Tao Articles

From a 2009 Qi Flows Naturally newsletter>

The question that few ask: is full sexual completion achievable, through either a
romantic sexual love relationship OR an internal spiritual practice?

Another way to ask: is it possible to embody an integrated
male-female state (divine androgyny) while still living
in a male or female sexed physical body?

Is the very desire of our soul to integrate its male and female
halves the hidden driver behind all sexual and romantic
love?

If Romantic Love cannot satisfy this soul quest, is it doomed to tragic failure?

                                             ————-

I have been exploring variants of these questions for
decades. My current premise: humans have a binary or
split soul. This soul tension flows into our sexed
body-mind. Many spiritual practices seems to target the
mind, rather than the soul. Is there a way to
energetically resolve this sexual tension at the soul
level?

Recently I had a breakthrough, a new alchemical
meditation practice I received as a transmission from
some more profound level of my Self. You could call it
way to induce “soul sex”, the internal copulation of
the split halves of our soul.

What I discovered was a method of circulating soul
essence (a particular quality of “jing”) in a
“pre-natal orbit” pathway. This orbit flows in a
different pattern than the spiral around the spine and
chest of the standard Taoist Microcosmic Orbit – it
also cycles through the core channel. It also seems my
“soul question” led me to have numerous intense
experiences of astral or beyond-the-body sex – i.e.
exchange of soul essence as a kind of macro-cosmic
orbit shared with others souls. More on astral sex in
my essay.

This new “Advanced Lesser Kan & Li: Second Refining of
the Golden Elixir” practice is given on the
Glastonbury/Stonehenge UK September 2007 retreat. The
audio CD set is 17 hours, and includes other powerful
new practices: the Wudang MACRO-cosmic Orbit, and a
great new Fusion 3 practice to concentrate the 8 cosmic
forces + Self: The 9 Cosmic Spirals of the Energy Body.
The CDs also have the full confession and juicy details
of my astral plane sex life…:). The new practice is
very intense if you have done the prerequisite
training.

————————–

Dear Seekers of the Sexual Mysteries of the Soul,

I have already written extensively about how, from the
viewpoint of Taoist cosmology, we humans got into these
strangely wonderful if sometimes awkward contraptions
we call a physical body. Briefly, our body-minds are a
crystallization of natural cosmic yin-yang and
five-phase forces. This a basic Taoist principle – that
humans are a microcosm of nature.

The original human being in the astral plane was
androgynous (both male & female), and hence immortal-
it could self-reproduce. This allowed us to
continuously explore the process of creation, a.k.a
Life. I received the information that during the
process of polarization into physicality, a problem
arose when we split into separate male and female
bodies in the physical plane. We unknowingly scattered
and lost much of our Original Breath (yuan chi) – the
neutral force that bound the original yin/female and
yang/male forces together.

This new level of sexual polarity caused a feeling of
separation from source/heaven and eventually led to the
battle of the sexes on earth. (see
www.healingdao.com/healinglove.html#slt for talk on
“Sexual Qigong: Secret Tao Path to Completing our Human
Identity”).

Immortality Formulas: Designed to Rebirth our
Androgynous Self

The Taoist hermit One Cloud’s “Seven Formulas for
Achieving Immorality” is basically an outline for the
process of re-constructing our original androgynous
Energy Body. This isn’t easy, however. Because when
you’re in a man or a woman’s body, your perceptions are
largely driven by the polarized sexual current running
your consciousness.

Many meditation traditions that I have studied attempt
to offset this sexual bias by focusing on “stillness”
or a passive “inner witness” or “divine self” that is
described as sex-less and desire-less. These traditions
often blame some aspect of the lowly physical self –
either the “ego”, the “mind” or our bodily sexual
desire – for leading us astray from our true nature or
higher self. I find these to be unnecessary judgments
against the body and its sexual nature. My view is the
polarization is now intentional, and begins BEFORE we
incarnate, at the soul level. Humans are blameless in
the predicament they find themselves, only able to
manifest as a male or female, but not both. It’s the
root cause of our mortality.

