I find that many cultivators, meditators and spiritual practitioners have read countless spiritual books, but because many of these are translations of ancient foreign languages, have no clue as to WHAT IS THE TAO?

As Buddhism explains, there are 53 stages to complete and perfect enlightenment. In the Stage of Wisdom and Merit accumulation (the first stage of the spiritual path for every practitioner, no matter what the religion or school) there are 20 stages of emptiness realization (which is why some ordinary people seem more mentally open or flexible than others, even though they do not practice). In the Stage of Intensified Practices there are 20 stages of emptiness realization. Upon seeing the Tao, or initial self-realization or awakening to non-ego, you’ve reached stage 41 of this process — there are then 12 more of these stages to be mastered.

Stages 40-50 of the cultivation path, starting with initial enlightenment or the awakening to the emptiness or non-existence of the ego (since it is only a product of thoughts),  are  called the Bodhisattva bhumis. One is indeed enlightened at these stages, but errant habitual energy streams still arise in the mind that must be purified away which explains the 10 progressive stages. So one has discovered the absence or non-existence of the ego in "seeing the Tao" but not yet realized the emptiness of phenomena and done away with all obstructions. Hence upon intiial awakening, there is not COMPLETE enlightenment but just partial enlightenment.

Now various spiritual texts explain this absense of the ego, disintegration of the small self, realizing of your true nature, emptiness realization, and so on as terms that try to explain "spiritual enlightenment," "self-realization," "realizing the Tao. " But what is this like?

This is what I suggest — read "Collision With the Infinite" by Suzanne Segal, who reached this stage of non-ego but didn’t know what was happening. Despite years of meditation and spiritual training, she actually thought that it was a pathological state and had no one to tell her, "This is it. You’ve entered the path." Only upon seeing the Tao can we say you’ve finally entered the path and can  begin the Stage of True Cultivation Practice to get rid of the errant mental clingings and illusions still left.

Once you understand what it means to realize the non-existence of the ego, you can then read "Nothing Ever Happened," by David Godman, which in Book 3 recounts scribblings from Master Papaji’s diary. In his diary Papaji describes how he attained enlightenment, but still had to progressively cultivate through these stages for a deeper realization. So in this book you can find out what it entails, what questions come up, and what it means to realize "the emptiness of phenomena" after aninitial awakening tot he "emptiness of the ego." This is the goal of all religions, and yet the origanized religions miss this completely.

First, in seeing the Tao, you realize the emptiness of the ego, or emptiness of the self. Next you have to cultivate to realize the emptiness of phenomena. As Samantabhadra says in the Surangama Sutra, it is not ALL done at once, but step by step because of karmic obstructions that still linger.

And if you have other questions, then "I am That" by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj will fill in some details, too.

Why these books? Because they are modern ENGLISH accounts of enlightenment. Once you understand what THEY say, then you can better understand ancient Zen stories, Taoist works, and Buddhist texts. Translators have used the best words possible to translate these ancient accounts, but in my opinion people never realize their true meaning unless they match them with modern accounts written in their own langauge. So know the goal, and then practice becomes easier.

As I point out constantly, use whatever works…these Hindu works are perfect because what is explained about enlightenment from these realized masters is in modern verbiage and English. So that will help you understand the cultivation path. If a Hindu text says it better, use that. If a Buddhist book, then use that, if a Christian, Taoist, Zen or other book, then use that. It’s all the same fundamental Ground State, or God they are pointing to. This is the state of liberation or freedeom or Union with God or enlightenment. You just have to get there.

Just get rid of denominationality and use what works, as long as it’s virtuous and pure.

This past week I was reading a book entitled, OVERBLOWN: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, by John Mueller.

This is a fantastic book - fantastic insights, and great writing by a definitely to-be-read thinker. Excellent.

I’m constantly stressing WISDOM on the path of cultivation, and wisdom in understadning worldly affairs, and this individual definitely has wisdom. He holds th chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University. Rather than tip you on his opinions, you can rerad the reviews at amazon.com or grab the book yourself. You don’t have to agree with him on everything (I don’t) but you must admire the way he writes, the points he makes, and the flat out pragmatic wisdom he pro-offers on this topic.

