Tao Articles

Note: this 124 page thesis, though it may seem lengthy, is a short way to get an excellent education in the principles and process of western internal alchemy. The writer is never pedantic, has done deep reserach on alchemy, and packs as much into some footnotes as some would an essay.

A main point for qigong and Taoist neidangong practitioners is the distinction between the type of ordinary imagination that is mere fantasy, and may disperse or merely “spin” chi, and the Divine Imagination of the alchemist, who identifies him/herself with the Creator Gods and uses it to “rebirth” Prime Matter (Yuan Jing, original Essence in Taoist terminology) and thus manifest in the physical plane the source of all life, which otherwise may remain in its chaotic and unborn state.

The alchemists, east and west, use imagination as the “gift of the Gods” to humans for use in shaping their energetic reality. In this sense, imagination is what allows the adept to perceive the yin-yang and five phase (elemental) tensions at various levels of their energy and spirit bodies, and to use that tensions imaginatively to transform and shape the world.

It will broaden the persepctive of Taoist pracitioners to view the alchemical imagination through the lens of Medieveal renaissance genius Marsilio Ficino and an esoteric Jesuit Ignatius de Loyola. This paper goes further, and summarizes the role of imagination in alchemy by scholars as diverse as Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Henry Corbin, Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, and Antoine Faivre.

Ficino was a Renaissance master of feng shui and inner alchemy. He would be totally comfortable practicing the Planetary and Soul Alchemy of the Taoists (Greatest Kan & Li), and gives similar type instructions to increase harmonic resonance between the sun, the soul of hte adapt, and the solar essences to be found in life.

Michael Winn

Imagination & Alchemy

Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and Alchemy

by K.C. Voss

INTRODUCTION

Although imagination as a religious phenomenon per se has been an under-represented topic of investigation, it nevertheless plays a central role in religious experience and religious praxis – especially in the mystic and esoteric varieties. One reason for this is that the imagination enables access to deeper levels of reality than those ordinarily experienced. A second reason is that it helps mediate between things which are conventionally perceived as ontologically separate. In particular, it permits the realm called human to come into contact with that which is called divine; in other words, the imagination functions as a bridge between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The premise underlying this paper should be made explicit here, at the outset, although I shall not take it up again in a systematic way. Namely, it is that the universe is ontologically whole, and therefore, that the separation felt so acutely between the mystics and God, between the natural magicians of the Renaissance and the cosmos, and between the alchemists and the Philosopher’s Stone was not the reflection of a correct ontology; rather, it was the legacy of a flawed conceptual framework. Thus mystics, magicians, and alchemists all had to embark on a process of what could be described as `sacred deconstruction’ before they were able to reach their goal. Closely related to this is an understanding of what it means to use the faculty of imagination as a method of gnosis, of knowing. Emphasis will therefore be placed on illustrating the role played by the imagination in the dissolution of the conceptual categories which support an experience of separation, and on showing how intentional use of the imagination functions to enable more intimate knowledge of the object of religious yearning [1] .

In what follows I shall discuss examples of the use of imagination by Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and within the alchemical tradition, as well as the function of the imagination in meditative, magical and alchemical praxis and in the construction of metaphorical and plastic images.

SOME THEORIES ABOUT THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION

Islamicist Henry Corbin distinguished between the imaginary and the imaginal as a way of clarifying the fact that the latter possessed a reality of its own, a depth and substance not generally associated with the merely imaginary. In an important article, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, Corbin relates that, in the course of translating Arabic and Persian texts dealing with Islamic cosmology, he realized that he needed to find a satisfactory way to translate different terms referring to a phenomenon which in English would usually be called ‘imaginary’, lest his readers think that what was being discussed in those texts was unreal, fictitious, or trivial. In contrast, the texts he was reading posited the reality of no fewer than three worlds:

There is the physical, sensible world encompassing both our terrestrial world (governed by the human souls) and the sidereal universe (governed by the Souls of the Spheres). The sensible world is the world of the phenomenon (molk). There is also the supersensible world of the Soul or Angel Souls, the Malakut, in which the… mystical Cities are located, and which starts at the `convex surface of the ninth Sphere’. And there is the world of pure archangelic Intelligences. Each of these three worlds has its organ of perception: the sense, imagination, and the intellect, corresponding with the triad: body, soul and mind. [2]

The second world is the ‘mundus imaginalis’, ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception” [3] . In order to distinguish this sort of perception from the sort that produces unreal sorts of things, and the things to which it pertains from those which are ‘outside the framework of being and existing’, Corbin eschews use of the word ‘imagination’; preferring instead to speak of the ‘imaginal’ and the ‘mundus imaginalis” [4] . Thus the faculty of imagination is a living tool which allows access by degrees into the realm described by Corbin as the ‘mundus imaginalis’ or the ‘supersensible world of the Soul’; far from being unreal, it is a parallel world which is ‘ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect’ [5] .

The mundus imaginalis corresponds to that which Mircea Eliade calls the ‘sacred center? [6] . Some of the characteristics of the imaginal world are that it ‘has no extension in space’, and that it exists beyond reality as we know it’ [7] . To produce an extensive analysis of this realm per se is outside the scope of the present paper; however, the importance of the concept of the imaginal world for understanding imagination as a phenomenon in esotericism and in mysticism cannot be overemphasized, since it is the landscape of that world which mystics and esotericists claim to have experienced. Corbin’s mundus imaginalis is thought to be the realm to which the angels described in the Summa Theologica belong, the middle ground between human beings and the divine [8] . As such, it must be passed through, not bypassed by all who seek the divine.

A second important contribution to our understanding of the function of imagination is found in Lynda Sexson’s book, Ordinarily Sacred. Deliberately setting out to `muddle the borders’ of the tight categories we deal in (real/unreal, sacred/profane, etc.), Sexson tries to show in particular that the boundaries between the sacred and profane are blurred; `religion’, she writes, ‘is made up of nothing special – the ordinary is holy or potentially holy? [9] .

The things of this world are vessels, entrances for stories; when we touch them or tumble into them, we fall into their labyrinthine resonances. The world is no longer divided, then, into those inconvenient categories of subject and object, and the world becomes religiously apprehended. [10]

Added to Corbin’s distinction between the quality of imagination which produces things that are unreal and the quality of the imaginal which produces, or apprehends that which is truly real, is Sexson’s understanding of imagination as a kind of solvent that dissolves the dichotomies which ordinarily govern our experience of the world. In marked contrast to the iconoclasm which characterized the Reformation, the shattering of these false images heralds the possibility of a ‘way in’ to the imaginal world [11] . To illustrate, Sexson describes a continuum which consists of officially sacralized objects on the one hand – in this example, rosary beads – and found objects on the other, objects which are consecrated by nothing more – or less – than their capacity to occasion transmutation [12] – here, dogwood berries found and wondered at by a little girl. ‘Religion’, writes Sexson, `does not reside in these literal things but resides in them metaphorically. By metaphor’, she continues:

I mean the imaginal reality that gives depth and integrity to our lives. Imaginal means not merely the imaginative (as- in referring to works of art) and certainly not the imaginary (as in referring to silly things made up); the imaginal makes up the world. [13]

Another significant idea has been introduced: the association of imagination with depth. Here, when I talk about the imagination, or refer to something as pertaining to the ‘imaginal’ realm, I mean something which pertains to the `really real’; that which has depth, that which Mircea Eliade would say is at the `center of the world’ [14] .

The notion of the imagination as a solvent which functions to dissolve our ordinary conceptual boundaries, thereby enabling access to the center, is also emphasized in the work of a third writer, James Hillman. Hillman provides the reader with an analysis of the word ‘psyche’, in his book Revisioning Psychology. Psyche means `soul’, he writes, `a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.

This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment – and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground. [15]

According to Hillman, since the second and third centuries of the common era we have progressively lost our experience of the world as an `ensouled’ sphere encompassing within itself the pluralities of human and divine, matter and spirit, part and whole none disconnected from another but forming and reforming in subtly interactive ways [16] . At the same time, we have also lost an understanding of the way in which the psyche once functioned to meld these things into a multivalent whole. Psyche functioned to enliven the cosmos and to enable its glittering parts to cohere. The process that Hillman calls psyche corresponds to that which I am calling imagination.
I The Magico-religious Use of Images

There is a long tradition of the magico-religious use of imagination to create images which are located in both interior and exterior space. My discussion of the imagination in Ficino’s natural magic, Ignatius’ meditative practice, and in alchemy illustrates its function in each context, and includes a description of its use in both kinds of spaces. The following preliminary remarks are intended to impart a sense of the centrality of that tradition.

The very ancient idea of sympathetic magic which accompanies the making of images can be seen to underlie the doctrines of similitudes and correspondences and the idea of relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Within a universe in which `like begets like’ and `what is below is just as what is above’ it is eminently reasonable to assume that one element can influence another. Moreover, there are radical ontological implications associated with the principle of similitudes, since, as E. H. Gombrich succinctly and very precisely expressed, `the `fetish’ not only `symbolizes’ fertility but `has’ it’ [17] . It is crucial for contemporary understanding to realize that the faculty of imagination was understood to cause things, and that its efficacy as a cause was taken for granted in the same way that we unthinkingly rely on the efficacy of electrical current to operate the appliances we use today.

It is also important to resist the temptation to limit discussion of the imagination within the context of esoteric phenomena and practices, rather than the wider context of those thought of as belonging to religion proper. Imagination has been a central theme in each of the three major religious traditions of the west, albeit only enjoying a necessarily limited audience. In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scripture we have to confront the idea of persons having been conceived in the image of God, and if Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God, various strains of philosophical and theological thought often lead us to the idea of `God being imagination itself, that is, of divinity defined as `an imagining power’ [18] . This is certainly an idea which we see in the alchemical tradition, and in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, together with the related conceptualization of this `imagining power’ as the cause of the world, as that which enlivens and continues the whole.

Thus in an Eliadean sense persons sought to `imitate the acts of the gods ab origine’ by attempting to mirror the divine paradigmatic act of imagining in their own endeavors [19] . The memory tradition whose history and significance is so brilliantly articulated by Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory developed an elaborate set of rules for remembering words and ideas by `placing’ selected images at strategic points within carefully contrived interior `spaces’, sometimes called ?memory palaces? [20] . There is a complex relationship between mnemonic systems used for rhetorical purposes and those which are employed for magico-religious purposes. If their use was not clearly demarcated at their origins, it proved no more so as time went on. For example, on the religious side, the pre-Reformation church nurtured for generations a tradition of prescribed ritual use of images as a help for fostering appropriate devotional attitudes [21] .

And, as we shall see, Ignatius consciously utilized the imagination to help construct an interior image of the world, while in the esoteric realm, Marsilio Ficino advocated the use of exterior images as an aid for interiorizing the macrocosm. We cannot forget as well tarot cards, which entailed utilizing exterior images as powerful mnemonic aids, and which are found to have been used in Europe from as early as the 15th century on for both meditative and divinatory purposes [22] . In every case, one essentially spread out before oneself a detailed imago mundi for contemplation. Let us turn now to consideration of some specific examples.
2 Marsilio Ficino: The Use of Imagination in De vita Triplici

Marsilio Ficino is, as James Hillman observed, still one of the `most neglected important figures in the movement of Western ideas [23] . Born in Figline, near Florence, in 1433, Ficino is responsible for translating Plato’s dialogues as well as the newly available Corpus Hermeticum from Greek into Latin. He also gathered around him a circle comprised of some of the best minds of his era [24] .

Ficino’s view of the soul was that it was `all things together… the center of the universe, the middle term in all things? [25] . The soul was the mediating element between the human and the divine by virtue of the fact that there was an ontological connection between the two spheres. Ficino understood the soul to be the seat of the faculty of imagination, and his belief in its efficacy is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the third volume of De vita triplici, called `On Making Your Life Agree with the Heavens’. Therein we find directions for making images as well as advice concerning their proper use and the benefits that can be expected. In keeping with Ficino’s dual vocation and training – as a physician, he was dedicated to the healing of the body, as a priest, he devoted himself to the healing of the soul – Book III appears to have been intended as a prescription not only for integrating the elements of the human person body, soul, and intellect – but for integrating the human with the divine as well. In writing De vita triplici, Ficino was not only attempting to provide a manual for restoring physical and psychological health; more importantly, he hoped to provide a formula for placing his readers in the right relation to the cosmos, and thus to the divine.

If one followed Ficino’s directions, one could transcend the conventional understanding of ontological bifurcation of the celestial and terrestrial spheres. On this interpretation, De vita triplici emerges as a profound corrective to the traditional scholastic understanding of the universe, for at the very center of scholastic teaching was the notion that an unbridgeable gulf existed between the human and divine; these were conceived as polar opposites, rather than as located at different ends of a continuum.

Turning to Book III, we find clarification of the most important elements in Ficino’s thought: `the world both lives and breathes, and it is possible for us to draw its spirit. What follows is vitally necessary and directly concerns learning how to use the function of imagination: `You must therefore learn how to bring this spirit into yourself’, he writes [26] .

Ficino’s method for drawing the spirit of the world into oneself entailed making ourselves open to celestial influences by using materials which were linked to those influences in particular ways; his instructions presuppose an acceptance of certain ideas (one could term them `doctrines’) which were prevalent at the time of the Renaissance. First are those regarding correspondences and sympathies which exist between and among things and qualities. Second is the notion that the universe was divided into two parts: the celestial or divine sphere (having to do with the heavens and with God), and the terrestrial or human sphere (having to do with nature and persons). Lastly there was an understanding of the person (and by extrapolation, the world) as a universe in miniature. This was the doctrine of the microcosm and the macrocosm, succinctly expressed in the Hermetic motto: ?As above, so below? [27] .

Accordingly, Ficino provides long lists of things, together with their qualities, arranged according to the celestial bodies with which they are believed to be associated. In giving us these lists, Ficino intends for his readers to surround themselves with as many of these things as possible: we are to reflect upon them, use them, eat them, dress in them, and otherwise immerse ourselves in them, all the while being careful to insure that each particular activity is done at the appropriate hour, day, and season. The underlying rationale is that this will maximize the potential for the embodiment in one’s own being of the qualities and attributes inhering in particular objects, smells, sounds, music, and places. Here particular attention will be paid to Ficino’s emphasis on the spirit-filled material with which images, objects, and medicines are made, and which imbues them with efficacy.

As we consider the examples below, we should remember that Ficino is not saying these things are only signs for some quality or other (although he certainly wants to say that on one level, the lion, for example, represents or signifies the sun). Nor is he limiting himself to mere similitude, saying that the lion is somehow like the sun. In the deepest sense Ficino understands lions as symbolic beings that actually participate in the being of the sun; each partakes of the same spirit’ [28] . Ultimately, in fact, he thinks that everything which is in the world really participates in the life of the heavens. `Let no one have any doubt’, he writes:

We and all the things that are around us, with certain preparations, are able to lay claim to the heavenly bodies. For that is how the heavenly bodies are made. They rule strictly, and they have been prepared from this from the beginning. [29]

We are linked to what Ficino calls `the one that is simplest and good’ by means of the anima mundi, which permeates everything, but is most concentrated in the planets and the stars, those `heavenly bodies that have been prepared for this from the beginning [30] . It has been noted that in his own way, Ficino can be said to have been reviving the worship of the sun, whom he terms `lord of heaven’; thus it comes as no surprise that he considers that the most beneficial influences are derived from the group he calls `solar things? [31] . Within this group we find `Gold and the color of gold’, carbuncle, myrrh, golden honey, saffron, the ram, hawk, hen, swan, and lion, beetles, crocodiles, golden-haired folks with curly hair, magnanimous people, and sometimes those with bald heads [32] . Because the Sun is exceedingly powerful – `amplitude belongs especially to the Sun’, writes Ficino – we must be cautious about getting too much of it [33] . Nevertheless, he writes:

It will be a good beginning in the use of things under this dominance if you put on Solar things to wear, if you live in Solar places, look Solar, hear Solar, smell Solar, imagine Solar, think Solar, and even desire Solar. Likewise, if you will imitate in your life the dignity and gifts of the Sun. Hang around Solar men and plants, and carefully touch the laurel. [34]

In short, we are supposed to saturate ourselves with `Sunness’. Since Ficino’s particular concern is for scholars, and since scholars are especially prone to be affected by Saturn and its concomitant melancholy on account of the reflective nature of their work [35] , he pays some attention to Saturnian influence, noting that it is not `harmful by nature…’ and should `be used sometimes, the way doctors must sometimes use poisons’. In fact,

The Pythagorean maguses seem to have been extremely cautious in this matter, when they would become frightened that their constant philosophizing was the tyranny of Saturn, so they would dress up in white garments, and each day sing songs and make music with Jovial and Appolonian things, and in this way they lived a long time under Saturn. [36]

Ficino discusses Jupiter and Venus as well, since these, together with the Sun, are the powerful planets he calls the `Three Graces of heaven’ [37] . Jovial things include silver, amethyst, topaz, crystal, sapphire; green and airy colors and wine; certain animals like the lamb, the peacock, the eagle and the calf; and also religious and law-abiding thoughts. Ficino says that `the discourses and deliberations of human reason… belong to Jove? [38] who `leads one to find philosophy, truth, and religion [39] , and that our reason, either through the imagination and the spirit together, or through deliberation, or through both, can, by a kind of imitation, put itself in agreement with Jove. Our reason then might take on Jove for his dignity and nearness to us, and receive the gifts of Jove much more than even the imagination or the spirit. In the same way, the imagination and the spirit, for the same reason, receive much more of the heavenly gifts than certain lower things and materials. [40]

Then there are Venetian things. `I want to call you old people away from these heavier Gods’, says Ficino,

and get you back to Venus through gardens and meadows. I summon all of you to nourishing Venus, not for her to play with you, but for her to make jokes with you. [41]

The color green, and the plants of the fields and meadows contain the essence of springtime, the young, fresh time of the year. Because of this, it will help keep a person, `even if he is an old man… in a natural state of greenness, as if… he were a laurel tree, an olive or a pine, still green in winter? [42] . Elsewhere, Ficino adds that `the power of Venus’, whom he calls `mother of the Muses? [43] , is drawn by `turtle-doves, pigeons, the white water-wagtail, and other things which modesty does not permit me to list’ [44] .

In addition to what has been mentioned already, all of the planetary influences must be juggled according to one’s deficiencies. To return to the case of the melancholy scholar, we remember that the introduction of Jovial and Appolonian things is believed to mitigate Saturnian influences. Ficino explains how to do this with other planetary influences too, since each planet has a role in the formation of the whole person. In this way, the various aspects of the person are able to approximate an ideal balance. Bringing all the different elements of the person into proper relation to each other by means of adding or subtracting qualities (like ingredients in a stew) is a primary desideratum of Ficino’s program.
3 The Macrocosm: Ficino and the Imago Mundi

Yet Ficino does not stop at the level of the person, as we discover when we examine his notion of an imago mundi. Chapter 19 of Book III is called simply ‘On making a figure of the universe’, and begins with the question: ‘Why not make a universal image, that is, an image of the universe itself?’ [45] . According to the ancients, the enterprise of making an image of the universe is beneficial, and Ficino writes that they advised coloring this image with the `universal and singular colors of the world: green, gold, and sapphire’ [46] .

The ancients decided, therefore, that it was a big help, if you wanted to capture the gifts of the heavenly Graces, to look at these three powerful colors frequently, and to color in, on the little wallmap of the universe that you are making, the sapphire color for the spheres of the world. They thought it was worthwhile, too, to add the color gold to the spheres of the heavens and the stars, and to dress Vesta herself, or Ceres, that is, earth, in a green mantle. In this way, followers of these ancients would either wear this little form of the universe, or look at it on the wall… Not just to look at it, but to reflect on it in the soul. [47]

Ficino also suggests it would be good to have `a little room, one with an arch’, appropriately painted and decorated with representations of the three planets inside one’s house (the bedroom would be excellent for this), and he advises us to contemplate the whole of life, rather than its parts whenever we are outside the house by focusing on `the shape and colors of the universe’ [48] .

Space precludes more detailed consideration of the imago mundi here. Instead, I wish to recall the claim made in the introduction to this paper, namely, that one of the most significant ways in which the faculty of imagination has been employed in the context of religious experience is to help deconstruct the erroneous conceptualization and concomitant experience of ontological separation between the celestial and terrestrial spheres. In advocating the fabrication and contemplation of an imago mundi, an image of the world in miniature, Ficino is providing a means of bringing microcosm and macrocosm together. Throughout Ficino’s work are two very important ideas having to do with the way in which synthesis takes place between the intellect and the body and between the realm of the Ideas and matter. On the microcosmic level the soul is the mediating term between body and intellect. On the macrocosmic level, the anima mundi functions analogously between matter and the Idea. These relationships can be diagrammed as follows:

Micocosmic Level

soul

body intellect

Macrocosmic Level

anima mundi

matter idea

Ficino’s directions for making an imago mundi are truly significant. In the first place, making a physical image of the world is meant to help us overcome the apparent dis/connection between self and world, and the reason we are to do it is to help us become more attuned to our (very real) participation in the world. Secondly, there is the fact that, according to Ficino’s ontology, the image of a thing is necessarily a part of the being of that which is imaged. Thirdly, because his advice to contemplate `the whole of life’ rather than its parts when leaving the house entails interiorizing and assimilating this image of the world, this microcosm, we thus begin to embody it. In embodying the microcosm we participate more fully in it; thereby we are enabled to participate more fully in the macrocosm since the microcosm itself is an image of the macrocosm and thus operates according to the same principles. Therefore, and once more in perfect accord with Ficino’s ontology, it too participates in the being of that which it symbolizes – the macrocosm. We can diagram this relation as follows:

Microcosm

(the Starting Point)

Imago Mundi

(the Means)

Macrocosm

(the Goal)

To be sure, there are gradations of being within Ficino’s schema, but his conception of the cosmos is that it is whole. It is for this reason that De vita triplici can be understood as a profound corrective to the traditional scholastic conception of the universe. Ficino’s imago mundi is an important element within a spiritual discipline that is meant to help us overcome divisions which are usually understood to be ontological, but are instead only conventional.
4 Imagination in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola

Ignatius de Loyola was born in Spain in 1491, and spent his youth as an officer in the army of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. At the age of twenty-six he sustained a serious leg wound and to help relieve the tedium of an enforced convalescence at his family home in Guipuscoa asked for novels and short stories. Since none were available, he had to content himself with heavier fare: the lives of the saints and a life of Christ. In his autobiography Ignatius says that during this time he `paused to think and reason’ `Suppose that I should do what Saint Francis did, what Saint Dominic did?? [49] . The answer came after his recovery, when he made a pilgrimage to Montserrat. In a church there, during a vigil lasting the entire night, he experienced a dramatic conversion. Ignatius left his weapons before the statue of Mary, and returned to the world to found the Society of Jesus. The remainder of his life was devoted to directing the activities of the order and endeavoring to perfect his own spiritual life.

