Michael Winn and the whole neo-taoist possee…

Welcome back, Plato. Yes, I didi call you back, I knew you are much too feisty to resist. You’ve been sniping from the shadows for some tiime and I thought you would enjoy a more direct discussion. Of course, all readers should know that Plato and I love each other. This is not about bashing him personally or his teacher, just about bashing the mistzken ideas, the dumb sterotypes and accusations put out by them.

I got a big laugh out of your indignant posting, I hope that mine amuses you!

And I know that Plato is not at all ATTACHED to his notions of buddhist dogma, he is just pretending to be angry as he shouts his defense of them….:)

> The computer hacker analogy arises from the concept that without a proper
> teacher, one is like a technician without a manual. Hence, a hacker. I came
> up with this analogy long before I knew who Nan Huai-Chin was.

Sounds like you were unhappy with your first taoist teacher. Sometimes bad teachers give you the best lessons.

I do not defend all qigong or all taoist teachers as being “proper”, and unfortunately some of them do use too much external force, as I have written previously.

Hacking is a concept of externality also, someone who feels like they are an outsider trying to get inside. This is the normal state of most people. They are trapped in shifting fragments of what they call their “mind” that they believe is different from their body and from some divine state they hope to get into.

So I agree with Plato, most seekers are hackers in this sense. The insinuation that only the lucky few can find the “proper” teacher is elitist hogwash. There is only one teacher (if I may quote from my standard opening line of Chi Kung Fundamentals 1) and that is the Life Force. It is everywhere, and is guiding everyone at every moment. That is the only true teacher. Not to be confused with any Deity or Boddisattvas or God notion or any enlightened human teacher. So from this viewpoint, everyone is on one their “proper” spiritual path.

And the entire science of alchemy and qigoing is only one way to learn how to better communicate with the LIfe Force as teacher. All human guides are flawed and at least partially blinded by their personal soul patterns of perception. But to imply as you do that this millennia old alchemical study of the Life Force is a false path is to deny the centrality of the Life Force as the proper teacher. A position I would not want to find myself in. It could be construed as a statement of resistance.

> You know, Michael Winn writing that:
>
> “A prime example of his superficiality is how Huai Nan ridicules taoists for
> running the orbit in endless loops around their body, instead of focusing on
> some higher true spiritual paradise sought by Buddhists.”
>
> betrays exactly where Michael Winn comes from. Oh yeah–Nan Huai-Chin is on
> the kindergarden level (and superficial) because he suggests people do good
> deeds instead of selfishly pursuing immortality!!!

This is a centuries old accusation by buddhists trying to win favor with the Emperor (who controlled the building of all temples), that the pursuit of immortality is selfish.

The reality is that seeking immortality is both the most difficult and least selfish path one can take.
Why? Because to attain immortality you have to merge with the greater collective consciousness of heaven, earth, and humanity. That is what the Seven Formulas for attaining Immortality teach – how to progressively merge your limited self with the greater reality. Why is that self-ish? It is only selfish to a Buddhist, because they don’t believe that there is a Self. But that is a metaphysical issue, not an argument about if we should behave unself-ishly with others.

The alchemical texts are clear – only the most humble will succeed in realizing their immortality, even though everyone carries the same potential within themselves to merge their individual self with their eternal aspect. To merge with all requires the greatest self-discipline and committment – far greater than doing a few good deeds for fellow humans, which happen naturally as a by product of one’s cultivation.

You cannot merge without cultivating your destiny, which is your “de”, your virtue or spiritual essence. Completing your destiny is your INDIVIDUAL spiritual job, it is why the collective separated each of us out of the cosmic ocean into individual bodies. So that from our individuality we could gather our life experience and return it to the collective. Stengthening the individual self should not be confused with “acting selfishly”. If an alchemical adept holds a narrowly selfish attitude, you separate yourself from the whole, and thus cannot achieve immortality. So a priori, seeking immortality requires un-selfishness.
Your “lesser self” is progressively challenged to expand its experience to include everything in nature as the insides of your own body.

