It?s Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the Winter Solstice, Year of the Water Horse. It begins early Tuesday morning (EST), Feb. 12, 2002. My physical body is only a tiny speck in the universe, how can it grasp what is really going on within these vast cosmic cycles of the earth, moon, sun, and stars? My energy body reaches out into the chi field, shaped like a giant question mark, its curved hook hoping to catch some answers. Since everyone?s Original Spirit is the center of the universal field of awareness, I am reminded that each of us can deliver our own State of the Union address to ourselves and our friends. Here is mine. The State of the Universe, as I experience it.
First, a short look back gives a better view of the general flow. 2001 was mostly a Snake Year, and some dark snakes certainly came crawling out last September and afterwards. People are afraid of snakes, and so a global wave of fear enveloped the planet. While the outer events of 9-11 were horrifying to contemplate, my inner vision was elated and bursting with excitement, even as the nightmare unfolded. Maybe it is because I love physical snakes as well as energy snakes (dragons). In the human body snake chi is just the kundalini dancing. It can be painful if your energy body is not prepared, and ecstatic if it is.
I felt the planetary ego-crust was finally cracking open, and the Dark Side could best initiate this, since it is the crust. 9-ll was a beautiful example, I reminded myself, of how the Light Side needs the Dark Side in order to reveal the True Side (i.e. its Side-lessness, a.k.a. the center).
On Sept.15, I flew on one of the first United planes to cross the Atlantic, and taught in Glastonbury, England one of the most powerful Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) retreats I?ve ever experienced. I knew it would be powerful, even on the morning of 9/11, as I could feel the chi field humming. In fact, it started six days earlier for me, when I turned 50 on Sept. 5th. My birthday present to myself was to do five hours of chi kung and meditation, and commit myself to living another 100 years (before reviewing my ” soul contract”). I noticed that my heart beat immediately made a dramatic shift, speeding up to a stable average of 10 beats faster per minute (and maintained that rate for the last five months). I was concerned and alarmed by this at the time. I didn?t understand until six days later that I had simply jumped the gun on the quickening about to occur in the planetary heartbeat of humanity.
Atop the Glastonbury Tor, a pyramid shaped mountain rising mysteriously from the plain below with spirals terraced into its sides, I had a vision. Isis, the tuned-in woman who runs the Shambala retreat center where we were staying at the base of the Tor, had told me exactly where to stand at the confluence of two polar ley lines (called Michael and Mary lines, suggestive of deep yin and yang). I rooted my energy body deep down inside the earth, where I saw a luminous green pearl pulsing deep inside the earth?s core. It felt like a long hidden treasure waiting to reveal its precious, joyful, essence.
I interpreted this green pearl (through my filter of Taoist alchemical language) to be the Hun spirit of the planet. Hun is the celestial spirit of the body, expressed physically through the liver function. It assists the deep ocean of jing chi (sexual essence) of the kidneys rising up towards the solar heart chi. Later this green pearl kept coming to me as my local guide Barry Spendlove (Healing Tao instructor from Wales) and I traversed the Michael ley line across southwestern England to St. Michael Mount (a dramatic island fortess opposite Mont St. Michel across the channel).
We crossed to Ireland and explored Celtic sites like New Grange and spent the night in some of these underground womb-tombs called barrows. These sites I believe were constructed using ancient Atlantean alchemical sciences, and they come alive when you practice alchemy in them. The earth chi was intensely powerful, and the green pearl kept calling to me from the deep earth. A few weeks later I went to China and spent a week in a cave in bigu (not eating) on the Taoist sacred mountain Mt. Huashan (Flower Mtn). I wrote a separate article on that experience, but didn?t have space to go into the green pearl. On Huashan I worked extensively with the green pearl, doing alchemical meditations to facilitate expanding its pathway by linking it with my heart and by resonance to the heart of all humanity at this time of crisis.
So now, the Year of the Water Horse rolls around, and what does this green pearl mean? A Water Year means that the dominant phase of chi flowing within the planet is watery. This chi gushes and rises up in waves, as is Water?s wont. The Horse is a yang symbol of fire and expansion, linked to high noon and Summer Solstice. In 1985, when I did a four month overland journey following Marco Polo?s footsteps across western China to Xanadu (north of Beijing), I visited the crumbled palace where the famous bronze “Flying Horse” from the Han Dynasty was discovered. The reason the Chinese emperors expanded their empire to envelop what is today the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts in Chinese Turkestan was to obtain the magical horses of Ferghana.