 

 

This is probably one of the best martial arts kung fu documentaries I’ve ever seen. This is what people practice years to achieve in terms of physical realm skills. At a higher level up, you practice with chi and shen to cultivate superpowers and paranormal abilities.

 video.google.com/videoplay

So, remember that this wonderful video is about cultivating physical gongfu (kung-fu), not spiritual kung-fu. Yet,  you can use martial arts (wai-kung) to  enter into the path because to get to the next skill level you must practice chi-kung, then nei-kung (internal alchemy) then Tao-kung.

 

 

Many people who cultivate come from the field of martial arts, and suffer knee problems from having over-extended their joints from too much kicking.

As to back pain, well just about everyone complains about  it.

Naturally you know about going to a chiropractor to fix joint pains, but there are some other bodywork therapies you can try.

The best therapy I ever came across for eliminating back pain was fixing the knee joint, which I saw done by a famous doctor in Hong Kong. You can find the articles describing this on the site. People would come from all over the world, he’d reset their knee joint and presto — they could bend and touch their toes, TMJ would disappear, and back pain would be gone … INSTANTLY!

Another lesser known therapy that sometimes helps is NCR, by Dr. Dean Howell, which you can also find on the web. A number of people have been trained in his techniques, and it’s done wonders for my own tailbone problems which originated from having been hit by a car when young.  Dozens of chiropractors and body workers over the years have not been able to help that section of my anatomy because of the jamming that had been done, but when the sphenoid bone in the skull was moved due to the NCR techniques, an untwisting the spine occurred which progressively fixed the tailbone. This can also be a miracle therapy for those who need it.

There’s also prolotherapy for the knee, which involves injecting the knee joint with a variety of healing substances that will help it regenerate tendons and cartilage. Many doctors offer prolotherpay, and the key is to find someone with lots of experience. Just because a doctor can do something doesn’t mean he’s very skilled at it.

Remember Bill’s 80-20 rule when dealing with ALL types of professionals: 80% aren’t anything special, only 20% are pretty good and the ones you’d bother to recommend to friends, and perhaps 3-5% are exceptional. Only 1-3% are outstanding. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, astrologers, martial arts teachers, chiropractors, massage therapists, dry cleaners, nutritionists, you name — they all follow this rule. So choose a bodyworker, doctor, chiropractor or some other health professional CAREFULLY.  It’s better to spend more money and get it done right than spend less and get no result at all.

Bodywork and massage also sometimes helps, but who do you go to? I always tell people to buy this $7 manual of practitioners throughout the US … just look up your area code, then city and then scan all the names of all the bodyworkers in your area. Those with the most number of certifications and courses listed that they’ve taken — those I’d try first.

What’s that book called? "The International Association of Healthcare Practitioners Directory." This is something you buy, keep in the house for years, and use to help all your family and friends. Every year I refer to it to help friends in various cities find a good body worker who might help them. The IMT therapies of bodywork, invented by Sharon Weiselfish-Giammatteo, also deal with healing "bone bruises," which even help with the pain felt by amputees who have lost limbs.

As to nutritional supplements, well we could spend days discussing what might or might not work. It all depends on the situation. So today’s focus has been on bodywork, because your want to fix any STRUCTURE that’s out of place before trying to eliminate any pain originating from  misplaced bones. Fix the problem, go to the source.

Of course, you can always try the famous skeleton meditation for bone pain — imaging your bones as shining silver or white in the area of the pain. That will send chi to the area and help with healing.

Lastly there is a meditation method my teacher taught me for resetting the chi of your bones when they hurt, or for helping to move your bones into new places. You learn how to grab on to the chi or etheric structure of your bones  and then push this chi structure into a more favorable location. This bone setting is actually a meditation method and few can learn it unless they already have some stage of kung-fu, but it’s something for you to know about as well.

As to your knees hurting when you sit cross-legged and first start to meditate? Well, you just have to work through it. It’s like burning up Hell karma, so abandon any attachment to your body and let go when it arises. That in itself is meditation again.

Hope that helps — a variety of therapies for bone pain that your doctor never told you about, and probably never will.

Get well!

There are two big  branches in spiritual cultivation - those who  try to cultivate enlightenment or awakening directly, and those who choose to cultivate samadhi and its adjoining kungfu (kung-fu, gongfu or gong-fu) as stepping stones for enlightenment.

