Sunday, August 5, 2018

Reversing the 5 Elements and the Double Reversal of Alchemy: The Golden Key and Darkest Minds movie



So now we turn to Thomas Cleary's book, Inner Teachings of Taoism






Is Western science "required" to practice qigong?


He sounds very accomplished. All the more reason to ditch the recordings and go study with him directly!

As to the rest of your message...

Im not sure why you need to try and translate the mechanics behind qigong into ‘sciencey sounding stuff’. Let’s face it - it’s not real science and it’s also not real qigong. You lose the point of both.

Do you feel that ‘science’ is more ‘real’? Do you feel that you need to uphold a certain air of intelligence to be taken seriously? I don’t really understand.

Why didn’t the enlightened sages who created the alchemical path and it’s offshoots (qigong, neigong etc) talk about parasympathetic rebounding and the 12 harmonic nodes? Shouldn’t we assume that they are far smarter than us and follow their advice instead of trying to be cleverer and re-invent the wheel?


Your question is a good one. For me the answer is pedagogical - meaning from my direct experience of taking classes from qigong master Chunyi Lin, he said that in China you just strictly obeyed the master's orders - no matter what - you did not question the master. In fact to "ask a question" in China to the teacher is considered an insult - so it was an "adjustment" for him to answer questions here in the U.S. And he has joked about how he has become "Americanized."

So I was able to see that process of him "Before" he was "Americanized" and "After" he was "Americanized." haha.
So my take on this is that - another example is that the story was given how to heal a boy in China, then the boy had to be slapped - and not in front of the parents of course, but in the West a qigong master would not be allowed such "discretion" - and yet the instructions of how to do the healing are from spirit information signals from the Emptiness. And so even the qigong master can be "surprised" by the instructions or visions he receives or she receives - but learns from experience to trust the Emptiness.

And so for me, trying to learn what the actual "teachings" are is complicated - for example Chunyi shared in 2015 how in his experience he discovered that when people open their third eyes then they commonly overuse their psychic energy and so then the person gets fat because they have to now rely on food for their source to replenish their energy. He said he has seen this many times now. But at first when he came to the US he taught the motto, "the more you heal, the more you heal yourself." Now he doesn't say that anymore! So he has learned from experience. Another thing he told me is that he has learned - he at first told a person to practice as much as they wanted - so it would not be forced. But now he realizes that for serious conditions a person needs to meditate at least 4 hours a day. So again this is something he has learned from his experience in the West.

So then - having considered the differences between Western and traditional Chinese culture - then since we can not just strictly "follow" the orders of the teacher here in the West - then I was forced to research what are the general principles of the training.
Here is my take on it - first I did the training by following the teachers instructions and also the book Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality. But I was told on this website that the book was "too dangerous" and so I should not read it. Then I was told if I have questions for teaching then I should just "ask the teacher" or "given him a call"  - but to call the teacher here in the West is not cheap! I think now the rate is $140 for 10 minutes for a healing - and a healing requires that little to no talking should take place. So I stopped reading the book and I stopped "asking" the teacher (i.e. attending the classes) because I could not afford to cheap asking the questions. haha.

So then I figured based on the experiences I had - then if what I experienced is biologically real - and it was confirmed to be real by the teacher who said I had an "enlightenment experience" - and so then if it is biologically real then it also must be transculturally real, since modern humans have less DNA variation than one troupe of chimpanzees. O.K. so then I figured - if there are general principles of science involved - then there is no need to rely on the effects of one teacher or another teacher or even one culture or another culture! A big problem in parsing out the teachings - on this website for example - is people are quick to judge a "school" based on its teacher! Well to me this is like saying a baseball coach is fat and therefore he team must be terrible. haha. For example Falun Gong is described as the teacher being fake but the principles of the training being real and achieving results. So there is a mixture involved - since obviously Falun Gong throws in Western concepts. Zhong Gong, a school that Chunyi also trained in, also throws in WEstern concepts - but this is something I had to discover on my own.

So in other words the "qigong revolution" in China of the 1980s already had a lot of Westernization - I recommend Dr. David Palmer's book "Qigong Fever" for a fascinating overview of the role of qigong as a kind of "vanishing mediator" in the Westernization of China.