Few meditators seeking transcendence seem able to
release their deep sexual tension, especially the
supposedly highly enlightened male gurus/masters who,
while posing as celibate transcendents, end up screwing
hordes of their female disciples. A case of “boys will
be boys”? The female gurus seem to have a less
scandalous record – but are they truly desire-less, or
perhaps just more discrete? (for the juicy details,
see my article “The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm: Daoist
and Tantric Sexual Cultivation in the West
www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&article
id=35). The parallel in the West is found in the Roman
Catholic church, with its history of widespread sexual
abuse by priests recently exposed.

Romance: the Cultural Solution to Sexual Tension

The solution to finding sexual peace on the popular
level of culture is more simple. Countless seminars
(Sterling comes to mind) and new age writers like David
Deida counsel something like, “if you are male, be
totally male. If you are female, be totally female”.
This is the traditional Asian approach. This seems to
make sense on one level – surrender to your bodily
destiny.

Men should explore their various roles as father,
brother, son, grandfather, and whatever list of male
archetypes you want to choose (warrior, priest,
magician, hunter, etc.). Women should explore their
roles as mother, sister, daughter, grandmother, and
various female archetypes (virgin, priestess, whore,
nurturer, etc). This raises political fights over which
archetypes belong to which sex, but essentially is
saying that biology ultimately controls destiny.

From a Taoist point of view, this cultural solution to
our deepest biological impulse would be considered one
Way of completing your worldly destiny, or “ming”. Your
“mingmen” or Door of Life, is the soul essence flowing
between your two kidneys to form your body. It carries
in it a demand that we complete some mission in the
world. We each have a unique post-birth destiny, and
filling it gives us a feeling of completion. The Taoist
view i’ve met in China is that there are differences
between the sexes, but they tend to disappear if your
cultivate to deep levels of soul integration.

This drive to complete “who you were meant to be” is
the same impulse that supports the modern industry of
self-fulfillment and self-improvement books and videos.
But most of them are only working at the level of mind,
not soul, so are only partially successful. Our deep
soul-sex drive also feeds the huge “quest for romance”
theme in songs and films, the default cultural reason
for existing.

But the simplicity of the biological-cultural romance
model of sexual completion gets a bit fuzzy when you
scratch the surface of it. The romance is never wholly
satisfying. You cannot permanently unite with your
lover. Lovers ultimately get sick and die on you. There
are all the confused gender issues, people claiming
they were born in the wrong sexed body. The sense of
dissatisfaction with marriage and culture, the feeling
there must be some deeper fulfillment beyond working
your whole life to scratch the sexual itch and all its
attendant cultural roles.

Modern science steps in to close the gap: you are
working for the survival of your species. But
Darwinism feels inadequate, too one-dimensional, like
chewing cardboard. It fails to fully explain the
evolution of collective cooperation and the range of
consciousness embedded in nature itself. From the
Taoist viewpoint, a dissatisfaction with romantic love
might be our spiritual destiny or “xing” calling us
back to re-discover and love our original bisexed
androgynous nature.

Can Inner Alchemy Create A Male-Female Energy Body?

This brings us to the key question: is it possible to
simultaneously satisfy both our worldly destiny of
biological romance and our spiritual destiny of divine
androgyny, aka immortality?

The Taoist meditations of the Inner Smile and the
Microcosmic Orbit seem aimed at harmonizing this
tension in our sexual-spiritual nature. The Inner Smile
cultivates the sense of our neutral inner witness. It
invites our soul force to flow in and unconditionally
accept what is, thereby freeing the stuck aspects of
our outer self to move on and unfold their unique male
or female destiny.

The Orbit actively embraces both our conscious front
and our unconscious back, creating a circular flow of
the male fire and female water channels in the body.
This circular flow harmonizes the direct expression of
our male/yang/governor and female/yin/conception energy
pathways. In effect, it begins the process of
consciously mixing our male and female energies.

But if we analyze the sequence of the formulas, the
Inner Smile and Orbit apparently aren’t enough to heal
the soul’s split. That is why there are seven alchemy
formulas to do the job – the sexually split soul runs
very deep, and must be healed or integrated on many
levels, not just for our personal selves walking the
earth looking for romance.