Shakyamuni Buddha, in countless sutras ages ago, always introduced the direct way to see into your mind’s true nature to Awaken to the Tao. In the Surangama Sutra, Complete Enlightenment Sutra and others, he first talked about awakening to enlightenment directly. When people did not understand (such as in the Diamond Sutra) he then said something along the lines, "Okay, let me teach you how to cultivate the samadhi as a stepping stone," and detailed various meditation methods as well as the kungfu that would result from these methods. You can find them all in various Buddhist texts.

My own teacher would do the same thing. First he’d give individuals a very high cultivation method. After they had no results or success with that or didn’t understand it, only then would he teach a lower level method. But he always gave them the chance to succeed at the highest first. People all think that the high methods are the complicated ones but the simplest ones are the highest. They are also the most boring or plain, so no one wants to do them. That’s another reason why so few succeed in spiritual pursuits.

Modern Hindu teachers like Papaji, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and others most often teach Buddha’s direct cultivation method to realize your original nature, which is the method that’s the basis of the Zen school. It’s a method of directly seeing into your original nature, abandoning  body and mind to realize the Tao. However, many other teachers talk about cultivating samadhi and kung-fu instead.

In fact, the MAJORITY of low level masters teach only chi and shen manipulations, and the various abilities that result from this which we call kungfu. The problem is, most people are confused and without wisdom and lack good teachers. hence, they take these  samadhi and kung-fu (gongfu) demonstrations/teachings as the path, and sport after cultivating their chi, shen, superpowers and all sorts of other things as spiritual accomplishment rather than penetrate through mental delusion to their original nature. They still attach to form and the idea of being a person or body, and cultivate this body or higher energetic bodies thinking that clinging to form in some way, and purifying it through effort, will win them the Tao. They just subsitute one form for another, and are still lost within the realm of relativities. It’s a higher accomplishment than physical accomplishment, but don’t make me laugh calling it the Tao.

The martial arts crowd is heavy with this influence, and ALL the form schools have this tendency such as Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, tantra, and the martial arts. In cultivating the body they cling to the body; in trying to bring consciousness into the body they also make another mistake.

These people use attachment to breed gongfu results, and yet are blinded by the fact that this isn’t true cultivation. This is just cultivation of gongfu or Kung-fu, like learning how to ride a bike or play tennis well when others cannot. It is a skill, for sure, but not the road to Tao if you are blinded by what you are doing. That’s why few people succeed on these form school paths. If you have wisdom you can use this to succeed, but if not then these folks are the real disasters. The simple practitoner passes these guys who get stuck on clinging to their gongfu life after life until they too, let go and recognize it’s not the real thing. The tortoise who doesn’t cling beats the har who does!

So there’s nothing wrong with following form school teachings if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t then be careful. Many people drop into Tibetan Buddhism thinking it’s very high stage and contains many secrets, but my own teacher used to laugh at them saying this was the low level stuff….and very expensive. In China’s Ming dynasty the Tibetan Esoteric school was outlawed because of all the damage it did to society. If I was a ruler of a country, I’d think seriously about this.

I’d argue with my teacher and report of all the high stage special phenomena that Tibet school practitioners report and which transpires on these form cultivation paths. I’d think to myself, "He doesn’t know because he can’t read all these books coming out in English," Years later, I can say that he was 100% right and that most monks, Rinpoches and students following   Tibetan Buddhism, even with samadhi achievements, are LOST…Remember, he was an enlightened Esoteric Master (which no Rinpoche can claim, nor even the Dalai Lama) and he was saying this, which is why he wouldn’t teach the Esoteric School. It just took me awhile to catch up.

So when you see people telling you to spin your chi and chakras and the like, know that there are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of cultivation methods like this that cultivate all sorts of things and produce all sorts of extra ordinary results, but cultivating gongfu of many types is NOT the spiritual path.  It’s just cultivating gongfu. Taoism has these methods. The Hindu yoga schools and tantric practices  of Tibet, born of Indian and Taoist influence in conjunction with Bon practices, have these methods. This is just low level stuff, so most all genuine schools have versions of this.

