Compilation of Winn Forum posts on Free Will, Neidan vs. Chan, 5 Shen vs. Original Shen, Binary Soul, Taoist cosmology

NEW NOTE: This is a re-post of an earlier post. The earlier thread has been deleted, at request of the poster, who asked for a minor modification. The WINN material is EXACTLY the same at the earlier post. The thread of 15 responses have been re-posted in a single post following this one.

ORIGINAL note: thanks to jerome for this lengthy compilation of Forum discussions on esoteric topics that are generally NOT written about. I plan to edit some of this material down for use as essays or book material (after I finish Primordial book and Atlantean Shape Power books!). -Michael

>Taoists use different methods to accomplish the same thing- their success or failure depends on allowing this process to happen naturally instead of forcing it.There is a difference between looking within your body and observing energy sensations AS THEY ARE and WHAT YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BE.

>Human mind is the key on any spiritual path. The moment it perceives any combination of 5 elements through your 5 senses and attaches an emotional response to it, you create karma. If you don’t stop this process, all your spiritual practices will have only a limited effect- just like cutting the weed without removing its root.

All of the excellent discussion about shen theory in this and the earlier thread are dancing around a hidden center of gravity without actually naming it. I will name it. It’s called Free Will.

Compilation of Winn Forum posts on Free Will, Neidan vs. Chan, 5 Shen vs. Original Shen,C in this and the earlier thread are dancing around a hidden center of gravity without actually naming it. I will name it. It’s called Free Will.

Free Will notion arises from the idea that the primordial, undifferentiated being had the WILL to polarize itself (yin-yang octaves) and then began playing with these polarities in five phase cycles/harmonics/tones.

So that whatever got created in this process also has a tiny piece of that original free will. Including humans, that by design (as things evolved, and challenges arose) got a pretty high degree of free will given to them.

The five shen are sometimes called the Five Wills. They simply represent microcosmically the relationship between original will (here Original Shen) and its manifesting process (here Five Shen).

I think Max gave a good overview of the process, but drew the wrong conclusion.
Possibly because he’s influenced by a tradition that thinks the self is illusory and thus how could it have any free will?

This is not too different from schools that all Will and thus all action is taken by God, thus human salvation relies on giving up your individual will and surrendering it to God. The belief blurs the simlultaneous co-existence of Original Will and its manifest forms expressed within the 10,000 things. There is not a conflict between the two; there is a process.

“Allowing” something naturally and “Responding actively” to an energetic sensation are both acts of free will, one is yin, the other is yang. Responding to an emotion does create karma. Karma just means action. So yes, response is an action to another action.

Nothing wrong with action – taking action is an essential aspect of free will. If we cannot take action, we don’t feel free. All outer action is preceded by inner action, which could also be called imagination – the activity of the five shen together creating a reality as an act of personal will. A perfect reflection of the action of the greater (cosmic) self in creating the reality in which it can also microcosmically act.

Inner Alchemy simply trains one to take action on higher levels of the chain of “self”, from lesser personal self to greater cosmic self to original self. To take higher action, one has to integrate the lesser 5 wills and act in a unified and harmonic manner. That brings one into closer allignment with Original Will and leads to greater trust.

When greater trust exists, more chi is released to flow into the lesse levels of self, and thus more power to exercise more free will. “Spiritual immortality” is simply a way to conceptualize/describe this process of developing responsible individual will that is allowed to exercise its creative imagination in more dimensions.l

When you birth a child, you hope the child will love you, and you encourage that response, that the child will acknowledge the love (yi, creative imagination/personal will needed to create another being) and sacrifice (giving of one’s sperm/egg) in order to birth. But you also know that you cannot force the child to love you, otherwise its mechanical (unwilled) expression of love would be meaningless.

The question, do the 5 shen have any reality? is really asking, does any level of the cosmic process have a reality? Or the underlying question really is, what can we say about that “reality” that would deepen our experience of it?

Of course, an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory.

But perhaps still useful to have “dry runs” here in mental/cyberspace.

A “reality” implies a center of perspective, which requires a center of gravity to hold together the process (yin-yang and 5 phase); so gravity defines a sense of self. Any “reality” thus is held together by gravity.

Is gravity real? This is the greatest mystery of both physics and metaphysics – we know its real, but its source is elusive.

The embracing of Earth’s physical gravity (starting with lower dantian) and Heaven’s spiritual gravity (beginning with upper dantian) will eventually awaken the true center of gravity of Humanity (middle dantian).

These are the Three Ones, the trinitarian processs inseparable from the Original One which mysteriously arose from the Supreme Mystery, wuji.

Lovely how every small question leads back to the same mystery.

michael

Nothing wrong with action – taking action is an essential aspect of free will. If we cannot take action, we don’t feel free. All outer action is preceded by inner action, which could also be called imagination – the activity of the five shen together creating a reality as an act of personal will. A perfect reflection of the action of the greater (cosmic) self in creating the reality in which it can also microcosmically act.
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How is “activity of the five shen creating a reality” an act of free will? Who’s free will?

— You are not a puppet, there is no God outside of you creating your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. You self-create. You missed what I wrote. Let me say it a different way: There is only ONE will that exists, but it has many ways of experiencing and shaping itself, ranging from Original Will to Collective Will to Individual Will. All wills co-exist simultaneously and influence each other, as they have common origin. Your perspective on will depends on your level of cultivation.
—–

When greater trust exists, more chi is released to flow into the lesser levels of self, and thus more power to exercise more free will. “Spiritual immortality” is simply a way to conceptualize/describe this process of developing responsible individual will that is allowed to exercise its creative imagination in more dimensions.
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Is the followong another way of saying this, “Individual will attunes to the cosmic self/creation/intelligence”, so attunning is an alchemical process, and as you mentioned the taoists have lots of ways to attune?
——

—-Attuning can only happen by resonant rapport (in chinese, gan ying). It is the fundamental principle of how the life force works. It is an alchemical process if you are using the principles of the life force to guide your process, to resolve apparent differences and bring out deeper truth and give it greater substance.

************************
Special and important question!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The question, do the 5 shen have any reality? is really asking, does any level of the cosmic process have a reality? Or the underlying question really is, what can we say about that “reality” that would deepen our experience of it?
*********************
Ssome taoist literature seems to imply the five shen can scatter at death, implying they are not really you/self???

— false conclusion. 5 shen are the awareness PROCESS of your local human self, a process that is by definition cyclical and thus temporary in form. Its illusion to consider the physical self permanent, but also illusion to consider the process illusory. the Process is REAL.

Are the five shen inseparable from the individual self?

— they are one set of parameters to define the individual self, give it boundary and direction and body. but that doesn’t make them separate from the collective or original self.

At death does the individual self split too?

—vague question. split from what? probable answer: you shift to other levels of self, there is no “split”. The “individual self” is just a mini-collective mirror, and at death it gets recycled to the macro-collective self.

If the five shen scatter into the collective, what happens to the individual self?

— depends on its level of integration and free will attained. If shen and jing have not integrated in the alchemical marriage on earth, they will not stay integrated in heaven. As above, so below. and vice versa. Its why alchemy stresses so strongly creating a vessel – the integration of jing, chi, and shen – while still in a body. You have greater free will in a body than in the sea of spirits.
That’s why spirits come to earth – to learn to manage free will. You have a mission/destiny to complete; completion brings integration.

Opponents of Free Will comes from those aspects in heaven and earth that believe in Celestial Hierarchy, rule from above, and granting of power to individuals below who serve the Hierarchy.

They hate free will, and offer power to tempt many from the Right Use of Free Will in order to prove it is a failure, that it results in chaos and war and violence.

If that sounds like a religion/priest hood/political structure you know….time to wake up.

…and use your free will to smell the roses and embrace the unique freedom you have to live in harmony and balance with the whole, to love it without being controlled by any level of it. Your free will comes from Origiinal Being, and cannot be taken away by any Deity or Power structure on earth or in heaven.

That is my interpreatation and experience of the spiritual freedom offered by realization of the Tao.

Michael
ROUND 2
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-03 10:40:58
Remote IP: 216.110.116.38
Message
Fajin: Therefore, we must transform the personality. Then, we integrate this ego with original spirit, do we not? Maybe now we understand each other better.
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Bagua: When we attune to our center, personality follows, the five shen follow, all aspects follow, cultivating this center is the transformation process, if you chase each emotion, it will never end.
———————

The above exchange is I think a good leverage point for entering fresh viewpoint into this discussion.
Basically, I perceive fajin using the language and perspective of the Daoists, and Bagua the perspective of Chan Buddhists. We know where I stand in general on their respective use of language, but I will try to reframe it in the light of this discussion.

A few preliminaries:

1. While it might seem “intellectual” to have such a detailed Daoist map of the workings of hte body-mind,
the terminology was developed by the Daoists over millenia for a good reason: to be more skillful and profound in understanding the workings of humanity in its relation to Heaven and Earth. Such compelxity is fundamental to the practice of Chinese medicine – which has even more categories, because you NEED them to describe the variety of human phenomena. And the innumerable applications of this language – to medicine, martial arts, city planning, feng shui, astrology, etc. etc. arise because of the precision of the language. In short, the Daoist language empowers functonality.

The higher practices get simpler because you are dealng with core issues, the beginning practices (One Cloud’s First Formula) are complex because you are dealing with a vast complex of manifestation. Let’s not confuse the two, but see their continuity as Many and the One needing each other.

2. My experience in China in dealing with both Chan and Daoists – is summed up by a Completee Perfection Daoist monk I met in Weibaoshan on my last trip (Yunnan province):

Winn: Why did you become a daoist monk?

Monk: I was a Chan monk at first for 3 years. But my heart yearned to express it self through music. And I wanted to study astrology. Both were forbidden by the Chan Buddhists as creating attachment. So I became a Daoist monk. Here I was taught to use music and astrology to express my soul and cultivate myself.
———
My take on the two paths – and why I do NOT think they are the same, even though some of their techniqeus overlap:

I believe that other than seeking the path of asceticism, most westerners prefer the Daoist approach to fulfilling their life. If the premise of Chan is that you have to give up everything that your soul wants, you get a world full of philistines that might be simpler, but its would be far more boring and ugly – and ultimately less enlightened. Basically, Chan argument is that all human accomplishment, artistic genius, etc. is a deluded string of attachments.

Its the extremes that teach wisdom and allow for true completion. The soul has desires that it expresses through the personality – without desire, its impossible to complete one’s mission/soul purpose.

Wihtout completing desire, you leave empty handed, mission aborted. False or “Empty” Enlightenment.

Chan likely response: soul must be deluded also, soul desire is part of its karma to be worked out.

My response: If soul is created by Original Spirit, then Original Spirit must also be deluded.

Possible Chan response: that’s why even the notion of Self implied by Original Spirit is also false.

My response: seems like the Life Force is going to an awful of trouble to create all these illusions.
Are you saying the Life Force itself is not expressing its free will – ie its innate desire – in creating the illusion of self?
—————-

2. These precise alchemical terminologies are found in the earliest Daoist texts such as the Nei Ye (Manual for Internal Training), which precedes the Daodejing., and already quoted in earlier posting on this board. Lao tzu refers to the po soul and the ling, the vessel which holds the heart-mind, xin. So let’s not get into a historical quibble about what the real Daoism is; it is a big river with many tributaries, all fed by the same waters.

3. The crux of the ego discussion:
” When we attune to our center, personality follows” sums up Bagua’s position.

WHO is the “we” that is attuning to the center, if it is not the xin-heart-mind/personality?

If its the Yuan Shen attuning to its own center, how did Original Spirit lose its attunement?
If it got distracted and is no longer attuned to the center, sounds to me like it is no longer Original Spirit.

Bagua’s statement implies one of three things:

1. that the Yuan Shen is not always attuned,

2. OR that it is the personality that must do the attuning.
In this case, it requires a transformative shift, a catalyst, to move from its state of distractedness and confusion t one of attunement to the center.

The “letting go” initial technique of the Daoists – later absorbed into Chan in my reading of history – is one possible catalyst for change, a yin method. But doesn’t change the nature of the transformative dynamic, i.e. the five shen that comprise the heart-mind are agreeing for whatever reason to focus inwardly on their root.

In this case, the five shen haven’t actually been truly “let go” – they just changed (=transformed) their behavior/perceptual process). We know this is true because the five senses continue to operate during and after sitting in “letting go” meditation. We know from sleep studies that the five senses/shen continue to record everything even while they are apparently “not functioning’ in the outer world. They are merely undergong transformation in the inner world, according to daoist dream theory.

3. OR that there is some other agent, not yet described, which is doing the attuning to center.

Love to hear your response on this point, bagua. Your position is very Chinese, by the way – let’s integrate the Three Ways, Dao, Chan, and Confucius. Can’t have any disagreement in the family…..

I have much more to say about the structure and function of ego, but not much point until we clear this up this mystery of WHO is attuning to the center.

Michael
Round 3: EGO/SELF & MEMORY IN LIFE FORCE PROCESS (long essay)
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-11 12:23:43
Remote IP: 66.32.103.120
Message
Thanks both to Bagua and Fajin for continuing an enlightened discussion in round 2. I was travelling.

My impression is that Bagua is really more a Daoist who prefers simplicity of early Taoist meditation techniques than he is interested in the underlying cosmological assumptions of Chan Buddhism.

He alludes to master Ni’s Five Clouds meditation. Ni studied in the Tientai school of mixed daoism-chan, but seems like he in the end favors the Taoist approach, and is a big advocate of all the complex spiritual sciences that bagua is questioning. I wonder if Bagua could comment on which school of Chan he favors, and if any of them do allow or encourage the study of astrology, feng shui, music, or medicine.

I think Bagua’s question to Fajin as to whether he has met any immortals is a clever debate tactic, and one I myself might use in reality-checking some else’s spiritual claims. But I also know that its a bit unfair in that the question doesn’t disprove Fajin’s clear resonance with the presence of immortals, or his possible soul remembrance of them. Youth has it own direct clarity and wisdom – that’s why we all hug babies, to get a fresh taste of pre-natal chi still flowing thru them, even if the baby can’t identify it as such or prove where it came from.

So I will supplement Fajin’s answer to that Question from Bagua – yes, I’ve had direct, uninvited experience of beings that shifted dimensions and entered my physical reality and demonstrated that they had the power to concentrate the life force and project that power into my body for purposes of accelerating my spiritual growth. It was central in shifting me from my kundalini yoga path into the Tao/Dao path. Numerous other experiences have confirmed my trust in their alchemical process and in the claims made by ancients about their existence.

I hope my essay below about Dao and Chan approach can be useful to illuminate the Daoist emphasis on life as PROCESS based on principles of the Life Force (chi field), that cultivates equally both outer life (destiny) and inner life (essence).

I identify potential problems of excess focus on inner essence only, or core without the arms and legs to support our outer destiny.

This excess focus on core could happen to any Dao or Chan practitioner, and I am in no way insinuating that Bagua’s personal practice is an illustration of this imbalance.

Rather I am using the discussion to posit the principle that 2 arms = 2 legs + core = five phases and yin-yang theory embodied = fundamental prinicple behind Dao science of inner alchemy. I think its a pretty simple and effective process, and safe the way I practice it. I also think its possibly risky and counter-productive to eliminate the arms and legs (whether physical limbs or as metaphor for the five senses) to prematurely dissolve into the core only.

Its premature to permanently seek to dissolve into the core if you haven’t learned how to extend your Energy Body’s limbs/senses in the inner planes, i.e. activated your inner will, in the inner planes.

————————————
Preliminary note:

How can I know my words below are illuminating the truth?

Because of an omen.

I went to sleep early last night, thinking about the question posed earlier on the forum – Who is attuning to the Center? I had been traveling, and hadn’t had time to post a further response. There was some new energy pressing on me, and dream practice seemed to be the correct response.

Early this morning, I “awoke” from unconscious sleep and entered in a lucid dream. I was interacting with two characters in that dream (details too lengthy to go into). The characters were strangers occupying my dream space, and wouldn’t leave. Not malevolent, just insistent that they had the right to occupy that same dream space. I took them as some aspect of the collective consciousness that had bled into my personal/ego space – but weren’t really adding much to my reality other than to awaken me to the fact that my boundaries had changed.

I realized, in the lucid dream, that I would have to re-dream that space if I wanted greater freedom. I was lying on my “dream couch” in the living room, with a cathedral ceiling overhead. Exactly at that moment of realization, about 4 am this morning – stil pitch black, the lights came on – literally. The over head light in the room, which can only be turned on by a remote control tucked in drawer and rarely used, was suddenly turned on, glaring over me at full brightness.

It took me a minute to realize that this light was not an event in the lucid dream, but a response, an omen, expressed in the physical plane. Only after I opened my eyes and saw the physical light was staying on did I get “the joke” – that shifting my dream reality had shifted my physical reality, to a reality with greater illumination.

Note: I did chastise my shen for being so literal in their omens….

——————————————

It is my perception that most Chan schools are focused on reaching a STATE of enlightenment, in which the limited ego self of physical plane can now function as a virtuous bodhisattava or perhaps emulate the Buddha himself (although I still haven’t had any Buddhist explain to me if Buddha is a state or deity, if its human, trans-human or neither, or a code word for something else).

But from my understanding, the ultimate goal of all functioning in that Buddhist state of enlightenment is to help other human egos get off the wheel of incarnation, i.e. GET OUT OF THE PHYSICAL PROCESS OF INCARNATION. If there is a chan Buddhist group that does NOT adhere to this goal, I would like to hear about it and know what their goal is. We cannot discuss the merits of any path unless we lay our cards on the table as to its intentions.

This desire to get off the wheel of incarnation is why, in my view, Chan Buddhists have seized upon the early Taoist TECHNIQUE of “Sitting in Forgetfulness” or “letting go” or “emptying the xin/heart-mind” and employ it to reach their goal. It’s simple to learn, thus can be taught to the masses (at that time, simple peasants). And its effective in relieving the stress of the post-natal mind. It s a kind of “unpointed” one-pointedness.

It’s one-pointedness is analogous to the TM techniques that spread like wildfire to millions in the 60’s and 70’s – just chant this one word, and you will transcend. Deepak Chopra left TM (why give maharishi the royalties?) and carried the baton to higher levels in the 80’s and 90’s and today. It’s the lure of any one-pointed technique: get on this ONE horse and ride it all the way to the Transcendent End. Don’t bother your mind with any other complication, you will end up lost in a side alley.

Of course, 40 years later, there are only a few thousand of hard core TM riding that One horse, and numerous other techniques (backup horses?) got added as it became the apparent that one mantra, assigned on basis of your birthdate, didn’t do everything. And like Chan, TM largely avoids or glosses over or minimalizes the issue of sex (“it is a temporary distraction that will fall away once you are living in the Primordial/neutral”). But the sex issue often drives followers to hop off that one horse and try others. Ah, sex – the fly in the ointment of all the religious paths.

The Chan position was perhaps best summed up by Ken Cohen, who in his Way of Qigong book quotes one of his teachers as saying in effect, “If the transformations are jing to chi to shen to wu, why not take a shortcut and just skip the first three and focus on Emptiness only?” (note: this is Buddhist translation of wu; I define it as “not known” rather than “emptiness”). Ken’s first Tao teacher, the famous and loquacious Alan Watts, was, by the way, really a Chan Buddhist – he hated alchemical Taoism. I wonder if a little alchemical practice might have helped Watt’s alcoholism, which apparently contributed to his early death.

I believe this shortcut issue is the heart of the question in this debate between paths of Dao and Chan and the efficacy of their methods. It underlies the question of what is Ego in Daoism? In posing the question, we are westernizing the discussion, to make these paths relevant in our language.

Ego is the term Freud used to describe the individual self (to be distinguished from egotistical/neurotic, negative or dysfuncitonal behavior of the ego). We should also be asking, “What is ego in Chan?”, to balance out the question “What is ego in Daoism?”, but I leave that for Max…

The Daoist viewpoint is NOT state-oriented, it is process oriented. There are not fixed states, the chi is always flowing and changing, even the yuan chi is constantly transforming itself back into yin-yang forces. Spiritual Immortality is the highest level of this process for a human. It means you have achieved a greater freedom to shift between jing-chi-shen-wu phases of creation in multiple dimensions as you embody the Life Force’s process. And what exactly is that process?

I note two major attributes of the Life Force, which we will then examine relative to Ego.

1. Life Force is continuously CREATIVE. Just as Tao divides into Heaven and Eartth, Yuan chi divides into streams of yin-yang chi, which copulate to birth the 10,000 things. In linear time we humans witness this as birth-death-rebirth-death-rebirth-death-rebirth, etc.

2. Life Force REMEMBERS EVERY EXPERIENCE. It is the cosmic memory bank. In Indian tradition this function was popularized as the Akashic Record. This function of life force is often overlooked by cultivators – and thus causes mis-understanding of the functioning of ego/self, which is essential to memory.

The Life Force process according to Daoism flows continuously between three major states, described historically using different terms.
Here I choose three terms derived from the Greek:

1. Proto-cosmos (primordial/original unified nature)
2. Macro-cosmos (larger field of nature)
3. Micro-cosmos (any subset of Macro, such as a human being, that mirrors the larger process).

So under this theory, ego/self is microcosm of the whole, containing inside it the essence of the protocosm and the macrocosm.

What happens if you “let go” of every experience of the ego-self? I.e. if you are successful at the method of forgetting the self, of “letting go” of every thought, feeling, and sensation, does the micro-cosmos disappear, is the memory of the ego self eventually erased? So that only the macro and eventually the proto reality become permanent? i.e. is this a sequential progression, so that will you eventually return to a continuous experience of proto reality only?

Is that what the Daoist phrase “return to Origin” means – the erasure of the ego/micro self?

Or put another way, what happens if you let go of the jing-chi-shen process, and cultivate “wu-only”? Do the first three stages of the process stop?

Or from energetic viewpoint, if I focus on core channel only, and let go of any left-right or front-back channel orientation (or 8 extra channels at macro level), do they stop functioning?

Or at micro level of five shen, if I fuse the five shen into one, do the five shen cease to exist?

If you believe that you will use a one pointed meditation method of going direct to emptiness to get off the wheel of incarnation, i.e. use the continuous “letting go” or “be neutral witness ONLY” to stop the process of ego self and ultimately incarnation, I believe one of two things are likely to happen:

1. You initially may be successful in reducing or eliminating the reactive aspects of the ego self. But you may pay an unintended price: you risk the danger of falling into a different state of illusion. The illusion is that by resting in a “neutral zone” between yin-yang realities, that you have achieved either “wuji” (supreme mystery) or “wu wei” (state of grace, your life is now totally effortless).

You must ask yourself, have I achieved “super-consciousness” or is the cessation of all ego experience “unconsciousness” and destruction of memory?

The danger is you become stuck in a lesser neutral zone, because you don’t have enough yin-yang tension in your spiritual process to shift to the next level of consciousness. The level of neutral you’ve achieved by “letting everything go by” may be vibrating at the frequency of the physical plane. As Master Ni Hua Ching put it, if you empty yourself without holding any intention, you simply become like a rock.

