Tao of Tsunamis and Earth Changes

For those not on my Tao News email list (subscribe on homepage), I am posting this jan.10 eletter. As part of the process of repairing the site from virus attack in Nov, all old TaoNews letters will soon be archived in the Articles page. I will soon be starting a weekly forum on these boards as well.-Michael Winn

Heaven and Earth are impartial;
they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
Sages are also impartial;
they also treat the common people like straw dogs.

The space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows
pump it and more comes out.
Better to safeguard what arises within
than seek outer knowledge that fails to nourish.

– Lao Tzu‚s Tao Te Ching, verse 5

Dear Seekers of Smooth and Comfortable Change,

What do you do when the Change is shocking and global in its impact?

When the earth starts spinning faster on its axis and 150,000 people
living in peaceful Pacific villages are wiped out in minutes,
leaving millions homeless and billions in shock?

The Indonesian tsunami was perhaps a bit less shocking to me, as I
have considered tsunami risks to my personal health for the last
decade. I am writing to you from a beachfront on one of the
Grenadine islands in the south Caribbean sea. I‚ve been coming here
for years to meditate, develop chi kung forms, write and immerse
myself in the water element during winter. Yet only 10 miles away
sits an underwater volcano that is active, called KickŒem Jenny. Its
peak is smoldering and bubbling only a few hundred feet below the
ocean surface.

When Jenny blows, I know there will be a major tsunami washing over
my idyllic fishing village. There are periodic „orange‰ alerts, as
the volcano is closely watched. Occasionally a boat wanders too
close to it and suddenly sinks like a rock, as the sulfur content in
the sea makes the boat too heavy. Another active volcano in the
area, on Monserrat, has already forced evacuation of most of the
island. So volcanic eruption and a tsunami is a real threat. Yet
every year I continue to take the chance, knowing it is unlikely I
will receive any warning given my low level of media contact and the
very few minutes it would take a tsunami to travel from Kickem Jenny
to my beach. So why do I take the risk?

It has to do with destiny, with being attuned to destiny through the
earth‚s chi field, and accepting my destiny as flowing natural
process of Tao. If I die in a tsunami, it is my destiny. If I get an
inner voice warning me to stay away from the islands, and I listen
and act on it, then it will not be my destiny. The 150,000. who died
in Asia had a date with destiny. I am sure there are another
150,000. miraculous stories of those unconsciously guided away from
the death zone. And its the destiny of the rest of humanity to deal
with the after shockwave.

I believe the reason this giant tsunami has provoked such a shock
wave is not because of the scale of suffering. Its because the
primordial and thus uncontrollable nature of water itself has
aroused an internal shockwave within each of us. More people die of
AIDS every year in Africa, and more died in the Rwanda genocide.
Four times as many people die every year in the U.S. from the side
effects of prescribed drugs. But you can control your personal
exposure to those risks. They are not primordial like the sea.

Here‚s the overview on death on planet earth: about 148,000. people
die every day, calculated from an 8.7% annual global death rate. So
for one day the global death rate doubled due to the tsunami. But
statistically this is insignificant. The death rate is soon going to
rise far above 150,000 per day, due to an aging global population
and declining birth rates. The tsunami‚s effect on the global
economy will be nil, so this is not cause for deep concern.

The real significance of the tsunami is its impact on the global
psyche. As I‚ve written about 9-11, when there is a mass death it
opens a portal between the formless and the physical realms. Its a
mass migration of soul essence, and for a brief time everyone feels
their soul essence more tangibly. That causes our hearts to open,
and we are reminded that humanity is really a single global entity
with 6.2 billion interdependent human cells.

Hence the outpouring of relief aid for flood „victims‰. Who are they
victims of? Its not the first time this flood has happened ˆ the
collective human memory has recorded it through myths of the Great
Flood, whether you take it from Noah and his ark or from thousands
of recorded memories from Atlantis and Lemuria (Pacific continent)
sinking beneath the waves (each for different reasons). On the sides
of Hawaii‚s volcanoes evidence has been found of tsunamis flooding
up as high as 1500 feet above sea level.

The relief aid and money we give is partly genuine kindness, but
also an unconscious hope that others will help us should the same
happen to us. When Kickem Jenny blows, a tsunami will flood the
east coast of the U.S. as well as my beach shack. Likewise for the
Azores volcano, sitting dead in the center of what was once
Atlantis. When it blows, the east coast of the US will need
re-mapping. If the 1500 foot wall of water predicted by scientists
happens, it will make the tsunami in Asia look like a small splash
in a kiddie pool.