> Doing good deeds and helping others happens to be the Ph.D. level of ALL
> FORMS of cultivation. This isn’t Buddhism nor is it Taoism—it is the
> underlying wisdom of ALL traditions.
> Seriously, how is Michael going to attain immortality with no sense of doing
> good deeds? This is basic Taoism people, but Michael likes to avoid the
> whole concept of karma and reincarnation and other “Buddhist musings” when
> in reality they simply conflict with his own selfish and greedy pursuit of
> immortality.

This is where great cracks in the Buddhist metaphysic begin to appear.
We are all reincarnated – especially me – because of bad karma (behavior) in past lives. And thus we have to be good in this life so we can get off the wheel of incarnation, and go to nirvana. Basically, it’s earth as a penal colony for bad souls, where you suffer as a result of your past misdeeds.
Hence, life is suffering. And you better do good deed, or else – you are coming back as a toad, or a toadstool. Or maybe just as Plato’s stool.

This is the worst fear trip and biggest lie that a priesthood ever played on hapless people (mostly dumb peasants) to keep their religious power.

If incarnation is caused by only by bad karma, what caused the first human to incarnate?
Who committed the first evil act that has now snowballed into six billion souls being condemned to this penal colony? Since the population of earth is ever growing larger, where did all these bad souls come from?

It is a stupid metaphysic, and disempowers Heaven and Earth, removing them from the incarnational process and from the desirability of CREATION from continuing. As if physical Creation would cease if all sentient beings attained enlightenment and stopped coming back to earth.

This is where Buddhist and Catholicism have historically merged: the emphasis on doing good inevitably leads to its opposite, i.e. the evil of the selling of dispensations or merits. And modern Buddhists – Tibetan and Chinese – are shameless about this — they constantly urge you to give lots of money to the Temple, so your soul accumulates good merits to get a first class ticket out of here. The western Zen types are less egregious in this respect, probably the tao influence in their root. But some of the Japanese sects are very controlling in this way also.

Its a lot of pious hogwash. I like lots of individual buddhist cultivators, but can’t stand being in their oppressive church hierarchy or near the dogma that has overflowed into so many crevices and sugar coated false claims to do-goodery and spreading compassion.

Lao Tzu dismissed religion and morality as arising ony when the Tao is lost.
Message: You can’t force people to to be good. It has to arise from within.

That is the purpose of qigong and alchemy – to cultivate what is naturally within. Everyone’s virtue will be unique – not packaged as someone else’s forced notion of “compassion” or doing good. The history of religion forcing its notion of “goodness” on others often leads to its extreme: kill them if they aren’t good.

Point to note: Taoism is the only native religion in China, and there has never been a religious war there. They didn’t kill the encroaching buddhists or nestorian christians who came, they accepted them and learned from them.

> As a matter of fact, if Michael had even the kindergarden level of awareness
> he attributes to Nan Huai-Chin, he would have warned all of us up in the
> caves on Hua Shan about the fox spirits that stole jing from everyone up
> there every night.
>
> How was he supposed to know? Unless a man’s chi is clean enough, no fox
> spirit will attempt to steal it! 😉

In fact, I did alert everyone that there were many spirits about this place, and recounted locals taoist tales of encounters. That is part of Huashan’s magic and power. And of course, I had already spent a week in the caves.
Your soul is naked there, no where to hide.

But as Thorny has already noted, you attract what you need. If you are holding on too tight to your jing, a spirit will oblige you to help release your hold. If you need an encounter with an immortal, there are many there as well. But you must have sufficent virtue and cultivation to attract them.

Simple spinning of your belt channels (fusion) might have sufficed to establish a clear boundary. I personally don’t put up boundaries. The alchemical process allows me to be the opening for trapped spirits, and I have had this experience of them passing through my cauldron frequently.

Plato’s comment (in later posting) that one should “teach them the Dharma”
illustrates the absurdity of religious dogma. You are going to read sutras to the hungry ghosts? This is just an unconscious and pretty inefficient way to clear your own chi field so they won’t disturb you. Hungry ghosts want food (jing), not lectures. Being an open cauldron – bringing your own jing into the cauldron – dissolves them instantly.

