Round 3: EGO/SELF & MEMORY IN LIFE FORCE PROCESS (long essay)

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.

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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….

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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…)
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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