Fusion of Five Elements 2 & 3

Open the Eight Extraordinary Vessels to the Macrocosmic Flow of Life

By Michael Winn

Note: This is an edited portion of a Fusion 2 &3 workshop given in Asheville, North Carolina. If you order the current home study version of Fusion, it may be different, reflecting the nature of the students attending, their soul vibration, and their questions. Eventually the entire transcript will be edited and available as an ebook reference for those buying the audio course.

Folks, are you ready to have some fun? The reason I say Fusion 2 & 3 is fun is that we are going to expand our range of playing in the qi field. We’re moving from our backyard sandbox to the Big Kids playground. Or we are just like a teenager who has discovered a new video game where you get to shoot the ball around, go zooming and play around in a whole different way. In the same way, its fun in Fusion 2 &3 to get into a different relationship with your energy body.

Or, It’s like mom and dad gave you the keys to the car; here, go for a spin. And whole new worlds open up to that wide-eyed teenager. The video game inside your body becomes the greater video game of Life. Only now the stakes seem bigger, and thus more real. But really, the little sandbox inside your body-mind and big sandbox of the world are the same, a precise mirror of each other.

Fusion shows us how the inner and outer worlds are connected. We’re going to reintegrate the material we learned in Fusion one, and repeat that because that material is very important, it creates a kind of synergy with Fusion 2/3. Fusion 1 is the five elements creation cycle and also the mandala where the earth/Creative Intent goes into the center. What we will work with a lot this weekend is reviewing that Fusion 1 practice, making sure that’s strong. We need to get clear on that, because this process of opening the 8 extraordinary vessels is still happening within the framework of the Fusion of the five elements.

Once the energy of the five vital organs spirits is fused, what do you do with it? You take it through the eight extraordinary channels, or vessels. That’s what we will be playing with a lot now; the eight extraordinary vessels, and what are they, what do they represent, what functions or abilities do they open up. All of it is fun.

It is important to have fun otherwise your practice gets boring and tiresome. In Zen they say you’ve become a “Dead Tree” – there is no juice flowing, no life force. That juice has to be flowing even when your body appears still. Otherwise, you’ve stopped growing.

I encourage everyone to look at qigong and neigong; qigong is actually a modern term in china, from this century. It used to be called Dao Yin, or Liangong, or Yang Sheng (“nourishing life”) and many different names. The modern term has come to mean regulating the qi field through posture and breathing, and mind.

Neigong is doing it more internally; nei means internal so it means internal skill. Gong just means skill. Qigong means skill with managing qi, and neigong means your internal skill with managing the qi field. So I’ve found if you use the two of them together, they work like a hand and a glove.

I’ve found that modern people need to do some movement work because our minds are so bombarded, we have so many different patterns with TV and media, we move our homes around so much, we don’t have a very stable relationship with anything, so we need to develop a deep sense of pattern. Kind of like locating ourselves in space and time; energetically what are we, where is our center. So the combination of the qigong and the neigong together gives the strongest sense of that.

The Fusion practices are the ones that first really set off bells in me. As I mentioned in Fusion one, I was doing other kundalini yoga practices and checking this out. I discovered there is a whole map here of my body-mind, and that I might have bypassed some of my own inner territory while zooming up my spine with kundalini yoga.

My focus, after learning all these practices over the years – there are so many practices it seems dizzying – is to understand these practices not as things that you are doing to your body, but a process of communication.

Qigong as a Subtle Energy Language Process

My goal is to practice qigong and inner alchemy less as things that you are doing and more as a process of communication, as a language that you are learning. Just as you all know how to speak English, it doesn’t mean that you are speaking every moment.

Learning the language just means that you have the capacity to express yourself when it’s appropriate and when you need to. If someone asks you a question, you can say yes, no, or I go this way, or I do this about that. Your energy body, which is what we are cultivating here, is also a language system; it is a deep silent language system.