It is an unresolved issue for our ancestors trapped in
sun-moon time cycles, and for the collective/archetypal
level of human consciousness embodied in the planets
and our astrology. It’s beginnings are found at the
celestial level – in the zodiacal stellar consciousness
that we could call the field of our oversouls.

In One Cloud’s 1st Formula, the chi flowing in the
orbit is superficial in the sense it harmonizes our
outer or post-birth chi only. It’s One Cloud’s 2nd
Formula of Inner sexual alchemy – Lesser Kan & Li –
that includes a method of “self-intercourse”. This
internal sex marries our inner male and inner female.
The fire and water halves of our soul are guided to
copulate in the central channel. This moves us
consciously into the energetic domain of the pre-birth,
the formless self, where our soul first polarized
itself into the male or female sexed body.

The Missing Element in Lesser Kan & Li

But I had noticed in both myself and in my students
that something was missing in the Lesser Kan and Li
practice, some element of our sexuality was not
completely being resolved. It was this dissatisfaction
that led to my asking for and receiving the practice I
call the” Advanced Lesser Kan and Li: The Second
Refining of the Golden Elixir”. This practice involves
coupling the male and female aspects of the soul (our
pre-natal essence) along the entire axis of our body’s
core channel and in all three dantian.

What I perceived was that even though the male and
female halves were coupling and resolving their past
“sexual split” in the original Lesser Kan and Li, the
higher levels of the soul collective downloading
energy from the future was still being polarized by our
male or female physically sexed vessel. This new
practice, with its pre-natal Microcosmic Orbit, brings
the horizontal sexual tension of the male/female halves
of our soul continuously into the vertical
crown/perineum or heaven/earth axis of our being. So
its more integrated, and refines the Elixir to a higher
level. The method is an evolution of the Wudang Orbit
taught in my Qigong Fundamentals 2, which is necessary
to get this new method.

How well does the alchemical process resolve the deep
sexual tension of the soul? Can the inner alchemy
process truly shift the practitioner from the sexually
polarized state into an androgynous state? I’ve trained
many hundreds of people in the practice. The reported
level of progress varies widely, depending on the
adepts’ natural aptitude and self-discipline. The
practices can bring up huge resistance that exists
collectively to re-integrating this male-female split.
It requires deep courage and strong focused practice to
keep penetrating to deeper levels of integration.

The answer for myself is both clear and ambiguous. I
have vastly expanded the functional presence of my
“inner witness”, the aspect of self that is holding the
neutral force that binds my original androgynous self
together. AND I simultaneously have as much or more
male sexual energy than I had as a younger man. My
sexual drive is quite different from when i was
younger.

My hormones-with-winged-feet are no longer flowing
wildly and indiscriminately out of my groins as an
unconscious biological urge. Rather the sexual impulse
emerges, still unpredictably, from an inner space,
where my heart-feeling and kidney-will seem to have
integrated into a deeper drive that I feel is best
described as a soul impulse. In short, I only feel
sexual attraction when there is a soul attraction.

Subtle Body Sex is Beyond the Personality

More interesting is that this soul impulse, flowing out
of my core channel, seems to have led me to have
numerous sexual affairs. Not in the physical plane, but
in the astral plane. These affairs were not generated
by the physical desire of my body and did not originate
from the sensory or culturally shaped mind. Instead, my
soul partners spontaneously arrive from the ethers and
impose themselves upon my personality involuntarily.

Some astral sex affairs happened with the energy bodies
of people I knew physically, but who were mostly not
conscious of the process (I asked). Other astral
affairs are with the souls of complete strangers who
seem to feel the need to exchange some powerful
information with me. This macro-exchange of soul
information involves what I would call a second phase
level of kundalini experience that is not experienced
in the spine, but in the core channel, which is far
more intense.

