive optical imaging technique. This continuum constitutes
a “body consciousness” that precedes the nervous system in
evolution (c.f. Oschman, 1984, 1993); and I suggest, it still
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works in tandem with, and to some extent, independently of the
nervous system. This body consciousness is the pre-requisite for
conscious experience that involves the participation of the
intercommunicating whole. When the body is fully coherent,
intercommunication is instantaneous and nonlocal. By nonlocal, I
mean that distant sites, say my left hand and my right hand, take no
time at all to reach agreement as to what to do next, so it is impossible
to know where the “signal” originated. This is the quantum coherent
state. The quantum coherent state is a very special state of being
whole, which maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion (see
Ho, 1993). This is due to the factorizability of the quantum coherent
state (Glauber, 1970) in which the parts are so perfectly coordinated
that the correlations between them resolves neatly into products of the
self-correlations of the parts, so the parts behave as though they are
independent of one another. Remember the huge superorchestra I
mentioned earlier? Factorizability of the quantum coherent state
explains why the body can be performing all sorts of different but
coordinated functions simultaneously. As I am writing this paper, my
metabolism is working in all the cells of my body, my trunk and leg
muscles are keeping in tone so I don’t collapse into a heap, while the
muscles in my arms and fingers are working together in just the right
way to make the appropriate taps on the keyboard, and my eyes are
tracking the words on the monitor screen; and hopefully, the nerve
cells in my brain are firing coherently. All that is possible also because
noiseless and instantaneous intercommunication can occur throughout
the system when the system is coherent . In practice, quantum
coherence occurs to different degrees, and factorizability is never
perfect except in the ideal. Nevertheless, our body approaches that
ideal, which also tends to be restored after decohering interactions (see
Ho, 1997a,b).
The coherence of brain and body consciousness
From the perspective of the whole organism, the brain’s primary
function may be to mediate coherent coupling of all subsystems, so the
more highly differentiated or complex the system, the bigger the brain
required. Substantial parts of the brain are indeed involved in
integrating inputs from all over the body, and over long time scales. But
not all the coordination required is provided by the brain, for this
coordination seems instantaneous by all accounts.
Thus, during an olfactory experience, slow oscillations in the
olfactory bulb (in the brain) are in phase with the movement of the
lungs (Freeman and Barrie, 1994). Similarly, the coordinated movement
of the four limbs (or all the hundreds of limbs in the millipede) in
locomotion is accompanied by patterns of activity in the motor centers
of the brain which are in phase with those of the limbs (Collins and
Stewart, 1992; Kelso, 1991). That is a remarkable achievement which
physiologists and neuroscientists alike have taken too much for
granted. The reason macroscopic organs such as the four limbs can be
coordinated is that each is individually a coherent whole, so that a
definite phase relationship can be maintained among them. The hand-
eye coordination required for the accomplished pianist is extremely
impressive, but depends on the same inherent coherence of the
subsystems which, I suggest, enables instantaneous
intercommunication to occur. There simply isn’t time enough, from
one musical phrase to the next, for inputs to be sent to the brain, there
to be integrated, and coordinated outputs to be sent back to the hands
(see Hebb, 1958).
I raised the posssibility that a “body consciousness” works in
tandem with the “brain consciousness”of the nervous system. I suggest
that instantaneous coordination of body functions is mediated, not so
much by the nervous system, but by the body consciousness inhering
in the liquid crystalline continuum of the body. (The nervous system is
also liquid crystalline, however, the known activities of the nervous
system are not based directly on their liquid crystalline properties.) Ho
and Knight (1997) following Oschman (1984, 1993), review evidence
suggesting that this liquid crystalline continuum is responsible for the
direct current (DC) electric field permeating the entire body of all
animals, that Becker (1990) and others have detected. Furthermore,
this liquid crystalline continuum possess all the properties required for
a body consciousness that can register tissue memory of previous
experiences.
 Becker (1990) has demonstrated that the DC field has a mode of
semi-conduction that is much faster than nervous conduction. During
a perceptive event, local changes in the DC field can be measured half
a second before sensory signals arrive in the brain, suggesting that the
activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the local body field.
Becker located the DC body field to “perineural” tissues such as the
glial cells. But we believe it is located in the liquid crystalline
continuum of the connective tissues (Ho and Knight, 1997).
Up to 70% of the proteins in the connective tissues consist of
collagens that exhibit constant patterns of alignment, as characteristic
of liquid crystals (Knight and Feng, 1993). Collagens have distinctive
mechanical and dielectric properties that make them very sensitive to
mechanical pressures, changes in pH, inorganic ions and
electromagnetic fields. In particular, a cylinder of water surrounds the
collagen molecule, giving rise to an ordered array of bound water on
the surface of the collagen network that supports rapid “jump
conduction” of protons, or positive electric charges. Proteins in liquid
crystals have coherent motions, and will readily transmit weak signals
by proton conduction, or as coherent electric waves. Thus, extremely
weak electromagnetic signals or mechanical disturbances will be
sufficient to set off a flow of protons that will propagate throughout
the body, making it ideal for intercommunication.
The liquid crystalline nature of the continuum also enables it to
function as a distributed memory store. The water bound on the
surfaces of proteins are known to be altered when the proteins change
their shape. Proteins undergo a hierarchy of shape changes over a
range of time scales and of different energies. The shapes are clustered
in groups that have nearly the same energies, with very low energetic
barriers between them. Thus, global shape changes in a liquid
crystalline network can easily be triggered, that will, in turn, alter the
structure of bound water. As the bound water forms a global network
in association with the collagen, it will have a certain degree of stability,
or resistance to change. By the same token, it will also retain tissue
memory of previous experiences. Additional chemical modifications of
the collagen network may also contribute to this memory. The
memory may consist partly of dynamic circuits, the sum total of which
constituting the DC body field.
A yet more interesting possibility is that the liquid crystalline
continuum may function as a quantum holographic medium, recording
the interference patterns arising from interactions between local
activities and a globally coherent field. This is exactly analogous to
Laszlo’s (1995) suggestion that the “zero-point field” of the universe
functions as a universal holographic medium, recording the
experiences of all the particles, each of which is subject to influences
from the rest of the universe as well as feedback from the particle’s
own activities on the universal medium. If the organism is coherent as
I have suggested, then the conditions are there for a quantum
holographic memory store in the liquid crystalline continuum of the
body itself. Holographic memory is unique in that it is distributed
globally, and yet, can be accessed and recovered locally. It captures an
aspect of the organic whole in developmental biology that has
completely eluded mechanistic understanding. It is that which can give
rise to the subjective self, or psyche, that guides and regulates all vital
activities towards a specific end. It is possible that biological
development is based on the same holographic memory so that the
entire organism can be engendered locally in a germ cell, from which
the organism is, in turn, recoverable. Thus, consciousness is distributed
throughout the entire body; “brain consciousness”, associated with the
nervous system, being embedded in “body consciousness”. Brain and
body consciousness mutually inform and condition each other. The
singularity of purpose of the individual is based on a complete
coherence of brain and body. The implications for holistic and psychic
health are clear. A stressful situation will affect body consciousness
through subtle ways in which mechanical pressures build up in the
body to block intercommunication. That acts on the nervous system
to give a diminished self-image of the body, which feeds back on the
body in a vicious cycle that further undermines the individual’s physical
well-being. By contrast, a supple body is a responsive body that moves
and responds with the greatest of ease. It leads to a buoyant self-image
that again feeds back to further enhance all bodily functions.
Quantum coherence and brain consciousness
98
Many recent studies of brain activities are revealing impressive
largescale spatiotemporal coherence that suggest the brain also
functions with a high degree of quantum coherence (see Ho 1997b and
references therein). These come from measurements carried out with
the ultrasensitive, noninvasive SQUID magnetometer, also referred to
as magnetoencephalography (MEG) (see Iaonnides, 1994) as well as
conventional electroencehalography (EEG) (Gray et al, 1989; Singer,
1995; Freeman and Barrie, 1994). Multichannel MEG, in particular,
provides high speed, high resolution information of spatiotemporal
coherence in brain activities. Studies conducted over the past 5 years
have revealed 40 Hz activities that are coherent at both deep and
superficial layers of the brain. Similarly, Freeman (1995) and his
coworkers, recording simultaneously with an array of 64 electrodes
from the rabbit cortex, found oscillations that are coherent over the
entire array, for which no obvious “sources” could be identified.
Computer scientist, Marcer (1992; 1995), proposes a quantum
holographic model of consciousness in which perception involves the
conversion of an interference pattern (presumably between a coherent
wave-field generated by the perceiver and the wave-field reflected off
the perceived) to an object image that is coincident with the object
itself. This is accomplished by a process known as phase conjugation,
whereby the wave reflected from the object is returned (by the
perceiver) along its path to form an image where the object is situated.
In the act of perceiving, the organism also perceives itself situated in
the environment, and through active phase conjugation directed
throughout its body, forms an image of the self coincident with the
organism itself, so “self” and “other” are simul-taneously defined (Ho,
1997b). What is the source of the coherent wave-field generated by the
perceiver? Could it be the body field itself? Or the body field as
modulated by the nervous system? This could be subject to empirical
investigation. In the same way that body consciousness associated with
the liquid crystalline continuum registers memory of its experience,
brain consciousness registers memory of sensory images. The idea that
brain memory is distributed and holographic has been suggested by a
number of neurobiologists over the past 40 years (see Ho, 1997b for
more details and references). Holographic memory storage is orders of
magnitude more efficient than any model that make s use of
“representations” because holographic memory employs actual
physical simulations of processes (Marcer, 1992, 1995) and do not
require lengthy sequences of arbitrary coding and decoding of isolated
bits. Marcer suggests that the brain stores experienced holographic
spatio-temporal patterns and compares stored with new patterns
directly, recognition and learning being reinforced in “adaptive
resonance”, thus also making for much faster processing.
As mentioned before, the liquid crystalline continuum supporting
the body field may also take part in memory storage, although this
possibility has never been seriously considered. Laszlo (1995) goes even
further to suggest that much of memory may be stored in an ambient,
collective holographic memory field delocalized from the individual;
and that memories are only accessed by the brain from the ambient
field. This ambient field may well be our collective unconscious. One
can begin to see the organism with its own local quantum holographic
field as a microcosm of the universal field in which it participates.
The organism’s macroscopic wave function and universal
entanglement
If quantum coherence is characteristic of organism and psyche, as I
have argued here, then the organism will possesss something like a
macroscopic wave-function. This wave function is ever evolving,
entangling its environment, transforming and creating itself anew.
There is no “collapse of the wave function” as required by conventional
quantum theory (cf Bohm and Hiley, 1993; see also Ho, 1993, 1997b).
When quantum systems interact, they become mutually entangled,
and there may be no resolution of their respective wave functions
afterwards. So one may remain entangled and indeed, delocalized over
past experiences (i.e., in Laszlo’s ambient field). Some interactions may
have time scales that are extremely long, so that the wave function of
interacting parties may take a correspondingly long time to become
resolved, and largescale nonlocal connectivity may be maintained,
possibly accounting for synchronicities, as Laszlo (1995) suggests. The
“whole” organism is thus a domain of coherent activities, constituting
an autonomous, free entity (see Ho, 1996a), not because it is separate
and isolated from its environment, but precisely by virtue of its unique
entanglement of other organisms in its environment. In this way, one
can see that organic wholes are nested as well as entangled
individualities. Each can be part of a larger whole, depending on the
extent over which coherence can be established. So, when many
individuals in a society have a certain rapport with one another, they
may constitute a coherent whole, and ideas and feelings can indeed
spread like wildfire within that community. In the same way, an
ecological community, and by extension, the global ecology may also be
envisaged as a super-organism within which coherence can be
established in ecological relationships over global, geological space-
times (see Ho, 1993, 1997d). What of the global community of human
beings who can potentially intercommunicate in a matter of seconds,
given the marvels of informational technology? Could they also be
envisaged as a super-organism? There is an important debate going on
in the global arena concerning “globalization” - the idea that the greater
part of our life is determined by global processes in which national or
local cultures, economies and borders are dissolving. While some are
questioning the reality of globalization (eg, Hirst and Thompson,
1996), others see the globalized economy as the greatest threat to the
survival of the global community (Korten, 1995). The problem with the
globalized economy under the current terms is that it does not respect
the autonomy of individual persons, local communities or nation
states, nor does it enable universal participation of all the parties
concerned. Local autonomy and universal participation are some of the
pre-requisites for a coherent, sustainable global society (see Ho, 1996c,
1997c), in which the players must also be sensitive and responsive, or
responsible and accountable. Instead, “unaccountable corporate
powers” (Korten, 1997) effectively rule the world, depleting the earth’s
natural resources with impunity, degrading the environment and
creating poverty on a massive scale. The challenge of globalization is,
indeed, to create a fully participatory global society, served by an
appropriate global economy, that maximizes both local autonomy and
global cohesion, as consistent with the quantum coherence of a truly
organic system.
Acknowledgments
I thank Ervin Laszlo, Walter Freeman and David Korten for
stimulating discussions and for relevant reprints.
Reprinted here with permission from the author, the following is
mirrored from http://www.i-sis.org/organis.htm
Gaia and the Evolution of Coherence
First presented at the 3rd Camelford Conference on The
Implications of The Gaia Thesis: Symbiosis, Cooperativity and
Coherence, November 7-10, 1989, The Wadebridge Ecological Centre,
Camelford, Cornwall; revised 10.8.93
Mae-Wan Ho & Fritz-Abert Popp
Mae-Wan Ho is the author of The Rainbow and The Worm: The
Physics of Organisms.
Her ideas on the universe as an intelligent, coherent quantum
organism match closely the ideas of ancient Taoists. She once again
offers an energetic explanation in the language of modern physics on
what is clearly described in Taoist alchemy texts. This paper links
ecology and the energy field as being inseparably linked.
Michael Winn
1. Introduction
The Ufaina Indians in the Colombian Amazon believe in a vital
force called fufaka which is present in all living things. The source of
this vital force is the sun. From the sun, it reaches earth and is
constantly recycled among plants, animals and human beings. Each
group of beings requires a minimum of the vital force in order to live,
and is seen to be borrowing the energy from the total energy stock.
When any being dies, the energy is released and goes back to the
stock. Similarly, when a living being consumes another, for example,
when a deer eats the leaves of the tree, or a tree extracts
nutrients from the soil, or when people cut down trees to
99
make a clearing, the consumer acquires the energy of the consumed.
What is of importance to the Ufaina is that the vital force continues to
be recycled from one species to another in such a way that not too
much accumulates in any one of them, since this could deprive another
of its vital force, and upset the natural balance (von Hildebrand, 1988).
It is a remarkably coherent cosmology: a natural ecological wisdom
that understands nature as a dynamically balanced whole linked by
energy flow, with the energy arising ultimately from the sun. This
cosmology is based on a total understanding that comes not just by
scientific observations, but from an intimate experience of nature
from within. It took Western science hundreds of years with many
sophisticated instruments and a number of false starts and turns in
order to arrive at a similar picture. As Peter Bunyard (1989) says, ‘The
Indian conception ... is not in principle far removed from... [our own]
notion of energy flows and foodweb and chains, with the sun providing
the necessary energy.’ The major difference between them and us is
that whereas they live by their wisdom and see themselves as part of
nature, we have placed ourselves above and outside the balance of
nature, to the peril of all.
What we want to do in this paper is to present a vision of
ecological balance from contemporary Western biophysics which
shows just how intimately we are connected with one another and with
nature. How all nature is one resonating and intercommunicating
whole. We shall be drawing from the work of many, including
ourselves, who have derived inspiration from the union of biology and
physics.
Let us begin with the western ecological versionof energy flow. The
energy of sunlight is absorbed in individual packets or quanta called
photons by chlorophyll, the colour pigment in green plants. This
energy in each quantum goes into an excited electron, which, in the
course of falling back to the ground state, travels around the body, its
energy meted out to support all vital activities such as growth and
differentiation, sensations, and movements. When animals feed on
plants or on other animals, they are taking in the energy stored in the
food to serve their own growth and development and all the activities
that constitute being alive. Hence, the energy absorbed from the sun is
circulated a long way round all the organisms in the biosphere, with
fractions of the total being lost as heat on the way till finally it
becomes spent, or reaches the ground state. The energy cycle is
accompanied by the parallel cycling of chemicals. Both cycles branch
and anastomose in a very complicated way as ecologists who study
foodwebs or nitrogen and carbon cycles are well-aware. But it leaves us
in no doubt that all life is a dynamic unity, it is the consequence of
sunlight streaming through an open system, to maintain it far away
from thermodynamic equilibrium.
Albert Szent-Gyorgi (1960), a founding father of modern
biochemistry, had a nice way of putting it: that life is an interposition
between two energy levels of an electron: the ground state and the
excited state, and furthermore, as it is the electron that goes round the
circuit, life is really a little electric current going round and connecting
up all nature with the sun and the earth. This fundamental unity of
physics and biology has indeed inspired a lot of people who felt that
here was the key to unlocking the mystery of the living state. But as
Szent-Gyorgi remarked then, and it is still largely the case now,
biochemistry and molecular biology do not address such questions.
They tell us a great deal about what the molecules that make up living
organisms are, but very little about how they are supposed to act. How
the energy plucked originally from the sun is translated so very
efficiently into various forms of work - chemical, mechanical, electrical
and osmotic - and in organizing matter into the splendid diversity of
organisms in the biosphere. Szent-Gyorgi suggested that we can only
begin to understand these characteristics of living systems if we take
into account the collective properties of the molecular aggregates in
terms of solid state physics. There, we would find a clue to the mystery
of life.
We know, for example, that although at ordinary temperatures, the
molecules in most physical matter have a high degree of
uncoordinated, or random motion. The situation can change when the
temperature is lowered to beyond a critical level. At that point, all the
molecules so to speak, condense into a collective state, and exhibit the
unusual properties of superfluidity and superconductivity. In other
words, all the molecules of the system move as one, and conduct
electricity with zero resistance (by a coordinated arrangement of all the
electrons). Liquid helium at a temperature close to absolute zero is the
first and only superfluid substance known. And various pure metals
and alloys superconduct at liquid helium temperatures. Recently,
technology has progressed to materials which can superconduct at
much higher temperatures above absolute zero. The solid-state
physicist Herbert Frohlich (1968) in Liverpool was among the first to
point out that something like a condensation into a collective mode of
activity may be occurring in living systems, such that living organisms
are in effect, superconductors working at physiological temperatures.
He suggested that much of the metabolic energy, instead of being lost
as heat, is actually stored in the form of coherent electromechanical
vibrations in the body. He called these collective modes, coherent
excitations.
Coherence refers to highly correlated activities in both space and
time. In physics, it is usually understood as the ability of
electromagnetic waves to interfere. For instance, in a version of
Young’s pioneering experiment (Fig. 1), two narrow slits and are
illuminated by light from a light source. The light beams, on passing
through the slits, fall on the screen and form an interference pattern of
differing brightness in accordance to where the oscillations in the two
light beams are in phase or out of phase. The ability to form
interference patterns depends on the stability of the oscillations in the
two light beams, or more specifically their phase relationships. This
phase stability is referred to as coherence; the more coherent the light,
the sharper the interference pattern. The coherent state is
fluctuationless and has the further characteristic that it is factorizable
(Glauber, 1969). This means that the parts paradoxically behave
statistically independently of one another while maintaining a
coherent pattern as a whole. In other words, coherence does not imply
uniformity, or that every individual part or molecule of the system is
necessarily doing the same thing all the time. An intuitive way to think
about it is in terms of a grand symphony, or a grand ballet; or better
yet, a jazz band in which individuals are doing different things and are
yet in tune or in step with the whole. It is a state of cooperativity in
which the individuals cooperate simply by doing their own thing and
expressing themselves.
What are the consequences of coherence? It results in properties
that are characteristic of biological systems. These include the high
efficiency of energy transfer and transformation which often
approaches 100%; the ability of communication at all levels within
cells, between cells and between organisms capable of resonating to
the same frequencies; the possibility for sensitive, multiple recognition
systems utilizing coherent electromagnetic signals of different specific
frequencies, such as for example, the organization of metabolic
activities within the cell, the operation of the immune network and a
host of other biological functions involving specific recognition
between hormones or ligands and their receptors; and finally, the stable
persistence of the working system arising from the inherent stability of
coherent states. A more detailed description of coherence is given in
Ho (1993a).
2. Biophotons and coherence in living systems
Evidence for the existence of coherent excitations in biological
systems came from the study of biophotons (see Popp et al, 1981; Popp,
1986). Practically all organisms emit light at a steady rate from a few
photons per cell per day to several photons per organism per second.
An increasing number of observations within the past 15 years from
different laboratories all over the world suggest that biophotons are
emitted from a coherent photon field within the living systems.
Organisms are thus emitters and most probably, also receivers of
coherent electromagnetic signals which may be essential for their
functioning (see next Section).
The nature of the light emitted from living organisms is best
studied after a brief exposure to weak illumination. It has been found,
without exception that the the re-emitted light from living tissues
follows, not an exponential decay curve as characteristic of non-
coherent light, but a hyperbolic decay function which is exhibited
only by coherent light (see Fig. 1). This unusual behaviour can be
100
intuitively understood as follows. In a system consisting of non-
interacting molecules emitting at random, the energy of the emitted
photons are lost completely to the outside or converted into heat,
which is the ultimate non-coherent energy. If the molecules are
emitting coherently, however, the energy of the emitted photons are
not completely lost to the outside. Instead, part of it is coherently
reabsorbed by the system. The consequence is that the decay is very
much delayed, and follows characteristically a hyperbolic curve with a
long tail. This result can be derived rigorously from both classical and
quantum mechanical considerations (Popp, 1986). A coherent system
stabilizes its frequencies during decay whereas a noncoherent system
always suffers a shift in frequencies. That, and the capability to
reabsorb emitted energy account for the stability of coherent states.
3. The characteristics of biophotons
Where do biophotons really come from? We know that all sorts of
excited molecules can emit light when they relax back to the ground
state, the frequency of the emitted light being specific for each kind of
molecules. When the spectrum of biophotons is examined, however, it
was found that the light is always in a broad band of frequencies from
the infra-red to the ultraviolet, with approximately equal numbers of
photons distributed throughout the range. This is very different from
the Boltzmann distribution which characterizes a system at
thermodynamic equilibrium at the physiological temperature of the
biological system, thus indicating that the latter is far, far away from
thermodynamic equilibrium (see Fig. 2). Not only is there an excess of
photons at the high energy (short wave-length) end of the spectrum,
but the distribution is very nearly flat. In other words, it does not
depend on the wavelength: f(l) = const. This means that the light is
emitted from all kinds of molecules all over the cell. The photons are
stored in a delocalized manner within the system, and all the
frequencies are coupled together to give, in effect, a single degree of
freedom.
Evidence for the delocalization of coupled photons come from the
observation that the emitted light retains its broad spectral
distribution when organisms are stimulated with monochromatic light
or light of limited spectral compostion. Moreover, the hyperbolic
decay kinetics has the same form over the entire spectrum of emitted
light (see Popp, 1986; Musumeci et al, 1992).
The Boltzmann distribution characteristic of a system at
thermodynamic equilibrium arises from the maximization of entropy
(molecular disorder, or degrees of freedom) under the constraint of a
fixed energy in a closed system. As biological systems are open instead
of closed, the constraint of a fixed energy does not apply. This does not
mean that energy conservation is violated, as biological system +
surroundings are still subject to energy conservation. Nor does it mean
that there is always an overflow of energy within the system. It only
means that there is always enough energy available for the system.
Living systems store
energy (or photons) over the whole range of space and time scales -
from 10-10m to metres or more, and 10-9s to days or longer time
intervals - in a readily mobilizable form. They do not suffer from
energy shortage on account of their high storage capacity within the
intricate space-time organization (see Ho, 1993a,b for details).
The f(l) = const. distribution can also be seen as the consequence of
the maximization of entropy when the constraint of fixed energy is
removed in an open system far from equilibrium. The f(l)= const.
profile looks somewhat like the expression of “white noise” within the
system, but this is far from the case. As this distribution represents the
highest possible entropy in a system far from equilibrium, fluctuations
cannot be interpreted in terms of noise - in contrast to a system at
thermal equilibrium. Rather, they are “signals” generated within the
system. In other words, by maximizing entropy according to f(l) =
const., the signal/noise ratio of the biological system is optimized over
all wavelengths (Popp, 1989). On the other hand, as the frequencies are
all coupled together, the absolute value of entropy representing the
maximum can also become arbitrarily small, theoretically even zero.
In summary, the fact that there is always enough energy available in
the biological system confers on it the following properties:
 1. Optimal signal/noise ratio for communication,
2. Existence at a phase threshold between a chaotic (S - , N - ) and
a coherent (S - 0, N - 1) regime, where S is the entropy, and N is the
number of degrees of freedom, and
3. The possibility to extend energy storage, or the f(l) = const.
distribution to longer and longer wavelengths in the course of
evolution, and hence to expand the range of communication from
distances between molecular within the cell all the way to distances
between individuals in a population.
4. Long range communication
The hypothesis that the f(l) = const. distribution of biophotons can
extend into infinitely long wavelengths is admittedly an extrapolation
from measurements within and near the visible range. However, it can
explain a variety of phenomena such as cancer development or group
formation in organisms.
We are postulating the existence of very weak, long-range (long
wave-length) interactions between living systems. These weak long-
range emissions cannot be detected directly with the instrumentation
now available. However, this is not a sufficient reason for excluding
them from consideration, as there are methods of obtaining indirect
evidence of their existence, as we shall describe below.
a. Normal and cancer cells in culture
A first experiment of this kind was performed by Schamhart and
van Wijk (1987). They exposed suspensions of cultivated rat liver and
rat hepatoma cell lines H35 and HTC for some seconds to white-light
from a 150W tungsten lamp and registered the re-emitted light
afterwards. The decay curves are, as usual, hyperbolic rather than
exponential. On altering the number of cells in the suspension, the
found that normal cells exhibit decreasing light re-emission with
increasing cell density, whereas tumour cells show a highly nonlinear
increase with increasing cell density (see Fig. 3). If there were no long-
range interactions between the cells, the intensity of re-emitted
photons would increase linearly with increasing number of cells,
corrected by a term for self-absorption within the population. Neither
the nonlinear increase of re-emission intensity from tumour cells nor
the significant decrease of re-emission from normal cells could be
explained unless there are long-range interactions between the cells,
which are furthermore, correlated with their differing social behaviour,
the tendency of tumour cells to disaggregation as opposed to the
tendency of normal cells to aggregate.These phenomena can be
interpreted in terms of Dicke’s (1954) theory of photon-emission from
an ensemble of emitters. He showed that photon emission tends to
bifurcate into the two branches of superradiance and subradiance as
soon as the wavelength of the emitted light is large compared to the
distances between the emitters which are also absorbers.
Superradiance is the increase of emission intensity concomittant with
a shortening of the relaxation time. The opposite branch describes the
regime of subradiance where emission intensity decreases with a more
and more prolonged decay time, corresponding to photon storage
within the system.
In terms of Dicke’s theory, normal cells have a greater capacity for
subradiance the closer they are together, while the malignancy of
tumour cells is associated with the opposite behaviour, that is, the loss
of subradiance. This suggests that long-range interaction is based on
the coherence of the subradiance regime, with the coherence volume
extending over the entire cell population. By changing the degree of
coherence the cells can control and regulate their social activities.
According to this model, tumour cells, unlike normal cells, seem unable
to communicate. This may account for the repulsive forces that are
responsible for metastasis in the malignant cells as opposed to the
attractive forces responsible for population formation in normal
hepatocytes (for further details see Nagl and Popp, 1987).
b. Populations of Daphnia
Even more clear-cut results are obtained in organisms, such as
Daphnia; where self-emission is measured instead of stimulated
re-emission. Figure 4 depicts the results of measurements
101
made by Galle et al (1991). Instead of the expected linear increase in
photon intensity with increasing number of individuals, a pattern of
maxima and minima is observed, where the maximum and minimum
values of photon intensity can be reproducibly assigned to definite
numbers of individuals in the cuvette. It turns out that they invariably
correspond to integer ratios of the average distances between
individual animals to their body size. The results cannot be interpreted
in terms of ordinary biochemistry. Instead, by treating the daphnia as a
population of antennae interacting by means of resonance wavelengths
related to their geometrical dimensions, a good fit to the experimental
data is obtained. Regardless of whether the details of the hypothesis
are correct, the experiments clearly demonstrate the existence of long-
range interactions between individuals in a population. These
interactions may be the basis for swarming and the regulation of
growth and other collective functions. The link to body size indicates
communication wavelengths in the microwave to millimeter range.
c. Superdelayed luminescence in Drosophila
We have recently discovered the remarkable phenomenon of
superdelayed luminescence in synchronously developing populations of
early Drosophila embryos, in which intense, often prolonged and
multiple flashes of light are re-emitted with delay times of one minute
to eight hours after a single brief light exposure. Some examples are
presented in Figure 5 (see Ho et al, 1992). The phenomenon depends
on the existence of synchrony in the population, and furthermore, the
timing of light exposure must fall within the first 40 minutes of
development. However, the occurrence of the flashes themselves do
not obviously correlate with specific embryonic events. They give
information concerning the physical state of the embryos at the time
of light stimulation - such as the existnece of a high degree of
coherence - rather than at the time during which the flashes
themselves occur. Superdelayed luminescence bears some formal
resemblance to the phenomenon of superradiance described above in
which cooperative interactions among embryos within the entire
population lead to most, if not all the embryos emitting light
simultaneously. This implies that each embryo has a certain probability
of re-emitting after light stimulation, so that it can either trigger re-
emission in other individuals, or alternatively, its re-emission could be
suppressed by them. Only whe the population is re-emitting at the
same time is the intensity sufficient to be registered as the intense
flashes that is detected by the photon-counting device. On the other
hand, re-emission in the entire population could also be suppressed
(i.e., in the subradiant mode), such that in approximately 30 to 40% of
the cases, there is no clear indication of any superdelayed re-emission.
We do not know if any functional significance could be attached to
superdelayed luminescence. Drosophila females typically lay eggs just
before sunrise, so the external light source could be used as an initial
synchronizaing signal or Zeitgeber, which maintains the circadian and
other biological rhythms. The superdelayed re-emission could then be
a means of maintaining communication and synchrony among
individuals in the population. On the other hand, the flashes may
simply be the embryos’ way to inform us of their globally coherent
state at the time when light stimulation is applied, enabling the
embryos to interact nonlinearly to generate light emission that is
coherent over the entire population, and orders of magnitude more
intense than the spontaneous emission background (see Ho et al, 1992;
and Ho, 1993a for further details).
5. Coherence and the evolution of consciousness
What does the study of coherence contribute to our
understanding of the unity of life? To return to our overview on the
cycle of life, we can see that sunlight is the most fundamental source of
energy, which is supplied at the high frequency end, and biological
systems as a whole display the natural tendency to delay the decay of
this high level energy for as long as possible. This is why the earth’s
natural biosphere is not a monoculture, indeed, it is the very diversity
of life that is responsible for delaying the dissipation of the sun’s energy
for as long as possible by feeding it into ever longer chains and webs
and multiple parallel cycles in the course of evolution. But that is not
the entire story, for the the most effective way of hanging on to this
energy for as long as possible is by the formation of a coherent
platform of oscillations which expands the photon field into a
coherent state of growing bandwidth. This is the f(l) = const.
distribution which allows the sun’s energy to spill over into longer and
longer wavelengths. This may be why organisms have such different
life-spans; the trend in evolution is towards the emergence of
organisms with longer and longer life-spans and finally in the case of
social organisms and human beings, we see the emergence of social
traditions that span many generations. The link with social tradition is
the clue to the meaning of this energy flow through a coherent field of
ever increasing bandwidth. For it is at the same time a flow and a
creation of information. Electromagnetic signals of different
frequencies are involved in communication within and between
organisms, and between organisms and the environment. The coherent
platform is a prerequisite for universal communication.
Thus, it seems that the essence of the living state is to build up and
extend the coherent spatio-temporal platform for communication
starting from the energy of the sun initially absorbed by green plants.
Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects isolated,
but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of
meaning. In contrast to the neo-Darwinist point of view, their capacity
for evolution depends, not on rivalry or on might in the struggle for
existence. Rather, it depends on their capacity for communication. So
in a sense, it is not individuals as such which are developing but living
systems interlinked into a coherent whole. Just as the cells in an
organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations
enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other
organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the
same time becoming more and more aware of this collective
consciousness. Human consciousness may have its most significant
role in the development and creative expression of the collective
consciousness of nature.
References
Ho, M.W. (1993a). The Rainbow and The Worm: The Physics of
Organisms, World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. (1993b). Bioenergetics, Open University Press, Milton
Keynes (in preparation).
opp, F.A. (1984). Biologie des Lichts, Paul Parey Verlag, Berlin.
Popp, F.A. (1986). On the coherence of ultraweak photonemission
from living systems. In Disequilibrium and Self-Organization (C.W.
Kilmister, ed.). pp. 207-230, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
Popp, F.A. (1989). Coherent photon storage of biological systems.
In Electromagnetic Bio-Information (F.A. Popp, U. Warnke, H.L.
Konig, and W. Peschka, eds.), Urban & Schwarzenberg, Munchen.
Popp, F.A., Ruth, B., Bahr, W., Bohm, J. Grass, P., Grolig, G.,
Rattemeyer, M., Schmidt, H.G., and Wulle, P. (1981). Emission of
visible and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems. Collective
Phenomena 3, 187-214.
Popp, F.A., Li, K.H., Mei, W.P., Galle, M. and Neurohr, R. (1988).
Physical aspects of biophotons. Experientia 44, 576-585.
Szent-Györgi, A. (1960). Introduction to a Submolecular Biology,
Academic Press, New York.
http://www.i-sis.org/
Bioenergetics and Biocommunication
Mae-Wan Ho
On Quantum Coherence, from conclusion of this article by Mae-
Wan Ho:
“An intuitive way to understand quantum coherence is to think of
the ‘I’ that each and every one of us experience of our own being. We
know that our body is a multiplicity of organs and tissues, composed of
many billions of cells and astronomical numbers of molecules of many
different kinds, all capable of working autonomously, and yet somehow
cohering into the singular being of our private experience. That is just
the stuff of quantum coherence. Quantum coherence does not mean
that everybody or every element of the system must be doing the same
thing all the time, it is more akin to a grand ballet, or better yet, a very
large jazz band where everyone is doing his or her own thing while
being perfectly in step and in tune with the whole. “
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The article below is cutting edge scientific thinking on wholeness
and the quantum field, which share a common foundation with Taoist
principles of chi field theory. The article gives the “hard” physics that
integrate those cutting edge ideas. Reading it (slowly, if you are not
used to scientific absracts) will give Tao practitioners another
viewpoint to understanding the energy body they work with in their
daily practice.
Bioenergetics and Biocommunication
by Mae-Wan Ho
1 Introduction
Organisms are so enigmatic from the thermodynamic point of
view that Lord Kelvin, co-inventor of the Second Law of
thermodynamics, specifically excluded them from its dominion
(Ehrenberg, 1967), while Schrödinger (1944) suggested they feed upon
“negative entropy” to free themselves from all the entropy they cannot
help producing.
Lord Kelvin was impressed with how organisms seem to have
energy at will, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly
coordinated way. That is at once the problem of bioenergetics - how
organisms can have energy so readily - and of biocom-munication -
how the energy mobilizing activities are organized as a whole. Similarly,
Schrödinger alluded to the ability of organisms to use the energy they
feed on to build up and maintain their dynamic organization. The
intuition of both physicists is that energy and organization are
intimately linked....
In this essay, I show how stored mobilizable energy effectively
frees the organism from thermodynamic constraints so that it is poised
for rapid and specific intercommunication. In the ideal, the organism
is a quantum superposition of coherent activities with instantaneous
(nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the system.
2.1 Energy storage and mobilization in living systems
The key to understanding the thermodynamics of the living system
is not energy flow or energy dissipation, but energy storage under
energy flow (Fig. 1). Energy flow is of no consequence unless the energy
is trapped and stored within the system where it circulates before
being dissipated. A reproducing life cycle, i.e., an organism, arises when
the loop of circulating energy closes. At that point, we have a life cycle
within which the stored energy is mobilized, remaining stored as it is
mobilized, and coupled to the energy flow.
.... According to Rothschild et al (1980), linearity in biological
processes can arise in enzymes operating near a multidimensional
inflection point far away from thermodynamic equilibrium, if some of
the rate constants are linked. That is realistic for living systems which
are now known to have highly organized flows in the cytoplasmic
matrix. ..Sewell shows how Onsager’s reciprocity relationship applies
to locally linearized combinations of forces and flows, which
nonetheless behave globally in nonlinear fashion. That is particularly
relevant to the living system, where nested compartments and
microcompartments ensure that many processes may be operating
locally at thermodynamic equilibrium even though the system or
subsystem as a whole is far away from equilibrium (Ho, 1995a).
Further-more, as each process is ultimately connected to every
other in the metabolic net through catenations of space and time, even
if truly symmetrical couplings (note: kan & Li?) are localized to a
limited number of metabolic/energy transducing junctions, the effects
will eventually be shared or delocalized throughout the system, so that
symmetry will apply to appropriate combinations of forces and flows
over a sufficiently macroscopic space-time scale (Sewell, 1991). That is
perhaps the most important consideration. As real processes take time,
Onsager’s reciprocity relationship cannot be true for an arbitrarily
short instant, but must apply at a sufficiently macroscopic time
interval when overall balance holds.
To summarize, nonlinearity does not preclude symmetry on the
appropriate scale, and local linearity does not exclude the possibility
for self-organization at a more global level....
 2.3 Thermodynamics of the steady state vs thermodynamics of
organized complexity
Microscopic homogeneity is not crucial for the formulation of any
thermodynamic state, as the thermodynamic parameters are
macroscopic entities quite independent of the microscopic
interpretation (Ho, 1993). Like the principle of microscopic
reversibility, it is extraneous to the phenomenological laws of
thermodynamics (Denbigh, 1951).
...According to Guggenheim the two processes, diffusion and flow
of current across the junction, “take place at rates which vary according
to different laws” when the composition gradient across the boundary
is altered, and so it seems reasonable to suppose that the two processes
are merely superposed, and that the one may be ignored when
considering the other. Thus, the steady state is treated as if there were
no dissipative processes, and it is this assumption which is later
validated by Onsager’s reciprocity relationship.
2.4 The living system is free from immediate thermodynamic
constraints
In the same spirit, I propose to treat the living system as a
superposition of dissipative irreversible processes and non-dissipative
processes... This will include most living processes because of the
ubiquity of coupled cycles, for which the net entropy production
balances out to zero. The principle applies in the smallest unit cycle in
the living system - enzyme catalysis - on which all energy transduction
in the living system is absolutely dependent. Over the past 30 years,
Lumry and his coworkers (see Lumry, 1991) have shown convincingly
how the flexible enzyme molecule balances out entropy with enthalpy
to conserve free energy during catalysis. The organism is, in effect, a
closed, self-sufficient energetic domain of cyclic non-dissipative
processes coupled to the dissipative processes (Ho, 1995b). In the
formalism of conventional thermodynamics, the life cycle, or more
precisely, the living system in dynamic equilibrium, consists of all cyclic
processes for which the net entropy change is zero, coupled to
dissipative processes necessary to keep it going, for which the net
entropy change is greater than zero (Fig. 3).
Consequently, the organism is free from the immediate constraints
of energy conservation - the First Law - and the Second Law of
thermodynamics. There is always energy available within the system,
which is mobilized at close to maximum efficiency and over all space-
time modes. This in turn creates the conditions for rapid, sensitive and
specific intercommunication throughout the system.
3.1 Energy self-sufficiency and the exquisite sensitivity of organisms
One distinguishing feature of the living system is its exquisite
sensitivity to weak signals. For example, the eye can detect single
photons falling on the retina, and the presence of several molecules of
pheromones in the air is sufficient to attract male insects to their
mates. That exquisite sensitivity applies to all levels of ‘information
processing’ in the organism, and is the direct consequence of its energy
self-sufficiency. No part of the system has to be pushed or pulled into
action, nor be subjected to mechanical regulation and control. Instead,
coordinated action of all the parts depends on rapid intercom-
munication throughout the system. The organism is a system of
“excitable media” (see Goodwin, 1994,1995), or excitable cells and
tissues poised to respond specifically and disproportionately to weak
signals because the large amount of energy stored can amplify weak
signals into macroscopic actions. It is by virtue of its energy self-
sufficiency, therefore, that an organism is a sentient being - a system of
sensitive parts all set to intercommunicate, to respond and to act
appropriately as a whole to any contingency.
3.2 The polychromatic whole
Evidence for constant intercommunication throughout the living
system may already exist in the physiological literature. I refer to
‘deterministic chaos’ which has been used to describe many living
functions from the complex, locally unpredictable behaviour of ant
colonies (Goodwin, 1994) to unrepeatable patterns of brain activities
(Freeman, 1995). A different understanding of the complex activity
spectrum of the healthy state is that it is polychromatic (Ho,
1995d), approaching ‘white’ in the ideal, in which all the modes
103
of stored energy are equally represented. It corresponds to the so-
called f(l) = const. rule that Fritz Popp (1986) has generalized from the
spectrum of light or “biophotons” found to be emitted from all living
systems. I have proposed that this polychromatic ideal distribution of
stored energy is the state towards which all open systems capable of
energy storage naturally evolve (Ho, 1994b).
It is a state of both maximum and minimum entropy - maximum
because energy is equally distributed over all space-time modes, and
minimum because the modes are coupled together to give, in effect, a
single degree of freedom (Popp, 1986; Ho, 1993). In a system with no
impedance to energy mobilization, all the modes are
intercommunicating and hence all frequencies are represented. But
when coupling is imperfect, or when the sub-system, say, the heart, or
the brain, is not com-municating properly, it falls back on its own
modes, leading to impoverishment of its activity spectrum. The living
system is necessarily a polychromatic whole, it is full of variegated
complexity that nevertheless cohere into a singular being, and that is
the ultimate problem of biocommunication that needs to be
addressed. (note: Need for organs to communicate with each other)
4 The intercommunicating whole
Recent advances in biochemistry, cell biology and genetics are
giving us a concrete picture of the organism as an interconnected,
intercommunicating whole. It is becoming increasingly clear that living
organization cannot be understood in terms of mechanistic controls,
nor of endless processings of genetic information.
4.1 A molecular democracy of distributed control
Henrik Kacser (1987) was among the first to realize that in a
network, especially one as complicated as the metabolic network, it is
unrealistic to think that there could be special enzymes controlling the
flow of metabolites under all circumstances. He and a colleague
pioneered metabolic control analysis to discover how the network is
actually regulated. After more than 20 years of investigation by many
biochemists and cell biologists, it is now generally acknowledged that
so-called ‘control’ is invariably distributed over many enzymes (and
metabolites) in the network, and moreover, the distribution of control
differs under different conditions. The metabolic network turns out to
be a “molecular democracy” of distributed control.
4.2 Long-range energy continua in cells and tissue.
Studies over the past 25 years have also revealed that energy
mobilization in living systems is achieved by protein or enzyme
molecules acting as “flexible molecular energy machines” (Ho, 1995a
and references therein) transferring energy directly from the point of
release to the point of utilization, without thermalization or
dissipation. These direct energy transfers are carried out in collective
modes extending from the molecular to the macroscopic domain. The
flow of metabolites is channeled coherently at the molecular level,
directly from one enzyme to the next in sequence, in multi-enzyme
complexes (Welch and Clegg, 1987). At the same time, high voltage
electron microscopy and other physical measurement techniques
reveal that the cell is more like a ‘solid state’ than the ‘bag of dissolved
enzymes’ that generations of biochemists had previously supposed
(Clegg, 1984). Not only are almost all enzymes bound to an intricate
“microtrabecular lattice”, but a large proportion of metabolites as well
as water molecules are also structured on the enormous surfaces
available. Aqueous channels may be involved in the active transport of
solutes within the cell in the way that the blood stream transports
metabolites and chemical messengers within the organism (Wheatley
and Clegg, 1991).
As Welch and Berry (1985) propose, the whole cell is linked by
“long-range energy continua” of mechanical interactions, electric and
eletrochemical fluxes and in particular, proton currents that form a
“protoneural network”, whereby metabolism is regulated instantly and
down to minute detail. Cells are in turn interconnected by electrical
and other cytoplasmic junctions. And there is increasing evidence that
cells and tissues are also linked by electromagnetic phonons and
photons (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992; Ho, 1993; Ho, Popp and Warnke,
1994). As I shall show later, the cell (as well as organism) is not so much
a “solid state” as liquid crystalline. Living systems, therefore, possess
just the conditions favouring the rapid propagation of influences or
‘information’ in all directions, which are naturally gated in cascades (see
Ho, 1993) by the relaxation space-times of the processes involved.
These are precisely the conditions that can yield linear flow force
relationships in a system globally far from thermodynamic equilibrium
(Berry et al, 1987). Global phase transitions may often take place, which
can be initiated at any point within the system or subsystem. Abrupt,
phase-transition like changes in the electrical activities of whole areas
of the brain are indeed frequently observed in simultaneous recordings
with a large array of electrodes, for which no definite centre(s) of origin
can be identified.
4.3 Organism and environment - a mutual partnership
Biology today remains dominated by the genetic paradigm. The
genome is seen as the repository of genetic information controlling the
development of the organism, but otherwise insulated from the
environment, and passed on unchanged to the next generation except
for rare random mutations. The much publicized Human Genome
Project is being promoted on that basis (Ho, 1995e). The genetic
paradigm has already been fatally under-mined at least ten years ago,
when a plethora of ‘fluid genome’ processes were first discovered, and
many more have come to light since. These processes destabilize and
alter genes and genomes in the course of development, some of the
genetic changes are so well correlated with the environment that they
are referred to as “directed mutations”. Many of the genetic changes
are passed on to the next generation. As I pointed out at the time,
heredity can no longer be seen to reside solely in the DNA passed on
from one generation to the next. Instead, the stability and repeatability
of development - which we recognize as heredity - is distributed in the
whole gamut of dynamic feedback interrelationships between
organism and environment from the socioecological to the genetic. All
of these may leave imprints that are passed on to subsequent
generations: as cultural traditions or artefacts, maternal or cytoplasmic
effects, gene expression states, as well as genetic (DNA sequence)
changes (see Ho, 1986;1996).
4.4 The distributed organic whole
Thus, the essence of the organic whole is that it is distributed
throughout its constituent parts, with no centre of control, no
governors, no hierarchical levels of line-managers or regulators
processing information down the line of command. Instead, pervasive,
moment to moment intercommunication throughout the system
renders part and whole, local and global completely indistinguishable.
The existing mechanistic framework is most inadequate in coming to
grips with the organic whole. In the next Section, I shall present an
alternative frame-work based on coherence, in particular, on quantum
coherence.
5 The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
5.1 The coherence of organisms
I mentioned earlier that the living system is necessarily a
polychromatic whole - a variegated complexity that nevertheless
cohere into a singular being. The wholeness of the organism is the
ultimate problem of biocommunication: how to account for the
continuity that encompasses the activities of elementary particles and
atoms, molecules and cells, tissues and organs all the way to the
organism itself (see Joseph Needham, 1935) The problem has never
been adequately addressed until Herbert Fröhlich (1968; 1980)
presented the first detailed theory of coherence. He argued that as
organisms are made up of strongly dipolar molecules packed rather
densely together (c.f. the ‘solid state’ cell), electric and elastic forces will
constantly interact. Metabolic pumping will excite macromolecules
such as proteins and nucleic acids as well as cellular membranes (which
typically have an enormous electric field of some 107V/m across them).
These will start to vibrate and eventually build up into collective
modes, or coherent excitations, of both phonons and photons
extending over macroscopic distances within, and perhaps also outside,
the organism.
The emission of electromagnetic radiation from coherent
104
lattice vibrations in a solid-state semi-conductor has recently been
experimentally demonstrated for the first time ... The possibility that
organisms may use electro-magnetic radiations to communicate
between cells was already entertained by Soviet biologist Gurwitsch
(1925) early this century.This hypothesis was revived by Popp and his
coworkers in the late 1970s, and there is now a large and rapidly
growing literature on “biophotons” believed to be emitted from a
coherent photon field (or energy storage field) within the living system
(see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992).
In collaboration with Fritz Popp, we have found that a single, brief
exposure of synchronously developing early fruitfly embryos to white
light results in the re-emission of relatively intense and prolonged
flashes of light, some tens of minutes and even hours after the light
exposure (Ho et al, 1992b). The phenomenon is reminiscent of phase-
correlated collective emission, or superradiance, in atomic systems,
although the time-scale is orders of magnitude longer, perhaps in
keeping with the coherence times of organisms. For phase-correlation
to build up over the entire population, one must assume that each
embryo has a collective phase of all its activities, in other words, each
embryo must be considered a highly (quantum) coherent domain,
despite its multiplicity of activities (Ho, Zhou and Haffegee, 1995).
During the same period of early development, exposure of the
embryos to weak static magnetic fields also cause characteristic global
transformation of the normal segmental body pattern to helical
configurations in the larvae emerging 24 hours later (Ho et al, 1992a).
As the energies involved are several order of magnitude below the
thermal threshold, we conclude that there can be no effect unless the
external field is acting on a coherent domain where charges are moving
in phase, or where magnetically sensitive liquid crystals are undergoing
phase alignment globally (Ho, et al, 1994). Liquid crystals may indeed
be the material basis of many, if not all aspects of biological
organization (Ho et al, 1995).
5.2 Organisms as polyphasic liquid crystals
Liquid crystals are phases of matter between the solid and the
liquid states, hence the term, mesophases (DeGennes, 1974). Liquid
crystalline mesophases possess long range orientational order, and
often also varying degrees of translational order. In contrast to solid
crystals, liquid crystals are mobile and flexible, and above all, highly
responsive. They undergo rapid changes in orientation or phase
transitions when exposed to electric and magnetic fields (Blinov, 1983)
or to changes in temperature, pressure, pH, hydration, and
concentrations of inorganic ions (Collings, 1990; Knight, 1993). These
properties are ideal for organisms (Gray, 1993; Knight, 1993). Liquid
crystals in organisms include all the major constituents of the
organism: the amphiphilic lipids of cellular membranes, the DNA in
chromosomes, all proteins, especially cytoskeletal proteins, muscle
proteins, collagens and proteoglycans of connective tissues. These
adopt a multiplicity of meso-phases that may be crucial for biological
structure and function at all levels of organization (Ho et al, 1995) from
channeling metabolites in the cell to pattern deter-mination and the
coordinated locomotion of whole organisms.
The importance of liquid crystals for living organization was
recognized by Joseph Needham (1935) among others. He suggested
that living systems actually are liquid crystals, and that many liquid
crystalline mesophases may exist in the cell although they cannot then
be detected. Indeed, there has been no direct evidence that extensive
liquid crystalline mesophases exist in living organisms or in the
cytoplasm until our recent discovery of a noninvasive optical technique
(Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Ho and Saunders, 1994; Newton, Haffegee
and Ho, 1995). This enables us to obtain high resolution and high
contrast coloured images of live organisms based on visualizing just the
kind of coherent liquid crystalline mesophases which Needham and
others had predicted.
The technique amplifies small birefringences typical of biological
liquid crystals, en-abling us to see the whole living organism down to
the phase alignment of the molecules that make up its tissues. Brilliant
interference colours are generated, specific for each tissue, dependent
on the birefringence of the molecules and their degree of coherent
phase alignment. The colours are generated even as the molecules in
the tissues are moving about, busily transforming energy. That is
possible because visible light vibrates much faster than the molecules
can move, so the tissues will appear indistinguishable from static
crystals to the light passing through so long as the movements of the
constituent molecules are sufficiently coherent. With this imaging
technique, one can see that the organism is thick with activities at
every level, coordinated in a continuum from the macroscopic to the
molecular. And that is what the coherence of the organism entails.
These images also bring out another aspect of the wholeness of the
organism: all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without
exception, are polarized along the anteroposterior axis, so that all the
colours in different parts of the body are maximum when the
anteroposterior axis is appropriately aligned, and they change in
concert as the organism is rotated from that position. The
anteroposterior axis is the optical axis of the whole organism, which is,
in effect, a single (uniaxial) crystal. This leaves us in little doubt that the
organism is a singular whole, despite the diverse multiplicity and
polychromatic nature of its constituent parts.
The tissues not only maintain their crystalline order when they are
actively trans-forming energy, the degree of order seems to depend on
energy transformation, in that the more active and energetic the
organism, the more intensely colorful it is, implying that the molecular
motions are all the more coherent (Ho and Saunders, 1994). The
coherence of the organism is closely tied up with its energetic status, as
argued in the beginning of this essay: energy and organization are
intimately linked. The coherent whole is full of energy - it is a vibrant
coherent whole.
5.3 Quantum coherence in living organisms
The above considerations and observations convince me that the
wholeness of organisms is only fully captured by quantum coherence
(Ho, 1993
A quantum coherent system maximizes both global cohesion and
local freedom (Ho, 1993). This property, technically referred to as
factorizability, enables the body to be performing all sorts of different
coordinated functions simultaneously (Ho, 1995b). It also enables
instantaneous (nonlocal) and noiseless intercommunication to take
place through-out the system (Ho 1995f). As I am writing, my digestive
system is working independ-ently, my metabolism busily transforming
chemical energy in all my cells, putting some away in the longer term
stores of fat and glycogen, while converting most of it into readily
utilizable forms such as ATP. Similarly, my muscles are keeping in tone
and allowing me to work the keyboard, while, hopefully, my neurons
are firing in wonder-fully coherent patterns in my brain. Nevertheless,
if the telephone should ring in the middle of all this, I would turn to
pick it up without hesitation.
The importance of factorizability is evoked by the movie character,
Dr. Strangelove, portrayed by Peter Sellers as a megalomaniac scientist
who wanted to rule the world. He was a wheelchair-bound paraplegiac,
who could not speak without raising his arm in the manner of a Nazi
salute. That is just the symptom of the loss of factorizability which is
the hallmark of quantum coherence.
The coherent organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of
activities - organized according to their characteristic space-times -
each itself coherent, so that it can couple coherently to the rest (Ho,
1995b). It is, in effect a vast array of Fröhlich systems all coupled
together. This picture is fully consistent with the earlier proposal that
the organism stores energy over all space-time domains each
intercommunicating (or coupled) with the rest...Furthermore,
quantum superposition enables the system to maximize its potential
degrees of freedom so that the single degree of freedom required for
coherent action can be instantaneously accessed.
The main implication of quantum coherence for living
organization is that, in maxi-mizing both local freedom and global
intercommunication, the organism is in a very real sense completely
free. Nothing is in control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is
the failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people
persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions
or information. These questions are meaningless when one
understands what it is to be a coherent, organic whole. An
organic whole is an entangled whole, where part and whole,
105
global and local are so thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable,
and where each part is as much in control as it is sensitive and
responsive. The challenge for us all is to rethink information
processing in the context of the coherent organic whole.
Acknowledgments (60 footnotes on website) http://www.i-sis.org/
A “New” Method of Tossing I Ching Hexagrams
Way of the Total I Ching by Stephen Karcher
Stuart Harrop
Note: For a review by Michael Winn of Stephen Karcher’s Total I
Ching, see the Amazon.com book reviews. This version of the I Ching
is the most suitable for Healing Tao adepts, combining the ancient
shamanic Jou I Ching with the later Confucian I Ching.
A New Method of Tossing I Ching Hexagrams
by Stuart Harrop (U.K.)
Which version of the I Ching is best?
When I began using the I Ching some 37 years ago the only
significant version available was the renowned Richard Wilhelm
translation. This translation served me well for years. I would not
recommend it now. There are some far better, more accurate and
comprehensive translations available. However, the forward to this
edition by Carl Gustav Jung, in which he asks the I Ching to analyse
the effect of its arrival in the West, is interesting and indeed a lesson in
interpreting the oracle.
Until very recently the best technical translation, giving a flavour of
the directness of the original Chinese and drawing on the known key
source documents, was the translation by Rudolf Ritsema and Stephen
Karcher (Element 1994). As soon as this book appeared I dropped the
Wilhelm version and didn’t look back. However, this is bulky and
esoteric in the extreme. Karcher has since produced many small texts
based on his translation work. Even though these books look like
every-day versions, such is Karcher’s scholarship (as a sinologist) and
depth of understanding and true relationship with the oracle, that they
are all useful and reliable.
They go by many names: Elements of the I Ching, How to Use the
I Ching etc. and he keeps reprinting them with new names presumably
pursuant to his publisher’s policy to encourage sales. He has even
produced a version called Love Symbols (with added relationship
meditations produced by two other authors). I have not used this
version but his rationale for producing it is that most of the questions
asked of the I Ching have something to do with human relationships.
I mention these subsidiary books because if you are hiking across
mountains or trekking in the jungle you may want to carry a small text!
The best of the I Ching editions by an immeasurable gulf is
Karcher’s latest work: Total I Ching -Myths for Change (Time Warner
Books 2003, also available from Capitol Books). This deploys the best
of the text translations and adds in the ancient mythical and magical
roots of the I Ching taking it back to all of our ancestors. (That isn’t
too far back according to scientists in a recent Nature paper where it is
suggested that we all share common ancestors who lived at about BC
1500 or even in the AD years if we discount outlying islands! So if Lao
Tzu had kids………..)
The only problem with this version is that it is a little heavy for a
rucksack.There is a rumour that a smaller more portable version by
Time–Warner books is on its way.. (Note: it now available in smaller
pocketbook size, soon to be available on this site - we may also put a
digital version of it online).
Finally, there are many other versions of the I Ching and some are
useful for cross-referencing or for cosmological introductions. One or
two are very badly translated or too coloured by the author’s own
prejudices to allow the oracle through. The safe bet is to stick to
Karcher’s translations and for oracular use; the Total I Ching is all you
need!
Using the Oracle
The I Ching does not require pomp and circumstance. Some say
that the long, slow yarrow process is best in order to reach the right
meditative state. I don’t entirely agree. If the questioner (the adept or
Chun Tzu) has already set foot in the Kan and Li’s he or she has already
learned to focus rapidly and effectively enough to work with the I
Ching as if in a conversation with Michael Winn at breakfast. Karcher
gives very clear instructions on the process in all of his books.
Essentially: ask a question when you have a real need. In so doing:
focus and centre your shen, write the question down and then consult
the oracle. In my experience, I usually get the answer to my real
question. This is not always the same as the question reduced to
writing. The I Ching is particularly capable of cutting through all of
our personal nonsense and trappings. On many occasions it has seen
through my superficially new question and scolded me as a “Young
Fool” for repeating one of the questions it has already clearly and
unequivocally answered. So be prepared for the guidance that you truly
need!!
For years I used the coin method, predominantly. However, when I
had the time I preferred to use the yarrow stalk method. (See most of
Karcher’s books for instructions.) I felt that the latter method
produced clearer answers and that it contributed to developing my
relationship with the oracle. The downside is that yarrow stalks are
bulky and take up too much space in a rucksack. Worse still, if you are
in a hurry, asking the I Ching a question can take a long time.
Karcher recommends a new method (again all mentioned in most
of his books) concerning the use of 16 coloured beads or similar
objects. This proposed method is portable, as rapid as the coins and
yet it replicates the odds of the yarrow stalk oracle. I now use
something like this almost exclusively. However, instead of basing the
system on colours, I use a depiction of the actual line that will make up
the hexagram. This “dowel” method has brought me increasingly closer
to understanding the ramifications of change as they affect my life.
The dowel method
Cut 16 similar sized thin pieces of dowel. (Use a thickness of either
1/4 inch or 1/2 inch to retain a portable system.) Then sand them and
draw a hexagram line on each of them in the following ratio:
--- five (solid yang liine)
- - seven (broken yin line)
-O- three (solid yang line with 0 over it)
- X - one (broken yin line with X in center)
To consult the oracle place all of the pieces of dowel in a suitably
sacred bag (or if you wish an old sock!), shake it and draw one piece out
at random whilst visualising and using any technique you can to
become fully immersed in your question. Draw the line revealed on
each piece of dowel (from the bottom up), place the dowel back in the
bag and repeat the process until you have drawn the six lines.
As long as there are 16 pieces of dowel in the bag prior to
extraction the probability of drawing a particular aspect of change
replicates the ancient yarrow stalk method.
Using the ratios described, there must be many other alternatives
to this. A computer programme could be developed, by example, that
generates specific musical tones attributed to each line.
Once the hexagram is generated Karcher details a number of ways
in which it can be analysed and I recommend these are experimented
with. Many of the methods he describes are new to the west and take
the pronouncements of the I Ching much further and deeper. One
particularly important process which should not be neglected is to let
the images which are generated by the oracle permeate your
imaginations, meditations and dreams. Total I Ching is
106
particularly useful in supporting this process through the wonderful
range of exquisitely rich images that are in the background
descriptions to the hexagrams. I have found that these images
ultimately give me the most guidance. They act directly on my shen
and do not, like so many words, stick in my head. I also find that the
guidance I receive acts on a number of levels, not only in my conscious
approach to life, but also in the inner events within my alchemical
meditations.
Probabilities and the nature of yin and yang
I have no doubt that the I Ching can reach beyond probability and
speak to us direct. But we are dreaming in later heaven and are subject
to the laws of mathematics aswell as physics. Therefore, I deploy an
oracular method that replicates the probability ratio of the ancient
yarrow oracle. I find that this approach deepens the relationship
without forcing dependence on an impossibly impeccable level of
focus.
There is an older method that uses tortoise shells (with weird
probability ratios) but burning the carapaces of endangered species is
not within my concept of the Dao’s flow.
The probability statistics of the coin, yarrow and “dowel” methods
are as follows:
Probability of drawing a line
3 Coin Method vs. Yarrow or Dowel Method
yang line 3 in 8 vs. 5 in 16
yin line 3 in 8 vs. 7 in 16
changing yang line O 1 in 8 vs. 3 in 16
changing yin line X 1 in 8 vs. 1 in 16
Karcher believes that the coin method is too symmetrical and does
not penetrate as deeply into a situation as the older yarrow stalks
oracle or the simpler dowel method that I have described. He says that
yin and yang are asymmetrical in their qualities and the odds in the
yarrow stalk oracle reflect the tendency of yin energy to stay in place
and that of yang energy to move.
This is difficult to appreciate when we consider some aspects of
the yin-yang flux. Thus the cycles of the moon are symmetrical
(although its dark phase might appear to be longer than its full, bright
phase). Similarly the seasons seem to depict a symmetry (but some
believe that winter goes on far, far too long and summer is gone almost
as soon as it begins). Time may not be relevant here.
The qualities of yin and yang described by Karcher are not
necessarily time-based but may reflect the asymmetry of later heaven.
For my part I have had consistent and direct communication with the
I Ching using the dowel method and the only areas that have been
difficult to understand have concerned questions about my internal
alchemical practices. In retrospect it might be that we should consider
using a coin oracle, with its symmetrical odds if we feel we are
requesting information that might require an understanding of early
rather than later heaven dynamics.
Ultimately, however, the I Ching is designed to give guidance for
the human in his or her later heaven interactions. I suspect that when
we can truly act from the centre then we transcend the dictates of
change.
On that latter note we also have to be careful not to obsess and
certainly we must avoid being ruled by the I Ching. Rather than
relying on an oracle and being subject to the ramifications of change,
the alchemical goals surely include transcendence through functioning
more and more from the centre: from a state of wu-wei (not that I
would know!!)
Best,
Stuart Harrop
 8 October 2004
Stuart Harrop holds a professorial Chair in the Durrell Institute of
Conservation and Ecology, within the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Kent, UK.
He has, over the last period of 20 years, learned a number of
“shamanic” dreaming and other practices deriving from various South
American and Celtic traditions. Changing direction somewhat he has
concentrated his path by studying the Taoist nei dan practices, during
the last 10 years, mostly on a self-taught basis (although during the last
three years he has been taught by both Mantak Chia and Michael
Winn). He has recently taught elements of these practices to small
groups in the UK and Africa. Mantak Chia awarded him the status of
Honorary Senior Inner Alchemy Instructor in March 2003.
The Subtle Body Ecstasy of Daoist Inner Alchemy
Daoist Mystical Experience
Livia Kohn
The Subtle Body Ecstasy of Daoist Inner Alchemy
LIVIA KOHN
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
Descriptions of personal mystical experiences in the Daoist
tradition are hard to find. Authors typically refrain from becoming too
personal, and the overall tendency in the literature is to express the
experiences of the mystic in generalized instructions and the listing of
warning signs. This is different from Western religions, where the
experience is at the pivot of it all and is described as overwhelming and
ineffable, timeless and yet full of knowing certainty (James 1936), and
where mystics have described its wonders time and again as they have
their agonies when it eluded them for a period in the so-called dark
night of the soul (Underhill 1911).
There is no strong emphasis on personal experience in Daoism.
There are experiences, yes—the complete oblivion of all, for example,
described often as “the body like a withered tree, the mind like dead
ashes,” and the ecstatic visions of the gods and palaces of the
otherworld, to name the most common. But there are very few
personal reports on the overwhelming and powerful nature of certain
specific experiences that could be compared in impact and importance
to their Western counterpart. This lack can be explained as a general
feature of Chinese culture, where religious autobiography was not a
major genre, and the earliest first-hand accounts of the troubles and
delights of the quest for perfection only appear after contact with
Western missionaries in the Yuan and Ming dynasties.
Still, even before this period mystical manuals contain warnings
and instructions regarding specific experiences. For example, the
Dingguan jing (Scripture on Concentration and Observation), a Tang-
dynasty text, says quite explicitly:
If there are thoughts and fantasies during concentration,
Manifold delusions and countless evils,
Also specters and wicked sprites
Will appear accordingly.
But when you see
The Perfected or Lord Lao,
Divine wonders and amazing sights,
This is an auspicious sign. (lines 27-28; Kohn 1987, 138).
Similarly, the Zuowang lun (Discourse on Sitting in Oblivion) of
the eighth century is very clear about the difficulties that adepts can
expect to face and outlines the radiance of spirit and boundless joy
they may eventually attain (see Kohn 1987). Yet neither has quite the
same importance, the same centrality as the mystical experience in the
Western interpretation of mysticism. While Western mystics fixate on
the experience, it seems, the Chinese concentrate more on the
transformation of body and mind. The key to being a mystic, then, is
not whether one has had a certain experience, but to what degree one’s
self is being transformed into cosmic dimensions, how sagely and non-
acting one has become (Kohn 1992).
The underlying reason for this difference in emphasis regarding
experience is the nature of the worldview at the foundation of the two
religious systems. Western traditions pose a transcendent divine agent,
a God totally other; their mystics accordingly concentrate on rare
visions of the deity, granted through his mercy, that are
overwhelming, ineffable, and entirely out of this world. The
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Chinese tradition, on the other hand, sees its ultimate in the Dao, a
divine force so immanent that it is even in the soil and tiles, so much a
part of the world that it cannot be separated from it. Oneness or union
with the Dao is the birthright of every being, not a rare instance of
divine grace. It is natural to begin with, and becomes more natural as it
is realized through practice.
The Chinese mystical experience of oneness with the Dao, quite
logically, is astounding only in the beginning. It represents a way of
being in the world completely different from ordinary perception,
sensually and intellectually determined. The longer the Daoist lives
with the experience and the deeper he integrates it into his life and
being, the less relevant it is. Thus, neither is the experience itself the
central feature of the tradition, nor is there a pronounced “dark night
of the soul,” a desperate search for a glimpse of the transcendent divine.
THE BODY
Another major difference between the two traditions is the
continued emphasis the Chinese place on the body in the
transformation to a celestial being. Unlike in the West, where body and
soul are radical opposites, body and spirit in in Daoist mysticism,
though clearly distinguished, are not seen as opposites. Rather, they
represent different aspects of the same continuum of the Dao and
have to be purified in equal measure. As Maxime Kaltenmark puts it,
Chinese terminology reflects subtle differences between states of a
more or less ethereal quality, but of one and the same principle lying at
the foundation of all the complex functions of man. The gross
conditions of the body are as much included as are its finer essences
and the higher mental states which make up holiness.
This then is the reason why one can say that the Chinese do not
make a clear-cut distinction between what we call body and mind.
Their outlook is in general much more oriented towards life as an
organic whole and ongoing process. (1965, 655)
The challenge for the mystic, then, is not to overcome the body in
favor of the spirit but to transform the entire body-spirit continuum to
a higher level and come to experience himself as the divine replica of
the cosmos in oneness with the Dao.
This perspective is again based on the worldview of the underlying
oneness of everything in the Dao. In this framework, the human body
is seen as an accumulation of cosmic, vital energy known as qi and
evaluated in terms of its energetic workings rather than as a solid,
ultimately fragile entity. Qi is at the root of everything that exists,
whether natural or supernatural, human or nonhuman, animate or
inanimate. It generally appears in the complementary forces yin and
yang, which correspond to night and day, shadow and light, resting and
moving, feminine and masculine, tiger and dragon, mercury and lead,
and so on. They cannot exist without one another but continuously
engender and develop in mutual interaction, moving in cycles of days
and seasons, of inner circulation and outer rhythm. They are further
subdivided into categories of lesser and greater and associated with the
Five Phases (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), symbolic representations
of their developmental patterns. In this more complex form, the
phases of qi are then set into a relationship with the key organs of the
human body, its senses, material constituents, psychological agents, and
emotions.
Qi comes in two major forms, prenatal or primordial and postnatal
or ordinary. Primordial qi is the cosmic parent of yin and yang, the
power of the universe at its creation, the original purity of the cosmos
in its most potent form. It is the ultimate neutral energy, the highest
creative power, the most essential force of all existence. Everybody at
birth receives a set amount of primordial qi, but even that amount is
already miniscule compared to the intensity of the primordial power of
the cosmos (Winn 2001). Postnatal qi is ingested through breath, food,
and interaction with others. It mingles with the primordial reservoir
deep within and most commonly diminishes it until the person
becomes spiritually disconnected and physcially weak, and eventually
dies. Lack of primordial qi in this system is the reason why so many
people feel alienated from God, nature, and each other, and why they
tend to believe that the gross, dense, physical reality they see around
them is all there is.
The Daoist endeavor consists in the recovery and replenishing of
the tiny spark of primordial qi that is buried within all human beings.
All qi continuously moves in the body in a smooth regular rhythm
dictated by the cosmic patterns of yin and yang. It is in a state of
ongoing flux, continuously changing, constitutes health or sickness,
moods and tempers, and determines how we work, eat, and sleep. As
and when the spark of primordial qi is ignited and strengthened, it will
“gradually dissolve one’s suffering and struggle and restore life to its
innate state of grace and effortless, nonactive (wuwei) communication
with Heaven, Earth, and all nature. Cultivating primordial qi is growing
Heaven and Earth within” (Winn 2001, 14).
To do so, practitioners begin with cultivating qi as it appears in the
body in its most tangible and concrete form—as jing or essence. Jing is
the indeterminate aspect of qi, also described as qi in transition from
one determinate form to another (Porkert 1974). Put most concretely,
jing is no longer the qi of the eggs in the omelet and not yet the qi of
the eggs as assimilated in the body body of the eater. As Michael Winn
describes it, “jing is perhaps best understood in Western terms as
primal matter. It is the raw fuel that drives the pulsating rhythm of the
body’s moment-to-moment cellular division and reproduction of
itself” (2002, 20). Governed in the body by the kidneys and the Phase
water, it is also closely related to the psychological power of the will or
determination, the innate power to “seek pleasure, and to fulfull a
specific destiny” (Winn 2002, 20). It is also the source of a person’s
charisma or magnetic power, of sexual attraction and an innate sense of
wholeness. In its most concrete form jing in the body appears as sexual
energy, i.e., semen in men and menstrual blood in women. Much of
Daoist cultivation accordingly begins with the control and
reorientation of sexual energy.
Eventually this jing is purified and made more subtle and
transformed into qi that is then moved consciously around the body in
various cycles. This qi in turn is further rarified into shen (spirit), which
is a third form qi assumes in the human body. Shen is understood as
the inherent higher vitality of life, the power of consciousness, and the
ability to think. It is closely associated with the individuality’s outlook
and personality and is said to reside in the central organ of the heart. It
governs the emotions and has the most impact on the mystical
transformation. Ultimately, spirit is also the goal of mystical
attainment: the transformation of a baser qi being into an entity of
pure spirit.
To achieve this, various methods of cultivation are employed,
including formalized body movements, breathing exercises, ritual
ceremonies, meditations, visualizations, and so on. It should be
understood, however, that none of these practices—however beneficial
they may be for health and long life and good fortune—are undertaken
to obtain or acquire qi. Rather, qi is already there, and the practitioner
already is part of nature’s infinite qi--field. The task is not to change
the basic set up of being human but to recognize one’s true nature as
part of the Dao, to “understand the unconscious communication
patterns that are always flowing between one’s microcosmic (personal)
qi-field and the impersonal (macrocosmic) qi-field”(Winn 2001, 13).
INNER ALCHEMY
The tradition within Daoism that makes most obvious use of this
understanding of the body as a cosmic qi-field is known as “inner
alchemy” (neidan). A complex system of techniques that integrated
physical longevity methods, spiritual meditations, operative alchemy,
and the intricate symbolism of the Yijing, it can be traced back to the
Tang dynasty (618-907) but came to flourish in the Song (960-1260),
especially in south China, where it was practiced by various schools.
Inner alchemy describes mystical attainment in terms of three stages—
transforming jing into qi, qi into shen, and merging shen with the Dao,
in the form of interior spiritual entity known as the golden elixir or the
immortal embryo.
Inner alchemical practice begins in the first stage with taking
control of the jing, the sexual energy. For men, this means that they
must avoid losing semen through ejaculation while women, through a
series of meditations and breast massages learn to lessen and eventually
stop the flow of menstruation. Instead practitioners retain their jing
and reverse its flow, making it move up the spinal column “to nourish
the brain.” The brain, according to Chinese traditional medicine, is the
Ocean of Marrow, and marrow is jing as manifest in the bones. Every
time jing is lost through sexual activity, therefore, the brain, the bones
of the head, and the skeleton of the body are weakened and become
more brittle.
The jing, moreover, that travels up the spine is not the semen
that would be ejaculated during sexual intercourse or lost in
108
menstruation but its refined form, the qi from which the semen arose
in the first place. At the top of the head, the reversed jing unites with
other yin secretions of the body and, once it begins to overflow in the
cavity there, descends again through the front of the torso to the
energy center in the abdomen known as the lower cinnabar field.
Circulated mentally in spiraling movements, the qi is stored here and
forms the interior cauldron for the concoction of the elixir, the
spiritual womb for the growth of the immortal embryo.
The process of qi circulation is known as the “microcosmic orbit”
and still actively practiced today (see Chia 1983; 1985; Winn 2002).
Undertaken after preparatory meditations, chanting of sacred sounds,
and the activation of the qi in the five inner organs, it is accompanied
by rhythmic breathing and the regular holding of breath.
Also, the technique is practiced in synchronicity with the yin-yang
patterns of the seasons and matched with appropriate visualizations,
seeing for example the rising yang-jing as solar, and the descending yin-
qi as lunar energies. Through this refinement, the qi in due course
opens up to unveiling a kernel of grain or a pearl in the lower cinnabar
field—the first concrete inkling of primordial qi within. Called the
“mysterious pearl” or the “pearl of dew,” this is the seed of the divine
elixir from which the immortal embryo will eventually grow. It
indicates the successful completion of the first stage.
During the second stage, the transformation of qi into shen, the
immortal embryo grows over ten months in the lower and middle
cinnabar fields (abdomen and solar plexus). It is nourished by the
rhythmic ascent and descent of qi, which creates a great abdominal
openness and allows the increasing sublimation of interior qi into
spirit. Understood as a reversal of the cosmic process of creation, it
involves reverting the five phases to the three primal forces (water, fire,
and earth), and the coupling of the reversed energies of fire within
water (yang within yin) and water within fire (yin within yang)—the
latter often expressed with the help of the symbols of the Yijing (Book
of Changes). More primordial qi is assembled and the three cinnabar
fields are turned into powerful alchemical cauldrons for its further
refinement (Winn 2002,18).
This process requires the strongest meditative awareness yet—long
periods of quiet sitting and deep inner stillness. After ten months of
nurturing with primordial qi, the newly developed subtle body, the
immortal embryo is ready to be born. For this, it is moved gradually
upward along the spine until it reaches the upper cinnabar field in the
head. From there it can leave the body through the top of the head,
