A practitioner from overseas wrote:

Since 2003 I started cultivating and practice your teachings. I ordered and read all your books, listen to the topics you speak about and read all your emails. I practise every day for a minimum of an hour before going to bed.

The past two years I am intensifying my practice. During day time a practice the Zhunti mantra, I have done about 252,000. At night before I go to bed, I practice the Vairocana-Zhunti mantra and visualize the flame on all the 8 petals and like you said I also try to be creative. Then I say 3 times the Usnisa Vijaya mantra for myself, the hungry ghosts and for my family. I also practise the 9 bottle wind anapana. After that I practise the Skeleton meditation. That goes quite well and then after that I try to sit and meditate on emptiness by trying to let go of myself as a person or just observe like a third person observer.

Lately I have these feelings in my head. When I am just sitting at my desk at work or doing something else I regularly feel these energies in my head. I have not yet realise emptiness, because I will know when it happen. You will probably say it is just Wind and I know for myself this is the case, but lately I feel quite overwhelmed. I have these intense emotional feelings at my heart and cannot fall into sleep. Because I am 44 years old, I wonder if these feelings are just because my hormones are bugging me. I didn’t have much problems until now, or is this because something is starting to happen, because of the practise? I have seen a Chinese docter and she tried to help me, but I still feel the same. Talking to my doctor doesn’t help because he will not understand.

I also have 2 little books to keep me on track with my cultivation and had read your book the White Fat Cow lately. I write down my Merits and Demerits for the day to try to get grips with my thoughts and behaviour.

If you have been reading our materials, you should be able to analyze this easily. Do not take this as a medical diagnosis or treatment, and if you are ever feeling ill please see a doctor. But if it is due to cultivation work, the following would be the normal analysis. Once again, you must first rule out medical things before proceeding to a cultivation analysis of the typical responses to spiritual practice. However, as my teacher told me many times, and as I found for myself, doctors do not understand this material even though the same patterns happen over and over again as the result for the same types of spiritual practice. Doctors never understand cultivation gong-fu,and frankly, for cultivation gong-fu there is nothing for anyone to do. In any case, the following is easy to write.

All these phenomena are normal signs of progress for someone who cultivates hard. It is EXACTLY what is supposed to happen. It has been written about many times in many schools. Many people pray all their lives to get this far, but no one does because they don’t cultivate hard enough or cultivate in the right way. Most people read books on spiritual topics and do nothing. Therefore they never get any progress. They just read more books. But if you do what’s said, which might seem a lot of effort but becomes natural or second nature after it becomes a habit, you make progress.

This person is experiencing Vajrayana / chi channel opening / body purification phenomena most people hope for but still do not get after 15-30 years of practice. Why they don’t attain it? No commitment to consistent discipline practice, they use the wrong methods and/or they practice incorrectly. Usually it is a combination of these factors and others that explains someone’s lack of cultivation progress.

That’s why I always teach people to do several different things simultaneously to cover all bases and not waste time. It’s more efficient and you make progress quicker. In short, this person’s chi is finally opening their channels from their spiritual work…But this is just the simple stuff. The central channel and front/back channels have not even opened yet. This is equivalent to energy rumblings, but in the right direction.

The skeleton practice + emptiness meditation + celibacy + mantra + visualization + time + patience = gong-fu. It’s a simple as that.

Spiritual progress means cultivation progress, and attaining that progress is a science. As the channels start clearing you will have more and more mental and emotional experiences. You will always finally feel the chi trying to open up the energy channels in the body after doing lots of cultivation work. You will usually feel the energy in the head, abdomen or running up the spine. However, because this person concentrated on the heart chakra, they are feeling the sensations there. As the chi rises to the head, you will feel sensations there. When chi rises to the head, you will also have trouble sleeping at first and will feel energy streams in the head. If they had concentrated on the du-mai they would have felt it in the back of the head. A different emphasis on a different set of channels will cause the energies to be felt there first.

This is actually what happens in Vajrayana, too, as well as in Taoism, Western Alchemy, Kabbalah Judaism, Esoteric Christianity, Hindusim, Jainism, Islam, Buddhism, yoga, Hinduism, Kashmir Shaivism, etc. If you work hard at spiritual practice then the channels start opening and you’ll feel it.

Christian monks who used to recite the Prayer of Jesus at the heart would have the exact same sensations at the heart, but they would get worried and interpret things incorrectly. Many would have palpitations because of the chi working to open up that region. The symptoms are less when you do full body cuiltivation work and open up other channels at the same time, which this practitioner did and what I always recommend. Sometimes the monks or nuns would even see a little flame in that region or have visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Why? Because the chi (kundalini) is opening up that region due to your concentration on it. If you concentrate on a region with visualization, the chi goes to that region because chi and consciousness are linked. Since this is a chakra location, it’s trying to open up the heart chakra region along the sushumna which send chi into the brain.

This is why the “Six Yogas of Naropa” tell people to concentrate on the chakras along the sushumna central channel. But if you don’t also do mantra and deity yoga (visualize yourself in the form of a deity, which is equivalent to full body skeleton meditation) and other practices, then nothing happens. You have to do a lot of necessary PREPARATORY work for anything to happen, which this person is obviously doing. That’s why they are lucky enough to experience progress. That work is also called the “intensified practices” to prepare you for seeing the Tao.