Most of my subtle body sex was with my wife Joyce – it
has been a hallmark of our relationship since we met at
a Taoist retreat 24 years ago. But even that could not
be fully willed by our personalities or any biological
urge; it usually happened spontaneously, most
powerfully BEFORE we had physical sex. Eventually we
surrendered to allowing it to be our primary form of
sexual coupling – just lie down next to each other,
relax and allow our energy bodies to copulate. Our
skill with Taoist alchemical practices obviously
facilitated this subtle body sex, but did not exactly
control it. The soul controls it, not the mind.

Soul Sex is Kundalini in the Core Channel

These subtle body sexual experiences are usually far
more intense than physical sex because the energy body
has many more channels of exchange than the physical
body. But it was observing my many experiences over a
long period of time that led me to suspect that my soul
was not in fact a totally”neutral witness”, but a
polarized pattern of force or entity within a more
neutral field of consciousness.

This led me to the hypothesis that all human souls are
sexed predominantly male or female, but that each human
soul has a “shadow” gender which functions exactly like
the shadow side of our slower vibrating male/female
sexed body-mind. In short, the formless pre-natal plane
of our soul is similar to the physical plane, only it
is difficult to grasp because it is vibrating as such a
fast level.

The hidden or unmanifest side of our soul is holding a
lot of power and has a different agenda than what we
think or feel we are. The sexual split at the body-mind
level has us polarized “horizontally” as male-female.
If we have a male body, our shadow is female, and vice
versa. This dynamic is played out biologically and
culturally in our sexual relations.

Humanity: 3rd Force between Heaven & Earth

At the soul level, the sexual split plays itself out
“vertically”, in our identification with the
heaven-earth polarity. This plays itself out in our
spiritual seeking after earth/form or heaven/formless,
and played itself out historically within sky god/earth
goddess religions and all the social implications they
promote. Groups offering a path into the ultimate Void
or Absolute Emptiness are simply repackaging the
male/formless/sky ideal.

If we can make the shadow side of our soul conscious,
we can harness its spiritual power and greatly speed
completion of our spiritual destiny as humans mediating
between heaven and earth. Otherwise, humans are simply
unconscious soldiers fighting for one or the other side
of their psyche. An awakened humanity will realize it
can consciously hold a third force between heaven and
earth. I believe our highest potential destiny is to
return to our divine androgynous male-female-state with
ia restored ability to easily breathe Original Breath
(yuan chi), the raw stuff of creation.

This accounts for the Taoist focus on becoming
immortal, which I define as unique beings who bring
continuity to creative life in other dimensions, other
heaven and earths beyond this particular physical one.
Human evolution is the process of internalizing our
relationship with and transforming the primordial field
of Original Breath, not devolving and disappearing back
into it without a trace. This is how I interpret
“returning to the source” in the Tao Te Ching
(daodejing) of Lao tzu.

May our Souls Play Harmoniously in the Tao,

Michael Winn

Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Tao as his door, and who becomes change  is a
Sage.

– Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters

“The Tao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”

— Taoist Sage, 200 B.C

Note: Taoists have traditionally written about alternate realities or “islands” that can only be visited by Immortals who know the secret of traversing space & time. Their underlying principle of causation, the chi field/Life Force, is both physical and metaphysical. This essay gives us a modern metaphor for for understanding the possibility of multiple realities generated by the Life Force.
– Michael Winn

by RUDY RUCKER
Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Infinity and the Mind
from an essay in www.edge.org
———-

Reality Is A Novel.

I’d like to propose a modified Many Universes theory. Rather than saying every possible universe exists, I’d say, rather, that there is a sequence of possible universes, akin to the drafts of a novel.

We’re living in a draft version of the universe?and there is no final version. The revisions never stop.

From time to time it’s possible to be aware of this. In particular, when you relax and stop naming things and forming opinions, your consciousness spreads out across several drafts of the universe. Things don’t need to be particularly one way or the other until you pin them down.

Each draft, each spacetime, each sheet of reality is itself rigorously deterministic; there really is no underlying randomness in the world. Instead we have a great web of synchronistic entanglements, with causes and effects flowing forward and backwards through time. The start of a novel matches its ending; the past matches the future. Changing one thing changes everything. If we fully know everything about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future.