undertaking excursions to the celestial spheres as it pleases. The birth
of the embryo into a free-moving spirit power signifies the adept’s
rebirth on a new level and a new yin body, an immortal being of
softness, purity, and light.
The third stage, following this spiritual rebirth, is not described in
great detail in the texts. They mention that the yin body is increasingly
transformed into a body of pure yang, essentially through deeper
absorption and meditative practice. Eventually it becomes pure,
luminous spirit and is reintegrated into cosmic emptiness. In the
course of this process, the adept acquires supernatural and magical
powers that are, however, not considered of major importance by the
tradition. The main objective is final deliverance, achieved through the
overcoming of individual identity and all body-mind duality.
The modern school of inner alchemy as taught by Mantak Chia
subdivides this last stage into five levels:
1.
the birth of the immortal child through the absorption of higher
forms of yin and yang, the sun and the moon, and by opening
communication with the five spirit centers and the divinities of the
four directions;
2.
the maturation of the immortal child through feeding of the true
elixir of the sun, a series of meditations arranged according to one’s
astrological birth elements that involve the absorption of planetary
power and ecstatic travels to the solar system;
3.
the crystallization of the primordial spirit by focusing on the
center in the head and there absorbing and interiorizing various astral
forces, such as the Big Dipper, the Polestar, and the four Great Star
quadrants, eventually attaining the ability to travel freely around them;
4.
 the merging of Heaven and Earth through opening a cosmic void
within, where Heaven and Earth come together in primordial unity
and where the physical body and personality of the adept fully
dissolves into primordial qi;
5.
union with the Dao, a spontaneous event that occurs when virtue,
destiny, and cultivation are complete (Winn 2001, 28-30).
Within this overall framework, then, two major sets of experiences
can be described: the sense of energetic openness and interior subtlety
as a being of pure qi when the microcosmic orbit is fully opened; and
the mystical realization of the spirit being both within the body and in
its travels through the otherworld.
THE MICROCOSMIC ORBIT
An early descripition of the transformative experience of the
microcosmic orbit is found in the Xiwang mu shize (Ten Rules of the
Queen Mother of the West), a work on women’s inner alchemy of the
eighteenth century (Despeux 2000, 397). The text notes that the qi
refined through extensive breast massages will spontaneously begin to
move about in the body. Once adepts become aware of this, they
should actively guide it downward through the abdomen and divide it
into two streams at the hips, spiralling it to the left and right in the
course of thirty-six respirations. Getting warmer and more active, the
qi begins to move up the spinal column, first slowly and hesitantly, then
with increasing speed and vigor. To unblock hindrances along the
spine, adepts clap their teeth seventy-two times and take thirty-six
deep nostril breaths before the practice. To prevent qi from staying in
the genital area and flowing out of the body, they contract the muscles
of the pelvic floor with some force and place both hands over the
pubic bone, at the same time actively visualizing the upward flow of qi.
Once the qi has begun its upward course, practitioners raise both
hands overhead, spreading and releasing the fingers at regular intervals
twice thirty-six times, first slowly and lightly, then a bit faster. Next,
they place their hands on their hips and shrug the shoulders thirty-six
times, allowing the qi to pass through the Double Pass at breast level,
the upper spine, and the Jade Pillow at the occiput. Any blockages
found there can be further dissolved by clapping the teeth and
concentrating on the nape of the neck. Once the qi has moved all the
way up through the Niwan Palace to the top of the head, adepts move
the lower lip above the upper to encourage the qi to descend along the
front of the skull toward the nose.
They roll the tongue against the upper palate to establish a
connection between the two central energy meridians in the torso, the
Governing and Conception Vessels, thus allowing the sweet dew of the
qi to descend further. It flows down naturally towards the Purple Gate
near the heart, where it is held for a short period. Moving further
down through the abdomen, it divides at the hips and is spiraled thirty-
six times as before, then concentrated in the cinnabar field and rotated
thirty-six times each to the left and the right (Despeux 1990).
This free flow of qi through the body brings with it a sense of
ecstasy and an increased subtleness of bodily perception. It constitutes
the reorganization of personal consciousness and bodily awareness on a
subtler and more refined level. Practitioners gain a sense of being part
of the flow of the Dao rather than separate individual entities.
A first-person account of this experience of the microcosmic orbit
has been transmitted from the early twentieth century, when Jiang
Weiqiao (1870-1955), a learned and sickly young man who later became
know as Master Yinshi, experimented with
Daoist inner alchemy to cure himself of tuberculosis. To achieve
his self-healing he set up a rigid schedule of meditation and physical
exercises, establishing a daily routine that closely resembled monastic
discipline. He got up around three or four in the morning and
practiced “quiet sitting,” as he calls his meditation, for an hour or two.
Breakfast and a short hike, “always facing east, to absorb the energy of
the rising sun” (Jiang 1985, 90), were followed by a rest and study period
to culminate in another phase of quiet sitting around ten o’clock. After
lunch he would spend some time pacing slowly around the room.
Beginning at about three o’clock, he practiced the seven-stringed lute
or went out for another walk. Dinner and another two hours of sitting
in the evening concluded a busy day of self-healing.
In the course of a year, he managed to strengthen his qi and began
to experience its strong power within:
I had started my regimen on the fifth day of the third
109
month of the year 1900. However, I had to endure many pains and
hardships and I was remiss and idle in some thing or another
practically every day.
Later I learned how to leave things to nature, and my spirit became
fresher and healthier every day. Before, when I had gone out for a walk
I would make it for two or three miles, then had to rest for tiredness
and exhaustion. After a few months of practice, once I got going I
could walk on for ten miles and more and never feel the strain.
Every time I sat down to meditate, I would focus my awareness on
the cinnabar field in the lower abdomen. I could feel a cloud of hot
power there. It came and went, rose and ebbed. I was quite amazed by
it.
Then, on the twenty-ninth of the fifth month, during the evening
sitting, it happened first: All of a sudden there was this intense
rumbling movement in the cinnabar field in my lower abdomen. I had
been sitting in quiet meditation as usual, but this was something I
really could not control. I was shaken back and forth helplessly. Then
an incredibly hot energy began to rise at the bottom of my spine and
climbed up further and further until it reached the very top of my
head. I was startled and alarmed. (1985, 91-92; Kohn 1993)
In traditional terms, this experience reveals the power of the
primordial qi over all living beings and is a first sign of the
practitioner’s growing oneness with Dao, an initial step toward the
dissolution of ego and the attainment of perfection. For Jiang Weiqiao,
it was the first discovery of an energy that pervaded and nourished his
body, a powerful, yet ultimately controllable agent, not a mystical
divine force of universal creation. Later, as he describes it, the
experience was repeated several times until the hot qi that rose along
his spine no longer left the body through the top of the head but
returned through the face and chest area to the lower abdomen. After
undergoing the spontaneous establishment of the microcosmic orbit,
he continued to use his power over the circulation of qi whenever he
felt weak or sick, sometimes guiding it to flow freely, sometimes
directing it to whatever part of his body felt unwell.
Another first-person report on the establishment of the
microcosmic orbit is by Michael Winn, a long-term seeker of spiritual
cultivation in the Indian and Chinese traditions. In the beginning of
his quest, he studied Rajneesh’s Book of Secrets and followed its
breathing instructions to the point where he could slow his breath
down to almost a complete standstill. Then
one day, after two weeks practice, I felt my breath stop completely.
During a long pause between breaths, I entered a deep, peaceful state,
and felt I no longer need to breathe air. Suddenly my whole body
shook, then exploded into an intense orgasm and I watched myself
catapulted into the space around me, with a clear vision of my body
expanding rapidly through the walls of the room. After this initial
explosion, I felt like a mushroom cloud above a nuclear blast, with the
debris of my former consciousness blown to bits and slowly raining
back down on my transparent body in blissful droplets. (2002, 7)
Here the opening of the qi body is not felt as a circulation of
energy but rather as an explosion, a dissolution of the former,
apparently solid foundation of self and body into tiny droplets of
energy that were dispersed through space and slowly came back to
settle in the personal sphere. Still, the event is very similar—the qi
manifests violently with a rumbling and begins to move entirely on its
own and without any conscious control of the practitioner. This
control is only learned over time and exercised carefully in proper
training.
Such training is undertaken in the contemporary Daoist practice
of inner alchemy in a school known as The Healing Dao, of which
Michael Winn is a leading practitioner today. Healing Dao was
originally founded by Mantak Chia, a Thai of Chinese ancestry. Born in
1944, he was recognized early for his spiritual potential and began the
practice of Buddhist meditation at age six. Later he moved to Hong
Kong where he studied various qi techniques, such as Taiji quan,
Aikido, and Qigong. There he also met a Daoist master, known as the
One Cloud Hermit, who taught him the secrets of inner alchemy over
a period of five years. Developing his own system, in 1973 he founded
The Healing Dao in Chiangmai, Thailand, and in 1978 brought it to
the West.
According to Chia, practitioners begin their endeavor by becoming
conscious of their inner organs and the qi flow within. Then they
gradually learn to open the microcosmic orbit. About the experience
accompanying this, he says:
Most people have some sensations during their meditation. These
may be warmth, heat, or tingling at the sacrum, Gate of Life, Third
Eye, or tip of the tongue, or cold or numb areas. Some people feel an
effervascence like champagne bubbles. You may experience mild
electic-like shocks anywhere in the body; the body may shake
rhythmically or suddenly jolt.
Also, the hands, feet, or whole body may become unusually hot; in
fact, you may feel strong sensations of heat anywhere in the body.
Those who are visually oriented may see a light inside their heads, or
points along the orbit may light up. If you have any of these sensations,
you may conclude that qi is circulating. (Chia and Chia 1993, 478)
The reason for these various sensations in the body is that “we
have begun to absorb qi from Heaven, Earth, and the Higher Self, and
our channels are widening to absorb additional bursts of qi” (1993, 484).
This is considered very beneficial and an important step on the way,
leading to a sense of self and body that is no longer limited to ordinary
consciousness but grows into a dimension of subtle energetics and
cosmic connection. The mystical dimension of existence here is
opened through the physical experience of the body and the
reorganization of self in terms of qi flow and the perception of subtle
energies. Experience is determined entirely by the body—but the body
is transformed into a more subtle, more cosmic, more divine entity.
THE IMMORTAL EMBRYO
This transformation of the body is further intensified in the
second stage of the alchemical process, when the inner seed of the
elixir, created by the systematic circulation and collection of qi,
blossoms forth and gives rise to the immortal embryo. Over ten
months of intense meditation, this spiritual alter ego of the
practitioner grows to completion, and a primordial light begins to
shine through the entire body. Adepts then enter a state of deep
absorption, lying immobile as if dead, appearing pale in complexion,
and apparently not breathing at all. They need a helper at this time
who watches over them day and night for however long the state
persists, which may well be up to six days. All noise and shouting that
might startle them must be avoided, lest the tenuously growing spirit
embryo be injured and the adept be afflicted by madness or demonic
forces. When they come out of this absorption, nostril breathing
begins very subtly and the divine light opens up. One can then call out
to them in a low voice. They slowly begin to move and will gradually
rise, get dressed, and take some nourishment, still remaining vigilant
since the process is not yet over. Rather, the most important part is
still to come: the exiting of the spirit into the celestial realm (Despeux
1990).
The first exiting of the spirit embryo is known as “deliverance
from the womb.” It is the adept’s celestial rebirth and is accompanied
by the perception of a deep inner rumbling, like a clap of thunder.
Then the celestial gate at the top of her head bursts free and opens
wide, and a white smoky essence can be seen hovering above her. The
spirit passes through the top of the head and begins to communicate
actively with the celestials, transcending the limitations of the body.
Before this exiting procedure, adepts actively move the immortal
embryo from the middle to the upper cinnabar field, using rhythmic
breathing and/or the recitation of sacred sounds.
As long as the adept has not entered a state of very deep
absorption, the embryonic spirit is not yet fully detached from the qi
circulating in the body and cannot leave. Once absorption is attained,
on the other hand, and the spirit has begun to move on its own, the
adept easily maintains concentration and may experience various
strong internal states. For example, she may may have a vision of a
shower of heavenly flowers, perceive divine perfumes, or see an image
of a seven-storied pagoda. According to Wu Chongyu of the Ming
dynasty, “leaving the state of great absorption is accompanied by
different phenomena in every individual. Some see a shower of celestial
flowers, others see wind and clouds.” The Dadan zhizhi (Pointers to
the Great Elixir) of the late thirteenth century similarly has:
As your perfect qi rises, your ears will hear the sounds of wind and
rain. Then inside your head there will be the sounds of harps and gold
and jade. In your Heavenly Pond [mouth], the Metal Liquid [saliva]
will gush forth like a cool stream. Some will flow up into the brain,
some will congeal into pearly dew, some will enter into the gullet.
110
Its flavor will be sweet and delectable.
Later, inside your head you will hear the sounds of flutes, zithers,
harps, and chimes. Or you may hear the call of the crane, the cry of the
monkey, or the chirping of the cicada. . . . When the spirit reaches its
exit point, you will hear a huge clap of thunder. (Eskildsen 2001, 150)
After its first exit, the spirit learns to come and go freely and
communicate widely with the otherworld. In the beginning, it moves
rather slowly and does not travel far from the body, then, supported by
further meditative exercises known as “nursing for three years,” it
gradually gets used to its new powers, moves about faster and travels
further afield until it goes far and wide without any limitation. As the
spirit enters into these cosmic ventures, the adept exhibits
supernatural powers: she can be in two place at once, move quickly
from one place to another, know the past and the future, divine
people’s thoughts, procure wondrous substances, overcome all hazards
of fire and water, and has powers over life and death. Known as “spirit
pervasion,” this indicates the freedom achieved by the spirit and also
manifest in the practictioner.
Few first-person accounts are found on this part of the practice.
Michael Winn mentions that he, at some point in his intensive
training, found his sleep needs drastically reduced and experienced
different spiritual powers, “ranging from bursts of telephathy and
foreknowledge of the future to experiences of the entire universe
collapsing into a single point” (2002, 8).
He also reports on a dramatic experience of cosmic merging in a
situation of what the Daoist tradition calls “dual cultivation” or partner
practice:
We had sat naked for a few minutes, facing each other in cross-
legged meditation position to tune in. We were both suddenly
overtaken by a powerful energy field with extremely intense and
unusual vibrations. Not a word was spoken, as our mental, emotional,
and speech faculties were completely suspended, but we later
confirmed having an identical experience.
One aspect of our consciousness began experiencing a very yang
orgasm, expanding out of the bedroom faster than the speed of light,
whizzing through galaxies, exploding supernovas, and then beyond.
Another part of us was orgasmically imploding inward with opposite
and equal force, grounding and concentrating the great intensity in our
physical bodies. (2002, 26)
Here the energy fields of the two practitioners merge in an
explosive and powerful manner, moving both outward as their spirits
travel into the planetary vastness of the otherworld and inward as the
body is opened to cosmic emptiness and primordiality. The experience
is overwhelming and transcendent, yet firmly grounded in the
energetics of the body, the result of years of practice and the
cultivation of subtle forms of qi.
However, even this high level if mystical attainment is not the
ultimate goal of inner alchemy, which is only reached after further
meditative practice, known as “wall gazing.” This technique is adopted
from Chan Buddhism, whose first patriarch Bodhidharma is said to
have realized full enlightenment by sitting in a cave and gazing at a wall
for nine years. In this very final phase of the process, the adept whose
body is already transformed into pure light has yet to fully overcome its
limits and melt utterly into cosmic emptiness. The process takes nine
years or 3,000 days, a number symbolic of highest yang and great
completion.
A poem attributed to the great lady adept Sun Buer (1119-1182)
describes it as follows:
All your tasks already well fulfilled,
Just sit down in a corner, concentrate the spirit,
Feel your body rest on purple clouds,
Your whole being calm, floating on weak waters.
The qi forces melt together, yin and yang unite,
Spirit, Heaven, Earth all are only one.
Concluding the great work, you see the Gate of Jade
Emerging from the mists—and heave a deep, long sigh.
(Chen 1934; Cleary 1989)
The deep meditative absorption in this stage, perfected over long
years of practice, involves the attainment of complete purity,
tranquility, and nonaction. Mind and spirit are no longer of this world
but illuminate the infinite, and the adept is fully integrated into the
heavenly spheres. Eventually he or she sheds her earthly form and
ascends upward, mounting a cloudy chariot or riding on an immortals’
bird. She receives formal empowerment from the palaces above and
becomes an acknowledged member of the heavenly host. Received by
the divine ladies at the court of the Queen Mother, she is led to the
immortals’ paradises and attains the ultimate state of mystical
achievement.
CONCLUSION
The mystical experience in Daoist inner alchemy, the most recent
and still practiced form of Daoist cultivation, can therefore be
described as a form of subtle body ecstasy. Practitioners learn, through
breathing, gymnastic, and meditative exercises, to open themselves to
a level of experience that is not accessible to ordinary, dualistic,
outward-oriented consciousness. They realize on an experiential level—
as opposed to the purely theoretical or intellectual understanding of
concepts and doctrines—that the universe consists of various fields of
qi, primordial, postnatal, yin, yang, fire, water, five phases, and so on.
Feeling the qi in its different levels within, refining sexual energy
(jing) into qi and qi into spirit (shen), they systematically reorganize
their experience to a wider, more inclusive, more open, a strongly
cosmic level. Doing so, they essentially reprogram their conception of
the universe with its various signs, metaphors, and symbols towards an
energetic perception, a mode of communication with nature in its own
way, a qi based way of being in the world. In the course of this
transformation, moreover, they discover internal levels of existence
they never suspected and learn to interact with beings of the
supernatural plane—ghosts, demons, gods, immortals, and various
planetary entities. Their universe expands both within and without,
and they become denizens of the larger universe, flowing streams of qi,
pure aspects of the Dao.
Their experiences, moreover, although not commonly described in
personal narratives are extraordinary and supra-sensual, raising the
individual’s consciousness to intense levels both within and without.
What, then, do they teach us about the nature of mystical experience?
As seen from the Daoist tradition of inner alchemy, mystical
experience is transcendent of ordinary consciousness and common
perception, not transcendent in the Western sense of experiencing
something totally other but transcendent in that it goes far beyond the
world to a deep, underlying level of existence that is always there,
always accessible, always present, but not usually perceived.
Mystical experience, moreover, is immensely physical and takes
place firmly on the basis of the body. This body, however, is not a clod-
like lump of material solidity but a replica of the universe, an entity of
flowing, subtle energies that are activated through systematic
cultivation and take on a life of their own, superseding and eventually
replacing the individual’s personal consciousness. Mystical experience
means the dissolution of self and body and mind into the larger cosmic
flow of the Dao, the recovery of the universal power of primordiality,
the attainment of a state at the original creation of all.
Mystical experience according to the Daoist tradition is also very
much determined by culture. It is consciously and actively created
through a series of exercises that apply physical movements, breathing
techniques, and specific guided meditations. While the very highest
level of total dissolution is something that happens on its own and
cannot be controlled, all other stages and experiences along the way
are systematically prepared and learned. This, again, is why there are so
few personal narratives: people know what to expect and when to
expect it, they are guided kindly but firmly by a master who knows the
body energetics and can give helpful support at all stages. It is
accordingly no accident that the two first-person reports on the
establishment of the microcosmic orbit cited above were written after
the qi-flow opened up unexpectedly and without a teacher’s guidance.
The practitioners were surprised and amazed and wondered what they
had stumbled into—experiencing mystery not unlike their Western
counterparts but with access to a tradition that could map their route
and provide them with support and reassurance.
According to him, peak experiences are special moments of
complete happiness, fulfillment and meaning. Transcending the ego
and giving people a sense of unity with all-that-is, they may come about
through love, creativity, art, or being in nature, and are characterized as
times of greatest maturity, individuation, and selflessness, moments of
perfect health and unity (Maslow 1964, 73). They are common to
humanity but differ in degree and interpretation. Although
111
arising of their own accord, they can be invited to occur. The more an
individual accepts peak-experiences positively and acknowledges them
as a meaningful part of life, the more frequently they recur. The higher
the frequency of peak-experiences, the more positively they are felt
and the more the individual’s consciousness moves into what Maslow
calls Being-cognition, the psychological equivalent of the selfless
cosmic consciousness of the mystic, a state of openness and freedom
and a sense of rightness and oneness with the cosmic flow (Maslow
1964, 83).
Daoists in the tradition of inner alchemy, therefore, use the
worldview of intermingling, flowing qi-fields to create an environment
that invites peak experiences of varying strength and intensity, from
the smooth and open qi circulation in the microcosmic orbit through
the sense of spiritual presence in the creation of the immortal embryo
to the ecstatic excursions into the far reaches of the universe. Daoists
learn to be open to the qi reality within and without, they train to flow
along with it, and they attain mystical transcendence both within this
world and within this body.
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The Doctrine of the “Mysterious Female” in Taoism
A Transpersonalist View
Eugene Tortchinov
This essay on the feminine nature of Taoism is by a Russian
professor who has penetrated to a very deep philosophical perception
of the Tao. My own perception, based on alchemical practice, supports
this view.
It is one reason why Taoist teachings are so very important at this
junction in global history. The feminine has been culturally and
economically suppressed throughout the world, but healing this
requires a deeper spiritual understanding and a practical alternative to
the way the major paternalistic religions use their idea of spirit to
oppress or dominate matter/body/sexuality.
Taoist alchemy avoids this imbalance by holding the truth is the
neutral boundary between the yin and the yang. This essay shows how
that Mysterious Pass or neutral point also is described through
essentially feminine images and functions of birthing. It also helps
explain how the Tao embraces the body and sexuality without limiting
itself to or being controlled by sexual/bodily needs. - Michael Winn
The Doctrine of the “Mysterious Female” in Taoism: A
Transpersonalist View
by Evgueni A. Tortchinov, Department of Philosophy
St. Petersburg State University, Russia
The principal purpose of this paper is to suggest the approach of
transpersonal psychology for analysis of some important aspects of the
Taoist doctrine, that is, the concept of the Tao as a female universal
principle and the Taoist attitude “to be like an infant” or even as an
“embryo.”
To understand these Taoist principles, we must begin from the
very beginning-from the central concept of Taoism, that is, Tao (the
Way, the True Way). This concept designates the prime ground of the
World, the source of all life and the limit of every existence, as well as
the rule and measure of beings.
The female, maternal image of Tao is the crucial point to
understanding the psychotechnique (or psychopractical) approach of
Taoism. It is possible to demonstrate its importance by citing some
passages from the Tao Te ching (The Canon of the Way and its Power)
or the”Lao-tzu,” a famous Taoist classic:
1. §6:
The valley spirit never dies-it is called ‘the mysterious female”;
The gate of the mysterious female is called “the root of heaven and
earth.”
Gossamer it is,
seemingly insubstantial, yet never consumed through use.
2. §25:
There was something featureless yet complete, born before
112
heaven and earth;
Silent-amorphous-it stood alone and unchanging.
We may regard it as the mother of heaven and earth.
Not knowing its name,
I style it the “Way.”
3. §28:
Know masculinity,
Maintain femininity,
and be a ravine for all under heaven.
. §61:
A large state is like a low-lying estuary, the female of all under
heaven.
In the congress of all under heaven,
the female always conquers the male through her stillness.
Because she is still,
it is fining for her to lie low.
E. M. Chen (1974), in her article dedicated to the role of the female
principle in Chinese philosophy, notes that some aspects of Lao-tzu’s
concept of Tao makes it possible to propose that the formation of the
teaching about Tao as a philosophical idea was preceded by the cult of
some Mother-Goddess which was connected with the genesis of
Taoism (Chen, 1974, p.53; Kravtsova, 1994, pp.208-213). She notes that
in the description of Tao in the Tao Te ching there are all the meanings
which are essential for the Mother-Goddess cult: Tao is like an empty
vessel (§4); voidness (§5); mysterious darkness (§1); it is nonborn, but,
nevertheless, it is the predecessor of the Heavenly Lord (§4); it is the
Mysterious Female which is the gate of Heaven and Earth (§6); mother
(§1, 20, 25, 52); female (or hen-§10, 28); female (§61); and Mother of all
under heaven (§25, 34). In addition, Tao is often described as water (§8,
78) and as valley (§6, 28, 32, 39, 41). Clearly this valley is the principle of
generation which bears all beings in its depth.
The Tao Te ching speaks much about the pre-existential,
nonmanifested aspect of Tao which is the philosophical opposition to
the manifested phenomenal existence as some potential being (wu). In
this regard, § I is rather interesting. It describes this nonmanifested or
mysterious (occult) aspect of Tao as the womb of the universal embryo,
the womb which generates Heaven and Earth, which is the source of
life. Briefly speaking, it is nothing but the Mysterious Mother of the
world:
The nameless is the origin of the myriad creatures;
The named is the mother of the myriad creatures. Therefore,
Always be without desire
in order to observe its wondrous subtleties; Always have desire
so that you may observe its manifestations...
Mystery of mysteries,
The gate of all wonders!
This passage develops the leading idea of §1 about two aspects or
“hypostases” of Tao: about Tao as “mysterious womb” and
Tao as mother-nurse of all beings. Here we can recall the words of
the famous commentator and thinker, Wang Pi (3 A.D.),
that “Mysterious” (or “Unnamed”) Tao nourishes and bears all
creatures, and phenomenal named Tao feeds them; the
analogous description Wang Pi gives to the character of the
interrelations between Tao and Te.
What about the last sentence of the passage? It can be said that
the character miao (mystery) of the sentence consists of two elements:
“woman” and “little.” We can suppose that its use here is not arbitrary.
It is not too difficult to “ascribe” its etymology (probably it is not a
scientific one) as this:
“something, that is little inside a woman,” that is, embryo hidden
in the womb, like the prototypes of things (see §21) are hidden in the
“womb” of Tao. This opinion may be supported by the fact that the
images of the womb and embryo are often used by Taoists to describe
the “Tao-world” relation. So Tao can be metaphorically defined as the
mother of the world, the source of life and being, and the universal
female archetype. It is quite essential to understand the Taoist doctrine
of immortality as well, because this doctrine considers Tao to be the
life-giving principle which gives eternal life to the adept who has
obtained unity with it. The Tao Te chitig also says (§52):
Having realized the mother,
you thereby know her children.
Knowing her children,
go back to abide with the mother.
To the end of your life,
you will not be imperiled.
Let’s look at the child of the “Mysterious female of all under the
heaven.”
§55 of the Tao Te ching says:
He who embodies the flillness of integrity is like a ruddy infant.
Wasps, spiders, scorpions, and snakes will not sting or bite him;
Rapacious birds and fierce beasts will not seize him.
His bones are weak and his sinews soft, yet his grip is tight.
He knows not the joining of male and female, yet his penis is
aroused.
His essence has reached a peak.
He screams the whole day without becoming hoarse; His harmony
has reached perfection.
Harmony implies constancy;
Constancy requires insight.
Striving to increase one’s life is ominous;
To control the vital breath with one’s mind entails force.
Something that grows old while still in its prime is said to be not in
accord with the Way;
Not being in accord with the Way leads to an early demise.
Here, an infant (a baby; the text uses Ch ‘ih tzu, “red,” or “ruddy”
infant, i.e., a just newborn child) represents the image of the perfect
sage hill of the vital force. An infant in the Tao Te ching is something
like an androgyrie who does not know the parting of male and female,
and who, because of this, is overflowing with vitality. His energetic
essence (ching) does not flow below; it does not change into semen yet,
and so it is perfect. Thus, an infant is like the great Tao itself Tao is a
source of life, and like an infant also can not be tired, because
exhaustion is a result of energetic deficiency. An infant enjoys absolute
security; nature is not dangerous to it because he or she is at the center
of its forces and powers. We should note the following words: Striving
to increase one’s life is ominous; To control vital breath with one’s
mind entails force. Here we can find a direct reference to the relation
existing between ideas of obtaining immortality and religious
psychopractice.
Taoism proclaims that a human being is nothing more than an
inseparable psychosomatic unity. So people can obtain inimortality
only when their body-microcosm becomes a self-sufficient whole--a
self-containing reservoir of the vital energy from one side, and when it
realizes its potential, isomorphism with the world-body of the cosmos
from another side. One of the most important means on the way to
this exalted state is the so-called “regulation of the vital breath” (or
“regulation of the pneumata” - hsing ch ‘i), that is, a complex of
gymnastical and breathing exercises, the aim of which is to obtain
mind control over the flowing of the energy streams in the human body.
The most important principle of such techniques is often repeated
in medieval Taoist writings: “Pneuma (breath, ch’i) is led by will-
consciousness (yi).” This means the presence of some volitional
enforcement which leads the streams of the vital energy along the
channels of the body (analogous to the meridians of acupuncture) in
the desirable direction. The Tao Te ching is just one text which clearly
formulates this idea in ancient times. Instead of the “volitional
impulse” (yi), the Tao Te ching speaks about “mind” or “heart-
consciousness” (Hsin), but it is the same idea.
It was thought for a long time that the concept relating the
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Taoist ideas of immortality and different practices was described only
in medieval tests, but recent archeological discoveries in Ch’angsha
Mawangtui (Hunan province) demonstrate the profound antiquity of
both. Thus, the Mawangtui texts describe numerous respiratory
exercises for the “regulation of the Pneumata” (hsing ch ‘i) and
postures of the Taoist gymnastics (tao yin). Special pictures painted on
silk, which were known under the general title, Tao yin t ‘u (Schemes of
Gymnastics), were even dedicated to such practices. So it may be
concluded that these practices were well-known in China in the days
when the Tao Te ching is now regarded to have been composed (4-3
B.C., rather than the traditionally accepted period of 6-5 B.C.).
The Tao Te ching everywhere prefers the softness and weakness of
the infant to the strong hardness of adults. Strictly speaking, a
newborn child is the concentration or manifestation of the vital energy.
This is quite clearly demonstrated in §76:
Human beings are
soft and supple when alive,
stiff and straight when dead...
Therefore, it is said:
The rigid person is a disciple of death;
The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.
But the theme “infant-sage” cannot be reduced only to the
metaphor of the newborn child. Much deeper and more interesting is
the image of the nonborn child, which also plays an important role in
the teachings of the Tao Te ching. Let us cite a part of §20 of the text:
All the people are glad and joyfull
as if they are celebrating upon the great sacrifice of oxen,
as if they are mounting a tower in spring.
O! I am the only who is quiet and silent,
like a baby who is not yet a child.
O! 1 am fastened and tied
and I have no place to return.
All people behave themselves
as if they have more than enough
and I alone am bereft.
O! I have the mind of a fool!
O! Muddled and mixed!
All people are luminously clear
and I am the only one who is dark and conhised.
All people are exact and definite
and I am the only who is obscured and vague.
O! I am wavering like an ocean.
O! I am flying in space and I have no place to stop in.
All people behave themselves
as if they have a purpose
and I alone am uncouth and simple.
I am quite different from others by honoring the mother-nurse.
This passage is worthy of careful analysis. It appears to me to offer
a key to the understanding of the most essential features>of Taoism.
And the sentence: “O! I am the only who is quiet and silent, like a baby
who is not a child yef’ (in Chinese: wo tu p’o hsi ch ‘i wei chaoju ying
erh chih wei ‘wi) is a key to this passage. So, it is best to begin an
analysis of the passage with this phrase.
What is the meaning of the words “a baby who is not a child yet”
or “a baby who did not become an infant yet”? I think that the text is
speaking about the foetus in the maternal womb. In fact, even those
commentators and translators who think that the hai (infant, child)
here must be changed into its phonetical and practically graphical
omonym (the difference between two characters is only one
classificator “mouth” written before the original grapheme) agree with
this interpretation. The second character hai means baby’s cry or
baby’s smile. But a not-yet-crying baby is a not-yet-born baby.
Therefore, Lao-tzu here compares himself with the nonborn baby.
What does he inform us about this baby? This baby-sage is “fastened
and tied” by his embryonic “clothes” and umbilical cord, which unites
him with the maternal body. This holy foetus has “the mind [or heart-
the thinking and conscious organ according to Chinese tradition] of a
fool,” while at the same time it possesses the highest wisdom. This
wisdom seems like nothing but stupidity to ordinary people proud of
their common sense. This nonborn baby wavers in the ocean of the
womb and “flies” in these maternal waves. The connection with the
motherly body and nourishing and feeding the foetus is depicted quite
clearly also at the end of the passage where “mother-nurse” (shi mu) is
mentioned.
If the baby of §20 is a sage, Lao-tzu himself; who then is the
mother? The information above makes it possible to conclude that this
mother is the great Tao itself; it is the eternal and unspeakable Way
and mysterious ground of every existence; the hidden depth of this Tao
is the womb wherein the baby-sage dwells. This image directly
correlates with Taoist cosmology and cosmogony. It considers Tao to
be something like a cosmic womb which embraces the whole universe.
The universe enjoys absolute unity (chaotic unity - hun yi) with the
maternal body of the Way until its birth, differentiation and divorce
from the Way in the course of cosmogenesis. Nevertheless, even in the
“born world” some unity with Tao is preserved: it is fed by the power of
Tao, which is called Te or Power-Virtue.
For example: “The Way gives birth to them and integrity [i.e., Te]
nurtures them” (§51). Thus, the connection between birth in the course
of the cosmic evolution world and Tao looks quite like the connection
between a mother nourishing her child, and the baby itself But in the
case of humans, there appears a self concept, an independent, self-
containing “I,” as an unchanging subject of actions. This kind of
egoistic self-consciousness harms the original unity, and humans begin
to counteract Tao. The predominant attitude of human actions is no
longer the law and measure of the cosmic rhythm of Tao, but
egocentric preferences, which change spontaneous natural life into
purposeful activities based only on bare subjectivity. Taoism sees
egocentricity as the cause of all human sufferings, pains, frustrations-
from mortality to social collisions.
The only means, not only to become liberated from sufferings but
to obtain the highest happiness, is to restore original unity with Tao, to
broaden consciousness and to put an end to the egocentric attitude,
that is, to return to the state of the nonborn child who does not know
a distinct difference between his or her own body and the maternal
body, who breathes the maternal breath and eats maternal food. This
coming back to the womb of the Mother-Tao is connected with the
broadening of the personality to the cosmic scale, when “eternal
integrity never deserts you, You will return to the state of
infancy” (§28) and “a man is sparing of his body in caring for all under
heaven” (§13). This state of the nonborn child is the state of
immortality, peace, and unity with all beings and with one’s own
nature: The return to the root is called “stillness,” stillness is called
returning to the “fate-vitality,” the return to the fate-vitality is called
“constancy.” One who knows constancy is called “enlightened” (§16).’
Tao explicates itself on all levels of micro- and macrocosm, and
because of this, the Taoist texts distinctively describe an isomorphism
between cosmogonic process, development of the foetus and birth,
and in the reverse sequence, the steps of the Taoist cultivation. So, for
the Taoist, the returning to the womb of the Mother-Tao is not simply
a metaphor, but a kind of expression of some profound essence of the
isomorphous structure of the universe. It is also the reason why
practicing Taoists try to imitate the prenatal states in their self-
cultivation. One example is the famous technique of “embryonic
breathing” (t’ai hsi), first depicted in Ko Hung’s Paop ‘u-tzu (4 A.D.). It
is very still and quiet breathing, minimizing inhalation and exhalation.
This kind of breathing control gives the impression that the
practitioner does not breathe at all, like a foetus in the maternal womb,
obtaining vital energy (ch ‘i) from the blood of the mother.
Prenatal symbolism permeates the whole text of the Tao Te ching.
The comparison of Tao with water and the important role played by
the symbolism of water in this text in general is well known: For
example: “The highest good is like water; Water is good at
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benefiting the myriad creatures but also struggles to occupy the place
loathed by the masses. Therefore, it is near to the Way” (§8). The
reason for the importance of the water symbolism lies not only in that,
archetypically, water has female nature; it can be proposed, following
Lao-tzu, that water is of the same nature as the nature of the waters of
that embryonic ocean in which the baby-sage washes and wavers (§20
of The Canon of the Way and its Power).
In this regard, it is rather important to evaluate the name-
pseudonym of the sage, who according to a tradition more than two
thousand years old, is considered to be the author of the Tao Te ching,
that is, Lao-tzu, Old Sage, and also Old Infant. Let us once again
reflect upon this infant with the grey beard.
Up to the first centuries A.D., the teaching was formed about the
divinized Lao~tzu (Lord Lao or Lao-jun). But the tendencies to
divinization were very old. Thus, in the 21st chapter of the Chuang-tzu,
Lao-tzu says that he was wandering in the origin of things. The
divinized Lao-tzu was associated with Tao and with original chaos-
undifferentiated energetic pneuma (ch ‘i), that is, with the source of
the universe itself. (Detailed research into the process of the
divinization of Lao-tzu may be found in Seidel, 1969.) The texts of the
Han dynasty period (3 B.C.-3 A.D.) describe Lao-tzu as the Body of
Tao. All of the texts use synonyms to express the idea of the body in
this context: hsing (form, pattern), shen (body, person, personification),
and ti (body, substance, incarnation) (Schipper, 1978, pp. 358-361).
But further still, identified with the chaos in its mythological
personification of P’an Ku (cosmic pananthropos, typologically akin to
Purusha of the Rig-Veda and Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah), Lao-tzu
became the creator of the world: “Lao-tzu has changed his body. His
left eye became the sun, his right eye became the moon, his head
changed into the K’unlun mountain, his beard changed into the stars
and heavenly space, his bones became dragons, his flesh-beasts, his
viscera-snakes” (Maspero, 1950, p. 108; Schipper, 1978, p. 361). In his
evolution from the undifferentiated chaos to his cosmic “birth,” Lao
tzu goes through nine stages, reflected in the myth of his “historical”
birth. As K. M. Schipper points out (1978, p.361), this corresponds to
the concept of §21 in the Tao Te ching which describes the
transformations of the universe from the unqualified “blurred and
nebulous” to the Name-Mother of all creatures. The famous
commentary of Hoshang-kung (2 B.C.) says:
In relation to myriad beings, Tao is such: it is wandering hither and
thither and it has no definite place to be grounded there. Tao dwells in
the formless of the “blurred and nebulous,” but it is the only principle
pattern of all beings. Though ‘Lao is nothing but “blurred and
nebulous,” the One exists in it; the One contains in itself all
metamorphoses. Due to the presence of the pneuma-ch’i, it becomes
materialized. Though Tao is only formless darkness of mystery, it has
spermatic energy [ching] and though in its essence its divine numinous
mind [shen ming] is very subtle, it lies in the basis of the yin-yang
interaction. If one can say anything about the nature of the spermatic
pneuma [ching ch ‘ij, it must be declared that its mystery is absolutely
real; it does not need any decorations, Tao hides glory in itself; Tao
contains name in itself-here is sincerity and truth [hsin] in the midst of
it. (Hoshang-kung, in Tao Te ching, 1989, p.55)
It is timely to recall here the myth about the historical and cosmic
birth of Lao-tar. There are very interesting details in the canonical text
San t ‘ian nei ‘chieh ching (Canon of the Esoterical Erplanation of
Three Heavens) written during the Han period. First of all, the text
describes the cosmic birth of Lord Lao as a kind of theophany:
Then in the midst of darkness, Cave of Emptiness was born
[K’ung tung]. In this Cave of Emptiness, Great Absence was born.
Great Absence changed itself into three pneumata: Mysterious,
Original and Principal. Being in chaotic mixture, these pneumata gave
birth to Jade Maid of the profound Mystery [Hsuan miao yu nü]. After
her birth joining pneumata twisted in her body and by their
transformations they bore Lao-tar... When he was born he had grey
hair. So he was called Old infant [i.e., Lao-tar]. This Lao-tzu is Lord
Lao. By his transformation he created from his pneumata Heaven and
Earth, people and things. Thus he has created everything by his
transformations.
This passage clearly tells us that Lao-tar was his own mother.
Another passage tells us about the “historical” birth of Lao-tar:
In the time of King Wu Ting of Yin dynasty, Lao-tar once again
entered the womb of Mother Li . .. When he was born, his hair was
grey again. Therefore he was again called Old Infant... What about his
coming back to the embryonic state in the Mother Li’s womb?; it must
be understood that he himself has changed his subtle various body into
the body of Mother Li, entering thus his own womb. In reality there
was no Mother Li. Unwise people now say that Lao-tar entered
Mother Li’s womb from inside. In reality, it is not so. (Tao tsang, Vol.
876; see also Schipper, 1978, p.365)
K. M. Schipper notes that none of the most ancient myths about
Lao-tar’s birth tell about the father of Lao-tar. Even his family name
(Li) Lao-tar received from his mother (”Li” literally means “plum”).
According to some versions, Lao-tar was born because his mother ate
the kernel of a plum (Schipper, 1978, p.365).
Thus, in Taoist texts, Tao is conceived of as a female maternal
principle personified in the image of the male-female androgyne Lao-
tar (Berthier, 1979; Seidel, 1969, p.64). Moreover, texts stress only his
female aspect, because Tao bears the universe by itself; its “male”
aspect does not participate in this process at all.
In the myths mentioned above, the founder of Taoism is conceived
of as universal panantropos, the All-Man, who enjoys everlasting bliss
in the maternal womb of Tao with which he is connected so perfectly-
like a foetus and its mother constituting one and the same body. It is
quite obvious that myths of this kind (myths of a rather early date, as
we have seen), underline the importance of the theme of perfection as
a prenatal state for Taoism. They also explain in great part why the
authorship of such a basic (though not uniquely basic) text of Taoism
was ascribed to the person called Old Infant. (I refer here to the
traditional view of Lao-tar as the author of the Tao Te ching.) It is also
interesting that the Taoists prefer to interpret the name of Lao-tzu as
Old Infant or Old Baby but not as Old Sage. It seems to me that
understanding the role and meaning of the prenatal symbolism in
Taoism would serve as a general key to the right insight into the whole
system of Taoist thought.
Here it is also possible to suggest a hypothesis about the
relationship existing between prenatal and perinatal themes and their
archetypic images from one side, and different kinds of myths about
miraculous conception, which are known to practically every
civilization, from another side. It can be suggested that the
mythologem of miraculous conception is a manifestation of a
subconscious wish to enjoy the synergetic unity with the mother which
was attainable during the period of prenatal development. This wish is,
in addition, accompanied by the elimination of every (and first of all,
fatherly) mediation of this unity. In any case, Taoist materials
undoubtedly connect the state of immortality and perfection with
returning to the state of the sage-infant (compare the biblical phrase
“If you do not change and become like little children you will never
enter the Kingdom of heaven” [Matt. 18:3], and the idea of the
combination of the wisdom of a snake and the simplicity of a pigeon,
the topic developed and explained by St. Paul). This sage-infant of
Taoism eternally dwells in the universal womb of the Mysterious
Female, Tao as Great Mother of the world, and this womb is
isomorphic, but certainly not identical to, the maternal womb in which
the embryo enjoys happiness before its birth.
Li Erh, Lao-tzu, Eternal Infant of Taoism, the founder of this
teaching and the teacher of the kings, age after age appearing on the
earth in the name of highest wisdom and highest simplicity
(nonpolished wooden block- p’u, and raw silk-su, are quite common
designations of original simplicity as one of the most important values
of Taoism. he/she is that paradigmatic figure to which Taoism appeals
and calls for identification with.
Taoism proclaims that the human body is a microcosm, an
“image and likeness” of the macrocosm, the universe. “A man is
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but small heaven and earth,” is an often mentioned Taoist saying. This
teaching, extremely important for the Taoist tradition, is also well-
known in other religious and philosophical doctrines, in the East as
well as in the West, including Christianity, especially in its Gnostic
variety (the Russian theologist Father Pavel Florensky considers it to
be absolutely orthodox).
The Taoists also evaluate body as the image of the state; the state
according to Chinese philosophical concepts is a part of natural,
universal integrity. This doctrine of the similarity of the body and the
universe is the true foundation of the Taoist practice of “inner
alchemy,” the aim of which is to produce the so-called elixir of
immortality inside the body of an adept from its energies or pneumata
which are a microcosmic analogue of the metals and minerals of the
outer world. It is obvious that the processes of the body were thought
of as analogous to the processes and changes of the outer laboratory,
alchemy, the cauldrons of which represented a specific acting model of
the macrocosm as well.
Strictly speaking, treatises on the inner alchemy (nei tan) tell us
about the creation of a new immortal body of the Taoist which must
be created inside the old “corrupted” body. If the process is successitilly
finished, a new immortal body replaces the old one. being “born” of
the mortal body. For our thesis, it is important that the process of the
creation of the new sacred body from the pneumata of the profane one
is described in the texts in terms of pregnancy, embryonic
development, and birth.
The image of the creation of the new perfect body is rather
widespread in the religious beliefs of quite different peoples of the
world. In Shamanism, for example, it is used in the imitation of death,
which is accompanied by contemplation of flesh decay, which is
followed by rebirth after the creation from the skeleton (substantial
ground of the body) of the new “Shamanic” body. This form of practice
is rather common for shamanistic initiations (e.g., Eliade, 1972, pp.
63-64). Such rituals are also known in some Indian yogic sadhanas,
especially those of Tantric origin: in the course of this practice, the yogi
creates a new indestructible yogic body (yoga deha), corresponding
with the old one as mature and green fruit, or (in terms of”rasayana,”
“vehicle of alchemy”) as vulgar profane metal and mature alchemical
gold (Fliade, 1958, pp. 274-278). The contemplation of a skeleton is also
a common practice in classical Buddhism.
But the semantics of this contemplation in Shamanism or Taoism
are quite different than in Buddhism. In the first case, the skeleton is a
symbol of some basic or original substance, which coming back to
gives new powers to the person and brings him or her to a new level of
existence. The adept returns to it in his or her experience of mystical
death and rebirth, and then obtains new powers and creates from this
substance a new sacred body. The Taoist image of coming back to the
maternal womb as an unborn child in the Tao Te ching and its
ontological connotation, that is, returning to the womb of the
emptiness of Tao and obtaining a new everlasting life, are also of the
same kind. From the depth of darkness of the “chaotic and obscure”
womb of the Mother-Tao (huang hu), the Taoist sage creates the light
of enlightenment (ming) and new life by passing through the
experience of mystical death (reduction to embryonic state in Tao) and
rebirth-resurrection.
But this rebirth does not lead to the separation from Tao: this
Mysterious Female forever remains the mother-nurse of the Taoist
baby-sage. In the case of Buddhism, however, such contemplation is
directed at recognizing that existence is inherently subject to
impermanence, destructibility and mortality, that is, the purpose of
this kind of meditation is an interiorization of the understanding of
the ubiquity of samsara (world of deaths and rebirths) as suffering and
frustration.
For an understanding of the Taoist inner alchemy, two pairs of
interrelated concepts are of predominant importance: natural essence
(hsing) and vitality (ming); precelestial or prenatal (hsian t’ian) and
postcelestial or postnatal (hou t’ian). The Taoist texts explain these
concepts thus: The teaching about alchemical melting is the teaching
of the method of melting of the natural essence and vitality to make
them perfect. The law of the natural essence and vitality has two sides:
the natural essence given by Heaven, which must be nurtured, and the
natural essence of the pneumatic quality, which must be overcome.
The vitality which is confirmed in separation must be pacified; bodily
vitality must be fed. These are the principal two sides of the teaching
of the Way (Tung Te-ning, a Taoist of the 18th century, commentary on
the “Chapters of the Insight into the Truth” of Chang Po-tuan, 11 A.D.).
A famous representative of inner alchemy, Wu Ch’ung-hsti (born in
1574), also tells us that precelestial nature is the pneuma received by the
foetus at the time of conception, and the postcelestial one is the
pneuma or energy received by a foetus due to the breathing of its
mother or (after its birth) through its own inhalations. The first
pneuma is concentrated in the navel, the second one in the nostrils.
The inner alchemy is directed towards the harmonization of the
“natural essence” and “vitality,” the elimination of any collision between
them. When this purpose is realized, an “elixir of immortality” appears
inside the body of an adept which, in turn, changes itself into the so-
called “immortal embryo” (hsian t’ai) growing into the state of the new
immortal body of the alchemist.
Therefore, the body of the Taoist is a female body, maternal body,
and the adept himself or herself appears to be his or her own mother,
like Lao-tar of the cosmological myth, who also was, as we have seen,
the mother of himself/herself. Certainly, “immortal embryo” is a fruit
of the conjugality or hierogamy of two principles, yin and yang, like
everything in the world, but this sacred marriage has its place in the
body of a Taoist who, like all beings, obtains his/her life in the maternal
womb of the Mysterious Female, the great Way (Tao) of the universe.
The body of the Taoist is a female body, too; in this body the
conjunction of the principles takes its place and the fruit of this union
is nothing other than the miraculously transfigured Taoist himself/
herself. Thus the body of the Taoist is an analogy to the mystical body
of Tao which is of paradigmatic value for the Taoist (Schipper, 1978, p.
371).
We can continue to compare “embryological” and
“psychotechnical” aspects of Taoism. The Taoists pay much attention
to the teachings about the states of development of the foetus. Why?
It seems to me that the reason lies in the deep isomorphism between
the steps of embryonical growth, the stages of the process of
cosmogony, and the phases of the formation of the “immortal embryo”
in inner alchemy”: “The foetus obtains his definitive bodily form for
ten lunar months and afterwards the baby is born. Like this, the
numinous foetus also needs ten lunar months to be born. The spirit
obtains its fullness and then goes out” (Wu Ch’ung-hsti, 1965, p.45). In
the teaching of the “inner alchemy,” therefore, two sides of the Taoist
concept of the female take their place: the identity of the body of the
adept with the female body, and the correspondence of the latter with
Tao as an ontological pattern from one side and the teaching about
transubstantiality of the mother-adept and ‘her” child from the other
side.
Nevertheless, Taoists understood ambivalence of the perinatal
patterns. So the maternal womb was seen by them, not only as a source
of life and energy, but as the grave as well-the resulting summary of life,
built on the expenses of the vital force. It resembles the idea in
transpersonal psychology of the ambiguity of the perinatal experience
(Grof; 1993): BPM I (Basic Perinatal Matrix) provides an experience of
the maternal womb as a blissful and secure place, and BPM 2 and BPM
3 places of suffering and disease. One of the most famous Taoists of the
T’ang period, Lu Tung-pin, according to tradition, declared the
following: “The gates, through which I came to life are also the gates of
death” (Schipper, 1969, p.38). This sentence was repeated in the famous
didactic and erotic novel of 16 A.D., Chin, Ping Mei (The Plum
Flowers in the Golden Vase) to warn readers against frivolous spending
of the life energy, but here, in a sexual context. In any case, the
ambivalence of the female principle has never been forgotten in China.
What kind of transpersonal experience is typical for Taoism?
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To answer this question we can use the classification of Grof (1993).
Grof mentions a specific kind of ecstasy he calls “oceanic’ or
“Apollonic” ecstasy.
According to Grof (1993, p.336), oceanic ecstasy (recall the sea
waves in which the unborn baby-sage of the Tao Te ching swims) may
be characterized by bliss, freedom from any stress, loss of any
limitations of “ego,” and the experience of absolute unity with nature,
universal order, and God. This state is concerned with a deep, direct
understanding of reality and cognitive acts of universal meaning. It
must be noted that the ideal of Taoism is a spontaneous and absolutely
natural following of one’s own primordial nature (which is rooted in
the empty Tao itself) and the nature of all other things, the nature of
the universal whole (shun wu, “following things”). This “following the
Way” suggests the absence of mentally constructed, reflective,
purposive activity-a state devoid of any real ontological status ego-
subject of activity (non-doing, wu we:). We must also note that Taoist
texts demonstrate for us a profound and direct vision of reality. Phrases
like “returning to the root, coming back to the source” are very typical
of Taoist texts. These texts also proclaim the epistemological ideal of
Taoism:
“One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know”.
According to Grof; the conditions of oceanic ecstasy correspond
to the experience of symbiotic unity of a baby and its mother during
the period of foetal development and of breast feeding. He writes
(cited in reverse translation from Russian): “As we could expect, in the
state of oceanic ecstasy there is presented the element of water as the
cradle of life . . . The experience of the foetal existence, the
identification with different aquatic forms of life or the consciousness
of the ocean, visions of the starry sky and the feeling of the cosmic
mind are exclusively widespread in this context” (Grof; 1993, p.336).
All these characteristics correspond to the description of the
Taoist experience. It is also interesting to note how late Chinese sects
with a Taoist background use the theme of the unborn. Here, Female
Tao takes the image of Wu sheng lao mu (Unborn Old Mother).
Unfortunately, sinologists have not noticed the paradoxical nature of
the worldview of the sectarians, looking upon themselves as the
children of the unborn mother! The paradox of a mother who is herself
unborn is as astonishing as a Zen Buddhist koan. Even the very word
“unborn” is paradoxical, and we know about the cases of enlightenment
of some Zen monks meditating upon the sense of this word. Indeed,
the unborn mother of the unborn child is but Great Tao itself.
In Grof’s Beyond the Brain (1993, p.380 of Russian edition), in fact,
there is a picture presenting the image of archetypical Lao-tar-the
baby-sage, an infant with grey hair. The picture was made by a
participant in a psychedelic session and is concerned with the
experience of BPM I. In the picture we can see a baby sitting with
crossed legs on a lotus flower. The baby has long grey hair and has an
umbilical cord conjoined with the unseen body of its mother. Grof
says: “Identification with the foetus in the period of the peaceful
prenatal development has, as a rule, divine qualities. The picture
demonstrates obtaining, during a high dose LSD-session, an intuitive
insight into the connection between the enibryonic bliss and the
nature of the Buddha” (Grof, 1993, p.380; reverse translation from
Russian). Here we once again meet with the exceptionally important
question of the correlation between perinatal and transpersonal or
“mystical” experience. The question is: Is it possible to reduce the
mystical experience of transcendence to prenatal or perinatal
experience and to recollections about it? At the present time, we
cannot resolve this question conclusively. Therefore, below I shall
suggest some hypotheses which remain to be verified in the course of
future transpersonal research.
First of all, like Grof I do not equate transpersonal (mystical,
psychopractical) experience with recollections of a perinatal character;
I think it is quite incorrect to reduce experience of the first kind to
experience of the second kind. Secondly, it is well known that perinatal
recollections of the adult are principally different from the amorphous
and rather simple experience of the foetus. The first kind of
experience is much richer, broader, and varied. This type of experience
is connected, as one can suppose, with much deeper levels of the
unconscious representing the archetypical dimension of the mind.
Probably these archetypical patterns and gestalts are something like a
priori forms of the repetitive experience of the perinatal state~as in
Kant’s philosophy, time and space are a priori forms of sensual
intuition which determine our form of vision of the transcendent to
these forms-reality as it is. Briefly speaking, our profound archetypical
levels of the unconscious may be the source of patterns forming the
experience of the perinatal states by adults. And those archetypical
patterns, in turn, are akin to some kinds of mystical vision.
Nevertheless, we can observe a kind of parallelism between the
perinatal and mystical experience. In this parallelism, perinatal gestalt
correlates with the corresponding transpersonal (mystical) state.
Moreover, in some cases, we can speak of the superimposition or
interplay between perinatal and mystical experience. In such cases,
perinatal experience may be a sort of key opening to the mind gates to
mystical experience.
We can only explain this phenomenon hypothetically by a kind of
likeness or analogy existing between some perinatal and mystical
states. For example, there is some analogy between the feeling of peace
and security of the foetal existence of BPM I and the transpersonal
experience of the unjo mystica, or the experience of universal unity.
Therefore, the attainment of the perinatal state serves to eliminate the
barriers of the unconscious, opening its deepest levels which
correspond to this unity, thereby enabling the mind (or self-
consciousness) to penetrate there. In other words, a person who
achieved the experience of symbiotic union with the mother of BPM I
can more simply and easily attain a parallel but higher experience of
the universal unity: the first kind of experience gives way to the
openness of analogical but highest (or deepest) strata and levels.
Probably, the personal or individualistic limitations dividing the
psychical worlds of different individuals are already absent on such
profound levels of subconscious existence. (I do not use the word
“subconscious” here in the psychoanalytical sense; perhaps it would be
better to call it “superconscious.”)
Therefore, we may cautiously suppose the existence of some kind
of isomorphism of basic states of consciousness of different levels,
rooted in the holistic and polistructural (”holonomic” in Grof’s
terminology) nature of reality as such, including its psychical
dimension. But the problems of the ontology of consciousness are too
subtle to discuss briefly. For now, we can only note the distinctive
interplay of perinatal and transpersonal levels of experience in the
Taoist tradition.
Taoist tradition, undoubtedly, is a precious part of the spfritual
heritage of humankind. Many of the basic ideas and images of Taoism
have a profound humanistic sense, deeply rooted in the very structure
of our psychical experience. Do we not see the image of the
Mysterious Female-Mother of all under heaven in Sophia or Eunoia of
the Gnostics, in Shekhina of the Kabbalah, or in Sophia, the soul of
the world, the image of the coming all-unity of the Russian
philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyev?
I have seen everything and everything was only one:
The only image of the female beauty.
Unlimitless entered its measure,
In front of me, inside of me, there is only you.
-Vladimir Solovyev, “Three Meetings”
NOTE
1.1 have used the English translation of the Tao Te ching by Victor
H. Mair (1 990). In cases of disagreement with his interpretation of the
text, I provide my own translation, which is indicated with the
superscript “I.” The concluding translation by Solovyev is also my own.
reprinted from: Everything Is According to the Way: Voices of
Russian Transpersonalism
(Bolda-Lok Publishing and Educational Enterprises, Brisbane,
117
Australia ©1997 )
Edited by T. R. Soidla and S. I. Shapiro
REFERENCES
Berthier, B. (1979). Le miroir brise ou le taoiste et son ombre.
L’Homme, 19, 3-4.
Chang Po-tuan. (1965). Wu chen p ‘ian chen yi [Real meaning of
the “Chapters of the Insight into the Truth”]. Taipei: Taryti ch’upan she.
Chen, E. M. (1974). Tao as the Great Mother and the influence of
motherly love in the shaping of Chinese philosophy. History of
Religions, 14 (1), 51-73.
Chuang-tar. (1986). Erh shi erh tzu [Twenty two philosophers.
Shanghai: Kuchi ch’upan she.
Eliade, M. (1958). Yoga: Immortality and freedom. New York:
Pantheon. (Bollingen Series No.56)
Eliade, M. (1972). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Bollingen Series No.76)
Grof, S. (1993). Za predelami mozga. Rozhdenie, smert i
transcendentsija v psihoterapii [Beyond the brain: Birth, death and
transcendence in psychotherapy]. Moscow: Izdatelstvo
Transpersonalnogo Instituta.
Kravtsova, M. E. (1994). Poezija Drevnego Kitaja: Opyt
kulturologicheskogo analiza. Antologija hudozhestvennyh perevodov
[Poetry of ancient China: An essay of culturological analysis.
Anthology of poetical translations]. St. Petersburg: Centr
“Peterburgskoe Vostokovedenie.”
Mair, V. (Trans.). (1 990). Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of
Integrity and the Way by Lao Tzu. An entirely new translation based
on the recently discovered Ma- Wang- Tui manuscripts. New York:
Bantam Books.
Maspero, H. (1 950). Le taoisme. Paris: Civilisation du Sud.
San t’ ian nei chieh ching. (1925-1926). T’ai shang san t ‘ian nei chieh
ching [Canon of the highest of the esoterical explanation of three
heavens]. Tao tsang [Taoist canon], Vol.876. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu
kuan.
Schipper, K. M. (1969). Science, magic and mystique of the body:
Notes on Taoism and sexuality. In Beurdeley et al. (Eds.), The clouds
and the rain: The art of love in China (pp.3-36). Fribourg and London.
(Russian translation: Kitaisky eros [Chinese eros]. 1993. Moscow:
Kvadrat, pp.102-123)
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(34), 355-398.
Seidel, A. (1969). La divinisation de Lao-tseu dans le taoisme des
Han. Publications de I’ Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient, 71. Paris:
Adrien Maisonneuve.
Tao Te ching. (1989). Lao-tzu. Tao Te ching. Han Hoshang-kung chu
(Laotzu. The Canon of the Way and Its Power. With the commentaries
of Hoshang-kung of the Han dynasty].
Chungkuo ch ‘i kung ta ch ‘eng [Compendium of the Chinese Ch’i-
kung gymnastics]. Ch’angch’un: Chum k’ohsue chishu ch’upan she.
Wu Ch’ung-hsu. (1965). T’ian hsian cheng ii chihiun tsengchu
[”Straight discussions about the true law of the celestial immonals”
with commentaries]. Taipei: Tzuyu ch’upan she.
Daoism and the Origins of Qigong
Livia Kohn
Daoism and the Origins of Qigong
LIVIA KOHN
Qigong or “Qi Exercises” describes a group of practices highly
popular in China and increasingly well known the West. They involve
slow, gentle body movements, breathing exercises, self-massages, and
the mental circulation of qi, with the aim to open the body’s inner
channels, provide a free flow of energy, help in healing, and in general
create a sense of greater well-being and openness of spirit.
Qigong as a modern system of healing goes back to the 1940s. In
1947, the communist party cadre Liu Guizhen (1920-1983), suffering
from a virulent gastric ulcer, was sent home to recover or die. He went
home but refused to die—he was only 27 years old at the time! Instead,
he took lessons in gymnastics and breathing from the Daoist Liu
Duzhou. After 102 days of faithfully undertaking these practices, he
was completely cured. He returned to his job and described his healing
success to the party, which appointed him as a medical research leader
in Hebei province with the task to study the effects of breathing on
healing. In 1948, he created the term Qigong to indicate the methods
which focused largely on breathing at the time. He then began to teach
party officials and repeated his success with various ailments (see Chen
2003).
As this beginning of the practice documents, contemporary
Qigong tends to focus on medical goals and the improvement of life
quality with the help of methods transmitted by Daoists. It is
practiced both in the medical community and actively pursued among
Daoist followers and successfully combines techniques that go back to
both medical and Daoist sources. The most obvious and direct
forerunner of Qigong is Chinese gymnastics, known as daoyin, which
literally means “guide [the qi] and stretch [the body].” Using the same
four basic methods as Qigong today, daoyin teaches practitioners to
move the limbs and torso in a particular way while exercising deep
breathing and mentally circulating the qi within. Through this, the
body’s qi-flow is regulated and pathogenic elements are expelled.
Gradually the body not only becomes supple and flexible but health
improves and longevity is attained. Gymnastics for many centuries
have been described as a valuable tool to prevent old age and cure
diseases. They nourish the qi, refresh the body after hard work, help
fasting and other spiritual practices, and open the body for a long and
joyful life. How, then, did daoyin relate to Daoism in the course of
Chinese history? To begin, let us look at the early documentation and
role of the daoyin tradition.
THE DAOYIN TRADITION
The earliest documents on daoyin are found in medical literature
on healing and health maintenance. Following the dictum of the
Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic that the best physician is one who
prevents diseases and never even has to treat a patient, gymnastic and
breathing exercises formed a part of traditional Chinese medicine that
specialized in preventative practice and was known as yangsheng or
nourishing life. Practices used are commonly called longevity
techniques and include diets, breathing exercises, gymnastics,
massages, sexual practices, the absorption of solar and lunar energies,
as well as various forms of meditation. Used both for healing and
enhancing health, these methods ensured not only the realization of
the natural life expectancy but were found to often result in increased
old age and vigor.
Our earliest sources on these methods, and thus also on
gymnastics and breathing, are a set of manuscripts unearthed at
Mawangdui and Zhangjia shan in southern China. Written on silk,
bamboo and strips of wood, they date from the second century B.C.E.
and present practical advice on how to nourish life with the help of
gymnastics, breathing, dietetics, and drugs. Works include: Conjoining
Yin and Yang (He yinyang), Discussion of the Perfect Way in All Under
Heaven (Tianxia zhidao tan), and Recipes for Nourishing Life
(Yangsheng fang).
A text called The Rejection of Grains and Absorption of Qi
(Quegu shiqi), furthermore deals with techniques of eliminating grains
and ordinary foodstuffs from the diet and replacing them with
medicinal herbs and qi through special breathing excercises. The text
repeatedly contrasts “those who eat qi” with “those who eat grain” and
explains this in cosmological terms, saying: “Those who eat grain eat
what is square; those who eat qi eat what is round. Round is heaven;
square is earth (Harper 1998, 130). The most famous and relevant to
our topic among the Mawangdui manuscripts is the Gymnastics Chart
(Daoyin tu). It contains color illustrations of human figures performing
therapeutic gymnastics. Some of the recognizable captions refer to the
names of exercises already mentioned in the Zhuangzi, such as “bear-
hanging” and “bird-stretching.” The text, although fragmentary, shows
the importance of gymnastic exercises, used in conjunction with self-
massages to dissolve blockages, help circulation, and increase the
harmony of qi in the body. It also documents the early use of animal
models for physical exercises, a practice that has been linked with
ancient shamanic dances (Despeux 1989, 237-38).
Another manuscript on gymnastics is the Book on Stretching
(Yinshu), found among several medical texts in Zhangjia shan, Hubei,
about 150 miles km north of Mawangdui, Dated to 186 B.C.E., it
begins with the description of a daily and seasonal health regimen,
including hygiene, dietetics, regulation of sleep and movement, as
well as adequate times for sexual intercourse. After that, the text
118
details fifty-seven gymnastic exercises, including massages. Some
exercises are preventative, others more curative. The third and last
part of the Book on Stretching deals with etiology and the prevention
of diseases. The most important factors that cause diseases, according
to this work, are climatic excesses such as the heat of summer,
moisture, wind, cold, rain, and dew. An unstable diet, excessive
emotions and a lifestyle inappropriate to the season are also named as
possible causes of an imbalance of qi. The text recommends various
therapies, such as breathing exercises, bodily stretches and the careful
treatment of the interior qi. It says: “If you can pattern your qi
properly and maintain your yin energy in fullness, then the whole
person will benefit” (Wenwu 1990, 86).
It is interesting to note that the text makes a distinction between
“upper class people,” who fall ill because of uncontrolled emotions such
as rage and excessive joy, and lower ones whose conditions tend to be
caused by excessive labor, hunger and thirst. It further notes that the
latter have no opportunity to learn the necessary breathing exercises
and therefore contract numerous diseases and die an early death.
Obviously longevity techniques were very much the domain of the
aristocracy and upper classes who could affort quality medical care and
the instruction by specialists of prevention (Engelhardt 2000).
Following these manuscripts, records on gymastics include
mention in dynastic histories, such as the biography of Hua Tuo, staff
physician of Cao Cao under the Three Kingdoms in the third century.
According to his official biography, he created an integrated system of
gymnastic exercises known as the Five Animals’ Frolic. The text says:
The body needs a certain amount of movement. This movement
serves to properly balance right and left, it helps to redistribute and
assimilate the various breaths that are issued from the cereals, more
than that it causes the blood to circulate properly and prevents the
origination of diseases.
The human body is like a door hinge that never comes to rest. This
is why Daoists practice gymnastics. They imitate the movements of
the bear which hangs itself head-down from a tree, of the owl which
keeps turning its head in different ways. They stretch and bend the
waist, and move all the joints and muscles of their bodies in order to
evade aging.
I myself have developed a series of exercises which I name the Five
Animals’ Frolic. The five animals are the tiger, the deer, the bear, the
monkey, and the bird. The practice of the Frolic aids the elimination of
diseases and increases the functioning of the lesser members.
Whenever a disorder is felt in the body one of the Animals should be
practiced until one perspires freely. When perspiration is very strong,
one should cover the affected parts of the body with dust. In due
course one will find the body lighter, more comfortable and a healthy
appetite will return. (Sanguo zhi 29.2a; Despeux 1989, 242)
Futher codification and development of gymnastic exercises
occurred in various medieval medical sources, such as the
Compendium of Essentials on Nourishing Life (Yangsheng yaoji). It
summarizes early sources and describes longevity practice in ten
sections: 1. Strengthening the vital spirits; 2. Caring for the breath; 3.
Maintaining the body; 4. Practicing gymnastics; 5. Speaking properly;
6. Eating right; 7. Sexual moderation; 8. Right relations to the common
world; 9. Taking medicinal drugs; and 10. Observing protective
prohibitions (Stein 1999, 103).
The most important medical source on gymnastics in the middle
ages is the Origins and Symptoms of Medical Disorders (Zhubing
yuanhou lun), compiled under the supervision of the physician Chao
Yuanfang and presented to Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty in 610.
The text presents for the first time a systematic treatise on the
etiology and pathology of Chinese medicine, distinguishing four major
categories of diseases: inner, outer, women’s and children’s. Each of
these four main parts is then subdivided into sections that outline the
origin of the disorder in question, its process of development and its
major clinical symptoms. After this, the text does not prescribe
phytotherapeutic or acupuncture prescriptions but rather specific
exercises of gymnastics, massages, breathing or visualization. This new
classification of the practices of nourishing life in accordance with a
systematic etiology and pathology represents a big step forward in the
development of these techniques (Despeux 1989; Despeux and
Obringer 1997).
 Further texts of the Tang dynasty continue this tendency, clearly
identifying gymnastics as part of the medical tradition and linking
them with specific diseases. For example Master Ning, one of the
classic gymnastics masters, is cited in the sixth-century Gymnastics
Scripture (Daoyin jing) as saying:
We practice gymnastics because they make all the pathogenic
energy evaporate from our limbs, bones, and joints. Thus only good
energy prevails and can become more pure and essential.
Practice the exercises diligently and with care whenever you have
time between work and conversation. Either in the morning or at
night is fine. Gradually your bones and joints will become firm and
strong. The hundred diseases will be eliminated completely.
Whether you have caught a chill [wind-attack disorder] in your
chest or are thoroughly fatigued and cannot rouse yourself;
—whether you have periods of deafness when you cannot hear or
find your eyes going dizzy and your mind turning mad on you;
—whether you have energy moving against its proper current and
rising up violently or experience severe pains in your hips:
—in all cases you can actively expel the disease by practicing these
exercises and guiding the energy to the place of trouble, following the
proper charts and focusing it on the right spot.
By guiding the energy you will supplement the energy of your
spleen and stomach systems; by practicing gymnastics you will heal
your four limbs. (2ab; Kohn 1993, 144-45)
How, then, did Daoists approach this medical tradition of
gymnastics?
THE DAOIST PERSPECTIVE
From the earliest sources and throughout the middle ages, Daoists
acknowledged the presence of preventative medicine and the methods
of nourishing life as a valuable tool but considered it secondary. Even
the very earliest mention of gymnastic exercises in the Zhuangzi of the
third century B.C.E., has a rather denigrating feeling to it. It says:
To pant, to puff, to hail, to sip, to spit out the old breath and draw
in the new, practicing bear-hangings and bird-stretchings, longevity his
only concern—such is the life favored by the scholar who practices
gymnastics, the man who nourishes his body, who hopes to live to be as
old as Pengzu, for more than eight hundred years. (ch. 15; Watson 1968,
167-168)
The contrast made in the Zhuangzi is between the liberated
master who has a direct connection to the Dao and lives freely in its
flow and the technical practictioner who needs to study hard and work
systematically at his attainments. A story in chapter 7 illustrates the
contrast. Here, a Daoist master named Huzi or Gourd Master gives in
to the urgings of his disciple Liezi and lets himself be analyzed by a
fortunetelling shaman. The shaman comes repeatedly, seeing a
different personality or mind image each time. After coming for the
third time, he exclaims in exasperation: “Your master is never the
same! I have no way to analyze him! If he tries to steady himself, I will
come back and examine him again.” The master, in contrast, is unfazed
and explains: “Just now I appeared to him as the great vastness where
nothing wins out. He probably saw in me the workings of the balanced
energies. Where the swirling waves gather there is an abyss; where the
still waters gather there is an abyss; where the running waters gather
there is an abyss. The abyss has nine names and I have shown him
three. Try bringing him again.”
The next day, the shaman again joined Liezi to see the Gourd
Master, but before he even came to halt before the master, his wits left
him and he fled—confronted by a vision of the pure Dao at the origins
of creation or, as the text says, “that which has not yet emerged from
the source—totally empty, wriggling and turning, not knowing
anything about who or what, now dipping and bending, now flowing in
waves.” (Watson 1968, 94-97).
The same distinction between a level of existence that is
completely at one with the Dao and a more technical approach to
cosmic harmony is also made in the Book of the Master Who
Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi), an alchemical classic of the fourth
century C.E.. It notes that those who nourish life with herbal
remedies, diets, breathing, and gymnastics may deem themselves
advanced practitioners of the Dao, but will never reach the higher
levels, for which an alchemical elixir has to be prepared and active
communication with the gods be established. First, the text
clearly acknowledges the medical and long life benefits of the
119
practices. It says:
The ability to writhe like a dragon, stretch like a tiger, waddle like a
bear, swallow like a tortoise, fly like a swallow, twist like a snake, dilate
like a bird, look heavenward and earthward—all these will prevent the
orange colored wax from leaving the Cavern Chamber in the head.
Then when you have climbed like a monkey and jumped like a hare
1,200 times, your hearing will not deteriorate. The deaf may steam
their ears with lizard. Or they may form a packed of jujubes, sheep-
turd cinnamon, and plumed sparrow cinnamon, and seal their earms
with it. All these procedures produce cures. (15.9b; Ware 1966, 257)
But then it notes that while these methods may help health, they
will not reach to the higher spheres, and that the truly marvelous
alchemical recipes can reach much further, granting practitioners
states of unlimited immortality and oneness with the Dao. The text
has:
Man’s death ensues from losses, old age, illnesses, poisons,
miasmas, and chills. Today people do gymnastics and breathing
exercises, revert their sperm to nourish the brain, follow dietary rules,
regulate their activity and rest, take medicines, give thought to their
inner gods to maintain their integrity, undergo prohibitions, wear
amulets and seals from their belts, and keep at a distance all those who
might harm their lives. In this way they may avoid the six baneful
things just listed that can cause death.
Physicians today have pills that activate and brighten the kidneys,
powders that benefit the circulation, roasted boxhorn from
strengthening bone structure, and infusions of yellow hedysarum as a
general tonic. . . .Writings also assert that a certain Wu Pu received
from Hua Tuo the Five Animals’ Frolic as a basic form of gymnastics
and managed to live to over a hundred. If such are the effects of the
humblest of medicines, just think what can be done by those that are
truly marvelous! (Baopuzi 5.4a; Ware 1966, 103)
This position is radicalized further in organized Daoism, where the
relationship to the Dao in the form of various heavens and deities
superseded all other concerns and health was the direct result of a pure
and pious life. Communal Daoists of the Celestial Masters, founded in
the second century C.E., thus prohibited medical and health
treatments in favor of religious cultivation. For them, the world was
populated by gods and demons—the latter appearing everywhere and
in every shape, from the lowly rabbit and the dirty rat to all sorts of
natural and supernatural creatures. A list of such demons has been
excavated from a Han tomb, and several others are found in the
earliest surviving texts of the Celestial Masters. To combat them,
members had to fortify their houses and bodies with talismans, learn to
recognize the demons and call them by their proper names, and
visualize themselves as demon-conquering heroes
If, despite such measures, someone was attacked by a demon, they
would suffer sickness and disease. Moreover, such an attack could
occur only because the person had been careless and had a moral
failing. As a result, all healing of the Celestial Masters was undertaken
through confession, ritual, and magic.. First the sick person was
isolated in a so-called quiet chamber, an adaptation of a Han
institution for punishing wayward officials involving solitary
confinement. There they had to think of their sins going all the way
back to their birth to try and find a explanation for the illness.
Once certain sins had been identified, a senior master would come
to write them down—in triplicate and together with a formal petition
for their eradication from the person’s divine record. The three copies
would then, in a formal ceremony, be transmitted to Heaven (by
burning), Earth (by burying), and Water (by casting into a river), whose
officials supposedly set the record straight and restored the person’s
good health. Longevity techniques, such as gymnastics and
meditations, were permitted only in the larger context of the
supernatural universe and seen mainly as supplementary measures of
purification (Kohn 2001).
The same also holds true for the major medieval schools of
Highest Clarity and Numinous Treasure, although their followers were
lay based and thus not prohibited from availing themselves of medical
treatments. Still, their universe was dominantly characterized by their
relation to otherworldly entities with cultivation practices that
involved visualizations of gods, opening of divine palaces within the
body, ecstatic excursions to the stars, and highly complex ceremonies
of communication, purification, confession, and the exoneration of
ancestors.
Methods akin to gymnastics and breathing were used mainly as
purification measures in the preparation of rituals. Thus the
Introductory Explanation to the Daode jing (Daode zhenjing xujue), a
fifth-century texts on devotional observances to Lord Lao discovered
among manuscripts found at Dunhuang, instructs followers who wish
to recite the Daode jing to begin by burning incense and straightening
their robes, then bowing to the ten directions. After this, while
concentrating their mind and visualizing Laozi together with his main
disciples, they should open the sacrd text and recite an incantation of
invitation and praise to the deity that also places the practitioner into a
cosmic context
In my room, the seven jewels come together,
Doors and windows open of themselves.
Utter in my purity, I strive for deeper truth,
Riding on bright light, I ascend the purple sky.
Sun and moon shine to my right and left,
I go to the immortals and find eternal life.
Following this, adepts are to click their teeth and swallow the saliva
thirty-six times, applying long life methods. Then, however, they again
move into the more religious spheres and are to see themselves
surrounded by the celestial constellations of the four directions: the
green dragon to the left, the white tiger to the right, the red bird in
front, and the dark warrior behind. Only when placed in such a cosmic
environment can they recite the sacred book.
It is thus evident so far, that medical gymnastics as the forerunners
of Qigong were acknowledged by medieval Daoists but considered
potential hindrances or, at best, preparatory and secondary measures
to their main concern of attaining immortality and oneness with the
Dao.
IMMORTALITY
Looking further into the early tradition, however, it becomes
evident that methods akin to gymnastics, breathing, diets, and sexual
control were also used by immortals—not as medical methods to
restore and enhance health, though, but as ways of transforming the qi-
constellation of the human body/mind and thereby attain a level
beyond natural life known as immortality. A state of having gone
beyond the limitations of this world and ascended to a higher sphere,
this is a form of transcendence to a divine realm that is closely
connected with the origins of the universe.
To attain this state, practitioners live in separation from society,
engage in techniques of physical and spiritual control, have their mind
set on interaction with the spirit world, and in the process of their
training acquire magical powers. They live in the wilderness, dress in
garments of leaves or deer skins, fast by living on pure qi or eat raw
food they find in the woods (Eskildsen 1998, 20-21). They are
symbolically associated with birds in the lightness of their bodies and
their ability to fly (Kaltenmark 1953, 10). Being so close to nature,
moreover, immortals attain extended longevity and continuous vigor
and eventually reach the paradises, luscious mountains surrounded by
extensive bodies of water, the most prominent of which are known as
Penglai and Kunlun (see S_fukawa 1981).
Not many sources remain that describe immortals and their
practices. The first appear in the Han dynasty and are typically written
by aristocrats and court writers—such as Sima Qian’s Record of the
Historian (Shiji) and the Immortals’ Biographies (Liexian zhuan),
attributed to Liu Xiang (77-6 B.C.E.). Additional information on
immortals is found in later dynastic histories (see Ngo 1976; DeWoskin
1983) and hagiographies, such as Ge Hong’s Biographies of Spirit
Immortals (Shenxian zhuan) and his work of The Master Who
Embraces Simplicity, both of the fourth century.
The key characteristic of immortals is the transformation that
happens in and to the body of the practitioner. Refining their inner qi
to higher levels of subtlety, immortals become etheric beings, feathery,
sometimes hairy, with no need to eat or drink and completely
invulnerable to heat and cold, fire and water. Light as ether, they can
appear and vanish in an instant, and despite highly advanced years
typically look young, fresh, and radiant.
The main techniques leading to this wondrous state involve
the refinement of qi, which is taken into the body as breath,
120
food, or sexual energy. Immortals accordingly practice control in these
areas, using breathing exercises and gymnastics, dietetics and sexual
practices in their own unquie way. Harnessing the breath through
methods of “expelling the old and inhaling the new,” they control
breathing and reach high longevity, so that even at an age of several
hundred years they still look as if they were only seventeen: a face clear
like peach blossoms, a mouth of cinnabar redness, vibrant and smooth
skin, and glossy black hair and eyebrows. However, even here
breathing is only the preliminary stage, and immortals need to
complete the elixir of immortality to fully ascend to heaven (Campany
2002, 357).
Food intake is another major way of achieving bodily
transformation. Most commonly this means the ingestion of only
natural substances, such as roots, nuts, berries, or pine needles. An
early example for this is Chang Rong, who lived in the mountains and
ate only ash raspberry roots, thereby maintaining the complexion of a
twenty-year old for several centuries before finally being transported to
the divine realm (Liexian zhuan 2.5b; Kaltenmark 1953, 152-53).
More famous than she is Yu Jiang, better known as Maonü, the
Hairy Woman. A palace woman under the First Emperor of Qin, she
saw the collapse of the dynasty approach and took refuge on Mount
Hua. There she met the immortal Gu Chun, who taught her how to
eat pine needles and survive in the wilderness—thus gaining the ability
to live without solid food, become immune to cold and heat, and move
as swiftly as if she were flying. After living at ease on the earth for
several hundred years, she ascended to the paradises of the immortals
(Liexian zhuan 2.7b-8a; Kaltenmark 1953, 159-60). Still a highly
venerated and respected immortal, she is depicted in a leafy gown and
with hairy legs and still venerated today on various Daoist mountains
(Porter 1993, 69).
Another well-known immortal who used dietary techniques is
Master Whitestone (Baishi xiansheng). He would have liked to concoct
an alchemical elixir, but his family was poor and he could not afford to
do so. Instead, he made it his habit to boil white stones and use them