The Spiritual Exercises were written with the intention to provide exercises that were calculated to maximize the quality of persons’ relationship to God during a period of deliberate retreat from the world under the guidance of a specially trained spiritual director. The smallest details of life are considered: there are rules for eating, drinking, sleeping; meditations formulated for particular times during the day – dawn, noon, evening, and midnight; careful advice for the various emotions a retreatant might experience, such as despair, pride, etc.; very little escapes consideration. And among these well-considered directions we find more than twenty-five specific instructions involving the intentional use of imagination, and no less than twenty-one pages of `points on which to contemplate’: brief descriptive references to major events in the life of Christ, clearly intended as image-making material but without any accompanying instruction [50] . There are also eight references to a process which Ignatius called `bringing to memory’, evocative of the Platonic doctrine concerning our innate memory of the Forms [51]
5 The Place of Images in the Church

Ignatius’s Exercises were thoroughly scrutinized before being given papal approbation in 1548, and are therefore officially orthodox. The Exercises are still in use today as a guide for persons making retreats conducted by the Jesuits. This is somewhat surprising in view of their emphasis on memory and imagination, for although it has always used them, the Church has long been wary of images because of their pagan antecedents [52] . While images of the saints and of Mary and even of the three persons of the Trinity were permitted, carefully formulated doctrinal distinctions regulated their use among the faithful, and insured that devotion would not be directed to the images themselves, but beyond the images, to the persons and qualities represented. These steps were not entirely effective: nuances of this kind were not readily grasped by those unused to making such distinctions themselves, but in formulating these pronouncements the Church anticipated and at least tried to address the confusion she feared would be inevitable [53] .

First, idolatry, as opposed to the use of images as sources of inspiration and as mnemonic help, was officially banned. Secondly, the theologians carefully distinguished the. kinds of veneration that could appropriately be directed to the beings represented by the images. Three degrees were articulated: latria (adoration), reserved for God (and thus lawfully extended to each of the three persons of the Trinity); hyperdulia (literally, high veneration), a singular form accorded only to Mary; dulia (veneration), reserved for the saints. The attitudes toward images, images themselves, and the Church’s teachings pertaining to these degrees of veneration are related ideas, possessed of difficult theological subtleties which were in practice disregarded by a majority of the faithful. I have introduced them here because similar issues arise with respect to Ignatius’ method for composing mental images of God and the saints.

Ignatius obviously considered the careful and deliberate construction of mental images to be of important, even critical help in making progress along spiritual lines. The Ignatian method is something of a hybrid; it is not unrelated to the `active imagination’ of the magus or the alchemist, both of whom are familiar with the place and function of imagination in their work, but could easily give pause to ecclesiastics who are already sensitive about the fine points of images and attitudes toward them. Moreover, some of the characteristics of the Exercises indicate clear links to the art of memory.
6 Examples from The Spiritual Exercises

Ignatius distinguishes `visible’ contemplations from `invisible’ ones. The purpose of the first type is `to see with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate? [54] . The second type is an aid for regulating inner attitudes and dispositions, and forming impressions of qualities which are incorporeal. Metaphor and analogy are key elements in this process. The ‘First Exercise’ includes general instructions for constructing a mental image, or as Ignatius calls it, an `invisible contemplation or meditation’:

In an invisible contemplation or meditation – as… on the Sins – the composition will be to see with the sight of the imagination and consider that my soul is imprisoned in this corruptible body, and all the compound in this valley, as exiled among brute beasts: I say all the compound of soul and body. [55]

Ignatius also emphasizes the importance of asking God for an experience of whatever emotion is appropriate to the image, for example:

if the contemplation is on the Resurrection, one is to ask for joy with Christ in joy; if it is on the Passion, he is to ask for pain, tears and torment with Christ in torment. [56]

After calling up an image in the mind, Ignatius sometimes instructs us to develop things even further by moving from being spectators outside what we see to being participants within it: `Imagining Christ our Lord present and placed on the Cross, let me make a Colloquy’ [57] . Ignatius notes that we are to perform the colloquy `as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant to his master’ … [58]

In one of his contemplations on hell, Ignatius asks us to ‘see with the sight of the imagination the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire’, but here he adds a new dimension which greatly expands the process because it involves all the senses: `hear with the ears’, he writes, the ‘wailings, howlings, cries’ of hell; then `smell’, `taste’, and `touch’ [59] . Next we are directed to build an image which will afford a God’s eye view of `all the surface and circuit of the earth’:

To see and consider the Three Divine Persons, as on their royal throne or seat of Their Divine Majesty, how They look on all the surface and circuit of the earth’. [60]

I note that by telling us to imagine the earth from the perspective of the divinity, Ignatius is telling us to imagine what God sees, and that this is but a step away from seeing through God’s eyes, so to speak. Thus, we have additional justification for locating Ignatius’ techniques along a spectrum which includes not only the mystic who seeks oneness with God in the unio mystica, but also the magician who intentionally imagines he/she is divine, and the alchemist who identifies him/herself with the creator gods of the beginnings.
7 Influences on The Spiritual Exercises

The situation with respect to the influences on Ignatius in some ways resembles the situation today, when references to Foucault and Derrida can be overheard in places in and around the university. Each generation of university folk have their intellectual fashions: sixteenth-century life at the University of Paris, which Ignatius attended (he enrolled in 1528, received the licentiate in theology in 1534, and the master’s degree the following year) would not have been an exception. Ideas concerning natural magic, the Hermetic texts, alchemy, and memory arts were common coin, and it is hard to see how he could have escaped familiarity with them [61] `.

As I stated earlier, many of the characteristics of the Exercises suggest that it belongs to the tradition of memory treatises which proliferated during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that were surveyed by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. Indeed, Yates remarks that these were so numerous she had difficulty in deciding which ones to use. Many of these treatises were written by Dominicans, and she refers to one work in particular which could easily have provided inspiration for The Spiritual Exercises:

An anonymous treatise, probably by a Dominican, gives a most solemn description of how to remember the whole order of the universe and the roads to Heaven and Hell by the artificial memory. [62]

Because so much of this material seems to have come from out of the Dominican order, it is appropriate to note that they enjoyed some prominence at the University of Paris; thus, by virtue of shared theological training, the Dominicans and Ignatius possessed certain kinds of knowledge in common. For example, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, which contains a section on memory was widely known and extremely influential [63] . (And of course Aquinas had been one of the luminaries of the Dominican order.) It would have been virtually impossible for Ignatius to complete the work for a master’s degree in theology without reading Aristotle, whose writings include De memoria et reminiscentia, or Plato with his account of recollection and the Ideas in the Phaedrus. Yates has traced the dissemination of these and other classical writings on memory up through the Renaissance period, demonstrating the links between rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, and the memory arts. To help illustrate she reminds us of Cicero’s description of the five parts of rhetoric in his De inventione:

Invention is the excogitation of true things (res), or things similar to truth to render one’s cause plausible; disposition is the arrangement in order of the things thus discovered; elocution is the accommodation of suitable words to the invented (things); memory is the firm perception in the soul of things and words; pronunciation is the moderating of the voice and body to suit the dignity of the things and words. [64]

With Cicero’s definitions in mind, when we turn again to The Spiritual Exercises we notice that attention is paid to all but one of the five. Ignatius’ images include a lot of details, as we see from his contemplation on Christ’s nativity:

It will be here to see with the sight of the imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem; considering the length and the breadth, and whether such road is level or through valleys; likewise looking at the place or cave of the Nativity, how large, how small, how low, how high, and how it was prepared. [65]

He is also concerned about order: the meditations on various aspects of the life of Christ and the events in the Garden of Eden follow the chronology found in the scriptures. Ignatius does not explicitly mention elocution, but can be presumed to have thought very carefully about the wording of his Exercises. He frequently talks about memory: the contemplator is to `bring to the memory’ an image from the past which must then be strongly impressed in the mind. Finally, his concern with experiencing the emotions appropriate to whatever is imagined is not unrelated to Cicero’s definition of pronunciation which calls for `the moderating of the voice and body to suit the dignity of things and words’. Moreover, many of the earlier writers on memory stressed the importance of fixing images in our mind, so they might not be easily forgotten; for this reason they often utilized images that were memorably grotesque or otherwise striking [66] . What could be more vivid than Ignatius’ image of hell, which even requires that we imagine its sounds and its smells: the bitter taste of the condemned souls’ ‘tears, sadness and the worm of conscience’, and `touch with the touch… how the fires touch and burn the souls’?

II IMAGINATION IN THE ALCHEMICAL TRADITION

The role of imagination in alchemy has been discussed by scholars as diverse as Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Henry Corbin, Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, and Antoine Faivre. And while a case can be made for viewing the faculty of the imagination as both the hermeneutical method and the creative principle of alchemy, it remains stubbornly resistant to analysis, tending in fact, to be nearly as elusive as the goal of the alchemical process itself.

The alchemical texts contain only occasional explicit references to the imagination with the result that would-be hermeneuts must face an uncannily self-referential task. Just as our alchemical predecessors had to organize chaotic material and amplify intuitions about meaning in order to proceed with their work, we too must select and then frame statements from primary and secondary sources and finally flesh out or amplify our intuitions about their meaning, in order to produce a coherent exegesis. Such a methodology has a circularity to which we in the contemporary era have become unaccustomed: it seems that if we are to discover the proper way to understanding imagination in alchemy, we must ourselves makes use of something like it in solving our hermeneutical problem. Circular or not, I believe this methodological approach to be the most promising tool in the box in this case. Given the real possibility that the concept of alchemy as a spiritual discipline may be somewhat unfamiliar to the reader, I want to provide a brief summary of what the alchemical work entailed, before considering several exemplary alchemical texts.

I Alchemy as a Spiritual Discipline

According to Jung, whose three volumes on alchemy represent the most comprehensive articulation to date of its psychological implications, the alchemical work can be understood in terms of what he calls its `double face’, i.e., two aspects, the practical (or operatio) and the theoretical (theoria). Alchemy therefore proceeded on two mere or less distinct levels – the theoretical and the practical [67] .

With respect to its practical aspect, on account of the nature of the material, it is virtually impossible to determine the exact order or number of stages in the alchemical work; in fact, these vary according to personal preferences and idiosyncrasies [68] . Nor is it always apparent what substances are being referred to. We may be told, for example, that mercury is necessary for a certain procedure, but it may be the metal that is meant, or the qualities of the metal, or the god himself! [69] . For a variety of reasons, primarily adherence to the doctrine of correspondences and similitudes and the view that there was a relation between microcosm and macrocosm, the alchemists were given to making analogies be tween events which occurred on an `outer’, material level, and experiences which took place on an `inner’, spiritual plane [70] .

There was thought to be congruence between the maturation of the chemical processes in the alchemists’ laboratory and the deepening of their own gnosis. Interpreted symbolically, the alchemists were attempting to perfect the Self, to `lead out the gold within’, as one expressed it. On the material level, the alchemists’ purpose in the laboratory was the production of gold, the most perfect of all metals; on the spiritual level, their goal was to produce the arcane substance variously known as the Philosopher’s Stone, the Hermetic Androgyne, or the Rebis [71] . When viewed in this way, the Philosopher’s Stone and ordinary gold are not so very different; the latter represented the actualization of all the qualities only potentially present in lesser metals; the former represented the actualization of all virtues potentially present in human beings.

Jung maintains that alchemy was a bona fide spiritual discipline, devoted to the unification of these material and spiritual opposites, as these are conventionally understood, and that ultimately it was the imagination which would mediate between them [72] . This resolution took place on different levels corresponding to deepening levels of understanding about the true nature of the alchemical operations. The most profound form of resolution was characterized by a mode of subtle mutual reciprocity and interpenetration in which each term of an opposition entered fully into the being of the other, simultaneously present to the other, transforming and being transformed [73] . Each alchemist equipped a laboratory, selected and studied texts, and constructed (and continuously refined, since the alchemists’ conception of the nature of the process, as well as their conception of their relationship to it seem to have undergone transformation as the work proceeded) a theoretical framework. This last was critical, since it not only provided a theoretical context within which physical experiments were carried out, but a hermeneutical one as well, within which the results of these experiments could be interpreted.

2 The Alchemical Theoria

It is in the context of the alchemical theoria that we most clearly encounter imagination as primary modus operandi of the alchemical endeavor. Just as the alchemical work had a `double face’, so too did the alchemical imagination. It was the hermeneutical method of alchemy, but its function was not limited merely to the articulation of meaning; imagination was also the creative force par excellence [74] . In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard describes his methodological approach to the study of images as one which `consists of designating the image as an excess of the imagination’ [75] . In alchemy the arena in which such imaginal excess takes place is the theoria. After commenting on the opacity of the documents pertaining to the operatio in Psychology and Alchemy, Jung makes several provocative remarks concerning the role of the imagination in the theoria. For example:

The method of alchemy, psychologically speaking, is one of boundless amplification… This ampliftcatio forms the second part of the opus, and is understood by the alchemist as theoria. [76]

At first glance, this comment may appear adequate, but a closer look shows that in itself, it simply doesn’t tell us enough, and proves somewhat unsatisfying. What does he mean by `amplification’? What had to be amplified? And precisely what is imagination’s role here? The contemporary reader of alchemical texts soon discovers a baroque landscape in which flourished visions, dreams, intuitions, feelings, hunches, and the like, all with thematic similarities, and all taken very seriously as comprising a foundation on which to build. But in their initial unmediated state, none of these, whether taken alone or together, would prove sufficiently substantial for shoring up the alchemical work. All these elements first had to be mediated in order to form a coherent foundation. From out of the theoretical context described above was derived a complex web of metaphorical associations, each with implications for all the others; this constituted the raw material for the analogy-making that was considered an integral part of the alchemical endeavor.

By means of the imagination, the alchemists

clothed their intuitions with `the stuff of association and analogy’ [77] . Their method was to seize upon and then contemplate such amorphous things as dreams, visions, mythic symbols, portents, signs, etc., at length, with a marked degree of intentionality, i.e., `active imagination’, as von Franz and others call it, thereby gradually imbuing them with solidity, dimension, and form [78] . In short, they used their imagination to deliberately exaggerate – `amplify’ – these things, to objectify them in order to work with them. Having done this, the alchemist would go on to further enrich and embellish what was in place by following a trail of associations, repeating the amplificatio with those; and then the entire sequence would be repeated with the next set of associations, and so on.

Just as mythic creator divinities, the alchemists created form from out of chaos; gold, where only lead had existed before. The thrust of the alchemical work was both redemptive and incamational, and if the alchemists’ stock in trade was the actualization of what formerly had existed only in potentia, the tool with which they plied that trade was the imagination. The following texts were based (or purportedly based) on their authors’ alchemical experience and were intended for the guidance and inspiration of fellow alchemists, as raw data for the imagination. With that in mind, let us turn now to my three examples.

3 The Hermetick Romance or the Chymical Wedding

According to historian Frances Yates, The Hermetick Romance of 1616 is properly located in the same tradition which gave us two other so-called Rosicrucian manifestos in the same century: the Fama (first printed edition 1614) and the Confessio (which appeared in 1615) [79] . These describe the initiatic events reputedly experienced by Christian Rosenkreutz, who is still revered by faithful Rosicrucians as one of the greatest imperators of their order [80] .

It sets the scene for a focus on the imagination in the opening lines. The protagonist had just finished praying, a process he describes as including conversation with his Creator and the contemplation of `many great Mysteries’, when a frightful tempest arose. The storm’s intensity was such that it threatened to cause the entire house to `flye in pieces’, clearly heralding an approaching dissolution of the limits of ordinary
time / space. To protect himself lest the storm be sent from the Devil, our character renewed his efforts at prayer and ‘persisted in my Meditation’, until a figure `touched me on the Back’. Although frightened, since the touch on the back had changed into an insistent twitching on his coat, he turned and beheld a ‘fair and glorious Lady, whose Garments were all Skye-colour, and… bespangled with golden Stars…who, before leaving, placed a letter for him on the Table? [81] .

One of the most remarkable things about this passage – which begins with prayer and meditation and ends with a letter – is that it brings together by degrees two modes of being -interior, private, and insubstantial and exterior, public, and substantial – which are normally viewed as dichotomised [82] . First, the description of the prayer contained a hint of corporeality: the prayer itself was an interaction, involving two persons, the subject (who prayed) and the object of his prayer (his Creator). Second, the vision was heralded by physical contact, meaning that it had enough materiality to involve his senses; in fact, the author uses the phrase ‘bodily vision’ in a subsequent passage from which I quote below. Third, the physical contact did not happen merely once, but repeatedly, and the figure left a letter, a physical token. We see that not only is the imagination involved here, but imagination of the type described in The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, which involves the body and its senses [83] .

The letter announced a long-awaited Hermetic wedding, which had first been called to his attention `seven Years before… in a bodily Vision’ [emphasis mine], and it therefore became the occasion for a rather anguished examination of conscience, since he felt he was not sufficiently prepared to participate in the event [84] . Added to that was genuine consternation because he could understand little of the significance of the announcement, now that it had arrived, for:

In my Head there was nothing but gross mis-understanding, and blindness in mysterious things, so that I was not able to comprehend even those things which lay under my Feet, and which I daily conversed with, much less that I should be born to the searching out, and understanding of the Secrets of Nature. [85]

A truly reluctant prophet, he also felt himself unworthy:

In my opinion Nature might every where find a more vertuous Disciple, to whom to entrust her precious, though temporary, and changeable Treasures.

Not knowing what else to do, he writes:

I betook my self to my usual and most secure course; after I had finished my earnest and most fervent Prayer, I laid me down in my Bed. [86]

With the hope that his normally instructive angel might whisper a helpful word or two of advice. No angel appears to have been forthcoming, but he dreamed a dream, `which was… strongly impressed upon my imagination’, and which functioned to reassure him that he was, after all, a fitting candidate for the task to which he had been called [87] .

Our voyager sets out on his journey to the wedding, taking along bread, salt and water, and placing four red roses in his hat (for he is, as he informs us, a brother of the ‘red-rosie Cross’) [88] . When he leaves his dwelling, the narrative explains that he is quite awake, but we again encounter the dissolution of a dichotomy, for the events which are subsequently related do not happen in ordinary space/time, but rather are characterized by dreamlike qualities; the conventional demarcation between waking and sleeping is blurred. These events belong to an imaginal world into which our character enters more and more deeply. This is Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, a world which Antoine Faivre has described as having ‘a geography of its own’ [89] . Indeed, for nearly a hundred pages, we find this character confronted with a series of symbolic personages, objects, and situations: he is presented with a choice of four paths to the ceremony; a wind presses him to move in one direction only; there is the alchemical antithesis in the form of a white dove and a black raven; he sees a ‘Portal’ on a `Hill’, the first in a series of gates, connoting the initiatory steps of gnosis [90] .

Finally, because this dreamlike journey into the imaginal world is supposed to take seven days, we are told of the circumstances attendant upon his going to bed, dreaming, and awakening; all of them highly symbolic, and therefore, worthy of imaginative contemplation; as are the concomitant philosophical complexities implicit in the `dream within the dream within the myth’ phenomenon, a frequent characteristic of myth [91] .

4 Aureum saeculum redivivum (The Golden Age Restored)

Alchemist Henricus Madathanus provides a similar focus on dreams in Aureum saeculum redivivum, first printed in 1625 in a collection of ten texts entitled the Musaeum hermeticum [92] . This treatise is also replete with symbols, especially those having to do with the alchemical marriage, and bears many of the characteristics of the Hermetick Romance:

I retired to rest?and fell into a deep slumber; when, behold, Solomon appeared to me in all his power?and with him came his whole harem?One of them was his most beautiful dove, and was dearest to his heart. [93]

Solomon takes him to a ?secret place?, restores his spirit with rare nourishment, and tells him to choose a bride for himself from among a group of virgins. Strongly attracted by one, he resists at first for she is dressed in utterly vile clothing, but he capitulates eventually, saying he is ?sick with love for her?, whereupon a clamouring arises among the women in Solomon?s entourage which awakens him [94] .

After he spends the remainder of the night in sleeplessness, morning reveals a pile of filthy clothing lying on the floor beside his bed! Once more we encounter a corporeal sign of an incorporeal experience; like the letter deposited on the table by the mysterious figure in The Hermetick Romance, the clothing is a visible token from the imaginal world. Frightened by this episode, the alchemist ignores the pile for five years, until he has a series of instructive dreams. From a woman in one of these dreams, he learns that the hideous rags are hiding a box filled with precious jewels. She gives him coals with which to burn the cloth, and thus, Madathanus is free at last to gaze at the contents of his treasure box. A sign on the box warns him to ?stir not up nor awake my love till he please?. Taking that as an exhortation to be patient yet awhile longer, he waits for a period of time, after which he is at last able to attain the long sought after Philosopher?s Stone [95] .

Like The Spiritual Exercises, this treatise is thick with points on which to contemplate imaginatively. An alchemist reading this text could certainly be expected to use his powers of imagining to learn the symbolic significance of the treasure box filled to the brim with precious jewels. On the level of chemical operations the box is the alchemical vessel and the precious jewels the substances which are being combined, and re-combined and subjected to all manner of processes like heating, evaporation, etc. On the level of spiritual work, the jewels are presumably things like character traits and dispositions of the soul which, through meditative practice are also subjected to a multitude of operations. The time spent waiting before extracting the jewels from the box corresponds to an incubation period. In the laboratory, the Philosopher?s Stone would be achieved only after a period of heating the substances in the alchemical vessel. ?Festina lente? could well be the motto here, because the texts are full of warnings that this heating must be done in a carefully regulated way otherwise the entire process could fail and would have to be repeated. By the same token, spiritual development cannot be forced either; but can be expected to take place only under properly regulated conditions.

5 Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta Fleeing)

Consideration of Michael Maier?s Atalanta Fugiens of 1618 adds still more to our understanding of the alchemical imagination [96] . The full title is revealing. It reads as follows:

Atalanta fleeing: that is, new chymical emblems of the secrets of nature; fitted partly to eyes and intellect, with figures engraved in copper and additional maxims, epigrams and notes, and partly to the ears and the recreation of the soul, with some fifty musical fugues in three parts, of which two are to correspond to one simple melody suitable for singing in couplets; the whole to be seen, read, meditated, understood, judged, sung and heard with extraordinary pleasure.

Thus this text, one of the most beautiful of all alchemical treatises, is intended from the very beginning to press the imagination into the service of helping involve our sense of sight as well as of hearing. Unlike The Hermetick Romance and The Golden Age Restored, which offer up the multi-sensory experiences of the alchemist/author for the edification and contemplation of the reader, Atalanta Fugiens constitutes a demand for participation by giving multi-sensory experience directly to its readers, as part of an explicit and comprehensive program. It is a unique combination of text, images, music, and lyrics, which is compelling even to the uninitiated [97] .

The text consists of fifty emblems, each accompanied by an epigram, an ostensibly explanatory, but characteristically cryptic, paragraph, and a fugue with lyrics [98] . Fifty emblems are far too many to comment on here, but the foloowing examples provide a good idea of what lies in store for the reader.

