Tao Articles

It?s Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the Winter Solstice, Year of the Water Horse. It begins early Tuesday morning (EST), Feb. 12, 2002. My physical body is only a tiny speck in the universe, how can it grasp what is really going on within these vast cosmic cycles of the earth, moon, sun, and stars? My energy body reaches out into the chi field, shaped like a giant question mark, its curved hook hoping to catch some answers. Since everyone?s Original Spirit is the center of the universal field of awareness, I am reminded that each of us can deliver our own State of the Union address to ourselves and our friends. Here is mine. The State of the Universe, as I experience it.

First, a short look back gives a better view of the general flow. 2001 was mostly a Snake Year, and some dark snakes certainly came crawling out last September and afterwards. People are afraid of snakes, and so a global wave of fear enveloped the planet. While the outer events of 9-11 were horrifying to contemplate, my inner vision was elated and bursting with excitement, even as the nightmare unfolded. Maybe it is because I love physical snakes as well as energy snakes (dragons). In the human body snake chi is just the kundalini dancing. It can be painful if your energy body is not prepared, and ecstatic if it is.

I felt the planetary ego-crust was finally cracking open, and the Dark Side could best initiate this, since it is the crust. 9-ll was a beautiful example, I reminded myself, of how the Light Side needs the Dark Side in order to reveal the True Side (i.e. its Side-lessness, a.k.a. the center).

On Sept.15, I flew on one of the first United planes to cross the Atlantic, and taught in Glastonbury, England one of the most powerful Inner Sexual Alchemy (Lesser Kan & Li) retreats I?ve ever experienced. I knew it would be powerful, even on the morning of 9/11, as I could feel the chi field humming. In fact, it started six days earlier for me, when I turned 50 on Sept. 5th. My birthday present to myself was to do five hours of chi kung and meditation, and commit myself to living another 100 years (before reviewing my ” soul contract”). I noticed that my heart beat immediately made a dramatic shift, speeding up to a stable average of 10 beats faster per minute (and maintained that rate for the last five months). I was concerned and alarmed by this at the time. I didn?t understand until six days later that I had simply jumped the gun on the quickening about to occur in the planetary heartbeat of humanity.

Atop the Glastonbury Tor, a pyramid shaped mountain rising mysteriously from the plain below with spirals terraced into its sides, I had a vision. Isis, the tuned-in woman who runs the Shambala retreat center where we were staying at the base of the Tor, had told me exactly where to stand at the confluence of two polar ley lines (called Michael and Mary lines, suggestive of deep yin and yang). I rooted my energy body deep down inside the earth, where I saw a luminous green pearl pulsing deep inside the earth?s core. It felt like a long hidden treasure waiting to reveal its precious, joyful, essence.

I interpreted this green pearl (through my filter of Taoist alchemical language) to be the Hun spirit of the planet. Hun is the celestial spirit of the body, expressed physically through the liver function. It assists the deep ocean of jing chi (sexual essence) of the kidneys rising up towards the solar heart chi. Later this green pearl kept coming to me as my local guide Barry Spendlove (Healing Tao instructor from Wales) and I traversed the Michael ley line across southwestern England to St. Michael Mount (a dramatic island fortess opposite Mont St. Michel across the channel).

We crossed to Ireland and explored Celtic sites like New Grange and spent the night in some of these underground womb-tombs called barrows. These sites I believe were constructed using ancient Atlantean alchemical sciences, and they come alive when you practice alchemy in them. The earth chi was intensely powerful, and the green pearl kept calling to me from the deep earth. A few weeks later I went to China and spent a week in a cave in bigu (not eating) on the Taoist sacred mountain Mt. Huashan (Flower Mtn). I wrote a separate article on that experience, but didn?t have space to go into the green pearl. On Huashan I worked extensively with the green pearl, doing alchemical meditations to facilitate expanding its pathway by linking it with my heart and by resonance to the heart of all humanity at this time of crisis.

So now, the Year of the Water Horse rolls around, and what does this green pearl mean? A Water Year means that the dominant phase of chi flowing within the planet is watery. This chi gushes and rises up in waves, as is Water?s wont. The Horse is a yang symbol of fire and expansion, linked to high noon and Summer Solstice. In 1985, when I did a four month overland journey following Marco Polo?s footsteps across western China to Xanadu (north of Beijing), I visited the crumbled palace where the famous bronze “Flying Horse” from the Han Dynasty was discovered. The reason the Chinese emperors expanded their empire to envelop what is today the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts in Chinese Turkestan was to obtain the magical horses of Ferghana.

I gave a copy of this beautiful bronze statue to my wife Joyce, who as a Water Horse naturally fell in love with it. It has little birds sculpted underneath the hooves of a magnificent horse, giving the impression it is flying. Even today in modern China the Horse represents fire. During Fire Horse Years many Chinese traditionally abort female babies because such yang fiery chi in a woman is considered very difficult and unlucky.

This present cycle of Later Heaven (physical plane) time takes us into a natural water-year & fire-horse alchemical combination “cooking” the planet at this time of crisis. I constantly remind alchemy adepts-in-training that Nature is the great alchemist, human alchemists are just imitating Her art & science. So after the Dark Snake crawled out of the hole, the Water Horse is going to speed up the transformational cooking of the unconscious energies exposed to the light of day. This means there could be some very dramatic shocks, likely much stronger than 9-11, to the global psyche. But not to worry. This is just part of a spiritual tidal wave that is cleansing the planet. The sick chi has to surface in order to be embraced and healed.

I feel the presence of the green pearl of the planet?s celestial Hun is a signal to me that the birthing process of the planet is about to enter a new phase. The human alchemical process of cultivating the “elixir” and birthing it into an “immortal child” that lives in simultaneous heavens or dimensions has been well described in classical Taoist literature and in my other articles. In my Sun-Moon Alchemy (Greater Kan & Li) retreats I talk about a parallel alchemical birthing process that is happening within the planetary being. It is known popularly as “earth changes”, which many view with apocalyptic dread.

To me, accelerating earth changes are just planetary birthing labor pains, and the adept of internal alchemy is a midwife. It is perhaps no coincidence that I find myself teaching the Sun-Moon alchemy retreat three times this year ? in May in Tuscany, Italy (in a natural earth amphitheatre formed from an old stone quarry), in July at Dao Mountain, N.Y., and in September at Glastonbury, England. There we will again rent Stonehenge for a Taoist Fall Equinox ceremony (it was truly amazing to feel it come alive last year) and hopefully physically descend into the Chalice Well (Glastonbury?s most powerful yin vortex) as part of our deep earth journey.

But what happens when a planet births its own Immortal Child? The same thing that happens when a human child is birthed: it separates into a parallel physical reality similar to its parents, yet slightly different. That?s why kids see the same world as their parents, but through slightly different (parallel) eyes. That is the job of each generation of souls waving through Later Heaven. Their destiiny is to allow the life force to manifest its cyclic changes through them. But occasionally a generation hits a special point in the cycle, and that seems to be the case with humans alive right now.

The chi field of Early Heaven (formless) and the chi field of Later Heaven (physical form) are coupling and penetrating each other more deeply than they have for milleniua. The extremely subtle experience of this Cosmic Love-making is cultivated in the sixth of One Cloud?s Seven Formulas of Immortality, called the Congress of Heaven and Earth. It will be interesting to see what new experience unfolds in the group cauldron of my Heaven and Earth Alchemy retreat in late August at Dao Mountain. This is the level of practice where you work with the expansionary shift in space itself. It is an opportunity to ground the virtues (te) or unconditional spiritual qualities (love, truth, acceptance, trust, etc) of Early Heaven into the physical plane. This is what will nourish the new born immortal child of planet earth as it separates into a parallel astral reality from its parent.

What does this mean for humans living on the old parent earth? You have a free ride if you willing to hitch yourself to Nature?s alchemical process of accelerated transformation. That is why an ounce of focused internal alchemy practice now will be worth a ton of blissful embodiment later. The planetary immortal earth child is just a collective space where we can all continue cultivating ourselves on a slightly less dense version of earth. The dark side will still be present, as you can?t have bodies without it. But it won?t be so stuck and evil-appearing, but a planet where the life force flows creatively and freely, without obstruction. A place where souls can shape the chi field to complete themselves, where long life will be the norm.

What will be most confusing is the transition period to this greater collective reality, where we will literally be in both worlds at once. You may be programmed by materialist science to disbelieve my conjecture about this, as some new age fantasy. But think again. You are already experiencing yourself in multiple dimensions: your body and your mind are the closest example. Body is solid and “proveably” exists in the physical, the mind is formless and cannot be proven to exist, yet we know it does. We are all already looking through a formless Mind window into a world of Body forms. That makes the most ordinary moment in life a multi-dimensional experience.

When we all “look” or envision together, in sync with deeper elemental forces of the planets, sun, moon, and stars, this collective fusion of the five elemental forces can create another solid-appearing reality.

This re-birthing process is in accordance with both spiritual law and the laws of physics that flow from the chi field (quantum field and parallel universe theory if you prefer scientific lingo). We already function in multiple dimensions each moment, but we don?t notice it because the perceptual shifts between dimensions usually occurs in nanosecond time frames and our senses are operating much more slowly.

What is confusing is the dimensional overlap between an old reality and an emerging new reality. It is sort of like projecting two movies at once on the same screen. This was apparent to me even as the world trade center was collapsing: my inner reality was expanding with compassion, love and joy at the release of stuck planetary energy, my outer reality was filled with death, suffering, war-hysteria and paranoia from political manipulation and lies. I chose to give the inner reality more weight, as being my unfolding reality, and the latter as the dying gasps of a reality whose negativity and self-contracting nature dooms it to eventual death.

The fact is, multiple realties can co-exist. Good-bad, right-wrong, male-female, and Me-Other occupy the same yin-yang energetic space simultaneously, even if we have separate physical bodies. All of these polarized energetic patterns are living in a single spectrum of consciousness. I expect that during the Year of the Water Horse to see the apparent disparity between these polarities intensified. The Devil-Angel faces of humanity will be out in full force, moving the drama along. Something like a nuclear suitcase bomb exploded in a major city, or some other apocalyptic event that the military will use to expand their global domination. Maybe an earthwquake or volcano near some major city that throws the global economy into confusion.

Most people will get sucked into the drama, and feel compelled to choose between the Light and the Dark. A minority of spiritually mature folks will find in it an opportunity to slip through the widening crack in the middle to find our Original Face, between the pendulum swings of the global theatre. That is where the new reality will be gradually crystallizing, comprised of beings who no longer want to create the old, dog-eat-god, fear-controlled reality.

How long will this process take? Impossible to predict. How long does it take you to shift between the dreaming and the awake state? In astral time, it has already occurred, the earth has already birthed its immortal child-new parallel reality. How long it takes for each of us to pkhysically shift into it, and thereby add to its ever growing density, will depend on our need to serve in the old reality or play out our attachment to its many thrills, some not so healthy.

Normally, I only go into these more difficult to accept spiritual ideas with students at the Greater kan and li level who are having some clearer experience of their ability to cultivate original chi and create a new internal reality. Or to perceive at least the seed of their original self, if not a fully birthed immortal child. But things are speeding up here. I am sharing my experience of the current earth-field shift with you so you may be inspired to explore it and verify for yourself the presence of the expanding Green Pearl of the Earth?s celestial hun soul. I find it usually appearing in the middle dantien (heart center). (The Green Pearl may also be linked to the Atlantean legend of a Green Emerald Tablet that recorded the earth?s history in it. If true, I believe it is the job of the alchemist to find, decode, and then merge with this green crystal or pearl.)

This type of “earth re-birthing itself” information has been proclaimed by many teachers/prophets/psychics over the last twenty years. The information is in the collective intelligence field of humanity, for anyone choosing to access it. But I never found these prophets to offer much practical training to actually communicate with these changing earth forces the way the Taoist tradition of neidangong (inner alchemy) does.

The most important thing is to stay grounded, so that ALL of your shen (vital organ spirits that comprise the ling, or soul) can shift together in a harmonious and integrated fashion. Otherwise you get conflicts, and your multiple shen want to split into different realities. This means staying a very calm, centered, neutral observer through the wildest of times, even when the Horse seems to be galloping over a cliff.

I hope this information may motivate some to take their chi kung and inner alchemy path a little more seriously. This year, by the way, is not only the beginning of a new Chinese year, but the beginning of a new century, as this calendar (based on 60 year cosmic energy cycles) dates back 4700 years to when the Yellow Emperor created it. I consider “Yellow Emperor” to be code for “Great Spirit of Planet Earth”. Next year will be the Year 4701. Time to hop on your flowing Water Horse and throw an even bigger party!

Wishing you a joyous and chi-filled year,

Michael Winn

Taoist monk views the West Peak of Huashan.

Why would anyone in their right mind choose to spend 5 days in a cold mountain cave without food or water? Short answer: Because the cave was on Mt. Huashan, the most famous Taoist sacred mountain in China. The long answer: I was curious to investigate the experience of Taoists who reputedly achieved the breatharian state through years of practicing internal alchemy meditation in these caves on little food or water. I wanted to have a small taste of their cave lifestyle, to see what it might evoke in me.

The idea originated with my Taoist monk friend Chen (named changed to protect his privacy) who lives in Jade Spring Monastery at the foot of Huashan, along with about 50 other monks and nuns. I had already visited Huashan twice, and fallen in love with its majestic 7,000. ft. high sheer peaks and temples perched precariously on cliffs that regularly disappeared into the clouds. There was something eerie about the mountain – I had the feeling it was alive and watching me constantly. Was this because so many Taoists had allegedly achieved immortality here?

Still being a mere mortal, I wasn’t sure exactly what immortality meant, even after two decades of doing Taoist cultivation. But when Chen said to me, “There are some secret caves here, and I thought you might like to meditate in one”, I promptly booked a date for the following year. I had seen many spectacular caves on Huashan on previous trips (see Qi Journal Spring 2000). But all of those caves had either been turned into Taoist shrines with statues inside, with a monk or nun who rang a bell or gave I Ching readings when hikers came in to pray, or they had been totally desecrated by tourism.

One giant cave was turned into a mini-hotel, with coffin sized boxes for tourists to sleep in. Others were abandoned or filled with trash, being too close to the main path that torturously winds its way up the mountain, its thousands of tiny stone steps faithfully delivering a stream of hardy souls to the very highest peak. Huashan has become one of China’s most famous national parks, even though the communist government returned all the shrines and monasteries to the local Taoists to manage after appropriating them during the Cultural Revolution.

When I finally settled down into my cave (one year later), and waved goodbye to Chen as his black Taoist frock disappeared over the edge of the cliff, I sat down in the mouth of the cave’s doorway to meditate. I focused first on my gratitude to the mountain for being such a powerful presence. The massive West Peak of Huashan towered 4000 feet of sheer wall above my cave. To get to my cave, I first had to climb up a 200 foot cliff with loose rocks, grasping at the roots of bushes, while wearing a backpack filled with camping gear. One misstep, or leaning too far back, and I would’ve been in a grave instead of my cave. I silently thanked Chen and other monks who had helped arrange my stay.

They are part of a very ancient line of Taoists who are guarding this mountain. The first reference to Huashan, which means “Flower Mountain”, comes from the Chou Dynasty, 3000 years ago. In fact, the Chinese character “hua” (flower) was invented to name this mountain, which has five peaks that unfold like petals of a flower. Taoists, attracted to this powerful Five Element feng shui, have been coming to Huashan to meditate for at least 2200 years, according to Han dynasty records.

But how they survived on this towering hunk of granite, where little food can grow and the only water is collected rain, is still a mystery. So I thanked the spirits of Taoists past for sculpting this cave space, and asked them to share with me their secrets. Finally I thanked the cave itself, and any rock elementals who cared to listen, for being such a grand cave – to me it felt more like a palace carved out of solid rock. The doorway was six feet wide and ten feet high, fit for a race of giants. The domed ceiling was 25 feet high, with a window at what could have been a second story level. Chen had read the inscription carved on the outside of the cave.

A Taoist monk named Can Xing had carved this cave, called “Spring Flower” (name changed to protect its location) during the Ming dynasty, which meant the cave was up to 600 years old. No one is quite sure how he or others carved the extraordinarily hard granite, one of Huashan’s many unsolved mysteries. The walls had uniform grooves a half inch apart, as if a giant comb were used to scrape out the insides of the mountain. After I finished saying all my thanks, an extraordinary thing occurred.

My mouth was suddenly filled with a ball of bright yellow pulsating energy, which slowly moved down my throat and esophagus into my stomach. Remarkably, this chi ball stayed in my gut during my time in the cave, and I am certain accounted for the fact that I never once felt even slightly hungry for the entire five day cave fast! Since this occurred immediately after my meditation thanking the cave, it felt like a clear communication from the mountain. I previously did have some fear about my decision to not eat or drink for five days, whether I would be strong enough to stay warm or to even climb down the cliff afterwards. So to have the mountain send me a chi ball into my spleen/stomach, the vital organ center of earth chi in the body, was incredibly reassuring.

Equally remarkable, I did not lose weight during the five days. I didn’t have a scale with me, but I did pinch the flesh all over my body to measure it, and none of it disappeared or grew taut. At my Healing Tao summer retreat program (now in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains) I had learned from a remarkable medical chi kung specialist, Madame Wang Yan, some weight loss chi kung techniques taken from the Taoist tradition of bigu, or “not eating”. The purpose of these bigu techniques to to satisfy your desire for caloric food with subtle chi (qi) that is breathed into the stomach/spleen. Overweight people then lose weight until they stabilize at their natural weight. I was expecting to use those techniques not to lose weight, but to fight off hunger in the cave. Yet none of these bigu methods were necessary.

Undoubtedly, I was well disposed to having such a spontaneous experience. I had already thoroughly investigated the “breatharian” question (“Is it real, or just a metaphor for a spiritual state?”) and decided it was physically possible. Several of my Taoist alchemy students had stopped eating for months at a time while maintaining stable body weight. Just before I made the Spring Flower Cave my home, Chen had introduced me to an 80 year old Taoist female adept, Ciao Xiang Zhen, who had not eaten for 20 years!

Ciao had been living on Huashan for nearly 50 years, up a different side valley with some other Taoist recluses. She had fallen and injured her hip, and so had moved to a more accessible location where I had the good fortune to interview her. She still wasn’t eating; Ciao admitted to me only to drinking 3 small tea cups of plain water daily and for variety, a small piece of fruit a few times a month. Her appearance was thin, but normal, and her eyes sparkled with the vigor of youth. Chen told me she is considered by the China Taoist Association to be one the “Eight Living Tao Immortals” in China, three of which are women. Skeptics of breatharianism (bigu) will remain skeptics, and that’s fine.