for food, the reason why he came to be called Master Whitestone, in
combinatin with bits of dried meat. For the most part, however, he
would abstain from all grains and solid foods and thus reach an age of
centuries. His account in the Biographies of Spirit Immortals says:
He was able to walk as far as three or four hundred miles in one
day. Though
hundreds of years old, he still looked like he was about thirty.
When someone
asked him why he did not wish to ascend to heaven, he replied:
“I’m not at all
sure I should enjoy myself as much in heaven as I do in this world
right here!”
(1.17b)
A third major way of controlling qi as it enters and leaves the body
is through sexual hygiene. In many cases this means the practice of
celibacy for the preservation of sexual energy and its circulation and
refinement within the body (Eskildsen 1998, 38-40), but it can also
involve work with partners. Men might have relations with numerous
women in order to obtain their qi so they could augment their own
stock by guiding the precious substance through the body for greater
energetic refinement, but some women are also reported to have used
sexual methods for their attainment of long life and transcendence (see
Wile 1992).
In all these cases, longevity techniques are used by religious
practitioners for the attainment of higher stages: first a level of
complete health, then a transcendence of health in an extended
longevity, often over several centuries, and finally a transformation of
the body’s qi to a more spiritual level of oneness with the Dao. Unlike
the organized religious Daoists of later centuries, the early immortals
acknowledged and actively used the continuity of qi to guide them
from healing through longevity to immortality. What, then, is the logic
behind this perspective and how can it be part of an integrated Daoist
teaching?
LEVELS OF PRACTICE
The three levels of healing, longevity, and immortality can be seen
as three different dimensions of practice within the same greater
universe of the Dao. The Dao can be described as “organic order”—
organic in the sense that it is not willful and order in that it is clearly
manifested in the rhythmic changes and patterned processes of the
natural world. Not a conscious, active creator or personal entity, but an
organic process that just moves along, the Dao is mysterious in its
depth and unfathomable in its essence. But beyond this, as order the
Dao is also predictable in its developments and can be discerned and
described in ordered patterns. These patterns are what the Chinese
call “self-so” or “nature” (ziran), the spontaneous and observable way
things are naturally. Yet while Dao is very much nature, it is also more
than nature. It is also the essence of nature, the inner quality that
makes things what they are. It is governed by laws of nature, yet it is
also these laws itself.
In other words, it is possible to explain the nature of the Dao in
terms of a twofold structure. The “Dao that can be told” and the
“eternal Dao.” One is the mysterious, ineffable Dao at the center of the
cosmos; the other the Dao at the periphery, visible and tangible in the
natural cycles. About the eternal Dao, the Book of the Dao and Its
Virtue says:
Look at it and do not see it: we call it invisible.
Listen to it and do not hear it: we call it inaudible.
Touch it and do not feel it: we call it subtle. . . .
Infinite and boundless, it cannot be named;
It belongs to where there are no beings.
It may be called the shape of no-shape,
It may be called the form of no-form.
Call it vague and obscure.
Meet it, yet you cannot see its head,
Follow it, yet you cannot see its back. (ch. 14)
This Dao, although the ground and inherent power of the human
being, is entirely beyond ordinary perception. It is so vague and
obscure, so subtle and so potent, that it is beyond all knowing and
analysis; we cannot grasp it however hard we try. The human body,
senses, and intellect are simply not equipped to deal with this Dao.
The only way a person can ever get in touch with it is by forgetting and
transcending ordinary human faculties, by becoming subtler and finer
and more potent, more like the Dao itself.
The Dao at the periphery, on the other hand, is characterized as
the give and take of various pairs of complementary opposites, as the
natural ebb and flow of things as they rise and fall, come and go, grow
and decline, emerge and die. The Book of the Dao and Its Virtue says:
To contract, there must first be expansion.
To weaken, there must first be strengthening.
To destroy, there must first be promotion.
To grasp, there must first be giving.
This is called the subtle pattern. (ch. 36)
Things develop in alternating movements as long as they live. It is
the nature of life to be in constant motion. It is the nature of things to
always move in one direction or the other, up or down, toward
lightness or heaviness, brightness or darkness. Nature is a continuous
flow of becoming, whether latent or manifest, described as the
alternation of complementary characteristics and directions that
cannot exist without each other. This becoming can be rhythmic and
circular or it can move back toward the source of life in the ineffable
Dao, which at the same time is a forward movement toward a new
level of cosmic oneness
In this larger cosmic vision, healing and longevity involve either the
recovery or the the maintanance of harmony with the visible and
tangible patterns of the Dao, while spiritual attainments of
enlightenment and immortality mean the overcoming of the natural
cycles and the ultimate return to the Dao at the center of creation, the
uncreated void at the base of all. The practice of Qigong and
gymnastics can serve all three, supplementing, enhancing, or
transforming the qi that makes up both the body and the universe.
Seen in terms of the body’s qi, the three levels of practice involve
different scenarios and trajectories of qi management. As is well
known, the body consists of two forms of qi: a basic primordial or
prenatal qi that connects it to the cosmos and the Dao; and a
secondary, earthly or postnatal qi that is replenished by breat, food,
and interaction with objects and people and helps the body survive in
everyday life. Both forms of qi are necessary and interact
constantly with each other, so that primordial qi is lost as and
121
when earthly qi is insufficient, and earthly qi becomes superfluous as
and when primordial qi is complete (as in the case of the embryo in the
womb). People, once born, start this interchange of the two
dimensions of qi and soon begin to lose their primordial qi, especially
through interaction with the world on the basis of passions and
desires, sensory exchanges, and intellectual distinctions—the very
same features considered most harmful for cosmic interaction in the
classical texts.
When people have lost a certain amount of primordial qi, they get
sick and eventually die. Healing, then, is the replenishing of qi with
medical means such as drugs, herbs, acupuncture, rest, gymnastics, and
so on. Longevity or health enhancement, next, comes in as and when
people have become aware of their situation and decide to improve
their quality and enjoyment of life. Attaining a basic state of good
health, they proceed to increase their primordial qi to and even above
the level they had at birth. To do so, they apply various longevity
techniques, including diets, breathing exercises, gymnastics, massages,
sexual practices, and meditations. These ensure not only the
realization of the natural life expectancy but may even result in
increased old age and vigor.
Immortality, third, raises the practices to a yet higher level. To
attain it, people transform all their qi into primordial qi and proceed to
increasingly refine it to ever subtler levels. This finer qi will eventually
turn into pure spirit, with which practitioners increasingly identify to
become spirit-people and transcendents. The practice that leads there
involves intensive meditation and trance training as well as more
radical forms of diet and other longevity practices. Unlike healing and
longevity, where the natural tendencies of the body are supported and
enhanced, immortality demands the complete overcoming of these
natural tendencies and the body’s transformation into a different kind
of energy constellation. The result is a bypassing of death, the
attainment of magical powers, and residence in cosmic realma, such
the immortals’ paradises.
DIFFERENCE IN APPLICATION
Daoyin exercises as much as the other longevity techniques,
therefore, can be used equally for medical, health enhancing, and
spiritual purposes. When done for therapy, the specific direction
toward which they are aimed does not seem to matter. When used to
enhance overall health, there are some instructions on geographical
orientation and astronomical constellations, with the east being the
most common, as it corresponds to spring and rising qi. Done as a
preparation for higher spiritual attainments, the exercises are often
conbined with formal purifications and with rituals to the gods.
However, their basic patterns remain the same on all three levels, so
that similar sequences of gymnastic exercises are used in all cases.
Still, the exercises are not entirely the same. Certain practices that
are useful in healing may be superfluous in the attainment of longevity,
while some applicable for immortality may even be harmful when
healing is the main focus. Take breathing as an example. When healing
or extending life, natural deep breathing is emphasized, with the
diaphragm expanding on the inhalation. When moving on to
immortality, however, reverted breathing is advised, which means that
the diaphragm contracts on the in-breath.
Undertaking this kind of reverted breathing too early or at the
wrong stage in one’s practice can cause complications, from diiness to
disorientation or worse.
Again, the point is made clear in the case of sexual practices. In
healing, sexual activity with a partner is encouraged in moderation and
measured ways, with both partners reaching regular orgasms. In
longevity practice, sexual activity may still be undertaken with a
partner, but ejaculation and other loss of essence and qi is avoided and
the sexual stimulation is used to raise the awareness of the positive
flow of qi in the body, which is the redirected to relieve stress and
increase vitality. Through the practice, as Mantak Chia and Michael
Winn state, people “become more aware that all living things are
one” (1984, 171).
In immortality, finally, sexual practices are undertaken entirely
within one’s own body and without a partner. They serve the creation
of an immortal embryo through the refinement of the sexual energy
jing first into qi, then into cosmic spirit shen. Ni Hua-ching
emphasizes accordingly that in advanced attainment sexual energy
should not be used to have fun or beget children, but must be
sublimated into spiritual energy, which will then give birth to the
spiritual embryo and help people to attain the immortal state (1992,
110).He says:
It is hard for people to establish the correct goal of life. Typically
people are
looking for emotional happiness in the form of lots of pleasure,
fun, stimulation
or excitement. For spiritual people, it is necessary to avoid
pleasure, excitement,
stimulation and fun. Actually, those four things have a healthy and
unhealthy
level. In other words, some fun is all right, because it does not
harm your life
being. However, even on a healthy level, if fun is overextended, it
can become
negative and damage your energy being. (Ni 1992, 111)]
Immortality is thus the creation of an inner spirit being and means
the avoidance of ordinary joys and excitements. Practices associated
with it are not only unsuitable (and probably impossible) for people on
the levels of healing and longevity, but may even be harmful if
attempted improperly.
The same point, that practices of a similar nature vary significantly
among the three levels, can equally be made for diets and fasting. Thus
diets on the medical and health levels involve abstention from heavy
foods such as meat and fat, as well as from strong substances such as
alcohol, garlic, and onions. Instead, practitioners are encouraged to eat
lightly and in small portions. As their qi increases, they will need ever
less food, until—in immortality practice—all main staples can be cut
out and food is replaced by the conscious intake of qi through breath
in a technique known as bigu or “avoiding grain.”
In all cases, longevity practices and thus Qigong and gymnastics
serve to guide people from a wasteful and neglecting attitude toward
their bodies and minds toward a more wholesome, healing, and caring
way of dealing with themselves. Allowing the conscious bodily
experience of the cooperation among all body and mind energies, the
practice increases the mental awareness of oneself as part of the Dao,
manifested as a flow of energy that rises and ebbs, comes and goes,
moves and halts. As one reaches a state of mental quietude and greater
stability in one’s heath, the practice leads on towards a more
encompassing understanding of self and world, which also includes a
sense of wonder, of gratitude towards the natural world and the greater
universe. The tense, ego-bound self loosens and a sense of open qi-flow
takes its place. Healing moves on to longevity, and as cosmic awareness
increases, even to immortality.
Historically, organized Daoists changed their attitude toward the
application of longevity techniques after unification around the
seventh century. Around the very same time when the medical
tradition began to systematize and organize long life methods in their
classics, Daoists integrated the practices of the immortals of old more
actively and acknowledged their value. Looking at the Daoist origins of
Qigong, there is, therefore, both a distinction and a continuity among
the organized religion with its foremost focus on divinity and
otherworldly powers and the tradition of life-enhancing practices that
can be used on all different levels. It is thus not surprising that long life
methods should be transmitted among Daoist texts and that Qigong
to the present day serves as a key part of Daoist practice.
DAOIST TECHNIQUES
So far, we have looked at daoyin as the key forerunner of Qigong—
a practice that uses to a large extent the same techniques and shares
the same worldview, that similarly reaches from health enhancement to
spiritual dimensions. However, daoyin alone is not Qigong, and there
are a number of practices commonly undertaken today that have a
different origin, that in fact go back to more religious Daoist practices.
In the last section of this presentation, I would like to point out a few
of those, focusing mainly on the transformation of the body into a
cosmic energy system, the visualization of animal nature and cosmic
flow, and the impact of inner alchemy.
One of these practices is the cosmicization of the body through
the ingestion of the so-called five sprouts, also known as the “method
of mist absorption,” which involves partaking of the pure energies of
the five directions. Part of medieval Daoist cultivation and
described especially in the texts of Highest Clarity (Robinet
122
1989, 165-66), the practice begins with swallowing the saliva while
chanting invocations to the original qi of the four cardinal directions.
Then adepts face the direction in question, usually beginning with the
east, and in their minds visualize the qi of that direction in its
appropriate color. A general mist in the beginning, it gradually forms
into a ball, sort of like the rising sun, then through further
concentration shrinks in size and is made to come close to the adept.
Eventually the size of a pill, the sprout can be swallowed and guided
mentally to the organ of its correspondence. A suitable incantation
places it firmly in its new receptacle, and gradually the adepts body
becomes infused with cosmic energy and partakes more actively of the
cosmos as a whole.
The sprouts, as Isabelle Robinet points out, are originally the
“germinal essences of the clouds” or “mist.” They represent the yin
principle of heaven—that is, the yin within the yang. They manifest in
human saliva, again a yin element in the upper, yang, part of the body.
They help to nourish and strengthen the five inner organsorbs. A
Highest Clarity scripture known as On the Code of the Dao (Daodian
lun) explains that they are very tender, comparable to the fresh sprouts
of plants, and that they assemble at dawn in the celestial capital, from
where they spread all over the universe until the sun begins to shine.
Turning like the wheels of a carriage, they ascend to the gates of the
nine heavens, from where they continue to the medium level of the
world—to the five sacred mountains ruled over by the five emperors of
the five directions—and finally descend into the individual adept. They
thus pass through the three major levels of the cosmos (Robinet 1989,
166).
The virtue of these sprouts is twofold. They are “emanations of the
highest poles” and as such full of the power of far-off regions, the
fringes of civilization where the Dao resides in a rawer state. At the
same time, they are “tender like freshly sprouted plants” and as such
contain the entire potential of being in its nascent state. This growth
potential, the small and imperceptible qi in a state of pure becoming, is
the main objective for the Daoist practitioner. “Sprouting” means
inherent creation, purity, newness, return to youth. It also implies the
prevalence of the soft over the hard and the power of yin over yang
that Laozi describes in the Daode jing . Here yin is represented by the
saliva that adepts absorb. The practice is undertaken at dawn, the time
when everything awakens to life, yet another symbol of creative,
unstructured potential. By ingesting the sprouts, the Daoist partakes
of the inherent power of celestia lbodies and feeds on the pure creative
energy of the universe its most subtle form. It is thus not surprising
that the absorption of the sprouts is also used as a preparatory practice
for the “abstention from grains.” By and by the sprout intake replaces
adepts regular nourishment and allows them to identify with the
germinal energy of the sprouts. They thus can become lighter and
freer, appear and disappear at will, overcome the limitations of this
world, and attain immortality in the heavenly realms (Robinet 1993).
Another Daoist practice that has made its way into modern
Qigong is inner observation or neiguan, the active, conscious
introspection of one’s body and mind. As documented in texts since
the Tang dynasty, and in particular in the Scripture of Inner
Observation (Neiguan jing; see Kohn 1989), practitioners are guided to
turn their perception inside and realize the realities of body energies
and consciousness movements within. Soon they begin to understand
how they function and react both physically and psychologically. With
prolonged practice, they become aware of the subtler energies of life
and see themselves increasingly in terms of qi-patterns than ego-
centered actions. As the Scripture of Inner Observation says, adepts
come to see the body as part of Heaven and Earth, raised through yang
and nourished by yin, helped and guarded by the spirit and material
souls, organized in accordance with the five phases and the six musical
tones, radiating with the power of the seven stars and the eight
luminaries.
They learn that beyond their tangible qi, they consist to a large
extend of spirit (shen), the primordial, formless, and ever-changing
force, which in connection with the physical body causes human
beings to be alive. Manifested in the human mind, where it is often
distorted to serve egoistic and one-sided needs, spirit is brought back
to a state of rest as the mind is concentrated and relaxed. Adepts come
to see that just as the Dao pervades the universe in utmost perfection,
so spirit working through their mind can govern their life perfectly—
that is, as long as it is observed and cultivated and not wasted on
sensual amusements and the exertions of the senses. From confusion
and defilment, adepts recover the primordial state.
Doing so, they come to realize the impermanent nature of the ego-
based vision of self and body and replace this identity with one that
consists of an assemblance of energy, essence, and spirit. They realize in
their own lives the dictum of Zhuangzi that “human life is a coming-
together of qi. If it comes together there is life. If it scatters there is
death” (Watson 1968, 235). Human life is only one part of the
continuous natural transformations of qi; it is merely borrowed from
heaven and earth but since it resembles them closely in its structuring
and undergoes the same transformations as all creation, it can be made
just as perfect, just as flowing, just as eternal. Realizing this inherent
nature of life and themselves, adepts see that there is no true master of
body and mind and acknowledge how little conscious control they
have over life’s transformations. Increasingly able to to let life and the
body go on changing as they please, they can forget themselves and
dissolve into the higher patterns of the Dao.
This Dao, in the Daoist context, however, is not just a flow of
energies, but populated by gods, spirits, and other supernatural
entities. As the practitioner becomes more attuned to his life and body
as the universe, he or she also comes to actively perceive the gods and
spirits as inhabitants of the human body. The body and thus the self
becomes increalsingly a microcosmic replica of the starry heavens
above, full of palaces and chambers, towers and terraces, gods and
immortals. The deities who reside in the paradises of the otherworld
are as much at home in the adept’s body, and again—as through the
ingestion of the five sprouts—the adept comes to cosmicize his or her
self, expanding identity into a larger sphere.
Along the same lines, the Daoist transformation of the self in the
process of inner alchemy, reaching from essence through energy to
spirit and the emptiness of the Dao, has become part of modern
Qigong discourse and many techniques of inner alchemy are actively
applied in practice. Not only perceiving of the body as an entity of qi-
flow and a replica of the universe, adepts of inner alchemy take active
control of the energies and, through the systematic circulation and
collection of qi, transmutate the body into a cauldron for the growth of
an inner elixir. Starting from a tiny seed, it blossoms forth and gives
rise to the immortal embryo, which then, over ten months of intense
meditation, grows to completion. A primordial light begins to shine
through the entire body, and adepts enter a state of deep absorption,
allowing the tenuously growing spirit embryo to grow to fulness and
take on a life of its own—moving about the heavenly realms in a new
variation of the ecstatic soul journeys of Daoists of old.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, Qigong as practiced today has a long and varied
history in Chinese culture. Strongly rooted in the medical tradition, it
has continuously over the past two millennia been used fro healing,
curing, and health enhancement. By extension, it has helped people
extend their lives and improve their capacity for enjoyment and
vivacity. Beyond its clearly visible medical roots, however, Qigong has
also been linked in various ways with the Daoist tradition—notably
through the qi-controlling practices of the ancient immortals and a
number of exercises adopted into the modern repertoire from religious
Daoist cultivation and ritual.
The main distinction between health and longevity on the one
hand, and advanced spiritual or immortality practice, on the other,
within the overall system of Qigong is the degree to which the body is
alignd with the flow of yin and yang or the Dao on the periphery
versus being transformed, transfigured, and energetically reorganized
to a higher level—the ineffable Dao of creation at the center of all. Are
we practicing to enhance nature or to overcome it? Is the goal of our
efforts to become stronger, more vibrant, and more successful in this
life or is it to transform ourselves completely into a mystical dimension
of existence that reaches far beyond this body and this world?
Whenever the goal of Qigong is transcendence, the practice has
passed into the realm of the Daoist religion—a passage, however, that
cannot be undertaken without first completing the medical curriculum
and enhancing health to the utmost.
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Levels of Qigong Practice for Attaining Immortality
Seen from Traditional Daoist Worldview
Livia Kohn
IMMORTALITY
The focal point of Daoist worldview (Menschenbild) is the
attainment of immortality or transcendence, which can be understood
on three levels that are also applicable to Qigong practice today. These
levels are: harmony with nature, perfection of nature, and
transcendence of nature. First, it is an ideal of immortals not to meddle
with the course of nature, to go along with the changes and patterns
that nature prescribes.(1) Then again, immortality is understood as the
perfection of nature, finding the perfect order inherent in the Dao. On
a third level, finally, immortality is the transcendence of nature, the
realization of the supernatural, a state which implies the conscious
separation from normal society and ordinary human habits.
To attain these three levels, which can also be described as
successive stages of Daoist attainment (Vervollkommnung),
practitioners first identify their particular station in the grander
scheme of things, note their specific physical makeup and geographical
situation, and adjust to the natural rhythms of yin and yang as they
manifest in their surroundings. They take care to eliminate any
potential diseases or disorders, ascertain that their vital energy is
strong and flowing smoothly, and move in fruitful accordance with the
patterns of life. Second, they use more subtle forms of nourishment to
refine their bodies, often substituting regular foods with crude or
refined drugs, and align themselves in even more detail with the
patterns of the cosmos, absorbing the energies of the sun and the
moon at the proper times and following not only the obvious but also
the inherent tendencies of the various forces of the universe. Doing so,
they match themselves to the powers underlyig nature and thus reach a
state of higher and subtler naturalness.
Third, Daoist seekers take food unfit for normal people and refuse
normal ways of nourishment, completely replacing grains with drugs,
minerals, and qi. They also enter into a direct relationship with
nonhuman cosmic agencies, such as the gods who govern and control
nature, but are not themselves part of it. Practitioners’ bodies become
residences and pathways of the divine, their spirits become parts of the
larger universe, and their true abode is no longer the earth but the sky
with its planets and celestial palaces. Death at this point is avoided:
even though there may be the appearance of death, the vital structures
of the corpse still continue to function, and the immortal does not
languish in the underworld but ascends to meet his celestial partners
on high.(2)
Taking these three levels or models together, we find that there is a
certain degree of contradiction within them. That is to say, if the decay
of the human body is unavoidable and if one is not to meddle with the
course of nature, how can one ever strive for immortality? If the first
two levels are the key focus, if one is bound by the laws of nature and
all one can attain is a slowing-down of the natural decay, there is no
room for transcendence or immortality. Turning this around, it means
that immortals, in order to achieve the very goal of their lives, must
meddle with nature, overcome nature as a continuous, inescapable
process.
It is at this junction, at this point of contradiction, that the
medical and immortality practitioner part ways, that we see different
levels and directions of health and religious practices. The physician
and the longevity master accept decay as inevitable and do all they can
to slow it down and make it smoother and easier. They devise exercises
and take or prescribe medicines to make people stronger and healthier,
but there they stop--right where the religious practitioner starts. His
incentive is less to live as healthily and for as long as possible, to enjoy
this life as much as he can. Rather, he wishes to attain a more perfect, a
more enduring life, one that is found in the higher subtlety of the
natural world, but ultimately rests beyond it.
All three levels of healing, extension of life, and transcendence of
nature, are essential in both traditional Daoism and the modern
practice of Qigong Yangsheng. How do they work together? How are
they realized within the human being? What do people have to do to
work on one or the other of them?
QI AND THE SOULS
To begin an answer to these questions, let us first look at the
ancient theories of the human body and soul. The classical belief was
that human beings consisted of qi or vital energy. Qi is the material
aspect of the Dao, which accumulates to create life. The softest and
weakest force in the world, this vital energy yet constitutes all; it makes
beings what they are, causes the sky to be high and clear and the
earth to be low and turbid.
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The Xisheng jing (Scripture of Western Ascension, DZ 726), a fifth-
century Daoist mystical texts in the tradition of the Daode jing,
describes the process of creation as depending entirely on this cosmic
energy or qi. It says:
Qi is the ground of all life: it comes together, coagulates, and
gradually becomes solid.
Thus there are different tastes and various shapes, such as sweet,
bitter, pungent, salty, and sour.
When qi moves, there are the many and the few; the strong and
the weak are not the same.
They arise together, yet differ in name and appearance. Each
follows its own intention in being born.
Thus they have different inner natures and natural movements,
develop different bodies and selves.
They are raised through the Dao of yin and yang; thus following
separate ways they are yet akin. (5.4-5.9; Kohn 1991)
As all things are created and animated by qi, so are people. Within
the human person, moreover, this qi was understood to come in two
basic forms: a yang part that was provided by heaven and appared as
the hun soul, and a yin part that was given by earth and manifested as
the po soul.(3) The gestation of the human embryo was defined as the
coming-together of these two types of qi, the death of the person as
their dispersal.(4) At death, the two souls go their separate ways. The
hun or heavenly part ascends back towards the sky and gradually--over
five to seven generations of ancestor worship--dissolves into the greater
atmosphere of the universe.(5) The po or earthly part remains with the
body and is buried in the soil, where it gradually will merge back into
the earth.
Both souls are forms of qi, vital energy moving at different rates of
oscillation, so that they are--to speak in our terms--both spiritual
(geistig) and material at the same time.(6) The hun is fast moving, more
subtle qi, it is more spiritual; the po is slow moving, somewhat grosser
qi, it is more material. But both have the potential to become ghosts
and specters and have to be cared for properly after death. Both also
have the potential to be transformed into higher forms of energy
constellation and attain the state of immortality. Immortality, when
seen from this perspective, can be described as the transformation of
all the person’s qi into hun or heavenly qi, as which the person then,
after the body falls away, ascends to the celesial realms above.(7) Death
at this stage is no longer a major break-up of the souls or the qi, but the
transformation of a more embodied qi-state to a less embodied one,
the transition from a materially bound qi to a free form of vital energy
that flows along in harmony with the greater powers of the cosmos.
How, then, do people attain this death-free state? And how, on the
contrary, do they come to die? The answer lies in the way people deal
with the pure qi they receive at birth.
Everyone, by being endowed with qi from heaven and earth, has a
basic, genetically determined inner disposition and reservoire of
health. As this qi is given by the cosmic forces, it is called original or
primordial qi (yuanqi). Within this qi, the person’s instinctual and
intellectual tendencies are deposited, and it also determines what is the
“natural” length of his or her life. As a Daoist text of the ninth century
describes it:
People are born between heaven and earth. Thus they are endowed
with qi that might be pure or turbid, soft or hard....
A person of pure qi is clever, alert, wise, and intelligent. One of turbid
energy is unlucky, harsh, dumb, and foolish. Someone endowed with
hard qi is haughty, strong, vigorous, and violent. One who has mostly
soft qi is compassionate, benevolent, honest, and magnanimous.
In the same sense, a wood-type character tends to be energetic and
impulsive. An earth-type is benevolent and harmonious. A water-type
tends to be modest and cautious. A fire-type is fierce and violent. And
a metal-type is severe and abrupt.(8)
Whatever their inborn tendencies and character, people have
three choices or ways of dealing with their primordial endowment of
qi--which is sometimes envisioned like the money in a savings account:
(9) they can waste and squander it, they can keep it on level
(ausgewogen), and they can increase, strengthen, and purify it.
By wasting it, they invite personal and social problems, health
difficulties and chronic diseases, and end up not living up to their
natural lifespan but dying an early or violent death. These are the
people in need of medical attention, the focus of Chinese medical
practices. Keeping the primordial qi on level, the second group of
people waste some of it in social and personal activities, but then
compensate for this loss by practicing longevity techniques and forms
of personal cultivation. They may have to face certain illnesses and
various ups and downs of life, but will succeed to live to a healthy old
age and die when their natural span runs out.
The third group of people will not only keep their vital qi on level
but increase and purify it. They are the ones determined to become
immortals, and they begin by transforming their bodies and minds into
subtler entities, thereby first reaching a longevity far beyond the
normally expected lifespan. If therefore, a person’s natural life
expectancy was, say, 80 years, and he chooses to stay on level, he will
die around that time. If he squanders and wastes his vital qi, he will be
sick and unhappy, and die maybe around age 50 or 60. If he enhances
his qi through the practice of longevity and immortality techniques, he
will live to maybe 120 or even 200, and then avoid death, instead
casting off the body and ascending to the realm on high.(10) By
choosing to keep the qi at least on level and even replenishing it,
people move away from death and towards life. This is where Qigong
Yangsheng practices have their place.
MIND AND SPIRIT, BODY AND PHYSICAL FORM
However, how do these practices work according to the larger
theoretical framework of Daoist worldview (Menschenbild)? Why
don’t people, once equipped with good, heavenly qi, not just keep it
naturally?
In answer to this question, Daoists propose a detailed and fairly
subtle theory of the human mind and body. They assert that when
people are first born, with their store of cosmic, primordial qi intact,
they consist of pure spirit (shen) and physical form (xing)
(Leiblichkeit?). As such they participate in the fundamental patterns of
the cosmos, joining the cosmic workings of spirit.
All creation, according to Daoist cosmology, is nothing but the
ongoing process of spirit’s self-realization through the medium of
physical form, which can appear as body, shape, or any kind of matter.
At first, there was only spirit, which was radiant light, pure and
alone. It developed and wanted to perfect itself. For this purpose it
embodied itself in physical bodies, shapes, material beings, and the
human being, too, came into existence as the perfect replica of the
cosmic pattern. In people, therefore, spirit and physical form are
joined and continue to develop. Spirit gives birth to physical form, and
physical form completes spirit. Together they attain the luminosity and
radiance of celestial purity.(11)
However, in people this purity is soon lost--mainly through the
development of mind and body. The purity of the spirit is
compromised by a limited, personal consciousness that engages in the
senses and emotions, described as the mind (xin); the purity of the
physical form is destroyed by the increasing power the idea that one is
identical with one’s material form and has control over it, described in
the literature as the personal body (shen).
The mind, then, is the ruler of the emotions and the seat of
knowledge. In the former function it is close to our idea of the
heart, in the latter it is very much like what we would define as
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intellect. In both instances it is above the senses and yet linked to
them. It reacts with emotion to the input received from the senses, as
the fifth-century Xisheng jing has it: “When the eyes see something,
the mind is agitated” (11.2).(12)
On the basis of sensory input, the conscious mind then develops
an abstract knowledge, which in turn has to be communicated and
expressed with the help of language and signs, i.e., again through the
senses. In both these respects, the emotional and the intellectual, the
conscious mind is harmful for the preservation of vital qi and
considered useless for cosmic purposes. It can heolp only if properly
trained and controlled, and through its powers of active imagination
(Vorstellungskraft), which guides the qi smoothly through the body.
Similarly, the personalized body is defined in terms of psychological
ego-identity and emotional afflictions. Frequently authors in this
context go back and quote the Daode jing, which says:
The personal body is the reason why I have terrible vexations.
If I didn’t have a body, what trouble would I have? (ch. 13)]
This passage is cited in the fifth-century Xisheng jing and
interpreted by Li Rong. He says:
Having a personal body means having vexations and adversities.
Frustrated by sight and hearing, tortured by taste and smell, one is
subject to pain, irritation, heat, and cold (7.8).
As soon as there is a body the hundred worries compete to arise
and the five desires [of the senses] hurry to make their claims (17.8).
Here we find the personal body defined as the conglomerate of the
senses. It encompasses the various human sensations and feelings
together with the evaluations attached to them and the passions and
emotions arising from them. We can therefore understand shen as the
“personal body” or the “extended self.” The term in this context
obviously implies much more than what we mean by “body,” even
though it does neither deny nor replace it. It is still predominantly
physical in intention, so that a purely psychological rendering of the
term, such as “identity” or “personality,” will not suffice.
The conscious mind and the personal body are the reason why
people squander their inherent qi and get sick and die early. It is not
entirely possible to avoid having some sort of a personal consciousness
and identity when alive in the world, but longevity practices, as they
are undertaken as part of Qigong Yangsheng, will loosen their power
and alleviate the harm they can do. In the long run, however, anyone
who wishes to firmly retain his or her inherent qi and even attain a
state of immortality, must overcome both of them. An early text
describing this is the Zuowang lun (Discourse on Sitting in Oblivion,
DZ 1036), which is found first in an inscription dated to 829. It says:
Laozi says: “If I did not have a body what vexations would I have?”
But if one does not have a body and thus returns to annihilation,
shouldn’t that be called the loss of the basis of eternal life?
Yet I answer: What you would call “not having a body” does not
refer to not having this particular physical form. It rather means that
the bodily structure is unified with the Great Dao, that one is never
influenced by glorious positions and does not seek after speedy
advancement. Placidly and without desires, it means to forget that
there is this body dependent on all kinds of things.
And, we could add: It means to forget that there is this mind
continously craving intellectual pleasures and emotional satisfaction.
Both the personal body and the conscious mind, in their close
dependence on the senses and the instincts, have to be refined and
overcome in favor of a restoration and empowerment of the pure spirit
and physical form that we were all born with.
THE SELF
How, then is one to do this? What kind of self-identity and
understanding do Daoists propose as the basis for a healthy, extended
life and the attainment of immortality?
There are two words for “self” used in classical Chinese: ji and zi--
the two together make up the modern compound ziji.(13) They are
clearly distinct: The graph for ji originally represents “the warp and
weft of a loom” and shows “two threads running transversely and
another running lengthwise” (Fazzioli 1986, 34; Wieger 1965, 217). This
indicates an organized structure, something one can see on the
outside, something that can be made and controlled. Grammatically ji
is used primarily in the object position (Dobson 1974, 414-15). One can
“right one’s selfhood,” conduct oneself, compare others to one’s self,
and search for humanity or virtue within it.(14) Ji as the self is therefore
an object among other objects, it represents an organized person
among other people.
In contrast, zi indicates an individual’s spontaneous inner being,
the qualities one is endowed with by nature. Like the physical form,
the spontaneous self is cosmic. It is the way one is spontaneously, the
natural so-being of oneself, the way nature or heaven has made people
before they develop ego-consciousness and desires for objects.
The graph goes back to the pictogram, which shows a human nose
(Fazzioli 1986, 29; Wieger 1965, 325). The nose is the most protruding
part of the face and as such a person’s central characteristic. Still today,
people in East Asia point to their noses when they want to indicate
themselves. And yet, the nose, however much it represents oneself,
cannot be seen or known. One can only guess at the shape of one’s
own nose with the help of a mirror. It is something one is equipped
with by nature, something one feels and uses, but cannot shape or
control. The nose, as the center of oneself, is part of one’s basic
makeup; it points back at one’s natural so-being, at the spontaneity of
one’s existence.
Grammatically zi is used exclusively in the reflexive position, i.e.,
before the verb. It never occurs as in the object position (Dobson 1974,
751). Whatever one does, if done by the zi, is done of itself, by the self
as a spontaneous, independent organism, not by an organized object-
centered self. In this sense, the zi can give rise to an inner feeling of
shame, it can have a spontaneous inclination towards good or back
fortune, it can develop spontaneous knowledge, or attain true
spontaneity within.(15)
These two types of self as defined in traditional Daoism can be
related to the modern understanding of the self as proposed by Arthur
Deikman. He suggests that people have both an “object self” and an
“observing self” (1982). According to him, the object self unfolds
together with human consciousness, when infants begin by
understanding the world through the medium of their bodies and the
first abstract, yet humanly fundamental concept emerges that object =
body = self (Deikman 1982, 68). One’s very own body, the agent that
processes the sense data and translates them into needs and desires, is
seen as an object in itself, as one more object from which to receive
stimuli and toward which to direct wishes.
Consciousness of the object self can be divided according to three
distinct functions: thinking, feeling, and acting. The thinking self
contains one’s conception of who and what one is. It is a “me” defined
by society and culture, bound by relativity and the dependence of
opposites, based on measurements and comparisons, on the
establishement of catergories and classifications. The feeling self
contains the emotions: anger, fear, worry, sadness, joy. All these are
reactions of feeling toward a given object or objective. They are
intimately linked with desire and classify the world according to
whether it is at any given moment desirable or undesirable and reacts
with feelings and emotions accordingly.
The acting or functional self contains all that we do. It is an
awareness of oneself as an acting individual. I know that I do; I realize
the capacity I have to act in the world. I feel my body as an instrument
of outer activity; I direct my feet and hands, my facial muscles, as well
as my vocal chords in a particular direction, producing a particular
effect. The acting self manipulates the world around it. It pulls
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objects and objectives toward it or pushes them away (Deikman 1982,
92-94).
The development of such an object self is a necessary stage of
human development, an evolutionary phase that is essential for
survival of both individual and culture. On the other hand, as children
develop, so evolution proceeds further, and eventually the object self
can and must be overcome for the greater attainment of the higher
stages of life. These, according to Deikman, are approached when
another mode of consciousness is first learned--the “receptive mode,” a
way of perception which diminishes the boundaries between self and
world and gives people a sense of merging with the environment
(Deikman 1982, 71).
This mode is realized in the observing self. Originally at the center
of one’s being, this self is the deep inner root of one’s existence, an
ultimate and transcendent sense of being alive within. It is there, yet
cannot be consciously known, felt, or manipulated: it cannot be
objectified in any way. Rather than thinking, feeling, and doing things
actively and with regard to an object, the observing self allows things to
happen spontaneously. Instead of as objects, people then see
themselves and the world as flowing streams of energy, intensely alive
and perfectly individual, yet ultimately interconnected in a cosmic
whole. The observing self has no limits; it is transcendent and yet most
deeply immanent in all.(16)
Although perception in the receptive mode of consciousness is
unifying and free from classification, thinking still takes place. Only,
instead of clearcut value judgments and the evaluation of things as
objects, there is now a sense of fluidity of values, an openness to other
points of views. Similarly, there is still feeling, but there are no
emotions that are intrinsically related to the desires of the ego. Rather,
emotions are now replaced by compassion, charity, kindliness, and
perhaps sadness about the shortcomings of life (Maslow 1964, 82).
Also, people in this state still can and do act in the world. But their
actions are not based on single-minded categorizations nor on ego-
centered emotions.
Instead, they give service to others and hope to aid them in their
health and longeivty. In Daoist terms, therefore, people who have
realized their observing self flow along with the Dao and live in
harmony with themselves and others, never wasting but only nurturing
and even increasing their inner qi. This self, moreover, becomes the
main stepping stone for the attainment of immortality, the complete
dissolution of all personality into the cosmic flow of the Dao, the
attainment of oneness with the cosmos and its never-ending life.
QIGONG PRACTICE
The heir to several millennia of Daoist and longevity practices,
modern Qigong Yangsheng is also deeply rooted in Daoist worlview
(Menschenbild) and the vision of the attainment of immortality. Even
though few people today believe in the gods--whether in the stars, on
earth, or in the body--and immortality is not a pronounced goal of
Qigong, many of its traditional characteristics are valued highly. These
characteristics include lightness and freedom of the body, extended
longevity, powers of healing (even at a distance),a nd various
supernatural faculties. These characteristics and other success
attainedin healing and longevity, however, are achieved through the
practices only inasmuch as the psychology of the individual is
transformed, as he or she learns to be more identical with a continuous
flow of qi rather than with a solid, emotion-based mind and body.
The psychological transformation form a solid into a more fluid qi-
entity, moreover, as it occurs on the three levels of Qigong and Daoist
practice (healing, longevity, immortality), is immediately reflected in
the practices. That is to say, certain practices that are useful in healing
may be superfluous in the attainment of longevity, while some
applicable for immortality may even be harmful when healing is the
main focus. Take breathing as a simple example. When healing or
extending life, natural deep breathing is emphasized, with the
diaphragm expanding on the inhalation.(17)
When moving on to immortality, however, reverted breathing is
advised, which means that the diaphragm contracts on the in-breath.
Undertaking this kind of reverted breathing too early or at the wrong
stage in one’s practice can cause complications, from diiness to
disorientation or worse.
Again, the point is made clear in the case of sexual practices. In
healing, sexual activity with a partner is encouraged in moderation and
measured ways, with both partners reaching regular orgasms. In
longevity practice, sexual activity may still be undertaken with a
partner, but ejaculation and other loss of body qi is avoided and the
sexual stimulation is used to raise the awareness of the positive flow of
qi in the body, which is the redirected to relieve stress and increase
vitality. Through the practice, as Mantak Chia says, people “become
more aware that all living things are one” (1974, 171). In immortality,
finally, sexual practices are undertaken entirely within one’s own body
and without a partner. They serve the creation of an immortal embryo
through the refinement of the sexual energy jing first into qi, then into
cosmic spirit shen. Ni Hua-ching emphasizes accordingly that in
advanced attainment sexual energy should not be used to have fun or
beget children, but must be sublimated into spiritual energy, which will
then give birth to the spiritual embryo and help people to attain the
immortal state (1992, 110).(18) He says:
It is hard for people to establish the correct goal of life. Typically
people are looking for emotional happiness in the form of lots of
pleasure, fun, stimulation or excitement. For spiritual people, it is
necessary to avoid pleasure, excitement, stimulation and fun. Actually,
those four things have a healthy and unhealthy level. In other words,
some fun is all right, because it does not harm your life being.
However, even on a healthy level, if fun is overextended, it can become
negative and damage your energy being. (Ni 1992, 111)]
Immortality is thus the creation of an inner spirit being and means
the avoidance of ordinary joys and excitements. Practices associated
with it are not only unsuitable (and probably impossible) for people on
the levels of healing and longevity, but may even be harmful if
attempted improperly.
The same point, that practices of a similar nature vary significantly
among the three levels, can equally be made for diets and fasting,
gymnastics and qi-infusion, quiet-sitting and imaginative visualization.
Generally Qigong Yangsheng serves to guide people from a wasteful
and neglecting attitude to their own bodies and minds towards a more
wholesome, healing, and caring way of dealing with themselves. It
“ermoeglicht das bewusste koerperliche Erleben des
Zusammenwirkens widerstreitender Kraefte” (von Brunn 1999, 85) and
increases the mental awareness of oneself as part of a larger flow of
energy which rises and ebbs, comes and goes, moves and halts.
As one reaches a state of mental quietude and greater stability in
one’s heath, the practice leads on towards a more encompassing
understanding of self and world, which also includes a sense of wonder,
of gratitude towards the natural world and the greater universe (see
Middendorf 1999, 90). The tense, ego-bound self loosens and a sense
of open qi-flow takes its place. Healing moves on to longevity, and as
cosmic awareness increases, even to immortality.
NOTES
1. This is reflected in modern Qigong in the emphases placed by
Jiao Guorui on the “Natürlichkeit als übergeordnetes Prinzip.” See
Lienau 1999.
2. I first formulated this outline of the understanding of
immortality in traditional Daoism in a review of Ute Engelhardt’s book
(1987). See Kohn 1988.
3. A description of this soul, with illustration, is found in Schlicht
1999, 57.
4. Accumulation of qi as the reason why people come to life is
already expressed in the Zhuangzi, which says: “Human life is a
coming-together of qi. If it comes together, there is life; if it
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scatters, there is death” (ch. 22; Watson 1968, 235. For a scholarly
discussion of the various early theories of qi and the soul, see Y”u 1987.
5. David Jordan in his anthropological research asserts that,
according to Chinese beliefs, the ancestral spirit does not die but
dissolves into the qi of the universe at the same rate as the descendants
forget the original person of the ancestor. When no one remembers
him anymore, he is gone. See Jordan 1972.
6. The modern master Ni Hua-ching speaks about them as the two
spheres of spiritual energy. “One sphere is higher, lighter energy. Even
though it uses the foundation of sexual energy, it is light and it has the
freedom to fly anywhere. The other kind of spiritual energy is heavy
energy, the so-called ghost or sinking energy. It tends to be vulgar or is
considered evil” (1992, 110-11).
7. In inner alchemy, this process is described as the creation and
ascension of the immortal embryo, which is created from the various
internal qi of the person in an alchemically defined cultivation. See Lu
1970; Ni 1992; Robinet 1999.
8. Yongcheng jixian lu (Record of the Host of Immortals of the
Walled City, 783), 1.5b.
9. Since the Song, there has been the notion of the celestial
treasury, which will provide people with a certain sum at birth. The
exhaustion of the funds means the end of life, an overdraft means
punishment in hell. See Hou 1975.
10. For details of the immortals’ path and their various forms of
ascension, see Kohn 1990.
11. For a more detailed discussion of these concepts, see Kohn 1991.
12. A more extensive discussion of the intimate relation between
the eyes and the mind as seen in traditional Daoism, is found in a
treatise by Wu Yun (d. 778), called “On Mind and Eyes.” See Kohn
1998. The importance of the eyes is also emphasized in modern
Qigong literature, notably by Jiao Guorui. See Hildenbrand 1999, 10.
13. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Kohn 1992.
14. These expressions are found in classical literature, e.g., Mengzi
2A.7, Lunyu 5.15, 13.20, 1.8.
15. These expressions occur in Lunyu 12.23, Mengzi 2A.4, Zhuangzi,
chs. 4, 15.
16. The observing self as Deikman describes it is in many ways
similar to Abraham Maslow’s concept of Being-cognition. Being-
cognition is the opposite of Deficiency-cognition. Where the latter is
constantly aware of something missing, something needed, the former
is content and calm, receptive as it were, and merely observing. See
Maslow 1964, 83.
17. The importance of natural breathing is also emphasized by Jiao
Guorui. See Middendorf 1999.
18. This practice goes back to traditional inner alchemy. In women,
it meant that the reservoire of qi in the breast area is no longer
depleted through menstruation, but kept intact. Menstruation ceases
(the decapitation of the red dragon), and the growing qi energy can be
converted into an internal spirit embryo. See Despeux 1990.
REFERENCES
Chia, Mantak, and Michael Winn. 1984. Taoist Secrets of Love:
Cultivating Male Sexual Energy. Santa Fe: Aurora Press.
Deikman, Arthur J. 1982. The Observing Self: Mysticism and
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Taoïsme et alchimie feminine. Paris: Pardés.
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Engelhardt, Ute. 1987. Die klassische Tradition der Qi-Übungen.
Eine Darstellung anhand des Tang-zeitlichen Textes Fuqi jingyi lun von
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Guorui zum Lehrsystem Qigong Yangsheng.” Zeitschrift für
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Hou Ching-lang. 1975. Monnaies d’offrande et la notion de
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Thought.” In Selves, People, and Persons, edited by Leroy Rouner,
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Yangsheng in der Arbeit mit Krebspatientinnen.” Zeitschrift für
Qigong Yangsheng 1999: 97-102.
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Yangsheng 1999: 89-90.
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Journal of Asiatic Studies 47: 363-95.
The Idea of Immortality in Chinese Thought
And Its Influence on Taiji Quan and Qigong
Arieh Lev Breslow, M.A.
taichi@beqezint.net
Immortality is an age-old dream of human beings. Ancient and
modern people, East and West, confront the same dilemma -- the
absurdity of death and the loss of personal ego. For most of us, it is an
unsettling thought that we will grow old, become infirm, and
eventually die. Western traditions have dealt with death in many ways.
Judaic-Christian teachings promise the resurrection of the dead in the
Messianic age. Against the specter of death, modern science has
marshaled the technologies of cloning and cryogenics. In both the East
and the West, there are an infinite number of products on the market
that promise youth and vitality.
Chinese philosophers have always concerned themselves with
immortality. Ko Hung and the religious Daoists believed that they
could manufacture a pill that would keep them forever young and
transform themselves into immortals. Through meditation and special
exercises like Qigong and more recently Taiji Quan, Daoists wanted to
purify their coarse bodies into subtle spirit and merge with the infinite
and eternal Dao. This paper will examine the origins of immortality in
Chinese thought and point to its influence on Qigong and Taiji Quan
Religion and Immortality in China
Throughout the centuries, religious attitudes and feelings have
played a powerful role in Chinese society. In addition to Confucianism,
Daoism and Buddhism, the central religious movements, various gods,
each with his or her own turf, required prayers and offerings in order to
safeguard family and home. In his classic study on Chinese religion, C.
K. Yang described the result of this attitude on the environs of a
traditional Chinese dwelling (Yang, 1961:28):
The influence of religion on the Chinese family life was
everywhere
128
visible. Upon entering any house, one saw paper door gods...painted
on the doors for protection...On the floor was an alter to T’u-ti, the
earth god...T’ien-kuan, the heavenly official, was in the courtyard,
and the wealth gods, who brought well-being and prosperity to the
family, were in the hall in the main room of the house....
In addition to the gods and the various religious movements,
ancestor worship exerted its towering presence over family life. This
form of homage was the one universal and unifying Chinese religious
institution. Ancestor worship fostered a binding relationship between
the living and the dead, the former to offer sacrifices and the latter to
bestow blessings. With such a powerful institution whose figures lived
on in heaven and wielded their authority on earth, it is no wonder that
the idea of immortality found fertile ground to grow.
The belief in immortality cut a wide swath across the various
philosophical, religious and social camps in Chinese history. Emperors,
peasants, merchants and soldiers could share a belief in and the
possibility of attaining eternal life. This was possible because religion in
China encouraged a dynamic flow between its multitudinous sects and
groupings that was unknown in the West. In Europe, one was a
Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, or a Moslem. An individual could not
claim allegiance to more than one religious persuasion simultaneously.
In contrast, the Chinese usually did not belong to a specific group nor
were they required to profess loyalty to a particular article of faith.
Professor Laurence Thompson observed (Thompson, 1989: 2):
Except in the case of the professional living apart in monasteries,
religion in China was so woven into the broad fabric of family and
social life that there was not even a special word for it (religion)
until modern times, when one was coined to match the Western term.
Even the strict and uncompromising Confucians were not immune
to the lure of immortality. Only the Buddhists, whose faith contained
the doctrine of achieving nirvana or ego extinction, were
unsympathetic to the transfiguration of the ego-self. Nevertheless, the
Buddhists also allowed for a kind of immortality in the doctrine of
reincarnation.
Of the many religious ideas, beliefs, and superstitions, the notion
of immortality held a prominent and inspirational position in Chinese
society, much like heaven in Western religions. Chinese folklore is
filled with the stories of immortals who live forever and obtain
supernatural powers such as walking through walls, flying through the
air and communing with the dead. These immortals often returned to
earth in order to right wrongs and to play tricks on the unwary. The
Daoist sage Zhuang Zi (3rd century BCE) drew a vivid portrait of one
such immortal (Watson (1964:27):
There is a Holy Man living on faraway Ku-She mountain, with
skin like ice or snow, and gentle and shy like a young girl. He
doesn’t eat the five grains, but sucks the wind, drinks the dew,
climbs up on the clouds and mist, rides a flying dragon, and
wanders beyond the four seas. By concentrating his spirit, he
can protect creatures from sickness and plague and make the
harvest plentiful.
The following piece of folklore is a typical tale of immortality, with
a moral to boot (adapted from Van Over, 1984:197):
There once lived a man who claimed to have discovered the secret
of immortality. A Daoist priest decided to seek him out in order to
be his disciple. When he reached the immortal’s abode, he discovered
that the man was dead. The priest was greatly disappointed and left
immediately in great despair.
Now why was the priest disappointed? Was it because the man had
departed from this life? But to become immortal, one must first die.
Significantly, the influence of immortality spilled over into the
martial arts. The immortal and Daoist priest, Zhang San-feng, was the
legendary founder of Taiji Quan. One tale recounted that he was
meditating in a cave when the principles and postures of Taiji came to
him in a dream. Another version claimed that the postures suddenly
appeared on the wall.
Zhang San-feng reputedly lived 200 hundred years in his physical
body and then flew off to heaven as an immortal one. It was said that a
Daoist monk taught him the techniques of immortality when he
dwelled and meditated on the Wu-Dang mountains, probably the sight
of his cave experience. During his mortal life, he performed many
miracles and feats of strength that grew out of his knowledge of the
shamanistic arts.1
The Origins of Immortality
The Chinese cult of immortality differed from the way people in
the West generally viewed immortality. In Western religions, one lived
forever and earned the reward of heaven by, for example, believing in
the Divinity, performing good deeds and, in some cases, through
predetermined selection. In China, those who sought immortality had
to harmonize their mental and physical life-force with the eternal life-
force of the cosmos. To achieve their goal, they developed a vast array
of spiritual practices and alchemical formulas.
Historically, the example of the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huang
Di) became the paradigm for attaining immortality. While presiding
over the China’s legendary Golden age (2852-2255 BCE), not only did
he teach the people how to use fire, to plow their fields, and to harvest
the thread of the silk worm but he also devoted his considerable
talents and resources to acquiring the secret of eternal life. By virtue of
his interest in medicine and in nourishing his own vitality, it was a
logical step for the Yellow Emperor to seek immortality.2 He reputedly
experimented with metals and herbs and eventually found the formula
for the golden elixir of immortality. After taking the drug, he mounted
a dragon and flew away to the world of the immortals. Some legends
recorded that he took his entire household of seventy people with him.
Because such a revered figure as the Yellow Emperor was linked to
immortality, it was difficult for later philosophers to deny its existence
outright.
Following in the wake of the Yellow Emperor, the Fang-shih
(magicians) were the keepers of the secret of immortality. These
shamans practiced many mystical arts such as astrology, spiritual
healing, and divination. The general populace believed in their powers
to achieve immortality, to heal the sick, and to perform miracles.
Occasionally, they obtained the patronage of the ruling class. One
famous emperor, Shih Huang Di (259-210 BCE) sent a famous Fang-
Shih on a quest to find the Isle of immortals and to bring back the
elixir of immortality. He equipped a sea-faring expedition of three
thousand men and women with ample supplies to accompany the
shaman. They never returned. One legend recorded that that they
found the isle of immortality and decided to remain there as
immortals. Another tale averred that they found the Japanese Islands
where the shaman crowned himself king and established a kingdom
with his retinue. As for the hapless Emperor, he used to wander along
the shore, gazing at the Eastern horizon in the hope of spotting the
returning expedition.
Lao Zi and Immortality
From the 3rd century BCE, several streams of Daoism flourished.
While certain later branches of Daoism became identified as seekers
of eternal life, other Daoists did not focus their efforts on achieving
immortality. On the other hand, all Daoists shared in common a
reverence for the Yellow Emperor and the heritage of Lao Zi (6th
century BCE) as their historical sources. Daoists were often called
Huang Lao because they were followers of both Huang Di (the Yellow
Emperor) and Lao Zi.
Fung Yu-lan, the great twentieth century philosopher and
historian, wrote that the best way to understand Daoism is to divide it
into two distinct movements (Fung:3): Philosophical Daoism (Dao Jia)
and Religious Daoism (Dao Jiao). Philosophical Daoists accepted
certain ideas of Lao Zi such as Dao being the creative life force
of the universe, a love of nature, and a rejection of war.
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Religious Daoists, on the other hand, transformed Lao Zi’s ideas into
an all-inclusive belief system, with the Dao De Jing, his masterpiece, as
their bible.
If the Yellow Emperor was the mythical inspiration for Daosim,
Lao Zi was its intellectual progenitor. Writing in his own enigmatic and
at times indecipherable style, Lao Zi advocated that the sage must
strive to comprehend the mysterious workings of heaven and earth,
that is, the Dao. Then, once these laws were understood as well as
humanly possible, the sage must bring himself into harmony with
them.
Lao Zi was aware that knowing the Dao was no easy task. In the
first chapter of the Dao De Jing, Lao Zi informed his reader that the
Dao cannot be named, that it is mysterious, and that it is “darkness
within darkness.”3 Yet this mysterious Dao held within it the secret of
life, for it was life itself. Furthermore, the Dao was ‘eternal.’ Thus, later
seekers of immortality claimed that the sage who unraveled the secrets
of the Dao secured for himself the possibility of merging with it and
attaining the gift of eternal life.
In the Dao De Jing, Lao Zi did not speak explicitly on the subject
of immortality. Nevertheless, his words, often closer to poetry than a
cogent philosophy, profoundly influenced those Daoists seeking
immortality. They interpreted his work to show that he was indeed
believed in immortality, pointing to several passages which, they held,
supported their claim. In Chapter 33, for example, Lao Zi declared:
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish
Is to be eternally present.
According to religious Daoists, proper cultivation of the Dao
would allow sage to live eternally, even after death. However, many
other commentators, like the great Taiji master Zheng Manqing,
understood the meaning of this phrase differently. According to
Professor Zheng, even though the sage dies, his contribution to
humanity (his Dao) lived on.4 In other words, his reputation and good
deeds remained as his living testament.5
Another example where the religious Daoists uncovered the idea
of immortality was found in Chapter 50. Lao Zi wrote:
Rhinoceroses can find no place
To thrust their horns,
Tigers no place to use their claws,6
And weapons no place to pierce.
Why is this so?
Because he has no place for death to enter.
It is noteworthy that Fung Yu-lan argued that doctrine of
immortality contradicted the spirit of Lao Zi and his writings.7 Lao Zi
believed that human beings should follow in the ‘natural’ course of
things.8 Life was followed by death and the sage should calmly accept
this reality with cold indifference. Religious Daoists, on the other
hand, focused their efforts on achieving immortality, which was the
avoidance of death and therefore unnatural.
The Dao De Jing also provided the intellectual and inspirational
wellspring for practitioners of Taiji Quan. The book elaborated on the
themes of Yin and Yang, Wu Wei (no unnatural action) and the
relationship of hard and soft.9 In Chapter 43, Lao Zi postulated: “The
softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the
universe.” This idea forms the pivot on which the entire system of Taiji
stands. Without this principle, one is not practicing Taiji but
something else. As the Buddhists were fond of saying, ‘Don’t be fooled.
A brass monkey may look like a gold monkey, but it is still made of
brass.’
Significantly, in Lao Zi, it is possible to see the confluence of Taiji
principles with the ideas of immortality. In Chapter 76, he observed:
...the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
 The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Both practitioners of Taiji and seekers of immortality focused on
the positive value of life as opposed to death. Each required a gentle
touch, patience, sensitivity, and, at times, a merging of one’s personal
ego with the greater Dao.
While Lao Zi’s words were easily interpreted in various ways, he
remains a seminal figure in the historiography of immortality and Taiji.
His pithy insights formed the intellectual framework for both the cults
of immortality and the soft-styles of martial arts that followed him.
Public Morality versus Immortality
Not everyone wholeheartedly accepted the doctrine of
immortality. Often its opponents cloaked their dispute in evasive
language, seldom attacking the popular precept head-on. In this
debate, what was not said was of equal importance to what was. This
was the case with Confucius, the most influential of all Chinese
teachers.
Confucius (b. 551 BCE), like Lao Zi, did not speak about
immortality directly. Rather, he focused his attention elsewhere on the
Dao (way) of humanity. He was concerned about public morality in the
here and now. This meant that he stressed the principles of
righteousness, justice, and benevolence and urged his students to
weave these teachings into the moral fabric of normative society.
Essentially, he was a social reformer, a radical conservative who wanted
his followers to return to the traditional ways of the Chinese Classics.
The following represents his down-to-earth view of the spirit world:
Chi Lu asked about serving the spirits of the dead.
The Master said: ‘If you are not able to serve men,
How can you serve their spirits?’
Chi Lu added, ‘I venture to ask about dead?’
He was answered, ‘While you do not know life,
How can you know about death?’ (Legge, 1971:241-42)
and
The subjects on which the Master did not talk were --
extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder,
and spiritual beings. (Ibid.:201)
The fact that he did not speak about ‘spiritual beings’ and
immortality suggests that, at the very least, he found the idea
problematic. His silence would be something like Thomas Jefferson
refusing to comment on an important article in the Bill of Rights. Yet,
in an interesting twist of logic, some later Daoists claimed that
Confucius knew more about the spirit world than anyone else precisely
because he did not speak about it (Fung, 1966:219).
Other philosophers, who followed Confucius, also preferred to
ignore the issue of immortality. Yang Xing (53 BCE-18 CE), a
philosopher who combined Daoism with Confucianism, was asked to
expound on the ‘actual truth’ about immortals. He observed: “I shall
have nothing to do with the question (of immortals). Their existence
or nonexistence is not something to talk about. What should be asked
are questions on loyalty and filial piety” (Chan, 1973:290). In public,
similar to Confucius, Yang believed that the sage should teach the Dao
of humanity, presumably to establish a just and benevolent society.
Notice that he did not deny the existence of immortals. Rather he
preferred to deflect the question while emphasizing the Dao of
humanity.
The Outer Elixir (wai-dan)
The path to immortality was divided into two streams with
different emphasis and methods: the outer elixir (wai-dan) and the
inner elixir (nei-dan). The two were not mutually exclusive, although
the inner elixir gradually became the method of choice for the vast
majority of Daoists. It is interesting to note that the inner and the
outer method is the same classification used in defining the two major
schools of Qigong.
To understand the mechanism of immortality, we must grasp the
following important concept. The seekers of both the outer and
inner schools believed that a person’s Qi or life-force was
130
composed of the same stuff as the ‘eternal’ cosmic Qi of the universe.
According to most Chinese thinkers, everything had its origins in the
cosmic Qi of Dao, which was something like the mountain water-
source of a great river.10 The great Neo-Confucian Zhang Zai
(1020-1077) explained the unity of Qi in this manner (Chan:502):
When it is understood that the Vacuity, the Void, is nothing but
material force (Qi),
then existence and nonexistence, the hidden
and the manifested, spirit and eternal transformation,
and human
nature and destiny are all one and not a duality. 11
The followers of the outer school sought to produce the pill of
immortality from metals and herbs through alchemical processes.12
Their goal was to bridge and unify the apparent duality of human Qi
and cosmic Qi. The difference between the two Qi’s was one of
appearance such as water, steam, and ice. Their essence or Qi was the
same -- H2O. These pioneers of the modern laboratory scientist
believed that a pill of gold and cinnabar combined with other
ingredients such as lead and water would restore, balance, and
harmonize the individual’s personal Qi with the cosmic Qi. Cinnabar
(red mercury ore) and gold were touted as the key ingredients of the
elixir because they contained unique qualities of indestructibility and
endurance.
The best known alchemist of the outer school was Ko Hung
(284-364). He wrote the Pao-p’u tzu, a ‘how-to’ book detailing specific
techniques and practices for attaining immortality.13 Ko Hung believed
that only the pill of immortality could fulfill the promise of eternal life.
Physical exercise, sexual yoga, breathing techniques, and meditation
could prolong life but could not bestow the gift of immortality.
Moreover, the pill could grant supernatural powers such as the ability
to walk on water or to commune with the spirit world.
However, the pill alone could not produce immortality. Despite his
belief in the elixir’s magic, Ko Hung was also a committed Confucian.
In order to achieve immortality, the practitioner had to practice the
Confucian virtues of filial piety, good deeds, loyalty, trustworthiness,
and sincerity. This is an interesting point because Ko Hung viewed
immortality differently from Confucius and Yang Xing who refused to
talk about immortals. It also highlights a Chinese worldview that
emphasized the unity of mind and body. The wholeness of the person
-- spiritual, physical, and moral -- was required in order to achieve
immortality. A thief, for example, could imbibe the elixir of
immortality and not achieve eternal life due to his character
deficiencies.
The Inner Elixir (nei-dan)
Later, by the Sung dynasty (960-1279), the quest for the elixir of
immortality became increasingly understood in spiritual rather than
physical terms. In part this evolution might be attributed to the lack of
verifiable success regarding the outer school’s approach.14 Then, too,
Neo-Confucian rationalists such as Qeng I and Zhu Xi, who came to
dominate Chinese thought from the 10th century CE, did not take
kindly to the notion of immortality. The rise of Buddhism was another
factor. Because of its highly sophisticated meditation techniques,
Buddhism challenged both Daoism and Confucianism to develop their
own equally skilled methods of contemplation, which many seekers
then applied to achieving immortality.
The objective of Daoist spiritual yoga was the liberation of the
yang soul (Shen) from the hindrance of the yin or gross physical body.
Traditionally, the Chinese understood that this separation occurred
with death, but the Daoists came to believe it could happen while one
lived. Taking their cue and terminology from the outer school, they
sought to transform the body into an alchemical laboratory. For
example, one early master of spiritual alchemy explained that the
semen corresponded to lead, blood to mercury, kidneys to water, and
the mind to fire. By mixing these elements together, the meditator
created the elixir of immortality in the fiery cauldron of his own body.
Gradually the Inner school rejected the outer school’s terminology
and developed its own framework known as the “Three Treasures”:
Jing (essence), Qi (vitality), and Shen (spirit). Each of the three
treasures had two parts, an abstract and a concrete dimension.
Concrete Abstract Body
Jing (essence):
male sperm and creativity as genitals
female sexual fluids the seed of life
Qi (vitality):
air and breath internal energy stomach,
Dan Tien
and life force lungs
Shen (spirit):
ordinary conscious spiritual head and heart
thoughts and feelings consciousness
To preserve life and to attain immortality, the Three Treasures had
to be conserved and blended into a balanced harmony. Through daily
nourishment, seekers of the inner elixir sought to cultivate the natural
growth of the Three Treasures. For example, the breath was not merely
a means for maintaining life. If the breath were not regulated properly,
the person’s life-force would be used up. Conversely, correct breathing
techniques would greatly increase the life-force in the body.
Ejaculation was another example of body ecology and
conservation. Daoists seeking immortality believed that the semen
represented a major source of Qi and had to be preserved within the
body, particularly as one grew older.15 During the act of lovemaking,
through various techniques, the male would prevent ejaculation,
thereby sending the semen (Jing) back through the spinal passage as
refined life-force (Qi) and to the brain where it nourished the spirit
(Shen).
The Daoist seekers of immortality believed that the bodily
processes and functions normally leading to death could be ‘reversed’
by concentrating and purifying the Three Treasures.16 By reversing the
life-to-death process with various meditation and visualization
techniques, one could return to his or her state of ‘pre-birth’ and
transform the coarse body into subtle energy. This was the same
principle as utilized in sexual yoga -- the transmuting of Jing into Qi
and then Qi into Shen.
Qigong exercises and Taiji Quan were important vehicles to
improve health and, for some, to attain immortality. These kinds of
exercises were highly valued because they conserved and strengthened
the life-force of the body, allowing the Qi to flow evenly and freely
along the spine to the head.
The same principle used in immortality was also adopted by the
Taiji Classics and became a hallmark in its concept of self-defense. The
Taiji Classics extolled the principle of the ‘suspended headtop’ in order
to promote a light and responsive body: “When the ching shen (spirit)
is raised, there is no fault of stagnancy and heaviness” (Lo, Inn,
Amacker, Foe, 1985:47). In other words, the body reacts quickly and
appropriately to the attack of an opponent because mind and posture
have allowed the Jing and Qi to flow freely and to become Shen.17
Generally, in order to conserve their Qi and to prepare themselves
for immortality, Daoists followed the Middle Path where they avoided
excess in all things. Moderation was their by-word. Even Daoist
exercises like Qigong were kept within the bounds of common sense.
One of my Taiji teachers often reminded us to do our best but don’t
overdo. The following is a Daoist checklist on maintaining moderation
(adapted from Cooper, 1990:104):
1) excessive walking harms the nerves
2) excessive standing harms the bones
3) too much sleep harms the blood vessels
4) sitting too long harms the blood
5) listening to much impairs the generative powers
131
6) looking at things too long harms the spirit
7) talking too much affects the breath
8) Thinking too hard upsets the stomach
9) Too much sex injures the life force
10) eating too much damages the heart
Taiji masters also recommended that their students should follow
the path of moderation. The Taiji Classics state (Lo, Amacker...:31):
It is not excessive or deficient;
Accordingly when it bends,
It then straightens.
In practical terms, this meant that, whether practicing the Taiji
form or sparring with an opponent, one must hold to the center.
‘Excessive’ indicates that one should not to bend over too far and
‘deficient’ means not to lose contact with the opponent (Wile, T’ai
Touchstones:117-18).
Pre-natal Breathing: A practical lesson
To understand the theory of the inner school, it might be helpful
to examine a technique of breathing called ‘pre-natal’ or ‘reverse’
breathing. This technique is characterized by contracting the lower
abdomen on the in-breath and the expanding it on the out-breath.
According to the Daoists, each baby is born with pre-natal Qi, which is
the life-force it receives before birth. Some babies are endowed with
more Qi than others, depending on the health of the parents, genetic
inheritance, and other factors. Before the baby is born, he takes in his
nourishment and oxygen through the umbilical cord and stores the
energy in his Dan Tien. Once the baby is born, breathing from the
nose and mouth begins, which is known as ‘post-birth’ breathing. This
transition marks the end of pre-natal breathing.
However, if we closely observe a baby breathing, we will see that,
while he breathes through his nose, he is still using his stomach in the
breathing process. We can actually observe the abdomen moving
rhythmically with the breath. The Daoists noticed that, as one grows
older, the diaphragm and the abdomen are employed less and less. The
breath gradually moves higher in the lungs until it flies out of the
mouth, culminating in death.
The Daoists hoped to accomplish two goals with the technique of
pre-natal breathing. They wanted to reverse the upward pattern of the
breath, so that it would remain deep in the lower stomach, that is, in
the Dan Tien. In this way, it was thought that a person would not
‘expire.’ They accomplished this goal by harmonizing the movement of
the abdomen and the breath.
Secondly, the Daoists believed that, when one’s Qi was depleted,
the person died. Thus, if one could conserve, strengthen and nourish
the prenatal Qi stored in the Dan Tien, then he or she would never get
sick and die. The Daoists hoped to accomplish this by mixing the Qi
from the air outside the body, a never-ending source, with the pre-natal
Qi inside the body. This was done by simultaneously contracting the
Dan Tien and inhaling of fresh air, joining them together in the area of
the diaphragm, and then sending the revitalized Qi back to its storage
place in the Dan Tien.
Immortality At Last
One who attained immortality became a ‘Xian.’ The modern
pictogram for a Xian contained a man and a mountain, suggesting the
correlation between the recluse and immortality. The earlier pictogram
for Xian showed a man ascending toward heaven. Historically, the best
known immortals in Chinese mythology were the Eight Immortals,
who were often depicted in Chinese art. They represented the eight
conditions of life: youth, old age, poverty, riches, nobility, common
people, woman, and man.
Ko Hung divided immortals into three categories: celestial,
terrestrial, and those who have given up the body. Celestial immortals
fly to heaven with their bodies intact like the Yellow Emperor.
Terrestrial immortals dwell in mountains or forests. Ko Hung’s death
was reputedly an example of the third kind. When he died, he was
placed in a coffin. Later when the coffin was opened, only his clothes
remained. This passing to the spirit world represented a cross-cultural,
archetypal image as it closely resembled the resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth in the New Testament.
In Chinese folklore, the types of immortals appeared less clear
than Ko Hung’s definitions of the Xian. Did the immortal one remain
the same after achieving immortality, his or her Qi having reached the
point of indestructibility, or did he or she die, dropping the physical
body while the body/mind was transfigured into subtle energy? The
answer was that the immortal one could do and be just about anything
he or she pleased. Whatever precisely occurred, the immortal one was
viewed as a power technician of the highest rank. This meant that he
could transform his body and environment to the shape of his will. The
immortal one often performed magic and miracles. This ability came
from great personal power and a deep understanding of the way energy
worked.
The following legends illustrate the above point and demonstrate
the convergence of immortality with personal power and martial arts.
When Zhang San-feng, the father of Taiji Quan, was on his way to the
capital at the invitation of Emperor Huizong (1092-1135), he had to
pass through mountains populated by dangerous bandits. That night
Yuandi, one of the semi-divine immortals visited him in a dream and
taught him certain self-defense techniques. The following day, Zhang
was attacked and he reputedly killed more than a hundred bandits.
Another story about Zhang described his great personal power.
Apparently, in winter, Zhang would walk out of the monastery to enjoy
the hoary landscape. It was said that he left no footprints on the snowy
paths. The legend does not say whether he flew or stepped down
without leaving an indentation. Presumably, he could do either.
Immortality in the Modern Age
In the modern world, belief in the elixir of immortality has fallen
by the wayside. Yet we have much to be thankful for its existence and
those seekers who aimed for the stars but still reached the moon. Fung
Yu-lan, for example, praised religious Daoism as heralding the spirit of
modern science. Daoist alchemists accumulated a massive body of
medical lore and laid the basis for modern chemistry, metallurgy,
botany, herbalogy, and zoology. Traditional Chinese medicine was also
greatly beholden to the seekers of immortality.
The search for immortality gave impetus to the belief that human
beings can live healthier, longer, and happier lives. It offered an ancient
and well-tested structure of exercise, meditation and visualization that
enabled ordinary people to dramatically enhance the quality of their
lives. While promising no guarantees regarding death and sickness, the
Daoist health systems postulated that it is best to follow the Dao, to
‘walk like a cat’ so that one might live as a lion in winter.18 The Taiji
Classics sum it up best: “Think it over carefully what the final purpose
is: to lengthen life and maintain youth.” (Lo, Inn, Amacker, Foe:66)
I following approach:
n 1935 John Blofeld met a Daoist monk at his monastery in the
mountains. This was what that monk had to say about immortals
(Blofeld, 1979:180):
Immortals not only break wind or belch like other people, they
die....
Becoming immortal has little to do with physical changes, like the
graying of a once glossy black beard; it means coming to know
something, realizing something -- an experience that can happen
in a flash! Ah, how precious is that knowledge! When it first strikes
you, you want to sing and dance, or you nearly die of laughing! For
suddenly you recognize that nothing in the world can hurt you.
****************
132
Notes
1. For more about Zheng San-feng, see Breslow, Beyond the Closed
Door, pp. 200-209.
2. The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, which
consists of the Yellow Emperor inquiring about questions of health
from his minister Qi Po, forms the basis for traditional Chinese
medical practices.
3. All translations of the Dao De Jing come from Feng and English.
4. Lao Tzu: My Words are Easy to understand, in commentary,
Chapter, 33, p. 119. Tam Gibbs translated the verse differently: “One
who does not lose what he has gained is durable. One who dies yet
remains has longevity.”
5. This idea is echoed in other cultures. In Judaism, there is this
adage: ‘The righteous live through their deeds even though they are
dead while the unrighteous are dead even though they live.’
6. This phrase should be compared with the wonderful story
Robert Smith told when Professor Zheng encountered a tiger in the
JAMA, vol. 6, no. 2, 1997, p. 66-68. Then, read the Professor’s
commentary on Lao Zi (the one we quoted in the text) in Cheng Man-
Ch’ing’s Advanced T’ai-Chi Form Instructions, trans. by Douglas Wile,
p. 25.
7. Fung:3
8. See Dao De Jing, Chapter 25.
9. I am often surprised how few practitioners of martial arts,
particularly students of Taiji, have studied Lao Zi’s masterpiece in
depth. It should be read and reread along with the Taiji Classics and
Sun Zu’s, The Art of War.
10. Dao De Jing, Chapter 42. The T’ai Chi Classics also state this
principle: “T’ai Chi comes from Wu Chi and is the mother of Yin and
Yang.” (Lo, Inn:31)
11. Many great martial artists drew on their harmony with cosmic
Qi for their spiritual inspiration and physical power. Witness the words
of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Akido (Stevens, 1987:112):
Regardless of how quickly an opponent attacks or how slowly I
respond, I cannot be defeated...As soon as the thought of attack
crosses my opponent’s mind, he shatters the harmony of the
universe and is instantly defeated regardless of how quickly he
attacks. Victory or defeat is not a matter of time and space.
12. We should be misled into thinking that the pill is part of the
inner school merely because it is ingested.
13. For more on Ko Hung, see Breslow, pages 132-33, Cooper in
Chinese Alchemy and The Encyclopedia of Eastern philosophy and
Religion, p. 183.
14. How one verifies the existence of immortals or the success of
such an endeavor is an interesting problem. Few mystics, East or West,
are willing to put themselves to the test. Besides, spirits and immortals
are known to be notoriously shy. Furthermore, the Daoists of both the
inner and the outer schools were not interested in proving anything.
They were simply doers, striving to achieve immortality, often recluses
who were unconcerned with the cares of the world. They had nothing
to prove.
15. Su Nu, the Yellow Emperor’s female advisor, suggested the
When a man loves once without losing his semen,
He will strengthen his body,
If he loves twice without losing it,
His hearing and vision will become more acute.
If three times, all diseases may disappear.
If four times, he will have peace of mind.
If five times, his heart and blood circulation
will be revitalized.
If six times, his loins will become strong.
If seven times, his buttocks and thighs
may become more powerful.
If eight times, his skin may become smooth.
If nine times, he will become immortal.
(‘The Secrets of the Jade Chamber’ quoted from Chang, 1977:44)
16. Today, teachers of Taiji and Qigong are more modest in their
claims and tend to use the words ‘halting’ or ‘arresting’ the process of
old age instead of ‘reversing it.’ Nevertheless, in some cases, I have Vintage Books, New
seen people drop ten years by strengthening their Qi. York.
17. See Breslow, pages 282-83, 299. Fung, Yu-lan, (1966). A short History of Chinese Philosophy, edited
18. The Taiji Classics tell us to ‘Walk like a cat.’ by Derk
Bodde, The Free Press Edition, New York.
Biography Legge, James, (Trans.). (1971). Confucian Analects: The Great
Arieh Lev Breslow is a thirty-year certified practitioner of Learning and The
Taijiquan. He has taught Taiji and Qigong in Wellness Centers and Taiji Doctrine of the Mean, Dover Pub., New York.
gatherings throughout Europe, Israel and the United States. Recently Lo, P., Inn, M., Amacker, R., Foe, S., (Trans). (1985). The Essence of
he wrote ‘The Tai Chi Falls Prevention Manual for Seniors and the T’ai Chi
Physically Challenged’ and produced video that demonstrates the Ch’uan, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA.
Manual’s exercises. The Manual and video comprise a complete Stevens, John, (1987). Abundant Peace: The Biography of Morihei
program designed with the goal of improving the walking ability for Ueshiba, Founder
those with balance problems. The Manual includes leg strengthening of Akido, Shambhala, Boston and London.
and Taiji balance exercises along with warm-ups and self-massage Thompson, Lawrence G., (1989). Chinese Religion, Wadsworth
techniques. pub.
Arieh has also written extensively in the field of Taiji and Qigong. Van Over, Raymond, (ed.). (1984). Taoist Tales, Meridian.
‘Beyond The Closed Door: Chinese Culture and the Creation of T’ai Watson, Burton, (Trans.). (1964). Chuang Tzu, The Inner Chapters,
Chi Ch’uan’ was his first book. It has been acclaimed for its erudition Unwin
and accessibility to the general public and is considered one of the best Paperbacks.
sources for the origins and history of Taiji. His second book, ‘When Wile, Douglas, (Trans.). (1985). Cheng Man-Ch’ing’s Advanced Tai-
Less is More: Using the Mind to Exercise the Body,’ teaches chi Form
meditation, Qigong and visualization exercises for health from both a Instructions with Selected Writings on Meditation, The I Ching,
theoretical and practical perspective. Accompanying ‘When Less is Medicine and the
More’ is a video that demonstrates the Qigong exercises found in the Arts, Sweet Ch’i Press, Brooklyn.
book. He has also written numerous articles on Taiji including ‘Tai Chi: Wile, Douglas, (Trans.). (1983). Tai-chi Touchstones: Yang Family
The Cosmic Mobile,’ and ‘The Importance of Yielding in Push Hands’ Secret Transmissions, Sweet Ch’i Press, Brooklyn.
which appeared in the T’ai Chi Journal and ‘Immortality in Chinese Yang, C. K., (1961). Religion in Chinese Society, Uni. of California
Thought and its Influence on Taijiquan and Qigong,’ which appeared Press, Berkeley
in The Journal of Asian Martial Arts. Recently an article on his work and Los Angeles.
with Taiji and older adults appeared in Tai Chi Chuan, The Journal of Attaining Sagehood & Immortality in Daoism
the Tai Chi Union for Great Britain. Laozi, Chuangzi, & Confucian Ideals
His first novel, ‘On the Wings of a Dragon,’ has just been Antonio Claret
published and is a whodunit based on his extensive knowledge of
Chinese immortality and martial arts. A new book of essays will be
published soon called, ‘In the Garden of my Teachers.’ Transcending the Human World and Attaining the Heavenly World
Arieh is married to Anne who also teaches Taiji and Qigong along
with dance. They have three daughters and live near Jerusalem, Israel.
Here we concentrate on the practical and humanistic aspects of
Arieh can be reached at: the ideal of a
taichi@beqezint.net sage (shengren) in Daoism, which reveal its paradoxicality or bi-
www.jerusalemtaichi.com directionality. The
Phone: 972-993-3394 or 052-845-5101 analysis is based of some stories from Zhuangzi, ideas from Laozi and
teaching of
Quanzhen school masters of the 20th century China.