And so the point being that a person could simply "follow" the instructions of the teacher but since the teacher is teaching in the West then their instructions are limited and even in China, traditionally, a student of alchemy would study many texts and Chunyi himself said he read many meditation texts as well. So then finally I realized that Western science was limited in its understanding of Daoist alchemy yet at the same time I also realized that you have to really study Western science in order to validate Daoist alchemy. In other words because of my qigong enlightenment experience, I was able to focus my mind, by sitting in full lotus all day, and reading one scholarly text a day, to read an overview of WEstern science. I have since corresponded with many science professors - math, quantum physics, philosophy, etc. And so the "promotion" of Western science - those "promoters" are quick to dismiss Daoist alchemy as woo-woo New Age nonsense - the so-called "skeptics" - but what I realized is that their WEstern science is not advanced enough! It is because they do not understand Western science well enough that they are unable to understand Daoist alchemy, a study that really requires quantum biology and quantum relativity.

O.K. having said that - the qigong revolution in science also relied on turning to Western science. So for example the first qigong master to perform in the public in a big way - did so by doing qigong anesthesia - and ..........

Is the Sun/Moon not connected to the Mysterious Female as the Gate of the Dao?


I have a lot of admiration for Red Pine--I wouldn't bust his balls just to bust his balls.

This was almost a decade ago, so my memory's a tad hazy, but it was a simple exchange, and I'm pretty sure I remember it reasonably clearly. At the time Red Pine was delivering a talk that mostly centered on Buddhism, with "emptiness" (空, in Buddhist contexts) occupying a central enough part of the lecture that I felt compelled to ask afterwards what he thought the important similarities/differences between Daoist and Buddhist discussions of emptiness (空 as well a 虛, in Daoism) are. He replied succinctly, "Daoists don't talk about emptiness, because they're only interested in qi," or something to that effect, and effectively closed the book on my question. Perhaps he was just having an off day or was jetlagged or whatever, but the fact is that one cannot read more than a few pages of inner alchemy texts without seeing that the Daoists are quite interested in emptiness, and thus I came to the conclusion that Bill Porter does not read these types of books. Early on he spent a lot of his time in Taiwan in a Buddhist monastery (in the Dharma Drum organization under Master Shengyen/聖嚴法師, if I'm not mistaken), and also spent time in the Land of 10,000 Buddhas in California, which is affiliated with Master Hsuanhua/宣化上人... while those temples are probably great places to learn about Buddhism, they are simply not hotbeds of Daoist alchemy. I know people in Taiwan quite steeped in the Dharma Drum organization, and they are taught very little about Daoism in general, and effectively nothing about alchemy.


If he says that--please dig up the exact quote, if you have the book on hand--that's still simply a very controversial statement. Oracle bone inscriptions of moon () and head () look nothing alike. The 《説文解字》 does not connect the two characters, nor did the master etymologist Duan Yucai.

As for all the ancient Sumeria/Sanskrit etymology/agriculturalism/Bushmen culture/etc., it's all very interesting in its own right and I am open to the possibility that there are shared motifs, wisdom, practices, etc. in all these ancient cultures, but I think one risks connecting dots that aren't really connected if one runs too wild with these things. From the standpoint of history, I think it's very hard to say that this or that calendrical tradition or representative god/dess found in one corner of the ancient world (and interpreted by some modern person millennia years later) tells us anything conclusive about anything else at some other corner of the ancient world.

And then there's another problem. If there was no moon, would there be no Dao? If there was no sun, would there be no Dao? What about two moons, two suns?

While we can certainly see yin and yang represented in the two big balls in the sky that we see every day, and while they certainly play a part in lots of Daoist imagery and even specific practices, one finds far more nuanced teachings. Song Longyuan, a Qing Dynasty-era Longmen Daoist-cum-imperial archivist who wrote a brilliant and exhaustive commentary on the DDJ for Emperor Kangxi (who was no lightweight in terms of his scholarship, nor credulous when it came to Daoism--he is recorded as once literally having thrown a book on secret methods for reaching physical immortality back in the face of the person who offered to him) for instance, when talking about the 玄 [Mysterious] and 牝 [Female], refers to them as wuji and taiji; it is those two vast, intangible-yet-everpresent, distinct-yet-inseparable, not-one-not-two principles that are constantly mating, giving us the seen and the unseen... not the two balls in the sky. 