Neutral witness can become a “dead zone”, or in zen (Japanese pronunciation of chan) jargon, you’ve become a “dead tree” meditator. They developed this language because they noticed that some people using this Taoist technique fell into a stupor that clearly was not enlightened or clear mind.

This is why, according to one of my qigong students who spends half his year in Korean zen monasteries, they developed koans or sayings to puzzle the mind, keep it awake with paradoxes – what is the sound of one hand clapping? And its why in other schools they also use mantra to give mind focus after emptying it.

Shifting to a higher level requires a much higher energy level to sustain higher spiritual function. Where is that high energy going to come from? Are koans and mantras the best way to get to them, once you’ve got past the preliminary clearing of ordinary mind fixations? Or are they merely engaging another level of mind?

This danger of illusory wuji attainment is why, I believe, the seven alchemy formulas passed down by One Cloud continuously identify the next set of polarities greater than the polarity you are consciously functioning from – Male-female, sun-moon, etc. thereby reducing the illusion that the process is complete or limited to quieting down your ordinary mind in your little human reality.

Neutral state of meditation, clear mind: does absence of ordinary ego-mind sensing define the state of wu-wei? Wu-wei is not about eliminating mind or ego-self – this is obvious to me. Who is there to experience the grace if there is no self? It really means ego-self is in harmony and balance, neutral mind and yin-yang ego mind are functioning smoothly. Wu-wei requires ego-state-of-not-grace in order to experience its opposite, grace/no-effort.

You can play infinite language games here about self vs. no-self, but I find it linguistically more accurate to say that wu wei is a process in which the micro self has entered into resonance with the macro and proto selves. There is seamless and instantaneous communication between them using the medium of the Life Force.

Second Possible result:

2. You gain tremendous freedom by successfully identifying yourself as “I am Neutral Witness Only”– an admirable advance over the masses of ordinary people stuck in a fixed polarity identity. But you may limit your development to a half-truth, based on an unconscious fear of becoming re-identified (“attached”) to polarity.

In simple terms, you may not develop your life-force given power of Creativity. The downside – and fear – of taking on Creative Power is that you must assume responsibility for what you create. And that brings up fear of failure and suffering: what if I create something and its bad? Or too much work to sustain? Or going to keep me trapped/attached to physicality?

The answer that “Creativity will happen spontaneously once I am in neutral” is, in my opinion, an attempt to avoid responsibility for your creative choices. Exercising creative power may include PAINFUL CONSEQUENCES as essential feedback.

That is one reason why I prefer the Daoist alchemical process. It continues on beyond the stage of letting go of the old fixed self: you are always refining and shaping a new level of balance and harmony in the present moment. It demands creativity. Present moment is not a passive witnessing state.

Daoist Alchemy seems like more work, but it more closely approximates the functioning of the Life Force. Once you get practiced or familiar with the Fusion or kan and li prccess, they also become as effortless as riding a bicycle or driving a car, which might look daunting at first. Even at the level of the Inner Smile, which dissolves any fixity of pattern, you are embracing and feeling. You are strengthening the depth of feeling of self, not eliminating it. The old fixed self gradually becomes a positive, smiling, loving, fluid self.

I feel that staying in “neutral-only” is a denial that the micro- ego-self, has the power of the life force to create. I noticed that sometimes after a really deep, blissful core channel meditation that I will be highly irritated by the smallest things in daily life. A reminder that my bliss in the core has not yet materialized and transformed my relation to the outer world of my destiny yet.

The desire to stay in neutral is essentially taking the religious position, “I am one of God’s Children, and if I let go of my limited sinful ego-self stuck in desire, then God-Daddy-Creator-Tao will make all the right creative decisions FOR ME or THROUGH ME”. Then I won’t actually have any responsibility for the outcome.

What would happen if God’s Children grew up to become God’s Adults? Would life be different? I.e. Can we let ourselves evolve to not only cultivate our neutral witness aspect of proto-self, but cultivate our power to copulate yin-yang forces and thereby procreate many realities, both micro and macro, that are in harmony and balance?

To keep this really practical, let’s bring in the consequences of having sexual power to create new realties/beings: If I get a woman pregnant (speaking as a man), and she gives birth to a child, can I just neutrally witness that child and expect that the Tao or Buddha will raise the kid? Or is the creative burden put on the level of micro-ego-self that created the kid, i.e. ME, to feed and clothe and love the kid and mature its new micro-ego reality?

(I won’t digress too far here, but want to raise question of whether the male-dominated sky/heaven religions – in which I include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity – in effect do this very thing, i.e. knock up the earth kid with unconscious lust while staring at heaven above for a solution. And while they are waiting for heaven to act. they expect the below/within/female/earth to raise the bastard kid/humankind and keep the show going…)
———————————-

All this comes back to the function of EGO or Micro-Self as miniature replay of the larger principles of the Life Force to:
1. create
2. Remember what it has created,
in order to take responsibility for keeping it in harmony and balance.

Why is enlightenment so often referred to as “re-membering who we really are”?
I believe the “members” that are lost are contained in jing/essences/memories embedded in our different subtle bodies.

THERE IS NO MEDITATION TECHNIQUE OR RELIGIOUS BELIEF THAT WILL END THE JING-CHI-SHEN-WU PROCESS of creation and memory of creation/experience. The Life Force’s alchemical process of continuous transmutation between these states – and the reverse process (wu-shen-chi-jing) as the spiral and counter-spiral of creation cannot be stopped by any meditation technique or religious belief in a state beyond this.

So my response to Ken Cohen’s Chan teacher: the shortcut could potentially reduce your connection to the Life Force process. It might intensify one part of the process, and thus be useful. But if not properly directed, It could become a long cut, you will be forced back into the creative process, and forced to embrace the steps that were skipped previously. The first shall be last….

You might object, how can I or anyone know this is true? How can we know there is not an absolute state of voidness/emptiness beyond all incarnation and suffering?

Only by direct perception of the unity of the process. i.e. I can only directly know my own truth, but it safe to assume that personal truth must be a reflection of the whole/universal truth, otherwise I could not experience it.

In religious language, let’s play out the consequences:

Let’s substitute “God” for “Original Essence-Breath-Spirit = yuan jing/chi/shen”

Once God divides its original nature of One into Many, it BECOMES the Many. The One no longer exists apart from the Many. The One has become a collective process, and IT CANNOT KILL ITSELF, i.e. end the process of creation, without the consensus of every aspect of the Many. God’s free will, i.e. its creativity, has been re-distributed to the Many. So I cannot personally stop my “self” from existing, because it belongs the collective/whole.

There is no pyramid, nobody on top who can issue the command to “cease existing”. No God or divine agent running the Tao. There is now a central meeting place, the hub of many spokes, the consensus point of the Many at the center of the multiple nested spheres of reality. This meeting point we can say is neutral, or empty of content controlled by any one individual being, but that space is not a void as long as it is “collectively owned” by the Many as their center.

This is why I am strongly opposed to the language and intention of any spiritual group promising people that if you follow their path , you will attain an absolute state, be it permanent Heaven or Emptiness absent the difficulty of physical incarnation. I believe that such an intention is a denial of full spectrum spiritual reality and is counter-productive to the creative process/free will of the Life Force. I think it slows down the conscious integration of the Many(macro or micro) with the One (proto).

(and yes, I haven’t forgotten the “None” or “wu”. But since humanity is not even close to collectively approaching the relationship between its Original Self and the Supreme Unknown, let’s not pretend any path has that territory covered. I doubt much can happen on that front until humanity collectively has achieved some kind of critical mass in its consciousness).

You may choose to exercise your free will and for training purposes, temporarily focus on a different part of the jing-chi-shen-wu process. But don’t fool yourself into believing that the process of physicality and its problems go away just because you choose to check out and take a spiritual vacation as you slip into a comfortable neutral state. If you die, someone else takes your place – same point. Nature abhors a vacuum, and will fill the space you’ve vacated with fresh creative polar energies.

Half-way houses/neutral zones between planes achieved through meditation may be great places to rehab and regroup before re-entering the fray from a higher or more integrated perspective. But all neutral spaces are simply nodal points in the collective yin-yang process. The foundational ground of neutrality is now permanently embedded in its creative yin-yang process. It’s a functional trinity.

In my understanding of Daoist alchemy, spiritual immortals are just micro-ego-based humans who expanded their level of function to SIMULTANEOUSLY include their macro and proto selves. All three levels have “self”, i.e. they must have some kind of jing that keeps them in the game. You cannot shift levels unless you can concentrate enough jing to allow you to consciously function on a higher level of self.

Immortality implies REMEMBERING the experience of the micro, macro, and proto levels. That MEMORY is what allows them to function freely in all three spheres. Immortality implies the ability to use the greater field – the Life Force’s cosmic memory bank – as your own memory bank. Without this super-memory faculty, all relationships, all love, and all wisdom is lost. Without memory, the cycle of incarnation and the lessons learned become pointless, and life loses all meaning.

It is the jing aspect of the Life Force that holds all form of the memory. Jing is like the RAM memory space in your computer. It gets input impressions, and creates a cache memory – it remembers the old pages you have viewed in order to more quickly pull them up for you with minor changes once you click on it again, and interact with that old page/memory, notice what is new, create something with it, etc.

Until your micro-self learns how to better create and remember what it creates, i.e. manage to remember and shape its jing/essence, the collective field holds the higher levels of jing as your still unconscious ‘future memory bank” of potential realizations. Daoist Alchemy is just one process for concentrating that jing and shifting levels of shen awareness.

“Neutral Witnessing” is a stage in the process of observing the flow of jing-chii-shen, but unless you also learn to concentrate and shape what you observe, you haven’t completed the process, i.e. you haven’t refreshed the screen and lived/expressed yourself in the present moment. You’re just viewing other peoples’ web page creations, you haven’t created your own. So neutral witnessing can become like a kind of bardo waiting state of endless levels waiting to be viewed, if you don’t start functioning from it and shaping it.

To sum up my point:

Human Ego-self is central to the evolution of the Life Force process. Human micro self is not an aberration that is meant to be eliminated, stopped, or escaped from. We are IINTENTIONALLY born incomplete, i.e. imperfect, fucked-up, confused, and ignorant so that we can integrate those incomplete/lost aspects floating about in the cosmic sea of the life force back into a conscious functioning whole.

The Life Forces gives birth to us so that we can express its process in the density of physicality. Central to that process is to clarify what is hidden within the polarity of sexuality,i.e. lost yuan chi from the splitting of the sexes that started a cycle of fragmentation.

OUR INDIVIDUAL (I..E. EGO) EXPERIENCE OF LIFE, EVEN IF BORN FROM FRAGMENTARY SEXUAL OR OTHER DESIRES, AND EVEN THE EXPERIENCE OF INCOMPLETION ITSELF, IS STILL AN ESSENTIAL FEEDBACK MECHANISM OF THE LIFE FORCE AND ITS ORIGINAL DESIRE TO PROCREATE.

The five jingshen (vital organ spirits) that govern the xin/heart mind are just a micro expression of the cosmic jing-chi-shen process. The five shen/heart-mind holds the shape of our experience, i.e. our MEMORY OF SELF, so that it can be evolved, refined, integrated by ourselves. If we fail to integrate it enough to remember it after death, then after death the process of integration may continue via other entities who may re- incarnate with our non-integrated ego fragments.

Simply put, we have to complete what our ancestors could not. It gets handed down through our gene code (biological lineage) and our soul code (spiritual lineage of soul/astrological patterns).

So, to answer my own question: WHO IS FOCUSING ON THE CENTER?
It is the common underlying desire of the five shen to be IN RELATION to their original spirit/proto-self/center that causes them to reverse their outer focus on the macro world and look within.

This impulse to meditate, i.e. focus on the center within, is natural. This “return to origin” described by the ancient Daoists (in my view) is actually bringing the Original Self to function in the physical plane. FOCUSING ON THE CENTER NOT A SUICIDAL ATTEMPT BY THE FIVE SHEN TO KILL THEIR EGO/SELF- FUNCTIONING IN THE PHYSICAL PLANE, and to thus get out of the responsibility of creating further realities. It is an attempt by the periphery (outer sensory awareness of five shen) to get guidance, strength and clarity from the center, in order to continue with the process of completing their destiny (ming).

In historical debates between chan Buddhists and daoists, the chan have focused on the overriding importance of the xing, the inner essence. If your goal is to get off the wheel of incarnation, then what’s the point of spending any time on the wheel completing one’s destiny? Just jump right back to the “wu”, don’t bother with the spinning yin-yang spokes of life. That’s why astrology, medicine (= long life), music and literature are useless, unless they are a scripture or a poem reminding you to get off the wheel and back into empty mind.

The Daoists focus on both ming and xing, and different Dao schools focus on different methods and sequences of cultivating them. The offshoot of their approach has produced an outpouring of human creativity in many fields, ranging from science (outer alchemy) to medicine, astronomy & astrology, poetry, martial arts/ enlightened body movement. I think some Chan schools have embraced the wider aspects of Daoist theory have also been very creative – but usually by ignoring the underlying cosmology of “getting off the wheel” and deciding to spin it faster instead.

Whenever you practice any method, you must ask how it supports your intention to cultivate both worldly destiny and inner essence. That is the test I use – otherwise I find myself going too far in one direction and getting out of balance.

Anyway, I hope these meanderings set off at least one light bulb in your reality as you grapple with the frustrating limitations of human ego and its relation to the life force.

Enjoying fond future memories of meeting you as an immortal,
michael
Round 3: EGO/SELF & MEMORY IN LIFE FORCE PROCESS
VERY IMPORTANT
The fundamental difference to me seems to be that your view states each person is not complete, they are lacking and need to “create” something new, something you do not have right now. Chan view and my experience is each person is complete, they have it all, its just a matter of changing their angle of awarenes or consiousness, then being able to live from this space. Add some healthy Qi Gong to that and its a complete mind/body/spirit practice.
————————-

So, Bagua, we agree on what we disagree.

I will post later as to why the reality of incompletion is so central to explaining human life.

And why if you over look it, you miss something very fundamental in your soul development, even on the most basic levels of practice.

And why immortality is something new and unique and rare – that while it can be said to exist as a potential in everyone, and is pulling unconsciously on all spiritual seekers, it does not really exist until soul completion is achieved.

blessings,
Michael
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-12 08:16:03
Remote IP: 66.32.103.120
Message
>You might do a practice that is so called will based or ego based but it’s no longer done from any ego.

My point is that this type of language is self-contradictory, and hence meaningless to me. I don’t blame your for being confused.Ego as I am using it just means personal self in psychological jargon (not egotistical). Egotistical actions would imply one aspect of the self asserting itself. But many writers blur these important distinctions.

If you are DOING or EXPERIENCING any type of spiritual practice, the self is involved, and thus your will, either active or passive, is involved. By definition.

Denial of this personal self involvement in one’s languaging points to one of two things to me:

1. the language is just clumsy. That the speaker really meant to say that they refer to “self” as something very limited, perhaps limited to sensory consciousness, and the agent they are seeking to invoke in their practice is a Greater level of Self that is operating through the lesser sensory self. This is much clearer language and incidentally, consistent with One Cloud’s seven formulas as a progressive training to expand one’s experience of self to include the whole of Nature and Tao.

2. the language used suggests the speaker does not understand the function of the body-centered consciousness and is attempting to suppress it due to their lack of understanding. Usually they blame the body-mind for having desires, without ever explaining how such a limited body-mind could come into being without the EXPRESS INTENTION OF THAT GREATER SELF they are promoting.

In sum, attacking the lesser sensory self for causing its own spiritual problems is either blind to the true cause of the problem, or is admitting that IF the lesser self can cause the problem, then it also has the will/skill to solve the problem that it created.

Michael

Round 4: Five Forces Shaping the Human Soul
From: Michael Winn_Subject: Philosophy_Date/Time 2006-03-14 12:18:18_Remote IP: 66.32.17.29
Message
Bagua, _Here’s a “short” interim reply on one topic only, until I have time to prepare a longer reply on the issue of human soul completion (we’ll call that round 5). __I appreciate your holding a beautiful vision of all humans sharing a common space of enlightenment. __I totally support the cultivation of that vision, and all Chan Buddhists or others who are cultivating such a space. __I personally prefer not to call such a space Buddha (-hood), as for me it crowds that space by identifying it with one historical human (or series of Buddhas, in most versions). And I also don’t believe that such a transpersonal space is the end/goal of human evolution – more like a beginning point from which we can collectively communicate with Heaven and Earth and thus freely and more effectively express our collective Human Will. It is a space from which humanity will begin to CONSCIOUSLY SHAPE its collective destiny. Seems right now we do that unconsciously. __And while I accept that Taoist cultivation of xin/heart-mind also includes awareness of such a collective Human space in its process, that simply holding the awareness of that enlightened space is not a sufficient description of what consciously merging Humanity with Heaven, Earth, and ultimately the Tao would be like. _And it doesn’t clearly embrace the process of individual evolution within the collective, which I believe immortality does. __I think its relevant that you accept your core identity as being somehow Taoist, it seems after long and perhaps difficult consideration. That suggests to me you have looked deeply into some of these issues. __I think that I correctly surmised that you do not really deeply resonate with other publicly stated Chan theories/cosmologies as to why human mind became unclear. It is more common for these to reveal the roots of Buddhism in its parent culture of Hinduism – both generally hold a fairly deterministic view that your problems (as desires or unclear mind) arise from “karmic samskaras”, i.e. impressions from past lives in which you did something bad and now have to work it out. __As I have pointed out before, I find these cosmologies unsatisfactory and unable to explain how the first human born, who should have been free of any past life, could have developed such an unclear mind/desire. _Such theories also promote a rather linear idea of time and reincarnation and have a very different concept of the soul than you express. __Your view is that the iinnocent baby is born with a pure soul, a tabla rasa or blank slate, and its original spirit is gradually corrupted by distracting or negative influences in the world. __Oh, I wish that humanity problems were so simple! Then behavioristic psychology and other changes in the post-natal realm would be able to cure all human problems eventually. Your dream is very close to the dream of materialistic science – they just don’t acknowledge that consciousness arrived first, but is rather a by product of being born. __Yes, when we hug a little newborn they seem so pure and innocent. And clearly they exude the spiritual fragrance of pre-natal chi, of being unconditioned. But the reality is that the seeds of their future destiny are already present. Those seeds have not yet sprouted, so the child is enjoying a honeymoon until his shadow side matures and begins to seek expression. __Ask any mother, especially those with more than one child with the same man. How there seems to be a distinct and pre-formed personality in each child that is totally unique, and waiting to unfold. That kids who receive the same love, same environment, etc. emerge with totally different problems that cannot be pinned down to either mother or father. __If this is the case, then simply “erasing” all the negative inputs and accumulated reactions to life since birth by sitting in “empty-mind” meditation will NOT solve the deeper “seed” problems brought in by the infant soul. _This is why I have concluded that we need to make conscious all the sources of those “seeds” and begin to consciously work to include them in our definition of “self” since they define who we are and our destiny. __I think you are well aware of the Taoist theory of ming – that each soul is given a destiny to unfold. The question is HOW is that destiny shaped. If we can know that, we can resolve it at that level, rather than waiting for it to slowly unfold over decades. __I have found that One Cloud’s Seven Formulas for Attaining Imimortality seems to cover all the forces that shape our wordly and spiritual destiny. This of course goes far beyond what Mantak Chia taught me about the formulas. But that is also fitting with the Taoist view of continual process and adaptation to the present moment – I have relanguaged them and adapted them to consciousness that modern humans in the West hold now. In future posts I will show this is completely consonant with the ancient Taoist texts like Tao Te Ching. __So, below I am posting a handout I normally give to my Lesser Kan and Li students, so they have some perspective on the vastness and multiple levels on which our greater Self is functioning within the boundary of Nature. I believe it is too much to attempt to manage all of these forces at once, hence the progressive nature of the formulas. __Someone might experience peace and happiness just by working with the first formula and the Inner Smile. _But large aspects of their Self would remain in a potential state, awaiting for the alchemical spiral of time and other lives to unfold. __And of course, my merely asserting these 5 forces exist is not attempting to prove them or offer Taoist scripture as proof. But meanwhile, any reader can decide whether it seems to resonate with their inner truth or not. _————————————- ___The Five Forces Shaping Human Soul Patterns _& Daoist Alchemy Formulas for Completing One’s Destiny __By Michael Winn __1. ACQUIRED patterns this lifetime (post-natal). _Physical, emotional, sexual and mental experiences that are not completed, often as traumas pretending to be a stuck “past” ego self. Stored in 5 phase & yin-yang patterns by vital organ spirits & meridians. _• Completed using first alchemy formula (Healing sounds, Orbit, Fusion). _• Sexual identity completed with Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li). __2. ANCESTRAL biological & psychological patterns (pre-natal). _Experiences of parents, grandparents, relatives and unknown distant ancestors that are stored and shared genetically in the blood. A collective pool of issues awaiting completion by anyone in that biological lineage. _• Completed with all three Water & Fire (Kan & Li) formulas. __3. GEOMANTIC forces (deep earth, or geo-natal patterns). _Deep earth directional forces control five phase outer weather cycles & inner “psychic weather”. Planetary feng shui is imprinted at birth on your constitution and reinforced by geography where you live. Embedded in global social and environmental struggle by collective negative thought forms. _• Completed with Sun-Moon Alchemy (Greater Kan & LI). __4. ASTROLOGICAL forces (planetary patterns, a.k.a. “karmic”). _Solar system is 5 phase processes embodied within individual souls. _Planets are your cosmic vital organ spirits, how your subtle bodies step themselves down thru the sun & planets. _• Completed with Planetary Alchemy (Greatest Kan & Li), by fusing the five planetary spirits and opening direct Sun to heart-mind (xin) communication. __5. STELLAR forces (spiritual lineage patterns). _“Essences” embody spiritual qualities in collective galactic & star “oversoul” patterns flowing through different dimensions (“heavens”) of space/time. _• Completed with Star Alchemy and Heaven & Earth Alchemy. _—————————— __Of course, I don’t list the “wuji”, the Supreme Mystery or Tao itself as a force shaping the soul, because “force” is inappropriate way to describe the original womb that is birthing the Life Force and beingness (Original Essence-Breath-Spirit) itself. __And I don’t claim that by merely attending these retreats that an adept will be able to master, i.e. shape all these influences. That might take a while longer….:). But you can bring them into awareness and beging find a center point or frequency from which to communicate with them and let them know that you are ready to enter into conscious relationship. __That is what I believe Tao inner alchemy as a spiritual science/process can do. _it is my experience, not a theory I read in a book. __More on soul completion issues coming, not sure how soon. _It is a big topic, a whole book worth. __peace and smiling enlightenment, _michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-16 18:57:42
Remote IP: 66.32.17.29
Message
Before I go travelling for next four days, want to drop a few thoughts.

The discussion in round 4 seems to be getting divorced a bit from history and traditional meaning of what “chan” describes.

I agree with Bagua that its ultimately unimportant what school or path one pursues – that is free will choice.
My goal is not to promote Tao-ISM, but to extract the essence of its alchemical process and make that process available under any name that people want to call it.

