RESOLVE SEXUAL IDENITY TO EVOLVE THE SPIRIT
You begin to center yourself in those aspects, and give them more form and substance. This is where the importance of your sexual energy comes in; your sexual energy is what gives substance to spirit. This second formula, the lesser enlightenment of water and fire, the water and fire is the sexual coupling of the body and soul, the male and female aspects of your consciousness. This is your inner male and the inner female. That is just the first step towards getting pregnant.
It is hard to have a rebirth without first getting pregnant. I believe that is the normal sequence. You get pregnant and then you give birth. A lot of the people want to skip some of the steps, and jump to some other transcendental level where they can’t sustain it; they don’t understand the process of it, what exactly it takes to nourish their own rebirth. Without first resolving your polarized sexual identity, how can you hope to resolve or complete the tension between Heaven and Earth, formless and form?
My method involves a combination of movement and meditation. I’ve found that westerners in particular need movement to awaken the sleeping levels of their consciousness in their body. It is also a simple way to get out of their heads, since most westerners are stuck in their heads. There is no faking your movement, and it gives you a way for the body to practice and stay healthy.
We will be learning a six-movement Qigong form; I call it The Gods Playing in the Cauldron of Original Qi. We will be doing some other Qigong forms along the way as well that are useful in getting out of your head, getting into the energetic movement of your body. This qigong form is more accurately described as neigong, we are internally directing the energy to alchemically couple the inner male and inner female currents of energy. That will be accompanied by a series of meditations that will gradually take us in step by step deeper and deeper into the practice.
Why does it takes a week? The technique of Lesser Kan & Li is actually very simple, the principles of Daoist practices are really very simple, but because we are dealing with the body and its complexities, it may appear complicated. The body in fact is very complicated. It has taken eons to design and evolve it, so that it can sustain itself here in this physical environment. During that process of evolution, aspects of our collective consciousness started to feel very attached to this form of the body, and so got vibrationally separated from aspects of their original Qi. The original Qi is just the breath of our original self before we divided ourselves into this physical body.
We will go deeper into this Daoist cosmology, and into how they understood evolution to happen. We’ll explore what happened to the Qi, what happened with the Jing, the sexual essence, and what happened with the Shen, the spirit or self-awareness, at each level. Those three levels, understand those three components at every level of yourself, every dimension of yourself, then you will have a very good map of how you got here, and where you might possibly be interested in evolving yourself.
Those are the things I found valuable about Daoist alchemy. You get a really good map, you get a really good language that has been developed over the last several thousand years, and you have a body-centered meditation practice that is coming to us live, that a continuous group of practitioners has passed down. Daoist alchemy is the origin of the fundamental principles that lie behind most of the Chinese arts: Chinese medicine, martial arts, Feng Shui, astronomy, astrology, and many other arts in china that are based on the idea of Qi, and how to manage it through different aspects of manifest life.
Internal Alchemy, or nei dangong as it is called in China, is the original science. If you get a good foundation in this, and go very deep into any other branch, whether it is healing, astrology, martial arts, it doesn’t really matter, inner alchemy will give you a foundation for understanding them on a much deeper level. It is not the purpose of internal alchemy to be proficient at any of those levels; those are just really side benefits and practical applications.
INDIVIDUAL SELF, COLLECTIVE SELF, ORIGINAL SELF
The purpose of these alchemy practices is to develop the original self, to grow it back here again. You have all of the ingredients present inside of your individual self, and you just need a cooking class: what is the recipe, how do you get it together and how do you cook it up? Presto, you find yourself impregnated with this seed of your original self and it begins to expand, as you have created the proper conditions for it. I think that is enough on that. What you do with your embodied original spirit is your business, your personal destiny unfolding within the collective self of humanity, not mine.
One important question is, what is the inner collective of the individual human being composed of? It is composed of a spirit that has stepped itself down into this plane, and divided itself out into different streams of consciousness. This is what you find in almost every ancient culture, a theory of the five elements, sometimes it is called the four elements and there is a hidden fifth element, but it is always the five elements. That is always managed by five streams of consciousness. That is what allows the rearrangement of consciousness into matter. If you understand how it is divided out, and is all present in you, you can begin to reassemble it at an even more core level of three-ness.
The best metaphor here is probably humpty-dumpty sat on a wall, and humpty-dumpty had a great fall, and all the kings horses, and all the kings men could not put humpty-dumpty back together again. But – the alchemist can, and that is the great mystery. You have to know what the fragments are, and how they manifest as different aspects of your personality, how they control your thoughts and feelings, and how they control your spiritual development. It is a deep subject, and we will go into it. Any other questions?
Where you do the retreat is important in the sense that your own practice is never separate from what is going on in the land. We like to think that we are independent, but the microcosm that we are is wholly interdependent with the macrocosm. The macrocosm includes the environment; the aspect of the environment that we resonate most closely with is the Earth, because it is physical just like us. Planets, stars, we resonate with also but the aspect of ourselves that we will say is the most condensed is resonating mostly with the Earth.
So where you are on the Earth, and the movement of Qi in the Earth near you can greatly facilitate the Alchemical process. I try and teach these retreats in places where I feel the earth is going to be supportive. I teach up in the Alps, in the Greek Islands, in a number of different places but in the United States a place I call Dao Mountain. The fact of the matter is that you can train the elements in any environment to support you, they actually are very excited by the possibility of change, changing themselves in a way that they can not do themselves.
They don’t have the same level of free will that we have. When we do this work and begin exercising our higher levels of free will, all the elementals get to participate in that, they have to. We can’t do it without them.
I was going around Glastonbury today, the Tor and the Abbey, and other places. The Tor has it’s own natural energy, very powerful; you can feel it at the Shambhala guest house where we are staying. There has been a lot of energetic work done at the abbey, the alleged grave of King Arthur, and at the High Altar, now outdoors as the Cathedral is in ruins. I think it has been a magnet for a long time for people to do spiritual work here. So as I said, we are not starting anything new here – the Michael and Mary ley lines, holding male and female earth energies, cross at the High Altar. You can feel the buzz when you stand there.
LEMURIAN AND ATLANTEAN INFLUENCES ON ALCHEMY
The work that has been done here has mostly been done through the western tradition, which I believe is essentially Atlantean in origin. I have studied the Atlantean tradition extensively myself, it is very powerful, and a worthwhile tradition. The Daoist tradition is what is known esoterically as coming from the Lemurian tradition. The main difference is that the Atlantean tradition is more of a fire path: the fire starts from above and descends down.
The Daoist tradition, the Lemurian tradition is starting from below and within, coming from the water side, and raising up. From my understanding, the reason Atlantis collapsed was from the abuse of fire, and the power they brought with it. This is the danger facing Western society today, as they replay this Atlantean catastrophe. This is the danger of blowing ourselves up with nuclear bombs; it is the danger of excess technology destroying us.
We are beginning to see this drama played out, with the bombing of the world trade center exactly one week ago. You should not get emotionally caught up in this drama, because it is a drama that started eons ago, and you have to understand it at its core if you want to do anything about it. The only thing you can do is change it at its core. It is not the political drama that the TV and news media would have you believe it is.
It is much more of an ancient deeper spiritual drama being played out between the forces of light and dark. Daoist alchemy is not about choosing sides, between the light side and the dark side, it is about developing the third side, that is your original self, that birthed out the light side and the dark side. If you choose sides, you become a soldier in a war, and you may win temporarily or you may lose. If you want to win permanently, choose the third column. The reason I am teaching the Daoist practices is that column currently needs to arise from below and within, from within matter.
The Atlantean experiment in a sense failed. The Daoist path uses essentially the same tools, it just uses them a little differently. I believe it is maybe a more grounded and more necessary work at this time; that is why I am teaching it. So yes, the Earth matters, and I think it is great to be doing this work here in Glastonbury. I think from my experience being here 24 hours that the energy is going to be very supportive; it will be a good marriage. Any other questions?