I remember in the last workshop, Gangotri asked a question, do you practice these things all the time, and do you have the orbits going all the time. I want to go further into answering this question before we learn the new practices, so you have a perspective on this. If we view qigong and neigong as a language, and we will call it a divine language because it is allowing us to communicate with our own nature and the macrocosm of nature around you – then you lose this kind of western pressure to achieve, to do, to make your Energy Body happen.

The stress-yourself-with-qigong approach: if I do this kind of qigong then I will get precisely this kind of result every time. Better to view qigong as the process of stepping into the unknown, a way of evoking infinite possible responses from the Qi Field. Surely, different kinds of qigong have different qualities and have known forces operating within them. But that doesn’t limit the experience you synergistically create in each moment with those forces.

Open Process vs. Forced-Head Practice

We need to get out of the head-driven expectations of our culture. Relax, open your heart, smile, step out of your tight little physical body and open up into a big, expansive energy body. You need lots of room inside your body to feel the qi flow. It may help to imagine a deep open space with beautiful colored clouds swirling through it.

The qi field is an ongoing field of open communication. You are constantly being bombarded by communications on the subtle plane. But you’re not hearing them, you are missing the subtle communications. Then when you occasionally do hear them, you don’t know how to respond or to talk back.

Really all we are doing with qigong is opening up channels and understandings of cycles and patterns so that you can start to listen to what is going on in your life and in the larger life of the universe. Its simple purpose is so that you can communicate back something in response to the energy coming to us from the larger field of life. It doesn’t mean that you have to do these practices everyday all day long.

You need to do them enough so they become open and they are there, so that you actually have the language skill. This is why it is important to practice, in the sense of doing it. Ultimately it is just like the wiring in your house, and the plumbing, you don’t run your electricity and your lights all the time, or turn your faucets on and let water run all the time.

But the system is there, if you need light or water, you turn it on. You have a structure, you have doors and windows that open and close, they let air in or out, or people and things go in and out all the time.

Your body and your mind are no different; they have a structure; you are letting qi in or out and you let it circulate. If you don’t let it circulate, it becomes this problem, the air in your house gets stuffy, the temperature gets too high in the summer and too cold in the summer, the pipes freeze and all these other things if you don’t have your structure in there.

We are still in the phase of building a foundation in this language, understanding the vocabulary and the grammar, how it works. And what you speak and how you communicate with yourself and with nature is up to you. Ultimately you become spontaneous. As is said before, this is not about following me or about following anybody, it is really about learning how to communicate and that is what allows your own nature to unfold.

If you don’t communicate with your own essence or with the essence of the universe, how can your own essence reveal itself? How can it express itself whether in society, internally in meditation or just being with yourself and nature; you have no way. And people get into crisis about the meaning of their life because they don’t have a language.

An Impossible Question: What’s the meaning of life?

People often ask this question; what is the meaning of life or my life? From a Daoist perspective, there is no answer to that question; there is no meaning on a verbal level. You can’t say any sentence or any paragraph that will fix the meaning of life. In other words the question is not answerable in surface language, a spoken language. Click here torticle” style=”display:none”>

Because life is much deeper than the concepts that our surface language – French, German, Chinese, English – allow. Those languages cannot possibly allow you to describe the totality of your experience; you can’t squeeze your life into a sentence, or a phrase or an idea or an image of a certain deity into any belief. Your life is always bigger than that because your life is connected to the whole life of the universe.

The principle of qigong and neigong is that the meaning of life is your experience of it in this moment. That experience is the meaning. There is no other meaning other than the present moment. It’s not something that you got in the past and you drag around in a sack with you and you say I found the meaning and here it is in this bag. You want the meaning? Here I’ll hit you over the head with this bag, did you get it, and did it hurt?

The meaning is constantly changing because the experience of the universe and your own experience is changing from moment to moment. So the meaning is spontaneous, and it’s not an accumulated thing. You can say wisdom accumulates, which just means that you are now in communication on a deep level with the parts of the universe that have evolved and know why they have evolved. You’re talking to the earth, that has had this experience and is holding form, but it is changing each moment; it has the experience of how to change and what the patterns should be.