However, I also agree with Fajin that all paths are NOT the same, and that distinctions exist for useful reasons. In fact, no path is the same, there are only individual cultivators deepening their life experience.

Bagua plays a bit free in blurring the distinctions between time zones/dimensions and stages of cultivation (jing-chii-shen-wu). I certainly agree with him that these all exist in a single continuum, simultaneously.
But accepting that conceptually and experiencing that are TOTALLY different.

Let’s not ignore that we are in the physical plane, in physical bodies, experiencing limitations – that it is not an accident, that the limitation has some function. That is why you cannot skip phases of growth, anymore than babies leap to adulthood and ignore the decades of maturation in between.

If you accept that your consciousness is dominated by the physical plane, then it behooves you to first and foremost integrate the physical plane with all other levels of consciousness. If we were in the formless planes having this discussioin, it would be the other way around – gee, how do we integrate fomless with the form world…?

So no progress in my opinion is made by denying that “we” -whatever you believe that is – have stepped ourselves into a physical body. And that the perspective of that body must be included in whatever other levels of process you believe exist beyond the body/mind.

I think its fine if modern Chan practitioners find their historical predecessors’s ideas too limiting and want to include new ideas or processes in their practice. But I fail to find any emphasis in Chan Buddhism on yin-yang theory or its processual implications on the nature of Tao. The references to Pure Land below are a sect that is clearly otherworldly, and believes in sudden enlightenment rather than gradual process.

Just to keep a grounded perspective, here is the Wikipedia’s survey of Chan Buddhism – suggesting that it historically had specific doctrines and beliefs. Its my read that Bagua is not really interested in those doctrines, just the freedom he finds in his practice.

Smiles,
Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-25 02:30:48
Remote IP: 66.32.67.69
Message
I see the Dragon Warrior Fagin has done a skillful job in my absence of persistently and intuitively clarifying the Dao, which he was clearly born to explore.

And that the Dark Turtle Warrior Bagua, with the 8 trigrams of the Dao armoring his back, and shielding his empty-centered chan belly, has ably presented his modern integration of chan and dao.

I had promised to address the issue of completion, which is surely a philosphical dividing ground between these two paths, at least as presented by bagua. It is different intentions arising from different cosmologies/philosphies that produce different methods. But this issue of completion will wait a bit; it seems we should first go deeper into the issue of Emptiness, and its Utility and relation to the Wheel of Life.

Do chan buddhists seek emptiness for the same reasons that Daoists do?

Clearly, both employ the concept; the Chan have borrowed the Dao method of “Sittting in Forgetfulness”
and made its process of emptying the heart-mind/xin their mainstay.

But once Emptiness is achieved, do the Chan advocate “using” emptiness to achieve some other goal?
I have never seen such a position expressed here or in any of the Buddhist writings I’ve been exposed to – apart from the Tibertan tantrics, such as quoted by Trunk. The Tibetans do propose to use the emptiness.

But for most others, including the Chan Buddhists, we find that the Emptiness is the supreme goal and that it is ultimately beyond this world – how else could it free us from the Wheel of Life?

That if one can grasp the truth of this Emptiness deeply enough, that one will be freed from suffering. It is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism – that suffering is caused by the endless cycle of birth-death-rebirth, and thus to end suffering we must get off this endless wheel of incarnation.

We are not splitting hairs here, or judging one path over the other; we are clarifying what the process of each is, or claims to be.

If Bagua disagrees with the First Noble Truth of Buddha, then I think he cannot really be called a Buddhist in its conventional meaning, and would have to found a new neo-Buddhist school that somehow differs or claims to advance beyond Buddha’s teachings. Perhaps Bagua should call himself a “Lao Chan-tzu”. :))

Of course, the Chan Buddhists were rebels and wanted to distance themselves from the Indian teachings of the Buddha as far too complicated and intellectual. (The true meaning of “dukka” I am told is not “suffering”, but “distraction”, as in a mind that is distracted will suffer from ignoring it core focus. All the concerns of someone bent on escaping their overbearing mental faculties…but I digress).

And we need to acknowledge that Chan Buddhism was and is a monastic path in China – they felt the need to separate themselves from the world. Hui Neng is a priest and a patriarch; lao tzu and chuang tzu are not, they live in the world with the common folk. My theory is that this monastic and essentially ascetic/sexless separation from the world is what propels their missionary activities, as modern Chan groups are wont to do.

I speak not only of max/Nan huai chin’s obvious zeal for saving suffering souls from the wheel of life, but my experience with other chan groups operating in the USA who offer “Taoist” initiations, a free meal, and a chance to join their chan sect. This missionary work is part of completing their buddhist mission. This desire is not only an issue of accumulating merit; I wonder if you sit deeply in emptiness as one’s metaphysical focus if it doesn’t propel one to seek balance in worldly activity, perhaps at core a need for any yin-yang movement?

And, I will remind again, that I am indifferent to whatever path people choose, as I accept that any path will help them to unfold their nature, however slowly. Your life is your path, and no one in a body can get off of that path.

But that it is best to NOT reduce all paths to the same bland Oneness. So here I disagree with Fajin, Bagua, and max: No Path ends up in the same place. Each path is unique, just as each human has a unique body-mind, they will also have a unique spiritual experience of self-realization. What force is operating to ERASE the difference?

Undoubtedly, the chan would say Emptiness erases the difference, if they go along with other Buddhists. But just because the two paths begin walking the same path for a way, doesn’t mean they stay on the same road. The path of Emptiness is not the path of Immortality, which preserves uniqueness even as it sustains the collective. The two paths are different, even though they intersect in their early and perhaps even middle stages.

My reading of the Daodejing is that the Chan have likely latched on to the expressed notion of emptiness – undoubtedly pre-disposed by earlier Buddhist teachings on Emptiness as the greatest virtue beyond all life – but that they did not understood its utility as intended by the Daoist sages.

This is the key difference: in the Daoist view, emptiness is part of the manifest Dao, the primordial ground that is invisibly present and generates the cycles of yin-yang life. It forms a trinity with yin-yang that is permanent and eternal, i.e. cannot be transcended.

Achieving emptiness does not remove one from the cycle of life-death-rebirth or remove one from the world; rather it takes one deeper into it as an inescapable part of the Dao’s Great Wheel turning endlessly. No amount of achievement of Emptiness in meditation can stop that Yin-Yang Wheel from Turning. Rather one cultives life within a dynamic of true yin and true yang; the wheel thus rolls effortlessly, no bumps.

The metaphor of the Wheel used by Lao tzu and Chuang tzu makes this perfectly clear;
The wheel gains its utlity from having an empty hub from which the spokes of life are generated. The empty space at the center of the wheel is not in another dimension or the “cure” for the ills of life and its suffering; rather it is what generates life and moves with the wheel of life as it rolls along.

And curiously, by great serendipity, on my way to the airport leaving New York, I stopped in a bookstore and happened upon a recent book called “Daoism Explained” by Hans-Georg Moeller, a prof. of Taoism in Canada. He makes the point about the Daoist notion of “return to the Origin” being similar to the empty hub of the wheel and the female gate to the Dao:

“The image of the root (in the Daodejing) certainly portrays the Dao as some kind of “origin”, but not as a divine creative force. It rather shows that Daoist philosophy conceived of “creation” as something without an absolute beginning, it is an ongoing process of which its origin is an integral part.

“ The “origin” is NOT beyond or next to what is originated, it is rather always within that which is, and has no place outside of this…..The root of a plant does not exist BEFORE the rest of the plant. It is a part of the plant, albeit it a special one. The root is where growth originates, but it is nevertheless totally integrated with the rest of the plant – like the hub is totally integrated with the rest of the wheel. The root is not something metaphysical with respect to the plant, it does in no way transcend the plant’s physical existence.”

Let’s not fool yourselves – Chan Buddhists – this is NOT the Buddhist conception of emptiness and does not describe the emptiness where the Buddha and his Boddhisattvas reside.

And this of course gets us back to the central discussion of why its necessary to include jing-chii-shen-wu in your training if you want to cultivate the Daoist experience of immortality. Immortality here is the shift from a single “ego” spoke of consciousness, to connect into the neutral “empty mind” hub of the wheel, and then to expand out to become all the spokes and the wheel itself, including its outer rim (flow of physical linear time).

The immortal is not escaping from the wheel of life by hanging out in the empty hub, but is merging into the experience of the whole wheel, and adding his/her Yi, or creative imagination as to what direction the wheel should go to maximize its experience of harmony, balance, and freedom. The immortal represents Humanity adding some unique value to the Dao, not merely getting out of the way of the Dao so the wheel can roll.
The emptiness of the hub doesn’t not exist without the spokes, just as the core channel does not exist without the front/back or left/right deep yin-yang channels.

The structure of the wheel is its jing. Its spiraling movement of its spokes is the yin-yang pulsation of chi. The awareness of where the wheel is going is the shen. The effortless of the wheel’s turning comes from its axle – which incidentally requires expression as the force of yuan chi within that “empty” space of the hub.

But there is no Daosit notion of getting off the wheel – that would be tantamount to “getting off the Dao”. And there is the implicit notion that by surrendering to the balanced flow between the spokes of the wheel – the cardinal directions of space/time and its yin-yang movement – that one also stabilizes one’s grasp of the center of all the spokes. How can one grasp a center, or a space of emptiness, except by reference to the coordinates of space/the spokes around it?

And I should also add that Georg Moeller has a final chapter on Dao and Chan at the end of the book. He is clearly non-partisan, and probably more familiar with chan/zen methods of meditation than he is with Daoist immortality methods. But his conclusion is that:

“Like Daoism, Chan also affirms the authenticity of the here and now, but it also affirms its inauthenticity….While Daoist emptiness and nonpresence (wu) contribute to the genuineness of the reality of the real (note: he clarifies this elsewhere as the “self-arising” or self-so nature of the Daoist authentic self, ziran).

“But Chan Buddhism indeed ends up with some sort of “relativism”. For Chan Buddhists, the real is always in a dialectical relation with the unreal…..(whereas) ancient pre-Buddhist Daoism affirms the full reality of the real. (In the Lieh tzu), the allegory of the Duke of Niuai and his “illness of change” showed unmistakably that even in the process of ongoing change, the segments of change lose nothing of their authenticity”.

(in short, change causes pain (“the illness of change”), but its not something to be gotten rid of or transcended – it just requires the experiencer of the pain to be more flexible towards change and allow it.)

I think that Moeller has exactly caught the distinction between the utility of Daoist emptiness in lubricating the flow of the Dao and the Buddhist notion of physical reality being quasi-illusory because at heart it has an emptiness more real than the changes.

And I think that is just the first reason why I (and apparently Fajin) are not comfortable with Chan. That the excessive focus on emptiness can produce a detachment from life. It places a higher value on Emptiness than it does on the Life Force. That is a very real difference – and probably not very real to Bagua because he is so immersed in Daoist thinking that he takes that life force perspective for granted.

Which approach is Dao, not Chan, unless one re-invents Chan to be even more Daoist than it traditionally is. Which in my opinion, is a good thing – I think Bagua is serving the Chan community well in this way. He honors them, even as he inches them closer to the Dao.

Of cousre, the modern neo-Bagua-Chan response may predictably veer towards denying the buddhist Noble Truth of seeking Emptiness to get off the Wheel of Life and instead claim that all the benefits of jing-chi-shen-wu alchemical cultivation spontaneously happen once you “enter” Emptiness at the hub of the wheel.

I think it is more accurate to say that modern people are so overloaded with information that one immediate cure is going to the opposite, sitting in still emptiness. This has truth to it, just as Kumar’s water method alleviates the excess yang of our culture – initially. But no need to make a school out of a technique, imho, especially if one doesn’t buy the Noble Truth that life is about suffering.

I think the Inner Smile is an advancement over sitting in forgetfulness – it emphasizes OPENNESS over Emptiness, and directly embraces with the human heart the individual ego-spoke, the empty hub, and all the other spokes. But even accepting all that is not immortality – as trunk so succintly pointed out. There is a special ignition process required, which is natural, but rare and difficult enough that sharing a supportive method is surely an act of kindness.

In the next round 6 we will go deeper into the danger of ignoring the split in the human soul and thus its need for completion, and why the problem of life and spiritual realization is much more profound than simply “changing one’s angle of focus”.

But Round 6 comes after a weekend of teaching Fusion of the Five Elements and finishing the summer retreat brochure. So maybe end of next week.

Blessings to all,
as our minds and hearts slowly fuse into common understanding
as we gently tread our separate paths
while looking over our shoulder
to see where our friends paths are leading them.
🙂
Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-28 20:10:30
Remote IP: 66.32.67.69
Message
Nice essay, Fajin. I think it is very important to bridge modern science and spiritual science.

I am familiar with tachyon products and theory. I like their vibration, very subtle, but very clean and pure – as advertised, because it allegedly has no preconceived frequency.

Whether their theory is correct probably remains to be further explored. Like all scientific hypotheses, they often turn out to be superceded by later, better theories and more developed applied sciences. I think that Tachyons – which are not accepted by mainstream physicists – are probably another way of describing mainstsream theory of neutrinos, massless particles which fly thorugh space without interacting with anything until someting large enough or we could say with “dense enough mass or will” can capture their energy.

Neutrinos are emitted from the center of stars, and I believe the equivalent force in Daoist alchemy would be related to “yuan jing” or original essence. I belive that the ability to crystallize yuan jing is one of the unique aspects of Daoist inner alchemy not addressed by other types of meditation, and is the fundamental essence of the immortality process.

This idea of “particle-less existence” may be relevant to this discussion on emptiness. i think both Chan and Dao are focused on human experience of very subtle states beyond the measureable particles of the post natla realm.

And both would agree that words cannot dfescribe the inner realities experienced in meditation, which makes all discussion frustrating to some extent by definition, since there are no objective methods to test the different states that might be cultivated by different methods.

Nonetheless, I believe discussion of methods is useful if progress is to be made in the spiritual sciences – it alerts others to new possibilities of what is being explored. And ultimately it will inspire bridges to be built between material science (what I call external alchemy) and inner alchemy.

I see that Bagua is fatigued by this discussion, feeling that I am discussing traditional buddhists that I have encountered or read and Bagua saying that the words used by those other Buddhists do not have the same meaning for him, he doesn’t care about the words, only experience counts. I agree only experience counts.

But I also think its important to use words in ways that are useful; that is part of the skill of living and communicating. And in general, I don’t find the Buddhist use of the word Emptiness to have any identifiable meaning. Bagua uses it to mean that its not really empty, but a door to yin-yang, five phases, etc. So if by cultivating emptiness he means cultivating yin-yang and five phases, and inner will (yi), then we really are in agreement.

But I doubt that is the meaning of Emptiness in the Chinese Chan tradition, otherwise they would support cultivating jng-chi-shen-wu instead of wu only. I believe they are using it in a particular way, although clearly the meaning has changed after crossing the Pacific Ocean and coming to America. Every religion transmutes when it changes culture. It becomes whatever the new believes want it to be in their life. Which is good, I call that evolution.

Take for example Max, from a different chinese chan school, who clearly has expressed that the self is illusory and the goal is to realize that, not to cultivate yin-yang balance or five phases. This is traditional Buddhist view.

I think the meaning of Emptiness in this discussion gets really stretched when you try to claim that it means cultivating free will expression. If there is will present, then surely one is not empty; one is in a state of willing something.

To match them, you would have to define Emptienss as a state of Potential Will, i.e. not really empty, but actually full of all possibility and containing all essences. If that’s what is meant, I think it would be better to drop the term Emptiness and just call it Infinite Potential Will. To most people that would be much clearer – if that is what Bagua means to say.

Gajin is coming to the same conclusion from a different direction, that different methods use the same starting point (wu) but end up with different levels of free will. I think he may be onto something there.

Except that I don’t translate Wu as emptiness. The term for Emptienss in the Daodejing is Xu, (hsu), not Wu.
The alchemical process is not one of cultivating jing-chi-shen-xu. Wu in Wuji means “not known” or “supreme mystery” in my translation, and other scholars, like George Moeller, translate it as “non-presence”, which I think is also accurate.

So when Chan Buddhists (or Daoists) sit in meditation and empty their xin/heart mind, to me they have NOT achieved a state of Wu or wuji. They are likely initialy in kong, post natal emptiness – a glass that has been emptied of water, and thus the space inside the physical glass is now empty. If they stay three too long that is what has the danger of becoming dead tree zen, no chi flow.

Or they have attained xu, pre-natal emptiness, i.e. they have crossed the neutral or empty zone between the physical plane and the formless dimension that mirrors it. But that xu, in my understanding of the Daoist use of these terms, is nowhere near wu. Wu or wuji is very very very difficult to attain, if it is attainable. How can Being attain non-presence? As I said before, I don’t believe this is even an option for an individual cultivator – it is a collective question that all of humanity, if it could focus its collective mind, might ask. But as long as youare still a human being, I don’t think you can become a non-being. By definition.

If we accepted these gradations of the meaning of Emptiness (kong, xu, wu), I think that would eliminate the broad generalizations being made about the Chan state of Emptiness. And allow a way of describing Emptiness not as the absolute goal, but a transitional space that offers greater freedom because you are less defined.

IF you use that neutral/empty space to make choices from. I think Bagua uses it that way. But I asked a student of mine, who had spent dozens of years meditating at zen centers (before he realized he was stagnating and began learning Dao) – I asked him if the many zen teachers he had sutdied under ever talked aobut their purpose in life, or the importance of making life choices.

He paused, and replied, “I have never heard any zen teacher talk about having a purpose in life”. They only talk about becoming One with Everything.

Whenyou become One with Everything, you have given up all free will. The One has everything, including your identity. You no longer exist. Only the One exists. That is the goal of Oneness. It is different than the goal of harmonizing the One with the Many (five phaes), or achieving balance amongst the Many (yin-yang). In the latter you accept that the Many is not going to give up its right to existence, that the Many will refuse to dissolve back into the One. The One is their primordial parent, but it is not the endpoint of their evolution.

This is why I keep saying that the Dao is about the Whole evolving in unique process, it NEVER eradicates its memory or its unique process of One generating Many Experiences. If the Many at death dissolved into a common state of oneness (or Emptiness) as the spiritual goal, then what would have been the point – or the learning – of becoming the Many/manifest? To hold either true Oneness or Emptiness as an ultimate goal or state is thus antii-evolutionary, its anti the processual nature of the Life Force. In this spectrum, immortality is the highest level of relationship between the One and the Many.

I don’t believe this is the message of Chan Buddhism. If it is, I would like to know which Buddhists are saying this and where. If they are saying it, it sounds to me that like Bagua, they are more Taoist than traditional Buddhist. Prof. Moeller says Chan Buddhism is a combination of Taoism and Buddhism. But if you keep reducing down the taditional Buddhism portion of “no self”, at some point it makes sense to just be a Taoist.
At least that is how I see it.

Thanks for smiling all the way through another long exposition…..and hope that there was a tleast one useful nugget to be found in it for you.

Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-29 06:17:57
Remote IP: 66.32.67.69
Message
Bagua:
My experience is when you begin or path or follow a path you no longer really have choice or freedom, you are following a formula, method or path. you are following jing-qi-shen-wu, this is your path, no choice and no freedom, this is your pathway, this is how you define your journey.
Chan does not define the journey, we live it momement to momement, we attune to it, to immerse oneself in everyday life, its magical and it is what all masters describe.

Bagua,
I think this thinking on “no freedom once you choose a path” is a mistaken understanding of the alchemical process. Its why Tao is often called the Pathless Path. Following the principles of the life force and cultivating a relationshiop with it does not limit your freedom of choice, it amplifies it.

The alchemical formulas are not determining your path; they are principles/processes/tools used to expand your freedom. The Taoist texts have numerous references to “mastering one’s destiny” rather than simply following it, which is the path of following post-natal only, i.e. whatever manifests you accept it. That is a different level of cultivation, a different direction of choice.

that accepting and allowing is the first stage of inner alchemy, bringing yourself into harmony with the existing cycles of destiny; but it is very different from cultivating a conscious relationship with inner levels of the process and shaping what manifests. That is shaping your own destiny. That is communicating to the lifeforce what you need and the Life Force responds and creates it.

From what I hear from you and others about Chan practice, this element of cultivating free will consicously to shape the life force is missing from that practice. That may not stop individuals from exercising their free will, but it is not part of that training.

Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-03-31 23:46:27
Remote IP: 66.32.59.28
Message
First, want to thank Wendy for reminding me about black holes throwing up.
Thank Tao they don’t eat garlic in those other dimensions. Solar Flares would take on a whole new meaning, as they ignited those garlic gamma rays…

Question: is a black hole throwing up an act of free will? I say yes.

It means we are particles of that vomited stardust, and ieach particle in our bodies carries the imprint of that original act of free will.

Is there any Freedom in dissolving into Oneness?

I know this is unpopular position to take, given the pervasive and HOLY use of Oneness in the New Age (mistakenly used to describe the desire for Harmony) – but the answer is that there is NO MANIFEST FREE WILL in the primordial oneness.

That is what makes it primordial – it hasn’t evolved out yet. Start by re-reading ch. 42, daodejing: Tao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, which births the 10,000. things.

If Oneness had manifest freewill, it would have generated the 10,000. direclty. Instead, it had to polarize itself before it could manifest. We will see in Round 6 how critical this is to idea of soul completion…but don’t want to give away that game yet.

So to cut to the quick here, I think Chan Buddhists try to find a shortcut, thinking that they will get back to Oneness by focusing on Emptiness, i.e. letting go of Manyness as it arises in their mind, letting go of all body movement by sitting in perfect stillness/zazen. It is a valid communication to the Life Force. Essentially, they are trying to evoke the yuan chi, by stopping all yin-yang. They call it Emptiness, but if you are energetically sophisticated and linguistically adept, you know the real purpose to access the primordial breath, yuan chi.

And I think that for SOME PEOPLE it is a good strategy, i.e. technique, to first empty out the aspects of Manyness that have gotten stuck somewhere in our system, and to do it persistently. As the Life Force pays ttention to persistence. Persistence is expression of free will – which has shifted from being in a potential state in Oneness to an active, manifest state in Manyness.

But useless to think that you will be able to attain some permanent or higher state of Emptiness – even if by Emptiness you really meant to say permanent Oneness. Linguisticaly, Oneness is pretty much opposite to Emptiness, but we are going to forgive the Buddhists for not saying what they really mean by Empty – something like “Empty of Many-ness”).

My understanding is that the flow of the Tao is to continously cycle between all the stages; as bagua put it, they are all simultaneous.

When jing chi shen wu are all simultaneous, there is no possible way to bypass any aspect. Because they are all instantly interactive. Nothing stays yin, nothing stays yang, and nothing stays yuan – which is the primordial breath that flows through all APPARENTLY EMPTY spaces.

Question: Is it possible to induce a state of EXCESS EMPTINESS?