The question is, is this similar to a Buddhist path, and the development of emptiness, the answer is no. That is a longer discussion. It depends which Buddhists you are talking about, some of the Tibetan Buddhists in the Dzogchen tradition, yes, it has some similarity to the Dzogchen tradition, but that is not Buddhist. The Buddhists adopted some of the teachings of the Dzogchen tradition, which existed long before Buddha, as did the Daoist traditions, which I believe go back about 70,000 years.
What generally the Chan Buddhists in China understand as emptiness runs in a different vein from the Daoist inner alchemy training because of their concept of essence, or jing. Is there is an essence that defines the “self”? The Daoist hermit tradition of this path of Internal Alchemy posits that our “ling” or soul is a vessel containing our personal essence(s). So when a Buddhist says that the self doesn’t exist, from the Daoist point of view you are just saying that the body’s apparent fixity is a temporary illusion.
Your collective of personal essences are not permanent, like the more fixed Christian notion of the soul, but are always in process. Dao is about process. “Hsu” or “xu”, the Daoist term for emptiness, is just an open space that this process uses in the transformation process, in the “opening and closing” of the Dao as described in Lao Tzu. From the Daoist point of view, the self is based upon some sort of essence, you cannot create the illusion of this body unless you had some essence.
What we are really concerned with is our original essence (yuan jing), that has divided itself out into the five elements. That is a more positive (meaning more substantive) approach as opposed to the negative Buddhist approach saying that nothing exists, that if you erase your illusion fully then your suffering and your karma as a human being will go away.
One of the reason I think that the Daoist approach is very suited to westerners is that westerners have a great deal of resistance to the term emptiness, and to what that might actually mean. Our body naturally seeks fullness. It’s the reason Buddhism failed in India originally, bodies kept appearing and disproving the notion of an illusory self. I think that the term “emptiness” is very misleading, it really means just empty of objects.. It doesn’t mean it is empty of energy or consciousness, so it is a little bit mislabeled I think. It really means openness, or implies a shift to a different kind of time and space than this physical one right here.
The Daoist approach is to work with the “self” a little more proactively, to just say look, you have an essence and can cultivate it. That is the purpose of alchemy. If you didn’t have an essence, what would you be cultivating? I think the Dzogchen approach is a much closer to the Daoists than some of the other Buddhist teachings. The Tibetan Buddhists have appropriated the original Dzogchen teachings (as well as the Buddhist teachings from India, which were larged borrowed from Hindu tantrism), so they are very similar in philosophy to Daoism.
NATURE OF QI AND TYPES OF QIGONG
We need to deal with some practical issues. I am going to teach you this Qigong form this morning. The Gods Playing in the Cauldron of Original Qi. We will just learn the basic mechanics, the movements and some of the energy directions that are activated by it. Throughout the week we will cultivate a deeper awareness energetically of what is going on inside of it. This is what distinguishes various types of Qigong from Neigong. Neigong means internal skill in managing your Qi. Qigong just means your general skill using breath, posture, movement and intention to manage your Qi. Manage is a modern word, the original term is to cultivate.
Before we do that, I would just like to speak a little bit about the very idea of Qi so that we don’t get caught up in any idea that Qi is something that we are chasing after, that it is something remote or difficult or mystical, that only a few people have it, these are all erroneous ideas about Qi. Qi only exists as a field, and it is everywhere, you can see it is a matrix of everything. If you exist, you have Qi, you are some pattern of Qi. There is no need to go out and look for it, you have more than you know what to do with. There is no shortage of it.
I think this is an idea that has been perpetrated, at least in the states, largely by martial artists who initially learned from other martial artists who didn’t necessarily have a spiritual understanding. Some fighter along the way thought that you had to build up the Qi in order to kick someone else’s butt. This idea that I have the Qi and you don’t, this is a myth. Everybody has infinite access to the Qi field, you are in fact a portal for the Qi field to manifest here, that is your nature as a human being. You can close down the valve, you can shut it down so that it doesn’t flow because you have free will. Or you can open the valve and let it flow, that is just a free will choice. It is not a question of whether you do or do not have Qi, it is a question of deciding whether you are open enough to let it flow.
So just release the idea that there is a limited amount of Qi or that you have limited access to it. That is the number one thing. A lot of people think I can’t meditate, or I can’t get Qi, or I have to do this for a million years before it is going to happen, or a zillion lifetimes, those are all just acquired ideas about it, they are not true. The only thing that is true is that as you begin to open up the valve, and begin to let this energy flow inside you, you want to make sure that it is flowing in a balanced manner. This is an idea in the west, that bigger is better, it is particularly true in America: more Qi is better.
Not necessarily, it is the quality of the Qi, and this gets into the idea of what the Daoists call Shen. Shen is spirit, or the intelligence that shapes the Qi. So if you just have Qi, it could be very coarse Qi, it could be very strong Qi but it may not necessarily have a high spiritual quality to it. So there is a relationship between the Shen, the spirit, and the Qi, they are not the same thing. A lot of New Ager’s confuse the two, thinking that if I have a lot of energy, it must be very spiritual. You can have a lot of energy and be very evil.
Energy, Qi is essentially neutral in it's original state, and as it manifests, it gets polarized, it has to get polarized in order to separate out into form and bodies and planets, and matter from a formless field. Your polarity is necessary to stay in form. The polarity which is defined by Yin Qi and Yang Qi, expanding and contracting Qi, by nature is harmonious. We will go later into the whole cosmology, what happens in different dimensions as the Qi field shifts into matter, and how do problems arise, where does suffering come from? If it is so harmonious, why is god allowing evil? I will go into that cosmology a little bit later, so you have a clear map of how the energy steps itself down. it is very important to understand that, because we are stepping it back up.
It is like Hansel and Gretel, you leave the little breadcrumbs along the way, then have to find the way back. When you came into a body, you left little breadcrumbs along the way, called subtle bodies, and you have to find your way back using them. You have to learn to recognize those markers and cultivate them so they become clear.
The main thing to understand here is that there is no limitation, either in the quality or in the amount of Qi. Most of the limitation is arising in this third thing that the Daoists call Jing. Jing means your essence, it is your sexual essence, and it is your genetic essencel
Speaking about Jing, sometimes spelled Ching. This is the key to understanding the Jing that holds the body in shape, and what holds anything in form. Planets have Jing, stars have Jing, anything that has physical form has Jing, it has something that is giving it a shape and essence. Its essence is giving it a form. This is something that you are inheriting from your parents, and that is why we are all shaped slightly differently. You get some Jing from your mother, and you get some Jing from your father, from each one of them. But you are not limited to them, their Jing is can be tracked all the way back to the source in the origins of where all Jing comes from, from the Dao.
Daoist alchemy is a process of cultivating a relationship between your Jing, your Qi, and the Shen. The essence, the energy and the spirit or the intelligence. What is important to understand is that while all three of those that might appear to function very differently, they are all at heart the same thing. It express a continuum of vibration, from spirit, to energy to body essence. And vice versa. They are constantly transforming between different states of density: spirit turns itself into energy, it shapes itself, and the energy crystallizes itself down into form, into matter, and it goes back again.
There is a fourth element here; after Jing Qi, Shen there is Wu. Wu means not-being in some translations. Being, the Shen, the intelligence arises out of not being. In fact wu is not exactly not being, it really means the unknown, all of creation is coming out of the unknown. We can’t know that the unknown is non-being, we just know it is not the same thing as spirit, which is the knower within us. This is the first mystery. It cannot be penetrated from here. Wuji is what I call the Supreme Mystery; if it was knowable, then we could control it or change it from here, but apparently we cannot.