Hiowever, what you need to do is break through thoughts, abandon thoughts, detach from, silence, let go of , not be involved with thoughts to discover your original nature. You penetrate through the idea of being an ego, or identifying yourself as an ego, and then you’re eon the first rung of self-realization.

There is one original nature, and that’s the TRUE REALITY. It only appears that we are all independent egos and beings because of false thoughts, but there is only one original nature. Like the one moon that appears in thousands of puddles all over the world as a reflection while there is only the one real moon in the sky, so it appears as if all universal  beings have separate consciousness when this is just mistaking a reflection for the parent real as well. There is only one Source nature — realize THAT ONE. All is THAT.

Cultivating body kung-fu will not help you realize the moon becaus ein the end you halways have to cultivate the mind. You need to cultivate a freedom from thought attachment (ignorance or delusion clinging)  to see the moon, and not focus on the finger that points to the moon. That’s the gist of Zen and Mahamudra and Advaita methods. You can cultivate all the kungfu you like, and become a skilled kungfunician, but it won’t win you the Tao. Sure it can help you transform your body, but if you focus on your body and its chi, and attach to it, and mistake the body or any form as REAL or as YOU or the OBJECTIVE, then you’re lost. You’ll watse years. You may waste lives. You may waste aeons.

Think about that before you talk indiscriminately about these things next time. Learn the whole picture before you open your mouth. You can talk about jing, chi, shen, samadhi, chakras, skandhas, heavens, heavenly beings, stages of consciousnessness, kungfu and so forth, but this is just the revolving scenery and not the real thing or real gist of spiritual cultivation. It will keep you occupied, but in a negative sense.

Cultivate to achieve the real. That’s all I can say. And if you need English to help you realize what that means, try Nothing Ever Happened, or Collision With the Infinite, I Am That and other English works  to learn what it means to awaken to the falsity of the ego, and achieve awakening. That’s what you’re after. It’s hard to realize the meaning of spiritual cultivation from books translated from foreign languages written in ages path, so these and others will help you realize the first stage of self-realization, which is crushing the notion of being an ego. From there you can work on REAL cultivation.

First you study the path. Next you practice. Then you awaken by abandoning the idea of being an I or ego. Only then do you start on the stage of true cultivation practice  that leads to perfect and complete enlightenment.

If your religion or spiritual path has no meditation forms for practice, oh boy are you lost. ceremonies, pujas, pilgrimages, and holy books won’t help. You have to realize within. So if you’re focused on ceremonies, that’s the same as being focused on a body - it will never get you to the Tao.

Remember, understand the WHOLE PICTURE and then you can guide yourself correctly. Don’t just drop into a path because it’s attractive. If you know what you’re doing you can use the false to cultivate the real, and use poison to cure illness. But if you can’t then follow the tried and true and not something based on the demonstration of superpowers and the like.  With so much at stake, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

"The Secret" has obtained a lot of publicity lately. Unfortunately, many of  the ideas it popularizes will lead to lethargy, poor mental habits and bad results in societies rather than good results. The secret is in working for success, not in JUST wishing for success, imagining success, visualizing success or wanting success. Even  here I’ve left out a big portion of the ingredient for accomplishment  or success — you need merit to succeed in building what you want.

The whole premise of wishing for something, visualizing something and attracting it  without effort, karma or merit  is just basically fiction. If you already HAVE the karma for something then it will come when it’s time (even if you don’t want it), and if you don’t have the merit or karma for something, then it will not come no matter what. If the  universe runs on cause and effect - which most people would agree upon - you have to build or set the requisite causes in motion, of the appropriate type and size, to achieve the results/effects you want. Sure anything can be achieved, but only if you actively create it … not just wish for it. Thinking plays a part int the doing, but the doing is MOST of the actualization. It comes down to your skillfulness, and merit.

The key, really, to producing the karma you want, namely obtaining the results you want, is WORKING FOR THOSE RESULTS. Whether they will transpire or not will be the result of your merit and efforts, and not because of the wanting. It will be the result of building with actions rather than just dreaming with the mind. Yes, the mind plays the part of coordinator, but in this physical world you need physical actions. Never forget that, or fall prey to those $100, $300 or even $1000 courses that tell you otherwise.