With this in mind, explaining an given draft of the universe becomes a matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment of that draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a particular Now moment. As Scarlett’s climactic scene with Rhett is repeatedly rewritten, all the rest of Gone With The Wind changes to match.

And this evolution, too, can be deterministic. We can figure we think of there as being two distinct deterministic rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The Physics Rule consists of time-reversible laws that grow the Now moment upwards and downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And we invoke the Metaphysics Rule to account for the contents of the Now moment. The Metaphysics Rule is deterministic but not reversible; it grows sideways across a dimension that we might call paratime, turning some simple seed into the space-filling pattern found in the Now.

The Metaphysics rule is…what? One possibility is that it’s something quite simple, perhaps as simple as an eight-bit cellular automaton rule generating complex-looking patterns out of pure computation. Or perhaps the Metaphysics rule is like the mind of an author creating a novel, searching out the best word to write next, somehow peering into alternate realities. Or, yet again, the big Metaphysics rule in the sky could be the One cosmic mind, the Big Aha, the eternal secret, living in the spaces between your thoughts.

Chapter 6. Michael Winn: Transforming Sexual Energy with Water-and-Fire Alchemy

My contribution to this volume is a 30 page chapter on transforming sexual energy that I consider the most comprehensive essay on the topic I’ve yet written. I’ve excepted it below, including my personal experience of “soul sex” or the “valley orgasm”, or what Lao Tzu would describe as the opening and closing of the gates of the Mysterious Female.

Most spiritual paths dislike getting into the topic of sex, as it is invariably messy. But 99 times out of 100, religious efforts to “transcend” sex means avoiding or suppressing the true essence of the sexual experience. Cutting to the essence of sex is tricky due to its literally “sticky” nature. We tend to embroil our emotional reactivity and body-as-self identity in the labyrinth of attachments that sex can create.

My chapter summarizes the principles within three major Daoist approaches to sex:
1) medical sexology, to improve body health
2) “bedroom arts” skill, to improve love relationships
3) inner alchemy for self-realization, by resolving inner-male vs. inner-female soul level sexual tension.

Excerpts from my chapter:

“The life-force of the valley never dies ?
This is called the dark female.
The gateway of the dark female ?
This is called the root of the world.
Wispy and delicate, it only seems to be there,
Yet its productivity is bottomless.

– Verse 6, Daodejing

“The sexual fertility expressed in this image of a cosmic female vagina highlights the connection between cosmology and sexuality found in this famous Daoist classic (460 bce). Nature is experienced by the sage who is in touch with the Dao as a continuous cosmic orgasm. Dao sexually births physical creation through the pulsating yin-yang process arising from original breath (yuanqi).

“…Daoists have sought to tap the power of sexuality to heal the body, deepen love relationships, and achieve elevated states of enlightenment. The Chinese texts on sexology are the oldest in the world, dating back about twenty-three hundred years (see Ruan 1991). Amongst the five major sexology texts are question and answer dialogues between the Yellow Emperor and his celestial advisors or sexual consorts on how to best cultivate sexual qi for long life and immortality.

“The body-centered cosmology of these early sexology texts, and the oral traditions of different Daoist groups have led over time to a wide spectrum of sexual practices. These range from ritualized physical sexual intercourse, through celibate contemplation of sexual essences copulating within the body, to conscious subtle-body love making with a partner at a distance. Inner sexual alchemy goes one step further – it immerses the adept in cosmic love-making, the sexually coupled polarities of nature?sun and moon, of humans sexually merging their essence with planetary and star beings.

“The notion that sexual energy is linked to eternal life at first glance seems counter-intuitive. The cycle of sexual birth and death defines human mortality. The idea that ephemeral sexual desires hold a hidden key to immortal life was codified by later Daoist schools of water-and-fire internal alchemy. Sexual essence or jingqi, is seen by them as the extremely fine spiritual substance of the soul that can be refined into the ?elixir? (dan) of eternal life. Cultivating sexual essence is the human secret to realizing the workings of the impersonal Dao, the opening and closing of its ?mysterious gate.?