Emblema I: Portavit eum ventus in ventre suo [99]

Mercury is show here in human form, with wind streaming through his long hair. He is carrying the still-embryonic Philosopher?s Stone in the form of a baby within his body [100] . This single image implies innumerable levels of meaning. For an alchemist who is taking this text seriously, provided here, for example, is symbolic ?llustration of the esoteric meaning contained in the accompanying quotation from the Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Table), a frequently quoted text which articulates the view that

the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, and gives an account of cosmic causality which is process-oriented, rather than mechanistic. It also conforms to what Giordano Bruno would call the `inner artificer’, and thereby provides a model for looking for the cause of the Philosopher’s Stone within, rather than outside, the alchemist, as well as a model for imitating divine creation [101] `.

Emblema XXVII: Qui Rosarium intrare conatur Philosophicum absque clave, assimilatur homini ambulate volenti absq[ue] pedibus [102] .

The motifs of the enclosed garden, the rose, and the key are all reminiscent of the initiatory theme in The Hermetick Romance. The alchemist begins with the premise that the knowledge which will enable a successful alchemical enterprise is hidden from the view of the profane. Focusing the imagination on these three images is expected to provide the adept with valuable clues about the `real’ significance of the lock, the enclosed garden, and the rose.

In a context informed by belief in the doctrine of correspondences and of the relation between microcosm and macrocosm the sexual connotations of these motifs could initiate the following associations: sexuality and reproduction are bound up with the idea of earthly creativity and fecundity, which in turn is a microcosmic reflection of macrocosmic process. These motifs also suggest the idea of penetration. In turn, that idea can be associated with initiation and with gnosis: one progressively penetrates the secrets of the divine, of nature, and of the self [103] .

Emblema XXXVIII: Rebis, ut Hermaphroditus, nascitur ex duobus montibus Mercurii & Veneris [104] .

This illustrates the alchemical marriage. We see Mercury (in the garb of a soldier) and Venus (in gossamer dress) embracing each other. Mercury’s caduceus lies to one side in the foreground; a precociously-visaged Cupid holds a full quiver of arrows. Above the heads of the couple is a hermaphroditic figure. One modern writer offers the following interpretation:

The Rebis, like Hermaphroditus, is born from the two mountains of Mercury and Venus. The Rebis, Hermaphrodite or Androgyne of the Wise is born from the union of the two Principles (Sulphur and Mercury), who enter the mercurial Bath. This, like the mythical fountain where the nymph Salmacis swam, has the property of turning both sexes into one: that is, it dissolves the Bodies radically in such a way that, once recomposed in the Fixation, they are One. [105]

The alchemist knows that the Rebis, or Philosopher’s Stone is said to be the product of the alchemical marriage of opposites. He has already been encouraged to ponder the esoteric meanings of sexuality by following a trail of associations. This led to the realization that sexuality is a potentially powerful metaphor for microcosmic and macrocosmic process. Now the question might well become: How do I accomplish a union between the opposing elements in the laboratory (and within myself) that can adequately mirror cosmic process? The alchemist can only do this by means of the ampliftcatio described earlier. He or she must press into service the powers of imagining which will enable a gradual identification of him/herself with the hermetic androgyne. On a microcosmic scale, the figure of the androgyne represents the continuous dance of the cosmos as it balances universal energies.

6 The Power of the Imagination

In the case of Ficino, Ignatius, and the alchemical authors, we are dealing with texts produced by persons who understood and intentionally used the transformative power of the imagination, which played a central role in the lived experience that preceded the process of writing. These were never intended to be dry texts, produced with mere pen and ink and parchment. They were not envisioned as being comprised of disembodied collections of words (signifiers) comprising sentences and paragraphs (bundles of syntactical relations) referring to conceptual constructs (that which is signified). On the contrary, these texts were intended to be embodied constellations of meaning, which shaped themselves into ‘voices’ that `call’ to their reader across the temporal space of history [106] .

At each step, the writers whose works are discussed here sought to make implicit meanings explicit, to actualize what had previously existed only in potentia. In this they sought to mirror the creative process of the universe. But, just as the universe continuously unfolds new forms, that process of explication and actualization was never complete. New meanings affected old interpretations, new forms enriched them. Like spiritual perfection itself, the Philosopher’s Stone was always amorphous, never absolutely present, always just beyond reach; yet just as Ignatius’s God and Ficino’s

divine Source of all, it drew its seekers toward it.

Throughout we find that the creative, form-making power of the imagination was continuously present. These texts are able to span the centuries with a bridge comprised of a formidable number of hermeneutical acts, each making use of the faculty of the imagination. One set of acts was performed by the original author: the initial experience and the subsequent attempt to interpret it, and the process of recollection in order to write it down, or illustrate it. Another set was performed by those who listened to the author, or read the treatise, or contemplated the images. Each of these hermeneutical acts unfolds upon one another to form constellations which unfolded upon still others, forming veritable galaxies of imaginal worlds all characterized by the same exquisitely enlivened complexity.

SUMMARY

The intentional use of imagination – here understood as pertaining to a level of reality which Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis – plays an important role in the formulation of mystical language, the construction of images (both metaphorical and plastic), and meditative, ritual, and magical practices. This article examines the phenomenon of imagination as it appears in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius de Loyola, the writings of Marsilio Ficino, and selected alchemical treatises. Emphasis is placed on illustrating what it means to use the faculty of the imagination as a method of gnosis which functions to dissolve conventionally perceived and/or experienced dichotomies.

[1] The theme of the imagination in gnosis is discussed in Karen Voss, Is there a `Feminine’ Gnosis? Reflections on Feminism and Esotericism, Aries, 14 (June 1992), 5-24, and further developed in: ‘Feminine’ Gnosis: Forms of Gnosis in Modern Feminist Thought, an invited lecture given in the course: Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modem Times, offered by the Amsterdam Summer University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 15-19, 1994 (unpublished).

[2] Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, in: Spring (1975), 6-7.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] Ibid., 1-2.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957, 20-65 et passim. First published as Das Heilige and das Profane, Rowahlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1957.

[7] Corbin, op. cit., 4.

[8] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1, qq. 50-64.

[9] Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred, New York: Crossroad, 1982,

[10] Ibid., p. 11.

[11] See loan P. Couliano’s lucid analysis of what he describes as the ‘total censorship of the imaginary’ that was characteristic of the Reformation in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook, with Foreword by Mircea Eliade, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 193ff. Orig. published as Eros et magie d la Renaissance, Paris: Flammarion, 1984.

[12] ‘Transmutation’ as metamorphosis implies a cooperation between knowledge (in the sense of ‘gnosis’) and active imagination in order for lead to be changed into silver and silver into gold. The ‘gnosis’ often referred to … esoteric currents is the kind of illuminated knowledge which results in a state of being conducive to the ‘second birth’ …’. Quoted from Antoine Faivre and Karen-Claire Voss, Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion,. Numen, 42 (1995), 48-77.

[13] Sexson, op. cit., 6.

[14] Eliade, op. cit.

[15] lames Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, p. x.

[16] Ibid., 1-13 et passim.

[17] Ernst Gombrich, Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute XI (1948), 163-92: 165.

[18] Antoine Faivre, L’Image creatrice (La fonction magique de l’image et son fondement mythique du XVIBme si6cle), in: Revue d’Allemagne XIII (1981), 355-90: 388-389 and 389, respectively.

[19] Eliade, op. cit., 68-113.

[20] Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. See also Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

[21] See for example Christianne Klapisch-Zuber, Holy Dolls, in: Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.

[22] See Robert Klein, Les tarots enluminrss du XV si8cle, in: L’oeil 145 (January 1967).

[23] Hillman, op. cit., 200.

[24] According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘It is, perhaps, not too much to say that all of educated Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century came under the intellectual influence of Ficino’s Academy’. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, 18-19. Some of the material on Marsilio Ficino appeared in an article entitled: Three Exemplars of the Esoteric Tradition on the Renaissance, Alexandria: the Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions, 3 (January 1995). I am grateful to the editor for permission to use it here.

[25] Hillman, op. cit., 201.

[26] Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer, Irving, TX: Spring Publications, Inc., 1980, 96. A translation of Liber de vita, or De vita triplici, Florence, 1489. Henceforth referred to as De vita.

[27] The fabled Tabula Smaragdina was reputedly written by Herms Trismegistus who is respectfully mentioned by almost all the alchemical writers. Many, though certainly not all, of the Renaissance humanists accepted Hermes as an authority. For some exceptions to this view, see Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, 207. An important collection of articles about Hermes Trismegistus is in Antoine Faivre, ed., Pr?sence d’Herm?s Trism?giste, Paris: Editions Albin Michel S.A., 1988. On philosophical hermetism see Mirko Sladek’s L’?toile d’Herm?s. Fragments de philosophie herm?tique, translated from the German by Josette Rigal, Paris: Editions Albin Michel S.A., 1993; originally published as Fragmente der hemretischen Philosophie in der Naturphilosophie der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1984. The most definitive account of the origin and transmission of the Tabula is found in Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina, Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akten der von-Portheim-Stifttutg, 16, 1926. See also Walter Scott, ed. and trans., Hermetica, 4 vols., London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968, vol. 1: 31, 33, 35-36; and M. Berthelot, Les Origines de L’Alchimie, 1885; reprint ed., Osnabriick; Otto Zeller, 1966, 35ff., 169. See the preface by Nock in A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugiere, Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols., Paris: Societ? d’Edition, Les Belles Lettres, 1945, i-vi.

[28] See Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper & Row, 1957; reprint ed. Harper Colophon, n.d., 42.

[29] De vita, 91. It is important to note the belief in a cosmic plan or divine purpose implicit in Ficino’s statement `they have been prepared for this from the beginning’.

[30] Ibid., 88.

[31] Ibid., 102. . See D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, 12-24, for a discussion about Ficino’s preoccupation with the Sun. First published in 1958 by the Warburg Institute, University of London. Reissued as volume 22 of the Studies of the Warburg Institute, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969.

[32] De vita, 90.

[33] Ibid., 97.

[34] Ibid., 131.

[35] For an interesting and exceedingly relevant description of the possible initiatory function of depression see Basarab Nicolescu, Jung et la science: histoire et perspectives d’un malentendu, presented at the colloquium: `Jung Aujourd’hui’, organized by Groupe d’Etudes C.G. Jung, Paris, November 27-28, 1993.

[36] Ibid., 93

[37] Ibid. 33.

[38] Ibid., 159.

[39] Ibid., 100.

[40] Ibid., 165

[41] Ibid., 61.

[42] Ibid., 63.

[43] Ibid., 3.

[44] Ibid., 91.

[45] Ibid., p. 151.

[46] Ficino exhibits a tone of reportage in this portion of Book III, probably resulting from a judicious fear of ecclesiastical reprisal. The distancing phrase `the ancients have said’, occurs frequently throughout. Cf. D. P. Walker’s comments regarding Ficino’s disavowals of magical practice, op. cit., 42-44 et passim.

[47] De vita, 153.

[48] Ibid.

[49] The biographical information about Ignatius comes from Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Reformation: A Narrative History Related by Contemporary Observers and Participants, second edition, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979, 431ff.

[50] I have used the edition by David J. Heming, S.J., The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading, St. Louis, Missouri: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978.

Explicit ‘points on which to contemplate’ appear on 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192, 194; 196, and 200. Henceforth referred to as Exercises.

[51] References to ‘bringing to memory’ appear on 34, 36, 44, 46, 80, 116, 136, and 138. On 78 Ignatius refers to ‘five senses of the imagination’. And on 82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 116, 118, 120, 124, 128, 132, 138, and 142 he makes specific reference to the ‘five senses’.

[52] I would argue that the Ignatian use of the imagination belongs to a spectrum which includes, at its most extreme, the magician who intentionally imagines he is God. On this view, then, we should think of it as a somewhat watered down version of the identical formulation found in magic; thus, it would have been in line with the teachings of the Church to condemn it as potentially heretical. It is interesting to note that she did not, and also to consider that if someone like the ill-fated Giordano Bruno had produced the same techniques found in The Spiritual Exercises it certainly would not be in use today as part of the Jesuit program.

[53] For example, after the Council of Ephesus in 431 declared Mary to be `the Holy Virgin’ and theotokos (bearer of God), it was understood that she could be adored right along with God and the faithful proceeded to do just that with great fervor. This enthusiasm is not surprising in view of the fact that Ephesus had previously been the site of a temple to Artemis. Although the temple had been destroyed thirty years before the Council, at some level the sacred quality of the site remained: Artemis’ temple simply became St. Mary’s basilica. For the text of the theotokos declaration see Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, second edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

[54] Exercises, 32.

[55] Ibid. Specific references to mental images appear on 32, 34, 36, 38, 44, 64, 70, 72, and 76 (on 76 Ignatius emphasizes that we should ‘look, mark and contemplate’).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid., 36.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid., 44-46.

[60] Ibid., 72.

[61] There is a wealth of circumstantial evidence that links Ignatius to unorthodox practice, and therefore to the memory tradition. For example, when Ignatius matriculated at the University of Alcala in Barcelona in 1526, Inquisitorial authorities summoned him several times; once, in 1527, he was imprisoned. After his release, he went to Salamanca where continued harassment by the Inquisition drove him to France, where he enrolled at the University of Pads in 1528. Ignatius’s contemporary, Giulio Camillo, arrived in Paris in 1530, with the aim of raising money from Francis I for a memory theater. (See Yates, op. cit., 129ff.) Did Ignatius know about Camillo’s project? Obviously final determination regarding the influences on Ignatius would require more research. My point here, however, is that there are a number of potentially fruitful leads that remain to be followed. Jung notes a similarity between the ‘active imagination that takes place in yoga’ and ‘the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, who employs the terms consideratio, contemplatio, meditatio, ponderatio, and imaginatio per sensus for the ‘realization’ of the imagined content’, in: Alchemical Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; 1983, n. 11, 164-165. See also his lectures on Ignatius given at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, reprinted in ‘Exercitia Spiritualia of St. Ignatius of Loyola,: Spring (1977), 183-200 and continued in Spring (1978), 28-36.

[62] Yates, op. cit., 108.

[63] Thomas Aquinas, op. cit., II-II, q. 49.

[64] Yates, op. cit., 8-9.

[65] Exercises, 74.

[66] See Yates, op. cit., 96-97, for a description of an exceptionally horrible image representing idolatry.

[67] Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trams. R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968; 1980, 290. First published as Psychologie and Alchemie, Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1944; 2nd ed. revised, 1952. See also Karen Voss, Aspects of Medieval Alchemy: Cosmogony, Ontology, and Transformation, unpublished M.A. thesis, San Jose State University, 1984,24-39.

[68] Partly on account of these idiosyncrasies, and partly because most of the alchemists felt bound to keep from casting pearls before uninitiated swine, problems like these abound. The alchemical texts are almost always obscure. Every alchemist had to decide, therefore, what substances to use, which writers to take seriously, which images and symbols would be of use, etc. This necessity for organization as a preliminary to beginning the work frequently gave rise to an identification with the divine creators of cosmogonic myth. The alchemists also had to impose order on chaos. Regardless of the culturally specific terms in which it is couched, every cosmogonic myth develops the theme of order proceeding from chaos. For this reason, it was natural for the alchemists to identify the disordered welter of purportedly instructive texts (characterized by obscure language), and the plethora of syncretic symbols, images, and mottos, and myths that were the currency of peoples before the so-called Enlightenment, with the prima materia, with absolute formlessness, with pure potentiality. Their task, so it must have seemed, was to ‘imitate the acts of the gods in the beginning’ by actualizing the Philosopher’s Stone which had existed only in potentia. The more syncretistically-minded alchemists related this identity with creator divinities to the Christian idea of the Word made Flesh, which was accomplished by means of the Incarnation. In turn, the Incarnation provided a model of brokenness redeemed, made whole, embodied, and thus we sometimes see that it has become a model for the alchemical quest for unity appearing under the form of the Philosopher’s Stone. See for example, K. Voss, The Hierosgamos Theme in the Images of the Rosarium Philosophorum, in: Alchemy Revisited: Proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Alchemy at the University of Groningen, 17-19 April 1989, ed. by Z.R.W.M. van Martels, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990.

[69] See Emblema I on 36 infra, for example.

[70] See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon Books, 1970, 17-25, for a discussion of the four similitudes; and 25-30, for a discussion of the doctrine of signatures. The book was first published as Les Mots et les choses, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966. See also Gombrich, op. cit. Gombrich seems somewhat discomfited when contemplating the world view which led to a confusion between the signifier and the signified. This is a very important article, however, and contains a thorough exposition of the most significant issues related to the question of images in the Renaissance Neo-Platonic tradition.

[71] One alchemist writes: ‘Our matter has as many names as there are things in the world’. A. E. Waite, ed. and trans., The Hermetic Museum Restored and Enlarged, 2 vols., London: James Elliott and Co., 1893, I, 13. The role of the alchemist was to lead out the gold, to actualize what had existed in potentia. In this respect, it is appropriate to speak of the alchemists as ‘midwives’ who, in accord with the cosmic ‘plan’, were enabling the substances in their vessels to be ‘redeemed’ from their actual state of baseness and to attain their potential condition of perfection. See Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures o fAlchemy, trans. Stephen Corrin, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 19-52. First published as Forgerons et Alchemistes, Paris: Flammarion, 1956.

[72] Jung was adamant about understanding alchemy as a spiritual discipline. See, for example, the contrast he makes between two different writers on the topic in Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, trams. R. F. C. Hull, second edition, Bollingen Series XX, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963; 1970, 457. First published as Mysterium Coniunctionis: Untersuchung iiber die Trennung and Zusammensetzung der seelischen Gegensdtze in der Alchemie, Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1955, 1956. See also my article: Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images, in: Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. by R. van den Broek and W.I. Hanegraaff. State University of New York Press: New York, 1995.

[73] This is by no means unrelated to the ‘interpenetration between matter and spirit’ of which Ewert H. Cousins writes in Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites: The Theology of Bonaventure, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978, 170.

[74] K. Voss, The Hierosgamos Theme, op. cit., 4-9.

[75] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas with foreword by Etienne Gilson, New York: Orion Press, 1964, 112. First published as La poetique de I’espace, Paris: PUF, 1958.

[76] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 289.

[77] Ibid.

[78] See Marie Louise von Franz, Alchemical Active Imagination, Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications, 1979 and Corbin, op. cit., 9. For a comprehensive and extraordinarily sensitive analysis of the use of imagination in mysticism, see Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series XCL, Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1969. First published as L’Imagination creatrice dans le Soufrsme d’Ibn Arabi, Paris: Flammarion, 1958. Parts One and Two were originally published in Eranos-Jahrbiicher XXIV (1955) and XXV (1956), Zurich: Rhein-Verlag.

[79] Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Boulder: Shambala, 1978, 41-45, 66 et passim. Christian Rosenkreutz is said to have been born in 1378 and to have lived for 106 years.

[80] The Hermetick Romance is contemporaneous with the works of alchemist Michael Maier. See the discussion of Maier?s Atalanta Fugiens, 35-38 of this text.

[81] The Hermetick Romance: Or the Chymical Wedding, in: Paul M. Allen, ed., A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, 2nd ed., Blauvelt, New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1974, 69. Henceforth referred to as Romance.

[82] For a thought-provoking list of some of the things we think of as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ see Wendy O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984,311-312.

[83] Cf. 16 of this text.

[84] Romance, 70.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Ibid.

[

87] Ibid., 74-75.

[88] Ibid.

[89] .Antoine Faivre, Esotericism, in: Lawrence E. Sullivan, ed., Hidden Truths: Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987, 39.

[90] Ibid., 39-40.

[91] Wendy O’Flaherty, op. cit., especially Chapter 2, ‘Myths About Dreams’.

[92] Musaeum hermeticum, Frankfurt: printed for Lucas Jennis, 1625.

[93] Waite, op.cit.,I,57.

[94] Ibid., 59-60.

[95] Ibid., 63-64.

[96] Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century, New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1988, 68.

[97] Having once heard selections from the music of Atalanta Fugiens performed while looking at the images and the text I can attest to its compelling qualities. See Joscelyn Godwin, ed. and trans., Atalanta Fugiens: An Edition of the Emblems, Fugues, and Epigrams, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1989.

[98] There are numerous instances in which the paradigmatic Tabula Smaragdina is actually quoted from; fact noteworthy in itself since the Tabula is frequently alluded to or paraphrased in other alchemical texts but relatively rarely quoted from.

[99] ?The wind carries it in its belly?. This is a direct quotation from the Tabula Smaragdina.

[100] That is, in the place where his womb would be if he were a woman.

[101] Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. with an introduction by Jack Lindsay, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1976, 82. First published, Castle Hedingham, Essex: The Daimon Press Ltd., 1962.

[102] ‘He who tries to enter the Rose-garden of the Philosophers without the key is like a man wanting to walk without feet’

[103] The idea of progressively more profound understanding of the nature of the universe outside the self as well as the idea of deeper and deeper levels of self-knowledge is bound up with esoteric gnosis. Gnosis is therefore associated with penetration, and therefore here penetration, like gnosis, has a dual connotation. Cf. my remarks concerning Eros and the dialectic of gnosis in: Is there a ‘Feminine’ Gnosis? Reflections on Feminism and Esotericism, Aries, 14 (June 1992), 16-17.

[104] The Rebis, like Hermaphroditus, is born from the two mountains of Mercury and Venus.

[105] de Rola, op. cit., 102.

106] Cf. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona on artists-she has in mind those described by Mircea Eliade, and Eliade himself-who ‘suspend the traditional perception of time and space by the act of ‘making’, an act in which we share through participating in the environment of that artwork’, in her Introduction to Mircea Eliade, Symbolism the Sacred, and the Arts, ed. Apostolos-Cappadona, New York: Crossroad, 1985. The quotation appears on p. xi.

Inside Chi Flows Naturally:

1. Reports from our first summer retreats at Heavenly
Mountain. We’re more than half way through the eight weeks,
and its not too late to sign up for the last three weeks.
Short letter on the challenges of integrating Tao into a TM
meditation field. Testimonials from those who journeyed into
the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A
brief summary of retreats still beckoning.

36 new (live action!) photos from our first retreats at
Heavenly Mtn at: www.healingdao.com/heavenly_mtn_2007.html

To sign up for a retreat, call 888-750-1773, email
retreats&heaingdao.com, or just signup on
www.HealingTaoRetreats.com. All the travel details are on
the site.

2. China Dream Trip 2007 was, as usual, a life-changing
experience. Each trip is novel and wonderful in its own
unique way. For me, it included being bitten by an excitable
monkey on Mt. Emei. Yep, he drew blood. All because I
wouldn’t give him a package of Chinese herbs in my pocket.
Will his monkey bite antidote my Monkey Mind??

Reflections on China and the nature of the Monkey Mind that
bit me coming in the next Chi Flows Naturally. Along with
new photos from China 2007 that I haven’t had time to post
yet.

Dear Lovers of Summertime Tao,

I hope you are enjoying summer as much as I am. The biggest
change for me was shifting our summer retreats from the
Catskill mountains of New York to the Blue Ridge mountains
of North Carolina. Heavenly Mountain has turned out to
be….heavenly. The consensus (see reports below) from both
newcomers and old timers is that the change is much for the
better. The Tao is so kind, giving us a new direction to
flow in at the last moment.