It is quite possible to get into illusory ideas that you have achieved the supreme unknown, just because you stopped thinking or breathing during meditation. The main thing to focus on right now is what is knowable, and develop some skill in transmuting between the Jing, the Qi and the Shen, the essence, the energy and the intelligence, or the spirit. If you are able to become fluid in making those transformations, or become conscious in making those transformations, then you gain a whole new level of freedom.
The real truth is that you are doing this every moment, you are going through these transmutations between spirit, energy and matter, or body, only it is unconscious for you. If you weren’t doing that, then you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be able to function, to think or feel. Those are stepped down qualities or properties of that process. Every one is already an unconscious master of this process, and all we are trying to do is make it conscious.
That’s why it is often referred to simply as remembering. But before you can remember, you have to forget who you think you have become, because that is blocking and occupying the space of your mind. It seems a little tricky that you have to forget yourself in order to remember yourself, but that just seems to be the way it goes.
TALK ON “GODS PLAY IN CAULDRON” NEIGONG
When you learn this Qigong form, in the beginning, it looks like you are just waving your arms around. But if you relax into the movements, you start to become aware that you are actually giving instructions to the Qi field, to the life force. So if you make a movement that is scooping upward, it is not about exercising your muscles or your ligaments, or anything like that, although those are side benefits of the physical movement of this. It is the signal to the Qi field saying, I want the energy to start moving up my body, and then you do it the other way, and it says I want you to go down now.
It is just like you are training your pet, a little dog, saying sit, run, walk, eat, beg. So you are training the Qi field. As I have said, it is essentially neutral, and it will never violate your will. It is an intelligent field, remember the Shen has merged in with the Qi field, the spirit. So when you have a clear intention, and communicate it clearly, it will respond, if you are relaxed enough to notice it. If you are uptight, you may not notice it even if the Qi starts to move.
There is one other thing - please release the expectation of what the Qi moving is supposed to be like: there is no supposed to. You can do different forms of Qigong, and it will have different effects. You can do Tai Chi, a long martial form, which I consider to be a form of Qigong, and it will have a certain effect. You can do another Qigong form, and it is telling the Qi to do something different, you get a different effect. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Qigong forms. There is no limit to the number of forms that could be invented. There is no limit to the human imagination or the different combinations that you could put a human body and human energy field through.
The important thing to understand is that this Gods Playing in the Cauldron Neigong is just a Qigong method that involves the body-mind in directing the Qi to flow back towards its own source in the pre-natal field of Qi. The reason it is so powerful is that by involving the body, not just giving mental directions, by involving the body, you begin to activate your Jing, the movement of your body essence. Your body essence is essentially your sexual energy. We’ll talk more about that later.
When you are getting that to move, it doesn’t mean you are sexually aroused, in the western idea of what sex is. Westerners generally have a very limited idea of what sexuality is. The purpose of the movement is also to include the densest levels of yourself, to get them moving in a particular pattern, and this neigong form is a way to encode and embody the meditative practice.
Sometimes you may find yourself in a state where you don’t feel like sitting still and meditating. So then you do neigong movement, you do moving meditation. You may just feel stuck, too anxious, and can’t meditate so you do a movement meditation, and the signals to the life force will be essentially another octave of the same messages you would give in a sitting meditation.
We will learn to use this Gods neigong form to do an alchemical operation, or meditative transmutation of the elements. The movement stimulates the spontaneous process of the meditation afterwards, they work beautifully together. I think it is important to do both sitting and moving practice. Because the signals in each are working at a little different frequency, it increases the chances that you will cover all the bases.
Maybe that’s an American metaphor, do you English play baseball? No. do you use that metaphor in English? You have rounders, cover all the rounders? Do you have bases in rounders? Okay, same metaphor, we’re in the same culture.
Let go of any fixed ideas you have about Qi. When you are doing the Neigong form, just relax, that is the key thing. Less effort, I guess you should make this point: if you try too hard, that means you are trying to use force, in Chinese that means Li, you are trying to push the Qi, that creates contraction, contraction slows down the Qi field. If you use too much muscle, if the muscles are tensing, that draws more blood, the blood needs Qi to circulate, that uses up your Qi and also slows down the Qi flow. So it seems paradoxical to westerners, but if you use less effort, more Qi flows, it is the opposite of “no pain, no gain” and all these things.
You want a clear intention, clear instructions to the Qi field, and minimal effort, just enough to move the body, and then keep it floating, and relaxing, because then the Qi starts to move. It is not being asked to do anything else, move blood, tighten muscles, hold your emotions, all these other things take Qi. So if you don’t give it any of those instructions, I need to be angry right now. That is an instruction to the Qi field, the Qi comes up and it shapes itself into anger. I need to be strong right now; then the Qi comes up into the muscles. Whatever you think is an instruction to the Qi field.
It is this very omnipresent, very sensitive field of energy, and most of us are giving unconscious instructions to it all the time, and most of those instructions are usually contradictory. Yes I want to go forward, and am no longer afraid to. Have you ever tried driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas? What happens? The car didn’t go anywhere, but you burned a lot of energy.
This is the normal state for most people, to some degree or another, one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas, and you are playing them back and forth, and you are burning up your energy, and you wonder why you are tired. These are just unconscious habits you have acquired, and you will be letting go of them on a much deeper level this week. It is important to realize they are there.
When you are moving, you are just going to be letting yourself go without resistance. We don’t want to give any double messages. This means letting go of your fear. What is your fear really about? It is usually about changing yourself, your Jing is fixed in a certain pattern and you have gotten used to it, here is my form, here is my body, and that creates a certain energetic pattern you could say, you could call it your personality.
Personality is just your Qi functioning expressed, it comes out as thoughts, it comes out as feelings, it comes out as sensations. Those are all the ways in which you shape the Qi field. That is all Qi, it just has a particular shape to it. Different subtle bodies are shaping the Qi in different ways, so most ordinary things require Qi to happen, all ordinary reality is part of the Qi field.
There is nothing really mystical about it, it just seems mystical when you get into what is behind it, and the subtle ways that you can shape it. You are not going over with a hammer and a nail and banging on it, or sawing on it or something else.
Dantian, Ming (Destiny), and Xing (Essence)
The questioner has asked, is there a difference between the navel, Dantian, and belly cauldron? No, I’m really using them in the same way, sometimes I’m giving you a biological reference. Thank you for asking the question, it is important that things go to the Dantian. A lot of people have different ideas abut what that is. The ancient term “Dantian”, has the meaning of “the space where the Qi completes itself”.
Some translations today call it the “field of the elixir”. The elixir field? In most cases, it is just a field, there is no elixir stored there, because you haven’t cultivated it. The Qi has not completed itself yet. Everybody’s Qi is different, so everyone has to find their own unique combinations of energy that will complete themselves, their own unique way of living and expressing themselves. All that is part of completing yourself.
The Daoists talk about two different phases of this. One is cultivating your Ming, your bodily destiny, and the other is cultivating your Xing (pronounced Shing), your spiritual essence. Your destiny is how you live out in the world, your job, your career, your relationships. These are all your choices, you are completing your destiny in the world. Moving from the origin out towards creation. Cultivating your Xing, your essence, you are gathering it back into its original source. Internal alchemy is focused largely on the process of cultivating inwardly. You need both. The Dantian is simply a portal, a doorway where this essence is cultivated.
The Dantian is sometimes described as a storage unit or a battery for your Qi. I don’t think this is a very useful description of it, and the reason why I don’t think it is a very good description of it is that it is too limiting, it makes it as if it was a physical container that stores your Qi, and that puts a limitation on the sense of your Qi, that you have to gather it, hold on to it, and store it.
Again, this is an idea of limitation on the Qi field, this is an infinite field of energy. I think it is better to look at it as a doorway to an infinite energy field, and that doorway can be wide open or it can be open a crack, but if the universe has infinite energy, why do you need to store it, it's like carrying coal to Newcastle. There is no need to store it. The energy field itself is storing all the energy you would ever need.