“The most spiritual Daoist sexual practice is internal cultivation (neidan gong), literally ?inner elixir skill,? popularly translated as inner alchemy. This is usually done as a solo meditative practice. The adept sexually couples his or her yin and yang essences internally as part of a lengthy process of defining energetic channels and opening up an inner body space or ?cauldron.? The adept?s inner male and inner female are united within this cauldron, causing a process of spiritual rebirth. This practice is often not seen by outsiders as a sexual practice, since there is no physical sexual partner visible.

“The more rare ?dual internal cultivation? practice, on the other hand, involves a pair of high-level cultivators having energetic sex (without touching) as part of their meditative practice…Here is my own experience of “soul sex”:

“Joyce and I removed our clothes. We sat cross-legged on the bed facing each other, naked. It was our intent to meditate before making love. We both did testicle or ovarian breathing and circulated the sexual energy in the orbit to harmonize our sexual feelings in our three dantian. We each smiled to our inner heart, deep in the body?s core. There was no visualization or attempt to create any experience ? we were simply in a state of naked surrender to each other. In deep silence, we noticed that a new and unusual pulsation began to envelop us.

“It felt to me like a simultaneous yin and yang orgasm. The yang orgasm was my energy body pulsing with Joyce?s, expanding out in waves, that became inconceivably vast. We zoomed faster than the speed of light past planets and galaxies and then ecstatically merged into formless swirls of light and sound. The yang orgasm kept exploding out beyond our bodies.

“The yin orgasm was an equal and opposite implosion deep within our bodies. Some powerful gravitational vortex keep sucking us into a tiny point that was incredibly heavy. I could feel that Joyce was inside that point as well. I felt deeply embodied and centered within my personal self.

“The yin and yang orgasm was a marriage of sexual counter-forces. They held the space for a neutral observer in us to perfectly experience both orgasmic feelings at once. We sat in this state for half an hour, amazed and dumbfounded. It finally subsided. We fell into each others arms, knowing that a great and sacred mystery had been revealed to us. Our love-making was lovely and tender, but somehow anti-climatic. The shared yin-yang orgasm is what we remember, it is forever seared into our souls, and is what impelled us to marry.

“This valley orgasm permanently shifted the nature of our sexual relationship. Our subtle bodies would quickly attune and later we found we could exchange deep sexual energy for hours, lying beside each other, naked or clothed, without any physical stimulation or intercourse. It was a direct exchange of our sexed subtle bodies. As our energy bodies mingled and coupled, we were infused with loving spiritual qualities. This led to long periods of spontaneous abstention from physical intercourse that could last for many months, but with exquisitely sublime daily subtle body coitus. As our subtle bodies crystallized and became more ?real?, we eventually graduated to astral sex ? the ability to intentionally exchange orgasmic subtle energy at great distances.

-Michael Winn

To order the book “Daoist Body Cultivation” or read my review of the other chapters in the book, please visit:
https://www.michaelwinn.qlogictechnologies.com/blk1.html

Dear Dreamers of the Natural Way,

?Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly fluttering about, enjoying itself. It did not know that it was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he awoke with a start and he was Chuang Tzu again. But he did not know whether he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu. Between Chuang Tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is called the transformation of things?.

– Readings from World Scriptures ? trans. by Andrew Wilson

The question of whether our life is being dreamed for us by some Cosmic Dreamer or we are dreaming our body and our life has long been discussed in spiritual circles. For most people, the dream world is considered unreal, a byproduct or hallucination of some physical brain process. Its essentially the modern scientific world view – only the physical brain/world is defined as real. Its really just a statement that because the scientists can manipulate it, matter is real to them.

But what would happen if you could intervene in the dream world, and express your will in the nether world? What if you could shape it as definitively as the multitudes of choices in daily life shape your physical world experience? This is what spiritual scientists/alchemical meditators do: they lawfully manipulate the life force to achieve greater harmony and balance. This is a very different process than dream interpretation, of which there are many schools and systems that analyze dreams after the dream is over.