There is wisdom in your gene code. There is wisdom in the shape of your energy body. All these things have evolved over time but their meaning is in the present moment, what their experience is. That’s why I’m saying you need the skill to communicate with yourself and experience your meaning, which means just experience. The thought, “I have found the Meaning of Life”, is just intellectual layering on top of it. Life is just an experience.

The universe is not having an identity crisis. Its not walking around saying what universe am I? What is the meaning of me being a universe? The Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) is constantly saying this. If you read Lao Tzu, this moment is a kind of revelation. Its sometimes translated as “self-so”: it is just so, its just this, in this moment this is what its meaning is, it is just being itself.

We are learning patterns, cycles and forms, but just look at them as the alphabet, as the ABC’s, as playing with the movements and forms and energies. When you are in grammar school you need to to repeat them a few times, and write them over and over until you know: I got that down. Now I don’t have to speak word by word, I can speak in sentences, and now I can think in paragraphs.

Flowing Life Force vs. “Illusion” of Physical Fixity

It’s the same thing, your sophistication develops and you become more sensitive and more centered. The centering is the tough thing for most people. They are flowing along from moment to moment and they lose their center. They think, how can I change in each moment and still have an unchanging moment that truly belongs to me, and not an identity that changes in each moment.

That’s the crisis; they think I’ve changed, therefore I’ve lost myself, I’ve lost my old identity. I used to be this fixed thing, like a little snapshot: here I am: I had these clothes and this job and this name, social security number, and a house and a spouse, kids and an address. That’s a snapshot.

Each moment, even if all of those externals were to magically stay fixed and not change, all of your internals are changing. It’s like a river flowing through you. That’s kind of the Greek paradigm that says you can’t step in the same river twice, what flows through it changes; so there are streams of consciousness moving through us, and it has patterns.

Some schools of Hinduism and its offshoot Buddhism like to describe physical reality as “maya” and “illusory”. I feel these superficially translated philosophical words are misleading and often taken out of the deeper context of the actual spiritual practices. They mis-lead Westerners to deny the importance of their physical body and cause them to dream of or project a better, different yet still illusory reality elsewhere.

The Daoist (Taoist) view I find more grounded and integrated: the change that is happening is real, the physical plane is an ongoing, real manifestation of subtle energetic changes. The physical plane is an integral part of the Tao. Heaven, Earth, and Humanity are the three fundamentals. Earth is not a temporary aberration or illusion or hellish prison planet where bad souls are sent to suffer and learn hard lessons before being allowed to escape with an elite cadre of Enlightened Beings. Is that the planet you choose to live on?

Are You Afraid to Live in a Body of Liquid Light?

The main illusion I see on this planet is that physical forms are dense, fixed and unchanging, part of a separate matter-based reality unto itself, rather than being part of the smooth continuum of body-mind-spirit (jing-qi-shen). Its because people are afraid of change, that they unconsciously want physicality to be more fixed than it really is. This fear of change is the core problem, more than the density of physical bodies and matter itself

Think of physicality as liquid light, an aspect of spirituality that is constantly re-pouring itself, and crystallizing bodies and solid-looking particles out of the larger liquid light field in each moment. But our bodies are really just liquid light; not just the blood, even our bones are liquid crystals. (Note: see article by Mae Wan Ho on website). When you get good at qigong, your moving body feels and looks like liquid light. It is truly a wonderful and liberating feeling when your physical self becomes liquid enough to flow instantly as the expression of the soul self.

The latest theory in physics is that the Big Bang was not an explosion of primal gas, but rather the sudden expansion of primal liquids, followed by some condensing and cooling of elements within that primordial ocean of space. So next time you think you’ve achieved “empty mind”, with no thoughts, feelings, or sensations, it may just be that you are floating on the surface of a dark liquid layer of space inside your whole body.