What I think this generally is confused with, is that the kidney spirit is considered to be connected with the lower Dantian because of it's proximity, and the kidney function which is regulating the water, the water acts as a storage medium. It is holding in a manifest form some of your essence, and it functions more like a battery, your sexual energy. But it is not to be confused with the Dantian, the field of the elixir. This elixir has infinite energy, doesn’t need to store anything, it is the universal storage of all possibilities.
There are three Dantians that are traditionally worked with, in the belly, the heart and the head. They all go to the same infinite Qi field, you can think of them as different doorways leading to the same room. As the energy moves from this infinite Qi field into manifestation, different functions come through. Your heart cauldron has more of your emotional and mental body functions coming through, and the head cauldron has more of the spiritual functions coming through.
You need all of the functions, your feet are just as important as your legs, and your hands are just as important as your arms, they are all connected and are all together. As I mentioned last night though, unless you get a foundation in opening up the densest portal, the one that is controlling your dense physical body, the other ones are not very stable, the thoughts come and go, the spiritual perceptions come and go. So the lower cauldron, if you can get your essence to crystallize there, it acts as a vehicle for all your higher bodies, so they can download here, and stay present here, other wise they come in and they go out, they come in and go out.
This is what is unique about Daoist alchemy, is that the method has evolved for stabilizing your original spirit here, it won’t happen unless you cultivate this doorway and open it up. In that space, you begin completing your Qi, and returning it back to it’s origin. In that space, which is the space where you are generating form, and you are generating your physical body, if you hold your spiritual energy there, you will start to generate the seed that will become the light body.
What the Daoists call the light body is the same thing that new agers call the light body, the only problem is that visualizing it doesn’t make it happen. It is not something that you can just imagine, and then you have it, that is called a Yin body. That is just like TV, you have a good show, you see it, and after the show is over, click, it is gone. We are cultivating what is called a Yang body, we have to give it some substance, and some vitality, and then it stays, it becomes a vehicle for your continued spiritual development, it becomes a body you can take into any dimension. So that is the long answer to your short question.
When I say bring the energy down there, we are really constantly performing various operations, various meditations and various aspects of ourselves, and we bring it back there, so it begins to crystallize and unite, and the place where your Qi will shift from Qi into Jing, your substance. Right now your substance, your Jing is very unconscious. The only time you are aware of it is when it converts itself into sexual energy, and you feel desire, or you feel pain, and you want to try and protect your body from discomfort we are just going to give it something a little bit more like that pearl there, it is clear but is has some substance. Any other questions?
The question is should you circulate the pearl after you have brought it back there? It is optional, this is a traditional Daoist practice, and the main reason for doing that is to make sure the energy is balanced. So you are giving it a Yin and a Yang movement, you are moving it clockwise and counterclockwise.
It is not that critical here, because we are going to be doing so many things, and we are constantly balancing, and changing them back and forth. If you have that habit, and that is comforting for you, and it gives you that feeling of what you have done, then do it. You are going to find that over the thousands of years of practitioners in China, people have evolved all kinds of practices, more practices than you can shake a stick at. And you can’t do them all.
You don’t need to do them all, you just need to do the ones that you feel give you the balance, energy and cultivation that you find you need. So any time a teacher tells you that you have to do it this way, and if you don’t do this, you can’t achieve yourself or whatever, I would be very cautious.
There are many ways to cultivate yourself, and there are all kinds of methods. Usually because we have a tendency to disperse our Qi, we divide ourselves and fragment ourselves, we are spending it in three or four directions at once, it will never accumulate. We wake up every morning with a fresh batch of energy, and we don’t know where it came from, and we go out and spend it all day long.
By the time we are tired and fall asleep, the next day we do it again and again, slowly running down, because we are never tapping into the source of where it is coming from. This is the process described as slowly spending down your principal. You inherit so much from your parents, you get so much from the universe when you are born, and you are just spending it everyday, and you are not recharging it, at the end of that you die.
We are reversing that process now, and there are a lot of different ways to reverse that. People have different ways of sabotaging themselves, and they are exhausting themselves, these techniques are often so that we have a definite procedure so we don’t just scatter the Qi. The real function of it is to say, make sure this is present and holds its unity, spiral it left, spiral it right. People do it physically, put their hands around the belly, some people hold the hands still and move the belly around it. Some people use their minds to send it this way and that way. They are all good. Any other questions?
FALLING ASLEEP VS. GOING UNCONSCIOUS DURING MEDITATION
This is quite normal, in the first few days of these retreats, you may find yourself going unconscious., and you should be aware that it is not necessarily sleep, in fact most of the time it is not sleep. A lot of the times people feel guilty, and they feel bad, they have paid all this money, and traveled all this way to come here, and now they are falling asleep, and they are saying why did I come here to go asleep?
What is going on is that from the group Qi field, from the energy that I am putting out, there are frequencies of energy that you are not used to encountering in your conscious state. You normally encounter them only in your dream state. So what happens when you suddenly are in a situation where these energies come in, coming from yourself, from me, the room or wherever, from Earth, from heaven. It acts like a signal and says oh, we are in the dream state, I guess we are asleep, you go out, and that is your cue.
After a while you may feel that, I’m not really asleep, this is a false signal, I’m not really supposed to be going asleep, it is just a new type of energy, I think I will stay awake, and watch what happens while that energy is present in me. Don’t be alarmed, the energy is still going in, you are still having the experience of it, it is just the recording part of your conscious mind is off for that moment.
But as they have done lots of studies on people in dream and sleep states, you record everything, it is just not in the particular play back mode that you call yourself, your little ego self, with this little tape recorder and video camera, play it back and say oh, yeah, that was what was said, or this or that. Don’t be alarmed. That will change, as the group energy starts to crystallize, in the first day or two, and then the whole thing will shift to another level. I have taught many, many of these retreats, so I can predict that pattern with great confidence. There are always exceptions, though.
You may also find disturbing patterns coming up. The energy in here gets very strong, and you can have a weakness in one organ, and suddenly it will surface. That should get better within a day or two also. The first day or two, you just have to detox. That’s why we are coming together, to speed that process up collectively, and have a strong Qi field, it will happen faster.
LETTING GO OF EGO RESISTANCE
That comes down to the question of just trusting the group, trusting the process, trusting me, and most importantly trusting yourself, saying okay, this is the moment I’m actually going to change. I actually am going to let go of these deep patterns, which your psyche is afraid to do on it's own, because it doesn’t feel like there is any safety net, because if I let go of all these patterns what will I be? I have to be healthy, I have to be functional, I have to be successful, blah, blah, blah, my god that is really scary, I think I will just go back to this thing that I know. So here we have a kind of safety net. Let go of the Qi field, then this stuff will circulate around, and something else will come into you, and there is a process to replace it with. That’s all. That’s here. A lot of it is being really clear, and letting go of your fear, and resistance to change. That is the core fear, is change, not to become something different. That’s why death is the biggest fear, because death is the biggest change. So you learn to have a lot of little deaths, letting your old self go, and letting your old patterns die, and you will have a lot of little births and eventually that will accumulate, and start to crystallize into something of substance. Any other questions?
USING 5 PHASES TO CREATE COHERENT QI FIELD IN BODY
The important thing to understand about the five elements, and about the creation cycle is that there is only one life force. Even though it divides itself out and it moves into different directions, and becomes different qualities, it is still the same Qi, just like the seasons going through a different phase, different weather, a different color, different qualities. so you are just taking it through those changes, and you are staying present with it. You draw the water up, and expand out the wood element, spring, the liver, the rising Qi, and then you get back to the fire. We are used to thinking of fire as expanding out and away that’s what it normally does. We are doing the reverse of it. We are pulling it down in. usually we think of water as sinking. The heavy element, it flows away from us, down. We are doing the reverse of it, we are drawing it up.