Taoist dream practice is about present moment interaction with the forces that control the dream plane. Since those forces appear to gain control while we are sleeping, they are traditionally called the forces of the ?night side? or the ?dark side?. Does this make the dark side evil?

Well, ask yourself ? is sleep evil? It is, after all, the realm labeled by modern psychology as the ?subconscious? in which many evil things might appear to happen ? you might find yourself killing or being killed. But if you love to sleep, and consider yourself a good (at least non-evil) person, what does it mean to be daily refreshed by the dark side?

Is the violence and sexuality that many experience in dreams a form of ?necessary evil?, needed to balance out what is repressed by daylight? Have we made some kind of unconscious pact with the Devil ? s/he will recharge our body batteries to let us live on earth another day, but only if we surrender our consciousness to Him/Her for eight hours?

Most people never consider these questions deeply, because they are afraid of things that go bump in the dark. They don?t want to know the answer, they only want to wake up refreshed, and pretend that the waking self is the only real self. The truth underlying this denial of the dark side is that the need to sleep ? to go unconscious – is the single most powerful thought form on planet earth! Stronger than sex, hunger, religion, political power, etc.

This may be why Taoist dream practice is considered to be the most advanced form of meditation ? its very easy to fall asleep during the process, to succumb to the thought form that ?I must go unconscious now?. Meditators of all traditions commonly think of their practice as a way of merging with their spiritual self or the Divine Spirit. But think about it ? does Spirit go to sleep?

If you think Divine Spirit, the ?All-that-Is? or total all-embracing consciousness of Nature also needs to sleeps eight hours a night, and that like humans, it is subject to cycles of night and day, then you need not bother studying Taoist dream practice. Likewise, if you believe that there is a Light Side that will someday vanquish the Dark Side, that whatever refreshes us during sleep needs to be killed, then you should not explore Tao Dream Practice.

Only if you are willing to explore and embrace the dark side as an equally important aspect of the whole should you attempt to manage your dream state. Tao Dream Practice is a method for managing sleep and the dark side as if it were an equally ordinary part of life as the day/Light side.

Because it effectively doubles the amount of time available to cultivate yourself, it is considered a shortcut. But the extra time available is the least important aspect.

The truth is, everyone has dreams about what they want in their life, and its ordinary to hope that they can manifest these dreams. This Day dreaming-manifesting process is no different in principle than the night dreaming-manifesting process. But there is a difference in effectiveness ? at night, there is no resistance from the dark side, because you have become the dark side.

So you can manifest what you truly need for spiritual development without struggle. That?s the shortcut: no resistance. That is why we love to sleep ? its the only time we are living without resistance. So sleep is an unconscious form of ?wu wei? –
living without coercive action, without trying to push the river. So during sleep, we can get profound answers to what we need from life. The ?genies? of the night side can become our ?genius? by day. Many of mankind?s greatest breakthroughs have thus been dreamed at night by artists, inventors, scientists or others struggling with seemingly unsolvable problems.

I used to run a ?Night School? in the dream plane, where all my friends would come and I would teach them to fly. It was just a gift I had. Flying dreams are one of the most tangible signs of achieving conscious state of non-resistance. In the astral plane its easy to defy gravity, but its still quite a thrill if your mind is awake, simultaneously aware of the force of gravity pulling on your physical body laying on the bed fast asleep.

Anyway, I finally closed that Night School, and decided it was time to open a Day School for living without resistance. That is really what all my ten qigong (chi kung) and inner alchemy Tao Home Study courses are about. So eventually conscious movement, breath, and inner mind meditation cultivates an energy body that is equally comfortable functioning in the Day or Night modes.

What happens when you manage dream states is ultimately no different than managing what we call physical states and their underlying energetic structure. They are both part of the same chi field. But if you can?t come to my Day School ? live or on audio – you can still contact me ? or anyone else who is willing to assist you ? at night. But it helps to know the method.

Dreaming the Inner Smile with you,

Michael Winn

?Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,

the Tao as his door, and who becomes change ? is a Sage.?

? Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters

https://www.michaelwinn.qlogictechnologies.com/articles/