Because bigu is not considered to be any big attainment to go for, just something that can happen spontaneously as a result of your practice. It’s not a special requirement to get into Taoist heaven or necessary for most to think about achieving. But it’s still real, and for me, just knowing that its real expands the freedom of my spiritual imagination and its power of manifestation.

Back to my first day in the cave. Although I felt I was off to a good start, I still had to face the next big issue in Cave Life: what do you DO all day and all night? Short answer: wrestle with your monkey mind. How do you do that? Long answer: practice Taoist cultivation methods, the most powerful of which is neidan gong, or internal alchemy. Alchemy is the art of communicating with the Life Force, as well as the science of locally shaping its universal chi field. The primary purpose of alchemy is to accelerate the unfolding and refining of one’s personal human essence, or jing. Jing is also translated as “substance” and is what generates our blood, sexual energy, and our cellular power to regrow our body.

In Taoist alchemy one’s “raw” jing is refined into an “elixir” of refined golden chi or inner light by a process involving the internal coupling or “cooking” of water and fire. Water and fire are Taoist alchemical code names for the sexually polarized yin and yang forces within the body. To make a long story short, you could say I went off to a cold cave in China in order to have hot spiritual sex within myself. The offspring of this internal sex is the re-birthing of one’s Original Chi (yuan qi) and its Original Spirit (yuan shen), a.k.a. the original self or “your face before you were born”.

Did it work? Hold on, while I fish around for some juicy details from my diary in the cave. Here’s a good place to start – the moment when I realized that by choosing to live in a cave I had stripped away every possible excuse to focus on something other than my core self: “Once you take away eating and drinking, socializing and entertainment and the myriad other distractions our monkey minds dream up – what’s left? A simpler level of being, in which more subtle perceptions arise. I sit in a granite cave, with its door opening out onto the bird filled valley below, and become aware that my mind is sitting inside its own cave, sitting inside my body cave with its sense openings, looking out of the body cave into the outer granite cave.

I am in a cave within a cave, and I know, if I look inward, that I am also sitting inside other caves that exist within deeper dimensions of myself. “In Taoist cosmology, the three heavens in the Tao canon (a kind of Taoist bible collection of 1,160 mostly alchemical texts) are described as the “three caverns”. As I contemplate this idea of Heaven as a cosmic cave, my outer self relaxes back into a deeper level of awareness. I keep surrendering, and ask the spirit of Huashan to take me deep into its core. It feels like eventually I cross some kind of void, and relax into what I recognize as the “cavern” of Early Heaven. Here my observing self sits as a “soul” watching the activities of itself as a body-mind in a Later Heaven cave, the physical dimension.

After this inner -outer cave duality stabilizes, I remember that my Original Ancestor, the Original Spirit from which all humanity has evolved – is sitting within an even deeper cave known as Primordial Heaven. This heaven is also known as Primordial Chaos (hun tun). This cavern is described as the darkest and most obscure of all three caverns. Here the Chaos-of-Oneness (with no distinctions possible) watches the perpetual play of Creation-as-Order it has set in motion. “So really, choosing to live for a week in a cave on Huashan is just a way of reminding myself that every reality has its own boundaries, its own cave walls. However, it seems our Original Spirit may effortlessly slip between these boundaries, as if its vibration were too fast to be caught in the net of any slower reality-cave.

The other lesson I’m learning is that the so called “necessities” of physical life are not necessities – they are optional pleasures. Food is mostly recreational eating, deemed a necessity only because we refuse to acknowledge the possibility of eating directly from the infinite chi field of nature’s abundance. “How do we see into these deeper caverns nested within ourselves, that lead into the original cave-womb of creation itself, the “wuji” or Supreme Unknown of the Tao? How many people sit and watch in the outer physical cave, and nothing much happens, except perhaps they see their boredom and frustration at being trapped in the seemingly solid granite walls of that cave reality? By watching the coupling of water and fire, the inner male and female, there comes an opening hidden from outer sight.”

Now let’s slow down, before the metaphysical story gets too far ahead of the physical one. I should tell you that four years earlier I had spent a week in a cave in Pagan, Burma. I was in a Buddhist cave, 75 feet deep inside a pitch black mountain, with a 25 ft. high Buddha statue guarding the cave outside. That experience gave me a point of comparison with this Taoist cave experience on Huashan, in a relatively shallow 18 foot deep cave. As I settled into my life in this cave, I appreciated how clean and dust free this granite cave was compared to the dirt walls of my Buddhist cave.

I recalled my confusion at the initial resistance the Buddhist cave seemed to have to my doing Taoist practices in its space. My Taoist meditation practices simply wouldn’t work, the chi wouldn’t flow. I decided the cave’s chi field had been deeply patterned by generations of Buddhist practitioners. Only after I opened my heart to the spirits of those before me did the mountain relax and only then did my alchemical practices begin to open up channels with the inner planes. Here it was totally different. Some invisible presence within Huashan mountain seemed to be actively pushing me deeper into Taoist practice at every moment. This ensured that I never got bored, even though my outer cave life was severely limited.

I soon explored the parameters of what was possible within my palatial cave. It had enough room for me to practice chi kung movements and even my Wu style tai chi form and a tight circle of Pa Kua Chang. Carved from solid rock was a three-foot high altar table in the middle of the cave, which was big enough for me to sleep on. Chen told me the cave had later been used in later centuries as a shrine, evidenced by holes higher up on the walls for holding statues. Bits of some of these statues were piled on one side of the cave, the destructive signature of teenage red guards from the 1960’s. This was one time I appreciated the house cleaning by them, as I actually preferred the cave naked, in its raw original form. There was another elevated pedestal in the center of the back of the cave, on which I respectfully set a single candle.

I found that I rarely lit it as there was really nothing much to see in the cave with my outer eyes at night. I spread out my foam pad and sleeping bag on the central stone altar, as if my body was a sacrificial offering to the Spirit of this mountain. There was nothing else in the cave, except my pack, in which I kept some “emergency” food bars and a water bottle I never felt tempted to consume. The only other piece of furniture arrived unasked the second morning, when another Taoist monk, Wen Shi, undoubtedly sent by Chen, arrived with a wooden kneeling stool for me to sit in meditation on. It was taken from a nearby shrine to a Taoist female deity from the Nine Heavens.

Wen Shi, concerned that I would be cold in the cave, also took off the black Taoist cape off his own back and gave it to me as a gift. My protestations were useless; he considered my flimsy pile jacket inadequate against the harsh mountain elements. I wrapped his cape around me, the dress uniform of Complete Perfection Taoists. Chen had told me that Taoists are becoming so rare in modern China that when he wears his traditional Taoist clothing outside the monastery in big cities, with his white leggings, black tai chi shoes and hair tied in a top knot, he is sometimes mistaken for a foreigner wearing some outlandish foreign dress!

I began to merge into the cycle of night and day of cave life. At night I lay on my stone altar-bed in the pitch blackness and did Taoist dream practice, a method where you put the body to sleep while the mind stays awake and does special meditations in the twilight space between sleep and waking states. I sat up at 4 am to meditate with the deep violet-blue light of early dawn. From 7 to 9 am I did standing chi kung movements. Then I sat again in meditation until the sun entered the cave at 11:30 pm. The boundaries between the two halves of the physical cycle of night and day began to dissolve as I sank deeper into the mind of the mountain itself.

This can be a very difficult concept for westerners to accept, that supposedly inanimate natural objects like a mountain or the earth itself could have a “mind”. Yet this is a very fundamental premise of Taoist philosophy – that all of nature is alive and breathing from the universal chi field, its in-out (yin-yang) breath sustaining its very physical form. This means every aspect of matter also has its own intelligence. Even the rigidly fixed intelligence of the granite rock of Huashan can be an energetic pathway into its “parent” spirit of the mountain, whose core intelligence is the earth itself.

A few days earlier I had asked Cai, the breatharian female adept, if she ever felt like the mountain was communicating with her. She smiled. ” I have never felt it speak to me like some human spirit, but its presence is always very strong for me. Everyone who comes to Huashan to live must feel its presence, why else would they stay?” The high piezo-electric conductivity of granite may contribute to the yang chi I felt flowing through Huashan. Others confirmed to me that historically Taoists from all over China considered Huashan as having very yang chi for cultivation practice.

I later visited Mt. Qingcheng (“Azure Truth”) Shan in Sichuan Province, the birthplace of one sect of Taoism 2000 years ago. It was a completely different experience, and I noticed how powerfully yin its chi was. The shape of Huashan, bursting up dramatically towards the Heavens in a five-petal flower formation, is an expression of its yang nature. In Taoist feng shui Huashan’s shape is considered to be a reflection of a yang stellar constellation manifesting on earth. Not far from my Spring Flower cave was another hidden cave used since Han dynasty times for viewing the Pole Star, the central star or higher earth element around which the other four stellar quadrants/elements of Heaven rotate each night.

This inspired me on some evenings to go out on the narrow ledge in front of my cave and practice Taoist star alchemy, a method of absorbing and balancing the chi from all the star quadrants into the crystal palace or upper dan tien (etheric space of the pineal gland). Meditating in this granite cave day and night for five days awakened memories in me of the seven trips I had made to Egypt to meditate inside the Great Pyramid. The walls of the King’s Chamber are made of a special red granite, and above this chamber (which architecturally represents the pineal gland) there are five giant slabs of granite with space between them, wrongly thought to be for earthquake adjustments. According to esoteric lore I learned while studying pre-Egyptian internal alchemy practices, these five slabs of granite represent the five subtle bodies of man that are awakened by initiation in the pyramid.

Taoist internal alchemy holds a similar pattern of unfoldment, but uses different methods to achieve the awakening. But the use of granite to amplify spiritual vibrations from the mountain’s deep earth consciousness and act as a ground for Heavenly frequencies may be similar in the Taoist and Egyptian traditions. Mountains are just natural pyramids; their axis acts as a double vortex between the center of the earth below and the stars above. My experience of Huashan, a giant “earth flower” made of solid granite, is that the mountain is a vast initiation chamber for those who can attune to its inner frequency.

When you align your human body axis to axis of the mountain, it becomes a pathway for communicating with all that the “mind of the mountain” is communicating with. Huashan is thus just an individual outlet for the collective planetary consciousness, like any ley line or sacred place. The more a place gets used for spiritual awakening, the more powerful and skillful it becomes at using the natural chi field to communicate with humans. For those following the path of the Tao, this is the major reason to visit China’s sacred mountains. This lure of awakening to one’s spiritual truth is undoubtedly what motivated Taoists to spend years digging these caves.

Chen told me that records reveal it took up to 30 years to dig a large cave like Spring Flower Cave out of the cliff wall of solid granite. After digging it, they would undergo tremendous deprivation of ordinary human pleasures to live in the cave. There had to be a special payoff in spiritual pleasure to keep them from abandoning their simple cave life. Meditating in solid rock seems to cause a special resonate with the bone level of human consciousness, where Taoists consider the jing or sexual essence to be stored. Bone and the jing within it is spiritually the most dense level of our human body, and thus the hardest to reach by ordinary meditation. But it is also the secret substance needed to crystallize an immortal Body of Light.

Painting, Mountain Taoist. The granite rock is so hard on Huashan, it took ancient Taoists 30 years to carve out a single cave.

This may also explain why so many Taoist are said to have achieved their immortality on Huashan – they were able here to concentrate their full being on the process of gathering their jing essence and refining it into chi, shen, and ultimately wu (non-being). What about harsh weather? You might ask, as I did: why didn’t the cave adepts simply light a fire in their caves to keep warm? Chen answered this question before he would even show me the way to the cave. “There is one very strict condition for your staying in the cave”, he warned me.”Absolutely no heating or cooking fires are permitted. You will notice that none of the dozens of caves on Huashan have their ceilings blackened by fire. This traditional Taoist rule against using fire is not to make cave life harder than it already is. It is to protect your internal practice. A strong external fire will disturb the delicate balance of water and fire within your dan tien. One purpose of cave practice is to activate more powerfully the internal fire needed for neidan (alchemy) practice”.

Of course, I readily agreed to this condition. I soon discovered other factors that may have heloed warm Taoist cave adepts. The cave itself is good insulation. They did do not freeze in winter because the internal earth temperature radiates an average 57 degrees F. into the cave. They put wood doors on the cave to keep out the worst winter wind and retard heat loss. From that minimal baseline of external support they did internal alchemy practices to heat their body to a sustainable and comfortable temperature.

While in the cave, I spent many hours practicing “internal chi breathing”, a formerly secret method of empty or “counter-force breathing” (kong jing) that powerfully heats the dan tien or belly cauldron. This unique method mixes the chi from the fire (du mo) and water (ren mo) channels, and synchronizes the rhythm of physical breathing with chi body rhythms. Once the dan tien is warm, it feeds warm yang chi to all the deep channels of the body, particularly the Eight Extraordinary Vessels. These control your core body temperature and autonomic system functions, and are the reservoirs that overflow to feed the vital organs and their meridians. I teach this Internal Chi Breathing as part of my Medical & Spiritual Qigong  Fundamentals 3, but it was valuable for me to see it work so effectively in the cave.

I found my cave to be quite warm at night, as if it perhaps were still absorbing heat form the daytime sun. This may have been amplified by movement of warm valley air masses rising after sunset. I usually had to toss the cover of my sleeping bag off during the night. I noticed the reverse seemed to occur in the morning: as the sun rose, the cave went through a chilly period from 7 am to 11 am, perhaps from cold valley air masses rising. The sun would not actually shine on my cave until 11:35 am each day. I would watch the pyramid-like shadow of West Peak slowly move across the valley. Then the sun would rise above West peak and cook my cave for the afternoon. I would do practices to directly absorb solar chi , and to circulate it throughout my body and into the chi body of the mountain. Of course, similar weather shifts are changing everyone’s patterns of bodily chi flow every moment.

But the cave seemed to amplify my feeling of the mountain’s deep chi rhythmically pulsating with the cycles of the sun and moon. One night, the moon rose just as the sun was setting. I sat in the doorway of my cave, as if the darkness behind me were a warm opening from the earth’s womb. The forces of the sun and moon entered my body, and having well trained pathways from my inner alchemy practice, flowed inside my cauldron and coupled within my core channel. I watched in awe as these cosmic streams of energy effortlessly made love inside me. My body began to glow from within, and I noticed that even though a cold wind came up as darkness descended, it did not disturb my internal bliss or make me feel cold. The experience continued long after the sun had set. After two hours, I finally moved back inside my cave-womb, feeling both deeply peaceful and exhilarated.

It felt like the mountain had again been teaching me something about the Tao – how nature meditates inside us if we meditate inside nature. In alchemy, this is known as wu wei, a state where things happen effortlessly, in the deep silence of the universal mind. Your personal mind doesn’t need to make this happen with visualization, movement, or mantra. Once natural forces have been alchemically accelerated within the adept’s body, wu wei is the ensuing feeling of child’s play as your chi flows with zero resistance between the local self and the Tao. After two days of not eating or drinking water, I awoke on the second night with a swollen tongue and feeling very overheated.

I self-diagnosed myself, and decided it was the lack of water flowing through my kidneys that was causing my heart to overheat. I had brought water, but had decided on arriving in the cave to not drink any, to more quickly test my body response to the deprivations of cave life that might have been experienced by earlier Taoist adepts. I recalled that one of my western friends had a Taoist spiritual guide who taught him how ancient adepts drank their urine and then refined it with internal alchemy. Since this put no new water into my system, and was a well tested method used by sailors to survive at sea, I began drinking my urine. No need to feel squeamish about this, if you’ve never drunk your urine. Urine doesn’t stink until after it grows cold.

It was my first time, but I literally guzzled my yellow fluid down the next morning. I found it to be warm, salty, and like a very mild and tasty broth – and very satisfying to my kidneys and heart, which cooled off. I had no more problem the rest of the time, and had the feeling I could have continued for a very long time. There is also a homeopathic effect also created by recycling one’s urine repeatedly through your system, as it concentrates many subtle essences that can have healing properties. There is a large literature on people healing serious illnesses with urine drinking. I also noticed something unusual. Every time I urinated, I would pee on the ground the starting and ending urine flow, to remove toxins accumulated in the bladder. I was losing about 30% of my urine each day, a gradual loss of body water.

Curiously, the empty water bottle I used to catch the urine always refilled to the same level each time. This meant my body was either producing water from thin air or it was converting blood or body fat into water. This continued the entire five days, and since I didn’t grow thin, it felt like my kidneys were producing new water, in the same way my spleen chi felt like it was producing new food from the chi field. Of course scientists would say I was deluded and just consuming myself on a fast. But what can scientists say about others who rarely eat for months or years on end? I recalled a conference sponsored by another nei dan teacher, Yan Xin, attended by a number of his scientist-students who themselves had stopped eating for long periods without undue weight loss.

Modern science does not have a paradigm for this and many other simple things in life, like love. The facts of our reality do not always fit the modern materialist hypothesis. This is why I find Taoist internal alchemy so fascinating – it allows anyone to use his body-mind as a cosmic laboratory. You don’t need big science grants or a $6 billion dollar super-collider to run an experiment. You can apply Tao spiritual science to explore all the deepest mysteries of the universe in your own body, as a micro-universe. The Microcosmic Orbit meditation, the first of seven formulas of alchemical practice in the system I learned, was by itself a kind of internal super-collider for the yin and yang forces flowing within the body. I was using the cave to test for its effects on my own practice. I found the results to be very positive.

The experimental nature of internal alchemy has led to the development of many different systems of neidan or internal alchemy within China. On Huashan, Chen told me that historically the Taoists here followed a form of neidan taught by Chen Tuan, an 11th century Taoist famous for his dream practice, even though Huashan today formally belongs to the Complete Perfection school of Taoism that follows Lu Dong Bing style of alchemy. Ironically, the Seven Tao Formulas of Immortality I learned (via Mantak Chia) came from an adept named One Cloud who renounced his Complete Perfection monastic life to seek in the mountains the true teachings of alchemy.

One Cloud found a high level hermit teacher, and used the Seven Formulas to become a breatharian himself. Yet these Seven formulas are recognizably within the tradition of Lu Dong Bing, even though they don’t teach the theory of reincarnation adopted by the Complete Perfection school. Neither Lao Tzu nor Chuang Tzu taught reincarnation in their writings. I believe it was because living in the Tao dissolves all divisions of past and future into a present moment that is incarnating ever fresh from the coupling of Heaven and Earth.