However, once again it is similar to what many people have experienced when the chi finally opens up the channels. Please read Chapter 4 in Measuring Meditation (which is sent on the first day you sign up for our newsletter) to see various typical reactions just like this.

To get the chi channels to start opening is difficult, not easy. Everyone thinks it’s easy but it only happens after lots of committed work, for those are the ones who deserve it. They really want it. Everyone else is after sex, money, power, status, fame and so on so how can they make progress like this? That is their first and foremost prioirty, so the extent of their practice is to visit the Church or mosque or temple on the weekend for an hour or so and participate in a ceremony and listen to some lecture. It’s impossible to make real spiritual progress unless they create a disciplined cultivation practice schedule.

When the chi starts surging upwards into the brain one sometimes cannot sleep. This person is NOT yet at the stage of chi trasnforming into shen causing sleeplessness, but simply chi clearing the channels in the cranium. When yang chi (kundalini) goes through an organ system then emotional stuff comes up which the Chinese have catalogued in their medical system. If it starts clearing the liver channels you tend to get angry or irritated, as an example. Every organ system produces different emotional responses as a predominant response when the channels inside them start to open.

As those channels clear lots of emotional stuff clears, too. It HAS to happen this way for ardent practitioners. When it opens all sorts of areas in the brain, then just as an electrical current in the brain will stimulate memories, memories and other material might come out as chi hits the region and the channels clear. The opening of chi channels causes all sorts of reactions.

So there is nothing in this report that is not typical. It’s just that, despite how many times we write about this, explain it, give case studies, historical examples, tell the science, when it finally happens no one believes it. No one believes they can achieve it. No one believes in the science in the first place. Everyone thinks their case is different.

If you cultivate sufficiently you will experience these things. If you don’t cultivate then they will not happen. The reason they have not happened to you is because your cultivation is insufficient, not because these things don’t exist or don’t happen.

This is all part of the science of human beings. When my book of Hercules and the tantric stages of cultivation like this is released, it will show that even the ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew of these things, not just the Indians and Chinese. Why? Because the gong-fu of spiritual progress is non-denominational.

This person is experiencing the typical reactions of REAL progress. If you practice in this way, you will awaken the kundalini (yang chi) and experience similar things too. Not necessarily the same pattern, but it will follow the typical symptomology or patterns that happen based on your practice.

Hats off to this practitioner. Good work so far and hopefully more to come! Don’t stop now for this is where it gets really interesting.

After a long wait one of our books, “The Insider’s Guide to The World’s Best and Worst Spiritual Paths and Practices,” is being released as a paperback on Amazon.com.

Totally rewritten, this book will be released in paperback as “Spiritual Paths and Their Meditation Techniques,” will be available next month. Because it’s so useful, here is a list of the 10 great cultivation methods of the world from the new book which summarizes many spiritual and meditation approaches. Your spiritual practice should fall within these Ten Great roads. I’ll send the rest of the methods out bit by bit over the next few days so that the material, just a small sample from the book, is easier to digest. I hope from reading this material you can understand the construction and purpose of many spiritual techniques. Here it starts:

As to the other spiritual schools of the world, Shakyamuni said that they commonly employed ten great roads of spiritual practice. By following one or more of these paths, you can progress towards self-realization. These paths include the following:

(1) Mindfulness of the Buddha (enlightened being) practice involves concentrating on an enlightened being such as Jesus, Buddha, Shiva, Krishna or any other virtuous enlightened saint, and then so identifying with the contemplation on a moment-by-moment basis that one enters into samadhi. “Mindfulness of the Buddha” is not a method to be identified with Buddhism, but simply the name of a mindfulness technique that uses one-pointed concentration on any enlightened being, whom we call “Buddhas” in recognition of their enlightenment. It is a method of developing long one-pointed concentration through mindfulness, akin to leading an ox home from the field by pulling it back on to a path through a tug on its nose every time it goes astray. It is a method of mentally imitating an enlightened being, and seeking what he or she achieved from mind-moment to mind-moment, until one finally achieves that ultimate attainment himself.

The bhakti yoga cultivation technique of India, as is Christian contemplation on Christ, is a form of Buddha mindfulness practice where through intense longing the mind melts in devotion and thoughts and attachment to the concept of an ego are surrendered. One pointed concentration on visualizing a deity, known as the exercise of imaginary cognition, is a popular accompaniment of Buddha mindfulness and a way in which many religious greats across traditions have traditionally achieved samadhi. If you reach a sufficient point of one-pointed concentration then your chi will begin to move, and dropping the visualization you can reach a state of contentment and no-thought. When the mind becomes free of all other thoughts except the meditated form, incessant thoughts become silent and the mind becomes pure with the object of meditation, thereby entering into samadhi after the object is discarded. Similarly, when one surrenders a sense of doership and turns everything over to the imagined enlightened being (including the idea of one’s individual will), this is also a form of Buddha mindfulness for entering into samadhi.