The „soul portal‰ that opens at time of mass death is not
metaphysical speculation, but my personal experience. On Dec. 26,
2005 I was sitting in meditation and was feeling quite amazed at the
density and volume of the jing (Taoist term for soul substance that
is refined by inner alchemy meditation) that was present. This was
before I had heard the news reports on the tsunami, or knew of the
shift in the earth‚s speeded up spin. Even though it is ony by a
fraction of a second, it represents an enormous shift in the global
energy body. In subsequent days it felt as if my „kan & li‰
meditations had effortlessly moved several octaves deeper. Later I
began to get unsolicited emails from some of my kan and li students
reporting the same amplified effects. I would be interested in
hearing from others of their direct experience.

Kan & Li Alchemy as Portal to Body/Earth Changes

Taoist/Daoist „Kan & Li‰, or Œwater & fire‚ alchemy turns out to be
the perfect pattern for attuning to earth changes in the form of
volcanos and tsunamis. Why? Because human energy bodies are modeled
on the same pattern as the earth‚s energy body. The physical earth
has a neutral core ˆ its mysterious inner heart is thought to be
crystalline according to some recent scientific tests.

This solid
crystal core, which may also house a star-like nuclear reactor, is
surrounded by a warm viscous interior of molten lava, further
surrounded by a cooler outer crust of tectonic plates on which our
cold oceans sit. When the fiery lava layer explodes volcanically, it
displaces the cold ocean layer on top, producing tsunamis and
flooding. So „earth changes‰ are not a surface effect, but rather
something that originates very deep within the planet‚s core.
Something has to shift or awaken deep within the Earth‚s core
crystal to cause these changes on the liquid surface that affect us
humans.

In Taoist water & fire alchemy practice, the model is similar: we
have a neutral inner observer/core self with crystalline bone
structure, a hot pulsing middle layer of blood and vital organs,
with a cooler outer layer of skin and blood cooling as it rises to
the fleshy surface. The goal of body-centered alchemical meditation
is to activate the deep spiritual fire within (Yang hidden within
the body‚s Yin) in order to refine the conditioned patterns of
water/blood and our jing, the substance of our genetic-ancestral
consciousness.

When you activate this alchemical fire within your dantian (belly
cauldron), it begins a long internal process of refining or
„steaming‰ blood into chi into spirit (jing to chi to shen). Where
and how this happens in the body is significant. Yogic view of
kundalini is of a spiritually fired shakti rising up the spine. In
the Taoist view this is the initial phase of development; the
microcosmic orbit is used to guide this fire down the front
yin/water channel), to produce a continuous and balanced yin-yang
refining cycle.

Kan and Li alchemical meditation is like a second phase kundalini.
The spiritual fire rises not up the spine, but up the neutral core
channel in the center of the body. I remember vividly the first time
I activated it over twenty years ago ˆ I wasn‚t very skilled, and
the rising force felt like a column of hot volcanic lava coming up
and threatening to blow my head off. I was terrified, and prayed for
it to go back down before my delicate brain (read here as Œego‚) was
fried. It was my first lesson in dealing with rapid body shifts as a
kind of internal earth change.

It was only much later that I actually connected my inner alchemical
process to outer earth changes. Alchemy, I discovered, is very
attuned to the current global cycle of what is popularly described
as a feminine/goddess energy, arising from within the body and the
earth. The old sky God religions (which includes vedic Hinduism,
most forms of Buddhism as well as Christianity and Islam) are mostly
focused on the Divine fire above coming down to purify the corrupted
human and demonic worlds hidden within the body and earth. Neither
the fire/sky centered or water/body centered cycle (of Taoists and
Tantrics) is better than the other ˆ it‚s just that we‚re in a cycle
of water being heated from within right now. And its just beginning
to really cook.

I don‚t believe earth events, from daily weather changes to huge
tsunamis, are mechanical chance events that are unknowable. They are
moments in the bodily life of the large organism we call planet
Earth. She is called by other names, like Gaia, or Pangu by the
ancient Chinese. The Egyptians identified it as a male spirit called
Tellur. I believe that this global intelligence is shifting,
regardless of whether humans listen or not. Was a mass death of
150,000 people needed to mobilize human global consciousness moving
into 2005?

That‚s probably beyond current human judgment, as a clear answer
would require a more intimate relationship between humanity and
Gaia/Pangu/Tellur. But we can make educated speculations. Maybe that
is what Lao Tzu is referring to in verse 5 of the Tao Te Ching
(daodejing) when he refers to Heaven and Earth impartially treating
humans as straw dogs.