Of course, we’ve had a few challenges along the way. We
moved Taoist body-centered energy practices into a
Transcendental Meditation space where the focus for ten
years was decidedly more out of body. We are on what used to
be the “divine mothers” campus, where several hundred women
were meditating around the clock using mantras, focused n
growing world peace and love. The vibe was nice, but a
different field from what we cultivate using qigong and
inner alchemy and various transformational body-centered
healing therapies.

So there was a brief moment of confusion when the elementals
in the main meditation hall were asking, “what are we
supposed to do?”. For ten years they had been programmed to
hang out somewhere above the head, out of the body. Mantak
Chia, who taught the first week here, noted that he
initially had trouble downloading energy into the space. It
was like there was an invisible plane of energy focused
slightly above the head that was behaving like a separate
fixed field, not really connected to the earth. This may
have caused a few people the first week to have strange and
disturbing dreams.

After a few days these elementals (the essences of the Life
Force that hold the shape of all matter) woke up and began
playing with our new patterns. Taoists focus on the
continuous flow between Heaven and Earth, without favoring
either as a permanent or absolute destination. Tao is about
process, and about humans as mediators of change between
form and formless. If you are in a fixed state, whether in
Heaven or on Earth (a.k.a. “Later Heaven”), then you’re
probably stuck.

For humans Tao means the Way of creative unfolding of the
self and one’s natural virtue. When I taught the second
week, I re-arranged the feng shui in the spacious meditation
hall. I moved the mediation seats so no one was sitting
beneath the four story tower in the center of the room,
which dispersed chi upward. I approached the problem of lack
of grounding using a different tactic than Mantak Chia. His
group work on DNA and Immune System Qigong certainly made a
huge shift in the space, but it still didn’t feel complete
to me.

Rather than trying to get the slightly “floating, spacy
field” to move down, I did a primordial qigong ceremony and
invited the earth elementals to move up and ground the field
by occupying the entire space. It worked great – I felt an
immediate and powerful response. The energy in my legs and
torso became solid like a mountain, and I felt a kind of
sigh of relief from the TM meditative field as it rushed to
join with the earth force. Others who walked into the space
afterwards noted that it felt completely different. I felt
it became much easier to enter into my body’s spiritual
inner space.

The difference in attitude toward the human body was brought
home by a former TM meditator who attended my Qigong
Fundametnals. He had been living and meditating at Heavenly
Mountain before it was “decommissioned” by agreement between
Maharishi and the twin brothers who built it, Earl and David
Kaplan.

This student had been forced to quit TM meditation because
of health problems he had developed. He told me there was
not much sympathy in the TM organization for those with
health problems. It was considered “your personal karmic
problem” and you should solve it on your own. If you were
sick, you would be kicked out of meditation courses as unfit
to enter the higher causal realms.

This of course led to many in TM suppressing medical
symptoms, until they became serious and more difficult to
heal. I find this thinking typical of Fire paths, with a
focus on otherworldly spiritual ideals rather than embodied
process. It is why I switched from kundalini yoga to
“water-and-fire” alchemy path of the Tao. My body was
getting weaker from the yogic practice, my adrenals were
burnt out from too much “breath of fire”. I decided I
valued my body as an integral part of my spiritual path. I
discovered through Taoist internal alchemy and qigong
practical ways to marry my worldly destiny (ming) with my
spiritual destiny (xing).

If you want to cultivate your body and spirit together,
please consider coming up to Heavenly Mountain during the
last three weeks of our schedule, Friday evening July 13
thru Wednesday, August 8. We accept last minute signups –
our new space is big enough to accommodate everyone (see
great new photos at:
www.healingdao.com/heavenly_mtn_2007.html).

Tina Zhang has two weeks of teaching the classical Northern
Wu Tai Chi form (that I also practice), followed by a
Woman’s Earth Qigong retreet. She is a fabulous teacher, and
is co-author of a hot new tai chi book on the Fighting Art
of the Manchurian Palace Guard (available on Amazon,
co-authored with Frank Allen).
To read more about her woemn’s qigong retreat, see:
www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/prod_list.pl?rpage=DM07-8A

Frank Allen has a three part Bagua Zhang series, that covers
a spectrum of what is considered the pinnacle of Chinese
martial arts. He has nearly 35 years of teaching
experience, and in my opinion is at the top of his field in
his ability to combine the energetics of meditation with the
precision of application. He is great in teaching
non-marital artists (including women who may have fears
about fighting) and runs multiple tracks in any course to
accommodate different skill levels. He offers certification
in Bagua as well. A great opportunity to learn from a master
in an optimal environment. Read more about his top flight
training program at:

www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/prod_list.pl?rpage=DM07-6B

Karin Sorvik, a Healing Tao Senior Instructor, is teaching a
Chi Nei Tsang Deep Organ Massage course followed by Tao
Basics and Healing Love in week 7. She has a magical gift of
healing and knows how to get people into the practice they
most need to ground themselves. Her Tao Basics course can
also be used for certification:

www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/prod_list.pl?rpage=DM07-7A

Madame Wang Yan is flying over from Europe to teach her
famous Weight Loss Breathing Qigong method along with
various useful forms of medical qigong. She is the youngest
70 year old grandmaster you’ll find, and an international
tai chi champion as well as medical doctor. Please go online
to read the restimonials about her course – this is her only
appearance in the USA, and not to be missed!

www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/prod_list.pl?rpage=DM07-8D

Rob Renahan, the summer retreats registrar, is offering a
new approach to Taoist cultivation that integrates his
extensive training as a zen monk in Korea. He calls it Zen
Qigong; the Art of Meditation as Non-Doing. It involves
finding the effortless way (Tao) to stilling the mind while
doing any form of yoga, qigong, or sitting in meditation. We
are delighted to share his new skills with our audience. If
your Monkey Mind is bothering you, be sure to attend his
course! He’s writeen an article on his integration of zen
and tao, you can read it at:

www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/prod_list.pl?rpage=DM07-8C

And, course, I have several higher level inner alchemy retreats.

Now, for the reports from students attending the first weeks
at Heavenly Mountain. It is always better to hear it from
the horses mouth…..:)

Subject: Wonderful Experience at Heavenly Mountain NC

I just returned from your Heavenly Mountain retreat (week
one) and I have to say it was one of the most wonderful
experiences of my whole life. The location is incredible,
the views of the mountains breathtaking, the accommodations
extremely comfortable, the teachings inspirational and I met
many new friends whom I will never forget….

I can’t wait to come back again. I have been dealing with
health issues for several years (myleodyspastic syndrome,
fibromaylagia, severe allergies and asthma)and cannot
remember the last time I felt so alive and healthy. Thank
you so much for creating the enviroment and opportunity for
me to be able to attend such a life changing program. This
is the first retreat I have ever been on, and was a little
apprehensive about what it would be like.

Heavenly Mountain is an apt description, and I feel blessed
to have been able to spend a week of my life REMEMBERING
just how wonderful it is to be alive. I can’t believe I
just spent a week tramping up and down a hill and several
flights of stairs without having to use an inhaler… I
slept like a baby when I wasn’t outside staring at the
stars.

Again, I THANK YOU greatly for the opportunity to have
shared in a wonderful week up there in the NC mountains, and
the Summer Solstice Celebration (I was standing in the
“West” 🙂 It was great fun and I will carry the positive
energy to as many others as I can !
Sincerely, Kelly Francies

Michael,

Taking the Fundamentals 1-4 at heavenly Mountian (week 2)
was a great experience. I’m very impressed with the energy
that was there, and what was generated by all our practice.
I wish I had known about Qigong 20 years ago. The food was
great, and the people there were quite interesting. It was
better than any vacation I’ve ever had.

It is had to pinpoint exactly what I liked the most, because
the experience got progressively better with each passing
day. I was so filled with Qi that I didn’t sleep long at
night, perhaps only 3-4 hours, yet I never felt better! The
Microcosmic Orbit started occuring spontaneously on its own
which was very interesting.

Some of my experiences include the opening of the Dan Tien
(with pulsations back and forth all over the place), the
hormonal and energy rush from the Bone Breathing, the
feeling of having a 6 inch bubble of Qi rush up my spine
after doing the Feldenkrais and back-neck stretching, doing
the most energetic 5 Animals (as a group) that I’ve ever
experienced, and the vast internal openness after doing the
Ocean Sky and Great Heart Breathing was awesome.

With all that said, I now think after looking back the the
Inner Smile Meditations were the high points. I have in the
past seriously underestimated the power of that meditation
form. When we did the Inner smile it was the most profound
Ive’ ever felt.

My Dan Tien opened up and I saw what looked like a worm hole
coming out of it, with a gold ball circulating around the
opening. As it continued to expand I saw the virtues coming
out from the opening, love, kindness, strength, integrity,
trust, etc.

The opening grew so large as to fill my field of vision, and
then two gold balls circulated about the opening. I could
see a field of stars in the portal, and then a deep black
emptyness. A very gentle and kind voice said, that I wasn’t
quite ready for the next level yet, but that after a few
months of experience, just a few, that I would be ready to
move on.

I think I’ll keep practicing the Fundamentals…….and I’ll
be back to heavenly Mountain next summer. Please share with
your staff that the retreat facilities, food, and energy was
great there. I couldn’t possibly give a higher
recommendation to someone, when I say that they should
definitely go to a Heavenly Mountain Retreat as soon as they
can.

Bob (Florida)

Date: July 2, 2007 11:36:03 AM EDT

Subject: heavenly mountain fundamentals

Hello Michael, I hope all is well with you and I am just
writing to thank you for an amazing experience. I just came
back a few days ago from the fundamentals 1-4 and I don’t
know if I should thank you because I really had a hard time
leaving.

I have studied taoist practices on and off for over 10 years
mostly reading of Daniel Reid and a few workshops in New
York but nothing compares to the total immersion of going to
a retreat in the beautiful mountains. What a great way to
spend a day, wake up at 6:30 do chi gung from 7:30-9 than a
healthy lunch 3 more hours of theory and work and great
lunch and break and than 3 more hours, it was like being in
spiritual training camp!!!!

The only bad part was that the food was so good I couldn’t
stop eating it.
The facility was amazing, it was gigantic, clean, and full
of energy. My room could’ve slept 4 people very comfortably
and the water up there was really clean.

I really appreciate your teaching style it is very direct
and yet very subtle. I am a massage therapist and a pretty
stressed out one, your technique is great because we don’t
know what’s coming next, I was so worried that I wasn’t
going to get to ‘feel’ anything that I was driving myself
crazy I was really afraid about not feeling the orbit or my
dan tien. The great thing about how you taught was that I
never knew what was coming so I couldn’t get tense about it.

The most incredible moments for me was the during the
Fundamentals 3 & 4 breathing exercises. When you focused on
the pauses, I thought it was a relaxation exercise to chill
out and take it easy. But at one point the pause came and I
didn’t feel the need to breath again! It was crazy and I
felt my dan tien open up and I saw colors and it expanded
more and more. I could have gone on for hours, when you
stopped us.

The week really opened up many things, I felt like my
eyesight improved, my kidneys felt renewed and especially my
lungs. My wife also noticed upon giving me a hug that the
bump on my C7 of my neck had straightened out!!!

Thank you so much and I plan on going to more retreats.

Chad Pilieri

Subject: Energy Body became Real for me

Michael,

My inner self told me that coming to Heavenly Mountain would
change my life. It has. When you talked about grounding and
opening a place inside that would be a spiritual center, I
understood intellectually what you meant but it had no real
meaning.

The energy body was an intellectual concept that I was
familiar with but I had no real experience of. I was so
blown away by what happened last week. It seemed like each
day the energy increased exponentially and got much more
solid. I feel so much more real and this feeling is
something that has changed me because I am not willing to
ever let that go.

I am doing a 45min to 1 hour workout (including the animals)
every morning before anything else. I break out
spontaneously with a smile when I talk to my organ spirits,
hug them, and tell then how much I love them. I want you to
know that saying I love you to myself is something I have
never done and writing this I almost break out in tears. I
can’t imagine starting the day any other way and I think
that that feeling will enable me to keep at it. I have never
experienced anything like when we did the seated orbit. I
was almost literally knocked out of my chair by the
experience.

I am so grateful for what you taught me and for the tools
you gave me. I can’t thank you enough !!!!!!!! Paul Zistl

Hello New Friends from Healing Tao,

The heavenly Mtn. reteat was an amazing experience for me.
A week of deepening awareness of my energy body and how real
it really is. The people were so great as well as the food !
It was just plain fun!
Warmly, Damon M. (Los Angeles)

Inviting you to come join the Tao Summer Fun,

Michael Winn

The Subtle Body Ecstasy of Daoist Inner Alchemy

LIVIA KOHN

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

Descriptions of personal mystical experiences in the Daoist tradition are hard to find. Authors typically refrain from becoming too personal, and the overall tendency in the literature is to express the experiences of the mystic in generalized instructions and the listing of warning signs. This is different from Western religions, where the experience is at the pivot of it all and is described as overwhelming and ineffable, timeless and yet full of knowing certainty (James 1936), and where mystics have described its wonders time and again as they have their agonies when it eluded them for a period in the so-called dark night of the soul (Underhill 1911).

There is no strong emphasis on personal experience in Daoism. There are experiences, yes?the complete oblivion of all, for example, described often as ?the body like a withered tree, the mind like dead ashes,? and the ecstatic visions of the gods and palaces of the otherworld, to name the most common. But there are very few personal reports on the overwhelming and powerful nature of certain specific experiences that could be compared in impact and importance to their Western counterpart. This lack can be explained as a general feature of Chinese culture, where religious autobiography was not a major genre, and the earliest first-hand accounts of the troubles and delights of the quest for perfection only appear after contact with Western missionaries in the Yuan and Ming dynasties.

Still, even before this period mystical manuals contain warnings and instructions regarding specific experiences. For example, the Dingguan jing (Scripture on Concentration and Observation), a Tang-dynasty text, says quite explicitly:

If there are thoughts and fantasies during concentration,

Manifold delusions and countless evils,

Also specters and wicked sprites

Will appear accordingly.

But when you see

The Perfected or Lord Lao,

Divine wonders and amazing sights,

This is an auspicious sign. (lines 27-28; Kohn 1987, 138).

Similarly, the Zuowang lun (Discourse on Sitting in Oblivion) of the eighth century is very clear about the difficulties that adepts can expect to face and outlines the radiance of spirit and boundless joy they may eventually attain (see Kohn 1987). Yet neither has quite the same importance, the same centrality as the mystical experience in the Western interpretation of mysticism. While Western mystics fixate on the experience, it seems, the Chinese concentrate more on the transformation of body and mind. The key to being a mystic, then, is not whether one has had a certain experience, but to what degree one?s self is being transformed into cosmic dimensions, how sagely and non-acting one has become (Kohn 1992).

The underlying reason for this difference in emphasis regarding experience is the nature of the worldview at the foundation of the two religious systems. Western traditions pose a transcendent divine agent, a God totally other; their mystics accordingly concentrate on rare visions of the deity, granted through his mercy, that are overwhelming, ineffable, and entirely out of this world. The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, sees its ultimate in the Dao, a divine force so immanent that it is even in the soil and tiles, so much a part of the world that it cannot be separated from it. Oneness or union with the Dao is the birthright of every being, not a rare instance of divine grace. It is natural to begin with, and becomes more natural as it is realized through practice.

The Chinese mystical experience of oneness with the Dao, quite logically, is astounding only in the beginning. It represents a way of being in the world completely different from ordinary perception, sensually and intellectually determined. The longer the Daoist lives with the experience and the deeper he integrates it into his life and being, the less relevant it is. Thus, neither is the experience itself the central feature of the tradition, nor is there a pronounced ?dark night of the soul,? a desperate search for a glimpse of the transcendent divine.

THE BODY

Another major difference between the two traditions is the continued emphasis the Chinese place on the body in the transformation to a celestial being. Unlike in the West, where body and soul are radical opposites, body and spirit in in Daoist mysticism, though clearly distinguished, are not seen as opposites. Rather, they represent different aspects of the same continuum of the Dao and have to be purified in equal measure. As Maxime Kaltenmark puts it,

Chinese terminology reflects subtle differences between states of a more or less ethereal quality, but of one and the same principle lying at the foundation of all the complex functions of man. The gross conditions of the body are as much included as are its finer essences and the higher mental states which make up holiness.

This then is the reason why one can say that the Chinese do not make a clear-cut distinction between what we call body and mind. Their outlook is in general much more oriented towards life as an organic whole and ongoing process. (1965, 655)

The challenge for the mystic, then, is not to overcome the body in favor of the spirit but to transform the entire body-spirit continuum to a higher level and come to experience himself as the divine replica of the cosmos in oneness with the Dao.

This perspective is again based on the worldview of the underlying oneness of everything in the Dao. In this framework, the human body is seen as an accumulation of cosmic, vital energy known as qi and evaluated in terms of its energetic workings rather than as a solid, ultimately fragile entity. Qi is at the root of everything that exists, whether natural or supernatural, human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate. It generally appears in the complementary forces yin and yang, which correspond to night and day, shadow and light, resting and moving, feminine and masculine, tiger and dragon, mercury and lead, and so on. They cannot exist without one another but continuously engender and develop in mutual interaction, moving in cycles of days and seasons, of inner circulation and outer rhythm. They are further subdivided into categories of lesser and greater and associated with the Five Phases (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), symbolic representations of their developmental patterns. In this more complex form, the phases of qi are then set into a relationship with the key organs of the human body, its senses, material constituents, psychological agents, and emotions.

Qi comes in two major forms, prenatal or primordial and postnatal or ordinary. Primordial qi is the cosmic parent of yin and yang, the power of the universe at its creation, the original purity of the cosmos in its most potent form. It is the ultimate neutral energy, the highest creative power, the most essential force of all existence. Everybody at birth receives a set amount of primordial qi, but even that amount is already miniscule compared to the intensity of the primordial power of the cosmos (Winn 2001). Postnatal qi is ingested through breath, food, and interaction with others. It mingles with the primordial reservoir deep within and most commonly diminishes it until the person becomes spiritually disconnected and physcially weak, and eventually dies. Lack of primordial qi in this system is the reason why so many people feel alienated from God, nature, and each other, and why they tend to believe that the gross, dense, physical reality they see around them is all there is.

The Daoist endeavor consists in the recovery and replenishing of the tiny spark of primordial qi that is buried within all human beings. All qi continuously moves in the body in a smooth regular rhythm dictated by the cosmic patterns of yin and yang. It is in a state of ongoing flux, continuously changing, constitutes health or sickness, moods and tempers, and determines how we work, eat, and sleep. As and when the spark of primordial qi is ignited and strengthened, it will ?gradually dissolve one?s suffering and struggle and restore life to its innate state of grace and effortless, nonactive (wuwei) communication with Heaven, Earth, and all nature. Cultivating primordial qi is growing Heaven and Earth within? (Winn 2001, 14).

To do so, practitioners begin with cultivating qi as it appears in the body in its most tangible and concrete form?as jing or essence. Jing is the indeterminate aspect of qi, also described as qi in transition from one determinate form to another (Porkert 1974). Put most concretely, jing is no longer the qi of the eggs in the omelet and not yet the qi of the eggs as assimilated in the body body of the eater. As Michael Winn describes it, ?jing is perhaps best understood in Western terms as primal matter. It is the raw fuel that drives the pulsating rhythm of the body?s moment-to-moment cellular division and reproduction of itself? (2002, 20). Governed in the body by the kidneys and the Phase water, it is also closely related to the psychological power of the will or determination, the innate power to ?seek pleasure, and to fulfull a specific destiny? (Winn 2002, 20). It is also the source of a person?s charisma or magnetic power, of sexual attraction and an innate sense of wholeness. In its most concrete form jing in the body appears as sexual energy, i.e., semen in men and menstrual blood in women. Much of Daoist cultivation accordingly begins with the control and reorientation of sexual energy.

Eventually this jing is purified and made more subtle and transformed into qi that is then moved consciously around the body in various cycles. This qi in turn is further rarified into shen (spirit), which is a third form qi assumes in the human body. Shen is understood as the inherent higher vitality of life, the power of consciousness, and the ability to think. It is closely associated with the individuality?s outlook and personality and is said to reside in the central organ of the heart. It governs the emotions and has the most impact on the mystical transformation. Ultimately, spirit is also the goal of mystical attainment: the transformation of a baser qi being into an entity of pure spirit.

To achieve this, various methods of cultivation are employed, including formalized body movements, breathing exercises, ritual ceremonies, meditations, visualizations, and so on. It should be understood, however, that none of these practices?however beneficial they may be for health and long life and good fortune?are undertaken to obtain or acquire qi. Rather, qi is already there, and the practitioner already is part of nature?s infinite qi–field. The task is not to change the basic set up of being human but to recognize one?s true nature as part of the Dao, to ?understand the unconscious communication patterns that are always flowing between one?s microcosmic (personal) qi-field and the impersonal (macrocosmic) qi-field?(Winn 2001, 13).

INNER ALCHEMY

The tradition within Daoism that makes most obvious use of this understanding of the body as a cosmic qi-field is known as ?inner alchemy? (neidan). A complex system of techniques that integrated physical longevity methods, spiritual meditations, operative alchemy, and the intricate symbolism of the Yijing, it can be traced back to the Tang dynasty (618-907) but came to flourish in the Song (960-1260), especially in south China, where it was practiced by various schools. Inner alchemy describes mystical attainment in terms of three stages?transforming jing into qi, qi into shen, and merging shen with the Dao, in the form of interior spiritual entity known as the golden elixir or the immortal embryo.

Inner alchemical practice begins in the first stage with taking control of the jing, the sexual energy. For men, this means that they must avoid losing semen through ejaculation while women, through a series of meditations and breast massages learn to lessen and eventually stop the flow of menstruation. Instead practitioners retain their jing and reverse its flow, making it move up the spinal column ?to nourish the brain.? The brain, according to Chinese traditional medicine, is the Ocean of Marrow, and marrow is jing as manifest in the bones. Every time jing is lost through sexual activity, therefore, the brain, the bones of the head, and the skeleton of the body are weakened and become more brittle.

The jing, moreover, that travels up the spine is not the semen that would be ejaculated during sexual intercourse or lost in menstruation but its refined form, the qi from which the semen arose in the first place. At the top of the head, the reversed jing unites with other yin secretions of the body and, once it begins to overflow in the cavity there, descends again through the front of the torso to the energy center in the abdomen known as the lower cinnabar field. Circulated mentally in spiraling movements, the qi is stored here and forms the interior cauldron for the concoction of the elixir, the spiritual womb for the growth of the immortal embryo.

The process of qi circulation is known as the ?microcosmic orbit? and still actively practiced today (see Chia 1983; 1985; Winn 2002). Undertaken after preparatory meditations, chanting of sacred sounds, and the activation of the qi in the five inner organs, it is accompanied by rhythmic breathing and the regular holding of breath.