That requires alchemical training and practice – the true skills that allow you to take real action in this situation. And you don’t have to negate your sense of individual self and pretend you are Empty or the Bodisattva of Compassion in order to do it.
You just naturally manage your personal chi field the best you are able. No dogma or Dharma needed.

> Life is suffering. Look around the world and tell me that life is not
> suffering! You would be a big fat liar if you did so! Life is suffering
> because no matter how great your life is, one day you will get old and die.
> Then what? What will happen in the next life? Who can say?
> Michael doesn’t care because his plan is to become immortal and then
> side-step the whole “death thing.” What if he fails? Then it is back into
> the meat-grinder with the rest of us!

“Life is Suffering” is perhaps the WORST negative thought form that one can hold, and the main reason I am so public in my attacks on this disempowering philosophy. Of course life includes suffering. But if you focus on it, it grows. Focus = sending chi to the negative thought form of suffering. Why amplify it? If you want to get rid of suffering, you focus on the opposite: love, hope, good health, balance and harmony, the healing power of chi. That is why buddhism was described to me by one qigong master from China as “the path of eating the pill of bitterness”.

The second fallacy here is that immortality is about overcoming death.
Immortality is not about living forever, it is about integrating so deeply that you preserve your will even as you pass through the death experience. That is what the collective WANTS – the integration of inidividual will even while merged with the collective. We can know this because we can witness it in ourselves as well as in historical trends.

Its obivous to me that Nature is NOT seeking dissolution of the individual self, it is seeking evolution of it. That is the positive reason why Nature, and humanity, keep reincarnating. This is where the anti-self notions of some kinds of Buddhism are antiquated, anti-evolutionary, and just plain false in my humble opinion. Without the self being real, you have no real responsibility in life or in afterlife. You fall into a childish state of helplessness while Big Daddy Divine Entity does everything and makes it all good even though childish little humans are bad or “false” selves.

Death does not need to be overcome. It just needs to be experienced the same way as life – i.e. from a deeply centered place. But once you lose your body, you have no jing to cultivate into spirit, ie. you have no will. So it is easier to cultivate now, while you are in your body. This is the central difference between the alchemical path of the Tao and other paths of mind enlightenment. Neither is right or wrong – they just produce a different experience of individuated will. Its why jing and its ability to embody are important on the Tao spiritual path.

> Seriously, your body is a reflection of the mind—not the other way around.
> In other words, there is an answer to the “chicken/egg aspect” of the
> body/mind riddle in this respect: THE MIND CAME FIRST!
> Naturally, when you are so far “in the hole” with a locked-up body that
> reflects a hopelessly attached mind then you need BODY methods to get to a “SPACE” where you can LET GO IN YOUR MIND.
> It is like the body is a dense form of thought. You need to dissolve that
> dense thought using certain methods so that you can approach the less dense
> version of that thought IN YOUR MIND.
> BUT THIS DOESN’T MEAN THAT THE BODY METHOD IS “THE WAY!!!”

This is trying to accomplish the same thing as Qigong and alchemy do, but just making some unnecessary distinctions between body and mind. But basically its an argument for “shen theory” – that the intelligence shapes the jing. The taoist are a little more sophisticated and make more subtrle distinctions as to the continuous process of transformation between jing, chi, shen without getting into any splits about which came first.

> All mundane methods lead you into your own mind–where the real work is
> done. The work of disentanglement and detachment. The more you can do so, the more your REAL CHI comes up and moves on it’s own accord.

Sounds like Taoist theory of cultivating orginal (yuan) chi, which sustains the neutral force between yin and yang poles of chi. And “wu wei” is the core taoist principle of spontaneity, literally of “non-coercive action”. But this doesn’t preclude taking efforts to open up energetic flow in one’s body.

> Even moving the FALSE CHI with your mind (“playing” with your microcosmic orbit) it just another body-method that takes you to a place in your mind where YOU NEED TO DROP THE METHOD IN ORDER TO ADVANCE!!!
> If you don’t DROP IT when you are supposed to then you will fall into a
> false path which gives you results SO YOU THINK IT IS THE REAL PATH. Or, you will just go nowhere with your practice. Remember, the ultimate work is in your mind and NOT in your body.