When I go into the energetics of the whole form, it will become clearer. All these movements are designed very specifically, and have particular effects, you will learn more and more what these effects are, and what we are doing with these movements. We are not just waving our arms around, you are giving instructions to your own Qi field, all the elements and all the intelligences of all the spirits inside your own Qi field, you are saying hey, go through this sequence, this pattern of expansion and contraction, and it starts to organize them and turn them into a coherent whole.
Right now, most of us are what we call a chaotic whole, we have a center of gravity, we don’t just fly apart at the seams, so there is something holding us together, but often at great struggle and chaos. one side conflicting with another, one part of us wanting to go forward, one wanting to go back. One is afraid, one is courageous. One part wants to fall in love, and the other part wants to hate the person. We are a collective consciousness, we hold all of these different wills, and all these different voices inside ourselves at once. It is very exciting. Occasionally you are in the same pattern for a long time, and it gets a little boring, that’s you want to rearrange it, when it's lost it's excitement. I think we need to take a break.
DAOIST COSMOLOGY
We are going to discuss and have a lightweight talk about Daoist cosmology. I say lightweight because when we get into cosmology and talk about creation of the universe, it sounds kind of heavy, and huge, and things that are generally beyond our ability as humans to understand. Without some kind of cosmology, spiritually you are lost. If you could just see it as a starting structure, and you could flesh it out through you own experience in meditation, Qigong, and Neigong, as you proceed along the path, which is to have the idea and the possibilities of what the different dimensions of yourself are. It is really important, because if you have no awareness of that, then you may fall back upon relying upon your sensory evidence, and your senses are limited in what they can know.
Your mind is not limited, your mind knows many things that your senses do not know. So you can close your eyes, and your mind is still there, and you can still be perceiving, and imagining and creating whole worlds, and you open your eyes and say that’s where it is, the created world, but none of us see this world exactly the same, so there is a great mystery, there is some kind of tension between the individual and the cosmos, between the spirit and matter, the kind of dialectic that is going on, and that kind of tension is always going to be there.
However, that can be a positive creative tension, rather than a source of anxiety; a source of why am I here, who sent me down to this prison planet, I am a huge spirit and I am stuck inside this tiny little body, and the world is beating up on me, slowly eating me out with disease and struggle, lack of money, evil people, etcetera, etcetera. So you could have all kinds of interpretations of being in a limited form, a physical form, but for the moment, I’m just going to ask you to release all those interpretations, and to release all those judgements, and open yourself to just hearing the Daoist cosmology. I think it is really essential because it gives you a framework for understanding these alchemical formulas, and why you are doing this practice.
You may have many immediate motives in terms of relieving your spiritual anxiety, or healing yourself of something. Those are all fine. From the universe’s point of view, your personal motives may be more or less irrelevant. You may be part of a larger process that you are just not aware of, even though you are perceiving your personal needs and your personal process.
The Daoists have three different heavens. There is no hell. This goes all the way back to the Dao De Jing, Lao Zi (Lao Tzu), what is considered to be the classic of early Daoist texts. Written about 400 B.C., it talks about the Dao giving birth to the one. This is in verse 42, if you check any translation of it, it will have something like this:
“The Dao (or the unknown) gives birth to the one,
one gives birth to the two,
two gives birth to the three
three gives birth to the ten thousand things (or the myriad things).”
I translate this cosmologically as:
“The Dao gives birth to unity,
Unity gives birth to the polarity,
Polarity gives birth to trinity,
The trinity gives birth to the ten thousand things.”
What does this mean? This short phrase, one of eighty one verses in the Dao De Jing, has been accepted almost universally by all the different branches of Daoism, all the different sects over thousands of years, as the foundation of Daoist cosmology. Also many Buddhist and Confucian thinkers accepted it as well.
You have to understand that in china, the term Dao is an umbrella term, so even though there are many different schools of thinking, the legalists, the Confucians, the naturalists, you have various schools of Buddhism all coming in at different historical periods. Many of them, most of them accepted the Dao as the umbrella, as some sort of mysterious goal. Confucius would also talk about the Dao, but he was more concerned about, say the Dao of human society. The Daoists such as Zhuang Zi and Lao Zi, would mostly talk about the Dao of the whole, of nature. Nature of course includes human society, they are not excluding humanity from that.
It is important to understand that there is a whole developed cosmology, of what this means to go from none to one to two to three and into the madness of creation, the multiplicity of the many. This gives you a pathway to understand the progression of the one to the many. Here we are in a room, there are many of us, yet on some level we all know that there is only one humanity, that there is some sort of global psyche, or perhaps even a global soul. Somehow all of the human minds are connected.
What causes us to think that there are only the many separate human minds, instead of just one? Because we all have internally an invisible pathway inside of ourselves, which links us to the collective mind, the unity mind. But this connection is obscured by the busyness, and the distraction of all the sensory things that are happening.
Beyond the unity of the collective mind, deep inside our core, there is the unknown. This kind of inner black hole is called the Wu Ji. Sometimes spelled wu chi, but it is not Qi, as in energy, it is Wu Ji, and it means Supreme Unknown or Supreme Mystery. That is like the womb of the Dao, there is this whole, this unknowable whole, and it births itself out through the void. But it is not really a void, or a black hole, it is the profound womb space from which we continually birth ourselves and the cosmos.
Daoism is essentially feminine, the language and terminology favors the feminine. It talks about birthing, and the Dao as the mother. It is different than many of the western religions that are focused on the fire, and say that the father is first, father, father, father. This is essentially saying that something is birthing things here, something is birthing creation, and birthing is essentially an androgynous act, it is either male or female, but later on that is physically appropriated by the female side, but we are going to get to that.
So these three forces all were birthed out, and there is this single first circle here, and that is called primordial heaven, HunTun. This is the state of primordial unity, as well as primordial chaos. Why do I always say chaos? If we, just to take this room here, if everybody’s minds here merged into one, which is what perennial philosophies, and most of the major religions are saying, “we’re all one”. What would it be like? It would be chaos, it means that I couldn’t tell the difference between your thoughts and my thoughts, my body and your body. You wouldn’t know the difference.
If you are able to make distinctions between yourself and another being, you are no longer one. Merging everything into one with no distinctions means chaos. Chaos is not a bad word, it has gotten a dirty name a little bit, associated with political chaos and other things like that. Now there is a new chaos theory, it is touching on what the ancient Daoists said, is that unity, that chaos is like a primordial soup, everything is blended together, and it hasn’t distinguished itself out yet, but all the ingredients are there that could emerge.
What are the ingredients in that primordial realm that could emerge? Yuan Qi, Yuan Shen and Yuan Jing. Original energy, original intelligence (the Shen), and Yuan Jing, the original essence or substance. So think of it as a cosmic egg, and the yolk or the whites are all mixed together in there, it hasn’t separated itself out, but the possibilities are there.
The mysteries of how this egg gets created, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Well here is the egg but it has the potential already for the full chicken inside of it. In a sense, they are both born at the same time: the potential for it to manifest…(end of tape).
This egg begins to crack open. Some times the egg is described as a gourd. Maybe you have seen drawings in Chinese art of this character with a big high forehead carrying a staff, and on that staff is hanging a gourd with two compartments in it, one smaller on top, and one larger. This is considered to be the elixir, primordial Yin and Yang, the gourd also represents a hollow state of emptiness, out of which this mysterious life force begins to create itself. A human being is a miniature gourd. The energies inside of you, the primordial aspects of Yin and Yang Qi are sitting in potential space inside us, and they are not moving, it is all chaos, very dark and obscure, but it is all one.