There is a beautiful simplicity to this vision: there are no endless cycles of the same individual recycling and suffering through different lives; every human is instead the direct, fresh, and unique child of Heaven and Earth. There are no past lives, only a multiplicity of parallel lives in the present moment. Each person who rfines their essence and thus completes themself in this life completes life for all Heaven and Earth. One’s level of completion is what defines one’s level of immortality, as a human, earth, heaven, or celestial immortal. The concern is not to live physically forever, just long enough to complete one’s true destiny. Ultimately everyone has the same destiny, to return consciously to the Tao.

The adepts on most Taoist sacred mountains in China have adopted a different set of nei dan methods to explore the Tao. Yet all these variations derive from the same core principles of yin-yang chi flow, of five elements cycles on a matrix of eight primal forces emanating from a ninth neutral force (yuan, or original chi) in the center. The fluid and changing nature of Taoist practices makes it very difficult for westerners to pin down, and thus to understand in their normal analytical manner, what exactly internal alchemy is. Unlike most religions, Taoist alchemy is not based on a fixed set of beliefs, or on an single divine entity who saves humans, but rather is based on the merging of human body-mind rhythms with cosmic rhythms. As the adept learns to shape the chi field through chi kung and nei kung practices, he or she also shapes their destiny in the world.

I arrived in the Spring Flower cave just a few weeks after the Sept. 11 bombing of the World Trade Center. It might have appeared I was retreating from the world’s problems, rather than engaging them. Yet I did not experience it as a withdrawal, but rather saw my cave an observatory from which I could more clearly interact with the convulsive rhythms pulsing through the planetary brain from the heart of America. When you are caught up in reactive emotional patterns of society and politics, it is difficult to directly perceive the underlying natural forces at work in shaping society. Every event, even one seemingly caused by evil forces, is ultimately an expression of natural forces seeking to achieve balance. I am not talking about the immediate or surface political reasons for terrorism, and maybe I should have made that clearer.

I am talking about the core spiritual reasons/imbalances in the global mind that surface from the deep unconscious and get shaped by cultural forces into whatever they are. By the time any thought form/impulse gets to the stage of action, be it benevolent or violent, it has gone thorugh many filters/layers of consciousness, some of which reflect the global brain imbalance I was attempting to refer to. These imbalances come from fears that are very primordial/deep ancestral, and precede the current situation. From my cave perspective, I saw that beneath the apparent political issues surrounding the 9-11 terrorist attack were deeper spiritual divisions in the collective global mind.

The left-brained western hemisphere does not comprehend and thus cannot trust the more right brained eastern hemisphere. Its similar to the difficulty men and women have in communicating. This is a very ancient ancestral pattern buried deep within the planet that is resurfacing in a new form. The mistrust breeds fear, which in the current scenario has translated into western politico-military strategists seeking to dominate with weapons the near eastern and asian peoples and their resources. The U.S. military sees China’s huge population and political system as its only long term potential competitor on a global scale, and the oil rich Muslim countries as essential to controlling and containing the China threat.

What can a simple western Taoist, while sitting in a cave in China, to do about all this? I love both China and America, the peoples of both the near eastern and the west. The politicians tell me I have to choose, that only one side can be in control. My natural response to this event as a Taoist is that there is always a third choice. I chose to align with and alchemically balance the natural chi field of the planetary mind with this third point, the still point between the global yin and yang forces. My hope was to bypass the apparent political polarity on the surface of the planet and use Huashan to help me dive deep into humanity’s collective heart. My intent was to lessen the intensity of fear driving the two split and competing halves of the planetary brain.

As a westerner sitting in a cave at the geographic center of China near its ancient capitol of Xian, I felt perfectly positioned to initiate such an alignment through meditation. To amplify the effect of my practice, I had pre-arranged for my wife and alchemy partner Joyce Gayheart to do similar meditations from the nearly exact opposite side of the planet back in America, not far from Washington D.C. Lao Tzu became famous in China because his 5,000 character meditation manual (the Tao Te Ching) integrated politics and spirituality. It emphasizes repeatedly the necessity for political leaders to harmonize with the chi field of the Tao. Following the

Tao is not about choosing one political system or leader over another, but about choosing the balance point between all contending forces. Only from this still point of calmness can the emotion-crazed and polarized politicians on both sides be guided to peace and harmony. This situation today is no different from Lao Tzu’s 2500 years ago. Unless the innate harmony of the Tao is sought, the cycle of guerrilla terrorism vs. state terrorism (a.k.a. war) will continue until all parties exhaust themselves and many innocents are harmed. This is a slow and tortuous way to achieve balance.

The meditations I did on the global situation from my cave on Mt. Huashan were very profound. I linked my own polarized brain hemispheres and deep energy body channels to the powerful granite meridians of Mt. Huashan. These connected me into the core of the planetary brain that links humanity into a single collective mind. I called in the polarized forces from the different Tao alchemy formulas, in equal and opposing streams of chi flow: male sexual fire vs. female sexual water, sun vs. moon, stellar spirit vs. earthly matter, formless chi field of Early Heaven vs. formed chi field of Later Heaven.

Ultimately all these poles are fluctuations between the eternal desire of beings to return to the primordial chaos of Oneness vs. the impulse to create new order as the Ten Thousand Things. Into the meeting point or cauldron of all these octaves of my consciousness, I called in the archetypal fear splitting the planet in half. Fear lacks its own center, and thus cannot survive such powerful cosmic impulses to unite in the center. I had an experience of the vast currents of fear flowing about the planetary chi field as fuel for a powerful meltdown into a deep and peaceful inner space. Joyce and I, meditating on opposite sides of the planet, were only two people out of six billlion people on the planet.

But by alchemically aligning and accelerating these natural forces, I am certain that we were able to dissolve some deep unconscious layers of fear and shift the mind of humanity far out of proportion to our tiny number of two. In this way, the Spring Flower cave on Huashan became in the inner planes a cauldron of hope and renewal for all humanity. Later, after I left Haushan, I could still feel the chi from Huashan’s granite still coursing through my deep channels, and the heart of humanity beating more palpably within my own heart.

The only book I took with me into the cave was Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. In it Lao Tzu comments that “the sage stays at home, does nothing, and yet everything is accomplished.” Staying home is a Taoist metaphor for staying in one’s spiritual center, in the inner heart of hearts, at the core of one’s personal cauldron. The easiest way to “do nothing” is to align with the natural harmonizing flow of cosmic forces. Those forces will ultimately and effortlessly accomplish the return to peace and harmony. Internal alchemy is one very deep and powerful way to align with those forces. Lao Tzu also mentions that “Humans hate to be alone, poor, and hungry”.

Yet there have been countless generations of Taoist adepts on Mt. Huashan who have chosen to live in remote mountain caves in lives of apparent aloneness, poverty, and hunger. Why did they do it? Perhaps only the paradoxical thinking of Lao Tzu can define their motive, incomprehensible to the great mass of humanity: “We we gain by losing, we lose by gaining,”Lao Tzu advises. In their cold caves without much food or water, lost to the gaity of outer world, I believe these alchemy adepts fed themselves and gained everything by embracing the Tao itself.

Michael Winn is a pioneer in bringing Tao arts to the west. He is founder & director of Healing Tao University which offers 30 week long summer retreats in all of the Tao arts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Recent President of the National Qigong Association USA, he wrote 7 books with Mantak Chia. and offers in depth Tao home study audio-video courses in qigong/chikung and Taoist inner alchemy. He  leads a China Dream Trip each year to Taoist monasteries and every other year to do cave practice on Mt. Huashan. Contact: Info@HealingDao.com or 888-999-0555  or www.HealingTaoUSA.com

Note: The main message of Taoist alchemy is that there is infinite and virtuous free energy (“chi field”) available to all of creation to assist in the unfolding of our personal essence and destiny. It is inevitable that this free energy inherent in our own nature should be reflected in modern technological society as free energy devices. Many people today will not believe they have infinite energy flowing in through the core channel of their body and manifesting first in their dantien until it is proven to them by external science through free energy devices. In effect, the scientists who create these free energy devices will become their spiritual teachers.

The following is an important essay by Peter Lindemann about the dark forces — in society and especially within ourselves — that have prevented the dissemination of existing free energy devices. If you are skeptical of the scientific validity of these claims, in a similar vein the Disclosure Project has over 400 government officials and scientists testifying on the same subject — that free energy has been suppressed in order to maintain the political power and stability of the current system (www.disclosureproject.com). The people in government, industry, and academia who have developed and kept these free energy devices secret certainly don’t consider themselves evil conspirators — they are just cooperating with forces more powerful than themselves. But as this article suggests, those forces (helped by the internet) are changing rapidly as global consciousness expands.

At the end are a list of web sites to help you build your own free energy device. If you get one running, send me an email to let me know. I’m looking forward to soon put a fuel cell unit in my house to help its elementals shift from the power company grid back onto the natural chi grid. But meanwhile, I am busy having fun learning to operate the most sophisticated small-scale free energy device ever created — the human body. That is what the science of Taoist energy body cultivation – chi kung and internal alchemy — is about. No government conspiracy can stop you from getting that free chi! We are the main conspirators in preventing its flow. The title “The Tao of Free Energy Devices” was added by me.
-Michael Winn

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from: educate-yourself.org/worldoffreeenergy1mar01.html

[Editor’s Note: I played a role in helping to arrange for an important lecture on September 12, 2000 in Irvine, California by Peter Lindemann titled “The Cold Electricity Secrets of Edwin Gray” . Prior to that, we had often talked on the phone about free energy topics and had both agreed that the only way to get free energy “secrets” out to the public is to simply give it away and forget about making money. Any attempt at going the conventional route by applying for patents and lining up money with venture capitalists, etc., was doomed to fail (as history has repeatedly demonstrated) at the hands of the controlling corporate elites and their pals in the military and government. This well written essay by Peter Lindemann is a fair accounting of the reality of free energy today and of the forces that have conspired to keep these marvelous technologies from benefiting the common man-for nearly a century. That time of suppression has now passed. Thanks to the Internet, the cat is definitely out of the bag and in more ways than one (unfortunately and fortunately) it’s a Brave New World…
Ken Adachi

By Peter Lindemann, D.Sc.
March 1, 2001

In the late 1880’s, trade journals in the electrical sciences were predicting “free electricity” in the near future. Incredible discoveries about the nature of electricity were becoming common place. Nikola Tesla was demonstrating “wireless lighting” and other wonders associated with high frequency currents. There was an excitement about the future like never before.

Within 20 years, there would be automobiles, airplanes, movies, recorded music, telephones, radio, and practical cameras. The Victorian Age was giving way to something totally new. For the first time in history, common people were encouraged to envision a utopian future, filled with abundant modern transportation and communication, as well as jobs, housing and food for everyone.

Disease would be conquered, and so would poverty. Life was getting better, and this time, everyone was going to get “a piece of the pie.” So, what happened? In the midst of this technological explosion, where did the energy breakthroughs go? Was all of this excitement about “free electricity”, which happened just before the beginning of the last century, all just wishful thinking that “real science” eventually disproved?

Current State of Technology

Actually, the answer to that question is NO. In fact, the opposite is true. Spectacular energy technologies were developed right along with the other breakthroughs. Since that time, multiple methods for producing vast amounts of energy at extremely low cost have been developed. None of these technologies have made it to the “open” consumer market as an article of commerce, however. Exactly why this is true will be discussed shortly.

But first, I would like to describe to you a short list of “free energy” technologies that I am currently aware of, and that are proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The common feature connecting all of these discoveries, is that they use a small amount of one form of energy to control or release a large amount of a different kind of energy. Many of them tap the underlying Ether field in some way; a source of energy conveniently ignored by “modern” science.

1) Radiant Energy. Nikola Tesla’s Magnifying Transmitter, T. Henry Moray’s Radiant Energy Device, Edwin Gray’s EMA Motor, and Paul Baumann’s Testatika Machine all run on Radiant Energy. This natural energy form can be gathered directly from the environment (mistakenly called “static” electricity) or extracted from ordinary electricity by the method called “fractionation.” Radiant Energy can perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity, at less than 1% of the cost. It does not behave exactly like electricity, however, which has contributed to the scientific community’s misunderstanding of it. The Methernitha Community in Switzerland currently has 5 or 6 working models of fuel less, self running devices that tap this energy.

2) Permanent Magnets. Dr. Robert Adams (NZ) has developed astounding designs of electric motors, generators and heaters that run on permanent magnets. One such device draws 100 watts of electricity from the source, generates 100 watts to recharge the source, and produces over 140 BTU’s of heat in two minutes! Dr. Tom Bearden (USA) has two working models of a permanent magnet powered electrical transformer. It uses a 6-watt electrical input to control the path of a magnetic field coming out of a permanent magnet. By channeling the magnetic field, first to one output coil and then a second output coil, and by doing this repeatedly and rapidly in a “Ping-Pong” fashion, the device can produce a 96-watt electrical output with no moving parts. Bearden calls his device a Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, or MEG. Jean-Louis Naudin has duplicated Bearden’s device in France. The principles for this type of device were first disclosed by Frank Richardson (USA) in 1978. Troy Reed (USA) has working models of a special magnetized fan that heats up as it spins. It takes exactly the same amount of energy to spin the fan whether it is generating heat or not. Beyond these developments, multiple inventors have identified working mechanisms that produce motor torque from permanent magnets alone.

3) Mechanical Heaters. There are two classes of machines that transform a small amount of mechanical energy into a large amount of heat. The best of these purely mechanical designs are the rotating cylinder systems designed by Frenette (USA) and Perkins (USA). In these machines, one cylinder is rotated within another cylinder with about an eighth of an inch of clearance between them. The space between the cylinders is filled with a liquid such as water or oil, and it is this “working fluid” that heats up as the inner cylinder spins. Another method uses magnets mounted on a wheel to produce large eddy currents in a plate of aluminum, causing the aluminum to heat up rapidly. These magnetic heaters have been demonstrated by Muller (Canada), Adams (NZ) and Reed (USA). All of these systems can produce ten times more heat than standard methods using the same energy input.

4) Super Efficient Electrolysis. Water can be broken into Hydrogen and Oxygen using electricity. Standard chemistry books claim that this process requires more energy than can be recovered when the gases are recombined. This is true only under the worst case scenario. When water is hit with its own molecular resonant frequency, using a system developed by Stan Meyers (USA) and again recently by Xogen Power, Inc., it collapses into Hydrogen and Oxygen gas with very little electrical input. Also, using different electrolytes (additives that make the water conduct electricity better) changes the efficiency of the process dramatically. It is also known that certain geometric structures and surface textures work better than others do. The implication is that unlimited amounts of Hydrogen fuel can be made to drive engines (like in your car) for the cost of water. Even more amazing is the fact that a special metal alloy was patented by Freedman (USA) in 1957 that spontaneously breaks water into Hydrogen and Oxygen with no outside electrical input and without causing any chemical changes in the metal itself. This means that this special metal alloy can make Hydrogen from water for free, forever.

5) Implosion/Vortex. All major industrial engines use the release of heat to cause expansion and pressure to reduce work, like in your car engine. Nature uses the opposite process of cooling to cause suction and vacuum to produce work, like in a tornado. Viktor Schauberger (Austria) was the first to build working models of Implosion Engines in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Since that time, Callum Coats has published extensively on Schauberger’s work in his book Living Energies and subsequently, a number of researchers have built working models of Implosion Turbine Engines. These are fuel less engines that produce mechanical work from energy accessed from a vacuum. There are also much simpler designs that use vortex motions to tap a combination of gravity and centrifugal force to produce a continuous motion in fluids.

6) Cold Fusion. In March 1989, two Chemists from Brigham Young University in Utah (USA) announced that they had produced atomic fusion reactions in a simple tabletop device. The claims were “debunked” within 6 months and the public lost interest. Nevertheless, Cold Fusion is very real. Not only has excess heat production been repeatedly documented, but also low energy atomic element transmutation has been catalogued, involving dozens of different reactions! This technology definitely can produce low cost energy and scores of other important industrial processes.

7) Solar Assisted Heat Pumps. The refrigerator in your kitchen is the only “free energy machine” you currently own. It’s an electrically operated heat pump. It uses one amount of energy (electricity) to move three amounts of energy (heat). This gives it a “co-efficient of performance” (COP) of about 3. Your refrigerator uses one amount of electricity to pump three amounts of heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator. This is its typical use, but it is the worst possible way to use the technology. Here’s why. A heat pump pumps heat from the “source” of heat to the “sink” or place that absorbs the heat. The “source” of heat should obviously be HOT and the “sink” for heat should obviously be COLD for this process to work the best. In your refrigerator, it’s exactly the opposite. The “source” of heat is inside the box, which is COLD, and the “sink” for heat is the room temperature air of your kitchen, which is warmer than the source. This is why the COP remains low for your kitchen refrigerator.

But this is not true for all heat pumps. COP’s of 8 to 10 are easily attained with solar assisted heat pumps. In such a device, a heat pump draws heat from a solar collector and dumps the heat into a large underground absorber, which remains at 550 F, and mechanical energy is extracted in the transfer. This process is equivalent to a steam engine that extracts mechanical energy between the boiler and the condenser, except that it uses a fluid that “boils” at a much lower temperature than water. One such system that was tested in the 1970’s produced 350 hp, measured on a Dynamometer, in a specially designed engine from just 100-sq. ft. of solar collector. (This is NOT the system promoted by Dennis Lee.) The hp, so this system produced more than 17 times more energy than it took to keep it going! It could power a small neighborhood from the roof of a hot tub gazebo, using exactly the same technology that keeps the food cold in your kitchen. Currently, there is an industrial scale heat pump system just north of Kona, Hawaii that generates electricity from temperature differences in ocean water.

There are dozens of other systems that I have not mentioned, many of them are as viable and well tested as the ones I have just recounted. But this short list is sufficient to make my point: free energy technology is here, now. It offers the world pollution-free, energy abundance for everyone, everywhere. It is now possible to stop the production of “greenhouse gases” and shut down all of the nuclear power plants. We can now desalinate unlimited amounts of sea water at an affordable price, and bring adequate fresh water to even the most remote habitats. Transportation costs and the production costs for just about everything can drop dramatically. Food can even be grown in heated greenhouses in the winter, anywhere. All of these wonderful benefits that can make life on this planet so much easier and better for everyone have been postponed for decades. Why? Whose purposes are served by this postponement?

The Invisible Enemy

There are four powerful forces that have worked together to create this situation. To say that there is and has been a “conspiracy” to suppress this technology only leads to a superficial understanding of the world, and it places the blame for this completely outside of ourselves.