Once I asked my teacher about the American tendency to promote the idea of just wishing for things (and so forth)  to mentally attract them or manifest them. You know what I mean — manifestation type thinking. He responded along the lines of , "If I cannot get things that way, why would I want to cheat others they could do so?"

That in a nutshell, summarizes the situation.

However, it is every easy to get money from people by promising them some secret formula that can attract wealth and prosperity and other things. In fact, the promise of salvation, prosperity or all sorts of results are all based on the same thing — promises only - and these have been used throughout history to even form movements that cheated people int he end. Communism is just one example. The fact is, you have to work for things, you have to build the karma for them to manifest. What the positive thinkers and New Age people fail to mention is that results depend on KARMA. If you have it, then these things come and if not, they don’t. So how do you build the karma? That’s the question… Some results come naturally because of karma from past lives (the type that seems the result of "free manifestation") and others are the results of actions done in this life.

Even then, karma is half the battle because if you don’t have the merit (from having done enough good deeds and acts of charity, merit and so forth), you can perform all the right actions in this life and still not get the results you want. So what everyone neglects to point out is that achievement is the function of action, karma and merit, something I explain clearly in White Fat Cow.

Famous marketer Dan Kennedy, whom I respect for his ability to produce material results, often said that 95% of people won’t do anything about anything, so it’s no wonder no one gets results in terms of the future they want to have. They just go along with the flow.

Those that do say they get results from some secret mind method, and who are cited for getting results through "magical thinking" and the like, usually are just people who  coincidentally manifest or mature their fortune at this time, and think it’s because of the methods espoused. That’s all.  If you really could manifest fortune this way, why aren’t they getting $10 billion or $100 million or $50 million dollars rather than $100K? Why aren’t they senators and presidents rather than what they are? All one need do, is have an astrological method like Iron Abacus Numerology performed to show that the results of fortune come  when it’s timed.  And if they can be timed, that shows it’s all due to karma.

Dan Kennedy also corrected a lot of people’s notions about positive thinking when he wrote:

"I’ve had more conversations than I care to count with my students, clients, customers, peers, and friends about “positive thinking.” Through it all, I’ve come to the conclusion that at least 95% of the people who think they’re positive thinkers actually have no idea what positive thinking is all about.

"Too many people think it’s some kind of mystical, magical shield from the real world. They believe that if they just think positive, bad things cannot happen to them. If something bad happens to somebody, they say: “See, you weren’t thinking positively.” But it just doesn’t work that way. You can think positive until you are turning blue from the effort, but you’ll still run into obstacles from time to time. People who believe that positive thinking is supposed to keep the bogeyman away eventually wind up frustrated, discouraged critics of positive thinking.

"Being a positive thinker does not mean that you should refuse to acknowledge the way things are. In fact, people succeed in business, sales, and marketing by dealing with “what is,” not “What ought to be.” The true positive thinker acknowledges potential and existing negative circumstances and reactions, and engineers a plan to overcome them, to achieve positive results." — No B. S. Sales Success, Dan Kennedy, (Self-Counsel Press, Bellingham: WA, 1999), pp. 17-18.

So let’s stand away from the positive thinking and manifestation and attraction type stuff. Sure, you need motivation and a positive attitude to keep going to solve problems and triumph over adversity. So don’t twist my words. And sure you need to know what you want, in terms of a clear mental picture or visualization, to produce what you desire. So don’t twist my words in all the ways you can. The point is, you need much more than this.

What all these people miss is that there are two sides to the situation. There’s the material accomplishment side — you need the Motivation to achieve something, you need action along a Method to achieve something, and your need a Measuring or Monitoring system to see that your actions are going along the lines you want and producing the effects you want. In a gist, that’s what most self-help books are about.

The second half of the equation, for building a fortune that isn’t already in your karma, is what all the New Age people miss. I’m talking about building a fate, fortune or manifest something that isn’t already in your karma. You can work your whole life at it and never achieve it, so how do you create a NEW fortune that isn’t already in your destiny? That’s what all the self help books should be talking about but never do. They only cite example of people who’s fortunes changed because they did X, Y or Z, but those changes were already in the fortune. That’s not a real change in fortunes, just a going along with the fortune.

See what I mean?