Also, the technique is practiced in synchronicity with the yin-yang patterns of the seasons and matched with appropriate visualizations, seeing for example the rising yang-jing as solar, and the descending yin-qi as lunar energies. Through this refinement, the qi in due course opens up to unveiling a kernel of grain or a pearl in the lower cinnabar field?the first concrete inkling of primordial qi within. Called the ?mysterious pearl? or the ?pearl of dew,? this is the seed of the divine elixir from which the immortal embryo will eventually grow. It indicates the successful completion of the first stage.

During the second stage, the transformation of qi into shen, the immortal embryo grows over ten months in the lower and middle cinnabar fields (abdomen and solar plexus). It is nourished by the rhythmic ascent and descent of qi, which creates a great abdominal openness and allows the increasing sublimation of interior qi into spirit. Understood as a reversal of the cosmic process of creation, it involves reverting the five phases to the three primal forces (water, fire, and earth), and the coupling of the reversed energies of fire within water (yang within yin) and water within fire (yin within yang)?the latter often expressed with the help of the symbols of the Yijing (Book of Changes). More primordial qi is assembled and the three cinnabar fields are turned into powerful alchemical cauldrons for its further refinement (Winn 2002,18).

This process requires the strongest meditative awareness yet?long periods of quiet sitting and deep inner stillness. After ten months of nurturing with primordial qi, the newly developed subtle body, the immortal embryo is ready to be born. For this, it is moved gradually upward along the spine until it reaches the upper cinnabar field in the head. From there it can leave the body through the top of the head, undertaking excursions to the celestial spheres as it pleases. The birth of the embryo into a free-moving spirit power signifies the adept?s rebirth on a new level and a new yin body, an immortal being of softness, purity, and light.

The third stage, following this spiritual rebirth, is not described in great detail in the texts. They mention that the yin body is increasingly transformed into a body of pure yang, essentially through deeper absorption and meditative practice. Eventually it becomes pure, luminous spirit and is reintegrated into cosmic emptiness. In the course of this process, the adept acquires supernatural and magical powers that are, however, not considered of major importance by the tradition. The main objective is final deliverance, achieved through the overcoming of individual identity and all body-mind duality.

The modern school of inner alchemy as taught by Mantak Chia subdivides this last stage into five levels:
1.

the birth of the immortal child through the absorption of higher forms of yin and yang, the sun and the moon, and by opening communication with the five spirit centers and the divinities of the four directions;
2.

the maturation of the immortal child through feeding of the true elixir of the sun, a series of meditations arranged according to one?s astrological birth elements that involve the absorption of planetary power and ecstatic travels to the solar system;
3.

the crystallization of the primordial spirit by focusing on the center in the head and there absorbing and interiorizing various astral forces, such as the Big Dipper, the Polestar, and the four Great Star quadrants, eventually attaining the ability to travel freely around them;
4.

the merging of Heaven and Earth through opening a cosmic void within, where Heaven and Earth come together in primordial unity and where the physical body and personality of the adept fully dissolves into primordial qi;
5.

union with the Dao, a spontaneous event that occurs when virtue, destiny, and cultivation are complete (Winn 2001, 28-30).

Within this overall framework, then, two major sets of experiences can be described: the sense of energetic openness and interior subtlety as a being of pure qi when the microcosmic orbit is fully opened; and the mystical realization of the spirit being both within the body and in its travels through the otherworld.

THE MICROCOSMIC ORBIT

An early descripition of the transformative experience of the microcosmic orbit is found in the Xiwang mu shize (Ten Rules of the Queen Mother of the West), a work on women?s inner alchemy of the eighteenth century (Despeux 2000, 397). The text notes that the qi refined through extensive breast massages will spontaneously begin to move about in the body. Once adepts become aware of this, they should actively guide it downward through the abdomen and divide it into two streams at the hips, spiralling it to the left and right in the course of thirty-six respirations. Getting warmer and more active, the qi begins to move up the spinal column, first slowly and hesitantly, then with increasing speed and vigor. To unblock hindrances along the spine, adepts clap their teeth seventy-two times and take thirty-six deep nostril breaths before the practice. To prevent qi from staying in the genital area and flowing out of the body, they contract the muscles of the pelvic floor with some force and place both hands over the pubic bone, at the same time actively visualizing the upward flow of qi.

Once the qi has begun its upward course, practitioners raise both hands overhead, spreading and releasing the fingers at regular intervals twice thirty-six times, first slowly and lightly, then a bit faster. Next, they place their hands on their hips and shrug the shoulders thirty-six times, allowing the qi to pass through the Double Pass at breast level, the upper spine, and the Jade Pillow at the occiput. Any blockages found there can be further dissolved by clapping the teeth and concentrating on the nape of the neck. Once the qi has moved all the way up through the Niwan Palace to the top of the head, adepts move the lower lip above the upper to encourage the qi to descend along the front of the skull toward the nose.

They roll the tongue against the upper palate to establish a connection between the two central energy meridians in the torso, the Governing and Conception Vessels, thus allowing the sweet dew of the qi to descend further. It flows down naturally towards the Purple Gate near the heart, where it is held for a short period. Moving further down through the abdomen, it divides at the hips and is spiraled thirty-six times as before, then concentrated in the cinnabar field and rotated thirty-six times each to the left and the right (Despeux 1990).

This free flow of qi through the body brings with it a sense of ecstasy and an increased subtleness of bodily perception. It constitutes the reorganization of personal consciousness and bodily awareness on a subtler and more refined level. Practitioners gain a sense of being part of the flow of the Dao rather than separate individual entities.

A first-person account of this experience of the microcosmic orbit has been transmitted from the early twentieth century, when Jiang Weiqiao (1870-1955), a learned and sickly young man who later became know as Master Yinshi, experimented with

Daoist inner alchemy to cure himself of tuberculosis. To achieve his self-healing he set up a rigid schedule of meditation and physical exercises, establishing a daily routine that closely resembled monastic discipline. He got up around three or four in the morning and practiced ?quiet sitting,? as he calls his meditation, for an hour or two. Breakfast and a short hike, ?always facing east, to absorb the energy of the rising sun? (Jiang 1985, 90), were followed by a rest and study period to culminate in another phase of quiet sitting around ten o?clock. After lunch he would spend some time pacing slowly around the room. Beginning at about three o?clock, he practiced the seven-stringed lute or went out for another walk. Dinner and another two hours of sitting in the evening concluded a busy day of self-healing.

In the course of a year, he managed to strengthen his qi and began to experience its strong power within:

I had started my regimen on the fifth day of the third month of the year 1900. However, I had to endure many pains and hardships and I was remiss and idle in some thing or another practically every day.

Later I learned how to leave things to nature, and my spirit became fresher and healthier every day. Before, when I had gone out for a walk I would make it for two or three miles, then had to rest for tiredness and exhaustion. After a few months of practice, once I got going I could walk on for ten miles and more and never feel the strain.

Every time I sat down to meditate, I would focus my awareness on the cinnabar field in the lower abdomen. I could feel a cloud of hot power there. It came and went, rose and ebbed. I was quite amazed by it.

Then, on the twenty-ninth of the fifth month, during the evening sitting, it happened first: All of a sudden there was this intense rumbling movement in the cinnabar field in my lower abdomen. I had been sitting in quiet meditation as usual, but this was something I really could not control. I was shaken back and forth helplessly. Then an incredibly hot energy began to rise at the bottom of my spine and climbed up further and further until it reached the very top of my head. I was startled and alarmed. (1985, 91-92; Kohn 1993)

In traditional terms, this experience reveals the power of the primordial qi over all living beings and is a first sign of the practitioner?s growing oneness with Dao, an initial step toward the dissolution of ego and the attainment of perfection. For Jiang Weiqiao, it was the first discovery of an energy that pervaded and nourished his body, a powerful, yet ultimately controllable agent, not a mystical divine force of universal creation. Later, as he describes it, the experience was repeated several times until the hot qi that rose along his spine no longer left the body through the top of the head but returned through the face and chest area to the lower abdomen. After undergoing the spontaneous establishment of the microcosmic orbit, he continued to use his power over the circulation of qi whenever he felt weak or sick, sometimes guiding it to flow freely, sometimes directing it to whatever part of his body felt unwell.

Another first-person report on the establishment of the microcosmic orbit is by Michael Winn, a long-term seeker of spiritual cultivation in the Indian and Chinese traditions. In the beginning of his quest, he studied Rajneesh?s Book of Secrets and followed its breathing instructions to the point where he could slow his breath down to almost a complete standstill. Then

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 need to breathe air. Suddenly my whole body shook, then exploded into 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. (2002, 7)

Here the opening of the qi body is not felt as a circulation of energy but rather as an explosion, a dissolution of the former, apparently solid foundation of self and body into tiny droplets of energy that were dispersed through space and slowly came back to settle in the personal sphere. Still, the event is very similar?the qi manifests violently with a rumbling and begins to move entirely on its own and without any conscious control of the practitioner. This control is only learned over time and exercised carefully in proper training.

Such training is undertaken in the contemporary Daoist practice of inner alchemy in a school known as The Healing Dao, of which Michael Winn is a leading practitioner today. Healing Dao was originally founded by Mantak Chia, a Thai of Chinese ancestry. Born in 1944, he was recognized early for his spiritual potential and began the practice of Buddhist meditation at age six. Later he moved to Hong Kong where he studied various qi techniques, such as Taiji quan, Aikido, and Qigong. There he also met a Daoist master, known as the One Cloud Hermit, who taught him the secrets of inner alchemy over a period of five years. Developing his own system, in 1973 he founded The Healing Dao in Chiangmai, Thailand, and in 1978 brought it to the West.

According to Chia, practitioners begin their endeavor by becoming conscious of their inner organs and the qi flow within. Then they gradually learn to open the microcosmic orbit. About the experience accompanying this, he says:

Most people have some sensations during their meditation. These may be warmth, heat, or tingling at the sacrum, Gate of Life, Third Eye, or tip of the tongue, or cold or numb areas. Some people feel an effervascence like champagne bubbles. You may experience mild electic-like shocks anywhere in the body; the body may shake rhythmically or suddenly jolt.

Also, the hands, feet, or whole body may become unusually hot; in fact, you may feel strong sensations of heat anywhere in the body. Those who are visually oriented may see a light inside their heads, or points along the orbit may light up. If you have any of these sensations, you may conclude that qi is circulating. (Chia and Chia 1993, 478)

The reason for these various sensations in the body is that ?we have begun to absorb qi from Heaven, Earth, and the Higher Self, and our channels are widening to absorb additional bursts of qi? (1993, 484). This is considered very beneficial and an important step on the way, leading to a sense of self and body that is no longer limited to ordinary consciousness but grows into a dimension of subtle energetics and cosmic connection. The mystical dimension of existence here is opened through the physical experience of the body and the reorganization of self in terms of qi flow and the perception of subtle energies. Experience is determined entirely by the body?but the body is transformed into a more subtle, more cosmic, more divine entity.

THE IMMORTAL EMBRYO

This transformation of the body is further intensified in the second stage of the alchemical process, when the inner seed of the elixir, created by the systematic circulation and collection of qi, blossoms forth and gives rise to the immortal embryo. Over ten months of intense meditation, this spiritual alter ego of the practitioner grows to completion, and a primordial light begins to shine through the entire body. Adepts then enter a state of deep absorption, lying immobile as if dead, appearing pale in complexion, and apparently not breathing at all. They need a helper at this time who watches over them day and night for however long the state persists, which may well be up to six days. All noise and shouting that might startle them must be avoided, lest the tenuously growing spirit embryo be injured and the adept be afflicted by madness or demonic forces. When they come out of this absorption, nostril breathing begins very subtly and the divine light opens up. One can then call out to them in a low voice. They slowly begin to move and will gradually rise, get dressed, and take some nourishment, still remaining vigilant since the process is not yet over. Rather, the most important part is still to come: the exiting of the spirit into the celestial realm (Despeux 1990).

The first exiting of the spirit embryo is known as ?deliverance from the womb.? It is the adept?s celestial rebirth and is accompanied by the perception of a deep inner rumbling, like a clap of thunder. Then the celestial gate at the top of her head bursts free and opens wide, and a white smoky essence can be seen hovering above her. The spirit passes through the top of the head and begins to communicate actively with the celestials, transcending the limitations of the body. Before this exiting procedure, adepts actively move the immortal embryo from the middle to the upper cinnabar field, using rhythmic breathing and/or the recitation of sacred sounds.

As long as the adept has not entered a state of very deep absorption, the embryonic spirit is not yet fully detached from the qi circulating in the body and cannot leave. Once absorption is attained, on the other hand, and the spirit has begun to move on its own, the adept easily maintains concentration and may experience various strong internal states. For example, she may may have a vision of a shower of heavenly flowers, perceive divine perfumes, or see an image of a seven-storied pagoda. According to Wu Chongyu of the Ming dynasty, ?leaving the state of great absorption is accompanied by different phenomena in every individual. Some see a shower of celestial flowers, others see wind and clouds.? The Dadan zhizhi (Pointers to the Great Elixir) of the late thirteenth century similarly has:

As your perfect qi rises, your ears will hear the sounds of wind and rain. Then inside your head there will be the sounds of harps and gold and jade. In your Heavenly Pond [mouth], the Metal Liquid [saliva] will gush forth like a cool stream. Some will flow up into the brain, some will congeal into pearly dew, some will enter into the gullet. Its flavor will be sweet and delectable.

Later, inside your head you will hear the sounds of flutes, zithers, harps, and chimes. Or you may hear the call of the crane, the cry of the monkey, or the chirping of the cicada. . . . When the spirit reaches its exit point, you will hear a huge clap of thunder. (Eskildsen 2001, 150)

After its first exit, the spirit learns to come and go freely and communicate widely with the otherworld. In the beginning, it moves rather slowly and does not travel far from the body, then, supported by further meditative exercises known as ?nursing for three years,? it gradually gets used to its new powers, moves about faster and travels further afield until it goes far and wide without any limitation. As the spirit enters into these cosmic ventures, the adept exhibits supernatural powers: she can be in two place at once, move quickly from one place to another, know the past and the future, divine people?s thoughts, procure wondrous substances, overcome all hazards of fire and water, and has powers over life and death. Known as ?spirit pervasion,? this indicates the freedom achieved by the spirit and also manifest in the practictioner.

Few first-person accounts are found on this part of the practice. Michael Winn mentions that he, at some point in his intensive training, found his sleep needs drastically reduced and experienced different spiritual powers, ?ranging from bursts of telephathy and foreknowledge of the future to experiences of the entire universe collapsing into a single point? (2002, 8).

He also reports on a dramatic experience of cosmic merging in a situation of what the Daoist tradition calls ?dual cultivation? or partner practice:

We had sat naked for a few minutes, facing each other in 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 the great intensity in our physical bodies. (2002, 26)

Here the energy fields of the two practitioners merge in an explosive and powerful manner, moving both outward as their spirits travel into the planetary vastness of the otherworld and inward as the body is opened to cosmic emptiness and primordiality. The experience is overwhelming and transcendent, yet firmly grounded in the energetics of the body, the result of years of practice and the cultivation of subtle forms of qi.

However, even this high level if mystical attainment is not the ultimate goal of inner alchemy, which is only reached after further meditative practice, known as ?wall gazing.? This technique is adopted from Chan Buddhism, whose first patriarch Bodhidharma is said to have realized full enlightenment by sitting in a cave and gazing at a wall for nine years. In this very final phase of the process, the adept whose body is already transformed into pure light has yet to fully overcome its limits and melt utterly into cosmic emptiness. The process takes nine years or 3,000 days, a number symbolic of highest yang and great completion.

A poem attributed to the great lady adept Sun Buer (1119-1182) describes it as follows:

All your tasks already well fulfilled,

Just sit down in a corner, concentrate the spirit,

Feel your body rest on purple clouds,

Your whole being calm, floating on weak waters.

The qi forces melt together, yin and yang unite,

Spirit, Heaven, Earth all are only one.

Concluding the great work, you see the Gate of Jade

Emerging from the mists?and heave a deep, long sigh.

(Chen 1934; Cleary 1989)

The deep meditative absorption in this stage, perfected over long years of practice, involves the attainment of complete purity, tranquility, and nonaction. Mind and spirit are no longer of this world but illuminate the infinite, and the adept is fully integrated into the heavenly spheres. Eventually he or she sheds her earthly form and ascends upward, mounting a cloudy chariot or riding on an immortals? bird. She receives formal empowerment from the palaces above and becomes an acknowledged member of the heavenly host. Received by the divine ladies at the court of the Queen Mother, she is led to the immortals? paradises and attains the ultimate state of mystical achievement.

CONCLUSION

The mystical experience in Daoist inner alchemy, the most recent and still practiced form of Daoist cultivation, can therefore be described as a form of subtle body ecstasy. Practitioners learn, through breathing, gymnastic, and meditative exercises, to open themselves to a level of experience that is not accessible to ordinary, dualistic, outward-oriented consciousness. They realize on an experiential level?as opposed to the purely theoretical or intellectual understanding of concepts and doctrines?that the universe consists of various fields of qi, primordial, postnatal, yin, yang, fire, water, five phases, and so on.

Feeling the qi in its different levels within, refining sexual energy (jing) into qi and qi into spirit (shen), they systematically reorganize their experience to a wider, more inclusive, more open, a strongly cosmic level. Doing so, they essentially reprogram their conception of the universe with its various signs, metaphors, and symbols towards an energetic perception, a mode of communication with nature in its own way, a qi based way of being in the world. In the course of this transformation, moreover, they discover internal levels of existence they never suspected and learn to interact with beings of the supernatural plane?ghosts, demons, gods, immortals, and various planetary entities. Their universe expands both within and without, and they become denizens of the larger universe, flowing streams of qi, pure aspects of the Dao.

Their experiences, moreover, although not commonly described in personal narratives are extraordinary and supra-sensual, raising the individual?s consciousness to intense levels both within and without. What, then, do they teach us about the nature of mystical experience? As seen from the Daoist tradition of inner alchemy, mystical experience is transcendent of ordinary consciousness and common perception, not transcendent in the Western sense of experiencing something totally other but transcendent in that it goes far beyond the world to a deep, underlying level of existence that is always there, always accessible, always present, but not usually perceived.

Mystical experience, moreover, is immensely physical and takes place firmly on the basis of the body. This body, however, is not a clod-like lump of material solidity but a replica of the universe, an entity of flowing, subtle energies that are activated through systematic cultivation and take on a life of their own, superseding and eventually replacing the individual?s personal consciousness. Mystical experience means the dissolution of self and body and mind into the larger cosmic flow of the Dao, the recovery of the universal power of primordiality, the attainment of a state at the original creation of all.

Mystical experience according to the Daoist tradition is also very much determined by culture. It is consciously and actively created through a series of exercises that apply physical movements, breathing techniques, and specific guided meditations. While the very highest level of total dissolution is something that happens on its own and cannot be controlled, all other stages and experiences along the way are systematically prepared and learned. This, again, is why there are so few personal narratives: people know what to expect and when to expect it, they are guided kindly but firmly by a master who knows the body energetics and can give helpful support at all stages. It is accordingly no accident that the two first-person reports on the establishment of the microcosmic orbit cited above were written after the qi-flow opened up unexpectedly and without a teacher?s guidance. The practitioners were surprised and amazed and wondered what they had stumbled into?experiencing mystery not unlike their Western counterparts but with access to a tradition that could map their route and provide them with support and reassurance.

According to him, peak experiences are special moments of complete happiness, fulfillment and meaning. Transcending the ego and giving people a sense of unity with all-that-is, they may come about through love, creativity, art, or being in nature, and are characterized as times of greatest maturity, individuation, and selflessness, moments of perfect health and unity (Maslow 1964, 73). They are common to humanity but differ in degree and interpretation. Although arising of their own accord, they can be invited to occur. The more an individual accepts peak-experiences positively and acknowledges them as a meaningful part of life, the more frequently they recur. The higher the frequency of peak-experiences, the more positively they are felt and the more the individual?s consciousness moves into what Maslow calls Being-cognition, the psychological equivalent of the selfless cosmic consciousness of the mystic, a state of openness and freedom and a sense of rightness and oneness with the cosmic flow (Maslow 1964, 83).

Daoists in the tradition of inner alchemy, therefore, use the worldview of intermingling, flowing qi-fields to create an environment that invites peak experiences of varying strength and intensity, from the smooth and open qi circulation in the microcosmic orbit through the sense of spiritual presence in the creation of the immortal embryo to the ecstatic excursions into the far reaches of the universe. Daoists learn to be open to the qi reality within and without, they train to flow along with it, and they attain mystical transcendence both within this world and within this body.

REFERENCES

Baldrian-Hussein, Farzeen. 1984. Proc?d?s secrets du joyau magique. Paris: Les Deux Oc?ans.

Chen, Yingning. 1934. Sun Buer n?dan shizhu. Shanghai: Yihuo tangshan shuju.

Chia, Mantak. 1983. Awaken Healing Energy Through the Tao. Huntington, NY: Healing Tao Books.

Chia, Mantak. 1985. Taoist Ways to Transform Stress into Vitality. Huntington, NY: Healing Tao Books.

Chia, Mantak, and Maneewan Chia. 1993. Awaken Healing Light of the Tao. Huntington, NY: Healing Tao Books

Cleary, Thomas. 1989. Immortal Sisters: Secrets of Taoist Women. Boston: Shambhala.

Cleary, Thomas. 1992. The Secret of the Golden Flower: The Classic Chinese Book of Life. San Francisco: Harper.

Xingming guizhi. Munich: Diederichs.

Despeux, Catherine. 1990. Immortelles de la Chine ancienne. Tao?sme et alchimie f?minine. Puiseaux: Pard?s.

Despeux, Catherine. 2000. ?Women in Daoism.? In Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn, 384-412. Leiden: E. Brill.

Eskildsen, Stephen. 2001. ?Seeking Signs of Proof: Visions and Other Trance Phenomena in Early Quanzhen Taoism.? Journal of Chinese Religions 29: 139-60.

Gyatso, Kelsung. 1982. Clear Light of Bliss. London.

James, William. 1936 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: The Modern Library.

Jiang Weiqiao. 1985. Jingzuo fa jiyao. Taipei: Jiyou, Daozang jinghua.

Kaltenmark, Maxime. 1965. ?La mystique tao?ste.? In La mystique et le mystiques, edited by A. Ravier, 649-69. Paris.

Kohn, Livia. 1987. Seven Steps to the Tao: Sima Chengzhen?s Zuowanglun. St.Augustin/Nettetal: Monumenta Serica Monograph XX.

Kohn, Livia. 1992. Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kohn, Livia. 1993. ?Quiet Sitting with Master Yinshi: Medicine and Religion in Modern China.? Zen Buddhism Today 10: 79-95.

Lu, Kuan-y?. 1970. Taoist Yoga ? Alchemy and Immortality. London: Rider.

Maslow, Abraham H. 1964. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Needham, Joseph, et al. 1983. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. V.5: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention?Physiological Alchemy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Porkert, Manfred. 1974. The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Robinet, Isabelle. 1989. ?Original Contributions of Neidan to Taoism and Chinese Thought.? In Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, edited by Livia Kohn, 295-38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies Publications.