The First Obstruction

The First Force that impedes the availability of free energy technology is our willingness to remain ignorant and action less in the face of this situation has always been interpreted by two of these forces as “implied consent.” So, besides a “non demanding public,” what are the other three forces that are impeding the availability of free energy technology?

In standard economic theory, there are three classes of Industry. These are Capital, Goods, and Services. Within the first class, Capital, there are also three sub-classes. These are:

1) Natural Capital. This relates to raw materials (such as a gold mine) and sources of energy (such as a hydroelectric dam or an oil well).

2) Currency. This relates to the printing of paper “money” and the minting of coins. These functions are usually the job of Government. And

3) Credit. This relates to the loaning of money for interest and its extension of economic value through deposit loan accounts.

From this, it is easy to see, that energy functions in the economy in the same way as gold, the printing of money by the Government, or the issuing of credit by a bank.

In the United States, and in most other countries around the world, there is a “money monopoly” in place. I am “free” to earn as much “money” as I want, but I will only be paid in Federal Reserve Notes. There is nothing I can do to be paid in Gold Certificates, or some other form of “money.” This money monopoly is solely in the hands of a small number of private stock banks, and these banks are owned by the Wealthiest Families in the world. Their plan is to eventually control 100% of all of the Capital resources of the world, and thereby control everyone’s life through the availability (or non availability) of all goods and services. An independent source of wealth (free energy device) in the hands of each and every person in the world, ruins their plans for world domination, permanently.

Why this is true is easy to see. Currently, a nation’s economy can be either slowed down or sped up by the raising or lowering of interest rates. But if an independent source of capital (energy) were present in the economy, and any business or person could raise more capital without borrowing it from a bank, this centralized throttling action on interest rates would simply not have the same effect.

Free energy technology changes the value of money. The Wealthiest Families and the Issuers of Credit do not want any competition. It’s that simple. They want to maintain their current monopoly control of the money supply. For them, free energy technology is not just something to suppress, it must be PERMANENTLY FORBIDDEN!

So, the Wealthiest Families and their Central Banking institutions are the First Force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology. Their motivations are the imagined “divine right to rule”, greed, and their insatiable need to control everything except themselves.

The weapons they have used to enforce this postponement include intimidation, “expert” debunkers, buying and shelving of technology, murder and attempted murder of the inventors, character assassination, arson, and a wide variety of financial incentives and disincentives to manipulate possible supporters. They have also promoted the general acceptance of a scientific theory that states that free energy is impossible (Laws of Thermodynamics).

The Second Obstruction

The Second Force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology is National Governments. The problem here is not so much related to competition in the printing of currency, but in the
maintenance of National Security. The fact is, the world out there is a jungle, and humans can be counted
upon to be very cruel, dishonest, and sneaky. It is Government’s job to “provide for the common defense.” For this, “police powers” are delegated by the Executive Branch of Government to enforce “the rule of law.”

Most of us who consent to the rule of law do so because we believe it is the right thing to do, for our own benefit. There are always a few individuals, however, that believe that their own benefit is best served by behavior that does not voluntarily conform to the generally agreed upon social order. These people choose to operate outside of “the rule of law” and are considered outlaws, criminals, subversives, traitors, revolutionaries, or terrorists.

Most National Governments have discovered, by trial and error, that the only Foreign Policy that really works, over time, is a policy called “Tit for Tat.” What this means to you and me is, that governments treat each other the way they are being treated. There is a constant “jockeying” for position and influence in world affairs, and the
STRONGEST party wins! In economics, it’s the Golden Rule, which states: “The one with the Gold makes the Rules.”

So it is with politics also, but its appearance is more Darwinian. It’s simply “survival of the fittest.” In politics, however, the “fittest” has come to mean the strongest party who is also willing to fight the dirtiest.

Absolutely every means available is used to maintain an advantage over the “adversary”, and everyone else is the “adversary” regardless of whether they are considered friend or foe. This includes outrageous psychological posturing, lying, cheating, spying, stealing, assassination of world leaders, proxy wars, alliances and shifting
alliances, treaties, foreign aid, and the presence of military forces wherever possible. Like it or not, this IS the psychological and actual arena National Governments operate in.

No National Government will ever do anything that simply gives an adversary an advantage for free. NEVER! It’s national suicide. Any activity by any individual, inside or outside the country, that is interpreted as giving an adversary an edge or advantage, in any way, will be deemed a threat to “National Security.” ALWAYS!

Free energy technology is a National Government’s worst nightmare! Openly acknowledged, free energy technology sparks an unlimited arms race by all governments in a final attempt to gain absolute advantage
and domination. Think about it. Do you think Japan will not feel intimidated if China gets free energy? Do you think Israel will sit by quietly as Iraq acquires free energy? Do you think India will allow Pakistan to develop
free energy? Do you think the USA would not try to stop Osama bin Laden from getting free energy? Unlimited energy available to the current state of affairs on this planet leads to an inevitable reshuffling of the “balance of power.”

This could become an all-out war to prevent “the other” from having the advantage of unlimited wealth and power. Everybody will want it, and at the same time, want to prevent everyone else from getting it. So, National Governments are the Second Force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology. Their motivations are “self-preservation.” This self-preservation operates on three levels.

First, by not giving undue advantage to an external enemy.

Second, by preventing individualized action capable of effectively challenging official police powers (anarchy) within the country.

And third, by preserving income streams derived from taxing energy sources currently in use. Their weapons include the preventing of the issuance of patents based on National Security grounds, the legal and illegal harassment of inventors with criminal charges, tax audits, threats, phone taps, arrest, arson, theft of property
during shipment, and a host of other intimidations which make the business of building and marketing a free energy machine impossible.

The Third Obstruction

The Third Force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology consists of the group of deluded inventors and out right charlatans and con men.

On the periphery of the extraordinary scientific breakthroughs that constitute the real free energy technologies, lies a shadow world of unexplained anomalies, marginal inventions and unscrupulous promoters.

The second and third Forces have constantly used the media to promote the worst examples of this group, to distract the public’s attention and to discredit the real breakthroughs by associating them with the obvious frauds.

Over the last hundred years, dozens of stories have surfaced about unusual inventions. Some of these ideas have so captivated the public’s imagination that a mythology about these systems continues to this day.

Names like Kelley, Hubbard, Coler, and Henderschott immediately come to mind. There may be real technologies behind these names, but there simply isn’t enough technical data available in the public domain to make a determination.

These names remain associated with a free energy mythology, however, and are sited by debunkers as examples of fraud. The idea of free energy taps very deeply into the human subconscious mind. A few inventors with marginal technologies that demonstrate useful anomalies have mistakenly exaggerated the importance of their inventions. Some of these inventors also have mistakenly exaggerated the importance of THEMSELVES for having invented it. A combination of “gold fever” and/or a “messiah complex” appears, wholly distorting any future contribution they may make.

While the research thread they are following may hold great promise, they begin to trade enthusiasm for facts, and the value of the scientific work from that point on suffers greatly. There is a powerful, yet subtle seduction that can warp a personality if they believe that “the world restson their shoulders” or that they are the world’s “savior.”

Strange things also happen to people when they think they are about to become extremely rich. It takes a tremendous spiritual discipline to remain objective and humble in the presence of a working free energy machine.

Many inventors’ psyches become unstable just BELIEVING they have a free energy machine. As the quality of the science deteriorates, some inventors also develop a “persecution complex” that makes them very defensive and unapproachable. This process precludes them from ever really developing a free energy machine, and fuels the fraud mythologies tremendously.

Then there are the out right con men. In the last 15 years, there is one person in the USA who has raised the free energy con to a professional art. He has raised more than $100,000,000, has been barred from doing business in the State of Washington, has been jailed in California, and he’s still at it.

He always talks about a variation of one of the real free energy systems, sells people on the idea that they will get one of these systems soon, but ultimately sells them only promotional information which gives no real data about the energy system itself. He has mercilessly preyed upon the Christian Community and the Patriot Community in the USA, and is still going strong. His current scam involves signing up hundreds of thousands of people at locations where he will install a free energy machine.

In exchange for letting him put the FE generator in their home, they will get free electricity for life, and his company will sell the excess energy back to the local utility company. After becoming convinced that they will receive free electricity for life, with no out front expenses, they gladly buy a video that helps draw their friends into the scam as
well.

Once you understand the power and motivations of the first two Forces I have discussed, its obvious that this person’s current “business plan” cannot be implemented. This one person has probably done more harm to
the free energy movement in the USA than any other Force, by destroying people’s trust in the technology.

So, the Third Force postponing the public availability of free energy technology is delusion and dishonesty within the movement itself. The motivations are self aggrandizement, greed, want of power over others, and a false sense of self importance.

The weapons used are lying, cheating, the “bait and switch” con, self-delusion and arrogance combined with lousy science.

The Fourth Obstruction

The Fourth Force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology is all of the rest of us. It may be easy to see how narrow and despicable the motivations of the other Forces are, but actually, these motivations are still very much alive in each of us as well.

Like the Wealthiest Families, don’t we each secretly harbor illusions of false superiority, and the want to control others instead of ourselves? Also, wouldn’t you “sell out” if the price were high enough, say, take $1 million dollars, cash, today?

Or like the Governments, don’t we each want to ensure our own survival? If caught in the middle of a full, burning theater, do you panic and push all of the weaker people out of the way in a mad, scramble for the door? Or like the deluded inventor, don’t we trade a comfortable illusion once in a while for an uncomfortable fact? And don’t we like to think more of ourselves than others give us credit for? Or don’t we still fear the unknown, even if it promises a great reward?

You see, really, all Four Forces are just different aspects of the same process, operating at different levels in the society. There is really only ONE FORCE preventing the public availability of free energy technology, and that is the unspiritual motivated behavior of the human animals.

In the last analysis, free energy technology is an outward manifestation of Divine Abundance. It is the engine of the economy of an enlightened society, where people voluntarily behave in a respectful and civil manner toward each other. Where each member of the society has everything they need, and do not covet what their neighbor has. here war and physical violence has become socially unacceptable behavior and people’s differences are at least tolerated, if not enjoyed. The appearance of free energy technology in the public domain is the dawning of a truly civilized age. It is an epochal event in human history.

Nobody can “take credit” for it. Nobody can “get rich” on it. Nobody can “rule the world” with it. It is simply, a Gift from God.

It forces us all to take responsibility for our own actions and for our own self disciplined self-restraint when needed. The world as it is currently ordered, cannot have free energy technology without being totally transformed by it into something else.

This “civilization” has reached the pinnacle of its development, because it has birthed the seeds of its own transformation. The unspiritual human animals cannot be trusted with free energy. They will only do what
they have always done, which is take merciless advantage of each other, or kill each other and themselves in the process.

If you go back and read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or the Club of Rome Report, it becomes obvious that the Wealthiest Families have understood this for decades. Their plan is to live in The World of Free Energy, but
permanently freeze the rest of us out. But this is not new. Royalty has always considered the general population (us) to be their subjects.

What is new, is that you and I can communicate with each other now better than at anytime in the past. The Internet offers us, the Fourth Force, an opportunity to overcome the combined efforts of the other Forces preventing free energy technology from spreading.

The Opportunity

What is starting to happen is that inventors are publishing their work, instead of patenting it and keeping it secret. More and more, people are “giving away” information on these technologies in books, videos and web sites.

While there is still a great deal of useless information about free energy on the Internet, the availability of good information is rising rapidly. Check out the list of web sites and other resources at the end of this article.

It is imperative that you begin to gather all of the information you can on real free energy systems. The reason for this is simple. The first two Forces will never allow an inventor or a company to build and sell a free energy machine to you! The only way you will ever get one is if you, or a friend, build it yourself. This is exactly what thousands of people are already quietly starting to do. You may feel wholly inadequate to the task, but start gathering information now.

You may be just a link in the chain of events for the benefit of others.

Focus on what you can do now, not on how much there still is to be done.

Small, private research groups are working out the details as you read this. Many are committed to publishing their results on the Internet.

All of us constitute the Fourth Force. If we stand up and refuse to remain ignorant and action less, we can change the course of history. It is the aggregate of our combined action that can make a difference. Only the mass action that represents our consensus can create the world we want. The other three Forces WILL NOT help us put a fuel less power plant in our basements.

They will not help us be free from their manipulations. Nevertheless, free energy technology is here. It is real, and it will change everything about the way we live, work and relate to each other. In the last analysis, free energy technology obsoletes greed and the fear for survival. But like all exercises of Spiritual Faith, we must first manifest the generosity and trust in our own lives.

The Source of Free Energy is INSIDE of us. It is that excitement of expressing ourselves freely. It is our Spiritually guided intuition expressing itself without distraction, intimidation or manipulation. Itis our open-heartedness. Ideally, the free energy technologies underpin a just society where everyone has enough food, clothing, shelter, self worth, and the leisure time to contemplate the higher Spiritual meanings of Life.

Do we not owe it to each other, to face down our fears, and take action to create this future for our children’s children? Perhaps I am not the only one waiting for me to act on a greater Truth.

Free energy technology is here. It has been here for decades. Communications technology and the Internet have torn the veil of secrecy off of this remarkable fact. People all over the world are starting to build free energy devices for their own use. The Bankers and the Governments do not want this to happen, but cannot stop it. Tremendous economic instabilities and wars will be used in the near future to distract people from joining the free energy movement. There will be essentially no major media coverage of this aspect of what is going on.
It will simply be reported as wars and civil wars erupting everywhere, leading to UN “Peace Keeper” occupation in more and more countries.

Western Society is spiraling down toward self-destruction, due to the accumulated effects of long-term greed and corruption. The general availability of free energy technology cannot stop this trend. It can only reinforce it. If, however, you have a free energy device, you may be better positioned to survive the political/social/economic transition that is underway. No National Government will survive this process. The question is, who will ultimately control the emerging World Government, the First Force, or the Fourth Force?

The last Great War is almost upon us. The seeds are planted. After this will come the beginning of a real Civilization. Some of us who refuse to fight will survive to see the dawn of the World of Free Energy. I
challenge you to be among the ones who try.

LIST OF RESOURCES:

Books:
Living Energies by Callum Coats
The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity by Peter Lindemann, D.Sc.
Applied Modern 20th Century Aether Science by Dr. Robert Adams
Physics Without Einstein by Dr. Harold Aspden
Secrets of Cold War Technology by Gerry Vassilatos
The Coming Energy Revolution by Jeane Manning

Websites:

www2.murray.net.au/users/egel/content1.htm
developed by Geoff Egel in Australia. Best free-energy site on the net!

www.free-energy.cc developed by Clear Tech, Inc. and Dr. Peter Lindemann

jnaudin.free.fr developed by JLN Labs in France

www.1dove.com/fe/index.html Jim’s Free Energy Page in the USA

www.keelynet.com/ developed by Jerry Decker in the USA

www.xogen.com site for super electrolysis technology

www.rumormillnews.com excellent site for all kinds of alternative news, with many links

Patents: (most can be viewed at www.delphion.com )

This list is nothing more than a sample of inventions that produce free energy.

Tesla USP #685,957
Freedman USP #2,796,345
Richardson USP #4,077,001
Frenette USP #4,143,639
Perkins USP #4,424,797
Gray USP #4,595,975
Meyer USP #4,936,961
Chambers USP #6,126,794

Clear Tech, Inc.
Box 37 Metaline Falls, WA 99153
ph: (509) 446-2353 fax: (509) 446-2354

Jerry W. Decker – KeelyNet
discussion list archive www.escribe.com/science/keelynet

Order Out of Chaos – main site www.keelynet.com

Dear Lovers of Chi Flow:

Scientists are finally waking up to the fact that physical movement affects the unfolding of the genetic code, and thus can prevent a wide range of chronic illness. More significant is the evidence on how INACTIVITY triggers a DNA reaction that causes the chronic diseases and obesity in the first place. The modern “drug” approach to manipulating the gene code and creating expensive gene therapies/drugs is misguided and unnecessarily complex.

The ancient Chinese figured this out thousands of years ago, and have been developing “yang sheng” (long life) exercises ever since, known as chi kung (qigong) in modern times. In my opinion they are far superior to aerobic and high impact western exercise systems like jogging. The science on this will eventually unfold — but DON’T WAIT for the science, deepen your chi kung practice today and get the health and spiritual benefits immediately!

These scientific findings are also consistent with the approach of Taoist mediation in the internal alchemy (neidan gong) tradition. This approach emphasizes internal circulation of energy that is captured and focused in key energy centers (dan tien) or circulated through the entire meridian sysem (micro-cosmic orbit). I find that this internally dynamic style of meditation is better suited to westerners than some types of meditation that cultivate extreme passivity. My experience is that it is impacting on the genetic level as well, which is why these practices are considered “immortality” practices.

Since most westerners have been brainwashed to believe their genes control their destiny, rather than your movements control your genes, reading this article may help you wake up to your own power hidden within!

Michael Winn

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“Obesity Sleuths” find chronic diseases are linked to a breakdown response to what our human DNA is expecting.
The American Psychological Society
July 10, 2002
http://www.the-aps.org/press_room/journal/release7-10-02.htm
The need for physical activity is hotwired into the body’s expectations;
When that activity does not occur, nutritional “thrifty genes” react, causing a steep rise in common chronic conditions.

BETHESDA, MD ? (July 10, 2002) ? The results of the most extensive research investigation into the relationship between chronic health conditions and physical inactivity have been released by a team of “obesity sleuths.” They conclude that today’s skyrocketing levels of chronic diseases are due to the collision between the body’s total gene complement of a set of chromosomes — programmed 10,000 years ago to anticipate physical exertion, and the inactivity endemic to 21st century sedentary societies. Nutritional “thrifty genes” may further exacerbate the deterioration of the human body, which takes the form of common, chronic disorders, once thought to be rare.

The Study

The study entitled “Waging War on Physical Inactivity: Using Modern Molecular Ammunition Against an Ancient Enemy,” is the latest report from the obesity research team of Frank W. Booth and Espen E. Spangenburg, both of the Departments of Biomedical Sciences and Physiology and the Dalton Cardiovascular Institute at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Manu V. Chakravarthy, of the Department of Internal Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; and Scott E. Gordon, of the Departments of Exercise and Sports Sciences and of Physiology and the Human Performance Laboratory, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. Their study appears in the current edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology, a publication of the American Physiological Society.