(2) Mindfulness of the Dharma (Teaching) practice involves cultivating samadhi through the road of logic and mental investigation. Studying the Consciousness-only school of Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta teachings of Hinduism or practicing jnana yoga are all ways to help you investigate the mind and consciousness. In Confucianism the idea of “tracing things back to their roots” can also be applied to studying consciousness so as to eventually detach from it to search for its source. When you constantly apply the principles of investigation to a constant introspection of your mind (vipassana) in order to help you let go, you are applying this cultivation method that will directly lead you to samadhi.

Success in dharma mindfulness practice involves applying an understanding of spiritual teachings dealing with consciousness to help you constantly detach from mental states that flow across consciousness, and thereby enter into samadhi that way. When you can fathom the true meaning of some spiritual teaching, and combine that understanding with periods of contemplation or mental watching so that you can let go, this is dharma practice, or dharma mindfulness. The Advaita Vedanta or Zen practice of constantly searching for the source of thoughts or the “I am” is also dharma mindfulness. If you were always watching your mind to purify your behavior and let go of unwholesome thoughts, as Confucians do, or making sure you broke no religious rules of discipline, as the strict Orthodox Jewish try to do, that would be the practice of virtue and discipline mindfulness. In this case, to be aware of dharma principles at every moment in time – such as to always recognize the impermanen ce of phenomena, painfulness of the world, non-existence of the ego, impurity of the physical body and the illusive nature of reality – will result in mentally letting go of attachments and constitutes dharma mindfulness.

Such constant practice on a continual moment-by-moment basis will lead to detachment, and the mental detachment of letting go of consciousness leads to samadhi and realization. Putting oneself in line with the Tao, once you know the principles of the true character of reality, is dharma mindfulness practice, and eventually leads to awakening. This is one reason why people are encouraged to study cultivation teachings, especially those from other schools that deal with matters that strike home. Applying them to daily life in order to become happy, let go of attachments, and experience mental freedom also constitutes mindfulness of dharma because you put dharma teachings into effect.

(3) Mindfulness of the Sangha practice means relying upon a living individual who has attained the Tao for cultivation guidance to reach some stage of spiritual attainment. Tibetan guru yoga is one such technique as is studying with an enlightened Hindu master. You don’t consider the guru as a body or person but as the original nature, or true Self, that can lead you to an experience of your own true self-nature. If you were to surrender yourself and imagine that you became one with the goddess Kali, for instance, that would instead be Buddha mindfulness. In sangha mindfulness you rely on the help and instructions of living human masters, or community of cultivators, to succeed in the spiritual quest for the Tao.

One component of sangha mindfulness is to model yourself on an enlightened teacher’s behavior by visualizing yourself becoming that person, or visualizing that you become united with that person during meditation in order to try to match their stage of attainment. The ancient Indian story of the man who learned archery by imagining that he was one with his teacher illustrates this technique. The intense imitation of a powerful enlightened role model, and trying to merge one’s mental state with the enlightened nature symbolized by that model, is the basis of the technique. Mindfulness of the sangha not only entails asking someone for help in achieving the Tao, but involves trying to match their stage of realization in hopes of achieving what they have achieved. It is often followed in tantric traditions that stress the necessity for a guru to help you see the Tao and not get caught up in the physical transformations of the human body.

Many, schools such as Zen and Vedanta, also stress the benefits of studying under an enlightened master because some teachers are able, at special opportunities, to instantaneously cut off your thoughts to help you recognize the inherent emptiness of your mind. The story of Hui-neng, The Sixth Patriarch of Zen, and his pursuer Hui Ming is one such example.

(4) The Mindfulness of Discipline and Virtue is a road of practice emphasized by the Confucian school, Vinaya school of Buddhism, the Taoist path of Humanity and Heaven, Orthodox Judaism, Jainism, and the early Greeks among others. This technique involves a constant introspection (watching, policing, or witnessing) of one’s mind and motivations so as to instantly cut off any mental faults when seen and thereby eventually attain a pure and clean empty mental state of samadhi. Outwardly the emphasis appears to be on following precepts of discipline, but inwardly the practice is on cultivating awareness of the mind. As soon as you see an error in thought or behavior from watching your mind, then like the sword of Manjushri that slices through mental obstructions, you cut it off instantly. You stop the behavior, drop the thought, empty the mind, or try to transform your negative thoughts into positive ones. The form of discipline is outward behavior but the nature of discipline i s that the mind is stopped, and thus there is no desire for evil doing.

This spiritual road can also be called the mindfulness of morality practice. The meditation practice of cessation and observation (normally known as “vipassana”) is also a form of morality mindfulness, and the Confucian practice of self-correction falls within this category as well. Christian monks who were always practicing introspection to watch their mind for breaches of discipline against religious codes of conduct can be said to also have been following this form of mindfulness practice. The stories of Liao Fan and Benjamin Franklin who changed their fortunes through this type of practice are perfect examples of this technique we should all study. As Benjamin Franklin exemplified, one must watch their mind and cultivate wisdom in their behavior to become effective in the world.