Bibliography It is argued that the peculiarity of this ideal in Daoism stems from
the idea of “mutual entailing of opposites” and the principle of
Blofeld, John, (1979). Taoism: The Quest for Immortality, Unwin reversibility (fan) as presented in Laozi and Zhuangzi and developed
Paperbacks, later into the practical view “to return into ordinary life after trans-
London. cending divine life”, which is still living in the 20
Breslow, Arieh Lev, (1995). Beyond the Closed Door: Chinese th century Daoism.
Culture and the Creation of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Jerusalem, Israel: Almond
Blossom Press. Some reasons for its development and rebirth are indicated. One
Chan, W.T. (Trans.). (1973). A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, of the most significant changes in the comparative studies of
Princeton Uni. Press. Confucianism and Daoism in the recent decade seems to be the
Chang, Joland, (1977). The Tao of Love and Sex: The Ancient dissolution of the long-lived stereotypical
Chinese Way to treatment of those two Chinese schools as opposite and incongruent
Ecstasy, Dutton, New York. ones (of
Cheng Man-jan (Zheng Manqing), (1981). Lao Tzu: My words are Confucianism as this-worldly, active, human-oriented, and Daoism as
very easy to other-worldly,
Understand, Trans. by Tam C. Gibbs, North Atlantic Books, non-active, nature-oriented, for example). Today, they both are
Richmond, CA. acknowledged as
Cohen, Kenneth, (1997). The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science concentrated on the same topics, namely those of self-cultivation and
of Chinese Energy self-
Healing, Ballentine Books, New York. transformation, and oriented to the body–mind practices, although
Cooper, J. C., (1990). Chinese Alchemy, The Taoist Quest for their ways and tasks often differ.
Immortality, Sterling
Publications. Accordingly, they both could be conceived as teachings about the
Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, (1989). ideal
Shambhala, Boston. person, since man is treated as a potential rather than actual, a creative
Feng, Gia-Fu and English, Jane, (Trans.). (1972). Tao Te Ching,
133
rather than created being both in Confucianism and in Daoism.
Moreover, they share the same ideal of the sage (shengren) which is
the highest one in the Kongzi and Mengzi schools as well as in Laozi,
and therefore this ideal has received the most scholarly attention.
Some sinologists even tried to compare it with the person of ancient
sages – rulers in the other cultures, and their charismatic sacral power
as the embodiment of the universal idea of the primordial unity of
human and divine realms.
Different types:
There are a good person (shan ren), benevolent person (ren ren),
gentleman (junzi), sincere person (chengren), a sage (shengren) in
Confucianism, and a great person (da ren), integral person (quanren),
genuine person (zhenren), superlative person (zhiren), spiritual person
(shenren), immortal (xianren), a sage (shengren) in Daoism.
Shengren of Laozi was investigated mainly from the political point
of view, since it is associated with Dao as the symbol of the “ruleless
ruler” of the universe here. In a similar manner, his actions are ascribed
to the realm of Heaven in Zhuangzi.
However, this ideal seems to me more complicated and richer in its
meaning,
especially as presented in Zhuangzi and developed after Han in the
Daoist religious
traditions. Here, I would like to re-examine the ethical and practical
aspects of
shengren in Daoism, as they are implied by the idea of “mutual
entailing of opposites” and the principle of reversibility (fan) in Laozi
and Zhuangzi, which were developed later into the practical view “to
return into ordinary life, after transcending divine life”.
It is argued that the ideal of shengren seems to be the most
evident embodiment of the paradoxical Daoist worldview and tasks, i.
e. its keeping to the roots of Heaven and being in the human world at
the same time, or being in the world without being in it instead of
ignoring the human realm in preference to the realm of Heaven, as was
usually supposed by many sinologists. This ideal sheds also more light
on the ethical
aspects of Daoism, which were ignored for a long time in Western
sinology.
At least three interconnected methodological problems of the
analysis of shengren
should be taken into consideration here as the possible foci of criticism
of my essay.
First, it is the problem of historical approach, since it would be not
correct to regard it as some unchangeable entity or idea. Its meaning
was transformed considerably from Han times onwards and was
influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism. Second, the problem of
“doctrinal” approach, or the possibility to extract some particular
Daoist features of shengren as different from Confucian ones. This
problem is already evident in Zhuangzi and its “outer” and
“miscellaneous” chapters in particular, since they are products of many
hands and schools. Third, the problem of conceptual consistency,
which is also very problematic in Zhuangzi. To try to give a consistent
definition of shengren here would be the same as to describe the virtue
of benevolence (ren) in Lunyu, and sometimes it seems to me that
Zhuangzi is talking about one ideal only named differently in different
contexts and from different aspects, in order to confuse the reader
who is concerned with the correct use of names.
The problems indicated above need more careful study than the
present essay. Thus,
my approach will be rather Confucianist in order to reveal some
particular human
aspects of Daoist self-cultivation, which connect or disconnect it with
Confucianism.
Chapter 15, “Ingrained Opinions” of Zhuangzi, opens with a
134
description of a few
kinds of people and their style of life and self-cultivation who aim at
the perfection of the world. First, among them there are arrogant
“scholars of mountain and valley” who try to be different from the
common society, “leaving the world behind” and “engaging in lofty
discussions and resentfully slandering others”.
Next, there are the “moralists” who aim at “discoursing on
humaneness, righteousness, loyalty, and trustworthiness”, thus being
concerned with learning and bringing peace to the world through
teaching and instruction. Yet next there are the “scholars of court” who
are concerned with the means of governing, ‘discoursing on great merit
and establishing great fame, observing the ceremonies for lord and
subject, and rectifying those on high and those below’.
They are followed by “the scholars of rivers and lakes” who prefer
non-action, fishing, living leisurely, fleeing from the world and being
idle. At last, there are the searchers for longevity who “bear strides and
bird stretches…, channel the vital breath…, nourish the physical form
so as to emulate the hoary age of Progenitor Peng”.
All those persons are practitioners of Dao, but their ways of doing
this seem to be
one-sided and too demonstrative. The only person who is able to avoid
such vice, or “be lofty without having ingrained opinions, cultivate
himself without humaneness and
righteousness, govern without merit or fame, be idle without rivers and
lakes, and live long without channelling and flexions” is the sage.
What makes him different from the others is his “placidity,
mildness, quietude, indifference, emptiness, non-being and non-
action”, which are the signs of his integrity as well as of Heaven. His
action of non-action is simply responding to the stillness and
movement of yin and yang and is not disturbed by anxiety and joy, likes
and dislikes. Thus, the characteristics of shengren here remind us those
of Laozi, with an emphasis on the purity and stillness of his mind and
on guarding the spirit in the integrity. Nevertheless, do those features
of shengren suggest his associality or supra-sociality rather than a
special kind of sociality? Or, to put it in other words, how should the
sage cultivate such indifference to the things in dealing with the things
and yet to preserve his universality?
The answer to this question could be found in another story from
Zhuangzi, namely
the dialogue between Yao and a border warden of the Hua kingdom.
The latter,
thinking that Yao was a sage, asked him for three blessings which were
long life,
wealth and many sons, but Yao declined all of them. The border
warden was surprised
why Yao did not desire such things which all men desire.
‘Many sons’, said Yao, ‘bring many fears. Wealth brings many
affairs. Longevity brings many disgraces. These three blessings are of
no use in nourishing virtue. Therefore, I decline them’. At first’, said
the border warden, ‘I thought you were a sage. But now I see you are a
superior man. In giving birth to the myriads of people, heaven is
certain to assign them their duties. If you were to have many sons, you
would assign them their duties, so what is there to fear? If you were
wealthy, you could share with others, so what affairs would there be?’
As the sage, according to the border warden, is not affected by any
tribulations, so
no any disgrace would be dangerous to him.This story could be
interpreted in various ways, especially since it is ascribed by some
sinologists to the type of “syncretic” and latest ones,in which some
Confucian virtues, condemned in previous chapters, are treated in a
more positive light here.
However, it doesn’t seem to be simply a propagation of Confucian
ideas. It implies an
example of a real Daoist ideal, i. e. of shengren’s ability to comprise in
his Dao all things, all opposites, or the Way of Heaven and of Man,
without being attached to
anyone of them. First of all, he is the one who is able to adapt to the
circumstances and to act accordingly, including the resolution of
human affairs and sympathy with people, without being involved in
their anxieties. It means that Daoists are no less concerned with the
realization of wisdom in real life, or the cultivation of the simplicity of
life in its civilizationality rather than ignoring the human world and
civilization. Such people were presented in the later literature
(Baopuzi, Guan Yinzi) as talented, able ones or those who know how
to act.
They look sometimes foolish, sometimes intelligent or ignorant,
but more often they look like masters, and because of this they are not
recognisable by clever or common people. Clever men are concerned
only with “higher” affairs and forget “low” ones, and common people
are concerned only with “low” things, overlooking “higher” ones,
whereas shengren is different from both in his ability to be imbued to
the same degree with both the “upper” and the “low” things.
In other words, he is able to look in both or all directions. In a
similar manner shengren is presented in Yijing which influenced
Daoism and Confucianism.
This ability of shengren to look in both directions actually implies the
principle of
the reversibility of Dao, later developed into the idea of “returning to
the secular realm after transcending the sacral realm”. It points to the
limitlessness or inexhaustibility of self-cultivation, which was described
in practical terms as the advice “Don’t stop after you attain the top, but
go further”, and became especially important in the 20th century
Daoism.
The full realization of this idea could be found in a unique story
about the life
and search for Dao of the contemporary Daoist master of the
Quanzhen school, “Wang
Liping” (born 1949), written by Chen Kaiguo and Zhen Shunchao.
The most impressive and instructive seems to me the last precept
given by two teachers of Wang Liping after he had finished his way of
learning and had to start his way of a teacher.
They told that it is difficult to be intelligent as well as to be stupid,
but it is much more difficult to return to stupidity on becoming more
intelligent, or having learnt the things that are not understandable and
acceptable by common people. Nevertheless, he should not in any way
oppose himself to them or show his superiority. Instead, he should
realize that everything and everybody has his own place in the world,
and he must hide his secret knowledge in the midst of ordinary life and
not to let anybody know or guess about it. Moreover, according to the
teachers of Wang Liping, the ability to live together with one’s
relatives, in one’s home and in the human world means a full
realization of one’s sincerity and following the natural way which could
be treated as returning to the primordial simplicity and enjoying the
heavenly genuineness.
One should not aim to attain the upper realms if his knowledge
has no limits.
This lesson could not be regarded only as an attempt to popularize
Daoism in
contemporary Chinese culture in the conditions of the loss of
traditional values and
involvement into the processes of globalization, or to adapt its secret
wisdom to
common thinking and thus making it more open for more people,
which is indispensable for its survival. Rather, according to teachers of
Wang Liping, it is making use
of a favourable moment or of changes of the world for a more universal
dissemination
of Dao in order to help people who are in need. It is, moreover, making
use of the idea of Dao (and of shengren) as being intermingled
with both the light and dust, as it was presented in Laozi.
135
This idea, unmasked in the light of practical wisdom, means that
the main task for the Daoist self-cultivation is helping others through
the cultivation of one’s virtue (de) or wisdom. To put it in other words,
we should help in improving others through the improvement of
ourselves according to the Daoist principle of “mutual support”, which
was later reformulated into the common axiom
“order your own personality and govern the empire” (zhishen
zhiguo),
which could be ascribed to Confucianism as well. In this regard,
the Daoist shengren is similar to the Confucian one. The influence of
his virtue (de) is described by Kongzi as natural as that of wind.
According to him, shengren is the one who integrates in himself the
virtue of all under the Heaven (Tianxia) and is able to communicate it
to others, thus being above other people like the polar star which stays
in one place but makes the other stars go round it. However, the
Daoist shengren, being superior in his power over others, nevertheless
has to disappear
in the crowd of people and to be like all of them, or to “take the heart
of the people as his own”.
As Ames comments on such “immediacy” of sagacious thinking, it
“lies in
inspiring and transforming the ordinary and routine business of the
common people
rather than in some “I-know-not-what” altered state of consciousness.
The influence of Daoist shengren should be as imperceptible as no-
influence, no-wind, because the wind seems too evident in its action.
According to Laozi, any show of the virtue or even an intention to
influence others is artificial. Consequently, as some sinologists note,
many Daoist adepts (including the authors of the dialogue in
Zhuangzi Ch. 12 cited above) have condemned the practice of
escapism and living in
reclusion as following not the genuine and integral Way.
Of course, such a view could be taken as a sign of the process of
interaction of Daoism and Confucianism,which became more active
after Han, especially in the period of Six Dynasties, when the main
models of reclusion were developed.
On the other hand, such an ideal of shengren as being involved
simultaneously in
self-cultivation and the realization of the order of the world could be
conceived as the embodiment of a paradoxical coexistence of opposite
orientations, namely con-
centration on oneself and participation in everything, or, to put it in
Daoist terms, as the harmonization of the “inner” (nei) and the
“outer” (wai). The Daoist could attain through his mastery of bodily
and spiritual powers such an inner freedom which makes needless any
outer dissociation from the human world and its affairs.
Nevertheless, such person looks like an ordinary man in his words,
actions and thoughts, but he is different from others in his no-talks, no-
actions and no-thoughts, and because of this he could live in safety. As
Maliavin has pointed out, he is neither involved into the ordinary life
nor separated from it, i. e. he is like a mirror in the emptiness of his
heart, which reflects all the things and is not in opposition to them.
This is why the ideal of shengren is not limited by the political
sphere only, but is
aesthetical and ethical as well. This is why the name of shengren could
be deservedly
given also to the most talented artist who know how to act and unite in
themselves the creativity of Heaven and man. Zhu Jinxuan, for
example, called the ideal painter a sage because of his ability to find the
room in himself for everything that could not be embraced by the
Heaven and Earth.
In conclusion, the Daoist ideal of shengren could be helpful in
explaining a few
things......
It makes clear, first, why Indian Buddhism under the influence of
Daoism took
its most popular form in China as Chan Buddhism, with its ideal of
Bodhisattva which
requires not to transcend the world after attaining Enlightenment;
second, why there
were principled Confucianists rather than non-principled Daoists who
suffered because
of their personal persuasions, since their sense of self-respect and
ambitions of a
gentleman sometimes were not reconcilable with the realities of social
life, and they
had to give up the former or the latter one. In this regard, the ideal of a
sage in Daoism seems more realistic and practical than that of a
gentleman (junzi) in Confucianism.
Third, we realise why the various and subtle methods of Daoist
self-cultivation have
penetrated into the many realms of Chinese culture and life and thus
extended in all
directions the limits of man’s perfection. The cultivation of virtue (de)
in Daoism leads to a bi-directional rather than one-directional way,
namely transcending the human world and attaining the heavenly
world in order to become a Great Person (da ren) and then returning
to the human world with the transformed heart–mind.
Thus, the criticism of the ordinary (more often Confucian) virtues
and norms of life
in Daoism could be understood not as the readiness to reject but to
broaden them, which helped to broaden also the boundaries of
Confucian culture. The look taken from the perspective of shengren,
or the unity of heavenly and human ways, helps to treat in a more
comprehensive way the phenomenon of culture itself as self-cultivation
and
self-creativity rather than the creation of conventional norms and
embellishment of
human nature. Such a treatment does away with the boundaries
between “nature” and
“culture”, or “naturality” and “artificiality” as they are discussed and
emphasized in the Western world, but it could not be adapted in the
interpretation of Chinese “Daoist” culture in the same way.
Women in Daoism, Buddhism, & Confucianism
Daughter/Wife/Mother or Sage/Immortal/Bodhisattva?
Joseph A. Adler
http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Writings/
Women.htm
Joseph A. Adler, Department of Religious Studies, Kenyon College
ASIANetwork Annual Meeting
Whittier, California April 23, 2005
Teaching the history of Chinese religions in a gender-balanced way
involves a rather large number of variables. First, of course, there is the
fact that one must deal with at least three religious traditions:
Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, each of which itself varies both
synchronically (at a given period of time) and diachronically (through
time).(1) In addition, there are the following sets of polarities that must
be taken into account:
The various textual traditions and the social practices that may or
may not reflect them.
Normative texts and descriptive texts. Students usually need to be
warned not to make the same mistake as some of the early
Orientalists, i.e. to assume that such texts as the Liji (Record of Ritual)
described actual practices, when they were more like idealized norms.
Similarly, the traditional dynastic histories were written from a
distinctly Confucian perspective and cannot be relied upon as
transparent sources on topics in which the Confucians had a particular
sectarian interest (such as Buddhism and Daoism).
The practices of the literate elite and those of the majority of
commoners. This distinction should not be over-emphasized
136
though, since there was considerable mutual influence.
Women constructed as ideal symbols and women seen as diverse
individuals.
Women portrayed as objects of a male-centered “gaze” and women as
subjects expressing their own lives and worldviews.
Since these are polarities, not dualities, any specific observation may be
located anywhere along the spectrum defined by each one. And in
certain cases the boundaries between the three traditions can be just as
fluid. So we have a large number of variables at play, and little time in
which to do them justice.
Of the three traditions, Confucianism must be central to this
discussion, since it largely defined the mainstream discourse on gender
in China from the Han dynasty onward. But just as we need to
distinguish between the treatment of women as symbols of a feminine
ideal and women as diverse individuals, we also need to be aware that
Confucianism is not a fixed, monolithic, entity but rather a dynamic
field of discourse. Not only does it display both synchronic and
diachronic variation, it also has different levels of discourse. For
example, the same Confucian thinker might express one view of
women in a commentary to a classic scripture and quite another in a
letter, conversation, or eulogy. The same is true, of course, for the other
religious traditions.
The conventional view
I will begin by sketching what might be called the conventional
view of women in Chinese religions, and then will suggest ways by
which to go beyond it. The usual story goes something like this. The
Confucians - or “scholars” (ru), as they were actually called - were the
conservative supporters of the status quo, especially after the 2nd
century BCE, when their teachings and their authority were given
official sanction by the government and they became invested in its
stability and continuance. Confucians argued that the family was a
microcosm of the state, and just as the state was ruled by a male
emperor with the mandate of Heaven, the father possessed a natural
authority that legitimized the social superiority of men in any social
context. The proper place for women was in the home, where they
were largely responsible for the upbringing and education of children.
The “woman’s way (dao)” was to assume the roles of wife and
mother. The chief virtue proper to these roles was obedience: first to
her father, then to her husband, and finally to her grown son. Such
views, it is said, led eventually to such misogynistic practices as foot-
binding (for the erotic pleasure of men), which began in the Tang
dynasty (7th -10th centuries), and the “cult of chastity” (in the Ming
and Qing dynasties, 14th - early 20th centuries), which elevated chaste
widows to the role of cultural heroes. In the early 20th century such
Confucian repression was harshly criticized, for example by the writer
Ba Jin in his novel, The Family (Jia), which portrayed the stifling and
lethal influence of Confucian family values on both women and men.
The “May Fourth” generation of intellectuals and the Communists,
who later came to power, rejected Confucianism as one of the chief
causes for China’s failure to modernize. For the Communists,
Confucianism was a “feudal ideology” (terminology that one still hears
from tour guides in China) that stood for social hierarchy and thus was
inimical to socialism.
The conventional view presents Buddhism and Daoism as the
woman’s refuge from the hostility of Confucian values. Although
Confucianism to a great extent defined the playing field for two
thousand years, alternatives were available to women by recourse to
the values and practices of Daoism and Buddhism. In the early phase
of Daoist thought - i.e. the classical texts Laozi (a.k.a. Dao de jing) and
Zhuangzi, which took their present forms by the 3rd century BCE -
Confucian values were strongly criticized as being human contrivances,
and the spontaneous processes of the natural world were seen as the
model for a meaningful human life.
The Laozi, in particular, seems to express a strong preference for
distinctly “feminine” virtues, such as yielding, softness, fertility, and
non-aggression, and suggests that these are, in the long run, both
healthier and (perhaps ironically) more effective in the furtherance of
personal interests.(2) Earlier versions of the conventional story end the
Daoist chapter right there, completely ignoring the full-fledged Daoist
religion, which only began in the 2nd century CE. But until the 1980s
there was relatively little scholarship available in English on the Daoist
religion.
Buddhism played a similar role. Entering China from India by way
of Afghanistan and the “Silk Road” at the beginning of our first
millennium, Buddhism at first was solely the religion of foreign monks,
all of whom (as far as I know) were male. But as it gradually spread into
the Chinese population it attracted women in substantial numbers.
Buddhist nunneries provided alternative vocations not only for those
women who chose not to marry, but also for widows and those women
who, once their children had grown, felt limited by Confucian social
restrictions. A prominent example of the greater possibilities for
women in Buddhism is the fact that one of its most important
“deities” (using that term loosely), the Bodhisattva of Compassion,
Avalokitesvara (Guanyin in Chinese), essentially became female in
China, reflecting the enormous appeal of Buddhism among women.(3)
Updating and complicating the conventional view
That, more or less, is the standard account of women in Chinese
religions. But it doesn’t incorporate much of the scholarly literature on
women in Chinese religions that has appeared in the past two decades
or more, and continues to appear at increasing rates. Here I will not
attempt to review it all, but I will merely offer an impressionistic
outline of some of the trends since about 1980 and new perspectives to
which students today can and should be exposed.
To begin with Chinese Buddhism, in the early 1980s Diana Paul,
who has been called a pioneer in the field, published two important
works on women as portrayed in the normative textual tradition of
Mahayana Buddhism: The Buddhist Feminine Ideal (Scholars Press,
1980), focusing on Queen Srimala in the Srimaladevi Sutra; and
Women in Buddhism (2nd ed., University of California Press, 1985),
surveying the Mahayana sutra literature more broadly. Paul showed
that there is a tension in the canon between the philosophical
foundation of Mahayana thought, which provides no justification for
discrimination against women, and the patriarchal attitudes that were
so deeply-rooted in both the Indian and Chinese cultures that gave rise
to and interpreted the canon.
The famously ambiguous story of the 8-year old daughter of the
Dragon King in the “Devadatta” chapter of the Lotus Sutra can be
taken as a symbol of that tension. The precocious young girl shows up
the sceptical disciple, Shariputra, by manifesting her full Buddhahood
at the wink of an eye - yet she does so by first briefly transforming
herself into a man, reflecting the popular Buddhist notion that women
cannot achieve Buddhahood in their polluted female bodies, but must
first be reborn as men.(4)
Several other scholars, since Paul’s ground-breaking work, have
been focusing less on the normative textual tradition and more on the
lives of individual women in Chan Buddhism, the most prevalent
school since the Song dynasty (10th - 13th centuries). Among them are
Miriam Levering, who has published a series of essays since the 1980s
on women in Chan Buddhism (primarily the female disciples of the
Song dynasty Chan master Dahui), Beata Grant, and Ding-hwa Evelyn
Hsieh.(5)
One of the most interesting developments in Buddhism today is
that Buddhist nuns in Taiwan have been leaders in such groups as the
Buddhist Compassion Relief (Tzu-chi) Foundation (founded in 1966 by
the nun Cheng Yen), which may be the fastest-growing religious
organization in Taiwan. I might also mention an excellent
documentary film, “To the Land of Bliss” by Wen-jie Qin (who has a
Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard), which examines the
responses of Buddhist nuns at a Pure Land Buddhist temple in
Sichuan to the death of their abbot in 1998.(6)
137
In the case of Daoism, the most remarkable development bringing
the conventional view up to date since the early 1980s is that
scholarship on the Daoist religion, as opposed to the early Daoist
classics (Laozi and Zhuangzi), has come into maturity and opened up
essentially a whole new tradition to the English-speaking world.
Beginning in the late 2nd century CE, several series of revelations were
received and recorded (the first series from the now-divinized Laozi),
and now comprise the core of the enormous Daoist Canon (containing
over 1400 titles). Daoist communities existed (in the Celestial Masters
tradition) in which women could be priests or “libationers”, and later
on there were respected female Daoist teachers, a number of whom
achieved apotheosis as “immortals.” In medieval Daoist monasteries,
women were equal in status to men in all ways, distinguished only by
the type of cap they wore.(7)
The current generation of Daoist scholars, many of whom were
trained by the late Michel Strickmann at the University of California at
Berkeley and by Livia Kohn at Boston University, have been churning
out translations, essays, and monographs at a furious rate, including a
substantial number of accounts of Daoist women. As in the case of
Buddhism, this has shifted the focus somewhat from normative texts
and idealized conceptions of the feminine to individual female figures,
including deities, immortals, and mere humans.
The recently published Women in Daoism, by Catherine Despeux
and Livia Kohn (Three Pines Press, 2003), provides an excellent
summary of current scholarship. So now there is much more solid data
available to show how Daoism provided alternatives for women to the
Confucian-dominated mainstream of society, in terms of vocation,
social status, and religious symbolism.
And so we arrive at last at the bête noir, Confucianism. It is not my
intention to exonerate Confucianism from responsibility for the
subjugation of women in China, but rather to complicate the over-
simplified picture presented above. It is unrealistic to attempt to
explain away or minimize the damage done to women’s lives in China
by policies and practices that have been legitimized in Confucian
terms, such as the “cult of chastity” in the Ming and Qing dynasties,
which condemned many widows to poverty and loneliness by placing a
social stigma on remarriage by women.(8) Nor is it adequate to
separate Confucianism entirely from these practices by arguing that
they stem ultimately from patriarchal social values, and are only
reflected secondarily in Confucian thought. While that may be true, it
does not remove from the Confucian ledger the responsibility for
reinforcing those values.
On the other hand, it is intellectually and historically mistaken to
essentialize the Confucian tradition - to treat it as a static, monolithic,
misogynistic entity - and thereby to condemn it out of hand.
Throughout most of the twentieth century in China that is precisely
what occurred: first by the pro-Western, rationalistic New Culture and
May Fourth movements, and then by the rabidly anti-traditional
Communist regime. An admittedly extreme example of this approach
is embodied in a pamphlet produced during the Cultural Revolution,
called Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Criticize Confucius and Lin
Piao, which begins, “Confucius was a reactionary who doggedly
defended slavery and whose doctrines have been used by all
reactionaries, whether ancient or contemporary, Chinese or foreign,
throughout the more than 2,000 years since his time.”(9) Even putting
aside the strident political dimension of such material, many non-
Maoist scholars today, both Chinese and Western, have not critically
examined the clichés and out-of-context Confucian quotes that
provided fodder for this kind of polemic, such as the oft-quoted
comment by the 11th-century scholar Cheng Yi to the effect that it
would be better for a widow to die of starvation than to lose her
“virtue.”
Nevertheless, Confucian scholarship in the West since World War
II has blossomed and matured, led by the estimable William Theodore
de Bary and Wing-tsit Chan at Columbia and Tu Wei-ming at Harvard
(and formerly Berkeley), and building upon the work of eminent
scholars in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. In mainland China,
however, serious contemporary scholarship on Confucianism got a
relatively late start. It began in the early 1980s after the death of Mao
Zedong, the fall of the Gang of Four, and the rise to power of the more
pragmatic Deng Xiaoping. Even then, such influential scholars as Ren
Jiyu brought to their work the Marxist assumption that religion was
inherently bad. Only in the past decade or so - paralleling the revival of
popular religion in China since the early 1990s - has Chinese
scholarship on Confucianism put aside the tired old debates about
materialism vs. idealism and begun to take seriously the prospect of
learning something valuable from the tradition. The website
Confucius2000.com, for example, is an extraordinary forum reflecting
the re-evaluation of Confucianism occurring in China today, including
vigorous debate on its religious dimensions.(10)
So what can we learn (and teach) from contemporary scholarship
concerning women in Confucianism? The first two points I would
stress are methodological: (a) we need to examine the Confucian
tradition as a dynamic field of discourse unfolding through history
rather than a static body of ideas, and (b) we need to bear in mind the
conceptual polarities outlined at the beginning of this paper, the most
important of which, in regard to Confucianism, are the first two: (1)
the distinction between the textual tradition and social practices, and
(2) the distinction between normative texts and descriptive texts.
Taking the historical view, we must identify the Han dynasty(11) as
the first important turning point. Two events are central to this
episode, and one man is the key figure in both: Dong Zhongshu
(195?-105? BCE). It was Dong who persuaded the Han Emperor, Wu-di
(r. 140-87 BCE), to switch allegiance and state support from Huang-
Lao Daoism to Confucianism. The Confucian scriptures (at that point
limited to the so-called Five Classics) and the ideas of Confucius
(551-479 BCE) then became the ideological basis for the training of
government officials, and for the first time the state had an interest in
controlling the content of those teachings. And, to further develop and
clarify the relevance of Confucian thought to government, Dong
Zhongshu wrote his magnum opus, the Luxuriant Gems of the Spring
and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu fan lu), in which he incorporated, for the
first time in a systematic way, the theory of yin and yang into the
emerging Confucian synthesis.
There is an emerging consensus among recent scholars that it was
the rigid application of the yin-yang rubric to women and men,
respectively, that has led to the repression of women in Confucian
thought and practice. There are two aspects to this process that need
to be explored: the intellectual and the historical. First, the intellectual
point is actually somewhat counter-intuitive, because the yin-yang
concept is a principle of complementarity or polarity, which, one would
think, would not be consistent with a hierarchical structure. But even
before the Han, yin-yang was associated with an implicit hierarchy,
since Heaven (above) and Earth (below) were early examples of the
distinction.(11a) Yet they were originally seen as functional modes of
activity, which both men and women were understood to embody.
The key interpretive shift, which seems to have occurred in the
Han and is certainly seen in Dong Zhongshu’s writing, was to
essentialize men as yang and women as yin:(12) “The husband is yang
and the wife is yin;”(13) and “Yin and yang also may be called man and
woman, and man and woman may also be called yin and yang.”(14) As
Chan Sin Yee points out in an excellent essay, the yin-yang concept
itself does not imply gender essentialism. But, she says, “the alignment
was in fact made by Confucians in the past, and with the alignment,
gender essentialism is suggested.”(15) This, of course, begs the question
why Dong Zhongshu should have made this interpretive shift in the
application of the yin-yang complementarity. One can only speculate,
but since Dong was constructing a massive intellectual system of
correspondences, it is not unreasonable to assume that even a garden-
variety level of sexism or patriarchal attitude might have tempted him
to align women and men with yin and yang, in the interest of filling out
his system.
If Dong Zhongshu’s system had remained merely an
138
intellectual construct it almost certainly would not have had the social
impact that is claimed for it. But Dong was not just an effete scholar;
he was a prime minister working for an activist emperor who was
reconceiving a theory of government that was destined to sustain a
great empire. It was the resulting politicization of Dong Zhongshu’s
Confucian synthesis that provided the conservative inertia which, over
the centuries, would draw Confucianism consistently toward support
of stability, a hierarchical order, and the status quo. We see this even
more strongly in the Comprehensive Discussion in the White Tiger
Hall (Baihu tong), which is a record of an imperially-sponsored
conference in 79 CE (although the received text may contain later
additions). The meeting was convened to decide the authenticity of
the “New Text” and “Old Text” versions of the Confucian canon, and
includes such statements as “Yang takes the lead; yin acts in concert.
The male acts; the female follows.”(16)
Another important Han-dynasty text is one written by a woman
for women: the Lessons for Women (Nüjie), by Ban Zhao (45-114 CE).
Ban was the sister of Ban Gu, the official historian of the Former Han
dynasty, who died before he could complete that history, so she
finished it. She wrote the Nüjie ostensibly for her daughters,
instructing them on how to live proper Confucian lives as wives and
mothers. Although this is a relatively rare instance of a female
Confucian voice, Ban Zhao almost entirely accepts the prevailing views
concerning women’s proper roles; they should be silent, hard-working,
and compliant. She stresses the complementarity and equal
importance of the male and female roles according to yin-yang theory,
but she clearly accepts the dominance of the yang-male. Her only
departure from the standard male versions of this orthodoxy is that
she insists on the necessity to educate girls and women.
We should not underestimate the significance of this point, as
education was the bottom line qualification for being a junzi or “noble
person,” and the prevailing view, ever since the time of Confucius, was
that a junzi is presumptively male. Still, some scholars assert that Ban
Zhao did more harm than good to the fate of women in China.(17) But
her example suggests that the Confucian prescription for a meaningful
life as a woman was apparently not stifling for all women. Even some
women of the literate elite, for whom Confucianism was quite
explicitly the norm, were able to flourish by living their lives according
to that model. But we also know from the personal accounts of women
who joined Buddhist nunneries that that was not the case for all
women.
The process by which male and female were rigidly boxed into the
categories of yin and yang was a gradual one, and it was slowed
considerably by the fall of the Han dynasty and the resulting discredit
brought upon Confucianism in the eyes of many intellectuals, who
were drawn instead to Buddhism and Daoism. But the growth of
politicized Confucianism resumed again in the Song dynasty
(960-1279). Here we meet with another great systematizer, Zhu Xi
(1130-1200), who was heavily indebted to his predecessor Cheng Yi
(1033-1107). Both of these figures are frequently depicted as culpable
for the suppression of Chinese women over the last millenium. Cheng
Yi’s statement about widow chastity, referred to above, is one of the
most-quoted indictments of the entire Confucian tradition. Zhu Xi
occasionally expressed similar views, e.g., “To do wrong is unbecoming
to a wife, and to do good is also unbecoming to a wife. A woman is only
to be obedient to what is proper.”(18)
Here is where the distinctions of text vs. social practice and
normative vs. descriptive texts become crucial. Scholars such as
Bettine Birge and Pat Ebrey have shown that these “Neo-Confucian”
writings do not necessarily reflect either the prevailing social practices
or the scholars’ own attitudes and practices in regard to actual women.
(19) Cheng Yi, for example, praised his father for “marrying off” an
orphaned, widowed relative, contrary to the scriptural injunction that a
widow should not remarry.(20) Zhu Xi similarly treated the actual
women in his life far differently than one would expect given his
theoretical writings and statements on the proper role of women. He,
even more so than Dong Zhongshu, was a systematizer, and he too
regarded yin-yang as the most fundamental ordering principle.(21)
Zhu was, in fact, intent on fitting everything he possibly could into
this intellectual system. So it is not surprising that he would align the
categories of man and woman with the fundamental yin-yang principle.
But as the above-mentioned scholars have shown, we should not
superimpose that theoretical structure onto the actual lives of Song
women. In fact, the very existence of such arguments for restrictions
on women’s lives might suggest precisely the opposite: the stronger the
polemic, the higher the percentage of women there might be who are
actually ignoring the strictures.
The politicization of Confucian principles resumed in strength
when Zhu Xi’s teachings became the basis of the civil service
examination system, and remained so for almost 600 years. It was
really the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties in which the
lives of women -- at least women belonging to the literate elite --
became seriously restricted. For example, “[a] woman who was
widowed before she was thirty and remained chaste until she was fifty
was granted a memorial arch, and her family was exempt from certain
kinds of taxes” (under a system of state rewards that actually began in
the early 13th century during the Yuan dynasty, and continued until the
20th century).(22) Of course it was the situation during the Qing, in
particular, that was the immediate point of departure for the liberal
and radical critiques of Confucianism in the twentieth century.
Finally, we should note that the limitations placed on women in
Confucian texts never really applied to the peasant class, for whom the
restriction of women to work within the home and with children was a
luxury they could not afford. And since the percentage of the literate
elite was tiny in the Han dynasty and still relatively small even in the
Qing, we should not assume that the majority of women were even
aware of these restrictions -- which, in any case, were idealized norms
rather than descriptions of the prevailing state of affairs.
Conclusions
The conventional view outlined above is fairly accurate in regard to
Daoism and Buddhism. They did indeed provide welcome alternatives
to the sometimes stifling restrictions on women’s lives prescribed by
Confucianism. What is most important today in teaching Chinese
religions is (1) to include the first-person voices of Buddhist and Daoist
women (making use of the scholars mentioned above), and (2) to
include institutional Daoism. These are fairly easy and straightforward
ways of presenting Chinese religions in a gender-balanced way to
undergraduates.
Confucianism is the hard part. Its role should neither be
whitewashed nor villainized. What is most crucial here is (1) to unpack
the historical development of the tradition, with some attention to the
way in which the yin-yang theory was interpreted, which resulted in
the essentializing of gender roles; (2) to distinguish between normative
texts and actual social practice; and (3) to note that it was politicized
Confucianism that became the supporter of a harshly patriarchal
society. A rigid social hierarchy, of which the gender hierarchy was a
part, was one way of maintaining a stable society.
This is not to say that politicized Confucianism is not “true”
Confucianism; that it is inauthentic. That would be a sectarian
judgment, not a scholarly one. But we can say that this version of
Confucianism was and is not the only version. It arose at a specific
historical moment in response to the political needs of a new empire,
and it continued to be reinforced as later iterations of that empire
found it a useful tool to support a hierarchical social system. Gender
essentialism was not a feature of the teachings of Confucius and
Mencius, nor is it part of contemporary Confucian thought.(23) In fact,
there are contemporary female scholars who call themselves feminist
Confucians. So in my view, the story of how Confucianism became
politicized and what became of it as a result is an excellent object
lesson in the danger of implicating religion too closely with politics.(24)
With these suggestions for nuancing the presentation of
139
Confucianism, and with the numerous resources readily available to
balance the teaching of Daoism and Buddhism with women’s lives and
voices, it is quite possible today to present an adequately gender-
balanced picture of the history of Chinese religions.
NOTES
1. For the sake of brevity I will omit popular religion (minjian
zongjiao), Islam, and Christianity from this discussion.
2. For an alternative interpretation -- that the Laozi stresses the
feminine with the aim of reaching a balance between masculine and
feminine virtues -- see Roger T. Ames, “Taoism and the Androgynous
Ideal,” in Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen, eds., Women in
China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship (Youngstown, NY:
Philo Press, 1981).
3. See Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of
Avalokitesvara (NY: Columbia University Press, 2001).
4. This widespread notion is roundly rejected by the 13th-century
Japanese Zen master, D?gen, in the “Raihai tokuzui” essay of his Sh?b?
genz? (translated by Francis Cook in How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice
as Taught in Zen Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo (Los Angeles: Center
Publications, 1978), pp. 133-150.
5. The syllabus for Hsieh’s course, “Women in Chinese Religions,”
is on the website of the Syllabus Project of the American Academy of
Religion and could serve as a valuable guide for anyone interested in
teaching a similar course.
6. “To the Land of Bliss” (47 minutes) is distributed by
Documentary Educational Resources in Watertown, Mass.
(www.der.org).
7. Livia Kohn, The Daoist Monastic Manual: A Translation of the
Fengdao Kejie (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 65.
8. This is based on a line in the Liji (Record of Rites), ch. 9.
9. Trans. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976.
10. See Anna Xiao Dong Sun, “The Fate of Confucianism as a
Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes,” in Fenggang
Yang and Joseph B. Tamney, eds., State, Market and Religions in
Chinese Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
11. 206 BCE - 220 CE, with a short interregnum from 9 CE to 23
CE.
11a. As Richard J. Smith has put it, “Yinyang relationships involved
the notion of mutual dependence and harmony based on hierarchical
difference. Yin qualities were generally considered inferior to yang
qualities, but unity of opposites was always the cultural ideal.” Richard
J. Smith, China’s Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, 2nd
ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 4.
12. Chan Sin Yee, “The Confucian Conception of Gender in the
Twenty-First Century,” in Daniel A. Bell and Haem Cabbing,
Confucianism for the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), pp. 312-333.
13. Chunqiu fan lu 53, trans. Mark Csikszentmihalyi, in Robin R.
Wang, ed., Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 168.
14. Ibid., p. 169.
15. Chan Sin Yee, p. 320.
 16. Trans. Paul R. Goldin in Wang, Images of Women, p. 171.
17. See Lily Xiao Hong Lee, The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese
Women (Australia: Wild Peony, 1994), ch. 1.
18. Trans. Robin R. Wang, Images of Women in Chinese Thought
and Culture, p. 325.
19. Bettine Birge, “Chu Hsi and Women’s Education,” in Wm.
Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee, eds., Neo-Confucian
Education: The Formative Stage (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989); and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage
and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). See also Bettine Birge, Woman,
Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yuan China, 960-1368
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and idem., “Women
and Confucianism from Song to Ming: The Institutionalization of
Patrilineality,” in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The
Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2003).
20. See Wang, Images of Women , pp. 318-319.
21. I have argued elsewhere that this claim is the key to the
significance of the term taiji (Supeme Polarity) in Zhu Xi’s thought. See
Joseph A. Adler, “Varieties of Spiritual Experience: Shen in Neo-
Confucian Discourse,” in Tu Wei-ming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds.,
Confucian Spirituality, vol. 2 (NY: Crossroad, 2004), pp. 122-123; and
idem., “Zhou Dunyi: The Metaphysics and Practice of Sagehood,” in
Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese
Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 672.
The argument is developed further in a work in progress.
22. Ann Waltner, “Recent Scholarship on Chinese Women,” Signs
21:2 (1996), p. 422. See also her “Widows and Remarriage in Ming and
Early Qing China,” in Guisso and Johannesen, eds., Women in China
(note 2 above).
23. As Li Zehou put it in 1980: “In the hands of different
Confucian scholars serving the interests of their respective classes or
political ideologies, Confucianism often went off at a a tangent. The
Confucius that the May 4 movement in 1919 destroyed was just the
Confucius that Confucians from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty
had identified with monarchy. This is just as Li Dazhao said: ‘We are
launching an attack not upon Confucius himself but upon the
Confucius whom the past successive emperors have molded into a
political idol and authority -- not upon Confucius himself but upon the
Confucius whom the emperors have invested with a tyrannical soul.’”
Trans. Liu Qizhong, in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano,
eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (NY: Columbia
University Press, 2000), p. 578.
24. Aside from the sources already mentioned, there are numerous
recent studies on women in Confucianism. Some of them are:
Patricia Ebrey, “Women, Marriage, and the Family in Chinese
History,” in Paul S. Ropp, ed., Heritage of China: Contemporary
Perspectives on Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990);
Mary Gallagher, “Women and Gender,” in Howard Giskin and
Bettye S. Walsh, eds., An Introduction to Chinese Culture Through
the Family (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001);
Dorothy Ko, “Footbinding as Female Inscription,” in Benjamin A.
Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms, Rethinking
Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam
(Los Angeles: UCLA Asia Institute, 2002);
Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds.,
Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and
Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
Chenyang Li, ed., The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism,
Ethics, and Gender (Chicago: Open Court, 2000);
Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long
Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997);
140
Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng, eds., Under Confucian Eyes:
Writings on Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001);
Sherry J. Mou, ed., Presence and Presentation: Women in the
Chinese Literati Tradition (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
Sherry J. Mou, Gentlemen’s Prescriptions for Women’s Lives: A
Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women (Armonk: M.E.
Sharpe, 2004);
Vivian-Lee Nyitray, “The Real Trouble with Confucianism,” in
Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin, eds., Love, Sex and Gender in
the World Religions (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000); Vivian-Lee Nyitray,
“Treacherous Terrain: Mapping Feminine Spirituality in Confucian
Worlds,” in Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds., Confucian
Spirituality, vol. 2 (NY: Crossroad, 2004);
Vivian-Lee Nyitray, “Confucianism” in Arvind K. Sharma, ed.,
Fundamentalism and the Position of Women in World Religions
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2005);
Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and
Virtue in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998);
Lisa Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood The Rites,” in Bryan
W. Van Norden, ed., Confucius and the Analects: New Essays (NY:
Oxford University Press, 2002);
Barbara Reed, “Women and Chinese Religion in Contemporary
Taiwan,” in Arvind Sharma, ed., Today’s Woman in World Religions
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1994);
Terry Woo, “Confucianism and Feminism,” in Arvind Sharma, ed.,
Feminism and World Religions (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998).
Daoist Alchemy in the West:
The Esoteric Paradigms
Lee Irwin
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVI/Dao.htm#_edn93
Daoism, as the primary indigenous religion of China, is a highly
esoteric tradition. Constructed of many different strands, over several
thousand years, Daoism has a complex history of integrating various
techniques of meditation, spirit communication, consciousness
projection, bodily movements, medicine, and “internal alchemy” with a
profound transpersonal philosophy of nature and a metaphysics of
human relationships based on an ideal of spiritual transformation
leading to immortality.
The mythically structured world of Daoism is rooted in the
tripartite division of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth which interact
through a rich web of symbolic correlations and correspondences
centered on the Daoist sage as a master of a parallel integration of
spirit, mind, and body. Thus while Daoism emphasizes bodily
disciplines like T’ai Chi and Chi Gong, a healthy diet, and a natural life
in harmony with nature and natural processes, it also emphasizes a
paradigm of embodied spirituality that seeks to actualized various
inner potentials that can lead to the radical transformation of the
natural.
Rather than seeking to attain transcendence “beyond nature,”
Daoism emphasizes the value of nature as the ground of all
transpersonal development.[1] Such a paradigm is highly congruent
with certain streams of practice and thought in Western esotericism as
well as with current, emergent models of participatory spirituality
influenced by Daoism.[2]
Over the last fifty years, Daoism has become increasingly
accessible to the west, primarily through the translations of esoteric
texts and through the increasing propagation of multiple Daoist
traditions by both Chinese and Western teachers. Daoism is by no
mean a single hegemonic tradition, but a mosaic of textual, ritual, and
interpretive practices and schools that eludes any simple
quantification. Much like Western esotericism, Daoism is a complex
reflection of movements and dialogical interactions, often based on the
writings or oral traditions of individual masters whose teachings were
at times subversive or highly controversial within the Chinese context.
[3]
 This dialogical interaction was unmediated by any single
institutional hierarchy until very late in Chinese history and even in
that late context, individual Doaists continued to develop esoteric
practices through personal interpretations of the immense collection
of Daoist esoteric texts, as epitomized in the Daozang or collected
sacred texts of Daoism, canonized in 1444 and still largely untranslated
into English.[4] The thousands of texts in this collection are highly
esoteric and yet, there is no specific doctrinal framework for the
collection which leads, in turn, to many sectarian differences in both
interpretation and application of those texts.
Simultaneously, specific schools have also institutionalized their
ritual enactments and training processes resulting in highly diverse
sects, each with its own ethics, techniques, and relationship to the local
community. The cosmological and philosophical reflections (daojia) of
the sages and the religious activities (daojiao) of the institutional
priests combine in a dynamic syncreticism that is unique for each
school or, possibly, for each Daoist. Only a loosely confederated series
of specific texts, practices, and concepts, such as yin-yang, wuxing five-
element cosmology, reiterative correspondence, basic moving and
sitting meditations, a shared pantheon of deities, and a search for
immortality link the various schools.[5]
By the Tang dynasty, the mythical founder of Daoism, Laozi [Lao
Tsu], was worshipped by many Daoists as both a divine ancestor and as
the personification of the great Dao, incarnating as or appearing to
different Daoist masters.[6] Daoism, like Western esotericism, is a
plurality of traditions, not a unilateral institution, a rich synthesis of
diverse texts and practices, not a dogmatized creed. Further, Daoism is
also influenced by shamanic practices, Chinese folk religions,
Confucianism, Buddhism, and various missionary influences from
Islam and Christianity (beginning with the 17th century Jesuits).
Daoists have reacted diversely to these additional influences and have
debated, sometimes fiercely, with each other over the appropriation of
non-Daoist ideas or practices.
Daoism in the West
Early European writings on Daoism such as Athanasius Kircher’s
China Illustrata (1667), characterized it as “full of abominable
falsehoods” and as originating in a form of idolatry transferred from
ancient Egypt. Jesuit missionaries further muddied the waters by
describing Daoists (as opposed to Confucianists whom they
supported) as “magicians and enchanters” whose alchemical search for
immortality was “ridiculous”. [7]
The German philosopher Leibniz (c. 1690s) was among the first of
the European intelligensia to see in the Chinese classics, and in the
synthesis of Neo-Confucian and Daoist thought, a true religious
expression of philosophia perennis, the ancient and perennial, unitary
truth underlying all great religions, a concept resonant with much of
Western esoteric thought. [8] The Leibnitz theory of the monadology,
of living beings mirroring and interacting through harmonious
relations, of the uninterrupted flow of continuous unfolding, has
strong resonance with Daoist ideas. [9]
More serious study of Daoism developed in the 19th century after
the appointment of Abel Rémusat to the first European chair of
Chinese language and literature at the Collège de France. In 1823,
Rémusat published Mémoire sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-Tseu, one
of the earliest European works on Lao-tzu and classical Chinese
Daoism. [10] It was during this same period that Jacques Marter
published his book Gnosticism (1828) in France which first used the
term “esotericism” as a construct linked to perennial philosophy and
secret knowledge. [11] Stanislas Julien published a French translation of
the Daodejing (the most popular classic text of Daoism) in 1841; in 1915
the French Jesuit Père Léon Wieger published his etymological
Dictionary of Chinese Characters plus a large volume of translated
Chinese texts (some from the Daozang); and by 1921, J. J. M. DeGroot
had published his detailed six volume study of the religious systems
(primarily Daoist) of China, a work largely ignored by the
European intelligensia. [12]
141
By the 1840s, European scholars had constructed a form of
Chinese religious philosophy that they named “Daoism”--a term not
used before this time. As a philosophical tradition, Daoism became
associated with a very limited selection of classic texts (Yijing,
Daodejing, and Zhaungzi) as epitomized in the early 1848 English
translation of the “old philosopher Lau-Tzse” by John Chalmers who
presented the text as a serious work of metaphysics. [13]
By the late 19th century, “classical Daoism” was constructed in an
orientalist paradigm as a text based philosophy, a perennial wisdom
tradition that “reflected a timeless spiritual quality” while “later” or
“religious” Daoism was seen as a decline from its original essential
purity. [14] This dual attitude toward Daoism as a transcendental
philosophy unencumbered by religious practice as juxtaposed to a
marginalized and degraded magical religion was largely a French
Catholic construct that was popularized well into the 20th century in
both Europe and America. In 1876, the Scottish Congregationalist
minister, James Legge, was granted the first British Chair in Chinese
studies at Oxford University. His construction of “Daoism” through
reputable classic text translations engendered an attitude and
vocabulary around western Daoism that virtually ignored the history
and complexity of Daoist esotericism. [15]
Legge dismissed “popular” religious Daoism (Taojiao) as
‘superstitious’, ‘unreasonable’ and ‘fantastic’ much in the same way that
other Protestant scholars dismissed Western esoteric traditions of
magic and the occult. Subsequently, the emergent orientalist paradigm
of Daoism was an imaginative projection by western scholars and
esotericists based in a reification of a narrow text corpus reminiscent
of the Christian New testament as “foundational” and essential to
western constructions of religion. [16]
In America, scholarly and popular interest in “oriental religions”
resulted in a Daoist representative attending the World’s Parliament of
Religions held in Chicago in 1893. American interpreters also carried
forth the theme of the universalist aspect of Daoism as illustrated in
Samuel Johnson’s 1878 work on “oriental religions” in which a limited
philosophical Daoism is shown to be a manifestation of a
transcendental “universal religion” independent of any creed or dogma
or rituals and united with the celebration of nature as found in the
New England Transcendentalists. [17]
By way of contrast, as early as 1853 the first Chinese temple was
built in San Francisco and by 1900 there were over 400 such temples
stretched along the American west coast, mixing popular Taoism,
Buddhism and Confucianism. This living presence of Daoism was
largely ignored by American scholars and mostly engaged by Chinese
immigrants. [18] In 1912, C. H. Bjerregaard gave a series of lectures on
The Inner Life and the Tao-Teh-King, discussing the mystical aspects
of philosophical Daoism, at the American Theosophical Society; the
lectures were then published by the Theosophical Society. Bjerregaard
was a newly initiated member of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Sufi Order
(Khan was a murshid of the Indian Chishti Order); this tentative
relationship between Daoism and Islamic esotericism would be later
developed in Europe and America (see below). This publication also
marks the beginning of American interests in esoteric Daoism. [19]
In general, the American Theosophical Society supported an
ecumenical idea of the philosophia perennis, an underlying primordial
wisdom teaching, as inherent to all world religions, an interpretation
that was reinforced throughout much of the 20th century. [20]
Another supporter of the “universalism” inherent to Daoism was Paul
Carus, a German emigrant to America who published (1906) with
Teitaro Suzuki the first English translation of a Daoist text on the
afterlife and karmic retribution, following his 1898 translation of the
Daodejing in support of his beliefs in a universal brotherhood inherent
to many eastern traditions. [21] A similar approach to the text was
made by Dwight Goddard’s (1919) translation of the Daodejing,
entitled Laotzu’s Tao and Wu Wei, later (1939) retranslated and edited
with an article on Daoist philosophy. In 1928, Obed Johnson published
A Study of Chinese Alchemy, one of the earliest western accounts of
Daoist alchemical theory in English. [22]
In Germany, Daoist alchemy was first introduced through the
publication of Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower
(1920’s in German, 1931 in English), a small esoteric Daoist text
selected from the Daozang canon, with a commentary by C. G. Jung.
Wilhelm also published early German translations of the Yijing (with
Daoist influenced commentary) and the Daodejing (1924). Wilhelm’s
translation of the Yijing was extremely popular in its English
translation (1950) in both Britain and America. [23] In 1910, Martin
Buber published a German translation, with commentary, on the
Zhuangzi (the other classic work of Daoist philosophy).
Buber drew parallels between Daoism and Hasidic Kabbalah as
shown in a common use of tales and parables of spiritual masters,
religion as social protest, an ethic of unconventionality, common
meditation-visualization techniques with a goal of mystical union. [24]
From the 1920s to the 1970s, Martin Heidegger drew on German
translations of the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing (as well as Zen
Buddhist texts) as primary sources for his philosophical reflections
after writing Being and Time. In fact, Heidegger made his own
translation of the Daodejing. Concepts such as being-in-the-world,
releasement, letting-be, his affirmation of worldliness and “openness to
Being” all seem resonant with primary Daoist teachings. [25]
C. G. Jung, a proponent of modern alchemical and gnostic
psychology, used the Wilhelm translation of the Yijing as a therapeutic
aid in “exploring the unconscious” of his patients in analysis. Further,
his popular idea of “synchronicity” was deeply influenced by his Daoist
readings as an alternative holistic idea in the face of the more
mechanistic theories of contemporary science. Jung also borrowed
from the Daoist theory of visualization processes and from Yin-Yang
to develop his theory of the polarity of the archetype and the general
polarity of the psyche in search of wholistic integration. [26]
Other psychological theorists, like Erikson and Maslow, also
contain ideas resonant with Daoist thought, while a few limited studies
in Daoist alchemy were also being published. [27] By the 1950s, a
limited textual Daoism was being propagated in academic institutions
and a rudimentary beginning was made in the study of the religious,
social, and historical aspects of Daoism through the work of Maspero,
Needham, Creel, Girardot, Wing-tsit Chan, and others.
Thus the primary influence of Daoism in the west was through
texts and translations, not through the study of religious rituals or
alchemical practices which remained largely obscure and unknown.
Further, these texts were composites based on generations of redaction
and application to religious life and not simply the unedited
philosophical texts of individual masters. This literary bias, based on a
western orientalist textual paradigm, has obscured much that is
esoteric and magical within living Daoism, both in the past and in the
present. The 5,000 texts of the Daozang are filled with esotericism of
the most diverse and complex kind, written in special languages, with
hundreds of symbolic, alchemical drawings, mandalas, maps, diagrams,
and instructions for internal alchemical transformations.
The Chinese terminology for the various esoteric traditions has a
highly complex etymological and semantic history (the 1915 Chinese-
German dictionary gives 46 different meanings for the term Dao).
While the Daodejing has over 200 translations in 17 languages, the
inner teachings of Daoist esotericism still remains obscure in the
popular context. [28] Nevertheless, Daoist thought has impacted both
European intellectual traditions and American transcendental thought
and popular culture in significant and enduring ways.[29]
Early Western Esoteric Interests
In Germany, the first German translation of the Daodejing (1870)
was introduced as a theosophical work of “ancient esoteric
wisdom” (~prisca theologia). [30] The theme of “ancient
wisdom” (coupled with a developing interest in the “exotic east”)
attracted some western esotericists to explore Chinese Daoist
142
texts as resources for the development of their own systems. The range
of intersection between the two is a fascinating melange of cross-
cultural comparison, systemic parallelism, and synthetic integration.
Daoist Five Element (wuxing) cosmology is based in a theory of
correspondences very similar to theories developed in the Greco-
Roman world and subsequently passed onto Medieval Europe. The
many diagrams of the various Daoist correlative systems, distinctive
within the various Daoist schools, resemble in many ways the
correlative symbolism of European Renaissance esotericism in
synthesizing the elements (in Daoism five: in the four directions, water
(N), wood (E), fire (S), metal (W), and earth in the center), with
seasonal, astrological, herbal, mineral, animal as well as with colors,
human organs, and spirit correlations. Equilibrium is found by
balancing the Five Agents through meditative (neiguan), symbolic
processes of internal alchemy (neidan), based in what Isabelle Robinet
calls a “double syntax” of balanced polarity and creative ambiguity. [31]
The Five Agents are a product of the deeper Yin-Yang dynamics
which originated as a relationship between Yang (light, breath,
movement, male heaven) and Yin (darkness, bodily stillness, female
earth) in the midst of which emerged the Human (jen) realm of
mediation and synthesis. This tripart division of Heaven, Humanity,
and Earth each have their correspondent rulers, spirits, and powers.
The interactive dynamics of Yin-Yang integration emerges from the
Primordial Breath (yuanqi or taiji), the creative energy of Being, which
is itself is born of wuqi (Highest Non-Energy). These correlations,
which are many and highly diverse within various Daoist systems, were
further correlated with the eight trigrams and the sixty four hexagrams
of the Yijing, accompanied by multiple Daoist commentaries,
associated with many diverse deities, and strong emphasis on astral
influences of the Big Dipper constellation (Thunder Magic).
All of these associations were tied to ritual and magical practices
carried out by trained Daoist masters who were experts in the esoteric
lore and visualization techniques of Daoist alchemy and ceremonial
invocation. [32] This correlative approach is highly congruent with the
western Hermetic tradition rooted in a similar correlative cosmology
based in early Greco-Roman alchemy, based on five elements (earth,
water, air, fire and aether) transmitted through Islamic alchemical
traditions in the form of alchemical and Hermetic cosmological texts
which were translated into European languages during the Italian
Renaissance. The Hermetic texts were primary sources for western
esoteric theories of the prisca theologia and the philosophia perennis
and were clearly an early, comparative resource for the esoteric reading
of translated Daoist texts. [33]
Renaissance correlative cosmology was highly visual (graphic arts)
and imagistic in mapping the body, for example Robert Fludd’s
microcosmic “atmospheric” depiction of the body or various
Kabbalistic theories of the body, in ways more detailed and elaborate
but similar to Daoist theories of the “landscape of the body” which
contains a multitude of sacred beings, astrological energies, and a
tripart division of upper, middle and lower chambers, each with its
ruling spirits and cosmological correlations. [34] Renaissance
esotericists also used number schemas to elaborate their cosmological
symbolism encoded in archetypal patterns of three, seven, nine and
twelve, as do many of the Daoist masters, particularly using schemas of
three, five, nine, and twelve. Western esotericism has many hierarchical
systems in organizing its cosmology as do the many Daoist schools
where various planes correspond to specific orders or powers or
deities, linked through correlative relationships forming a “chain of
being” between the different orders, as illustrated in ~Cornelius
Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533) and similar to many Yuan
dynasty Daoist texts. [35] However, Daoists have tended toward a less
rigidly structured hierarchy and have been tolerant of diversity among
the various Daoist esoteric schools. [36]
Many texts on Daoist alchemy share resonances with Western
esoteric, hermetic practices including the refinement of material
substances through various stages of transformation, a search for an
immortal elixir or “cinnabar pill”, use of an hermetic vessel or cauldron,
occult animal and talismanic (fu) symbolism including special magical
scripts, the use of mineral, vegetable and pharmacological substances,
secret or orally transmitted instructions (later written down), the use of
esoteric visualization (tsun), breath and movement techniques,
reclusive withdrawal from the world, fasting and asceticism, the
significance of dreams and a general visionary epistemology, as well as
the elusive search for varying degrees of immortality, a particular goal
of Daoist practice. Magical practices, with invocations, sacred circles,
geomantic inscriptions, carried out with magical implements like the
staff or sword, with incense, bells, and chanting are also common
aspects of both Daoist and Western esoteric techniques. [37]
It was the religious and magical techniques of Daoism that
strongly attracted the interests of certain western esotericists, much
more than the strictly philosophical texts of early classical Daoism.
Mythical stories and imagery, dragon bones and water fairies, the
golden peaches of immortality from the gardens of Hsi Wang Mu
(Queen of Heaven), as well as the reputed occult powers and abilities
of the Daoist masters or “immortals” (xien), both embodied and
disembodied, resonate well with the imaginative worlds of western
esoteric, magical thought. The Daoist emphasis on “internal” (neidan)
alchemy or the distillation of the “Golden Elixir” (jindan) based on
ritual, meditation and breath techniques for personal spiritual
transformation, as compared to the more “external” (waidan)
laboratory practices, also resonated well with late 19th century magical
society practices that emphasized personal transformation while the
mingling of both alchemical aspects was common in western esoteric
traditions. [38]
Israel Regardie tells the story of how, in the late 1920’s, he watched
Aleister Crowley of Golden Dawn fame “operate the sticks” for the
oracular use of the Yijing in Crowley’s apartment in Paris in order to
“obtain some augury for the ensuing period.” [39] Crowley at that time
had “written a poetic interpretation” of the 64 Yijing hexagrams which
Israel Regardie observed him using in oracular fashion. After Crowley
obtained his Hermetic revelation from Aiwaz, the messenger of Horus
in Egypt in 1904, he then traveled to China (1905) and in 1907
established his own magical order, Argenteum Astrum (AA/Silver Star)
in which he integrated rewritten Golden Dawn rituals with “yogic and
oriental materials of his own.”
By 1925, Crowley, a high standing member of the Ordo Templi
Orientis (OTO) German magical order, became the international
leader of the OTO. [40] It was in this magical ritual context that Israel
Regardie, later a prominent member of the Stella Matutina (a late
division of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), went to Paris in
1928 where he was introduced to the transliterated “Daoist” texts of
Crowley as his secretary. Crowley, like Jung, took a serious interest in
the Yijing and published in the 1930s, Shih Yi; A Critical and
Mnemonic Paraphrase of the Yi King and Khing Kang King, The
Classic of Purity (a paraphrase of the Daodejing). [41] At the very least,
Crowley seems to have learned something of the Daoist oracular use of
the Yijing and of the importance of the classic Laozi text as
fundamental to Daoist occultist practices. Crowley mixed a magical
brew of east-west esoteric symbolism, oracular divination and spirit
invocation, reminiscent of Daoist religious techniques, without any
exposure to genuine Daoist religion. [42] In 1932, Regardie also
referenced yin-yang and Daoist theory in his classic work on Stella
Matutina magical Kabbalah. [43]
Another follower of Crowley, Louis Culling, who in the early 1930s
joined the magical gnostic order of the GBG founded in America by
C. F. Russel (a disciple of Crowley) and who became head of the
southern California section of the GBG Order, studied the Yijing for
many years as intrinsic to the GBG gnostic magical path. Culling
became the expert on magical interpretation of the “pristine” Yijing
which he believed was hidden beneath the “barnacles” of historical text
transmission. He eventually published (1966) a written version of the
text, The Pristine Yi King, as used in the GBG starting in the
late 1930s. The casting of the divination sticks (or wands or
143
coins) fell according to a “Supraconscious Intelligence” working
through the operator of the sticks. The 64 hexagrams were memorized
as a Magic Square by members of the GBG and drawn on a white
cloth for the oracular casting. In developing his magical use of the
Yijing, Culling demonstrates familiar with Daoist terminology and the
symbolism of the bagua prognostic chart of the eight primary trigrams.
He rejected the Yijing translations of Wilhelm and Legge and claims to
have “recovered” the original text based on the eight bagua (trigrams)
of Fushi, the original (mythic) author of the Yijing.
Culling created a table of correlations for each of the eight bagua
consisting of a trigram, a symbol, a specific meaning, a quality, and
“sigil” or geomantric graphic image of an element--for example,
“Khien” (three solid yang lines), symbol of heaven or sky, the meaning is
projecting strength or power, the quality is will or creation, the sigil is a
large T symbolizing the lingam (Sanskrit), the male sexual organ. [44]
This is all a strange mix of Daoist and east-west magical symbolism.
From this table of correspondences, Culling then develops a system of
interpretations of the position of each of the bagua in 64 combinations
and gives the magical application of the hexagrams as related to a
magical circle very similar to actual Daoist ritual practices related to
the hour, day, season and so on. He then gives only a single line
“translation” for each hexagram, coupled with his own original
commentary based on his primary table of correspondences.
Subsequently, this oracular technique was taught by Culling to the
GBG members.
While the writings of C. G. Jung and Mircea Eliade on western
alchemy set the stage for even greater interest in possible parallels with
Daoist alchemy, perennialists such as René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt,
and Julius Evola were also strongly attracted to Daoism as an esoteric
expressions of philosophia perennis. [45] Whereas earlier writers, as
noted above, drew parallels between Daoism and Kabbalah, these neo-
traditionalists drew parallels between Daoism and Islamic Sufism. By
“perennialists” I mean a coterie of European intellectuals committed to
sophia perennis, or a “perennial wisdom” that they claimed as the
authentic, inherent core of all “true” religious traditions, epitomized by
Frithjof Schuon as a “transcendental unity” inherent to all religions, a
claim still made under the term “primordial tradition” in America by
such scholars as Huston Smith and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. [46] The link
with Daoism was made through the circuitous route of identifying an
inner core of teachings reflecting a universal and transcendent, esoteric
spirituality supposedly free of all cultural and hermeneutic influences.
Daoism was eventually assimilated into this esoteric ideology through
comparisons drawn between various mystical texts and initiatic
traditions, which came to include the “pristine” teachings of the Laozi
and Zhuangzi.
John-Gustaf (Ivan) Agueli, a Swedish painter and Swedenborgian
living in Paris in 1905, was a member of the Paris Theosophical Society.
In 1907, while on a second visit to Egypt, Agueli was initiated by a Sufi
sheikh strongly interested Islamic “universalism” (philosophia
perennis), A‘ bd al-Rahman ‘Illyash al-Kabir, head of one branch of the
Shadhili Sufi Order. Abd al-Rahman initiated Agueli and confered
upon him the title of moqaddem, one who has the authority to initiate
others into the order. Agueli was possibly the first European
traditionalist sanctioned to give esoteric Sufi initiations. In the same
year, 1907, Agueli also wrote an article for the journal La Gnose on the
universal and esoteric similarities between Daoism and Islam. Agueli’s
understanding of Daoism came from Albert Puyon, Comte de
Pouvourville, “who had been initiated into a Chinese Daoist secret
society” (c.1907) where he took the name Matgioi. [47]
In 1907, René Guénon had started publishing La Gnose, as an
esoteric journal, which he continued for about five years. As an
esotericist, Guénon helped to organize the Spiritualist and Masonic
Congress of 1908 where he met Fabre des Essarts, ‘the Gnostic
patriarch’ (or ‘Synesius’) who initiated him as a “bishop” into the
Masonic brotherhood founded by Encasse (Papus) where he assumed
the name ‘Palingenius’. During this same period he was also initiated
into the Primitive and Original Swedenborgian Rite, and given the title
(or name) Chevalier Kadosch, and, supposedly, in 1912, Agueli initiated
Guénon into the Shadhili Sufi order. The Daoist Puyon, the Sufi Agueli
and the Traditionalist Guénon were friends and collaborators on La
Gnose, thus creating a context for an orientalist reconstruction of
“Daoism” along the lines of a traditionalist ideology. [48] Guénon also
references another French esoteric source, a small work entitled “Les
Enseignements Secrets de la Gnose,” which discusses the various
esoteric aspects of the gnostic revival, such as in Kabbalah and
Freemasonry, and the gnostic connection with Daoism. [49]
From this initial introduction, Guénon went on to develop an
enduring interest in Daoism as a manifestation of sophia perennis,
even though he eventually migrated to Egypt where he was fully
initiated into Sufism. Significantly, Guénon’s first book, published in
1924 was entitled Orient et Occident (East and West) and touches on
Daoist ideas as part of his development of an esoteric, traditionalist
paradigm. In his Symbolisme de la Croix (1931), which was composed
in part for La Gnose, he writes extensively on the concept of jingyong
(unchanging middle) and on the yin-yang symbol and its universal
significance for all religious and esoteric traditions, specifically quoting
many times La Voie Métaphysique written by the Daoist “initiate”
Puyon (Matigoi) who cites the Yijing.
Guénon also compares the Sufi “primordial man” with the
kabbalist Adam Cadmon and the Daoist “wang” (Emperor) quoting
the Daodejing. [50] In later works such as La Métaphysique Orientale
(1939) and particularly in La Grande Triade (1946/1994), Guénon
focuses on the Daoist ternary-- Heaven, Man, Earth -- while
referencing other traditions, as an “inescapable feature of all
spirituality,” a triad whose symbolic structure, according to Guénon,
offered guidance for inner development and spiritual transformation.
Guénon continued this comparative and analogical analysis of Daoism
in relationship to Sufism and other traditions until the end of his life,
particularly as epitomized in his work, Insights into Islamic Esoterism
& Taoism (Aperçus sur l’Esotérisme Islamique et le Taoïsme, 1973). [51]
The Italian hermetic and magical baron, Giulio (Julius) Evola, was a
keen follower of Guénon and wrote a book on his life among his many
other esoteric works. While Evola, as a “philosopher-visionary”, sage,
esotericist, painter and mountaineer applied the traditionalist and
perennialist ideology to political matters, he also had a strong interest
in Daoism. Evola borrowed from Daoist, Buddhist and Tantric texts to
formulate his magical theories of correspondence. Recently, Evola’s
thoughts on Daoism have been published in Taoism: The Magic, the
Mysticism (1995). [52] Evola, whose interests centered on an
“aristocracy of the spirit” epitomized by heroic, kingly figures and
ascetic, mystical “men of knowledge,” understood Taoism as a
paradigm of the “primordial Eastern tradition.”
Lao-tzu, whose teachings are described as “mysterious, elusive, and
bewildering,” became a “super-temporal being” after his death (a
reference to the divinization of Lao-tzu in the later Han period), and
was an initiator of “real men” though his visionary appearances to
various Chinese masters. This initiatic element reflects a universal
esoteric current “strictly associated with the royal function” meant to
guide elect human beings to higher knowledge. Evola regarded the Tao
Te Ching as an esoteric text of the great “primordial tradition”
centered on the Dao, or Way, manifest in two aspects: the great
principle of primordial unity (transcendence) and the active principle
(immanance) of spiritual virtue or law (de).
He rejects, as did other traditionalists, the religious (daojiao)
aspects of Daoism, focusing on the “impersonal” philosophical
teaching (daojia) of the text as “characteristic of the Far Eastern
Weltanschauung, its superhuman purity...and what may be called its
‘immanent transcendentalism’.” For Evola, Daoism reflected a prefect
integration of both immanence and transcendence, actualized through
the virtue of emptiness (wu), in order for these two aspects of the Dao
to initate the “eternal development of the world.” However,
somewhat at odds with his rejection of religious Daoism, he
144
theorized that virtue (de) is a magical power whose efficacy was not
based on a “moralizing theology” (Christian) but was an expression of a
“superior influence uncaring about individual human existence.”
This virtue was a magical power of presence that “real men”
manifested through their spiritual perfection, a presence that did not
require them to act, but only to be “real” in order for that magical
efficacy to impact others and the world at large. The “men of Dao”
undergo a profound transformation “beyond form” that results in their
being true men of spirit (shenren), “illumined by a great light” and
beyond all rudimentary forms of change or horizontal existence. The
term “real men” for Evola reflects an ontological state of spiritual
perfection that he borrowed from Guénon as a “purified and subtle
doctrine of the ‘superman’.” Such “real men” are rare, aristocrats of the
spirit concerned with “transcendental inner life and not external social
conduct.” [53]
The Daoist concept of spontaneity (po) is interpreted by Evola as
not “animal-like innocence” but a state hinted at in the myth of the
Golden Age as the “naturality of the supernatural” in certain
individuals. The perfected “real man” of Dao does not act but bends,
withdraws, gives in, in order that the principles of yin-yang may
manifest the will of the Dao in harmony with him who is truly in
accord with the Dao. Such an individual is an “impenetrable type of
initiate” whose similar type can be found, according to Evola, in
western Hermeticism and in Rosicrucianism, as well as in Sufism, as an
antinomian “real man” who dismisses current values and norms as
insufficient for true spiritual life.
Such an individual has the magical traits of invulnerability, spiritual
charisma, and a transcendent detachment that reflects his royal
ontological status (as wang or king). He is a true “sovereign” and
mediator between heaven and Earth, a custodian of doctrine, a natural
leader and “royal man” who is not passive but active through his
magical presence. Evola sees an “Olympian” quality in Daoist political
teachings: the initate leader who acts with supreme detachment and
whose subtle, invisible, and immaterial influence, based on his
attunement with Dao and De, is superior to any type of force or
coercion. Detached from every human feeling with “impersonal
impassibility,” utterly neutral before good or evil, he fosters “primordial
simplicity” in the common folk, in order for the Dao to act with
perfect freedom and efficacy. For Evola, this uptoian, kingly ideal was
realized in the “ancien regime” in Europe (King Arthur, the Grail, and
so on). [54]
The decline of Daoism from its utopian ideals is evident, according
to Evola, in the rise of popular, folk religious Daoism (daojiao),
“surviving only as a cult practiced by monks and wizards.” However,
operative Daoism survived in the form of an esoteric alchemy whose
adherents sought immortality (xien) through the formation of secret
initiatic schools. Daoist immortals, in Evola’s view, attain immortality
through the transformation of the physical body using techniques of
“fixing the breath” and practicing the “coagulation of subtle ethereal
substances” in order to avoid the loss of connection with the One/Dao
(and the fall into rebirth and loss of all spiritual knowledge).
Immortality consists, then, in sustaining consciousness while
undergoing the crisis of radical changes of state (at death) through
training in esoteric techniques similar to initiatic traditions of the west.
The formation of the “immortal embryo” is the esoteric alchemical
technique by which one forms an enduring identity, one consonant
with a “real man” (immortal) of the Dao. Consciousness then is
transferred to an embryo or immortal body, or into a “pure form”
analogous to the Forms of Platonic scholasticism, a teaching that Evola
regards as beyond the understanding of the ordinary non-initiate.
Further, these immortal forms reflect an esoteric hierarchy of higher
and lower types manifesting the degree and intelligence of the
individuals thus transformed. Finally, Evola references Matigoi (Puyon)
as a European who had direct training in esoteric Daoism and who was
clearly a source of information for Evola’s interpretation. [55]
 Another less dogmatic traditionalist and esoteric writer, Titus
Burckhardt, was also influenced by Daoism, particularly by Daoist
aesthetic theories as seen in Chinese painting. Burckhardt, a close
intellectual compatriot and friend of Frithjof Schuon, espoused a
universalist Sufi wisdom (sophia perennis) and wrote on alchemy and
gnosis. He also wrote at length on the Daoist idea of “creative spirit” in
painting, which he identified in Daoism with “the rhythm of cosmic
life.” The flow of brush and ink, like the appearing and dissolving of a
snowflake, reflected the dynamic reality of the Dao underlying static,
perishable physical phenomena.
Burckhardt saw in the Daoist perspective, a less individual or
“homocentric” emphasis, which expressed an inner calm of
contemplation that revealed a hidden, timeless harmony normally
veiled by “the subjective continuity of the mind.” He accurately
grounds this deeper harmony in the Daoist concept of wuji (non-being
or void) as a primordial, transcendental truth. He also references the
importance of Daoist concepts of “wind and water” (fengshi), sacred
geography (mountain and water), simplicity, naturalness, and
spontaneity, all basic to classical Daoism. [56] In a similar spirit,
Toshihiko Izutsu, a scholar at McGill University, published his
perennialist work, Sufism and Taoism (1967) comparing the mystical
writing of Ibn A‘ rabi (Fusus al-Hikam) with the Zhuanzi and
Daodejing, which became highly popular among traditionalists and
esotericists supporting philosophia perennis.
Chinese Daoist Teachers and Western Esotericism
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Daoism in the west had entered
a new phase. Scholarship was producing new translated texts for study,
historical interpretations were moving beyond the old paradigms, and
Daoist studies were moving increasingly away from a simplistic
interpretation of a few classic texts. [57] Increasingly, Daoism was
differentiated from western models of mysticism and spirituality in an
attempt to elucidate its unique cultural and historical aspects. The
“immanent” aspects of Daoist spirituality were emphasized in contrast
to Christian “transcendence” and the religious and magical aspects of
Daoism were increasingly regarded as normative features of the
religious traditions--there was no true split between “philosophical and
religious” Daoism.
Instead there was only an increasing complexity and interweaving
of diverse sources, as more ethnography was published and more texts
from the Daozang have become accessible. [58] Starting in the 1970s,
American-Chinese authors also began to publish translations on
Daoism, beyond the normative texts, such as Lu K‘uan Yü’s (Charles
Luk) The Secrets of Chinese Meditation (1964) and his more
influential Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality (1970) which gives a
translation of the Xin Ming Fa Jue Ming Zhi (“The Secrets of
Cultivating Essential Nature and Eternal Life”) written by an late 19th
century Daoist master of internal alchemy, Zhao Bi Chen. This work
and its useful Chinese-English alchemical glossary has become highly
referenced by contemporary esotericists and by many Chinese Daoists
in America.
In the 1970s, authors like J. C. Cooper (1972), began to write
popular but short overviews of Daoism, published (like Charles Luk)
by Western esoteric presses, which covered the subject in a way that
demonstrated familiarity with more diverse aspects of the esoteric
tradition. [59] Fritjof Capra also published his very popular work, The
Tao of Physics (1975), which explored parallels between modern
physics and “eastern mysticism” and has a chapter on Daoism. Capra
draws heavily on the Zhuangzi and on the Daodejing and Yijing but
applies the ideas to the physics relativity paradigm, to holistic
transformation, and to wu-wei, or non-action, as intellectual ideas
precursory to quantum physics and a “dynamic transformative view” of
the universe, with an emphasis on flow, change, and the integrated
polarity of the Dao.
Such a work helped to give credibility to Daoism by aligning
it with science (following Joseph Needham’s earlier work) and
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with a detheologized metaphysics. [60] Even more popular were two
outstanding authors who were very influential in making Daoism
accessible to westerners, John Blofeld and Alan Watts. Both Watts and
Blofeld have associations with western esotericism simply because they
helped to popularize Daoism at a time when “eastern religions” were
part or an emergent “new age” paradigm that was impacting many
currents within American and European esotericism. [61] While both
authors had strong interests in Buddhism, Blofeld’s work was largely
based on his actual meeting with Daoist masters and practitioners
during his 17 years in China.
Blofeld, an English gentleman, was a world traveler, an outstanding
réconter, and a gifted writer who got along well with practitioners of
many diverse esoteric schools, particularly among Daoist hermits.
Following the publication of his own translation of the Yijing (1966), he
published a work on Daoist “mysteries and magic” (1973) based on the
Daoist classics (using reputable English translations), Charles Luk’s
previously mentioned works, and a reconstruction of his “wanderings”
in the mountains and hermitages of China (1930s) where he met and
conversed with as “many different kinds of Daoists as possible.” [62]
Blofeld clearly states that there is little or no distinction among
practicing Daoists between philosophical and religious Daoism. He
draws parallels between Daoism and Sufism, western mystics and
esoteric writers, and tells many a remarkable and entertaining tale
embedding Daoism in its proper Chinese cultural milieu. [63]
This is not scholarly or textual Daoism, but a living representation
of the foibles, ritual practices, magical techniques, and remarkable
accomplishments of real Daoists. Following Luk, Blofeld also discusses
Daoist yoga or meditation and Daoist sexual techniques, a theme
which has attracted some contemporary esotericists. In Blofeld’s other
major Daoist work (1978), he draws extensively on the Dao Jia Yu Shen
Xian (Daoist Philosophy and Immortality) of Zhou Shau Xian based
on selections from the Daozang canon. Blofeld describes this
expanded overview as “a first comprehensive sketch of Huang-Lau
Daoism” and discusses popular Daoist religion as well as three chapters
on Daoist alchemy, with an appendix tabulating a variety of wuxing
correspondences. This work is one of the first, very readable,
overviews of Daoist religion. [64]
Alan Watts, an English emigrant to America, had an early
interested in Buddhism and its Zen variations, and toward the end of
his controversial and somewhat eccentric life, wrote a book exclusively
on Daoism. Being a great popularizer of “Eastern religions” through
public lectures, Watts (author of 25 popular books melding Eastern and
Western thought) was a member of the English Theosophical Society
and was friends with D. T. Suzuki and Krishnamurti (the promised
“Avatar” of the Theosophical Society). Interested in Zen
“enlightenment” and Daoist yin-yang principles of spiritual
transformation, Watts eventually migrated to America in the
mid-1940s and embraced the perennialist view (influenced by Aldous
Huxley) of the universality hidden in all spiritual traditions. [65]
After leaving the Episcopal ministry and rejecting institutional
religion, Watts “embraced insecurity” based on his “Daoist”
interpretations of individual freedom, the immediacy of experience,
and the abandonment of all creeds and dogmas. [66] By the late 1950s,
Watts was on the lecture circuit to about 100 American cities, had a
radio program, and his own televised education special (“Eastern
Wisdom and Modern Life” a 24-part series on NET). Watts, more
than any other individual, popularized “eastern religions” to the
American public and rode a wave of enthusiaum for his books
throughout the 1960s and 70s. His book on “nature, man, and
woman” (1958) had very strong Daoist influences and from this point
onward, his interest in Daoism deepened. A friend of Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert (Ram Das), Watts became a charismatic “guru” to
many younger people, influencing them to practice meditation and
take an interest in eastern teachings. By the late 1960s, he became
increasingly identified as “the American Daoist” through the
publication of Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (1968) and his
last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975), published two years after
his death. [67]
Watts was also involved in the human-potential movement,
centered in the California Esalen Institute where he met and gave
seminars with Al Huang, a popular Chinese Tai Ji teacher, calligrapher,
dancer, and organizer of his own Daoist institute, the Living Tao
Foundation. Al Huang, a close friend of Watts, helped complete his
final Daoist book after Watts’ death and illustrated it with his own
gracious and flowing calligraphy. Watts also read and supported Huang
in the writing of his popular Tai Ji book, Embrace Tiger, Return to
Mountain (1973). Huang teaches “Watercourse Way Tai Ji” (not Tai Ji
Quan), a popular improvisational form of Tai Ji and dance movements,
and seeks to “represent Dao without the ism” through improvisational
classes designed specifically for Westerners. Using Daoist concepts
such as yin-yang, wuxing, and Yijing bagua symbolism, his work
represents a mediating East-West cultural synthesis that bridges the
normative gap between academic scholars and popular writers and
Chinese Daoist teachers. [68]
During the 1970s, in China, a popular wave of interest in Tai Ji
reanimated cultural inquiry into Daoism and Chinese Daoist teachers
began to immigrate to America (and Europe). Eva Wong, PhD, came to
America in the 1960s as a member of the Daoist Fung Loy Kok temple
and eventually became director of studies at Fung Loy Kok Taoist
Temple in Denver CO. which offers various Daoist activities, including
scripture study, meditation, classes in qi-gong, retreats, chanting, and
training in traditional Lion Dance. Dr. Wong, who grew up as a Daoist
in China, has translated many Daoist texts and contributed to a
growing interest in Daoist religious practices. [69]
In the 1970s, Lily Siou, who began her studies in Daoism at the
Dai Xuan monastery in China on the “dragon and tiger mountain” of
Long Hu Shan and was eventually initiated and confirmed as the 64th
generation Master of the Zheng Yi (Lingbao) Daoist school, opened
her own school in Hawaii (Tai Hsuan Foundation College) where she
teaches Daoist theory, magic, and Tai Ji to many American students.
[70] In 1974, Jwing-Ming Yang, PhD, came to American as a Qi Gong,
Wushu, and Tai Ji teacher and eventually formed the Oriental Arts
Association (Boston) where his students have won outstanding
international awards for excellence in Tai Ji. Dr. Yang mixes science,
martial arts, and Daoist internal alchemy with vocabulary drawn from
English esotericism and European alchemcial thought. His eclecticism
typifies a willingness to synthesize and accommodate his American
students common to many Chinese Daoist teachers. [71]
In 1978, Michael Saso, a Western scholar fluent in Pinyin and
classical Chinese as well as in Japanese, published his excellent Taoist
Master Chuang about the life and esoteric practices of a Zheng-Yi
Daoist master then living in Taiwan. Saso lived with Master Chuang in
Taiwan and studied with him over a period of years. He writes,
“Daoism is an esoteric religion” and he observes that Daoist masters
draw a clear distinction between “common doctrines” and the “secret
teachings of the highly trained specialist” which he then describes in a
detailed, though introductory fashion. [72] From the mid-1970s on,
“esoteric Daoism” based in wuxing (correlative cosmology) and neidan
(internal alchemy) became increasingly accessible through texts and
ethnographic descriptions. While these resources have proliferated, it
has been the Western students of Chinese teachers that have
introduced Western esoteric ideas into a Daoist context.
These ideas in turn have initiated dialogues that have resulted in
publications by Chinese teachers (and by their students) that meld
Western esotericism and Chinese esotericism into a variety of systemic
comparisons and a rich vocabulary of teachings and practices. The
mediating language of this comparison, in America, Canada, Britain,
and Australia, has been English in translations, ethnography and in
Daoist writings. Subsequently, it is the English vocabulary of
esotericism that is most commonly used and assumed by these writers.
Thus there is a certain amount of “matching terminology” (ge-yi)
between systems of Chinese and English esotericism, simply assumed
as normative by both Chinese teachers and their American
students.
146
The most prolific of all the Chinese teachers in America is Hua
Jing Ni. He is a 74th generation Daoist master who dates his school
back to the Han Dynasty. He was educated in the Daoist spiritual
traditions by his family and was then chosen to study with Daoist
masters “in the high mountains of mainland China.” After more than
30 years of training, he was acknowledged and empowered as a master
of traditional Daoism. Master Ni arrived in America from Taiwan in
1976 and has since written many books (over 30) related to the practice
of traditional Chinese medicine and Daoist esotericism. He is also the
founder of Yo San University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the
College of Tao and the Integral Way, and the Universal Society of the
Integral Way. [73] Master Ni’s earliest English works are translations of
classic Daoist texts, while many later works are on esoteric Daoism
and the creative interactions “of East and West, ancient and modern”
as seen from a Daoist master’s perspective. [74]
Master Ni’s writings are eclectic and diverse, borrowing many
Western esoteric, psychological, and scientific ideas in a non-systemic
fashion, in order to explain Daoist esoteric thought and practice. He
writes, “to attach an ‘ism’ to Dao is to attach a limit or title which is
really not appropriate.” Terms like astral realm or worlds, astral beings
or entities, ghosts, demons, subtle beings, multiple subtle bodies or
souls, nine astral lights of different colors, astral rays, elixir, alchemical
furnace, magic, elementals, mountain and lake spirits, human aura,
reincarnation, invisible masters, channeling, energy centers in the body,
microcosm and macrocosm, dream states, higher mind, universal
energy, psychic powers, and so on, abound in his writings
demonstrating his correlations of Chinese Daoist esotericism with
English language esoteric vocabulary. [75]
His son Maoshing Ni is also trained in Daoist esotericism and
Chinese medicine and is a teacher and Vice President of Yo San
University (established in 1989) which he describes by saying, “The
heart and soul of the university is the Daoist approach, which includes
a strong Qi program and offers over 15 different courses in Qi
development.” The Yo San program covers five branches of Traditional
Chinese Medicine: acupuncture, herbology, massage, nutrition and Qi
Gong. Much of the vocabulary of the school reflects the above esoteric
terminology. [76]
Perhaps the most prominent influence of the contemporary fusion
of Daoism and Western esoteric thinking has been through the
teaching of Mantak Chia. Chia was born in Bangkok, Thailand and,
after studying Tai Ji Quan, Aikido, and Kundalini Yoga, he met and
followed the Daoist Master Yi Eng, known as the White Cloud
Hermit. Originally from Central China, but living in the mountains
not far from Hong Kong after WW II, Yi Eng taught Chia “Daoist
Esoteric Yoga” during a five year training period, with the “formulas
and methods of internal alchemy, culminating in the Reunion of
Heaven and Man.” His teachings also combine various healing
techniques, including the Buddhist Palm, a martial arts system uniting
Thai Boxing and kung fu, a Shao-lin technique for collecting internal
energy and the Iron Shirt and Steel Body techniques for strengthening
muscles and tendons. In 1977, Master Chia moved to New York city
and began teaching Daoist Yoga and his “universal Dao system” in a
contemporary, modern form. Author of ten books, he is particularly
well known for his techniques of self-healing, male and female sexual
yoga practices, and for founding the Taoist Esoteric Yoga Center and
Foundation in New York City in 1981. He presently has 32 Universal
Dao Centers worldwide and in an international Daoist teacher with his
home center (after 1994) in the Tao Garden Healing Arts Resort just
outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand. [77]
During his years in New York City, he attracted many students and
several of them had a background in Western esotericism, particularly
Eric Yudelove in Kabbalah and Dennis Lewis, who was a student of
the Gurdjieff breathing techniques. Yudelove’s work is by far the most
integrative work on Daoism and Kabbalah (The Tao & the Tree of Life:
Alchemical & Sexual Mysteries of the East and West). Yudelove
references John Blofeld (1973) as highly influential on his thinking and
talks of his interests in Kabbalah, the Yijing, and Western alchemy
during his earlier years. The study of Western alchemy led to interests
in Chinese alchemy, Wilhelm’s publications, Aleister Crowley, Charles
Luk, and subsequently to Daoist martial arts where he met Mantak
Chia in 1981 in New York City, a rather archetypal journey. Yudelove
notes that he “taught Master Chia about shamanism and the Western
study of the elements called Hermetics.” [78] Yudelove picks up on an
old theme of the connection between Daoism and Kabbalah, as first
compared by Martin Buber, then in the masonic text “Les
Enseignements Secrets de la Gnose,” and later by members of the
Golden Dawn like Israel Regardie, and more recently by Réne
Guénon. Yudelove’s book is a remarkable dialectic exploration of
Kabbalah and esoteric Daoism.
Yudelove tracks the parallel developments of Daoism (from its
shamanic roots) and Kabbalah, linking them through magical practices
and specific theories of the body. Chia remarks in the preface that the
Sephirot practice of the “flash of lightning” is a “good way to move Qi
energy quickly through the body.” [79] Yudelove describes Daoist Yoga
as a “very advanced shamanic system” and sees a clear parallel between
the upper, middle, and lower worlds of the shaman and the triadic
Heaven, Man, Earth cosmology of Daoism as well as a parallel with the
“upper and middle” worlds of Kabbalah. Both Kabbalah and Daoism
are “magical traditions” and both have masters who are experts in
ascending to the higher worlds. [80] In introducing Kabbalah, he
distinguishes between Jewish Kabbalah and “Western Kabbalah” as
found in post-Renaissance Christian Rosicrucianism, astrology, and
magic (via Crowley and Regardie). He emphasizes that the
comparisons with Daoism are found primarily in this “Western,
esoteric” [non-Jewish] side of Kabbalah. [81] He then compares
terminology and worldviews, matching terms (ge-yi) such as Wu Ji
(Energy of Emptiness) and Ein Soph (limitless) or comparing the
highest three sephira (kether, hokmah, and binah) with the three great
Daoist principles of Taiji, Yin-Yang, and the Three Pure Ones
(divinities of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth). He uses a classic
Kabbalah text, The Sepher Yetzirah, as a basis for many such
comparisons, a text he describes as “a system most similar to Daoist
yoga.” [82]
Yudelove recreates a Daoist Tree of Wisdom by matching the Five
Element (wuxing) correspondences with the 10 Sephera spheres: wu-qi/
kether, yang/chokamah and yin/binah (upper triad); fire/geburah, wood/
chesed and sun/tiphereth (second triad); and metal/hod, water/netzach,
moon/yesod (third triad); with earth as malkuth, the lowest sphere. [83]
He then goes into considerable detail on the Mantak Chia “universal
dao system” (comparing Qi to aether and other Western esoteric ideas
on subtle energy) and the circulation of Qi energy in the body,
including an overview on Daoist sexual yoga and various energy
exercises on “inner and outer fusion” (inner energy alchemy). He
discusses bagua (eight trigrams) theory and the inner mandala,
visualization processes of “higher fusion” and advanced circulation of
the Qi, with a brief overview of Daoist Qi meridian systems.
He then compares this with Kabbalah practices from Franz
Bardon, the well-known Austrian occultist writer (d. 1958) who also
explored the relationship between Kabbalah and eastern religions,
while developing his extensive invocational magic system. [84]
Yudelove regards the Chia “fusions” as a form of Hermetic practice
and develops a correspondence theory between the Hebrew letters,
number theory, and the organs of the body based on his reading of the
Yetsirah and Bardon’s Kabbalah writings. These correspondences are
then related to the “power of sound” (Hebrew invocations) and
compared to the “six healing sounds” of Daoist esoteric healing chants.
He also links the color system found in Bardon to a Daoist five-
element color system, with their comparative vocables, sacred names,
and internal visualizations. [85]
Just as esoteric orders of the West have graded stages of mastery
(Rosicrucian and Golden Dawn), so too, the Daoist training of adepts--
both follow pathwork training and proceed in stages from
higher to lower ranks using the various visualization and
147
meditation techniques he outlines in comparative fashion. He
compares various concepts of energy bodies and soul
conceptualizations, as well as “sex magic” in both traditions,
particularly drawing on Crowley for practices related to Kabbalah. He
has written a much longer work on Taoist Yoga and Sexual Energy
(2000) which explores the topic in great detail without the references
to Kabbalah but published by a press specializing in Western
esotericism. [86] He then goes on to discuss more advanced practices
of Daoist internal alchemy, in relationship to astrology and Big Dipper
(Thunder) magical techniques, astral visualizations in the body related
to Kabbalah visualizations of Herbrew letters in the body, astral magic
invocations, and the “return to heaven” or mystical realization in both
traditions. The final sections of the book gives meditative exercises for
both Daoism and Kabbalah. Overall, his book is an initial exploration
of comparative esotericism, East-West synthesis, and a portent of such
comparative systems yet to come. [87]
Another of Mantak Chia’s students, Dennis Lewis has also written
a 1997 work on Daoist breathing techniques and practices which he
compares to certain breathing techniques and ideas that he studied
with John Pentland, the English teacher of the Russian Gurdjieff
system. Gurdjieff had, at least in part, learned his breathing and dance
exercises during his travels and studies among the Sufi dervishes of
central Asia. Gurdjieff’s esoteric “law of three” (active, passive and
neutral) corresponds well with the Daoist triad of Tai Qi mediating
between yin and yang, as do the three chambers of Daoist alchemy
(stomach, heart, and head) correspond well with Gurdjieff’s “three
bodies” of the carnal, emotional, and spiritual. Lewis attributes John
Pentland (d. 1984) with teaching him “how to think from the
perspective and sensation of wholeness” and thanks Jean Kline, an
Advaita Vedanta master, for helping him to understand the “that love
and consciousness are at the very heart of being.” [88] Lewis, blending
Western esotericism with Vedanta, is particularly interested in Ji Nei
Zang (Chi Nei Tsang) a Chia healing technique using an “internal organ
Qi massage” with breathing techniques to clear tensions and illness
from the body. He has been certified by Master Chia in Ji Nei Zang
and combines his work with Gurdjieff breathing techniques to break
down the “buffering mechanisms” (Gurdjieff) that inhibit connection
with deeper self-awareness and good health.
Following Gurdjieff’s maxim that “without mastering breath,
nothing can be mastered”, Lewis gives a warning that correct breathing
is an art and science that needs to be thoroughly studied to be
correctly applied. Correct application leads to “deep inner relaxation
and a freedom from willfulness,” whether one is a Daoist, a yogin, or a
follower of Gurdjieff, that in turn allows for true, natural breathing and
a “return to the expansive emptiness of wu-ji.” [89] Citing Gurdjieff,
Lewis writes that learning wholeness requires first seeing that one is
not whole but often fragmented and imbalanced; the discovery of
balance cannot be forced, it requires inner quiet, clarity, calm, and
learning to “follow the breath without interfering,” listening to the
body, and practicing the three breaths of balancing, cleansing, and
energizing. [90] Lewis notes that, reflecting Gurdjieff’s ideas, both
attachment to and identification with particular images, ideas,
emotions, sensations, or actions can create severe limitation and
disharmony, inducing poor breathing habits. These habits of
identification and attachment, according to Gurdjieff, “reduce our
impressions of what nature transmits to us as energy, the flow of life,
slowing us down, creating poor health and leading to exhaustion.” [91]
For Lewis, this “energy” is Qi, the fundamental life force according to
Daoist teachings. Lewis goes on to discuss inner alchemy, the Daoist
meridian system, whole body breathing, the expansive and smiling
breath, and various systems for the circulation of ji-breath in the body.
[92]
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Daoism has become increasingly
popular and accessible to the general public, primarily through the
increasing presence of Chinese and American teachers in the area of
Daoist martial arts.
 Michael Winn, another of Mantak Chia’s students, and a 25 year
practitioner of Daoist martial arts has his own teachings of internal
alchemy, based on “the seven Tao alchemical formulas Chia
transmitted from the wandering Daoist Yi Eng.” Winn has studied
alchemy (East and West) and uses a vocabulary replete with East-West
alchemical terms in teaching Daoist martial arts and internal practices.
[93]
Deng Ming-Dao’s Chronicles of Tao : The Secret Life of a Taoist
Master (1993), published in three volumes during the 1980s, tells the
fascinating story of a Daoist martial artist’s training and then journey
to America. Deng has also published an esoteric work on Daoist
scholar-warrior’s training (1990) and several other popular works. Eo
Omwake, who established the Mind, Body & Spirit Academy near
Chadds Ford PA, is a member of the Gold Mountain Jin Dan Taoist
Order, a “traditional Taoist order with roots going back many
generations into old China.” Omwake, a highly respected martial artist,
writes on “Taoist Alchemy and Symbolic Language” (using Western
terminology) to discuss the esoteric aspects of symbols and images as
they apply to Daoist marital arts and personal psychological
development.
More popularly, Flying Without Wings: A Manual of Taoist
Meditation and Subtle-Body Development has recently been self-
published by martial arts student Brian Orr, a fifth generation disciple
of Gao Yen Tao, grandmaster of the Bu Di Zhen system, which
contains the teachings of both Shaolin and Wudang traditions. The
book also reflects strong interests in Western esotericism, “aura
building” techniques, subtle body development, astral travel, a ninefold
chakra-system, inner alchemy, and other aspects of an East-West
synthesis. [94]
Articles in the popular American Daoist e-journal, The Empty
Vessel, initiated by Solalal Towler in 1994, at Abode of the Eternal Tao
in Eugene OR, has become a site for the mixing of Daoist and Western
esoteric thought. [95] Edwin Shendelman’s article in the journal, “The
Vision of the Primary Body-Focus Zones in Qigong Practice,”
compares the three body zones of Chinese esotericism (from the base
of the torso up to the solar plexus, to the mid-brow region, to above
the mid-brow) to the
Conclusion: The Dao in Esotericism
Contemporary interest in Daoism abounds in popular culture,
promoted primarily through martial arts centers and teachers, but also
through the increasing abundance of newly published materials,
increasing interest in Chinese medicine, and an ever-expanding
scholarship in Daoism. Recently, Orthodox Daoism in America and
the British Taoist Association have been formed to promote a better
understanding of Daoism. [97] Another area of contemporary
intersection with Daoism is in spiritual ecology as tied to Daoist
philosophy of nature and to feng-shui (wind and water) geomantic arts.
One scholar has noted that Daoism offers a foundation for a
“genuinely ecological society” and the necessity of maintaining a
healthy and positive relationship with the natural world.
Daoism provides a genuine integrative perspective on relationships
with the natural environment and on values of cooperation and
balance rather than on issues of control and the exploitative use of
resources. There is a convergence of themes in Daoism and in deep
ecology that may well be assimilated into a more global esotericism
that seeks to develop a cosmology of nature, drawing on Western
esoteric resources, for example, such as German Naturphilosophie or
New England transcendentalism. The ecological aspects of Daoism
have been recently explored by a number of distinguished scholars, as
an “older wisdom” able to enrich perspectives on contemporary
attitudes toward nature. [98]
Increasingly, Daoism is resonant with various aspects of the
148
deontologized views of physics, for example in “chaos theory,” which
has also manifested intersections with various magical theories, such as
“Enochian magic.” Daoism presents an interesting resource for
cosmological speculations that are very current in terms of
astrophysical theories concerning “self-organization,” an “open
universe,” fractal transformation, and a general process view of change
and development. [99] Post-modern theorists have also reflected on
Daoism, drawing certain aspects of Daoist language theory into post-
modern discourse, claiming an affinity between the two.
Deconstructive writers—who seek to undermine dualism and binary
opposition—have seen in Daoism a theory of non-exclusive mutuality
between pairs that undermines all oppositional metaphysics. Daoist
theories of interdependence, harmony, and accommodation, its non-
logocentric view of natural processes, and a pragmatic theory of
immanence and transformation all contribute to a “post-philosophical”
discourse that emphasizes the value of diversity, alternate perspectives,
and multivocal language. [100] Daoism continues to expand its
influences in ways that will no doubt stimulate esoteric thought and
practices in the years to come.
In summary, there are three notable stages of Daoist impact on
Western esotericism. In the first and earliest stage, Daoism was seen as
an exotic, strange, alien cultural alternative that was perceived only
through a very limited textual horizon, primarily through questionable
translations of the Yijing, Daodejing and Zhuangzi, studied in a
completely decontextualized atmosphere of Western speculation,
theory building, and deculturalized appropriation. Opposed to a
Confucian bias, reinforced by the early Jesuits preference for social
order, and contrasted as a deviant, eccentric, and “degenerated”
religious influence, Daoism was reduced to its classical texts as
appropriated by intrigued European intellectuals, such as Leibnitz,
Buber, Heidegger, Wilhelm, and Jung.
In this stage, “Daoism” was constructed with little relation to its
living religious practices, and was only minimally represented by the
early formative roots of its most classic texts. The dominant paradigm
of “philosophical Daoism” was built around the concept of philosophia
perennis, as an enduring “truth” inherent to all religious traditions and
as manifest in the comparative study of classic texts. Daoism was not
seen as “esoteric” but as a vaguely understood mythic wisdom tradition
whose enigmatic teachings perplexed and fascinated Western
intellectuals who assimilated the classic texts into a metaphysical
discourse built around themes of universalism, comparative mysticism,
and archetypal theory.
In the second stage, some esotericists upheld a theory of Daoism
as ~prisca theologia (ancient wisdom) resonant with Renaissance
astrological and correlative cosmology. These esotericists noted various
structural similarities between Daoist and traditional pre-scientific,
Western cosmology. Further similarity was noted between Chinese and
Western practices or theories of alchemy, ritual magic, and divination
techniques. Magical practitioners, like Crowley, Regardie and Louis
Culling investigated the oracular use of the Yijing and the “pristine,”
underlying sophia perennis of a few Daoist texts. Simultaneously,
European traditionalists such as René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, and
Julius Evola drew parallels with Sufism and other forms of mystical and
esoteric, perennial teachings.
Daoism in this context referred to the textual classics and was
interpreted ideologically in terms of a universalist approach to
mysticism and a constructivist, orientalist paradigm. In this context,
“esotericism” came to mean a “traditional, initiatic school of masters
and students” which passed on a universal teaching discoverable in the
texts of all “authentic” religions. These traditions were hieratic and
wisdom was based on authoritative teachings and masters that sought
to elucidate each tradition in terms of an “inner core” of mystical,
transcendent essence. Guénon in particular had specific ties with
Western esoteric societies and initatic lodges and epitomizes the
intellectual appropriation, as does Schuon, of other religions into their
unique brand of ideological universalism.
 However, some scholars, like Toshihiko Izutsu, were more carefully
textual in their comparative analysis.
The third stage was initiated by an increasing dissemination of Daoist
teachings through the popular writings of Westerners like Thomas
Merton, John Blofeld, and Alan Watts as well as through emerging
Chinese translations from writers like Charles Luk. These authors help
to create a more receptive climate for Daoism in a popular context of
interest in esotericism and “new age religions” and provided
introductory works accessible to the general public. Watts specifically
had ties to Western esotericism and more than others, promoted
“eastern religions” as a source of wisdom without promoting any
particular ideology regarding the relationship between traditions.
Also in this same late 20th century period, Chinese Daoist
teachers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan began to
immigrate into Western countries and began to attract Western
students, particularly in relationship to Qigong, Taiji, and other martial
arts related to “internal alchemy.” Chinese teachers began to publish
materials on their own traditions at the same time that Western
scholars began to publish on Daoist religion, its history, cultural
context, and rich text traditions. Ethnographic descriptions of “Daoist
esotericism” such as those by Michael Saso, were complimented by the
writings of Chinese teachers, such as Deng Ming Dao, and many new
translations of texts from the Daozang.
Chinese teachers, like Master Hua Jing Ni, have continued to write
and publish prolifically and many have started Daoist organizations in
the West in the form of training programs, schools, universities, and
institutions for advanced training in Daoist medical and martial arts. In
turn this is complimented by a growing American interests in martial
arts, internal alchemy, and Daoist techniques of healing and self-
development. Students of these Chinese teachers have written works
that explicitly tie Daoism to Western esoteric traditions, in areas such
as esoteric cosmology, Kabbalah, magic, occultism, and the teachings
of specific Western masters, such as Gurdjieff. Increasingly, Daoist
esotericism is resonant with Western esotericism in “matching terms”
to form a basic vocabulary that is not strictly Eastern or Western, but a
bit of both.
At this stage, the comparative synthesis is far from fully developed
but shows a deepening integration by those who are practioners of
both traditions. However, the emphasis for contemporary
practitioners is far more on “embodied spirituality” than on any
particular essentialist ideology; the goal of actualizing energies latent
within the body seems to be the normative goal. The esoteric
alchemical texts of physical transformation are far more influential in
this period than the early classic philosophical texts because the latter
texts are tied to spiritual practices inseparable from a concern with
alternate perceptions at the somatic, sensate level.
Daoism in the context of esotericism offers an entrance into
energy practices, meditation, visualization, and martial arts that is far
more grounded in body work and self-development than earlier
Western interests. The “internal alchemy” practices written about by
Western students of Chinese teachers are particularly tied to
visualization and magical techniques highly congruent with many of
the practices in Western esoteric magical societies.
Without doubt, the “dao in Western esotericism” will continue to
develop as more texts, more enhanced practices, and more familiarity
with Daoist esoteric magical rites become known. Overall, Daoism
may prove to be far more amenable to synthesis with Western
esotericism than other traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism due to
its very strong connections with nature, magical techniques, martial
arts, living a healthy long life, and a thoroughly magical and
transcendent, detheologized cosmology. The implicit relationship with
much of the history of interest in Daoism lies in its adaptability to a
non-theological view of nature and human development. Western
esotericism shares similar interests and both traditions favor a
diffuse and decentralized institutional structure that allows for
149
great variability without any controlling central authority, nor any strict
monastic or ascetic traditions (though both exist in variant forms of
Daoism).
Popular Daoism has assimilated the classical tradition into its
religious practices and subsequently developed a complex metaphysics
that shows some compatibility with modern science and
deconstructive theories of language (as in “the Dao that can be spoken
of is not the true Dao”). Coupled with its highly developed esoteric
practices, Daoism clearly offers a rich field of comparative study for
the development of esoteric paradigms neither exclusively Western nor
Eastern. In that context, Daoism will certainly provide a rich source of
esotericism for those willing to make the necessary efforts to truly
understand its inner teachings.
Lee Irwin
Religious Studies
College of Charleston
Charleston SC 29455
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[1] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 3. Since there is no strict convention for the
conversion of Chinese characters into English, I have written this
article using contemporary Pinyin transliterations. Thus, Tao te Ching
(Wade-Giles, the older English system) is written as Daodejing
(Pinyin). At present, there are four major transliterations used for
converting Chinese to English, all of which ave various problems due
to the subtlety of Chinese intonation and its distinctive lingual
expressions.
[2] . Jorge Ferrer, 2002: 5-6.
[3] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 9.
[4] . Isabelle Robinet 1997: 196-97; Michael Saso 2000: 31-45.
 [5] . J. J. Clarke 2000:18-21. [37] . Michael Strickmann 1979, passim, for a good introduction to
Daoist alchemy; also Micheal Saso 2000, passim, for an excellent
[6] . Isabelle Robinet 1997: 50-52. overview of Daoist magical practices; J. J. Clarke 2000:122-128.