Your body-mind has knowable patterns of communication inside of it, flowing between the deep dark unformed primal liquid and this light-reflective surface reality. That is what qigong and alchemy training is about – how to move and be moved by the deep currents. Nature’s body also has its physical patterns of communications, and that is the knowable language of the Mind of Nature. That is why there are seasons, solstices, equinoxes, eclipses and other regular cosmic cycles.

All these things are part of the flowing language of nature. This is what we are learning in Fusion: where are the deep, invisible patterns of flow that hold or “fuse” this reality together within our body-mind? You train each channel separately, then you put them together to communicate your total experience in the moment. Your increased skill allows Nature to communicate back to you.

The qi field is the language of the universe, it is the language of nature, and it’s the way you talk to your self, and evolve by communication. That’s how I would like everyone to approach these practices. Please don’t feel like you are accumulating a lot of knowledge and things that you need to “do” everyday. Learn to allow these deep channels to simply be present and functional, as needed. That “allowing-into-consciousness” process does require dedicated practice in the beginning.

Ask Inside: What is the Right Level of Practice?

Let’s say you skip a day of practice, and you feel guilty; oh, I’m not a good qigong/neigong practitioner because I didn’t do my Fusion practice everyday. You just made qigong and neigong into a thing, rather than a process, a language process and communication process. Better that you ask your shen everyday, “what process do I need to practice today?”. Then there is no forcing the wrong practice at the wrong time.

If you only listen to one vital organ shen that is in total resistance to change or to your doing any spiritual practice, you will eventually find it out. The other shen will feel lousy and start demanding you do this or that practice to balance things out. You – the core self emanating from Original Spirit – will eventually be forced to harmonize the demands of your entire inner soul team.

This is why I say that the Dao is very different than other religions in the sense that it is a process. Dao/Tao is a spiritual process; it doesn’t define itself by fixed belief in a thing, or by naming a Deity or a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses who dictate the process to mere human mortals. Taoism is constantly absorbing new influences and experiences. Historically as it went along Taoism has absorbed other spiritual traditions and practices that it found effective in that moment. It’s the attitude, someone discovered another a good way to communicate, so we’ll draw that in and use it.

But there’s no need to convert to someone else’s belief system. New experiences or ideas don’t change the fundamental grammar that you’re working with, the fundamental principles of the Dao – the Yin, the Yang and the Yuan. The expanding, the contracting, and the neutral/original field. These three forces define the process of the five phases/elements, the cycle and the movement of the spirits through the eight channels. The vital organ spirits are managing the qi flows in the body’s deep 8 energy channels.

8 Extraordinary Vessels = 8 Trigrams of I Ching

The eight trigram forces of the I Ching (Yi Jing in pin yin) are, from viewpoint of inner alchemy, the eight extraordinary vessels manifest in your body. These eight deep channels in turn feed the superficial 12 channels. The deep channels are just an expression of the way the universe communicates with itself. We have these eight deep channels so there can be macro to micro communication, and vice-versa.

It’s also the pathway of Form Self to Formless Self communication. It is WHY when you ask the I Ching a question, “it” can give you coherent and insightful answer. IT is just the still unconscious 8 deep channels/trigrams communicating the pattern of subtle forces downloading into your life.

Lets get an overview of what we are going into today. The ancient Daoists used a kind of a map, where you have a mandala. I think all of you have seen the eight trigrams in a circle. These originally came from some older maps in china called the He Tu and the Luo Shu. The river diagram and the Turtle-horse diagrams.

They found these diagrams on the back of a turtle that supposedly came out of the yellow river in china many thousands of years ago. They were a series of dots, numbers, and these numbers were later converted into trigrams. There is some conjecture about this, about how the “magic square” first arose in China, much older than any patterns found in Babylonia, Egypt or Greece.

