On this past eleseminar, I mentioned that the 12 labors of Hercules were descriptions of stages of cultivation, something I go over with my Stages students. Here are some of the labors and what they correspond to:

1. Killing the Nemean Lion and then wearing its skin -  this means getting a hold of the yang chi of the body. In India, masters sometimes sit on the skins of tigers/lions (animals that represent yang) to show they’ve harnessed their yang chi.

2. The Lernean Hydra – the Greeks say that the hydra whose head cut off sprouts yet more means endless desires. Actually, when the yang chi starts clearing the chi channels, the dirty chi is pushed out over and over again like logs ejected from a hole one after another. it reminds you of a snake or insect  or worms coming out of a hole in series … it goes on for days and doesn’t stop until all the channels are empty, an inner chi body deflates and falls away like a robe, and then another inner chi body within it that was trapped rises into the air and dissapears. This stage  (higher than Hercules at this pint) is mentioned in the Bible in the Song of Songs.

Anyway, the ejection of dirty chi out of the channels in worm-like sections one after another is an apt description for the hydra (if you’ve experienced it, you’ll know). In the Journey to the West, a similar but quite different phenomenon is represented by Wu Kong who chops off his head and a new one always forms.

3. Catching the Hind of Ceryneia (a female red deer) – as I explain in my Atalanta Fugiens tape course, red is the color of rising yang chi, female stands for yin, and deer or sheep/ram   stand for yang chi while horses always stand for chi. The deer had golden horns (crown chakra) and hooves of brass metal (meaning the bottom of the feet are hard to open in cultivation). This is the stage of jing to chi cutivation that took Hercules one year to complete. Now that he has harnessed his yang chi and used it to open up his chi channels, it  takes him a year to transform the yin chi into yang chi of his body.

4. The Erymanthian boar – when the yang chi is rising, all sorts of bad behaviors come out linked to unpurified yang chi streams. Anger, irritation, violent tendencies etc. just come up and you almost can’t control them. Man is half animal and this is the animal nature of yang chi that starts getting transformed but is initially wild, coarse and unpurified like a boar. That’s why Hercules kills the centaurs (half human-half animal) over some wine (when men lose control) at this stage, meaning he purifies his base nature. He finally captures the boar by driving it into snow (purifying it).

Anger is one of the big problems at this stage — the Chinese medicine Lung Tan Xie Gan pill helps calm the liver at this stage when you’re irritated. When the throat chakra opens, you also have a tendency to violent thought behavior that needs to be purified because of the Devadatta chi route rushing upwards. The story of poison in Shiva’s throat illustrate this problem.

5. Augean stables – the course of two rivers are diverted to clean the stables located in-between them. The stables, filled with horse manure (horses always represent chi in almost all such stories, such as in Journey to the West wherein the Tang monk riding the horse meant he was cultivating his breath), represent the sushumna central channel. The two rivers diverted to clean the stables, filled with dirt, are naturally the left and right chi channels. As Tibetan Buddhism emphasize in some of its tantric techniques, you want to push their chi into the central channel to clear it out and open it. 9-bottled wind practice helps prepare for this.

If that happens, the central channel opens and it’s like Jacob’s dream in the Bible of angels ascending and descending from a ladder (when was the last time you saw angels needing a ladder?) – the central channel chi goes upwards, connected to the tu-mai/jen-mai circulation from front to back, and the left and right channel chi dribbles jing-chi downwards. It’s a complete plumbing system. The root chakra sends a pipe of chi up to the top of the head, and from there it heads downwards back to the root chakra. In the center of the body, the sushumna points upwards and connects with the other two channels, but the overflow of chi needs an escape route, and that’s the left and right channel. The other two “petals” of the root chakra lead to the bottom fo the feet.

6. Stymphian birds – Birds represent thoughts, so Hercules driving away their incessant presence and chatter means he finally reaches a stage of emptiness after all his channels clear. How did he do this? He used clappers made by the divine God of the Forge, Hephaistos, meaning the dan tian pumping of hsi or kundalini.

You see, these stories  always show the same stages of cultivation though represent them  differently in different schools.

7. Cretan Bull – I mentioned this before — two protrusions open up on the two sides of the head, like horns, and dirty chi is ejected from them. In Chinese cultivation, this is a stage called dragon bones or in Tibetan Buddhism, a stage of Yamantaka cultivation. The bull, being strong and male, is yang chi, of course. So Hercules is harnessing stronger yang chi now that he has some stage of emptiness and the central channel is open. Now the head chakras can start to open, especailly the ones in the back and front of the head as well. As the yang chi gets stronger and proceeds to the flesh, we get the following…

8. Horses of Diomedes – these flesh eating horses means the Big Knife Wind of Maitreya, a stage where the chi starts opening up the flesh of the bodoy. It’s very painful, extremely uncomfortable, very painful. The flesh of the body feels as if it’s being cut up by the chi opening the channels. The degree of pain depends on the robustness of your vitality. For instance, there are three degrees of kundalini — great, intermediate, small.

and so on it goes….

The Belt of Hippolyte – the subsidiary channels open, changing from yin chi to yang chi

The Cattle of Geryon – now the yang chi travels everywhere — all over the circulation of chi channels opened up …

etc.