[7] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 39, as published in Charles le Gobien’s [38] . N. J. Girardot 1983:292.
Histoire de l’édit de l’Empereur de la Chine, 1698.
[39] . Louis Culling 1989:ix.
[8] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 40.
[40] . Neville Drury 2000: 92-93, 99, 108.
[9] . J. J. Clarke 2000:70.
[41] . For an interesting comparison of Crowley and Jung, see Lloyd
[10] . Lee Irwin 2001:18. Keane 1999.

[11] . Antoine Faivre 1998: 118. [42] . Aleister Crowley 1971, 1973, passim.

[12] . See Léon Wieger 1927a and 1927b, passim. [43] . Israel Regardie 1999: 42-44, 58, 60.

[13] . See John Chalmers, 1848, passim, J. J.clarke 2000: 54. [44] . Louis Culling 1989: 25, Table One; GBG is a secret anagram,
uninterpreted by Culling.
[14] . See Richard King, 1999, passim, for more on the “orientalist”
paradigms constructed by Western scholars and esotericists. [45] . N. J. Girardot 1983: 294-98.

[15] . See James Legge 1881, passim. [46] . See Huston Smith 1977; Frithjof Schuon 1984; Seyyed Nasr
1990.
[16] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 44-45.

[17] . See Johnson 1878, passim; J. J. Clarke 2000: 45.

[18] . Lee Irwin 2001:21. [47] . Robin Waterfield 1987:42.

[19] . C. H. Bjerregaard 1912, passim; Andrew Rawlinson, 1993: [48] . Andrew Rawlinson 1993, passim; Robin Waterfield 1987:
passim. 35-42. Mark Sedgewick 1999: 3-24, passim.

[20] . Antoine Faivre 1998:120. [49] . René Le Forestier 1990, contains the entire work.

[21] . J. J. Clarke 2000:47; Paul Carus 1898 and 1906. [50] . Réné Guénon 1958: 6, 95-98.

[22] . Obed Johnson 1928. [51] . René Guénon 1994: 171; 1973, passim; 2001.

[23] . For Daoist influences on the Yijing, see J. J. Clarke 2000: [52] . Julius Evola, Taoism: The Magic, The Mysticism (Oriental
59-60. classics, Holmes Publishing Group, 1995; original 1959). This short text
was written as an introduction to an Italian translation of the Tao Te
Ching.

[24] . J. R. Herman 1996: 15, 135, 163. [53] . Julius Evola, 1995: 8-14.

[25] . J. J. Clark 143-44, 172-175; Graham Parks 1987: 79-91. [54] . Julius Evola 1995: 18-21.

[26] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 73, 100, 121-22, 126. [55] . Julius Evola 1995: 21-26.

[27] . David Rosen and Ellen Crouse 2001: 120-129; Chung-yuan [56] . Titus Burckhardt 1967: 134-142.
Chang, 1973; Tenny Davis, 1939.
[57] . Such authors as Angus Graham, Livia Kohn, Steven
[28] . J. J. Clarke 48, 50-51. Bokenkamp, Roger Ames, David Hall, Chad Hansen, Thomas Cleary,
Isabelle Robinet, Kristofer Schipper, Julia Ching, and Eva Wong have
[29] [29] all contributed to the new paradigms.
[30] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 54.

[31] . Isabelle Robinet 1997: 9, for an introductory overview of [58] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 146-47, 160-165; also Russell Kirkland 1997,
Daoist cosmology see 1997: 7-14; also John Blofeld 1985: 189-191. passim.

[32] . Michael Saso 2000: 208-218 gives a very condensed summary, [59] . J. C. Cooper 1972.
also passim.
[60] . Fritjof Capra 1975: 106-118, 126ff; Clarke 2000:75-77.
[33] . Antoine Faivre 1994:58-59.
[61] . See Irwin 2001, passim.
[34] . Kristofer Schipper 1993: 103-112.
[62] . John Blofeld 1966, 1973: 15; Blofeld’s title (Taoist Mysteries
[35] . Isabelle Robinet 1997: 252-256. and Magic) is no doubt a paraphrase of Alexandria David-Neel’s
popular book on Tibetan esotericism; Blofeld’s Daoist books are still in
[36] . John Henderson 1984: 54-58. print.