Again, I say yes – if by forcing your consciousness to stay still until it becomes excessive/imbalanced in relation to yin-yang movement. And this is what I see in patients suffering from excess sitting Zen practice.
If Chan Emptiness truly led to spontaneous flow of yin-yang, they would allow folks to spontaneously jump up and begin dancing. But they don’t. Rigid discipline is needed to achieve stillness – but danger of rigid remaining along with the stillness….

My point here goes even deeper. We have to shift to Taoist language, since Chan language i find so inadequate. Let’s assume a chan sitter has pumped up a goodly amount of yuan chi, even from the pre-natal level, assume they got past stuckness of Emptiness in Post Natal (kong).

Will this yuan chi automatically produce balance and harmony in the post natal realm?

My experience says NO.

YUAN CHI NEEDS TO BE “COOKED” to become functional in the post-natal.

What does this mean? Yuan chi has to be digested. Otherwise it “floods” the consciousness, and overwhelms the jingi-chi-shen process, it drows yin-yang cycles that are delicately balanced in the human psyche.

Its my fundamental opposition to the assumption made not only by Channists, but by Dzogzhen practitioners as well. Their idea is that if Primordial Chi is the Origin, then the MORE you get of it, the better. Very all American in a way: bigger yuan chi is better.

In fact, it looks like they are promising a more direct path to enlightenment because they are directly focusing on stillness and implicitly hoping to extract yuan chi from that direct stillness process.

But I say it is faster and safer and more balanced to grasp yuan chi by first cultivating experience and skill with yin-yang flow. That is why I use simple qigong techniques like Ocean Breathing to open lower dantian first, and Inner Smile to embrace both movement, blockage, and still aspects of Body-Mind.

Reasons:
1. Revealed to be more effective thru my experience of teaching thousands of students.
If you cultivate movement first, resistance to stillness is lowered, and becomes part of natural cycle to rest after moving.

2. yin-yang is closer in vibration to ordinary mind, and thus easier, more comfortable to grasp for VAST majority of people.

3. Yuan chi needs to be integrated into yin-yang post natal patterns in any case, and if these are NOT CONSCIOUS, they can easily be manipulated or misused or misdirected. Excess bliss can be dysfunctional.
See the “masts” of India described by Meher Baba – the village idiots who are really in stae of divine bliss, but cannot function and must be taken care of by others.

I think we could classify this BLISSED OUT syndrome as EXCESS YUAN CHI. The general population is in state of DEFICIENT Yuan chi. So Yuan chi is not a good in itself – only when the negative ego doesn’t convert it into its own warped ends/needs. And yes, negative ego and yuan chi co-exist. Yuan chi is everywhere, it co exists with everything, and will permit it self to become any thing – it totally surrenders to our human free will!

So Emptiness in itself is not a virtue, but the absence of all virtue – and hence ultimately claiming to be not responsible for creation/birthing process, and here we are back to Getting Off the Wheel of Life instead of merging with it as the Tao’s process.

4. If you practice Inner Smile, there is no demand made to still the mind – only accept whatever pattern it takes. That gradually and inexorably leads to stillness, but one that embraces simultaneously and consciously all the yin-yang patterns of the body-mind.

5. You can use any starting point of the trinity – yin,, yang, or yuan as your entry into cultivation process, it doesn’t really matter. That ‘s why you have Yin Immortals, Yang Immortals – they took one aspect and developed it deeply. So none of the approaches is better than the others – but all still need to be integrated.

Question here becomes one of practical suitability for Westerners, and dangers of staying too long with any one strategy before integrating the others. I’ve seen many Chan/Zen practitioners err on the side of rigidity…

I could go on, but I think this sums up the main ponts as far as practicality of path goes – all paths are wonderful by definition, but the reason we have free will is to choose which amongst thm best suits us.

Fagin, Bagua, and myself will all study the same material and craft it into three separate paths….

Such a wonderful plane we live in!
Tiny little bodies, Infinite possibilities of expression of free will.

michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-02 12:57:05
Remote IP: 66.32.59.28
Message
>is it possible to “replace” the “false self” or “negative ego” through cultivation of free will with the spontaneous pure virtue qualities, or does the conditioned self continue to co-exist at all times with the pure virtue-self?

Short answer is Yes, we can transform the balance of forces governing the false/conditioned self/negative ego, but not eliminate conditioning itself.

Conditioned Self is simply a way of describing what is functioning in linear time/physical plane. It can function destructively as negative ego, or harmoniously as postive ego.

Neutral ego (seed state for cultivating immortality) would be state of not identifiying the self with any pattern of negative or positive. but neutral ego does not eliminate yin or yang; it is still embracing both of them as necessary to embodiment and functioning. All three wheels are rolling in sync in the physical plane in neutral ego state.

If you believe you believe that you can truly be Empty or Neutral in physical plane, and were able to accomplish that, you would simply become invisible to all the embodied humans around you. Embodiment requires operating at the polarized yin-yang frequency.

Everything in the physical plane is conditioned by yin-yang and five phase patterns, so no matter how enlightened you get, you will be operating under “conditions” of polarity.

The point is that as you cultivate and awaken to other levels of greater self functioning in cyclical time zones of Energy Body and Eternal Time zone of Spirit Body, that the reality of your conditioned physical self is viewed from a different perspective. The physical limitations become tiny, because the rest of yourself becomes so much more consciously vast.

This I think is what I think Bagua was trying to describe by “just shifting our perspective a little”, every thing changes and enlightenment is achieved (basically Chan/Zen idea of sudden moment of enlghtenment).

I totally agree with Bagua on the possibility of that shift, but disagree with him on what is required to stabilize and “own” that shift so that it is integrated with the physical self and continues as an individuated consciousness after death (immortality).

People pop into altered states all the time, or suddenly “remember” some plane of their greater self is there, but that doesn’t give them functionality with it. That requires cultivation and integration work, hence Taoist emphasis on gradual process.

Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-03 13:59:30
Remote IP: 66.32.59.28
Message
Bagua,
I think we are getting closer to understanding each other.

I agree with you (and Jernej below) that we have no real choice but to fulfill our destiny and to attune or harmonize ourselves to the Life Force and its pathways. All other choices lead to suffering andf deadends which eventually guide us back to that initial choice.

But you are missing the WILD CARD,
which I will introduce in the next round.

That will clarify WHY the element of free will is so critical in the process of fulfilling our destiny and attuning to the Life Force.

After I finish a few days work, gotta issue 40 tickets to china. Once again the details of yin-yang life push aside the vast under lying truths, Necessity is the Greatest God.

empty smile,

Michael

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-07 18:12:58
Remote IP: 66.245.122.182
Message
The point made by Fajin is an important and profound point, that underlies the entire discussion.
It is not the focus of Round 7 on completion, but it has great bearing on its underpinnings.

Its why I translate wuji as Supreme Mystery – we cannot categorize as any form of consciousness that we are aware of, it is certainly not original jing, chi, or shen, which emerge from it.

If wuji can be known, it can be overthrown.

The created – incuding the Life Force itself – cannot know the Unknown source of its creation.

We can have a relationship to “not knowingness”, but even to define it as a void or emptiness is linguistically and inentionally incorrect, in my view.

The wuji bears no responsiblity for the mess humanity finds itself in.
It created original spirit, breath, and essence within its murky primordial darkness.
It gave free will to original spirit in that original mysterious act. But original spirit, and all who partake of that free will, must take responsibility for their use of that free will.

In the same way, parents give birth to children. They raise them and love them as best they can.
Hypothethical case:
Then some of those children grow up, get caught in a dark downward spiral as an adult, and murder someone. Should the parents be sent to jail ifor life for instigating the murderous impulse in the child?

If the wuji is responsible for humanity’s mess, then humanity has no way to correct the situation or impact it unless wuji commands it.

But Dao is a wheel, a sphere-archy, not a pyramid, a hierarchy. All beings share the same original will at their core, and each being that derives its existence from this will to exist is responsible for exercising that will in a manner that is in harmony and balance with the other 10,000. free wills.

Fajin has appropriately dtrawn a linguistic distinction between consciousness beginning with the first self-awareness of Original Spirit-Breath-Essence.

It doesn’t make snese to name the wuji as being the same thing with the same qualities as consciousness; it limits its freedom, it puts boundaries on the Dao, and all Daoist agree that the Dao is limitless.

Perhpas the wuji is Anti-Consciousness, or a differnet medium altogether holding Anti- and Consciousness as one whole; we don’t and can’t know. We can only observe that we have a degree of free will, and track that to its source, and notice as we do that, that we seem to gain more freedom.

That is my experience. If doing Chan practice does not lead to greater freedom, then what does it lead to?
An Emptiness that deprives humanity of freedom? I doubt that is bagua’s position or aspiration from what I have heard, although some more rabid frothing in the mouth lovers of Emptiness might argue for that case, that freedom itself is too limited a concept for Beingness or absolute Nothingness . But we have to examine those states in relation to the physical bodies that exist now, to see if they are real or permanent or better in some way. The fact that physical creation continues seems to argue against these absolutist viewpoints.

Where Fajin’s point leads is to the right of any being, once it is embodies as a being (even if it continously is interdependent with the collective Being or Source) – to continue to exist.

The is the most fundamental right, you could say, the Universal Birthright, of all beings: the right to continue existing. Contnued existence has a price tag: living in harmony and balance with the Whole, which is embraced by the medium of the Life Force, we could call it the totality of Consciousness.

If you violate that mandate for collective harmony, you are NOT killed. Rather the Life Force mercifuilly mirrors your pain and contractedness to you – you suffer it until you release and transform it.

Otherwise it is all a puppet show, no free will in any dimension of being. And who is pulling the strings?

Not the wuji – it is wise to resist interfering in the process it begat. If it interferes with the principles of the Life Force, and with the lawful transformations of jingi-chi-shen, then it violates the right of what it has given birth to. And it won’t or can’t do that.

My Atlantean teacher called it ‘Ring Pass Not”. Once a being comes into self-awareness, past the ring of undifferentiated awareness into self-consciousness, it has the right to exist. The Source cannot Un-Will it to exist, it cannot kill it – it would be killing itself. It must allow it a natural path/existence.

In his heart of hearts, since Bague is really a Daoist, I suspect he agrees with this as well. The laws of unity, yin-yang, wu xing (5 phases), and bagua forces cannot and will not be arbitrarily changed or denied by the wuji.

Yours in the Supreme Mystery,
Michael

Round 7 (Prelim.) Humans Have a Binary Soul
From: Michael Winn_Subject: Philosophy_Date/Time 2006-04-17 14:43:09_Remote IP: 66.32.83.105
Message
Since Bagua was concerned that I might resort to channelled sources to buttress my propositions about immortality, I’ve decided to start off the next round with a piece by Peter Novak, an independent researcher with no investment in Taoism (in fact he is Christian), and whose interest is in integrating scientific research with religious theories. __Peter’s wife committed suicide when he was 27, and it baffled and obsessed him such that he wanted to know more about death. He spent 15 years studying all the world’s religions as well as near death experiences NDEs and past life regression. i recommend his booksThe Lost Secret of Death: Our Divided Souls and the Afterlife, or his earlier book, The Division of Consciousness. __He has just come out with a book on Original Christianity in which I think he argues that the anti-reincarnation early Christians got the pro-reincarnation gnostic Christians banned or suppressed, out of fear that if people believed they could reincarnate, why did they need Jesus to help them resurrect? What’s interesting is that this is exactly an opposite attitude about reincarnation to that expressed by Buddhism, which views reincarnation as the source of suffering. Novak is arguing that in the West, incarnate souls WANT to reincarnate to enjoy more time here (and thus satisfy the earthy half of their soul). __His research led him to same conclusions the ancient Taoists had: the human soul is binary, or has yin and yang components in Taoist language. Peter knows very little about Taoism and even less about its practrices to resolve this yin-yang tension, so this posting is for theoretical background only, but one that puts the issues in a very modern context. __What Novak has concluded from his research is that according to many of the world’s ancient religions, a Third Consciousness that he describes as immortal is the only way to resolve the division in the human soul. __From his research, religious experiences of and past-life memories of the state of floating in absolute “nothingness”, total detachment, are common indications of ONE SIDE of the soul after death, what we would call the Heavenly “spirit” side vs. the Earthly “soul”. That this half of the soul has NO MEMORY and NO ATTACHMENT because that is not its job in the incarnational process. __Realizing either side of the soul while alive is a kind of enlightenment, but is NOT to be confused with the integrated Third state of immortality. __I believe this kind of half-souled enlightenment is what most Buddhists who intentionally cultivate Emptiness and bypass the longer and slower jing-chi-shen process are experiencing. The evidence that many Buddhist practitioners (excepting Tantric Buddhists) disregard their physical bodies is well established. They are seeking a shortcut that bypasses the problem of embodiment, or denies the problem/split between the souls even exists. __The point Novak is making is that this is not simply a matter of disregarding one’s physical health; it is a chronic and globally pervasive condition of under-valuing the earthly half of the binary soul. Just as the Conscious Ego devalues and underestimates the Unconscious half of itself. Just as men tend to devalue women’s reality, the intellectual tends to devalue feeling, etc. etc. __I will take this foundational premise further in future posts, showing its relevance to theories about ego/mind, the relation between yini-yang soul and five shen theory, and the natural human tendency to escape suffering by focusing on one side (the formless/Heaven) of the soul. __This has led to modern priesthoods simplifying what was known to the ancients about the binary nature of the soul into a more simple doctrine of saving a single soul. This has created a set of cultural blinders on humans eager for salvationalpromises from what is “above”. It is as pervasive as the blindness created by being “left brain dominant” and suppressing the contents of the right brain into the “unconscious”. __This is the opening page of Peter Novak’s website. I am hotlinking the URL below. __Michael ____————————— _D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y _of Peter Novak ___”Nothing else in the world … not all the armies… _is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” _- Victor Hugo ___This website describes a revolutionary theory about what happens to us after death. Hundreds of such theories exist, of course – most of them mutually contradictory. The Binary Soul Doctrine is different, in three respects : _1. It accounts for virtually all the reports emerging from modern research into afterlife phenomena. __2. It accounts for the vast majority of humanity’s religious teachings about death and the afterlife, explaining why people would have arrived at those conclusions. __3. It is based on modern scientific knowledge about how the mind functions. __But the oddest thing is that this theory, though newly rediscovered, is among the oldest of explanations – perhaps the oldest explanation – ever devised by the human mind for a series of puzzles about life, death, and the afterlife. __The simple premise of DivisionTheory is that we DO survive death – our psyches do continue to exist and function after the demise of the physical body, but at the tragic cost of being ripped apart into two separate pieces, each of which goes on without the other into a different, crippled afterlife experience. __The conscious mind, known for eons in the East as the Spirit, loses its memory and goes on to reincarnate. The unconscious mind, known for eons in the West as the Soul, becomes trapped in a heavenly or hellish afterlife dreamworld of its own unwitting creation. Both scientific and scriptural evidence exists to support this startling conclusion, which not only explains the differences between many of the world’s great religions, but also shows that humanity’s intuitions about the soul’s survival has a reality separate and distinct from the mind’s philosophical conflicts. __Ancient religious beliefs from all over the globe contain elements of DivisionTheory, suggesting that this was once a world-wide religion. And now our modern science is again pointing in that same ancient direction. __Has modern science finally arrived at the underlying mechanics of Life After Death? It now seems possible, perhaps even likely, that humanity’s many various reports of heaven & hell, reincarnation, and ghosts are all the common effects of a single, scientifically definable “Life After Death” condition. A great wealth of scriptural evidence, compiled from the sacred texts of religions all across the world, also seems to constitute substantiating evidence for a radical new, scientifically-based vision of Life After Death. And yet more evidence for this has been added to our cultural storehouse by recent sociological research into Past-Life Regression, Near-Death Experiences, and ghost reports. __The ancients believed, as modern psychology does, that the inner SELF is composed of a fundamental duality. __Whether one calls the two parts of that duality a conscious and an unconscious, or a mind and a heart, or (as in ancient China) a p’o and a hun, or (as in ancient Greece) a thymos and a psyche, or (as in ancient Egypt) a ba and a ka, or (as in ancient Persia) an urvan and a fravashi, or (as in ancient India) an asu and a manas, or (as in ancient Hawaii) the uhane and unihipili souls, or (as in ancient Israel) a soul and a spirit, humans have always seen themselves as possessing two non-material psychic components. __Like that ancient SELF described in so many cultures, modern science has in this century also discovered that our mind is composed of two parts – one conscious and one unconscious. And the characteristics of the two parts that science has discovered (surprise!) are the very same characteristics those ancient cultures described the two parts of the ancient duality has possessing. __The ancients (Greece, Egypt, Persia, China, Hawaii, Israel) all believed that these two parts separated from one another at death; most cultures believed that one of their two parts would become trapped in some sort of netherworld (a heaven/hell type scenario), while the other part slipped away freely. Some of these ancient cultures believed that this second part went on to reincarnate. __What is particularly interesting to me about this is that : __(A) These ancient cultures described the functions and characteristics of the two parts in terms virtually identical to how modern psychologists describe the functions and characteristics of the conscious and unconscious halves of the human psyche. __(B) If one then asks what would happen if the two halves of the human psyche survived the death of the physical body, but divided from one another in the process, one finds that the unconscious would seem to become trapped in a self-induced dreamworld (think netherworld), while the other would loses its memory and sense of identity but remain free to go on to have new experiences (think reincarnation). __(C) The Bible, as well as many other ancient scriptures, includes literally hundreds of passages supporting such a soul/spirit division concept (although no one seems to have noticed this relationship). ____This Division Would Hide Itself _What is particularly interesting is that such a division, if indeed it did occur, would naturally hide itself: _If such a division did occur, no one would be likely to report the division itself, but only the effects of the division (the division itself could only be discovered through deductive reasoning, or if you accept the possibility, divine revelation). __No one would report the division itself because after the division, neither side of the mind would be aware that any such division had occurred at all. Each side of the mind would be prevented from arriving at this realization, because after the division, each side of the mind would be crippled, because each would then lack the mental capacities of the opposite side of the mind: __If the conscious and unconscious split apart, each side would report the very afterlife experiences we have seen come down through history, and which continue to be reported today. The afterlife experience of the conscious mind would reflect the traditional reincarnation scenario, while the afterlife experience of the unconscious would reflect the traditional heaven/hell netherworld scenario. __As has happened for thousands of years, each is still being actively reported today, in NDEs and Past-Life memories. For the last 20 years, science has researched these phenomena, and this research has produced yet further evidence supporting DivisionTheory. __When subjects are regressed in their memories to a point in time in-between lives, they report an afterlife scenario dramatically unlike that reported by NDE subjects. In-between lives, they report possessing no memories or emotions, just calmly floating in a tranquil nothingness. They don’t recall their own names, or having ever lived any previous lives, or having ever been anywhere else besides that nothingness they are experiencing at that very moment. This contrasts sharply with the scenario described by NDE subjects, who report undergoing profound memory-reviews – confrontations with their memories of their past-life- after which they visit emotionally-intense heavens or hells populated by any number of other people. NDE subjects do often report a similar episode during their experiences, in which they seem to temporarily “lose track” of their own emotional state, during the first few moments of an NDE. But shortly after they begin the subsequent events (traveling through the tunnel, experiencing the memory-review, etc), they again report having vivid, intense emotions. ____The Evidence _This century brought many discoveries which stand as evidence supporting DivisionTheory: _(1) the psychological discovery that the human mind is naturally divided into two halves, and the discoveries that each half possesses unique traits and characteristics __(2) the DivisionTheory discovery that, if the mind was to survive death, but divided apart in the process, those innate scientific characteristics of those two halves, the conscious and the unconscious, would cause them to neatly reproduce humanity’s two classic afterlife scenarios (the conscious would lose its memory but remain free to go on to new experiences, i.e., reincarnate, while the unconscious would become trapped in a dreamworld created out of its own reactions to its own memories, i.e., a memory-review, a judgment, and then heaven or hell), and __(2) the archaeological discovery, in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, that the afterlife theology of the early Christian church originally focused on such a division of two halves of a person’s spiritual self, and __(3) the historic discovery that the ancient religions of Hawaii, Egypt, Greece, China, Persia, and many other cultures also focused on such a belief, and __(4) the sociological phenomenon that subjects hypnotically regressed in their memories to a point in time in-between past lifetimes (as during Past-Life Regression) consistently describe floating calmly in nothingness, feeling no emotions, recalling no memories, and possessing no sense of identity, and __(5) the sociological phenomenon that people describing Near-Death experiences frequently report experiencing a similar, but temporary loss of feelings and emotions (this occurs immediately after leaving their bodies, but before they travel very far away from that body, and their sense of experiencing emotions returns shortly thereafter), and __(6) the sociological phenomenon that modern exorcists consistently describe the devils and demons they encounter as possessing a single identity, but being at the same time composed of innumerable separate entities. __Does this constitute final, definitive, conclusive proof of DivisionTheory? No. But DivisionTheory does explain ALL the phenomena being reported, up to and including the peculiar memory- and emotion-loses being reported by NDE and past-Life Regression subjects. DivisionTheory suggests that the NDE group is reporting the afterlife experience of the unconscious soul, while the Past- Life Regression group reports the afterlife experience of the conscious spirit. __But neither side, neither conscious nor unconscious, would report the division itself at all. There could be no direct eye-witness reporting of such an event. Neither part would be aware such a division had occurred, because: __*The conscious would not remember the division. Memory is stored in the unconscious. __* The unconscious would not be able to figure out that the division had occurred, because, having lost the conscious mind with its rational intellect, it could no longer objectively figure out anything. It would be as unable to discern logical conflicts and irrationalities as the mind is during dreams. __This would explain why the reports of heaven/hell netherworlds and the reports of reincarnation both continued through the ages, keeping both legends alive, but the reports of the division itself got lost in the confusion during the Dark Ages. After the Dark Ages, the division was no longer understood. or was the distinction between the soul and spirit comprehended, and they became thought of as interchangeable terms for the same thing, whereas in the original texts, the two were clearly separate and distinct components of the human spiritual economy. __Given that, we must ask, what part of “ME” is the soul, and what part is the spirit? If we do divide apart, this question becomes crucial – are they parts I will miss much? __The ancient cultures speak of these two parts in the same way modern science speaks of the conscious and unconscious. If the spirit splits away at death, and the spirit is in fact our conscious mind, death suddenly become far less hopeful a place than merely the reincarnation scenario of the East or the heaven/hell of the West. Instead, we are split apart, losing our very SELFhood. __This rings true in my ears. When something deteriorates, it breaks down into its constituent components. Perhaps the mind does as well. Perhaps this explains what so many ancient religions focused so strongly on the importance of INTEGRITY.
Re : No one but Michael…STOP HIDING FROM THE BODY-SOUL ISSUE
From: Michael Winn_Subject: Philosophy_Date/Time 2006-04-18 19:21:40_Remote IP: 66.32.83.105
Message
I am delighted to see so much buzz happening here. Hopefully something will get cooked,including me. __First of all, let me clear up the assumption that I am trying to pigeon hole all buddhists into little boxes. __There are as many different schools of Buddhism, if not more, as there are in Taoism. So I am not concerned about what school anyone belongs to – only about the underlying issue of soul completion involving both the yin “soul” and the yang “spirit” to use Peter Novak’s terms. __If some school cultivates both of those, i support it. The first book published on Taoist neidan in English – Taoist Yoga: alchemy & Immortality by Charles Luk – was by a buddhist. We know the practices are deeply entwined in China. But our purpose here is to unravel the underpinnings and get to some clarity about possible differences between enlightenment and immortality. __Fors starters, let’s stop pretending that all religions and paths are the same. No need to act miffed about your particular subsect or teacher in order to distract from the point being made. When I make a point about classical buddhism of the Pali original type adhered to by Max (vs. its tantric evolution in Tibet, or its subsequent variations) (for example) – they have particular beliefs which are printed in books for anyone to read. and they DO NOT ATTRIBUTE SOUL STATUS TO EMBODIMENT EQUAL TO EXISTENCE IN A BODHISATTA REALM. __You can site numerous exceptions, and waffle all your want, but it is a valid generalization in my opinion, i.e. valid for purposes of this discussion. __I don’t care what path anyone follows, including Taoist. I am just trying to get to underlying issues, and point how how the soul issue as it relates to the body has been blurred by ALL the major religions today, i.e. MOST Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians. And I think Peter Novak has done a service in pointing how how manyof them originally did use a binary soul concept that got lost. __But most Buddhists clearly do NOT have a binary soul concept. If I am mistaken, please educate me. Doing a practice that also deals with the body does not mean you are working with a binary soul concept OR the third immortal soul beyond it. You could be doing a body centered practice for other reasons. __My comments about Buddhists attributing reincarnation as a cause of suffering are not misleading. But I should have added the word “ongoing” cause of suffering – i.e. humans keep coming back and re-experiencing mental attachment as the immediate cause of suffering. But clearly there is an implication that there is some “attachment” that continues after death that is causing the next round of reincarnation and suffering. __Otherwise we would just die once, and the attachment would be ended forever. Peter Novak is saying that the Spirit can be perfectly Unattached and have no desire to reincarnate – but that the other half of its former self, the yin half of the soul, from which it is after death totally unaware – is still holding those memories and attachments and is suffering and stuck. And that some mechanism in the Cosmos (he lacks a theory of the life force) propels a resolution and re-incarnation of new binary soul. __But my whole point here – and Peter Novak’s – is that what the Buddhists are calling “mind” here, and what is generally discussed as ego here, is not sufficient to describe what is meant by the binary soul, both halves of which survive after death. __Mental activities that are described by psychologists as “egoic” are really a byproduct of the conflict that is happening between the two halves of the soul. The actual thoughts or feelings of attachment, the desires themselves – are not the problem in this model. The core problem is the lack of integration between the two halves of the soul. And that cannot really be solved at the level of ego/mind. __In the taoist alchemical model, the activity of the five shen are an extrapolation and expression of the these two primary bi-souls, which are identified in Kan and li practices as primal water and fire. You can re-arrange the activity of the five shen to be more harmonious and functional in the world (goal of psychological counseling), but that doesn’t mean they have integrated at the soul level. But a certain level of ego intregration is a prerequisite to realizing the deeper level of the binary soul as the source of left-righit brain ego activities. __It’s why, in my opinion (since I accept the binary soul reality), that merely releasing one’s mental attachments or simply “shifting the angle of perception of the mind” does NOT equal the marriage of the two halves of the binary soul into a third consciousness. Those releasing attachment practices may produce wonderful results, but I am simply saying they are not the same process. __And if one feels that those other practices lead to spontaneous union of the two halves of the binary soul, then I say it good to make that process conscious and use language that will encourage people to cultivate that binary soul marriage. There’s no need to pretend that it can’t be spoken of, because clearly it can and has been explored for thousands of years. __Cosmologically speaking, the binary souls of human is simply a stepped down expression of the union of Humanity’s parents, Heaven and Earth. So it’s perfectly natural that half our human soul would reflect an earthly nature, and half would reflect a heavenly nature. __If the binary soul halves marry and have an inner child/sage, that sage child can live eternally carrying the consciousness of both heaven and earth. If the two halves don’t marry, the soul experiment is over and the two halves get recycled back to the pool of earthly or heavenly consciousness. __It makes perfect intuitive sense to me, and feels harmonious and balanced. __michael _