This doesn‚t necessarily mean that Heaven and Earth are cruel to
humans, giving them life and them mercilessly taking it away ˆ
indifferent to whether we are morally good or evil. It could be
describing how all humans are treated equal, and no higher than the
other non-human elements of nature that are undergoing
transformation. There also the interpretation that „straw dogs‚
could refer to us humans being sacred ritual objects burned in
sacrifice to a higher cause.

I‚ve personally been attempting for over a decade to cultivate a
relationship with deep Earth consciousness using body-centered
Taoist internal alchemy technologies. Its one reason I have
frequently travelled to China‚s Taoist mountain sanctuaries ˆ I
found them more alive, like open portals into the earth. These
portals have been opened by millennia of Taoist adepts meditating
upon earth cycles, its numerous spirits and its axial consciousness.

This axis is the core energy (chong chi) that links the earth‚s
subtle bodies to both the physical heavens (planets, sun, stars) and
the formless Heavens where the Celestial Immortals (very highly
achieved humans) hang out. My next China trip is not until May 2006,
and there are no guarantees that you will return a Celestial…but
many people have had major openings in these sacred mountain Taoist
power spots.

Becoming an Earth Immortal is the developmental stage before you
achieve Heaven or Celestial Immortal. Of course, none of this
happens until you achieve ordinary Human immortality, which has
nothing to do with living physically forever. Human immortality is
simply completing your soul‚s destiny and a tangible sense of
spiritual integrity with the larger flow of nature. Earth
Immortality requires attuning your personal human energy body to the
earth‚s impersonal energy body, mediated by the time cycles of the
sun and moon. This is what the Greater Water & Fire (kan & li)
Alchemy formula is about. This requires resolving a lot of ancestral
issues trapped within the earth‚s energy body.

One interesting thing I‚ve found through my China connections is
that many Chinese psychics, very attuned to ancestral issues, have
been predicting big earth changes.

We have had numerous psychics in the West telling us the same thing
for decades, starting with Edgar Cayce giving detailed dates of huge
land/ocean shifts. But Cayce‚s changes did not occur on schedule.
Nor have other predictions manifested on schedule.

Ramtha (the channelled spirit behind J. Z. Knight and inspiration
for the recent „What the Bleep‰ film) urged followers to store food
and guns in the pacific northwest back in the mid-80‚s due to
impending earth changes. There were numerous other false alarms by
other end-of-the-milllenia prophets (ala Gordon Michael Scallion),
so many that one necessarily became very leery of any channeled
predictions. Yet at the same time it intuitively felt right, that
some major changes HAD to happen if a real paradigm shift was to
occur.

Now that Earth has been confronted by increasingly stronger signs of
global warming, changes in deep ocean currents, bigger hurricanes,
near-miss meteors and now a kick-ass tsunami, should we begin to
take these earth change predictions more seriously? Maybe the failed
predictions were intentionally made early, to allow us resistant
humans time to absorb the possibilities of unimaginable changes to
earthly life.

Become the Change Before Change is Forced

What to do about all these predictions and the disturbing changes in
weather? My decision has been to live in the flow of the present
moment, without allowing myself to be paralyzed by other‚s
predictions of apocalyptic destruction. At the same time, I keep an
alert ear to my inner voices, so that I may BECOME THE CHANGE
BEFORE CHANGE IS FORCED upon me.

In late 2004 these voices began to speak to me. When I asked on my
birthday (last September 5th) what the new year would bring, the I
Ching gave me – twice in a row, to two different questions – its
answer; the double hexagram Wind over Wind. That is equivalent to
„Change squared to a higher power of itself‰. I went into deep
meditation to clarify that image, and received information about a
long cycle of dramatic changes that could last for 20 years, but
with especially strong kickers in 2005, and 2007-9. More mass
deaths, perhaps up to a third of humanity, may occur during this 20
year shift to a higher vibrational frequency in our planetary
pattern of functioning.

This information, if accurate, is hardly new; its significance to me
is about timing. The Timing of this cycle should not be seen as the
end of Time, as Creation cannot stop without the free-will agreement
of all beings (unlikely). Nor is it vindication of Mathusian
theories of self-correcting population cycles ˆ if humanity were in
deep harmony, earth could support a vast population with clean
free-energy technologies. But most importantly, these Changes
should NOT be cause for panic.

If you go into Fear reaction, that the Changes are trying to kill
you, you can no longer hear your deepest inner soul voice directing
you to grasp the enormous opportunities for growth possible during
this cycle of change. This is the function of the Taoist Fusion of
the Five Elements practice ˆ to speed the integration of your five
inner „body spirits‰ (jing shen, correlated with the 5 major vital
organ functions) so they speak in one clear, spontaneous,
body-centered authentic voice (ziran).