Plato, I appreciate your committment to truth and to people not getting stuck with any one level. But this doesn’t make any one method false – just that people can sometimes use methods in ways that don’t serve them. But you are playing with semantics here when you talk of “dropping Method” to get onto the real path. Dropping Methods is a method in itself, it is just a shift from what I would describe as moving from a yang method to a yin method to a yuan (spontaneous) method. That choice has to be made by the adept, as is appropriate.

But I hope you don’t fall into the trap of thinking “I won’t do any method because I want to be totally spontaneous and authentic in each moment, and other teacher’s methods are false”. Try playing the violin without hours – or years – of practice. The music of spontaneity can only arise out of structured discipline – that gives you the skilll to play freely.

That is the path of qigong and inner alchemy training – beginning with structure, and gradually cultivating greater freedom and spontaneity while able to hold your center in balance and harmony. Easier said than done – but most people will get it done much faster with a series of tested methods like qigong and inner alchemy.

And I would personally not use the term”false” to describe any path – that is just a judgement. Your life is your path. So if you are having an experience of being stuck at one level, that is a true experience. That is why Tao masters handed down formulas – to let me people know that there was more to grow into, that there is something beyond their level of enlightenment.
In fact they have three levels of enlgihtenment and three of immortality in this particular teaching.

> Another way to look at it is to say that Buddhists talk about letting go of
> thoughts and feelings but you HAVE TO FEEL THEM BEFORE YOU CAN LET THEM GO
> Read books like “Aware Baby” and study the videos of Scott Sonnon” because you have to learn to let go and feel in order to have feelings to let go of! But the Healing Tao fucked it all up because they taught everyone that the mind is a computer and the organs are the software

Not sure who “they” is, but I can guess. So no need to confuse any one teacher with the whole of the thousand teachers in the Healing Tao globally.
Computer metaphors are common ways of communicating ideas to modern folks, and should not be taken too literally. But I think you worked with computers and perhaps the metaphor was too real for you.

>and then later on that it is about shen theory.

Yes, the “interior gods” school of inner alchemy. My contribution was to clarify this core theory of shen, as an antidote to adepts who practiced too mechanistically. Seems like if you want to get in touch with your feelings,
this is a good way to identify source of internal conflicts. The subtitle of my fusion 1 course is “Cultivate Your True Feeling”. We explore where feelings arise from. The taoists are very clear that “feeling” is not to be confused with who you are.

Your diatribe against this approach suggests you probably took the “vital organs” too physically, a common mistake amongst westerners. The shen are not the organs, they are “spheres” of feeling with specific biological and psychological pathways of function that incude both meridians and organs.

> In short, they gave the WRONG answer to this fundamental question:
>
> “Does the chi follow the mind or does the mind follow the chi?”

Actually, you’ve asked the wrong question. The mind is nothing other than the chi functioning. It appears to the novice that the shen guide the chi, which condenses into jing/substance. But when you get deeper into alchemy, you discover that the jing is actually the shen in another form.

Your conclusion I consider dualistic and thus false – that the mind leads the body. This type of language promotes the mind-body split. The deeper truth, I feel, is that the body IS the spirit, and when it vibrates we call its subtle movements our mind (chi flow). There is never any split in reality, only in our thinking and talking about it.

And I find it a little contradictory to hear you promote this buddhist variant of “everything exists in the mind only” theory and in the same breath say that the only real thing of value is helping others physically.

Thanks, Plato, for taking the tiime to clarify your positions about why you’ve chosen another path. I have no interest in changing your mind about this, but hope you can release your false ideas about what the Taoist path of cultivation entails. It may help reduce the suffering for the wounds you believe you’ve experienced. And it could help release you from your missionary zeal to convince sincere qigong practictioners that they are on a false path.

Read the Ken Sancier article I just posted (can link from homepage or articles page). He summarizes the medical benefits of qigong in healing chronic illness via 3500 scientific studies. If so many people are getting medical healing from qigong, it seems unlikely that your premise about it being a false or very dangerous practice is simply untrue.