Then there is the sound of thunder, something cracks, some energy that is released and the egg cracks open and the gourd breaks open or whatever, and begins to birth itself. The Yin and the Yang energies begin to move and turn, and to exchange. They divide themselves out into eight primordial forces. The Yin and Yang divide three times, and each time they divide, I’ll show you later a diagram of the division process. The I Ching is the map of that process. This is a lot like mitosis, the cells dividing. You have the Wu Ji that becomes one, this original (yuan) thing that holds everything inside of it, and it divides itself into two, into Yin and Yang. Positive and negative separate out and birth from the unmixed neutral. As the egg cracks open, while it is still inside the egg, it begins to move and divides itself into three. The three things inside become distinct; they really are certain things. You have the positive force, and the negative force, and the original neutral force.
This is the most important principle in alchemy to understand, that there are always three forces in the life force, the positive, the negative and the neutral. Yin, Yang and Yuan: the Yuan means the neutral Qi, it is essentially neutral Qi before it has polarized itself into positive and negative. You can see this like the original parent, it gives birth to one male and one female, and this is of course on a cosmic energetic level. Now you have a charge, an attraction between the male and the female. Then they begin coupling, the Yin and Yang begin interacting, they actually begin to have sexual intercourse.
If you can imagine the cosmic being having self intercourse. It is good if you can imagine it because you will be doing a practice later on this week called self intercourse. You are going to be imitating what nature is doing, it is birthing itself, this universe doesn’t go hunting around for a partner, and say hey, lets get laid baby, lets have some baby universes: it does it right from within itself. It gives birth right from the center, and it births itself out. All birth happens from the center, and it births itself out. All births happen from the center, and manifests outwards: it is not like a stork dropping it down. just in case some of you didn’t know that.
So what happens? The Yang divides into extreme Yang, and mixed Yin and Yang, and the Yin divides into extreme Yin, and mixed Yin and Yang. This is what gives us five elements. You have the fire and the wood on the Yang side, and you have the metal and the water on the Yin side. Can you all see this chart?
This is just a progression energetically, to understand how the Qi divides itself out, and creates different levels and forces. That gives us four forces, they are polarized, and you have a fifth force that mediates and balances the other four. This is essential to understanding five-element theory, is that the Yuan Qi, is the central axis. It steps itself down, and here it embodies both the Yin and the Yang in one element.
That is what the job of the fifth element is to be, to harmonize Yin and Yang. In terms of your own body, that is the spleen and the stomach, it takes food in, and it distributes out nourishment and essences to all the other organs. That is why Earth is considered to be the most central, the stomach and the spleen. Essentially it is holding the space for the neutral Qi, the Yuan Qi, only it is no longer neutral here, it is balanced Yin and Yang which is holding a neutral field. What happens here, is that you have the five elements, the five phases, as most modern scholars are translating it. Elements make it sound like it is a thing, where they are really dynamic, they are like five intelligences: the Shen.
This first trinity that appears, also represents Jing Qi and Shen. We will go into that. They move through, and they divide out. The various energies now divide again. The fire divides, and you get heaven and fire, the water divides, and you get Earth and water. The wood divides, and you get wind and thunder. The metal divides, and you get lake and mountain. It gives you eight forces there, that is where the Yi Jing comes from, from the division of the original one. It keeps dividing itself, and on the manifest level, it becomes four and then it becomes eight, because there are eight forces there. Normally these are put in a circle, and the center point of this circle is this invisible element, which is still the Yuan Qi, it has no form or shape, it has no name because it is neutral, it doesn’t have any form. The other eight forces all have a particular shape to them. This will tell you, and help you to understand what is inside the Yi Jing.
Now you have five elements here, and you have the nine forces: eight manifest forces plus the invisible one. Again, this is why when you go to some culture, like the Hindu, or the Greek, and they say there are four elements. In the Hindu culture, the fifth element is called ether. In Greek terminology, it is called the quintessence, it is just invisible. The Chinese are unique in that they make it manifest, they say the Earth, the fifth force is manifest. The whole five element system is geared to alchemy, because this Earth is your cauldron, it is your center space where all the other elements, the Qi comes to complete itself, it is your Dantian.
The Chinese are making it very conscious, even in the physical plane, and saying that fifth element actually has a name, it has substance. The other ones don’t deal with it in the physical plane, they are only dealing with it in the etheric body, that fifth element. The Chinese track it all the way through. This is a key idea, because if you can’t manifest the etheric body into the physical plane, you are never going to develop the light body. The “light body” is essentially a way of saying you are not just light, you have some substance, some Jing/body. That is what we are trying to do here, is give some substance to the etheric.
In early heaven, there are eight trigrams, there are eight forces, and this is ruled by a different arrangement of energies than the outer ring, which is later heaven. Early heaven is the same thing as your pre-natal self. If you can imagine your spirit here, your spirit, when you are in the primordial space, you are all one, and then you decide “I want to create”, but in order to get into later heaven, which is the physical plane, I have to go through a period of gestation.
The same way as when you were a spirit inside your mothers tummy, and you were forming yourself, and you were not quite yet separate from your mother. You are in a process of individuating yourself but you haven’t done it yet: it totally depends upon her, and you are still in touch with your original spirit, your primordial self. This is a middle heaven, pre-natal heaven, it is an intermediate stage, where the energy of the spirit goes through, and then finally steps itself down into later heaven, which is the physical plane.
It is important to understand that these are all heavens, that this is heaven here, that you are in heaven. Heaven means you are created from original spirit, you are created by the Dao.This is not the creation of some evil force apart from it that said I’m going to stick you in a little body, and torture you, make you run out of money, make you hunt around for a partner, and you can’t find one so that you are all frustrated.
No, this is not the creation story here, everything here is all coming from the same force, whether you like it or not, whether you call it good or bad, or fun or not fun, it is all coming from the same source. It is all designed, it is just vibrating at different speeds. So they say that the energy of early heaven is ruled by heaven and Earth, as in the arrangements of the Yi Jing, one is the early heaven arrangement, one is the later heaven arrangement. They have an axis, they have a head and a tail. The head, three solid lines is heaven, and the axis, the tail is three broken lines. Just manifest again.
Everything is fine there, so the center of early heaven, to go back to the other chart here, the first arrangement, is still Yuan Qi, original Qi. It is sitting in the middle of early heaven, and even though you are halfway into form, starting to form yourself, you have distinct qualities or forces that are happening. The five elements are there, qualities or the five phases are there, the aspects of your intelligence that are starting to move and cycle, like seasons, only now it is happening cosmically, the cosmic mind is beginning to turn.
Everything is revolving around a neutral center, so they are balanced, this is symbolized by heaven and Earth, which are an exact mirror of each other: three solid lines and three broken lines. Fire and water, all these symbols, all the images, everything neutralizes it's opposite force, so there is no real conflict, even though you have all these opposites in perfect polarity, they are just dancing, moving easily.
So if you can just imagine that you are in the womb, in the prenatal state, and your mother is in a perfectly happy state, your mother being the Dao here, or primordial heaven. You are going to feel perfectly happy, you are not going to have any struggle, there is no fight, everything is in harmony. So when these eight forces shift, and they flip their arrangement, they go through a shift, they slow down their vibration into the physical plane what happens?
This is the key to understanding where all of our problems come from. As you shift into later heaven, you can say the center is still original Jing, Qi and Shen, the original trinity that is there in primordial heaven, that is still there inside everything here, still generating and birthing out through the early heaven phase, but now that center is a little more distant, in fact, it is unconscious. You can’t quite remember how you got here, you can’t remember the pathway in, that is very unconscious, and now the head and the tail are ruled by the trigrams fire and water.
Fire and water is symbolized by these patterns here, Yang, Yin, Yang, and Yin Yang Yin. They mirror each other also, but they are not pure, there is a hidden force inside each one of them, so there is the possibility for conflict. The other trigrams don’t mirror each other, even though the fire and water more or less hold that axis stable, fire and water are inherently volatile, and the other trigrams no longer perfectly mirror each other, so you have these cycles now happening, but you don’t have perfect harmony and balance.