The team set out to identify the underlying genetic and cellular/biochemical bases of why a sedentary lifestyle produces chronic health disorders. They support the hypothesis that humans have inherited a genome programmed for physical activity by selective forces from the Late Paleolithic era (10,000 years ago), when physical activity was necessary for survival. Another associated hypothesis that was examined in this research effort is that a lack of physical activity leads to failure of the maintenance of normal signaling by cellular networks that activate that genome. Since the normal orchestration of protein expression in cells in humans was selected during evolution, when physical activity was higher than today, an altered protein expression of cells from sedentary individuals is associated with a higher incidence of chronic conditions.

As part of their efforts, new conclusions have been reached on how physical inactivity affects at least 20 of the most chronic and deadly medical disorders. They suggest that all these conditions share common genetic inheritances that were supported by physical activity. When physical activity diminished, chronic health conditions occurred.

Needs for the Paleolithic Age

Daily physical activity was an integral, obligatory aspect of our ancestor’s existence. The weekly activity pattern of hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic Stone Age period (c. 8,000 B.C.) required several days of fairly intensive physical activity followed by days of rest and light activity. Men commonly hunted from one to four consecutive days each week while women gathered every two to three days. The physical labors involved in tool making, butchering, food preparation, carrying firewood and water, and moving to new campsites were supplemented by dances, often lasting hours, as a major recreational activity in many cultures.

(Lack of) Needs for 21st Century Americans

Twenty-first century Americans still possess late Paleolithic, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer genes, and, perhaps nutritional “thrifty genes.” Since our food abundant society makes physical activity no longer obligatory for survival, the sedentary lifestyle has emerged, disrupting the normal homeostatic mechanisms that have been programmed for the proper metabolic fluctuations necessary to maintain health. Physical inactivity interferes with the genome thus becoming an initiating factor in the molecular mechanisms of disease.

This assessment of chronic disorders addressed a wide range of maladies that affect a considerable number of Americans. Disorders were considered and conclusions were reached.

Highlights include:

Cancer

• Breast cancer: Sedentary females, compared with physically active women, are less likely to have primary and secondary anenorrhea, delayed menarche, and irregular cycles, all associated with a reduced development of breast cancer.
• Colon cancer: Physical inactivity was the risk factor most consistently shown to be associated with the increased risk of colon cancer. A 50 percent reduction in the incidence of this disease was found in those with the highest level of physical activity.
• Pancreatic cancer: Walking or hiking less than 20 minutes a week was associated with twice the risk of pancreatic cancer when compared with those who performed the exercise for more than four hours a week.
• Melanoma: Sedentary men and women had a 56 and 72 percent, respectively, higher incidence of melanoma than those exercising five to seven days a week.

Cardiovascular Diseases

• Heart disease, coronary artery disease, angina, and myocardial infarction: Undertaking a moderate-intensity physical activity would prevent 250,000 deaths each year, 12 percent attributed to these medical
  conditions.

• Heart disease: congestive heart failure: Exercise may improve the condition of people afflicted with this disorder; physical inactivity may be a determinate factor to their time of death.
• Hypertension: Tests found that inactivity led to blood pressures in sedentary individuals being substantially higher than in those who were
  active.

• Stroke: Physical activity lowers blood pressure, facilitates weight loss, and decreases the chance for Type 2 diabetes, a major cause of strokes.

Metabolic Diseases

• Type 2 diabetes: Most of the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the United States can be attributed to a change in lifestyle that involves a genome evolved from a Paleolithic lifestyle. Cultures that still have hunter-gatherers have low incidence of this disease.
• Obesity: Sedentary individuals can lower their risk of many disorders by increasing their physical activity, regardless of whether they are normal or overweight.

Musculoskeletal Disorders

• Osteoarthritis: Appropriate exercise, both therapeutic and recreational, is an effective therapy in the successful management of this disorder. The benefits are flexibility, muscular conditioning, and cardiovascular and general health.
• Rheumatoid Arthritis: Exercise for patients with this disorder minimizes loss in muscle strength but not in bone loss.

Conclusions

This effort clearly points out that a sedentary lifestyle leads to a breakdown in the body’s biomedical system and a failure of genes leading to chronic disease. Now, the American public has a baseline of information of how to develop an optimum design for living that will contribute to a healthy lifestyle and to the avoidance of disorders caused by inactivity.

This research also suggests that the publicized searches for genes causing chronic illnesses are too limited. In addition, scientists should explore how selected “activity” genes are misexpressed as a result of a sedentary lifestyle. These findings challenge those engaged in using the human genome sequence to fight disease to recognize the “activity genes” that produce diseases when inactivity occurs. They repeat their call for Americans to participate in more physical activity to prevent the advent of a wide range of chronic disorders.

Source: Journal of Applied Physiology, July 2002.

The American Physiological Society (APS) was founded in 1887 to foster basic and applied science, much of it relating to human health. The Bethesda, MD-based Society has more than 10,000 members and publishes 3,800 articles in its 14 peer-reviewed journals every year.

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By abstaining from intercourse, the spirit has no opportunity for expansiveness,
yin and yang are blocked and cut off from one another.
– Classic of Su Nu (Wile,1992, 7)

Sexual love can be one of the most powerful human experiences. Over the past two thousand years, certain Daoist and Tantric cultures sought to tap the power of sexuality to cultivate elevated spiritual states of awareness and achieve immortality. These practices appear to have originated in China and India and later spread to Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. Daoism and Tantrism are both experiential approaches to life, and share similar microcosmic-macrocosmic theories of the human body as an inner mirror of outer Nature. The body-centered cosmology of each has led to a spectrum of sexual practices that range from ritualized physical sexual intercourse to celibacy accompanied by conscious subtle-body love making. (Bokemkamp, 1997, 43; Wile 1992, 25, White, 2000, 15).

Both posit a multi-dimensional universe governed by divine, all pervading polar energies identified in Tantra as Shakti-Shiva deities or in Daoism as the yin-yang forces of Heaven and Earth. These polar forces arise from a mysterious non-dual unity, whose dance within the physical plane follows a five-fold pattern of harmony governed by five families of deities or five phase principles. Both offer alchemical maps, often hidden within mandalas interiorized within the body – yantras in Tantra and I Ching (Yijing) patterns in Daoism – that can be fully understood only by the initiated adept. These subtle body maps allow the adept to navigate the apparent chaos of conflicting physical and sexual desires to find the way to the true self at the still center of the drama of creation. Despite these underlying similarities in their cosmology, the Tantric and Daoist methods of sexual cultivation, both physical and subtle body, are radically different.

Since the late 1970’s Daoist-Tantric sexual practices have been widely publicized and taught in the West. As a student, teacher, and private scholar of these practices during this period, I took it upon myself to “test” the methods of different Tantric and Daoist schools that washed up on Western shores. I was driven by an intense curiosity about the nature my own sexuality, which I intuitively felt to be central to my spiritual evolution. This journey led me to travel widely in China and India to investigate the cultural context of these practices and discern their differences as paths emphasizing Fire (Tantric) or Water and Fire (Daoist).

My goal is to show how Western sexual needs have shaped the teachers and teachings of Daoist and Tantric sexual practices in the West. I will examine the sexual behavior, attitudes, lineage, and methods of different teachers, and if their practices were largely re-invented or presented in radically different ways from traditional Asian lineages. I hope to clarify the relation between physical sex, subtle body sex, the issue of celibacy, and the traditional distinction between medical-therapeutic sexual practices and mystical approaches to sexuality. I’ll explore why sexuality is so crucial to spiritual transformation, and describe the different kinds of subtle body orgasm one might evoke using Daoist and Tantric methods.

The broad framework of my study is that (1) there is a deep tension in every human being between a non-sexual, non-dual core Being and a sexually polarized male-female Body. This tension is alleviated by development of an intermediate Energy Body that is androgynous (both male and female) in nature, and which is the deepest drive behind all forces of spiritual evolution. (2) This tension between Being and Body is so powerful that most “Enlightenment” states cannot bridge it, despite claims to the contrary. It is only bridged by what are called Immortality practices in both Tantra and Daoism.

In general, I found more detailed medical and internal sexual practices available in the Daoist tradition, described in a concluding overview. This paper is titled The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm because in the course of teaching sexual practices to Westerners, I have polled thousands of students to find out why they are learning a sexual practice. Asked to select between understanding their sexuality, improved sexual performance, better love relationships, and having a spiritual orgasm, about eighty percent choose spiritual orgasm.
Because the river of Daoist and Tantric history is so vast, with so many tributaries, generalizations are inevitable in my thumbnail sketches of a wide array of teachers and teachings I encountered. The obstacle to all research on sexuality is widespread lying and concealment. Subtle body sex complicates this problem, since by definition the Daoist-Tantric experience of the body-as-divine-cosmos-copulating-within-itself is personal in nature. In the spirit of creating a new openness about delicate sexual-spiritual issues, and to vivify the reader’s senses, I often shift to a first person narrative. I accept (on behalf of my unnamed informants) full responsibility for any inaccuracies in my brief footnote to this chapter of Western religious history.

Sexual Revolution as Cultural Context

Tantrics and Daoists have often assumed the role of rebelling against the prevailing social and sexual values, which were dominated by a strict caste system in India and overtly anti-female values of Confucianism in China. Tantrics and Daoists were also early experimenters with “external alchemy”, the use of mind-altering natural substances to quicken one’s spiritual evolution. It is not surprising that their ideas came into widespread popularity in the West during a period of widespread cultural rebellion in the 1960’s with mind expanding drugs, pelvic-undulating rock music, and a pill-provoked Free Love movement, all designed to topple Establishment values. The Western sexual revolution occurred without any Eastern stimulus; but once it was happening, it needed somewhere to go, and Tantric and Daoist teachings offered a new and more spiritual direction into which the sexual revolution could mature. If we imagine that planet earth has a single global libido, I suspect these ancient teachings would have surfaced any place where sexual freedom was exploding.

It is important to first remove a naivete common to Westerners about oriental sexual practices. Teachers of traditional sexology, whether medical or spiritual, are difficult to find today in either China or India. On seven trips to China, despite an extensive network of Daoist contacts, no one knew of a single teacher of Daoist sexual cultivation, even though all were well aware of its historical and textual presence. There are two reasons. One, Daoist sexology has a bad historical reputation for being abused and used to promote sexual vampirism, making it risky to teach in Communist culture. Two, as Fang Ru Ruan’s Sex in China study notes, ancient China produced the world’s oldest and most detailed sexology texts, but modern China is one of the most sexually repressed countries in the world – sale of pornography is punishable by death. The neo-Reichian Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makaveich showed in his 1972 film Mysteries of the Organism that as political repression increases, sexual freedom decreases. This political repression may be a factor in recent medical reports in mainland China of increasingly widespread sexual dysfunction. Most current Daoist books on sexology are coming from Taiwan and Hong Kong, often centered around trained courtesans (Lai 2001, McNeil 1999), or from Chinese living in Thailand (Chia/Winn 1984, Chia 1986, 1996, 2000).

Three trips to India, numerous contacts and books on Tantra convinced me the situation there is not much different. Mainstream educated Hindus are puritanical in their sexual mores, and Tantrism is seen as low caste and morally suspect excuse for black magic, especially seduction spells (vashikarana), suitable for entertaining stories but not serious pursuit. It is an underground subculture, with a invisible subset of adepts skilled in the esoteric sexual rites described in classical Tantric scriptures, erotic paintings and sculpture. Tantric practices are kept alive by secrecy: “publicly Vedic, secretly Tantric” is the Indian aphorism that summarizes the situation. My thesis is that amongst the Tantric male teachers who brought their sexual wares to the West, few had any actual training in physical sexual practices. I believe most recreated them from ancient texts or invented them out of their own needs or the expectations of their Western students.

Asian sexual practices would likely not have taken root in the West except for the ground being prepared by Sigmund Freud (d. 1939), his students Carl Jung (d.1961)and Wilhelm Reich (d.1957), and the early sex researcher Havelock Ellis (d.1939). The widespread acceptance of the theory of sexual impulse being a fundamental shaping force of the personality opened Westerners to the Daoist-Tantric metaphysic that went one step further, giving sexuality a key role in spiritual evolution. Jung expanded this greatly with his explorations into eastern mysticism, writing introductions to both Tantric and Daoist esoteric texts. In his essay on the Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung tried (without success, in my opinion) to impose his anima-animus psychological archetypes on yin-yang theory. Jung lacked the practical energetic methodologies (beyond “talk” therapy) for directly experiencing and guiding these subconscious male-female forces in the body into superconscious states.

Reich tried to fill this gap, and died in prison in the U.S. for spreading his teachings and devices promoting a universe – and human body – centered around orgasm, through the medium of “orgone”, similar to prana in India and qi in China. The ideas of these psychologists later became increasingly mainstream, and set the stage in 1972 for bestselling self-improvement books like The Joy of Sex, by Alex Comfort, a scholar of Tantric erotic art and philosophy. The appearance of crazy wisdom teachings from Tibetan Buddhist Tantrics like Chogyam Trungpa (d.19 89) inspired beatniks and poets like Allen Ginsberg, who as a homosexual in a homophobic society was attracted to a teaching claiming enlightenment could be achieved by following and completing your ordinary desires.

Two early major stimuli to the growth of Asian sexual practices in the West were 1) publication of From Sex to Super Consciousness (1974) by Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh and his growing popularity as a “sex guru” of Tantric and new age mysticism, and (2) publication of the bestselling Sexual Secrets (1979) by Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger , with classical texts and six hundred illustrations of Tantric and Daoist sexual iconography. Unlike previous erotic art books, it offered a living spiritual path. These events put images and a vision of sexual-spiritual liberation into popular media with a psychology accessible to Westerners.

Nik Douglas was an English rock music producer who went to India for eight years in the 60’s, several of them wandering about as a Tantric sadhu, stirring the ashes of his guru’s sacred dhouni fire. Douglas made the first film on Tantra in English, financed by Mick Jagger — a clear statement of alignment between Tantra and rock music subcultures. Douglas published Chakra magazine in India and had an indirect but pivotal role in introducing the Beatles to their guru, Maharishi Mahesh. This subsequently gave other Indian gurus instant rock star status, promoting their teachings to the rebel youth culture in the West. Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation movement passes itself off as Vedic, and completely avoids sexual issues and practices. But as Douglas points out in his history of Tantra, Spiritual Sex (1997), the TM power mantras given to initiates, chosen by birthdate, are Tantric. The Vedas themselves are hymns to be sung, but do not offer mantras, which Douglas traces to the older Dravidian vegetative fertility cults in India.
Traditionally, in Hindu Tantra a lineage tranmission is essential, a personal initiation by a guru. Rajneesh (1931-90) was an Indian professor of philosophy who basically had no guru – he got his initiation from books. From his wide readings and direct experimentation, Rajneesh “self-invented” a Tantric path for Westerners to explore themselves. He forbade his Indian followers from using the techniques devised for Westerners, as he felt that Western minds worked differently. He had a genius for translating obscure mystical concepts into a workable Western psychology. He offered Westerners exactly what they wanted: freedom from guilt about sex, the promise of enlightenment, and a smorgasboard of workshops led by followers that allowed them to explore and integrate their eclectic mix of Eastern and Western methods. Having no lineage, he invented a feeling of lineage for Westerners by requiring them to wear swami-like robes.
Rajneesh set the stage for his Western followers to appropriate the five element Tantric chakra system and psychologize it to fit their own spiritual needs and Western archetypes. This trend towards a “self-invented” spirituality became a hallmark of the New Age movement in the West. Tantra and Daoism both have a long history of experimenting with and absorbing new spiritual technologies, so I do not use the term “self-invented” pejoratively, but only to distinguish it from teachings adopted from traditional lineages in India or China.

Nik Douglas, who met Rajneesh in India before he was famous, told me his main recollection him was of a “nice professor type who wanted me to set him up with intellectual Jewish girls who would fuck”. This suggests an early stage of trying to reconcile his sexual and intellectual identities. Rajneesh was later touted as the “sex guru” by the media because he told his followers to have as much sex as they could possibly tolerate until they no longer desired it. This was his novel application of a traditional Tantric principle of using ordinary desire to obtain enlightenment. At seminars he would begin by requiring everyone to strip off their clothes and sniff the armpits and genitals of a member of the opposite sex. Rajneesh reportedly entered a phase of natural celibacy between the ages of forty-two and fifty-five, so he was not having sex at the height of his fame as a sex guru. This highlights the paradox, found in many traditional Tantric and Daoist lineages, of an approach that advocates celibacy yet employs sexual energy as the main force in their meditation.

Personal Account: Kundalini Rising in the West

My own first spiritual initiation experience offers a snapshot of how Tantric methods leapt across cultural lines without a lineage to define it, and how the Tantric-induced experience of kundalini, the female Shakti force rising within the body, itself blurred the boundary between the sexual and the spiritual. I was working as a free lance war correspondent in Africa in 1978. Enroute to the airport leaving the U.S. I grabbed Rajneesh’s Book of Secrets, his compilation of a hundred different Tantric methods. I had never heard of Rajneesh. Later, stuck waiting for a visa in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, I had time to browse the book.

I had never had a guru or any meditation training. Rajneesh’s Book of Secrets overwhelmed me with the number of techniques in it. So I picked the simplest one I could find, a breathing method. It instructed me to follow my inhalation and exhalation, while gradually increasing the length of the pause between breaths. I got deep into the process, lying on a straw mattress in a sweltering $3. per night flea bag hotel, shared with a black South African refugee whose epileptic seizures were my only distraction. I practiced for three to five hours at a time, and found I could slow my breath down until the pauses seem to last interminably.

One day, after two weeks practice, I felt my breath stop completely. During a long pause between breaths, I entered a deep, peaceful state, and felt I no longer needed to breathe air. Suddenly my whole body shook, then exploded in an intense orgasm and I watched myself catapulted into the space around me, with a clear vision of my body expanding rapidly through the walls of the room. After this initial explosion, I felt like a mushroom cloud above a nuclear blast, with the debris of my former consciousness blown to bits and slowly raining back down on my transparent body in blissful droplets. I was shocked, scared, and excited.

I realized I had entered some other dimension of myself, and decided I had to make it a priority in life to find a way to stay connected to it. I decided to give up meat, drugs, and sex, the latter decision particularly shocking to me as at that time I was prone to having three girlfriends at once. Since my beyond-the-body experience was a thousand times more orgasmic than the best sexual orgasm I had previously experienced, being celibate didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t know it then, but I had entered the realm of my subtle bodies and their spontaneously orgasmic properties. I had no guru or formal initiation, my only teacher was a book, yet I found myself celibate, on the Tantric path, and questing for a repeat spiritual orgasm.