151
 [63] . Blofeld 1973: 30-31,
[64] . John Blofeld 1978, passim.
[65] . Alan Watts 1950.
[66] . Alan Watts 1951.
[67] . Edmund Ballantyne 1989: 436-445.
[68] . Al Huang 1973; Solala Towler 1996: 111-130.
[69] . Solalal Towler 95-109; beyond text translations, she has also
written a good overview of Daoist religious history and practices, Eva
Wong 1997.
[70] . Solalla Towler, 1996: 49-57; see also
[71] . Jwing-Ming Yang, see YMAA (Yang’s Martial Arts
Association Press), Yang says, “The best way to find a teacher is one
who has published books”; Solalal Towler 1996: 15-29. I have studied
Tai Ji with one of Yang’s teacher-students for five years and attended
his workshops; I have also studied Tai Ji with two other Chinese
teachers (from mainland China) and all of them borrow esoteric
constructs from Western alchemy and magical traditions.
[72] . Michael Saso, 1978/2000 (plus many other works), this is an
excellent introduction to Daoist magical rites and practices.
[73] . Hua Jing Ni, see .
[74] . See Hau Ching Ni, 1979, 1989, 1992, 1995.
[75] . Hau Ching Ni 1979/1996, passim; Solalal Towler 1996: 1313-149.
[76] . Solala Towler, 1996: 30-48; Maoshan Ni, Yo San University at:
[77] . J. J. Clark 2000: 133-134; Solalala Towler 1996: 58-73 and ; Tao
Garden Healing Arts Center .
[78] . Eric Yudelove 1995: xviii-xxi.
[79] . Eric Yudelove 1995: xv.
[80] . Eric Yudelove 1995: 7-9.
[81] . Eric Yudelove 1995: 16-18.
[82] . Eric Yudelove 1995: 25-27.
[83] . Eric Yudelove 1995: 34-36.
[84] . Franz Bardon, 1975 (original 1971).
[85] . Eric Yulelove 1995: 81-92.
[86] . Eric Yudelove 2000.
[87] . Eric Yulelove 1995, passim; see also his web page:
[88] . Dennis Lewis 1997: 6.
152
[89] . Dennis Lewis, 1997: 21-22.
[90] . Dennis Lewis 1997: 50-54.
[91] . Dennis Lewis 1997: 145-46.
[92] . For more on Dennis Lewis, see:
[93] . Michael Winn, see: and
[94] . Brian Orr, see:
[95] . Solala Towler, The Empty Vessel, see:
[96] . Edwin Shendelman, see: under articles for The Empty Vessel.
[97] . J. J. Clarke 2000:20.
[98] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 82-84.
[99] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 64-65; also David Jones and John Culliney,
1999, passim.
[100] . J. J. Clarke 2000: 184-193.
Imagination & Inner Alchemy
Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and Inner Alchemy Process
KC Voss
Note: this 124 page thesis, though it may seem lengthy, is a short
way to get an excellent education in the principles and process of
western internal alchemy. The writer is never pedantic, has done deep
reserach on alchemy, and packs as much into some footnotes as some
would an essay.
A main point for qigong and Taoist neidangong practitioners is the
distinction between the type of ordinary imagination that is mere
fantasy, and may disperse or merely “spin” chi, and the Divine
Imagination of the alchemist, who identifies him/herself with the
Creator Gods and uses it to “rebirth” Prime Matter (Yuan Jing, original
Essence in Taoist terminology) and thus manifest in the physical plane
the source of all life, which otherwise may remain in its chaotic and
unborn state.
The alchemists, east and west, use imagination as the “gift of the
Gods” to humans for use in shaping their energetic reality. In this
sense, imagination is what allows the adept to perceive the yin-yang
and five phase (elemental) tensions at various levels of their energy and
spirit bodies, and to use that tensions imaginatively to transform and
shape the world.
It will broaden the persepctive of Taoist pracitioners to view the
alchemical imagination through the lens of Medieveal renaissance
genius Marsilio Ficino and an esoteric Jesuit Ignatius de Loyola. This
paper goes further, and summarizes the role of imagination in alchemy
by scholars as diverse as Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Henry
Corbin, Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, and Antoine Faivre.
Ficino was a Renaissance master of feng shui and inner alchemy. He
would be totally comfortable practicing the Planetary and Soul
Alchemy of the Taoists (Greatest Kan & Li), and gives similar type
instructions to increase harmonic resonance between the sun, the soul
of hte adapt, and the solar essences to be found in life.
Michael Winn
Imagination & Alchemy
 Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and Alchemy
by K.C. Voss
INTRODUCTION
Although imagination as a religious phenomenon per se has been
an under-represented topic of investigation, it nevertheless plays a
central role in religious experience and religious praxis - especially in
the mystic and esoteric varieties. One reason for this is that the
imagination enables access to deeper levels of reality than those
ordinarily experienced. A second reason is that it helps mediate
between things which are conventionally perceived as ontologically
separate. In particular, it permits the realm called human to come into
contact with that which is called divine; in other words, the
imagination functions as a bridge between the microcosm and the
macrocosm.
The premise underlying this paper should be made explicit here, at
the outset, although I shall not take it up again in a systematic way.
Namely, it is that the universe is ontologically whole, and therefore,
that the separation felt so acutely between the mystics and God,
between the natural magicians of the Renaissance and the cosmos, and
between the alchemists and the Philosopher’s Stone was not the
reflection of a correct ontology; rather, it was the legacy of a flawed
conceptual framework. Thus mystics, magicians, and alchemists all had
to embark on a process of what could be described as `sacred
deconstruction’ before they were able to reach their goal. Closely
related to this is an understanding of what it means to use the faculty
of imagination as a method of gnosis, of knowing. Emphasis will
therefore be placed on illustrating the role played by the imagination
in the dissolution of the conceptual categories which support an
experience of separation, and on showing how intentional use of the
imagination functions to enable more intimate knowledge of the
object of religious yearning [1] .
In what follows I shall discuss examples of the use of imagination
by Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and within the alchemical
tradition, as well as the function of the imagination in meditative,
magical and alchemical praxis and in the construction of metaphorical
and plastic images.
SOME THEORIES ABOUT THE FUNCTION OF
IMAGINATION
Islamicist Henry Corbin distinguished between the imaginary and
the imaginal as a way of clarifying the fact that the latter possessed a
reality of its own, a depth and substance not generally associated with
the merely imaginary. In an important article, Mundus Imaginalis or
the Imaginary and the Imaginal, Corbin relates that, in the course of
translating Arabic and Persian texts dealing with Islamic cosmology, he
realized that he needed to find a satisfactory way to translate different
terms referring to a phenomenon which in English would usually be
called ‘imaginary’, lest his readers think that what was being discussed
in those texts was unreal, fictitious, or trivial. In contrast, the texts he
was reading posited the reality of no fewer than three worlds:
There is the physical, sensible world encompassing both our
terrestrial world (governed by the human souls) and the sidereal
universe (governed by the Souls of the Spheres). The sensible world is
the world of the phenomenon (molk). There is also the supersensible
world of the Soul or Angel Souls, the Malakut, in which the... mystical
Cities are located, and which starts at the `convex surface of the ninth
Sphere’. And there is the world of pure archangelic Intelligences. Each
of these three worlds has its organ of perception: the sense,
imagination, and the intellect, corresponding with the triad: body, soul
and mind. [2]
The second world is the ‘mundus imaginalis’, ‘a very precise order
of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of
perception’’ [3] . In order to distinguish this sort of perception
153
from the sort that produces unreal sorts of things, and the things to
which it pertains from those which are ‘outside the framework of
being and existing’, Corbin eschews use of the word ‘imagination’;
preferring instead to speak of the ‘imaginal’ and the ‘mundus
imaginalis” [4] . Thus the faculty of imagination is a living tool which
allows access by degrees into the realm described by Corbin as the
‘mundus imaginalis’ or the ‘supersensible world of the Soul’; far from
being unreal, it is a parallel world which is ‘ontologically as real as the
world of the senses and that of the intellect’ [5] .
The mundus imaginalis corresponds to that which Mircea Eliade
calls the ‘sacred center’ [6] . Some of the characteristics of the imaginal
world are that it ‘has no extension in space’, and that it exists beyond
reality as we know it’ [7] . To produce an extensive analysis of this
realm per se is outside the scope of the present paper; however, the
importance of the concept of the imaginal world for understanding
imagination as a phenomenon in esotericism and in mysticism cannot
be overemphasized, since it is the landscape of that world which
mystics and esotericists claim to have experienced. Corbin’s mundus
imaginalis is thought to be the realm to which the angels described in
the Summa Theologica belong, the middle ground between human
beings and the divine [8] . As such, it must be passed through, not
bypassed by all who seek the divine.
A second important contribution to our understanding of the
function of imagination is found in Lynda Sexson’s book, Ordinarily
Sacred. Deliberately setting out to `muddle the borders’ of the tight
categories we deal in (real/unreal, sacred/profane, etc.), Sexson tries to
show in particular that the boundaries between the sacred and profane
are blurred; `religion’, she writes, ‘is made up of nothing special - the
ordinary is holy or potentially holy’ [9] .
The things of this world are vessels, entrances for stories; when we
touch them or tumble into them, we fall into their labyrinthine
resonances. The world is no longer divided, then, into those
inconvenient categories of subject and object, and the world becomes
religiously apprehended. [10]
Added to Corbin’s distinction between the quality of imagination
which produces things that are unreal and the quality of the imaginal
which produces, or apprehends that which is truly real, is Sexson’s
understanding of imagination as a kind of solvent that dissolves the
dichotomies which ordinarily govern our experience of the world. In
marked contrast to the iconoclasm which characterized the
Reformation, the shattering of these false images heralds the
possibility of a ‘way in’ to the imaginal world [11] . To illustrate, Sexson
describes a continuum which consists of officially sacralized objects on
the one hand - in this example, rosary beads - and found objects on the
other, objects which are consecrated by nothing more - or less - than
their capacity to occasion transmutation [12] - here, dogwood berries
found and wondered at by a little girl. ‘Religion’, writes Sexson, `does
not reside in these literal things but resides in them metaphorically. By
metaphor’, she continues:
I mean the imaginal reality that gives depth and integrity to our
lives. Imaginal means not merely the imaginative (as- in referring to
works of art) and certainly not the imaginary (as in referring to silly
things made up); the imaginal makes up the world. [13]
Another significant idea has been introduced: the association of
imagination with depth. Here, when I talk about the imagination, or
refer to something as pertaining to the ‘imaginal’ realm, I mean
something which pertains to the `really real’; that which has depth,
that which Mircea Eliade would say is at the `center of the world’ [14] .
The notion of the imagination as a solvent which functions to
dissolve our ordinary conceptual boundaries, thereby enabling access
to the center, is also emphasized in the work of a third writer, James
Hillman. Hillman provides the reader with an analysis of the word
‘psyche’, in his book Revisioning Psychology. Psyche means `soul’, he
writes, `a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward
things rather than a thing itself.
This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes
differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between
us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective
moment - and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
[15]
According to Hillman, since the second and third centuries of the
common era we have progressively lost our experience of the world as
an `ensouled’ sphere encompassing within itself the pluralities of
human and divine, matter and spirit, part and whole none
disconnected from another but forming and reforming in subtly
interactive ways [16] . At the same time, we have also lost an
understanding of the way in which the psyche once functioned to meld
these things into a multivalent whole. Psyche functioned to enliven the
cosmos and to enable its glittering parts to cohere. The process that
Hillman calls psyche corresponds to that which I am calling
imagination.
I The Magico-religious Use of Images
There is a long tradition of the magico-religious use of imagination
to create images which are located in both interior and exterior space.
My discussion of the imagination in Ficino’s natural magic, Ignatius’
meditative practice, and in alchemy illustrates its function in each
context, and includes a description of its use in both kinds of spaces.
The following preliminary remarks are intended to impart a sense of
the centrality of that tradition.
The very ancient idea of sympathetic magic which accompanies
the making of images can be seen to underlie the doctrines of
similitudes and correspondences and the idea of relationship between
the microcosm and the macrocosm. Within a universe in which `like
begets like’ and `what is below is just as what is above’ it is eminently
reasonable to assume that one element can influence another.
Moreover, there are radical ontological implications associated with
the principle of similitudes, since, as E. H. Gombrich succinctly and
very precisely expressed, `the `fetish’ not only `symbolizes’ fertility but
`has’ it’ [17] . It is crucial for contemporary understanding to realize
that the faculty of imagination was understood to cause things, and
that its efficacy as a cause was taken for granted in the same way that
we unthinkingly rely on the efficacy of electrical current to operate the
appliances we use today.
It is also important to resist the temptation to limit discussion of
the imagination within the context of esoteric phenomena and
practices, rather than the wider context of those thought of as
belonging to religion proper. Imagination has been a central theme in
each of the three major religious traditions of the west, albeit only
enjoying a necessarily limited audience. In Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic scripture we have to confront the idea of persons having been
conceived in the image of God, and if Genesis tells us that we are
made in the image of God, various strains of philosophical and
theological thought often lead us to the idea of `God being
imagination itself, that is, of divinity defined as `an imagining
power’ [18] . This is certainly an idea which we see in the alchemical
tradition, and in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, together with the
related conceptualization of this `imagining power’ as the cause of the
world, as that which enlivens and continues the whole.
Thus in an Eliadean sense persons sought to `imitate the acts of
the gods ab origine’ by attempting to mirror the divine paradigmatic
act of imagining in their own endeavors [19] . The memory tradition
whose history and significance is so brilliantly articulated by Frances
Yates in her book The Art of Memory developed an elaborate set of
rules for remembering words and ideas by `placing’ selected images at
strategic points within carefully contrived interior `spaces’, sometimes
called ‘memory palaces’ [20] . There is a complex relationship between
mnemonic systems used for rhetorical purposes and those which are
employed for magico-religious purposes. If their use was not clearly
demarcated at their origins, it proved no more so as time went on.
For example, on the religious side, the pre-Reformation church
154
nurtured for generations a tradition of prescribed ritual use of images
as a help for fostering appropriate devotional attitudes [21] .
And, as we shall see, Ignatius consciously utilized the imagination
to help construct an interior image of the world, while in the esoteric
realm, Marsilio Ficino advocated the use of exterior images as an aid
for interiorizing the macrocosm. We cannot forget as well tarot cards,
which entailed utilizing exterior images as powerful mnemonic aids,
and which are found to have been used in Europe from as early as the
15th century on for both meditative and divinatory purposes [22] . In
every case, one essentially spread out before oneself a detailed imago
mundi for contemplation. Let us turn now to consideration of some
specific examples.
2 Marsilio Ficino: The Use of Imagination in De vita Triplici
Marsilio Ficino is, as James Hillman observed, still one of the
`most neglected important figures in the movement of Western ideas
[23] . Born in Figline, near Florence, in 1433, Ficino is responsible for
translating Plato’s dialogues as well as the newly available Corpus
Hermeticum from Greek into Latin. He also gathered around him a
circle comprised of some of the best minds of his era [24] .
Ficino’s view of the soul was that it was `all things together... the
center of the universe, the middle term in all things’ [25] . The soul was
the mediating element between the human and the divine by virtue of
the fact that there was an ontological connection between the two
spheres. Ficino understood the soul to be the seat of the faculty of
imagination, and his belief in its efficacy is perhaps nowhere more
evident than in the third volume of De vita triplici, called `On Making
Your Life Agree with the Heavens’. Therein we find directions for
making images as well as advice concerning their proper use and the
benefits that can be expected. In keeping with Ficino’s dual vocation
and training - as a physician, he was dedicated to the healing of the
body, as a priest, he devoted himself to the healing of the soul - Book
III appears to have been intended as a prescription not only for
integrating the elements of the human person body, soul, and intellect -
but for integrating the human with the divine as well. In writing De
vita triplici, Ficino was not only attempting to provide a manual for
restoring physical and psychological health; more importantly, he
hoped to provide a formula for placing his readers in the right relation
to the cosmos, and thus to the divine.
If one followed Ficino’s directions, one could transcend the
conventional understanding of ontological bifurcation of the celestial
and terrestrial spheres. On this interpretation, De vita triplici emerges
as a profound corrective to the traditional scholastic understanding of
the universe, for at the very center of scholastic teaching was the
notion that an unbridgeable gulf existed between the human and
divine; these were conceived as polar opposites, rather than as located
at different ends of a continuum.
Turning to Book III, we find clarification of the most important
elements in Ficino’s thought: `the world both lives and breathes, and it
is possible for us to draw its spirit. What follows is vitally necessary and
directly concerns learning how to use the function of imagination:
`You must therefore learn how to bring this spirit into yourself’, he
writes [26] .
Ficino’s method for drawing the spirit of the world into oneself
entailed making ourselves open to celestial influences by using
materials which were linked to those influences in particular ways; his
instructions presuppose an acceptance of certain ideas (one could term
them `doctrines’) which were prevalent at the time of the Renaissance.
First are those regarding correspondences and sympathies which exist
between and among things and qualities. Second is the notion that the
universe was divided into two parts: the celestial or divine sphere
(having to do with the heavens and with God), and the terrestrial or
human sphere (having to do with nature and persons). Lastly there was
an understanding of the person (and by extrapolation, the world) as a
universe in miniature. This was the doctrine of the microcosm and the
macrocosm, succinctly expressed in the Hermetic motto: A ‘ s above, so
below’ [27] .
Accordingly, Ficino provides long lists of things, together with
their qualities, arranged according to the celestial bodies with which
they are believed to be associated. In giving us these lists, Ficino
intends for his readers to surround themselves with as many of these
things as possible: we are to reflect upon them, use them, eat them,
dress in them, and otherwise immerse ourselves in them, all the while
being careful to insure that each particular activity is done at the
appropriate hour, day, and season. The underlying rationale is that this
will maximize the potential for the embodiment in one’s own being of
the qualities and attributes inhering in particular objects, smells,
sounds, music, and places. Here particular attention will be paid to
Ficino’s emphasis on the spirit-filled material with which images,
objects, and medicines are made, and which imbues them with efficacy.
As we consider the examples below, we should remember that
Ficino is not saying these things are only signs for some quality or
other (although he certainly wants to say that on one level, the lion, for
example, represents or signifies the sun). Nor is he limiting himself to
mere similitude, saying that the lion is somehow like the sun. In the
deepest sense Ficino understands lions as symbolic beings that actually
participate in the being of the sun; each partakes of the same
spirit’ [28] . Ultimately, in fact, he thinks that everything which is in the
world really participates in the life of the heavens. `Let no one have
any doubt’, he writes:
We and all the things that are around us, with certain preparations,
are able to lay claim to the heavenly bodies. For that is how the
heavenly bodies are made. They rule strictly, and they have been
prepared from this from the beginning. [29]
We are linked to what Ficino calls `the one that is simplest and
good’ by means of the anima mundi, which permeates everything, but
is most concentrated in the planets and the stars, those `heavenly
bodies that have been prepared for this from the beginning [30] . It has
been noted that in his own way, Ficino can be said to have been
reviving the worship of the sun, whom he terms `lord of heaven’; thus
it comes as no surprise that he considers that the most beneficial
influences are derived from the group he calls `solar things’ [31] .
Within this group we find `Gold and the color of gold’, carbuncle,
myrrh, golden honey, saffron, the ram, hawk, hen, swan, and lion,
beetles, crocodiles, golden-haired folks with curly hair, magnanimous
people, and sometimes those with bald heads [32] . Because the Sun is
exceedingly powerful - `amplitude belongs especially to the Sun’, writes
Ficino - we must be cautious about getting too much of it [33] .
Nevertheless, he writes:
It will be a good beginning in the use of things under this
dominance if you put on Solar things to wear, if you live in Solar places,
look Solar, hear Solar, smell Solar, imagine Solar, think Solar, and even
desire Solar. Likewise, if you will imitate in your life the dignity and
gifts of the Sun. Hang around Solar men and plants, and carefully
touch the laurel. [34]
In short, we are supposed to saturate ourselves with `Sunness’.
Since Ficino’s particular concern is for scholars, and since scholars are
especially prone to be affected by Saturn and its concomitant
melancholy on account of the reflective nature of their work [35] , he
pays some attention to Saturnian influence, noting that it is not
`harmful by nature...’ and should `be used sometimes, the way doctors
must sometimes use poisons’. In fact,
The Pythagorean maguses seem to have been extremely cautious
in this matter, when they would become frightened that their constant
philosophizing was the tyranny of Saturn, so they would dress up in
white garments, and each day sing songs and make music with Jovial
and Appolonian things, and in this way they lived a long time under
Saturn. [36]
Ficino discusses Jupiter and Venus as well, since these,
together with the Sun, are the powerful planets he calls the
155
`Three Graces of heaven’ [37] . Jovial things include silver, amethyst,
topaz, crystal, sapphire; green and airy colors and wine; certain animals
like the lamb, the peacock, the eagle and the calf; and also religious and
law-abiding thoughts. Ficino says that `the discourses and deliberations
of human reason... belong to Jove’ [38] who `leads one to find
philosophy, truth, and religion [39] , and that our reason, either
through the imagination and the spirit together, or through
deliberation, or through both, can, by a kind of imitation, put itself in
agreement with Jove. Our reason then might take on Jove for his
dignity and nearness to us, and receive the gifts of Jove much more
than even the imagination or the spirit. In the same way, the
imagination and the spirit, for the same reason, receive much more of
the heavenly gifts than certain lower things and materials. [40]
Then there are Venetian things. `I want to call you old people away
from these heavier Gods’, says Ficino,
and get you back to Venus through gardens and meadows. I summon
all of you to nourishing Venus, not for her to play with you, but for her
to make jokes with you. [41]
The color green, and the plants of the fields and meadows contain
the essence of springtime, the young, fresh time of the year. Because of
this, it will help keep a person, `even if he is an old man... in a natural
state of greenness, as if... he were a laurel tree, an olive or a pine, still
green in winter’ [42] . Elsewhere, Ficino adds that `the power of Venus’,
whom he calls `mother of the Muses’ [43] , is drawn by `turtle-doves,
pigeons, the white water-wagtail, and other things which modesty does
not permit me to list’ [44] .
In addition to what has been mentioned already, all of the
planetary influences must be juggled according to one’s deficiencies. To
return to the case of the melancholy scholar, we remember that the
introduction of Jovial and Appolonian things is believed to mitigate
Saturnian influences. Ficino explains how to do this with other
planetary influences too, since each planet has a role in the formation
of the whole person. In this way, the various aspects of the person are
able to approximate an ideal balance. Bringing all the different
elements of the person into proper relation to each other by means of
adding or subtracting qualities (like ingredients in a stew) is a primary
desideratum of Ficino’s program.
3 The Macrocosm: Ficino and the Imago Mundi
Yet Ficino does not stop at the level of the person, as we discover
when we examine his notion of an imago mundi. Chapter 19 of Book
III is called simply ‘On making a figure of the universe’, and begins
with the question: ‘Why not make a universal image, that is, an image
of the universe itself?’ [45] . According to the ancients, the enterprise
of making an image of the universe is beneficial, and Ficino writes that
they advised coloring this image with the `universal and singular colors
of the world: green, gold, and sapphire’ [46] .
The ancients decided, therefore, that it was a big help, if you
wanted to capture the gifts of the heavenly Graces, to look at these
three powerful colors frequently, and to color in, on the little wallmap
of the universe that you are making, the sapphire color for the spheres
of the world. They thought it was worthwhile, too, to add the color
gold to the spheres of the heavens and the stars, and to dress Vesta
herself, or Ceres, that is, earth, in a green mantle. In this way, followers
of these ancients would either wear this little form of the universe, or
look at it on the wall... Not just to look at it, but to reflect on it in the
soul. [47]
Ficino also suggests it would be good to have `a little room, one
with an arch’, appropriately painted and decorated with
representations of the three planets inside one’s house (the bedroom
would be excellent for this), and he advises us to contemplate the
whole of life, rather than its parts whenever we are outside the house
by focusing on `the shape and colors of the universe’ [48] .
Space precludes more detailed consideration of the imago mundi
here. Instead, I wish to recall the claim made in the introduction to
this paper, namely, that one of the most significant ways in which the
faculty of imagination has been employed in the context of religious
experience is to help deconstruct the erroneous conceptualization and
concomitant experience of ontological separation between the celestial
and terrestrial spheres. In advocating the fabrication and
contemplation of an imago mundi, an image of the world in miniature,
Ficino is providing a means of bringing microcosm and macrocosm
together. Throughout Ficino’s work are two very important ideas
having to do with the way in which synthesis takes place between the
intellect and the body and between the realm of the Ideas and matter.
On the microcosmic level the soul is the mediating term between body
and intellect. On the macrocosmic level, the anima mundi functions
analogously between matter and the Idea. These relationships can be
diagrammed as follows:
Micocosmic Level
soul
body intellect
Macrocosmic Level
anima mundi
matter idea
Ficino’s directions for making an imago mundi are truly significant.
In the first place, making a physical image of the world is meant to
help us overcome the apparent dis/connection between self and world,
and the reason we are to do it is to help us become more attuned to
our (very real) participation in the world. Secondly, there is the fact
that, according to Ficino’s ontology, the image of a thing is necessarily a
part of the being of that which is imaged. Thirdly, because his advice to
contemplate `the whole of life’ rather than its parts when leaving the
house entails interiorizing and assimilating this image of the world, this
microcosm, we thus begin to embody it. In embodying the microcosm
we participate more fully in it; thereby we are enabled to participate
more fully in the macrocosm since the microcosm itself is an image of
the macrocosm and thus operates according to the same principles.
Therefore, and once more in perfect accord with Ficino’s ontology, it
too participates in the being of that which it symbolizes - the
macrocosm. We can diagram this relation as follows:
Microcosm
(the Starting Point)
Imago Mundi
(the Means)
Macrocosm
(the Goal)
To be sure, there are gradations of being within Ficino’s schema,
but his conception of the cosmos is that it is whole. It is for this reason
that De vita triplici can be understood as a profound corrective to the
traditional scholastic conception of the universe. Ficino’s imago mundi
is an important element within a spiritual discipline that is meant to
help us overcome divisions which are usually understood to be
ontological, but are instead only conventional.
4 Imagination in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola
Ignatius de Loyola was born in Spain in 1491, and spent his youth
as an officer in the army of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. At the age
of twenty-six he sustained a serious leg wound and to help relieve
the tedium of an enforced convalescence at his family home in
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Guipuscoa asked for novels and short stories. Since none were
available, he had to content himself with heavier fare: the lives of the
saints and a life of Christ. In his autobiography Ignatius says that
during this time he `paused to think and reason’ `Suppose that I should
do what Saint Francis did, what Saint Dominic did?’ [49] . The answer
came after his recovery, when he made a pilgrimage to Montserrat. In a
church there, during a vigil lasting the entire night, he experienced a
dramatic conversion. Ignatius left his weapons before the statue of
Mary, and returned to the world to found the Society of Jesus. The
remainder of his life was devoted to directing the activities of the order
and endeavoring to perfect his own spiritual life.
The Spiritual Exercises were written with the intention to provide
exercises that were calculated to maximize the quality of persons’
relationship to God during a period of deliberate retreat from the
world under the guidance of a specially trained spiritual director. The
smallest details of life are considered: there are rules for eating,
drinking, sleeping; meditations formulated for particular times during
the day - dawn, noon, evening, and midnight; careful advice for the
various emotions a retreatant might experience, such as despair, pride,
etc.; very little escapes consideration. And among these well-
considered directions we find more than twenty-five specific
instructions involving the intentional use of imagination, and no less
than twenty-one pages of `points on which to contemplate’: brief
descriptive references to major events in the life of Christ, clearly
intended as image-making material but without any accompanying
instruction [50] . There are also eight references to a process which
Ignatius called `bringing to memory’, evocative of the Platonic
doctrine concerning our innate memory of the Forms [51]
5 The Place of Images in the Church
Ignatius’s Exercises were thoroughly scrutinized before being given
papal approbation in 1548, and are therefore officially orthodox. The
Exercises are still in use today as a guide for persons making retreats
conducted by the Jesuits. This is somewhat surprising in view of their
emphasis on memory and imagination, for although it has always used
them, the Church has long been wary of images because of their pagan
antecedents [52] . While images of the saints and of Mary and even of
the three persons of the Trinity were permitted, carefully formulated
doctrinal distinctions regulated their use among the faithful, and
insured that devotion would not be directed to the images themselves,
but beyond the images, to the persons and qualities represented. These
steps were not entirely effective: nuances of this kind were not readily
grasped by those unused to making such distinctions themselves, but
in formulating these pronouncements the Church anticipated and at
least tried to address the confusion she feared would be inevitable [53] .
First, idolatry, as opposed to the use of images as sources of
inspiration and as mnemonic help, was officially banned. Secondly, the
theologians carefully distinguished the. kinds of veneration that could
appropriately be directed to the beings represented by the images.
Three degrees were articulated: latria (adoration), reserved for God
(and thus lawfully extended to each of the three persons of the Trinity);
hyperdulia (literally, high veneration), a singular form accorded only to
Mary; dulia (veneration), reserved for the saints. The attitudes toward
images, images themselves, and the Church’s teachings pertaining to
these degrees of veneration are related ideas, possessed of difficult
theological subtleties which were in practice disregarded by a majority
of the faithful. I have introduced them here because similar issues arise
with respect to Ignatius’ method for composing mental images of God
and the saints.
Ignatius obviously considered the careful and deliberate
construction of mental images to be of important, even critical help in
making progress along spiritual lines. The Ignatian method is
something of a hybrid; it is not unrelated to the `active imagination’ of
the magus or the alchemist, both of whom are familiar with the place
and function of imagination in their work, but could easily give pause
to ecclesiastics who are already sensitive about the fine points of
images and attitudes toward them. Moreover, some of the
characteristics of the Exercises indicate clear links to the art of
memory.
6 Examples from The Spiritual Exercises
Ignatius distinguishes `visible’ contemplations from `invisible’
ones. The purpose of the first type is `to see with the sight of the
imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want
to contemplate’ [54] . The second type is an aid for regulating inner
attitudes and dispositions, and forming impressions of qualities which
are incorporeal. Metaphor and analogy are key elements in this
process. The ‘First Exercise’ includes general instructions for
constructing a mental image, or as Ignatius calls it, an `invisible
contemplation or meditation’:
In an invisible contemplation or meditation - as... on the Sins - the
composition will be to see with the sight of the imagination and
consider that my soul is imprisoned in this corruptible body, and all the
compound in this valley, as exiled among brute beasts: I say all the
compound of soul and body. [55]
Ignatius also emphasizes the importance of asking God for an
experience of whatever emotion is appropriate to the image, for
example:
if the contemplation is on the Resurrection, one is to ask for joy
with Christ in joy; if it is on the Passion, he is to ask for pain, tears and
torment with Christ in torment. [56]
After calling up an image in the mind, Ignatius sometimes
instructs us to develop things even further by moving from being
spectators outside what we see to being participants within it:
`Imagining Christ our Lord present and placed on the Cross, let me
make a Colloquy’ [57] . Ignatius notes that we are to perform the
colloquy `as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant to his
master’ ... [58]
In one of his contemplations on hell, Ignatius asks us to ‘see with
the sight of the imagination the great fires, and the souls as in bodies
of fire’, but here he adds a new dimension which greatly expands the
process because it involves all the senses: `hear with the ears’, he writes,
the ‘wailings, howlings, cries’ of hell; then `smell’, `taste’, and
`touch’ [59] . Next we are directed to build an image which will afford a
God’s eye view of `all the surface and circuit of the earth’:
To see and consider the Three Divine Persons, as on their royal
throne or seat of Their Divine Majesty, how They look on all the
surface and circuit of the earth’. [60]
I note that by telling us to imagine the earth from the perspective
of the divinity, Ignatius is telling us to imagine what God sees, and that
this is but a step away from seeing through God’s eyes, so to speak.
Thus, we have additional justification for locating Ignatius’ techniques
along a spectrum which includes not only the mystic who seeks
oneness with God in the unio mystica, but also the magician who
intentionally imagines he/she is divine, and the alchemist who
identifies him/herself with the creator gods of the beginnings.
7 Influences on The Spiritual Exercises
The situation with respect to the influences on Ignatius in some
ways resembles the situation today, when references to Foucault and
Derrida can be overheard in places in and around the university. Each
generation of university folk have their intellectual fashions: sixteenth-
century life at the University of Paris, which Ignatius attended (he
enrolled in 1528, received the licentiate in theology in 1534, and the
master’s degree the following year) would not have been an exception.
Ideas concerning natural magic, the Hermetic texts, alchemy, and
memory arts were common coin, and it is hard to see how he could
have escaped familiarity with them [61] `.
As I stated earlier, many of the characteristics of the Exercises
suggest that it belongs to the tradition of memory treatises which
proliferated during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that were
surveyed by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. Indeed, Yates
remarks that these were so numerous she had difficulty in
157
deciding which ones to use. Many of these treatises were written by
Dominicans, and she refers to one work in particular which could
easily have provided inspiration for The Spiritual Exercises:
An anonymous treatise, probably by a Dominican, gives a most
solemn description of how to remember the whole order of the
universe and the roads to Heaven and Hell by the artificial memory.
[62]
Because so much of this material seems to have come from out of
the Dominican order, it is appropriate to note that they enjoyed some
prominence at the University of Paris; thus, by virtue of shared
theological training, the Dominicans and Ignatius possessed certain
kinds of knowledge in common. For example, Thomas Aquinas’
Summa Theologica, which contains a section on memory was widely
known and extremely influential [63] . (And of course Aquinas had
been one of the luminaries of the Dominican order.) It would have
been virtually impossible for Ignatius to complete the work for a
master’s degree in theology without reading Aristotle, whose writings
include De memoria et reminiscentia, or Plato with his account of
recollection and the Ideas in the Phaedrus. Yates has traced the
dissemination of these and other classical writings on memory up
through the Renaissance period, demonstrating the links between
rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, and the memory arts. To help
illustrate she reminds us of Cicero’s description of the five parts of
rhetoric in his De inventione:
Invention is the excogitation of true things (res), or things similar
to truth to render one’s cause plausible; disposition is the arrangement
in order of the things thus discovered; elocution is the accommodation
of suitable words to the invented (things); memory is the firm
perception in the soul of things and words; pronunciation is the
moderating of the voice and body to suit the dignity of the things and
words. [64]
With Cicero’s definitions in mind, when we turn again to The
Spiritual Exercises we notice that attention is paid to all but one of the
five. Ignatius’ images include a lot of details, as we see from his
contemplation on Christ’s nativity:
It will be here to see with the sight of the imagination the road
from Nazareth to Bethlehem; considering the length and the breadth,
and whether such road is level or through valleys; likewise looking at
the place or cave of the Nativity, how large, how small, how low, how
high, and how it was prepared. [65]
He is also concerned about order: the meditations on various
aspects of the life of Christ and the events in the Garden of Eden
follow the chronology found in the scriptures. Ignatius does not
explicitly mention elocution, but can be presumed to have thought
very carefully about the wording of his Exercises. He frequently talks
about memory: the contemplator is to `bring to the memory’ an image
from the past which must then be strongly impressed in the mind.
Finally, his concern with experiencing the emotions appropriate to
whatever is imagined is not unrelated to Cicero’s definition of
pronunciation which calls for `the moderating of the voice and body to
suit the dignity of things and words’. Moreover, many of the earlier
writers on memory stressed the importance of fixing images in our
mind, so they might not be easily forgotten; for this reason they often
utilized images that were memorably grotesque or otherwise striking
[66] . What could be more vivid than Ignatius’ image of hell, which
even requires that we imagine its sounds and its smells: the bitter taste
of the condemned souls’ ‘tears, sadness and the worm of conscience’,
and `touch with the touch... how the fires touch and burn the souls’?
II IMAGINATION IN THE ALCHEMICAL TRADITION
The role of imagination in alchemy has been discussed by scholars
as diverse as Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Henry Corbin, Gaston
Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, and Antoine Faivre. And while a case can
be made for viewing the faculty of the imagination as both the
hermeneutical method and the creative principle of alchemy, it
remains stubbornly resistant to analysis, tending in fact, to be nearly as
elusive as the goal of the alchemical process itself.
The alchemical texts contain only occasional explicit references to
the imagination with the result that would-be hermeneuts must face
an uncannily self-referential task. Just as our alchemical predecessors
had to organize chaotic material and amplify intuitions about meaning
in order to proceed with their work, we too must select and then
frame statements from primary and secondary sources and finally flesh
out or amplify our intuitions about their meaning, in order to produce
a coherent exegesis. Such a methodology has a circularity to which we
in the contemporary era have become unaccustomed: it seems that if
we are to discover the proper way to understanding imagination in
alchemy, we must ourselves makes use of something like it in solving
our hermeneutical problem. Circular or not, I believe this
methodological approach to be the most promising tool in the box in
this case. Given the real possibility that the concept of alchemy as a
spiritual discipline may be somewhat unfamiliar to the reader, I want
to provide a brief summary of what the alchemical work entailed,
before considering several exemplary alchemical texts.
I Alchemy as a Spiritual Discipline
According to Jung, whose three volumes on alchemy represent the
most comprehensive articulation to date of its psychological
implications, the alchemical work can be understood in terms of what
he calls its `double face’, i.e., two aspects, the practical (or operatio)
and the theoretical (theoria). Alchemy therefore proceeded on two
mere or less distinct levels - the theoretical and the practical [67] .
With respect to its practical aspect, on account of the nature of
the material, it is virtually impossible to determine the exact order or
number of stages in the alchemical work; in fact, these vary according
to personal preferences and idiosyncrasies [68] . Nor is it always
apparent what substances are being referred to. We may be told, for
example, that mercury is necessary for a certain procedure, but it may
be the metal that is meant, or the qualities of the metal, or the god
himself! [69] . For a variety of reasons, primarily adherence to the
doctrine of correspondences and similitudes and the view that there
was a relation between microcosm and macrocosm, the alchemists
were given to making analogies be tween events which occurred on an
`outer’, material level, and experiences which took place on an `inner’,
spiritual plane [70] .
There was thought to be congruence between the maturation of
the chemical processes in the alchemists’ laboratory and the deepening
of their own gnosis. Interpreted symbolically, the alchemists were
attempting to perfect the Self, to `lead out the gold within’, as one
expressed it. On the material level, the alchemists’ purpose in the
laboratory was the production of gold, the most perfect of all metals;
on the spiritual level, their goal was to produce the arcane substance
variously known as the Philosopher’s Stone, the Hermetic Androgyne,
or the Rebis [71] . When viewed in this way, the Philosopher’s Stone
and ordinary gold are not so very different; the latter represented the
actualization of all the qualities only potentially present in lesser
metals; the former represented the actualization of all virtues
potentially present in human beings.
Jung maintains that alchemy was a bona fide spiritual discipline,
devoted to the unification of these material and spiritual opposites, as
these are conventionally understood, and that ultimately it was the
imagination which would mediate between them [72] . This resolution
took place on different levels corresponding to deepening levels of
understanding about the true nature of the alchemical operations. The
most profound form of resolution was characterized by a mode of
subtle mutual reciprocity and interpenetration in which each term of
an opposition entered fully into the being of the other, simultaneously
present to the other, transforming and being transformed [73] . Each
alchemist equipped a laboratory, selected and studied texts, and
constructed (and continuously refined, since the alchemists’
conception of the nature of the process, as well as their
conception of their relationship to it seem to have undergone
158
transformation as the work proceeded) a theoretical framework. This
last was critical, since it not only provided a theoretical context within
which physical experiments were carried out, but a hermeneutical one
as well, within which the results of these experiments could be
interpreted.
2 The Alchemical Theoria
It is in the context of the alchemical theoria that we most clearly
encounter imagination as primary modus operandi of the alchemical
endeavor. Just as the alchemical work had a `double face’, so too did
the alchemical imagination. It was the hermeneutical method of
alchemy, but its function was not limited merely to the articulation of
meaning; imagination was also the creative force par excellence [74] .
In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard describes his
methodological approach to the study of images as one which `consists
of designating the image as an excess of the imagination’ [75] . In
alchemy the arena in which such imaginal excess takes place is the
theoria. After commenting on the opacity of the documents pertaining
to the operatio in Psychology and Alchemy, Jung makes several
provocative remarks concerning the role of the imagination in the
theoria. For example:
The method of alchemy, psychologically speaking, is one of
boundless amplification... This ampliftcatio forms the second part of
the opus, and is understood by the alchemist as theoria. [76]
At first glance, this comment may appear adequate, but a closer
look shows that in itself, it simply doesn’t tell us enough, and proves
somewhat unsatisfying. What does he mean by `amplification’? What
had to be amplified? And precisely what is imagination’s role here? The
contemporary reader of alchemical texts soon discovers a baroque
landscape in which flourished visions, dreams, intuitions, feelings,
hunches, and the like, all with thematic similarities, and all taken very
seriously as comprising a foundation on which to build. But in their
initial unmediated state, none of these, whether taken alone or
together, would prove sufficiently substantial for shoring up the
alchemical work. All these elements first had to be mediated in order
to form a coherent foundation. From out of the theoretical context
described above was derived a complex web of metaphorical
associations, each with implications for all the others; this constituted
the raw material for the analogy-making that was considered an
integral part of the alchemical endeavor.
By means of the imagination, the alchemists
clothed their intuitions with `the stuff of association and analogy’ [77] .
Their method was to seize upon and then contemplate such
amorphous things as dreams, visions, mythic symbols, portents, signs,
etc., at length, with a marked degree of intentionality, i.e., `active
imagination’, as von Franz and others call it, thereby gradually imbuing
them with solidity, dimension, and form [78] . In short, they used their
imagination to deliberately exaggerate - `amplify’ - these things, to
objectify them in order to work with them. Having done this, the
alchemist would go on to further enrich and embellish what was in
place by following a trail of associations, repeating the amplificatio
with those; and then the entire sequence would be repeated with the
next set of associations, and so on.
Just as mythic creator divinities, the alchemists created form from
out of chaos; gold, where only lead had existed before. The thrust of
the alchemical work was both redemptive and incamational, and if the
alchemists’ stock in trade was the actualization of what formerly had
existed only in potentia, the tool with which they plied that trade was
the imagination. The following texts were based (or purportedly based)
on their authors’ alchemical experience and were intended for the
guidance and inspiration of fellow alchemists, as raw data for the
imagination. With that in mind, let us turn now to my three examples.
3 The Hermetick Romance or the Chymical Wedding
 According to historian Frances Yates, The Hermetick Romance of
1616 is properly located in the same tradition which gave us two other
so-called Rosicrucian manifestos in the same century: the Fama (first
printed edition 1614) and the Confessio (which appeared in 1615) [79] .
These describe the initiatic events reputedly experienced by Christian
Rosenkreutz, who is still revered by faithful Rosicrucians as one of the
greatest imperators of their order [80] .
It sets the scene for a focus on the imagination in the opening
lines. The protagonist had just finished praying, a process he describes
as including conversation with his Creator and the contemplation of
`many great Mysteries’, when a frightful tempest arose. The storm’s
intensity was such that it threatened to cause the entire house to `flye
in pieces’, clearly heralding an approaching dissolution of the limits of
ordinary
time / space. To protect himself lest the storm be sent from the Devil,
our character renewed his efforts at prayer and ‘persisted in my
Meditation’, until a figure `touched me on the Back’. Although
frightened, since the touch on the back had changed into an insistent
twitching on his coat, he turned and beheld a ‘fair and glorious Lady,
whose Garments were all Skye-colour, and... bespangled with golden
Stars...who, before leaving, placed a letter for him on the Table’ [81] .
One of the most remarkable things about this passage - which
begins with prayer and meditation and ends with a letter - is that it
brings together by degrees two modes of being -interior, private, and
insubstantial and exterior, public, and substantial - which are normally
viewed as dichotomised [82] . First, the description of the prayer
contained a hint of corporeality: the prayer itself was an interaction,
involving two persons, the subject (who prayed) and the object of his
prayer (his Creator). Second, the vision was heralded by physical
contact, meaning that it had enough materiality to involve his senses;
in fact, the author uses the phrase ‘bodily vision’ in a subsequent
passage from which I quote below. Third, the physical contact did not
happen merely once, but repeatedly, and the figure left a letter, a
physical token. We see that not only is the imagination involved here,
but imagination of the type described in The Spiritual Exercises of
Ignatius, which involves the body and its senses [83] .
The letter announced a long-awaited Hermetic wedding, which had
first been called to his attention `seven Years before... in a bodily
Vision’ [emphasis mine], and it therefore became the occasion for a
rather anguished examination of conscience, since he felt he was not
sufficiently prepared to participate in the event [84] . Added to that
was genuine consternation because he could understand little of the
significance of the announcement, now that it had arrived, for:
In my Head there was nothing but gross mis-understanding, and
blindness in mysterious things, so that I was not able to comprehend
even those things which lay under my Feet, and which I daily
conversed with, much less that I should be born to the searching out,
and understanding of the Secrets of Nature. [85]
A truly reluctant prophet, he also felt himself unworthy:
In my opinion Nature might every where find a more vertuous
Disciple, to whom to entrust her precious, though temporary, and
changeable Treasures.
Not knowing what else to do, he writes:
I betook my self to my usual and most secure course; after I had
finished my earnest and most fervent Prayer, I laid me down in my
Bed. [86]
With the hope that his normally instructive angel might whisper a
helpful word or two of advice. No angel appears to have been
forthcoming, but he dreamed a dream, `which was... strongly
impressed upon my imagination’, and which functioned to reassure
him that he was, after all, a fitting candidate for the task to which he
had been called [87] .
159
Our voyager sets out on his journey to the wedding, taking along
bread, salt and water, and placing four red roses in his hat (for he is, as
he informs us, a brother of the ‘red-rosie Cross’) [88] . When he leaves
his dwelling, the narrative explains that he is quite awake, but we again
encounter the dissolution of a dichotomy, for the events which are
subsequently related do not happen in ordinary space/time, but rather
are characterized by dreamlike qualities; the conventional demarcation
between waking and sleeping is blurred. These events belong to an
imaginal world into which our character enters more and more deeply.
This is Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, a world which Antoine
Faivre has described as having ‘a geography of its own’ [89] . Indeed, for
nearly a hundred pages, we find this character confronted with a series
of symbolic personages, objects, and situations: he is presented with a
choice of four paths to the ceremony; a wind presses him to move in
one direction only; there is the alchemical antithesis in the form of a
white dove and a black raven; he sees a ‘Portal’ on a `Hill’, the first in a
series of gates, connoting the initiatory steps of gnosis [90] .
Finally, because this dreamlike journey into the imaginal world is
supposed to take seven days, we are told of the circumstances
attendant upon his going to bed, dreaming, and awakening; all of them
highly symbolic, and therefore, worthy of imaginative contemplation;
as are the concomitant philosophical complexities implicit in the
`dream within the dream within the myth’ phenomenon, a frequent
characteristic of myth [91] .
4 Aureum saeculum redivivum (The Golden Age Restored)
Alchemist Henricus Madathanus provides a similar focus on
dreams in Aureum saeculum redivivum, first printed in 1625 in a
collection of ten texts entitled the Musaeum hermeticum [92] . This
treatise is also replete with symbols, especially those having to do with
the alchemical marriage, and bears many of the characteristics of the
Hermetick Romance:
I retired to rest…and fell into a deep slumber; when, behold,
Solomon appeared to me in all his power…and with him came his
whole harem…One of them was his most beautiful dove, and was
dearest to his heart. [93]
Solomon takes him to a ‘secret place’, restores his spirit with rare
nourishment, and tells him to choose a bride for himself from among a
group of virgins. Strongly attracted by one, he resists at first for she is
dressed in utterly vile clothing, but he capitulates eventually, saying he
is ‘sick with love for her’, whereupon a clamouring arises among the
women in Solomon’s entourage which awakens him [94] .
After he spends the remainder of the night in sleeplessness,
morning reveals a pile of filthy clothing lying on the floor beside his
bed! Once more we encounter a corporeal sign of an incorporeal
experience; like the letter deposited on the table by the mysterious
figure in The Hermetick Romance, the clothing is a visible token from
the imaginal world. Frightened by this episode, the alchemist ignores
the pile for five years, until he has a series of instructive dreams. From
a woman in one of these dreams, he learns that the hideous rags are
hiding a box filled with precious jewels. She gives him coals with which
to burn the cloth, and thus, Madathanus is free at last to gaze at the
contents of his treasure box. A sign on the box warns him to ‘stir not
up nor awake my love till he please’. Taking that as an exhortation to
be patient yet awhile longer, he waits for a period of time, after which
he is at last able to attain the long sought after Philosopher’s Stone
[95] .
Like The Spiritual Exercises, this treatise is thick with points on
which to contemplate imaginatively. An alchemist reading this text
could certainly be expected to use his powers of imagining to learn the
symbolic significance of the treasure box filled to the brim with
precious jewels. On the level of chemical operations the box is the
alchemical vessel and the precious jewels the substances which are
being combined, and re-combined and subjected to all manner of
processes like heating, evaporation, etc. On the level of spiritual work,
the jewels are presumably things like character traits and dispositions
of the soul which, through meditative practice are also subjected to a
multitude of operations. The time spent waiting before extracting the
jewels from the box corresponds to an incubation period. In the
laboratory, the Philosopher’s Stone would be achieved only after a
period of heating the substances in the alchemical vessel. ‘Festina lente’
could well be the motto here, because the texts are full of warnings
that this heating must be done in a carefully regulated way otherwise
the entire process could fail and would have to be repeated. By the
same token, spiritual development cannot be forced either; but can be
expected to take place only under properly regulated conditions.
5 Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta Fleeing)
Consideration of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens of 1618 adds
still more to our understanding of the alchemical imagination [96] .
The full title is revealing. It reads as follows:
Atalanta fleeing: that is, new chymical emblems of the secrets of
nature; fitted partly to eyes and intellect, with figures engraved in
copper and additional maxims, epigrams and notes, and partly to the
ears and the recreation of the soul, with some fifty musical fugues in
three parts, of which two are to correspond to one simple melody
suitable for singing in couplets; the whole to be seen, read, meditated,
understood, judged, sung and heard with extraordinary pleasure.
Thus this text, one of the most beautiful of all alchemical treatises,
is intended from the very beginning to press the imagination into the
service of helping involve our sense of sight as well as of hearing.
Unlike The Hermetick Romance and The Golden Age Restored,
which offer up the multi-sensory experiences of the alchemist/author
for the edification and contemplation of the reader, Atalanta Fugiens
constitutes a demand for participation by giving multi-sensory
experience directly to its readers, as part of an explicit and
comprehensive program. It is a unique combination of text, images,
music, and lyrics, which is compelling even to the uninitiated [97] .
The text consists of fifty emblems, each accompanied by an
epigram, an ostensibly explanatory, but characteristically cryptic,
paragraph, and a fugue with lyrics [98] . Fifty emblems are far too many
to comment on here, but the foloowing examples provide a good idea
of what lies in store for the reader.
Emblema I: Portavit eum ventus in ventre suo [99]
Mercury is show here in human form, with wind streaming
through his long hair. He is carrying the still-embryonic Philosopher’s
Stone in the form of a baby within his body [100] . This single image
implies innumerable levels of meaning. For an alchemist who is taking
this text seriously, provided here, for example, is symbolic ?llustration
of the esoteric meaning contained in the accompanying quotation
from the Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Table), a frequently quoted text
which articulates the view that
the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, and gives an account
of cosmic causality which is process-oriented, rather than mechanistic.
It also conforms to what Giordano Bruno would call the `inner
artificer’, and thereby provides a model for looking for the cause of the
Philosopher’s Stone within, rather than outside, the alchemist, as well
as a model for imitating divine creation [101] `.
Emblema XXVII: Qui Rosarium intrare conatur Philosophicum
absque clave, assimilatur homini ambulate volenti absq[ue] pedibus
[102] .
The motifs of the enclosed garden, the rose, and the key are all
reminiscent of the initiatory theme in The Hermetick Romance. The
alchemist begins with the premise that the knowledge which will
enable a successful alchemical enterprise is hidden from the view of
the profane. Focusing the imagination on these three images is
expected to provide the adept with valuable clues about the `real’
significance of the lock, the enclosed garden, and the rose.
160
In a context informed by belief in the doctrine of correspondences
and of the relation between microcosm and macrocosm the sexual
connotations of these motifs could initiate the following associations:
sexuality and reproduction are bound up with the idea of earthly
creativity and fecundity, which in turn is a microcosmic reflection of
macrocosmic process. These motifs also suggest the idea of
penetration. In turn, that idea can be associated with initiation and
with gnosis: one progressively penetrates the secrets of the divine, of
nature, and of the self [103] .
Emblema XXXVIII: Rebis, ut Hermaphroditus, nascitur ex
duobus montibus Mercurii & Veneris [104] .
This illustrates the alchemical marriage. We see Mercury (in the
garb of a soldier) and Venus (in gossamer dress) embracing each other.
Mercury’s caduceus lies to one side in the foreground; a precociously-
visaged Cupid holds a full quiver of arrows. Above the heads of the
couple is a hermaphroditic figure. One modern writer offers the
following interpretation:
The Rebis, like Hermaphroditus, is born from the two mountains
of Mercury and Venus. The Rebis, Hermaphrodite or Androgyne of
the Wise is born from the union of the two Principles (Sulphur and
Mercury), who enter the mercurial Bath. This, like the mythical
fountain where the nymph Salmacis swam, has the property of turning
both sexes into one: that is, it dissolves the Bodies radically in such a
way that, once recomposed in the Fixation, they are One. [105]
The alchemist knows that the Rebis, or Philosopher’s Stone is said
to be the product of the alchemical marriage of opposites. He has
already been encouraged to ponder the esoteric meanings of sexuality
by following a trail of associations. This led to the realization that
sexuality is a potentially powerful metaphor for microcosmic and
macrocosmic process. Now the question might well become: How do
I accomplish a union between the opposing elements in the laboratory
(and within myself) that can adequately mirror cosmic process? The
alchemist can only do this by means of the ampliftcatio described
earlier. He or she must press into service the powers of imagining
which will enable a gradual identification of him/herself with the
hermetic androgyne. On a microcosmic scale, the figure of the
androgyne represents the continuous dance of the cosmos as it
balances universal energies.
6 The Power of the Imagination
In the case of Ficino, Ignatius, and the alchemical authors, we are
dealing with texts produced by persons who understood and
intentionally used the transformative power of the imagination, which
played a central role in the lived experience that preceded the process
of writing. These were never intended to be dry texts, produced with
mere pen and ink and parchment. They were not envisioned as being
comprised of disembodied collections of words (signifiers) comprising
sentences and paragraphs (bundles of syntactical relations) referring to
conceptual constructs (that which is signified). On the contrary, these
texts were intended to be embodied constellations of meaning, which
shaped themselves into ‘voices’ that `call’ to their reader across the
temporal space of history [106] .
At each step, the writers whose works are discussed here sought to
make implicit meanings explicit, to actualize what had previously
existed only in potentia. In this they sought to mirror the creative
process of the universe. But, just as the universe continuously unfolds
new forms, that process of explication and actualization was never
complete. New meanings affected old interpretations, new forms
enriched them. Like spiritual perfection itself, the Philosopher’s Stone
was always amorphous, never absolutely present, always just beyond
reach; yet just as Ignatius’s God and Ficino’s
divine Source of all, it drew its seekers toward it.
Throughout we find that the creative, form-making power of the
imagination was continuously present. These texts are able to span the
centuries with a bridge comprised of a formidable number of
hermeneutical acts, each making use of the faculty of the imagination.
One set of acts was performed by the original author: the initial
experience and the subsequent attempt to interpret it, and the process
of recollection in order to write it down, or illustrate it. Another set
was performed by those who listened to the author, or read the
treatise, or contemplated the images. Each of these hermeneutical acts
unfolds upon one another to form constellations which unfolded upon
still others, forming veritable galaxies of imaginal worlds all
characterized by the same exquisitely enlivened complexity.
SUMMARY
The intentional use of imagination - here understood as pertaining
to a level of reality which Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis -
plays an important role in the formulation of mystical language, the
construction of images (both metaphorical and plastic), and
meditative, ritual, and magical practices. This article examines the
phenomenon of imagination as it appears in the spiritual exercises of
Ignatius de Loyola, the writings of Marsilio Ficino, and selected
alchemical treatises. Emphasis is placed on illustrating what it means
to use the faculty of the imagination as a method of gnosis which
functions to dissolve conventionally perceived and/or experienced
dichotomies.
[1] The theme of the imagination in gnosis is discussed in Karen
Voss, Is there a `Feminine’ Gnosis? Reflections on Feminism and
Esotericism, Aries, 14 (June 1992), 5-24, and further developed in:
‘Feminine’ Gnosis: Forms of Gnosis in Modern Feminist Thought, an
invited lecture given in the course: Gnosis and Hermeticism from
Antiquity to Modem Times, offered by the Amsterdam Summer
University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 15-19, 1994
(unpublished).
[2] Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the
Imaginal, in: Spring (1975), 6-7.
[3] Ibid., 1.
[4] Ibid., 1-2.
[5] Ibid., 7.
[6] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask,
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957, 20-65 et passim. First
published as Das Heilige and das Profane, Rowahlt Taschenbuch
Verlag GmbH, 1957.
[7] Corbin, op. cit., 4.
[8] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1, qq. 50-64.
[9] Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred, New York: Crossroad, 1982,
[10] Ibid., p. 11.
[11] See loan P. Couliano’s lucid analysis of what he describes as the
‘total censorship of the imaginary’ that was characteristic of the
Reformation in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret
Cook, with Foreword by Mircea Eliade, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987, 193ff. Orig. published as Eros et magie d la
Renaissance, Paris: Flammarion, 1984.
[12] ‘Transmutation’ as metamorphosis implies a cooperation
between knowledge (in the sense of ‘gnosis’) and active imagination in
order for lead to be changed into silver and silver into gold. The ‘gnosis’
often referred to ... esoteric currents is the kind of illuminated
knowledge which results in a state of being conducive to the ‘second
birth’ ...’. Quoted from Antoine Faivre and Karen-Claire Voss, Western
Esotericism and the Science of Religion,. Numen, 42 (1995), 48-77.
[13] Sexson, op. cit., 6.
161
[14] Eliade, op. cit.
[15] lames Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, New York: Harper &
Row, 1975, p. x.
[16] Ibid., 1-13 et passim.
[17] Ernst Gombrich, Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-
Platonic Thought, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute
XI (1948), 163-92: 165.
[18] Antoine Faivre, L’Image creatrice (La fonction magique de
l’image et son fondement mythique du XVIBme si6cle), in: Revue
d’Allemagne XIII (1981), 355-90: 388-389 and 389, respectively.
[19] Eliade, op. cit., 68-113.
[20] Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1966. See also Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace
of Matteo Ricci, New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
[21] See for example Christianne Klapisch-Zuber, Holy Dolls, in:
Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
[22] See Robert Klein, Les tarots enluminrss du XV si8cle, in: L’oeil
145 (January 1967).
[23] Hillman, op. cit., 200.
[24] According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘It is, perhaps, not too
much to say that all of educated Florence in the second half of the
fifteenth century came under the intellectual influence of Ficino’s
Academy’. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, 18-19. Some of the
material on Marsilio Ficino appeared in an article entitled: Three
Exemplars of the Esoteric Tradition on the Renaissance, Alexandria:
the Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions, 3 (January 1995). I
am grateful to the editor for permission to use it here.
[25] Hillman, op. cit., 201.
[26] Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer, Irving,
TX: Spring Publications, Inc., 1980, 96. A translation of Liber de vita,
or De vita triplici, Florence, 1489. Henceforth referred to as De vita.
[27] The fabled Tabula Smaragdina was reputedly written by
Herms Trismegistus who is respectfully mentioned by almost all the
alchemical writers. Many, though certainly not all, of the Renaissance
humanists accepted Hermes as an authority. For some exceptions to
this view, see Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the
Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, 207. An
important collection of articles about Hermes Trismegistus is in
Antoine Faivre, ed., Présence d’Hermès Trismégiste, Paris: Editions
Albin Michel S.A., 1988. On philosophical hermetism see Mirko
Sladek’s L’étoile d’Hermès. Fragments de philosophie hermétique,
translated from the German by Josette Rigal, Paris: Editions Albin
Michel S.A., 1993; originally published as Fragmente der hemretischen
Philosophie in der Naturphilosophie der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main:
Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1984. The most definitive account of the
origin and transmission of the Tabula is found in Julius Ruska, Tabula
Smaragdina, Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akten der von-Portheim-
Stifttutg, 16, 1926. See also Walter Scott, ed. and trans., Hermetica, 4
vols., London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968, vol. 1: 31, 33, 35-36; and M.
Berthelot, Les Origines de L’Alchimie, 1885; reprint ed., Osnabriick;
Otto Zeller, 1966, 35ff., 169. See the preface by Nock in A. D. Nock and
A. J. Festugiere, Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols., Paris: Societé d’Edition,
Les Belles Lettres, 1945, i-vi.
 [28] See Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper &
Row, 1957; reprint ed. Harper Colophon, n.d., 42.
[29] De vita, 91. It is important to note the belief in a cosmic plan
or divine purpose implicit in Ficino’s statement `they have been
prepared for this from the beginning’.
[30] Ibid., 88.
[31] Ibid., 102. . See D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic
from Ficino to Campanella, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1975, 12-24, for a discussion about Ficino’s preoccupation with
the Sun. First published in 1958 by the Warburg Institute, University of
London. Reissued as volume 22 of the Studies of the Warburg
Institute, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969.
[32] De vita, 90.
[33] Ibid., 97.
[34] Ibid., 131.
[35] For an interesting and exceedingly relevant description of the
possible initiatory function of depression see Basarab Nicolescu, Jung
et la science: histoire et perspectives d’un malentendu, presented at the
colloquium: `Jung Aujourd’hui’, organized by Groupe d’Etudes C.G.
Jung, Paris, November 27-28, 1993.
[36] Ibid., 93
[37] Ibid. 33.
[38] Ibid., 159.
[39] Ibid., 100.
[40] Ibid., 165
[41] Ibid., 61.
[42] Ibid., 63.
[43] Ibid., 3.
[44] Ibid., 91.
[45] Ibid., p. 151.
[46] Ficino exhibits a tone of reportage in this portion of Book III,
probably resulting from a judicious fear of ecclesiastical reprisal. The
distancing phrase `the ancients have said’, occurs frequently
throughout. Cf. D. P. Walker’s comments regarding Ficino’s disavowals
of magical practice, op. cit., 42-44 et passim.
[47] De vita, 153.
[48] Ibid.
[49] The biographical information about Ignatius comes from
Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Reformation: A Narrative History
Related by Contemporary Observers and Participants, second edition,
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979, 431ff.
[50] I have used the edition by David J. Heming, S.J., The Spiritual
Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary
Reading, St. Louis, Missouri: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978.
Explicit ‘points on which to contemplate’ appear on 158, 160, 162,
164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192, 194; 196,
and 200. Henceforth referred to as Exercises.
[51] References to ‘bringing to memory’ appear on 34, 36, 44,
162
46, 80, 116, 136, and 138. On 78 Ignatius refers to ‘five senses of the
imagination’. And on 82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 116, 118, 120, 124, 128, 132, 138,
and 142 he makes specific reference to the ‘five senses’.
[52] I would argue that the Ignatian use of the imagination belongs
to a spectrum which includes, at its most extreme, the magician who
intentionally imagines he is God. On this view, then, we should think
of it as a somewhat watered down version of the identical formulation
found in magic; thus, it would have been in line with the teachings of
the Church to condemn it as potentially heretical. It is interesting to
note that she did not, and also to consider that if someone like the ill-
fated Giordano Bruno had produced the same techniques found in
The Spiritual Exercises it certainly would not be in use today as part of
the Jesuit program.
[53] For example, after the Council of Ephesus in 431 declared
Mary to be `the Holy Virgin’ and theotokos (bearer of God), it was
understood that she could be adored right along with God and the
faithful proceeded to do just that with great fervor. This enthusiasm is
not surprising in view of the fact that Ephesus had previously been the
site of a temple to Artemis. Although the temple had been destroyed
thirty years before the Council, at some level the sacred quality of the
site remained: Artemis’ temple simply became St. Mary’s basilica. For
the text of the theotokos declaration see Henry Bettenson, ed.,
Documents of the Christian Church, second edition, London: Oxford
University Press, 1963.
[54] Exercises, 32.
[55] Ibid. Specific references to mental images appear on 32, 34, 36,
38, 44, 64, 70, 72, and 76 (on 76 Ignatius emphasizes that we should
‘look, mark and contemplate’).
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid., 36.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., 44-46.
[60] Ibid., 72.
[61] There is a wealth of circumstantial evidence that links Ignatius
to unorthodox practice, and therefore to the memory tradition. For
example, when Ignatius matriculated at the University of Alcala in
Barcelona in 1526, Inquisitorial authorities summoned him several
times; once, in 1527, he was imprisoned. After his release, he went to
Salamanca where continued harassment by the Inquisition drove him
to France, where he enrolled at the University of Pads in 1528. Ignatius’s
contemporary, Giulio Camillo, arrived in Paris in 1530, with the aim of
raising money from Francis I for a memory theater. (See Yates, op. cit.,
129ff.) Did Ignatius know about Camillo’s project? Obviously final
determination regarding the influences on Ignatius would require more
research. My point here, however, is that there are a number of
potentially fruitful leads that remain to be followed. Jung notes a
similarity between the ‘active imagination that takes place in yoga’ and
‘the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, who employs the terms
consideratio, contemplatio, meditatio, ponderatio, and imaginatio per
sensus for the ‘realization’ of the imagined content’, in: Alchemical
Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1967; 1983, n. 11, 164-165. See also his lectures on
Ignatius given at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich,
reprinted in ‘Exercitia Spiritualia of St. Ignatius of Loyola,: Spring
(1977), 183-200 and continued in Spring (1978), 28-36.
[62] Yates, op. cit., 108.
[63] Thomas Aquinas, op. cit., II-II, q. 49.
[64] Yates, op. cit., 8-9.
 [65] Exercises, 74.
[66] See Yates, op. cit., 96-97, for a description of an exceptionally
horrible image representing idolatry.
[67] Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trams. R. F. C. Hull.
Bollingen Series XX, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968; 1980,
290. First published as Psychologie and Alchemie, Zurich: Rascher
Verlag, 1944; 2nd ed. revised, 1952. See also Karen Voss, Aspects of
Medieval Alchemy: Cosmogony, Ontology, and Transformation,
unpublished M.A. thesis, San Jose State University, 1984,24-39.
[68] Partly on account of these idiosyncrasies, and partly because
most of the alchemists felt bound to keep from casting pearls before
uninitiated swine, problems like these abound. The alchemical texts
are almost always obscure. Every alchemist had to decide, therefore,
what substances to use, which writers to take seriously, which images
and symbols would be of use, etc. This necessity for organization as a
preliminary to beginning the work frequently gave rise to an
identification with the divine creators of cosmogonic myth. The
alchemists also had to impose order on chaos. Regardless of the
culturally specific terms in which it is couched, every cosmogonic
myth develops the theme of order proceeding from chaos. For this
reason, it was natural for the alchemists to identify the disordered
welter of purportedly instructive texts (characterized by obscure
language), and the plethora of syncretic symbols, images, and mottos,
and myths that were the currency of peoples before the so-called
Enlightenment, with the prima materia, with absolute formlessness,
with pure potentiality. Their task, so it must have seemed, was to
‘imitate the acts of the gods in the beginning’ by actualizing the
Philosopher’s Stone which had existed only in potentia. The more
syncretistically-minded alchemists related this identity with creator
divinities to the Christian idea of the Word made Flesh, which was
accomplished by means of the Incarnation. In turn, the Incarnation
provided a model of brokenness redeemed, made whole, embodied,
and thus we sometimes see that it has become a model for the
alchemical quest for unity appearing under the form of the
Philosopher’s Stone. See for example, K. Voss, The Hierosgamos
Theme in the Images of the Rosarium Philosophorum, in: Alchemy
Revisited: Proceedings of the International Conference on the History
of Alchemy at the University of Groningen, 17-19 April 1989, ed. by
Z.R.W.M. van Martels, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990.
[69] See Emblema I on 36 infra, for example.
[70] See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon Books, 1970, 17-25, for a
discussion of the four similitudes; and 25-30, for a discussion of the
doctrine of signatures. The book was first published as Les Mots et les
choses, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966. See also Gombrich, op. cit.
Gombrich seems somewhat discomfited when contemplating the
world view which led to a confusion between the signifier and the
signified. This is a very important article, however, and contains a
thorough exposition of the most significant issues related to the
question of images in the Renaissance Neo-Platonic tradition.
[71] One alchemist writes: ‘Our matter has as many names as there
are things in the world’. A. E. Waite, ed. and trans., The Hermetic
Museum Restored and Enlarged, 2 vols., London: James Elliott and
Co., 1893, I, 13. The role of the alchemist was to lead out the gold, to
actualize what had existed in potentia. In this respect, it is appropriate
to speak of the alchemists as ‘midwives’ who, in accord with the
cosmic ‘plan’, were enabling the substances in their vessels to be
‘redeemed’ from their actual state of baseness and to attain their
potential condition of perfection. See Mircea Eliade, The Forge and
the Crucible: The Origins and Structures o fAlchemy, trans. Stephen
Corrin, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 19-52. First published as
Forgerons et Alchemistes, Paris: Flammarion, 1956.
[72] Jung was adamant about understanding alchemy as a spiritual
discipline. See, for example, the contrast he makes between two
different writers on the topic in Mysterium Coniunctionis: An
163
Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in
Alchemy, trams. R. F. C. Hull, second edition, Bollingen Series XX,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963; 1970, 457. First published
as Mysterium Coniunctionis: Untersuchung iiber die Trennung and
Zusammensetzung der seelischen Gegensdtze in der Alchemie, Zurich:
Rascher Verlag, 1955, 1956. See also my article: Spiritual Alchemy:
Interpreting Representative Texts and Images, in: Gnosis and
Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. by R. van den
Broek and W.I. Hanegraaff. State University of New York Press: New
York, 1995.
[73] This is by no means unrelated to the ‘interpenetration between
matter and spirit’ of which Ewert H. Cousins writes in Bonaventure
and the Coincidence of Opposites: The Theology of Bonaventure,
Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978, 170.
[74] K. Voss, The Hierosgamos Theme, op. cit., 4-9.
[75] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas
with foreword by Etienne Gilson, New York: Orion Press, 1964, 112.
First published as La poetique de I’espace, Paris: PUF, 1958.
[76] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 289.
[77] Ibid.
[78] See Marie Louise von Franz, Alchemical Active Imagination,
Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications, 1979 and Corbin, op. cit., 9. For a
comprehensive and extraordinarily sensitive analysis of the use of
imagination in mysticism, see Corbin, Creative Imagination in the
Sufism of Ibn Arabi, trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series XCL,
Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1969. First published as L’Imagination
creatrice dans le Soufrsme d’Ibn Arabi, Paris: Flammarion, 1958. Parts
One and Two were originally published in Eranos-Jahrbiicher XXIV
(1955) and XXV (1956), Zurich: Rhein-Verlag.
[79] Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Boulder:
Shambala, 1978, 41-45, 66 et passim. Christian Rosenkreutz is said to
have been born in 1378 and to have lived for 106 years.
[80] The Hermetick Romance is contemporaneous with the works
of alchemist Michael Maier. See the discussion of Maier’s Atalanta
Fugiens, 35-38 of this text.
[81] The Hermetick Romance: Or the Chymical Wedding, in: Paul
M. Allen, ed., A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, 2nd ed., Blauvelt,
New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1974, 69. Henceforth referred
to as Romance.
[82] For a thought-provoking list of some of the things we think of
as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ see Wendy O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, and Other
Realities, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984,311-312.
[83] Cf. 16 of this text.
[84] Romance, 70.
[85] Ibid.
[86] Ibid.
[
87] Ibid., 74-75.
[88] Ibid.
[89] .Antoine Faivre, Esotericism, in: Lawrence E. Sullivan, ed.,
Hidden Truths: Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult, New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987, 39.
 [90] Ibid., 39-40. qigong be better
if it doesn’t build bulk muscle or tax the heart with an aerobic
[91] Wendy O’Flaherty, op. cit., especially Chapter 2, ‘Myths About workout? Taken
Dreams’. from my new Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section, which will
be posted
[92] Musaeum hermeticum, Frankfurt: printed for Lucas Jennis, within a week.
1625.
2. The 2007 Summer Retreat schedule is posted. These are at Dao
[93] Waite, op.cit.,I,57. (Tao) Mountain
in the Catskills, 90 minutes from NYC. Start planning now - these low
[94] Ibid., 59-60. cost
retreats are fun “learning vacations” and a boost of high energy not to
[95] Ibid., 63-64. be
missed. Note the 2007 schedule has been compressed into eight weeks
[96] Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical (instead of
Engravings of the Seventeenth Century, New York: George Braziller, ten): June 16-Aug. 5. Contact: retreats@healingdao.com or visit
Inc., 1988, 68. http://www.healingtaoretreats.com/#c.

[97] Having once heard selections from the music of Atalanta My personal schedule has also been updated:
Fugiens performed while looking at the images and the text I can http://www.healingdao.com/pages/asheville/index.html
attest to its compelling qualities. See Joscelyn Godwin, ed. and trans.,
Atalanta Fugiens: An Edition of the Emblems, Fugues, and Epigrams, 3. Congratulations are in order. Daoist Body Cultivation, ed. Livia
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1989. Kohn (my
chapter is on sexual alchemy), has received the prestigious Outstanding
[98] There are numerous instances in which the paradigmatic Academic
Tabula Smaragdina is actually quoted from; fact noteworthy in itself Title Award from Choice magazine, the main source for librarians.
since the Tabula is frequently alluded to or paraphrased in other Only a few
alchemical texts but relatively rarely quoted from. books receive this award every year for academic excellence and
pioneering work.
[99] ‘The wind carries it in its belly’. This is a direct quotation from Read my book review and get your copy, or send one to a friend as a
the Tabula Smaragdina. gift:
http://www.healingdao.com/blk1.html
[100] That is, in the place where his womb would be if he were a
woman. 4. Thinking of gifts this Winter Solstice season? Consider the gift
of glowing
[101] Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. with an health for family and friends. Give a qigong DVD or homestudy audio-
introduction by Jack Lindsay, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood video
Press, Publishers, 1976, 82. First published, Castle Hedingham, Essex: course. Some DVDs like Primordial Qigong/Tai Chi for
The Daimon Press Ltd., 1962. Enlightenment or the Five
Animals/Six Healing Sounds are already in home study packages
[102] ‘He who tries to enter the Rose-garden of the Philosophers (Qigong
without the key is like a man wanting to walk without feet’ Fundamentals 1 & 2) that are effectively half price. But everything else
is on
[103] The idea of progressively more profound understanding of sale.
the nature of the universe outside the self as well as the idea of deeper
and deeper levels of self-knowledge is bound up with esoteric gnosis. 4a. SALE OFFER to Tao News/ Chi Flows Naturally subscribers
Gnosis is therefore associated with penetration, and therefore here and their friends:
penetration, like gnosis, has a dual connotation. Cf. my remarks Starts Tuesday Dec. 5 until Friday midnite, Jan 5, 2007:
concerning Eros and the dialectic of gnosis in: Is there a ‘Feminine’
Gnosis? Reflections on Feminism and Esotericism, Aries, 14 (June Sale price of all my Qigoing DVD’s is $29.95. (35% discount off $45.
1992), 16-17. retail
price), plus s/h. AUDIO CD & DVD PACKAGE prices for Fusion of
[104] The Rebis, like Hermaphroditus, is born from the two 5 Elements,
mountains of Mercury and Venus. Taoist Sexual Secrets/Healing Love, Dream Practice, and Lesser Kan &
Li are
[105] de Rola, op. cit., 102. discounted 10% off their web price (note: no further discounts on
Qigong
106] Cf. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona on artists-she has in mind Fundamentals 1-4).
those described by Mircea Eliade, and Eliade himself-who ‘suspend the
traditional perception of time and space by the act of ‘making’, an act VHS videos are all $19.95 (50% off) plus s/h. AUDIO CASSETTE
in which we share through participating in the environment of that courses are
artwork’, in her Introduction to Mircea Eliade, Symbolism the Sacred, discounted 25% off web price while stock lasts. VHS and Cassettes are
and the Arts, ed. Apostolos-Cappadona, New York: Crossroad, 1985. being
The quotation appears on p. xi. discontinued, except for the Primordial and Fundamentals 1& 2
Why is Qigong Superior to Ordinary Exercise? courses and a few
+ SALE on DVDs, etc. higher Kan & Li courses. Everything else will be in DVD/CD audio
Michael Winn format only in
Inside Tao News/Chi Flows Naturally: the future.

1. Essay: five reasons why qigong is better for our health than To receive discount, please phone the super-efficient Wendy,
ordinary manager of our new
exercise for us humans struggling to “stay in shape”. How can Office of Satisfaction: 888 999 0555 noon-4 pm Eastern time, or email:
164
info@healingdao.com. Local numbers: 828-505-1444 (-1044, fax). are greatly appreciated. Sending you a big smile in advance!

-------------------------------------------------
4b. For the really unusual gift, give someone the “Tai Chi Dynamic-
Sit Sexy Ergo Dear Souls that are Curious about Good Health,
Ball Chair”.
http://www.healingdao.com/ballchair.html Question: Why is Qigong (chi kung) better for health than regular
exercise or
4c. For the high end special “art” gift, consider a hand-painted sports?
calligraphy
infused with Qi by my friend, the qigong artist Wu Zhongxian: Answer:
http://www.healingdao.com/calligraphy.html
I think sports and physical exercise is great, it’s one way to enjoy
5. Thanks for all the feedback on our new copper roof. Yes, both your body
sides of the and explore its potential. I’ve tried just about every sport. I am a top
roof are grounded - via two ten-foot copper rods buried in the ground. skier.
We had a I was a professional white water rafting guide, with 40 trips down the
wonderful meditation last saturday, and everyone is invited again on Grand
Friday Dec. Canyon. I’ve hiked in many of the world’s most famous mountains. I
22, 7pm-midnite, for the Winter Solstice meditation. swim a mile
in the Caribbean ocean every day during my winter retreat. I especially
6. Still space in the Dec. 9 -10 Sat/Sun Internal Chi Breathing & love
Bone Rooting outdoor sports, as they put me in direct contact with nature’s energy
workshop. field.
email: winn@healingdao.com.
Sports are totally compatible with qigong. But none of the sports
. Tax-deductible Donation: Support the Tao vs. Black Hole of or other forms
Government of exercise I’ve tried ultimately can compare to the benefits I’ve
received from
I give thanks and feel deep gratitude for your interest, support, and daily practice of qigong. If I do a sport, I still practice qigong the same
good day,
energy around the healing and spiritual work we are doing through our as it balances and refreshes me. If possible, I always practice qigong
non-profit outdoors,
501c3 organization. As the 2006 tax year approaches its end, I’d like to to absorb more natural chi.
remind
all US citizens that you CAN choose where you want your Federal tax Below are five reasons I find qigong to be a superior form of
money to go… exercise. The same
and it doesn’t HAVE TO go into the black hole of government benefits apply to tai chi, which I consider to be a long martial form of
spending. qigong.
But tai chi is longer and thus harder to learn. For this reason I’ve found
The IRS makes it legal to make large, 100% tax-deductible qigong delivers faster and deeper results for most people.
donations to official,
tax-exempt, non-profit, 501(c)3 organizations like Dao Alchemy 1. Qigong is a whole mind-body exercise.
Research
Institute (d.b.a. as Healing Tao USA). You can make these donations The main difference is that qigong is not just a physical body
instead of exercise, it is a
paying your federal taxes. Talk to your accountant or financial advisor if body-mind exercise. The mind could be defined as our ability to shape
this energy
makes sense for you. It’s a way to put your money to work more into thoughts, feelings, sensations, or other perceptual patterns.
effectively.
Donations could include cash, real estate, art, or creative services. When you exercise the full spectrum of your body-mind using
qigong, a completely
Your donation is a way to make a noble statement and different experience happens. You begin to shape energy into flowing
simultaneously ease the patterns of
burden of staff costs and ever rising advertising needed to keep the harmony and balance and peace. You connect your body to the sky
website up above and the
and the summer retreat program happening. I donate many hundreds earth below, and your heart opens up a vast open creative space inside
of hours of the body.
unpaid labor each year to support the vision of Healing Tao USA. My
vision is of If you practice qigong in a group, you begin to experience the
a dynamic community of smiling, heart-centered beings, dedicated to “group heart” of
the Way of your fellow practitioners. If you practice alone, it opens a peaceful
cultivating our original nature and unfolding each person’s unique space in
creative your heart that is easy and wonderful to share the rest of the day. This
potential. My work is to make available the most effective body- whole
centered methods body-mind involvement of qigong is also what makes it a perfect
of self-cultivation. complement to
passive sitting meditation.
lf donations don’t make sense for you, please know that your
purchases or 2. Qigong overcomes our resistance to physical exercise.
attendance on a China Dream Trip also qualify for partial tax
deduction - and
165
 Qigong is so much fun, it becomes a “healthy addiction”. People
love being
relaxed while they exercise. Many folks tell me they cannot wait to
practice it
each day. Unfortunately, most Western people treat physical exercise as
something that you “do to your body” or to your muscles or “to” your
heart. They
hate going to gym.
Why do so many people hate physical exercise, and drop it as the
first excuse?
Their mind is separated from their body. Hence, there is an
unconscious fear and
sometimes loathing of the body. The modern top-heavy mind sees the
body like a
difficult and needy child, that cannot really be controlled or satisfied.
Many modern people live in their head, and just visit the lower
part of the body
occasionally to get it into shape. They exercise mostly so the head/face
will
look good sitting on top of the body. Others can only experience their
body
through sex. Then they quickly shift back into their head immediately
afterwards. People engage in sex-ploitation of their own body without
realizing
it. It’s much healthier to have a full time relationship between your
mind and
your body.
Example: many joggers listen to music as they run in mindless
circles around the
block. They are not focused on what their body is experiencing while
running.
They ignore the joy of movement or the exhilaration of moving
through space.
Instead, they listen to their favorite band because they find their body
incredibly boring to hang out with. Exercise is a chore. They resent
having to
work hard, to sweat to get the fat off their flabby muscles. There is no
deep
mind-body communication happening during their exercise.
With qigong it’s different. You don’t push the river, you find a
gentle rhythm
and you repeat it with slow, relaxed, often circular movements.
Different
movements open different energy channels in your body. The process
invites to go
deeper. You gradually find the body moves by itself effortlessly, as if
propelled by some invisible energy field. You relax and enjoy a ride on
an easy
feeling of flow.
3.Qigong delivers better & quicker health benefits than ordinary
exercise.
I could go on for an entire book all the health benefits that come
about from
this kind of relaxed movement. About how ONLY gentle circular
movements will
stimulate your lymphatic system, which is the backbone of the body-
mind’s immune
system. Jogging and aerobics actually shut down the lymphatic-
immune system
during vigorous exercise!
Why would fast exercise cause your immune system to shut down?
When you go
running, your body assumes that you need to conserve energy. It
thinks (in the
166
deep instinctual brain) that you are running away from a bear chasing
you down
for a meal. Your belly-instinct brain doesn’t see your $200. nike
running shoes,
it thinks you are in survival mode, so it kicks the adrenaline on and
shuts the
immune system. It considers your immune system an optional at that
survival
moment.
So vigorous exercise is not optimal for your lymphatic and immune
system. It may
do other things for you, and is certainly better than rotting in your
chair!
Does your heart need the “fast” aerobic exercise? According to
Chinese medicine,
no. It posits that the heart is already over-worked, and actually needs a
vacation. Qigong gives the heart a vacation by getting the chi
meridians and
blood vessels of the entire body to take over the heart job of blood
circulation.
That is why top athletes have low blood pressure – their
circulatory efficiency
is so high that the heart doesn’t need to overwork. Chinese sports
athletes
already know that qigong training will give them a secret edge over
their
competitors, but they don’t advertise it.
Does science back up the claim that qigong offers superior health
benefits?
Please check our the research from the past director of the Stanford
Research
Institute on the 3500 science studies proving the health benefits of
qigong.
http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?
rm=mode2&articleid=40
4. Qigong gives you more energy than you expend practicing it.
You get more energy back from qigong than you put into it. When
you do qigong,
you are exploring the natural of perpetual motion. Your body is really a
“free
energy device”. Physicists admit that humans expend more energy
than they take
in from food, water, and air. But they cannot answer the mystery as to
where the
extra energy comes from.
If you practice qigong regularly, it is like making a really safe,
profitable
investment. You get all your invested principle back, plus huge interest.
Most
physical “body-only” exercise result in a net energy loss. People work
hard,
they sweat, afterwards they feel pleasantly exhausted. The addiction
here is
different – it is the need to release pent up or stuck energy in the body.
So even this type of physical workout is healthy for you, up to a
point. But
consider this: body builders who develop huge muscles often die young
of heart
attacks. Why? Because as they age, their heart has to feed blood to all
that
muscle, and it gets exhausted early. The big muscles turn to fat, and
reduce
efficiency of circulation.
 Qigong in my progressive training has you store the extra chi
gained in your
bones, tendons, and vital organs – not in the muscles. These require far
less
maintenance and are part of the qigong secret to producing longevity.
5. Qigong is easy, fun, & all ages can practice it anywhere.
You can learn qigong and begin to feel the chi flow within minutes.
It’s really
a universal exercise – it’s super easy to learn, whether you are 8 or 80
years
old. You can practice anywhere, anytime – indoors or outside, even in a
small
apartment space.
With qigong exercise, less is more. Less effort gives better results -
the more
relaxed and soft you are, the more the chi can flow through you. Forget
the “no
pain, no gain” exercise theory. When you push the river, you get tired
of it
eventually. Ordinary kinds of exercise can make your body strong, but
they wear
you out energetically.
With qigong exercises, you can forget the sweaty workout. Stop
treating the body
like a dumb sheep that needs to be herded by a head that ”knows”
what is best
for the body. Qigong exercise is about appreciating your body-mind,
respecting
its intelligence, and giving it love and energy while you are moving it.
The
body-mind together keep you young and healthy. Qigong doesn’t push
or stress the
body into a hard sweat – it seeks to release stress from the body.
Wishing you love, flowing chi, and radiant health,
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
ALERT! Tao Retreats Moved to Blue Ridge Mtns/North Carolina!
April 2, 2007 or How the I Ching Saved My Ass....
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Story of how Healing Tao summer retreats 2007 had to
suddenly relocate, due to sale of its Catskill center.
By grace of Tao and guidance from I Ching, we have a
new (and better) site: Heavenly Mountain, a former
luxurious spiritual center of Transcendental Meditation
(TM). It’s nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge
Mountains near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. At 4000
feet high, it is energetically far more powerful than
our old Catskill site. These are the highest mountains
on the east coast and have fabulous waterfalls, caves,
rafting and hiking nearby. It’s close to Asheville,
with its many attractions. Details below. Photo link:
http://www.healingdao.com/heavenly_mountain.html
167
Nearest big airport is Charlotte, N.C.. New schedule is
very close to the old schedule, but there are changes.
Mantak Chia’s June 16 start date is unchanged; all
other retreats run Friday dinner to Wednesday lunch,
with more weekend options. Tuition costs unchanged,
better accomodations, and single rooms are cheaper. New
schedule, travel details below. We need a chef and more
workstudy students.
Website is being updated, but may take a few days.
Check www.HealingTaoRetreats.com for ongoing info - we
have space for expansion now and may be inviting other
Tao masters to teach their art. Contact our registrar
Rob Renahan with questions: retreats@healingdao.com
(email is best for us) or 1-888-750-1773 (noon - 4 pm
EST, M-F). After April 8, Rob’s cell is 828-242-0968.
2. We are still accepting late signups for China Dream
Trip, subject to change in air costs.
Contact: winn@healingdao.com.
See full trip itinerary at:
http://www.healingdao.com/chinatrip2007.html
See my top 60 China Dream Trip photos at:
http://www.healingdao.com/china_dream_trip_photos.html
3. Fusion of the Five Elements 2 & 3 on April 28 & 29,
in Asheville, NC. Added plus for those travelling:
Asheville is only a short drive up the Blue Ridge
Parkway to our new retreat site near Blowing Rock, a
magnificent drive this time of the year. Contact:
winn@healingdao.com
--------------------------
Dear Lovers of the Natural Way,
The Tao is about Change. Taoist self-cultivation
studies Nature because it teaches us how to change
gracefully. Tao teaches us how to dance with the all
pervading Life Force as we move through our personal
life cycles. Sometimes, Change happens quickly, like a
spring thunderstorm.
Dealing with Bad News
Ten days ago, the summer retreat program got slammed by
a small tsunami of Change. I received an email
informing me our N.Y. Catskills retreat center is being
sold and that our rental contract to hold 25 Healing
Tao University retreats this summer was being torn up.
The Jeronimos who own the Catskills center are good
folks, but for personal reasons are desperate to sell.
Their desperation was our potential ruin.
That kind of change can take your breath away. It
affects hundreds of people, a faculty of 20
instructors, and a tightly crafted schedule of 25
retreats. With a year’s notice, it would be a small
feat to relocate. On three months notice, it was like
asking an ocean liner to suddenly behave like a
speedboat.
The strange thing is that the I Ching, the ancient
Chinese book of wisdom (lit. “Book of Unchanging
Changes”) had already warned me last summer that we
would be moving. But I thought it wouldn’t happen for
another year, so I signed the 2007 contract. I am
reminded, once again, that the forces of Change wait
for no man. The Year of the Female Fire PIg is kicking
in full strength, bringing new abundance for those
properly aligned, and the chaos of separating Fire
Above and Water Below for those who are not.
 I did an intensive search for New England sites,
starting in the Catskills and radiating outward. I
called the top dozen likely candidates. Of course,
everyone was mostly booked or could offer only choppy
dates sandwiched in between other groups. Totally
unsatisfactory for the quality of energy work we are
doing, and for the type of space we have been holding
internationally for the Taoist community. I was getting
a bit concerned, and wondering if the retreats were
even meant to happen in 2007. So I asked the I Ching
what to do, and it suggested “the situation is changing
rapidly, the Way is Open. Be open to receive assistance
from a new direction. Great Harvest.”
Following the Dragons to the Southeast
I decided to look at other mountain locations, the
traditional favorite for Taoist cultivation. I chose to
live in the Blue Ridge mountains near Asheville, North
Carolina because the earth chi is so powerful. There
are powerful “dragons” in the land, what other
traditions would call “ley lines”. These mountains are
the oldest mountains on earth, some 400 million years
old according to geologists. A deep earth wisdom lies
within their bones. The Appalachian mountains of North
Carolina are loaded with crystal of such high quality
that 96% of the silicon used in computer chips in the
USA comes from here.
The crystal stone circle in my backyard came from a
woman near Blowing Rock, North Carolina who didn’t want
the garage-sized crystal boulder in the middle of her
driveway.... So I sat in my stone circle, where I often
meditate or practice qigong, and asked for help. I
followed the vibration of the Stones, tracking them to
their source within the land for inspiration. And I
suddenly remembered ten years earlier, my younger
brother Steven visiting me. We went up to Blowing Rock
to visit a TM center, an enormously ambitious project
built by two of his TM friends, Earl and David Kaplan.
The Kaplans were inspired in 1993 by their TM guru
Maharishi to build a retreat center to hold a thousand
“professional meditators” who would be meditating and
chanting all day to radiate out World Peace. The idea
was to get critical mass going, to send out an
energetic wave to the planet. What a lovely idea, quite
alchemical. One drop of pure consciousness shifts the
entire polluted field. But the trick is getting the
right alchemical essences into that one drop. Then the
vibrational intent penetrates to the very heart of
matter. Very different, in my training, than simply
praying to Spirit. Spirit, I believe, is just half of
Matter. And Spirit wants us to use our free will and
love to directly shape Matter - not beg Spirit to do it
for us.
In 1997 my brother Steven and I drove up to Blowing
Rock, an old Native American area that is now a popular
tourist site. It is close to Grandfather Mountain,
Linville Falls, deep caverns, and Mt. Mitchell (at
7,000 ft. the highest peak on the East coast). Blowing
Rock itself is a famous precipice with a stunning 80
mile vista over the Blue Ridge Mountains and the green
valleys below. When the wind blows, the Rock makes its
own music. There is an old Cherokee and Catawba legend
that lovers from the two tribes - who were at war - met
at Blowing Rock. The man felt called by duty to return
to his tribe, and leaped off the rock to his death. The
woman called to Spirit to bring him back - and the Wind
blew him back up onto the Rock into the arms of his
lover.
168
Steve wanted to go to Blowing Rock to do a special
meditation to solve a personal problem he had at the
time. So in 1997 we sat on the land at Heavenly
Mountain, the name given to the 5000 acres purchased by
the Kaplans. They had hired top fengshui experts from
both the Chinese and Vedic (Hindu) traditions to study
the land and its layout before building on it.They had
security guards swarming all over the mountain to
guarantee its privacy. So we drove off to a secluded
patch of forest that called to me, to get away from the
temples and meditators and guards.
While Steve chanted to the heavens, I did my Taoist
meditation, which included going deep into the earth to
talk with the spirits there. I had a powerful
meditation, it was easy to go in deep, the earth
spirits were very open. I had done TM meditation back
in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and it had helped me
greatly to release tension. In fact, it cured me of
eye headaches and assisted me in surviving the rigorous
study needed at my Ivy League college. I never took
formal TM initiation. I just used their method, taught
to me by a friend, with a mantra of my own spontaneous
choosing (which unbeknownst to me at the time, was the
named of a major Hindu God...)
Tracking the Perfect Retreat Center
Sitting in my stone circle ten years later, I flashed
back into that meditation at Heavenly Mountain. It was
filed deep within a library of frequencies stored
within my subtle bodies. All memory is really subtle
energy patterns, which is why its possible for us to
access any experience stored in the universal
time-space vault. My connection to Heavenly Mtn.
flowed back into my bones.
A few minutes later I got up and called my brother
Steve, to locate the Kaplans. I knew that they had
become disillusioned with Maharishi from a posting on
the Healing Tao forum - an open letter by Earl Kaplan
to the TM community you can read HERE:
http://forum.healingdao.com/general/message/3110/ It
was his reasons for kicking out the 800+ meditators at
Heavenly Mountain, and why he thought folks needed to
move beyond the old Guru model. It is a brilliant
detailed expose on the danger of giving up one’s power
to anyone else.
I try not to get too involved in spiritual politics,
and focus on spiritual practice. But I could see that
Earl Kaplan was likely moving in the direction of more
grounded, body-centered meditation that Taoist
cultivation offered. Long story short, Heavenly
Mountain was sitting empty, awaiting completion of
legal battles with the meditators who were evicted.
I called Earl Kaplan in Boulder, and he sounded
interested in the Taoist work. He knew that he needed
to shift the chi at Heavenly Mountain, and get it
moving in a fresh new direction. That’s our speciality,
I informed Earl. The chi in the Catskills was dead when
we arrived 5 years ago, we awakened it with deep
embodied meditation and qigong training. Taoist
spiritual technology is Earth centered; Hindu spiritual
technology is Ether centered. Both are valid spiritual
approaches. But my experience is that we are currently
in a cycle in which the Earth chi is doing the
expanding, making it the more vibrant, grounded path at
this time.
 After talking to Earl, I drove to Blowing Rock the next
day. I was shown the east campus, where all the women -
the “Divine Mothers” - lived and meditated. The chi
there was more appropriate for Taoist cultivation, with
its focus on Water and Fire alchemy, on the
feminine/yin side first. The energy there was nice, but
a bit ethereal, not really connected to the earth chi
in the mountain. Within 3 days we had a deal, securing
a new home for Healing Tao USA’s summer retreat
program.
Advantages of Heavenly Mountain
Of course, for those in the northeast, it may seem
inconvenient and more expensive to travel further
south. But our top flight faculty - many from NYC and
Boston - are making the trip, and they are excited
about it. If you have your doubts, a little
investigation will soon have you excited and
surrendering to Change as well!G
A good place to start off is with PHOTOS of Heavenly
Mountain and nearby areas. Go to
http://www.healingdao.com/heavenly_mountain.html
It also has maps of where Blowing Rock is - 78 miles
from Charlotte, the capitol of North Carolina. Heavenly
Mtn. is a few miles from Blowing Rock and Boone, just
off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The parkway is widely
considered to be the most beautiful drive in America -
a good reason to drive to the retreat.
MUCH QUIETER - no road traffic, the main thing driving
me away from our Catkskills location. Heavenly Mountain
is totally private and secluded, and thus easier to
build a real and sustained energy field.
BETTER FACILITIES - better meeting rooms, all with
quiet central a/c and chairs designed for meditation.
The bedrooms are bigger, more modern construction, less
mold, with each room having full a/c and heat control.
We are lowering the price on the singles because we
have so many available. Plus higher quality doubles,
incredible mtn views, laundry facilities on each floor.
There is an outdoor pool, and hot tubs are being
installed. Of course, we will have our Taoist
Bookstore, with its unsurpassed collections of titles
and cool Tao T-shirts.
BETTER FOOD -Healing Tao is taking control of the
kitchen, and supplying our own chef. (Contact me asap
if you are interested in the job- just hit reply to
this email). There is a state of the art kitchen, a
dining hall that can serve 250 people. For those
staying between retreats, there is a smaller private
kitchen and big refrige space.
Note: We’ll have MORE WORK STUDY spaces available to
man the kitchen and laundry facilitities, great for
those who want to trade work for room/board (you still
pay tuition). Contact retreats@healingdao.com
MORE NATURAL BEAUTY - On the east campus where we will
be, there are two giant crystals. One is a 6,000. pound
Amethyst geode, the largest in the world (see photos).
The other is a 10,000. pound quartz crystal, also said
to be the largest of its kind. Both offer unique
energetic opportunities. A short hike from campus is
the “blue hole”, a magnificant swimming hole with a
river flowing into an emerald pool. See photos of the
nearby Linville Falls, Grandfather Mtn, Blowing Rock,
Falls Creek, and many other fabulous natural sites that
will happily occupy your time between retreats. We are
169
located in the heart of some of America’s most
beautiful sites that make coming to a retreat a double
vacation.
SPIRITUALLY ATTUNED OWNERS AND STAFF - Earl and
David
Kaplan are super serious spiritual seekers, totally
committed to supporting others in their path. Quite
different from the hoteliers we had in the Catskills.
Debbie Triplett, the business manager, is committed to
giving the Healing Tao the best experience possible.
The Kaplans have hired a half-welsh, half-Native
American sensitive named Cynthia Hart to be the
Gatekeeper at Heavenly Mountain. She is a wonderful
earthy soul, a former Park ranger with divinity degrees
and doctorates in many world religions. Her job is to
continually clear the land of negative energy and to
keep positive chi flowing. When I first called her, she
immediately asked, “Are you bringing the dragons I’ve
been dreaming about for the last three days?”
TRAVEL - The Charlotte airport is my favorite in the
USA - clean, spacious, with a piano bar, nice
restaurants, rocking chairs and trees to rest under.
Much nicer than passing through New York City. Its an
international airport with direct connections abroad.
It’s about 2 hours drive to get to Blowing Rock - no
farther than the Catskills. Our registrar will be
keeping a bulletin board for travellers looking to
share rental cars and/or shuttles (we are negotiating
deals on that). Having a car will be really nice, given
all the nice sites worth visiting nearby, and the
convenience going to/from the airport. You can also fly
into Greensboro, NC, and they have a cheap bus up to
Blowing Rock.
TRAVEL DISCOUNTS/REBATES: If you are a past attendee of
Healing Tao retreats and our shift is causing you
economic hardship to get to our new location, i.e. you
used to drive and cannot afford to fly or drive south,
call our registrar to see if we can help with a special
discount this first year. If you already booked a
flight to NYC and are forced to change it to Charlotte,
we’ll deduct any reasonable cancel/ change fee from
your registration cost.
Insider’s Guide to 2007 Summer Retreats
(reposted from last email):
It’s time to decide if there is summer retreat awaiting
you. A fun week that will hopefully awaken the sleeping
essence within.
How does one choose between 25 retreat offerings? Easy.
Read the list below slowly. The close your eyes, drop
your focus down into your heart. Breathe in and out of
your heart a few times. Then ask, which retreat serves
my highest good? Your heart won’t lie to you.
In 2007, we are still offering the only live-in retreat
with Mantak Chia. It’s great to just hang out with him
at meals and around the campus. He may not be
travelling here forever, so don’t postpone the
opportunity to check out the heavy chi pumping out
through his energy field. He’s offering a totally new
topic, DNA repair and Immune Building Qigong, plus
Tao-Yin (Taoist Yoga).
David Twicken is continuing his brilliant integration
of Chinese Astrology, Feng Shui, and Qigong. I will be
offering his books shortly in the new astrology section
of my website, and you will be able to get a Free natal
chart. David offers a free detailed reading to each
person attending his seminar, which also carries CEU
credits.
We’ve got a hot new Classical Tai Chi training from
Tina Zhang, to match Frank Allen’s unsurpassed 3 part
Bagua training. Tina and Frank recently authorized an
excellent book on the Norther Wu Style, a style I
happen to practice and really love. Tina also has a
Women’s Earth Qigong retreat.
We have all the old standbys - the HealingTao Senior
Instructors offering a top notch Instructor
Certification training (courses open to the public):
myself, Marie Favorito, Masahiro Ouchi, Rene Navarro,
and recently tapped for Senior status, Karin Sorvik.
This is the core curriculum track - Qigong
Fundamentals, Iron Shirt, Fusion, Healing Love, and for
the body workers Chi Nei Tsang.
Minke de Vos is coming out from Vancouver to share her
20 year insight into healing love. She developed her
Happy and Healthy Heart Qigong course after undergoing
a heart transplant. Read her amazing story on
www.HealingTaoRetreats.com
Adding new spice is my friend Robert Peng, an top
qigong healer who shares his secrets in a Qigong
Healing Intensive over the July 4 week. Robert is
lovely, humble, and powerful - he was born with the
ability to “spark” chi in a tangible form, like an
electric current. If you want to learn Qi Emission,
Robert is the man.
We have the irrepressible Madam Wang Yan, a spry 70
year old who is a walking encyclopedia of medical
qigong and the Grand Madam of weight loss qigong in the
West. If you want to breathe away fat and lose 4-6
pounds a week, it is achievable by natural means. Her
stories and insight into the world of Chinese qigong is
alone worth the trip.
Another healer and empath is Judith Poole, who has
gather the top Energy Medicine and Energy Psychology
tools under her single roof. If you’ve got an intense
crisis or issue to heal, Judith is the Woman.
Finally, our Retreat Registrar, Rob Renahan, is
unveiling his stuff for the first time at Dao mtn. He
is developing his version of Zen Qigong, based on his
extensive practice in the Zen tradition and his
integration of it into the Taoist qigong and inner
alchemy tradition. If you want to get to deep quiet
space, Rob is the Man.
They are all great teachers, and they attract wonderful
people who create a beautiful synergy. These are high
energy retreats where you will walk away with new
skills, new friends, and a burst of amazingly high
energy that you will surf on for months.
Now that we have more teaching rooms available at
Heavenly Mountain, I may be inviting other worthy
teachers that we never had space for in the Catskills.
We will let you know of further developments.
Sharing the Joy of Unchanging Change with all Lovers of
the Way,
Michael
170
“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.
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Click to Unsubscribe
Year of Female Fire PIg Predictions
February 9, 2007 + China Dream Trip Photos
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Year of the Fire Pig - what’s coming in the next
spin of the earth around the sun. Energetic analysis
and chinese astrology predictions that can affect your
health, your wealth, and your spiritual practice.
2. Some top photos I took on China Dream Trips. This is
just a small sampling of 40 pics, with captions. I plan
to post more soon. Landscapes, people, temples, quirky
details, doing qigong in wild places. I’ve travelled to
nearly 100 countries - just fulfilling the demands of
my astrology. China is amongst the most deep, rich,
profound places I’ve visited in this lifetime. The
Dream Trip is designed to be a portal to what I call
“deep earth” - we tap into layers of ancient
consciousness that helps to ground us in the core of
our soul’s immortality.
There is still space on the May 18-June 4, 2007
Dream Trip. We have a great group signed up - I
invite you to join us and fulfill your own hidden
dreams. Come practice “Tai Chi for Enlightenment”
a.k.a. Primordial Qigong, on three marvelous sacred
Taoist mountains of Mt. Emei, Mt. Qing, and Mt.
Hua. Plus all the exciting cultural highlights of
China, at below-market cost. We usually can squeeze
in last minute signups and help you get creative
with financing of the trip. See full trip itinerary
at: http://www.healingdao.com/chinatrip2007.html
Amusingly, my favorite Taoist hangout on Mt. Hua
(Flower Mtn) has hit it big time. A Super bowl TV
ad for Snapple Green Tea features a hiker on
Huashan’s spectacular sheer cliffs. The ad exploits
the spiritual authority of a monk living on top, to
tell the hiker that what’s in the green tea is good
for him. Better hurry and see these remote parts of
China before they are engulfed by the new face of
China....which looks a lot like the face of big
western corporations. To see the ad:
http://www.cbs.sportsline.com/nfl/postseason/superads
and then click on fourth quarter ads, Green Tea.
In the past, I think some Taoist monks and nuns
chose monastic life to escape the bleak realities
of communist China. The dream of big money sweeping
across China makes it very challenging for young
people to choose the lifestyle of a Taoist mountain
recluse. Perhaps it is positive, useful in weeding
out those who chose temple Taoism for the wrong
reasons.
See my photos at:
http://www.healingdao.com/china_dream_trip_photos.html
3. Time to plan for summer fun at Dao Mountain in the
New York Catskills. 25 Retreats featuring, according to
one happy camper, “the highest quality energy body
training on planet Earth”. These are very special - do
yourself a favor and scan down the list of stellar
offerings. You only need to make a $100. deposit
online to hold your spot. It’s low-cost, high-energy,
good-people place to cultivate your chi! The
accommodations are spa quality, with two pools, sauna,
& hot tub. www.HealingTaoRetreats.com or if questions,
email retreats@healingdao.com
4. “Cultivate True Feeling” at the Fusion of the 5
Elements workshop in Asheville, N.C. March 10 & 11.
This is very powerful energy work that cuts to the
heart of dissolving negative emotion and growing the
seed essence of one’s soul. This takes qigong practice
into the realm of Taoist depth psychology and five shen
theory. It trains you to FEEL the five-phase cycles in
your body that lie at the heart of the astrology cycles
described below. Only $144. for the weekend, $90 to
review. Prerequsite: Qigong Fundamentals 1&2, life or
by homestudy. Contact: winn@healingdao.com.
5. A quick winter season Kidney-building Qigong
Breathing tip. The healing sound for the water/kidney
element is “chuuu”. Normally this is exhaled in certain
positions to detoxify the kidneys and release the
cold/fear that can get trapped in the kidneys. During
winter season you can also REVERSE and INHALE the
“chuuu” sound so the cool air is sucked between one’s
teeth. The teeth are your only exposed bones in your
body, and they vibrate into the kidney spirit and
charge it up with the chi extracted from the incoming
air (metal/gold element).
Inhale by sipping the “chuuu” sound in 3 or 5 times
(any odd number), keeping the mind focused on the
mingmen, the point between your two kidneys near the
center of your body. Then close your mouth, and
exhale gently but forcefully, feeling the breath is
directed into the mingmen. Do this for five minutes
every day, and your kidneys will glow like a
171
recharged battery. Most powerful when done between 3
and 7 pm. Can be done before or after other kidney
qigong, such as the Cosmic Swimming Dragon, Deep
Earth Kidney Pulsing, or the modified Marriage of
Heaven and Earth qigong forms taught on the Sexual
Vitality Qigong DVD. See:
http://www.healingdao.com/healinglove.html
--------------------------------------
Dear Cultivators of Nature’s Great & Mysterious Cycles,
The Year of the Yin Fire Pig (Ding Hai) , a.k.a. Year
of the Female Red Pig, began on Feb. 4, 2007. That’s
the first day of the lunar Tiger month. Because the
Chinese lunar calendar needed to insert a “short leap
month”, the Chinese New Year itself doesn’t begin until
the new moon of Feb. 18 in China (Feb. 17 in USA and
Europe). Chinese astrology is fundamentally lunar. But
it also uses solar calculations which make it complex,
but contributes to its accuracy as being energetically
attuned to the macro cycles of change.
That’s why I’m currently constructing an online Healing
Tao Chinese Astrology center that will allow readers to
calculate (at no cost) a natal chart that shows your
strong and weak elements and ten year luck cycles. If
you combine that information with qigong practice and
5-element nutrition and feng shui, it becomes an
extremely powerful practical tool of Tao
self-cultivation. I will have available ebooks by
Mantak Chia and David Twicken on how to interpret and
use that information in sophisticated ways.
Chinese love the Year of the Pig, the 12th and final
animal in this cycle. It’s not just because they’ve
mastered the art of making pork tasty. Note: the pork
in China tastes very different from American pork, so
different in fact I thought it was a different species
of pig. I mention it because I had been a vegetarian
for 7 years when I first visited China in 1985, as a
photo-journalist following Marco Polo’s route for four
months across the remote parts of China. It was the
tasty Chinese Pig that ultimately caused me to switch
diets...But I digress.
2007 is a Fire Pig Year, considered one of the most
auspicious years to give birth to children, out of the
whole 120 year astrology cycle (10 celestial stems x 12
terrestrial branches = 120). A higher rate of reported
pregnancies in China - up 30% from last year by one
count - is one reflection of the popularity of the Pig
Year. Websites for “Golden Pig Mothers” have sprouted
up, and special “Pig Mother” maternity deals are being
offered by hotels. So we’re not talking about the
quaint superstitions of peasants. Even the Chinese
government has issued a Pig stamp and commemorative
gold and silver coins with a Pig on them. Why the big
fuss over a Pig?
Role of the Pig in Chinese Culture
First, Westerners need to put on a new pair of cultural
lenses. In the West, pigs are often seen as dirty, fat,
lazy creatures who lie sleeping all day in filth. Call
it the Year of the Boar if you cannot get over your
image of dirty pig. In China, pigs are highly
respected. In ancient times they ran wild and were
considered to have strong shamanic powers. In the
famous novel “Journey to the West”, the Monkey King
(symbolizing the evolving human travelling on a
spiritual adventure) has “Pigsy” as his main companion.
Together they get into a lot of trouble - and fun. I
summarize the story (see Godchecker.com for more
details):
Pigsy the Pig spirit was actually the ex-Marshall of
the Hosts of Heaven, who was sent down into a pig’s
body after lusting after angels and stuffing his face
with food at every opportunity. The last straw was one
day he guzzled too much immortal peach wine and got
fresh with Chang-O, Goddess of the Moon.
An uproar ensured, and the Jade Emperor turned into a
monstrously ugly pig spirit on earth to teach him a
lesson.
But it didn’t work. As Pigsy, his lustful nature
multiplied and soon he was revelling in troughs and
chasing pretty ladies for all he was worth. After many
mis-adventures, with the help of Kuan YIn, their quest
was fulfilled and Pigsy achieved enlightenment. In
heaven he was rewarded with the title Cleaner of the
Holy Altar, and thousands of worshippers send him
offerings to this very day. Moral of the story: it CAN
pay to be a pig - just play your part well!
Note: To read this delightfully fantastic tale, try
Arthur Waley’s short version or Anthony Yu’s 4-volume
classic. I found this 16th century novel dramatized as
a Chinese TV serial when I first visited China, so it
is very much present in the modern culture.
The modern Chinese are acutely aware of both their long
history and their current rise to prosperity on the
global stage. In 621, a Fire Pig Year, the Tang dynasty
marked a golden age of art, religion, and prosperity
that lasted for nearly four hundred years. In that
year, the emperor introduced a single national currency
called the “Jin Zhu” which literally translates into
“Gold Pig.” This communist government is happy to
reclaim the ancient Gold Pig mantle for itself, heading
into the 2008 Olympics.
The Pig Character
In China, the Pig’s character is considered to be
honest, tolerant, well-meaning, and friendly. The Pig
is noble and courageous; its steady perseverance leads
it to prosperity. Pigs are known for ending their days
well-off and contented. The Fire Pig is especially
known for its traits of wealth, prosperity, luck and
fertility. So naturally everyone wants their “one
allowed child” to be born in such a year, as it will
make the parents life easier.
The shadow side of the pig character is they can be
very naive, gullible and overconfident, or even
downright stupid about money. But even though they can
lose lots of money, it always seems to come back to
them. Some might see the Chinese national character
reflected in the way pigs eat food with great gusto,
enjoy sleeping all day long and worry about nothing -
life works out for them in the end.
The Fire Pig is more vivacious, bold and relentless in
achieving its goals than the other types of Pigs. The
Pig is ordinarily associated with the water element,
and thus appears lazy. But even the Water Pig may just
be biding its time until the opportunity ripens. Once
in motion the Pig, like a strong river current, is
172
unstoppable. A Fire Pig “boils” the Water, which makes
this year’s energy potentially turbulent. I will
discuss the political and economic implications of that
shortly.
I have a personal story to relate here. On the small
Caribbean island where I winter, my neighbor Sam raises
pigs. Sam told me how he bought a baby pig once, put it
inside a gunny sack, effectively blindfolding it. The
piglet was tied atop a donkey, which took it some five
miles over a mountain to its new home. The baby pig
slyly waited for an opening, escaped and immediately
ran back the 5 miles to its mother. That is a very
clever and persistent pig.
Bad Weather Hidden Inside a Silver Cloud
The Fire Pig year will be generally auspicious, but it
may also bring calamity. This is mostly due to the
conflict between the heavenly Female Fire and the
earthly Water. 2006 was a Yang (Male) Fire Dog year,
and this yang Fire played itself out much as predicted
in relationship to the Dog/Earth element - civil war in
Iraq, sudden change of political power in the USA, and
public outcry over global warming threatening the
earth. Trials that “outed” corrupt politicians and
lobbyists. More media exposing the inconsistencies
around 9-11.
The Female (Yin) Fire is described by some astrologers
as “candlelight”, i.e. gentle and soft. This is a big
mistake, like under-estimating the potential fury of
ordinarily sweet women that slowly cooks within until
it explodes. Yin Fire is ultimately more powerful than
Yang Fire. It gets held in suppressed emotions, hidden
tension, anxiety and continuing struggle over failed
dreams.
The problem here is that the celestial Yin Fire is
ABOVE the Watery Pig energy below, which means they are
separating. This is revealed in Hexagram 64 of the I
Ching, the Classic of Unchanging Changes. Fire (Li) is
above water (kan). Look it up in whatever I Ching
translation you have. This separation of fire and water
leads to chaos and conflict.
This volatile water-fire energy in 2007 can explode
into natural disasters such as hurricanes, El Nino,
tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical fires, or industrial
explosions. In 1995, a Wood (expanding) Pig year, an
earthquake rocked Kobe, Japan. Natural disasters can
strike anyone, anywhere. Be thankful if you avoid them
and instead find the Pig’s good fortune - and share
your wealth to help the less fortunate. This female
fire celestial energy is generally beneficial, but in
certain places and people it will produce excess or
deficiencies, particularly to the South (excess fire)
and West (controlled/deficient metal).
The destructive 5-element cycle reveals that
Metal-dominant people will have the most difficulty in
a Fire year, as Fire melts Metal/Gold. Water types are
a close second, as uncontrolled Fire plus Water in
spells disaster. Health issues are most likely to
involve the heart, tongue,and small intestine in Fire
types. The negative results of too much passionate fire
activity could include stress, strained relationships,
and a hot temper. In Metal types the problem would be
lung infections. This could get played out on a macro
scale as a bird flu virus spreading in certain areas,
perhaps the south and west of whatever country you live
in.
On the other hand, the Pig Year is great time to use
the fire to move with great gusto to finish projects
and engage in passionately chasing your dreams or true
love. The secret, as always, is holding the balance
point. Depending on your personal astrology, that could
be natural or terribly challenging. Based on the “Law
of Mutual Attraction”, the three animal signs that will
benefit the most in 2007 will be those born in Rabbit,
Dog, and Tiger years. Pig Years favor those who hold
the space of peace and mediate for stability vs.
violent change.
1947: The Last Fire Pig Year
Yin Fire is very explosive and can symbolize firearms.
The AK47 assault rifle was designed and began
production in 1947, the last Fire Pig year. It has
become a global symbol of revolution. The CIA was
established in the US (water rules secrets) and that
year marked the birth of the Cold War that lasted
another 40 years. The seed energy of East-West
separation.
In 1947 the separation of India and Pakistan took place
and resulted in 4 million Hindus and Muslims changing
their homeland. By the end of the year, the two were at
war, and it is still flaring up. Palestine was
partitioned in 1947, another case of water and fire,
arab and jew, not finding harmony 60 years later.
Hopefully, we are in an upward spiral, but more
purification may yet be needed.
2007 may thus be a good year for terrorists and violent
upheavals, even if they ultimately fail. I predict the
partitioning of Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite
territories will begin, a solution that will ease the
civil war but is unlikely to bring lasting peace to the
region.
As we shift to the second half of 2007 the Fire element
may lose its explosiveness as the Pig watery force
begin to re-assert itself. The Fire chi will begin to
ground itself as it flows into the next Earth Rat
cycle. But the water element resurgence in the second
half of the year may bring into consciousness
contraction and fear in various forms. Secrets are also
ruled by the Water element. With Fire (ideals) and
Water (secrets) co-existing in the 2007 chart we can
expect clashes of values over secrecy. The US
government has never been so secretive as under the
Bush administration, and I expect this year will bring
fierce attempts to restore transparency.
1947 brought the report of a crashed UFO near Roswell,
New Mexico. This crash has since dominated UFO
research. I think the UFO issue may arise again very
strongly in 2007 as more of this secrecy gets unveiled.
I find myself reading material on this topic. If you
want more dramatic and detailed evidence of US
government MJ-12 (Majestic, top secret agency)
relations with aliens, listen to intereview of an MJ
government scientist Dan Burisch who was assigned to
medically heal a captive sick alien. He says he’s been
allowed to speak because the govt. finally wants the
truth to start seeping out....
http://www.eaglesdisobey.net/ scroll down to navigation
links on left side for 2 hour free video interview.
173
Economic Effects of Fire Pig Year
Financial markets will be influenced by these
fire-water tensions. Investment themes for 2007 may
center around the effects of peak oil and global
warming, disease and famine. Commodities, especially
the softs (grains) should do very well. The economy
will blow hot or cold from geopolitical events and
psycho-social trends. Financial mergers and
acquisitions will continue and we will see widespread
consolidation. Larger Pig companies will gobble up
smaller companies. Water-related businesses will do
well by the end of this year.
Fire and Water can contribute to sudden breakthroughs
in technology or new and dramatic inventions to
generate power or solve medical problems. Note in 1947
Bell Labs invented the radio transistor and a plane
flew fast enough to break the sound barrier for the
first time.
The Stock market may benefit from the fire/heat in the
first half and cool in the second half. In 1997, also a
Yin Fire year, the Asian markets collapsed in the
second half.
Spiritual Practice in 2007
This year, the water and fire are NOT naturally
harmonized - so it is up to humanity to mediate the
struggle that unfolds. That means you and me! This
water-fire conflict within the Lunar Pig sign is
somewhat analogous to the energy of the Scorpio sun
sign in western astrology. Scorpio is a very deep,
penetrating energy controlled by water, but also
simultaneously containing fire.
An un-evolved Scorpio type can do a lot of damage with
the unconscious sexual-water power that gets unleashed.
They have to harmonize the fire and water within
themselves. Hence, an evolved Scorpio is often an
alchemist. This relates directly to the heart of the
Healing Tao path of Water and Fire alchemy, which
focuses on harmonizing the two forces by reversing them
so the fire stabilizes below and gently “cooks” the
water above. Another way of describing inner sexual
alchemy, the coupling of the male and female forces
within one person.
Note: the Healing Tao has attracted many people with
sun, moon, and/or rising signs in Scorpio....my
webmaster is a triple scorpio. I’ve got my moon and
rising sign in Scorpio. Scorps, we need you during this
Pig year! Good time to do lots of Taoist inner alchemy
on behalf of the planet, to speed up its process and
thereby reduce the collective suffering.
Other advice for dealing with a Female Fire year: avoid
burnout. Avoid accumulating internal fire/emotional
stress. Seek the Earth element in your life - a great
reason to go on the China Dream Trip this year, or tale
the summer retreat of your choice. Those who took that
advice during last year’s Yang Fire Year certainly were
grateful for it.
Slow down and make relaxation an art form. Do lots of
qigong and tai chi, yoga, other body-centered
activities. Gardening, working with clay, and petting
animals will increase the Earth element in your life.