The mandala has four cardinal directions and a center, which is also found in other esoteric teachings and cultures, this is very universal. This is not just unique to Daoism, this is many cultural expressions of a common silent energetic universal language. I think the Chinese developed a very clear early understanding of it. You have four cardinal directions and then you have four intermediate directions; you have north, south, east west and you have northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest.

Cosmic Egg: 3 Divisions Crack Open 10,000 Things

The idea here is that as the universe creates itself – wake up, we’re going into Daoist cosmology here – it starts off as an undifferentiated. The Universe or original oneness comes out of the original not-oneness or non-being, the wu ji or Supreme Mystery. It births itself like a cosmic egg. But imagine yourself inside this egg.

You are the yolk inside the egg and you can’t see any light. There are all the raw elements of your cosmic self in there,, but they have not quite yet been born. Then something hatches out of that and that’s when the yin and the yang begin to move. There is the interaction between the yin and the yang, and there is the neutral force, the Yuan qi, which is the inner space itself inside the cosmic egg.

Originally, its all blended together within this neutral force. Its not moving, but it starts to polarize itself as it hatches; thus chickens have two legs, the yin and the yang. The chicken needs the polarity to walk and create. But the body of the chicken still has a single center of gravity, which is a kind of remnant of the original force. This neutral point within the chicken allows the legs to walk, the yin and the yang to move.

We could say that out of this cosmic yin-yang process of birthing, one of the ten thousands things that eventually gets born is a human baby. The interaction of the yin and the yang is what multiplies out; in the embryonic core of this human foetus, the yin/yang pulses and its cells divide out. They first are 2 and then divide to becomes 4, and that divides again to become eight (actually four pairs of yin-yang polarized cells).

It happened to all of us when we were born; we started off as sperm fertilizing the egg and after we merged those into one, then we went into cellular division. We started off as a single cell; and then our first act was to began dividing three times. We later went through many replications of these original divisions, and this is how we reproduced ourselves – until there were so many divisions in the foetus that we were able to gradually accumulate enough form to become a body. During that process the vital organ spirits gradually entered and materialized as the vital organ functions. That’s how we become who we are.

The Human Cube – 8 Vessels as Stabilizing Force

So the first three divisions of this yin/yang create a pattern of eight, and this is what happens with a human sperm and an egg. Eight seems to be the number of stability in this physicalizing process. When any point in sacred geometry is expanded in eight equidistant directions it becomes the inner structure of a cube. A cube has eight corners on it. Eight gives it the stability of squareness or “earth”. That is why our body is our mini-earth, it is held together by 8 deep earth channels. The cube also has 12 outside edges to it, which parallel the development of 12 superficial meridians sustained by the 8 deep channels.

The core patterns, the framework is laid out in the first three divisions. Three-ness is always there; yin, yang, yuan – and the three treasures in Daoism, heaven earth and man. The idea in the Dao de jing is that the one becomes the two, the two becomes the three, and the three becomes the ten thousand things. After these first three cycles of primal embryonic growth, you have enough ingredients to create with.

According to the Lao Tzu text (chapter 42), we all originally come from the unknowable Dao. From the “none” arises the One, the Yuan qi, the original qi, and then arises the Two as the yin and the yang, and the three is the interaction of the One and the Two; the Yuan qi and the yin/yang qi. Those three ingredients are all you need to co-create. Those three start creating in a pattern of five phases; the three becomes five, they become combinations of themselves. We will explain the relationship between the eight extraordinary channels and the five phases later. Just understand that a cosmology (or cosmogony, the cycle of human creation) is hidden here in the patterns of nature.

We are constantly recreating this cosmology. Our bodies are a microcosmos, which means that we are a microcosmos, a miniature cosmology of what goes on in the universe. We are the process of creation every moment, we are dividing our selves every moment, thus we are recreating ourselves anew each moment. The eight extraordinary channels in our human energy body are just a printout of this cosmology, just a reflection of the creative process of ourselves.