When I returned to New York, I hunted down the nearest Rajneesh ashram, a dingy cellar in Tribeca. I did Rajneesh’s Dynamic Meditation to arouse the kundalini, but it didn’t work for me, and I didn’t like the “group grope” feeling of the people there. I didn’t want strangers grappling with my newly delicate energy field, and the methods seemed to lack sufficient internal focus. The only book in print that seemed to confirm the reality of my experience was Gopi Krishna’s Kundalini:The Serpent Power, an account of his twelve year ordeal with his kundalini current run wild, finally cured by simply eating meat. Krishna published many later books claiming the kundalini – the dance of the ida (solar), pingala (lunar), and sushumna (central) currents of prana up the spine — was the evolutionary force behind all genius and all genetic evolution. When I interviewed Gopi Krishna shortly before his death in 1984, I was not impressed by his spiritual presence. He seemed very intellectual, an Indian pundit with thick black glasses whose energy was mostly in his head.

I began practicing White Tantric Yoga, taught by Yogi Bhajan and his 3HO organization, and found that it systematically stimulated and sustained the blissful experience I had in Africa. I practiced this system of kundalini yoga daily for four years, which employed a rigorous combination of yogic asanas (postures), “breath of fire” (rapid belly breathing), yogic locks (squeezing different body parts tightly), mudras (hand positions) and mantras. I took ice cold showers at 4 am, and found my sleep needs reduced to four hours. I also began experiencing different siddhis or spiritual powers, ranging from bursts of telepathy and foreknowledge of the future (useful in planning my free lance writing career) and, more dramatically, having repeated experiences of the entire universe collapsing into a single point. I would be immobilized for up to an hour, as if my being were condensed into a heavy steel ball at the center of the universe, with a contracting pressure so intense not even my mind could escape its gravitational power.

Being a self-employed writer, I was able to practice four to eight hours a day. The link between kundalini and sexuality was self-evident. My testicles pulsed day and night, I could feel and internally hear my sexual energy rushing up my spine and throbbing in my third eye. At other times I experienced fiery sexual-like currents of electricity flowing throughout my body. I felt like I had discovered organic LSD, and walked about in an ecstatic state, feeling ten foot tall and looking down from above my head into the mundane reality below. I was still celibate, but had so much sexual energy I masturbated daily to release the pressure. My conversion of sexual energy into blissful subtle energy must have been unbalanced, as it eventually led to a weakening of my physical body. This subsequently led to my shift to Daoist inner sexual alchemy practices.

I was told that I was practicing the traditional ancient science of Tantra, but later investigations by myself and others into Yogi Bhajan raised serious questions as to whether his methods were “self-invented” from a hodgepodge he had collected while formerly a customs official in Delhi. Bhajan had no identifiable guru, no specific Tantric lineage or school, and had mixed his yogic methods with a curious blend of religious worship of Sikhism. I went to the Punjab state in India, and widespread inquiries produced no one who had ever heard of any Sikh Tantrics there. This is not to judge Bhajan’s methods as ineffective, but simply to note the pattern of self-invented Tantrics coming to the West to seek a following. One of his innovations was to line up male yogis and female yoginis facing each other in long rows, up to a hundred people in length. They would stare into their opposite sexed partner’s eyes while doing rapid breath of fire in different asanas, building up a tremendous sexual energy field that would shift into a higher octave of shared collective bliss.

Bhajan offered little real training on sexual energy management, other than the advice to limit sex to once a month with a married partner. The only specific technique for men was to sit with their perineum over the heel (mulabanda), to block the upward flow of sexual feeling from going out the penis. Yet his ashrams, with serene white-turbaned and long-bearded Western yogis, were filled behind the scenes with frequent sexual affairs between adepts who could not follow their guru’s admonitions. One of Bhajan’s inner circle at the time revealed to me the existence of lawsuits against Bhajan (who was married) by female followers for sexual abuse, and told of a coterie of sexual favorites and “deviant” sexual practices in his inner Tantric circle.

A different yogi, also a leader in 3HO, later left to become a Daoist student of Mantak Chia, from whom he learned the Microcosmic Orbit meditation, a method of circulating energy up the spine and down the front channels of the body. This radically differed from kundalini yoga in suggesting the subtle energy circulated in endless loops that ultimately spiraled into the center of one’s core consciousness, instead of a linear flow from lower chakra to upper chakra to union with an absolute self somewhere above the head. The Orbit is also the key Daoist channel for circulating sexual energy. Before he left Bhajan’s organization, Bhajan’s lieutenant introduced the Microcosmic Orbit meditation into the White Tantric practice. It later became standard practice to help ground the many spacy yogis, who, like myself, were literally floating out of their bodies. America had become an accelerated microcosm of the Orient, where different Tantric and Daoist schools traded methods over the centuries along the Silk Road trade routes.

Bhajan’s pattern of appearing sexually conservative in public while engaging in sexual practices in private was common in other Tantric gurus in the 1980’s, most famously Swami Rama of the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, Pennsylvania and Swami Muktananda at his Siddhi Yogi ashram in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Both were discovered to be giving “Tantric initiations” to dozens of young female devotees in the guru’s private boudoir. There is a tradition in Indian Tantra of gurus initiating with a drop of semen or saliva, or performing ceremonial sexual rites where sexual union with a low caste or untouchable virgin female is used by male adepts to enter a divine state of union (White, 1996).

But the Tantric sex scene in America more closely resembled the groupie music and movie star scene. The young girls who were “gifted” with the guru’s initiating lingam (penis) reported that it was quick sex, and felt like a man masturbating inside them, with no deep ceremonial, emotional, or spiritual connection made. There was no body-specific training in the Siddha Yoga program at that time in transmuting sexual energy into spiritual energy, other than what occurred naturally through devotional chanting. All the acharyas (novitiates) and Western swamis had to take strict vows of celibacy. Swami Rama’s followers were particularly galled by his insistence that male and female yoga students were not allowed to hold hands, under penalty of being expelled from the ashram.

Was this seemingly compulsive sexual behavior by enlightened masters a kind of crazy wisdom, an intentionally paradoxical Tantric behavior that we morality-bound Westerners could not understand, or was there something else going on here? Thousands of followers would testify to the spiritual powers of these men. For me, it raised a new question: is it possible to be spiritually enlightened, and at the same time be an emotional and sexual midget? Over time, my later study of Daoist subtle body development suggested this was likely the case. Muktananda and Rama were trained by Tantrics that emphasized austerities, including abstention from sex, while driving all energy into the head to nourish the spiritual body. They likely had no previous sexual experience in India.

These head centered (third eye and crown) practices are typical of “fire” school methods for achieving rapid enlightenment, which often suppress physical body urges to achieve this expanded head-enlightened state. These repressed sexual urges can later suddenly emerge powerfully, amplified by the active fire energy of the adept’s spiritual body seeking to ground itself in the sexual waters of the earth plane/physical body. The trigger activating this release could have been the shift from the sexually repressive culture of India to the free-sex culture of New York. The unconscious desire of the young female devotees to have sex with their guru may also have been a factor; to Rama and Muktananda’s opened subtle vision these sexual desires may have been perceived consciously, and they may have been simply unable to resist an opportunity to seek balance for their excess spiritual fire.

A Tantric might argue these events were simply life offering a new opportunity for exploration by all concerned, to be viewed without any moral judgement. But was there a patriarchal blindness and excess male-fire insensitivity to the very goddess Shakti force which Tantrics universally claim to worship? Swami Rama escaped to India for two years at the height of his scandal to let things cool off. When he returned, I had the opportunity to personally ask him, what is the purpose of sexuality in spiritual evolution? His answer was evasive, mentioning that some cultures allowed multiple wives, implying sexual-spiritual development was completely culture-determined rather than obeying some cosmic law.
Muktananda was brought to the West in 1971 by his student Albert Rudolph, a Brooklyn Jew, former nightclub bouncer and later an art dealer. Muktananda inducted Rudi into his religious order, and so Swami Rudrananda (“Rudi” to his followers) donned traditional swami saffron robes. But Rudi didn’t follow traditional swami rules. Rudi was open about his Tantric self-inventedness, and was open about his sleeping with both male and female followers to intensify their spiritual awakening. His honesty about this was refreshing and shocking, exemplified by his book titlle, Spiritual Cannibalism. I saw from a video of Rudi that he had excess kundalini, causing his head to whip back and forth ferociously. Rudi’s creative re-invention of an American Tantra was cut short by a 1973 plane crash. He trained a new generation of American Tantrics who spread his experimental approach to Tantrism, often blending it with Tibetan Tantric and later Daoist alchemical teachings.

Two of Rudi’s top students, John Mann and Lar Short, exchanged teachings with me and my first Daoist teacher Mantak Chia in the mid 80’s when Chia rented Rudi’s Big Indian ashram in the New York Catskills. Some of that ended up in The Body of Light (1988), Mann and Short’s comparison of the subtle bodies in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions. Chia learned from them the Tibetan Powa technique of shooting one’s essence (bindu) out of the physical body before death, which he borrowed and integrated into his Daoist teachings. This ejected essence is, in my view, the sexual-spiritual substance that allows one to create a new incarnation, a specialty in the Tibetan tradition. While editing the Daoist chapter in The Body of Light I took of number of their Tantric initiations, and tried Rudi’s experimental method of making sexual love with any astral beings met while travelling in the subtle planes. I later rejected this (and the powa practice) as unnecessary and potentially distracting to the process of Daoist inner sexual alchemy. The low astral plane is filled with half-beings of low vibration and hidden agendas. In Daoist alchemy one is kept busy sexually coupling sun, moon, planet and star energies of higher frequencies.

One discovery that emerged from our sharing of Daoist, Tantric, and Bon Dzogchen teachings that had been absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism was the clear similarity of Daoist alchemy subtle body coupling using pearls and channels to the completion stage annutarayoga Tantric practices with its colored male and female drops and winds. Detailed in Geshe Gyatso’s Clear Light of Bliss (1982), these vajrayoga practices emphasize the value of having a physical sexual consort to speed the opening of the heart needed for highest attainment and interpenetrating mind awareness.

John Mann later developed an innovative two person Tantric meditation method called Divine Androgyny, which I consider a quintessential Tantric sexual coupling of higher subtle bodies. A male and female adept sit on chairs facing one another and do nothing except stare in each other’s eyes and surrender to whatever flows through. This creates a build up in the sexually polarized subtle energy field between them which eventually begins to pulsate. If the adepts are highly skilled and attuned, the pulsating field becomes quite intense, tangible to anyone sitting in between, and can result in deep healing for all involved in the process. (Mann, 2000)

In the late 70’s and early 80’s I also took a series of Tibetan Tantric initiations from two lineage heads, the Karmapa and Dalai Lama. I never pursued these practices in depth, as I did not feel drawn to their complex mandalas of visualized deities and their guru worship. But friends who studied Tibetan Buddhist Tantrism reported they kept their sexual practices very secret from Westerners.

A Western female acquaintance went on a three-year Buddhist retreat, believing she would practice various austerities. She afterwards reported the retreat was a “veritable Peyton Place,” with lusty Lamas besieging her to become a consort and thus speed their path to enlightenment. I heard reliable reports of another lama who insisted all the western women on retreat become his consort. Two of the four major Tibetan sects require celibacy, but all four teach methods for sublimating sexual energy into subtle bodies, projected as various deities. Skill in this kind of astral projection creates the possibility of “astral sex affairs” that occur mostly in dream time or meditative states.

A different female friend, involved in helping Tibetan teachers, confided to me she was under “astral rape” attack for months by a Tibetan Tantric practitioner who became obsessed with her as his consort after she terminated a brief sexual affair. I shared with her some Daoist methods for defining the boundaries of one’s subtle bodies, which seemed to help. Sexual intercourse opens subtle body connections that can be extremely difficult to dissolve. Men become obsessed with pornography for the same reason: they are having astral sex with their own projected fantasy in the low astral plane, the subtle body closest to the physical.

Any divorced or separated couple also knows too well how difficult it is to cut the bonds of sexual attachment, especially in cases of first true love. This is often because their sexual energy bodies have been “glued” together in the low astral plane. My own experience is that this can go beyond a strong subtle body sexual relationship. It may involve the exchange of what the Daoists call the jingshen, the vital organ spirits that animate the personal body. It is difficult to separate from someone else because a part of their consciousness is actually living inside your body, and vice versa. Similar situation may be found in certain deep child-parent relationships, which may be intensified by an unspoken sexual polarity. This is a vast topic, beyond the scope of this paper, but it does imply a spontaneous and high level of subtle body sex that is usually unconsciously willed.

California Tantra

One of Rudi’s New York students was Franklin Jones (b. 1939), who left Rudi to try Scientology for a year before starting his own movement. Jones moved to California and became the self-proclaimed God-man and World Teacher Da Free John (later changed to numerous other names). It appeared Da Free John had such an extreme case of rising kundalini heat that it permanently burned off his hair. Jones-Free John is clearly a case of second generation Western self-invented Tantrism, a showman who created a Wizard of Oz mystique by teaching from behind panels, too sacred to be viewed by his followers. He later added a modern twist. He lived for a long time on an island in Fiji, surrounded by multiple wives and “gopis” (female devotees-lovers), and daily instructs his followers in a California ashram in the most minute aspects of their lives by computer email. Jones may be another Tantric case of excess fire seeking female sexual water to cool and ground itself.

The California Tantra scene in the 1980’s and 90’s was blossoming with its own flavor, and students (mostly of Rajneesh) sprang up teaching Tantric workshops. These typically were taught in the nude, and often encouraged participants to sexually partner with a stranger, with instructions to first tune into them by breathing together and holding one’s hand over their partner’s heart. This extremely simplified and re-invented Tantric sex ritual for Westerners may have cemented the media definition of Tantra as being primarily a practice of spiritualized sexual intercourse, which of course it never was in India. Even the famed Tantric ritual of the “Five M’s” (pancha makara) that culminated with coitus (maithuna) was proceeded by mantric initiation and ordinarily required lengthy prior subtle body training (Tigunait, 1999). But Californians wanted both quick sex and quick enlightenment, the latter being one promise of Tantra, and so market demand attracted the teacher supply to satisfy it.

This public sexual intercourse in a group workshop setting seems to be an enduring part of the Western reinvention of Tantra. It fits a general Tantric pattern of defying public mores for the purpose of shocking someone into enlightenment, but I put it more into the category of psycho-therapeutic or medical sexual therapy than subtle body practice. Participants are usually guided to take the sexual energy up the chakras in the spine, but may have little or no prior training in meditation or in stabilizing internal states of consciousness with mantra, yantra, internally created alchemical symbols or visualizations, or mudras, the hallmarks of traditional Hindu Tantrism. This may be because Rajneesh, the self-invented Tantric guru of many of them, did not himself have lineage training in these methods. Rajneesh also did not believe mantra was suitable for Westerners, as he felt it produced a soporific state of self-hypnosis in which it was difficult to be fully present in the body.

In 1997 I met Jwala, a women who had been one of the first teachers on the California Tantra scene in 1980. Her practice of Tantric initiation involved gently masturbating men while guiding them to move their sexual energy up the chakras to their heart and head, and counseling them on sexual issues. She confirmed my perception of California Tantrism being more focused on physical sexuality as therapy, exemplified by her own professed challenge to spiritual progress in terms of building a stable subtle body awareness. I knew by then that if there is excessive focus on physical sexuality, the subtle body energy is pulled down and eventually dispersed.

This limitation of focusing excessively on physical sex may prove to be the force that moves California style Tantrism towards subtle body sexual cultivation practices. In 2000 I taught the Daoist inner sexual alchemy practices of Lesser Water and Fire in Switzerland. One of my students was the director of a Tantric Institute in Germany that was using Rajneesh inspired methods taught by Margo Anand, whose teachings and first book The Art of Ecstasy, was also influential amongst California Tantrics. (This book borrowed the Inner Smile technique from the books I had written with Chia, as well as material from Nik Douglas’ Sexual Secrets, both without acknowledgement, which we both gracefully accepted at the time as her hidden fear of not having a tradition behind her). At the end of the retreat, this student, a male, broke down in tears. “I have been teaching and helping so many people with their sexuality”, he said. “But I have been personally at a dead end, I could not get beyond the boundary of my physical maleness and the limitations of physical sex. I was feeling very frustrated. But now I have a very great gift from you and from the Dao, the subtle love-making between my inner male and female souls. Now I have a way to move forward!”

Kriya Yoga: Tantra and Celibacy

In 1983, two years after I had shifted my main practice from White Tantric Yoga to Daoist internal alchemy, I stumbled onto Kriya Yoga, a Tantric method taught by Swami Paramhamsa Hariharananda Giri (“Baba” to his followers). His Kriya Yoga was definitely not self-invented, but strictly followed the initiations he had received in India from Sri Yukteswar and from his student, Paramhamsa Yogananda, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in the USA the 1920’s. Baba was later made President of Sri Yukteswar’s ashram in Puri, India, and took higher level kriya initiations from other yogis in a lineage extending back to its founder Lahiri Mahasay. Lahiri, a railroad engineer with five children, claims an immortal being named Babaji appeared to him in 1862 and taught him six kriyas (Sanskrit root kri, to act, ya, divine soul). These kriyas offered a structured internal map of subtle body development, through six stages of samadhi. To objectively explore these practices, I eventually discontinued my Daoist internal alchemy practices for a few years.

Kriya Yoga is Tantric in its divinization of the body. In the first kriya, prana is circulated up and down the spine. In the second kriyas, internal seed (bij) mantras are silently chanted to infuse the spinal pathway and the multi-petalled lotuses visualized in the chakras and fifty body parts. Then the 50 letter-sounds of the sanskrit alphabet are spiralled around the cranium, activating the primordial sound which is gradually captured into the center of the cranial void space in higher kriyas. The higher kriyas drop all use of mantra as one enters the higher void spaces. Like Rajneesh, Hariharananda completely eschews all use of chanted mantra, which he considers an intermediate level of practice: “if you are busy shouting to your Mother, how can you hear God speak to you?” he would ask. In Kriya Yoga there is a typically Tantric progressive internalization of the cosmos within the body, which evolves into the experience of one’s inner soul focusing on the subtle current of sound, light, and vibration/heat in the central channel (sushumna). Baba’s private deity is Kali, the paramount Tantric goddess, who he claims has intervened to allow him an extremely long life (age 96 at this writing in 2002). He was 75 when I first met him, a few years after he arrived in the West.