Love, Chi, and Blessings during the Fire Pig Year,
Michael
“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
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9 Essential Principles of Tao Self-Cultivation
Jan. 23, 2007 New FAQ page
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Summary of “9 Essential Principles of Tao Self-Cultivation”.
This is my personal short list of qualities that maximize the
process of self-realization. This is another way of describing
the Union of our Human self with the Way or Great Process of
Nature.
2. Cultivate Qigong in Winter, Harvest in Summer. A discussion of
seasonal qigong - how following the cycles of nature preserves
robust health. How to choose the best qigong to practice in
winter time.
3. Followup on Winter Solstice. We had a wonderful group
meditation on solstice. During a break between our second and
third sittings, the Great Jade Stone arrived by special delivery
after a troubled four month journey from China. U.S. Customs,
under the withering pressure of solstice, had turned a new leaf
and released the precious cargo without undue fees. What
fabulous
174
timing! It added a very special deep earth energy to our final
midnite meditation.
We ended up renaming it the “Jade Tree Immortal” because we
realized that after spending 250 million years inside the earth,
the essence of this tree qualified for immortal status .
“Petrifry” means to “change into stone”. Scientists don’t really
know why wood petrifies and in rare cases turns green. The lead
theory is that the tree falls into a marsh, and liquid silica
minerals from jasper and chalcydony penetrates into the cellular
level. They gradually replace the wood particles with crystals
shaped identical to the original tree. It is very alchemical, as
heat from volcanic flows or deep earth fire is needed to keep the
process cooking.
Bottom line: the Jade Tree Immortal inspires me to tune even
deeper into our Great Mother’s earth chi. I feel my bones light
up when I do qigong beside it, as my bone crystals love to
resonate with the green quarzite crystal. The tree decided it
wanted to stay in the center of my living room, see photo link
below.
The other unusual phenomena was a photograph I took of my
crystal
stone circle during the Winter Solstice “hour of Tzu”. This is
the Taoist favorite hour for meditation in the 12-hour chi clock
cycle: the hour before & after midnight. I took a series of
photographs, starting at sunset, of a candle burning in the
center of the stone circle. The midnite photo of the circle,
taken without flash, appeared totally black except for the candle
flame. When I increased the exposure on the photo, dozens of
marvellous colored spheres appeared. I thought at first it must
have been refraction from the candle or some wierd digital
technical effect.
My in-house techie Mike Teeters examined the whole series of
photos and declared the “floating pearls” were not a mechanical
effect. You can decide for yourself whether these are the “light
bodies of the beings of all directions and dimensions” who
accepted my invitation to join the winter solstice meditation. Or
just random reflections off a ghost in my camera. See:
http://www.healingdao.com/stone_circle_&_jade_tree_immortal.html
4. Announcing the posting of a new section on my website,
Frequently Asked Questions.
http://www.healingdao.com/faq_qigong_fundamentals.html
The FAQ’s are still a work in progress. Feel free to email me at
winn@healingdao.com to suggest new questions you would like to
see answered (I still have a long list myself). Or just log onto
the Healing Tao forum and ask your question.
These FAQs are like a small book. It is likely is too much to
read in one sitting. I plan to offer an option to have them
auto-sent to subscribers in small doses. Note: not all the
sections listed below are complete.
FAQ’s on Qigong Fundamentals
Where to start? Tao Inner Smile, Five Animals shamanic qigong,
Six Healing Sounds medical qi gong, Microcosmic Orbit meditation,
Internal chi breathing & bone rooting. Why is chi kung superior
to ordinary exercise? How long to get results?
FAQ’s on Advanced Qigong Training
Fusion of Five Elements. What is Taoist depth psychology? Eight
Extraordinary Vessels as Macrocosmic Orbit. Can Chi Kung deliver
super powers? Tao dream practice, Deep Healing Qigong for healing
chronic illness. What kind of people do this stuff?
FAQ’s on Tao and Taoist Lineages
What is Tao? Is it philosophy or religion? Taoist mountain vs.
temple lineages, Michael Winn’s relation to Mantak Chia and
hermit One Cloud. Is lineage needed? Buddhism vs. Daoism vs.
Confucianism.
FAQ’s on Taoist Sexual Practice
How do I master Taoist sex? Is it risky? Why avoid million-dollar
point. Differences in male & female practice. Medical sexology
vs. bedroom arts vs. spiritual sex.
FAQ’s on Inner Alchemy Meditation
How change happens. How alchemy works, what are benefits? 7
stages of spiritual development. Qigong vs. neidan gong. Inner
vs. outer alchemy, spiritual science vs. material technology.
FAQ’s on Michael Winn Who is this dude? Short & long bio,
background in kriya & kundalini yoga, Dzogchen, Tantric Buddhism.
Teaching style, master-student issues.
4. March 10 & 11 is next workshop in Asheville. Fusion of the 5
Elements 1: Cultivating True Feeling & Dissolving Negative
Emotion.. Prerequisite: Qigong Fundamentals 1&2 (homestudy
accepted).
contact: winn@healingdao.com
5. Plan ahead. Reserve a space for this summer’s retreats online.
We’re working on a full online registration system. Until its
ready, you can only leave a $100. deposit for the retreat(s) of
your choice. Questions? Email retreats@healingdao.com. Or visit:
www.HealingTaoRetreats.com
----------------------------
Dear Seekers of Elusive Truth in the Cold Heart of Winter,
It is winter in the northern hemisphere, although until recently
it was hard to tell. But your body isn’t really faked out by the
surface temperature. We still live in animal bodies, even though
we’ve let many of our instinctual animal skills atrophy. Our
animal self knows where the natural chi is flowing, and its down
and in. Why else do we instinctively face the sun? Because our
front chest “water” channel, known to acupuncturists as the
conception or yin or water channel, instinctively feels balanced
by the yang heat of the sun. So the sun is like the magnet that
attracts our body’s spiritual compass.
Likewise, our body knows instinctively that in the winter, the
chi flows deep into the earth. I recently bought a gas
refrigerator. The noisy hum of electric models disturbs my hunger
for deep silence. But gas refrigerators are finicky, and we have
to monitor the temperature. I notice it keeps things colder in
winter than at the same outdoor temperature in summer.
Apparently, even my refrige isn’t faked out by the surface
temperatures...as if it could also sense the underlying cold
contraction of the winter season.
Why does this matter? How can we take advantage of the seasonal
shifts in chi flow? The barometer of this changing energy flow
are our vital organs. So in winter the Kidney spirit (”shen”)
which rules the water element in our body, follows the cue of
Nature and goes into deep contraction as it senses the cold. The
kidney intelligence is the dominant vital organ in the winter
cycle, so it sends that message out to all the other vital organ
spirits that together make up our mind. It is like a bear
hibernating in the winter. The kidney chi wants to hibernate all
winter - but when it does come out in the spring, it has stored
up a LOT of energy.
Moral of story: if you do a lot of qigong and meditation during
the winter months, you’ll get a big payoff later when Nature’s
chi begins to expand in Spring and Summer. You’ll effortlessly
expand along with it as your kidney chi comes out of hibernation.
If you overwork now and don’t store up any winter chi, your fuel
tank will feel a bit empty come spring. You’ll feel a little
older each year, instead of growing younger.
175
The Life Force doesn’t age, nor does Nature, which has no
resistance to its flow. Tao conclusion: imitate Nature, drop
resistance to Life Force (qigong practice and aligning with
natural cycles) and you will feel yourself growing younger.
That is why the Taoists devised what is known as “seasonal
qigong”. In winter they do qigong to build the kidneys and
strengthen the water element, which includes conserving sexual
energy, drinking plenty of fluid, and absorbing earth chi into
the bone marrow, where your blood is manufactured. You could
cultivate your bone marrow with Qigong Fundamentals 3&4, Internal
Chi & Bone Rooting & Breathing.
(see http://www.healingdao.com/ckf3.html)
Or you could use kidney building qigong. I spent 20 years
gathering the best kidney building qigong I could find and put
them on my Sexual Vitality Qigong DVD. You only need to go deep
with one or two qigong exercises. I’ve put 25 qigong forms on the
DVD that boost your kidney power - to give variety and let people
choose what attracts them the most.
See: http://www.healingdao.com/healinglove.html
As part of my deep winter contemplation I recently distilled out
what I felt to be the 9 essential principles of Tao
self-cultivation. The Chinese are masters of distilling big
complex things down to their core essence -that is what yin-yang
and five phase theory is. I’ve noticed that many other spiritual
traditions have begun using yin-yang language to try to explain
the essence of their own process.
That means yin-yang theory is so simple and true that it has
become embedded in global consciousness. I’m just honoring that
tradition, trying to boil down the thousands of years of wisdom
and zillions of different health and spiritual practices into
nine essential principles. Here it is, my gift to anyone who
wants it: 9 ways to ponder life’s mysteries more deeply this
winter:
9 Essential Principles of Tao Self-Cultivation
Surrender. If we trust and surrender to the Life Force (Chi or Qi
Field), the Life Force will flow into our body-mind. The Life
Force supports us to effortlessly unfold who we truly are.
Surrender is the prerequisite to expressing the highest level of
our individual free will and creativity.
The central challenge our ordinary ego-personality (heart-mind or
“xin” in Chinese) faces is the separation, fragmentation and
dispersion of our underlying soul essence. Cloudy and reactive
emotions, poor sexual habits, bad diet, shallow breathing,
self-judgments, negative thinking and rejection of the spiritual
nature of our physical body results in struggle, disease,
suffering, and unhappy feeling of incompletion in life. Our
resistance to life is what kills us. Self-cultivation teaches us
to let go of our resistance to the Life Force.
Harmony. The Life Force is about Process. It is made of three
streams of vast flowing consciousness or chi that harmonize all
life: negative-receptive-female (Yin), positive-creative-male
(Yang), and neutral-stabilizing-primordial (Yuan). This chi field
is all-penetrating, yet remains neutral or paradoxically still
even as it moves. Likewise, our soul rests in stillness while the
Life Force moves in Yin-Yang and Five Phase (element) cycles
through our essence.
These flowing cycles/seasons offer a simple and perfect mirroring
between our changing inner thoughts, feelings, perceptions and
the outer action of Nature. Taoist qigong is the Process of
communicating with the Life Force. Qigong trains us to speak the
language of subtle energy or chi. We learn practical ways to
harmonize the three currents of chi flowing amongst our self, our
community, and Nature.
Simplicity. On the outside, life is very complex. On the inside,
it is very simple. The Inner Smile is the Tao path of simplicity.
It’s simple when you open the heart of your soul to
unconditionally accept first your own body-mind. Second phase is
to accept everything “Other” as part of a unified, flowing
essence of the Life Force. The Inner Smile is the simplest way to
keep your path heart-centered.
This simple, continuous act of acceptance ends all separation and
loneliness, causing a soul peace to arise within our personality.
Our path in each moment is to allow our smiling presence to
embrace life’s wonderful complexity. It is this simple foundation
of smiling, unconditional acceptance that allows all spiritual
qualities such as love, kindness, compassion and forgiveness to
unfold spontaneously.
Grounding. Taoist qigong & meditation fuse our ego into a strong,
grounded, integrated whole. Qigong allows our heart-mind and
physical body to achieve optimum health. Meditation merges our
personality and body with our soul, or “ling”. This “whole-body
enlightenment” can be achieved while living an ordinary life in a
physical body. Being centered in life means being grounded,
physically and spiritually.
Integrity. Qigong (chi kung) movement exercises and meditation
(neigong or nei kung) are two main pillars of Tao
self-cultivation. They empower a third pillar - the expression of
personal integrity or innate spiritual virtue (“de”) in daily
life.
Study of the I Ching (Book of Unchanging Changes), feng shui,
Chinese astrology, the outer elixirs of Chinese medicine
(massage, nutrition, herbology), sexual energy cultivation, and
self-expression through creative arts complete the eight pillars
of our personal Tao or “Way”. Together these eight offer us
practical skills to grow the central ninth pillar, and realize
our soul highest destiny, our integration with the Great Tao.
Sexual Sagehood. Our volatile male-female sexuality is reflected
in the polar split between the two halves of our soul, the
Heaven-formless spirit and Earth-form sexually embodied aspect.
But sex is our soul’s secret alchemical elixir. If we know how to
tap our sexual volatility, we can quickly transform spiritually.
Taoist sexual practice with a partner and solo meditative inner
sexual alchemy both use our tangible sexual essence to “capture”
and crystallize the invisible essence of our spirit. This union
of our sexual and spiritual selves births a “third self” – an
androgynous, bi-sexual Inner Sage that manifests our immortal
non-dual Original Nature. Our Inner Sage is able to embody
non-dual energy (yuan chi) while present in a sexually polarized
male or female body and simultaneously express our unique
individual will.
Transformation. The core Taoist spiritual practice is Internal
Alchemy (neidan gong). Alchemy is transformation, the process of
speeding up internal change. Both science and art, this
meditative process offers a heart-centered systematic method to
transform the apparent spirit-matter split within a single
lifetime.
Inside every human being lives a mystical trinity. In the West
this trinity might be called body-mind-spirit, but their meaning
is vague. In Taoism, the trinity is jing-chii-shen, with very
precise meaning. Alchemical meditation speeds up the
transformations between sexual essence (“jing”), subtle breath
(“chi”), and intelligence-spirit (“shen”). The three are really
the same, but vibrating at different speeds, to give our soul
greater freedom of expression.
Immortality. Tao inner alchemy offers Seven Alchemy
176
Formulas for
Eternal Life. These seven stages are a practical map to
spiritually rebirth the mortal self into an immortal
consciousness that continues functioning after death. This is not
a quest for physical immortality. Ordinary souls dissolve after
death. Enlightened souls hold enough integrity to reincarnate
consciously, a kind of soul immortality.
Spiritual immortality is the stage beyond enlightenment. It
allows us to complete the natural process of soul individuation
that is happening in both our Lesser Self/personality as well as
our cosmic Greater Self. Spiritual Immortality is Nature’s way to
allow the most worthy individual beings to participate in the
ongoing creation of the divine multi-verse.
Spontaneity. Every soul seeks two things. One, to complete its
unique worldly destiny. Two, to achieve a high spiritual destiny
of consciously merging back into its Original Spirit. But destiny
is not a fixed or pre-determined path. There is only the
effortless spontaneous unfolding of each moment (“wuwei”).
The Supreme Mystery (Wuji) that births the Life Force will always
remain unknowable and unpredictable, even as we gradually merge
with the vastness of the Tao. This central Mystery lives in the
core of our inner self and keeps all life eternally fresh,
joyful, and spontaneous.
Love, Chi, and Blessings of the 9 Principles of Tao,
Michael
The Sun, the Alchemist, and a Copper Roof
Nov. 24, 2006 Photos - My Copperized Landscape
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Essay on why my inner alchemist felt inspired to install a copper
roof on our
humble log cabin.
Why Copper? The mysteries of the sun, metallurgy, astrology, feng
shui, inner
and outer alchemy, artistic beauty and the practicality of solar heating -
all
fused into one copper roof. Are you ready to join me, and get off the old
psychic grid? Photos of copper roof :
http://www.healingdao.com/copper_roof,_sun,_the_alchemist.html
2. Free Meditation beneath our newly copper-domed roof this Sat.
Nov. 18, 7
pm-11:30 pm. Three silent sittings, leave early if you wish. Everyone is
welcome, Tao embraces all paths and types of meditation. Light
refreshments
afterward. Joyce and I are picking up any Thanksgiving strays. Its a
great time
to absorb the deep earth changes happening, and a warm up for
Winter Solstice.
Please email if you’re coming, send your Energy Body if you aren’t. We
always
manage to squeeze last minute arrivals in. For directions and rsvp:
winn@healingdao.com
3. The China Dream Trip 2007 (May 18-June 4) is starting to hum
with signups
from a really interesting international group of spiritual adventurers,
including one returnee from the 2006 trip. The people who come on
this trip are
at least half the fun. They are folks excited about exploring China,
from the
Great Wall to Mt Emei, Mt. Qingcheng, and Mt. Hua. No prior
experience in qigong
required. We will be practicing qigong together every day in different
power
spots. A qigong training video is sent in advance to all who signup. For
more
info or to make a deposit, contact: winn@healingdao.com
Full itinerary at: http://www.healingdao.com/chinatrip2007.
Spectacular photos from a two-time China dream tripper:
http://www.arrowofmoonlight.com/China.html
4. Dec. 9-10. Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4 workshop in Asheville,
Internal Chi
Breathing and Bone Breathing & Rooting.
Gets you deep into your bones, your ancestors, and the relationship
between
inner breathing and outer breathing. Open your dantian/ center of
gravity more
powerfully. Five simple standing-in-stillness postures. Natural, reverse,
and
counter-force breathing. “Ocean, Sky, Great Heart Breathing” qigong
form.
Excellent for preventing and healing all kinds of chronic illness, which
is
often diseased chi pushed down into the joints and bones. For more
info or
homestudy course,
visit http://www.healingdao.com/ckf3.html
Contact: winn@healingdao.com
------------------------------
Dear Lovers of the Mystery of Transmutation,
I recently completed a dream of mine, to add a little copper shine
to the roof
of my and Joyce’s humble log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains near
Asheville,
North Carolina.
This story begins in 1994, in Finland, on a journey above the arctic
circle, on
the solid land closest to the North Pole. I was headed to an initiation
with a
saami shaman and my Atlantean guide, which took place on a pyramid
island in the
middle of a frozen lake, where there was a potent 3-way crossing of
earth ley
lines. That story is for another time, consider it colorful backdrop. We
stopped
in Helsinki, the capital, and visited a church that had a hammered
copper roof
inside its chapel. The energy in the place was intense; I could feel the
copper
was holding the charge of people’s prayers.
The warm vibration from that copper roof experience stayed with
me. It made me
remember Wilhelm Reich, the inventor of the “orgone box”. His
orgone box was
made of layers of copper and wood and cotton. You would sit in the
box and the
dynamic tension between these natural elements would ostensibly
concentrate the
life force in your body, and effect healing. He was imprisoned by the
Feds for
constructing an unlicensed medical device, and sadly, died in prison in
1957.
Reich was mostly hated because of his theory that “orgone” (chi or
prana) was an
orgasmic force at the center of the universe and every human being.
This is
similar to my own understanding of yin-yang pulsation theory. But his
use of
copper in conducting that force is what aroused my curiosity.
From my study of Taoist inner alchemy and fengshui, I
know that metal is an
177
excellent conductor of chi. In the outer world, the conducting function
of
copper is obvious in electrical wiring, and the widespread reliance on
other
metals in technology to transfer force (i.e. metal structure of a building,
or
metal weapons, cars, trains, planes). The key virtue of the metal
element is its
strength and versatility. It can be shaped into many patterns and still
hold
great integrity.
Inside the human body, the metal element is linked with the lungs
and breathing.
The spiritual job of the lung spirit (”po” soul in Taoist worldview) is to
conduct chi between heaven and earth. Humans do this by using
subtle breath in
our body’s internal channels. These channels are well mapped out by
the Taoists,
and can be activated using qigong and inner alchemy. The basic
training in this
internal breathing I cover in my Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4.
Since visiting that church in Finland, I have long speculated that
having a
copper roof on my home might facilitate that subtle breathing process,
and add
some extra kick to my meditation process. A kind of house-sized
orgone box,
where even mundane household chores would feel slightly more
orgasmic. Actually,
I was perfectly happy with the flow of cosmic chi in my meditations.
But Joyce
and I had done much to improve the feng shui of our little cabin, and
we noticed
that with every improvement, the land on which our home rested
seemed to be
happier.
We built two stone terraces to stop the chi from rushing downhill,
and to create
level land for the ambitious gardener in Joyce. The earth element was
given a
huge oomph by the crystal stone circle, which we wired in
energetically to Lao
Tzu’s ascension site in China. We added a waterfall, and the plants and
trees
seemed to rejoice at the presence of the water element. This beautiful
“flow
form” waterfall, with a sexy vulva shape and jade finish, was acoustically
designed by New Zealand artist Iain Trousdell. It can be seen in the
opening
shots of my Qigong Fundamentals 3 DVD, “Ocean, Sky, & Great Heart
Breathing
Qigong”.
I know that fengshui, using adjustments to the external
environment, has it
limitations. The figure I accept is that aligning natural forces with
fengshui
methods can improve one’s energy flow in a home or office up to about
20%. The
other 80% efficiency needs to be achieved via greater biological and
psycho-spiritual conductivity within the human body. Most of our
resistance is
internal, and it is the major work for every human to overcome that
resistance.
Hence the Taoist emphasis on “wu wei”, or spontaneous action, and the
development of qigong and inner alchemy methods to cultivate
Original Chi (yuan
qi) in opening a “super-conductive” relationship with the Life Force.
 But the “Great Work” of alchemical transformation includes shone upon it.
working with natural (Perhaps if we covered the pyramid atop the Washington monument
forces to establish greater harmony and balance between humans and obelisk with
the auriculum, America would recover its spiritual compass....?).
macro-cosmos or Nature. Other than keeping us dry, the cheap asphalt-
tar roof Before choosing a copper roof, I considered the astrological
over our head just didn’t seem to be adding much. Copper would offer affiliation each
better metal has with a planet:
protection from high winds and forest fires. It would be more Sun: Gold
beautiful, and Moon: Silver
last longer. But these were secondary considerations, added Mercury: Mercury
justification for Venus: Copper
the expense of adding a copper roof. The real question: what kind of Mars: Iron
subtle Jupiter: Tin
energy would it add to our home and land? Saturn: Lead

This brings us to a fascinating aspect of copper - its close The alchemical transmutation process starts with lead (Saturn,
relationship to called “true or
gold, the quintessential alchemical metal. In Chinese, the metal original earth” in Taoist alchemical texts), and proceeds through tin,
element is more silver,
accurately translated as the Gold (”jin”) Element. If you visit Wudang mercury, iron, copper and finally becomes gold. Note that copper is
mountain highly
(scheduled for the 2008 China Dream Trip), the highest and most evolved, sitting next to gold, and its reddish-yellow color
powerful point approximating that
is Golden Peak, with a temple magestically perched high above the of gold. Only the last four metals on the list would be economically
clouds and feasible
surrounding peaks. The Golden Peak temple roof is covered with for roofing material. Having a Jupiterian/tin or Saturian/lead roof could
copper, supplied also
by the emperor. be balancing for someone (and they have metal roofs now in stunning
colors).
Note that only the Taoists include this gold/metal element in their
five I chose copper because of of it close affinity to gold and its ability
element/phase system. Gold/metal is missing in the Indian, Egyptian, to
Greek, conduct the solar, lunar, and stellar forces into the earth. Copper also
Arabic elemental systems, although esoterically those systems all focus directly expresses the chi of Venus, the planet of love, beauty, and sexual
on the transmutation. There are many myths surrounding Venus as being the
alchemical production of gold. The base metals buried within the earth planet from
are all which humanity’s original 144,000 souls were “seeded’ into earth.
considered to be evolving towards the solar purity and incorruptibility Copper is
of gold, holding the corresponding Venus vibration within the earth.
in the same way that plants grow towards the sun. As above, so below. Interesting that in
In western the classic book of Unchanging Changes (I Ching), the trigram for lake/
alchemy, copper is linked with the earth element and the alchemical metal,
process of connected with the Spirit of the West and the planet Venus, is the only
“conjunction”. Copper and silver were often added to gold to “grow the one
gold” - which is also associated with Heaven/gold.
hence the popularity of alchemists with kings seeking to bolster their
treasury. Is this planetary - metal resonance “real”? The scientific basis of
these subtle
Copper was considered to be the metal closest to gold in its alchemical-planetary correspondences has been challenged recently on
spiritual the Healing
evolution, i.e. closest in vibration. The capstone of the Great Pyramid Tao forum. I consider any resonance “real” if you can feel it clearly - no
and need
every temple in Egypt had an obelisk at its center covered with for external scientific proof to verify what you know is energetically
“auriculum”. true. But
This was a gold-silver-copper and other rare earths natural alloy there are interesting experiments in this case. Rudolf Steiner, the
mentioned by Austrian
Plato in his account of Egypt and Atlantis. Auriculum has apparently occultist, said “So long as substances are in a solid state they are subject
since gone to
back underground, its a rare earth metal no longer found on the the forces of the earth, but as soon as they enter the liquid state, the
surface. The planetary forces come into play.” (As an aside, this suggests interesting
“au” in its name later became the chemical symbol for gold and the “cu” reasons why Taoist water-fire alchemy is so effective. The metal/jing yin
symbol elements in human blood are used to establish a deep resonance with
for copper. spiritual
intelligence of the vital organ spirits and their planetary affinities).
Auriculum was used to conduct power between the earth and the
heavens in Egypt, Steiner inspired Frau L. Kolisko to perform an experiment over the
and was the core source of spiritual power that radiated out from every Sun-Saturn
temple. conjunction of 1926, described in her book, “Workings of the Stars in
It protected the auric field of those doing spiritual practice within it. Earthly
The Substance”. Image patterns normally formed by lead (affiliated with
pyramid’s capstone produced a blinding light when the sun Saturn)
178
were in a dissolved silver nitrate solution. These lead patterns
completely
disappeared during the Saturn conjunction, and later reappeared
afterwards. This
experiment was successfully repeated by others, suggesting a physical
change in
liquified earth metals due to the resonance. I recall my first teacher in
the
spagyric arts (external or laboratory alchemy), Dan Travers, proudly
showing me
how he had liquified gold at room temperature. I eventually gave up
spagyrics
for inner alchemy as a more direct method. In any case success in inner
alchemy
is necessary for the external alchemy to proceed.
Nick Kollerstrom, a former scientist, has also conducted
astrological research
on what he calls “The Eureka Effect”. He showed a statistically
significant
relation between moments of inspiration in scientific work and the
presence of
septiles and quintiles among transiting planets. He’s done interesting
studies
involving metal-planet correspondences, showing how in the chart for
the first
creation of Plutonium, Pluto was on the ascendant. None of this
should be
surprising to modern folks slowly getting used to the possibility that
our
quantum universe is intelligent and that every event entails a complex
set of
resonant forces.
Part of my mission in spreading body-centered Taoist internal
alchemy meditation
and its external component of qigong is to resurrect alchemy as the
oldest
science on the planet, preceding even the development of religion.
This process
of recovery entails revealing alchemy as the hidden foundation for
modern
science, which I believe will eventually evolve to reclaim its alchemical
roots.
It may surprise some to learn that the first famous American
scientist was the
alchemist George Starkey (1628-1665), educated at Harvard College,
who wrote
numerous alchemical treatises under the name Eirenaeus Philalethes
(”a peaceful
lover of truth”). Starkey became the “chymistry” teacher of Robert
Boyle, who
borrowed heavily from Starkey and would go on to acquire fame as
“the father of
modern chemistry”. Starkey’s works acquired a huge audience that
included
luminaries like Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Gottfried Leibniz.
The million or so words that Newton composed on alchemy are
heavily indebted to
the theory and practice of Philalethes, and were the hidden driver for
most of
Newton’s famous discoveries. it was Newton’s belief in alchemy that
drove him to
fathom the subtle forces of nature like gravity. He pursued the secrets
of
alchemy until his death. He believed the mere physical forces he had
discovered
were superficial to deeper underlying spiritual forces. Alas, like most
western
alchemists, he had no teacher of inner alchemy.
179
Newton left clear directions for making alchemical furnaces and
other apparatus,
as well as processes for star regulus, a copper-antimony alloy called “the
net,”
a beautiful purple metal that forms crystals. Newton wrote a
manuscript
discussing metallic “vegetation,” the formation of dendrites from salts
and
metals. To Newton, the fact that metals could be made to grow in a
flask was a
sign that they possessed a sort of life, and could therefore be made to
ferment,
putrefy, and ultimately multiply.
These alchemical speculations become even more interesting in
light of modern
discoveries about metal. I read a piece in Scientific American
describing how
the earliest complex life forms on earth did not begin in a primordial
sea
struck by lightning. Life more likely evolved in ponds with metallic
concentrations that allowed single celled organisms to form complex
life forms
using metals/minerals as their infrastructure. This is born out today by
the
spray of thousands of tiny metal ions that are showering out from
every cell in
the human body. This metal spray is what keeps the cell healthy and
allows the
life force to circulate at that level. But enough digression into the
mystery of
metallurgy, biology, and alchemy.
The bottom line is that we put a copper roof on our home,
primarily as an
alchemical exploration. It was not cheap. I saved my copper pennies
for quite a
few years. We took advantage of copper’s close relationship with the
sun, and
installed beneath the copper on the south side of the roof 2000 feet of
tubing
filled with water and anti-freeze. The sun heats the copper, the copper
(with a
radiant foil to intensify the process) cooks the water in the tubing,
which
flows into my home radiant flooring system. Its essentially a copper
rooftop
cooking unit. The rooftop coiled tubing system is a system that I
designed from
scratch, not on the market, so its effectiveness remains to be proven.
But meanwhile, I feel I am deeper into experiencing the Sun-
Copper-Human
energetic loop of transmutation. The copper roof has added a lovely
spice to our
home’s meditative field. To me, it feels like the heavens have been
grounded
just above my crown, and the Gods of Alchemy are pleased. Its like
sitting in a
divine “chi sandwich”, with both heaven and earth snuggled a little bit
closer
together with me.
I spent a long time welcoming the copper elementals with a big
inner smile from
my human solar-heart fire, and those shiny copper sprites seem very
responsive.
The other elementals on our property are playing with them,
showering a new
subtle bliss upon on our humble log cabin in addition to its dazzling
appearance. The metal element also helps to keep the excessive wood
element of
the house and forest in balance. In the Chinese “control cycle” of 5 The Indonesian tsunami was perhaps a bit less shocking to me, as I
element have considered tsunami risks to my personal health for the last
theory, metal controls wood. decade. I am writing to you from a beachfront on one of the
Grenadine islands in the south Caribbean sea. I‚ve been coming here
I will let you know when our log home achieves full for years to meditate, develop chi kung forms, write and immerse
enlightenment, or ascends myself in the water element during winter. Yet only 10 miles away
like a dragon’s chariot into the heavens. I hope we are still living in it sits an underwater volcano that is active, called KickŒem Jenny. Its
when peak is smoldering and bubbling only a few hundred feet below the
it takes off. Meanwhile, you’re all invited to stop by a meditate at the ocean surface.
regular
meditations we hold here. Or tune in with your Energy Body, When Jenny blows, I know there will be a major tsunami washing
recognizing that over
without its metal/gold element, you wouldn’t be able to transport my idyllic fishing village. There are periodic „orange‰ alerts, as
yourself the volcano is closely watched. Occasionally a boat wanders too
across time/space. close to it and suddenly sinks like a rock, as the sulfur content in
the sea makes the boat too heavy. Another active volcano in the
I am enclosing a link to a few photos, in case you are curious to see area, on Monserrat, has already forced evacuation of most of the
the island. So volcanic eruption and a tsunami is a real threat. Yet
different stages of transformation. Joyce accuses me of showing the every year I continue to take the chance, knowing it is unlikely I
roof photos will receive any warning given my low level of media contact and the
as if they were “baby pictures”, and assures me no one else is very few minutes it would take a tsunami to travel from Kickem Jenny
interested....I to my beach. So why do I take the risk?
reply: no one except other alchemists.
It has to do with destiny, with being attuned to destiny through the
http://www.healingdao.com/copper_roof,_sun,_the_alchemist.html earth‚s chi field, and accepting my destiny as flowing natural
(note: photos are a bit slow loading, to preserve rich copper- process of Tao. If I die in a tsunami, it is my destiny. If I get an
saturated color). inner voice warning me to stay away from the islands, and I listen
and act on it, then it will not be my destiny. The 150,000. who died
in Asia had a date with destiny. I am sure there are another
Smiling with a golden-copper heart glow, 150,000. miraculous stories of those unconsciously guided away from
the death zone. And its the destiny of the rest of humanity to deal
Michael with the after shockwave.

“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
Tao of Tsunamis & Earth Changes
Jan. 15, 2005: Becoming Change Before it Changes You
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
Essay on the spiritual nature of tsunamis and a Tao perspective on
how to relate to the new octave of earth Changes. The surprising
usefulness of alchemical Taoist Kan and Li spiritual technology in
embracing deep change gracefully.
I believe the reason this giant tsunami has provoked such a shock
wave is not because of the scale of suffering. Its because the
primordial and thus uncontrollable nature of water itself has
aroused an internal shockwave within each of us. More people die of
AIDS every year in Africa, and more died in the Rwanda genocide.
Four times as many people die every year in the U.S. from the side
effects of prescribed drugs. But you can control your personal
exposure to those risks. They are not primordial like the sea.
Here‚s the overview on death on planet earth: about 148,000.
people
die every day, calculated from an 8.7% annual global death rate. So
for one day the global death rate doubled due to the tsunami. But
statistically this is insignificant. The death rate is soon going to
rise far above 150,000 per day, due to an aging global population
and declining birth rates. The tsunami‚s effect on the global
economy will be nil, so this is not cause for deep concern.