So this is what we are learning in Fusion 2/3. At the end you might go: “Aha, I finally know how I created myself!”. We laid down a blueprint of eight, then we started repeating and laying down octaves and spirals on top of that template. All our biological and psychologica function and structure and everything else crystallized around that core energetic blueprint. The essential functions are there in those first eight. It’s like the grid, the matrix, the compass, and the map: there’s north, south, east, west, and then the intermediate directions. Now we can start to lay out a body, now we can start to lay out a planet, now we can start to lay out time and space because we have a grid of sacred directions.

Without a pattern, how do you lay out matter, time and space or anything? You can’t do it. Without a pattern, you are ignorant, wandering in the dark. There is an order in nature and a pattern, and this is the deep pattern we are bringing into awareness. That’s all it is. The invisible center of gravity of this pattern of eight gives us a mysterious 9th number in the center of our diagram/mandala. But that will reveal itself only after you experience the four polar paired-forces of the eight channels.

Unfolding Sequence of the 8 Deep Vessels

We started talking about the cardinal directions, the main points on it; north, south, east and west. These are the most important four of the eight channels. What are they? You have already learned two of them; the back and front, fire and water channels, the du mai and the ren mai, spine and front, the governor and the conception vessels. In Chinese they are written as pictures, these are just words we are giving to describe the ideograms.

These are cardinal channels, they are north-south, front-back, the core yin-yang orientation of a human being. So we start with that, we start learning the microcosmic orbit up the back and down the front. You likely didn’t know you were learning the first two of the eight extraordinary channels when you started with the orbit; all you knew was that it was the primary yin/yang division that gives humans a front and a back. Okay, I’m now energetically divided into yin and yang, where do we go from there? That’s where we are right now. The answer: we get those two primary channels harmonized and running smoothly with six other channels.

You’re not a human being with just two channels; you need six more channels to function and to operate in physical time and space. You could perhaps operate in some primordial subtle plane with just two channels, you could pulsate like the cosmic amoeba. You migiht be the primal breath of the universe, but you wouldn’t yet have a time and space body.

What are the next two of the eight extraordinary vessels that we need to learn? The core/thrusting channel and the belt channel. In Chinese, the chong mai and the dai mai. Now some people might say that those evolved before the front and back channel. But historical sequence doesn’t really matter, these four all balance themselves out. The ren and du channels are more accessible and thus more functionally open to change.

There is an up and a down, there is an around, and there is a front and a back. The shape of these four deep channels forms a sphere with an axis. Front and back, we have an orbit; the belt channel is like the equator, and then a core channel, like an axis between the north pole and the south pole. Now you have created a sphere out of those four channels. Did you all follow that?

These are the four core channels that you use to create your core self. Atop them you lay out an energy grid, and then the other four channels unfold. They are called the positive and negative arm and leg channels, also known as the bridge and regulator channels. They let you reach out from the egg and interact and extend your core self into hands and feet; there are the other four directions. So the microcosmic orbit is just dealing with the core trunk of your body, and its acts as a kind of vessel binding together the vertical thrusting channel and the horizontal belt channel.

The arm and leg channels let you reach out from this core sphere and interact with the macrocosm, with everything outside yourself. So that’s what arms and legs are about. They are about interacting, from the core, from the center out and you reach out and get food, money, sex, you reach out for them and you bring them back into yourself, into your core, where you digest them at some deep soul level seeking completion. Your arms and legs let you move through the physical plane, through that time and space, so you can reach out and grab its fruits.

That’s it, that’s your human energy grid. The body is a printout from these eight channels combined with many other superficial branch channels. These other meridians in your body add layers of complexity and sophistication. They allow communication between the organs and the legs and the arms and other things; all the twelve meridians run out to the legs and the arms and through the organs in the body. The twelve regular meridians are just another layer of communication on top of the eight; they are sometimes called the six greater meridians.

Let me open it up to questions, and then we will get started on the practical skill of opening these channels.