Kriya Yoga is a interesting case. It was originally designed for householders, who could have sex and children, eat meat, and meditate at home to achieve enlightenment. The original technique was very Tantric in allowing one to indulge these worldly pleasures, but one had to watch from the soul level as one indulged. Lahiri insisted his students get married, and his subtle body teachings were quite sexually explicit: “I beheld the Red Lingam (“penis”) of Shiva inside of me; it contained the energy of the Sun. Then I came up to the third eye, and entered the Maha Yoni (“Great Vagina”). (Satyeswarananda, 1988) But the lineage was virtually captured and shifted into the monastic Giri (“mountain”) order of swamis who were forbidden from having sex, watching theatre, eating meat or any food cooked by a non-initiate. An American student of Baba’s visiting Benares, India ran into the grandson of Lahiri Mahasay, who complained bitterly that Kriya Yoga had been hijacked by Hindu monks.

Yogananda did not think Westerners were prepared for Kriya’s shakti power, and so only taught the first kriya to his followers, a method of circulating prana up and down the spine without mantras. Nonetheless, the SRF-simplified Kriya Yoga has spawned many splinter schools of American swamis claiming lineage and has achieved widespread acceptance in the West. Meanwhile, the SRF-promoted facade of Yogananda’s yogic purity as a celibate is beginning to crumble under various challenges. I had a student whose father claimed to have been in Yogananda’s inner circle, which he reported included sexual affairs. A man closely resembling Yogananda in appearance filed a lawsuit to examine genetic tests by SRF to determine if Yogananda was his father. SRF devotees and relatives claim the test results were negative. Hariharananda may eventually prove to be one of the few cases of complete sexual abstinence amongst Tantrics who have come to the West. He claims it was only when he gave up all sexual desire that he achieved enlightenment.

I found Hariharananda to be a fountain of illumination and wisdom, a Brahman with a tiger’s mind who could recite the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanisads, yet who also radiated a heart that was lovingly pure and had a child-like innocence. It was impossible not to love him. After meditating for decades, at the age fifty Baba attained nirvakalpa samadhi , the sixth kriya and highest level of enlightenment possible. He is famous for his yogic power to stop both his breath and heartbeat for extended periods while in samadhi. Since then, for the last forty-five years, he has been revered as a fully realized “God man” in India. It is not my place to judge anyone’s level of spiritual attainment, but I did have the expectation was that such an evolved being would at least be sex-neutral, if not sex-positive in his attitude.
I instead discovered he was both female-negative and sex-negative, raising the same question again: was sex and subtle body training incompatible? Or was cultural conditioning at work? Working for some years in close personal contact with Baba while editing his Bhagavad Gita in the Light of Kriya Yoga (I989), I noticed how his aversion to women also manifested itself as subtle attraction to and need for women to be around him. Privately he expressed anti-body sentiments (“from the senses down, the body is the domain of the devil”), and made anti-female comments (“if you marry a woman, they will constantly lure you to bed and weaken your power to meditate”). He often publicly recounted a favorite story of how once a foreign woman at his ashram in India had tried to seduce him. She crawled on top of him naked, but his steely control was such that neither his mind nor his penis was aroused.

Hariharananda’s top-heavy, male-fire crown chakra consciousness seemed to regularly attract yogic successors-to-be who would act out his suppressed lower desires, involving themselves in money scandals and love affairs that invariably resulted in their dismissal. When I last saw him in 1999, he was having severe back pain. I read his pulses using Chinese diagnostic methods, and observed a kidney deficiency, a weakness in his water element. This was likely due to his practicing Fire methods his entire life. The thing that seemed to help his back pain was having teams of young female devotees massage his body, reminding me of the celibate Mahatma Gandhi sleeping beside two young teen girls to rejuvenate himself. The sexual energy Baba denied himself directly his entire life he could only allow himself to receive indirectly through female touch.

There may be other systems of Kriya Yoga with different attitudes about sex. The editors of Tantra Magazine in the 1980’s were Kriya Yoga practitioners of a different Babaji lineage (Herakan Baba, an immortal whose followers claim he materialized in a body in India in the 1970’s) and the magazine was definitely sex-positive. But it appeared their mix of Kriya and Tantra was not by lineage training but rather an integration of their own choice, a part of the trend amongst Westerners to reshape Tantric methods to fit their own sexual and spiritual needs.
recount the details of my experience with Hariharananda to highlight a recurring split amongst some Tantrics (and historically, Daoists) between sexual and subtle body development. It is ok for their lay followers to have sex or get married, but the elite cadre of acharyas and swamis who attain subtle body enlightenment need to be celibate. The equation of celibacy and anti-sexual attitudes with enlightenment led me to question whether Hariharananda’s Fire path paradigm of nirvikalpa samadhi as enlightenment was complete. Despite his worshipping Kali and using Tantric meditation methods to divinize the body, underneath he seemed to reflect a widespread patriarchal based Indian spirituality that feared the sexual power of women, and perhaps deep beneath that, feared an earth centered consciousness. My desire to integrate my sexual and earth nature fully was a key factor in my resuming my Daoist Water and Fire inner alchemy practices.

Daoist Sexual Cultivation in the West

In 1981 I became one of the first Westerners to study with Mantak Chia. He was a thirty-six year old Chinese married man working as a healer in New York’s Chinatown. He left Thailand in 1976, chased out by Thai Western style medical doctors threatened by his Bangkok center offering low-cost healing. For a few pennies people sat on a large platform, charged with a negative ion current strong enough to detoxify chronic ailments. Chia’s unorthodox approach to life served him well in the West, where he wore multiple hats as healer, martial artist, and inner alchemist. He was eager to bridge the gap between modern science and ancient Daoist methods. He was equally comfortable with medical and bedroom sexual practices (fangzhong) and the subtle body coupling employed in internal alchemy (neidangong). Most important, he was willing to openly share his knowledge with Westerners. Other books have been published in the West on Daoist medical sexology (J. Chang 1977, S. Chang 1986, Heng 1997), but they lack deep understanding of Daoist alchemy or subtle body development.

Chia had studied in the mountains behind Hong Kong with One Cloud, a Daoist hermit, who transmitted to him Seven Formulas for Immortality. These alchemical meditations offered a subtle body map of spiritual development: one stage of clearing physical blockages and opening the channels of the energy body, followed by three stages of enlightenment and three stages of immortality. It embraced a paradigm of Water and Fire (kan and li), a continuous yin-yang, female-male, earth-heaven exchange of energies through a well-defined network of physical and subtle energy body channels. But it required first harnessing one’s sexual energy as the raw fuel to be refined by spiritual practice. Sexual attraction was a very powerful aspect of one’s worldly destiny (ming). It had to be cultivated and refined before one could restore one’s original nature (xing). Sexual practice with a partner strengthened the yin-yang flow of qi, and thus rejuvenated the physical body. But as I explored deeper into One Cloud’s alchemy formulas, I found that the higher sexual practice was dual cultivation of xing and ming, essentially the sexual coupling of the spiritual and earthly dimensions of oneself.

Apart from his difficulty translating obscure alchemy terms, Chia’s teachings on Daoist alchemy and sexual energy cultivation had no complex layers of Chinese religious deities to peel off, no mantras in a foreign language, and did not require long waits by students humbly prostrated at the foot of a master. Chia broke with Chinese traditions of personal initiation and secrecy, and presented instead the beginnings of a spiritual science, accessible to Westerners, based on principles of resonance between cosmic forces of Nature and the human body, mapped and refined by generations of Daoists. The alchemy formulas appear to date back one thousand years to the tenth century teachings of the semi-legendary Daoist Immortal Lu Dong Bin.

Rather than employing mantra to vibrate the subtle bodies as in Tantra, Chia used a combination of physical qigong movement, natural healing sounds, and transformation obtained by alchemical coupling of polarized energies inside three subtle bodies defined by jing-qi-shen (sexual essence-subtle breath-spirit). These fire and water couplings occur within five-fold colored psychic spheres and eight deep “extraordinary” channels that form the infrastructure of one’s energy body. This energy body is mapped out within an internal mandala of spinning bagua (eight -sided shapes), most likely derived from the Yijing (I Ching).

Daoist alchemy presents classical yin-yang theory as the cosmic pulsation of polarized positive-negative energy around a pole (chungmai) of neutral or Original Energy (yuanqi) that extends between Early Heaven (xiantian) and Later Heaven(houtian), or earth. The “ten thousand things” were procreated by the copulation of Heaven and Earth, and yin-yang is their eternal multi-orgasmic movement. The human sexual orgasm is an exquisite echo of that pulsation, and internal alchemy is the process of interiorizing within the physical body the cosmic subtle body love-making. By getting one’s human qi – especially sexual energy (jingqi) – to flow in rhythm and harmony with the hidden cycles of Nature, one’s personal energy gates open to the cosmic flow of inner light and spiritual powers (de) of the Way (Dao).

Nurturing healthy, non-depleting physical sexual orgasm is just the beginning level of Daoist cultivation practice. One Cloud’s internal alchemy formulas created increasingly powerful subtle body orgasm. The sexual nature of these subtle body processes was quite explicit. The key practice in the second alchemy formula (Lesser Enlightenment of Water and Fire) is entitled “Self-intercourse”. It requires the adept to revert to the androgynous state of his Early Heaven self. The adept gathers the five jingshen (deep body intelligences/spirits, or vital organ “gods”) into two primal yin (inner female) and yang (inner male) forces that copulate in the lower dantian. This fire-water copulation births an immortal embryo, made of androgynous Early Heaven yuan qi that coagulates within the adept’s physical body. This embryo is slowly birthed up the core channel, nourished by the copulation of natural sexually polarized geomantic forces within the earth below, planetary and stellar forces in heaven above. In the sixth formula this reaches a crescendo as the full-out sexual Congress of Heaven and Earth, a kind of multii-dimensional sexual coupling of their virtues. All of these copulations gradually restore the yuanjing, the pre-natal and pre-sexual substance of the adept’s original nature (xing).

Chia told me he originally sought out Daoist medical and bedroom sexual practices because a Chinese doctor read his pulses and told him at age 21 that his kidneys were weak and that he would die very young. This motivated Chia to hunt down various Chinese teachers of Daoist sexology, and pay them large sums of money to get their secrets. In Chinese medicine, “the kidneys” is a broad energetic sphere that includes the sexual organs, kidneys, bladder and their meridians, and the breasts in women. The kidney spirit or intelligence is said to regulate the endocrine glands, blood, bone marrow, and sexual essence (jing), all essential to long life.

Jing, the subtle substance holding the form of one’s body, is the key ingredient to apprehending the function of sexuality in this Daoist cosmology. Jing is perhaps best understood in Western terms as prime matter. Jing is the raw fuel that drives the pulsating rhythm of the body’s moment-to-moment cellular division and reproduction of itself. In modern terms, it generates stem cells, genes, and the sexual energy of the glands, but is not sexual energy itself.
The jing is governed in humans by the kidney water spirit, called the zhi, literally the “will” to be in bodily form, to survive, to seek pleasure, and to fulfil a specific destiny while in a body. It is the jing that in the human animal is radiating polarized waves of male or female sexed energy we label charisma or magnetic power. In short, jing is the source of sexual desire and the feeling substance of earthiness. Without jing, spirit (shen) would not be able to embody its virtues or have direct sensory experience of physicality. If one is feeling “spiritual bliss”, the bliss part is vibrating jing. Jing is also the main source of vexation for spiritual seekers who ignore it or run from their sexual impulses in order to chase after the other end of the spectrum of consciousness, the shen or spirit body, which spreads out as an infinite sea of pure awareness. This also defines the key difference between centering a meditation in the Fire-head-shen or Water-belly-jing cauldrons within the body.

One of the main ways Chia rebuilt his kidney jing was a method of semen retention and recirculation of sexual energy (jingqi) in the Microcosmic Orbit (xiao zhoutian). Recent scholarship suggests the Orbit began as a sexual practice to rejuvenate the brain (huanjing bunaeo) two thousand years ago and evolved to become a spiritual practice as the qi was observed to spiral inside the body. (Pregadio, 2000, 427). Skill in semen retention is essential to the successful male practice of One Cloud’s internal alchemy. Other systems of neidangong may require celibacy in the hope that it will result in the indirect or spontaneous redirection of sexual energy to the subtle bodies. But this is a hit or miss proposition, and can result instead in sexual repression. Non-celibacy requires a deliberate method of guaranteeing the sexual energy is recycled in the Orbit, which is later refined and taken up the central subtle body channel.
How does it work? At a moment prior to ejaculation (whether in coitus with a woman or self-pleasuring), the orgasmically vibrating seminal qi is introjected by the man up his spinal yang fire channel (dumai, Governor Vessel) to refresh the brain and its master glands, the pituitary and pineal. If in coitus, the male draws up his partner’s female sexual essence (jingqi) as well, and offers his to her. When the brain is full of the rejuvenating sexual essence, it overflows down the yin front water channel (renmo, Conception Vessel) which clears and purifies qi flowing into yin meridians, heart, navel and sexual organs. The physical method can be done with a partner (dual cultivation) or without a partner (single cultivation), and is practiced using varying levels of non-aroused (cool) or aroused (hot) sexual energy.

Ejaculation is Physical, Orgasm is Pulsing Chi

One goal of the medical sexual practice is to shift from a limited “genital orgasm” to a pleasurable and healing “whole body orgasm”. Slowing or stopping “ejaculation” doesn’t prevent a man from having “orgasm” or being “multi-orgasmic”. Ejaculation is physical, orgasm is chi pulsating. One should not get obsessed with “stopping” ejaculation, but focus rather on opening up the chi channels and recycling sexual energy to one’s partner until you finally ejaculate. Then this physical ejaculation does not cause major loss of jing, as the essence is already extracted. Semen retention also slows down the man’s fiery nature to stay in closer harmony with the woman’s slower cycle of arousal.
Another key in “sexual kung-fu” is understanding the relation between the fire element in the heart and the water element in the kidneys. These fire and water essences stimulate each other and keep the other in check. By keeping proper exchange between them, one enters a steady state that opens the door to subtle body love-making. By simply keeping an open heart you protect against blind lust, which ultimately injures the kidneys because it can never be satisfied by physical sex alone. All aloneness at core is the heart spirit (shen) seeking the love, sensual touch and sexual stimulation of the kidney shen, and the deeply embodied kidney spirit seeking the heart’s virtue of unconditional acceptance and love.

This kind of internal biological psycho-dynamics is currently opening for Western students the field of Daoist depth psychology. It promises to deepen the Freudian and Jungian approaches with a clearly defined network of energy channels and psychic spheres linking the physical and the spiritual realms.

Changing the Western Sexual Paradigm

I had read of semen retention being practiced by Tantric yogis, but had assumed that I would have to sit in a Himalayan cave for twenty-five years and attain enlightenment before mastering it. Chia presented the reverse paradigm: one had to gain some mastery of semen retention (or the equivalent female practice, menstrual blood-ovary retention) before one could master the subtle body practices. Equally important, semen retention – an inner celibacy of one’s spirit (shen) attaining unity with one’s seed essence (jing) – freed the male adept from enforced outer celibacy. Practitioners could have their cake (physical sexual pleasure) and eat it too, as long as they maintained this inner unity of body essence and spirit.

The accessibility of this Daoist sexual practice to the average Western male offered them a radical and totally new approach to sexuality. It also offered a revolutionary and healthy way to alleviate male horniness. The learning context presented by Mantak Chia and his trained

Western instructors made it easy for Western students to accept. The practices were taught in an open and accepting atmosphere, with men and women studying each other’s “esoteric biology” in a shared and fun space. After the sexual repression I had witnessed in so many Indian teachers, I was shocked and pleased by Mantak Chia’s innocent directness about sexual matters.

Would these sexual teachings promote a culture of promiscuity amongst the Westerners who learned them? Chia and I delayed publication of our co-authored book on Daoist sex for nearly a year while pondering this question and its ethical ramifications. Looking back over the twenty one years that I have known Mantak Chia, I never heard a single accusation of his sexual involvement with students. Certainly there was a degree of open experimentation between male and female students attracted to one another. But there was a strong caution placed against promiscuous and indiscriminate absorption of another’s sexual energy (sexual vampirism), as sexual exchange was a double edged sword in which you also absorbed your partner’s “psychic garbage”. This meant sexual relations demanded deep transformational effort and great selectivity in choosing partners. It was the opposite approach of the Rajneesh inspired California Tantra of having sex with a stranger at a weekend workshop.

Shortly after meeting Chia, I described my White Tantric Kundalini Yoga practice to him. He diagnosed it as “heating the room” – I was driving all my sexual fire up the spine and out the crown, where it dispersed into the room. As soon as I learned to recirculate my rising kundalini energy down my chest through the front Orbit channel and began practicing semen retention, I quickly grew physically stronger and more grounded spiritually. Most Tantrics work only with the spinal fire path and not the water path in the front.

I gradually dropped my intense Kundalini Yoga sadhana as the Daoist methods grew on me. The lure of a more effortless practice (wu wei) attuned to nature, the grounding embrace of the feminine through qigong and in the Water and Fire subtle body practices, and a poetic yet scientific approach to spiritual development were the attractions. I was also learning new practices focused on circulating sexual energy in ways I never dreamed possible – through the bone marrow, or using it to give substance to an inner “pearl”, which was circulated through the core channels and eventually into subtle body dimensions. Using the sexual essence as the catalyst to crystallize my subtle bodies in the lower dantian solved the problem I’d observed with most head-centered practices, that the “fire” – the clarity of meditative bliss – would gradually disperse in the chaos of modern life.

Later I would end up using the Orbit and other Daoist methods to heal many cases of “kundalini psychosis” – generally energy running up the wrong channel or stuck in the head. The condition is usually easy to correct if the person has not been heavily drugged by psychiatrists who do not understand the energy body. These cases were often Western Tantrics who believed, as I once did, that their energy flow was supposed to move only up the spine in a linear, one-way direction from lower to upper chakra. The Daoist model was that the energy was always moving in spirals, cycles, and orbits; the Orbit was a kind of unified chakra. Any energy movement up had to be balanced by a movement down, until one finally arrived at the still point of no movement at the intersecting center of the physical and subtle body, called the lower dantian (“field of the elixir”). This is the doorway to pre-natal jing, from which all embodiment effortlessly emanates. But to shift my spiritual focus from the third eye to my navel was extremely challenging, as my Tantric Fire teachers had always considered this a lower energy center to be swiftly left behind. It took me a while to understand that chakras are centers of post-natal energy, and are not operating at the pre-natal and inner dimensional depth as the dantian.