Robinet, Isabelle. 1995. Introduction a l?alchimie interieure tao?ste: De l?unit? et de la multiplicit?. Paris: Editions Cerf.

Shi, Dao. 2002. ?A Meeting on the Pathless Path: An Interview with Ken Cohen and Shi Jing.? The Dragon?s Mouth, Summer 2002, 2-9.

Short, Lar, and John Mann. 1988. The Body of Light. San Francisco: Fourth Way Books.

Skar, Lowell, and Fabrizio Pregadio. 2000. ?Inner Alchemy (Neidan).? In Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn, 464-97. Leiden: E. Brill.

Underhill, Evelyn. 1911. Mysticism. London: Methuen & Co.

Wilhelm, Richard. 1962 [1929]. The Secret of the Golden Flower. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Winn, Michael, and Mantak Chia. 1984. Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy. Huntington, NY: Healing Tao Books

Winn, Michael. 2001. ?Daoist Internal Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature?s Intelligence.? Paper Presented at the Conference on Daoist Cultivation, Vashon Island.

Winn, Michael. 2002. ?The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm: Daoist and Tantric Sexual Cultivation in the West.? Paper Presented at the Conference on Tantra and Daoism, Boston University, Boston.

  
One Cloud?s 9 Tao Alchemy Formulas

                 To Cultivate the True Immortal Self

 

A Guide to the Healing Tao System

 

 Note: A short
introductory essay by Michael Winn precedes a detailed description of
the Healing Tao?s 9 Tao Alchemy Formulas. This is followed by a list
of the 8 Branches of the Great Tao. (Note:
in Chinese pinyin, Tao= Dao, and Chi = Qi. I use the more popular western spelling of Tao here).

 

    The stages of Taoist internal spiritual
cultivation were transmitted by Mantak Chia to his Western students starting in
1981. Master Chia received his transmission from a Taoist Hermit named One
Cloud, who achieved the breatharian state.

 

    One Cloud originally taught 7 Supreme
Alchemy Formulas for Cultivating the True Immortal Self. The Healing Tao?s
knowledge base expanded so much in the past 30 years, that we decided in 2010
to simplify things by dividing the huge 1^st Formula into three
foundation stages. The new total is 9 Alchemy Formulas. Nine is the
traditional Taoist number of completion. One Cloud?s traditional principles of
cultivating Tao remain unchanged.

 

     One Cloud lived on chi alone for many
years while living in a cave on Long White Mountain (Changbaishan) in northeastern China. During the Japanese War in
1949, One Cloud walked across China, and settled in the mountains behind Hong
Kong?s Taoist Yuen Yuen temple. Mantak Chia studied with him in his small
mountain hut in the early 60?s. One Cloud left his body at age 96 in 1976.

 

   One Cloud?s Supreme Alchemy Formulas to Cultivate the
True Immortal Self are similar to those mentioned in thousand year old texts
known as the Tao Canon (1160 books of the Taoist ?bible?). These formulas are
attributed to Lu Dong Bin, one of China?s revered Eight Immortals and the
patron ?saint? of Inner Alchemy. The core methods themselves are undoubtedly
thousands of years older, passed down by strict oral transmission and held in
deepest secrecy. It took many generations of masters to refine the great spiritual
truths into practical alchemical stages. These Alchemy Formulas are the
spiritual crown jewels of Chinese civilization.

 

    Even today, most Chinese students ? and Chinese
qigong (chi kung) and meditation teachers ? do not have access to these inner alchemy methods. On a
recent trip to Huashan, one of the most sacred Taoist mountains in China, I
eventually got around to discussing these alchemical formulas with my good
friend Chen Yu Ming, then the vice abbot of Huashan. We had had many long talks
about Taoism on previous visits, but I was always careful to not probe into his
personal practice or discuss mine. Chinese Taoists are very secretive, and it
is not considered good taste to pry into another?s practice.

 

   The vice abbot had recently opened up. He taught a
stage of Huashan inner alchemy to a group of Western Healing Tao adepts ? the
first time in Huashan?s 3000 year written history, he believes. It turns out,
of course, that we already knew a similar practice, taught as the Lesser  Enlightenment of Water and Fire in One
Cloud?s system. I finally shared with Chen Yu Ming details of the Healing Tao
practices and the structure of One Cloud?s Alchemy Formulas. He gasped in
surprise, and was so shocked he could hardly speak. ?These are very secret methods?,
he said. ?There are very few Taoists here in China who even know of what you
speak.?

 

    When I asked him the reason for the great
secrecy, he replied, ?because the ancients kept it secret?. He then added,
?Those who are lucky enough to find a teacher often join the School of
Seclusion, which believes the knowledge should be kept hidden except to one or
two worthy students. This is the Chinese way.?

 

   We are in a time period where formerly secret esoteric
mysteries from many cultures are being shared. These Inner Alchemy practices
are probably surfacing in the West because cultural conditions are not
currently conducive to their release in China. The weight of thousands of years
of tradition preserved the alchemy practices, but is too great today to allow
change.

 

    These qigong  and meditation practices are needed to stimulate the birth
of a new global spiritual science for the benefit of all humanity. That is why these
teachings are being publicly offered to sincere seekers in the West for the first
time in history ? without groveling at anyone?s feet. If you feel spiritually
attracted to them and feel worthy within yourself to receive these teachings,
then you deserve the right to learn them. Why should any human be denied the
opportunity of achieving true spiritual independence?

 

    A parallel tradition of Western internal alchemy
also exists, but it has largely been lost or fragmented. The principles of the
Eastern and Western traditions of alchemy are identical, but the Western
methods are more ?fire? centered, which translates into the dominance of matter
by spirit. The ?above? is used to control and transform the ?below?.

 

   The Taoist Water and Fire alchemy practices are more
body-centered, and thus more grounded and appropriate for Westerners at this
time. They emphasize Water first, with the ?below? gradually revealing the Fire
?above? hidden within itself. One Cloud?s Taoist Water and Fire approach
translates into the liberation of the spirit hidden within matter-body, and the
rebirthing of deep earth consciousness. It is the feminine discovering that
yang fire is its true inner nature. The Healing Tao instructors are sharing
them because they feel they penetrate and resolve the problem of the BODY which
plagues so many meditators seeking perfect union with Spirit.

 

   Many people have a problem of wanting to get out of
their body so that their meditation can be more perfectly spiritual, without
the messy problems caused by having a body. It is a rude awakening for them to
realize this desire is not for transcendence, it is at core escapist. What are
they escaping?

 

   The difficulty of staying here, of living in a body.
They are escaping their failure to recognize and accept the spiritual nature of
the physical body. Many falsely believe if they open their third eye and go out
my crown, that their spiritual journey will be complete.

 

  These kinds of spiritual people either overlook or deny how
essential the body is to full enlightenment. In the Healing Tao, we often make
a distinction between those achieving ?head enlightenment? and those achieving
?whole body enlightenment?. They are very different experiences. All meditation
methods are wonderful gifts. Alchemy is a special kind of meditative gift that
is dynamic, accepts the sexual nature of the body, and seeks to refine the
entire polarized physical body into an elevated spiritual state infused with
non-dual original chi.

 

    Internal alchemy in China is called neidan
gong, or ?inner elixir skill?. It is
not to be confused with external alchemy, an art which arose much later during
the Han Dynasty (200 b.c.) and involves the laboratory manipulation of
substances external to the human body. External alchemy is a much later
offshoot of internal alchemy. This position is accepted by such prominent
scholars as Mircea Eliade in his history of alchemy, The Forge and the Crucible.

 

  There is a
misconception floating about that because Taoist adepts and Emperors died from
ingesting mercury, that internal alchemy was invented as a later alternative to
external alchemy. My research suggests inner alchemy was codified and refined
in the Song Dynasty (10^th century), but based on a much older oral
tradition.

 

    Many
modern people fantasize about Taoist immortality formulas and use it to spice up
kung fu novels or add spiritual romance to movies. Armchair philosophers of the
Tao love to speculate about its meaning, and play with its arcane symbols and
code words. But how many have understood this is an accessible human science,
or really experienced its reality, its power to shape and embody reality?

 

   The Taoist concept of immortality does not mean you live physically forever. Immortality means
you achieve spiritual integration of your authentic self (zhenren). This achievement requires great humility, high
spiritual virtue, and mastery of the Life Force on the part of the adept.

 

    Your authentic Self is immortal because it has
the power to survive the transition of physical death and continues its
creative life in higher dimensions. This process requires integrating the
physical body?s sexual essence (jing),
the energy body (chi), and the
spirit body (shen) into a
functional state of total openness (wu) to the multi-dimensionality of the present moment.

 

    The spiritual power of manifestation hidden
within the jing or sexual essence
is most critical to cultivating what is known as a ?golden light body? or the
authentic immortal Self. Without the sexual essence being properly cultivated,
the crystallization of one?s spirit does not occur. For this reason, I believe
many meditators achieve enlightenment, but not immortality.

 

    Cultivating this high level of harmony and
balance requires a progressive training of the body?s sexual essence (jing), the mind (chi), and the spirit (shen)
within a state of total openness (wu).
The purpose of the Healing Tao training laid out in the Nine Supreme Alchemy
Formulas is to accelerate transformations that might take Nature many lifetimes
to accomplish. Inner Alchemy is a precise step-by-step process, and each step
builds on the next.

 

 

——————————————————————————————    

 

   One Cloud?s Nine Supreme Alchemy Formulas

               for
Achieving Immortality

 

                  

              
Preparation & Supplemental
Practices

 

Purification, grounding,
and centering through various forms of qigong (meditation as movement).
Examples:

 

 ? Simple qigong (chi kung) forms to open the dantian,

 ? Chi Nei Tsang (Deep Organ Massage) to detoxify organs. 

?Tai
Chi Qigong and other internal martial arts to refine and  

   express outward chi flow using
body movement,

?
Cosmic Chi Healing to channel cosmic forces to others.

? Tao
Yin (Taoist Yoga) to relax and open up the body.

?
Tai Chi for Enlightenment/Primordial Qigong for medical  

   and spiritual health, centering
and easing karmic difficulties.

 

 

                    
1^st Formula of Inner Alchemy

         Lay a Foundation
of Love & Balanced Chi Flow

 

1a. Inner Smile to radiate Heart/Soul Presence of our Original Spirit
(yuan shen) into the physical
body-mind as yin practice. This radiates Unconditional Acceptance and
Unconditional Love as the foundation of all lasting chi cultivation. Accepting
the flow of our personal chi allows us to shape that chi flow and thus become
who we truly are destined to be.

   
Chi  cultivatioin is thus
the deepest act of self-love. The yang practice is to radiate that loving Inner
Smile out to the larger body of humanity and nature. Inner Smile is the
simplest and thus most profound body-centered Tao practice. It integrates outer
life with inner meditation and delivers true peace to our soul.

 

1b. Six Healing Sounds and
Five Animals Qigong to purify the internal vital organs and bowels, and
circulate chi in the Five Elements Creation Cycle of Nourishment.

 

1c. Microcosmic Orbit to balance and circulate chi in the Energy Body. It
is a dynamic meditation creating a balanced, yin-yang flow of perpetual golden
light chi circling around the spine and chest. Also known as ?small heavenly
round? or ?embryonic breathing?, this meditation balances the pre-natal chi
(from Heaven) and post-natal blood (from Earth, body, and ancestors) and
stabilizes all yin-yang chi flow in the meridians.

 

 

               
2nd Formula of Inner Alchemy

       
Cultivate Harmonious Feelings & Sexual Energy

 

2a. Iron Shirt 1: Internal Rooting & Bone Breathing to ground the
Energy Body. Grounding is a major challenge for many westerners. Standing
postures connect the skeletal structure to the flow of earth chi. This rooting
is essential to managing sexual and emotional energy and allows one to absorb
cosmic chi as one progresses.

 

2b. Fusion of the Five
Elements 1 is about cultivating our
original or true feelings, before they are corrupted by resistance and ego
struggle. This is accomplished by harmonizing the five phases of chi flow (wu xing). Fusion 1 practice transforms negative emotions into
positive, virtuous chi flow. It harmonizes the Five Spirits (shen), the biological-psychological intelligences of the
personal self. These Five Vital
Organ spirits, also known as the ?Inner Body Gods?, fuse their essence (jing) and natural virtue (de) into a pearl of original chi (yuan chi) in the belly cauldron (lower dantian). This purified chi pearl is then circulated in the 5
Elements Creation Cycle. When the emotional chi is harmonized, then sexual
energy can be more deeply and safely cultivated.

 

2c. Healing Love/ Taoist
Sexual Secrets: conserves, recharges,
harmonizes, and spiritually guides sexual energy. Taoist medical sexology heals
sexual dysfunction, the bedroom arts harmonize couples love life and guard
their health. Women use the jade egg to strengthen and own the spiritual space
of their womb. Men learn to build sexual power by re-circulating internally
their semen?s essence with Testicle Breathing. Women learn to reduce monthly
blood loss with breast massage and Ovarian Breathing. The conserved sexual
energy is guided into the appropriate body center (dantian) or energy channel
(microcosmic orbit, etc.). Sexual energy, when refined, is the primary fuel for
the alchemical process of accelerating human evolution.

 

 

                  
3rd Formula of Inner Alchemy

           Balance
our 8 Cosmic-Psychic Forces

 

3a. Iron Shirt 2 (Tendon
Power) & Bone Marrow Neigong 3. These practice strengthen our body?s
functional structure by storing long-lasting chi  and clean the bone marrow by charging it with sexual energy
to stimulate the production of fresh blood cells.

 

3b. Fusion of Five
Elements 2 and 3. The pearl activates
the yin-yang pulsation of the eight cosmic forces (I Ching trigram energy) that
flow into the Eight Extraordinary Vessels of the human body. These deep energy
channels form the blue print or matrix of our personal Energy Body, and
supplies the twelve regular meridians with chi.

 

   When these eight psychic energy channels are
activated, they collectively open the Macrocosmic Orbit  (or ?large heavenly round?) and can
heal at a very deep level. Faster and far more powerful than acupuncture or
herbs for healing chronic illness and ancestral (genetic) issues. This practice
opens deep awareness of chi field beyond the body, hence its reputation for
awakening psychic powers (known as the eight Siddhas in a parallel Indian
tradition).

 

 

                    
4th Formula of Inner Alchemy

   Inner Sexual Alchemy: Heal our Male/Female
Soul-Split

 

4. Lesser Enlightenment of Kan and Lii (Water & Fire), also known as Inner Sexual Alchemy. This practice presupposes some skill in the Taoist
Healing Love sexual cultivation art of semen retention for men and partial
lessening of the menstrual cycle in women. The Kan & Li method of
?spiritual self-intercourse? couples primal fire and water chi in the body.
This dissolves the personal mind-body split (and its resulting diseases) by
unifying all male and female soul fragments in the lower belly cauldron (the
navel center), our center of gravity.

 

   When primal fire and water chi are ?steamed? in the
belly, it produces original chi that dissolves deep genetic patterns. It opens
our Inner Eye at all levels of the body?s core channel, thus enhancing and our
ability to ?see? inside our body and matter. This meditation creates a feeling
of spiritual pregnancy, a deep body bliss known as the formation of the
?immortal embryo?.

 

 

                        5th
Formula of Inner Alchemy

          Sun?Moon-Earth
Alchemy: Complete Our Ancestors

 

5. Greater Enlightenment
of Kan and Li (Water & Fire), also called Sun-Moon Alchemy. It advances the previous level; integrates the 5
inner essences of the personal self with the five directional forces of the
planetary self. These are identified as the spirits of the north, south, east,
& west meeting in the center of earth, at the solar plexus cauldron.

 

   The powers of the Sun and Moon ?cook? the planetary
essences and are coupled to spiritually birth the ?immortal child? or the
greater elixir. It is the experience of our reborn inner self playing in the
astral fields of reality. This dissolves the boundary between the adept and
nature (including humanity) and dissolves many geo-mantic (feng shui) and
ancestral patterns that need healing.

 

 

                
6th Formula of Inner Alchemy

       Planetary
and Soul Alchemy: Change our Destiny

 

6. Greatest Enlightenment
of Kan and Li, also called Planet
and Soul Alchemy. This third Water
& Fire  practice integrates the 5 body spirit-essences of the
personal self and the 5 planetary forces of the collective Solar system Self
(symbolized by the Sun) in the middle cauldron at the heart. This is ?living
astrology?, in which cosmic forces are interiorized inside the body, where they
continue to function through planetary tones (music of the spheres).

 

    It involves, for example, direct experience of
and making friends with the planetary spirit of Saturn, the ruler of the earth
element, the core unity of living matter and controller of the astrological
forces of manifestation. Successful practice removes all fear of death and dissolves
deep karmic patterns of resistance and struggle that plague humanity. This
allows us to clearly receive and transmit our inner solar logos or Way of knowing. This stage is about the maturation
of our Inner Sage or Immortal Self.

 

 

                 
    7th
Formula of Inner Alchemy

             
Star Alchemy: Unite our Soul with Over Soul

 

7. Sealing of the Five
Senses, also called Star Alchemy. This unifies the five shen, the five streams of
personal consciousness that operate through our senses, with the five forces of
the collective Stellar Self, in the West called the Over Souls. The body of our
stellar mind can be viewed in the four quadrants of fixed stars in the night
sky, originally symbolized by heraldic animals (Black Turtle, Red Phoenix, Green
Dragon, White Tiger).

 

   The fifth, the quintessence, is the Purple Pole Star
in the center of the sky, with the Great Bear of the Big Dipper marking the
progression of the seasons as its handles rotates like the arm of a cosmic
clock. These personal and stellar essences are fused in the upper dantian, the cauldron in the head. This is the process of our
Inner Sage attaining the stellar logos, celestial level of immortality.

 

   The pure open space connecting the three cauldrons is
integrated. This stabilizes the celestial axis and activates what Lao Tzu calls
the ?Great Tone?. Profound peace and different spiritual qualities continuously
manifest from this activated core and radiate sonically into our physical
becoming. Our soul pattern expands its conscious destiny to include dimensions
of life beyond the physical plane.

      

 

                            8^th
Formula of Inner Alchemy

      Heaven & Earth Alchemy: Marry
Form and Formless

 

8. The Congress of Heaven
and Earth, or simply Heaven and
Earth Alchemy. This practice explores
the origins of human love and how it serves to integrate the 3
Treasures/Originals of the Tao. We couple the Early Heaven or formless Self
with the Later Heaven (Earth) physical Self. The Self here identifies itself
here with two dimensions that co-exist and co-create: the ?formless form? of
our being and the ?substantial
form? of our becoming.

 

    These two polar dimensions of our greater Self
engage in cosmic sex. They couple in order to re-open the portal to their
Original state, or ?Pre-Self?. This pre-state or Primordial Heaven is called hundun, the primal chaos-unity or unconditional love state
that preceded the ?big bang? of the cosmic egg cracking open.

 

   The Three Pure Ones or Three Originals (san yuan) of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity are gathered in the three body cauldrons as original jing, original chi, and original shen. This
three-tone harmonic chord is resonated with the fundamental or original tone of
time and space. Consciousness then stabilizes in the axial center where our
true multi-dimensional nature can now be embodied. A continuum between
unconditional love and the myriad forms of conditional love is consciously
crystallized.

 

   This practice creates a tonal double vortex spinning
faster than the speed of light within the void of space. This opens up fully
the Music of the Spheres, the cosmic subtle bodies in harmonic play. Into this
symphony is fused our inner sage?s immortal presence, the quintessence of
humanity meditating on unconditional love in the center of a cosmic torus (spiritual
black hole). We must enter this primordial sound portal to complete our journey
of Return to the Origin.

 

 

                      
9^th Formula of Inner Alchemy

                      
Human Merges with Tao

 

9. Union of Human and Tao. This stage is the integration of the eight previous
levels of consciousness into the experience of living simultaneously in the
present moment in all dimensions, from physical linear time to spirit?s eternal
time. This state cannot be fully known or defined conceptually for others. The
Taoists simply describe it as the experience of living fully in the wuji, the Cosmic Present Moment. Wuji is sometimes translated as the Supreme Unknown  — which
could be equated, in western religious terms, as living from a godhead that has
no ruling god.

 

    This is the true achievement of the authentic or
Immortal Self, a permanent state of grace and high creativity known as wu
wei, ?effortless action?, or
?spontaneous action without acting?. Creation (of the manifest) and Return to
Formless Origin seamlessly complete each other. Attainment of this final level
is, in my belief, spontaneous; it is not a technique. It is the natural
evolution of humans to realize their divine nature.

 

    It happens naturally only when our spiritual
virtue (de) reaches a refined level. We have persevered in humbly completing
the challenges of our worldly destiny, and diligently cultivated our highest
spiritual virtues given to us as yet-to-be-realized gifts at birth. The inner
will of our immortal sage displaces our personality and reaches complete
alignment with the Tao, Heaven and Earth and Humanity, and the flow of the Life
Force. It is the supreme level of grace, bestowed by direct transmission from
the Tao to the mature and receptive adept.

 

—————————————————————————–

 

Suggested further reading:

 

1. For a concise survey of
the Healing Tao?s role in the spread of Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West,
and how it has changed due to the influence of Western energy bodies: https://www.michaelwinn.qlogictechnologies.com/blk7.html

   This is a 15 page excerpt from my chapter in Livia
Kohn?s Internal Alchemy: Self, Society, and the Quest for Immortality. I highly
recommend this book as the best available on Taoist alchemy.

 

2. For a more in-depth
analysis of One Cloud?s Alchemy Formulas, I suggest my paper presented to a
conference of Taoist scholars and adepts in 2001, titled ?Daoist Internal
Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature’s Intelligence?.  http://www.healingdao.com/articles/taoalchemy_idx.html

(You may need to re-register
at top of page to get access to Articles Library).

 

 

 

 

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Eight Branches of the Great Tao

 

Taoist tradition often described itself as having Eight
Branches emanating from the ninth, the axial formless trunk of the Tao.
Different writers may describe these eight branches with slightly different
variations. Here is one version:

 

1)                 
Nei gong, or meditation.
Includes the 9 Supreme Formulas of Inner Alchemy (neidan gong) and all forms of
meditation, from Inner Smile to Union of Man with Tao. The stillness within the
stillness of the mind is the source that bursts into the movement of Life.

 

2)                 
Qigong , which includes
taiji chuan, bagua chuan, and all sacred dance/ritual. Moving meditation as a
dynamic body-centered path of unfolding Nature?s inner patterns.

 

3)                 
Tao philosophy – I Ching
sciences: cosmology, astrology, numerology, physiognomy (face reading),
palmisty, divination, and the application of yin-yang, five-phase, or 8-cosmic
force principles to any natural science.

 

4)                 
Healing/medical arts:
acupuncture, tuina, deep organ massage, moxabustion, medical qigong .

 

5)                 
Sexology: bedroom arts
(fangzhi), medical and spiritual-alchemical sexual practices.