From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-21 04:09:15
Remote IP: 66.32.83.105
Message
First, a few wrap up comments on the response to my Round 7 preliminary posting.

Bagua and others have raised the point that yin-yang is one cycle, one whole, so what me worry about having a split soul? And of course everyone wants to support the Oneness is all that matters attitude.

Let’s remember to keep our language precise: Oneness is not the same as Harmony, which implies the continued existence and relationships amongst of the Many.

It seems easy and obvious to argue that the Many is innately in harmony with its source, the One, that it’s a given and does not require real cultivation other than smiling and accepting What Is.

But WHY IS THERE NOT HARMONY AMONST THE MANY, Ii.e. between the different individual s all incarnating from that primoridal oneness? In common language, WHY IS THERE SUFFERING, VIOLENCE, DISEASE, or EVIL?

That is the question, and that is why binary soul theory and Daoist yin-yang theory needs to be understood at a deeper level than the obvious taiji circle. Yes, I agree, on the vast scale of eternal time it is all in balance, and will all work itself as that is inevitable process of the Life Force.

But as Bagua casually mentioned, and failed to elaborate on, there seems to be a little problem of “extreme cases” of imbalance that requires a little extra work. And what does it mean when that extreme case seems to be manifested on an entire planet, in the suffering many of the 6.5 billion humans, and a planet facing self-destruction by war and environmental destruction?

The explantion that is’s all perfect, if you could just shift the angle of perception, rings a little hollow. It doesn’t describe the reality. Its basically a “mind is perfect” or “shen is perfect” theory if you let it be perfect.

It means that if you just sit there are watch the suffering from your safe neutral spot on the meditation pad, you’ve improved your own lot (of at least your mind, if not your jing/bodily health) but may not have speeded up that process for the larger field.

TIME, which is just an illusion created by subjective rate of vibration of space, IS A REAL and SERIOUS PROBLEM WHEN YOU’RE SUFFERING. Ask anyone who has got a disease, or is in pain, or is feeling suicidal. If their suffering is not real, then the notions of kindness, love, compassion are empty and useless if they don’t alleviate anything for those stuck in the “illusion” of their suffering.
———————-

Now, on to the key questions.

1. Why is there a binary soul? How does it serve the whole?
It serves the whole by allowing greater mirroring and distinction of Self, that does NOT exist in the primordial or Oneness state. In humans, it steps down and concretizes the relationship between Heaven and Earth.

2. If there is conflict and struggle between the two halves of the soul, which is acted out as violence, war, etc. in outer world, its because there is friction between Heaven and Earth, or within Elements of Heaven and Earth, that are showing up in their Child Humanity. This is sometimes called the War in Heaven that is reflected as the war on earth.

3. The cause of suffering then is in the agency that creates the binary soul, i.e. heaven and earth, formless and form. It does NOT originate in any flaw or sin of humans, although we may aggravate it out of fear and ignorance. But since humans have been given the spark of free will that existed in the original will to exist, present in the primordial oneness, then we do have the power to alleviate our own suffering.

4. This means Humanity has been given a pre-existing flaw (or “extreme imbalance”) AND the means (free will) to heal it. It would seem that every human is given a “mandate from heaven”, i.e. a destiny, a patatern of jing imprinted and flowing through our mingmen/Gate of Destiny in each moment.
Question: if we all followed that destiny everything would come up roses and suffering should quickly end. Why is it so difficult for any one human being to follow their destiny, i.e. to know their purpose in life and act on it?

5. THIS IS THE WILDCARD: NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH KNOWS FULLY WHAT OUR DESTINY IS! Our destiny is NOT PREDESTINED. They have stepped themselves down into humanf orm as a binary soul pattern in the hopes that the tension between the yin-yang halves of the soul will propel us each to DISCOVER THE MISSING ESSENCE NEEDED TO RESTORE HARMONY between heaven and earth.

6. We need to admit that Heaven & Earth have a little problem: it is called astral pollution, and it occurs at the moment of death. There are consequences to humans NOT exercising their free will and using it to choose integration between yin & yang halves of soul.

The consequence is separation of the souls and leaving each in an incomplete state. There is a huge pileuip of dead po souls, or earth bound souls that neither feeling complete in fulfilling their mission on earth and incomplete in merging with their heaven/formless halfl.

This large and incomplete pool of yin/earthbound souls exerts negative influence on the global psyche of humanity, perpetuating negative thought forms which trigger negative actions, which require incarnating more souls to take on those patterns in the hopes of resolving them.

The mass wars and epidemic of human violence and killng has created a huge pool of incompletion that IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM FOR THE COLLECTIVE WHOLE. It becomes a vicious repeating cycle – unless the feeling of soul incompletion is completed somehow. This is why SOUL COMPLETION is the DRIVING FORCE BEHIND EVOLUTION.

Yes, everything always remains in its proper and inevitable yin-yang relationship of Heaven-earth, man-woman, hun-po – but that relationship will produce intense suffering in this physical plane if any imbalance is allowed to continue for a period of time.

Denial of this problem just pushes the suffering into a deeper level of unconscious, from which it will emerge at death once the conscious suppression is stopped,a nd the two halves split in immediate relief that a bad relationship is over. But soul divorce doesn’t solve the core suffering – it just shifts it from the failed individual effort back into the collective burden.

6. The alchemical methods are designed to speed up the natural process of soul completion. And at higher levells, allow the individual to consciously radiate the vibration of the integrated /sage / third pole of consciousness out into the broader field of human consciousness. They permit the individual to speed up their own process of soul completion and begin working on the colletive isues beyond their own soul pattern.

This alchemical process is different than the enlgihtenment process (in my definition of the words).
The yin/earth soul dominant types are either Self-Improvers or World Improvers. Their enlightenment is to serve the world.

The yang/heaven soul dominant types are Self-Transcenders or World Transcenders. Their enlightenment is seek otherworldly states that free the self from the limitations of form.

Many pursue the completion of their yin or yang half while SUPPRESSING the other half. This gets played out at death, although the individual doesn’t know it, because once you’ve split youlack the capacity for self-awareness. The collective has already taken on your problem.

Immortality is not an end state, in my definition it is just a way to describe the ongoing evolution of the individual ability to relate to the Many after death. The Immortal can REMEMBER CONSCIOUSLY WHAT ESSENCE WAS DISCOVERED THAT COMPLETED THE WHOLE and evolved it beyond what it was.

this is the unique process of Tao – it never repeats itself, each mment is unique and open to uniqiue realization by humans. The constancy of the primordial ground of oneness does not interfere with or prevent the continuing flow of the Tao’s uniqueness, it serves it and stabilizes it.

But the key point about the WILDCARD is that your free will, exercised n each moment, is exploring thorugh desire = and intention to complete each desire – those essences necessary to restore the harmonoius flow within the physical plane, without violence or suffering. As I have mentioned in my essay on sexuality posted on the Healing Love product page – I believe the first level of essence to be recoverd with our freewill is the yuan chi that was “lost” to consciouness during the splitting of the male and female sexes.

enough for now.
michael

Round 8: Binary Souls, Free Will, Why OneNess Chooses to Evolve: (763) Michael Winn (1397) – – 2006-04-21 04:09 am
Ghosts: (498) we

From: singing ocean
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-24 03:05:03
Remote IP: 154.20.12.53
Message
Ba,

I have been readng your post, and would like to answer it until michael gets around to it, but again, your language is very unclear, and you take things out of context:

>>”Wu Ji created Heaven and Earth, under your assumption, it created the potential for this polarity, and of course not to polarize to the degree to cause the “human problem”, which you are stating it did create.”
(this is grammatically very unclear and hard to understand)

I think what you are saying in general is why would the Dao create this extreme unresolved polarity, and then not create an answer to it (like you say: “Why would we connect to the these flawed and polarized forces, Earth and Heaven, in our alchemy?”)?

My interpretation of Michael’s post is that humanity was created by the dao as an experiment, the stepped down result of the mystery of yin and yang, of formless and form: the answer to your question was in his next paragraph, which said that the wildcard is that Heaven and Earth do not know our destiny completely, IT’S UP TO US TO FIGURE IT OUT. It is a mystery, the beauty of free will. Can we resolve this extreme polarity?

We are at the receiving end of this polarized mystery, meaning that there is no predestined answer laid out for us by heaven and earth. I think what you are really saying is, “why can’t we connect to this perfect state of heaven (or earth, or the dao) to resolve all our problems?”, Why isn’t it already answered, perfected and done for us?
The answer is that we have to do the work to find the resolution through our lives, cultivation and free will, we microcosmically create the answer that heaven and earth is seeking.

Why Did Heaven and Earth Create Humanity – and its Suffering?
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-24 07:18:30
Remote IP: 66.32.83.105
Message
I feel that Singing Ocean has basically responded to Bagua as I would.

But Bagua’s question about following the way of Heaven and Earth is very profound, and deserves a fuller answer. I often quote the same passage from the Cantong Qi (Triplex Unity), which is one of the oldest Taoist alchemical texts (2nd century AD).

First, let’s just note that the Oneness (or Primordial) has always been around, it never leaves even in this focused plane of polarity/physicality with its limitations of linear time flow. As the Triplex Unity notes, there is no real difference between Life and Death as far as the Original Breath/yuan qi/Oneness is concerned.

The Oneness was around when Genghis Khan slaughtered millions of innocent people on his imperial whim. It was around when Hitler executed five million jews in gas chambers because of their religion. We can surmise that our Original Being observes neutrally when each murder is committed, when every anguished person suffering from disease is screaming to be relieved of pain.

Yet the Primordial Oneness does nothing to relieve our suffering. Or, at least nothing that we can readily perceive. I agree with Bagua, that cultivating an identity of Oneness does relieve personal suffering on some levels. But won’t necessarily stop the progression of a disease or give you long life, or even stop your soul karma from being played out. You may have a more relaxed, less reactive space to experience your pleasures and your pains in life.

But just because you perceive the underlying unity of all things doesn’t mean that you will choose to change the pattern of your soul’s unfoldment, in life, or at death when the souls split. That requires Will, or choice, and that must be communicated to the Life Force. All religions profess belief in God and Unity, and most have been involved in huge atrocities. Even the compassion-loving Buddhists of Tibet engaged in the wholesale extermination of competing Shamans form the Bon tradition. Talk is cheap when it comes to religious values.

The question that is raised here, is (how) can we do more than become a neutral witness to our lives? Can we actually change the pattern of unfoldment? How far can we push the limited free will that we seem to have in our physical choices?

The issue that is raised is not too different from the biblical story of Job: Why do you allow me to suffer, God? (Unlike Fajin, I do not equate God with Tao; I equate all Creator Gods with emanations of Original Spirit, but that is another discussion).

And it speaks to the issue of the impersonality of Heaven and Earth raised in the Tao Te Ching, in which the Sage who has presumably merged with Heaven and Earth “treats humans as if they were straw dogs”, i.e. with indifference. Straw figures were burned in rituals in ancient China to appease the Gods.

The Life Force is not exactly indifferent, in my view. It is simply neutral. and has to be, in order to unconditionally accept all that is created and to honor the desires of all that lives.

The Taoist cosmology in the Tao Te Ching is that the Tao created Heaven and Earth, and that Heaven and Earth created Humanity. The question is, why did Heaven and Earth create Humanity? If we don’t know that, then we cannot know our own purpose for existing, we cannot understand why our souls has been bifurcated into two warring halves, and we cannot know our soul mission in life.

It echoes into the question, on another level, of why the original androgynous bi-sexed, integrated yin-yang soul was divded into physical male and female. Was that part of the War between Heaven and Earth, to be played out by Humanity?

These are the deepest mysteries in life, and no one can claim to definitively answer them. In my opinion, we can only explore the continuum of personal self to collective self, and use our tiny window of microcosmic perception to look at the possible macrocosmic relationship that Humanity has to Heaven (the formless planes of consicousness) and Earth (the form planes of consciousness). We know that as humans we seem to be both, animals (form) with quasi-fomrless minds that mediate totally invisible souls.

My position in the chan-taoist debate has been to support the cultivation practices of both, but to point out that differences in intention will be mirroed by the Life Force differently. That “clearing the mind” of negative ego perceptions, while very beneficial and essential, is not the same as resolving deeper soul divisions.

That enlightenment and immortality are different in my languaging of human evolution – they involve overlapping but ultimately different processes. Different intentions will create different choices, which will produce different experiences.

Essentially, my belief is that you cannot skip the conscious transformations of jing-chi-shen and go straight to wu without bypassing important soul choices that are forced upon us by our physical embodiment. That the “wu” you will achieve may not be the ultimate “wu”, and will thus leave behind soul incompletions that will have to be resolved by Humanity.

The most important choice we can make is to drop our judgments against embodiment and the suffering it may possibly cause. This is macrocosmically the same as dropping our judgement of Earth. Yet most religions – including Buddhism in its root form and most of its Asian non-new age western forms – are making that judgement, and saying that Heaven and the formless is better than earth because it doesn’t have suffering. Hence their hope to get off the wheel of incarnation.

But Heaven ALONE doesn’t have free will, because it lacks the mirroring of Earth, the body/jing/individual shape necessary to express free will. It needs Earth to create, just as men and women need each other to pro-create.

What is going on is that the Old Boy, paternalistic religions – in which I include Buddhism, HInduism, Islam, and Christianity – are expressing the dissatisfaction of certain streams of Heaven with the way things are going on Earth. That humanity was created as a way to mediate those differences between heaven and earth, and test the possibilities of free will, but that humanity hasn’t proven itself and that the experiment in free will is best ended, the sooner the better. This involves dissolving everyone back into a formless state, where there will be no suffering. Or at the very least, create a clear hierarchy, where Heaven dominates Earth and things are ordered according to a domination/hierarchical order led by those streams of heaven who are horrified by the mess that humanity has become.

But Earth doesn’t hold this position, nor do certain streams of Heaven consciousness that favor free will and believe the experiment will ultimately prove itself important in the evolution of heaven-earth. The problem is that all the players – the diverse streams of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity and their shifting alliances via religion and science – because of the underlying unity of all process, has to stick with it, there is no option to break away and go live in another dimension.

So the Big Picture puts our tiny human choices as leverage points in the cosmic process and the at times absurd virtual reality we call planet earth.

But no need to feel lonely just because there is no Top Dog/ God guaranteeing your salvation and holding your hand like an overweening parent. You have to become both your own parent and treat your binary soul struggle with the kind of love and compassion that only a parent has for their confused offspring.

Every thickening of the human plot is followed by an ultimate resolution. Question is, how soon will you complete your piece/peace in this Way-making process?

Smiling to the Cosmic Jokester,
Michael

Difference between Heaven & Earth Drives Creation
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-25 06:08:40
Remote IP: 66.32.6.26
Message
Bagua,

I completely accept your intention as correct, the traditional daoist dictum that a cultivator should harmonize with Heaven and Earth. And you know that the fundamental premise of my Greater Kan & Li is “Embrace the Earth, and Heaven will Chase You” – same line that Fajin takes, and what is at the core of five phases system where Earth is the central element, not ether. So Daoists don’t chase the ether, they embrace the earth, and heaven, which is its ethereal aspect, then comes to us.

I am highlighting the distinction between Heaven and Earth to take our understanding of the binary soul tension to a deeper level.

Just because there is a dynamic tension between Heaven and Earth does not imply that they are NOT in harmony.
There is a dynamic tension between yin-yang that drives creation in the same way – but they are not the same.
It is reflected in everything – left-right brain tension, binary soul tension. Heaven-Earth is a single entity, but it holds the tension of creation within it.

I believe that this particular physical plane (one small corner of Earth) represents the “unconscious” of Heaven, its dark side, and so it is in the process of “cooking” this reality to grasp the inner nature of its own dark side. We are injected into the process as Humans to clarify and evolve that relation between Heaven-Earth. But its not a pre-determined state of harmony, the harmony exists only in the moment, and is constantly evolving.

Would you not agree there is a “difference” between the Early and Later heaven arrangements, a creative tension between them? They have the exact same trigrams, but their arrangement creates a dynamic movement between the two states. In my musical view of the I Ching, they are singing different songs, using the same chords.

I contend that being aware of the dynamic tension between Heaven and Earth will help us to resolve the tension within our own binary soul, and vice versa. But the tension originated in Heaven and Earth, not in humans, which is their child. Same with every family: the child of mother and father is creative attempt to evolve a unique new harmony between the essence of mother & father. But you cannot actually know what is the hidden tension until you manifest the child, the child plays it out for you.

Same story with Heaven & Earth, they NEED humanity to play out their intra-psychic drama. That’s what we add to the trinitarian dynamic – we are not just passive bystanders who happened to start killing each other over what are at core sexual differences, and who when we wake up will dissolve back into Heaven and Earth and disappear gently into the Night of some Void. No, the parents don’t want to destroy/dissolve their child, they want to rebirth their own source within the child in a new and more aware/immortal Way.

Guess we are going to have to have a live meeting of this Daoist Philosophers Club at some point, and allow our energy bodies to wrestle it out….

Smiling from the hidden space between Heaven & Earth,
Michael

Round 8: Binary Souls, DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND PARASITE COLLECTIVES
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-30 19:58:37
Remote IP: 66.32.6.26
Message
Dylan,
I think you’ve drawn an important distinction – and one I make in my higher kan & li courses. The difference between the adept who is cultivating himself/individuating to immortality and the parasitical negative thought forms that keep gathering soul fragments together is this: the parasite has no yuan chi. It depends for its life on leftover yin-yang energies, which is why they foment “evil” and “suffering” to increase the available fragments for their food.

Humans have connection to infinite yuan chi, and thus infinite levels of transformation. We can move on. The parasites/demon immortals wait here for the next confused human meal.

Michael

The Solitude of Self-Relationship: EGO VS. SOUL RELATIONSHIPS
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-30 09:54:02
Remote IP: 66.32.6.26
Message
Fajin,

I’ve read through all the responses to your posting. Thanks for stimulating such an important discussion.
The fact that its a real life issue for you, and not an abstract theory question, attracts a deeper response.

Relationship with the “Other” is the most difficult path in life for most people. I think this outer reality is just a mirror of the inner yin-yang relationship problem we have between the two halves of our souls, both male-female on the horizontla axis and form-formless tension on the vertical axis of our being.

That said, my experience is that while alchemical work can greatly accelerate and deepen the process of resolving and integrating the yin-yang tension, it is not generally meant to replace it. Most of us are not born to sit in a cave apart from society, which means relationships.

I believe most people- including cultivators – need the stimulus of other people’s soul force to awaken the hidden essences and their potential within them. We’re born incomplete, but we cannot realize it except by experiencing atttraction to and completion with others.

That stimulus doesn’t ahave to be sexual, you can have a soul relationship with anyone. The sexual relationship is just more intense and hence transformative, especially of deep jing issues. It brings up the hidden issues more quickly. You find out how you are replaying your issues with your mommy-daddy (if you can be self-aware enough to notice it). Which is another way of saying that relationships are attempts to resolve ancestral issues.