The story of Liao Fan, which you can easily find on the web, illustrates this exactly. Which brings up the second half of how to create a new fate, fortune, accomplishment, success or life if it isn’t already in your fortune. The first half of this equation is the magic of worldly action, which everyone talks about. The second half is self-improvement, but a certain type.

First, you need to create Merit for the new fortune to manifest. No merit = no achievement. It’s as simple as that.

Second, you should ask Heaven (meaning higher beings) for help in manifesting the fortune you want that isn’t already in your fate.  Plenty of stories of saints and sages from dozens of religions talk about this. And the best way to do this is Mantra or Prayer. Whether it’s the Prayer of Jabez, the Zhunti Mantra, or a sincere request to heaven every night is up to you. I always recommend a ledger of behavior such as used by Benjamin Franklin, Frank Bettger, various Confucians and Jesuits, the Greeks, and Liao Fan. It’s all the same idea in different formats. People always talk about creating better  societies and self-improvement citizens but they fail to mention that  this type of journaling is the tool that makes it possible. It produces that result because the goal, and your progress towards that goal, is constantly in front of you.

Lastly, the big thing is to change yourself through Meditation. Why meditation? Your karma works through events from the outside that just happen to you interacting with events from the inside, namely your own actions, efforts and responses. How you react and the future you create is due to your habits and inclinations. By learning how to detach from habits and inclinations and thoughts that would propel you down a different direction, you can create a new future. That’s why all the sages espouse meditation for changing your fortune.  

Naturally there is much more to it than that, but we can summarize the fact that in learning how to let go of the trajectory of your current present fortune, you can then, with wisdom and action, build the new fortune you desire. The key is to watch your mind and learn emptiness or detachment from what might prompt you down the opposite path, and meditation is the tool or remedy for this ill. Only meditation can achieve this. But even if you’re empty you still need actions and merit for accomplishment along the lines of what you intend to build.

So the self-help crowd always focuses on one side of the equation, and nothing more. They resort to mystical exhortations as the cure to a new destiny, and neglect the practicalities of the world and the words of the sages. In fact, they create pseudo-mumbo jumbo explanations to explain why "manifestation  thinking" might work, and neglect the deep basis of karma, working for results, and so forth that the sages from COUNTLESS religions commonly talk about. In fact, they cannot explain away the effectiveness of methods like Iron Abacus Astrology and what they really prove in terms of the truth about karma and so forth. If they did, they’d have to abandon all sorts of other false thoughts, and then they would have nothing to sell.

If they had to admit to karma and self-responsibility and work, customers wouldn’t like that and profits would go down. It’s always better to promise a free universe you can take from with no work to be done, and the idea that you deserve it. Also, if they had to admit to karma, they’d have to admit to reincarnation (which all the sages espouse) and if they had to do that, they’d have to  update their religious notions that they  mix in with their work  to justify the reason people justly "deserve" any future they imagine. It all goes beyond any type of logical thinking.

All of this is detailed in White Fat Cow, which is the first and only book to ever talk about the REAL way for changing your fate and destiny in a way that’s truly beyond your karma, rather than just manifesting the karma you have in store. Maybe you put acts into motion because some book motivated you or propelled you, so you owe your wealth to that, but if you calculated it out according to astrology or Tieh Pan Shen Shen (Iron Abacus Numerology) you’d see it was just a manifestation of a fate you had previously built, and your motivating force was just the tinder box in this life to ignite that fortune’s manifestation. You didn’t step outside of fate to build a new one; you just manifested a new state that was already in your fortune.

Anyway, White Fat Cow: The 6M Method for Changing Your Fate, Fortune and Destiny is the only one that explains the metaphysics behind this in an ontological no-nonsense sense. Finally someone did it by linking up the stories from countless religions and spiritual streams of people who changed their Fixed fates and fortunes by following the recipe of the sages. And since it’s the same recipe, it’s the same non-denominational cure.

White Fat Cow …

What meditators do not realize is that most "masters" in the world today are samadhi masters rather than enlightened. In other words, they have cultivated one of the four dhyana (samadhi) but have not yet pierced through the entire barrier of delusion created by thoughts to reach the fundamental state beneath thoughts and all things…the fundamental substrate, essence or original nature we call God. In cultivating samadhi, they are still cultivating thought states rather than abandoning their involvement with thoughts.