Thank you very much for your excellent response! And so the book I "quote" from on Red Pine and the "character" of head and the Dao as face of the Moon is his commentary on the Tao Te Ching, translation. It is stashed in my teepee - that I just came back from - and I never did get a chance to look at it again. I didn't want to waste my headlamp battery, and I figured any reading of phonetic language would have just put me more back into a left brain dominance mode anyway. But it seems you know your Chinese well enough - or classical Chinese oracle bones, etc. - and what you say about Red Pine's response - and your take on it - all makes sense to me. But then we can also consider how the Daoists in the internal alchemy texts incorporated Buddhism - and so the terminology possible has several meanings - based on a Daoist or Buddhist "slant" on the reading.  But my foray into this type of research is mainly only after I did the meditation training from Chunyi Lin who does have a Moon and Sun meditation C.D. set for his Level 3 class to open the third eye. And so my experience, as Chunyi says, the meditation is ten times stronger 3 days before and after the full moon - and my experience has been precisely this - that I could realize it was the Full Moon when the pineal gland magnetic bliss got that much stronger. Anyway ...

And then there's another problem. If there was no moon, would there be no Dao? If there was no sun, would there be no Dao? What about two moons, two suns?

Now this theoretical - well "opportunity cost" as an Economist would call it - the issue I have with this is that the scientific fact that we only see one "face" or one "head" of the Moon is due to the "harmonic resonance" of the moon's orbit with the sun and the Earth - and this is also the scientific reason that the moon can cause eclipses of the sun - despite their huge different in size and distance from Earth. And so in terms of the Dao - we have to ask, is this a "coincidence"? Again in terms of Western science this is part of the argument called the Strong Anthropic Principle stating in cosmology that the whole Universe is based on extremely fine tuning of constants, in order for humans to exist. Of course most scientists state, what to me also seems obvious, that the past, in retrospect, is 20-20 hindsight, meaning it only looks like "fine tuning" since we already exist in order to ask the question of why we exist in the first place. But in the context of what is human consciousness a la the possibility of consciousness of the Universe - and what is the role of humans in terms of life on Earth, etc. - science puts this in terms of entropy - and I won't get sidetracked into a science discussion. In other words it is quite a "left brain" question to start supposing - "what if" Earth had two moons, etc. because the Moon governs ecology of LIfe on Earth - and yet science - western science has destroyed already 80% of life on Earth - in the past couple thousand of years. In other words Western science - by assuming that life on Earth is not sacred inherently, and therefore could theoretically be switched around - (maybe we could power civilization using a black hole or something?) these types of experiments - like maybe nuclear bombs should be used for mining or we should mine the moon, and maybe create an artificial moon, etc. - the results of such theoretical questions have been turned into actual science projects that have destroyed the fragile ecology on Earth. In other words Daoism appears to assume that ecological life, controlled by the moon, is assumed and this would appear to be based on the evolutionary fact that human females, when living in Nature, as a group, are the only primates that have their "estrus cycle" synchronized precisely with the moon and this cycle is governed by the third eye as psychic energy - the pineal gland.

So in other words to project a Western reality as the assumed background - that the background of reality could be switched around willy-nilly - is to inherently already go against the formal process of Daoism itself. Or as VAndana Shiva states, life grows from within, Evolution happens from within first and grows from within, externally. But we as WEsterners take an external approach first. So I don't really see it as a problem - the Sun and Moon meditation is to open the third eye and as per alchemy  - when the Earth is created - this means the Sun manifests within the Moon and for Heaven - the Moon manifest in the Sun - when the Mercury is replenished. And I would take this back to music theory.