Most people are struggling with ego issues in relationships, which can be adjusted by energetic cultivation to be more harmonious or balanced. But that level of ego adjustment doesn’t penetrate completely on the soul level.

So on the ego level, I think its more choice whether you choose solo or dual sexual cultuvation. You can have a reasonably happy life either way, depending on your sexual nature (astrology) and situation.

On the soul level, the ego has no choice, it is secondary to those deeper forces, which can overrun the ego like a freight train. I would paraphrase bagua’s advice to you – just continue cultivating your (ego) life, and if a deeper (soul) relationship happens, then great. The ego cannot control the soul, only merge with it and integrate it with other soul forces.

As a martial artist, there is a tendency to train to establish control of the situation or of the self. So I think Freeform was giving some good if challenging advice. Relationships are inherently “out of our control” and require continuous surrender to the greater process. This is essential part of experiencing the Self and Other
as One Process.

What is a love relationship? Words can confuse and blur our inentions, as Pietro points out, and become mere cultural impulses we are acting out.

The common element I see in almost all definitions of love is the process of merging some part of ourself with Other. Another way to phrase it: is the nature of the Many experiencing its wholeness as One that we can call Love.

Alexander’s comments highlight this important point. I think he is just putting into western language of Divine Love what is cultivated in alchemical as Yuan/ Original Self. Can you cultivate original self without a partner? Surely. Does your original self include all other human beings within its emanation? Surely. The result: you dig into any relationship, and you find some aspect of yourself. If you dig deep enough, you get past the ego patterns and touch the soul level.

That is behind the wisdom of conventional arranged marriages: you can learn to love anyone, because they are by definition already a part of your greater human self. I self-arranged a green card marriage when I was 23 years old, with a young Ethiopian girl who was about to be deported. We fell in love, but only many months after we had been married and even decided to live together, that it was more than a legal arrangement.

A very few cultivators dig past the soul to get to the oversoul (collective soul) level. While I agree with Max the deep spiritual work is mostly done alone, internally thorugh meditation, without the outer mirror of life the process is sterile. Empty, in the worst sense of the word :).

There are few things more alien or “other” to a man than a woman. If you can bridge that gap then your chances of bridging the heaven-earth gap are much, much greater and likely to embrace the other half of humanity.

The women posting on this forum, bless their souls, have been noted to be generally more favorable toward relationships. Why is that? They are in stronger relationship to the earth side, implanted in the psyche via their biological/menstrual cycle and their function of pro-creation. And because their shen have more intense feeling relationships because of their sexual energy being more internal.

The tough thing for men is loving a woman who is honest with them. Men tend to be a bit ego- rigid and feeling-avoidant, mental body feels safer to them. Hence relationships challenge that safety. If you are with someone because of a deeper soul attraction, then I think the investment is worth working through the ego crap and unclean energy. Otherwise, better to cultivate solo and wait for the right soul to be attracted to who you are.

The danger in solo work is in building up armor against openness, which is vulnerability without the fear factor.

Hope something in these ramblings serves you.

Michael

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Wugong vs. Jinggong, Qigong, and Shengong INTENTION IS HUMAN KEY
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-05-09 06:50:31
Remote IP: 66.32.44.168
Message
Bagua: It sounds like you are saying “intention is following the patterns consciously within your body, following wu xing and energy patterns”. To me this is just following what already exists with your Yi, you are not shaping anything, you are becoming aware of what already exists. Unless the two are the same, this is what I believe.

I will jump into this conversation just to point out the contradiction here, Bagua. You refer to “what exists” as if it were an absolute and/or predetermined fullness, when the chan position traditionally is that “what exists” is emptiness. This “what exists” is a hidden rigidity in your attempts to equalize everything, incuding dao alchemical process of cultivation, which only partially overlaps chan.

In a process oriented cosmology like Dao, there is no fixed “what exists”. What exists is always in a unique process of flow, it never repeats itself, the contents of the river are never the same even though the river has an apparent path.

The principles of yin-yang and five phases are not “what exists” in terms of experience, they are archetypal patterns or principles within the process/river.

What Fajin is correctly defending is the role of Humanity as one of the Three Treasures. That role includes Intention/Creativity in shaping the flow of Heaven and Earth. Humans are not inventing or creating Heaven and Earth, but they have no choice but to shape the impulses received from both (via their binary soul, as stepped out micro verison of heaven & earth).

Choiceless choice is a good way to describe wu wei, but it doesn’t imply lack of creativity, or following something else. Its following effortlessly your own nature, and that nature, defined by the triune dynamic tension of the life force, involves constant creativity.

It sounds like wu wei to you means surrendering to some pre-existing “what is” outside of yourself. What exists in humans is constant creativity that refreshes Humanity. If you want to speak more usefully of “what exists”, then I think its more fruitful to speak of the natural alchemical process of refinement that is occuring in life, and whether that can be useuflly accelerated or intensified. The alchemical tradition embodies the experience that it is useful for those able to grasp the essence of the process.

The chan tradition is not overtly alchemical, i.e. it is not trying to consciously accelerate the process as its goal, it is trying to bypass or shortcut the process by jumping straight to wu and skipping the jing-chi-shen-wu process.

What I’ve seen here is a lot of backpedalling by chan theorists to say that we are in fact cultivating jing chi shen by focusing on wu, and that we get the same result or better by doing it that way. But that’s not the traditional position taken in the literature I’ve read, the chan literature is NOT PROCESS ORIENTED with equal weighting to jing-chii-shen-wu, It is state oriented, i.e. state of emptiness. I think its great that practitioners here are moving beyond that position and integrating daoist alchemical principles into their practice CONSCIOUSLY. But as Fajin says, why not just practice the alchemy? The functional use of emptiness is already integrated.

The bypass straight to wu, while it may advance one’s personal evolution, may also fail to explore important lessons in the creative process. And may lead some adepts to confuse the empty/formless state with complete realizaation unless one is very careful NOT to make emptiness a fixed state. As the Dalai Lama points out, emptiness is merely the counter-point to individual states of existence and has NO INHERENT “WHAT EXISTS” to it.

Alchemy consciously explores the relation between individual states and their formless couinterpart, and the equilibrium crystallized between the two is the secret to the unique process of human immortality. Again, in humans that attainment of immortality DOES NOT PRE-EXIST, it is not part of the “what exists”. It is what is evolving from the POTENTIAL THAT EXISTS, since of course the ground of existence is eternal.

But the potential seed and its flower are two different things. If you don’t Water the seed and shine Fire/light on it in the right balance, the seed does not flower. That is why human choices are so important, and why process cannot be bypassed in the course of human evolution, physical, cultural, and spiritual. Emptiying the past of its resistant patterns is useful only to free up the space for making those choices.

alchemical smiles dissolving this endless talk,
Michael

ps I am starting my journey to west coast and then china shortly and may not be on board much in the next month, but will try to drop a line from China.

EGO VS. SOUL RELATIONSHIPS and binary soul question
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-04-30 19:15:16
Remote IP: 66.32.6.26
Message
This of course is the 64 Trililion (note inflation has occured) dollar question: do I leave a difficult relationship, or work through it?

Only “you” can answer this, i.e. the shen consensus of the ego-self deciding what is most productive. But answering the question is ultimately a reflection of the xin/ego self’s level of communication with its soul level, as the soul knows beyond the immediate physical-mental-emotional level of ego struggle, what is to be completed (or not) by staying in the relationship.

When I say “soul knows”, I do not mean in any pre-determined sense, just that the binary soul has a different perspective on the process that is a bit wider and deeper than the local heart-mind. In your case, since you are deep into the kan & li process, I would go deep into whatever level of that kan & li process that feels intuitively might have the input to move your current relationship. Once you open up that cauldron and invite the appropriate ancestors/earth forces/planetary-astrological-archetypal foces into the cauldron, just ask for a consensus at that level, and listen to the input for clues as to why the current relationship is either stalled and could go deeper, or why it is not so fruitful for all concerned to continue on.

For those who haven’t yet penetrated the mysteries of the higher alchemical formulas, you could ask the same question before doing a wuji gong (primordial qigong) ceremony.And see the form as a ritual calling in of all the aspects of the greater self, even if not consciously identified, to help decide on the highest and most true direction for the relationship.

It is NOT in my opinion a given that one should plough through every relationship just because it started for what appeared to be good reasons at the time. And just because you love someone doesn’t mean its best for you to be married and living with them.
.
Souls (and heart-minds) evolve at different speeds, and may have diverging destinies, and this is the main problem, as people grow in different directions or at different speeds, it may not serve either soul to continue that relationship as primary.

I have many past relationships that I have continued cultivating on the inner (soul) plane, even though the physical relation is over, by force of circumstance or whatever. But sexual bonds outlive the relationship, and I honor them by continuing to grow the soul relationship even though the sexual-emotional one is over.

This is not attachment to the past, it is seeking completion of earlier bondings at the jing level now internalized in the ongoing texture/process of myself. Your old lovers shape you long after they depart. I’ve chosen to make this conscious and give it completion, by continuing to love (merge with) those souls, even though I may not have had any physical contact with them for years/decades. I create an inner cauldron space where my primary partner’s soul is in the center with me, and the other lovers are like ancestors in an outer ring, holding the sacred space of my soul development and invited to participate in it.

Since all individual binary soul patterns are inexorably on a path of individuating themselves and then bringing the fruit of that to the collective soul process, this cauldron arrangement works for me. Sometimes old lovers will disappear from the cauldron completely, and I know that they have then completed their soul relationship with me.

Could luck, hope you win the 64 trillion dollars, send me some when it arrives…

Michael

Re: Wugong vs. Jinggong, Qigong, and Shengong INTENTION IS HUMAN KEY
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-05-10 09:23:55
Remote IP: 66.32.44.168
Message
We probably agree on some level, max. But there may be a useful distinction.

I’m saying that you can never achieve a state of pure emptiness as a prerequsite to beginning the alchemical process. Because the emptiness is co-existing with multiple levels of polarized yin-yang levels of self.

So we are constantly “emptying” (moving towards neutral) while simultaneously constantly balancing the immediate flow of yin-yang patterns on ego, soul, and oversoul levels (even if unconscious of those distinctions). That’s why you can feel bliss internally, and have challenging shit happening all around you in your life.

That’s why I feel it can become a rigidity to presume that there is only one way to progress in cultivation. Some may find it easier to grasp the emptiness by first balancing the yin-yang forces, others may prefer to ignore yin yang patterns and focus on stillness. This depnds on innate constitution and chance, i..e. who you happen to learn from and imitate their Way.

The emptiness and yin-yang forces are constantly mutating into each other, because the yuan chi is always dividing into yin-yang and yin-yang are always exhausting their polarity and at the extremes becoming yuan chi.

I think we all agree this process is happening naturally and spontaneously without any human intervention to make it happen, i.e. humans don’t CAUSE Heaven and Earth.

But humans tend to almost universally to “interfere” with this process due to cultural or karmic conditioning, i.e. we can’t help but have an intention, even if it is an imbalanced/egoic/reactive intention.

I think the difference is that while both chan and dao tries to remove the ego interference in the natural process, the Daoist (alchemist) goes a step further.

AFTER achieving a greater level of ego balance (a relative state, which will include a greater awareness of “empty center between yin-yang”), such that the adept is then able to express a deeper level of “de”/virtue/soul essence that empowers the adept to shape the flow of the life force according to its individual needs.

This shaping of the life force by the adept’s “desire” or ” authentic need” is spirtually lawful expression of the soul, and not “attached” or “egoic”, but is rather an expression of the life force itself and in particular of Humanity’s role as mediator between heaven & earth.

So the distinction being made here is probably that there is no “emptiness” in linear time to “first” achieve before beginning alchemy. That emptiness is residing in an underlying counter-reality that forms a whole with the yin-yang flow of physical reality. So the emptiness is really in a sense in a parallel time zone, not in the physical present moment, even though it is linked to it.

That parallel dimesnion emptienss may be what bagua is perceiving as “pre-existing”, without having to shape it. But SOMETHING is going to shape how that emptiness becomes yin-yang manifest patterns, and alchemy makes that something conscious.

hopes this clarifies the difference I perceive.

peace,
michael

Don’t miss the distinction SPIRITUAL MING VS. WORLDLY MING
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-08-07 16:15:07
Remote IP: 74.32.39.116
Message
Thanks Nnoonth for refocusing my comments on what was intended.

It’s not that I disagree with you Fajin – our ultimate ming/destiny is to cultivate our xing, our inner essence, if successful it allows us as an immortal to function freely from within the primordial and shape it as needs be to participate in the broader multi-dimensional process of Creation. But neidan isn’t a one way ticket – its a two way process in which ming and xing mourish each other.

But it’s NOT your ming as a human being in a body to ignore the world, as if Original Spirit was somehow separate from it. That’s why I was cautioning you, don’t fall into the trap of thinking some samadhi state is meaningful in any ultimate way. These openings are just carrots along the Way, to entice you to go deeper. Expect closings will follow, forcing you to seek openings of a different nature. the will to manifest the soul is not so weak as to rollover and sit in a blank state of bliss for eighty years….

Just wait long enough, and the deeper demands of your body and worldly destiny (actually exerted by your soul pattern) will re-assert themselves and begin pulling on you to complete them. The cave will grow old eventually, for all but a very few whose destiny it is to be a lifelong hermit. As your worldly destiny re-asserts itself, either you keep running away from it, trying to escape your inner voices by suppressing them or by focusing on an unmanifest plane, or you respond to them and ask, what is it that you (I) came here to complete?

Do you think the Primordial needs your puny little body to realize itself, that its sole purpose in reducing its consciousness down to a slowly vibrating sexed human body was so that through you it could transcend the reality of its limitations, and that your soul destiny was only to love the unmanifest Origin and not the rest of manifest Creation?

That sounds like a spiritually pretty insecure Primordial to me, one that is totally co-dependent on getting love from its own lesser creation. I think the process of the Tao is much deeper, not a mere “Get in a body, then get out as fast as possible to please the Original Spirit”.

The 10,000 Things ARE the Body of the Original Spirit, and their life rhythm is its process. Tao has spent billions of years in physical time perfecting the manifestation process of bodies, so let’s not underestimate the importance of manifestation in our spiritual journey. this is the weak suit of Chan; I am not trying to discourage you from exploring its strengths.

I will re-state my intention by quoting the advice of another Taoist master to me, Ni Hua Ching. “Don’t go to the mountains too early”, he cautioned, reflecting on his own experience. “You can get so pure that later its nearly impossible to live in the rest of the polluted world….your destiny becomes very difficult.”

Wishing you deepest completion,
Michael

Getting Clear: Pre-natal vs. Primordial Distinction, Sweeping Away Thoughts
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-08-12 20:53:44
Remote IP: 74.32.39.116
Message
Fajin, I’m using your comments that prenatl and primordial are the same, as a jumping off point. I’ve posted your response to NN below as reference.

Of course everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but I think you’ve grasped onto one that is rather unworkabale.

I know some Taoist and Buddhist writers mush the terms Early heaven and Primordial together, but my observation is that they do not fully understand the alchemical process of transformation that exists in nature. It is not easy to experience the difference between the two, and hence the confusion.

But even conceptually, they have ignored the most obvious symbolism of the terms even as it is recorded in Chinese culture in the I Ching.

The quantum physicists you quote as well – do you really think that they have peered into the wuji? Brother,
they are looking at “kong” – post natal emptiness. The fact that they can measure that 99.9% to the 1 % already suggests that they are only looking on the surface. The wuji is not measureable! By defintion – it is the unknowable. Don’t get sucked into quantum new age think! Telescopes do not measure dimensions! When they have a machine they can piont inside me, and measure how deep my inner space is, let me know!

The scientists have not even penetrated into “xu” – the pre-natal emptiness level which I think (suspect?) you may be confusing with the “wu” in “wuji”. This is the “xu” in early Taoist texts used to describe the emtpy center of the Wheel – again, always in order to improve one’s understanding of the movement of the wheel (concept I am sure you agree with, but I am distinguishing it from wuji).

Why do I say that pre-natal is not the wuji? Just look at the symbol for “Early Heaven” in any I Ching book.
You will find 8 gua, or four pairs of polarized trigrams, representing an energetic arrangement.

Are you saying the wuji is polarized four-ways? Never heard of anything like that in any Taoist texts!

Lao Tzu in verse 42 talks of process from Tao to One to Two toThree to 10,000 things. Not a word about the four way polarity (or even core yin-yang polarity) in the beginning One. How can the One be Four at very start?

Tao is process, cosmology is process, and NN correctly challenged your claims about stillness making the physical plane some kind of illusion. (Glad you agreed with him – but it rasies questions about some of your other positions).

I think iphysical plane is a virtual reality, like all realities, created out of the primordial ground. The perspective from the primordial ground of it self may be one of eternal stillness, but how can it be separate from its creation? As you say, they form a Oneness, but that means ONE PROCESS, not one state of permanent stillness being sought by the Primordial. If the Primordial is seeking movement in Creation, shouldn’t we imitate it?

The obsession with stillness in general I’ve found to obscure the issue of Free Will that the Primal Ground has injected into Creation, and especcially into Humanity. If we use the quantum 1% of existence is physical, it may just imply that we are the cutting edge of Primal Ground’s explroation. One we work it out, there may be more diemensions of Free Will being birthed.

That tension here is the function of humans to resolve – and resolve here in the physical plane, by aligning it with the deeper soul and primal consciousness.

Is it the destiny of the physical plane to become still? I dobut it -I believe that is wishful thinking, and why i ascribe escapism to all colors of absolutist philosophies.

I often hear silly responses to this – that Science proclaims that the EArth is doomed, our sun is doomed to end, within a few billion more years, so why not go into Permanent Emptiness directly, why wait the few billion agonizing years of suffering?

First of all, a big mistake to believe scientists know anything much about the end of evolution. I don’t think Creation itself knows – its all an experiment in my book, the very nature of process itself.

Second, it assumes that Humanity will fail to evolve into higher dimensions within those next few billion years.

It not that Humanity will die and fall into Emptiness, the Pro”cess keeps going, the Primal Ground is BEHIND the process of Creation, so it cannot stop! What does the word stillness” really mean within this unstoppable Process? That is the correct question to ask.

I believe the correct answer iis that “stillness” is a concept of the post-natal mind that offers only a relative value to obvious movement of thoughts and feelings in the post-natal heart-mind. Energeticlaly, I define stillness as simply yuan chi – which can function at many different levels.

Stillness of mind doesn’t initially refer to the subtle planes underpinning creation. That is the stillness within the stillness often mentioned as part of higher practice. One shoulldn’t even pretend to talk about achieving primordial stillness of wuji until one has intgrated one’s energy body sufficiently that one can still the binary tension in the personal soul – that creates worldly karmic/astrological movement (ming). And then it doesn’t make sense to talk about deeper stillness until the tension betweent he different streams of Stellar /Collective Soul Consciousness have resolved their Process, their battle over the outcome of Free Will being given to humans.

Is it really possible to bypass all these levels of cosmic creative process and leap straight into the Primal Ground beneath our soul’s feet, by simply quieting one’s post-natal mind of thoughts? I doubt it.

This is the common illusion I’ve found – first in myself, and later in others, in desiring that their meditation match a metaphysic of some perfect Still/state. It leads me to believe that the Stillness of the primal ground is basically just an axial support to be sought in the creative process, not sought in isolation from Process. And I know you agree that they are integrated, but I still hear a void that beleives in absolute stillness being achieved. How would you know it if you achieved it? There would be no “movement” of even self-awareness!

That is why I believe Humanity has been created – we are the process of refining self-awareness within the mirror of physicality. Stabilizing that self-awareness within the physical and other planes is the process is immortality – not the galse quest for physical immortality that Bagua alludes to as throwiing seekers off their track.

NN is correct – Nature is the alchemist, it creates the dimesnional distinctions, they are not invented by human alchemists who imitate her transformations.

Of course, some Chinese writers (as Bagua points out) get heady and create escessive distinctions, always a problem with writers, and why most alchemists never both to write. Then you have to write more, to explain your experience, which is all unexplainable and indescribable. The only point of writing about immrortality is to get people to think differently about who they are and what is possible.

AS for the original question:

> Is there a difference between ‘guarding the thoughts’ and ‘sweeping
> away miscellaneous thoughts’ ?
> I will appreciate the explanation.
> I’m rather confused, because Zhang San Feng, in his ‘Tai Chi
> Alchemical Secrets’, says that in order to cultivate the Golden
> Elixir, at first the work is a matter of extinguishing emotionalism
> and sweeping away miscellaneous thoughts.

I think both are alluding to a post-natal process that Chan borrowed from Early Tao of “forgetting the self” (post natla heart mind) in order to start remembering the more subtle levels. Then one can begin to function (express Free Will, which is NOT simply thoughts or emotions) at the subtle levels.

More to chew on,

peace and smiles,
Michael
Getting Clear… a resolution? FREE WILL & YUAN JING issues
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-08-13 10:59:07
Remote IP: 74.32.39.116
Message
Nice post.

But to clarify my position, I am not taking strict Southern School approach, there are mixtures of the two.

I am just trying to make a point about approaching Tao from PROCESS (of interacting yin-yang-yuan chi fields) point of view vs. STATE OF MIND point of view that focuses on stillness as final and absolute GOAL.

The summary of this viewpoint: Humans are polarized and find it difficult to escape yin-yang movement, even have trouble balancing the two. So its easy to develop a metaphysic worshipping stillness/yuan chi as solution and end of yin-yang process. But from Primordial point of view, I intuit that the opposite experience/viewpoint is experienced. It is the primal ground, that is its “given”, and its focus is the polarization process we call creation. So as soon as you cultivate any level of stillness/yuan jing-chii-shen cultivation, you get flipped around, and re-focused back onto polarization process of creation.

The Sudden Schools of Enlightenment are traditionally STATE OF MIND oriented. The Northern School – Quanzhen is the one that absorbed the most from Chan Buddhism, i.e. monasticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, etc. that is not part of earlier Taoist sects or early Taoism.

I am certainly not arguing against using stillness methods of quieting the mind, letting go of distracting thoughts, emotions, etc. I think they are great METHODS and centering the post natal mind is of course essential.

I think its easy to confuse the different levels of stillness and intermediate states of Enlightenment with the development – gradually – of a consciousness that is permanently (eternally) functional after death. So the question is not whether one should adopt a stillness method first or a yin-yang opening method first, those are just strategies. I applaud anyone who can take any of the 10,000 methods to profound levels.

The questions arising here is whether there is any useful distinction to be made between enlightenment and immortality. For immortality, my experience is that it is not enough to be neutral /still only. That is a good possible definition of enlightenment, as stillness indicates centering.

For immortality, one needs to concentrate the Life Force and use the jing-chii-shen refining process to ultimately and CONSCIOUSLY GRASP THE YUAN JING.

And while I think there are infinite paths in life, I think few of them lead to higher levels of immortality.