I gave a copy of this beautiful bronze statue to my wife Joyce, who as a Water Horse naturally fell in love with it. It has little birds sculpted underneath the hooves of a magnificent horse, giving the impression it is flying. Even today in modern China the Horse represents fire. During Fire Horse Years many Chinese traditionally abort female babies because such yang fiery chi in a woman is considered very difficult and unlucky.
This present cycle of Later Heaven (physical plane) time takes us into a natural water-year & fire-horse alchemical combination “cooking” the planet at this time of crisis. I constantly remind alchemy adepts-in-training that Nature is the great alchemist, human alchemists are just imitating Her art & science. So after the Dark Snake crawled out of the hole, the Water Horse is going to speed up the transformational cooking of the unconscious energies exposed to the light of day. This means there could be some very dramatic shocks, likely much stronger than 9-11, to the global psyche. But not to worry. This is just part of a spiritual tidal wave that is cleansing the planet. The sick chi has to surface in order to be embraced and healed.
I feel the presence of the green pearl of the planet?s celestial Hun is a signal to me that the birthing process of the planet is about to enter a new phase. The human alchemical process of cultivating the “elixir” and birthing it into an “immortal child” that lives in simultaneous heavens or dimensions has been well described in classical Taoist literature and in my other articles. In my Sun-Moon Alchemy (Greater Kan & Li) retreats I talk about a parallel alchemical birthing process that is happening within the planetary being. It is known popularly as “earth changes”, which many view with apocalyptic dread.
To me, accelerating earth changes are just planetary birthing labor pains, and the adept of internal alchemy is a midwife. It is perhaps no coincidence that I find myself teaching the Sun-Moon alchemy retreat three times this year ? in May in Tuscany, Italy (in a natural earth amphitheatre formed from an old stone quarry), in July at Dao Mountain, N.Y., and in September at Glastonbury, England. There we will again rent Stonehenge for a Taoist Fall Equinox ceremony (it was truly amazing to feel it come alive last year) and hopefully physically descend into the Chalice Well (Glastonbury?s most powerful yin vortex) as part of our deep earth journey.
But what happens when a planet births its own Immortal Child? The same thing that happens when a human child is birthed: it separates into a parallel physical reality similar to its parents, yet slightly different. That?s why kids see the same world as their parents, but through slightly different (parallel) eyes. That is the job of each generation of souls waving through Later Heaven. Their destiiny is to allow the life force to manifest its cyclic changes through them. But occasionally a generation hits a special point in the cycle, and that seems to be the case with humans alive right now.
The chi field of Early Heaven (formless) and the chi field of Later Heaven (physical form) are coupling and penetrating each other more deeply than they have for milleniua. The extremely subtle experience of this Cosmic Love-making is cultivated in the sixth of One Cloud?s Seven Formulas of Immortality, called the Congress of Heaven and Earth. It will be interesting to see what new experience unfolds in the group cauldron of my Heaven and Earth Alchemy retreat in late August at Dao Mountain. This is the level of practice where you work with the expansionary shift in space itself. It is an opportunity to ground the virtues (te) or unconditional spiritual qualities (love, truth, acceptance, trust, etc) of Early Heaven into the physical plane. This is what will nourish the new born immortal child of planet earth as it separates into a parallel astral reality from its parent.
What does this mean for humans living on the old parent earth? You have a free ride if you willing to hitch yourself to Nature?s alchemical process of accelerated transformation. That is why an ounce of focused internal alchemy practice now will be worth a ton of blissful embodiment later. The planetary immortal earth child is just a collective space where we can all continue cultivating ourselves on a slightly less dense version of earth. The dark side will still be present, as you can?t have bodies without it. But it won?t be so stuck and evil-appearing, but a planet where the life force flows creatively and freely, without obstruction. A place where souls can shape the chi field to complete themselves, where long life will be the norm.
What will be most confusing is the transition period to this greater collective reality, where we will literally be in both worlds at once. You may be programmed by materialist science to disbelieve my conjecture about this, as some new age fantasy. But think again. You are already experiencing yourself in multiple dimensions: your body and your mind are the closest example. Body is solid and “proveably” exists in the physical, the mind is formless and cannot be proven to exist, yet we know it does. We are all already looking through a formless Mind window into a world of Body forms. That makes the most ordinary moment in life a multi-dimensional experience.