NATURE OF YUAN QI (ORIGINAL BREATH)
The easiest way to understand this is the amount of Yuan Qi, or original Qi in heaven, when everything is unified. The Jing, Qi and Shen are all connected and unified, in that primordial chaos unity – it is 100% original Qi, 100% neutral force. As it births itself out, into a gestational, early heaven, a lot of the energy goes into the eight forces, and only about 50% original Qi in the middle. So the amount of neutral force is already reduced, but the polarity of the eight forces, the other 50% of the qi field is already balanced, so it is no problem. It is still functioning as a whole, everything is communicating, everything is in harmony. When it divides again, and shifts out to the physical in later heaven, you have about 90% polarity Yin and Yang force, and only 10% neutral force. These percentages I am assigning arbitrarily, but they reflect Daoist numerology.
So the neutral force has been weakened in the physical plane. It seems that in order to have physical matter, you have to have mostly polarized energy: you have to have hot and cold, hard and soft, all these things that define matter, they have to be very extreme, and slow down in vibration so you can see what is hard, and what is soft, what is male and what is female. So the energy has to be more polarized. Probably if you just had a 50/40 split on the Yang and Yin, with ten percent more Yang to keep that Yin from getting stuck, the Yin here is not a negative term, it just holds stable. The numbers 4 and 5 tend to equate with Yin and Yang: odd numbers are Yang, even numbers are Yin, together that gives you the number 9 which is considered to be the number of creation. The number 10, the other 10%, made up of original Qi is what is really causing the wheels of creation to turn here, it is dividing itself out and feeding into the Yin and Yang.
The problem comes about on the human level. If you took the humans off this planet, you would be sailing along, the animals would be eating the grass, and eating each other, but it would all be in harmony, and they would be keeping each other in balance. it went on this way for quite a long time, and there was no problem. This planet was never on the brink of extinction because of the animals, other than the human animals. They never took the earth out of balance: it's not as if plants overgrew the place, and were going to choke the place to death, there is no planetary genocide going on because of the plants. The problem comes with the humans, and how did that problem start?
If you can imagine that in the early heaven stage, there is already some type of human consciousness that is forming there, we’ll say still in an etheric body, it hasn’t gotten to the physical stage yet. At that stage, it is androgynous, it hasn’t divided itself into male and female. Androgynous means you are actually cloning yourself, you can birth yourself again. You don’t die, you are actually immortal, you can birth yourself, if you get tired of that form or that shape, you can say I’ll just birth a new me, and you draw on that Yuan Qi, the original Qi, and you pull it through by the natural coupling of your inner male and inner female aspects. If you are androgynous, you can have sex internally, and boom, here I’ve refreshed my essence, my substance, and I’ve just birthed a new form. There is nobody to argue with you, there is nobody to fight with you, there is no hunting around for a partner, and there is no rent to pay, so it is very easy.
When you shift into the physical plane, something very different happens, there was an experiment you could say, that is still going on, you flip this androgynous prototype of a human being into a male and female physical form. In the process of splitting those two, the Yuan Qi, as you separate out the male and female aspects, the Yin and Yang aspects, the binding force of the Yuan Qi, the original Qi, the neutral force, gets dispersed.
It means that males and females are born with maybe only one percent Yuan Qi instead of ten percent, that makes it even harder to communicate with this original self which is one hundred percent Yuan Qi. Now you are stepped down so you have only one percent of your original self, and you have 99% polarity, and you are walking around saying I’m totally a man, I’m for all the men, or I’m a woman, I’m on the woman’s side: they are from Mars, I’m from Venus. Heard that one? That’s how that rumor got started, so the polarities got more extreme, and as they get more extreme, they get harder to manage.
There is no fault here, there is no blame, it is not as if you or I caused this. It is just in a process of dividing itself out, and experimenting: lets download some more of higher intelligence into the physical plane, maybe into a monkey body, to a lemur. That is the first monkey, that is where you get the Lemurian race from; injecting higher consciousness, stellar consciousness into an animal form. The first monkey couldn’t handle it and died, eventually they got it in there, but at a price, because the energies were so polarized that they started to feel separated from it's original self.
There is still a pathway there, all the ingredients are still inside, you have this Yin Qi, the Yang Qi and the original Qi, but mostly you have this Yin and Yang Qi. You are getting very polarized, and very easy then if you evolve over the next couple hundred thousand years, or a million years, or however long it took, it is very easy to form judgments, it is very easy to hate something apart from yourself, and not recognize it as yourself, even though it is coming from the same original heaven because you are so polarized, you don’t remember. It is very easy to have conflicts internally because these energies inside you are not in harmony.
The five elements, the five phases that we talked about earlier, they are all functioning in you but at a reduced level of awareness. So everything gets stepped down: it is still there, you are still a microcosm of everything. All the ingredients of the universe, that are birthing the universe, everything is coming from the same original heaven. Some of it is going out into stars and heaven, some of it is going into plants and rocks, and some of it is going into us.
That is why animals have essentially the same genetic code as us, we are coming from the same source. I think some of you know, and have read in the papers, is that difference genetically between a mouse and human beings is 3% difference in the gene code, the difference between a monkey and a human is 1.3%: those are just the patterns of Jing. The DNA is just the printout, the intelligence, different levels of intelligence, of connection to the Shen, the spirit, we have a greater connection.
KAN & LI AS ENERGETIC EQUIVALENT OF “OPPOSABLE THUMB”
You have heard of human beings having the opposable thumb, have you heard of that? Everybody here have one? Just check it out, and see what it is. That should grasp tools right? Is that why you are so smart and so advanced, and able to build atomic bombs, and blow yourself up? No. That is only one small aspect, and that is a physical aspect. You have an opposable mind, you have the ability to grasp with the Yin and Yang aspects, the left and right brain. The Yin and Yang Shen, the spirits within you are able to grasp something else with their polarity, a third force.
That is why you are so smart. It is not just because you can manipulate tools. Monkeys have opposable thumbs, too. But we higher human monkeys are able to manipulate energies, and concepts, and feelings, and change them around again, again and again until you get tired of that toy, and then get another one. It is just like the opposable thumb, only it is happening on a psychic and spiritual level, it is highly polarized.
But even in that polarity, you can grasp what the opposing sides of your brain, what the inner male and inner female are seeking. what is it you most deeply want to grasp? Simply put, you seek a return to your original self. You are grasping other things, thinking they will complete your energy, and eventually they may. If you are a male, you grasp for the female, if you are hungry, you grasp for food if you are hot, you grasp for hot, if you are hot, you grasp for cold.
You are always trying to find something else, and you are interested in finding something in the middle. You are not trying to get too cold, or too hot, you are trying to get it just right. You don’t want too much of women or too much of men, you will get sick of them, they are different from you. You want just as much of them as you want, just enough to satisfy yourself, just enough to bring yourself to that right spot.
This is all a gifted memory of your trying to grasp your original Qi. That is your original self. So the function of alchemy is to help you speed up that process. Alchemy takes who you are, divides it out into three forces, recombines it and presto, it purifies it and you have some more Yuan Qi, Yuan Shen or Yuan Jing. There are specific stages for each of those. That is all it is.
The reason for wanting to grasp that, the reason for doing alchemy is because of this cosmology, because we have lost our connection to that original spark. It is still inside of us, but it is buried, it is like a deep unconscious witness. We know there is somebody in there watching as wee go through all these phases in our life, all these different personality changes, from a baby, a little toddler body to a young hormones on feet teenager body, to an alien elderly body, there is still one witness watching all of these things, and remembering all these things, and holding all of these things inside, and that is your original self. Just the fact that you can witness it is not enough. You want it to become actively present, and when it becomes actively present, you retain your health, you retain your choice, and you can participate in creating your reality.
DOES “SELF” CREATE OR MERELY SHAPE OUR REALITY?
This new age slogan where you can create your own reality is misinterpreted to mean that your ego self can create it's own reality. But that is not what you want, that is the problem. The problem is that your fragmented self is creating it's own reality, and that reality is a mess, it is not in balance, it is not embracing all the forces, it is not connected to all the heavens.