Heaven and Earth are impartial;
they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
Sages are also impartial;
they also treat the common people like straw dogs.
The space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows
ˆ pump it and more comes out.
Better to safeguard what arises within
than seek outer knowledge that fails to nourish.
- Lao Tzu‚s Tao Te Ching, verse 5
Dear Seekers of Smooth and Comfortable Change,
What do you do when the Change is shocking and global in its
impact?
When the earth starts spinning faster on its axis and 150,000
people
living in peaceful Pacific villages are wiped out in minutes,
leaving millions homeless and billions in shock?
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The real significance of the tsunami is its impact on the global
psyche. As I‚ve written about 9-11, when there is a mass death it
opens a portal between the formless and the physical realms. Its a
mass migration of soul essence, and for a brief time everyone feels
their soul essence more tangibly. That causes our hearts to open,
and we are reminded that humanity is really a single global entity
with 6.2 billion interdependent human cells.
Hence the outpouring of relief aid for flood „victims‰. Who are
they
victims of? Its not the first time this flood has happened ˆ the
collective human memory has recorded it through myths of the Great
Flood, whether you take it from Noah and his ark or from thousands
of recorded memories from Atlantis and Lemuria (Pacific continent)
sinking beneath the waves (each for different reasons). On the sides
of Hawaii‚s volcanoes evidence has been found of tsunamis flooding
up as high as 1500 feet above sea level.
The relief aid and money we give is partly genuine kindness, but
also an unconscious hope that others will help us should the same
happen to us. When Kickem Jenny blows, a tsunami will flood the
east coast of the U.S. as well as my beach shack. Likewise for the
Azores volcano, sitting dead in the center of what was once
Atlantis. When it blows, the east coast of the US will need
re-mapping. If the 1500 foot wall of water predicted by scientists
happens, it will make the tsunami in Asia look like a small splash
in a kiddie pool.
The „soul portal‰ that opens at time of mass death is not
metaphysical speculation, but my personal experience. On Dec. 26,
2005 I was sitting in meditation and was feeling quite amazed at the
density and volume of the jing (Taoist term for soul substance that
is refined by inner alchemy meditation) that was present. This was
before I had heard the news reports on the tsunami, or knew of the
shift in the earth‚s speeded up spin.
Even though it is ony by a
fraction of a second, it represents an enormous shift in the global
energy body. In subsequent days it felt as if my „kan & li‰
meditations had effortlessly moved several octaves deeper. Later I
began to get unsolicited emails from some of my kan and li students
reporting the same amplified effects. I would be interested in
hearing from others of their direct experience.
Kan & Li Alchemy as Portal to Body/Earth Changes
Taoist/Daoist Kan & Li, or water & fire alchemy turns out to be
the perfect pattern for attuning to earth changes in the form of
volcanos and tsunamis. Why? Because human energy bodies are
modeled
on the same pattern as the earth‚s energy body. The physical earth
has a neutral core - its mysterious inner heart is thought to be
crystalline according to some recent scientific tests.
This solid
crystal core, which may also house a star-like nuclear reactor, is
surrounded by a warm viscous interior of molten lava, further
surrounded by a cooler outer crust of tectonic plates on which our
cold oceans sit. When the fiery lava layer explodes volcanically, it
displaces the cold ocean layer on top, producing tsunamis and
flooding.
So earth changes are not a surface effect, but rather
something that originates very deep within the planet‚s core.
Something has to shift or awaken deep within the Earth‚s core
crystal to cause these changes on the liquid surface that affect us
humans.
In Taoist water & fire alchemy practice, the model is similar: we
have a neutral inner observer/core self with crystalline bone
structure, a hot pulsing middle layer of blood and vital organs,
with a cooler outer layer of skin and blood cooling as it rises to
the fleshy surface. The goal of body-centered alchemical meditation
is to activate the deep spiritual fire within (Yang hidden within
the body‚s Yin) in order to refine the conditioned patterns of
water/blood and our jing, the substance of our genetic-ancestral
consciousness.
When you activate this alchemical fire within your dantian (belly
cauldron), it begins a long internal process of refining or
„steaming‰ blood into chi into spirit (jing to chi to shen). Where
and how this happens in the body is significant. Yogic view of
kundalini is of a spiritually fired shakti rising up the spine. In
the Taoist view this is the initial phase of development; the
microcosmic orbit is used to guide this fire down the front
yin/water channel), to produce a continuous and balanced yin-yang
refining cycle.
Kan and Li alchemical meditation is like a second phase kundalini.
The spiritual fire rises not up the spine, but up the neutral core
channel in the center of the body. I remember vividly the first
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time
I activated it over twenty years ago ˆ I wasn‚t very skilled, and
the rising force felt like a column of hot volcanic lava coming up
and threatening to blow my head off. I was terrified, and prayed for
it to go back down before my delicate brain (read here as Œego‚) was
fried. It was my first lesson in dealing with rapid body shifts as a
kind of internal earth change.
It was only much later that I actually connected my inner
alchemical
process to outer earth changes. Alchemy, I discovered, is very
attuned to the current global cycle of what is popularly described
as a feminine/goddess energy, arising from within the body and the
earth.
The old sky God religions (which includes vedic Hinduism,
most forms of Buddhism as well as Christianity and Islam) are mostly
focused on the Divine fire above coming down to purify the corrupted
human and demonic worlds hidden within the body and earth. Neither
the fire/sky centered or water/body centered cycle (of Taoists and
Tantrics) is better than the other - it’s just that we‚re in a cycle
of water being heated from within right now. And its just beginning
to really cook.
I don’t believe earth events, from daily weather changes to huge
tsunamis, are mechanical chance events that are unknowable. They are
moments in the bodily life of the large organism we call planet
Earth. She is called by other names, like Gaia, or Pangu by the
ancient Chinese. The Egyptians identified it as a male spirit called
Tellur. I believe that this global intelligence is shifting,
regardless of whether humans listen or not. Was a mass death of
150,000 people needed to mobilize human global consciousness
moving
into 2005?
That‚s probably beyond current human judgment, as a clear answer
would require a more intimate relationship between humanity and
Gaia/Pangu/Tellur. But we can make educated speculations. Maybe that
is what Lao Tzu is referring to in verse 5 of the Tao Te Ching
(daodejing) when he refers to Heaven and Earth impartially treating
humans as straw dogs.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Heaven and Earth are cruel to
humans, giving them life and them mercilessly taking it away ˆ
indifferent to whether we are morally good or evil. It could be
describing how all humans are treated equal, and no higher than the
other non-human elements of nature that are undergoing
transformation. There also the interpretation that „straw dogs‚
could refer to us humans being sacred ritual objects burned in
sacrifice to a higher cause.
I‚ve personally been attempting for over a decade to cultivate a
relationship with deep Earth consciousness using body-centered
Taoist internal alchemy technologies. Its one reason I have
frequently travelled to China‚s Taoist mountain sanctuaries ˆ I
found them more alive, like open portals into the earth. These
portals have been opened by millennia of Taoist adepts meditating
upon earth cycles, its numerous spirits and its axial consciousness.
This axis is the core energy (chong chi) that links the earth‚s
subtle bodies to both the physical heavens (planets, sun, stars) and
the formless Heavens where the Celestial Immortals (very highly
achieved humans) hang out. My next China trip is not until May 2006,
and there are no guarantees that you will return a Celestial...but
many people have had major openings in these sacred mountain Taoist
power spots.
Becoming an Earth Immortal is the developmental stage before
you
achieve Heaven or Celestial Immortal. Of course, none of this
happens until you achieve ordinary Human immortality, which has
nothing to do with living physically forever. Human immortality is
simply completing your soul‚s destiny and a tangible sense of
spiritual integrity with the larger flow of nature.
Earth
Immortality requires attuning your personal human energy body to the
earth‚s impersonal energy body, mediated by the time cycles of the
sun and moon. This is what the Greater Water & Fire (kan & li)
Alchemy formula is about. This requires resolving a lot of ancestral
issues trapped within the earth‚s energy body.
One interesting thing I‚ve found through my China connections is
that many Chinese psychics, very attuned to ancestral issues, have
been predicting big earth changes.
We have had numerous psychics in the West telling us the same
thing
for decades, starting with Edgar Cayce giving detailed dates of huge
land/ocean shifts. But Cayce‚s changes did not occur on schedule.
Nor have other predictions manifested on schedule.
Ramtha (the channelled spirit behind J. Z. Knight and inspiration
for the recent „What the Bleep‰ film) urged followers to store food
and guns in the pacific northwest back in the mid-80‚s due to
impending earth changes. There were numerous other false alarms by
other end-of-the-milllenia prophets (ala Gordon Michael Scallion),
so many that one necessarily became very leery of any channeled
predictions. Yet at the same time it intuitively felt right, that
some major changes HAD to happen if a real paradigm shift was to
occur.
Now that Earth has been confronted by increasingly stronger signs
of
global warming, changes in deep ocean currents, bigger hurricanes,
near-miss meteors and now a kick-ass tsunami, should we begin to
take these earth change predictions more seriously? Maybe the failed
predictions were intentionally made early, to allow us resistant
humans time to absorb the possibilities of unimaginable changes to
earthly life.
Become the Change Before Change is Forced
What to do about all these predictions and the disturbing changes
in
weather? My decision has been to live in the flow of the present
moment, without allowing myself to be paralyzed by other‚s
predictions of apocalyptic destruction. At the same time, I keep an
alert ear to my inner voices, so that I may BECOME THE CHANGE
BEFORE CHANGE IS FORCED upon me.
In late 2004 these voices began to speak to me. When I asked on
my
birthday (last September 5th) what the new year would bring, the I
Ching gave me - twice in a row, to two different questions - its
answer; the double hexagram Wind over Wind. That is equivalent to
„ Change squared to a higher power of itself. I went into deep
meditation to clarify that image, and received information about a
long cycle of dramatic changes that could last for 20 years, but
with especially strong kickers in 2005, and 2007-9. More mass
deaths, perhaps up to a third of humanity, may occur during this 20
year shift to a higher vibrational frequency in our planetary
pattern of functioning.
This information, if accurate, is hardly new; its significance to me
is about timing. The Timing of this cycle should not be seen as the
end of Time, as Creation cannot stop without the free-will agreement
of all beings (unlikely). Nor is it vindication of Mathusian
theories of self-correcting population cycles ˆ if humanity were in
deep harmony, earth could support a vast population with clean
free-energy technologies. But most importantly, these Changes
should NOT be cause for panic.
If you go into Fear reaction, that the Changes are trying to
182
kill
you, you can no longer hear your deepest inner soul voice directing
you to grasp the enormous opportunities for growth possible during
this cycle of change. This is the function of the Taoist Fusion of
the Five Elements practice ˆ to speed the integration of your five
inner „body spirits‰ (jing shen, correlated with the 5 major vital
organ functions) so they speak in one clear, spontaneous,
body-centered authentic voice (ziran).
The simplest and truest response to these Changes is to celebrate a
new phase in the rebirthing of Gaia/Pangu‚s deep spiritual
consciousness. This in turn will initiate a change in the unfolding
patterns of human destiny. Our old dysfunctional patterns of
pollution, war, and struggle need to die to give birth to a stronger
foundation for humanity‚s collective spiritual development.
Some of us will choose to „die‰ in support of that global
rebirthing
process. The reality is that nobody is ever truly forced to die; we
mostly leave our bodies as the result of millions of moment to
moment unconscious choices. The true general cause of unconscious
death choices will not be physical calamities, but an underlying
resistance to the new vibrational frequency radiating from the
earth‚s core as it undergoes its rebirth.
This will cause many to go mad and commit violent acts to relieve
the tension arising from their own resistance/madness. But what
looks horrible on the outside will be beautiful on the inside. The
core of the earth will no longer be experienced as a place of fiery
Hell and trapped beings, but as the open, luminous sacred center of
an embodied Heaven Within Earth. Death-ing is just the initial stage
of rebirth-ing and liberation into new dimensions of life. So all
destiny choices of when and how to leave this body and this earth
are ultimately expressions of human free will.
My Humble Predictions (or Projections?)
Paradoxically, it is the evolution of human INDIVIDUATION
that will
be empowered by this collective process of Change. Individuation is
the integration of our spiritual will within our physical body. The
old governmental and religious institutions with pyramidal authority
structures and from-the-top-down dogmas will gradually break down.
We‚ll be forced to invent new ways to regulate our lives, and it may
take us a while to get it right. The
corporate-miliitary-intelligence „black government‰ that currently
rules our elected government without our consent will not go gently
into the night.
Western astrology will have to shift to acknowledge the voice of
planet earth as the single most important heavenly body for humans.
We will no longer have to chase after calendars to figure out who
and where we are. In the long cycle, Earth as entity will take on
multiple incarnations that we can choose to live on.
The one I plan
to choose (meet you there?) will ultimately be freed to realize its
inner nature as a „dark star‰ manifesting its true destiny as a
place for enlightened spiritual embodiment (rather than
imprisonment). Earth as a planet, and the body for each of us will
become for humans the conscious clearing house and point of
integration for all planetary, solar, and stellar voices.
The end of this individuation process is for humans to finally
arrive in their bodies. This is another way of saying that our
bodies will be recognized as the immediate and true transmutation of
spirit, eliminating all dualistic struggle. Light and Dark will
still exist, but their relationship will be more one of divine dance
and play, less intense polarities of war, disease, and struggle.
This body-centered self-realization is why Earth is the center
element in Taoist astrology and the center of inner alchemy
practice. Earth in Chinese systems is the equivalent of an embodied
Ether (hidden fifth element) found in the western esoteric systems
inherited from Atlantis and used in Greece, Egypt, Middle East,
India, and the West.
This is not to claim that Taoist cosmology or astrology is better;
it simply has different, clearer body-centered information. It has
what is needed at this point in the cycle of changes to achieve
completion. In the new cycle of change there will be the opportunity
to integrate the wisdom of the ancient Lemurian and Atlantean
civilizations. (and yes, now is finally the time for me to get off
my ass and release my book giving the historical details of this
subject...as soon as I find a reasonable source for print-on-demand
technology!).
What are the most important practical steps to take to prepare for
this cycle of earth changes? To find a way to get grounded on every
level of the process of one‚s Becoming. I am teaching chi kung and
inner alchemy because I find that combination of movement and
meditation to be the most effective and effortless path to deep
embodied change.
Its why in particular I have been urging Healing Tao students to
move ahead to the three Kan & Li levels of practice, Lesser (Inner
Sexual Alchemy), Greater (Sun-Moon-Earth Alchemy), and Greatest
(Planetary & Soul Alchemy). I teach the entire cycle every summer at
Dao Mountain, and the rest of the year at selected retreats abroad.
The next Greater Kan & Li, which is the most focused on earth
changes, is in central Italy May 3-8 (contact Cristiano Palazzini
. Why are viruses so powerful? Is it because they are closer to the
I feel we need to make these alchemical technologies accessible as
the basic and essential tools of a modern spiritual science. Not a
secret practice people will get to someday when they are perfect
masters. They are tools for imperfect, evolving human beings seeking
to become the force of natural change - before Nature forces change
upon us.
But everyone will find their own path. Inexorably and invisibly.
That is Tao/Dao ˆ the pathless path. Enjoy your journey!
May the Five Inner Tones of the Dao Sing in our Heart,
Michael Winn
„Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Dao as his door, and who becomes change ˆ is a Sage.‰
ˆ Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters
“The Dao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
ˆ Daoist Sage, 200 B.C
Tao of Viruses and Human Trans-mutation
Dec. 10, 2004
Michael Winn
Inside Chi iFlows naturally:
essay on how we need to tap into the hidden intelligence of viruses
to survive coming changes.
If you previously “unsubscribed” to TaoNews, you may have to
unsubscribe again due to a virus. See new unsubscribe link at end of
letter. To subscribe, go to home page of www.healingdao.com, and
you’ll get a free Inner Smile ebook, a download function recently
restored.
2005 Summer Retreat schedule will be coming soon, as well as
details of May 2006 China trip. Plus Winter Solstice specials on dvd’s
and new cd releases of the Chi Kung Fundamentals.
183
Dear Cultivators of the Natural Way,
I’ve been meditating on the inner nature of viruses recently. All
kinds of viruses. Computer viruses, because one disabled most of my
website on Nov. 2 , Election Day. Should I be paranoid? My webmaster
thinks it was not maliciously targeting the site, but rather a trojan
horse virus that rode on an unsuspecting ex-employee’s pass word to
get past our hefty defenses.
The site is 90% back to normal but it cost me thousands of dollars
and a lot of aggravation. Yet it forced me and my webmaster to make
improvements that long needed doing – so I am ultimately happy
about being dragged forcibly into the maws of Change.
I’m also contemplating Asian bird flu viruses, because World
Health experts are saying it could cost up to a billion human lives in
the next massive cyclical outbreak. That sounds pretty apocalyptic,
and makes my suffering seem rather puny in the scale of viral pain. A
billion lives: these are cold scientific statistical possibilities. They’re
talking about this winter or next.
It’s not born again fundamentalists (or New Agers) waiting for the
End of Time to happen in a vague future that constantly is moving
away from us. This outburst of Asian viral influence is well recorded in
history, killing millions in the past. The next cycle may kill more
because we are so globally connected. Viruses doing a house-cleaning
on humanity, or acting as the catalyst for new operating paradigms to
emerge?
secret of immortality than humans? They are more intelligent than
humans in their ability to self-replicate. They can mutate in the
moment, and seem to know exactly where to find the chi to support
their life, even if it is parasitic.
Viruses rewrite the DNA and RNA code of other entities for its
own survival – whether its the common cold or HIV or herpes or the
zillion other unnamed viruses. Viral ability to read genetic code
effortlessly is what scientists have wet dreams about doing themselves.
A virus could win the Nobel Prize for genetics if somebody would
nominate one.
So I ask myself, what’s the spiritual function of the virus? Are
viruses the most advanced type of entity that is evolving on earth, and
are humans merely a lesser creature or host to serve their needs? Given
the high genius-like IQ of viruses, we have to consider this possibility,
humbling as it is. There are countless viruses living in our bodies, and
they may be essential to maintaining our biological equilibrium – or is
it THEIR biological equilibrium?
A Textbook Definition of a Virus
“Viruses are parasites which use almost every kind of living system
as host. On the human body, there is virtually no part that cannot be
colonized by viruses - brain, CNS, heart, GI tract, blood vessels and
blood cells, skeletal muscles, reproductive system, skin, trachea, lungs,
lymphatic system.? Bacteria too are susceptible to viral attack; E.coli is
host to at least 4 different types of viruses.”
From the viewpoint of Daoist (Taoist) cosmology, we humans are
smaller wholes that are part of the process of larger wholes. Each sub-
whole – whether its a cell or a human being or a planet - as well as the
meta-wholes (galaxies, universes and higher dimensions) are operating
from the same chi field. Each entity embodies the same yin-yang
pulsation and the same five phase cycles.
If we apply this energetic thinking to viruses, we can understand
viruses as “rogue strands” of the collective five phase operating system.
They create a certain amount of chaos in the existing order, and that
may be a valuable function in helping us mutate to our next level.
Mostly, the viruses succeed because of their utter and total openness to
embracing any and all life operating systems. Can we learn from that?
Find the Secrets of our Operating System
The key, I believe, is tap into the viral ability to transmute our
operating system. Its an un-winable war to battle and kill all viruses.
This trans-mutation of our operating system is essentially what daoist
alchemy is focused on. It gives us a practical way to capture rogue
elementals in the form of dysfunctional energetic patterns or ego
fragments, and puts them to work to speed the evolution of the whole.
We constantly exploit the intelligence of other people, and we
frequently copy their energetic patterns. Viruses do the same thing,
but they lack their own body. They have no earth element. Viruses are
the chaotic but powerful aspects of ourselves and the world that seek
to ground themselves by chasing after other’s bodies. So they appear
perpetually destructive instead of stable and peace loving. They have
no way to internalize their reproductive process. But we could
internalize the genius of viruses – IF we cultivate our alchemical
cauldron, our dantian. The dantian at our personal center of gravity
exists by the grace of our having an individual body.
Viruses generally lack their own cell wall, but are happy to borrow
the cell walls from other creatures. This notion of viruses as rogues
matches scientific speculation on their origins. A popular theory is that
viruses are clusters of genes that originally broke off from some
primordial cell. They now act as pirates, boarding all descendants of
that original cell to plunder their genetic treasures at will.
It sounds like a pop sci-fiction plot. And it resembles one popular
theory as to why aliens keep abducting humans – to study and steal our
DNA code, considered to be one of the most royal designs in the
cosmos. All of this Cosmic Viral drama seems to be about a desire to
find our own center of reproductive creativity.
Trans-Mutation at Winter Solstice
Let’s shift from tiny viruses to Big Picture process. As we head into
Winter Solstice on Dec. 21, we do well to prepare ourselves for the
alchemical transformation that is possible at this time in the annual
cycle of rebirth. The scattered parts of ourselves, operating as
fragments, and always seeking opportunities to survive out in the
world – suddenly are drawn back into a mysterious hole of dark night.
Out of that wintry darkness is rebirthed the light of our renewed soul.
Astrologers have pointed out that leading up to the Solstice the
planets are flowing into a new pattern of five phase integration, where
all five of the visible planets can be seen in the morning sky, in order of
their appearance from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
This happens every morning from Dec. 16 to Dec. 22, and won’t
happen again for another 12 years. This symbolizes the strengthening
of our elemental alignment within as the planets
reflect their natural alignment without.
Can you be utterly open to this process, and capture the cosmic
operating system, and use it to reproduce yourself?
I’m getting a strong signal that change is going to happen more
dramatically and powerfully in 2005. That we need to learn from our
viral guides – our hidden ancient unconscious powers of trans-
mutation and flexibility.
May the Inner Sound of the Dao Sing in Us,
Michael Winn
“Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Dao as his door, and who becomes change – is a Sage.”
– Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters
“The Dao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
184
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
-- Daoist Sage, 200 B.C
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Ancient Celts and Taoists share Fundamental Principles
Oct. 12, 2004 Exploring New Grange, Ireland
Michael Winn
Inside Tao News:
Article: What the ancient Celts and Taoists had in common: the
Fundamentals of capturing the life force.
Chi Kung Fundamentals 1 & 2 Oct. 23-24 in Asheville, North Carolina,
$144.
Just reply to this email to reserve your space.
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switching
between talks and guided practices. If you already own an audio
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If you already own a video and want to UPGRADE to DVD, cost
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upgrade.
Dear Chi Lovers,
I recently returned from Newgrange, Ireland where we had a
wonderful
star alchemy retreat. We were practicing the Daoist Hermit One
Cloud’s 5th
alchemy formula, also known as “sealing of the senses”. We turned our
mind
deep inside and expanded that inner mind to open up direct
perception of the
inner nature of the outer cosmos.
We aligned the axis of our body’s chong mai (core channel) with
the Pole
Star and the precession of the equinoxes, the wobble in the earth’s axis
causing it to trace a grand orbit around the zodiac every 26,000 years.
We
absorbed the stellar chi from the zodiac inside us. It activated a
profound
inter-galactic awareness of our collective human nature, what is called
the
oversoul in the west.
5000 years ago ancient Celtic adepts built a massive stone mound
in
Newgrange, older than Stonehenge. The mound aligns with a shaft of
sunlight
that shines through a narrow opening and reaches 100 feet into the
innermost
chamber on the Winter Solstice. More amazing than the enduring
construction
and design of Newgarange was the purity of vibration within this inner
chamber. It was energetically still intact.
These ancient architects laid profound importance upon the
fundamentals
of alignment with natural forces. They used stone to capture the power
of
the Sun and store it deep within the earth. I could not only feel it, but I
could actually internally HEAR this vibration - a very fine high pitched
pure hum. I remembered one researcher called Newgrange “an
advanced
astro-acoustic chamber”. It concentrates the inaudible high sonic
frequency
of the sun entering the earth. But with the practice of chi kung and
inner
alchemy, you can internally hear these super-fine frequencies.
Newgrange got me thinking about what is fundamental in life.
What makes
Chi Kung (qigong) Fundamentals so fundamental within Daoist
practice? Why
are the Inner Smile, Healing Sounds/Five Animals, and the
Microcosmic Orbit
(”embryonic breathing”) considered the fundamentals over so many
millennia?
Why have they endured for thousands of years, through huge gyrations
in
Chinese culture and history, to now blossom in the West? Why do
these
fundamental structures of yin-yang and 5-phase energy practices appear
throughout all of One Cloud’s seven Daoist formulas for immortality?
Chi Kung and internal alchemy use exactly the same principle
tapped by the
ancient Celts at Newgrange: they align our multiple body intelligences
and
energy pathways in order to capture the life force shining naturally
within
us. Using sound, breath, feeling, color and movement these energies are
concentrated deep within the chamber of our inner body-mind space.
What the
Celts did with outer architecture the Taoists do with inner body
architecture. Of course, the Celts likely had similar internal practices.
Chi Kung Fundamentals are fundamental because the movement
forms and
meditations give us a practical way to feel and stabilize this flowing
energy of nature inside our body’s “elixir field”, or dantian in Chinese.
But if we practice Chi Kung Fundamentals from the perspective of
inner
alchemy - the way I now teach it - they become even more powerful.
Inner alchemy gives us an internal map for navigating the
biological,
psychological, and spiritual processes that are all happening
simultaneously
inside us. Alchemy is humanity’s oldest and our original spiritual
science,
and it satisfies our craving for some practical and definable spiritual
process beyond praying to an invisible god(s) somewhere out there
beyond the
night sky. It concentrates the god-power of Nature inside our own
body.
The forms we learn in chi kung fundamentals are not creating or
building
up chi - it’s already infinitely abundant within us our body-mind. We’re
just learning to communicate with the pre-existing chi field inside us.
We’re learning how to play with the external chi field all around us.
Having
inner alchemy’s map of our body’s vital organ spirits, and
knowing their
185
behavior is governed by our internal energy pathways, makes it easy to
continuously feel chi flow in our daily life.
If you want more flow in your daily life, I invite you to learn the
fundamentals of chi kung. If you’ve already learned them and left them
behind, you’ll find them worth a second, deeper visit.
To the Inner Light and Sound of the Tao (Dao) within Us,
Michael Winn
“Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Dao as his door, and who escapes change is a Sage.”
Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters
“The Dao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
-- Daoist Sage, 200 B.C
Stonehenge, Callanish, Silburiy Hill, Glastonbury, Isle of Skye
Oct. 13, 2006 Winn Photos from UK & Scotland
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Back from Getting Stoned in Scotland - diving into the
heart of the 5,000. year old Callanish Stones. Plus tales of
recent Taoist ceremonies in Stonehenge. Are these ancient
timekeeping devices trying to tell us something?
2. Oct. 21-22 in Asheville. Primordial Qigong + Feldenkrais
for Super-Learning the secrets of Effortless Movement. with
Michael Winn and Joyce Gayheart.
Open to all. Includes certification to teach wuji gong,
a.k.a. “Tai Chi for Enlightenment” for those practicing at
least one year. Workshop is highly recommended for anyone
wanting to teach this magical form, even if you’ve learned
it from the video. (see www.taichi-enlightenment.com for
info on the form, and amazing testimonials). Also a great
time to visit Asheville, peak leaf season in the Blue Ridge
Mtns. contact: joycegayheart@earthlink.net to register or
help with local hotels. Or call 828-296-1930.
3. Mystery of Stonehenge Solved? The perfect followup
to my Stonehenge photos - see this amazing video of a
carpenter from Flint Michigan moving 19 ton blocks
using only gravity and leverage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0
-------------------------
Dear Lovers of Getting Naturally Stoned,
I am back from getting Stoned. On stone circles, that is,
both in Stonehenge and a new site to me, Callanish in
Scotland. These are the two largest stone monuments in
Britain. I got high on each, using a 5000 year old
megalithic technology. What exactly causes the high warm
feeling when you stand inside, or next to these great cold
stones?
The energetic technology the ancients used is called
RESONANCE. The Taoists use it as their main technology as
well; in chinese it’s called gan ying. Its a principle of
“subtle music” or harmonic tones of nature. By aligning
these giant stones in sacred geometric patterns attuned to
the cycles of the sun, moon, and earth, the ancient sages in
Scotland created a coherent wave and tonal pattern that is
still broadcasting - to anyone who is listening.
The stones themselves function as kind of giant acupuncture
needles inserted into meridians on the planet. This triggers
the earth’s magnetic field to expand out the stone points. I
have long suspected the ancients dowsed their site for
underground streams, which concentrate the earth’s magnetic
jing/essence, like blood flowing in her veins.
A similar
thesis has been proposed by dowser Michael Poynder in a
recent book, Lost Science of the Stone Age: Sacred Energy
and the I Ching. He contends every stone has either a lunar
(para-magnetic) or solar (di-magnetic) charge to it, that
correlate to the yin and yang signs of the I Ching. And that
you can dowse five distinct layers down deep into the Earth
beneath such sites, a reflection of the five elements/phases
that flows into the stones above.
Then as the earth rotates, sun and moon cycles act as
triggers which intensify and alter the pulsing magnetic
pattern of the “stone needles”. Add to this concentrated
cosmic force the millennia of human ceremonies performed on
the site, and you are left with a richly layered recording
from the past that still feels alive and pulsating -- if you
are sensitive enough to catch the frequency. It is
megalithic fengshui at its best - and still humming away.
During the week of the autumn Equinox, we rented Stonehenge
and did a private powerful sunrise ceremony inside its
massive circle. Part of the ceremony involved doing
Primordial Qigong inside, with our group arranged in the
shape of a cross pointing to the four cardinal directions.
The primordial qigong form is designed to gathers and
concentrates chi from the four directions into the center of
one’s body (and core energy channel).
Having 25 people doing this wuji qigong in a “flying cross”
formation intensified its normally magical effect.
Afterwards a number of us, who had done ceremonies within
Stonehenge three times in the last six years, noted that the
earth chi seemed to be shifting on the site. It felt softer,
gentler, more welcoming, as if the Earth had slowly been
opening its giant heart and radiating it out the needles of
the massive stone circle. Many people had felt being
embraced, even cradled, by the paradoxically hard stones.
Although Stonehenge is the more famous site, Callanish may
be more intact and its field less interfered with by modern
visitors. It’s located on Lewis, a remote and wild windswept
island off the barren northwest coast of Scotland. At 400
feet long by 150 feet wide, its bigger than a football
field, the second largest stone circle in England.
Please first take a look at an aerial shot of the Callanish
Stones in a celtic cross formation:
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=a312
&file=index&do=showpic&pid=1703
Clink here to view 22 Winn Photos from Stonehenge,
Callanish, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Isle of Skye
(Scotland)
or
http://www.healingdao.com/stonehenge_index.html
Callanish has a very different feeling from Stonehenge. It
is arranged like the much later christian celtic cross - a
circle of taller stones at the center of an immense cross
extending to the four sacred directions. Only in the north
there are two rows of stones, like a woman with her legs
spread open, to capture the planetary energy of “new birth”
coming in from the darkness of the north pole.
What is the purpose of this massive stone cross, a kind of
megalithic “ankh”, that was erected three millennia before
186
the Christians made the cross configuration popular in
another part of the world? I think its a combination of
geomantic “earth acupuncture” and magnetic alignment to
sun-moon and zodiacal cycles of time. The zodiac is
indicated by the circle at the center of the cross.
Astro-geographers have determined the site measures, among
other things, the 18.5 year lunar ecliptic cycle.
Callanish focuses a beautiful heart energy. That was my
experience - it was much more heart centered than
Stonehenge, even though our ceremony there this time was
enveloped in a much softer energy than in previous year’s
ceremonies. Callanish, I believe, was designed to hold the
deep heart space of humanity, the meeting of the four sacred
directions in the central/ fifth circle.
I stood with my back to the 25 foot tall stone in the very
center of circle, facing the setting sun. The chi from the
four directions was pouring into my heart. It was forcing my
heart to expand into a vast inner space, but so powerfully
that it was almost painful.
It was as if my heart was capturing in a single moment the
force of the stones flowing with unwavering focus for 5000
years. I could voices imploding within me from a past
civilization. They were voices challenging us humans,
asking: where is your heart taking you, and taking planet
earth?
Perhaps the ancients had a vision of vast time cycles, and
knew that a time that would come when Earth and humanity
would make a great shift. Global warming is slowly becoming
global “cooking”, and the impurities in human civilization
may get cooked out in the process.
I hope everyone is wise enough to “cook” their own essence
before it gets cooked by outer energies of change. That is
why i practice qigong and inner alchemy - to open the portal
of change within, before the energies without force the
changes upon me. There are many ways to ride the waves of
change.
I hope each of you has found a process to do so .
To the eternal Song of the Stones of 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
Equinox, Easter, & Eclipses: the Sexual Resurrection of Time
Cycles
Mar. 20, 2006
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Essay on tapping the hidden sexual forces in the Spring
Equinox and eclipses.
2. Equinox Event at my Asheville, N.C. home Tuesday March 21.
Can’t make it? Send your Energy Body, or host your own
local event!
Dear Lovers of Spring-is-here-at-last,
 Religions around the world observe Holy Days in March and
April linked in some way to the spring or vernal equinox
when day and night are equal. The ancient Taoists celebrated
this as a moment of cosmic natural balance between the
forces of yin (dark) and yang (light). As I have described
in my articles on Taoist sexology, yin-yang describes a
sexual coupling of cosmic creative forces that we
microcosmically re-enact as female-male.
When these cosmic yin-yang forces are in equilibrium, in the
Tao tradition of inner alchemy a portal opens in which a
third force arises, the primordial or Original Breath as an
expression of the clear light of the Original Spirit. This
is a kind of neutral divine force that precedes and births
the tai chi movement of yin-yang.
The purpose of inner
alchemy is to “resurrect” that clear light or non-dual
consciousness within an immortal spiritual body. Such an
immortal being functions to harmonize humanity between the
realms of Earth/form and Heaven/formless, which are engaged
in their own eternal sexual dance of creation into form, and
dissolution into the formless.
In most myths Spring is the time of victory of a god of
light (or life, rebirth, resurrection of form/body) over the
powers of darkness (death and dissolution into formless).
Many ancient cultures - preceding Christianity - describe
the descent of a goddess or god into the underworld for a
period of three days. This is such a popular theme among
religions that mythologists refer to it as “the harrowing of
Hell.”
Last year at this time I was teaching in italy, and
afterwards visited the site of Cybele near Naples.This was
an ancient oracle similar to Delphi in Greece. It was
located at the end of a long deep cave, and there was a very
strong earth energy there. Cybele is thought by some
scholars to have been the origin (about 250 b.c.) of later
Christian stories of Easter. Cybele was a Phrygian fertility
goddess, whose consort Attis was believed to have been born
via a virgin birth. He was said to have died for three days
and been resurrected each year during the period of the
vernal equinox.
The Christian Version of Easter vs. Pagans
The early Christians in Rome battled to assert their
dominance over this pagan tradition, and claimed that Cybele
was a counterfeit inspired by Satan centuries earlier,
preparing the way for Jesus to replace her as the real
savior. Other scholars point to the Norse fertility god
Oestre (root of Estrogen) and to similar stories about
Egyptian deities like Horus and Osiris as the origins of
Easter. If you visit Egypt, its obvious that the theme of
resurrection is sexual, as these Gods are commonly depicted
with an erect phallus. Apparently the ancients were not
prudish in their public works, unlike some modern sexually
suppressed societies.
The Christiian sects today all date their different
calculation of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday on any
date from March 22 to April 25th, based on a period
following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. The
Orthodox year-to-year sequence is so complicated that it
takes 5.7 million years to repeat.
The moral of this story? All the traditions rely on the
Nature’s Spring Equinox to derive their mythic-spiritual
power. But I still haven’t figured out how the Easter Bunny
and Easter Eggs got mixed together, since I know that my pet
187
rabbit doesn’t lay eggs. I guess its part of the general
religious confusion over sex, and its link to natural
yin-yang cycles....
How to Capture the Essence of an Eclipse
I always do a ceremony on each Equinox and Solstice, to
attune to and “capture” the yuan chi/clear light that floods
this polarized physical plane for about three days. If you
do this regularly, you will find yourself becoming very
sensitive to the shifts in energy during this period. Since
we’ve entered into the Red Fire Dog Year, the energies have
been especially intense on the inner psyche level -stronger
than any I’ve felt in any spring cycle.
This year’s Spring Equinox is framed between a set of
eclipses. There was a full moon eclipse the week before,
followed by a new moon eclipse the week after Equinox. In
the Greater Water & Fire (Sun-Moon) alchemical practice,
I’v developed a special meditation to capture the power of
eclipses. This is really just a variation on the inner
practice of coupling the essence of the sun & moon inside
the adept’s “true earth” inside the body along its core
channel or central axis.
Every eclipse is a similar alignment of outer the sun, moon,
and earth along some invisible axis that links us to the
galaxies and beyond. Eclipses create what I call a
“post-natal void” - time seems to stop, darkness deepens,
and an empty space opens in the collective psyche. The
emptying process is nature is one of its ways to open up a
creative space for something new to emerge. I this case, I
feel the eclipses serve to more powerfully extract the
creative potential of the Equinox.
So as the I Ching advised us in an earlier reading of the
Red Dog Fire Year, it behooves us to “have a direction to go
in”, to direct these creative energies into something
concrete. It reinforces the energy of spring as the time of
birthing new ideas, new feelings, new bodies, new ambitions,
new romances or new life into old relationships.
Desiging Your Equinox Ceremony
My qigong form of choice for all Equinoxes and Solstices is
the wuji gong, the primordial qigong/tai chi for
enlightenment ceremony. (see www.taich-enlightenment.com for
full description). It is a ceremony for entering into the
wuji, or Supreme Mystery that lies beyond all myths of a
Creator God/dess. Eclipses could be said to faint echoes of
that original dark mystery from which the Life Force and
thus all Creation emerged.
As I have described for other Solstice ceremonies, it is
useful to direct the equinoctial energy into your personal
process of manifestation. Think of what it is your heart
truly wants to grow, and then do your ceremony to the five
directions (north, south, east, west, and center). At the
end release your Yi, your creative intention, to the Life
Force, surrendering to its power to mirror back your need
and manifest it from the etheric field into earthly form.
There are very powerful collective processes of rebirthing
moving into higher octaves on planet Earth, so its very
important to stay grounded and practical in your spiritual
process.
To the eternal opening and closing of the Gates of 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
Summer Solstice Ceremony Instructions
June 20, 2005 Capturing the Divine Fire
Michael Winn
Suggestions for an Equinox Ceremony
The following is modified version of spring equinox directions,
the intention is modified to reflect the direct infuence of the fire
element.
The Power of Physical Movement in Ritual
I feel the most powerful ceremony includes a ritual chi kung
(qigong) form. The movement of the physical body invokes your
deepest soul essence (jing) if you are deeply centered while
moving. When you combine a movement ritual with specific
intention, it becomes nei kung (neigong), or “internal skill in
cultivating the life force”.
My favorite ceremonial form is one developed by the Taoist sage
Chang San Feng, the creator of the original tai chi form and its
esoteric sister, wuji gong. Wuji gong I translate as Primordial
Chi Kung or Tai Chi for Enlightenment. (For more about its
origins and efficacy, see www.taichi-enlightenment.com
. Its available in dvd or
video, and has an optional audio training as well).
My Deep Healing Chi Kung form (available on dvd) is also very
ceremonial in nature. It faces all the directions and harmonizes
the center of the Sun with the deep center of the Earth Being.
Doing just one of its six movements - the three part mandala of
Sun-Earth exchange
- transports me into an altered state. It’s called medical chi
kung simply because it was developed with that intention. But it
could be directed to any other goal, or used to add power to an
equinox ceremony.
You don’t have to know a chi kung form, although doing the same
one every solstice/equinox is more powerful. Using the same form
“programs” and empowers your energy body to contact the yuan chi
at those times. It helps to capture/embody the elusive yuan chi,
which our polarized egos don’t want to notice because it
threatens our illusory belief that we are an island. Original Chi
is boundary-less, so it challenges our belief that the energy we
feel is uniquely ‘mine”, under “my” control.
The truth is no one owns the chi field, and it is not controlled
by any one deity or external agent/God. It just IS. It is
self-generating and self-regulating. Everyone can use its
abundance if we have the skill to do it. We use it unconsciously
all the time. But if we consciously use it to promote harmony and
balance in our life, the Tao will give us more chi to play with.
If we abuse it or over control for selfish ends, a natural
contraction occurs. We will face increased resistance in our life
and chi flow, resulting possibly in suffering, disease, or death.
1. SACRED SPACE. keep it simple. Find or create a sacred space
where no one disturbs you, indoors or out. The more neutral the
better - if any element (wind, noise) is too strong, it will
distract you. Turn off all phones. Face all the directions, and
smile or tone to all beings in that direction, and ask them to
help you purify your ritual space. Don’t forget to smile to the
188
inner space of your body, and attune to its highest, most core
divinity. Invite in the Tao Immortals, your personal guides, and
any other beings/teachers from any tradition you feel are
important.
During the actual ceremony I invite the Beings of All Directions
and All Dimensions into my ceremony. Don’t exclude the dark side
- it is holding part of the balance. It is important to align
yourself with the whole field of the Life Force, as it carries
your greater self - including the good, the bad, the ugly and the
beautiful. If we embrace the whole within our personal self, then
our ceremonial intention will come out balanced.
If you light a candle, put a red one in the south to symbolize
Summer and Fire,
or put five candles - one in each direction and the center.
Timing: High Noon
is perfect mini-solstice moment that matches summer, with the sun
at its peak. But any time can work. Its a big event, the chi is
flowing strongly for three days at least.
2. FOCUS INTENTION. Get a clear intention as to the ONE
thing
that is most important to EXPAND OR TRANSCEND in your life in
this moment. Fire element/phase is about RAPID
TRANSFORMATION. Do
not attempt to wish something for other people or even your own
children - let them unfold their own nature. (Do not do your
solstice ceremony for Ron Diana). Be specific, be concrete as to
what you want to change and allow to expand in yourself NOW. Do
not use language delaying anything into the future. Receive it
NOW.
Don’t feel guilty about asking to EXPAND or RAPIDLY
TRANSFORM
material things if they truly would serve you best at this moment
(new car, a different job, a
lover). It is not selfish to ask that your material needs be met.
Or ask that your needs expand beyond or transcend your physical
needs. Just ask inside what it is you most need to transcend or
lighten up.
Harmony and balance arrives from each individual completing their
destiny, their soul desires. Just make sure they are authentic
needs, not the idle desire for a million dollars. Do not ask for
money except for the exact amount needed for a specific purpose -
you risk growing unconscious greed or vague fears of not having
enough money.
So you would say, by example, “I need to grow expand my wealth by
a thousand dollars for this specific retreat I want to attend”.
Or “I need to receive $200,000. IN ORDER to expand my new life
and buy a house in Hawaii”. You don’t need to focus on the
selling of your old house, just whatever it is you want to
expand.
Or expand a specific spiritual quality in your inner body-mind
space, such as a greater capacity for self-acceptance,
other-acceptance, abilty to heal a disease or a broken
relationship, deeper power of meditation, deeper service to
humanity, or deeper movement practice.
3. RITUALLY COMMUNICATE WITH CHI FIELD. After
you have
established your clear intention, face SOUTH (direction of
Summer, sun bringing new life). Open your heart, share your
sincere need to merge more deeply with the Life Force and all
beings. Do your movement ritual, which may involve facing and
gathering chi from all five directions, as well as above and
below. If you don’t have a chi kung or a short piece of a tai chi
form, do spontaneous movement, song, dance, or poetry. After you
finish, face south again.
4. RELEASE PERSONAL INTENTION TO FIELD OF
YUAN CHI. Infuse a
booster shot of yuan chi or Original Breath from the Equinox chi
field into your specific desire. Simply feel and mentally focus
on your desired goal of RAPID TRANSFORMATION very strongly,
with
all the personal chi you can muster. Your specific desire
polarizes the chi field. Then release it into the
larger chi field. This acts like a cosmic lube job, as the field
of yuan chi at Equinox will spontaneously attempt to balance your
desire. Nature now knows EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED has an
easy path
with little resistance to delivering what you truly need.
5. BE PREPARED TO ACCEPT CHANGE. A lot of people
forget about
this part of the deal. You want something expanded or
transcended, and you do
Summer Solstice Ceremony Instructions
Suggestion for Summer Solstice Ritual.
If you ask for more power in your life, it brings greater
responsibility as well. This can come as a nasty shock to some.
You get the new lover you asked for, but s/he makes a lot of
demands on your old comfortable way of life. Change is not just
external -- it must be matched by internal changes.
I wish you a powerful ceremony and the power to digest what you
invoke!
May the Five Inner Tones of the Tao Sing in our Heart,
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
The Way to Heaven, Cosmic Eggs & THE SECRET
May 1, 2007 How We Resist our Power to Manifest
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
1. Essay on a secret Way to Heaven....while still living on
Earth. It’s a neat trick, “going” someplace new, more
formless - without leaving your old body. It boils down to a
practical question: how to best allow higher vibration chi
to flow through your “OLD” SPOT on planet earth... It’s
especially difficult to get Heaven inside your little body
when sudden Change destroys your previously well-ordered
life on Earth. You may instead receive a guided tour of what
feels like living Hell.
I share the spiritual Secret I’ve
found - on how to reduce Resistance To Change, a.k.a.
self-sabotage. And why “The Secret”, a popular internet DVD
on manifesting what you want, unfortunately won’t work for
most people unless they solve this self-sabotage problem.
Essay also reveals which Buddhist group bought our Dao
Mountain center in the Catskills....attracted by our chi?
2. WHICH WAY IS HEAVENLY MOUNTAIN? There has
been some
confusion over the Way to Heaven-ly Mountain, our fabulous
new heaven-on-earth retreat center in the Blue Ridge
Mountains near Blowing Rock, N.C. Folks got rightfully
confused due to our slowness in erasing all references to
189
“Dao Mountain” on our website. I apologize.
NO, we are not hosting retreats in both the Catskills and
North Carolina. YES, the sudden change of location has
induced moments of Primordial Chaos in my office. Funny how
a moment of darkness can last an eternity. But it’s the
healthy darkness, the condition of “not knowing”. Adepts of
Taoist inner alchemy munch on this darkness during
meditation. It feeds the spiritual hunger of our Inner Sage.
This darkness is the space of Pure Potential.
E-BROCHURE. Heavenly Mountain is now poised to unfold the
tremendous creative potential of the Taoist arts - we’ve got
a bigger, more beautiful space. The revised brochure is
being mailed out as you read this. But best not to wait for
bulk mail, which is slow. You can download the entire 12
page brochure (in 4 segments) at:
www.healingtaoretreats.com/index.html#p
REGISTRAR. Rob Renahan, our summer registrar, has agreed to
start talking again after three months of silent retreat. I
suspect he was using that quiet time to secretly refine his
Zen Qigong: The Art of Non-Doing, a new course he is
offering this August on bringing effortlessness into Tao
practices. Expect clear advice from him on which of our 30
retreats are best for you. His cell: 828-242-0968 or
888-750-1773.
JUNE RETREATS. Call now to book these six fabulous retreats
- happening next month!
See retreats site for full description: www.HealingTaoRetreats.com
WEEK 1:
June 16-21: Mantak Chia on Taoist Yoga & his new Immune
System Qigong. If you haven’t seen this man in action, this
is the best time and best place to hang out with him.
WEEK 2
June 22 - 27: Michael Winn’s Qigong Fundamentals 1-4. Tools
for a lifetime of health. By Day 2 we usually blow out our
old circuits and spend the next 3 days in Chi Heaven.
June 22 - 27: David Twicken’s Qigong and Spiritual
Astrology. A fascinating, cutting edge integration - how to
combine Chinese astrology and Qigong cultivation to
influence your destiny. Get deeper into the Five Elements.
WEEK 3
June 29 - July 4: Qigong Healing Intensive. Robert Peng, a
humble healer with hot hands from China.
June 29 - July 4: Fusion of the 5 Elements. Emotional
alchemy with Masahiro Ouchi, master of the light touch.
June 29 - July 4: Bone Marrow Neigong & Iron Shirt Qigong.
Get rooted, get healthy & get powerful with Marie Favorito.
REGISTER ONLINE. Our shopping cart now lets you reserve
rooms and pay retreats IN FULL. Get a $20. pre-payment and
other discounts.
NEW SINGLE ROOM BONUS: Book a single room
this year, and get a $30. discount per week for single
bookings in subsequent years. Housing info:
www.HealingTaoRetreats.com/index.html#h
IF YOU ALREADY PAID A $100. DEPOSIT online for a
retreat, in
a week or so expect to receive an email. It will have
instructions on how to open your online account in the
shopping cart and add payments to your retreat(s).
 TRAVEL INFORMATION is now posted, with three easy ways
to
get to Heavenly Mountain:
a. cheap Amtrak train (or Greyhound bus) + $10. Mountaineer
bus via Greensboro, N.C.
b. Fly to Charlotte Airport + group shuttle (2 hr drive).
Book it directly at 828-295-7779.
c. driving instructions from Asheville & Charlotte.
For full travel details, see
www.healingtaoretreats.com/index.html#l
TRAVEL SUBSIDY, EXTENDED PAY. Please don’t let money
stop
you from coming to Heavenly Mountain! We have an extended
payment program. Our 501c3 nonprofit received a donation
from a generous soul. It allows us to offer travel subsidies
for some who cannot afford to come to Heavenly Mtn.
----------------------
3. MID-SPRING MEDITATION (free) at our home in Asheville
Saturday, May 5. (incorrectly listed as May 6 on website).
From 7pm to 11pm+. Welcome to arrive early and hang out with
the eight giant crystal beings in our Stone Circle. Email
for directions: winn@healingdao.com
EGGS. I have a confession: our Stone Circle is not really a
circle. It’s an egg. I designed it to be slightly ovoid on
the North-South axis to reflect the innately female
egg-shaped nature of being in a physical body. The Egg also
reflects the slight egg-like elongation of planet Earth’s
body.
The Microcosmic Orbit meditation circulates chi inside an
egg pattern. Our Energy body grows from this ovoid shape.
We’re eggy because the yin-yang poles of our crown and feet
are pulled away from the dantian/center-of-gravity to build
a bigger polar energy charge. Kan & Li meditation practice
internalizes a vesica piscis, a sacred geometry pattern in
which two energetic male-female spheres copulate to form a
elongated egg.
My conclusion: Being Ovoid and having
internal sexual bliss is half the fun of becoming human,
isn’t it?
New PHOTOS: Easter egg mandala, by my wife’s artistic inner
child, her spring ritual. A fabulous photo of Lao Tzu
(life-size statue at Dao Mountain) in a winter blizzard on
his Way south to Heavenly Mountain; fun snapshots from
recent retreats in Mexico and Holland. See:
www.healingdao.com/cosmic_eggs,_lao_tzu,_mexico_retreat.html
Mike Teeters Photo Essay & commentary on wild party with Lao
Tzu & assembled spirits the night before leaving Dao
Mountain:http://www.arrowofmoonlight.com/dao_mtn_move.html
4. ARCHIVES of past “Chi Flows Naturally” e-letters finally
posted in Articles section of website. If you’re receiving
this email, you are already registered to browse the
archives for free. (Others need to sign up for free ebook
first). Essays go back 3 years, and cover Tao of Everything:
from viruses to tsunamis & Earth changes, to celtic chi
cultivation and whole body Enlightenment:
www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl#top
(note: scroll down to bottom of articles page)
5. HELP! We need retreat brochure distributors - folks who
live within driving distance of Heavenly Mtn (northern
Florida to D.C., atlantic coast to TN, KY, southern Ohio.
If you live in a southeast state, we need folks willing to
DROP OFF our 12 page color retreat BROCHURES at your local
health food store, coffeehouse, bookstore, or other
appropriate venue. Just HIT REPLY and email us name,
190
shipping address, and number of brochures you think you can
distribute. Or call 888-999-0555.
How many should you get? 25 to 50 might be an estimated
range - we can always ship you more later, guess in the
middle range what you can realistically place. Think of this
process as inviting your local friends to join our high
energy party.
If readers have suggestions on the best LOCAL MAGAZINES to
advertise in the southeast, please email me immediately!
winn@healingdao.com
_________________________________
Dear Seekers of the Way to Heaven,
From the top of Heavenly Mountain, you can see 80 miles. At
sunset it ranks amongst the world’s finest vistas, as
purplish watercolor hues of the Blue Ridge Mountains
dissolve into the inky black beauty of the first rising
stars. The view from this private mountain top is even
better than nearby famous Blowing Rock, N.C. But before one
is rewarded with this marvelous vision, you must first get
your skinny lil’ ass to the top of the mountain. Meaning,
you have to first physically find your Way to Heavenly
Mountain.
The metaphor of my process in the last month is a perfect
mirror of the challenge facing us all. We’re stuck, and we
need to change, sometimes quickly. The wall of Change looks
like a big mountain to climb. I was suddenly forced to face
a major change - to find a new home for a loose community of
Taoists and lovers of natural health who gather for summer
fun, before wandering off on their individual journeys for
the winter.
The immediate difficulty, finding a new home, detailed in my
last letter, is over. But a new and more hidden challenge
arises: we still have to release an old and comfortable
pathway, we have to break with the past. We spent ten
lovely, intense years in the Catskills. Years of meditating
and moving and healing in those mountains, years finding new
friends and lovers, years of exploring our spiritual
journey. How can the “pull” of all that be safely left
behind, without us losing something valuable?
This is a situation everyone confronts at key transitional
moments in our life. We leave home to go off to college, we
change jobs, we change relationships, or the big one, we
change dimensions at death. We’re forced to move on, but the
past clings to us like barnacles encrusting our old
identity.
Our Deep Fear of Losing the Past
All of these life changes represents an old and very
comfortable energetic path that is being broken. The fear:
if we break our comfortable old path, we will lose an
important piece of our identity. How does one measure
“identity”, much less let go of it? We cannot get rid of
“self”, no matter how much the self meditates and tries to
empty itself of Self. The self-identity is still there, and
unless we are drunk or drugged or asleep, it doesn’t lose
its power of memory. And surely becoming more Awake doesn’t
mean we suddenly suffer from amnesia.
The problem is that we do not really have the power to erase
memory itself. Because memory is not just our physical
senses recording our personal life, moment by moment The
larger field of consciousness is also recording us, no
matter how tiny we might seem. Nature itself is holding our
memory - our personal experience of Nature - in its vast
databank. It has to - otherwise how can it develop any
wisdom and evolve the countless “individual selves” that
function as the cells of Nature’s vast organism?
Universal memory is one of the most important functions of
the Life Force in maintaining balance and harmony. Without
memory, Life would repeat its blunders over again and again,
learning itself would be impossible, and chaos would
permanently rule. Instead, we now know that Chaos itself is
a form of learning, a pathway to break up old identities
while we shift to higher order. So Chaos itself is able to
hold memory - even as it dissolves old patterns and tries on
new ones.
Our Energy Body Controls What We Manifest
It is memory, embedded in the chi field itself, that holds
the shape of the Past. Self relies on memory of the Past to
help shape the Future. From the Taoist perspective, the
Energy Body is the aspect of Self that controls this process
of time-shifting manifestation. The Energy Body is what
shape shifts. A Westerner might call it our Soul. Whatever
you call it, we express different energetic shapes that flow
through our personality and body along the continuum of
past, present, future.
The key variable here is Chi. Chi is living “subtle breath”.
Instead of trying to erase the Self or its life memories to
escape past suffering, the Secret is how to manage Chi flow,
how to keep it breathing easily through us. And it turns
out, managing chi flow is pretty similar to managing any
investment. So in my case, I find myself invoking the
pioneer aspect of our Tao communities’ collective soul
force. We have to break in a new energetic pathway to
Heavenly Mountain. Why is this so hard?
Because our old Energy Body was comfortable heading up into
the Catskills for the last ten years. This is the first time
this community of Taoists has gone trekking into the wilds
of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Next year it will be much
easier, after we have blazed a trail. It is amazing how the
energy patterns of the past pave the way for the future. We
take this process for granted. It is known as the power of
Habit.
Once the new path is broken in, the new Habit forms. It is
like the wind behind a big truck on the highway, sucking the
air behind it to speed its own momentum forward. But how to
get moving in a new direction, to get enough speed going in
one direction in the first place? This is the challenge that
arises. There is a key moment, when we turn the wheel of our
life in a new direction, and are facing a stiff headwind -
that is when the challenge comes.
“The Secret” - A Harry Potter Manual for Adults?
That is where so many of us fail to grasp the real Secret of
manifesting something new. The popular film “The Secret”
buzzing around the internet and Oprah these days gives the
standard channelled new age nostrums: visualize what you
want, and build a new energetic thought form. By seeing your
thought as real, and relying on the Law of Attraction to get
support, you will manifest the $3 million dollar dream house
with the pool (that cost $300K a decade ago).
There is nothing new here, this is an Old Secret, variations
of which appear as sexual magic (charge up a thought form
with sexual energy). The only thing that it is really new is
that New Age visualization is getting into the mainstream
media as a sign of changing times. The public is over its
head in financial debt, and the film offers a magic solution
to becoming one of the wealthy, worry-free elite.
Its a
191
Harry Potter manual, packaged for adults, promising instant
riches. The focus is on material, not spiritual development.
But the advice offered is useful in getting people to focus
their energy, as many problems do arise from the
fragmentation and scattering effects of modern life.
What’s not being fully dealt with is Our Resistance to
Change. That is the main impediment to manifesting the life
we truly want. No, Resistance is not a dark cloaked evil
figure. It’s not Satan trying to make our life difficult,
forcing us to have a nervous break down, and then sobbingly
surrender our free will to some religious group claiming a
power greater than the Darkness.
Our Resistance is Invested in the Past
Our Resistance is the shadow aspect of our self, a.k.a. the
Self-Saboteur. It is actually the part of our Energy Body
that is invested in the past. The past represents the Known.
The Self-Saboteur is a junkie for what’s known, even if
what’s known doesn’t really work and has us mired in
suffering. Same problem arises when our past pleasures no
longer really give us pleasure. The sex becomes mechanical,
the rich food tastes like cardboard. Our past attachment
becomes future suffering as our Shadow Junkie puts us
through withdrawal pains if we try to change from what is
known.
So what’s the Real Secret to manifesting while living in a
habit-encrusted body with rigid personality traits? It’s
pretty simple, but there are three steps. The first step is
to realize what and where you are currently investing your
energy. Once you can see your old investments, you can
choose to re-invest. But unlike investing money, where we
have the feedback of numbers in a bank account to tell us if
we are winning or losing, our Energy Body keeps tabs of its
investment invisibly. We could say sexual bonding, emotions
and mental beliefs are the most tangible aspects of those
invisible energetic investments.
What happens is that people want to invest in having new
lives, new jobs, new homes, new relationships, new spiritual
paths. But they forget where their past capital is
unconsciously invested. It’s like forgetting the number on
your bank account, and never withdrawing the funds. Banks
make a lot of money this way in real life. And the same loss
occurs with our psychic capital.
For the person trying to change, half of their “energetic
money” is still invested in the past.This reduces by 50% the
amount of energetic money they have available to invest in a
new future. So when folks try implementing “The Secret” and
visualize a new life, they may be dealing from half a deck
of cards. It’s hard to produce a royal flush or four aces
playing with a half a deck - even if you are the dealer and
the only player.
That is why, by process of trial and error, I’ve concluded
that Taoist energetic practices are the most valuable tools
I’ve discovered for managing my “unconscious money”. The
money is hidden inside our body, in deep energetic patterns
- right where we invested it and stored it years ago.
Lots of people try to get rid of that money in therapy,
because they don’t recognize it as money. They try to
discard the old self or deny the self even exists, or try to
heal the old pattern by surgical-energetically removing
these dysfunctional patterns. I’ve found you are best off
simply remembering that the old pattern is there, and
re-invest its chi into a new pattern that is now unfolding
in your life. You turn what is a useless self-sabotage into
something productive.
Breaking the Vessel of the Old Self
Sure, there is “big new money” floating all around us, in
the general chi field of Nature. We could say infinite
amounts of chi money has been pre-printed by Nature, waiting
to be spent, if only we could attract it. Just like there
are trillions of dollars floating around in the global
economy. But there’s no point chasing after those trillions
until you break your old piggy bank and create a vessel that
is big enough to hold what you really need.
But if your Energy Body is habituated to being the size of
child’s toy piggy bank, then that is how much “money” you
will allow yourself to receive and spend. Because that tiny
piggy bank is the vibrational vessel for your wealth. You
have to break the old toy piggy bank and build a bank-sized
vault as big as the sun, moon, and stars if you want to hold
the vibrational wealth of Nature.
But again, visualizing the sun and moon won’t do much if the
tiny piggy bank is still the core investment that you are
holding onto in your deep unconscious. The piggy bank
represents something valuable to the subconscious child in
you. That child is holding tight in its fist the first
nickel you ever got, and only lets go of the nickel to store
it in that little plastic piggy bank.
That nickel seemed like huge wealth to the child - and back
then it bought a juicy handful of candy. We know from the
Law of Compounding that energy, just like money, grows over
time if undisturbed and allowed to multiply steadily. Our
Energy Body acts like a focusing vortex for the Life Force,
and it will grow exponentially if we don’t disperse it. That
is why alchemists create inside their body a vessel for the
elixir. They know the Life Force will compound over time if
allowed to “cook” in a strong container. This internal
cauldron space is the equivalent of the alchemist’s piggy
bank.
Whatever we focus on, chi will keep pouring into it until we
tell it to stop. We forget what commands we’ve issued in the
past - but the Life Force doesn’t forget. It keeps feeding
your request until you take responsibility for changing it.
That’s how it gets us to grow up.
So our first job in overcoming Our Resistance is recognizing
what form that piggy bank takes inside us. It could be
encoded as a small or weak self-image. It could be from a
phrase like “You are worthless!” that someone unconsciously
imbedded into our field at a vulnerable time. It helps to
locate where in your body these old energies are stored, and
note the shape, feeling, color, size, etc.
Second step is to break the old piggy bank, now a
dysfunctional energy pattern, but still a controlling one.
There are many methods for this, available through study of
qigong and inner alchemy and certain kinds of healing.
The third step is to re-invest that nickel and the hundreds
of dollars in interest it has unconsciously accumulated over
the years. You invest the past “stuck” wealth into your new
direction in life. Then you are investing from inner
strength, not struggling against your old investments. You
are putting the Shadow energy to work for you.
In terms of Taoist energetic practice, you won’t be able to
hold much chi until you clear your inner space of old
energetic patterns - it’s like furniture blocking free flow
of chi inside your body. That is what the Six Healing
Sounds, Inner Smile, Orbit and Fusion of the Five Elemetns
192
are all doing - clearing out old patterns while something
new simultaneously is invited to flow in.
Become a Moving Vessel for the Life Force
In this way we each become a Moving Vessel for the Life
Force. This is a flexible, process-centered identity that
eliminates the rigid psychic battle between the dark Shadow
Self vs. the good Light Self struggling over what gets
manifested. Instead, we become aware of both aspects moving
through outer time and space, while inviting the Life Force
to move through our inner space.
It’s a dance. We wake up to the possibility of having a
vast, spacious cauldron in our center of gravity, where
before there was just the blood and guts of our physical
belly. The notion of “dan tian” takes us into a deeper
dimension of ourself, beyond the physical. The ancient
chinese characters for “dan tian” are best interpreted to
mean the “open field in which the elixir completes itself”.
The spiritual science of manifestation is focused on
completing our soul’s destiny - not on satisfying mere
culturally stimulated desires - like chasing after 3 million
dollar homes with swimming pools. Many people manifest the
dream home, but how many also end up in divorce, loneliness,
and dissipating their energy through drugs, power, lust,
etc.? Ao one Secret is not to chase after the cultural
dream, but to listen to your inner soul’s desires.
The inner elixir sought by alchemists is your soul’s wealth,
gathered from your life’s experience. We can concentrate
this essence in one very pure point of consciousness that
fuses our yin-yang identity into a third force. But we need
a very dynamic space, and that is why I describe it as a
Moving Vessel, because the Life Force is always flowing in
and out of it.
When we are children, it feels like there’s no past, so our
chi is free to flow in all directions, a time of wonderful
exploration. Because kids have no past to get attached to,
little resistance has developed. It’s easy to change
direction, and do it often. But our Way in youth is a
unrefined, unformed, a lump of clay waiting to be sculpted.
Lao Tzu might say youth is carrying within itself the
uncarved block - the pure potential of the situation or
one’s life, before we’ve shaped it into something new and
beautiful. One translation of “lao tzu” is “ancient child”,
implying a sage that has learned to live in the moment with
a child’s fresh joy and wonder. Yet this child-sage
simultaneously holds the wisdom of the past and future in
this present moment.
The Law of Attraction is also working on us, even as we
think we can manipulate it. It is a difficult force for us
adults to manage, because it impacts onto our own
(unconscious) sexual energy. Sexual chi holds the yin-yang
poles within our core self identity. They are constantly
magnetizing everything in the field around us.
Yin-yang
sexual force causes the chi to flow towards us or be
repelled out of our personal cauldron. Once we can witness
this sexual inner push-pull, we can begin to shape our
manifestation process. But that is not a quick
visualization. It takes years of serious qigong and
meditation cultivation practice.
This is one application of the Kan & Li (Water and Fire)
alchemical process. The Lesser Enlightenment of Kan and Li
harnesses your sexually polarized soul force to re-shape
your reality. It converts the yin-yang forces into neutral
force, and then allows that to spontaneously unfold as
needed in our body and our life. Because it works at the
deep jing (sexual essence) level, I find all the Kan & Li
meditation practices to be the most powerful way to shape
the Law of Attraction and thus manifest what your soul
REALLY needs.
Visualization is Limited - Use Your Whole Energy Body
Visualizing the manifestation process is too mental and too
partial to produce the most profound results. We have to
gather and reinvest our sexual and emotional and at higher
levels of practice, our ancestral and astrological soul
energies if we really want to shape the process of
manifestation.
This involves deep and long training of our
energy body. We invest decades in school to acquire outer
knowledge in order to earn outer wealth. Why not invest a
few years to learn the secrets of your internal process, and
how to invest your inner wealth?
Otherwise, many spiritual seekers settle for becoming
“spiritually detached”, mere passive witnesses to the
unfolding of life. This is first stage, letting go of their
past. But they never get inside their body and its
spiritual secrets - they have forgotten where the “money” is
hiding in their little piggy bank.
I feel many may never
realize the next stage, they never re-invest their chi. Some
become spacey and lacking worldly direction, pretending it
doesn’t matter, as long as their head is in the clouds of
some other higher world. That is when their Self-Saboteur,
The Resistance, starts acting out and they wonder why
physical life doesn’t conform to their idea of spiritual
life.
But in reality they have yet to learn the True Secret, the
need to reinvest their old stuck energy into Life’s new
direction. This involves learning energetic skills that make
this process much easier, like qigong. And developing skill
in recognizing what you are really invested in, so you can
re-direct that energy. Then we can realize the creative
potential of the gift of Free Will that we each have.
I was grateful that Mike Teeters, who I sent up a few weeks
ago to the Catskills to gather my extensive collection of
asian artwork, did a ceremony to “gather the spirits” that
we had been working with closely for years at Dao Mountain.
I recall how when we first arrived there, the chi felt dead,
totally asleep. But we invited the elementals in the earth
to wake up and play - and they did. Each year I noticed the
place would buzz more deeply, the elementals happy that we
were returning.
The description of Mike’s “party” with the spirits of the
land is posted at
http://www.arrowofmoonlight.com/dao_mtn_move.html
I knew last summer that our time was drawing to a close,
based on I Ching readings and my desire for deeper silence
than that space could offer. The cause for our suddenly
being forced out was the purchase of the retreat center by
Thich Nat Nanh - a famous Vietnamese Buddhist. He is turning
Dao Mountain into Plum Village West, a counterpart to his
Plum Village in France. I feel good about having prepared
the ground for another generation of spiritual seekers.
But I feel even better about taking the consciousness that
we refined there - and moving it to Heavenly Mountain, to be
193
evolved to a new level. I have followed up on Mike’s
ceremony with my own at Heavenly Mountain, preparing the new
pathway for the future of Healing Tao summer retreats. And I
can feel the momentum shifting. The Change is happening.
When I suggested to Corky Jeronimo, the owner of the
Catskills ceneter, that it may have been our Taoist energy
that attracted his buyer, he laughed and replied, “but it
was my energy that attracted you Taoists to come here!”. And
so the Process of Change turns the world, and everyone finds
a new place on the stage for their next act.
Surrendering to the Secret Ways of Heaven,
Michael
“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.
Soul Sex: Hidden Driver behind Romantic Love?
Dec. 5, 2007 Soul Polarity is Different than Male-Female Gender
Michael Winn
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 in Asheville.
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
194
“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&article
id=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&article
id=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
195
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
196
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”
197
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.
Can Enlightenment be achieved in one week?
March 10, 2007 Inside Scoop on Summer Retreats
Michael Winn
Inside Chi Flows Naturally:
note: if your email changes, to update simply
re-subscribe to “Tao News” on my homepage. Old emails
will auto- delete.
1. Essay on whether its possible to achieve
Enlightenment in one week. Hint: the answer is yes. In
fact, it generally happens in less than a week. It all
depends on one’s ability to grasp the value of
Ignorance. That makes my essay about enlightenment akin
to chasing a greased pig into a pit of
quicksand....i.e. it is a very slippery topic.
1a. Essay is followed by an insider’s guide to the 25
very cool one week retreats this summer in the New York
Catskills. These offer great possibility for fun,
friendship (or find a spiritual playmate, as I once
did), high “chi” experiences and the deep wisdom of
seasoned masters in their field. Note: these retreats
carry no guarantee of enlightenment - but do raise the
probabilities....
We’ve upgraded the website so you can fully register
online for housing as well as tuition, with our low
prices and numerous discounts. Details at:
www.HealingTaoRetreats.com.
2. “Taoist Hermit One Cloud’s 1st Formula - Advanced
Training” is the Spring Equinox retreat Mar. 17-23 in
Holland. It’s already full. I mention it because my
monster 23-CD audio recording of it (last time I was in
Holland) I feel is my best integration of the broad
range of Taoist foundation qigong & meditation
practices.
Part of the quality of this recording is due to the
impressively high level of preparation by the 35 Dutch
students, each with 4 to 7 years practice in the
foundation Tao methods. So the questions they ask are
deep. It’s also a credit to the seven Dutch Healing Tao
teachers, who have developed a wonderful synergy and
commitment to Tao as a community process. Perhaps
they’ve mastered the beauty of living in a small
country. I’ll be journeying with this disciplined group
through all the Kan & Li formulas in coming years.
A few thoughts on One Cloud’s 1st Alchemical Formula.
it is essentially a summary of the whole of internal
Chinese medicine. it embraces Inner Smile, 6 Healing
Sounds, Microcosmic Orbit, Internal Chi Breathing &
Bone Breathing and Rooting, Fusion of 5 Elements 1,2,3,
and Healing Love/Taoist Sexology. These are all the
foundation practices for cultivating your Energy Body
from every possible angle. It’s a potent spiritual
cocktail, and a lot to digest. The equivalent to
getting a good education at a top private school.
After you graduate from the the 1st Formula, one gets
into the “college level” Water & Fire “soul
enlightenment” alchemy formulas - Lesser, Greater, and
Greatest Kan & Li. These practices move into deep areas
of the collective unconsicous, from bloodline ancestral
to sun-moon and planetary/astrology cycles. For your
Phd, you go for Star Alchemy and Heaven & Earth
Alchemy. Of course, this is all metaphor. No matter
what your skill level, we are all constantly being
tested in the Tao of living in each moment. Everyone
has a front row seat with the Life Force flowing
through them. The challenges we face ground us in our
Way, our process of endless transformation.
If you’ve been studying the foundation practices for a
while, you might be interested in my integration of One
Cloud’s formula in this week-long set of 23 CD’s. This
is not intended to be a replacement for doing these
courses separately, but does summarize all the
refinements I’ve added over the last 27 years. The
audio does not duplicate any of the qigong training on
my DVDs, it assumes you have/will get those DVDs or
know the forms. This 23-CD audio set is not on the
website, you’ll have to call the office at 888-999-0555
or email at info@healingdao.com to order. $295.
Healing & Universal Tao instructors receive a 40%
discount.
3. Fusion of the Five Elements 2 $ 3 on April 28 & 29,
in Asheville, NC. This lays bare the infrastructure of
the “macro-cosmic orbit”. This is about the Eight
Cosmic Forces that flow in the body via the Eight
Extraordinary Vessels. These are key in preventing and
healing chronic illness and undiagnosable “mystery
diseases”. It develops the psychic skill of your five
shen/organ spirits that control the eight channels -
the interface of your Energy Body with the environment.
Cost: still only $144. April is a lovely time to visit
the Blue Ridge mountains surrounding Asheville. The
Fusion 1-2-3 courses are most powerful taken in
sequence, but could be taken as stand alones.
winn@healingdao.com.
4. We’ve still got a few spaces on the May 18-June 3
China Dream Trip. We do accept last minute signups, but
airfare may be higher for late signups. See full trip
itinerary at: http://www.healingdao.com/chinatrip2007.html
See my top 60 China Dream Trip photos at:
http://www.healingdao.com/china_dream_trip_photos.html
Dear Seekers of Any Kind of Enlightenment,
The question is sometimes asked, how long will it take
to find enlightenment once I embark upon the “pathless
path” of the Tao? I once had this question, asked with
some angst, by someone thinking of signing up for one
my summer retreats. The hidden question was, “Can I get
enlightened by the end of this week?”
Normally I decline to discuss the topic as a hopeless
quagmire of hard to define concepts. But in this case,
after enjoying a silent chuckle, I gave my best answer:
“Only the most Doltish and Dorky adept would take a
whole week to achieve enlightenment”. I explained that
in my opinion, enlightenment happens all the time, it
is part of the natural process of living. And it always
happens spontaneously and in a split second in which
perceptions are expanded to some new level.
There is no waiting for a week. It is not a time-bound
game. And yet I also believe it is a loser’s game to
chase after some Final or True Enlightenment beyond
time. From my study of the Life Force, for humans there
is no Absolute State. We humans - including those who
transcend death and achieve immortality - are destined
to experience transformation and endless change, tiny
cells in a vast multi-verse. Likewise, in my
understanding, all deities, including any Creator God,
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must follow the Principle of Change initiated by the
Life Force.
Is Enlightenment a Process or a Permanent State?
If the Life Force is about Process, then humans
necessarily reflect that, at all levels of awareness.
It doesn’t matter if we have a clunky physical body of
flesh or one of glorious radiant light - change still
happens. The most ancient Chinese wisdom classic, the I
Ching, is also known as the Book of Unchanging Changes.
To put it in religious language, God/dess can’t stop
creating. S/He/It is a compulsive Creataholic, and the
endless cycles of the zodiac is the local 12 step
program to work out the kinks and bad habits. The
purpose of this cosmic game plane is to strengthen the
ground of love and free will, so they can manifest more
effortlessly.
In a cultivated human life, enlightenment of the Taoist
variety offers the promise of a somewhat smoother life
process. The sharp edges of our suffering gets
polished, yet stubbornly insists on remaining, lest we
grow too comfortable and stop changing. The doors of
perception can somehow always open wider, to
increasingly paradoxical levels. A small pain triggers
a memory, which unleashes an odd neuron, which sets off
a strange new bliss. And so it goes.
Our souls are bound to the collective stream of
consciousness of our ancestors and children, and our
future selves stare at us with bug eyes from alien
lands. We are on an endless journey between creation
and source and back again. This is the great or
Macro-cosmic cycle of life, mirrored in the meditation
practice of the Taoist Micro-cosmic Orbit. Most
puzzling of all, this endless spiral of life is
mysteriously fed by and feeds back into a core silence
that is somehow not quite human.
The question of “achieving enlightenment in one week”
did honestly express the concern of an ordinary mind
engaged in the flow of physical events. These events,
the chunks of life that constellate into our most
poignant memories, appear to be happening in linear
time. It seems much of life in the linear time zone is
spent reveling in the mundane. You must pay your bills
on time, show up at work on time, and settle the fight
with your partner in a timely fashion before it leads
to divorce.
From this ordinary mind perspective, the Time Frame is
always there. It is a legitimate to ask if
Enlightenment-Beyond-Time really exists, and if so,
where it fits into the Time Frame. How will achieving
it affect our life destiny? If Enlightenment doesn’t
really affect us - if after achieving “IT” we just go
back to “chopping wood, and fetching water”, then why
bother with cultivating it?
To Kill or Not-to-Kill The Ego?
The question also comes because of a lot of fuzzy ideas
floating around about Enlightenment, part of the modern
tension between Eastern and Western spiritual cultures.
The New Age is perhaps the largest repository of that
fuzziness. There is a separate interesting path this
discussion could take that compares Eastern ideas to
the Western Renaissance notion of Enlightenment, which
I am not entering, nor the esoteric Western traditions.
Here I discourse upon an Old Age cosmology and specific
terminology which I’ve adapted into English from the
Taoist tradition in China.
Let’s deal with one of my pet peeves, the notion that
for Enlightenment to occur, the ego must be killed. Ego
is just a concept of self invented by psychologists in
recent times. My view is that just because
Enlightenment is spontaneous, it doesn’t mean the
ordinary sensory mind entrained with linear time has to
be “killed” or “de-activated”. Yes, I’m all for
transforming our reactive, compulsive aspects, and
embracing the shadow side of the mind. But ordinary
mind functions remain an essential part of human
nature.
Silencing the chattering Monkey Mind is one (widely
advertised) aspect in the process, but ofttimes is
taken to rigid extremes of asceticism and body denial
in a doomed effort to silence desire. Silence can never
be final or total while living in monkey bodies in
linear time. The function of silence is to give us
clarity in unfolding who we truly are. We are always
going to think, feel, act and perceive as long as we
have a monkey body and have enough chi to enough to
respond to our environment.
Veil of Ignorance is Mankind’s Greatest Virtue
Contrary to popular myths about shutting down the
Monkey Mind, without the ordinary mind (”xin”, or
Heart-Mind to the Taoists), Enlightenment does not
exist and would cease to exist. It is the very
ignorance of the ordinary mind, the very boundary of
sensory perception, and its corresponding sexual and
psychic tension, that allows the process we think of as
Enlightenment to even exist. Ignorance has been
unfairly given a bad name as the cause of all desire
and evil. I believe the human Veil of Ignorance is the
ultimate driver behind the human quest for spiritual
development and creativity.
Ignorance is a good thing. We could even go so far as
to say that Ignorance is mankind’s greatest virtue, our
gift to the universe. Its our common defining
characteristic. Other animals are born knowing who they
are and what to do. Only human animals are baffled by
life and obsess on its meanings. Perhaps it’s why
aliens in high-tech ships hover in nearby dimensions,
spying upon us humans stuck in our 3-D zoo. I suspect
they are amazed and baffled at our sophisticated level
of Ignorance, in the same way we humans are fascinated
by animals in the wild.
Perhaps they ponder, how can humans possibly survive
the level of chaos caused by their Ignorance? Mind you,
I’ve never met an alien, but I have friends who claim
to have been poked by aliens, the way we might
fearfully poke a wild animal with a stick. There are
many who report that aliens seem afraid of human
unpredictability - and are trying to figure out how
that can possibly be programmed into our genes. Its
like we have built-in “Ignorance software” that they
cannot decode. Yet that very same ignorance is also the
source of our wildest enlightenment. It is what leads
us to emerge from the dark, and perpetually bring new
forms of consciousness to Light.
I believe it’s why our “formless, all-knowing soul” is
veiled when it begins to crystallize itself into a
clump of flesh, an embryo floating in the amniotic
fluid of our mother’s womb. The soul intentionally
separates itself from the transcendent mind of
199
Heaven-Earth in order to challenge itself, to discover
something new through physicalization in human form.
Who else but our soul, putting on the blind-fold called
Monkey Mind, would ask the curiously dumb questions?
Its our monkey-ness that veers off into unexpected
directions, or tosses out wildly unconscious energies -
that lead to fresh insights and stimulate new solutions
to old problems. The Soul is not stupid when it dons
the Veil of Ignorance. Ignorance is just Wisdom waiting
to be born.
The Black Hole of Enlightenment Talk
Of course, any discussion of what Enlightenment
actually “is” immediately falls into the black hole of
language problems and the limits of conceptual
definition. English may be particularly limiting, with
its mushy boundaries between words like “soul, energy,
spirit, mind” or “God, Absolute, Void”. This is
further beclouded by quantum physics attempting to
muscle in on the consciousness act with “zero point,
wormhole, and parallel universe/self” dancing at the
end of a musical super-string. Enlightenment language
becomes a giant bowl of cosmic alphabet soup. Our
monkey mind stirs the letters and sips the tasty
potential, but is unable to shape them into coherent
sentences.
The net result? A lot of paradox talk about
Enlightenment. It often takes the form of those who
allegedly “know” what its like to live in the space
beyond Earth time, dropping hints to those still asleep
or doped up on the sensory explosions of event-driven
linear time (i.e. birth, sex, love, death and any
intense low or high points in between). These whispered
hints from the Already Enlightened could be viewed
either as acts of kindness or as the spiritual
arrogance of those who’ve become self-convinced of
their elevated state or appointed position.
But what do these Perennial Philosophers whisper to the
monkey mind when it asks, “If we monkeys are all
destined to end up with a single consciousness of
Oneness beyond linear time, why does Nature/space
continually explode into endless new life forms, an
expanding spiral of complexity and Manifesting
Many-ness? “Patience, child, patience - you will
understand someday” comes the patronizing answer.
Instant vs. Gradual Schools of Enlightenment
Historically in China, there have been two major
schools of Enlightenment - the Gradual School and the
Instant School. The Taoists are mostly in the Gradual
School, as they are process oriented. You might
gradually experience a series of “instant” mini or even
mega-shifts. But they are still part of the never
ending process of the chi field. These shifts require
integration with the flow of linear time, which
includes completing one’s destiny on earth.
The Instant Schools often disregard the body or worldly
destiny. They are more oriented towards seeking sudden
shifts into “permanent states” of higher consciousness,
that are identifiable to their believers. We simply
need to wake up, as from a dream, and live in some
higher dimension once the Veil is lifted. These instant
schools tend to be more other-worldly - some would say
escapist. Does “permanent enlightenment” mean “no more
change”? Does detachment from worldly life create
spiritual freedom, or is it an unconscious tactic to
avoid deeply embrace of Earth and avoid accepting
responsibility for what manifests?
Or is there a grid, a series of recognizable states and
stages that can be mapped out, as per the Ken Wilber -
Alan Comb’s Matrix? Comb’s “Radiance of Being:
Understanding the Grand Integral Vision” is an
excellent summary of research and contemporary thinking
on these consciousness issues. This is the domain of an
emerging spiritual science, which is trying to redefine
the ground on which older schools of Enlightenment
stand. It is trying to plow a new field somewhere
between religious belief and empirical science. It
explores issues often not resolvable by old models. The
most frequent problem: the difficulty of using our
subjective interior states of experience as evidence.
So why bother even talking about Enlightenment? Are we
better off silently chewing bubble gum, than blowing
hot air about the wattage in our cosmic light bulbs?
Well, since I have the podium, I’d say a focused
discussion about Enlightenment can be beneficial on
several levels. It might positively affect the mental
body reading the words. Concepts can lead to trying out
useful practices that are more embodied. Words might
occasionally stimulate shifts in perception in other
subtle bodies. The subtle bodies are all linked
energetically, so if the mental body shifts, it ripples
through the others. Words have chi in them, one of
humanity’s special gifts. Words are part of the dynamic
flow of Humanity.
Mind Enlightenment vs. Whole-Body Enlightenment
People will drink in talk about the Light Fantastic
according to their need and their interest. Some will
seek Head Enlightenment, and claim their body no longer
really exists - they are now Pure Mind, the body is
relegated to illusory status. Is this transcendence,
or just another mind-body split being projected out as
Enlightenment? It depends on your belief, and on what
the “words” like Pure or True Mind mean.
Others will sense the intentional chi flowing behind or
through the words, and use the body to concentrate the
chi power and intention hidden within language. This is
more likely to lead to what I call Whole-Body
Enlightenment, which is typically sought by the
immortality schools of Taoist alchemy. This approach
focuses on the invisible essence that underlies
physical form, or “jing”.
The fire/spirit in the head and heart must be brought
down into the instinctual center of the belly, or lower
“dantian”. This becomes an internal cauldron space in
which spirit and matter are “cooked” into a more
refined state. In Western alchemy, it’s known as the
process of refining Prime Matter.
Why cook the spirit/shen in the lowest center? It’s
because the belly is our center of gravity in the
physical present moment. It’s where we create our body
from. In women, its where babies come from. The
instinctual belly-brain is also the most spontaneous
brain, unlike the head brain with its complex
self-reflections and manipulations. The belly brain,
known to scientists as the enteric or gut brain, is the
brain that is functioning in new born infants. So the
instinctual brain is more spontaneously itself, just
like babies don’t worry about impressing others. That
need to impress is acquired. Spontaneity is the key to
200
the Taoist notion of enlightenment.
Wu Wei: Spontaneous Action as Enlightenment
The Taoists have terms to suggest enlightened qualities
of being. One is “authenticity” (zheng), another is
“self-so” or “self-arising” (ziran), a third is
“spiritual virtue” (de). But I believe the Taoist
equivalent of Enlightenment is best summed up by the
term “wu wei”. Wu wei is inacurrately translated by
some as “non-action”, giving Taoists a reputation for
quiescence and passivity. According to the scholars of
ancient classical Chinese that I trust, wu wei is
better translated as “spontaneous action” or
“effortless action”. Wu wei is the quintessence of the
Way.
Wu wei implies that Enlightenment is very much involved
with living in the world and completing one’s destiny.
It is about allowing the LIfe Force to guide us to live
in harmony and balance with a chaotic world. The key is
to live without resistance or struggle, while
maximizing our creativity. That involves integrating
the Heart-Mind (ego-self) and allowing one’s inner soul
- from the Timeless Realms - to express itself through
the vessel of the physical body into the Linear Time
Realm. It could be called the Soul in Action in the
World.
Example? When I am deciding whether to buy a book or
not, I hold the book and close my eyes. I mentally ask
my shen - the vital organ spirits that manage my
biology, psychology, and spirituality - to quickly read
the book first and let me know if my brain-centered,
slow sensory ordinary mind will benefit from reading it
word-by-word. I get an immediate vibrational response,
ranging anywhere from dead silence to excited pulsation
to hearing the sublime music of the spheres.
Did my liver or heart spirit actually read the book on
some deep level of my unconscious? No. They just
tracked the vibration of the book back to its author at
the moment of writing, and responded to that by
vibrating my body. All knowledge is stored in the
field of Life Force’s universal memory bank - otherwise
known as Nature. Our body is a microcosm of Nature,
which makes our body divine. Thus the Taoist focus on
on the belly brain and whole-body enlightenment - the
body is the true and innocent ground of the mind. The
essence of the physical body is really our closest
portal to the higher dimensions.
The Practical Use of Enlightenment
At the end of the day, I am a pragmatist. Enlightened
talk is designed to speed enlightened action. It’s
meant to inspire either outer deeds of selfless virtue
in the world or internal deeds, a practice that deepen
one’s chi flow - qigong, tai chi, meditation or other
chosen self-cultivation modality. The faith that at
some level our Becoming is flowing out of an
action-less Being (call it Original Spirit, Creator,
God/dess, or Void) may be reassuring.
But these transcendent agents are ultimately irrelevant
to the ordinary mind. The ordinary mind is busy
navigating the flow of those chunky linear events that
sometimes appear like icebergs in our path. We are
being constantly challenged to choose, to act, to
exercise our free will in navigating the flow of
events. We are provoked to survive, to be creative and
to love in enlightened ways that transcend mere
survival. Our life challenges us to peek behind the
Veil of Ignorance. Praying for some God to pull back
the Veil for us is a childish dream. Its our job to
grow up and pull back the curtain, as far as we need
to.
Of course, anyone can decide for themselves what
qualifies as enlightenment in the chaotic context we
call life. Who besides yourself is qualified to judge
the relationship between your own soul and
personality-in-a-monkey body? Why give that power away
to someone else, to an abstract deity or even a great
teacher?
In my book, any moment you accept some new level of
self - you are enlightened. The toughest part is the
challenge of truly embracing our physical body and
accepting that it arises directly from Source via the
pathway of own divine Soul. Whenever we embrace
embodied life in the present moment with a deep hearted
Inner Smile, we experience a moment of enlightenment -
our body vibrates its divine support to that child we
call our mind.
Embracing the Neutral Point is Key
My experience is that our Monkey Mind’s innate
cleverness can be directed to good use. The monkey has
a heart-mind that can be trained to embrace the neutral
point between past and future, Water and Fire, Female
and Male, form and formless. There is a neutral
observation point where the Soul is hanging out, in the
portal between different dimensions of the self. When
the personality brings its free will and focuses its
sexual volatility at that neutral point - Bingo! Our
old resistance to change in linear time/3-D space is
overcome. Soul and Heart-Mind couple and a new identity
is birthed.
String enough of those mini aha! moments together and
the Monkey Mind gradually begins to accept the timeless
perspective of its own Soul as an equal reality to its
linear physical perspective. This can ignite an
alchemical marriage between lesser and greater self.
Neither side dies nor kills the other; the appearance
of spiritual battle between spirit and matter is
finally revealed as illusory. They both live happily
ever after - that’s the Tale of Eternal Life. In China,
its called Immortality, and implies that some essence
from the personality continues to create after death.
We simplify the tale for this short essay. There are
other dimensions to Self and Mystery not discussed
here.
Rewriting the Enlightenment Story
I frankly would like to re-write the Enlightenment
Story as its generally been received into popular
culture. In my version, it’s not about escaping into an
ideal spiritual paradise of Enlightened Beings or
Angels living in a (boring) world on Cloud Nine without
challenges. Nor is it dying to a Supreme Nothingness
State in which absolutely no change is allowed to
manifest less we suffer once again on the Wheel of
Life. To be fair, many hold a story somewhere in
between those two extremes.
I prefer a story of growing a multi-dimensional bridge
201
between the Time and Timeless aspects of our Self. I
envision a more playful continuum, a Great Process or
Way, that is functional in new ways. I vote for a new
paradigm of Enlightenment in which both the embodied
personality and the timeless soul release their need to
suffer extremes (aka violence and illness) as part of
the learning curve.
I am investing my energy into a process in which we
humans can more easily transform challenges and pain
into greater bliss. Perhaps the Veil of Ignorance
becomes translucent, but is not lifted entirely. The
Veil that keeps humans ignorant is a needed boundary,
put there for good reason. The veiled boundary gives us
definition, and keeps us creative and alert to
unfolding our essence.
Insider’s Guide to 2007 Summer Retreats
“Talk does not cook the rice” is a old Chinese proverb.
So enough talk of Enlightenment. Its time for practical
action in the world.
It’s time to decide if there is summer retreat awaiting
you. A fun week that will hopefully awaken the sleeping
essence within.
How does one choose between 25 retreat offerings? Easy.
Read the list below slowly. The close your eyes, drop
your focus down into your heart. Breathe in and out of
your heart a few times. Then ask, which retreat serves
my highest good? Your heart won’t lie to you.
In 2007, we are still offering the only live-in retreat
with Mantak Chia. It’s great to just hang out with him
at meals and around the campus. He may not be
travelling here forever, so don’t postpone the
opportunity to check out the heavy chi pumping out
through his energy field. He’s offering a totally new
topic, DNA repair and Immune Building Qigong, plus
Tao-Yin (Taoist Yoga).
We’ve got a hot new Classical Tai Chi training from
Tina Zhang opening up the summer with Mantak Chia. She
recently authorized an excellent book on the Norther Wu
Style, a style I happen to practice and really love.
Tina also has a Women’s Earth Qigong retreat later in
the summer. Co-author witih Tina is Frank Allen, who
offers three of the best Bagua Zhang training seminars
in the USA at Dao Mountain.
David Twicken is continuing his brilliant integration
of Chinese Astrology, Feng Shui, and Qigong. I will be
offering his books shortly in the new astrology section
of my website, and you will be able to get a Free natal
chart. David offers a free detailed reading to each
person attending his seminar, which also carries CEU
credits.
We have all the old standbys - the HealingTao Senior
Instructors offering a top notch Instructor
Certification training (courses open to the public):
myself, Marie Favorito, Masahiro Ouchi, Rene Navarro,
and recently tapped for Senior status, Karin Sorvik.
This is the core curriculum track - Fundamentals, Iron
Shirt, Fusion, Healing Love, and for the body workers
Chi Nei Tsang.
Adding new spice is my friend Robert Peng, an top
qigong healer who shares his secrets in a Qigong
Healing Intensive over the July 4 week. Robert is
lovely, humble, and powerful - he was born with the
ability to “spark” chi in a tangible form, like an
electric current. If you want to learn Qi Emission,
Robert is the man.
Later in the summer we have the irrepressible Madam
Wang Yan, a spry 70 year old who is a walking
encyclopedia of medical qigong and the Grand Madam of
weight loss qigong in the West. If you want to breathe
away fat and lose 4-6 pounds a week, it is achievable
by natural means.
Another healer and empath is Judith Poole, who has
gather the top Energy Medicine and Energy Psychology
tools under her single roof. If you’ve got an intense
crisis or issue to heal, Judith is the Woman.
Finally, our Retreat Registrar, Rob Renahan, is
unveiling his stuff for the first time at Dao mtn.
He is developing his version of Zen Qigong, based on
his extensive practice in the Zen tradition and his
integration of it into the Taoist qigong and inner
alchemy tradition. If you want to get to deep quiet
space with, Rob is the Man.
They are all great teachers, and they attract wonderful
people who create a beautiful synergy. These are high
energy retreats where you will walk away with new
skills, new friends, and a burst of amazingly high
energy that you will surf on for months. Plus the real
kicker - the discovery that you’ve achieved
Enlightenment in less than one week. :)
Love, Chi, and the Blessing of Enlightenment in One
Week,
Michael
Tap the Great Yin Power of Winter Solstice!
History of Solstice “Holy Night” Dec. 2003
Michael Winn
Inside:
1. How to Cultivate Original Breath (Yuan Chi) during Winter
Solstice
2. Tune into Asheville Solstice meditation Sat. Dec. 20, 7-12 pm
3. A brief history of Winter Solstice as source of Christmas, etc.
4. Instruction for downloading free Inner Smile Ebook
(this may duplicate letter sent to private lists)
Dear Lovers of the Natural Effortless Way,
There is a new moon coming on December 23. For the savvy
cultivators of
chi kung (qigong), it is not an ordinary new moon. What makes it
many times
more powerful is its nearly simultaneous conjunction with the Winter
Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and historically the source for all
Christmas and yuletide celebrations. Let me explain, so you can take
advantage of the free ride being offered by Nature.
Winter Solstice is a regular opening of the cosmic gates in which
the
deep yin or receptive chi of the earth opens up to a vast flow of
Original
Chi (yuan qi). Original chi is the subtle breath of the Tao that exhales or
expands out as yang chi and inhales back to the center as yin chi. This
original chi field is the hidden continuum aligning the inner energetic
axis
connecting the earth, the sun, and the pole star/stellar field. You
might
202
ask, what good does that do us humans?
The centerpiece of Daoist (Taoist) theory is that the human body
is a
microcosm of the larger universe (macrocosm). That is the idea of the
famous
Daoist meditation, the “micro-cosmic orbit” - we are designed to
imitate the
flow of nature inside our own body. So if the earth opens her inner
womb at
Winter Solstice to receive an orgasmic in-rush of heavenly chi, our
human
bodies naturally resonate with that event.
The timing of the new moon intensifies it greatly. If we are aware of
this powerful subtle cosmic process, we can use the conjuction of the
solar-lunar process to capture the Original Breath of the universe
within
our personal body-mind vessel. Growing the original chi within us is the
main focus of inner alchemy, and it offers us not only long healthy life
but
deepens our freedom to create what we truly need in life.
The beauty of cultivating Original Chi during the Solstice is it is the
only type of chi that is beneficial to all people in all places, regardless
of their type of chi imbalance. We are ALL in some state of un-
balance. We
are here on planet earth to activate our will to achieve balance and
harmony. This is what drives our need to complete our destiny. It the
imbalances we are born with or acquire from living in human society
that
create the desires driving us to be who we are destined to be.
Original Chi is core energy from the universal matrix or primordial
chi
field,, also called Source chi in Chinese medicine. It spontaneously
mutates
into whatever is needed for achieving optimum balance. Our bodies
have
undifferentiated stem cells that convert themselves into brain, heart, or
bone cells. Original chi does the same thing for our subtle field, known
as
our Energy Body. This yuan/neutral chi becomes either yin/receptive or
yang/projective chi flowing in our meridians, and these are the building
blocks of our body-mind. So Solstice is a great time to nourish your
body-mind.
This conjunction of maximum Solar Yin at the Winter Solstice and
a Lunar
New Moon is a big event lasting several days. But the most intense
solar
moment would technically be at midnight on Sunday Dec. 21 (a few
hours
before the exact Winter Solstice on Dec. 22). Midnight is the
maximum yin in
the daily cycle, giving you a “triple whammy of Great Yin” or the Dark
Goddess as it would be described mythologically. An equally intense
but
slightly more lunar moment would be at midnight on Monday Dec. 22,
the
midpoint between the new moon on Dec. 23 and Winter Solstice on
Dec. 22.
When the chi field reaches a maximum yin state, it automatically
flips
into its opposite polarity, the six month yang cycle of spring and
summer,
which will be amplified by the cycle of full (or yang) moons during that
period. If you live south of the equator your current experience will be
just the opposite.
 It is in the process of flipping from yin to yang that the chi field has
to first shift into neutral “gear”, the yuan chi that lubricates the
yin-yang cycle. This deeper layer of neutral force opens up greater
possibilities for cultivating Original Chi than any other day of the year,
except for the possible conjunction of full moon at a Summer Solstice.
My wife Joyce and I regularly invite local meditators into our home
to
celebrate this cosmic transition and to use our collective power to tap
the
cosmic forces for personal growth. Many people have some of their
deepest
experiences at these extended meditations, which go from 7 pm to
11:30 pm in
three sittings. Most use the Taoist Emperor position for meditation,
sitting
in a chair, as it is more grounded than cross legged and allows for longer
meditations. Having your feet on earth lets you receive the deep earth
chi
more completely. Standing meditation is also extremely powerful at this
time.
I urge you to get family and friends together for the same purpose.
For
convenience I have my meditation this year on Saturday, Dec. 20, 7 pm
– 12
pm EST and you are most welcome to tune in from wherever you are.
The chi
field is what connects us all instantaneously so you can directly share
this
intense experience by simply holding a clear intention and being as
receptive as possible.
Of course, Winter Solstice is the time of greatest receptivity in the
annual cycle, so just doing the Inner Smile at this time will be powerful.
(If you don’t know this meditation, see instructions below for
downloading
the free ebook, The Way of the Inner Smile). If you know other Taoist
meditations like the Orbit, Fusion of the Five Elements, or Water and
Fire
Inner Alchemy (Kan & Li), you will find them most productive by
doing them
in a yin fashion.
This means being gentle, inviting and allowing the chi field to work
inside you instead of trying to direct it. It means surrendering to the
natural cycle of chi flowing to the center of the cosmic womb.
Opening your
inner heart and smiling within will open up many new layers of
consciousness
to you. This allows the deepest rebirth of the Inner Light that Winter
Solstice acts out for us on the outer planes. (For more on the difference
between yin practice, yang practice, and entering the wu wei state, see
the
articles page on www.healingdao.com).
------------------------------------------------------------------
A Brief History of Winter Solstice
203
(excerpted from: www.religioustolerance.org/winter_solstice.htm
ANCIENT EGYPT: The god-man/savior Osiris died and was
entombed on DEC-21.
“At midnight, the priests emerged from an inner shrine crying ‘The
Virgin
has brought forth! The light is waxing” and showing the image of a
baby to
the worshipers.”
ANCIENT GREECE: The winter solstice ritual was called
Lenaea, the Festival
of the Wild Women. In very ancient times, a man representing the
harvest god
Dionysos was torn to pieces and eaten by a gang of women on this day.
Later
in the ritual, Dionysos would be reborn as a baby. By classical times, the
human sacrifice had been replaced by the killing of a goat. The
women’s role
had changed to that of funeral mourners and observers of the birth.
ANCIENT ROME: Saturnalia began as a feast day for Saturn on
DEC-17 and of
Ops (DEC-19). About 50 BCE, both were later converted into two day
celebrations. During the Empire, the festivals were combined to cover
a full
week: DEC-17 to 23.
By the third century CE, there were many religions and spiritual
mysteries
being followed within the Roman Empire. Many, if not most,
celebrated the
birth of their god-man near the time of the solstice. Emperor Aurelian
(270
to 275 CE) blended a number of Pagan solstice celebrations of the
nativity
of such god-men/saviors as Appolo, Attis, Baal, Dionysus, Helios,
Hercules,
Horus, Mithra, Osiris, Perseus, and Theseus into a single festival called
the “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun” on DEC-25. At the time,
Mithraism and
Christianity were fierce competitors. Aurelian had even declared
Mithraism
the official religion of the Roman Empire in 274 CE. Christianity won
out by
becoming the new official religion in the 4th century CE.
Note: As a Taoist/Daoist cultivator, I find it simplest to tune in
directly
to the sun and moon directly and open to them as living beings. But
this
doesn’t conflict with the numerous cultural-mythological
interpretations
that you may be partial to. Use whatever feeds your creative
imagination and
liberates your chi flow!