And I am sure that as one of those lovely big-hearted buddhists (their best quality) you will find a way to forgive any Taoists for any wrong guidance.

inner smiles,
Michael

Brother, I’m so glad to see you back.
Metta.

< he [Michael] was not saying that Nan is, sweepingly as a person, < at kindergarten level, just that his notion of the microcosmic < orbit was at said level--i.e., a beginner's notion of what it < is or could be used for. Simon, Michael's comment shows how little he knows what master Nan knows and teaches. It is true that Nan is against any mind guided energy system. Yet, he describes in volumes what happens to the body and the effects of opening the microcosmic orbit in details. It is very well described in his book "Tao and Longevity". And believe me, it is more then "oh, you should feel warm sensation here and there". Nice energy, btw. Metta.

>And believe me, it is more then “oh, you should feel warm sensation here and there”.

yeah, well, it’s this vagueness that works for me with michael as a teacher. i got pretty fed up with people telling me i should feel and do and think exactly as they do with energy practice, morality, etc., and tell me i’m wrong if i feel something a little different than they do. without exception i found out these people didnt know what they were talking about because they had never experienced anything real, just parroted their teacher(s). and if they did experience something real, they negated it because the teacher or dogma said otherwise. using the HT practices i’m left to my own devices to explore and discover, and that works for me. i can always get feedback from other people–michael, this forum, taobums, etc–to furhter understand or work with my practice.

i dont know who these guys are that all the fuss is over. i’m not a big reader. and if i’m not directly drawn to read a book, i dont bother with it. nor am i into personality cults. not sying we have one going on here or that this discussion is a conflict of personality cults. i just dont care to keep up with al the big names and what they say or do, i’m only interested in following the signposts of my own journey. sakyahumawhata or huainanwho’samutha. i dont care. they may be great and enlightened teachers or a cupla bozos. if their not in my signposts, they’re useless to me (to ME, get it?). and if they are in my signposts, i’ll get to them when i see the signs. can’t cross a bridge ya havent come to.

actually, one of em i think i may have heard of before and picked up his books at a borders. but i didnt like the feel of em. not bad, just not for me. so there ya go. thanks for telling me i’m wrong about how i’m living. i often appreciate criticism (still some i can’t deal with). let me follow the signs in the road though and i’ll keep your info handy in case i need it in the future.

–“Authoritarian double think?”
Well, it depends on the teacher, and on how much the person approaching the lama has developed his own (accurate) intuitive insight.
I’ve learned that Tibet has it’s fair share of crappy politics, including in the “reincarnated tulku” department. But there are genuine ones, to be sure.
A good “lama” wants you to become a good “lama”, where lama for me would mean here someone who’s refined his connection to buddha nature/primordial awareness-energy-intelligence.
Something I’ve often thought: But not everyone can be “professional teachers of spiritual knowledge”. A zen in the art of whatever you happen to be doing, and especially of what appears to be our own natural calling, is more realistic (which may mean having several irons on the fire of course). A kind of confucian thought I guess, which for me puts an interesting spin on the whole student teacher dynamic…
Simon

I learned of hierachy:
body sensation=feeling
emotion=pattern of feeling
thought and image
choice
This is teaching in scientology, one zen buddhism, gnosticism.
(Musing: When skimming through Scott Sonnon site I realize he was consistently using formula bady sensation, emotion, thought, image.)
I always approached emotion recognizing it through thought.

However I realized approaching in such way is headway.
Presence of ladies consistently demonstrated. Appreaciation.

Emotion is not stream of sensation. This is egghead concept. It is much more primal.

It is:
gestalt (from remote viewing)
pathos (greek drama)
hinods (ron’s weinegger http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/schareng.pdf)
“There is a stage in mental activity in which this subdivision of psychical phenomena cannot be mage, which is too early for it. All ‘elements’ at their first appearance are merged with the floating backgroung, the whole thing being vaguely tinged by ‘character’.”

No pathos, no catharsis. Catharsis is alchemy.
Emotions and virtue go handway.
Egghead can call emotions. It is evocation. But the magic is of the heart.