Now the other thing to understand about this cosmology is that heaven is not above your head up in the stars, it is right inside your body. There are many different sects, but starting about 2nd century AD there began a process of temple institutionalized Daoism. But there has always co-existed a daoist hermit tradition, many were just mountain Daoists sitting up there, doing their thing, which was often inner alchemy, in a hut or cave.
That is where this tradition of One Cloud (and Healing Tao) comes from, from the mountain Daoists. The temple Daoists are creating gods and deities and statues inside temples that were approved by the Emperor, and all these other more standard religious things. They are all basically mythologizing the daoist cosmology: they have the three pure ones, they give it some human and cultural forms, but it is essentially the same cosmology. These heavens are not outside of yourself in the temple or in the sky above, they are inside your body-mind micro-cosmos.
The whole function of alchemy is to start opening up the layers, and to harmonize the later heaven layer, the physical body, and the flow of Qi in the physical body. Then take that in one layer, back to your early heaven body, it is just a different kind of energy, and then from there, eventually you get back to the primordial heaven, the chaos (hundun) from which you are creating yourself. There is no where to go, there is nothing to transcend, you are not going to stop creating yourself even if you arrive back in early heaven or in primordial heaven, it doesn’t mean creation stops.
This other diagram here shows the line of creation, from origin to creation, and from creation back to origin. You are just constantly cycling back and forth. It is not that you are really creating the universe from scratch in each moment; you are just reshaping the energy field that’s here. That is pulsing back and forth, it happens so fast that you don’t see it, you are dissolving back into the source in each moment, and in each moment, you are birthing it back out, only it is slightly different.
In that moment, you scratched your nose, your blood flowed, you had a thought, a feeling: this is what allows you to change, the fact that the universe is rebirthing itself, and reorganizing itself, according to your will. I want to blow my nose, I want to scratch, I’m doing higher math, it doesn’t matter, it is just how you are reshaping the Qi field. So this way you can begin to understand that the spirit shapes the energy, and the energy becomes form, and there you got it, in that moment, that is what your body is like. That is the shape of your physical reality, the whole thing dissolves, and it goes back in, back inside you, then it comes back out again, in the next nanosecond, back out and allowing you to have a slightly different change in yourself.
This cycle of moving between creation and origin, also has a macrocosmic cycle, where it seems like you are born in one moment, and you go through so many decades of life and then you check out and you go back. But during that whole time, you are still doing the same thing, there is a vibration moving back and forth, so it not like your spirit left you when you got born, and then when you die, you go back to the spirit realm. This is just complete ignorance, to think that your spirit suddenly left when you got born, and now you are not in the spiritual realm, and now you in some physical realm. The spirit is still here, but you are distracted by the intensity of physicality, all the elements are still here.
So the purpose of this kan and li meditation is to start getting you to say hey, how do I take these things back down, from the patterns of the eight cosmic forces dancing around here, and the ninth force of the yuan qi in the center almost invisible, and unconscious. How do I start to gather those forces back down to the physical self, consciously?
This is what the eight extraordinary channels, as well as the fusion of the five elements is about. It’s about learning how to manage the eight channels: the arm and leg channels, the thrusting channels, the belt channel, the front and back channel. Who is managing it? The five Shen, the spirits of your heart, liver, lungs, spleen and kidneys. When those spirits get back together, and they are managing the Qi, and they take it back to the next level, back to the level of three, and the three divides, and it becomes five, and the five divides, and it becomes nine. That is all it is doing, alchemy is retracing that consciously. How do you gather yourself into a level of three instead of having it polarized out into five different aspects, and five elements, I want to go down into a deeper dimension, and a deeper heaven, and that is how you do it.
CROSSING THE MESH BOUNDARY BETWEEN BODY AND SPIRIT
Just think of it as if you had kind of a coarse membrane. On one side of it is the physical plane, and here is this coarse membrane, and then on the other side is early heaven, the formless self. You have form there, but you can’t see it, it is not solid right? If you had to go from this side of this membrane to that side, to get through that membrane, it is a kind of a fine mesh, but you have to get your particle size down, the consciousness to a certain vibrational speed, a certain fineness of vibration so that you can fit through the mesh, otherwise it acts as a boundary, and you get up against it and you go I can’t go there.
So we are all temporarily “stuck” in the physical plane.But if you raised your vibration, you could easily penetrate the formless inner plane, have an experience, as the other part of yourself that is there already, and maybe you can look back and say oh, that’s what my physical self looks like from this side of the mesh, isn’t that interesting, I thought I was stuck over there, but part of my consciousness is over here looking in. Then you could shift it back here, and you could play through that boundary.
To get through the boundary is the challenge. If you have a big ego, like the chunk of a rock, it just doesn’t go through. You have dissolve those energy patterns, get them back to a little finer vibrations, and then they move right through. The same thing with your body. Your body starts getting a certain imbalance. In certain elements you are weak, for whatever reason: you weren’t born with enough wood element, or you have too much fire, you had this or that, or you were in an environment that was excessive, and there was this cold, cold climate, and you had cold parents, or whatever it was, and this whacked you out, and you have weak organs as an expression of that, of your Qi field. What happens is because you can’t get your Qi field into balance, you might have certain faculties very highly developed to break through that mesh, but the other parts are stuck here.
That is another way that the Chinese would draw a distinction between enlightenment and immortality: with enlightenment you can look through the mesh with part of yourself, maybe part of you can go through it and look around. With immortality, you are actually integrating all of yourself so you can go through that mesh, through that boundary, but you have to give up your fear, causing a contraction in big chunks of your psyche, ego chunks, and keeping your body vibrating at a slower speed. If you want to resonate with this heaven only, and it doesn’t want to believe that it is also connected in to this other level of your self.
So that is all it really is: this is a very simple process of gathering in all the aspects of your psyche, and saying hey, I want to assert my self out into Yin and Yang aspects, that means inner male and inner female aspects, and I want the male and the female that are naturally attracted to each other to couple, I want them to make love. In the process you may give birth to more original Qi, between your core Yin and Yang coupled, that is what happens. They tend to birth Yuan Qi, and then the vibration, that expands the space between the molecules, that dissolves the rigidity of the ego, and now you are able to move through the mesh, now you are able to actually see and communicate with the subtle parts of yourself, the formless parts of your mind. They are here all along, they are inside you right now, but you are not communicating with them because you are vibrating so slowly that that part of you seems like a foreign planet.
This process, starts off with the lesser Kan and Li right inside your own body, because if you can get it right here, then you can stand out and you can start to do the same thing in the macrocosm. That is the greater Kan and Li, you start going inside all the forces out there, and you start coupling areas, and dissolving the blockages there, and opening communication. Then you go to the planets, that is the greatest Kan and Li, and you start communicating with parts of yourself that are still parts of the planetary level.
When you came in, and you birthed yourself, and you stepped yourself down, it is like you passed through all these levels, and you just left a part of you, you parked a part of your consciousness there, part of it in the sun and moon, part of it in the planets, some of it up in the stars. When you started stepping yourself down, a big hunk of it in the Earth, that is the really unconscious piece, and then you finally stepped yourself into human form, coming in at the right moment, invited by your parents. But your consciousness had to step itself all the way down.
All these formulas are doing is tracking yourself back up, stage by stage, and reunifying this individual consciousness with each level of consciousness, and seeing that the same patterns are there. The consciousness of the planets, like Earth, or any of the other planets in the sky, sun and moon, they all must follow the same laws of the life force that human beings must follow, there is only one Qi field, it has the same principles.
It is all organized around expanding and contracting, and stabilizing, Yin, Yang and Yuan: those three forces are operating on the planetary level, the galactic level, and they are operating at the human level, so you can understand what is inside yourself, if you can talk to yourself in this language of the life force, yo