When we all “look” or envision together, in sync with deeper elemental forces of the planets, sun, moon, and stars, this collective fusion of the five elemental forces can create another solid-appearing reality.
This re-birthing process is in accordance with both spiritual law and the laws of physics that flow from the chi field (quantum field and parallel universe theory if you prefer scientific lingo). We already function in multiple dimensions each moment, but we don?t notice it because the perceptual shifts between dimensions usually occurs in nanosecond time frames and our senses are operating much more slowly.
What is confusing is the dimensional overlap between an old reality and an emerging new reality. It is sort of like projecting two movies at once on the same screen. This was apparent to me even as the world trade center was collapsing: my inner reality was expanding with compassion, love and joy at the release of stuck planetary energy, my outer reality was filled with death, suffering, war-hysteria and paranoia from political manipulation and lies. I chose to give the inner reality more weight, as being my unfolding reality, and the latter as the dying gasps of a reality whose negativity and self-contracting nature dooms it to eventual death.
The fact is, multiple realties can co-exist. Good-bad, right-wrong, male-female, and Me-Other occupy the same yin-yang energetic space simultaneously, even if we have separate physical bodies. All of these polarized energetic patterns are living in a single spectrum of consciousness. I expect that during the Year of the Water Horse to see the apparent disparity between these polarities intensified. The Devil-Angel faces of humanity will be out in full force, moving the drama along. Something like a nuclear suitcase bomb exploded in a major city, or some other apocalyptic event that the military will use to expand their global domination. Maybe an earthwquake or volcano near some major city that throws the global economy into confusion.
Most people will get sucked into the drama, and feel compelled to choose between the Light and the Dark. A minority of spiritually mature folks will find in it an opportunity to slip through the widening crack in the middle to find our Original Face, between the pendulum swings of the global theatre. That is where the new reality will be gradually crystallizing, comprised of beings who no longer want to create the old, dog-eat-god, fear-controlled reality.
How long will this process take? Impossible to predict. How long does it take you to shift between the dreaming and the awake state? In astral time, it has already occurred, the earth has already birthed its immortal child-new parallel reality. How long it takes for each of us to pkhysically shift into it, and thereby add to its ever growing density, will depend on our need to serve in the old reality or play out our attachment to its many thrills, some not so healthy.
Normally, I only go into these more difficult to accept spiritual ideas with students at the Greater kan and li level who are having some clearer experience of their ability to cultivate original chi and create a new internal reality. Or to perceive at least the seed of their original self, if not a fully birthed immortal child. But things are speeding up here. I am sharing my experience of the current earth-field shift with you so you may be inspired to explore it and verify for yourself the presence of the expanding Green Pearl of the Earth?s celestial hun soul. I find it usually appearing in the middle dantien (heart center). (The Green Pearl may also be linked to the Atlantean legend of a Green Emerald Tablet that recorded the earth?s history in it. If true, I believe it is the job of the alchemist to find, decode, and then merge with this green crystal or pearl.)
This type of “earth re-birthing itself” information has been proclaimed by many teachers/prophets/psychics over the last twenty years. The information is in the collective intelligence field of humanity, for anyone choosing to access it. But I never found these prophets to offer much practical training to actually communicate with these changing earth forces the way the Taoist tradition of neidangong (inner alchemy) does.
The most important thing is to stay grounded, so that ALL of your shen (vital organ spirits that comprise the ling, or soul) can shift together in a harmonious and integrated fashion. Otherwise you get conflicts, and your multiple shen want to split into different realities. This means staying a very calm, centered, neutral observer through the wildest of times, even when the Horse seems to be galloping over a cliff.
I hope this information may motivate some to take their chi kung and inner alchemy path a little more seriously. This year, by the way, is not only the beginning of a new Chinese year, but the beginning of a new century, as this calendar (based on 60 year cosmic energy cycles) dates back 4700 years to when the Yellow Emperor created it. I consider “Yellow Emperor” to be code for “Great Spirit of Planet Earth”. Next year will be the Year 4701. Time to hop on your flowing Water Horse and throw an even bigger party!
Wishing you a joyous and chi-filled year,
Michael Winn