 

6)                 
Feng shui: living
(homes, offices) and dead (graves).

 

7)                 
Five element nutrition
& herbology.

 

8)                 
Fine/expressive chi
arts: music, singing, calligraphy, painting, sculpture, dance, story telling
(today film and theatre).

 

 

      Deeper Explanation of the 8
Trigrams and Taoist Bagua

 

    Healing Tao USA supports the adoption of these
Eight Branches of Taoist energy arts & sciences and their integration into
all aspects of modern western culture: education, art, science, psychology,
politics and medicine.

 

The hidden ninth branch is
the True Self at the center of the bagua.

 

 For the special arrangement of the trigrams in the Healing
Tao USA logo, please see full page graphic: https://www.michaelwinn.qlogictechnologies.com/aboutsymbol.html

 

RODOLPHE: INSERT Smaller
IMAGE OF HT LOGOS HERE.

 

 

 

 

Tao of Balance and Harmony

Song of a New Heaven on
Earth

 

By Michael Winn

 

Tao births the One.

One births the Two.

Two births the Three.

Three births the 10,000.
things.

– Verse 42, Tao Te Ching

 

This Healing Tao USA logo
is a map of Higher Consciousness based on Taoist cosmology. I designed it based
on decades of exploring the secrets of Taoist internal alchemy meditation, deep
experience of qigong (chi kung), and study of the ancient classic – I Ching:
Book of Unchanging Changes.

 

Are you ready for a quick
journey deep into Taoist cosmology?

 

The logo maps an image of
a vibrational experience: flowing consciousness is being ?sung? into physical
form through a pattern of subtle tones. A subtle tone is just a vibration
moving in a particular pattern, that can be known by the shape of what is
created.

 

Just as Nature sings
itself into existence, we each sing our human body-mind into existence. But
humans are generally not aware of how we ?sing-vibrate? the shape of our
reality.

 

This image expresses the
principle of balance in the yin-yang pulsations of the chi field. Chi, also
spelled ?qi?, is the subtle breathing of Nature. Yin-Yang is any polarity –
male-female, positive-negative, etc. – flowing dynamically in equilibrium
within a matrix of neutral or Original Chi (yuan chi).

Tao as Musical Cosmology

 

Each of the eight trigram
tone-symbols has three lines or notes that form a musical chord. The eight
trigrams are from the Early Heaven (formless) arrangement, in which each
trigram-tone is the mirror opposite of the trigram-tone facing it.

 

This creates four pairs of
musical chords that represent the primordial Tao or Nature ?singing itself into
creation? as the four sacred directions/ cardinal vibrations.

 

The fifth direction ? the
Center ? is symbolized by the five-pointed star emerging from the ?vesica
piscis? or sexually coupled large red (fire) and blue (water) spheres. Three
forces are coiled inside this geometric vesica piscis ? the black and white
spirals of primal yin-yang chi force, and the golden glowing sphere of Original
Breath, or yuan chi.

 

In the center of the star
is a tiny circle, representing the Original Breath emerging from the Supreme
Mystery, or Wuji. This center can never be fully known, it is the Mystery
beyond all other mysteries. Yet this Mystery lives inside each of us. It
divides itself out three times into:

 

   1. The Fundamental Tone of Oneness (yuan or Original
chi field).

   2. The chi field of Two-ness (Yin-Yang polarity).

   3. The Five Phase cycle (five-ness called Fire, Earth,
Gold, Water, and Wood).

 

These three core layers of
tonal patterns are vibrating simultaneously in everything in nature, creating
the seasons, the flow of chi inside our body meridians and organs, the spin of
galaxies and atoms.

Five Elements Pattern at
Core of Every Human

 

The 5-pointed star in the
center also represents a Completed Human Being. This is any human being who has
internalized the five sacred directions/elements/tones within themselves. When
this happens, there is no boundary between their body and the body of Nature.

 

This is a human being in
perfect harmony and balance with its environment, they have expanded their
awareness to become one with the universal natural flow. It is a state of
consciousness that is simultaneously transcendent (multi-dimensional) and
immanent (physically present).

 

The star expresses the
principle of five elements/five phases, which, along with yin-yang theory, is
central to all Chinese culture. These principles are the foundation of Chinese
medicine, feng shui, qigong, inner and outer alchemy, astrology, face and palm
reading, martial arts and war strategy, city planning, the Chinese calendar,
etc.

 

Five Elements is also a
universal pattern, found in all ancient cultures as the sacred four directions
and the Center.

Flipping Yin-Yang Poles to
Rejuvenate Life

 

The mirroring of the eight
trigram tones also suggests a timeless equilibrium of cosmic musical forces
that are all held in the Unnamed center, as a 9th tone-force. This is also
known as the Fundamental, or Original Tone that sings out all the tones of
creation.

 

The eight tonal-trigrams
in my arrangement have been changed from the normal Early Heaven arrangement:
each pair of trigrams has been flipped or inverted twice. Heaven (three solid
lines) used to be on top, now it is below. Earth (three broken lines) used to
be on bottom, now it is on top.

 

Fire (yang-yin-yang lines)
and Water (yin-yang-yini) lines have reversed their positions o the left and
right.

 

This flipping of the eight
trigram-tones naturally occurs the ?refining? process of inner alchemy
meditations. When we meditate, we dissolve our fixed sense of
duality/separation by ?flipping? the energetic poles inside our body-mind.

 

This produces a refreshed
state of consciousness, and one that is more stable. This is similar to life
and death cycles in nature rejuvenating each other.

 

The flipping or inverting
of any two polarities creates a new awakening of the third force in the center,
the Original Breath of Humanity.

Paradigm Shift: A New
Heaven on Earth

 

What does ?a new Heaven on
Earth? mean? The Chinese term is ?zhong tian?. It implies the sexual coupling
of Early Heaven (formless plane) and Later Heaven (physical plane). It also
reveals that humanity is in a major paradigm shift, a major birthing process, a
critical point in the turning of the great cosmic wheel.

 

Heaven, the formless, is
below Earth, the embodiment of form. Heaven supports Earth (vertical axis), and
Fire is stabilized by Water (horizontal axis). This represents the free flow of
chi or subtle energy between these poles ? the state of wu wei manifested.

 

Wu-wei is the
?no-resistance? state of grace natural to every being. It was made famous by
Lao Tzu in his 2500 year old classic, Tao Te Ching (daodejing).

Qigong and Meditation as
Best Tools for Personal Change

 

Tao inner Alchemy and
qigong (chi kung) are the meditation and movement aspects of an ancient
spiritual science. Healing Tao USA has as its mission to make these wonderful
spiritual tools available to you. They can help each of us to speed up the
process of unfolding our Natural Path.

 

Alchemy is the ancient
term for the natural way to speed up evolution. It allows us to more easily and
quickly merge with Nature and the formless Oneness of the Tao while preserving
our individual will and responsibility for shaping creation.

 

 

Daoism and the Origins of Qigong

LIVIA KOHN

Qigong or ?Qi Exercises? describes a group of practices highly popular in China and increasingly well known the West. They involve slow, gentle body movements, breathing exercises, self-massages, and the mental circulation of qi, with the aim to open the body?s inner channels, provide a free flow of energy, help in healing, and in general create a sense of greater well-being and openness of spirit.

Qigong as a modern system of healing goes back to the 1940s. In 1947, the communist party cadre Liu Guizhen (1920-1983), suffering from a virulent gastric ulcer, was sent home to recover or die. He went home but refused to die?he was only 27 years old at the time! Instead, he took lessons in gymnastics and breathing from the Daoist Liu Duzhou. After 102 days of faithfully undertaking these practices, he was completely cured. He returned to his job and described his healing success to the party, which appointed him as a medical research leader in Hebei province with the task to study the effects of breathing on healing. In 1948, he created the term Qigong to indicate the methods which focused largely on breathing at the time. He then began to teach party officials and repeated his success with various ailments (see Chen 2003).

As this beginning of the practice documents, contemporary Qigong tends to focus on medical goals and the improvement of life quality with the help of methods transmitted by Daoists. It is practiced both in the medical community and actively pursued among Daoist followers and successfully combines techniques that go back to both medical and Daoist sources. The most obvious and direct forerunner of Qigong is Chinese gymnastics, known as daoyin, which literally means ?guide [the qi] and stretch [the body].? Using the same four basic methods as Qigong today, daoyin teaches practitioners to move the limbs and torso in a particular way while exercising deep breathing and mentally circulating the qi within. Through this, the body?s qi-flow is regulated and pathogenic elements are expelled. Gradually the body not only becomes supple and flexible but health improves and longevity is attained. Gymnastics for many centuries have been described as a valuable tool to prevent old age and cure diseases. They nourish the qi, refresh the body after hard work, help fasting and other spiritual practices, and open the body for a long and joyful life. How, then, did daoyin relate to Daoism in the course of Chinese history? To begin, let us look at the early documentation and role of the daoyin tradition.

THE DAOYIN TRADITION

The earliest documents on daoyin are found in medical literature on healing and health maintenance. Following the dictum of the Yellow Emperor?s Inner Classic that the best physician is one who prevents diseases and never even has to treat a patient, gymnastic and breathing exercises formed a part of traditional Chinese medicine that specialized in preventative practice and was known as yangsheng or nourishing life. Practices used are commonly called longevity techniques and include diets, breathing exercises, gymnastics, massages, sexual practices, the absorption of solar and lunar energies, as well as various forms of meditation. Used both for healing and enhancing health, these methods ensured not only the realization of the natural life expectancy but were found to often result in increased old age and vigor.

Our earliest sources on these methods, and thus also on gymnastics and breathing, are a set of manuscripts unearthed at Mawangdui and Zhangjia shan in southern China. Written on silk, bamboo and strips of wood, they date from the second century B.C.E. and present practical advice on how to nourish life with the help of gymnastics, breathing, dietetics, and drugs. Works include: Conjoining Yin and Yang (He yinyang), Discussion of the Perfect Way in All Under Heaven (Tianxia zhidao tan), and Recipes for Nourishing Life (Yangsheng fang).

A text called The Rejection of Grains and Absorption of Qi (Quegu shiqi), furthermore deals with techniques of eliminating grains and ordinary foodstuffs from the diet and replacing them with medicinal herbs and qi through special breathing excercises. The text repeatedly contrasts ?those who eat qi? with ?those who eat grain? and explains this in cosmological terms, saying: ?Those who eat grain eat what is square; those who eat qi eat what is round. Round is heaven; square is earth (Harper 1998, 130). The most famous and relevant to our topic among the Mawangdui manuscripts is the Gymnastics Chart (Daoyin tu). It contains color illustrations of human figures performing therapeutic gymnastics. Some of the recognizable captions refer to the names of exercises already mentioned in the Zhuangzi, such as ?bear-hanging? and ?bird-stretching.? The text, although fragmentary, shows the importance of gymnastic exercises, used in conjunction with self-massages to dissolve blockages, help circulation, and increase the harmony of qi in the body. It also documents the early use of animal models for physical exercises, a practice that has been linked with ancient shamanic dances (Despeux 1989, 237-38).

Another manuscript on gymnastics is the Book on Stretching (Yinshu), found among several medical texts in Zhangjia shan, Hubei, about 150 miles km north of Mawangdui, Dated to 186 B.C.E., it begins with the description of a daily and seasonal health regimen, including hygiene, dietetics, regulation of sleep and movement, as well as adequate times for sexual intercourse. After that, the text details fifty-seven gymnastic exercises, including massages. Some exercises are preventative, others more curative. The third and last part of the Book on Stretching deals with etiology and the prevention of diseases. The most important factors that cause diseases, according to this work, are climatic excesses such as the heat of summer, moisture, wind, cold, rain, and dew. An unstable diet, excessive emotions and a lifestyle inappropriate to the season are also named as possible causes of an imbalance of qi. The text recommends various therapies, such as breathing exercises, bodily stretches and the careful treatment of the interior qi. It says: ?If you can pattern your qi properly and maintain your yin energy in fullness, then the whole person will benefit? (Wenwu 1990, 86).

It is interesting to note that the text makes a distinction between ?upper class people,? who fall ill because of uncontrolled emotions such as rage and excessive joy, and lower ones whose conditions tend to be caused by excessive labor, hunger and thirst. It further notes that the latter have no opportunity to learn the necessary breathing exercises and therefore contract numerous diseases and die an early death. Obviously longevity techniques were very much the domain of the aristocracy and upper classes who could affort quality medical care and the instruction by specialists of prevention (Engelhardt 2000).

Following these manuscripts, records on gymastics include mention in dynastic histories, such as the biography of Hua Tuo, staff physician of Cao Cao under the Three Kingdoms in the third century. According to his official biography, he created an integrated system of gymnastic exercises known as the Five Animals? Frolic. The text says:

The body needs a certain amount of movement. This movement serves to properly balance right and left, it helps to redistribute and assimilate the various breaths that are issued from the cereals, more than that it causes the blood to circulate properly and prevents the origination of diseases.

The human body is like a door hinge that never comes to rest. This is why Daoists practice gymnastics. They imitate the movements of the bear which hangs itself head-down from a tree, of the owl which keeps turning its head in different ways. They stretch and bend the waist, and move all the joints and muscles of their bodies in order to evade aging.

I myself have developed a series of exercises which I name the Five Animals? Frolic. The five animals are the tiger, the deer, the bear, the monkey, and the bird. The practice of the Frolic aids the elimination of diseases and increases the functioning of the lesser members. Whenever a disorder is felt in the body one of the Animals should be practiced until one perspires freely. When perspiration is very strong, one should cover the affected parts of the body with dust. In due course one will find the body lighter, more comfortable and a healthy appetite will return. (Sanguo zhi 29.2a; Despeux 1989, 242)

Futher codification and development of gymnastic exercises occurred in various medieval medical sources, such as the Compendium of Essentials on Nourishing Life (Yangsheng yaoji). It summarizes early sources and describes longevity practice in ten sections: 1. Strengthening the vital spirits; 2. Caring for the breath; 3. Maintaining the body; 4. Practicing gymnastics; 5. Speaking properly; 6. Eating right; 7. Sexual moderation; 8. Right relations to the common world; 9. Taking medicinal drugs; and 10. Observing protective prohibitions (Stein 1999, 103).

The most important medical source on gymnastics in the middle ages is the Origins and Symptoms of Medical Disorders (Zhubing yuanhou lun), compiled under the supervision of the physician Chao Yuanfang and presented to Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty in 610. The text presents for the first time a systematic treatise on the etiology and pathology of Chinese medicine, distinguishing four major categories of diseases: inner, outer, women?s and children?s. Each of these four main parts is then subdivided into sections that outline the origin of the disorder in question, its process of development and its major clinical symptoms. After this, the text does not prescribe phytotherapeutic or acupuncture prescriptions but rather specific exercises of gymnastics, massages, breathing or visualization. This new classification of the practices of nourishing life in accordance with a systematic etiology and pathology represents a big step forward in the development of these techniques (Despeux 1989; Despeux and Obringer 1997).

Further texts of the Tang dynasty continue this tendency, clearly identifying gymnastics as part of the medical tradition and linking them with specific diseases. For example Master Ning, one of the classic gymnastics masters, is cited in the sixth-century Gymnastics Scripture (Daoyin jing) as saying:

We practice gymnastics because they make all the pathogenic energy evaporate from our limbs, bones, and joints. Thus only good energy prevails and can become more pure and essential.

Practice the exercises diligently and with care whenever you have time between work and conversation. Either in the morning or at night is fine. Gradually your bones and joints will become firm and strong. The hundred diseases will be eliminated completely.

Whether you have caught a chill [wind-attack disorder] in your chest or are thoroughly fatigued and cannot rouse yourself;

?whether you have periods of deafness when you cannot hear or find your eyes going dizzy and your mind turning mad on you;

?whether you have energy moving against its proper current and rising up violently or experience severe pains in your hips:

?in all cases you can actively expel the disease by practicing these exercises and guiding the energy to the place of trouble, following the proper charts and focusing it on the right spot.

By guiding the energy you will supplement the energy of your spleen and stomach systems; by practicing gymnastics you will heal your four limbs. (2ab; Kohn 1993, 144-45)

How, then, did Daoists approach this medical tradition of gymnastics?

THE DAOIST PERSPECTIVE

From the earliest sources and throughout the middle ages, Daoists acknowledged the presence of preventative medicine and the methods of nourishing life as a valuable tool but considered it secondary. Even the very earliest mention of gymnastic exercises in the Zhuangzi of the third century B.C.E., has a rather denigrating feeling to it. It says:

To pant, to puff, to hail, to sip, to spit out the old breath and draw in the new, practicing bear-hangings and bird-stretchings, longevity his only concern?such is the life favored by the scholar who practices gymnastics, the man who nourishes his body, who hopes to live to be as old as Pengzu, for more than eight hundred years. (ch. 15; Watson 1968, 167-168)

The contrast made in the Zhuangzi is between the liberated master who has a direct connection to the Dao and lives freely in its flow and the technical practictioner who needs to study hard and work systematically at his attainments. A story in chapter 7 illustrates the contrast. Here, a Daoist master named Huzi or Gourd Master gives in to the urgings of his disciple Liezi and lets himself be analyzed by a fortunetelling shaman. The shaman comes repeatedly, seeing a different personality or mind image each time. After coming for the third time, he exclaims in exasperation: ?Your master is never the same! I have no way to analyze him! If he tries to steady himself, I will come back and examine him again.? The master, in contrast, is unfazed and explains: ?Just now I appeared to him as the great vastness where nothing wins out. He probably saw in me the workings of the balanced energies. Where the swirling waves gather there is an abyss; where the still waters gather there is an abyss; where the running waters gather there is an abyss. The abyss has nine names and I have shown him three. Try bringing him again.?

The next day, the shaman again joined Liezi to see the Gourd Master, but before he even came to halt before the master, his wits left him and he fled?confronted by a vision of the pure Dao at the origins of creation or, as the text says, ?that which has not yet emerged from the source?totally empty, wriggling and turning, not knowing anything about who or what, now dipping and bending, now flowing in waves.? (Watson 1968, 94-97).

The same distinction between a level of existence that is completely at one with the Dao and a more technical approach to cosmic harmony is also made in the Book of the Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi), an alchemical classic of the fourth century C.E.. It notes that those who nourish life with herbal remedies, diets, breathing, and gymnastics may deem themselves advanced practitioners of the Dao, but will never reach the higher levels, for which an alchemical elixir has to be prepared and active communication with the gods be established. First, the text clearly acknowledges the medical and long life benefits of the practices. It says:

The ability to writhe like a dragon, stretch like a tiger, waddle like a bear, swallow like a tortoise, fly like a swallow, twist like a snake, dilate like a bird, look heavenward and earthward?all these will prevent the orange colored wax from leaving the Cavern Chamber in the head. Then when you have climbed like a monkey and jumped like a hare 1,200 times, your hearing will not deteriorate. The deaf may steam their ears with lizard. Or they may form a packed of jujubes, sheep-turd cinnamon, and plumed sparrow cinnamon, and seal their earms with it. All these procedures produce cures. (15.9b; Ware 1966, 257)

But then it notes that while these methods may help health, they will not reach to the higher spheres, and that the truly marvelous alchemical recipes can reach much further, granting practitioners states of unlimited immortality and oneness with the Dao. The text has:

Man?s death ensues from losses, old age, illnesses, poisons, miasmas, and chills. Today people do gymnastics and breathing exercises, revert their sperm to nourish the brain, follow dietary rules, regulate their activity and rest, take medicines, give thought to their inner gods to maintain their integrity, undergo prohibitions, wear amulets and seals from their belts, and keep at a distance all those who might harm their lives. In this way they may avoid the six baneful things just listed that can cause death.

Physicians today have pills that activate and brighten the kidneys, powders that benefit the circulation, roasted boxhorn from strengthening bone structure, and infusions of yellow hedysarum as a general tonic. . . .Writings also assert that a certain Wu Pu received from Hua Tuo the Five Animals? Frolic as a basic form of gymnastics and managed to live to over a hundred. If such are the effects of the humblest of medicines, just think what can be done by those that are truly marvelous! (Baopuzi 5.4a; Ware 1966, 103)

This position is radicalized further in organized Daoism, where the relationship to the Dao in the form of various heavens and deities superseded all other concerns and health was the direct result of a pure and pious life. Communal Daoists of the Celestial Masters, founded in the second century C.E., thus prohibited medical and health treatments in favor of religious cultivation. For them, the world was populated by gods and demons?the latter appearing everywhere and in every shape, from the lowly rabbit and the dirty rat to all sorts of natural and supernatural creatures. A list of such demons has been excavated from a Han tomb, and several others are found in the earliest surviving texts of the Celestial Masters. To combat them, members had to fortify their houses and bodies with talismans, learn to recognize the demons and call them by their proper names, and visualize themselves as demon-conquering heroes

If, despite such measures, someone was attacked by a demon, they would suffer sickness and disease. Moreover, such an attack could occur only because the person had been careless and had a moral failing. As a result, all healing of the Celestial Masters was undertaken through confession, ritual, and magic.. First the sick person was isolated in a so-called quiet chamber, an adaptation of a Han institution for punishing wayward officials involving solitary confinement. There they had to think of their sins going all the way back to their birth to try and find a explanation for the illness.

Once certain sins had been identified, a senior master would come to write them down?in triplicate and together with a formal petition for their eradication from the person?s divine record. The three copies would then, in a formal ceremony, be transmitted to Heaven (by burning), Earth (by burying), and Water (by casting into a river), whose officials supposedly set the record straight and restored the person?s good health. Longevity techniques, such as gymnastics and meditations, were permitted only in the larger context of the supernatural universe and seen mainly as supplementary measures of purification (Kohn 2001).

The same also holds true for the major medieval schools of Highest Clarity and Numinous Treasure, although their followers were lay based and thus not prohibited from availing themselves of medical treatments. Still, their universe was dominantly characterized by their relation to otherworldly entities with cultivation practices that involved visualizations of gods, opening of divine palaces within the body, ecstatic excursions to the stars, and highly complex ceremonies of communication, purification, confession, and the exoneration of ancestors.

Methods akin to gymnastics and breathing were used mainly as purification measures in the preparation of rituals. Thus the Introductory Explanation to the Daode jing (Daode zhenjing xujue), a fifth-century texts on devotional observances to Lord Lao discovered among manuscripts found at Dunhuang, instructs followers who wish to recite the Daode jing to begin by burning incense and straightening their robes, then bowing to the ten directions. After this, while concentrating their mind and visualizing Laozi together with his main disciples, they should open the sacrd text and recite an incantation of invitation and praise to the deity that also places the practitioner into a cosmic context

In my room, the seven jewels come together,

Doors and windows open of themselves.

Utter in my purity, I strive for deeper truth,

Riding on bright light, I ascend the purple sky.

Sun and moon shine to my right and left,

I go to the immortals and find eternal life.

Following this, adepts are to click their teeth and swallow the saliva thirty-six times, applying long life methods. Then, however, they again move into the more religious spheres and are to see themselves surrounded by the celestial constellations of the four directions: the green dragon to the left, the white tiger to the right, the red bird in front, and the dark warrior behind. Only when placed in such a cosmic environment can they recite the sacred book.