I don’t think you can go from physical plane direct to wuji – and stay there. WE are sometimes graced with sudden glimpses of the vast beyond. But Even the Northern Schools suggest you have to sit in the “empty” state for nine years while your immortal seed gestates, and that the entire process can be destroyed in a moment’s lapse. That is not sudden enlightenment nor sudden immortality!

And they have meanwhile used tons of alchemical techniques to prepare the process (I cited 30 different methods in the Jade Lock/Gold Pass treatise of Wong Chongyang, the founder of Commplete Perfection Northern School, that I found in Louis Komjapthy PhD thesis).

you can make leaps certainly, but there will be long plateaus, making it s long journey and a long process. Life and the whole of Nature is simply deeper than the ability of our tiny minds to grasp the whole. A baby does not mature into a full grown adult in a moment. Neither can you plug a 5 watt bulb into a socket that has trillions of volts flowing through it. When you leap up to 25 watts you experience a great moment of enlightenment.

That is why I believe the gradual path is the only real one – you have to slowly build your ability to hold consciously the higher voltage. And that requires grasping the nature of jing, which is the key to the manifestation process. Simple awareness is the first step. Shaping the jing, which gives you free will/personal shape and destiny, the next step. Then learning to do that on different levels matures that Free Will.

This is why I believe the bypass of jing-chi-shen straight to wuji as a permanent mind state is ilusory. It doesn’t develop the Free Will, which is the evolutionary focus of the Original Spirit-Breath-Essence. (not to be confused even with wujii, the mystery from which yuan is born).

Focusing on wuji is great, it holds open the Mystery of the Supreme Unknown within each of su at every moment. That is why I love the wuji gong form – it brings all the cycles of Heaven and EArth into relation to the core wuji at the center. But I’ve noticed in the traditions that focus on final end states of primal emptienss that it often leads to abandoning focus on the yin-yang process of co-creation between human free will and the original spirit-breath-essence trinity.

I think focusing on absolute states of Emptiness/Primordial Stillness as a goal can become an unconscious sabotage of Free Will; one can unconsicously align themselves with streams of higher consciousness that oppose the human free will experiment, and offer you the promise of better (non-individual) existence elsewhere. They offer you a bliss in which only the higher collectives have Free Will.

These different paths are all just free will choices that humans have – and I am simply making mine clear.
YOu don’t have these same free will choices in the states in between the Primal Ground and Later Heaven – the Early Heaven states where most spirits reside.

It is a mistake to assume the human free will experiment will always continue – it s a choice that requires staying with an evolutionary process. It requires loving your own body-mind, loving humanity, loving our free will within the plane of the physical, and accepting the suffering that has come with it, and holding faith that this suffering (war/disease) will gradually be resolved.

That is the resolution that I seek – not on the strategy whether one should focus first on stillness or movement. But on briging that entire process to focus on cultivating yuanjing and the free will it has birthed here.

peace,
michael

Replies to Above:Can SELF Merge into Non-Self (wuji)?
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-08-17 20:38:57
Remote IP: 74.32.39.116
Message
Fajin,
Here’s your original post that prompted my reply:

——–
>Yuan is yin or prenatal. Postnatal is yang. Primordial is Wu Ji, or stillness, the void (macrocosmically), yuan shen (microcosmically). In the microcosmic sense, ie. ourselves, we attempt to return to our primordial nature. That is the final goal of Daoist and Buddhists.

>In Daoist nei dan, the shen to wu stage is the return to nothingness. So it is final because it is beyond time, or transcendent. It is the moment. To understand how to experience the moment, you have to practice Zen.

———–
“To understand how to experience the moment, you have to practice Zen”. Such a statement has quite a bit of hubris, and is made even more confusing since the basic zen method is the baasic Tao method.

There are many variants on Taoist cosmology and use of the terms. I haven’t noticed Buddhism using cosmology (and its implied process) so much as they rely on Ontology, i.e. defined states of being that are permanent rather than processual. Maybe you could refer me to some Zen writing on their cosmology and its nature of being “processual” rather than focused on sudden enlightenment taking you into absolute states of knowing the moment.

I took your equation of yuan qi as “yin” or pre-natal rather than primordial/neutral as my starting point.
To classify yuanqi, Original Breath as polarized I think is a mistake linguistically, it impies the first breath taken to form the seed of Creation is already polarized, and that effectively eliminates the possibility of neutrality (or neutral witness) within manifestation. Its saying the Orignal Self is Yin.

I use the model of hundun, the primordial chaos-unity, as the vessel for the Original Breath before it begins to move and polarize into taiji. Read Norman Girardot’s Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism for the Myth of the Empty Gourd, and how the yuan qi cracks open and begins self-generating itself. It appears that the gourd is generating itself from “nothingness”, but the process he finds in early Taoist texts is yuan qi dividing into yin-yang qi. He speculates that this originates in early fertility cults that worshipped the vegetatative process of nature.

But if we agree hundun/primordial chaos is “knowable” as the ground of the present moment, which I believe it is (and it seems you agree), then I do go one step further and distinguish it from “wuji” , literally the “not knowable”. And of course wuji is omni-present, there is no argument about that. Its just that I take wuji as as the unknowable mystery underlying the Primordial Ground/Original Being.

You and the Buddhists, as I understand it, claim to know the unknowable. To me that just means the words have become meaningless. I don’t think this is a rigidity of alchemy, as bagua suggests, it is just a viewpoint about cosmology. And I also know that the transformational experiences are paradoxical and transcend 3-D language. But that doesn’t mean we should totally abandon language (wont’ happen) or make extraordinary and unproveable claims (always seems to happen with religion).

Its the relationship between wuji and self that is being discussed here – as NN’s says, it comes down to what one defines as Self. Does it makes sense linguistically to say that Self can grasp Non-Self (wuji)? I don’t think so. This is why I think the original Pali Buddhists declared that there was no self, it was illusory, since it arose from Non-Self and that non-self must be the true ground.

So what you are left with is telling others to try it, you will soon be in emptiness and that is the wuji, you can slip right out of your Self into Non-Self. That is where I say that the linguistic love affair with Emptiness fools you. you are merely expanding to another level of self-awareness that feels more empty (relatively speaking), it is not truly empty because the Self, by definition, has an ESSENCE that has been born from the Wuji.

This is a real distinction that you (and other Buddhists) disagree with me on. I say that Essence (=Beingness itself) cannot be destroyed or dissolved once created. That there is only One Original Being underlying the 10,000 beings, and that none of the 10,000. individuals has the right to “tear” itself from the fabric of creation and permanently eliminate itself into Non-Being.

That Essence and Self have a reality that once granted by the Wuji, cannot be taken away, any more than the Original Being can take any of the 10,000 beings right to exist away.That we can grow our awareness of Original Being and Non-Being, but that awareness strengthens our sense of self, and cannot eliminate/dissolve it.

it comes down to this:

Orignal Essence is non-polarized, it contains the very essence of self born from the wuji. But it is unable to make any distinctions, it is in a Unity State. So there is No-Self Awareness, just the Original Awareness.

That Original Awareness is what I believe the Buddhists are confusing with Emptiness, there is no content of separate self inside the Primordial Cosmic Egg/Gourd. That is Unity, by definition, everything is experienced as Oneness. Its a neutral state, i.e. non-polarized. No distinctions. But Oneness is NOT None-ness or Non-Self of the wuji.

But once that Original egg/gourd cracks open and the essence gets polarized, the self-awareness is made possible by the taiji process – you have a first distinction made, yin-yang is the term for that.

For me, the end of this train of thought can be summarized by the question:
Can you put the Original Essence that began to move (taiji) into yin-yang and later divided into 10,000 things — can you put them back into the Cosmic Egg, and then reverse the birth of the Cosmic Egg so it disappears back into its womb whence it was born, the wuji?

I think some Buddhists are falsely claiming that they can simply bypass the entire process of Creation and skip back over the eons of Collective Process and the multiple dimensions and stay permanently in the Supreme Mystery. This is simply my personal skepticism, I have never met or seen anyone who credibly could give meaning to those words to me – I always see too much evidence of an untransformed self/body remaining here.

I am saying that awareness of Oneness or especially awareness of the Supreme Mystery is differrent than merging with it or permanently dissolving the personal essence of the Self into it.

That the reason you cannot merge with it is because your personal self/Essence is part of the whole of manifestation, and that you cannot divide yourself from its process. You can lead it in one direction, i.e towards Onesness and wuji byeond it, and the beings that continue that aspect of relating to the wuji are what I define as Immortal Beings,i.e. they continue bringing individual awareness to the Collective of what is possible. This helps to end the separation between the physical plane and the subtle planes. The limit to the process: the Individual Self can only merge back into the Collective Self, and Collective Self is always in a relationship to Non-Self, i.e. wuji.

The reason i don’t believe the Collective Self is dissolving itself into the Wuji is because I see that it is still in conflict with itself over the process of Creation, hence all the suffering. So until it resolves that problem, i think it is purely fantasy and escapism to believe you can merge into wuji, even though it is always present as the non-ground of the Primordial Ground of Being (Yuan jing-qi-shen).

I think neidan can only take you back to the Original State of Oneness, that it can microcosmically restore that. That wuji is always at the core of that transofrmational process. But that is a not a quick piece of work to accomplish at the level of jing. Certainly the shen can shift its awareness immediately, and have an experience of feeling emptied of some level of Self, possibly quite cosmic. But I wouldn’t personally want to claim that is the wuji.

More differences in language and models to chew on,

Michael
Tao Cosmological Terms Clarified
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-09-07 09:17:37
Remote IP: 66.32.50.129
Message
There was a string of postings that revealed how different Taoists use terms like “hun dun”, “wuji”, etc.

There is no consensus on these terms as far I am able to tell – different writers use them differently, depending on the application they seek to highlight. So Chinese medicine and martial artists and buddo-Taoists and neidangong specialists all used these terms differently over the thousands of years of use, which implies changes in culture and language.

The vast majority of writers are not practitioners of innner alchemy to any deep level, and so they have little use for making detailed distinctions between, say, wuji and yuan shen and early heaven. It’s unimportant for someone practicing chinese medicine, TCM doens’t even believe that shen can be manipulated for speeding up the healing process.

And Wuji-Taiji-Wuxing is a simple and sufficient cosmology for a martial artist – anything beyond the tangible physical is formless or empty, practically speaking, and no further distinctions are really useful to learning their movement forms or applications.

But I found, over 25 years of trying to make sense of mass of conflicting terminology, that I had to select out the terminology that was practical and useful for inner alchemy cultivators. “Hun” (from hundun) is the anceint term used to describe the primal state that precedes taiji. Ames and Hall (in Philosophical Daodejing) note that “hun” does not imply “emptiness” in classical use by early Taoists, but rather a positive connotation of “spontaneity” within the arising of the original self.

“wuji” is a later cosmological term that was added many centuries later, probably to match taiji.

Wu means “not”, “ji” means “to know”, so together we get “the not known”, what I render more poetically as the Supreme Mystery.

The brilliant french scholar Claude Larre in his excellent Survey of Traditional Chinese Medicine notes that radicals of the characters used to write “wuji” does not imply a void, but rather an opening from which the original breath comes.

Even modern quantum physicists have not been able to find a true void – there are just mysterious levels of “dark energy” that they don’t yet understand but can measure as having energy and presence.

Many Taoist writers, especially the syncretic ones from Song Dynasty onward (last 1000 years), use “wu” as Emptiness and use it interchangeably with the term Tao or Buddhahood. However I consider most of these syncretic writers to have deviated from the original sense of “hun” as original state of spontaneous self-arising, which is very different from the state-oriented Buddhist metaphysic of emptiness.

The syncretic writers are expressing the Chinese cultural value (Confucian) of creating “surface harmony” and trying to paper over differences, and that is fine with me on the cultural level. But for training purposes, clear language and clear intention are important.

The problem is compounded with translation into English, and the level of ambiguity is increased ten fold.
The translated words become meaningless when “non-being” and “emptiness” and “immortal self” and “dao” are all used interchangeably as concepts representing knowable ‘states”.

The whole point of spiritual science and using method to accelerate the evolution of self-realization, self-healing, and harmonizing personal and collective self is to be as precise as possible in defining the intention behind every method used to deepen one’s process.

If one simply wants to “have a religious belief about a state of mind that pre-exists or in a deity”,
then that is not method-based spiritual science, it is religious belief.

There is no point in arguing about religious belief – one either chooses to hold it or not, and arguing rarely convinces someone to change their belief.

That is why I focus on practice and the experience it engenders. The cosmological language is a useful adjunct in allowing practitioners to discuss more subtle levels of intention. If your religious belief does not include those subtle levels of existence, but is divided into only “here in the physical” and “there in the absolute/emptiness”, then alchemy will be of no use to such a person and their beliefs will interfere in the experiences of subtle bodies and subtle planes.

The life force is always listening to your intent, and responding.

This use of cosmological terms to clarify the subtle details of the alchemical process is why I have chosen my particular definitions of the terms – they correlate to practical and attainable levels of experience.

Whatever was once in an undifferentiated process of spontaneous self-arising has now differentiated itself, and thus the yuan shen-chi-jing in motion in early and later heaven I view as a different level of process than the primordial passive state (cosmic egg before it cracks open).

There is no right or wrong here, only a discussiosn about what is useful or not.

Michael

Is alchemy experience personal, or common to each formula?
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-09-09 21:56:13
Remote IP: 66.32.50.129
Message
Bagua,
This is a complex question to answer, since each person is having a private experience when they practice, and each person’s experience is filtered by their own unique yin-yang/5-phase constitution and their unique process (or Way-making) as they resonate with the method taught to them.

It’s probably why inner alchemy was mostly taught one on one historically, to allow the teacher to adapt the method to the individual constitution and level of mastery of each student. I try to do the same thing by offering an option to use methods in each formula that are more yin or more yang but can achieve a similar kind of self-completion. And I am careful to instruct practitioners to allow for personal response and spontaneous development to occur during guided practice. I make it clear I am offering a method and a principle to be used as a loose guide, and that my personal guidance should not limit their personal experience.

Since I am not physically present when someone who is practicing far away from me I will not comment on that, even though it is possible to attune to someone at a distance and share their experience energetically. But in that case I have no feedback to verify their experience of someone else, tand thus cannot know to what degree their experience correlates with my experience of that formula. Nor is it important to me that they have my experience of it – their experience and unfolding of the alchemical/transformational process is all that matters.

So the closest answer I can give to your question:

My experience, as the teacher monitoring the group chi field of students with different constitutions practicing together, is that each person is having their unique experience of a common field that is being stabilized at a particular frequency as a group process by myself and the group’s intention.

It is clear in the sharing that occurs afterwards that each person can be having very different experience/response to that group chi field/process. And its equally clear to me that their unique individual responses are triggered by the group’s practice of that particular formula.

Before practice, each individual was undergoing transformation, but at a slower rate and less intense frequency of change. Whne we joined together and focused on a single process designed to accelerate change, the change happens faster and more deeply.

A process involving transformation of consciousness is metaphorically well described by a river. A river has boundaries, it has a path, it folows principles (gravity leads it downhill, it concentrates smaller tributaries and rainfall, etc). But what the water does in the middle of that river cannot be predicted by the general principles or controlled by the banks of the river. Imagine each drop of water has having a degree of free will – they have to obey the general principles, but each drop can express itself.

The water in the river could be hitting massive boulders (resistance) and might generate mighty turbulences as it flows around them. Or it might be flowing serene as glass.

We are all drops in the river of Humanity’s flowing consciousness, and we all share the common banks of Heaven/formless/ sky above the river and Earth/form/land below the river.

But our individual experience within that flow is unique. We can expand our awareness and our skill at self-expression as long as we don’t violate the general principles of balance and harmony.

If you follow the metaphor of the river all the way to the ocean. It doesn’t really end in the ocean, which is commonly used to describe the whole. The ocean itself has vast currents hidden within its deeps that are commingled and affecting each other, and affecting the entire climate/whole of heaven-earth, and affecting the larger cycle of water evaporating and feeding the more clearly bounded aspect of Humanity flowing as a river on land (physical plane).

The individual drops of most humans lose their individual awareness when they arrive at the Ocean. An immortal is just a drop that has the ability to hold its consciousness/memory of being a drop, to simlultaneously concentrate itself with others into a whole new river of drops, or to shape-shift and exert its individual drop-will anywhere within the process (depending on its level of attainment) – and shape some aspect of the ocean-sky-river cycle/process.

I believe that with each cycle of personal flowing through this cycle/process of incarnation, Humanity refines its path and relationshiop to heaven-earth.

Long answer to a short question.

Michael

Livia Kohn on Daoist “Sitting in Forgetfulness” vs. Chan/Zen Emptiness vs. Inner alchemy
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-10-29 12:09:32
Remote IP: 66.32.121.172
Message
I am posting below an email exchange between myself and Livia Kohn, one of the top Daoist scholars in the world. She is also a long time practitioner of vipassana/insight meditation, and has explored many other cultivation approaches as well, including lots of qigong.

from Winn:
————————–
Dear Livia,

Debate on my Healing Tao forum often centers on the question, if one follows the Chan/Zen method of simply sitting and forgetting/letting go, without specific concentration methods, will one achieve spontaneously the same kind of immortality sought by neidan practitioners?

I note in your first book, Seven Steps to the Tao, that “sitting and forgetting” (zuowang) is considered by early Daoists to be the preliminary practice to other alchemical practices that involve more concentrated shaping of the Qi field.

I understand that this may not necessarily be a black and white issue. Wang Chongyang, the founder of Complete Perfection daoism in 13th cen., was clearly syncretic, and mixed elements of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. I noticed in your student Louis Komjapthy’s PhD thesis, that Wang included over 30 “doing” neidan methods in his Jade Lock/Gold Pass treatise. This suggests to me that he did not think that sitting in emptiness was final realization, even though he does seem to incorporate a more chan-like approach in the quanzhen final “waiting 9 years for the embryo to mature”.

One question that arises out of this debate of “to sit and do nothing vs. sit and shape the life force” is:

How does the literature in China address this topic? Are the attainments of these different practices considered to lead to the same result? If you have any thoughts on your general sense of it, I would also be interested to hear them.

—————–
LIVIA KOHN REPLY

Dear Michael,

As for the difference between zuowang, chan, and neidan, I see it in historical terms.

Zuowang appears in the 8th century, under clear influence of Tientai Buddhist insight meditation (samatha vipassana) as a form of consciously reorganizing one’s perception of self and world. It is not really, at the time, a sitting and doing nothing. I suspect that it becomes that gradually as it evolves in the 9th century. It is then that we also see the classic Zen radicalism of “meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha” and the rejection of all conscious content and aspiration as well as energy work. This continues in the Song dynasty in Buddhist circles and also spreads over into Daoism.

Neidan evolves as a separate branch of all this, using longevity techniques, breathing, qi-work, and zuowang-style insight meditation, and combining these methods into a complex system that also uses alchemical vocabulary and a lot of I-ching symbolism. The energy work done in neidan, with however many methods, is thus both similar and different to the zuowang and chan methods.

As with all Daoist practices, a lot depends on where the individual practitioner is coming from and what his/her specific strengths and needs are. You may find some quite expert at letting the mind go who need to focus more on physical transformation and whose practice will look completely different from chan/zuowang/insight. You may have others who have a good grip on qi transformation and cirulation who need to work on opening their conscious minds to the Dao and on letting go of preconceptions, whose practice will accordingly be more zenny in style.

Are the end results the same? My inclination is to say no, since the underlying concepts of what the end result should be are so different. The chan immediacy is different from the immortal existence in zuowang which is again different from the ultimate neidan transformation. Each technique will get people to where it is geared to go. Krishnamurti is strong on emphasizing that point and working by leaving all techniques aside.

I hope this helps.

Best

Livia

The Big Dipper: Origins & Function in Taoism, 9 Steps of Yu
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2006-12-22 18:45:44
Remote IP: 66.32.15.105
Message
Note: Since it si the turning of the Big Dipper that marks the celestial
signals of Earth’s changing seasons,
I am posting this information at Winster Solstice. This si from the Hon
Kong Temple translation project. David Palmer, the Taoist scholar based
in Hon Kong who oversees the chinese translaators, has accompanied two
of my China Dream Trips. On the last one, he had a very powerful
experience in the Pole Star cave at the Big Dipper Place used by Taoists
to meditate since the Han Dynastry over two thousand years ago.
michael

The most common form of Pacing the Big Dippers is the Big Dipper of the
Mysterious Pivot18. On the diagram of the Dippers, there are only seven
Dipper stars. The names of the stars are used as the names of the steps
to be made by the ritual master during his pacing forward, and the names
of the star sovereigns are used as the names of his steps during his
pacing back. The pacing of the Twenty-Eight constellations represents
the 28 constellations in the heavens. In ancient China, the heavens were
divided into 28 areas matched with 28 corresponding signs, which are
called the constellations as the symbols of heaven. Pacing it symbolizes
turning the Dippers around and crossing the Ji Constellation as well as
moving around the heavens. Below are drawings of the two types of
Pacing the Big Dippers.

The Dippers of the Twenty-Eight Constellations

The Dipper of the Mysterious Pivot

The basic function of Pacing the Dippers is to symbolize flying over the
Nine Heavens, prohibiting evil things, and controlling spirits.

The Big Dipper is also called the Celestial Matrix and the Earthly Pattern.
So the first function of the Pacing is to pace the Dipper according to the
Diagram of the Stars. It is thought that by pacing it the ritual master,
crossing the Nine Quarters and patrolling the universe, has been to the
Nine Heavens, flying over the realm of Immortals. A common diagram is
the Great River Chart Dipper of the Open Valley 19, which was originally
the Big Dipper. The seven stars of the Dippers and the two stars Fu and
Bi compose the Big Dipper Diagram regulated by the post-existent
positions of the trigrams 20 listed on the River Chart. There are two
types of them; one is used after the Winter Solstice and the other after
the Summer Solstice. In the former, the ritual master starts from the Kan
Trigram and moves to the Li Trigram 21, and in the latter he moves from
the Li Trigram to the Kan Trigram.

The nine numbers on the River Chart represent the nine areas of the
heavens or the nine constellations: Tianying, Tianren, Tianzhu, Tianxin,
Tianqin, Tianfu, Tianchong, Tianrui, and Tianfeng. The ritual master recites
the incantations while pacing any one of them, pointing out the directions
he is moving to, the symbolic meaning of the specific Dipper, and the
power of his magic skill. For example, the incantation used when pacing
the Dipper after the Winter Solstice says: “The Dipper is sublime at the
12 two-hour periods, and I take the Big Dipper flying over to exhibit
mighty power with Vital Breath like the clouds. The seven stars move to
interact with the heavens, so that we know the changes of good or ill
luck. Pacing the Dipper by the rhythms, it seems I move into the Dipper,
and the constellations through the Heaven Pass with the change of the
time.

http://www.qi-whiz.com/archive/animals.html
The Mandate of Heaven — the xuangui or “dark scepter” that symbolized
a clustering of all five naked-eye planets — was given to Yu, whose
dancing pattern performed the Big Dipper, in the Dark Palace (Xuan Xu, in
the longitude of xiu sector Yingshi, linked with alpha Pegasi) on February
26, 1953 BCE, a date that corroborates the Bamboo Annals. In the
Songshu it says a “river diagram” of red and green “writing” was
presented to Yu by the same “spirit” that announced the transfer of
power for Shang and Zhou. Because of this astronomical portent the Xia
supplanted the Miao. (In many ancient cultures, a calendar out of sync
with precession created dire political and religious consequences — it
portended the fall of dynasties and spiritual movements.)