In terms of doing a cross cultural examination - David Ewing Duncan's book Calendar is quite fascinating because the issue is how to subtract the lunar calendar from the Solar calendar and try to "line" the two up. And so to do the mathematics using a language based on ideograms or pictograms (sorry I don't know all the fancy terminology) - well it's like trying to do math with Roman numerals but even worse. Just as Chinese are known today to be able to count faster since the english language uses more terms for numbers, etc. And so David Ewing Duncan argues that the Chinese then incorporated the phonetic "rod-based' number system of 10s - into Chinese culture - maybe this is when the Chariots "invaded" China as well with their "hub" wheel metaphors?
But the point being - that from the cosmology as music harmonics - for the Daoist harmonics - the lunar calendar is lined up with the solar - I think it is every 19 years based on 81 lunar months. I would have to quick check the math again. The point is that the math, of course, does not line up precisely - and that is not a problem in Daoist harmonics because the Lunar month is the "foundation" as the first number or number 1 - in the music harmonics.
And so similarly in Pythagorean philosophy - "one" is Not a number - why? Because the full moon is actually the resonance of the Solar energy - and so the female number as lunar has the sun within it - and the source of the number 1 as spirit-consciousness is the Formless Awareness as Yuan Qi.
So to say, for Red Pine, to say that Qi is not emptiness - I disagree with this. Yuan Qi is the Emptiness as a spacetime transformation as the hidden momentum of light ( to put it in science terms) - or as the "doing in non-movement" of Yuan Shen to put it in alchemy terms.
So quantum physics has shown that the source of the Sun is quantum entanglement - this was coined as "negentropy" by Schroedinger in his classic 1930s book, "What is Life?" - again I won't go into a Western science side-talk - but I'm just point out that when you make the connection about the Moon and Sun, as hypotheticals, and not necessarily the Dao, etc. - that I don't think they are mutually exclusive - there are connecting levels to this or "gates" or harmonic nodes. Gurdjieff's philosophy gets into this and so does Sri Aurobindo - although I disagree with Aurobindo more so, as Ramana Maharshi also disagreed with Aurobindo. haha.


Is the Bindu point at the beginning or the end of the training?

Thank you for the good question!

But towards the end of your pdf I can't quite make it out, but it seems like your saying intention should fully be placed on the bindu which by itself begins the whole process. 
I recommend this website http://qianfengdaoismuk.weebly.com/ for further training details.
Yes the beginning of the Taoist Yoga book says to focus on the center of the brain until the light is bright - from the heart - and this means that the yin qi has been replenished, so that the small universe can be opened up for real. But to do this requires that the heart intention be pure, such that the shen naturally goes down the front, instead of the shen going out of the eyes, via "Evil Fire" of the heart. And so this is much easier to do at a younger age when a person is pure of heart, and since any older person is usually not pure of heart, then the small universe is used to purify the energy. So then if chapter 1 can not be done, then the small universe is used with the Quick Fire or Warrior breathing - which has the power to sublimate the water, to get it above the fire. In the above website, the author of the book, emphasizes, that he taught that with standing active exercise, the results are achieved twice as fast, when combined with the sitting meditation. This is not mentioned in the Taoist Yoga book directly though.

But the main point being that I am against the "meme" of "semen retention" because as qigong master Effie P. Chow teaches - the healing is all about the intention - and the goal is to increase and retain the qi energy. "Generative Fluid" means an impure heart - and so if your mind's goal is to retain "generative fluid" then you have negated the goal if increasing and retaining qi from the get go! This is the subtle power of the Mind as Shen, that the Westernization of the training has lost - and so only a "lower path" is allowed. Taoist Yoga recognizes this "lower path" stating it can be used for health but that is all.

So then to even get to replenishing the yin qi to that of a 16 year old is very difficult and 90% of people training do not make it - that is my estimation. And then those few who do activate the Yuan Qi, as Master Nan, Huai-Chin states, achieve spiritual capabilities, use those capabilities, and so then "fall back into worldliness" due to "heroic overexuberance." This is what happened to me. So then I have had to go back and study the book Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality even more - and so I recommend the "word searchable" format or "full text" format in archive.org - since that enables a better means to "connect the dots" of that book, since so many terms are used that cross correlate, with so many details that can be discounted, etc.

So when the Yuan Qi is activated - that means all three tan-t'iens open up into the 5th dimension as nondualism - and so the third eye opens up - but as that above website link states, the ancestral cavity is inside the body and yet the mysterious gate is outside the body - or as I have it quoted on my blog -

It can be said that the ancestral cavity is the mysterious entrance that humanity must pass through during self-cultivation, but the mysterious entrance is not inside the body, and the ancestral cavity is not outside the body.  When the disposition of fire does not flare, then the dragon can be controlled and possessed. One can then obtain the time of lead. Therefore it is said: “If you don’t amass mercury, how can you seek lead? If you don’t subdue the dragon, how can you tame its tiger?” Xing ming gui zhi, 1615