The simplest and truest response to these Changes is to celebrate a
new phase in the rebirthing of Gaia/Pangu‚s deep spiritual
consciousness. This in turn will initiate a change in the unfolding
patterns of human destiny. Our old dysfunctional patterns of
pollution, war, and struggle need to die to give birth to a stronger
foundation for humanity‚s collective spiritual development.

Some of us will choose to „die‰ in support of that global rebirthing
process. The reality is that nobody is ever truly forced to die; we
mostly leave our bodies as the result of millions of moment to
moment unconscious choices. The true general cause of unconscious
death choices will not be physical calamities, but an underlying
resistance to the new vibrational frequency radiating from the
earth‚s core as it undergoes its rebirth.

This will cause many to go mad and commit violent acts to relieve
the tension arising from their own resistance/madness. But what
looks horrible on the outside will be beautiful on the inside. The
core of the earth will no longer be experienced as a place of fiery
Hell and trapped beings, but as the open, luminous sacred center of
an embodied Heaven Within Earth. Death-ing is just the initial stage
of rebirth-ing and liberation into new dimensions of life. So all
destiny choices of when and how to leave this body and this earth
are ultimately expressions of human free will.

My Humble Predictions (or Projections?)

Paradoxically, it is the evolution of human INDIVIDUATION that will
be empowered by this collective process of Change. Individuation is
the integration of our spiritual will within our physical body. The
old governmental and religious institutions with pyramidal authority
structures and from-the-top-down dogmas will gradually break down.
We‚ll be forced to invent new ways to regulate our lives, and it may
take us a while to get it right. The
corporate-miliitary-intelligence -black government- that currently
rules our elected government without our consent will not go gently
into the night.

Western astrology will have to shift to acknowledge the voice of
planet earth as the single most important heavenly body for humans.
We will no longer have to chase after calendars to figure out who
and where we are. In the long cycle, Earth as entity will take on
multiple incarnations that we can choose to live on. The one I plan
to choose (meet you there?) will ultimately be freed to realize its
inner nature as a „dark star‰ manifesting its true destiny as a
place for enlightened spiritual embodiment (rather than
imprisonment). Earth as a planet, and the body for each of us will
become for humans the conscious clearing house and point of
integration for all planetary, solar, and stellar voices.

The end of this individuation process is for humans to finally
arrive in their bodies. This is another way of saying that our
bodies will be recognized as the immediate and true transmutation of
spirit, eliminating all dualistic struggle. Light and Dark will
still exist, but their relationship will be more one of divine dance
and play, less intense polarities of war, disease, and struggle.
This body-centered self-realization is why Earth is the center
element in Taoist astrology and the center of inner alchemy
practice. Earth in Chinese systems is the equivalent of an embodied
Ether (hidden fifth element) found in the western esoteric systems
inherited from Atlantis and used in Greece, Egypt, Middle East,
India, and the West.

This is not to claim that Taoist cosmology or astrology is better;
it simply has different, clearer body-centered information. It has
what is needed at this point in the cycle of changes to achieve
completion. In the new cycle of change there will be the opportunity
to integrate the wisdom of the ancient Lemurian and Atlantean
civilizations. (and yes, now is finally the time for me to get off
my ass and release my book giving the historical details of this
subject…as soon as I find a reasonable source for print-on-demand
technology!).

What are the most important practical steps to take to prepare for
this cycle of earth changes? To find a way to get grounded on every
level of the process of one‚s Becoming. I am teaching chi kung and
inner alchemy because I find that combination of movement and
meditation to be the most effective and effortless path to deep
embodied change.

Its why in particular I have been urging Healing Tao students to
move ahead to the three Kan & Li levels of practice, Lesser (Inner
Sexual Alchemy), Greater (Sun-Moon-Earth Alchemy), and Greatest
(Planetary & Soul Alchemy). I teach the entire cycle every summer at
Dao Mountain, and the rest of the year at selected retreats abroad.
The next Greater Kan & Li, which is the most focused on earth
changes, is in central Italy May 3-8 (contact Cristiano Palazzini
.

I feel we need to make these alchemical technologies accessible as
the basic and essential tools of a modern spiritual science. Not a
secret practice people will get to someday when they are perfect
masters. They are tools for imperfect, evolving human beings seeking
to become the force of natural change – before Nature forces change
upon us.

But everyone will find their own path. Inexorably and invisibly.
That is Tao/Dao ˆ the pathless path. Enjoy your journey!

May the Five Inner Tones of the Dao Sing in our Heart,
Michael Winn

„