The mandate passed to the Yin because of precessional shift, noticed in
1576 BCE when the xuangui appeared in Sagittarius. The scepter passed
again to the Zhou in 1059 BCE, and for the occasion King Wen composed
“Song of the Phoenix.” In the Mandate of the Zhou, the “spirit” was the
star that formed the “beak” of Red Bird due to precessional shift. Mozi
said that Red Bird held the scepter in its beak and landed on Mt. Qi (that
is, Red Bird’s timing and azimuth of setting on the northwest horizon
created this effect.)

http://www.universal-tao.com/article/astrology.html
(and on hard drive as Nine Star Dipper Astrology (?) or something like
that.
Taoist Nine Star Astrology is the essence of the all the Taoist practices
and is based on the Pole Star (Yang), the Big Dipper (7 Points), and the
Vega Star (Yin). All movement and energy patterns on Earth are based
from energy fields of these 9 points. Every 26,000 years completes one
cycle of Light (Yang) to Darkness (Yin), and presently shifting the Pole
Star (Yang) (Center of Galaxy) to the Vega Star (Yin), which there about
2,000 years after in this cycle before the shift.
(1) Vega (Yin) * (9) North (Pole) Star *
*(2)
*(3)
*(4)
*(5) *(8)
*(6) *(7)
Although our planet’s polar axis is tilted at 23 degrees with the Star
Polaris in Ursa Minor above its northern pole, this is not a constant.
Modern astronomers know that approximately every 26,000 years the
earth flops to a position where the star Vega in the Constellation Lyra
becomes the Pole Star. This shift is fairly dramatic, however, there is less
dramatic wobbling that our planet makes on its axis, a wobbling that
invariably alters the North-South Polarity, as with the body channels, the
Positive Governor Channel an Negative Functional Channel, and how this
affects the human electromagnetic field. Sages of the past were able to
observe nine distinguishable electromagnetic phases in this wobbling.
Astrology and astronomy have determined that as there are Nine Stars in
the Northern Sky closely centered around the northern end of the earth’s
polar axis. Polaris, Vega and the Seven Stars that make up Ursa Major, the
Big Dipper.

They are responsible for the slight electromagnetic shift that occurs. As
Nine Star Chi Theory has it, each star is integrally a part of and
responsible for each of the distinguishable electromagnetic phases. When
our planet is under the influence of one of the particular electromagnetic
phases, one of the transformations phases or transformations mentioned
earlier becomes accentuated, thus there are five fire years, earth years,
water years, wood years and metal years with all elemental
transformation phases represented within a nine year cycle and each year
is positive or negative (yin or yang). In Nine House Astrology a man or
woman is not simply born in a particular house, bur during his or her
lifetime migrates through the yearly, monthly, daily and hourly sequences
many times.

The belief behind this is that man can and should become perfectly
balanced as possible through facing and overcoming all the varied
experience presented to him as a result of the influences of the various
houses. People follow different patterns because of the influences
permanently imprinted upon them at their particular times of birth. The
rules that carry them through these cycles remain constant, and it
depends upon their state of wisdom as to how well they apply them. The
different situations different people face, are determined by their state of
evolution at the time they re-enter this world. The strength and intensity
of troubles or good fortune depend on the strength and (cosmic)
maturity of the individual.

With the Earth there are 10 Branches based on the 5 Elements, which are
5 Positive Elements (Yang Energetic) and 5 Negative Elements (Yin
Physical).
(1) Water (Kan-Water) Yang within Yin (+)
(2) Earth (Kun) Yin (-)
(3) Wood (Chen-Thunder) Yang (+)
(4) Wood (Sun-Wind) Yin (-)
(5) Earth (Tai Chi Symbol) Yin & Yang (+ & -)
(6) Metal (Chien-Heaven) Yang (+)
(7) Metal (Tui-Lake) Yin (-)
(8) Earth (Ken-Mountain) Yang (+)
(9) Fire (Li) Yin within Yang (-)

This formation is converted into Sacred Geometry using the Magic Square:
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6

Question for Bagua: Does the Self Pre-Exist Birth?
From: Michael Winn
Subject: Philosophy
Date/Time 2007-10-31 04:11:08
Remote IP: 66.32.8.71
Message
I decided to pick up this interetesting post by Bagua below as basis for a
new thread. I invite others to jump into the discussion.

OLD POST:
—————–
MW
>>This is why I find Bagua’s position on the One as being pre-existent and
thus “already achieved” to be confusing the issue of post-natal
practice/potential achievement.<< Nnonnth Well I don't want to get into that, I mean everything I'm posting is a way to say why I think that discussion is useless! Of COURSE 'the one thing' is everything! The thing is that the difference in time perception between it and ourselves makes it impossible to say it is already achieved, and impossible also to say it isn't! It's just a silly conversation to have. But I'm probably only opening more cans of merry little worms here. j ************** Bagua: The Tao is everything, we are part of life and therefore part of Tao. Regardless of what our ego/I/intellect/Yi has been conditioned to beleive or shaped by society, parents or life's pathologies we are part of Tao and it is never separate from us, each person just needs to become aware of it and stop believing they are their thoughts and feelings and emotions. One Cloud alchemy is one possible method to achieve this, there are many others. We don't Merge into the One, we can't merge into what we already are, we just focus or become aware of what has always existed, this self realization results in our knowing our true nature and how the I/Ego/Yi/intellect functions is apparent. It does not destroy, kill or eliminate the I/Self/Ego, these are seen in the light of their true function, no more, no less; they will always function but how you respond to them is differnt. In this way your are free, free from the bondage and prison of the narrow ego/self/Yi, you are free to experience life in a normal, dyanmic, spontaneous and natural way. It seems some just do not want to accept the reality they are complete as they are, they dont need to add things, look at much of life as life pathologies and allow what has always existed to be the center of your life. Your perceptions and your actions will be from this normal, natural awareness. What a dynamic, playful, amazing way to live life, ready to accept life in its changing, spontaneous cycles. This is living in the Tao. Qi Gong, Nei Gong, Tai Chi can guide this realization. ----------------- The Key bagua passage I wish to use as spring board for more discussion: (Our self-realization of Oneness) does not destroy, kill or eliminate the I/Self/Ego, these are seen in the light of their true function, no more, no less; they will always function but how you respond to them is differnt. In this way your are free, free from the bondage and prison of the narrow ego/self/Yi, you are free to experience life in a normal, dyanmic, spontaneous and natural way. ---------- thanks, Bagua, for clarifyng your meaning. Your ideas rest on the concept of Original Nature, which is not spelled out in detail here as ot whether that is something uniquely human or different than human. What I'm hearing is another way of expressing the desire to live in the wu wei state, i.e. live spontaneously, but do it cosmically, freely shifting from primal Oneness to post natal unique-ness. I wholly support your efforts for people to become aware that wu wei is the natural state of things. My comments should not be taken as criticism of your desire. Rather as attempting to clarify the notion of Self vs. the notion of Mind. I think one disagreement I have here is whether the notion of wu wei carries any assumption that the post-natal self existed before it was born. So this is also a discussion about the nature of Self and its relationship to the underlying primal field of existence. Taoists cosmologically would say humans divided out from the Original Three Ones (three aspects of the primoridal - yuan jing, yuan chi, yuan shen in one version, or in another, humans were born from heaven and earth coupling). Existence and Self are not the same in my view and in my understanding of this cosmology. You define self in the above passage as "narrow and limited", i.e. suggesting that our lesser "self" is related to the limitations of the post natal mind, and that if you shift the mind to other pre-existing realms, the limitations disappear. But in Tao Cosmology, if you shift back to the Origin, you are in Hundun, Creative-Chaos, and there were no human selves in existence - that was a later evolution that happens after division into Beings. The question raised here by your position: once "you" shift realms, isn't that saying that the limited self has already become something different, i.e. unlimited? There are not two selves here, only one you say. But it sounds like you are taking the viewpoint that the Self is something unlimited and multi-dimensional, but that the human being is not a self, just a collective of thoughts and emotions and physical sensations, i.e. a MIND, that the real Self observes from other dimensions of Unlimitedness. Am I understanding you correctly? I believe this is similar to the position of the later Mahayana Buddhists (not to politicize the discussion, just trying to clarify it). That the Great self is real, but the lesser self is an illusion which you can suddenly wake up to. You are equating "lesser self" with "mind" and its narrow illusions of "selfness". I view this shift itself from limited emotions, etc. to greater cosmic self as an act of transforming the post-natal self into something completely new - a phase of self that never pre-existed before that moment. I see that new greater cosmic self as a totally new integration of post-natal experience and pre-natal awareness. In my view the existence of a pre-existing or higher dimensional field of consciousness itself doesn't necesaarily imply that the SAME post-natal self pre-existed in a different time zone or space. As i understand your view, the real self was just hiding in another dimension, and now decided to peek in on its "lower, limited self, but that they are essentially the same "self". That only one self exists, divided into many minds and bodies. I think this is the difference between our views, but correct me if I am wrong. A simple way to see my position is the analogy of parents and children. Something of the parents self- their jing/essence - shapes the child, but the child is not the same "self" as the parents - each has a unique destiny and unique self-awareness. The child's Self (we could also call it soul) is composed of three sources of jing - the mother, father, and the yuan jing from the primal field, probably not direct, but filtered thorugh an oversoul vibration. So the child is similar to the parent and linked to its ongoing unfoldment within the Tao, but they are different in the shape of their essence, which defines their "selfness" in my view. The same difference is found in the the "greater" and "lesser" self multi=dimensionally - they are linked, like parent and child, to a common field and thread of evolution, but their experience is unique, i.e. different. A parent and child love each other and can develop deep mutual sharing and understanding; likewise, the greater self and the lesser post natal self can learn to share thru qigong and meditation methods or spontaneous awareness their shared experience of the Life Force. Perhaps this analogy to parent-child ends at death. The lesser self may ordinarily "die" or be dissolved back into the greater Self, which does not experience mortality by itself, only thru its post-natal "child". This might be seen metaphorically as a kind of mis-carriage by a woman: the seed of a new self is growing within her, but it sometimes doesn't come to full term. The mother absorbs the seed-self back into her body. But WHAT IF the post-natal child grows up to full term and spiritually re- births, through spiritual methods or spontaneous awakenings that allow it to hold the full awareness of the "parent" WITHIN the physical realm? then that child may be said to have achieved immortality and will NOT be dissolved back into the parent at death, but continue beyond its physical death, growing and exploring and maturing that lesser self that was originally seeded into physical plane by the mother-greater self. That is when the lesser self truly begins to share the experience of the Greater Self, but from its own unique perspective. They still exist as family in the higher dimensions - merged, but not dissolved, in a totally new and unique experience of loving each other in different dimensions. This is how I believe the Cosmos re-imagines itself and gradually replaces itself, so the old Greater Self can move on to cteate other Cosmos instead of babysitting a seed-projection of itself on this one planet. That greater mother self is also not to be confused with the primal field of existence. Yes, the Greater Self was also born out of that field. This is how we get levels of "self", called soul and oversoul in the west. The process of cosmological division has many levels to it - all connected to the primordlal field of existence, but each a unique pattern of jing and thus different in some critical way from the parent primal field. Thus the necessary distinction between Beings arising with the field of Existence vs.the Existence/Non-existence continuum itself. It is possible we are saying the same thing using different words, but are disagreeing about the accessibility of the different levels of Self. I think you may be saying just be aware sponteanously of all the levels of Self and are calling them One Self or Oneness, whereas I am saying it requires great training and discipline to be able to truly hold the reality of that greater consciousness within the lesser self. I am saying that there is a difference between having your shen /xin/ heart mind having on-off-on glimpses into its own greater potential vastness vs. having your personal jing actually hold stable the vibration of the yuan jing stepped down through the Greater Self and stabilized within the Lesser Self. That is what I am calling the highest level of Self Realization, i.e. making the newly seeded post-natal self real beyond its mortal life experience. There may be another underlying disagreement, over what constitutes true experience of Self. I would say you need a conscious center of gravity. I think the lesser self can have awareness of the general or universal process of Self-ness arising out of the primal field of the Life Force, i.e. simply noticing change and accepting it as an expansion from any previous level of self -awareness. i accept that having that greater awareness connects you by resonance to all selves going thorugh the same process. There is an awarness of the common ground or Oneness that all beings share, just like all humans stand with the unique two feet on the one planet. I would call this expanding awareness the enlightenment process. I think both states are very enlightened, but I consider the former - the experience of having a specific center of gravity from which to create a unique reality - to be different from the latter, i..e the experience of immortality vs. that of the general enlightenment process. Not better or worse. But serving a different function in the unfoldment of the Tao and the process of creation. Does you see any usefulness in the distinction I am making? Smiling to Our Potential Immortality, Michael Question for Bagua: Does the Self Pre-Exist Birth? From: Michael Winn Subject: Philosophy Date/Time 2007-11-01 02:17:08 Remote IP: 66.32.8.71 Message There is no development or deepening in conscious-presence. That already is, and you already are that. Knowing yourself is not a path of becoming. It is a matter of being. Becoming implies time, a goal and someone to reach it, all of which are purely conceptual. You do not become what you are. You are what you are. This is simpler than we imagined. You are already what you are seeking. Just pause and see what is here and now — natural and effortless being and awareness that is utterly simple, clear and undeniable." This sounds like a really appealing philosophy, and I think the focus on Being helps people accept themselves unconditionally, ala the Inner Smile, since most people have doubt about their connection to the ground of being. On the other hand, this is really a "head in the sand" philosophy, that overlooks that the major process of Being is BECOMING. There is no self- realized person I've ever met or even heard of who has managed to escape this process of Becoming and settled into a state of Pure Being that was in anyway separaate from Becoming. This is the essence of the Tao - it is always unfolding its Te, its spiritual power/virtue,/essence. The process is well defined in the Tao Te Ching - the principle of return, of reversion is the process. And the TTC gives many methods to support it, and you yourself support those methods - so obviously humans have free will to intervene in the process. I don't feel you really responded to my questions about the nature of self and its relationship to the ground of existence/being. You say the purpose of life is Self-Realization. What does the "self" in that sentence refer to? Is a terrotist setting off an atomic bomb in Los Angeles self-realizing themself? If they pull the bomb trigger effortlessly, and joyfully, offering their own life at the same moment, and feeling it is their original nature instructing them to do so, does that make them self-realized and ato be emulated by others? What about the other two million souls destroyed in the blast who believe they have a separte destiny? That is why I say this philosophy is "head in the sand". Just saying we are all one being, nothing else matters - doesn't resolve the real dilemma facing humans, their every day conflicts. It doesn't deal with the tension implicit in this reality, and consequences of human free will. Free Will is another way of saying the process of Self taking responsbility for Becoming. I feel the flight to "Being" is a way to avoid responsibility - everything can be blamed on Original Nature, or God, no need to do anything about it. I agree with the Buddhist in one sense - that most people do not have a real self, they are mostly a cocktail of reactionss.. But I see their soul as a potential self, if it integrates here in the post-natal. All the dimensions are present here - that is exactly what the Tao is talking about - that heaven, Earth, Humanity and Tao all are part of a single process. The question here is, what is the function of humanity in the Tao process? That is why humans are ensouled and given free will - they have a privileged position of power, and hence a responsibility. The Tao Te Ching makes it clear that when people deviate from unfolding their inner virtue, that there are destructive consequences. And there are many passages that support the notion that those who follow Tao will achieve great longevity as part of their virtue. This all implies cultivating as a process of manifesting, becoming. So I feel its meaningless to say "its all inside you" - the challenge is how to manifest that potential inside you, i.e. to allow Original Nature to BECOME in the post natal realm. Why else did original nature divide itself into Beings, and introduce the experience of suffering and ignorance? To provide an impulse towards greater learning. The whole of the Tao Te Ching is about the uniqueness of each moment, rather than the sameness implied by making Original nature an absolute or unchangeable state. The metaphor of the Ocean vs. the Waves is equally mis-leading: the human waves in this case have free will, and can move in a different direction if they choose. And let's consider that water holds memory - so that each wave, each human decision, is held in the universal memory as a Self that realized it could create not only a wave, but entirely new oceans as a playground for the unfolding self. Implying that human free will doesn't matter, because all the waves will eventually just become part of the same old ocean again - is the kind of determinism that has paralyzed Hinduism (for example). It implies that the primal ground, or original nature, doesn't change - when the Taoist philoosphy is that the Tao is Always Changing. So if all is one - if the primal ground and billions of selves are ONE - then the primal ground changes in response to each cell/Self changing. This means that simplicity and complexity are ONE - and reducing the complexity of Becoming to a siimplistic reduction of Beingness is only looking at half the equation, and IGNORING that the ground of Being is actually the motive force generating the complexity of Becoming. Why did the Tao and humanity's Original Nature create such complexity, and humans with a potential Self that becomes more Realized with every responsible expression of free will? Smiling to your Self Realizing the Uniqueness of Tao, Michael Bagua: Does the Self Pre-Exist Birth? MY CONCLUSON From: Michael Winn Subject: Philosophy Date/Time 2007-11-03 11:47:13 Remote IP: 66.32.8.71 Message I agree with Dog-God (obviously). Bagua's attitude is good for cultivating unconditional acceptance, by seeing that our original nature ulitmately trumps all others levels of its expression/experimentation via the soul, mind, body, etc. Everything ultimately is co-evolving with our original nature. But the question is, how does saying that or knowing that change one's path in life? Is the attempt here to empower the Original Nature, or to empower the individual's creative efforts? Bagua claims there is NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO. I say there is NO SEPARATION, but there is a HUGE DIFFERENCE. The path (tao) is individual, it is experienced from the perspective of the Soul or the mind-body. Yes, the "information" from our life/soul experience is ultimately at death digested back into the greater whole, but tha digestion process changes the collective whole. The point is that the physical dimension of humans incarnating on earth is intentionally differentiated to allow learning, experimentation with free will/responsiblilty that does NOT exist in the same way at the collective level. Another way of saying this: heaven and Earth would NOT be having the same experience if Humanity did not exist. Original Nature (in my definition) is what generates Heaven and Earth. So what we cultivate as humans is the cutting edge for Original Nature's process of change. The way I perceive Bagua's attitude is essentially gnostic in nature: "We are in the world, but not of it". Just kind of watch and enjoy it from an "inner distance", don't take it too serioiusly because Original Nature will resolve it all and your mind-based choices won't really change anything. I think it's a perspective heavily weighted to the shen/awareness side, which can detach/distance itself from the Jing/substance side that expresses the will. The Chi/Subtle Breath is what allows the movment or change, and keeps the two in balanced relationship. I feel that when you lose this essential dynamic of the trinity, and dissolve in into an amorphous Original nature rather than making consicous its play, that you are depriving yourself and the whole of its full joy. But I really appreciate Bagua holding his position so that i could more deepl clarify mine. That is yin-yang at play. Smiling from my 3-in-1 Original Nature to Yours, Michael Individual vs. Collective issue) ISSUE OF FREE WILL From: Michael Winn Subject: Philosophy Date/Time 2007-12-23 13:36:46 Remote IP: 66.32.113.117 Message Bagua, I completely agree with you, the individual and the collective have been and always will be One. The Collective has birthed itself as many "Small Ones", which each contain the collective within themselves. Knowing this eases but does not solve for most people the dilemma presented by Individual Free Will. We are free to align with the Collective Will (harmony), and free to move against it (disharmony). Sometimes disharmony creates pain and suffering, other times it leads to a higher level of collective awareness and greater freedom for all as the Collective adjusts to the demands made by individual (small ones). I feel it is a dynamic process. Being spontaneous in my opinion will not automatically eliminate all pain and suffering, which seem to be ingredients needed to some extend to motivate change. Trusting your "core" or orignal self and living spontaneously eliminates the worst kind of existential pain, but it may bring you into deeper contact with ancestral and collective karmic levels of suffering. There seem to be endless layers to resolve. Diving deep into the Dark Night of Solsstice, Michael Greastest Kan and Li Question - Function of Inner Earth in solar system From: Michael Winn Subject: Practice Date/Time 2008-02-24 18:39:27 Remote IP: 66.32.104.115 Message Nice to have the vibration of cyberspace holding this website raised by such a discussion.... Of course, this is such a DEEP issue, the function of inner earth, that I consider it largely unconscious even in most esoteric paths of the last ten thousand years. I am sure that even though it is publicly absent in any substantive manner from the sky god (here Hindu & Buddhist) traditions, that any high level adept who sat in a cave for some years eventually got a similar transmission and used the inner earth being to advance their sky practice. I know I was quite shocked when I stumbled upon Tsong Khapa's cave (in the heart of the Potala, Tibet) to find a clear and SUBSTANTIAL channel all the way to the core of the earth. I did the sun-moon polarity for years, but knew intuitively there was some level of grounding missing. Only a hint from my Atlantean teacher about the esoteric suppression of earth consciousness - he allegedly spent 2300 years in a physical body - got me looking elsewhere, i.e. closer to home. Then it took a few more years of experimentation and inner plane guidance to map out a workable practice that, when I introduced it into One Cloud's formulas, made them sing at a much fuller and higher octave. For me, its the difference between embodied and disembodied meditation - they are both blissful and wonderful, but as different as day and night. If you want to understand suffering, and generate true compassion for the collective level of suffering that actually transmutes it, then for me there is really only one master, and that is the Inner Earth being (and its surrounding court of dragons and foundational beings that generated the prototype of a human being. This is the inner sanctum of lemurian sacred science. The only reason so much suffering is tolerated on the surface of the earth is because of the amazing resilience and compassion of the Inner Earth being (which is of course androgynous, even though we call her outer body our mother). It is from this perspective that when you go deeper into the psyche of the sun, that you find Inner Earth is central to its purpose and function in a way that no other planet is. In my experience, if you meditate only upon the emptiness inside other celestial beings or even in space itself (ala dzogchen), you will likely miss what is vibrating uniquely from the open heart inner space of planet Earth. The redemptive power of humanity I believe arises from human ability to manifest that heart. I think what you are looking for Brian, is not to be found in the moon. The Moon is the daughter of the Earth, for humans its visble concretization of yin-yang cycles, but not its higher evolution. I suspect that what you are seeking can be found in the other missing piece that I recently added iinto the formulas, as the "Advanced Lesser Kan and Li: Second Refining of the Golden Elixir". This is the bridge of inner sun and inner moon as they relate to inner male and inner female within humans, and grounds it like nothing else i've come across. This is cosmic sex in its most tangible form. If you want to advance your other practices, and prepare more deeply for Star and H/E, that is what i recommend you study - the Advanced lesser. It is now in the Product Catalog on the website, eventually will have its own page. Surfing the Waves of Love Smiling from the Heart of Inner Earth, Michael