This shift in my practice led to my writing collaboration with Chia, which over time produced seven books on qigong and neigong (“inner skill”). Chia taught me the techniques he knew, and I would test them out on myself before writing about them, often under his name. Our second book, Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy (Aurora Press, 1984) catapulted him to fame, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The book became a key force in a larger paradigm shift in Western culture, begun earlier by an influx of Tantric ideas, that sexual and spiritual development were inseparable.

Why was a book on semen retention, radically antithetical to Western sexual values and even to Rajneesh-New Age Tantra style, so successful? One, it linked biological sex-as-natural-science to a kind of spiritual science, a comfortable fit for Western minds. This helped remove guilt promoted by Judeo-Christian religious beliefs separating sex and spirit and labeling sex as sinful. Two, the book was written in my sophisticated Western literary voice, infused with insights from my years of Tantric practice, posing as Mantak Chia’s voice, the Daoist transmitting his oral tradition. (This was such an effective literary device for entraining readers that it created confusion among readers who met Chia. Hearing his “Chinese English” created difficulty believing he was the author). Three, there was no missionary pressure on the reader to leave one’s chosen path and join a Daoist religion. The sexual and energetic teachings were put out as the “energetic open architecture” of the Dao, from which one could take what one needed, whether for sexual health or spiritual health.

Chia and I were frankly surprised at the time by the diversity of response, and in retrospect, at the book’s contribution to the globalization of emerging new spiritual attitudes towards sexuality. We received hundreds of letters from men following many other spiritual paths -Sufi, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish – thanking us for giving them a way to stay on their chosen path and embrace their sexuality instead of repressing it. For example, the well known Catholic mystic David Stendl-Rast wrote to say the book had been of immense practical help to him and he was recommending it widely to other Catholic priests to help them deal with their celibacy.

It was just as typical that a man with no spiritual background would show up at a “Healing Love” workshop because “I just met a girl and thought this might help.” The sexual teachings became the hook that converted many such seekers with superficial external desires into serious students of Daoist internal cultivation. This book,Taoist Secrets of Love and its later sequels – Healing Love: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy (1986), The Multi-Orgasmic Man (1996), and The Multi-Orgasmic Couple (2000) – combined with a global network that grew to one thousand Healing Tao teachers in thirty countries certified to teach Daoist sexual and subtle body practices, became a major doorway for tens of thousands of Western spiritual seekers to enter on a path of the previously obscure Daoist alchemy formulas passed on by the hermit One Cloud. (Winn, 2001)

Daoist Female Sexual Practices in the West

Teaching Daoist female sexual practices to Western women who expected equality of the sexes and wanted to use these practices to improve their personal relationships presented a special challenge. Douglas Wile in his definitive Art of the Bedchamber (1992) surveyed the last twenty five hundred years of Chinese texts on sexuality, and noted a progressive decline in the treatment of women and a proportional increase in patriarchal type of sex manuals in which the yin essence of women was used by male adepts for their own spiritual progress. The Chinese women who use these practices today are mostly Daoist nuns stopping their menstrual cycle because they’ve made a lifetime commitment to childless, monastic meditation – not a motivating factor for most women in the West.

In 1983 at a Daoist retreat I met a potential female consort, Joyce Gayheart, shortly after I had conveniently decided to drop my four year experiment with celibacy, in order to test the practices I was writing about in Taoist Secrets of Love . She later became my wife and has remained my partner for the last nineteen years, offering us the opportunity to explore the full range of Daoist physical and subtle body sexual practices that require time and maturity to master. Joyce taught me directly about my own hidden yin nature. I now recognize every relationship as a transmission to one’s partner that the essence they are seeking is already hidden inside them as an inner male or inner female. In the early years we used Daoist methods to prolong physical love-making for many hours, interspersed with periods of meditation.
Our most powerful early experience together is interesting because it reversed my expectation that physical sex’s main spiritual use was to jump start our subtle body meditations. The opposite proved to be true – our subtle bodies jumped in and made love first. We had sat naked for a few minutes, facing each other in a cross legged meditation position to tune in. We were both suddenly overtaken by a powerful energy field with extremely intense and unusual vibrations. Not a word was spoken, as our mental, emotional, and speech faculties were completely suspended, but we later confirmed having an identical experience. One aspect of our consciousness began experiencing a very yang orgasm, expanding out of the bedroom faster than the speed of light, whizzing through galaxies, exploding supernovas, and then beyond. Another part of us was orgasmically imploding inward with opposite and equal force, grounding and concentrating inward this great intensity in our physical bodies. After a half hour in this wonderful sacred trance, the vibrational field subsided in intensity. We afterward made physical love as planned. It was pleasurable, but seemed anti-climactic, mostly a way to digest and ground the subtle body orgasm that had spontaneously enveloped us.

This permanently shifted the nature of our sexual relationship. Our subtle bodies would quickly attune and we found we could exchange deep sexual energy for hours, lying beside each other, naked or clothed, without any physical stimulation or intercourse. It was a direct exchange of sexually polarized subtle bodies. As our energy bodies mingled and coupled, we were infused with loving spiritual qualities. This led us to long periods of spontaneous abstention from physical intercourse that could last for many months, but with exquisitely sublime daily subtle body coitus. As our subtle bodies crystallized and became more “real”, it eventually graduated to astral sex – the ability to intentionally exchange orgasmic subtle energy at great distances. I attribute the longevity of our relationship to this subtle body love making, and it created a very solid foundation for making advances in our individual inner alchemy practices.

Joyce’s early experiences with the female sexual practices I anonymously appended to my third editing project, Healing Love: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy (1986), written under the name of Mantak and his wife Maneewan Chia. Maneewan in fact did not contribute any content to the book and appeared to me to be a non-practitioner. I was forced to resort to interviewing Joyce and dozens of Chia’s Western female students to evaluate the effectiveness of the Daoist female sexual practices because there was no pool of qualified Chinese Daoist female practitioners available.

The female sexual practices (Ovarian Breathing, Slaying the Red Dragon, and others) focus on initially reducing or later completely stopping loss of eggs and blood through menstruation, said to be the main source of women’s loss of jing. They progress to cultivation of ovarian essence, absorbing male sexual essence and redirection of the genital orgasm up the spine and or into the lower dantian and other vital organs until full body orgasm is achieved. Its medical applications include relief of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome and menopausal hot flashes, healing of infertility (“cold womb syndrome”) and a variety of glandular and sexual dysfunction including frigidity. But application of these practices to Western women was largely experimental, due to the lack of role models. Study groups were formed to compare results, resulting in deeper levels of female sexual practice. (Piontek, 2001) Several women did completely stop their menstrual cycle through voluntary internal practice. Most used it to simply lighten the amount and color of blood flow as they learned how to detoxify their blood. But most important was the paradigm shift of women gaining control of inner sexual forces and liberation of qi trapped in the uterus using Daoist subtle body methods.

Westernizing of Daoist Sexual Practices

Editorial collaboration by myself and other senior students with Mantak Chia resulted in the conversion of what had been a one-to-one “ear-whispered” transmission in China into an open and detailed curriculum of progressive courses that Westerners could pay for and take when they were ready. Transmission was given according to the level of the teacher and received according to the openness of the students in the course. Those who didn’t get the transmission simply took the course again. The integration of sexual energy, whether physical-sexual or subtle body sexual polarities, remained central to this curriculum.

This process meant the information on Daoist sexual practices presented to the public was filtered through Western editors and teachers. Daoist principles were honored as the cornerstone of every practice. But the content of the books and courses was inevitably re-shaped to suit modern Western psychological and sexual needs. This included acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual practitioners; the need to enhance the sexual and emotional quality of personal relationships, the relationship of sex to sports performance and artistic or career creativity. Supportive Western sexological research was marshaled showing the difference between the prostate spasm that causes ejaculation and the whole body physiology of orgasm. We presented Western scientific biological studies relevant to semen retention and longevity, showing how nematode worms, when genetically altered to stop sperm production, lived twice as long.
The Healing Tao organization was an educational structure created so Westerners would feel comfortable learning some times strange sexual practices that did not fit into the ordinary context of their culture. A good example is the Bone Marrow neigong practice of hanging weights of up to fifty pounds by a silk cord tied around the testicles and penis to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles and increase capacity to absorb sexual energy into the bone marrow. Or for women to exercise their vaginal muscles by inserting a jade egg into their vagina and move it about as an internal exercise. This evolved into an innovation for women drilling holes in their jade eggs in order to also hang two or three pound weights for greater isometric effect in strengthening the internal fascia. There was “tongue kung-fu” for strengthening that versatile sexual muscle, and methods for absorbing qi directly into the genitals from the sun. Sexual energy was cultivated (often by mixing it with qi drawn up the earth) to magnify one’s power of healing oneself and others, or to add power to martial arts skills like tai chi chuan.

Unlike Rajneesh’s promotion of Tantra in the West, there was a deliberate attempt to de-sensationalize these Daoist sexual practices. No nudity was allowed in workshops and teachers focused on them as primarily internal sexual-spiritual practices that could be practiced fully clothed, but also had optional application to the bedroom arts. California Tantrics criticized Healing Tao practitioners for their focus on semen retention, claiming it made men uptight and selfish about holding onto the seed instead of sharing it with women. This was sometimes true for men who did not integrate semen retention with other Daoist subtle body practices. I know of men who transferred old sexual patterns of guilt onto their inability to quickly master semen retention, instead of treating it as a gradual subtle body training process. In other cases, emotional struggle was created in their love relationships if men became too technique oriented. The transmission of these Daoist sexual practices to Westerners was complex, involving subtle body experiences, and not always successful.

Over the past two decades tens of thousands of Westerners learned these sexual practices with virtually no negative side effects. The few cases with side effects usually already had an extreme imbalance, they did not have a teacher, did not learn the other methods to open energy channels first, or used too much force. This is the problem inherent in people learning a powerful practice from a book. Yet periodically I was challenged by Chinese students who would repeat warnings from some mainland China qigong master that all sexual practices were very dangerous and should be avoided, as they can cause craziness and deep psychological disturbances.

Investigation led me to conclude that these warnings were valid – but mostly for mainland Chinese, whose culture of collective “face” suppresses individual emotional and sexual impulses in order to not disrupt the larger social harmony. The emphasis in China is on fitting in, not making trouble, but certainly not on personal self-improvement. Sexual kung-fu could unleash suppressed feelings in people that had no model for integrating them, and hence they “went crazy” from what are called “qi deviations” by qigong professionals. Western students occasionally reported similar problems, but these were almost always people who had bypassed all preliminary practices such as the Six Healing Sounds and Inner Smile.

Westerners are generally encouraged to explore their individual impulses. In my experience they are sexually and emotionally better equipped to practice Daoist sexual cultivation than the average Chinese person. This curious conclusion was confirmed by a top qigong teacher in Beijing, Dr. Cai Jun, one of the few Chinese with a Ph.D. in qigongology. Cai Jun told me it was easier for Western students to open their qi flow than for his Chinese students. He thought it was because the Chinese had fixed ideas about qi.

The addition of sexual force to any energetic practice is the equivalent of throwing gasoline on an open fire. The expansive force and multiplying nature of sexual energy needs a safe and clear energy channel to flow in, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This integration must occur both internally and in one’s outer relationships. This defined the Healing Tao’s multi-level Daoist training as a far more complicated and ambitious transformational process than other meditation traditions which did not consciously engage sexual energy and its accompanying emotional and mental challenges.

Modern awareness of psychoanalytic processes and growing public acceptance of sexual equality, combined with the Daoist energy body training of the Inner Smile, Six Healing Sounds, Microcosmic Orbit, and Fusion of the Five Elements from White Cloud’s first alchemy formula, allowed most Westerners the possibility of safely integrating the self-released sexual forces in a way suitable for their relationships and spiritual development. The methods taught by Chia have since been further developed by myself and others to deepen and simplify their psychological accessibility to westerners. In China this integration could also occur traditionally through close personal supervision by a qualified teacher. But since the cultural milieu is still largely Confucian, patriarchal, and sexually repressive, finding a suitable teacher and achieving a Daoist model of male-female harmony within oneself is difficult.
One very visible stage in the process of Westernizing Daoist practices was my founding in 1995 of Healing Tao University. This has a faculty of twenty Western and Chinese specialists teaching the full spectrum of Daoist Arts and Sciences, with the sexual cultivation and alchemy as the core curriculum. No similar institution exists today in China. Ironically, it is only in the West that Daoist sexual practices are being publicly taught. This sexual freedom is apparently irresistible to some young Chinese Daoists who migrate to the United States. I know of two Chinese priests, ordained in celibate Complete Perfection monasteries, who married here and are openly teaching practices of internal alchemy. In China they would be told that sex would spoil their practice, and asked to leave the order. In America, nobody cares or knows better. A New Yorker cartoon circa1995 sums up public perception: a fashionably dressed young lady walking down the street exclaims to her friend, “Wow! You’ve just got to try Taoist sex!”

Sex, Enlightenment, and Immortality

What is the functional relationship between ordinary human sexual desire and the more abstract realm of subtle bodies? The short answer is that physical sex nourishes post-natal qi, and subtle body sex nourishes pre-natal qi. Sexual intercourse can “cook” the male-female post-natal qi and speed its transformation back into the yuan qi from which they originated. The long answer is more complicated. Most people are stuck in deep struggle, paralyzed by the wide gap between their sexed animal body and their core non-polar original being. The experience of one’s androgynous (bi-sexed) subtle body offers a transitional stage in both Daoist and Tantric esoteric traditions. Nature lures humans to pursue subtle body refinement by tantalizing them with the sublime experience of spiritual orgasm.

The sexual identity issues are complicated by celibacy issues. When learning a new subtle body practice, it is often best to avoid sex as a distraction, but it may be resumed once the subtle body practice is stable. Or the reverse: many who learn Daoist alchemy “self-intercourse” find themselves spontaneously losing outer sexual desire, and needlessly panic. It returns, just like a woman regains her sexual appetite after being occupied by pregnancy. But subtle body sex may trigger deep fears around changing one’s physical sexual identity.

When one begins the Daoist subtle body practices of neidangong, the vertical axis of heaven-earth communication is activated. The coupling of yang jingshen (heart and liver spirits) with yin jingshen (kidney and lung spirits) causes one’s parental and ancestral jing to begin resonating with its “true earth”. This is the infinite pool of prenatal yuanqi flowing into the lower dantian through the Door of Life (mingmen), the point of moving qi between the kidneys. The attraction between inner male-inner female, water-fire, kidneys-heart, jing-shen, outer body passion – inner loving acceptance – all are polar forces of Destiny (ming) and Original Nature (xing) played out in a very dynamic theatre of meditative alchemy. But the bottom line is that the subtle body heaven-earth axis cannot fully open if the horizontal male-female axis has not first been made conscious and its impulses harmonized. Sexual balance precedes and is a prerequisite to stable experience of heaven-earth harmony. The opposite is also true; some practitioners rush this transition, and try to use the sexual force prematurely to open up the Heaven Earth axis without first balancing the male-female axis.

In the sexual cultivation process the human adept leads a double life. One life is physical, where the adept appears quite ordinary, and may have sexual relations as the desire to complete one’s essence spontaneously arises. Physical sex may benefit health and add longevity, but not make one physically immortal. The other life is inner, where parallel relationships are played out between one’s own polarized subtle bodies, and possibly with others. There are periods of intense subtle energy copulation and active love-making that birth new spiritual virtues and powers. These alternate with phases of deep stillness, gestation, and observation. The adept’s inner life follows invisible currents flowing between heaven and earth. The inner and outer sexual couplings intersect and nourish each other. The human heart holding the balance point between the inner and outer lives is what defines humans as one of the three treasures of the Dao, along with heaven and earth. This is the human path of spiritual immortality.

West as Cauldron for Dao and Tantra

The growth of Tantric and Daoist sexual cultivation practices in the West since 1974 initiated a period of remarkable experimentation, adaptation or outright re-invention inspired by ancient methods from Asia. Westerners radically reshaped these sexual practices to suit their own needs, a process likely to continue as they mature and study more deeply the subtle body maps of the Daoist and Tantric traditions. Since my explorations into Tantra in the 1980’s, new writers on its theory and practice have published (Svoboda 1993, Frawley 1994, Tigunait 1999, White (2000). Whether they fuel a new wave of Westerners exploring lineage Tantric subtle body and sexual cultivation remains to be seen. Sales of Rajneesh’s Tantra tapes and books, claimed to be in the millions sold, have reportedly increased every year since his death. Nik Douglas predicts Westerners will evolve virtual Tantric initiations, with mantras delivered over the internet.

On my journey seeking out Tantric and Daoist practices in the West, I observed three general approaches to sexual cultivation: physical sex only, celibate subtle body cultivation only, and physical and subtle body sex together. I noted a pattern among some highly achieved male teachers of a strong, possibly excessive kundalini fire in the head being a possible cause for seeking female energy and/or sex. My observation about these teachers is not meant as a criticism of their methods, as I personally used many of them for years to great benefit. Simple modifications to most methods can easily ensure energetic balance, and this has already happened as part of the globalizing process of Westerners exposed to both Tantric and Daoist practices. I found the Fire-solar culture of Tantra and the more Water-Lunar culture of Daoism (Torchinov, 1997) to balance each other. Because I feel the current cosmic cycle is favoring the rebirth of the feminine, I eventually settled into Daoist practice.

The difficulty some highly achieved adepts had in balancing their sexual energy highlights the possibility that the cosmological splitting of our original non-dual being, first into an etheric androgyne and then into physical male and female sexed bodies has created a spiritual trauma so deep that it cannot be fully resolved by what are considered states of enlightenment in the Daoist and Tantric traditions. Individual self-realization may be insufficient to heal the vastness of this collective wound, which may be the core issue driving the human incarnational process. Sexual issues may continue to arise as long as one is still in a physically sexed form, perhaps a bleed over from the collective field of human sexual consciousness into the highly purified (non-polar) vessel of an individual adept. The resolution of this cosmic sexual tension may occur only by achieving what is called immortality, the alchemical re-fusion of spirit and body-matter into its original essence, requiring an adept to merge not only into the mind of Nature (enlightenment) but to merge fully into its body. This is the ultimate focus of subtle body sexual cultivation.
A major force attracting Western spiritual seekers to Daoism and Tantra is the drive to integrate their sexual desire into a subtle body experience that I term the quest for spiritual orgasm. This quest has put Daoist and Tantric sexual cultivation practices into a Western cultural cauldron and created positive evolutionary pressure on their traditional methods. I believe this process will ultimately birth a new spiritual science in the West with recognizable Daoist and Tantric principles as its foundation.

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