It is thus evident so far, that medical gymnastics as the forerunners of Qigong were acknowledged by medieval Daoists but considered potential hindrances or, at best, preparatory and secondary measures to their main concern of attaining immortality and oneness with the Dao.

IMMORTALITY

Looking further into the early tradition, however, it becomes evident that methods akin to gymnastics, breathing, diets, and sexual control were also used by immortals?not as medical methods to restore and enhance health, though, but as ways of transforming the qi-constellation of the human body/mind and thereby attain a level beyond natural life known as immortality. A state of having gone beyond the limitations of this world and ascended to a higher sphere, this is a form of transcendence to a divine realm that is closely connected with the origins of the universe.

To attain this state, practitioners live in separation from society, engage in techniques of physical and spiritual control, have their mind set on interaction with the spirit world, and in the process of their training acquire magical powers. They live in the wilderness, dress in garments of leaves or deer skins, fast by living on pure qi or eat raw food they find in the woods (Eskildsen 1998, 20-21). They are symbolically associated with birds in the lightness of their bodies and their ability to fly (Kaltenmark 1953, 10). Being so close to nature, moreover, immortals attain extended longevity and continuous vigor and eventually reach the paradises, luscious mountains surrounded by extensive bodies of water, the most prominent of which are known as Penglai and Kunlun (see S_fukawa 1981).

Not many sources remain that describe immortals and their practices. The first appear in the Han dynasty and are typically written by aristocrats and court writers?such as Sima Qian?s Record of the Historian (Shiji) and the Immortals? Biographies (Liexian zhuan), attributed to Liu Xiang (77-6 B.C.E.). Additional information on immortals is found in later dynastic histories (see Ngo 1976; DeWoskin 1983) and hagiographies, such as Ge Hong?s Biographies of Spirit Immortals (Shenxian zhuan) and his work of The Master Who Embraces Simplicity, both of the fourth century.

The key characteristic of immortals is the transformation that happens in and to the body of the practitioner. Refining their inner qi to higher levels of subtlety, immortals become etheric beings, feathery, sometimes hairy, with no need to eat or drink and completely invulnerable to heat and cold, fire and water. Light as ether, they can appear and vanish in an instant, and despite highly advanced years typically look young, fresh, and radiant.

The main techniques leading to this wondrous state involve the refinement of qi, which is taken into the body as breath, food, or sexual energy. Immortals accordingly practice control in these areas, using breathing exercises and gymnastics, dietetics and sexual practices in their own unquie way. Harnessing the breath through methods of ?expelling the old and inhaling the new,? they control breathing and reach high longevity, so that even at an age of several hundred years they still look as if they were only seventeen: a face clear like peach blossoms, a mouth of cinnabar redness, vibrant and smooth skin, and glossy black hair and eyebrows. However, even here breathing is only the preliminary stage, and immortals need to complete the elixir of immortality to fully ascend to heaven (Campany 2002, 357).

Food intake is another major way of achieving bodily transformation. Most commonly this means the ingestion of only natural substances, such as roots, nuts, berries, or pine needles. An early example for this is Chang Rong, who lived in the mountains and ate only ash raspberry roots, thereby maintaining the complexion of a twenty-year old for several centuries before finally being transported to the divine realm (Liexian zhuan 2.5b; Kaltenmark 1953, 152-53).

More famous than she is Yu Jiang, better known as Maon?, the Hairy Woman. A palace woman under the First Emperor of Qin, she saw the collapse of the dynasty approach and took refuge on Mount Hua. There she met the immortal Gu Chun, who taught her how to eat pine needles and survive in the wilderness?thus gaining the ability to live without solid food, become immune to cold and heat, and move as swiftly as if she were flying. After living at ease on the earth for several hundred years, she ascended to the paradises of the immortals (Liexian zhuan 2.7b-8a; Kaltenmark 1953, 159-60). Still a highly venerated and respected immortal, she is depicted in a leafy gown and with hairy legs and still venerated today on various Daoist mountains (Porter 1993, 69).

Another well-known immortal who used dietary techniques is Master Whitestone (Baishi xiansheng). He would have liked to concoct an alchemical elixir, but his family was poor and he could not afford to do so. Instead, he made it his habit to boil white stones and use them for food, the reason why he came to be called Master Whitestone, in combinatin with bits of dried meat. For the most part, however, he would abstain from all grains and solid foods and thus reach an age of centuries. His account in the Biographies of Spirit Immortals says:

He was able to walk as far as three or four hundred miles in one day. Though

hundreds of years old, he still looked like he was about thirty. When someone

asked him why he did not wish to ascend to heaven, he replied: ?I?m not at all

sure I should enjoy myself as much in heaven as I do in this world right here!?

(1.17b)

A third major way of controlling qi as it enters and leaves the body is through sexual hygiene. In many cases this means the practice of celibacy for the preservation of sexual energy and its circulation and refinement within the body (Eskildsen 1998, 38-40), but it can also involve work with partners. Men might have relations with numerous women in order to obtain their qi so they could augment their own stock by guiding the precious substance through the body for greater energetic refinement, but some women are also reported to have used sexual methods for their attainment of long life and transcendence (see Wile 1992).

In all these cases, longevity techniques are used by religious practitioners for the attainment of higher stages: first a level of complete health, then a transcendence of health in an extended longevity, often over several centuries, and finally a transformation of the body?s qi to a more spiritual level of oneness with the Dao. Unlike the organized religious Daoists of later centuries, the early immortals acknowledged and actively used the continuity of qi to guide them from healing through longevity to immortality. What, then, is the logic behind this perspective and how can it be part of an integrated Daoist teaching?

LEVELS OF PRACTICE

The three levels of healing, longevity, and immortality can be seen as three different dimensions of practice within the same greater universe of the Dao. The Dao can be described as ?organic order?? organic in the sense that it is not willful and order in that it is clearly manifested in the rhythmic changes and patterned processes of the natural world. Not a conscious, active creator or personal entity, but an organic process that just moves along, the Dao is mysterious in its depth and unfathomable in its essence. But beyond this, as order the Dao is also predictable in its developments and can be discerned and described in ordered patterns. These patterns are what the Chinese call ?self-so? or ?nature? (ziran), the spontaneous and observable way things are naturally. Yet while Dao is very much nature, it is also more than nature. It is also the essence of nature, the inner quality that makes things what they are. It is governed by laws of nature, yet it is also these laws itself.

In other words, it is possible to explain the nature of the Dao in terms of a twofold structure. The ?Dao that can be told? and the ?eternal Dao.? One is the mysterious, ineffable Dao at the center of the cosmos; the other the Dao at the periphery, visible and tangible in the natural cycles. About the eternal Dao, the Book of the Dao and Its Virtue says:

Look at it and do not see it: we call it invisible.

Listen to it and do not hear it: we call it inaudible.

Touch it and do not feel it: we call it subtle. . . .

Infinite and boundless, it cannot be named;

It belongs to where there are no beings.

It may be called the shape of no-shape,

It may be called the form of no-form.

Call it vague and obscure.

Meet it, yet you cannot see its head,

Follow it, yet you cannot see its back. (ch. 14)

This Dao, although the ground and inherent power of the human being, is entirely beyond ordinary perception. It is so vague and obscure, so subtle and so potent, that it is beyond all knowing and analysis; we cannot grasp it however hard we try. The human body, senses, and intellect are simply not equipped to deal with this Dao. The only way a person can ever get in touch with it is by forgetting and transcending ordinary human faculties, by becoming subtler and finer and more potent, more like the Dao itself.

The Dao at the periphery, on the other hand, is characterized as the give and take of various pairs of complementary opposites, as the natural ebb and flow of things as they rise and fall, come and go, grow and decline, emerge and die. The Book of the Dao and Its Virtue says:

To contract, there must first be expansion.

To weaken, there must first be strengthening.

To destroy, there must first be promotion.

To grasp, there must first be giving.

This is called the subtle pattern. (ch. 36)

Things develop in alternating movements as long as they live. It is the nature of life to be in constant motion. It is the nature of things to always move in one direction or the other, up or down, toward lightness or heaviness, brightness or darkness. Nature is a continuous flow of becoming, whether latent or manifest, described as the alternation of complementary characteristics and directions that cannot exist without each other. This becoming can be rhythmic and circular or it can move back toward the source of life in the ineffable Dao, which at the same time is a forward movement toward a new level of cosmic oneness

In this larger cosmic vision, healing and longevity involve either the recovery or the the maintanance of harmony with the visible and tangible patterns of the Dao, while spiritual attainments of enlightenment and immortality mean the overcoming of the natural cycles and the ultimate return to the Dao at the center of creation, the uncreated void at the base of all. The practice of Qigong and gymnastics can serve all three, supplementing, enhancing, or transforming the qi that makes up both the body and the universe.

Seen in terms of the body?s qi, the three levels of practice involve different scenarios and trajectories of qi management. As is well known, the body consists of two forms of qi: a basic primordial or prenatal qi that connects it to the cosmos and the Dao; and a secondary, earthly or postnatal qi that is replenished by breat, food, and interaction with objects and people and helps the body survive in everyday life. Both forms of qi are necessary and interact constantly with each other, so that primordial qi is lost as and when earthly qi is insufficient, and earthly qi becomes superfluous as and when primordial qi is complete (as in the case of the embryo in the womb). People, once born, start this interchange of the two dimensions of qi and soon begin to lose their primordial qi, especially through interaction with the world on the basis of passions and desires, sensory exchanges, and intellectual distinctions?the very same features considered most harmful for cosmic interaction in the classical texts.

When people have lost a certain amount of primordial qi, they get sick and eventually die. Healing, then, is the replenishing of qi with medical means such as drugs, herbs, acupuncture, rest, gymnastics, and so on. Longevity or health enhancement, next, comes in as and when people have become aware of their situation and decide to improve their quality and enjoyment of life. Attaining a basic state of good health, they proceed to increase their primordial qi to and even above the level they had at birth. To do so, they apply various longevity techniques, including diets, breathing exercises, gymnastics, massages, sexual practices, and meditations. These ensure not only the realization of the natural life expectancy but may even result in increased old age and vigor.

Immortality, third, raises the practices to a yet higher level. To attain it, people transform all their qi into primordial qi and proceed to increasingly refine it to ever subtler levels. This finer qi will eventually turn into pure spirit, with which practitioners increasingly identify to become spirit-people and transcendents. The practice that leads there involves intensive meditation and trance training as well as more radical forms of diet and other longevity practices. Unlike healing and longevity, where the natural tendencies of the body are supported and enhanced, immortality demands the complete overcoming of these natural tendencies and the body?s transformation into a different kind of energy constellation. The result is a bypassing of death, the attainment of magical powers, and residence in cosmic realma, such the immortals? paradises.

DIFFERENCE IN APPLICATION

Daoyin exercises as much as the other longevity techniques, therefore, can be used equally for medical, health enhancing, and spiritual purposes. When done for therapy, the specific direction toward which they are aimed does not seem to matter. When used to enhance overall health, there are some instructions on geographical orientation and astronomical constellations, with the east being the most common, as it corresponds to spring and rising qi. Done as a preparation for higher spiritual attainments, the exercises are often conbined with formal purifications and with rituals to the gods. However, their basic patterns remain the same on all three levels, so that similar sequences of gymnastic exercises are used in all cases.

Still, the exercises are not entirely the same. Certain practices that are useful in healing may be superfluous in the attainment of longevity, while some applicable for immortality may even be harmful when healing is the main focus. Take breathing as an example. When healing or extending life, natural deep breathing is emphasized, with the diaphragm expanding on the inhalation. When moving on to immortality, however, reverted breathing is advised, which means that the diaphragm contracts on the in-breath.

Undertaking this kind of reverted breathing too early or at the wrong stage in one?s practice can cause complications, from diiness to disorientation or worse.

Again, the point is made clear in the case of sexual practices. In healing, sexual activity with a partner is encouraged in moderation and measured ways, with both partners reaching regular orgasms. In longevity practice, sexual activity may still be undertaken with a partner, but ejaculation and other loss of essence and qi is avoided and the sexual stimulation is used to raise the awareness of the positive flow of qi in the body, which is the redirected to relieve stress and increase vitality. Through the practice, as Mantak Chia and Michael Winn state, people ?become more aware that all living things are one? (1984, 171).

In immortality, finally, sexual practices are undertaken entirely within one?s own body and without a partner. They serve the creation of an immortal embryo through the refinement of the sexual energy jing first into qi, then into cosmic spirit shen. Ni Hua-ching emphasizes accordingly that in advanced attainment sexual energy should not be used to have fun or beget children, but must be sublimated into spiritual energy, which will then give birth to the spiritual embryo and help people to attain the immortal state (1992, 110).He says:

It is hard for people to establish the correct goal of life. Typically people are

looking for emotional happiness in the form of lots of pleasure, fun, stimulation

or excitement. For spiritual people, it is necessary to avoid pleasure, excitement,

stimulation and fun. Actually, those four things have a healthy and unhealthy

level. In other words, some fun is all right, because it does not harm your life

being. However, even on a healthy level, if fun is overextended, it can become

negative and damage your energy being. (Ni 1992, 111)]

Immortality is thus the creation of an inner spirit being and means the avoidance of ordinary joys and excitements. Practices associated with it are not only unsuitable (and probably impossible) for people on the levels of healing and longevity, but may even be harmful if attempted improperly.

The same point, that practices of a similar nature vary significantly among the three levels, can equally be made for diets and fasting. Thus diets on the medical and health levels involve abstention from heavy foods such as meat and fat, as well as from strong substances such as alcohol, garlic, and onions. Instead, practitioners are encouraged to eat lightly and in small portions. As their qi increases, they will need ever less food, until?in immortality practice?all main staples can be cut out and food is replaced by the conscious intake of qi through breath in a technique known as bigu or ?avoiding grain.?

In all cases, longevity practices and thus Qigong and gymnastics serve to guide people from a wasteful and neglecting attitude toward their bodies and minds toward a more wholesome, healing, and caring way of dealing with themselves. Allowing the conscious bodily experience of the cooperation among all body and mind energies, the practice increases the mental awareness of oneself as part of the Dao, manifested as a flow of energy that rises and ebbs, comes and goes, moves and halts. As one reaches a state of mental quietude and greater stability in one?s heath, the practice leads on towards a more encompassing understanding of self and world, which also includes a sense of wonder, of gratitude towards the natural world and the greater universe. The tense, ego-bound self loosens and a sense of open qi-flow takes its place. Healing moves on to longevity, and as cosmic awareness increases, even to immortality.

Historically, organized Daoists changed their attitude toward the application of longevity techniques after unification around the seventh century. Around the very same time when the medical tradition began to systematize and organize long life methods in their classics, Daoists integrated the practices of the immortals of old more actively and acknowledged their value. Looking at the Daoist origins of Qigong, there is, therefore, both a distinction and a continuity among the organized religion with its foremost focus on divinity and otherworldly powers and the tradition of life-enhancing practices that can be used on all different levels. It is thus not surprising that long life methods should be transmitted among Daoist texts and that Qigong to the present day serves as a key part of Daoist practice.

DAOIST TECHNIQUES

So far, we have looked at daoyin as the key forerunner of Qigong?a practice that uses to a large extent the same techniques and shares the same worldview, that similarly reaches from health enhancement to spiritual dimensions. However, daoyin alone is not Qigong, and there are a number of practices commonly undertaken today that have a different origin, that in fact go back to more religious Daoist practices. In the last section of this presentation, I would like to point out a few of those, focusing mainly on the transformation of the body into a cosmic energy system, the visualization of animal nature and cosmic flow, and the impact of inner alchemy.

One of these practices is the cosmicization of the body through the ingestion of the so-called five sprouts, also known as the ?method of mist absorption,? which involves partaking of the pure energies of the five directions. Part of medieval Daoist cultivation and described especially in the texts of Highest Clarity (Robinet 1989, 165-66), the practice begins with swallowing the saliva while chanting invocations to the original qi of the four cardinal directions. Then adepts face the direction in question, usually beginning with the east, and in their minds visualize the qi of that direction in its appropriate color. A general mist in the beginning, it gradually forms into a ball, sort of like the rising sun, then through further concentration shrinks in size and is made to come close to the adept. Eventually the size of a pill, the sprout can be swallowed and guided mentally to the organ of its correspondence. A suitable incantation places it firmly in its new receptacle, and gradually the adepts body becomes infused with cosmic energy and partakes more actively of the cosmos as a whole.

The sprouts, as Isabelle Robinet points out, are originally the ?germinal essences of the clouds? or ?mist.? They represent the yin principle of heaven?that is, the yin within the yang. They manifest in human saliva, again a yin element in the upper, yang, part of the body. They help to nourish and strengthen the five inner organsorbs. A Highest Clarity scripture known as On the Code of the Dao (Daodian lun) explains that they are very tender, comparable to the fresh sprouts of plants, and that they assemble at dawn in the celestial capital, from where they spread all over the universe until the sun begins to shine. Turning like the wheels of a carriage, they ascend to the gates of the nine heavens, from where they continue to the medium level of the world?to the five sacred mountains ruled over by the five emperors of the five directions?and finally descend into the individual adept. They thus pass through the three major levels of the cosmos (Robinet 1989, 166).

The virtue of these sprouts is twofold. They are ?emanations of the highest poles? and as such full of the power of far-off regions, the fringes of civilization where the Dao resides in a rawer state. At the same time, they are ?tender like freshly sprouted plants? and as such contain the entire potential of being in its nascent state. This growth potential, the small and imperceptible qi in a state of pure becoming, is the main objective for the Daoist practitioner. ?Sprouting? means inherent creation, purity, newness, return to youth. It also implies the prevalence of the soft over the hard and the power of yin over yang that Laozi describes in the Daode jing . Here yin is represented by the saliva that adepts absorb. The practice is undertaken at dawn, the time when everything awakens to life, yet another symbol of creative, unstructured potential. By ingesting the sprouts, the Daoist partakes of the inherent power of celestia lbodies and feeds on the pure creative energy of the universe its most subtle form. It is thus not surprising that the absorption of the sprouts is also used as a preparatory practice for the ?abstention from grains.? By and by the sprout intake replaces adepts regular nourishment and allows them to identify with the germinal energy of the sprouts. They thus can become lighter and freer, appear and disappear at will, overcome the limitations of this world, and attain immortality in the heavenly realms (Robinet 1993).

Another Daoist practice that has made its way into modern Qigong is inner observation or neiguan, the active, conscious introspection of one?s body and mind. As documented in texts since the Tang dynasty, and in particular in the Scripture of Inner Observation (Neiguan jing; see Kohn 1989), practitioners are guided to turn their perception inside and realize the realities of body energies and consciousness movements within. Soon they begin to understand how they function and react both physically and psychologically. With prolonged practice, they become aware of the subtler energies of life and see themselves increasingly in terms of qi-patterns than ego-centered actions. As the Scripture of Inner Observation says, adepts come to see the body as part of Heaven and Earth, raised through yang and nourished by yin, helped and guarded by the spirit and material souls, organized in accordance with the five phases and the six musical tones, radiating with the power of the seven stars and the eight luminaries.

They learn that beyond their tangible qi, they consist to a large extend of spirit (shen), the primordial, formless, and ever-changing force, which in connection with the physical body causes human beings to be alive. Manifested in the human mind, where it is often distorted to serve egoistic and one-sided needs, spirit is brought back to a state of rest as the mind is concentrated and relaxed. Adepts come to see that just as the Dao pervades the universe in utmost perfection, so spirit working through their mind can govern their life perfectly?that is, as long as it is observed and cultivated and not wasted on sensual amusements and the exertions of the senses. From confusion and defilment, adepts recover the primordial state.

Doing so, they come to realize the impermanent nature of the ego-based vision of self and body and replace this identity with one that consists of an assemblance of energy, essence, and spirit. They realize in their own lives the dictum of Zhuangzi that ?human life is a coming-together of qi. If it comes together there is life. If it scatters there is death? (Watson 1968, 235). Human life is only one part of the continuous natural transformations of qi; it is merely borrowed from heaven and earth but since it resembles them closely in its structuring and undergoes the same transformations as all creation, it can be made just as perfect, just as flowing, just as eternal. Realizing this inherent nature of life and themselves, adepts see that there is no true master of body and mind and acknowledge how little conscious control they have over life?s transformations. Increasingly able to to let life and the body go on changing as they please, they can forget themselves and dissolve into the higher patterns of the Dao.

This Dao, in the Daoist context, however, is not just a flow of energies, but populated by gods, spirits, and other supernatural entities. As the practitioner becomes more attuned to his life and body as the universe, he or she also comes to actively perceive the gods and spirits as inhabitants of the human body. The body and thus the self becomes increalsingly a microcosmic replica of the starry heavens above, full of palaces and chambers, towers and terraces, gods and immortals. The deities who reside in the paradises of the otherworld are as much at home in the adept?s body, and again?as through the ingestion of the five sprouts?the adept comes to cosmicize his or her self, expanding identity into a larger sphere.

Along the same lines, the Daoist transformation of the self in the process of inner alchemy, reaching from essence through energy to spirit and the emptiness of the Dao, has become part of modern Qigong discourse and many techniques of inner alchemy are actively applied in practice. Not only perceiving of the body as an entity of qi-flow and a replica of the universe, adepts of inner alchemy take active control of the energies and, through the systematic circulation and collection of qi, transmutate the body into a cauldron for the growth of an inner elixir. Starting from a tiny seed, it blossoms forth and gives rise to the immortal embryo, which then, over ten months of intense meditation, grows to completion. A primordial light begins to shine through the entire body, and adepts enter a state of deep absorption, allowing the tenuously growing spirit embryo to grow to fulness and take on a life of its own?moving about the heavenly realms in a new variation of the ecstatic soul journeys of Daoists of old.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, Qigong as practiced today has a long and varied history in Chinese culture. Strongly rooted in the medical tradition, it has continuously over the past two millennia been used fro healing, curing, and health enhancement. By extension, it has helped people extend their lives and improve their capacity for enjoyment and vivacity. Beyond its clearly visible medical roots, however, Qigong has also been linked in various ways with the Daoist tradition?notably through the qi-controlling practices of the ancient immortals and a number of exercises adopted into the modern repertoire from religious Daoist cultivation and ritual.

The main distinction between health and longevity on the one hand, and advanced spiritual or immortality practice, on the other, within the overall system of Qigong is the degree to which the body is alignd with the flow of yin and yang or the Dao on the periphery versus being transformed, transfigured, and energetically reorganized to a higher level?the ineffable Dao of creation at the center of all. Are we practicing to enhance nature or to overcome it? Is the goal of our efforts to become stronger, more vibrant, and more successful in this life or is it to transform ourselves completely into a mystical dimension of existence that reaches far beyond this body and this world? Whenever the goal of Qigong is transcendence, the practice has passed into the realm of the Daoist religion?a passage, however, that cannot be undertaken without first completing the medical curriculum and enhancing health to the utmost.

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