To reach the stage of spiritual realization called enlightenment or the Tao, and which is also called "Self realization" because you are realizing your true Self  original nature, you have to abandon clinging to thoughts. In fact, you have to abandon the idea of being an ego or individual because an ego does NOT exist — it’s just a thought. When you reach THAT point in your cultivation of abandon the belief in an ego because you experince that state, we call it "seeing the Tao."

But that’s just the beginning of the spiritual path. From then on, there’s more work to be done. That’s just initial enlightenment or awakening.

The problem is that most masters who teach today have not seen the Tao but have only achieved one of the samadhi ranks of attainment. To meet an enlightened master is very rare — you can go for many lives without ever meeting one.

So what does samadhi have to do with the spiritual path?

Buddha taught people to realize the Tao directly. If they could not, he taught thm how to cultivate the samadhi stages as training grounds or practice grounds to help them approach the Tao progressively until they were mature enough to let go of thoughts altogether. Most of the people you see cultivating superpowers and chi and inner martial arts today are cultivating kungfu (gongfu) and samadhi, or pre-samadhi stage of attainment rather than the Tao.

That’s a BIG distinction.

There are many barriers to success in spiritual cultivation, and one of the biggest is sexual desire. That is, succumbing to sexual desire and losing your jing, semen, elixir, or whatever term your spiritual school uses.

In the quest to climb the spiritual ladder, you must open up your chi channels, chakras, arouse your kundalini and abandon the view of the body. All this, at its basis, is a function of cultivating chi. Cultivating chi (qi or ki), in turn, is a product or function of accumulating chi, or "not letting the elixir leak" through sexual activities. If there is no water (jing or semenal force) in the boiler, there can be no steam (qi or chi) in the pipes….and hence the chi channels won’t clear out their obstructions and chakras won’t open. Kundalini, which is essentially the real chi of the body, won’t arise either.

In Taoist terminology, ching transforms into chi, which transforms into shen and then emptiness. So in cultivation, the first rule is that of celibacy, or brahmacharya. Only if one can retain their jing while cultivating an empty mind of nonattachment, only then will the jing transform into chi and the chi channels open and the entire domino-effect sequence of spiritual results start occuring. Without that first step of "discipline", however, it is useless. Monkhood, priesthood, and so forth without the combination of celibacy + emptiness is useless for true spiritual ascension.

You’ll certainly gain merit with a spiritual occupation, but without cultivation, very little true spiritual progress. The true success of spritiual accomplishment is enlightenment, or seeing the Tao. In the realm of samsara, falsity, or conventional worldiness, cultivating the samadhi identifies someone as having attainment. And if not that, cultivating kung-fu of some sort. You cannot achieve kungfu (gong), samadhi or the Tao without first opening your chi channels and cultivating and empty mind, and to do that it first starts with cultivating your jing and chi.

The conservation of jing, in essence, is one of the first lessons meditators have to learn about spiritual cultivation and yet hardly any know. Why? Because people don’t want ot hear that they have to control their sexual urges and let their energies be transformed. But whether politically correct or not, you cannot cheat this natural fundamental requirement. No one said that it was easy to attain the Tao, or samadhi, but to deny the requirements of the path just so one can excuse themselves is simply self-deception.

So one of the first things to understand on the meditaiton path is the why, wherefores, and hows of cultivating jing, chi and shen. The first step is to understand jing, or semenal force, and how to accumulate it without force, and allow it to transform without force or leakage. While all religions refer to this first step of purity, chastity, or celibacy, the best school to understand these essences is the Chinese Tao school, or Taoism. Nan Huai-chin wrote a book, Tao and Longevity, which explains these three essences in terms of the road of spiritual cultivation, and it’s the best I’ve ever found for understanding the topic.

Different schools for different aspects of the path is one of my mantras … but for understandig jing, chi, shen  and the importance of cultivating each of these essences on the path — without really trying or even knowing that you are so doing — Chinese Taoism is the best school to refer to.

Welcome to the MeditationExpert.com blog.  I hope to publish more articles on meditation and various cultivation topics through this blog vs. through website articles, so stay tuned. logs are the future of the internet as they are so easy to update and add content to, so this is where I’ll add my brief thoughts on various cultivation topics.

Stay tuned.

Bill